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The topic of this article may not meet Misplaced Pages's general notability guideline. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources: "Ipotane" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Ipotanes are mythical creatures; a race of half-horse, half-humans. They are the dual of centaurs having their upper bodies horselike and their lower bodies humanlike whereas the centaurs are the other way round. The ipotanes are supposedly from Greek mythology but likely originated at a much later date. They appear in many modern works of fiction of the fantasy genre.

Description

The typical ipotane looked overall human, but had the legs, hindquarters, tail, and ears of a horse. However, some had human-like rather than horse-like legs (compare with early satyrs, whose front legs were often human-like). The Greek suggested by "ipotane" is ιππότης (hippotes). It means knight, which is reasonable since knights are typically thought of as being on horseback. It is also used as an adjective as in ιππότης λεώς (hippotes leos) – horse knights that rode people. The definition given above would fit ιππότης λεώς – "horse-people".

See also

• Glaistig - Scottish
• Hippopodes - Greek myth

References

• Liddell & Scott, Greek-English Lexicon.

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