I once worked for an antique shop that dealt in rare items including some rather rare books from all over the world. I was lucky enouch to see a few very old texts. in some of the older ones there were pictures of a half man half bull. In one text there was a print that was most likely a very detailed woodcut that had been hand colored after it was printed. The book was hand written and in a language I did not recognize. I am no multilingual scholar but I can read English(native tongue), old and middle English, I get by in Spanish, and can usually get the general flow of a document in French, German or Italian if it is not a technical manual but more along the lines of common speech. Upon seeing it I know I am looking at Japanese, Korean, or Chinese though I can't tell which unless it is one of the two or three simple charachters I know. I am generally fairly sure about Russian. This book was none of these. I am fairly certain that it did not look like the Hebrew texts that I have seen and when I reproduced a few of the letters that I remembered many years ago for a friend of mine who can read Greek and Latin said friend did not think it looked like any charachters in those languages. I do not know what language it was or how old the book was. It was bought as part of a auction lot out of a library of some castle either in the UK or Europe. So basically I just looked at the pictures. The book was rather large and had a picture every ten or fifteen pages, so there were a lot of pictures. In this text the males were on one picture very muscular, which would make sense. Some of the first steroids were made from bull testicles if I was informed correctly so imagine the build of the torso of a human male who had spent all of the adolescense of a bull attached to it's blood supply with all those bull hormones raging. Thes bulls carried clubs or spears, no bows. On another print plate was the female and young. The upper portion of the female was not as pronounced as the female equine "centaurs" of fantasy novels and movies. A few pages farther on were several pictures of the equine version of the "centaur". The women's hair continued all the way down thier back and blended with thier mane. There were many other creatures in that book. Some I knew, some I did not. well anyway here are a couple of my artist's interpretations of the "true" centaur.
