Myths in the Middle East

The first kind of monsters here are going to be those of legends in the Middle East, and some of the stories may seem surprising when you take the general landscape of the Middle East into consideration.

الغول  The Ghoul

What many people don't know is that ghouls originated in Arabian mythology, making their first appearances as a creature associated with graveyards and death, and counted as a member of the undead. Ghouls were known and feared because of their taste for human flesh. A ghoul is a desert-dwelling shapeshifting demon that can assume the guise of an animal, especially a hyena. However, in ancient Arabian folklore the Ghoul would dwell in burial grounds or other uninhabited areas. It lures unwary people into the desert wastes or abandoned places to slay and devour them. The creature also preys on young children, drinks blood, steals coins, and eats the dead, taking the form of the person most recently eaten.

بهموت‎   The Bahamut

Surprisingly enough, the Bahamut is not actually a creature conjured from the imaginations of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons, but was a beast of the Arabian folkloric tales. This giant fish was said to have lived underneath the ground, acting as one of the Earth's layers and supporting the entire Earth. The monster was supposed to be "altered and magnified" to be so immense that no human could bear its sight. However they managed to learn about this creature without anyone ever having sight of it, I'm not entirely sure. BUT, point being, this was a huge fish (slightly unusual for people living in areas where the landscape is mostly desert) that was described as being so large that "all the seas of the world, placed in one of the fish's nostrils, would be like a mustard seed laid in the desert." This fish does have some variation though; in some stories it's been said to have the head of a hippo or elephant.

ساندوالكير The Sandwalker 

The Sandwalker is a beast out of Arabian folklore and as its name suggests, it spends most of its time in the desert (and were creatures that appeared in the movie Wrath of the Titans). They were said to favour a steady diet of camels and horses. Which makes sense, because camels are probably the tastiest thing in the desert anyway. They basically look like a really big scorpion, around the size of a horse, who were described to have the beak of an eagle, notoriously sharp claws and a menacing stinging tail that was loaded with poison. The good news is that the poison is fairly redundant because if you were impaled by the tail, there’s a good chance you would die of blood loss (or organ loss) before the poison had any time to really kick in. Worse than this is the fact that they only come out at night, when their black exoskeleton makes them almost invisible, and that they could hide themselves under the desert sands incredibly fast- all in all, not a creature you'd like to come across.