I know that the dragon is based on snakes cuz people were fearful of it and lots of countries have mythology about snakes (eg: Quetzalcoatl), but why Phoenix? Why firebird?
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Asia and Europe is the same thing, really. For instance, when you’re studying Slavic languages, lots of words sound suspiciously similar to something out of Sanskrit.
Humans mythologise animals. Some time some place in Asia someone looked at high-altitude clouds (of the kind that, of an evening, have a decent correlation with a coming atmospheric front, so a weather change, so a storm) and said “fuck me, this looks like a giant red bird, doesn’t it”? And the legend began.
Birds also migrate and do other things like that, again, easily connected with themes of cycles, renewals and rebirths.
So we have great birds like Peng or the Phoenix in the sky, sea monsters in the… well, sea; and dragons underground (totally unrelated, I’m sure, to people digging for flint, clay, and eventually ore, and finding huge-ass fossil skulls with teeth the size of knives).
The European pheonix and the asian phoenix aren’t similar, what happened was Europeans heard the chinese talk about their cool firebird and then just used the european word for it
Things being on fire, then going out, then starting on fire again are a real thing. Especially in like, a forest fire. It’s pretty easy to use Pokémon rules of just combining things that are vaugely related to just mash birds in there for a creature.
A lot of ancient stories and religions associate animals with concepts e.g. storms or the sun etc. they may seem like they originate from one place but most of the stories differ.
A bit more detail…
When looking back at ancient mythology there will usually be a blur of their actual origin due to the way stories were told orally but one thing a lot of these religions have in common is associating animals with a devine entity.
In a number of religions birds are commonly associated with the sun most likely due to their ability to fly towards it, causing a reflection of light or a glimmer. What this means is although religions may seem similar, like the fire bird and the phoenix they are actually based on different folklore or religion but hold similar comparisons, in this case a link to heat and fire.
The phoenix is a bird of Greek mythology about rebirth from ashes but it’s origins can be traced back to the Egyptian being Bennu, which in turned was the name given to a large heron fossil found in the middle east thought to have gone extinct over 2000 years ago. Whether this bird is the origin of a red bird is debatable as we don’t know what they looked like but this could be a basis of the origin of the myth, particularly depending on its flight path.
It’s from neither, it’s from egypt. It actually moved to Europe and Asia via trade. It’s a bird that was able to carry the disc of the sun and would be reborn each day with the sun. It’s a heron that carried the sun each day across the sky, it went hand in hand with ra and some sun worship out in egypt. That’s the origin of the phoenix, you’re welcome.
‘Dragons’ in the European sense came from monitor lizards. The depiction of a forked tongue in art morphed into ‘fire breathing’. Then people add wings to art, just because.
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