Robert E. Howard's The Shadow Kingdom
Michael Barkun, Professor of political science at Syracuse University, posits that the idea of a reptilian conspiracy originated in the fiction of Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard. The first appearance of "serpent men" in literature was in Howard's story, "The Shadow Kingdom", published in Weird Tales in August 1929. This story drew on Theosophical ideas of the "lost worlds" of Atlantis and Lemuria, particularly Helena Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, with its reference to "'dragon-men' who once had a mighty civilization on a Lemurian continent".[4] Howard's "serpent men" were described as humanoid with human bodies but snake heads, able to imitate real humans at will, who lived in hiding in underground passages, using their shapechanging