Authors: Brian Fagan
The Intimate Bond (17 page)
For centuries, donkeys by the hundred plied well-trodden tracks between the Nile and the Red Sea and deep into the Western Desert. The Theban
Desert Road Survey, a project of Yale University, has traced some of the desolate caravan routes that crossed forbidding terrain to the Kharga Oasis, 177 kilometers (110 miles) west of the Nile.
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Thebes (modern-day Luxor) became an important hub for trade east and west, especially during a turbulent period in approximately 1800
BCE
, when Hyksos invaders from Southwest Asia occupied the Nile Delta. The pharaohs marooned in Upper Egypt responded by controlling desert caravan routes that led east and west and trading with the Nubian rulers of Kerma upstream. In about 2000
BCE
, the Theban ruler Mentuhotep II annexed the western oasis region. So successful were Egyptian donkey caravans that, for centuries, the desert effectively became a fourth power in the Egyptian equation.
The well-watered Kharga Oasis extends ninety-six kilometers (sixty miles) north and south along a limestone ridge in the Western Desert. The oasis became a major caravan crossroads both for the well-trodden Girja Road from the Nile and for routes to Nubia and places to the north. Umm Mawagir (“mother of bread molds” in Arabic) was a large permanent settlement of several thousand people at the end of the Girja Road that flourished between 1650 and 1550
BCE
. Its excavators, John and Deborah Darnell, found an administrative building, grain silos, storerooms, workshops, and enormous numbers of bread molds, all protected by a military garrison. Anyone wanting to trade in the Western Desert had to deal with the people at Kharga, whether they were driving a handful of donkeys or hundreds of beasts. From the oasis, the archaeologists are mapping ancient trails, using potsherds (pottery fragments) from an enormous area, including Nubia. Umm Mawagir and the earlier oasis settlement at Dakhla Oasis, to the south, were the bases that allowed the rulers of Thebes to control donkey caravan trade over an enormous tract of arid landscapes.
Donkeys were everywhere in Egypt, as commonplace as people working in the fields. At the tomb workers' village at Deir el-Medina, on the west bank of the Nile, opposite Thebes, dozens of ostraca (potsherds, or smooth limestone flakes used as “writing pads”) record medical remedies, love poems, and the transactions of the donkey trade, written between 1500 and 1200
BCE
. The Deir el-Medina workers were
unusually literate and quite prosperous. Their ostraca record the trading of donkeys, people borrowing them, owners commonly renting them outâthe Ancient Egyptian equivalent of a rent-a-car. Owners leased out their beasts for an average of a month, sometimes longer, with the transactions faithfully recorded. The records preserve the inevitable problems: failure to pay, disagreements over prices, and the unexpected death of what were valuable animals. Water carriers, woodcutters, and policemen rented donkeys, for which they paid about three and a quarter sacks of grain a month, about two-thirds a worker's salary. This must have been a profitable business. Records one ostracon: “Year 3, second month of winter day 1. This day, giving the donkey for hire to the policeman Amen-Kha: makes 5 copper
deben
for the month. And it spent 42 days with him.” (A
deben
was about a quarter pound of copper.) Leases were sometimes guaranteed against potential disputes, and occasionally terminated early, especially if the animal fell ill. “Year 31, fourth month of winter, day 17. Giving the donkey to Hori in place of his father,” records another document. Ten days later “[the donkey] died, although his lease was not [complete].”
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Situations like this were hard on the owner, perhaps, but the business was lucrative, with so many donkeys used for agriculture and load carrying.
Egypt's contacts with Mesopotamia were of little economic importance compared with the gold and tropical products obtained from Nubia and the semiprecious stones, copper, and other vital commodities packed in from the Sinai. Some official caravans, sent to obtain copper and other strategic commodities, involved hundreds of people and thousands of donkeys. Apart from riverboats and coastal merchantmen, all diplomatic ventures and trading expeditions relied on strings of donkeys, which plodded stoically along arid trackways far from the Nile. These “average joes” linked temples and oases; cities, towns, and villages hundreds of kilometers apart. Their arduous journeys globalized much of the eastern Mediterranean world.
Four thousand years ago, no one living along the Nile or in eastern Mediterranean lands would have given a laden donkey a second glance. A nineteenth century English traveler in Syria remarked of the beast that “It will maintain an easy trot and canter for hours without flagging, and always gains on the horse up the hills or on the broken ground.”
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Obdurate, certainly, occasionally troublesome, these versatile beasts linked cities and civilizations over thousands of kilometers of arid, often rugged terrain. There was little glamor attached to donkeys in the early days. They were the ancient equivalent of pickup trucks long before they became marks of rank and dignity. We've forgotten that these self-effacing beasts helped create the first truly global world. They linked the Euphrates with the Mediterranean, the Upper Tigris with Central Turkey, quietly broke down Egypt's geographical and cultural isolation, and provisioned military campaigns. A more powerful instrument of globalization is hard to imagine.
Donkeys Become an International Asset
Donkey caravans connected courts and cities long before Ancient Egypt's greatest pharaohs cast their eyes on more distant lands. The tempo of long-distance trade, of globalized commerce, picked up dramatically throughout Southwest Asia after the nineteenth century
BCE
. Caravan trails led from coastal cities such as Ugarit and Tyre, on the Mediterranean coast, to the Euphrates and Tigris. Donkey routes linked Egypt and the Levant. Virtually everywhere, the terrain was rough, the trails narrow and sometimes hazardous. Only donkeys, heavy oxcarts, or human porters could carry loads from city to inland city, until the introduction of the camel in the centuries before Christ. The sheer volume of the mercantile caravan trade turned the donkey into a major economic asset, an instrument of widespread prosperity. Gifts for rulers, mundane commodities such as textiles or salt, mining caravans using hundreds of beastsâloads of all kinds traversed desert and river valley alike in a world where urban economies were becoming more interdependent, more global.
Figure 9.1
 A modern-day donkey caravan in Mali transporting Saharan salt. James Michael Dorsey/Shutterstock.
Some respect for these humble beasts developed as well. They served a small but well-documented ritual part in an increasingly complex mercantile and political world. Numerous examples of donkey burials lie with the graves of high-status individuals or warriors. They occur in pairs, even occasionally in larger numbers, their bones sometimes disarticulated as if they were part of ritual feasts or sacrifices. Judging from Egypt's Abydos burials, such sacrifices were symbolic of wealth and economic power. One well-documented donkey burial lies in the heart of the sacred precinct at Tel Haror, a city near Gaza, dating to around 1700 to 1550
BCE
.
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The four-year-old donkey, a young beast, came to
light in a temple courtyard, lying on its left side, its limbs neatly bent. A well-worn, defective, copper bridle bit was still in its jaws, but was just placed in the animal's mouth. There are no signs from the teeth that the donkey was ever ridden or carried loads, but the bit gives it a special status: a beast too young to be trained for caravan use. Significantly, too, copper fittings for saddle bags survive on either side of the ribs, again a symbolic acknowledgment of the importance of donkeys in the economic lives of the rich and powerful.
Still, donkeys were mainly economic assets. The impatient, aggressive Sumerians, in southern Mesopotamia, who first made extensive use of donkeys forty-five hundred years ago, portrayed them as slow, stubborn animals. One saying preserved on a cuneiform tablet remarks that donkeys ate their own bedding. Another owner rebuked his donkey for not running fast, but merely braying. (The loud and prolonged bray was an excellent adaptation for arid landscapes, where wild asses were often widely separated.) In later times, the Jewish
Wisdom of Sirach
talks of “Fodder and a stick and burdens for the ass; bread and discipline and work for a servant.”
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Even when ridden, donkeys were humble beasts. Witness the prophet Zachariah, who portrayed Israel's future king as arriving not on a war horse, but “humble and riding on an ass.”
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Some donkeys denoted dignity and prestige. In Judges, the prophetess Deborah addresses the judges: “Speak ye that ride on white asses, ye that sit in judgment.”
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For the most part, however, donkeys were the proletariat of the ancient animal world.
Emarum Sallamum:
The Saga of Assyrian Donkey Caravans
If one were to ask for an example of obscure, highly specialized scholarship, one would need look no further than the esoteric, but very challenging, task of studying Assyrian donkey caravans. The few experts on the subject pore over dozens of cuneiform tablets from an important trading post at Karum Kanesh, adjacent to a major ancient city at Kultepe, in what is now central Turkey. The often highly personal letters and records from both Kanesh and Kultepe provide a
compelling story of an enduring and prosperous international trade that could flourish only because of donkeys (see sidebar “Archives in Clay Envelopes”).
Archives in Clay Envelopes
Karum Kanesh (Assyrian, meaning the “merchant colony of Kanesh”) yielded more than a thousand cuneiform tablets when the Czech archaeologist Bedrich Hrozny dug into its earthen mound in 1923. Excavations resumed in 1948, in the hands of Turkish archaeologists, and continue today. Five hundred meters (1,640 feet) across and standing about 20 meters (66 feet) above the surrounding plain, Kanesh and its twenty-three thousand cuneiform tablets provide us with a complex portrait of a thriving commercial settlement just under four thousand years ago.
Fortunately for archaeologists, but not for the inhabitants, two fierce conflagrations destroyed the colony twice. The people fled, leaving their possessions and their archives behind. Thousands of burnt tablets, many of them still sealed in clay envelopes, reveal the complex transactions and sometimes convoluted personal lives of the merchants. The tablets are extremely fragile, many of them impregnated with high concentrations of soluble salts from the local soils, so just conserving them is a challenging task, often involving careful heating to bake them slowly. Then comes the intricate detective work of decipherment. Cuneiform is a wedge-shaped script; the writing used at Kanesh is Old Assyrian, which is relatively simple to learn. Although there were obviously trained scribes, the literacy level at Kanesh seems to have been unusually high. We know this from painstaking studies of correspondence on a wide range of subjects, written by both men and women. To tease out the complex transactions and hidden meanings of many tablets requires not only fluency in Old Assyrian and cuneiform, but also the same deep reserves of patience needed to assemble jigsaw puzzles.
The Kanesh tablets preserve an extraordinary range of correspondence. On one tablet, sealed in an envelope, a twenty-five-line letter written by Assur-lamassi, a copper trader, informs Su-Belum in Kanesh that he is shipping him silver carried by Iddi[n]-Su'en as payment for seven talents, thirty minas of copper. A shekel of silver purchased sixty-two and a half shekels of copper. The copper traders mentioned on the tablet are known from the karum archives of a well-known copper trader, Ada-S.ululi. Assur-lamassi considered the message so important that he sealed it eight times. Other tablets record ownership disputes involving merchant houses, the exchange of textiles and tin from Assur for precious metals, the dangers of bandits, and the need to provide grazing for donkeys. Women were active correspondents, concerned not only with the management of houses and servants, but also with commercial transactions. Tarisha, daughter of Alahum and sister of Assur-taklaku, maintained an archive of tablets for her husband. Wrote one man, “Extract for me my tablet concerning one mina of silver that Shat-ishtar, the wife of Assur-taklaku, wrote.” This was a sophisticated, carefully monitored donkey trade that shaped economic life over an enormous area of the eastern Mediterranean world.
The city of Assur lies on the western bank of the Tigris River in what is now northern Iraq, far upstream of Sumerian domains in fertile Mesopotamia. Assur's rulers shook off the yoke of their southern masters at Ur, in Mesopotamia, during the twenty-first century
BCE
. They prospered because their city lay at the hub of a web of trade routes that extended over an enormous area. The city enjoyed a lucrative overland trade in textiles and tin, encouraging traders from elsewhere with minimal taxation.