The period of the archaic dynasties (2900-2340 BC) can be considered as that of the first globalization. In Mesopotamia, Sumerian city-states to the south (Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Umma, Nippur, etc.) neighbored Semitic kingdoms to the north (Kish, Mari, Nagar, Ebla, etc.), until around 2340 BCE, Sargon of Akkad begins to unify entire Mesopotamia by founding the Empire of Akkad there. Both the city-states and the kingdoms of the period of the archaic dynasties were dominated by warrior elites using battle chariots drawn by “kungas”, prestigious equines whose price could reach six times that of a donkey. domesticated. The team of Eva-Maria Geigl and Thierry Grange at the Jacques-Monod Institute of the CNRS and the University of Paris has just revealed what kind of horses it was.
The domesticated horse, for its part, would not be introduced to Mesopotamia until 2000 BCE, so to identify the kungas, researchers had the choice between the hemione (Equus hemionus) and the domestic donkey (Asinus Africanus), which, first domesticated by the ancient Egyptians, was later introduced to the Near East. The hemione, also known as the “Asian wild ass”, is a wild equine, whose range extends from the Arabian Peninsula to China and Mongolia. It is moreover in these two countries that local subspecies of hemiones still exist today, but there was still one at the beginning of the xxe century in Syria, where it took the name of “Hémippe”. Very fast, even faster than a horse, hemiones/hemipps had the disadvantage of being much more difficult to tame than (African) donkeys, sober, robust and docile.
What did the researchers do? Not far from Aleppo, on an ancient road linking the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, archaeologists from Johns-Hopkins University in Baltimore excavated the royal tombs of Tell Umm-el-Marra in the 1990s – possibly the oldest city of Tuba. Next to royal-rank graves, they discovered in brick structures the skeletons of 25 male equids and six others, which Jill Weber of the University of Pennsylvania proposed to identify as remains of the prestigious kungas.
One of the tombs of hemiones discovered on the Syrian site of Tell Umm-el-Marra. She delivered skeletons larger than those of the hemippes, the Syrian wild donkeys of Asia.
John Hopkins University
The researchers wanted to confirm this hypothesis by sequencing, using several methods – direct PCR and “shotgun” sequencing – a significant part of the best-preserved genome of the Tell Umm-el-Marra equines. They then compared the sequences obtained with the corresponding genes of horses, domestic donkeys and various hemiones sequenced for this occasion: those of an 11,000-year-old Syrian hemippus found at the Turkish site of Göbekli Tepe and two other specimens from the same subspecies dead xxe century at the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna, Austria, where their skeletons are preserved.
It emerges from the comparison of the sex chromosomes of these animals that the equines of Tell Umm-el-Marra were obtained by crossing domesticated donkeys with male hemippes. The latter were therefore Syrian representatives of the “Asian wild ass”, which, contrary to what this name suggests, was a species quite distant genetically from the African wild ass (African horsethe ancestor of our domestic donkeys) so that the hybrids are sterile.
The fact that the kungas were obtained by this crossing is surprising, because the last hemippes were small: they measured hardly more than 1 meter at the withers against 1.30 meters for the equines of Tell Umm-el-Marra (and 1. 60 to 1.70 meters in most current domesticated horses). However, specimens from Göbekli Tepe and other ancient hemippes found at Tell Mureybet and Tell Munbaqa, two sites close to Tell Umm-el-Marra, were also larger in size. For this reason, researchers believe that the Syrian hemippes that disappeared in xxe century were presumably dwindling descendants of a population of larger Asian wild asses that populated Syria during the 3rde millennium BC and earlier.
The kungas were therefore “hinnies before their time”, that is to say hybrids produced by a stallion and a donkey, except that the stallion was an Asian wild ass rather than a horse. While the hemiones were no doubt almost indomitable, their hybrids with an ass were not, and combined the speed of running and aggressiveness of wild asses (superior to that of the wild horse of the time) with the docility of ‘African donkey.
This bas-relief discovered in Nineveh dating from 645 to 635 BCE shows Assyrians capturing and taming a hemione.
British Museum/E.-M. Geigl, IJM
The “Standard of Our”, a Sumerian wooden chest decorated with mosaics dating from 2500 BCE, shows that the first Mesopotamian “cavalry” consisted of four-wheeled chariots drawn by two kungas, from which soldiers of elite could approach and break through enemy lines by attacking them with bows and spears. The Yamnayas, who are among the ancestors of the Europeans, will soon invent much faster battle tanks with four or two wheels drawn by horses. All the cultures of Europe, including the Gauls, then used these horse-drawn yamnaya chariots until Antiquity, but the fact remains that the first “military cavalry” was in fact “military bullshit”…
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