The Triumph of the Mule

This chapter starts as the Roman Empire fragmented, encompasses the emergence of Christianity and Islam, and explores the donkey’s place in the history of the Middle Ages, as well as what Fernand Braudel termed ‘the triumph of the mule’ in the ensuing early modern period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Being closer in time to the present, historical documents are generally richer and more plentiful than for earlier periods, but archaeological excavations and surveys—especially of post-medieval sites and landscapes—are still undeveloped in many regions. Inevitably, therefore, what I present draws as much on textual sources as it does on them. I look first at the symbolic value of donkeys and mules in Christianity and Islam. Next, I consider their disappearance from some parts of Europe in the aftermath of Rome’s collapse and their re-expansion and persistence elsewhere. One aspect of this concerns their continuing contribution to agricultural production, another their consumption as food, a very un-Roman practice. A second theme showing continuities from previous centuries is their significance in facilitating trade and communication over both short and long distances. Tackling this requires inserting donkeys and mules into debates about how far pack animals replaced wheeled forms of transport as Late Antiquity gave way to the Middle Ages. Wide-ranging in time and space, this discussion also provides opportunities for exploring their role in human history in areas beyond those on which I have concentrated thus far. West Africa is one, the Silk Road networks linking China to Central Asia a second, and China’s southward connections into Southeast Asia a third. According to the New Testament Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday seated on a donkey (Plate 20). The seventh-century apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew also envisages donkeys carrying His mother to Bethlehem, being present at the Nativity, and conveying the Holy Family into temporary exile in Egypt. Donkeys thus framed both ends of Jesus’ life and, given their importance in moving people and goods in first-century Palestine, must have been a familiar sight. But the implications of their place in Christianity’s narrative were originally quite different from those that are generally understood today.

Origins

Over 50,000 years ago a Neanderthal hunter approached a wild ass on the plains of northeastern Syria. Taking aim from the right as the animal nervously assessed the threat, he launched his stone-tipped spear into its neck, penetrating the third cervical vertebra and paralyzing it immediately. Butchered at the kill site, this bone and most of the rest of the animal were taken back to the hunter’s camp at Umm el Tlel, a short distance away. Closely modelled on archaeological observations of that vertebra and the Levallois stone point still embedded within it, this incident helps define the framework for this chapter. At the start of the period it covers, human interactions with the donkey’s ancestors were purely a matter of hunting wild prey, but by its end the donkey had been transformed into a domesticated animal. Chapter 2 thus looks at how this process came about, where it did so, and what the evolutionary history of the donkey’s forebears had been until that point. Donkeys and the wild asses that are their closest relatives form part of the equid family to which zebras and horses also belong. Collectively, equids, like rhinoceroses and tapirs, fall within the Perissodactyla, the odd-toed division of hoofed mammals or ungulates. Though this might suggest a close connection with the much larger order known as the Artiodactyla, the even-toed antelopes (including deer, cattle, sheep, and goats), their superficial resemblances may actually reflect evolutionary convergence; some genetic studies hint that perissodactyls are more closely related to carnivores. Like tapirs and rhinoceroses, the earliest equids had three toes, not the one that has characterized them for the past 40 million years. That single toe, the third, now bears all their weight in the form of a single, enlarged hoof with the adjacent toes reduced to mere splints. This switch, and the associated elongation of the third (or central) metapodial linking the toe to the wrist or ankle, is one of the key evolutionary transformations through which equids have passed. A second involves diet since the earliest perissodactyls were all browsers, not grazers like the equids of today.

The Donkey’s Tale

Readers must draw their own conclusions as to whether Eeyore’s assessment that ‘That Accounts for a Good Deal’ is valid regarding what they have read thus far and whether they agree that the statement of a Tswana informant consulted by Martha Geiger and Alice Hovorka—‘Donkeys made me who I am today’—captures an important truth about their overall significance in human history. This final chapter summarizes my own thoughts on the matter. It starts by identifying the key themes that run through the donkey’s tale, the millennialong association between people and donkeys and mules. Can we recognize durable or recurring sets of connections, either practical or symbolic? Are consistencies discernible across time and space, independent of cultural context, perhaps because of biological and behavioural propensities that all mules and donkeys may share? What kind of worlds, in short, did the donkey make? One theme that undoubtedly warrants attention is the widespread demotion in the donkey’s status following the adoption and spread of other riding animals— horses and camels—across much of the Old World. How far does this in fact permit, or encourage, us to use donkeys to write a history of the subaltern, of the oppressed, something that archaeology still often neglects? Whether the framework of interspecies relations within which donkeys have existed—and still exist—truly permits us to write a history of the donkey (rather than of donkeys and people), let alone a donkey’s history of the worlds the two have shared, also demands consideration. In turn, this requires us to think carefully about how active the donkey has been in the creation of those worlds. Responding to these points connects as much with the status and recognition we are prepared to extend to Equus asinus as it does with framing the questions by which to continue investigating our shared past. People domesticated donkeys some 7,000 or more years ago somewhere in northeastern Africa, most likely because of the assistance they could offer in supporting a mobile pastoralist way of life by reducing the costs of moving personal possessions, children, the infirm, and perhaps even young animals.

The Ancient Near East

The donkey was domesticated from the African wild ass in Northeast Africa some 7–6,000 years ago. This chapter looks at what happened when donkeys turned right and exited Africa into Asia. Though tracking their movement as far as India and China, its principal focus lies in the Ancient Near East, the region stretching from Israel north to Turkey and eastward into Iraq and Iran that is often termed the ‘Fertile Crescent’. Within this vast area, donkeys were used in daily life, including the agricultural cycle, just as they were in Egypt. But like there they also acquired other, more specialized uses and associations. Thus, after tracing the donkey’s spread I look at its role in three key aspects of the Near East’s earliest civilizations: the organization of trade; the legitimization of kingship; and religion. By 3500 BC the earliest cities had already emerged in Mesopotamia, the ‘land between the rivers’ Euphrates and Tigris. Over the course of the next 1,500 years, urbanization gathered pace across Palestine and Syria in the west, northward in Turkey, and east through Iran. Within Mesopotamia the independent Sumerian city-states of the south developed increasingly monarchical forms of government, seeing brief unity under the kings of Akkad and the Third Dynasty of Ur in the late third millennium BC. Then and later a city-state pattern of political organization also held in northern Mesopotamia (for example, at Aššur and its neighbour Mari) and in the Levant. In the mid-second millennium bc, however, much larger kingdoms emerged: the Hittites in central Turkey, Assyria in northern Mesopotamia, and Babylonia in its south. The Hittites, in particular, competed with Egypt for control of Syrian and Palestinian cities like Ugarit. When these Bronze Age powers collapsed around 1200 BC, their disappearance opened a window for smaller states like Israel to flourish briefly in their wake. Subsequently, however, first Assyria (911–612 BC) and then Babylon (612–539 BC) established much more centralized and extensive empires across the Near East before being subsumed within the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great and his successors.

A long and beyond the Nile

If, as Herodotus stated, Egypt is the gift of the Nile, then it is a gift delivered largely by donkeys. Donkeys appear in the archaeological record of Egypt earlier than anywhere else. For over 6,000 years they have sustained some of the densest human populations on the planet, as well as supporting the development of one of the world’s first civilizations. Along the river, they have moved people, carried goods to market, threshed grain, and ploughed fields. They have been essential for extracting valuable metals and precious stones from the surrounding deserts and crucial for connecting Egypt with its neighbours. This chapter looks at all these themes. Additionally, it explores the symbolic significance that donkeys acquired in Egyptian thought, before considering their spread beyond the Nile into other parts of Africa. Faunal remains identified as donkey, rather than wild ass, are known from several sites of the Predynastic period that preceded Egypt’s development as a single state by about 3100 BC. During this period Egyptian society changed from being a series of small agricultural villages to a situation in which some of those settlements expanded into early towns, some of them seats of evermore competitive chieftains, others centres of craft production that were becoming heavily engaged in long-distance trade. This last point holds particularly true for several sites close to modern Cairo. It is from some of these, as we have seen, that the earliest donkey remains have been recovered: at El Omari c.4600–4400 BC and Maadi c.4000–3500 BC. A little later, one of the many carved slate ceremonial palettes produced during the later fourth millennium BC, the so- called Libyan (or Cities) Palette, shows a line of tame-looking donkeys between a row of cattle above and one of sheep below: though pictured with the dark shoulder stripe characteristic of wild asses, and without harness or loads, their context and demeanour suggest that they are domesticated. The kings of Egypt’s First and Second Dynasties (c.3085–2686 BC) reinforced their status by building monumental tomb complexes at Abydos in Upper Egypt and Saqqara outside Memphis, their new administrative and ceremonial centre just south of the apex of the Nile Delta.

The Classical World

Donkeys are the quintessential Mediterranean animal. This chapter explores the first two millennia and more of that association. It starts with the Bronze Age societies of the Aegean, but principally emphasizes the donkey’s contribution to the Classical world of the Greeks and Romans, a topic richly informed by literary, as well as archaeological, evidence. Summarizing that contribution, Mark Griffith noted that ‘Without them there would have been no food for the table or fuel for the fire; nor would the workshops, markets, and retail stores have been able to conduct their business’, while the Roman writer and politician Cicero simply observed that it would be unduly tedious to enumerate their services. Around 4,000 years ago urban, state-organized societies centred on large, multiroom ‘palaces’ were already active on the island of Crete. By the mid-second millennium bc similar societies had emerged on the Greek mainland in the form of the Mycenaean kingdoms. Bronze Age societies further west, however, were organized at a less complex level and did not use writing. The same holds true of Greece itself once Mycenaean civilization collapsed: only after 800 BC did the material culture and city-state political systems characteristic of the Classical period emerge. Without discussing the latter’s archaeology or history in detail, it is worth remembering that the Classical Greek world was far more extensive than the modern country, a result of early settlement of the west coast of Turkey, followed by large-scale migration into southern Italy and Sicily (‘Magna Graecia’ or ‘Greater Greece’) and smaller scale colonization elsewhere along the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Greeks—and the Phoenician merchants who preceded them—were attracted into the western Mediterranean by opportunities for trade as much as settlement. Of the region’s indigenous populations Italy’s Etruscans were among the first to engage with them, undergoing a rapid process of urbanization and increasing political and economic complexity from about 800 BC. On the Etruscans’ southern periphery emerged Rome. Through luck, strategy, and a geographically central location, by the third century BC it dominated the Italian Peninsula. Moreover, following wars with Carthage, an originally Phoenician city in Tunisia, and with the Macedonian kings who succeeded Alexander the Great, its sway extended across the whole of the Mediterranean by the time Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC.

New Worlds for the Donkey

One of the signature historical phenomena of the past 500 years has been the global expansion of European societies and their trans-Atlantic offshoots. The mercantile networks, commercial systems, and empires of conquest and colonization that formed the political and economic framework of that expansion involved the discovery and extraction of new mineral and agricultural resources, the establishment of new infrastructures of transport and communication, and the forcible relocation of millions of people. Another key component was the Columbian Exchange, the multiple transfers of people, animals, plants, and microbes that began even before Columbus, gathered pace after 1492, and were further fuelled as European settlement advanced into Africa, Australasia, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Donkeys evolved in the Old World and were confined there until the Columbian Exchange was underway. This chapter explores the introduction of the donkey and the mule to the Americas and, more briefly, to southern Africa and Australia. In keeping with my emphasis on seeking archaeological evidence with which to illuminate the donkey’s story, I omit other aspects of its expansion, such as the trade in animals to French plantations on the Indian Ocean islands of Réunion and Mauritius or, on a much greater scale, India to meet the demands of the British Raj. These examples nevertheless reinforce the argument that mules and donkeys were instrumental in creating and maintaining the structures of economic and political power that Europeans and Euro- Americans wielded in many parts of the globe. From Brazil to the United States, Mexico to Bolivia, Australia to South Africa, they helped directly in processing precious metals and were pivotal in moving gold and silver from mines to centres of consumption. At the same time, they aided the colonization of vast new interiors devoid of navigable rivers, maintained communications over terrain too rugged for wheeled vehicles to pose serious competition, and powered new forms of farming. Their contributions to agriculture and transport were well received by many of the societies that Europeans conquered and their mestizo descendants. However, they also provided opportunities for other Native communities to maintain a degree of independence and identity at and beyond the margins of the European-dominated world.

Why Donkeys?

Donkeys carried Christ into Jerusalem, transported the Greek god Dionysus to his childhood home on Mount Nysa and into battle against the Giants, and provided a mount for Muhammad, who supposedly used it to summon his companions. Long before the arrival of the horse, they were ridden by kings in the Near East, buried near Egypt’s first pharaohs, and sacrificed to ancient gods across the Fertile Crescent and as far beyond it as Baluchistan and Badajoz. Along with their hybrid offspring, the mule, donkeys formed—and in places still form—a core technology for moving goods at both local and international levels, especially in areas of rugged or mountainous terrain: agricultural produce throughout the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East, and beyond; tin and wool for Bronze Age merchants between Assyria and Anatolia; supplies for the Roman army; New World silver to Caribbean ports for shipment to Spain; salt in contemporary and medieval Ethiopia; household necessities and even the dead in the modern Moroccan city of Fez. Their muscles ground flour in the Classical Mediterranean, powered water wheels in Islamic Andalucía, and helped deliver stone columns from Egypt’s deserts to build the Pantheon in Rome. Today, they remain a critical resource for many of the world’s poor, their use promoted by numerous development projects. At the same time, conservation authorities in places as distant from each other as Australia and the United States seek to control the numbers of feral donkeys using means that pose impossible-to-resolve ethical questions. And yet, for most twenty-first-century individuals in the Western world, donkeys are among the least considered of the animals that people have domesticated. Tellingly, for example, a recent overview of the archaeology of animals completely omits them, while nevertheless including the Muscovy duck (Cairina moschata), a tree-nesting bird kept by Pre-Columbian Native Americans, in its table of ‘major domestic animals’. Rarely seen and even more rarely eaten, donkeys are perhaps met with on foreign holidays or encountered as unusual companion animals, participants in school Christmas celebrations, or seaside attractions for small children.