A panel from the Standard of Ur, a Sumerian artwork from about 4600 years ago. It depicts the fearsome battle-carts of a Sumerian army, drawn by kungas, hybrids between donkeys and onagers.
“Meet the kunga, the earliest known hybrid animal bred by people.
“The ancient equine from Syro-Mesopotamia existed around 4,500 years ago and was a cross between a donkey and a hemippe, a type of Asiatic wild ass, researchers report in Science Advances.
“Horses didn’t appear in this region of Asia until 4,000 years ago, centuries after their domestication in Russia. But dozens of equine skeletons were excavated in the early 2000s from a royal burial complex dating back to 2600 B.C. at Umm el-Marra in northern Syria. The animals, whose physical features didn’t match any known equine species, appear to be 'kungas' – horselike animals seen in artwork and referenced in clay tablets predating horses by centuries.
“'They were highly valued, very expensive,' says paleogeneticist Eva-Maria Geigl of Institut Jacques Monod in Paris.”
(Jake Buehler “Part donkey, part wild ass, the kunga is the oldest known hybrid bred by humans.” Science News. January 14, 2022.)
References for these valuable equids are found in multiple clay tablets such as those detailing fodder expenses, e.g., barley for the equids of the god Shara and the deified king Shulgi from Umma, and dowries for royal marriages.
Large-sized male kungas were used to pull the vehicles of “nobility and gods,” and their size and speed made them more desirable than asses for the towing of four-wheeled war wagons, which predate horse-pulled chariots. Smaller-sized male and female kungas were used in agriculture, where they were frequently reported pulling ploughs.
Kunga foals were seldom born within the urban centers of Sumer and Syria, and Ebla purchased young kungas almost exclusively from what may have been the principal breeding center at Nagar (modern Tell Brak), in northern Mesopotamia, whose rulers also provided them as gifts to the elites of allied territories.
Presumed kungas featured prominently on royal seals throughout the region, and images of these hybrids likely appear on both the “war” and “peace” panels of the standard of Ur, a Sumerian artifact excavated from the royal cemetery in the ancient city of Ur (in modern-day Iraq).
In one of the first depictions (2600 BCE) of a military expedition in human history, warriors stand on four-wheeled war wagons, each drawn by a team of unspecified equids. An example of the rein ring featured in this image has been found in a royal grave at Ur, decorated with a small statue of a noncaballine equid, either a kunga or hemione. Kunga use and traditions decreased and eventually vanished following the introduction of domestic horses in the region.
(E. Andrew Bennett, Jill Weber, Wejden Bendhafer Sophie Champlot, Joris Peters, Glenn M. Schwartz, Thierry Grange and Eva-Maria Geigl. “The genetic identity of the earliest human-made hybrid animals, the kungas of Syro-Mesopotamia.” Science Advances. Vol 8, Issue 2. January 14, 2022.)
The Super Donkey – Valuable War Equid
The onager, or Asian wild-ass (Equus hemionus), is an animal inhabiting the deserts of the Middle East. They are larger and heavier than donkeys and they are very fast. They can reach speeds of 70 km/h (faster than a modern racehorse) and maintain a speed of 50 km/h for several hours. They would be perfect as chariot draft animals − except for one thing: They are notoriously untamable. They are stubborn, foul-tempered, and they can be aggressive to humans.
“Folks wished the qualities of a wild animal,” said Fiona Marshall, an archaeologist at Washington College in St. Louis who has researched the prehistory of donkeys and their domestication.
Donkeys may need been tamer than their ancestors, the African wild ass; however, the breeders in Mesopotamia wished to again breed to different wild asses for energy and velocity – and maybe measurement. (Though the final identified dwelling examples of the Syrian wild ass had been very small, slightly greater than three feet on the withers, older animals of the identical species had been bigger.)
(“The Kunga Was a Status Symbol Long Before the Thoroughbred.” Global Online Money. January 15, 2022.)
Before the arrival of the horse, finding an animal willing to charge into battle was a challenge, said Geigl, head of research at CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) at the Université de Paris and author of the study.
While cattle and donkeys could pull wagons, they wouldn't run toward an adversary.
"They were not used for making war, and there were no domestic horses at the time. The Sumerians, who wanted to make war because they were really very powerful city states, they had to find another solution."
However, it wouldn't have been easy. The Syrian wild ass was thought to be aggressive and moved extremely quickly, Geigl said.
Kungas were extremely valuable in Mesopotamia, costing up to six times as much as a donkey. The analysis of their ancient genomes both solved a long-standing controversy and identified the earliest human-made equid hybrids, highlighting their critical role in the “art of war” centuries before the first domestic horses arrived in the area.”
Standard of Ur
The Standard of Ur – a Sumerian artifact of the 3rd millennium BC that is now in the collection of the British Museum – was found in the Royal Tomb of PG 779. It is a trapezoid box about 50 cm long. On each of its four sides are scenes with humans and animals, created with inlays of lapis lazuli, red limestone and shell (the composition is partially reconstructed). Its function is not known. Woolley thought it might be a standard of the kind carried by military units. This hasn’t been substantiated and finds little support in the ancient imagery, but the name has stuck nevertheless.
The standard has two long sides, usually referred to as the “war’ and ‘peace” side respectively.
The “war” side has three registers. The top register has one four-wheeled wagon pulled by equids, while the bottom register has another four vehicles with equids. Each team of equids consists of four stallions. The engravings offer some really interesting details about how these equids were observed and integrated into human activity.
The Spirited Horse, blog of Laerke Recht – Professor in Early Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies, Institute of Classics University of Graz, Austria – offers a description of the tack …
“We can see that the animals were controlled by a nose ring. Reins were attached to the nose ring and run back to the driver through the rein ring (actual examples of rein rings were found in the Ur tombs). Probably only one rein was attached to each nose ring. This method of control (combined with the kind of vehicle) would mean a rather unwieldy vehicle that would have been difficult to turn.
“The equids all carry neck collars with some kind of tassels attached, probably a textile or leather. The tassels might mostly have been decorative, but could also have served a practical purpose (for example, keeping insects from bothering the animals, especially when sweating).
(Laerke Recht. “The Standard of Ur.” The Spirited Horse: Archaeology. Animals in the ancient world and today.)
As for military chariots,
they were the state-of-the-art war machines of the time. They were
part of an extensive organization, ranging from stable hands, grooms,
animal trainers, stable master, chariot warriors, charioteers, and
the captain of the charioteers.
An administrative unit was
probably also included.
The chariot warriors and the charioteers held privileged positions, and like modern professional soldiers, they spent their days with training. The chariots were costly to build and they were pulled by expensive animals, so chariot warfare was probably the exclusive domain of wealthy noblemen.
(“Sumerian War Chariot.” Sumerian Shakespeare. sumerianshakespeare.com. March 14, 2021.)
Ancient Mesopotamian texts refer to war memorials where the corpses of enemies were piled up, although none have actually been found.
According to a research paper appearing in Antiquity (2021) …
“We recognized that there was a distinct pattern in the burials – pairs of bodies with skins of equids in one part of the monument, single individuals with earthen pellets in the other,” said Professor Anne Porter from the University of Toronto, Canada. She noted that the pairs buried with kunga “may reflect chariot teams.” Such organization and specialization would also suggest also that the military force “was state organized.” Moreover, the team found “it was not a mass grave of those who fell in battle, but the deceased were deliberately reburied in the monument at a later point.”
The researchers theorize that the decision to carefully rebury their own dead in the mound with its new stepped architectural features, possibly along with their military equipment, was a conscious effort by the community to celebrate their warriors. Its 4000-year age would make it the oldest known monument to war dead in the world.
(Lindsay Powell. “A 4,000-Year-Old ‘War Memorial’ Identified in Syria, According to New Research.” Ancient Warfare Magazine. May 28, 2021.)
Bio-engineers
Bronze Age bio-engineers created the majestic horselike creature known as a kunga, that had a donkey mom and a Syrian wild ass for a father, according to new research based on the sequencing of DNA from the animal's skeleton.
“It is surprising to see that these ancient societies envisioned something so complex as hybrid breeding, since this was an intentional act: they had the domestic donkey, they knew they cannot domesticate the Syrian wild ass, and they did not domesticate horses,” Eva-Maria Geigl said. “So, they intentionally developed a strategy to breed two different species to combine different characters that they found desirable in each of the parent species.”
(Isaac Schultz. “Oldest Known Human-Bred Hybrid Animal Was a 'Kunga.'” Gizmodo. January 14, 2022.)
"Since hybrids are usually sterile, it means there was a remarkable level of energy devoted to constantly capturing and raising wild onagers, breeding them with domestic donkeys and then training these teams of prestigious kungas (which would only last for one generation)," said Benjamin Arbuckle, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Gone, Gone, Gone
The analysis workforce additionally sequenced DNA from a Syrian wild ass discovered at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, an 11,000-year-old web site the place people gathered for functions nonetheless being studied, and from two of the final animals of the species, held at a zoo in Vienna.
It’s a species that now not exists. The kunga can’t be recreated, Dr. Andrew Bennett, now with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, mentioned. Donkeys are plentiful, after all, however the final identified Syrian wild asses died within the late Nineteen Twenties. One was shot within the wild and the opposite died in a zoo in Vienna.
“The recipe for making the kunga was unknown for 1000’s of years,” Bennett said. “And we lastly decode it not even 100 years since one component has develop into extinct.”
(“The Kunga Was a Status Symbol Long Before the Thoroughbred.” Global Online Money. January 15, 2022.)
“The Stele of the Vultures originates from Tello (ancient Girsu) in Iraq and dates to the Early Dynastic III period, or roughly between 2600 and 2350 BC. The stele was erected to celebrate the victory of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash, ruled by Eanatum, over its rival Umma …
“The second panel from the top depicts more soldiers marching, this time apparently without shields, and with their spears held aslant against their shoulders in one hand, and axes held up in the other. They follow a war-cart pulled by donkeys or onagers, driven by a figure holding a long spear overhead: this is again supposed to be Eanatum.”
– Ancient World Magazine (August 14, 2017)
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