by Brian Fagan
The Pickup Trucks of History
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.”1 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 beasts—loads 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.2 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.”3 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.”4 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.”5 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 ove
r an enormous area. The city enjoyed a lucrative overland trade in textiles and tin, encouraging traders from elsewhere with minimal taxation.
Assur flourished at a time when bronze technology was of enormous importance, both for utilitarian artifacts and weapons and for ornaments and ceremonial vessels of all kinds. Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was a currency of imperial gifts and diplomatic exchange, prized for its durability and lustrous glow. Copper was relatively commonplace, but tin was a rarity, highly prized, and a staple of Assyrian trade. The city’s merchants purchased the metal from Babylonia, but it originally came from modern-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in Eurasia. Who controlled the mines and to what extent Assur monopolized the tin trade is a mystery, but shipments of the metal passed westward by donkey caravan to the Anatolian Plateau. Assur’s merchants also handled both locally woven textiles and highly prized Akkadian fabrics from the south. One expert has estimated that the ratio of donkey loads of textiles and wool to tin to pass west was in the order of three to one. However, one load of tin was five times as valuable as one of textiles.6
Assyrian commerce with Anatolia depended on trading colonies. For centuries, an Assyrian quarter of merchants and soldiers, known as a kârum, an Akkadian word for “port” or “quay”—Akkadian was the lingua franca of the time—prospered outside the city of Kultepe in central Turkey. Karum Kanesh was the terminus of a caravan trade in tin and textiles that lasted between about 1895 and 1715 BCE. The merchants of the kârum maintained contacts with a much larger set of trading networks through Anatolia and farther afield. The entire region was a patchwork of city-states and shifting alliances, which required adept diplomacy. The Assyrians with their tin and much-coveted textiles kept a strategic advantage by executing sworn agreements with local rulers. Tolls and tribute were important sources of income for such worthies. The cuneiform tablets from the kârum contain frequent references to payments made by caravans along the road.
Like so much ancient trade, the Assur caravan trade was in the hands of powerful family-run merchant houses, in this case Assyrian, within a framework of carefully administered and financed partnerships that depended on agents in Kanesh. The entire enterprise relied on the hardworking donkey. (The Assyrians also possessed mules, or perdum, which were used for riding, especially by more prominent individuals.)7
The Assyrian donkey was a dark-colored pack animal—emarum sallamum, or “black donkey”—apparently a larger animal than the modern equivalent, with a long body and ears. They were plentiful, sturdy, and generally docile. As far as the merchants were concerned, donkeys were merely a means of transport to be used as efficiently as possible, so their life expectancy was relatively short. Heavily laden Assyrian donkeys must have been tough beasts, operating as they did in rough terrain. The Kanesh tablets tell us that many caravans arrived without losing any animals. Others suffered casualty rates of 50 to even 70 percent, but whether this was because of disease or weather conditions is unknown.
A donkey caravan—ellatum, a word approximating to “traveler”—was the terrestrial equivalent of an ocean convoy. Most people preferred to travel in company, with caravans leaving once there were enough individuals wanting to reach a specific destination, perhaps several times a month. Apart from security considerations, caravans lessened labor expenses and, perhaps just as important, were an invaluable source of intelligence on conditions along well-traveled routes. Like Egyptian caravans, an ellatum moved slowly but steadily, apparently traveling about twenty-five kilometers (fifteen miles) a day, what one might call a donkey pace. (A British army manual from modern times states that a donkey carrying a full load would travel about 3.4 kilometers (2 miles) an hour for six hours a day, which provides a yardstick.) (Also see sidebar “Xenophon Once Again.”) The journey from Assur to Kanesh, some 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) took about six weeks through rocky desert, mountain passes, dense forest, and flat plains.
The caravans required large numbers of strong beasts, so much so that breeding and training centers (gigamlum) sold them in many places. Assur in particular required a regular supply of male donkeys for load carrying; females were used for breeding. A caravan pack animal cost about sixteen to seventeen shekels in Assur, a few shekels more for saddles and panniers. Those sold in Anatolia fetched between twenty and thirty, so the profit margin was virtually nonexistent, once one took into account the costs of feeding the animal. Its care was minimal—the tablets speak of straw as fodder, the beasts being permitted to graze in spring, sometimes in rented paddocks along the way.
The vehicles of the caravan trade were just that, disposable pack animals worked to death or sold at the other end with the hope that one would break even. Few of the beasts made the return journey. The gold and silver carried eastward required many fewer pack animals. Hundreds, if not thousands, of donkeys plodded along the caravan routes, in convoys large and small—we have no means of estimating the precise numbers. As Assyriologist Gojko Barjamovic remarked in an e-mail to the author, “Someone must have been mass producing donkeys somewhere. The animals were not exactly cheap . . . about the price of a . . . female slave. These were not exactly Mercedeses, but at least the Dodge Ram trucks of the day. And people drove them in a comparably heinous and destructive manner.”8
Each donkey carried about 75 kilograms (165 pounds), loaded on a pack saddle, perhaps a leather- or cloth-covered wooden frame over a saddle cloth. Tin lay in two goat hair or leather half packs, one on either side of the beast, textiles in leather bags atop the pack saddle. With relatively standardized loads, merchants could be charged costs per load, which made the logistics of the trade somewhat easier to control.
Just how large Assyrian caravans were is a matter of debate, but groups of forty donkeys or more were not uncommon. A cuneiform tablet from the archives at the city of Mari in Syria tells us that one ellatum organized by local merchants comprised some three hundred donkeys and three hundred men, presumably the drivers, at a rate of about one per beast. Junior members of the merchant family often served as caravan leaders. They were responsible for the administration of the convoy and its safe arrival, and for the letter tablets in clay envelopes that formed part of the cargo. Tablet after tablet pleads for messages to be sent with the first available caravan; at the typical pace of twenty-four kilometers (fifteen miles) daily, each day truly counted.
Just the provisioning of caravans was a major task. As a result, the caravan routes changed little over the generations, proceeding from staging post to staging post, using agreements with local rulers to ensure safe passage. Inns along the routes fulfilled many functions, including storage of goods as well as providing food, fodder, and water. The last was an important consideration, especially with large caravans of three hundred beasts or so, which could consume six tons of water daily. Just growing and processing the fodder at such inns would have been a full-time job involving significant numbers of workers. Everywhere, the Assyrian caravan trade had a lasting effect on communities through which it passed.
We will never be able to reconstruct the full details of the caravan trade from surviving clay tablets. The primary sources are too incomplete and leave out many telling details of what was a very profitable, if sometimes risky, trade. The weary pack animals earned huge sums for their owners. Profit margins for tin (about 100 percent) and textiles (200 percent) were enormous. Just to give an impression of the value of the textiles, one standard-size cloth would buy about 3,600 loaves of bread, 7 kilograms (15 pounds) of copper, or 12 sheep. A single length of fine textile was even more valuable than a slave. One family’s tablet records a caravan of thirty-four donkeys that carried about 600 kilograms (1,322 pounds) of tin and 684 textiles, a mere smidgen of the wealth that traveled from Assur to Anatolia on donkey’s backs. If one arbitrarily estimates one donkey load of tin per Assyrian family annually, about two tons’ worth traveled west over a thirty-year period from 1889 to 1859 BCE, a staggering figure.
Global Beasts
Merchants, travelers, pilgri
ms—everyone in the eastern Mediterranean used donkeys and sometimes mules, before horses and camels became people movers. Cities such as Damascus prospered because they lay at the crossroads of strategic donkey caravan routes. Convoys of beasts wended their way from central and southern Mesopotamia, traveling north along the Tigris and Euphrates before heading west rather than traveling straight across the arid and dangerous Syrian Desert, where brigands lurked. The caravans supplied the markets of Aleppo, Hamath, and Damascus, where they linked up with other groups from the north. From these hubs, the donkeys headed south to Egypt and places near the Red Sea. Some of the largest caravans are said to have involved three thousand beasts, many of them carrying fodder and water for the other pack animals.
Donkeys also carried loads deep into Armenia and eastward, along what became known as the Silk Road, linking Europe and China. They came to Greece as early as the tenth century BCE, where they found work in every aspect of daily life—packing loads from mountain villages to ships, hauling logs from forests, laboring on construction sites, grinding grain, and carrying baskets through rows of vines on hillside vineyards.9 Without them, classical Athens would have lacked firewood, been chronically short of food, and its workshops and stores without raw materials or items to sell.
The Greeks made a clear distinction between the noble horse and the “servile” donkey, which corresponded in broad terms with that between people who were free and slaves. The ass was a menial laborer, a source of ribald humor, one of the unfree, despite being ridden by people of wealth or spiritual importance such as Christ and the Prophet Muhammad.10 However, donkeys developed strong ties with Christian symbolism as a result of Christ’s triumphant ride into Jerusalem. Christianity helped raise the status of the donkey, which supported the Savior when others ignored him.
