by David Day
George Edwards was an aristocratic artist-naturalist who recorded the arrival of this first Quagga to reach Britain from the Cape of Good Hope. On the recommendation of Sir Hans Sloane, Edwards had been appointed the librarian of the Royal College of Physicians. Besides Gleanings, Edwards also published his earlier History of Birds, in which he described and illustrated more than 600 species never before described or delineated. He was later to become known as the “Father of British Ornithology.”
The Quagga was often mistaken for some sort of cross-bred animal: half-zebra, half-horse. It was, in fact, a distinctive type of Zebra. Its head and forequarters were striped like a zebra while its hindquarters were a solid rufous brown. Alternatively, the Edwards animal was for a time believed to be the female variation of the fully striped white-legged Burchell’s Cape Zebra. In fact, Burchell’s Zebra (Equus quagga burchelli) is now classified as a subspecies of the nominate Quagga species (Equus quagga quagga) and both suffered the same fate.
Zebras from “Ethiopia” were known to the Romans when the historian Dio Casio described them as “horses of the sun resembling tigers.” However, it was William Dampier, the famous adventurer and buccaneer, who, upon visiting the Dutch Colony of the Cape of Good Hope in 1691, first gave a description of Burchell’s Cape Zebra: “a very beautiful sort of wild ass whose body is curiously striped with equal lists of white and black.”
William John Burchell – 1811
Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa , London
I could compare the clatter of their hooves to nothing but to the din of a tremendous charge of cavalry, or rushing of a mighty tempest. I could not estimate the accumulated number at less than fifteen thousand, a great extent of the country being actually chequered black and white with their congregated masses. As the panic caused by the report of our rifles extended, clouds of dust hovered over them, and the long necks of troops of ostriches were also to be seen, towering above the heads of their less gigantic neighbours, and sailing past with astonishing rapidity. Groups of purple Sassaybes and brilliant red and yellow Hartebeests likewise lent aid to complete the picture, which must have been seen to be properly understood, and which beggars all attempt at description.
William John Burchell was a remarkable English explorer and naturalist who from 1810-15 gathered over 50,000 specimens in the most extensive collection of African plant and animal species ever amassed – before or since. From 1825-30, he made a similarly extraordinary collection in Brazil which included 16,000 insects, and 1,000 animals. As an authority of Southern Africa – having travelled over 7,000 kilometres of largely unexplored territory – Burchell was instrumental in the parliamentary decision in favour of British emigration to the Cape in 1820. In later years much angered by disputes with the British Museum, and feeling unappreciated after having totally exhausted his own personal fortune in creating these astounding collections, Burchell took his own life in 1863.
The “purpleSassaybes” andthe “redHartebeests” colourfullydescribed by Burchell in his Travels as part of these vast herds of Quaggas and Burchell’s Zebras were sadly also all hunted to extinction. Sassaby was the Saan Bushmen’s name for a “goat-horned” antelope with a blue-grey coat that the Boers called Blaauwbok and the English called Blue Buck (Hippotragus leucophaeus). Burchell’s “red Hartebeest” was the nominate Cape Red Hartebeest (Alcelaphus caama caama).
The remarkable and unique Blue Buck was actually the first African animal to become extinct in historic times: the last specimen being shot about eighty years after its discovery by Europeans in 1799. By the 1830’s, all of the Cape Red Hartebeest herds had been reduced to a handful of animals that were kept in a private reserve until they too were killed off by poachers by 1940.
Jared Diamond – 1997
Guns, Germs, and Steel, New York
“Efforts at domestication of zebras went as far as hitching them to carts: they were tried out as draft animals in 19th century South Africa. Alas zebras become impossibly dangerous as they grow older. Zebras have the unpleasant habit of biting a person and not letting go. They thereby injure even more American zoo-keepers each year than do tigers. Zebras are also virtually impossible to lasso with a rope because of their unfailing ability to watch the rope noose fly toward them and then to duck their head out of the way. Hence it has rarely (if ever) been possible to saddle or ride a zebra, and South Africans’ enthusiasm for their domestication waned.”
In England in the 1830’s there was a brief vogue for Quaggas as harness animals after Sheriff Parkins became famous in London society for his pair of exotic imports. A few decades later, Lord Rothschild rode in a carriage pulled by two Burchell’s Zebras. Eventually, however, both the Quagga and the Zebra proved to be too unpredictable. Quaggas in particular were prone to dangerous fits of rage. In 1860, the Regent’s Park Zoo’s only attempt to breed captive Quaggas failed when the stallion beat itself to death in its enclosure.
The last wild Quagga stallion was hunted down in the Cape in 1878; and the last captive Quagga died in the Artis Magistra Zoo in Amsterdam on the 12 August 1883. Only 23 specimens of the Quagga now exist in museums anywhere in the world.
Burchell’s Zebra, known to the Boers as the Bontequagga (meaning “painted Quagga”), managed to avoid extinction for a few decades longer than its cousin. The last known Bontequagga died in captivity in London’s Regent’s Park Zoo in 1910.
HORSES OF THE SUN
Quagga – 1883
1.
Bushmen called them Quay-Hay
In imitation of their “barking neigh”
Memories of them gather like thunderclouds
On the edge of this landscape of the mind:
A high veldt with kloofs and koppies
Where thoughts like strong winds gust
Through the tall grass, acacia
Whistling thorn and quiver trees
2.
Knowing they have no concept of heaven
Or hell or soul or resurrection
I summon them anyway
And for a moment, the gates are forced
By the rolling thunder of thousands
Upon thousands of pounding hooves
Legions of stallions and mares
Burst onto the veldt
“Horses of the sun resembling tigers”
According to Dio Cassio
Nostrils flared, “savage and fierce by nature”
Magnificent in their defiance
While the Boer hunters wait
Over water with long guns
3.
The Orion constellation
Is read differently here
Still the Celestial Hunter
But the sword is no sword
This one carries a spear
And the three stars
Of the belt are no belt
But three Quagga
The hunter’s prey
For millennia after stars have gone out
We still marvel at the beauty of their light
The brilliant memory of what once was
XENOPHON’S ONAGERS
SECOND WATCH 1 A. M. MIDNIGHT
ASSYRIAN ONAGER – 1930 – Equus hemionus hemippus
Xenophon – 401 BC
Anabasis: The March of Cyrus, Mesopotamia
Cyrus now advanced through Arabia, having the Euphrates on the right, five days’ march through the desert, a distance of thirty-five parasangs. In this region the ground was entirely a plain, level as the sea. There were wild animals, however, of various kinds; the most numerous were wild asses; there were also many ostriches, as well as bustards and antelopes; and these animals the horsemen of the army sometimes hunted. The wild asses, when any one pursued them, would start forward a considerable distance, and then stand still; and again, when the horse approached, they did the same; it was impossible to catch them, unless the horsemen, stationing themselves at intervals, kept up the pursuit with a succession of horses. The flesh of those that were taken resembled veniso
n, but more tender.
Travelling through Mesopotamia in 1884, Canon Tristram wrote of the Assyrian Onager: “This is the Wild Ass of Scripture and the Ninevite sculptures mentioned by Strabo, Eratosthenes, Artemidorus, Homer, and Pliny. Measuring just one metre at the shoulder, it was the smallest and swiftest of all the horse family.”
Xenophon’s adventures are among the most famous in all of military history. He commanded an elite force of ten thousand Greek mercenary soldiers who supported Cyrus, a pretender to the throne of the Persian Empire. The Greeks completely routed the opposing army, but disastrously Cyrus was killed in the battle, so Xenophon’s Greeks had to fight their way over thousands of miles back to Greece.
Xenophon’s observations were precisely confirmed over twenty-two centuries later by the British explorer Blandford in 1876: “It is said the Onager can not be caught by a single horseman in the open. But at other times they are caught in relays of horsemen and greyhounds. Some say their meat is prized above all other venison.”
Sir Austen Layard – 1850
Nineveh and Its Remains , Mesopotamia
A great herd of Wild Asses are seen in the Sinjar region west of Mosul. Those mentioned by Xenophon must have been seen in these very plains. The Arabs sometimes catch the foals during the spring, and bring them up with milk in their tents. They are of light fawn colour – almost pink. The Arabs still eat their flesh.
Sir Austen Layard’s remarkable travels to Mesopotamia were made expressly to uncover the lost civilizations of Assyria. He succeeded in discovering the lost cities of Nineveh and Nimrod, and the palaces of Ashurbanipal and Sennacherib. It was his knowledge of Xenophon and the Scriptures that led to his success. Here, while camped on the desolate site of ancient Nineveh, Layard remembers the biblical passages relating to wrath of Jehovah being unleashed upon Sennacherib and quotes Zephaniah (ii, 13-15): “And He will stretch out His Hand against the north, and destroy Assyria; and will make Nineveh a desolation, dry like a wilderness… a place for beasts to lie down in”: an accurate description of Assyria’s fate.
J. E. T. Aitchison – 1885
British Botanical Expedition , Persia
My guide took me to a slight elevation, above the ‘Plain of Wild Asses’. For some time I could see nothing; at last whilst using my glasses, I noticed clouds of dust, like a line of smoke left in the track of steamers. These several lines of dust-cloud were caused by herds of Asses, galloping in various directions over the great plain. One herd came well within a mile’s distance; from its extent, I am even now of the opinion that the herd consisted of at least 1000 animals. I counted sixteen of these lines of dust-cloud at one time on the horizon.
J. E. T. Aitchison conducted botanical surveys of Persia and Afghanistan for the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew for Sir William Hooker. Wild Asses are of two distinct types: the African Wild Ass (Equus africanus), ancestor of the domestic donkey, and the irascible and never domesticated Asian Onager (Equus hemionus). Besides the Assyrian Onager of Syria and Mesopotamia there was one other subspecies in the Near East: the Persian Onager (Equus hemionus onager) – now critically endangered with only about 500 animals in two reserves in Iran. Aitchison’s account testifies to the immense numbers that, before the introduction of modern firearms, once inhabited these now nearly empty deserts.
William Ridgeway – 1905
Contributions to the Study of Equidae , London
That the Onager was regularly captured and domesticated in Assyria in ancient times is clearly established by one of the bas-reliefs discovered by Sir Austen Layard at Nineveh. The relief, which is one of a series of slabs recording scenes in the life and hunting expeditions of Ashurbanipal (668-626 BC), represents two of the king’s attendants lassoing a wild ass. The other two asses are seen running away.
William Ridgeway is correct here. Sir Austen Layard was not only aware that he was following in the footsteps of Xenophon, but interestingly enough, this is the same animal Layard discovered precisely observed by a sculptor over 2400 years earlier in the royal hunt on the walls of Nineveh that he was in the process of excavating. And furthermore, besides the Onager, there are found the images of the Persian Lion and the Aurochs – all three suffering the same fate as the Assyrians.
Austen Layard later presented the British Museum – along with these massive relief wall sculptures of the royal hunt portraying the Assyrian Onager – a specimen of this same species: the only wild-caught example in any British collection.
This region of Old Mesopotamia between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers has been the setting for many other military adventures for over five thousand years. It has seen the rise and fall of the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongols, the Turks, and the British. And Mosul seems to have been the seat of power for extravagantly ruthless dictators from the days of Sennacherib to those of Saddam Hussein.
Otto Antonius – 1938
On the Recent Equidae , Vienna
The little Hemippus of Mesopotamia and Syria, domesticated by the ancient Sumers before the introduction of the horse became totally extinct in recent years. It could not resist the power of modern guns in the hands of the Anazeh and Shammar nomads, and its speed, great as it may have been, was not sufficient always to escape from the velocity of the modern motor car which more and more is replacing the Old Testament Camel-Caravan.
The social anthropologist Jared Diamond writes extensively about the how and why of the process of domestication of animals. He wonders why, out of the world’s 148 possible big wild herbivorous mammal candidates – although a number have been “tamed” – only a dozen have been successfully domesticated, and only six have been universally adopted: sheep, goat, pig, cow, horse, and donkey.
Interestingly enough, Diamond points out that, while there are eight distinctive species of wild equids (horses and relatives) that would all appear to be suitable candidates, only two of them – the Tarpan as the ancestor of the Horse and the North African Ass as the ancestor of the Donkey – were successfully domesticated. He then specifically observes the case of the Assyrian Onager. “Closely related to the North African ass is the Asiatic ass, also known as the Onager. Since its homeland includes the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of Western civilization and animal domestication, ancient peoples must have experimented extensively with onagers. We know from Sumerian and later depictions that onagers were regularly hunted, as well as captured and hybridized with donkeys and horses. Some ancient depictions of horse-like animals used for riding or for pulling carts may refer to onagers. However, all writers about them, from Romans to modern zookeepers, decry their irascible temper and their nasty habit of biting people. As a result, although similar in other respects to ancestral donkeys, onagers have never been domesticated.”
The last wild Assyrian Onager was shot in 1927 in Arabia, while the last captive animal died in the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna in 1930. This, despite the efforts of the Zoo’s director Otto Antonius, one of the co-founders of modern zoological biology, and one of the leading lights in the rescue of such endangered species as the Wisent.
THE WALLS OF NINEVEH*
Assyrian Onager – 1930
“Onagers are among the beasts of the royal hunt on the walls
of Ashurbanipal’s palace at Nineveh.” – Sir Austen Layard, 1850
1.
When those in the heavens
Had not been named
When those beneath the earth
Were without a name
We raced alive and free
With no need of names
The speeding world was turning
Beneath our bright hooves
As whirlwinds and sandstorms
Arose in our wake
And chased the sun’s fire
Across the desert sky
2.
Then later came those Others
With their names and words
With their dark incantations
Building kingdoms and empires
By the power of words
With names to own and suppress
And spells to enslave
Mastering the art of slaughter
Made a paradise
Watered with the tears of slaves
And the blood of beasts
3.
In these passageways of word
And image cut in stone
In these corridors of power
In the great king’s house
With lion-slaying arrows
With axes and spears
With horse-slaves and chariots
The lord of the hunt reigns
Here we too are captives
In this counterfeit world
