Istwa Nou

One animal went out from Africa to the rest of the world and changed how goods move. Modern contempt for the donkey obscures the scale of that. Centuries of Western usage have turned the animal's name into a term of abuse for stupidity, and the abuse has done real damage to the record. The donkey was the first multipurpose beast of burden in history. It carried loads and it carried riders. In the Middle East people harnessed it early to wheeled vehicles. Long distance trade in goods depended on owning donkeys, and so did the first wheeled transport anywhere. The uses people found for it very likely supplied the model for domesticating and working horses and camels later on. Every chariot in Egypt, every camel caravan crossing Arabia, every cavalry charge in the ancient world descends conceptually from an animal that Africans brought under care thousands of years before a horse carried anyone.

Genetic work on donkeys points to two separate domestications, one among communities in Somaliland and another farther north along the Red Sea Hills. People in both places would have been speaking early languages of the Cushitic branch of Afrasian, and within that branch linguists can follow a word distinguishing the domestic donkey from the wild one back to roughly 5000 BCE. The linguistic date agrees with the genetic date, and both agree with the archaeology, where domestic donkeys show up in Egypt after 4000 BCE. Three independent lines of evidence converging is what makes a case of this depth solid. Two African communities, neighbours in the Horn, took the same animal in hand at about the same time and set off consequences that reached transport, trade, warfare and the organisation of states across the ancient world. The road from Somaliland to Sumer is one of the least told routes in world history.

The domestic donkey came from Cushitic-speaking herders in the Red Sea Hills. It moved north through Egypt into southwestern Asia, and by the early fourth millennium BCE the cities of Mesopotamia and the Levant had an animal that could carry goods across long distances and pull a cart. A Sumerian cylinder seal of that millennium shows the result: a rider holding the reins of a donkey harnessed to a chariot, with more chariots behind him in procession. The wheels are solid, with no spokes, and the vehicles are cumbersome enough to look like display pieces rather than weapons of war. They remain the first wheeled transport known in the ancient Near East, and the engine was an animal that Africans domesticated and African exchange delivered. Sumer is remembered for ziggurats, for cuneiform and for the phrase cradle of civilisation. It should also be remembered for a donkey out of the Horn of Africa hauling the first cart through the streets of Uruk.