Istwa Nou

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.