I was eager to review this book because I had reviewed R. Platte's Equine Poetics (BMCR 2018.11.35), which is about horses in ancient Indo-European poetry and cultures, and I wanted to explore R.'s account of similar subjects in the Ancient Near Eastern world. R.'s book is very different from Platte's in that its central subject is the equid–human relationship. Literary representations are part of R.'s Analysis, but the heart of it is equid behaviour and agency, and how these relate to the human relationship with equids as food, labour and the source of useful materials. R.'s approach combines faunal remains, iconography and texts, and it is characterised by broad and deep knowledge of equine ethology and biology. The book, which is the result of research carried out during R.'s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at Cambridge, is largely free of typos, handsomely bound, richly illustrated with high-quality figures throughout, and it features a preface for Bloomsbury's Ancient Environments series by the series editors A. Collar, E. Eidinow and K. Lorenz.
The book begins with the memorable royal self-presentation of Shulgi, King of Ur, who compares himself to various equids. Almost all evidence for equids appears in elite contexts because of the nature of the sources. R. shows that, while information about the equids who spent their lives with people of lower status is scarce, we know that donkeys were used and owned by free people of all social stations.
In Chapter 2 R. emphasises the intelligence and sociability of equids, which allow them to collaborate with humans on complex tasks. We learn that the most important species of equid in the Ancient Near East are: (1) Equus asinus (donkey), Sumerian ANŠE, which can also mean ‘equid’; (2) Equus caballus (horse), Sumerian ANŠE.ZI.ZI and Old Babylonian ANŠE.KUR.RA; (3) Equus hemionus (hemione), Sumerian ANŠE.EDIN.NA and Akkadian serrēmu; (4) Equus hemionus hemippus (Syrian onager), which does not have an identified designation in the texts; and (5) the kunga, likely referred to as ANŠE.BAR.AN. In the conclusion these animals are usefully ranked according to their social status. The wild hemiones occupy the lowest position, succeeded by donkeys, then by kungas and topped by horses, who are limited to elite contexts in their engagements with humans in the Bronze Age.
R. shows that Equus caballus already existed in the Ancient Near East in the Neolithic period, which is something that must be kept in mind when scholars attempt to use horses as markers of human population movements. R. mentions that the Ugaritic words for horses, śśw, śśwt, are likely borrowed. Considering the phonetically similar words for horses in Avestan (āsauuō) and Sanskrit (āśavas), which Platte discussed, the origin of these Ugaritic words is likely to be an Indo-European language.
Chapter 4 begins by discussing equids as beasts of burden and emphasises the greater intimacy of the human–equid relationship when the equids are domesticated. There are many examples of Early Bronze Age figurines representing equids as pack animals (p. 57). Among the Early Bronze Age documents that mention equids as beasts of burden, there is a text from Uruk that includes KASKAL.ANŠE, ‘road or travel donkeys’, and a text from Shuruppak that refers to donkeys going to Kish.
In a section titled ‘local transport’ R. provides further detail about donkeys owned by common people. In Early Dynastic Girsu a text mentions that workers, who may be employed by the state as corvée labour, can sell their donkeys to the administrator in charge. Donkey ownership was not out of reach for common people in Sumerian society or for those of later cultures in the second and first millennia bce.
The discussion of equids and chariots as royal gifts in the Amarna Letters on pp. 65–7 leaves something to be desired. R. questions the use to which the horses were put after being received by a king, but this is obvious. Teams of horses and chariots in the procession of gifts and dignitaries that arrived in the capital of a king would be employed in the self-same manner by their new owner, i.e. in parades, processions and public representations of royal power.
Chapter 5 is devoted to equid-drawn vehicles. Figure 5.1 and the discussion of chariots and straddle cars on pp. 73–7 provide a clarifying overview of the types of Bronze Age two-wheeled vehicles as well as an update to the authoritative work of M.A. Littauer and J. Crouwel (Selected Writings on Chariots and other Early Vehicles, Riding and Harness [2002]). The importance of chariots in elite ideology is obvious in the Ancient Near East, and there is even an Old Babylonian hymn to the chariot of Išme-Dagan, king of Isin. The excellent discussion of equids, wheeled vehicles and war on pp. 93–7 reveals that donkeys were employed already in the earliest conflict that is known in any detail, the Umma-Lagash border conflict of the mid-third millennium bce.
R. provides an important update to arguments about the Indo-European origins of chariot technology or larger horses (pp. 98–9), which will be of use to everyone concerned with the Indo-European question. Acknowledging that some words in Ancient Near Eastern texts relating to horses and chariots have an Indo-European etymology, R. argues that ‘none of the developments that occur in equids and types of vehicles and harness are so extreme or unfamiliar as to necessarily merit outside influence’ (p. 99).
Chapter 6 moves from chariots to equids as mounts. Riding equids is especially associated with messengers and dignitaries (p. 108). There is ample evidence for mounted messengers in the Late Bronze Age from the Amarna Letters and other diplomatic correspondence. R. speaks of a ‘generally hostile attitude to messengers’ (p. 113) in the Ancient Near East, but I find this description to be inconsistent with the evidence. In the Amarna Letters, kings are often asking for their messengers to be returned and not to be detained, but that does not mean that continuing to host a messenger, always a high-ranking person in his kingdom of origin, is an act of hostility towards the messenger.
Some of the most important material in the book is presented in Chapter 8. We see equids regarded as persons and as the honoured dead in the Ancient Near East, with special treatment and placement in tombs similar to the treatment of humans. Many equids are found in human burials, and some equids are buried in tombs without human remains present. Some equid burials seem to be part of foundation deposits, located under city walls or the thresholds of houses – a phenomenon limited to the Levant and western Syria.
There are donkey sacrifices in the Ancient Near East, including the specialised sacrifice of equids associated with treaties. This is a crux in ancient studies, since both ancient Greek and Semitic languages have treaty-making formulas that involve a verb for cutting, for example τέμνειν in ancient Greek or כרת in Hebrew. R. suggests that the practice of sacrificing donkeys in association with treaty-making may be an Amorite practice, since it first appears in Mari.
Chapter 9 and the conclusion return to the theme that unites the book – the agency of equids and their personhood. R. shows the high status of equids in the Ancient Near East by adducing evidence, for example that an Ugaritic god wanted to marry a mare, that equids are cared for in old age and that King Shulgi considered a hemione a worthy rival in the hunt (p. 179). Bringing us back to Shulgi produces a pleasing ring-composition to the book. This book is the only one of its kind, and it updates our understanding of many important issues in Ancient Near Eastern Studies and in Classics.
