KUNGA POWER
omesticated horses are thought to have arrived in Mesopotamia around 2000 B.c., but before then, Sumerian scribes wrote of another type of equid, the family that includes horses, donkeys, and—a transliteration of the ancient Akkadian symbol meaning hybrid equid—had never been determined. Recently, a team of researchers analyzed the remains of equids that were discovered in a cemetery dating to between 2600 and 2200 B.c. at the site of Umm el-Marra in what is now Syria. They concluded that the characteristics of the animals’ skeletons do not fit with those of donkeys, which arrived in Mesopotamia from Egypt, where they were first domesticated around 3800 B.c. They also do not fit with those of a type of local wild ass called a hemippe that went extinct in the 1920s.
