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Advanced English Skills

20 Oct 2024 03:40

the uprising city states in the region, other factors could also have led to the rather late arrival of domesticated donkeys. Both the Assyrian and the Mesopotamian Empires made great use of donkey caravans for transporting goods through regions lacking suitable waterways (cf. Algaze 2008) and as depictions in Persepolis show, the Achaemenids were surely acquainted with the animal. But the question of when and how the animal gained popularity in the eastern areas of the Persian Empire is not easily answered. Iranian philological and linguistic evidence seems to reflect a rather diffuse origin of the name for the beast during the Old Iranian period. Only in Middle Iranian, sources of which are dated between the fourth century BCE and the tenth century CE, we find clear evidence for an actual animal called xar ‘donkey’. In southern Iran, donkeys became possibly known through contacts with Mesopotamia in the third millennium BCE, when they were used to connect regions which were difficult to access by boat (Clutton-Brock 1992: 65). Despite Potts (2011) being convinced that donkeys were well known, if not domesticated, on the Iranian Plateau already by the fourth millennium BCE, most evidence seems to support the idea that donkeys spread to northern Iran along with the expansion of the Old Assyrian Empire. It is important to notice that regions of northern Iran were used as breeding centres for donkeys with indigenous wild Asian asses (Goulder 2018: 84). According to the cuneiform manuscripts of Kültepe-Kanesh, a trade hub in modern Anatolia, donkeys were excessively used under the Old Assyrian reign during the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000–1750 BCE). An extensive caravan business called for good donkeys which were bred in the capital Aššur. A special breed of donkey is often mentioned in the texts: the so-called ‘black donkey’ (emāru[m]/imēru[m]) which is identified with the modern Damascus ass, a large, strong and dark-haired breed (Atici 2014: 244–245). Donkeys were often sold for good money at the caravan’s destination if the goods to be transported back to the capital required less donkey power (Barjamovic 2018: 152). In this way, donkeys might also have found their way to the Iranian plateau, where they possibly became known as the ‘black’ variety of asses in contrast to the local wild asses with which they could be interbred to produce “donkey-likes” (PIr. *khara-tara-), i.e. mules or hinnies (Kümmel 2017: 279). However, the PIr. word *kh-er-o- meaning ‘dark’ as suggested in section 3.6 “A new etymology for YAv. xɑrɑ-?” could also be a translation from Old Assyrian ṣa-lá-mu-um ‘black’, which was used to describe the prized black donkey (Zarins 1978: 4). Yet again, the fact that donkeys were brought to northern Iran in order to be crossbred with local wild asses and possibly also horses could have triggered an association with a mythical beast of fertility after which the strange equid was finally named (see section 3.1 “Commentary”).

It should be stressed that in Iran, like in China, the donkey was not the primary equid, but a “latecomer”. As such, it was constantly compared to the horse which played a central role in many societies east of the Zagros mountains. Upon its introduction, the nobility might have found pleasure in the animal as a ‘rare breed’, but there was no cultural background which would have given the donkey a ritual, cultural and social role comparable to the one it enjoyed in West Asia (cf. Greenfield et al. 2012). Thus, donkeys were destined to become animals of the common people and easily gained a bad reputation or even developed into negative symbols as soon as they became more available. This supposedly happened on the Iranian plateau56 as well as later in China and possibly in many regions in between (cf. Shirasaka and Watanabe 2019). Various vernacular variants for the donkey’s name might well have led to multiple written forms in Iranian literature, thereby making its etymology extremely d[...]