Equids as Luxury Gifts at the Centre of Interregional Economic Dynamics in the Archaic Urban Cultures of the Ancient Near East

Abstract

The 3rd millennium bc texts from some major sites in Syria (Ebla, Nagar, Nabada) indicate the importance of equids in the trade between the region’s greatest kingdoms and especially of one species, long considered a hybrid on philological grounds. Recent archaeozoological studies of the equids from the Umm el-Marra necropolis have clarified the hybrid nature of the buried animals; these may be specimens of the most valuable species, the kunga, recurrent in the documents from the Royal Archive of Classic Early Syrian Ebla. This article considers further data from Ebla texts on the rich equipment of chariots and equids for the royal court and its notables, men and women, and for allied kingdoms, and presents archaeological and figurative evidence from various sites, especially Nagar and Urkesh, for the high economic and symbolic value of kunga, identified on royal seals. These equids were a status symbol for their owners, even after death, as shown by the necropolis of Marra-Tuba and the burials of chariots among the funerary equipment of the Eblaite elites recorded in the texts. Finally, kunga may have circulated in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia and may be present among the animal remains of the Y necropolis at Kish and in the equid lying on the rein-ring from a tomb in the Royal Cemetery at Ur.

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