kissing balaam's ass?

…from the New York Times:

March 25, 2008
Early Egyptians Revered Lowly Donkeys
By KENNETH CHANG

When archaeologists excavated brick tombs outside a ceremonial site for an early king of Egypt, they expected to find the remains of high officials who had been sacrificed to accompany the king in his posthumous travels.

Instead, they found donkeys.

No other animals have ever been found at such sites. Even at the tombs of the kings themselves, the only animals buried alongside were ones full of symbolism like lions.

But at this funerary complex, overlooking the ancient town of Abydos on the Nile about 300 miles south of Cairo, the archaeologists discovered the skeletons of 10 donkeys that had been buried as if they were high-ranking human officials.

“They were very surprised to find no humans and no funerary goods, and instead to find 10 donkeys,” said Fiona Marshall, a professor of archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis.

“It was just a spectacular discovery,” said Dr. Marshall, one of the few researchers in the world dedicated to understanding the history of donkeys. “It’s not exactly what an Egyptologist would expect to find.”

The graves, uncovered in 2002, and the 10 almost intact skeletons were a trove for Dr. Marshall, pointing to the importance of donkeys in early Egyptian society and challenging some basic ideas about domesticating animals.

Dr. Marshall and her colleagues reported their findings March 11 in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Donkeys probably made possible long-distance trade routes between the Egyptians and the Sumerians. A genetic study published in 2004 concluded that donkeys were domesticated in northeastern Africa 6,000 years ago or earlier, perhaps in response to a changing climate that dried a lush pre-Sahara into the Sahara. Donkeys were well suited for the task, requiring little water and able to subsist on meager vegetation. “It was the first transport off human backs,” Dr. Marshall said.

The bones of the Abydos donkeys, dating from around 3000 B.C., clearly showed wear from their burdens. At the major joints like shoulders and hips, the bone surfaces were roughened where the cartilage had worn down. Signs of arthritis were seen in areas where the heavy loads would have been carried.

“It’s the first definite evidence for their use as transport animals,” Dr. Marshall said.

But the animals were also in good health and apparently well taken care of, she said. There were no signs of feet or teeth problems. And the beasts were revered.

“This is a very high-status area where these donkeys were buried,” said Matthew D. Adams, a lecturer in Egyptian art and archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, a member of the team that excavated the graves and a co-author of the donkey article. “And they were buried just like courtiers that were associated with the king. That in itself is a statement on the importance of the donkey as a service animal at this time.”

Although the wear and tear on the bones clearly showed that these donkeys were domesticated pack animals, they looked in shape more like a wild ass, the progenitor of donkeys, than a modern donkey. “Morphologically, in terms of their bones, you couldn’t differentiate them from a wild ass,” Dr. Marshall said.

That runs counter to the traditional assumption about the domestication of animals, that the wild animals quickly became smaller as people selectively bred them for farming, food or transport.

“It’s another example of this false marker that has misled people,” said Melinda A. Zeder, director of the archaeobiology program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “The idea that these animals instantaneously get smaller with domestication simply doesn’t hold true.”

Dr. Zeder, who was not involved with the donkey research, has found that goats also did not instantly shrink with domestication. The bones of domestic goats found in farming communities were smaller than those of hunting societies. But that was because farmers tended to keep the smaller females while earlier hunters had killed the larger male goats.

“We’re going to have to be smarter about domestication as a process rather than a moment,” Dr. Zeder said.

The physical changes in donkeys, when they finally did occur, were probably detrimental to their societal status. “Human selection has made the donkey much slower and less fine limbed than the original wild animal,” Dr. Marshall said. No longer revered by royalty, the donkey has become associated as the animal for the poor and bumbling. (Don Quixote's sidekick, Sancho Panza, rode a donkey.)

In English, donkeys also run into a linguistic hindrance. Centuries ago, “ass” became conflated with a vulgar term, turning “ass” into a much ruder word than in other languages.

That might explain why donkeys have been studied less than other domestic animals. “I’ve become quite a donkey chauvinist,” Dr. Marshall said. “They clearly were very important.”

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Don Quixote rode a donkey. It was his sidekick, Sancho Panza, who did.