Adulis and the transshipment of baboons during classical antiquity
- University of Konstanz, Germany
- German Primate Center, Germany
- Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France
- Musée des Confluences, France
- Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, France
- State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart, Germany
- University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy
- Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Belgium
- Dartmouth College, United States
Abstract
Adulis, located on the Red Sea coast in present-day Eritrea, was a bustling trading centre between the first and seventh centuries CE. Several classical geographers--Agatharchides of Cnidus, Pliny the Elder, Strabo-noted the value of Adulis to Greco--Roman Egypt, particularly as an emporium for living animals, including baboons (Papio spp.). Though fragmentary, these accounts predict the Adulite origins of mummified baboons in Ptolemaic catacombs, while inviting questions on the geoprovenance of older (Late Period) baboons recovered from Gabbanat el-Qurud ('Valley of the Monkeys'), Egypt. Dated to ca. 800-540 BCE, these animals could extend the antiquity of Egyptian-Adulite trade by as much as five centuries. Previously, Dominy et al. (2020) used stable istope analysis to show that two New Kingdom specimens of P. hamadryas originate from the Horn of Africa. Here, we report the complete mitochondrial genomes from a mummified baboon from Gabbanat el-Qurud and 14 museum specimens with known provenance together with published georeferenced mitochondrial sequence data. Phylogenetic assignment connects the mummified baboon to modern populations of Papio hamadryas in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and eastern Sudan. This result, assuming geographical stability of phylogenetic clades, corroborates Greco-Roman historiographies by pointing toward present-day Eritrea, and by extension Adulis, as a source of baboons for Late Period Egyptians. It also establishes geographic continuity with baboons from the fabled Land of Punt (Dominy et al., 2020), giving weight to speculation that Punt and Adulis were essentially the same trading centres separated by a thousand years of history.
Data availability
Raw sequencing data are deposited in the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA, project accession no. PRJEB60261), mitochondrial genomes on Genbank (accession numbers: OQ538075-OQ538089). Code used for data processing and analysis is available on OSF via https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/D5GX3.
Article and author information
Author details
Nathaniel J Dominy
Funding
Universität Konstanz (Young Scholar Fund)
- Gisela H Kopp
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Centre of Excellence 2117 Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour" ID: 422037984")
- Gisela H Kopp
Universität Konstanz (Zukunftskolleg)
- Nathaniel J Dominy
- Gisela H Kopp
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Open Access Fund)
- Gisela H Kopp
Hector Stiftung II (Hector Pioneer Fellowship)
- Gisela H Kopp
Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina - Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften (Die Junge Akademie)
- Gisela H Kopp
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (Excellence Strategy of the German Federal and State Governments)
- Benjamin Hume
- Gisela H Kopp
Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg (bwHPC)
- Franziska Grathwol
- Benjamin Hume
- Gisela H Kopp
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (INST 37/935- 1 FUGG)
- Franziska Grathwol
- Benjamin Hume
- Gisela H Kopp
Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-11-LABX-0032-01)
- Stéphanie M Porcier
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2023, Grathwol et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Adulis and the transshipment of baboons during classical antiquity
eLife 12:e87513.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.87513
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