Читать книгу Giraffe Reflections - Dale Peterson - Страница 12

ZARAFAS

FOLLOWING THE GREEK AND ROMAN HABIT, Arabic authors of the Middle Ages continued to identify giraffes as camelopards, but Arabic speakers began applying a word that sounded like zurafa or zarafa. The word, according to one early commentator, came from a linguistic root meaning “assembly,” in reference to the idea that this animal was an assemblage of parts of different animals. Another Arabic scholar insisted that it derived from the Ethiopian zarat, meaning “thin” or “slender.”¹

Rome and the classical world had depended on Egypt as the sole gateway to deeper Africa and thus the sole source of giraffes, but after the disintegration of the Roman Empire in AD 476 and the subsequent expansion of Islamic civilizations that would finally control three-quarters of the Mediterranean, these animals were typically destined to become the private property of Islamic nabobs in the Middle East, who may have had occasion to speak among themselves about the rare, strangely formed, and remarkably gentle animals called zarafas.

The giraffes arrived, as before, from lands along the Nile to the south of Egypt—a part of Africa the Romans called Nubia, which included what the Ptolemies knew as the kingdom of Meroë. The Nubians, like the earlier Meroites, were occasionally acquiring live giraffes in trade with hunters and dealers from farther south. But the movement of giraffes into Egypt became more routine by 652, after Islamic forces took over Egypt and the emir Sa’d Ibn Abi Sarh proceeded to conquer Nubia. The emir settled on a treaty with Nubia that required the annual tribute of four hundred slaves, numerous camels, a pair of elephants, and a pair of giraffes. Later on the extortion was moderated so that the Nubians were sending three hundred slaves and a single giraffe annually. But the same steady traffic—in captive humans and animals—moving from sub-Saharan Africa through Nubia and into Egypt would continue for more than two centuries.²

Islamic cultures had by then created a powerful monopoly on most trade out of the northern end of Africa. Christian Europeans were excluded from participating in the profitable trans-Saharan traffic in gold and slaves, for instance; and, because the Nile River trade was likewise limited and blocked, Europeans were also kept from trading in—and ultimately kept ignorant about—giraffes.

By the time Saint Isidore, Bishop of Seville (560 to 636), was writing his De Natura Rerum, camelopards were obscure enough in the West that he accidentally combined them with chameleons, thereby producing a beastie he dubbed chameleonpardus, which resembled a cross between a camel and a lion—with a leopard’s white spots, a horse’s neck, the feet of an ox, and a coat that “changes to the colours which it sees by a very easy conversion.”³