Giraffe Reflections. Dale Peterson

the Grand Procession would have been impossible to miss, since its final portions included a fully armed and armored display of close to 48,000 foot soldiers and more than 23,000 cavalry mounted on prancing steeds. A middle portion of the parade displayed ninety-six elephants marching four abreast and harnessed, in that formation, to twenty-four enormous chariots. These would have been just a portion of Philadelphus’s war elephants, barged downriver from their training quarters in Memphis for the parade. Armored with quilt-wrapped metal or fire-hardened leather, armed with sharp metal blades affixed to their tusks, taking onto their backs skilled javelin throwers, and emotionally fortified at the last minute with buckets of red wine, the parading pachyderms could readily be transformed into fearsome battle tanks supporting phalanxes of Egyptian infantry and cavalry.

      Yes, it was a military parade. But the Grand Procession was also a religious one, an unfolding projection of pious obeisance to the deeper powers of the universe—powers, of course, as the Greeks understood them, and in this instance concentrating on the grape-growing, wine-making, mind-expanding powers associated with the god Dionysus, from whom the Ptolemies had begun claiming ancestral descent.

      In honor of Dionysus, the parade was opened by actors dressed as the god’s companions and allies, the older Sileni (who restrained the crowds) and the youthful Satyrs (wearing artificial tails and outrageously large phalluses and carrying torches of gilded ivy). Next came incense—aromatic clouds of frankincense, myrrh, and saffron wafted into the air—followed by more costumed actors representing further aspects of the Dionysian myth. Then came a cart more than twenty feet long and a dozen wide, drawn by one hundred eighty men and transporting a fourteen-foot-high statue of Dionysus himself, dressed in a purple robe with a draped fold that was purple interwoven with threads of gold. Shaded by a fruit-laden, vine-laced canopy and standing before a golden table holding numerous gold vessels, the statue poured a continuous libation from an enormous, two-handled gold cup. Other celebrations to grapes and wine and the wine god followed, including a cart drawn by three hundred men transporting a giant wine press filled to the brim with ripe grapes. Sixty Satyrs sang stirring songs while stepping squishingly onto the grapes. Now came six hundred men pulling a bigger cart containing a double-spouted wine vessel made of leopard skins and pumping seasoned wine into the street as it passed. One hundred twenty Satyrs and Sileni followed, carrying gleaming vessels of solid gold, and they were followed in turn by a giant silver bowl on a cart drawn by six hundred men. More statues passed by, including an eighteen-foot Dionysus lying on an elephant, a golden phallus one hundred eighty feet long, a gilded thunderbolt sixty feet long, and a gilded shrine sixty feet in circumference. Thus passed the iconography representing the spiritual moorings of Egypt’s latest rulers.

      The glory of Philadelphus’s Grand Procession was largely an exuberant expression of economic triumph, a day-long presentation of one gleaming treasure after the other, demonstrating—with a veritable river of jewels and silver but above all gold, gold, and gold—the astonishing wealth that the Greek king had accumulated on behalf of himself and his subjects.

      But Philadelphus’s glory was also expressed more diversely in the form of a living zoological wealth, as he revealed his command over the many creatures, both dangerous and docile, he had gathered from all over the known world. Thus, the ninety-six elephants lined up in rows of four and harnessed to chariots were followed by a parade of two-animal chariots drawn by one hundred twenty goats, thirty hartebeests, twenty-four saiga antelopes, sixteen ostriches, fourteen oryxes, fourteen Persian wild asses, eight Asian wild asses, and eight horses. Small boys and girls rode in the chariots, the boys dressed up as charioteers, the girls as warriors. The procession also included twenty-four hundred dogs of various breeds and—destined for ritual slaughter—four hundred fifty sheep and forty-six head of cattle. Meanwhile, men carried trees laden with birds and animals of many sorts. More men carried cages containing guinea fowl, parrots, peacocks, pheasants, and other exotic birds. And yet more paraders guided and restrained nineteen cheetahs (three of them cubs), fourteen leopards, four lynxes, one bulky bear, one hulking rhinoceros, and one no doubt very elegant giraffe.²

      The giraffe may have been Ptolemy Philadelphus’s most singular surprise. That animal was, as far as the historical record reveals, the first giraffe to reach Egypt for nearly a thousand years—with the closest known predecessor harking back to the time of Ramses the Great, who, according to a painting on a temple wall, received a giraffe as tribute from Egypt’s southern neighbors along the Nile during his reign as pharaoh from 1279 to 1213 BC.³

      A thousand years may seem like a long time—approximately the remove between ourselves and such hoary historical events as, say, the Norman Conquest of England. Why so long? And what were the consequences of such a distance in time?

      The first question has a simple and obvious answer. It took so long because it was so difficult. Giraffe ancestors originally came from Asia, and they moved into Africa during a migration that happened around seven million years ago. This event could have occurred gradually, perhaps over hundreds or thousands of years. From a forgotten, mysterious place far to the north and east, so we can imagine, they migrated, moving, always moving, through life and birth and death, following not a vision but the scent of steady moisture and the food it would foretell. They ambled across the Arabian land bridge and on to the very edge of Africa where, through an open door, there appeared the promise of sufficiency.

      Through the open door they passed. But then, over time, the door began to swing shut behind them. The rains, in other words, began to fail. The monsoons that had once pulled endless clouds of water away from the seas, carried them overland and into the northern reaches of a continent, lost their energy. The weather and then the climate changed. The welcoming wet lands of northern Africa, that great green cap of a continent, turned drier. Rivers became seasonal, then unreliable, then nonexistent, leaving a faint feathery trace across the sandblasted land. Vegetation turned brown, withered, became sparse. It died or survived by adapting to this far less merciful world. The earth turned barren and hostile, becoming a seething wilderness of sand piled against rock, with a ragged palisade to the north and west. In the west, the wilderness broke at last into cliffs that slipped into the boiling ocean. To the east, it descended finally into the shallows of a warm salt sea. The great green cap of Africa became a great brown cap. At 3.32 million square miles, this impossible wilderness now approaches the size of the United States. It is what you and I, harkening back to the Arabic word for desert, call the Sahara.⁴

      So the Sahara was once wet and green. In fact, it was several times wet and green, that condition occurring in a slow and steady oscillation with dry and brown, with the latest wet period receding some six to eight thousand years ago.⁵ That is recent enough that we can examine the cultural evidence of teeming wildlife in a vast plateau of southeastern Algeria, the Tassili n’Ajjer. Here, in one of today’s most unforgiving environments, we can contemplate a gallery of some 15,000 rock paintings and etchings, many of them drawing us back to a time when the place was a grassy savanna washed by rivers and streams, when such water-dependent species as crocodiles and hippos were abundant, when the many game species included large mammals such as giraffids and giraffes.

      Giraffes are capable of surviving in very arid environments. Karl and I sighted them foraging along dried-up riverbeds and running past giant sand dunes in the deserts of northwestern Namibia. They can endure for a long time, perhaps indefinitely, without actually drinking water, as long as they find food that includes enough moisture. In that sense, they resemble dromedary camels: famously tolerant of extreme aridity and used for transportation in the Sahara. Both giraffes and camels have slit-like nostrils, which may be an evolutionary adaptation to windblown sand. And again like camels (and only a few other large-bodied, warm-blooded species), giraffes have a thermo-regulatory system that allows their body temperature to drift. Giraffes thus have less need to expend energy keeping themselves cool on exceptionally hot days and warm on very cold nights.

      Nevertheless, as that latest shift in climate began transforming the Sahara from grassy savanna to barren desert, the giraffes and a number of other large mammals living in the Sahara went extinct or began retreating south. The door, as I say, was closing.

      The final crack of that closing door was the Nile Valley. Giraffes lived along the lower Nile as late as 3800 to 3400 BC, when early Egyptians were producing pottery and carving ivory knife handles