The default bird in most Sino-Tibetan languages is a chicken. By which I mean that the word for "bird" and "chicken" are the same. This is true throughout Southeast Asia and beyond. The Moa, that extinct bird from New Zealand, shares it's name with the Austronesian word that just means "bird", or well, "chicken".

In Tibeto-Burman languages, almost all words for common types of birds are prefixed with the "chicken" stem. In Wancho, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Arunachal Pradesh, "bird" is pronounced /o/, and a native script invented by a Wancho schoolteacher even goes so far as to have the letter for "O" designed to look like a bird (he started inventing it in 2001 so I'm fine for the 20 year rule here).

The Chinese character for bird is 鳥, pronounced niǎo in Mandarin and niu⁵ in Cantonese. But wait, that's not what we'd expect. The pronunciaton, based on what it was around the year 600 CE, sould be diao in Mandarin. So what happened? Taboo avoidance is the generally accepted answer. "Bird" became a slang term for penis, and, as the story goes, the pronunciation of "bird" was thus changed to distance itself from 屌 (which by the way is made up of the character for body 尸 and "a thing that hangs" 吊). Guess what still gets used all the time as slang for penis? Bird, sure, but also "chicken" specifically, 鷄, pronounced jī in Mandarin. Jī-jī is the common kid-talk way of referring to it, like "wee wee" in English.

In 889, the recently-crowned Emperor Uda of Japan received a gift intended for his late father, and was instantly enamoured with it: 'I am convinced it is superior to all other cats,' he wrote!

A few hundred years earlier, and on the other side of the world, Byzantine chronicler Procopius relates the Ahabian frustration present in the Emperor Justinian regarding an infamous whale that terrorized his waterlanes.

This whale was named Porphyrios.

Porphyrios is described as having "its length to be about thirty cubits, and its breadth ten", and "annoying Byzantium and the towns about it for fifty years, not continuously, however, but disappearing sometimes for a rather long interval." That it was named is itself remarkable, attesting to its impact on the mindsets of Byzantine sailors and subjects. The account is included amongst a number of other natural disasters that were reported to have occurred at a similar timeframe, placing Justinian in a very stressful position. Indeed, Porcopius states that Porphyrios "had consequently become a matter of concern to the Emperor Justinian to capture this creature, but he was unable by any device to accomplish his purpose..." What devices might have been used is not expounded upon, but that the whale remained present for fifty years is a testament to it's evident elusiveness and strength.

The identity of this whale will likely never be known, as this is about the extent of description that Procopius gives his audience of the leviathan. Given its reported size and longevity, Porphyrios as a sperm whale is the oft-theorized conclusion. This is a convenient fit into later "sperm whale attacks ship" narratives that come much later in the whaling histories, indeed, Ishmael as narrator in Moby Dick relates this ancient story as proof of the capabilities of the White Whale to target humans in rage. The lack of further identifying features and the assumption of outright truthfulness in the story will probably never allow a settlement on the species.

Porphyrios is said to have stranded on the coast of the Black Sea in pursuit of dolphins ("...the whale succeeded in capturing some of them, which he swallowed forthwith..."), where he was set upon by locals, dragged further inland, measured and butchered. I cannot infer whether this action was intended to represent a "revenge" on the infamous whale, or simply an act that is historically consistent in the opportunistic harvesting of beached marine mammals. In any case, the story ends there. A whale that swam opposed to an Emperor, brought to an end by a common coastal populace.

Or was it? Porcopius' last mention of Porphyrios is foreboding:

"However, some say that it was not the same whale that I mentioned, but another one that was captured."

How dramatic.

The mule (male donkey x female horse) is no longer the earliest known human-engineered animal hybrid as of January 2022.

In 2002, 2004, and 2006, excavations into an elite burial complex at Tell Umm el-Marra, which possibly belonged to the ancient city of Tuba (Dub), 55km east of Aleppo in modern-day Syria, yielded bones of 25 animals that had been sacrificed and buried with their owners. The skeletons date from 2700-2600 BCE and they appeared to be equids, eg horses, donkeys, mules. However, they weren't recognizable. Could they have been the bones of the ancient and currently extinct Syrian Wild Ass?

Too big.

Domestic donkeys were out.

Too early for horses.

Hmm.

Over a decade of DNA analysis yielded an interesting cross: Y-DNA (papa) from the Syrian Wild Ass and mitochondrial DNA (mama) from the domestic donkey.

So...

50% Syrian Wild Ass + 50% domestic donkey = ?

Meet the ANŠE.BARxAN.

The...?

The Sumerians called it the kunga.

You can see a representation of kungas on the "war side" of the Standard of Ur, currently in the possession of the British Museum, pulling the war wagons and chariots.

Donkeys were not viewed as useful for warfare especially as they were not particularly swift nor were they seen as tractable enough to follow orders. Donkeys weren't seen as animals that would put themselves at risk in battle. The kunga, bred to be fast (Syrian Wild Ass) and hardy (domestic donkey), was the solution. Not all kungas were used for battle though: that was the job of the "superior" (larger male) - they pulled the battle wagons and the chariots of the kings (and the gods in iconography) and participated in ceremonies. Smaller males and females were used for pulling plows.

The existence of the kunga has been known for some time as cuneiform texts from Syrian sites such as Ebla, Nagar (where kungas are now known to have been bred and from whence they were shipped), and Nabada recorded the breeding, acquisition, sales, care, and gifts of kungas. Because there doesn't appear to be any records of young kungas in the company of kunga parents, the consensus is that they were sterile. So producing a kunga was an expensive proposition: acquisition of 1 Syrian Wild Ass and 1 donkey per kunga needed, feeding them, watering them, sheltering them, ensuring that reproduction was successful, training them, accounting for attrition...it added up. It was particularly difficult to capture Wild Ass stallions and keep them captive as they were highly aggressive - the last captive Syrian wild ass died in a zoo in Austria (1920s), the director of which described them as "furious".

Once horses were introduced into Mesopotamia by Indo-European migrants to the region around 4,000 years ago (end of the third millennium BCE), kungas gradually fell out of common use. Horses were less expensive to feed and keep, they could reproduce, they were more easily trained and to live with, and they could and did take over the roles that had been filled by kungas - military, ceremonial, domestic, agricultural.

The kunga didn't disappear immediately - reliefs from Nineveh, capital of the Neo-Assyrian empire (911-609 BCE), show men trying to capture one, so it held on into the Iron Age, though even status as a treasured animal didn't save it from extinction.

For further reading:

Humans Bred Hybrid Animals 4500 Years Ago in Ancient Mesopotamia

The genetic identity of the earliest human-made hybrid animals, the kungas of Syro-Mesopotamia

Teaching History with 100 Objects - The Standard of Ur

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

The Kunga Was a Status Symbol Long Before the Thoroughbred

When donkeys ruled: ancient tomb unearths equids

EDIT: I left in a cliffhanger sentence! So for any Wile E Coyotes, I'm sorry, and I have removed it.

Who first domesticated the chicken?

When did the study of the history of animals become a part of anthropology? As in, most historical books make some mention of animals in their descriptions of civilisations or geographical regions. When did we realise tracking the history of animals provides much insight to human history?