Vertebrates of Upper Mesopotamia: Present Evidence and Archaeological Data

The late Hellenistic king Antiochos I (69–34 B.C.)—who reigned over the kingdom of Commagene, founded north of Syria after the breakup of Alexander’s empire—built his mausoleum on the top of the Nemrut Dag, one of the highest peaks of the Eastern Taurus mountains in southeastern Anatolia (Fig. 2.1). Looking down from its privileged geographical location, this monument surveys the underlying progression of the sleepy floodplain of the large water bodies of northern Mesopotamia, term that means the “land between the rivers” in ancient Greek. These “rivers” referred to the Tigris and the Euphrates, locating the well-known Near Eastern alluvial plain which, since ancient times, had enlivened the desertic geography of the eastern Fertile Crescent, supporting the development of millenary civilizations, such as Sumerians, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Parthians, Romans, and Muslims (Fig. 2.2). As far as is presently known, Mesopotamia also hosted the oldest permanent human settlements and the first evidence of the domestication of ungulates. The latter phenomenon seems, in fact, to have started in a few PPNB (Pre-Pottery Neolithic B) sites of southern Turkey, such as Nevali Cori, Gobekli Tepe, and Gurkutepe (Peters et al. 1999, 2005; cf. Schmidt 1999).