Exotic foods reveal contact between South Asia and the Near East during the second millennium BCE

Abstract

intensified, which is documented most prominently in the famous Amarna letters (21). Ancient literary sources and illustrations also reference long-distance journeys to foreign lands to obtain exotic goods, such as ivory, ostrich eggshells, ebony, and frankincense. Among the most well-known of these accounts is an expedition initiated by the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut to the land of Punt (probably located in the Horn of Africa region) in the 15th century BCE (22, 23). In addition, evidence for longdistance trade between the Near East and the Indian subcontinent is growing for the second and third millennium BCE (8, 24), and includes written accounts (25–27), seals and stone weights (8, 28–30), shell, lapis lazuli, and carnelian jewelry (8, 24, 31, 32), and timber and ivory (33, 34). Live animals were also transported long distances. Zooarchaeological and isotopic analyses have identified the movement of donkeys from Egypt to the Southern Levant during the third millennium BCE (35), and ancient DNA analysis has documented the transport of pigs from Italy to the southern Greek mainland (36) and from the Aegean to the Southern Levant during the second millennium BCE (37). In addition, depictions of zebu (Bos taurus indicus), a humped subspecies of cattle native to South Asia (38), have been found in Mesopotamia as early as the third millennium BCE (39), and a clear depiction of a zebu (Fig. 2) appears on a bichrome ceramic vessel from the southern Levant dating to 16th century BCE, the same period when depictions of zebu also become common in Egypt (39). Zooarchaeological study of faunal remains and genetic data further confirm the presence of zebu cattle in the Levant during the second millennium BCE (37, 40), and genetic evidence suggests possible taurine–zebu hybridization at the site of Megiddo at approximately 900 BCE (37). Monkeys depicted in 18th and 17th century BCE frescoes at Akrotiri on the Aegean island of Thera were recently identified as South Asian gray langurs (Semnopithecus sp.), with a probable origin in the Indus valley (41), and the identification of dermestid khapra beetles (Trogoderma granarium) that had infested a wheat deposit from a Middle 2 of 10 | PNAS