Giraffe Reflections. Dale Peterson

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

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