Beasts of the Bible and Babylon

The Ancient Near East was home to much wildlife, many of which is now sadly gone. As previous articles on this website have shown, many species of Camel, some of vast size once lived in the region during the Pleistocene, but by the time the Sumerians and Egyptians invented writing in the 4th millennium BC, all but one species was long gone. Nonetheless, many other species, today extinct in the region, or worldwide in some cases, lived in the region of the Near East in the early historical period, such as Elephants, Aurochsen, and Hippopotami.