Beauties that captivated the pharaohs

 The mystery of the existence of deer in North Africa 

   

   When we think of African herbivores we cannot help but think of antelopes, wild boars, buffaloes, zebras and even rhinos, But I am a family that has never been abundant in Africa, that is the deer family, (one of my familia favorites).

Currently only two fossil species of deer are known and one variety currently exists in the barber mountains of northern Africa, This being the only African variety that is currently considered valid of this entire large family that can be found abundantly in Eurasia and America, However, some evidence could lead us to understand that there were more deer in these places, we began.

Possible Deer in Ethiopia and Africa 

   In Egyptian archaeology, a puzzling fact has always been the fauna that inhabited that place in ancient times, and an example of this is the probable presence of deer in Egyptian iconography.

Described in hieroglyphics and Egyptian art from the predynastic era, these animals are a true mystery, since there has been no record of deer in Egypt in historical times, The physical evidence is a set of bone remains from excavations in Qantir and Piramesse giving a total of 35 bones, most of the finds date from the late 18th and 19th dynasties. Both cranial and postcranial skeletal elements are present, implying the presence of live deer near Qantir, Although engravings of deer have also been found in pyramids and funerary sites, although these are rare.

The animals are portrayed as you would expect, having unequal sizes, sometimes small and sometimes larger than a person, but their descriptions and representations are always different from those of antelopes and gazelles, even so, the bone remains continue to be studied.

The validity of this possible taxo. is in doubt, since it is believed that they could have been a variety of known deer or a new species, although perhaps it is related to the Barbary deer, although it is not known that another people in Africa also mentioned deer, these being the Ethiopians, It has been reported that in southern Ethiopia, there is talk of a hypothetical variety of deer that was reported by the British archaeologist Louis Leakey and was apparently known to the ancients egypts, perhaps being the same as the Egyptian deer.

Described as an animal similar to the fallow deer and represented in Ethiopian art as one of these, the natives of the area until not long ago They said that these inhabited the plains and large open areas of that region, being an elusive creature.

A crypt of dead-end questions with no apparent way out

     But the questions remain, what are these representations? Have there been other deer in North Africa? Where did they come from? Let us remember that until not long ago, species such as the mountain nyala, endemic to Ethiopia remained unknown, so it is possible that in past times there may have been something similar but this is just a hypothesis.

Today it is questioned what these animals were, some point out that it was a sub-species of the fallow deer or a branch of the Barbary deer, or elsewhere, an unknown species that is now extinct, although remains and archaeological evidence exist, No clear answer has been found to the mystery surrounding this case, although there is also a theory that these animals were deer introduced externally, as gifts from travelers to nobles.

It seems that this will remain a mystery, until it is proven that another African deer existed in recent times, since today we only know 3, But it has long been clear that the Egyptians left us a wealth of knowledge not only in their papyri and architectural works, but also in its art, and in its way of representing everything, which gives us a glimpse into our remote past as a civilization.

[Reading links]

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/030751330809400108?journalCode=egaa

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_nyala

https://cryptidarchives.fandom.com/wiki/Ethiopian_deer