Did Bucephalus get his hooves Wet?
Some years ago a friend and I were travelling in Turkey. I was driving and concentrating on avoiding the speed traps while keeping up a decent average speed on the back roads, not the easiest of feats. My friend alternately snoozed and scanned the map in search of somewhere he could buy something to eat. It was during one of these lucid intervals as we neared the south coast of the Sea of Marmara that he suddenly exclaimed, "That's the River Granicus!"
"Where?" I demanded, my attention temporarily diverted from the luking peril of the Turkish police.
"Here," he said, brandishing the map.
I relaxed. I hadn't noticed a river or a bridge, but nonetheless thought that I might have missed something as we flashed past. It now appeared that the Granicus was about ten miles away - keep on north to the main road then turn right (our route led to the left) for another two or three miles. As I have travelled further in search of the interesting or unusual, a diversion of three miles off our route was nothing.
The River Granicus was where Alexander the Great first confronted the Persians. As soon as he heard of Alexander's invasion, the Persian general summoned his men, who were relaxing amid the cool, well-watered meadows of Mt Ida - over which we had just driven - and marched to meet the invader. Alexander, equally anxious to get to grips with the Persians, marched to meet them and the two sides met on opposite banks of the River Granicus.
For a space there was stalemate as the Persian bowmen on the east bank flexed their drawing hands and eyed the helmeted Greeks on the west bank, and the Greeks crouched behind their shields and eyed the Persians opposite. Neither side seemed willing to wade into the river, whose waters and further bank would be a killing ground for the side that stayed put.
It was Alexander himself who broke the impasse. With a wild shout he charged into the river and his Companions, a picked body of cavalrymen, followed him. Arrows hissed and thudded and men and horses went down in the foaming water, but before the archers could reload Alexander was among them, hacking to left and right and in the confusion the footmen of the phalanx steadied their 32' long spears and marched over the river in perfect order. Once across, of course, there was nothing that could stand against them and the Persian army either fled or died where it stood.
We reached the main road and turned right. I glanced down at my mileometer, then turned my attention to the road, scanning this time for the gleam of water from the famous river, which I confidently expected to be a broad stream, a liquid obstacle that would be fordable in only a few places. Five miles later, as we climbed up the further side of a broad valley I stopped the car and demanded to be shown the map.
"Well, we must have missed it," I commented as I swung the car around.
Back we went and at the lowest point of the valley pulled up by a tiny culvert we had crossed almost without noticing. I stopped the car and we got out to peer over the concrete wall and there was the River Granicus, (click here to see the river) a tiny stream meandering over a gravel bed. Far from the serious obstacle of the historical accounts, I doubt that Bucephalus even got his hooves wet as he jumped it.
Or did he?
As I have mentioned more than once in my articles, I believe that the world was considerably wetter in ancient times than it is today - one reason may be the extensive deforestation that has taken place since then - and the River Granicus is just one piece of evidence for my claim. Another comes from the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Along with all the gold and silver in the tomb, its priceless alabaster vases and magnificently carved ebony statues, there was also a copious supply of food and wine, among which was a hoard of argun fruit.
First brought to European attention by the Italian adventurer Giuseppe Passalacqua, who went to Egypt as a horse trader and then turned to the more profitable pasttime of looting ancient tombs, the wizened fruit ended up in the collection of Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia where they were studied by Carl Kunth, the leading German botanist. Kunth found a plethora of plant materials among the objects brought back by Passalacqua and had no difficulty in identifying dates and the fruit of the Doum Palm, but the third type he recognised as new to science. He named it Areca passalacquae but the public knew it simply as "the Egyptologist's palm".
Eleven years later in 1837 another German, Prince von Wurttemberg, came across a tree with unusual purple fruit the size of plums in the desert of northern Sudan. He collected samples and brought them back to Germany, where they were studied and the tree from which they came was called Medemia argun. It was twenty years before anyone realised that the two were the same and I'm sorry to say that poor old Passalacqua missed out: the tree retains its newest name and Passalacqua is forgotten.
Since then a few more of the Argun Palm trees have been found; Dungul Oasis in the Nubian desert has a few seedlings that have grown up from a tree identified in 1963 by Swedish botanist Vivi Tackholm. A single tree has been found in the Nakhila Oasis and in 1995 a special expedition found 14 trees and 15 seedlings in the desert in the Great Loop of the Nile in Nubia. The following year the expedition was guided to a regular forest of Argun Palms, but it is clear that this is nothing compared to the once widespread forest of the trees that once made its fruit so common in Egypt.
According to the archaeological evidence, the Argun Palm could be found from Aswan to the Delta. It was grown in temples and private gardens, it is even depicted on the tomb of Enneni at Luxor. The reason is not only the fruit, which is sweet but not as sweet as the date, but the leaves, which are stronger and more pliable than those of other types of palm. This makes them the raw material of choice for making rope, matting and baskets and the locals will cheerfully strip a tree of its leaves, caring nothing for the fact that the tree promptly dies - no doubt it was the will of Allah.
It is merely the remoteness of the few stands of Argun Palms that has ensured their survival. Once the western desert was a fertile savannah, grazed by deer and buck, its pools teeming with crocodile and hippo, its plains stalked by giraffe and lion and its skyline dotted with Argun Palm (among other vegetation, of course). As Haitham Ibrahim, ecologist at South Valley University in Aswan, says, "In pharaonic times it was much greener and there was less desert. The places where the palms are now are what is left of the ancient vegetation."
So it is entirely possible that Bucephalus got his hooves wet in the Granicus - and that he ate Argun fruit in Egypt. Today he could do neither and with man-made climate change it is questionable how long the remaining Argun Palms can survive.
© Kendall K. Down 2009
