The Hittites paid three times more for a mule than for a fine horse
Mules, the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse, were prized long before cars and tractors. In Hittite Anatolia one cost three good horses, and Sumerians valued them at seven donkeys. George Washington, often called the father of the American mule, reshaped his Mount Vernon stables around them.
A mule comes from crossing a jack, or male donkey, with a mare. The reverse cross, a stallion with a jenny, produces a hinny, which is harder to breed and less common. Horses and donkeys are separate species with different chromosome numbers. Mules come in any size or colour found in either parent, and they are reputed to be more patient, tougher and longer-lived than horses and smarter and less stubborn than donkeys. Females are mollies, males johns, and a group can be a pack, a barren or a span.
Mule breeding had to wait until the domestic horse, which originated in Central Asia around 3500 BC, met the domestic donkey from northeastern Africa, probably in Anatolia and Mesopotamia, where mules were being bred before 1000 BC. They appear in Israel and Judah in King David's time, and a relief from Ashurbanipal's palace at Nineveh shows two mules carrying hunting nets. Homer mentions them reaching Asia Minor in the Iliad.
Washington bred them after the Revolutionary War, lending his donkeys to farms across the country. He found mules worked harder and longer than horses on less food and water. In 1785 Mount Vernon held 132 horses; by 1799 it kept 27 horses, 20 donkeys and 63 mules. Through the nineteenth century mules became favourite farm and towing animals, numbering 885,000 in the United States, more in the South than the North. From 1883 to 1889 the famous twenty-mule teams, actually eighteen mules and two horses, hauled wagons of borax out of Death Valley.
Armies used them to carry supplies and drag field guns over mountain trails, as in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. In industrialised countries their day ended in the later twentieth century, when diesel tractors and trucks took over farm work and transport.
Source: Mule
