Adulis, on the coast of present-day Eritrea, was an important hub during the rise of cross-ocean maritime trade, connecting ships, cargoes, and ideas from Egypt, Arabia, and India (Burstein, 2002; Munro-Hay, 1982; Seland, 2008). Trade peaked between the fourth and seventh centuries CE, propelling the rise and expansion of the Aksumite kingdom, but its occupation history extends, at minimum, to the first millennium BCE (Zazzaro et al., 2014). Corroborating this archaeological record are written accounts that draw attention to the importance of Adulis as one of the foremost sources of African animals or animal products during the Hellenistic period (323–31 BCE). In Topographia Christiana, a sixth-century text, the Nestorian merchant Cosmas Indicopleustes recounts his own visit to Adulis in 518 CE (Fauvelle-Aymar, 2009; Hatke, 2013). There he copied the text of a stele inscribed in Greek and known today as the Monumentum Adulitanum I. The text celebrates the military conquests of Ptolemy III Euergetes (reign: 246–222 BCE) and notes the local availability of war elephants for himself and his predecessor, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (reign: 284–246 BCE) (Bowersock, 2013).

Echoing this account is the first-century Periplus Maris Erythraei, an anonymous text focused on maritime trade across the Red Sea Basin: ‘practically the whole number of elephants and rhinoceros that are killed live in the places inland, although at rare intervals they are hunted on the seacoast even near Adulis’ (Casson, 1989; Casson, 1993). Pliny the Elder described Adulis as a thriving emporium in his Naturalis Historia, another first-century text, and commented on the availability of ivory, rhinoceros horn, hippopotamus hides, tortoise shell, and sphingia—or ‘sphinx monkeys,’ a term that probably refers to the gelada, Theropithecus gelada (Jolly and Ucko, 1969). Pliny’s account relied heavily on the writings of Agatharchides of Cnidus (ca. 145 BCE), who described ‘Aithiopia’ (meaning the Red Sea coast and African hinterlands) as a source of sphinx monkeys, cepi (probably patas monkeys, Erythrocebus patas; Burstein, 1989), and cynocephali—or ‘dog-heads.’ Strabo’s Geographica references the worship of cynocephali at Hermopolis (Egypt), making it clear that the animal in question is the hamadryas baboon (Papio hamadryas), the traditional sacred animal of the Egyptian god Thoth (Figure 1). The source of baboons in ancient Egypt is an enduring question (Dominy et al., 2020) as the current distribution of baboons excludes Egypt (Figure 2) and there is no prehistoric evidence of baboons occurring in Egypt naturally (Geraads, 1987).

Figure 1

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Figure 2

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Though fragmentary, this historiography points to Adulis as a commercial source of mummified baboons in Ptolemaic catacombs, such as those at Saqqara and Tuna el-Gebel (Goudsmit and Brandon-Jones, 1999; Peters, 2020) [or those of their progenitors if Ptolemaic Egyptians maintained captive breeding programs; (von den Driesch et al., 2004)]. At the same time, these accounts invite questions focused on the source of pre-Ptolemaic baboons recovered from Gabbanat el-Qurud, Egypt (Lortet and Gaillard, 1907) and dated to ca. 800–540 BCE (Richardin et al., 2017), a span that corresponds to the 25th Dynasty and Late Period of Egyptian antiquity. If these older specimens can be traced to Eritrea, and by extension Adulis, then they have the potential to extend the time depth of Egyptian–Adulite trade by as much as five centuries.

Mummified baboons have been investigated morphologically, revealing species-level taxonomic assignments as well as individual details, such as age, sex, and pathological condition (Boessneck, 1987; Brandon-Jones and Goudsmit, 2022; Goudsmit and Brandon-Jones, 1999; Peters, 2020). Such data are telling, but insufficient for determining fine-scale geographic origins. Recent oxygen and strontium stable isotope evidence suggests that mummified hamadryas baboons were imported from a region encompassing northern Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia (Dominy et al., 2020), a level of geographic precision with limited practical value. Another limitation concerns the captive breeding of some animals. For instance, stable isotopes can reveal a lifetime in Egypt but not the geoprovenance of the source population, as shown for olive baboons from the Ptolemaic catacombs of North Saqqara (Dominy et al., 2020). The analysis of ancient DNA (aDNA) recovered from baboon mummies and compared to the current distribution of baboon genetic diversity has the potential to provide more detailed insights on the geographic origin of baboons in ancient Egypt. To explore this possibility, we sequenced the mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) of a mummified baboon to infer its geographic origin through phylogenetic assignment.