Well — if we are talking Onager’s in general, then yes very possibly they were either not used at all due to their intractablility or were only used briefly. Oxen are undoubtedly stronger and more placid so if you were a farmer they would be more practical. However, using oxen to pull the royal conveyance would probably not give the “class” associated for royalty so indeed they might have been used for limited things. But I am really out of my element here.

As you know I am very skeptical about academics and their claims. I am reminded of MacCauley’s book “The Motel of the Mysteries”. If you haven’t read this I highly recommend it and when I hear some archaeologist make some suspcious claim — like human sacrifice — I am reminded of this book.
RLCallaway@aol.com

Also, the ‘wild ass’ Hilzheimer was referring to was, he wrote, actually a feral onager, and I should correct my original post to say that this is not the ass that went extinct in the 1920s. There was another wild ass which is always sharply distinguished from the others. It looked exactly like a miniature Arabian horse and was extremely fast, and some scholars have even speculated that the Arabian breed was developed from it. (My sources are limited to English-language texts, and there might be a lot more data about all this in Arabic.)

Initially, I thought that this was the wild ass Woolley had referred to but, according to Hilzheimer, it was the feral ass that he specifically claimed was buried in Queen Shubad’s tomb. In either case, he was working from an assumption and should not have reported this as fact. Nor should Moorey have brushed aside the entire issue of fabrication in scholarship, especially in regard to Woolley, whose work had long-lasting negative social consequences, as Moorey well knew. Woolley’s dig at Ur is still used for anti-Semitic purposes, to assert that human sacrifice was practiced by early Semitic cultures, of which there has never been any proof whatsoever. Moorey would disagree with this, I’m sure, as, after he finished his rewrite of Ur, he went on to do a similar job with the excavation of Kish, another early Semitic city-state, and claimed that evidence of human sacrifice had been found there as well.

I should add, in defense of Woolley, that he was not entirely responsible for the exploitation of his work by bigots. Max Mallowan, who began his career as Woolley’s assistant at Ur, called attention to the fact that Woolley had published very detailed journal articles about this excavation immediately after every season. In addition, Woolley had finalized his excavation report of Ur within just a few years of the completion of the dig, but its publication was delayed for decades. No explanation has ever been put forth to justify the withholding of this material – I believe, in fact, that it was withheld until after Woolley died.

In addition to Dyson, there was an interesting article published in 1941 about this issue; see Max Hilzheimer, Animal Remains of Tell Asmar, in Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization No. 20, University of Chicago Press. Prof. Hilzheimer wrote that, on the basis of Woolley’s original assessment that the chariot found among the grave goods in Queen Shu-bad’s tomb at Ur was drawn by asinus onager, “We should then have to give the ancient Sumerians full credit for the taming of Equus onager and its use as a draft animal for war chariots, an accomplishment all that more characteristic of ancient Sumerian culture because, so far as we know, the onager has nowhere since been tamed on an extensive scale…In any event the taming of the onager remained restricted to the Sumerian culture. The later culture apparently knew it no more. It must therefore have been abandoned in Akkadian times.”

In other words, it is clear that, even prior to Dyson, Hilzheimer also doubted Woolley’s assessment, because it would not make sense that, once accomplished, the taming of this animal would have been abandoned.