On that day, the storm shrieked, the west wind whirled,

The north wind and the south wind howled at each other,

Lightning together with the ‘seven winds’ devoured everything in heaven, The thundering storm made the earth quake,

ISkur roared in the broad heavens,

The clouds of heaven mingled with the waters of the earth,

Their small (hail-)stones (and) their large (hail-)stones

Were striking on my back.

The weather apparently did not deter Sulgi in the least. (“Like a fierce lion I charged furiously, Like a wild ass I galloped, With my heart full of joy, I ran onward.”’) Clearly, distance runners in antiquity were just as hard core as they are today. Upon his arrival back in Nippur, he again headed to the temple:

My sag-ur-sag-priests gazed at me (with astonishment); In Nippur and Ur, in one day, I celebrated their eSes-festival!

Since the text appears to suggest that he made the almost-200-mile round trip in time to celebrate the ees festival in both cities in one day, and since the current 24-hour road record (set by Yiannis Kouros in 1998) is only a bit over 180 miles, it’s no wonder the priests gazed in astonishment!

A run for the Pharaoh only

But, as with the accounts of distance running in ancient Greece, the run of Sulgi was not a race. While the oldest known running races did occur in Sumer (“city races” that dated from circa 2035 BCE, or about a dozen years after the end of Sulgi’s reign), we know nothing of the distances of these events—merely that they occurred and, based on the fact that they were accompanied by sacrifices provided by the king, that they were important events in the life of the city.

In order to find the roots of distance racing in antiquity, we need to turn to Egypt. Like other ancient cultures, Egypt also had a history of shorter-distance runs, but unlike Greece and (probably) Sumer, where the shorter events were staged for competition, in Egypt these runs were undertaken exclusively by the Pharaoh. The role of the Pharaoh, who was considered to be a divine personage, was to maintain order in the world and to protect the lives of his subjects. These tasks, of course, demanded great physical strength, which Pharaoh was required to demonstrate periodically by participating in athletic events. Since, however, he was a divine personage, the idea of him competing against mere mortals (and possibly risking defeat!) was unthinkable, so these events were exhibitions rather than competitions. At the beginning of a Pharaoh’s reign, he (or rarely she—a block in the Temple of Karnak depicts Queen Hatshepsut, a female Pharaoh, in a running pose) would make a ritual run around the palace as a means of symbolically laying claim to

the kingdom and proving his fitness for the role of king. At the 30th anniversary of his reign, and at three-year intervals thereafter, a jubilee festival would be celebrated to confirm that the Pharaoh was still fit to rule and to “magically” restore his strength; a similar ritual run was a centerpiece of these festivals. While the precise distance the Pharaoh ran is not known, the archaeological excavation of the pyramid complex of King Djoser suggests that it wasn’t very far.

But while the Pharaohs didn’t race against others themselves, we can thank one of them for providing us with an account of the first known competitive ultramarathon. In 1977, a monument was discovered on the desert road of Dahshur, which ran from the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis to the oasis of Fayum. The monument, known as the “Running Stela of Taharqa,” carries an inscription dating it to December 685 BCE, during the reign of Taharga, a Pharaoh of the 25th dynasty. The stela, which identifies itself as the “running practice of the army of the Son of Re Taharga,” tells of the king’s decree that his army was required to run daily (although it doesn’t, sadly, give a training schedule), insisting that “a faint heart does not exist in the midst of my army, nor a feeble officer of mine.”

Taharga’s interest in promoting a swift and fit military is certainly understandable. The Assyrian Empire (the superpower of its day) had recently conquered much of neighboring Canaan (and had its eye on Egypt as well). The stela goes on to describe a race that was organized as part of a royal troop inspection. Not