The kunga was a hybrid equid that was used as a draft animal in ancient Syria and Mesopotamia, where it also served as an economic and political status symbol.

Cuneiform writings from as early as the mid-third millennium BCE describe the animal as a hybrid but do not provide the precise taxonomical nature of the breeding that produced it.

[2] It has been suggested that the kunga trade was central to the economies of the region's kingdoms, and that the ostentatious display of such expensive animals in official art directly associated them with kingship and power.

[7] Their appearance in formal administrative cuneiform and official art seems to parallel the contemporary development of kingships in the region, suggesting a propagandistic association of the kunga with royalty.

[1][3] They had a prominent overbite, while their bones had a combination of onager and donkey characteristics, being sized more like the former, but with the greater robustness of the latter, as might be expected in a hybrid between the two equid species.

A similar hybrid was reportedly produced at the London Zoo in 1883,[10] but the subsequent extinction of the Syrian wild ass makes it impossible now to reproduce the kunga's precise taxonomic cross.