ANIMALS IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

INTRODUCTION

A strikingly common feature among early Old World civilizations was the pervasive importance of other species of animal life, both wild and domestic. Beyond the forms of utility that some species acquired before or after domestication, pre-literate peoples in antiquity apparently perceived an additional closeness or interrelatedness to particular animals. They admired or feared—were seemingly awestruck by—certain characteristics which some species possessed in common with themselves, but in greater and more impressive measure. These special qualities included physical and behavioural ones, such as size, bravery, speed, grace, cunning, strength and libido. Some animal species also became important by association with aspects of the unknown, such as with phenomena associated with life versus death.1 Among different peoples this perceived closeness of human and other species led to varied forms of prominence for these species within evolving cosmologies, including their actual worship.

This chapter will explore this distinctive and less familiar aspect of man-animal relations in antiquity. Though common to the distant past of many present-day peoples, it is a phenomenon virtually unknown to us today except through survival in myths and fables (or, with respect to cattle, in modern expressions of Hinduism).2

Despite the wealth of evidence that these relationships were especially prominent, there has been a tendency among modern scholars of particular ancient civilizations (who are themselves products of today’s values and mindsets) to treat such apparently profound animal relationships in the past as simply metaphorical. And, since metaphors are regarded as obviously exaggerated (or purely poetic) comparisons today, this tendency underestimates the importance of the considerable fusion in ancient minds not only of such notions as metaphor, symbol, simile, analogue and identity/sameness,3 but also of such activities/institutions as religion, animal husbandry and healing,4 which are now totally distinct.

KINGS, GODS AND HEAVENLY BODIES AS BULLS

Here I shall concentrate on the most profound and widespread of such interspecific ‘identifications’ in antiquity, that between the bovine and human species. Wild bulls (the aurochs Bos primigenius), possibly the largest, strongest, bravest and most successfully libidinous animals with which the founding peoples of most ancient civilizations were familiar, became their preeminent models both for male power5 and fertility, especially as applied to their chiefs or incipient kings. These related phenomena of power (e.g. dominion, bravery) and fertility (e.g. life, libido) also became associated over time with heavenly bodies and with weather, particularly with thunder, lightning and rain6 (and, in at least the Minoan civilization, with earthquakes as well).

Thus, as exemplars par excellence of both ‘dominion’ and the mysteries of ‘life’, wild aurochs bulls (and hence their mothers and consorts, cows)7 became central to the conceptions and practices of several ancient religions through which the special relations of chief/king to god(s), people and the physical universe were defined and solidified. As a result—and in contrast to dogs, sheep and goats, which many present-day scholars believe virtually domesticated themselves—cattle were probably domesticated later, and more intentionally, for just such religio-political or cosmological reasons.8

It may also be that these important and partially related aspects of man-bull rivalry and emulation, which were so characteristic of several major ancient civilizations over a very broad geographical expanse of Asia, Africa and Europe, were so ancient as to have developed before some of the major linguistic groups of modern man separated, as suggested for the Proto-Indo-Europeans by Vendryes (1918).9

Alternatively they may have originated some time later as more or less identical and quite rational responses of different peoples to commonly shared ecological determinants, as argued by Lincoln (1981) for the emergence of a societally similar cattle-culture pastoralism in or at the margins of the Old World’s natural grasslands amongst diverse and apparently separated peoples.10 In either case, all of these cattle beliefs and practices probably appeared rational or at least practical in the eyes of their creators. It is also possible, though unlikely, that these striking notions shared by many ancient Old World civilizations could have been the result of very early diffusion from one of them.

Whatever the actual case, there are good reasons to believe that bull and man were originally viewed in a much more practically analogical than purely metaphorical relationship to one another. And we might posit further that some key requisites of civilization actually ‘gelled’ only when some of these highly cattle-oriented peoples entered and dominated certain fertile riverine deltas and floodplains where other sedentary peoples were already practising simple digging stick agriculture.11 I will return to that idea in a moment, but let us first consider how important and complex these relationships between human and bovine species became.

Though a number of surviving geographical names were derived in antiquity from cattle or from particular bulls or cows,12 a far more striking and profound consequence of such tendencies to associate ‘places’ with cattle was the frequent identification of the two most prominent heavenly bodies (and some constellations of stars) with bulls, or parts of bulls, the whole sky with a cow and, then sometimes, to deify them all.13 At the same time, the kings of ancient civilizations also became commonly and inextricably associated with bull, sun and moon. An important point to note is that these associations usually involved the identification of kings, certain gods and heavenly bodies as bulls. It was not the converse, whereby bulls were regarded as gods, or kings related to heavenly bodies. Thus the bull was clearly the main point of reference, the familiar model to which these others were compared.14

‘Bull-leaping’ as a demonstration of bravery and strength (possible symbolic representation for recreational or other purposes of the original pitting of kings or other powerful men against wild bulls in the bull hunt) was practised in more than one ancient civilization. Boundary-marking (and associated fertility) representations of the bull or the bull-plough combination were also shared in antiquity. Each of these was a manifestation of the early and preponderant association of bull with the idea of dominion.

Related evidence suggests that cattle sheds were precursors of some civilizations’ temples, and bull-cow statuary and other art, especially bovine heads (bucrania), received architectural prominence in the fully evolved temples of a number of otherwise distinct civilizations. Prehistoric examples suggest linkages between portions of all of this and the much older cave art of earlier hunters’ cults (Mellaart 1967).

Cattle domestication itself must have been accompanied by the development of three surgical techniques necessary (even today) to control the powerful and unpredictable domestic bull. Thus, castration, nose-ringing and cutting off the sharp tips or all of the horns, are themselves evidence that—in contrast to dogs, sheep and goats—cattle did not domesticate themselves. Most ancient peoples seemed reluctant to dehorn or blunt the horns of bulls if it could be avoided, as has been the case everywhere until recently.15 Castration of cattle was probably originally purely a behaviour- (i.e. aggression-) modifying operation since semen was regarded by several ancient civilizations to originate as the white marrow of bones. Eventually Aristotle doubted it and Galen actually established the testes as its production site.

In fact this belief that semen arose from bones as marrow and was channelled to the penis via the spine’s ‘marrow’ (the spinal cord) was possibly the earliest physiological theory formulated (Schwabe et al. 1982; Schwabe 1986). It apparently originated before the advent of major civilizations from priests who frequently presided over the ritual dissection of bulls. The bull’s penis actually is connected to its spine by the two cord-like, white unstriated retractor penis muscles, a connection of organs early priest-sacrificers must surely have noticed.

By far the greatest consequence of domestication of cattle was the contribution of yoked domestic bulls to the emergence of major Old World civilizations. They provided humans with their first (and for a very long time their only significant) source of power for plant food production greater than that of their own muscles (Schwabe 1978a). Thus, the ox was the key to human socioeconomic evolution from primitive digging-stick agriculture to more energy-intensive systems which produced true surpluses of grains. These changes took place mostly within certain fertile riverine valleys. This satisfying of food needs, while providing surpluses for trade, did not require participation of the entire population, as had digging-stick agriculture (or subsistence-level purely pastoral systems).16 The changes introduced by the yoked ox and plough provided some people with leisure and release from the labours of foodproviding. Associated with this was the emergence of the first social division of labour and more differentiated sociocultural institutions.

The notion of cattle as primary wealth (and as the apparent inspiration eventually for metal coinage) probably preceded a similar perception of surplus grain. Cattle wealth was a widespread idea tied to both the earlier religious power/fertility and subsequent ‘harnessed power/fertility’ roles cattle served.17 As a consequence, cattle and stored grain were both prominent in the evolution of some of the first symbols for writing, a device for recording this wealth.18

Again, an important point to note with respect to these profound mancattle relationships in antiquity is that—except for some unusual individual living bulls who received recognition as gods incarnate—these interactions were at the species level and apparently seldom depended upon any widespread ‘bonding’ between individual people and individual bulls (or cows). However there is also evidence of affectionate relationships between individual men and their domestic cattle in antiquity. For example, the existence in some civilizations of living bull gods such as the Egyptian Apis and the survival of songs sung to their cattle by Egyptian cowmen (see Pritchard 1969:469). The Egyptian word ka, a man’s (or bull’s) ‘animating principle’ or ‘double’, also means ‘bovine animal’ and is represented in hieroglyphic form as human arms upraised in imitation of a bull’s horns. This suggests an original ‘brother bond’ between individual men and individual bulls in antiquity.19

THE EXAMPLE OF EGYPT

Although popularly associated with the Minoan civilization of Crete, ‘bull-leaping’ or bull-dancing was also prominent in ancient Egypt.20 Like bull-baiting and bull-fighting practices in modern Spain and other countries, it probably arose and was practised as a ritual form of prowess-demonstrating and bravery-testing among leaders of the earlier wild bull hunt. Wild bull hunting by monarchs is well described and portrayed in Egypt up until the time of Amenhotep III in the Middle Kingdom (mid-2nd millennium BC), when the wild bull apparently became extinct (Epstein 1971, I: 235). Only later, perhaps, did such rituals become popular spectator recreation in which hostages or slaves sometimes substituted for the king, or for local heroes or youths.

Several forms of Egyptian evidence exist for cattle constituting the first (or one of the first) forms of primary wealth among individuals (e.g. the king), the temple community and the ancient state. Cattle-raiding expeditions by the earliest Egyptian kings into adjacent areas, Nubia especially, are well documented (Adams 1977). While some modern scholars have assumed that the large numbers of cattle said to have been taken were exaggerated, there is no evidence that this was so. That large numbers of cattle, even by modern ranching standards, were still possessed by particular temples at a later time is also recorded. It was surely reflective of a large cattle population and its significance as primary wealth that the annual cattle census of the Egyptians became such a very important national event.

In any case, cattle were certainly numerous in Old Kingdom Egypt, and probably before, and the taking and keeping of cattle purely as wealth by the Egyptians probably preceded the hoarding of gold or pretty stones for the same purpose. One urban anthropologist and Nile Valley specialist, Richard Lobban (1989), has even advanced the interesting hypothesis that it was this cattle wealth, acquired especially from foreign raids, that provided the capital to finance the monumental construction so characteristic of the Egyptian civilization. Lobban also contends that intensive plant cultivation may have developed in the delta (following its capture by the king of Upper Egypt) less from the necessity at first of producing more food for a still small human population, than to produce fodder for maintaining this expanding cattle herd as the surrounding grasslands dried. As Lobban points out, berseen, a fodder plant for livestock feeding, is still Egypt’s major crop.

The Egyptian association of the heavens and its prominent bodies with cattle was possibly much older than this conquest of the fertile delta lands by peoples of Upper Egypt.21 A rock drawing ascribed to prehistoric times in Upper Egypt is of a bovine animal with a solar symbol (Winkler 1937). And already in their oldest religious literature, the funerary Pyramid Texts, the king is referred to as the ‘sun bull’ and identified with the god Re. Specific utterances in the Pyramid Texts refer to this ‘Bull of Re’ as the male counterpart of the cow goddess Hathor, and to the king as ‘Bull of Heaven’ taking the place of Re. Elsewhere in these same texts Re is specifically equated with the ‘Great Wild Bull’. These identifications persisted over very long expanses of time. From the Middle and New Kingdoms, additional references emerge to the then sun god Atum as a bull.

Also in Egypt some specific living bull gods emerged who were also associated with sun.22 Perhaps the earliest example is Mnevis, who is already called ‘Bull of Heliopolis’, a ‘sun bull’, the ‘Herald of Re’ in the 'Pyramid Texts'. He was also called ‘Living sun god’ and frequently depicted with the sun disc between his horns. Similar living bull gods included Montu, Buchis and Kamutef. From the Middle Kingdom onward, Montu was named bull and associated with the sun. During later times he too was connected with Re, and eventually became a universal sun god. Buchis was called ‘Living soul of Re’ from Dynasty 30, while Kamutef bred daily with his cow mother Hathor to be reborn as the sun calf.

Hathor, the cow goddess whose cult goes back to pre-Dynastic times (according to a range of evidence reviewed by Van Lepp 1990), was portrayed frequently with a sun-disc between her horns and was associated in other ways with Re. More specifically, Hathor, and another cow goddess Nut, were referred to and portrayed as the sky. During later times she was described as a celestial goddess who carries and then rejuvenates her son, the solar-disc which, as we recall, was also identified with the king.

Especially interesting in this connection is Egyptian evidence that the drinking of cow milk by ancient peoples, especially as portrayed by the adult pharaoh (shown kneeling at the side of the cow goddess sucking directly from her teat, was associated with early beliefs in the cow mother of humankind (Schwabe 1984a).23

Additionally, the moon God Khonsu was called bull (the crescent moon’s horns were especially likened to the heavenly bull in several ancient civilizations), and the Ursa Major constellation was to the ancient Egyptians the bull’s forelimb. Egyptologist Andrew Gordon and I believe that this association had profound importance with respect to one of the Egyptians’ earliest attempts to distinguish biologically between life and death.24 That is, muscle fascicles and intact muscles of the amputated forelimb, so commonly portrayed as the first part removed from sacrificial bulls, can be stimulated to contract for a considerable period after the animal’s death. It was this observation that the forelimb seemingly contained an ‘animating principle’ that led the priest-dissectors to touch it to the dead pharaoh’s mouth in the revivification ceremony of Opening-of-the-Mouth.

While Henri Frankfort (1948:170), as well as a number of earlier scholars, drew attention to the importance of this strong interpenetration of solar and bovine images in ancient Egypt, its implications have been slighted by most modern scholars. My own evolving explanation for this fusion of images and concepts is that it derives originally from anatomical, physiological, behavioural and social observations by Egyptians of wild and (later) domestic cattle. These led to analogies drawn for people (the human ‘herd’ and its chief), gods, and finally heavenly bodies, in sum the derivation of an inclusive cattle-culture cosmology.25 To restate, the basis for comparisons is clear. Sun and king were likened to/identified with the bull. The wild bull was the brave, powerful, libidinous bovine leader of his herd whom the Egyptian king so earnestly wished to emulate. For millennia he bore the title ‘mighty bull’, and, not surprisingly, Egyptians referred to themselves as ‘cattle of Re’, the divine sun bull which the king became in his rebirth after death.26

These associations are also apparent orthographically in other epithets for pharaoh. One such is ‘victorious bull’, k3 nht, written as a bull shown with the ka, a sign of two upraised human arms, together with a human penis. In other words, in this representation of pharaoh, the horns and penis, both sources of the bull’s dominion, have evolved into human representations of the mighty bull’s organs, the sources of his power. Another probably earlier orthographic example was an anatomical derivation of the king’s most frequent epithet ankh, djed, w3s (‘life, stability, dominion’) from the bull’s reproductive system as it was understood by the Egyptians; Schwabe et al. 1982; Schwabe and Gordon 1988, 1989; Gordon and Schwabe 1989). An even more striking, extremely early example of these bovine attributes of pharaoh and their source is his portrayal as a goring bull in the well-known palette of the first pharaoh Menes-Narmer (4th millennium BC.

MAN AS BULL IN OTHER CIVILIZATIONS

Throughout the Fertile Crescent (Mesopotamia, the coastal strip of Phoenicia-Canaan and the northern rim of city states connecting these two ‘horns’), bovine emulations and associations also were prominent in antiquity.27 Several gods from the Mesopotamian civilizations of antiquity were called bull, including some members of the Sumerian pantheon. Examples were Anu, the ‘Bull of Heaven’, the ‘almighty Wild Bull’,28 husband to the cow goddess Ninhursag, who personified the sky and could send the celestial bull to earth; Enlil, the god of air and water29 who was described as follows: ‘overpowering ox...at thy word which created the world, O lord of lands… O Enlil, Father of Sumer...over-powering ox’ (Farnell 1911:56; see also Pritchard 1969:576). Later, the Akkadian crescent moon god Shin, represented with bull’s horns, was also called ‘Young Bullock of Enlil’; and Amarut(k) (Marduk), ‘young bull of the sun’.

Ninhursag, sometimes wife or mother of the chief god(s), was paramount among Mesopotamian cow goddesses, several others of which were assimilated to her at various times.30 About her an active cult with a living herd was centred at the Temple of el-’Obeid (Plate 3.7). As with the Egyptian pharaoh and Hathor, Sumerian kings claimed to be the cow goddess’s children, ‘fed with the holy milk of Ninhursag’. She was also called ‘Mother of the Gods’ and associated with the birth of mankind.31 Her symbol, the bicornuate uterus of the cow, was used on boundary stones (Barb 1953, pl. 27; boundary stones were also associated elsewhere in antiquity with the penis).

There are indications, too, that the commonly portrayed Mesopotamian reed cattle house was the prototype of more permanent and grand temple architecture. One of the clearest examples is the famous frieze from the Temple of Ninhursag from el-’Obeid, now in the British Museum, of priests in front of a reed cattle shed milking cows and making butter.

In the Phoenician-Canaanite horn of the Fertile Crescent, the senior god El was also called ‘bull’ and shown in surviving portrayals as a man with bull’s horns. His son Baal, grandson Aleyin and grand-daughter Anat were also called bulls and cow, respectively. Baal and two of his manifestations, Hadad and Dagon, were represented as bulls or as men standing on the backs of bulls. Related biblical references exist, as with Aaron and the golden calf at Sinai and the persistence of Baal-worship in Judaea (Bodenheimer 1960).

On Crete, Zeus was the earthshaker bull32 born within the bowels of the earth in the Dictean cave, while the Cretan demi-god Minotaur, was born of the mating of the Minoan queen Pasiphae with a bull.33 Among the Indo-European Greeks more generally, their father god Zeus Pater (cf. Roman Jupiter [Jovis Pater], Indian Dyaus Pitar), who sometimes bore an epithet helios tauropolos, could assume bull form even after his otherwise complete anthropomorphization, as for example when he carried Europa on his back from Phoenicia to Crete (Fraser 1972).

Bulls were also central to the festival honouring Poseidon called the Taureia. But perhaps the most complex and persistently bovine of Greek gods was Dionysus.34 He was often represented as a bull or with bull’s horns. Dionysus was worshipped in theophagic communion rites by ‘ecstatic and frenzied worshippers…tearing at the raw flesh of a bull that was thought to be the actual embodiment of the god. By eating this flesh, the worshipper believed he received a little of the god’s power and character’ (Young 1979:14). It is interesting to note here the common belief that Dionysus was originally from Egypt.35

Artemis, a Greek fecundity goddess, was also called tauropolos at some sites of her worship. A herd of sacred cattle was maintained at the Temple of Eleusis, near Athens, dedicated to Demeter, goddess of fertility, also earth mother. Similarly, Hera and Zeus’ lover Io had strong bovine associations (see Cook 1964).

Turning to other Indo-European civilizations, the scriptures of the Persians clearly indicate the central importance of pre-existing bull worship to their religion. Examples from the sacred Zend Avesta include: ‘Hail bounteous Bull! Hail to thee, beneficent Bull…to the body of the Bull, to the Soul of the Bull; to thy soul, to thee, O beneficent Bull.’ This primeval bull’s soul went to heaven where he sits as Goshurun (protector of animals) in the sphere of the sun, while his semen went to the moon: To the Moon that keeps in it the seed of the Bull, to the only created Bull, to the Bull of many species.’ The latter referred to the belief that this primeval bull’s semen gave rise to all 272 kinds of animal.

Goshurun’s female counterpart was Drvaspa: ‘To the body of the Cow, to the soul of the Cow, to the powerful Drvaspa, made by Mazda and holy.’ Mithra, lord of pastures, was another bull god, who cast his ‘health-bringing eye’ upon the ‘abode of cattle, the dwelling of cattle’. The importance of cattle generally in ancient Persian civilization is summed up in another passage from the Zend Avesta: ‘In the ox is our strength, in the ox is our need, in the ox is our speech, in the ox is our victory, in the ox is our food, in the ox is our clothing, in the ox is our tillage, that makes food grow for us.’36

Among the creators of the ancient Indus Valley civilization,37 a plethora of similar beliefs and practices abounded. The relative familiarity of many of them to us today is due, of course, to their unique survivals in multiple forms within modern expressions of the Hindu faith.38 These are the only really important examples of cattle cultures surviving from ancient civilizations to the present day. The origins of current beliefs about cattle and man in India are the subject of an active academic debate.39 I shall not even attempt to chronicle their specifics beyond a quotation or two to illustrate similarities to other already cited examples. From the Rig Veda we learn how the father god Dyaus Pitar, the ‘bull with the thousand horns’, bred Prithivi, the earth cow, to produce the gods and all other animals. Similarly, when cosmic force was released at creation it was in the form of cows as rain clouds from which the sun also arose. Thus the cow and its father/husband the bull were the sources of all.

Regardless of the outcome of the current debate about how and why cow protection (ahimsa) in modern Hinduism may have originated, abundant evidence from India corroborates the overall thesis advanced here about very close interspecific identifications between man and cattle among the earliest creators of civilizations. This originally religious association of our two species led to the development of widespread cattle-culture pastoralism as well as to plough-based plant cultivation which relied on ox power. This provided the food surpluses and wealth which were the keys to civilization.40

Finally, it seems that the Romans added little that was original or very significant to pre-existing cattle culture. But they do indicate how, as time went on, these earliest relationships between the human and bovine species dimmed in memory and were replaced by more comprehensible (to us) utilitarian relationships. In Roman legend and myth the boundaries of the city state of Rome were said to have been laid out by cattle, as was the case for the laying out of Thebes, the capital of the Greek ‘cattle land’ Boeotia, by Cadmus).41 Moreover, Romulus and Remus were said to have been suckled by the wolf outside the temple of the cow goddess Rumina.

In the subsequent records of the Roman civilization (as in the Greek) we can begin to see how such ancient notions began to fade in importance before the dawn of the first Christian millennium. In Marcus Terrentius Varro’s detailed work on agriculture, including animal husbandry, which dates from the first century BC (Hooper 1935) we can read such statements as: ‘the ancient Greeks, according to Timaeus, called bulls itali, and the name Italy was bestowed because of the number and beauty of its cattle’,42 ‘When the city was founded the position of walls and gates was marked out by a bull’, ‘If the flock had not been held in high honor among the ancients, the astronomers, in laying out the heavens, would not have called by their names the signs of the zodiac... the names of the Ram and the Bull,43 placing them ahead of Apollo and Hercules’, ‘up to this day a fine is assessed after the ancient fashion in oxen and sheep; the oldest copper coins are marked with cattle’, ‘the very word for money is derived from them, for cattle are the basis of all wealth’, ‘the ancients made it a capital offense to kill one’.

Thus, by Varro’s time, though Romans still remembered some of these ancient cattle associations of their own and of Greece, bulls and cows, like other farm and draught animals, had simply become utilitarian possessions, albeit ones of the greatest value to the economy.44 By this time, much of their prior prestige value to sovereigns had been taken over by horses or mules, species which had played no role in the creation of ancient civilizations.

In summary, companion, as well as utilitarian, functions of animals were completely overshadowed at civilizations’ creation by the religio-political functions of a few animal species. For some time after that, some of the most all-embracing and absolutely fundamental relationships of power, fertility and sex were still envisaged between the human and bovine species.45 The very fact of this central common feature among the several peoples who created civilizations supports its ancient origins in man’s evolution, before major groups divided and dispersed, and probably long before cattle were first domesticated.

OTHER SPECIES ASSOCIATIONS IN EARLY CIVILIZATIONS

In more restricted senses, or in more specific contexts, special cultural relationships also existed in ancient times between Homo sapiens and other animals. For example, in a few civilizations the lion shared, in comparatively minor ways, the power role of the bull. But some other species associations, especially with the dog and snake, were profound and, as with cattle, were shared by more than one ancient civilization. Although it may seem odd to us now, dog and snake associations in antiquity were similar in that both originally seem to have been with death. They then evolved in parallel ways. The snake killed people and the wild canine killed and ate them (as it also scavenged bodies dead from other causes). In the Egyptian god Anubis we see some of the earliest and most persistent of these canine roles.

Clearly the earliest Egyptians feared dismemberment after death and it is probable that Anubis’ prominent funerary roles (Plate 3.8) evolved from such fears. Among some modern Nilotes, for example, the Turkana and Nandi, the dead (or dying) are deliberately put out for canids (or hyenas) to eat and for some of these peoples the ‘soul’ of the deceased must pass through such an animal to achieve afterlife (see discussion in Schwabe 1978b: 58–9).

Exceptions are sometimes made for chiefs or other important elders whose bodies are buried deeply or beneath stone cairns precisely to prevent their being consumed: they have an alternative route to the afterlife. Early Egyptian funerary texts clearly indicate the expectation, and fear, of such dismemberment after death, especially for the pharaoh, and this could explain the origin of early mud-brick mastabas and then pyramids to protect them.

The Israelites feared dismemberment of their dead by semi-domesticated pariah dogs, as indicated in such biblical verses as 1st Kings, 14:11: ‘Him that dieth of Jeroboam in the city shall the dogs eat’; 21:23: The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel’; Psalm 22: ‘Deliver…my darling from the power of the dog’; and: ‘thou hast brought me into the dust of death. For dogs have compassed me.’

Similarly in Mesopotamia we find many related beliefs and practices, for example dogs as harbingers of death. There, as well as in Egypt and Greece, these earliest associations of dogs with death and dismemberment, including the foretelling of death, seemed to have evolved gradually into beliefs that the dog could also ward off death, prevent death, and hence cure (Leach 1961). The Mesopotamian healing goddess Gula was shown with her healing companion the dog. By the same token, dogs were kept as co-therapists in Greek healing temples.46

The Zoroastrian Persians seem to have evolved the most positive ideas from such commonly observed facts about the canine species and death. Originally, a deceased person needed to be eaten by a dog for the soul to enjoy afterlife but later the body had only to be rent by a dog. Later still it was sufficient simply to be gazed upon by a dog. As a consequence of this among these Persians all dogs received unusual respect, protection and care.

In antiquity snakes evolved remarkably similar associations to those of dogs. These ‘limbless spinal columns’47 are mentioned almost as frequently as are cattle in the Egyptian funerary literature. Moreover, between them, cattle and snakes seem to have stimulated early Egyptians to develop the earliest biomedical theories about life and death. Snakes’ spines (vertebral columns) were regarded as playing a reciprocal role to the spines of bulls (in the case of snakes, as sources of poison, the fluid of death, while the bull’s spine was considered the source of semen, the fluid of life).48 Therefore, rebirth (recreation) of the pharaoh following death was sometimes portrayed as a journey along the same route as that taken by semen in procreation, that is the deceased was portrayed being pulled by priests through the spinal cord of a bull (or, rather perversely, by the route of semen’s negative analogue snake poison,49 by pulling him through the spine of a snake). Not surprisingly, the pharaoh wore both the snake’s head (uraeus) on his brow (top of his own spine) and the bull’s tail attached to the rear of his kilt.

In other ancient civilizations these associations between snakes and death also evolved towards the perception of snakes as healing companions. This was apparent in Mesopotamia in portrayals of snakes, as dogs, with the healing goddess Gula. Also, like dogs, snakes were kept in Greek healing temples and the caduceus symbol of healing may well have had similar origins. The Late Greek god Hermanubis, an amalgam of the Egyptians’ Anubis and Hermes, carried the caduceus. Interestingly, among the cattle culture Dinka Nilotes of the southern Sudan, snakes (both poisonous and constrictors) command special respect and solicitude. They are regarded as jok, a local spirit or ‘god’ to be placated. To kill one accidentally causes great social turmoil and snakes are allowed to enter huts unmolested; indeed milk and butter are put out to attract and placate them. It is possible that similar approaches (deliberately putting out food) for the man-killing, man-eating wild canid, originally to bribe or placate him, contributed to this species’s domestication.

Other complex and widespread animal associations arose in antiquity. In early Mesopotamia, evidence suggests that small ruminants began to fulfil an important surrogate religious role as substitute cattle, particularly when cattle were scarce.50 But only in rare instances such as Middle Kingdom Egypt did ram gods like Amun actually replace or augment bulls as principal gods. There, too, we have the living ram god of Mendes and the fertility connections, again especially prominent in later times, of another ram god Khumn.51 But even among Amun’s powerful priesthood, the bull still remained the central animal of sacrifice and of many associated beliefs and practices.

Other quite different associations with sheep, especially lambs, began to arise within certain civilizations (or neighbouring pastoral communities) of the Fertile Crescent. For example, analogies abound linking kings with shepherds and ordinary people with sheep—i.e. emulation by the king of the shepherd’s compassion and gentleness towards his flock. The Bible is replete, of course, with similar ovine allusions and other imagery, mostly of this gentle, innocent, humane God-as-shepherd, people-as-sheep type. In fact the Bible provides one chief source of how pervasive and important sheep-man relationships became to some ancient peoples. Such importance probably originated among peoples who then—as now—lacked cattle wealth and the power and prestige associated with it. While sheep-keeping may have been, as the Bible suggests, the paradigm for encouraging humane conduct between people, sheep seem to have played no seminal role in the creation of civilization as such. Nevertheless, some biblical texts can be read with little difficulty as a kind of shepherds’ handbook, a religiously enhanced stockman’s almanac for living the good pastoral life.

The horse entered most ancient civilizations too late to stimulate seminal religious or other cultural associations. But once introduced, its importance was profound, especially when it was understood that it could be ridden or that it could pull war chariots. Numerous Ugaritic, Hittite, Greek, Indian and other hippological texts suggest, however, that the horse may well have played the same religio-political roles as did cattle. Mythological accounts exist among ancient peoples, such as those shared in Greek, Mesopotamian (Kassite) and Indian portrayals and/or stories about centaurs (or their analogues), but these all seem to originate with legends about later invaders of the original civilizations. Nevertheless, there are a few early examples of Indo-European chimera gods, some of them centaurs which are half horse, half man, such as the Greek god Cheiron.52

But it is clear that, as horse-keeping pastoral people invaded, conquered and absorbed (or were absorbed by) some of these oldest civilizations, horses did provide the new rulers of these cattle-rich states with a source of speed and stamina far in excess of man alone or his powerful but plodding cattle. They provided some of these original city state civilizations with the means to engage in long-range overland trade and foreign conquest. Horses became as profoundly important to these ‘ageing’ ancient civilizations as cattle had been to their creators. Gradually, however, while the horse as property also took over some of the power-prestige functions of cattle, religions themselves became progressively more abstract and celestial, less autochthonous or tied to certain animal characteristics. Except among the horse-possessing, cattle-raiding nomads who eventually overran many of the great early civilizations, horses never became as integrated into their religious beliefs or general culture as cattle. Persia is a possible exception, as were some successive ancient Indian civilizations following the initial civilization of the Indus Valley.53

At the same time individual horses and, occasionally, mules came to be highly prized as very close companions by important men. Some acquired a special reputation for loyalty and affection, which was often reciprocated. Examples include Alexander’s love for his horse Bucephalus and Cyrus’ for his favourite horse which drowned under him in Mesopotamia’s Diyala River (causing, it is said, his engineers to wreak revenge by dividing it into 365 channels which then flowed out into the desert and died!). Evidently among mounted soldiers, as among rulers, individual horses were regarded as partners and companions in ways similar to the relationship which developed between individual men and their dogs.

SUMMARY

At the dawn of Old World civilizations there was widespread recognition that certain animal species shared important characteristics with humans but in exaggerated forms. This frequently inspired admiration or fear, which prompted various feelings of kinship, identification and awe, with a desire to emulate, placate or even, in extreme instances, to worship such animals.

Among the most culturally and historically significant of these shared attributes were those representing power/dominion and libido/fertility. These were linked in various ways, and together helped to define the institution of kingship and solidify emerging cosmologies dealing with the overall relationships of humankind to the heavenly bodies, earth and gods. Amongst these relationships, bovine and solar images became pre-eminent.

Certain animal species also enjoyed prominence through their associations with the concepts of creation, procreation and rebirth and man’s efforts to comprehend the significance of life and death. As civilizations emerged no species was so intimately intertwined with humankind as cattle: bulls and cows. With the eventual yoking of the ox to the plough, man-cattle relationships took on even greater significance. By providing humankind with the first source of power for plant cultivation greater than that of their own muscles, cattle proved the key to surplus grain production and, hence, to the development of civilization.

Other especially prominent relationships existed in antiquity between people and dogs and snakes, especially in relation to death and its consequences.

Such man-animal relationships, which originally represented or bordered upon identification, gradually evolved to become less central and real. They became more peripheral and symbolic, and/or purely utilitarian or social as civilizations aged. Such changes occurred more slowly in some civilizations (such as the Egyptian and Indian) than others and survivals from antiquity still persist to a considerable measure in India.54

Similar religio-political roles for the horse may have existed among other pastoral peoples who did not themselves create ancient civilizations, but solid evidence for this is relatively scarce. However, once the horse did enter early city states, its stamina and speed, far in excess of those of people, proved to be the key to emergence of the large landed empires developed by some ancient civilizations.

Sheep, or the sheep-man relationships which their domestication prompted, may have had an early and seminal influence upon man’s admiration and striving for other qualities which we now regard as humane—compassion, trust and caring.

NOTES

1 Individuals from the ‘western tradition’ will be most familiar with such an early perspective vis-à-vis animals not only in what is revealed in surviving portions of Greek mythology, and references by ancient authors to other myths since lost, but also in fables collected by the Greek Aesop, who lived from about 620 to 560 BC and the Roman Aelian, of late second and early third century AD (see also Lawson 1964). Bodenheimer (1960) is a useful zoological source about animals and man in the ancient Near East generally and Paton (1925) gives many Egyptian textual sources.
2 As well as among various pre-literate present-day African pastoralists, notably the Nilotes of East Africa.
3 Dulling, for example, recognition of the roles the gradually increasing ability to differentiate between such notions played in beginning stages of evolution of the approach to unknowns we now regard as science. This has been my own special interest in this subject, an interest based upon conclusions which more or less parallel ones reached by Lloyd (1966, 1990).
4 As evidenced, for example, from studies of modern pre-literate cattle-culture peoples of the Nile basin.
5 A present-day example of adolescent boys being taught to assume the role of bull of the herd has been described among West Africa’s Fulani by Lott and Hart (1979).
6 All these relationships merged at some point. Thus thunder was sometimes understood as the heavenly bull’s libidinous bellow, lightning his ejaculation and rain his semen fertilizing the earth.
7 Walsh (1989) would reverse this ordering, finding earliest evidence to be of associations among a feminine birth goddess (with lunar cycle for menses), the horned cow and the horned (crescent) moon and its cycle. That would be consistent with Hornblower’s (1943) belief that the male role in reproduction was not understood until herding animals (especially cattle) were confined, then domesticated. Neither Walsh (personal communication), nor I, have seen evidence to the contrary and it is likely that the original bull associations per se were with power/dominion only and then later acquired the fertility aspect.
8 As suggested first, but more generally, by Eduard Hahn (1896). One of Hahn’s more ardent modern supporters was Carl Sauer (1952) who argued that most contemporaries of Hahn resisted his views then because he stressed the role of sex in evolution of religions and religion over materialistic rationalism as an instigator of man’s apparent inventiveness. Some of the circumstances surrounding evolution of just such a scenario as Hahn postulated were illustrated through the excavations by Mellaart (1967) at Çatal Hüyük near the Taurus Mountains of Anatolia. However, with respect to the general implications for early civilizations of such cattle-culture possibilities, these are still being largely overlooked. Since most students of ancient civilizations have tended, understandably, to be highly specialized and to consider development of single civilizations quite independently, important common features and their likely origins may easily be neglected. This is especially so if these are not readily comprehensible from our present-day perspective of possibilities (mindset). Therefore, some phenomena, such as identifications between other animals and man, have tended to be trivialized by scholars and their possible importance missed. This seems very much the case with cattle and man in antiquity. As Walsh (1989:15) notes: ‘animal domestication and contemporary ancient religions are topics that are usually treated as discrete phenomena despite the fact that animals were, and remain, of seminal importance in the belief systems of many societies’. The major philological demands upon scholars of these ancient records, which so compartmentalize their individual fields, also continue to act as formidable barriers to inputs into work on particular civilizations of heuristic contributions possible only from other specialized, even distant, disciplines. A notable exception with respect to cattle and religion among modern scholars interested in ancient civilizations has been Henri Frankfort (1948:162ff.). And only a few other investigators from any relevant discipline, most notably Cook (1964), Von Lengerken and Von Lengerken (1955), Conrad (1957), Mourant and Zeuner (1963) and Walsh (1989), have yet focused even more broadly upon the general subject of man-cattle extensive relationships in antiquity. Simoons (1968), as well as the fairly extensive literature on present-day Nilotic peoples, gives especially important insights into ancient mindset and process.
9 He considered that shared anatomo-pathological vocabularies among speakers of a wide range of Indo-European languages probably resulted from information gained by the earliest Indo-European priests during dissection of religiously important animals.
10 With respect to the more commented upon instance of such cattle-culture survivals in India, the principal proponent of this theory of purely rational ecological determinants has been Harris (1966).
11 Or that these same peoples had already evolved both a small ruminant pastoral system and simple digging-stick agriculture and simply had to await domesticated cattle for the ingredients of civilization to gel. In that connection, Louis Grivetti (1980) has suggested from observations among present-day goat-herders (who are also hunter-gatherers) in southwestern Africa that the idea of ‘gardens’ may have originated in antiquity when herded goats or similar animals corralled for their protection at night deposited with their faeces in that confined well-fertilized place seeds of a variety of plants (including some highly scattered plants prized by gatherers). Especially when these corrals were moved, as they were periodically, these concentrated seeds germinated and the seedlings survived and thus there grew man’s first gardens! In fact, these observed agro-pastoralists of the Kalahari now transplant such desired plants from these natural goat-created ‘gardens’ to their own household compounds, and then tend them. This idea prompts speculation about the huge accumulations of cattle dung described from Neolithic India by Allchin (1963).
12 Among instances of Greek origin are the Anatolian Taurus mountains, Taurean (Crimean) peninsula, Greek Boeotia and Euboia, Bosporus (literally, ‘Ox Ford’), Italy.
13 Other important chthonic gods, too, were sometimes more or less equated with bulls.
14 While present-day Nilotic Dinka liken practically everything, including ‘Spiritual Force’, to particular qualities of bulls and cows (Schwabe 1987), elders and priests interviewed vociferously denied that they ‘worshipped’ cattle. It should be noted that few Dinka have not had some exposure to the religions of outsiders (and are somewhat defensive or secretive about their own beliefs). However, even the strongest analogies may be quite different from identity; for example, the biblical assertion that man was created in God’s image.
15 But the practice appears to have become an early legal recourse for victims of cattle that frequently gored, as evidenced by one rendering (Pritchard 1969:163) of a passage in the fragmentary Mesopotamian legal code of the city state of Eshnunna (older than the intact Old Babylonian legal code of Hammurabi).
16 The Sudan’s several million Dinka are a major modern example of a pastoral cattle-culture society who also practise digging-stick agriculture but have yet to yoke the ox to the plough.
17 Earliest coinage in some ancient civilizations suggests that precious metals were at least partially a wealth surrogate for cattle since cattle were actually portrayed on some of the first coins. And, among early speakers of at least the Indo-European phylum of languages, the proto-Indo-European word pek’u for cattle is preserved not only in pecuaria in Spanish for animal industry, but in the English pecuniary and impecunious and similar wealth words originally meaning the possession or non-possession of cattle. Similarly, the word chattel relates etymologically to cattle and capital in the wealth sense originally referred to head of cattle. (Similarly, many related words in Sanskrit have cattle origins. As to the context of their origins, ‘to fight’ in Sanskrit meant literally ‘to raid for cattle’ and the word for ‘leader’ is literally ‘lord of cattle’.) Even the origins of such modern English financial terms such as stock, stock market, watered stock, etc., though much more recent, are similar. The early Indo-European prophet Zoroaster indicated this wealth significance of cattle and attendant responsibilities scripturally, as for example, in: ‘Give him welfare in cattle, three times a day raise thyself up and go take care of the beneficent cattle.’
18 As to writing symbols which evolved at the dawn of at least several ancient traditions, at least the first three numbers (counters) in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform, Roman numerals, Chinese ideograms (and surviving cursive scripts like modern Arabic or our own numerals) are simply the requisite number of short straight marks in a row. But probably the first symbol for the things ‘to be counted’ (i.e. wealth), as evidenced by its becoming the first letter in alphabetic writing systems, was the horned bovine head (i.e. capital), drawn, for example, in cuneiform as , on its side with its horns curved in Greek as a and still in our own alphabet, on its back as A.
19 Further hints of such more personal and intimate relationships are still to be found among Dinka and other Nilotic cattle-culture pastoralists—peoples whose ancestors are also believed to have lived near the upper Nile since antiquity (Ehret 1982). Each young male at puberty is given a special ‘name’ or ‘song’ bull to which he is bonded as a brother and to which he talks and composes sung verse.
20 It was also portrayed in the Indus Valley civilization.
21 Some of these subsequent points are from a study in progress by Andrew Gordon and the author which is currently available for comment as a working paper (1989).
22 Apis, the best known and longest persisting living bull god, was associated instead with (or was the ‘double’ of) the important ancient chthonic god Ptah.
23 The drinking of cow’s milk by human babies—and by human adults—has been so taken for granted for so long in many (but surely not all) societies (Simoons 1979b) that its origins and the profundity of the relations between man and cow it originally signified now totally escape our inquiry. Yet nothing less than carriage to term within one’s mother’s body so identifies the mother-child bond of
dependence and protective love that is basic to the existence and continuity of one’s line than nursing from one’s mother’s teats. How biologically unique among relationships of one animal species to another is the fact that our species Homo sapiens sought the aid of another species to wet-nurse its young, to enter into this most intimate of relationships, for the cow in particular to become in effect foster mother to man. How great a contrast is the great pharaoh (king-god) drinking from the cow goddess’s teat with the purely biological process among all mammalian species wherein milk secretion and milk drinking is confined to the immediate postpartum period of greatest infant dependence. Adult men, like the adults of all other mammalian species, have long ceased such dependence upon
their own natural mothers and most cultures make much of a boy’s severing this and other dependent bonds to his natural mother. Only the profoundest cultural needs, therefore, initially caused adult man to continue to drink the cow’s milk through life (Schwabe 1984a).
24 An hypothesis initially sketched in Schwabe (1986) and developed in detail in Schwabe et al. (1989). For some present-day Dinka parallels see Schwabe (1987).
25 Belief in a similar cosmology can still be found today among some Nilotic pastoralists.
26 Ancient man had yet to conclude that one correct explanation for a phenomenon precluded alternative explanations. Rather, alternative explanations were seen as reinforcing and complementing one another.
27 However, if cattle once played the central ritual functions in religious sacrifice among most of these peoples, and probably continued to do so to some extent for some time in Phoenicia-Canaan, even early historic records suggest that sheep were already playing some of these ritual roles too, possibly, of course, first as surrogates for cattle, which were no longer sufficiently numerous. This species shift also occurred among many present-day Nilotic cattle-culturalists after the late 1890s African rinderpest pandemic decimated their cattle population. However, sheep/ goat sacrifices among these modern pastoral peoples such as the Dinka are still referred to by them as ‘bulls’!
28 As late as the Assyrian kings Sargon II and his grandson Naram-Sin, rulers of Mesopotamia still called themselves ‘Wild Bull’ and wore the horned headdress of their office.
29 The word for ‘water’ in Sumerian also meant ‘semen’ (as it sometimes did in Egyptian). Enlil’s ejaculation filled the Tigris (Kramer 1963:179).
30 Examples included Ninsuna, Gula and Ishtar (see Walsh 1989, for a more complete list). Ninhursag was also associated with Innana, the consort of the ‘Wild Bull’ or ‘Divine Shepherd’ god Dumuzi (Tammuz).
31 Some scholars have directed attention to many parallels between Ninhursag and the Egyptians’ Hathor.
32 In Homer we read ‘in bulls does the earthshaker delight’.
33 The supposedly original temple on Athens’ acropolis, the Bukolion (cattle barn) was also the reputed site of the ritual mating of its queen archon with a bull representing Dionysus.
34 E.R.Dodds (1960 passim, esp. p. 194, notes on 920–2): ‘a bull thou seem’st that leadeth on before; and horns upon thine head have sprouted forth. How, wast thou brute?—bull art thou verily now!’ and on Dionysus as ‘the bull who leads the herd’; see also Plutarch’s hymn (Q. Gr. 36, 299) to Dionysus by the women of Elis: ‘Come hither, Dionysus, to thy holy temple by the sea; come with the Graces to thy temple, rushing with bull’s foot, O goodly bull, O goodly bull’ and designation of his priests as ‘cattle-herds’.
35 Herodotus 2.42 2, 49.2, see Dodds (1960), 126–6, notes on 406–8.
36 ‘Ox’ is used here as singular of cattle.
37 For much interesting material in the context of this conference, see Leshnik and Sontheimer (1975).
38 For example, the early origins of goshalas or ‘old cattle homes’ still present in India are detailed by Lodrick (1981). A modern Indian scriptural defence of cattle protection there against common western perceptions (as well as against some western scholarship vis-à-vis cattle and ancient India) is Anon. (1971).
39 Keys to this extensive literature and ongoing debate may be found in recent works of Harris (1966), Heston (1971), Odend’hal (1972), Simoons (1979a) and Lodrick (1981). For some modern Hindu religio-political arguments see Gandhi (1954) and Anon (1971).
40 In part I think the protagonists in today’s Indian sacred cow debate, both Indian and foreign (of two camps) are mostly talking past one another, often advancing extreme or too-embracing scenarios, sometimes from pre-existing ideological beliefs, and sometimes anachronistically mixing historical events with current concepts and practices, all without regard to ancient parallels outside of India. My conclusion is that, while the religious ideas about bull-chief-gods-men came first, these ideas were only irrational when perceived from the modern western mindset, not the ancient, and that other rational forces (even from a modern perspective)—and surely including ecological ones—importantly influenced events during the roughly 3,000 years between the time cattle were first domesticated and the time when the complexes of actions and their natural consequences we identify as civilizations fully emerged.
41 For details on boundary-marking and dominion see Schwabe and Gordon (1988) and our further work in progress (Schwabe and Gordon 1989).
42 He also mentions Italy being named for the bull Italus chased from Sicily by Hercules.
43 It is of interest that all ancient Old World civilizations arose in the astrologically designated Age of Taurus.
44 For how some of these very important utilitarian roles of oxen (and horses) in agriculture and transport arose in the ancient world see Littauer and Crouwel (1979).
45 Among many present-day cultural derivatives are such terms in English as ‘strong as an ox’, ‘take the bull by the horns’, ‘to bully someone’, ‘to be horny’ and ‘to be cowed’.
46 Compare also, in the New Testament, a dog licking Lazarus’ wounds. Examples of much of this same type of lore survive in more recent times; for example folk beliefs today that a dog licking its, or our, wounds is a helpful thing.
47 Aelian (On Animals I, 51): ‘The spine of the dead man, they say, transforms the [its] putrefying marrow [cord] into a snake.’
48 For evidence of beliefs among Egyptians that bone marrow, especially of the spine (the spinal chord was considered ‘marrow’) was semen and the widely shared nature of this belief outside Egypt in antiquity see Schwabe et al. (1982).
49 Thus the Egyptian word mtwt meant both semen and (snake) poison.
50 As mentioned, this surrogate religious role of sheep and goats is seen increasingly among modern Nilotes who, nevertheless, still refer to the ovine or caprine sacrifice as ‘bull’.
51 Comparative examples from Greece are given by Cook (1964, I).
52 And surely among much later Indo-European invaders of northern Europe, the horse played a central religious role. Ostensibly it was to help stamp out Odin worship, for example, that Pope Gregory II in 732 forbade the eating of horsemeat since it was a practice central to sacrifice and communion rituals among such peoples. Of course, just as the ox gave man the source of power for the agrarian revolution and the emergence of civilization, the horse provided man with speed and stamina far in excess of that of his own muscles. This was, in turn, the key to communication, transport and control that helped small city states to grow into and rule the first large landed empires. Some of the more interesting recent studies of horses in antiquity are those of Cohen and Sivan (1983) on the Ugaritic hippiatric texts (from that Pheonician city state) and of Mack-Fisher (1990) proposing, from the study of these and other ancient equine veterinary texts, that the obscure Latin word veterinarius derives via Carthage (perhaps in the Carthagian city of Gades, modern Cadiz) from the ancient Ugaritic (semitic) btr, an official of the Ugaritic queen responsible for horse health and care.
53 An account of the utilitarian and companion roles of the horse in ancient Greece is that of Anderson (1961).
54 These are also prominently preserved in many respects among the cattle-culture Nilotic pastoralists of the Nile Basin today (e.g. the Dinka, Nuer, Turkana, Maasai) who never did develop ‘civilization’.

By Calvin W, Schwabe in "Animals and Humans Society", edited by Aubrey Manning and James Serpell, Routledge, UK,1994, excerpts pp. 36-56. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.