Authors: Brian Fagan
Domestication means a shift in focus from the dead animal to the living one. Unlike communally owned game, open to be killed by all,
domesticated livestock is owned and maintained. Slaughtering an animal diminishes the herd, so the owner has to take into account all manner of other factors, not only costs such as food needs and herd requirements, but benefits of all kinds, such as meeting social and ritual obligations. These factors are particularly important with large, slow-reproducing animals like cattle, which are harder to replace. Without access to storage or drying facilities, one family alone cannot consume the amount of meat such animals produce, which adds another layer of complication to daily life. Modern-day anthropological studies of traditional cattle herders find that they behave toward their animals in ways that are very different from those of modern owners, concerned only with price, protein, and calories.
Managing the Herd
Hardly any twentieth-century cattle herders (pastoralists) lived entirely off their herds. They relied on cereals and even cultivated the soil themselves if they had to, which they usually considered a demeaning activity. The blood, flesh, and milk from their beasts were inadequate for true self-sufficiency. Most likely, ancient herds were small, for cattle breed more slowly than goats or sheep. This makes it harder to recover losses from slaughtering, drought, or disease. Judging from recent traditional practice, documented by anthropologists, each herder had his own management strategy, which depended to a considerable extent on the size of his or her herd and wealth. Right from the beginning, herding households would have measured their wealth and social status in head of cattle. Both small stock and grain also had value, but not as wealth in the social sense. Land was communally owned by clans or other kin units, so about the only currency was beasts. And cattle have the advantage that they are social animals that thrive in groups and can survive off natural vegetation without fodder; otherwise, the cost of raising them in corrals alone would be unsustainable. In many African societies, cattle effectively served as “money.” The same must have been true in many other ancient cattle-owning cultures.
As cattle became more important as wealth, a conflict would arise between the quest for riches and the need for subsistence. If ancient societies were like recent ones, the management strategies would have changed. Cattle became stored wealth, often exchanged for grain. In more arid environments with a high risk of drought, wealth on the hoof was never permanent riches. Owners would try to reduce risk by lending out animals, distributing them with relatives over wide areas, or loaning them to obtain goodwill and help fellow kin. Those without livestock would often have attached themselves to wealthy households in exchange for their labor and a few animals that allowed them to build up a herd. A great deal of energy and thought went into building ever-larger stocks of cattle wealth. Then there was the bride price (sometimes called bride wealth), a payment from the groom's side to the bride's to seal a marriage, a fundamental dynamic in many cattle-herding societies.
“The Parasite of the Cow”
Until recently, cattle-herding societies thrived in widely scattered parts of the Old World, in both Africa and Asia. Fortunately, a series of classic anthropological studies described some of these societies before population growth and industrialization encroached on their lifeways. Given the conservatism of herding societies, we can learn something from them about the realities of cattle management in the more remote past. We know, for example, that subsistence cattle herders developed extremely close relationships with their beasts, almost to the point of what we would describe as eccentricity.
Among the best-known pastoralists are the tall, long-limbed Nuer, who grazed their beasts in the swamps and open savanna on either side of the Nile in southern Sudan. The British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who lived among them during the 1930s, wrote that they “regard horticulture as toil forced on them by poverty of stock . . . The only labor they delight in is care of cattle.”
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Families owned cattle. Kinship formed powerful bonds, defined in part by payment of bride wealth. Evans-Pritchard defined the movement of cattle from family
camp to family camp as the equivalent of lines on a genealogical chart, so carefully were such movements traced.
So important were cattle in Nuer life that both men and women often bore names that referred to the form and color of their favorite beasts. Every owner established contact with spirits of the lineages of the owner. By rubbing ashes along the back of a beast, one could get in touch with the spirit or ghost associated with it, and ask for assistance. The Nuer also contacted the dead through sacrifice of oxen or smaller animals. This obsession with their cattleâit was nothing lessâwas due in part to the beasts' great economic value, but also because the people defined their social relationships in terms of them.
In subsistence terms, the Nuer prized their cows for their milk, the most valuable beasts being those that yielded the most. Like other East African cattle herders, the Nuer extracted blood from the necks of their beasts, especially during the dry season, when milk was in short supply. No Nuer herd was maintained for slaughter, much as the people liked meat. But they did consume animals that died, even those of which they were inordinately fond. Cattle were sacrificed rarely, and mostly on important occasions such as funerals or marriages.
Above all, the Nuer valued their beasts for display and because of the prestige that a large, fat animal brought, especially those with large humps that wobbled when the animal walked. As Evans-Pritchard remarked, “The Nuer might be called the parasite of the cow.”
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Their herds lived lives of indolent leisure, while the people catered to their every needâlighting fires to keep off mosquitoes, moving them to ensure their good health, fashioning ornaments to adorn them, and guarding them against human raiders and animal predators. Every herder knew each animal in his herd: its color, the shape of its horns, its peculiarities, its history, ancestry, and the amount of milk it provided. He knew which beast bellowed in the evening, which liked to lead the herd back to camp, and which were restless during milking. The more an owner could display his ox, walking among the docile herd at night with an ox bell, the happier he was. The symbiotic relationship between the Nuer and their cattle was one of common interests, and of close physical contact.
During the 1930s, the herders ranged over an enormous tract of open country, their movements determined by variations in the vegetation and water supplies. During the rainy season, from April to August, the people moved out into small camps. During the height of the dry season, they congregated in larger settlements near permanent water. During the flood season, camps lay on low mounds or on higher ground with enough space for humans and animals, as it is dangerous for cattle to stand in water for long periods of time. Today, Nuer cattle herding is a shadow of its former self, a victim of rising populations, political and social unrest, civil war in southern Sudan, and rampant modernization. Many Nuer now live in Nebraska.
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Change was afoot long before the twentieth century. Stock raising for cities, especially of goats and sheep, developed on a rapidly growing scale during the fourth millennium
BCE
. The ancient stockyards that supplied the relentless maw of cities, temples, and rulers became places where animals were statistics of numbers and weight rather than measures of social importance. As subsistence herding of farm animals gave way to a tapestry of religious ideologies, we find an ambivalence about humans and their relationships with beasts that would have been unthinkable for the Nuer.
“He walks around in the enclosure of Uruk / Like a wild bull he makes himself mighty, head raised [over others].” Thus reads the mythic Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, commemorated in an epic that is one of the classics of ancient literature. He was “the brave scion of [the city of Uruk], wild bull on the rampage.” His genealogy proclaimed him “suckling of the august Wild-Cow, the goddess Ninsun.” He “lords it over the men like a wild bull,” capable of shattering established order, while at the same time he is shepherd of the people.
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The Epic of Gilgamesh
is far more than a tale of heroes. It's an ideological document, an exploration of a king's role in society where the divine and the human are interconnected and where rulers and priests sacrifice to the deities and appease them, using their unique knowledge and ritual acts to do so. Many of the ideas about animals laid out in the epic reflect the then-still-close links between animals, humans, and the forces of the supernatural world.
By Gilgamesh's time, there was an emerging symbolic ambiguity expressed in the daily life of cattle herds. Cows were symbols of the nurturing earth mother, sustainer of life. Lions and griffins had long been symbols of leadership, of prowess in the chase and in war. Inevitably, the bull was also seen as icon of masculine power, a fierce beast but the protector of its herd. Its ferocity implied connections with the powers of the wild and the unexplained. Such thinking became critical to the ways in which early rulers such as Gilgamesh projected their authority. Bulls possessed explosive power. They became the avatar of gods and rulers; the divine power of the bull reinforced that of the king. These beliefs shaped the religious ideas of Mediterranean society for many centuries. At the same time, the development of the wheeled cart and
the plow, perhaps in the fourth millennium
BCE
in Mesopotamia, introduced another element: the use of cattle as draft animals.
Divine Kings, Holy Bulls
By the fourth millennium, we can discern a divergence between cattle as numinousâsymbols of power and sacrificial victimsâand their more pragmatic role as draft animals pulling plows and transporting loads, and as sources of meat. The identification of rulers with bulls provided the leaders with respect and uncontrollable might. Egyptian pharaohs identified themselves with the divine bull. The Egyptians revered bulls through the cult of Osiris, with special festivals in honor of Hapi (the Greek name is Apis), known as the Running of Hapi, as early as the First Dynasty, around 2900
BCE
.
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But cattle cults go back much further in Egyptian history, perhaps to the time when herders from the increasingly arid Sahara Desert brought their cattle cults and notions of leaders as strong bulls to the Nile long before 3000
BCE
. Hapi may have started as a fertility god connected to grain and herds. The sacred bull symbolized the strength and virility of the pharaoh, who was often called “strong bull of his mother Hathor,” the cow goddess and mistress of the West, the realm of the dead.
Over the centuries, the cult of the sacred Apis bull, the personification of the god Ptah, creator god of Memphis, became deeply ingrained in Egyptian life. The great pharaoh Ramesses II (who reigned 1279â1213
BCE
) elevated the Apis cult to new heights. He ordered the construction of the Serapeum, an underground maze of burial chambers for Apis bulls near the royal capital at Memphis in Lower Egypt, which remained in use for many centuries
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(see sidebar “Rediscovering the Serapeum”). Every living Apis bull had the same coloring: black with a white diamond mark on the forehead. A bull born with such markings lived a pampered existence in Ptah's temple. Apis was an oracle and a prophet, a source of wisdom, attended by priests who monitored its every move. When an Apis bull died or was sacrificed in its mid- to late twenties (the age of the god Osiris when he perished), the state plunged into mourning. The discovery of a new Apis bull with the correct markings was an occasion for rejoicing.
Rediscovering the Serapeum
In 24
CE
, the Greek geographer Strabo mentioned that the Apis bulls were buried in an underground sepulcher known as the Serapeum, at the end of an avenue of sphinxes that was constantly buried by drifting sand. Apis was an oracle and a prophet, so powerful that his cult survived until almost 400
CE
, into late Roman times. Once the popular cult passed into oblivion, the Serapeum, with its mummified bulls, was effectively lost until 1850, when a twenty-nine-year-old Frenchman, Auguste Mariette (1821â1881), became curious about fifteen sphinxes adorning the gardens of wealthy Alexandrians and Cairenes. At the time, Mariette worked for the Louvre, in Paris, which had sent him out to acquire Coptic and other historic manuscripts. While waiting for permission to export his collection, he inquired about the sphinxes, learned they came from the Saqqara necropolis, on the west bank of the Nile. Mariette remembered Strabo's words, set thirty men to work and uncovered 140 sphinxes, on the very avenue described eight centuries earlier by the ancient geographer. At the end, he found the entrance of the Serapeum, buried in sand that was “so to speak fluid.” It was like excavating water. The discovery caused an international sensation.
The tomb of Apis lay behind a magnificent sandstone door. Inside stood the great sandstone coffins of the Apis bulls, their lids removed by tomb robbers centuries earlier. A great deal of material and numerous precious artifacts remained, however. The terms of Marquette's permit required that he hand over his discoveries to the Egyptian authorities, so he quietly packed the cases destined for the Louvre at the bottom of a dark pit at night, while showing disappointed Egyptian officials the empty tombs in daytime.
Mariette spent four laborious years recovering a multitude of artifacts and parts of mummified bulls. He was lucky enough to find one undisturbed Apis burial in a sealed niche, dating to the time of Ramesses II. The fingerprints of the worker who'd put the last stone in place could still be seen in the plaster. Even the footprints of the funerary workers had survived in a dusty corner. The sarcophagus contained both the undisturbed bull mummy and rich offerings of gold and jewelry. In his rough-and-ready fashion, Mariette used gunpowder to open the lid.
Auguste Mariette devoted the rest of his life to Egyptology and became the country's first “conservator of monuments.” Among other things, he developed the plot for Verdi's opera
Aida
,
first performed in Cairo, and supervised the scenery with its Ancient Egyptian themes.