The Intimate Bond (14 page)

Nevertheless, at the same time, tomb paintings depict workers butchering animals and herding them on noble estates. Cattle worked and were slaughtered in thoroughly pragmatic ways. It was inevitable that beef would become an important food source in a society where the state paid noble and commoner alike in rations and kind, not with currency. The Pyramids of Giza, erected at vast expense by the pharaoh Khufu and his successors after 2550
BCE
, required veritable armies of laborers, who had to be housed and fed. One pyramid builder's settlement is estimated to have required more than eighteen hundred kilograms (thirty-six hundred pounds) of meat daily—from cattle, sheep, and goats.
⁴
Only about half the protein for the ten thousand workers who lived in the settlement for the pharaoh Menkaure's pyramid came from fish, beans, and other nonmeat sources. One estimate has it that about 11 cattle and 37 sheep or goats were butchered daily. To maintain this slaughter level would have required herds of 21,900 cattle and 54,750 goats and sheep. To graze these animals would have required about 400 square kilometers (154 square miles) of pasture, probably in the fertile Nile Delta. Farm animals were an integral part of the Ancient Egyptian economy, used for draft, as rations, and for their milk and other by-products. Scribes counted herds and flocks, whose members were as much commodities as dried fish and grain.

Palace Monopolies and Bull Leaping

In Greece, domestic cattle arrived from Anatolia: beasts with long, lyre-shaped horns, much prized as drinking vessels. Herds were small; there was plenty of land to go around; oxen were important for hauling plows. This was low-intensity cattle herding, based mainly on mountain pastures where abundant forage could be found. By 1700
BCE
, however, cattle had assumed great importance in the Minoan civilization of Crete, where they played an important role in both economic and symbolic life. Minoan civilization revolved around a network of palaces, the most elaborate being Knossos, near the modern city of Heraklion, a sprawling complex of courtyards, shrines, workshops, storehouses, and residential quarters inhabited by between thirteen thousand and seventeen thousand people.
⁵

Knossos prospered on wool and textiles, so much so that its flocks may have numbered as many as a hundred thousand sheep, grazing on 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) or more of pasture. Clay tablets inscribed with Linear B script tell us much about the Minoan economy. The tablets tell us that cowherds gave individual beasts names such as
aiwolos
, “nimble,” or
kelainos
, “black.” Almost invariably, palace tablets inventory cattle when they were sent out from Knossos. Some
we-ka-ta
, “working oxen,” left Knossos for dependent settlements and other palaces, sent in pairs for work at the plow. But most beasts departed alone, high-value goods perhaps destined for sacrifice. Such a present had great value, not only in ritual terms, but also as a source of meat, hide, and other by-products. It may be no coincidence that copper ingots were shaped like ox hides when traded, perhaps a symbolic indication of the beasts' value.

Almost all Minoan cattle herding appears to have been under tight palace control, a monopoly that formed part of an elaborate network of connections with other palaces and communities. The wealth implied by cattle allowed rulers to assert political authority by means of providing sacrificial beasts that were ancient symbols of power and by demonstrating a regal largesse that cemented domination over others.

According to Greek legend, the Minotaur, a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a human, dwelled in a special compound near
Knossos. This fierce beast was born of King Minos's wife, Pasiphaë, who mated with a white bull sent to Minos by the sea god Poseidon as a sign of support. Minos corralled the monster near the palace, where it is said to have been killed by the Greek hero Theseus, sent as a sacrifice to the Minotaur by the ruler of Athens as part of an annual offering of young men and women as tribute to the Cretans. We know nothing of this remarkable beast beyond legend of the Minotaur—the word is a Greek combination of
Minos
and
tauros
, or “bull.” Perhaps it was a priest wearing a bull's head who carried out the human sacrifices. We will never know.

The Minotaur is a striking reminder of the importance of bulls in Minoan society. Minoan palaces teem with them. Ceremonial bronze axes, rings, terracotta figures, stone seals, and frescoes all commemorate these powerful animals. Frescoes on Knossos's walls, and in Minoan buildings as far away as Avaris, in the Nile Delta, depict bulls and human figures leaping over them. Most impressive of all are ceremonial containers known as rhytons, which are perforated at the base and designed to dispense blood from sacrificial victims. The most famous rhyton, from Knossos, is in the form of a bull's head carved from steatite and decorated with rock crystal and gold. A formal libation from a bull's head rhyton at the feast where the sacrificial beast was eaten would have reenacted the bloodletting, replacing slaughter with formal ceremony.

Friezes depicting young men leaping over bulls adorn the walls of Knossos. Bull leaping itself is a contested subject among scholars. Whether it was a reenactment of an ancient cosmic drama or simply a way of demonstrating human mastery over bulls is a mystery. Perhaps it was a ceremony at which young participants somersaulted or vaulted over a charging beast's back, a movement akin to the
saut de l'ange
and other movements performed by modern-day bull leapers in southwestern France.
⁶
Certainly bull leaping, which also took place elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean world, was a centerpiece of Minoan life, and perhaps a way of affirming the power of the elite over society as a whole. Cattle were unique symbols of power in Minoan society and also special commodities in the intricate realm of trade and exchange.

Figure 7.1
  A bull rhyton with golden horns from Knossos. John Copland/Shutterstock.

Figure 7.2
  Frieze depicting a bull leaper from Knossos, Crete. Superstock.

Minoan civilization gave way, after 1450
BCE
, to Mycenaean control of Crete, a mainland society where cattle wealth was of central importance. As Mycenaean influence grew, so bull leaping vanished into history. Now the elite used cattle in more pragmatic ways, as they controlled access to breeding stock, draft animals, and food. Ceremonial feasting became an important instrument of exercising political authority. Some of these feasts were on a large scale. Linear B tablets from the Mycenaean palace at Pylos, in western Greece, come from the same room as a rich deposit of cattle bones, the remains of five to eleven head of cattle. These beasts would have provided enough meat to feed many more people than a small elite group. At another Mycenaean site, Tsoungiza, near Nemea, most of the surviving bones from a deposit of cattle remains are those from the heads and feet, as if the rest of the carcasses were butchered and the flesh-carrying bones carried elsewhere for numerous celebrants.

Sacrifice, ceremonial feasting, and food distribution—the Minoan and Mycenaean treatment of cattle was a way of acquiring and confirming prestige. The cattle wealth became social capital through feasting and the distribution of flesh to people, who subsisted, for the most part, on cereals. At Pylos, in the eastern Peloponnese, where cattle herding was far more important than at Knossos, Linear B inventories tell us that economic imperatives and religious beliefs were closely interwoven. Everyone in the Mycenaean world was bound together by sacred bonds: stockbreeding, sacrifice, and ceremonial feasting. Bulls were symbols of power, associated with gods such as Zeus and Poseidon. Thus it was that Homeric king Nestor of Pylos sacrificed “sleek black bulls” to Poseidon, “god of the sea-blue mane who shakes the earth.”
⁷

The Mycenaeans took cattle out of myriad economic activities and made them a central element in their social and political organization. This legacy passed down the centuries to the classical Greeks, whose small agricultural communities prized their autonomy but engaged in both manufacturing and trade on a broader canvas. But dedications, rituals, and sacrifices to supplicate the gods remained a central part of Greek life and colored people's relationships with the remote descendants of
Bos primigenius.

The Enduring Dilemma

Herein lay a dilemma for the Greeks. Cattle were not only a specific form of wealth, but also the focus of human behaviors and values that arose from animal husbandry. The herders manipulated their herds, their control helping both animals and humans to thrive. Milk, provided by cows year after year, was a powerful bond between people and their beasts, expressed in a profound reluctance to kill animals, except in a sacrificial setting. Sacrifices were ritual occasions, a means of connecting with the supernatural realm and revered deities, a moment of profound ritual significance, which usually ended in a feast, in itself a social outcome.
⁸

There's a contrast here, between the hunter, who preyed on
Bos primigenius
opportunistically, and the herder, who nurtured the herd, sheltered it, then made sure the animals had water, and led them to pasture. He or she was in effect the herd leader, not a predator, until the moment when the beasts were killed in what can be seen as an act of betrayal. This was something that the Greeks took very seriously. As the historian Plutarch once famously observed, “They considered the sacrifice of living animals a very serious matter, and even now people are very wary of killing an animal before a drink-offering is poured over him and he shakes his head in assent.”
⁹
The herder had a greater power to take life than a hunter ever did, because he controlled his herd. As the philosopher Plato once pointed out, piety is the human nurturing of the gods. Likewise, cattle herders nurture their beasts.

All this came out in the ritual of sacrifice. The Greeks garlanded sacrificial bulls, washed them, and adorned them with flowers. The victim processed to the altar, where the knife lay hidden in a basket. Grain showered on the beast caused it to nod and agree to the sacrifice. The sacrificial rite moved the act of killing to the realm of the holy, the divine, and the supernatural.

The classicist Jeremy McInerney points to the importance of what he calls the “bovine idiom,” the familiarity with pastoralists that marked Greek life from deep in antiquity.
¹⁰
This common idiom helped the Greeks to navigate centuries of tumult and to search for a common
identity, something never fully achieved. These were the centuries of Archaic Greece (800–480
BCE
), when great sanctuaries such as Delphi, Olympia, and Nemea emerged to become shrines of significance to all Greeks, whatever their local loyalties. As the practices of classical culture took shape, cattle were always important during an era when the pantheon of Olympus came into prominence.

Greek deities personified the mind-set and values of stock-breeding societies, capable of turning themselves into bulls, possessing cow's eyes like the goddess Hera, or acting as herders. The gods were tauriform, yet were involved and appeased through cattle sacrifice, while the people ate the flesh of the victims. Meat was a source of nutrition as well as a medium of contact with the supernatural. Smoking altars, lowing cattle, and bloody knives—these were an important part of ceremonies associated with the Olympic Games and at Delphi festivals, apart from sacrifices carried out in Greek cities. Cattle shed their blood for the benefit of the community, this in a society where agriculture became increasingly important, with pastoralism pushed to the margins except for draft animals. Yet the institution of sacrifice demanded an increasingly large supply of sacrificial animals.

The continual emphasis on sacrifice caused severe economic strain in farming societies.
¹¹
The more animals that were needed for sacrifice, the less land there was for farming—this in landscape with rugged terrain. Fully one-third of the Athenian year was taken up with communal sacrifices and feasting. When the major gods were involved, the offering had to be cattle, to the tune of an estimated sixty-five hundred annually in Athens alone. The major sanctuaries in more rural settings had grazing land around them. The real problem was for cities, so Athens leased land outside the city. Calculating the amount of meat produced by a major festival such as the midsummer Panathenaia in honor of the goddess Athena, celebrated every fourth July, is nearly impossible, but this particular event coincided with the best time for culling surplus beasts. As what one can only call the business of sacrifice became ever more elaborate, so the purchase of cattle moved from the sacred economy into the secular one, especially the market in hides. And as the centuries passed, Greek stock raising became a practice that straddled
the religious, private, and public domains. In a modest way, and never on a large scale in a predominantly agricultural society, cattle became a commodity.