by Brian Fagan
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 cattle—it was nothing less—was 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.”11 Their herds lived lives of indolent leisure, while the people catered to their every need—lighting 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.12
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.
CHAPTER 7
“Wild Bull on the Rampage”
“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.1 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 numinous—symbols of power and sacrificial victims—and 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.2 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 1279–1213 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 centuries3 (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 (1821–1881), 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, o
n 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.
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