Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig

by Mark Essig

  Villagers in both Mesopotamia and Egypt kept pigs purely on their own initiative. Throughout the Near East, pigs could be found wherever there was water. Towns near natural pig habitats—along the Jordan River, for instance—kept the most pigs because the animals could supplement urban scavenging with foraging in the woods and marshes. Towns in drier areas kept fewer pigs. Nomadic pastoralists, on the move for much of the year, kept none. Archaeologists have plotted on maps the areas that received enough rainfall to allow farming without irrigation. All villages within those areas showed evidence of pig remains. In other words, if it was biologically possible to raise pigs, people raised pigs.

  There were variations within this broad pattern. At Tell Halif, a small site on the edge of the Negev desert in what is now southern Israel, the archaeological record shows dramatic swings in the reliance on pork: pigs account for more than 20 percent of animal bones in garbage heaps dating to 3000 bc. That figure plunges to less than 5 percent five hundred years later, rises again to 20 percent by 1500 bc, and finally drops once more to less than 5 percent by 1000 bc. Changes in rainfall levels cannot explain those swings. It seems that the true reason was political: periods of highest pig use correspond with times of weakest state control. Halif was located along a major trade route; when the political situation was stable, the town likely became integrated within a regional economy, and a steady supply of sheep and goats flowed through. When the ruling dynasties descended into chaos—as they did rather frequently—the town had to fend for itself. That’s when the villagers turned to pigs.

  The rise of strong states discouraged pig raising in another way as well: by changing the landscape. As populations grew, they put increased pressure on the land. Farmers felled oaks to make way for olive groves and drained marshes to plant crops. The land, often poorly managed, deteriorated from forest to cropland to pastureland to desert, with each successive stage providing less habitat for pigs. By the time desert scrub prevailed, only sheep and goats could survive. As pigs lost habitat, they likely began to raid crops in the field, threatening the food supply and thereby earning a spot on the state’s hit list.

  Pigs didn’t fit into the new political and agricultural order. As time marched on, they began to disappear. At many archaeological sites, pig bones remain common up through about 2000 bc, then dwindle away. A thousand years later, few people raised pigs in any quantity.

  In a few spots, however, pigs persisted. They remained important for sites like Tell Halif that were on the margins of empire, far from the urban centers. And pigs became crucial to the marginal people living within those urban centers. Careful sifting of debris from streets has turned up shed milk teeth—baby teeth—of piglets, evidence that pigs were living and breeding among the homes of the world’s first great cities. But not everyone in those cities partook in equal measures. Archaeologists tend to find pig bones in the areas of cities where the common people lived. In elite areas, they find more cattle and sheep bones.

  Some of the most compelling evidence of this pattern comes from the temple complex at Giza. At the official barracks, temple laborers ate provisioned beef driven there from far-flung villages. Nearby, however, another settlement grew up. This neighborhood, haphazardly constructed, most likely housed those who provided services to temple workers and bureaucrats—grinding wheat, baking bread, brewing beer. These people were not part of the official workforce and therefore did not receive food directly from the rulers. Instead they hunted, foraged, and traded for their food, or they raised it themselves. And what they raised was pigs. Although absent from the residences of official workers, pigs are common in this self-supporting area. Pork offered these common people what we would call food security: a source of meat under their own control.

  Poor people ate pork because it was the only meat they had. The elite refrained from eating it because they had access to other sources of meat. In time, though, the ruling classes began to actively avoid pork. The Greek historian Herodotus, in the fifth century bc, reported that an upper-class Egyptian man, after accidentally brushing against a pig, rushed into the Nile fully clothed to cleanse himself.

  By the start of the Iron Age, about 1200 bc, elites in the Near East had begun to see pigs as polluting, a view that arose in part from the habits of urban pigs. Though cities had grown large, sanitation systems had not kept pace. Residents threw garbage into the streets or piled it in heaps outside their doors. This waste included spoiled food, dead animals, and human excrement. Information about ancient sewage disposal is scant; one of the few references is found in Jewish scripture. “You shall have a stick,” Moses tells his people in Deuteronomy, “and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it, and turn back and cover up your excrement. Because the Lord your God walks in the midst of your camp, . . . therefore your camp must be holy, that he may not see anything indecent among you, and turn away from you.”

  Evidence suggests that the Lord God saw quite a few indecencies among the Israelites and their neighbors. Sewer systems didn’t exist. A few elite homes and temples had pit latrines, but mostly people practiced what today is known as open defecation: they relieved themselves in fields or streets, and they didn’t bring a stick. This is where pigs enter the picture.

  Pigs eat shit. In many villages around the world today, pigs linger around peoples’ usual defecation spots awaiting a meal. Some English pigs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the same habit. In China, archaeologists discovered a terra cotta sculpture, dating to about 200 ad, showing a pig in a sty, with a round, roofed building just above it. The structure was originally identified as a grain silo for storing pig feed, but the model in fact depicted a combination pigsty-outhouse: people sat on an elevated perch and made deposits to the hungry pig below. The practice was widespread—the same Chinese character designates both “pigsty” and “outhouse”—and has survived into the present on Korea’s Cheju Island. In the 1960s more than 90 percent of farmers on the island used a pigsty-privy in their subsistence-farming regimen, and they insisted the arrangement produced the sweetest pork in the world.

  This Chinese sculpture, dating to about 200 ad, depicts an outhouse perched over a pigsty. All over the world pigs ate human waste, carrion, and rotting garbage, a habit that made them quite useful—they cleaned the streets and transformed filth into meat—but sometimes turned them into pariahs. (Courtesy John Hill, Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike)

  The pigsty-privy apparently did not exist in the ancient Near East, but pigs discovered this food source on their own. Tapeworm eggs have been found in fossilized pig feces from ancient Egypt. Since these eggs are produced only by adult tapeworms living in human guts, it appears that human feces formed part of Egyptian pigs’ rations. In Aristophanes’ play Peace, dating to the fifth century bc, a character notes that a “pig or a dog will . . . pounce upon our excrement.”

  This particular dining habit did not improve the pig’s reputation. Just as troubling was the pig’s taste for carrion, including human corpses when available. Eating human flesh and eating excrement are nearly universal human taboos, and eating animals that eat those substances carried a transitive taint. “The pig is impure,” a Babylonian text asserted, because it “makes the streets stink . . . [and] besmirches the houses.” An Assyrian text from the 670s bc contains these curses: “May dogs and swine eat your flesh,” and “May dogs and swine drag your corpses to and fro on the squares of Ashur.”

  Dogs and pigs had first domesticated themselves by scavenging human waste, but now that role made them pariahs. Filthy animals offended the gods and therefore were excluded from holy places. The people of the Near East practiced many different religions, but all agreed that the key sacrificial animals were sheep, goats, and cattle and that pigs were unclean. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, pigs never appear in religious art. The Harris Papyrus, which describes religious offerings made by King Ramses III, includes a detailed list of every desirable ite
m to be found in Egypt and the lands it had conquered, including plants, fruits, spices, minerals, and meat. Pork does not appear on the list. “The pig is not fit for a temple,” a Babylonian text reads, because it is “an offense to all the gods.” A Hittite text declares, “Neither pig nor dog is ever to cross the threshold” of a temple. If anyone served the gods from a dish contaminated by pigs or dogs, “to that one will the gods give excrement and urine to eat and drink.”

  Many people, for many different reasons, rejected pork in the ancient Near East. Largely arid, it was a land of sheep, goats, and cattle. Nomads didn’t keep pigs because they couldn’t herd them through the desert. Villages in very dry areas didn’t keep pigs because the animals needed a reliable source of water. Priests, rulers, and bureaucrats didn’t eat pork because they had access to sheep and goats from the state-focused central distributing system and considered pigs filthy. Pigs remained important in only one place: nonelite areas of cities, where they ate waste and served as a subsistence food supply for people living on the margins.

  This was the situation in the Near East around 1200 bc, when a tribe of people known as the Israelites settled in Canaan, west of the Jordan River in Palestine. Like most of their neighbors, the Israelites rejected pork. Unlike those neighbors, the Israelites came to consider pork avoidance a central element of their identity.

  FOUR

  “Of Their Flesh Shall Ye Not Eat”

  God told Abraham to leave his homeland, Mesopotamia, and settle in Canaan. “I will indeed bless you,” God told him, “and I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven.” Those descendants, after a time, found themselves exiled in Egypt. There Abraham’s heirs became so powerful that Pharaoh began to fear them and ordered all boys born to the Hebrews to be cast into the Nile. One mother set her infant son afloat in a basket of bulrushes, and he was rescued and adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, who named him Moses. When the boy had grown, God ordered him to lead the Hebrews back to Canaan. This Moses did, despite resistance from Pharaoh and a lengthy sojourn in the desert.

  God then renewed the covenant with his people, issued the Ten Commandments, and gave highly detailed instructions on how the Hebrews must worship him. The greatest danger his followers faced was that they would make themselves impure and thereby force God to abandon them. He therefore laid out the rules of religious ritual and everyday behavior, including which animals were proper to eat. Among the forbidden beasts were pigs: “Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcass shall ye not touch; they are unclean to you.”

  This is the story presented in Jewish scripture. Most of its details can’t be independently confirmed, but archaeologists tell us that after 1200 bc, the human population exploded in the hills of central Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. These settlers were the Israelites—a mixed lot that, scholars speculate, included recent arrivals from Egypt, refugees from Palestinian cities, and seminomadic herders who chose to settle down.

  Assume that the biblical story is true: Abraham was born in Mesopotamia, and the Israelites escaped from bondage in Egypt. The elites of both these great civilizations shunned pigs. They didn’t sacrifice them to the gods, and they didn’t eat pork. A formal ban on pork would have raised no eyebrows among the Israelites’ neighbors. When the dietary laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy were set down—most likely in the eighth century bc—very few people in the region ate pigs. Israelite priests, in banning pork, simply codified the beliefs of their place, their time, and their class.

  Pork eating had become so rare in the Near East by this point that you might say that Jewish leaders banned something that didn’t need banning. But ban it they did, and with far-reaching consequences. Because the ban was recorded as divine law, Jews maintained it after migrating to other regions of the world. And the Jewish ban influenced the pork prohibition within Islam, another Near Eastern religion that traces its heritage to Abraham. Today, there are about 14 million Jews in the world and 1.6 billion Muslims—meaning that the religions of nearly a quarter of the global population reject swine.

  In the early years, the Israelite ban on pork wasn’t all that important to the Jews: pork was rare in the region, so the issue rarely came up. Later, as pork-eating Greeks and Romans entered the picture, pigs took on a larger role. Avoiding pork, long a requirement of ritual purity, became a marker of cultural identity. Who were the Jews? They were the people who didn’t eat pork.

  There are many theories regarding why the Jews formally prohibited pork. Anthropologist Mary Douglas famously argued that Israelites deemed the cloven-footed, non-cud-chewing pig unclean because it was a “taxonomic anomaly.” Like dirt, it was “matter out of place,” threatening chaos by upsetting an orderly organizational scheme. Douglas’s argument, though, suffers from circularity because the Israelites appear to have structured their taxonomic rules precisely to exclude the pig: perhaps the pig was unclean because it was a taxonomic anomaly, or perhaps it was a taxonomic anomaly because it was unclean.

  Some have pointed to the unsuitability of pigs for desert conditions and the fact that pigs might devour foods, such as wheat and barley, that people needed for themselves. The pork prohibition therefore simply codified wise economic and environmental decisions. This view, although broadly correct, doesn’t acknowledge that pigs can be kept on a small scale as urban scavengers, feeding off human garbage rather than challenging people for a limited food supply.

  Others see in the pork ban the influence of pastoralist views, pointing out that some people who practiced long-distance herding held pig-keeping urbanites in contempt for their settled ways. This was the case with nomadic Mongols, for instance, who associated pigs with their sedentary Chinese enemies. But not all Israelites were nomads, and in any case there is little evidence of such views in the Near East.

  Another theory holds that pigs were judged unclean because the Jews’ idolatrous neighbors worshipped and sacrificed them. The evidence suggests, however, that others in Canaan sacrificed pigs only rarely. When they did, the sacrifices had links to the netherworld—that is, Canaanites sacrificed pigs not because they were clean but because they were dirty. And they certainly did not worship pigs.

  One of the most persuasive recent theories points to the fact that the poor often raised pigs in order to gain control over their own food supply. A powerful central state, intent on controlling all aspects of the economy, would have seen such dietary autonomy as a threat to its control and a potential source of sedition. The elite banned pigs, in other words, so the poor would be hungry unless fed by the state. Pigs offered a dangerous independence and therefore had to be outlawed under cover of religious sanction. Though promising, this theory rests on a great deal of conjecture, and the best evidence for it comes not from ancient times, when the Israelite ban was codified, but from the rise of Islam in the seventh century ad.

  Although the scholars who hold these theories tend to disagree on nearly everything, they come together on one point: all reject the view that the pork prohibition had anything to do with trichinosis. This theory found wide support starting in 1859, when scientists first proved the link between Trichinella spiralis and undercooked pork. It’s not certain, however, that this parasite existed in ancient Palestine. And even if humans came down with the disease, they would have had a hard time connecting it with pork, because there’s generally a ten-day delay between eating tainted meat and falling ill. Just about any kind of meat could make people sick—sheep can transmit anthrax, for instance—yet Jewish dietary law permitted other, equally dangerous types of flesh and singled out pork for prohibition.

  Though the theory that the pork taboo was a public health measure has been thoroughly discredited, people have been reluctant to abandon it. Such beliefs stretch back at least to medieval times, and even then some authorities objected. “God forbid that I should believe that the reasons for forbidden foods are medicinal,” wrote Jewish scribe Isaac Abrabanel. “For were it so, the Book of God
’s Law would be in the same class as any of the minor brief medical books.”

  This is a good reminder that there doesn’t necessarily have to be a clear explanation for the pork ban. Scripture is, after all, primarily concerned with a people’s relationship with their God, so to explain the Levitical dietary restrictions in terms of medicine or health or economics may miss the point. As Job learned after being stripped of his wealth and afflicted with boils, God wasn’t much for explaining himself. Imposing an arbitrary food ban would not have been his most inscrutable act.

  The pork prohibition, though, was far from arbitrary: it was thoroughly consistent with the sacred logic of the Bible and with God’s command that the Israelites remain pure in order to preserve their relationship with him.

  God demanded that the Israelites provide him with a physical home. They first constructed the Tabernacle, a portable structure housing the stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments that the Israelites carried with them during their wandering in the desert. The Tabernacle was replaced by the more permanent Temple built by King Solomon in Jerusalem about 950 bc. The Temple occupied the central place in the religion of the Israelites. It preserved the presence of God among his people and ensured that blessings would continue to flow from him. To fulfill this role, however, the sanctuary had to remain pure, and it was under constant threat of defilement. If the people became polluted, they would pollute the sanctuary, and the relationship between God and his people would be severed.