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We must wait until about 12,000 years ago before we get the first unmistakable evidence of the intimate bond developing between man and dog. This came from Natufian burials at Ain Mallaha, in Israel. The human inhabitants, the Natufians, were Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, but, unlike their ancestors in the Upper Palaeolithic whose nomadic life was dominated by the migrations of prey animals, they led a more sedentary life in rich surroundings. The region was heavily wooded, with abundant sources of nuts and wild grains, and fish in nearby Lake Hula. Though they were not yet truly farmers in the modern sense they were certainly heading in that direction. Rather than moving from one temporary camp to another they built proper houses – large circular stone huts, set into the ground, with roofs supported by wooden poles.
The Natufians buried their dead in their own houses, which they afterwards abandoned. Central to our story is one particular burial of an elderly woman, her head resting on the body of a small puppy. This is the first proof of what the authors of the paper reporting the excavation cautiously refer to as ‘an affectionate rather than gastronomic relationship’ between the two burials.1 They must have been very close indeed.
By this time the agricultural revolution was well and truly under way. Arable crops such as wheat and barley replaced the harvest of wild plants. Domesticated animals, which could be easily confined, made meat supplies more reliable. No longer constantly on the move, the people followed the Natufian example and settled down in one place. Feeding themselves and their families no longer took up all their time, and culture, in the form of music and art, flourished. Alongside these welcome improvements to daily life came the emergence of new ideas. Concepts of property and ownership, unknown to our free-living ancestors, started to divide society between the haves and have-nots. The egalitarian social structures of the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers diminished, labour was for hire, and before very long, servitude and slavery took their place. The invention of agriculture also heralded the abrupt shift in the human attitude to the wolf and ended the 30,000 years of mutual cooperation that had kept our ancestors alive through the hard times of the Upper Palaeolithic.
The first clear depictions of a dog were discovered in Mesopotamia. One is a small gold pendant found in the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk on the banks of the Euphrates River in southern Iraq. Uruk was the capital of Gilgamesh, and it had embraced the trappings of urban life: a military garrison and a full-time bureaucracy overseeing a many-layered society. The pendant, dating from about 5000 years BP and currently on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is clearly modelled on a dog, and not a wolf. It is striking in that this creature had already acquired one of the features often associated with domestication, a tail curling over its back, which is reminiscent of a modern Husky, Samoyed and other spitz breeds.
It is not obvious exactly what the Uruk dog might have been used for – guarding or possibly just companionship. Later, stylised images of dogs began to appear on ceramic shards. In two small farming villages in Iran, Tepe Sabz and Chogha Mish, the dogs looked very like the ubiquitous guard dogs still plentiful in the region today. Again, their tails are curled over their backs.
Another indication of what dogs were becoming came from the large prehistoric settlement in Susa, in western Iran, dating from around 6000 BP. Over 1,000 painted vessels, mainly pots, beakers and jars, were recovered from a large cemetery and were clearly intended to accompany the dead into the afterlife. Many displayed stylised images of birds, insects, reptiles, and occasionally of dogs. The dogs closely resembled modern salukis with their lithe bodies, deep chests and long legs. These dogs were almost certainly used for hunting, just as in modern times. Until the last few decades, salukis were still used to bring down gazelle, fox and ibex and, even today, are worked with falcons. Given the similarity of the Susa images to the modern saluki, it looks as though very little has happened to change their overall appearance over the last 6,000 years. Their mythical associations first appear in The Epic of Gilgamesh, dating from around 4000 BP. This text describes in words, though without illustration, the goddess Innana travelling alone with seven hunting dogs in tow, each with a collar and on a leash.
In contrast to the depictions of hunting dogs built for speed, clay figurines from about 4000 BP have been excavated at Nineveh in northern Iraq close to the modern city of Mosul. These figurines show large dogs resembling modern mastiffs, whose principal purpose is made clear by the inscription on one of them: ‘Don’t stop to think. Just bite.’
Dogs maintained close emotional ties with their human masters, as is clear from their inclusion in human burials, as at the Natufian site of Ain Mallaha. By the fourth century BCE, much more defined images appeared on two ‘palettes’ excavated from an archaeological site associated with the Naqada culture, which flourished in pre-dynastic Egypt between 3500 and 3200 BCE. These palettes, used to grind the ingredients of an early form of mascara, were often richly decorated. As an example, the so-called Hunting Palette depicts a lion hunt, with five arrows bristling from the beast’s neck. Clearly visible are three dogs, not wolves by any means, but of a more slender build similar to the Mesopotamian examples.
In ancient Egypt the dogs themselves were venerated by ceremonial burials as they passed into the afterlife. A celebrated example comes from the Old Kingdom site near Giza around 4500 BP where a named dog, Abuwtiyuw, belonging to an unknown servant of an unknown king, was buried beneath a limestone slab bearing the following inscription: ‘His Majesty ordered that he [i.e. the dog] be buried ceremonially, that he be given a coffin from the royal treasury, with linen and incense.’
This was clearly a very special dog.
Dogs were highly regarded in ancient Egypt and, when families could afford to do so, they had their dog mummified and ceremonially interred amid great displays of sorrow, even extending to grieving family members shaving off their eyebrows.
Abundant Egyptian tomb paintings give us a good idea of what dogs looked like in later dynasties. For instance, the magnificent tomb of Ramesses II in the Valley of the Kings, dating from 3213 BP, is richly decorated with bas-relief panels. One shows the pharaoh with a team of slender saluki-like hunting dogs, ideal as sight-hounds in the open desert terrain where herds of gazelle and oryx were abundant.
The slightly earlier tomb of Tutankhamen contains probably the most familiar image of a dog from the ancient world – a magnificent black statuette of Anubis. As a god, Anubis is said to have the head of a jackal, but his statue in Tutankhamen’s tomb is all dog by the look of it. With its large erect ears and slender body, the statue closely resembles the earlier Mesopotamian images of sleek hunting dogs.
Later in history dogs are depicted in many tomb paintings, sometimes with a strikingly piebald appearance reminiscent of today’s Dalmatians. Mummified dogs were frequently buried with their owners. In the catacombs at Saqqara, close to the temple of Anubis, the mummified remains of a staggering 8 million dogs sacrificed to the god were discovered in 2015.
The fondness of the Egyptians for their dogs is evident from the names they gave them, preserved on their collars: ‘Brave One’, ‘Reliable’, ‘Good Huntsman’ and even ‘Useless’. This tells us that the qualities of loyalty that dog-owners prize most highly today were already well developed many thousands of years ago.
This Anubis shrine, made of wood, plaster, lacquer and gold leaf, was found in the eighteenth-dynasty tomb of the pharaoh Tutankhamen. (INTERFOTO/Alamy Stock Photo)
As well as hunting, the other main purpose of these early dogs was guarding, and for that task a more solid physique was developed, best seen today in mastiffs. We see this particularly in Roman wall paintings where images of dogs very similar to modern mastiffs are being used for guarding sheep flocks and protecting human settlements and, lastly, as weapons of war.
The preferred guarding breed, both in ancient Greece and in Roman times, was the Molossian. This was a huge dog whose origin has been attributed to the legacy of Alexander the Great’s military expeditions to India and Afghanistan. Allegedly, he was so impressed with the breed that he sent some specimens back to Greece, where they became the forerunner of the mastiff. The Molossian was also the favourite breed of the armies of both Greece and Rome. Although they were mainly used on patrols and as sentries, Molossians did fight in battles side by side with the Roman infantry.
Looking back at descriptions and representations of dogs in past times conveys the evolution of physical features over time. In Mesopotamia and in Egypt dogs had already undergone a dramatic change from their lupine ancestors in the Palaeolithic. Two quite separate types had emerged – the guard dog and the hunting dog. Though they could not yet be called breeds in the modern sense, we can assume that they evolved from a common stock by selection from the largest, fiercest, most obedient or swiftest adults, depending on the desired qualities. There was no need for breed isolation to maintain a standard. As we will go on to explore, the genetics of modern breeds reveals the fairly relaxed breeding regimes of earlier times.
We need no longer rely solely on ceramics or carved images to discover what dogs were like in ancient Rome. This is thanks to a twelve-volume treatise on farming, De Re Rustica, written by Columella around 60 CE and discovered intact in a monastic library in Switzerland during the fifteenth century. After a career in the army, Columella was a military tribune in the Roman province of Syria. Eventually he retired to his farm in Italy and immersed himself in its improvement. He emphasised that every farm needed a dog.
Buying a dog should be among the first things a farmer does, because it is the guardian of the farm, its produce, the household and the cattle. It should be big and have a loud bark, first to intimidate the intruder when it is heard and then when it is seen. Colour too is important. An all-white dog is recommended for the shepherd to avoid mistaking it for a wolf in the half-light of dawn or dusk, and an all-black guard dog for the farm to terrify thieves in the daytime and be less visible to trespassers at night. It should not be too savage, so as not to attack the inhabitants of the house, nor so mild that it fawns over the thief. The farm-yard dog should be heavily built, with a large head, drooping ears, bright eyes, a broad and shaggy chest, wide shoulders, thick legs, and short tail. Because it is expected to stay close to the house and granary, its lack of speed is not important. The sheepdog, on the other hand, should be long and slim, strong and fast enough to repel a wolf or pursue one that has taken its prey.2
Being a farmer, Columella has most to say about guarding rather than hunting dogs. For information on the latter we turn to the earlier writings of the Athenian polymath Xenophon, a contemporary of Plato, writing around 370 BCE. Xenophon distinguishes two types of hunting dog, the Laconian and the Vertragus. The Laconian hunted by following a trail, like any scent-hound today. The Vertragus, on the other hand, chased down its prey by sight, and hunters needed to be on horseback to keep up with it.
Odysseus owned a Laconian, named Argos – meaning ‘swift-footed’ – and trained it from a puppy to hunt wild deer, hares and goats. Argos was his master’s constant companion until Odysseus set out for the Trojan War. It would be another twenty years before they met again after Odysseus’s eventful journey back to Ithaca, as described in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. On his return Odysseus discovers his house is besieged by suitors all keen to impress and marry his wife Penelope. Planning to slaughter them all, he enters his house dressed as a beggar but discovers Argos on the threshold, old, weak and neglected. Even so, the dog recognises him but only has the strength to wag his tail before he collapses, dead, at Odysseus’s feet.
The only other distinct type of dog known from the ancient world was much smaller than either mastiffs or hunting dogs and was used for an entirely different purpose. From the rare surviving images, notably on a Greek amphora from about 550 BCE found in the Etruscan city of Vulci, this small breed was similar in appearance to the Maltese, a modern toy breed. One of a clutch of modern alternative names for the breed is ‘Roman Ladies’ Dog’, and the historian Strabo, writing in the first century CE, tells how it was favoured by wealthy patrician ladies. Was this the first record of the modern ‘pampered pooch’?
By the classical period, dogs had evolved into clearly distinct types, not quite breeds in the modern sense, but evidence that enormous changes in appearance and behaviour compared to their lupine ancestors were well established over 2,000 years ago.
Though Columella the farmer offered plenty of advice on the right choice of dog for guarding the flock and the farmyard, he was silent about another feature of farm life, with which he would have been familiar – the presence of rats. All dogs are good at catching these destructive pests, which, like dogs, have discovered the benefits of living with humans but not the trick of making themselves appealing to their patrons. As far as I am aware, none of the ancient breeds was especially bred to catch rats, but their eagerness to do so would not have escaped notice. Besides being very useful in killing vermin, catching rats with dogs appears to be enormous fun.
While the aristocracy hunted game on their estates, the landless working man used dogs to kill rats. Modern terrier breeds all began as rat-catchers. The sport of rat-baiting became widespread in the eighteenth century, with enclosed pits used to contain competing terriers and an assortment of live rats. Onlookers placed wagers on their favourite dog and, if it had killed the most rats in a bout, collected the winnings. These assemblies had a historically significant role. They were the forerunners of the modern dog shows, as fashion, and the law, turned against cruel sports during the nineteenth century and terrier owners funnelled their enthusiasm into showing their dogs in competition instead.