FIRST WATCH 9 A. M. TERCE
AUROCHS OR WILD OX – 1627 – Bos primigenius
Gilgamesh Poet – 2100 BC
Epic of Gilgamesh,
Sumeria
Ishtar led the Bull of Heaven
Down into the world.
When the Bull of Heaven bellowed
The earth shook and quaked:
Lakes and streams were emptied
And the Euphrates stopped its flow.
When the Bull of Heaven bellowed again
And its great hoof struck the ground:
The earth cracked open
And into that deadly abyss fell
The armies of the King of Uruk.
The Aurochs or Wild Ox first appears in literature in that first epic of the human race, Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia – 2100 BC), as the “Bull of Heaven” belonging to Anu the King of the Gods is lent to his daughter Ishtar, who wishes to use it to destroy the hero Gilgamesh, the King of Uruk. The Aurochs is also referred to as the Reem in the Bible, and as the British traveller Canon Tristram wrote in 1884, “on the Assyrian monuments its chase is represented as the greatest feat of hunting in the time of the dynasties of Nineveh.”
In Greek mythology, the Aurochs was the avatar of the thunderbolt god, Zeus, and the god of earthquakes, Poseidon. In the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus, in his The Persian Wars, wrote: “That whole region [of Thrace] is full of lions and wild bulls with gigantic horns which are brought into Greece.” In the earlier Minoan civilization of Crete many images of these massive wild bulls being used in the spectacular sport of bull jumping were painted on the walls of the palace of Knossos.
Julius Caesar – 65 BC
De Bello Gallico,
Gaul
They are but little less than Elephants in size, and are of the species, colour and form of a bull. Their strength is very great, and also their speed. They spare neither man nor beast that they see. They cannot be brought to endure the sight of men, nor can they be tamed, even when taken young. The people who take them in pitfalls assiduously destroy them: and young men harden themselves in this labour, and exercise themselves in this kind of chase; and those who have killed a great number – the horns being publicly exhibited in evidence of the fact – obtain great honour. The horns in amplitude, shape and species, differ much from the horns of our oxen. They are much sought after; and after having been edged with silver at their mouths they are used for drinking vessels at great feasts.
The Aurochs or Wild Ox was known to Caesar as the Ur or Uras. Measuring six and a half feet at the shoulder, the Aurochs was the archetypal wild bull, as its Latin name Bos primigenius suggests. It was from the Aurochs that all our domestic cattle are derived. It is the source of what was the single most important animal domestication in the evolution of agriculture-based civilizations.
Recent DNA research indicates there were at least three subspecies of Aurochs. Two were the Indian Aurochs from which the “humped” cattle of India are descended, and the North African Aurochs from which the “humpless” cattle of the Near East are descended. What survived in a wild state into historic times in Europe was this terrifying, primeval, and untameable Giant Wild Ox.
Pliny the Elder – 65 AD
Natural History,
Rome
Scythia produces but very few animals in consequence of the scarcity of shrubs. Germany, which lies close adjoining it, has not many animals, though it has some very fine kinds of wild oxen: the Bison, which has a mane, and the Urus.
The hunting of the Aurochs seems to have been regarded as the exclusive right of kings and aristocrats among the Germanic peoples. In the 9th century, Charlemagne hunted Aurochs in the forests near Aix-la-Chapelle; while in the German epic the Niebelungenlied, we learn that the hero Siegfried slaughtered four of these mighty beasts near Worms in the 12th century.
The Aurochs was sometimes confused with that other giant of the European forests: the Wisent or European Bison. Both of these beasts are famously and frequently portrayed in hunting scenes in prehistoric cave paintings. It is instructive to realize that although populations of both these massive quadrupeds were hunted by man for at least 40,000 years, it took the advent of firearms to result in their extinction.
Benedyct Fulinski – 1627
Fulinski Manuscript XVII,
Poland
A century ago, King Sigismund III Vasa, seeing the imminent danger of a quick and total extermination of the Aurochs, proclaimed orders with the object of protecting the feeding grounds of these animals, the number of which at this time did not amount to more than some ten pieces. Unluckily the enactment of those orders came too late and in consequence the Aurochs disappeared from the lands over the next century.
By 1400, two royal preserves in Poland were the last refuges of the Aurochs. By 1564, there were only 30 surviving animals in the Jaktorowska forest preserve. By 1620, this last herd had dwindled to one last animal. With her death in 1627, after nearly four millennia, the “Bull of Heaven” finally enters the annals of literature – along with the dragon and the griffin – as an entirely (non-existent) mythical creature.
Like the Aurochs, the Wisent was becoming rare by the end of the Middle Ages. By the 1800s, Wisent populations surviving in the wild had dwindled to small herds in only two regions and in two forms. Both the Caucasian Wisent (Bison bonasus caucasicus) and the Lithuanian Wisent (Bison bonasus bonasus) populations survived because they lived in substantial park reserves under the protection of the Czar of Russia. However, after the Great War and the Russian Revolution, these last animals were no longer protected in imperial reserves, and by 1923, both the Caucasian and Lithuanian Wisent became extinct in the wild. Then, in 1925, an aging bull called Kaukasus, the last of the Caucasian race, died in the Hamburg Zoo.
However, a remarkable captive breeding program by the European Bison Society in the 1920’s gathered just 6 captive animals from various zoos, and miraculously saved the Lithuanian race from extinction. Since the end of the Second World War, new parklands were established, and today there are several thousand European Bison of the Lithuanian subspecies roaming woodland reserves in Europe.
TAURUS
Aurochs or Wild Ox – 1627
The last black bull’s wounding
Was like the bursting
Of an old sun in the belly
His roar betrayed the centuries
Of refusing to tread warily in this world
Flutes were made from his bones
They play them even now
And hunting horns from his ivory crown
In his veins the singing of a hundred
Rapacious birds
He was strength without malice
His forehead was a crushing millstone
Fearful, lordly beast of all the mythologies
Father of the minotaur
A small part of his stubborn blood
Is yet in the fighting bulls of the ring
Who break the bodies of horses and men
His legend is as ancient as the pale moon
But his life now is only a fish’s song
And his spirit is steel and flint striking
On a dark and empty plain