In the spring of 2009, the Near East stood poised on the threshold of a regionwide crisis. In the Levant, Israel had just finished a campaign against Gaza that had cost the lives of 1,500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and Hamas was still launching rockets into southern Israel, explicitly targeting civilians. In Mesopotamia, as the American occupation of Iraq approached its seventh year and the insurgency against it faded, its most vicious opponents began reorganizing themselves into a group that would, four years later, declare itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In Iran, anti-government demonstrations erupted across the country to protest the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And in Syria, a country held together since 1971 by a brutal Baathist regime, a multi-year drought that was likely intensified by global warming had forced hundreds of thousands of Syrian farmers from their homes.1 They gathered in the cities, desperately searching for income in the shadows of a global economy shattered by Wall Street’s recklessness.
To add to the growing calamity, a major health crisis was developing. In what would become a dress rehearsal for the much more devastating COVID-19 pandemic a decade later, the H1N1 “swine flu” rapidly turned into a worldwide epidemic. Governments around the globe scrambled to prevent outbreaks. In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak’s government placed medical personnel at airports and began a campaign to vaccinate anyone traveling for the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
In April, the government also decided to slaughter all the pigs in Cairo and its suburbs.
The decision would come at a high price. A Christian minority, referred to as the Zabaleen, had raised pigs in Cairo and its outskirts for generations. Their livelihood leaned heavily on collecting refuse from the city’s streets and feeding its organic components to their pigs, the meat of which they would sell to supplement their often meager incomes.2 But the Zabaleen and their pigs played a much larger role in the Egyptian economy than simply subsisting off its urban waste. They stood at the heart of an informal waste management and recycling system on which the 20 million residents of metropolitan Cairo depended to keep their city clean.
Many, including international health experts, saw the Cairo pig cull for what it was: an attack on a way of life that had long triggered discomfort among the majority. Pigs are haram, forbidden by Muslim dietary laws.3 The very thought of pigs can elicit disgust and disdain among Muslim Egyptians. For that reason, despite their role in waste management, there was considerable pressure to keep swine out of Cairo. The H1N1 outbreak provided a convenient opportunity to rid the city of an animal to which was attached one of the most powerful taboos in the world.
The slaughter met swift resistance in the form of a citywide strike; the Zabaleen refused to pick up the trash. Reporting for the New York Times, Michael Slackman interviewed local Zabaleen:
“They killed the pigs, let them clean the city,” said Moussa Rateb, a former garbage collector and pig owner who lives in the community of the Zabaleen. “Everything used to go to the pigs, now there are no pigs, so it goes to the administration.”4
Within days, filth piled up in the streets, bringing parts of Cairo to a standstill and exposing the Mubarak government’s incompetence. But Moussa Rateb’s implication—that the government was the real swine—reflected broader disenchantment with the way that Egypt and other countries in the Near East were being run. People’s distrust of those in power and their frustration with their leaders’ inability to provide them opportunities for better lives would eventually erupt into a regionwide social movement. The Zabaleen strike itself offered a preview of the Arab Spring and Egypt’s revolution two years later, an example of how grassroots mobilization of discontented people could defy seemingly powerful governments.5
Although often forgotten in the tangled web of political events and violence that defined the Near East over the next decade—from the ousting of Mubarak, to the eruption of the Syrian civil war, to the rise and fall of the Islamic State, to the increasing tensions between Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the US, and Russia for influence over the region—Cairo’s pig problem reflected in microcosm the greater political, economic, and environmental challenges facing the Near East. In Cairo, pigs acted as a figurehead for class and ethnic conflict. Their presence forced discussions about religious tolerance, respect for Islam’s tenets in a Muslim-majority country, and the strength of political liberty. Swine had crept into discussions of public health and the management of waste in the Near East’s largest city. And they raised questions in the West about what this taboo on pigs was all about and why it was so important.
The clash between the Egyptian government and the Zabaleen highlights the multifaceted and socially entangled roles that pigs play in the Near East. These 21st-century predicaments reflect a deep and recurring historical theme: although often left out of the popular imagination of daily life in the region, Near Eastern pigs have long been uniquely situated within greater social processes, trapped within the politics of different ethnic and religious groups. In that way, swine offer an underexplored perspective on human cultures in the region. By understanding the pig, we can begin to appreciate the complexities of culture and politics in the Near East.
This is no easy task. Historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and theologians have long studied and speculated about swine’s role in Near Eastern cultures, largely with regard to the origins and significance of the taboo on pigs in Judaism and Islam. For the most part, these scholars have been badly mistaken—not because of a lack of intellectual rigor, but because they have not had solid data on which to ground their arguments. This situation has changed over the past three decades largely in thanks to the work of zooarchaeologists, or archaeologists who specialize in studying animal bones and understanding human-animal interactions in the past.
Why is it that the pig, an otherwise uncomplicated animal in other cultures, is the focus of so much consternation for Near Eastern peoples? After all, archaeological research documents that pigs were domesticated within the Near East around 10,000 years ago and remained a part of agricultural life throughout the region for millennia. Pork was eaten in abundance by kings, soldiers, merchants, and the poor in the first cities of Sumer, Syria, Anatolia, and Egypt. Pigs and their progenitors, wild boar, were depicted in artwork and writing composed for imperial courts. They had roles in rituals of magic and religion and were part of the tableau of daily life in the Near East for most of recorded history. What changed? How did swine traverse the road from wild boar to domestic pig to an animal so taboo in Judaism and Islam that even mentioning its name can elicit disgust?
This book will tackle these long-standing questions by tracing the history of swine in the Near East from the earliest moments of human prehistory up to the present day. In doing so, it joins other works devoted to understanding the unique position this animal has held. Authors of all stripes have wondered about the pig and its taboo since at least Greco-Roman antiquity. They have put forth many theories—for example, some have claimed that the taboo was a response to pig-borne pathogens like trichinosis; others that the pig is ecologically unsuitable for the Near East; still others that the pig taboo is essentially a confused attempt to understand a symbolically powerful animal, an inversion of sentiments surrounding what was once a holy animal. As we will see, all of these theories are wrong, or at least partially so.
I should warn my readers that this book does not present a single explanation for why the pig got to be the way it is. There is no Sherlock Holmes–style discovery in its pages. Rather, it is a story of converging factors, competing interests and ideologies, and contradictions. It is a tale with many loose ends and much need for future research.
Theories of the pig and its taboo have filled countless pages for almost 2,000 years. But it is only recently, with the aid of zooarchaeology, that scholars have left the realm of speculation and tested their theories empirically. In the process, they have developed a more accurate picture of pigs in the Near East, from domestication to the formation of the taboo to the Zabaleen’s and other humans’ interactions with pigs in the region today.
Although we zooarchaeologists focus our attention on animals and their remains (i.e., bones), we do so in order to understand human behavior. We do this not because we love animals per se or because we couldn’t cut it as veterinarians (although both of those statements may be true), but because animals provide a unique insight into the human experience. They stand at the center of so much of human activity and thought; they provide meat and milk for our tables, labor for our farms, and material for our clothing. On a deeper level, they supply us with metaphors for ourselves. They provide the archetypal characters in the drama of life and death.6
Zooarchaeology provides a powerful scientific tool for understanding how pigs and other animals have shaped human history. Excavators recover animal remains from sites—often from ancient garbage dumps where meal refuse was discarded, but also from other deposits like the remains of ritual sacrifices in temples and human graves. Field archaeologists then pass these remains along to faunal specialists (often themselves site directors or excavators). Once on the lab bench, zooarchaeologists identify the animal species to which the recovered fragments of bones and teeth belong; measure these fragments to determine the animals’ age, sex, and domestication status; and examine them for pathological lesions to determine what stresses and diseases the animals’ may have been exposed to. Some of us examine bones on the microscopic level, sequencing ancient DNA to document population turnovers and unique phenotypic traits, or analyzing ratios of light stable isotopes to reconstruct the ancient environments and diets.
The cumulative work of zooarchaeologists has fostered a breakthrough in understanding past societies. Rigorous scientific approaches to archaeology are only a couple of generations old, and zooarchaeology itself was a relatively marginal subdiscipline until the 1970s and 80s. But since that time, it has become one of the most popular methodological approaches in archaeology. Researchers from around the world have revolutionized the study of animals’ centrality to human cultures, from the diversity in hunting strategies and trajectories toward domestication, to the ritual use of animals in human spiritual life, to the fundamental roles that domestic livestock played in early state societies.7 From zooarchaeologists’ tireless efforts, there is now a considerable body of evidence pertaining to all periods of history and prehistory. This is especially the case in the Near East. It is those data I will bring to bear on questions regarding one of the region’s most unique animals: pigs.
Zooarchaeology is not about telling the stories of dead animals, but uncovering what they meant to the human societies that hunted, herded, and tabooed them. The pig’s story, which the reader will trace over the next nine chapters, is a representation of—and a lens through which to perceive—a broader socioeconomic, environmental, and political history. If nothing else, in the pages that follow, I hope to convince the reader that pigs offer a unique perspective on the Near East’s long-term social processes. The goal is simple, if indirect: as biomedical researchers study the organs of pigs to better understand human biology, zooarchaeologists investigate the pig to learn about the past, and thereby to understand the human condition.
Swine provide a particularly useful lens for delving into the Near Eastern past because, as the Cairo episode demonstrates, they often find themselves on the battlegrounds (or as the battleground) of the politics of identity and piety. Today, Muslims’ and Jews’ negative attitudes toward these animals often clash with the deep love of pork, ham, and bacon harbored by hundreds of millions of Christians and other people around the world. To the members of each faith, the position opposing their own is ridiculous, insane, and unfathomable. How can you eat something as abominable as that? How can you detest something as mundane and delicious as this? Addressing these sentiments strikes at the heart of questions of tolerance. Understanding the other side, or refusing to do so, has a long legacy in interethnic and interreligious relations in the Near East and beyond.
Sometimes the conflicting attitudes toward pigs are found within the same community, family, or even individual persons. Recognizing that these contradictions exist today and have existed for millennia is a critical part of the story of swine. Today, as in the past, not every Jew or Muslim abstains from pork, and not every Christian thinks it’s okay to eat swine. In Israel, for example, the market for pork has blossomed in recent decades as curious or secular Jews and émigrés from the former Soviet Union have sought out the forbidden flesh—even despite the legal controversy surrounding it and a windstorm of finger wagging from Orthodox rabbis.8 Love and hate, curiosity and taboo have made the first pork cookbook in Israel (titled The White Book)9 not so much a market success as a salacious offering in a nation bitterly divided between Jewish nationalists and secular cosmopolitans.10
Of course, pigs are not unique to the Near East, but instead have a global impact.11 Today, over a billion pigs are slaughtered every year to satisfy the globe’s unrelenting demand for ham, bacon, pork chops, ribs, salami, lard, prosciutto, and pork belly.12 This would not be possible if swine had not been domesticated, something that occurred at least twice—once in the northern Mesopotamian region of the Near East and once in China. Were it not for early Holocene sedentary hunter-gatherers in the Near East and China and the unintentional consequences of their efforts to manage wild boar populations, there would be no industry in pork. Similarly, had a taboo on pigs not developed in certain corners of the Near East in 1st millennia BC–AD, we would not have the widespread refusal to eat pork by most of the world’s 2 billion Muslims, 15 million Jews, 40 million Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, and many other groups. Nor we would have pig-related hate crimes like the one that occurred on December 7, 2015, when worshippers in Philadelphia found a pig’s head on their mosque’s doorstep, a blatant attempt to belittle and terrorize the city’s Muslim community.13
These global encounters cannot be understood without a firm grasp on the history and archaeology of the Near Eastern pig. We study the past to learn about ourselves, not only where we come from but who we are. While it is all too easy to view history, especially ancient history, as something remote and unrelated to the present, even a cursory inspection reveals just how much our daily lives have been shaped by millions of decisions made thousands of years ago in faraway places. The millennia-long history of the Near Eastern pig still resonates today. Understanding that story through zooarchaeology brings us closer to appreciating our place within a rapidly globalizing world.
The story of pigs in the Near East that will unfold in the chapters to come is complex and historically contingent. One cannot attribute the changing role of pigs or the rise of the pork taboo to a single underlying factor, although many have attempted to do just that (discussed in Chapter 6). Simply put, the cultural significance of pigs evolved. Only by understanding the animal and its biology (Chapter 2) and then tracing its trajectory through archaeology, zooarchaeology, anthropology, and historical texts can we hope to understand how pigs came to be what they are today. We cannot understand this process in a vacuum; the place of pigs within Near Eastern cultures evolved in relation to other social processes. For that reason, the Near Eastern pig is remarkably complex.
The transition from wild boar, an animal hunted infrequently by the Paleolithic peoples of the Near East, to domestic pig in the early Holocene sets the story in motion (Chapter 3). Pigs, along with sheep, goats, cattle, and domestic plants, formed a “Neolithic package” that served as the foundation of the human diet in the region for millennia to come. But from the beginning, swine were unique. They were excluded from most forms of mobile pastoralism, and they produced no “secondary products” such as milk or wool (Chapter 4). On the other hand, pigs’ abundant dietary flexibility and their capacity to adapt well to urban environments made them ideal forms of livestock in the Near East’s first cities in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC. Pork was one of the main sources of meat for the world’s first urbanites, especially those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. They also played unique religious roles. People sacrificed piglets to honor fertility deities and their dialectical opposites, the gods of the underworld. Pigs served as substitutes for humans; the gods accepted pork in the place of human flesh.
It was, I argue in Chapter 5, elites’ quest for storable and valuable agricultural commodities such as cereal, dairy, and wool that signaled a major shift for pigs. Sheep, goats, and cattle proved useful in these regards; pigs less so. As a result, pigs did not become sources of wealth in the way that these ruminating animals did (and horses, donkeys, and camels later on). While they continued to eat pork, economic and political elites largely excluded pigs from the institutional economies that they founded—the palaces, temples, and manorial estates that formed the nuclei of ancient economic life. Additionally, in some limited cases, some temples began to ban pigs from their premises by the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. The reasons for doing so remain opaque, but the exclusion of pigs effectively transformed the ritual connotations that pigs had carried up to that point. Nevertheless, most people in the Near East continued to eat pork. Among the exceptions were the inhabitants of the Levant, where pig husbandry began to erode beginning in the 3rd millennium BC in favor of wealth-producing ruminant husbandry. Not eschewing pigs per se, the people in this region unintentionally founded food traditions that emphasized beef and mutton, and transmitted those traditions from generation to generation.
By the Iron Age in the late 2nd and early 1st millennium BC, this passive avoidance of pork found fertile ground in the ethnogenesis of the Israelite people to grow into a taboo. It emerged first as a point of conflict with the Israelites’ pork-eating neighbors, the Philistines. Later, during a period of political upheaval and existential anxiety, the biblical authors revitalized this taboo as part of their romanticization of an imagined ancestral way of life based on mobile pastoralism and a tribal ethos. It was this image that the biblical authors attempted to promote in what became a religious revolution that laid the groundwork for Judaism. Pigs played no part in this tableau; eating them detracted from the fantasy of living like the ancestors, from resurrecting a glorious past, and from living a pure life devoid of the taint of an ancient enemy’s otherness and ritual pollution (Chapter 7).
Political and religious developments during the ensuing twenty-five hundred years accelerated the process by which swine developed into an animal of intractable cultural significance. By the end of the Iron Age, written Jewish Law forbade the consumption of pork. Yet pork was but one of many prohibitions found in the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. It was the violent confrontation between pork-avoiding Jews and pork-loving Greeks and Romans that elevated the pig to a new position. The pork taboo emerged as a symbol of Jewish resistance to Hellenic and Roman culture (Chapter 8). Meanwhile, Christians, originally adherents of Jewish Law, abolished the taboos on pork and other meats in order to facilitate a new focus on the spiritual purity of their adherents’ communion with Christ. Several centuries later, Islam adopted an evenhanded approach to Christian and Jewish theologies, taking what its founders perceived to be the middle way between them. While most of the taboos outlined in the Torah were abandoned, the Quran kept what its writers saw as most significant—including the taboo on pork (Chapter 9).
Over the centuries that followed, the differences between these three world religions and their approach to pigs grew more pronounced. As pigs became more reviled in Islam and Judaism, pork became more socially significant for Christians. At the extremes, people in all three religions used pigs, in the flesh or as metaphors, in acts of intolerance and swinish bigotry. These episodes have only served to more deeply entrench sentiments surrounding pigs, trapping Jews, Muslims, and Christians within the politics of swine and identity.
The lesson that the story of swine imparts to readers will vary. But one essential point is that taboos, food preferences, and other elements of culture—“social facts,” to use the terminology of Durkheim—evolve along complex trajectories and in relation to many factors. One cannot pinpoint a single cause located at a discrete moment in time for such social facts, nor can one identify a specific historical figure responsible for their genesis. For culture and its evolution exist beyond the individual person or his or her ability to truly comprehend it. Culture is a cradle and a medium; it creates each human being. Lest this philosophical approach to history appear too much in line with Tolstoy’s fatalism, let me be clear that human agency plays a vital role. To paraphrase Marx, individual humans do themselves create culture and history, but they do not do so in the ways that they think or hope. Actions, social facts, and events that may appear to their direct observers as trivial often radically reshape the conditions of future generations.
The pig, though perceived by many as a humble animal caught in people’s social entanglements, a walking larder of pork that can be dispensed with by a butcher or state-appointed health official, holds more power than meets the eye, certainly more than a mass cull disguised as a public safety measure can hope to destroy. As much as present or future generations may want to free themselves from their power, pigs and their history exist as a sort of monolith among the cultures and peoples of the Near East. Shunned or eaten, reviled or idolized, pigs have irreversibly shaped the past and thereby give structure to the future.