Figure 5.1. Number of administrative texts mentioning pigs and other livestock species. Cuneiform terms for species in parentheses. Texts refer to live animals or animal products.
Toward the end of the Chalcolithic period, a new type of settlement appeared in the Near East: cities. These communities, consisting of thousands of people, were much larger than Neolithic villages, an order of magnitude larger than even the “megasites” of the Late PPNB. But they were also unique in terms of their social, economic, and political significance. A city is a community of communities, a collection of people inhabiting a diverse number of roles that is organized through a division of labor and socioeconomic and political hierarchy. Cities project their influence into the countryside, controlling production and consumption in satellite villages and enfolding these smaller settlements into coherent political units headed by urban elites. As central and strategic places, cities were more vulnerable to attack than other settlements; people therefore built walls around them of mudbrick and stone.
The first cities appeared in southern Mesopotamia and the Khabur drainage in northern Syria in the early 4th millennium BC. Urbanism then spread, and by 2500 BC, cities dotted the landscape from Iran to Anatolia. In Egypt, the Levant, and western Anatolia urban centers were much smaller than their Mesopotamian counterparts, typically encompassing 10–25 hectares compared with the 100 or more hectares of the behemoths in the Khabur, southern Mesopotamia, and Iran. Though smaller, like the cities in the East, these centers served as seats of highly centralized political and economic power—what archaeologists refer to as “states.” By the early 2nd millennium BC, cities and states controlled, or least exerted considerable influence over, the vast majority of people in the Near East.1
At the heart of cities’ political and economic domination were the so-called institutions—palaces, temples, and elite manorial estates. The institutions controlled vast herds of animals, land, and other resources. They developed elaborate bureaucratic networks and assembled hundreds of workers, free and unfree. The elites who ran these institutions constructed massive houses and religious monuments, many of which are found on the acropolises at the center of major archaeological sites. The scale of institutions and their activities inspired new organizational techniques. It was in the need to manage and document economic activity over large areas that led institutional record-keepers to develop the world’s first writing systems by the late 4th millennium BC in Egypt and southern Mesopotamia.2
Institutions sat at the center of all the states that emerged in the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age, but there were regional differences. Most institutions focused on the agrarian sector of the economy to finance their power. But some, especially in western Anatolia, also relied on trade in precious commodities like metals. Some states, like Egypt, extended over large territories. In southern Mesopotamia, or Sumer, a collection of highly competitive city-states persisted throughout the 3rd millennium BC. Much like their Greek counterparts two millennia later, Sumerian city-states typically controlled only a single city and its surrounding countryside. Each city-state vied with neighboring powers for regional supremacy through warfare and political intrigue. As time went on, just as in ancient Greece, some Sumerian city-states were able to extend their hegemony over others. Ultimately, territorial empires—political units that controlled numerous cities spread over several regions—would supersede city-states. By the Middle (2000–1600 BC) and Late Bronze Ages (1600–1200 BC), empires of increasing size and complexity dominated the Near East from Mesopotamia to Anatolia to Egypt.
While it is perhaps unavoidable to see the Chalcolithic period and Bronze Age as a time of increasing political development, it is important to take stock of the numerous pauses and retreats in the process. Indeed, there was a cyclical nature to Bronze Age urbanism and state power that is reminiscent of the historiographical observations of 14th century AD Arab historian Ibn Khaldun.3 Much attention has focused on the ends of these cycles, or why civilizations collapse. Answers have included resource overexploitation, climate change, warfare, economic contraction, and popular discontent, among others.4
Whatever the specific causes, the Bronze Age Near East has provided some of the most dramatic examples of collapse and rebirth. The end of the Early Bronze Age witnessed a panregional process of deurbanization coinciding with the collapse of the Akkadian Empire, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, and city-states in the Levant. Perhaps not coincidentally, a global climatic downturn referred to as the “4.2 ka event” also occurred around this time.5 Urban society reorganized in the Middle Bronze Age, but the Hyksos conquest of Egypt around 1650 BC and the Hittite sack of Babylon in 1595 BC led once again to regional power reshuffling and a century-long “Dark Age.”6 The Late Bronze Age, beginning in 1600 BC, was a time of internationalism and imperialism, when great powers—the Hittites in Anatolia, the New Kingdom of Egypt, the Elamites in Iran—controlled the Near East. But this world, too, would fall apart and set the stage for new powers to emerge in the Iron Age.7
The development of cities and states had a major impact on livestock husbandry, one that brought the secondary products revolution to fruition. So central were animals to early states and empires that it is not too great an exaggeration to say that many of the institutions at the heart of Bronze Age societies, including those in Egypt and Mesopotamia, built their economic power on the backs of sheep, goats, cattle, and later equids. Of course, managing herds for secondary products was nothing new. But during the 3rd millennium BC, institutions sought to produce truly massive volumes of tradable and storable commodities. If the idea that ruminants equaled wealth first appeared in the Chalcolithic, it became a foundational feature of economic thought in the Bronze Age, particularly in Mesopotamia.8
Among the most important animals of the Bronze Age were cattle. As agents of traction power, cattle became “the engines of Bronze Age agricultural systems”9 that were increasingly needed to feed the burgeoning populations of cities. But cattle also contributed to greater inequality. Families that owned cattle could produce more grain than those that did not. Families that did not own cattle often had to rent oxen to prepare their fields, exacerbating existing wealth disparities and leading to situations in which cattle-owning families could hold cattle-borrowing families in debt or social dependence. By the late 3rd millennium and early 2nd millennium, oxen rentals were such a regular feature of daily life that Mesopotamian authorities composed laws regulating transactions and compensations for damages.10
Cattle were key elements in large-scale grain production, which helped underwrite state-making in the Bronze Age. The institutions at the top of the socioeconomic ladder, especially in Mesopotamia, produced vast surpluses of grain to distribute to their clients, dependent workers, and slaves as rations. In this way, they conducted “gastro-politics,”11 employing food and the politics of food-sharing to reinforce social inequalities. Similarly, institutions presented themselves as guarantors of security in the face of famine by operating granaries.12 In part because of the enormous increase in grain productivity enabled by their traction power, institutions amassed vast herds of cattle. Texts document that Bronze Age institutions in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Anatolia owned and managed large herds of cattle.13 Additionally, elites presented these valuable animals as gifts to one another, sought after and captured them in war, and sacrificed them to the gods.14
Sheep and goats15 provided what was, in addition to grain, the single most important agricultural commodity in the Bronze Age: wool. The expansion of the wool economy in Mesopotamia and neighboring regions at the end of the 4th and 3rd millennia BC16 was so pronounced that some have argued it constituted a veritable “Fiber Revolution.”17 By the 3rd millennium, wool and woolen textiles were the major export of Mesopotamia, driving trade throughout the Near East.18 Wool also impacted labor. In their attempts to increase the volume of traded textiles, individual institutions controlled tens or even hundreds of thousands of sheep and goats. Institutional authorities contracted specialist herders to manage these assets. Institutions also created textile workshops that employed or enslaved thousands of workers, especially women, to pluck fiber, clean raw wool, spin it, dye woolen cloth, and weave textiles. Thus, the increase in wool production was supported by (and contributed to) the creation of a landless lower class, debt slaves, and captives taken in warfare to bolster institutions’ labor forces.19
In addition to ruminants, equids (donkeys and horses) were also treated as wealth. These animals were not a part of the original Neolithic package, but were added to the mix in the Bronze Age. First domesticated in Egypt, donkeys were particularly valuable in Early Bronze Age ritual and warfare. Elites routinely sacrificed donkeys and kunga (specially bred hybrids of donkeys and wild onagers), burying them alongside their dead. As depicted on the famous “Standard of Ur,” donkeys or kunga also pulled wheeled carts into battle. Equids thus facilitated conquest and the appropriation of wealth from others.20 Horses, originally domesticated in Central Asia and introduced to the Near East by the 3rd millennium BC, eventually replaced donkeys and kunga in military roles and enabled the development of the fast-moving chariot and, later, cavalry.21 By the Late Bronze Age, horses were incredibly valuable assets and taken, along with sheep, goats, and cattle, as tribute and as booty in war.22
Pigs are conspicuously absent from the list of animals that constituted wealth. For one thing, as mentioned in the previous chapter, pigs did not provide commodifiable and storable secondary products like wool or something that could be translated into a commodity, like traction. While pigs did provide lard, around which a lively trade developed, this product was never as valuable as grain or wool.
For another thing, raising large herds of sheep, goats, cattle, or even equids was more efficient in many Near Eastern environments than raising large numbers of pigs. Large-scale intensive pig husbandry requires vast amounts of grain to fatten hogs before slaughter, something that institutions would have wanted to avoid to keep up their image as the guarantors of grain for the populace.23 Herding and fattening pigs in nut-bearing hardwood forests would have provided an alternative, one that Roman institutions took advantage of (Chapter 8). But these landscapes were not as common in the ancient Near East as they were in Europe; instead, vast tracts of steppic grasslands covered Syria, central Anatolia, Iran, and other places. These landscapes are excellent for raising ruminants and equids, but not pigs.
There is also a political angle to pigs’ exclusion. The anthropologist James Scott24 has written extensively about how states seek to measure, tally, and quantify the resources under their control. States and their institutions focus their attention on, and encourage the production of, the types of resources that are the most quantifiable and amenable to large-scale coordinated management. Grain, ruminants, and equids fit this description. Pigs do not. The problem would become particularly pronounced as states attempted to derive income from taxes.25 Any tax collector or tax farmer sent to assess the number of pigs in a peasant village would have to take into account the fact that a sow might farrow anywhere from three to eight piglets every time she gave birth. And she might give birth once, twice, or not at all within a given fiscal year. Of the piglets born, some might die of malnutrition or hypothermia. Given these uncertainties, it would be easy for pig breeders to underreport their gains and cheat the tax collector. Unless under regular surveillance, pig owners could easily sell off or trade their piglets before the tax collector arrived and convincingly claim an underproductive year.26
None of this is to say that pigs had no value at all. They remained prominent sources of food in the Bronze Age. Mesopotamian institutions themselves raised pigs, sometimes several hundred at a time. Authorities even meted out punishment to pig thieves, indicating that these animals were valuable. For example, an entry from Hammurabi’s famous Law Code (1792–1750 BC) specifies:
If a man steal ox or sheep, ass or pig, or boat—if it be from a god (temple) or a palace, he shall restore thirtyfold; if it be from a freeman, he shall render tenfold.27
A later Middle Assyrian law code (11th century BC) even detailed fines for the theft of different types of pigs—for example, 12 shekels of silver for fattened pigs, 6 shekels for ordinary pigs, and 6 shekels plus 1 parisu for pregnant/nursing sows.28 Other sources document the prices in silver or grain of cuts of pork.29 However, it is worth mentioning that pigs were evaluated at lower prices (in grain or silver) than other domestic animals.30
Although valuable, pigs were never considered worthy of large-scale investment by Bronze Age institutions. Even for middle-class families in Mesopotamia, pigs were not considered wealth. Documents discussing property inheritance among families frequently discuss livestock but only occasionally mention pigs.31
While pigs were not sources of wealth, pork did not disappear. Zooarchaeological work in Mesopotamia and Egypt over the past 30 years has disproved the myth, once popular among researchers, that the Bronze Age witnessed a decline in pork consumption.32 In fact, during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, there was a boom in pig husbandry in several key regions of the Near East. But the pattern was uneven. In some places, notably the Levant and western Syria, pig husbandry declined precipitously. And even in those places in which pig husbandry did expand, it did so primarily in lower-class and urban contexts.
Table 5.1 shows three variables that were key to the success or decline of pig husbandry in the 3rd and early 2nd millennia BC: how institutions developed wealth, the degree of urbanism, and preexisting food traditions. During the Bronze Age, pork was an important part of the diet in regions in which cities were large and where a tradition of eating pork had been pervasive in the preceding Chalcolithic. To a lesser degree, pigs tended to be more abundant in regions where institutions financed themselves primarily by accumulating sources of wealth other than grain or secondary products (e.g., precious metals).33 Similarly, pig production declined in regions that lacked large cities and in contexts in which institutions were able to monopolize livestock management and direct it toward the production of secondary products and grain. People from regions lacking a tradition of pork consumption in the Chalcolithic period tended to continue to refrain from eating pork in the Bronze Age. However, which of these variables was the determining factor of pig production varied from case to case. There is no one pig principle we can apply to explain all cases of swine abundance in the Bronze Age.
Table 5.1 Relative Abundance of Pig Remains across Regions of the Bronze Age Near East as a Function of Three Variables: Urbanism, Food Traditions, and Sources of Institutional Wealth
| Region | Pig Remains in Early–Middle Bronze Age ca. >20 Percent | Degree of Urbanism in Early Bronze Age, Small or Large Cities | Pigs Included in Chalcolithic Food Traditions >20 Percent | Grain/Secondary Products Major Sources of Institutional Wealth |
| Egypt | Yes | Small | Yes | Yes |
| W. Anatolia | Yes | Small | Yes | No |
| Khabur | Yes | Large | No | Yes |
| S. Mesopotamia | Yes | Large | Not enough dataa | Yes |
| Iran | No | Large | No | Yes |
| Levant | No | Small | Yes | Yes |
| W. Syria | No | Small and medium | Yesb | Yes |
a There were few pig remains at 4th millennium Uruk and none at Tell Rubeideh (Payne 1988; Vila 2006:140).
b There was a decline in pig husbandry at many sites in western Syria during the Uruk Expansion, but pig husbandry rebounded around 3000 BC (see Price 2016; Price et al. 2017).
In Mesopotamia during the Late Chalcolithic, the secondary products revolution seemed poised to make pork a thing of the past. Sheep and goats had largely replaced pigs throughout much of Mesopotamia34 during the Uruk Expansion in the 4th millennium BC, which was a form of colonialism at least in part connected to expanding wool economies.35 Its impact significantly curtailed pig husbandry in Anatolia and northern Syria.36
The situation changed during the 3rd and early 2nd millennia BC, when pork consumption flourished in the heavily urbanized parts of Mesopotamia. Take southern Mesopotamia. In most of the major Sumerian cities for which we have zooarchaeological evidence, pigs constituted anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of the main livestock animals slaughtered for food.37
Pork was even more popular in the cities of the Khabur drainage in northern Syria, where urbanism exploded in the 3rd millennium BC at sites such as Tell Leilan, Tell Mozan, Tell Brak, and Tell Hamoukar. At each of these cities, pig remains constitute at least around 25 percent of the main livestock species and often as much as 50 percent. Concentrations of pig bones were particularly high in areas associated with lower socioeconomic classes. In fact, because archaeologists tend to focus their excavations on elite areas (temples and palaces), zooarchaeological summaries of these sites probably underestimate the overall importance of pork for the general urban diet.
The dependence on pig husbandry survived episodes of urban retreat. Many of the cities of the Khabur were abandoned, perhaps due to a global climate change event (the 4.2ka event) at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. Nevertheless, when cities were once again repopulated in the early 2nd millennium, pig husbandry was a crucial component of the livestock economy. At Middle Bronze Age sites in the Khabur, pig bones typically make up around 30 percent or more of the bones of the main livestock species (see Table A.2 in the appendix).38
Urbanism thus appears to have played a key role in supporting pig husbandry in Bronze Age Mesopotamia—and vice versa. Cities offered a new type of environment that was particularly suitable to pig production. As examples from modern-day Cairo demonstrate, pigs thrive in urban spaces as consumers of waste. Indeed, from the pigs’ perspective, Bronze Age city life must have been a never-ending feast composed of accumulated human and animal feces, table scraps, and spoiled grain. Food production refuse, such as spent brewery grain or whey from cheesemaking, would have provided another source of calories. From the human perspective, whether penned or allowed to wander city streets in search of food, pigs provided an efficient waste management system, converting garbage into calories.39
Pigs served as a crucial source of meat for the burgeoning urban lower classes. Zooarchaeological data from Mesopotamia and Egypt suggest that, although people of all classes ate pork, most pig husbandry took place outside of institutional settings.40 Textual records of palaces and temples, as Figure 5.1 demonstrates, mention pigs far less frequently than sheep, goats, and cattle. Yet zooarchaeological data indicate that people regularly consumed pork. Zooarchaeological data also indicate that pig bones occur in lower relative frequencies41 in institutional contexts than in domestic ones, especially those associated with the lower classes.42
Figure 5.1. Number of administrative texts mentioning pigs and other livestock species. Cuneiform terms for species in parentheses. Texts refer to live animals or animal products.
The class-based patterns of Bronze Age pork consumption reveal how different economic opportunities presented themselves to different status groups. On the one hand, institutions were busy concentrating on forms of livestock production that would increase their wealth and ability to trade with distant parties. Pig husbandry, as we have seen, served neither purpose. In fact, it seems that elites in Mesopotamia continued to raise pigs not in order to develop their wealth, but rather simply because they enjoyed the taste of pork on occasion. But pigs were largely a luxury for the elite, not an asset.
The situation was quite different for the urban poor. Lacking access to institutional herds and frequently landless, members of the lower classes probably turned to the one type of animal they could feasibly raise—pigs.43 This class divide in pork consumption explains an apparent contradiction in the zooarchaeological pattern: why pig husbandry increased in Mesopotamia during the Bronze Age at the same time that state institutions were attempting to maximize the production of secondary products and grain.
Because institutions focused their attention on other animals, pig husbandry presented an opportunity for the lower classes to pursue a form of food production that fell largely outside institutional interests and beyond their interference. Pig husbandry may therefore have acted as a sort of Bronze Age “informal economy.”44 Today, the informal economy exists in the shadows of global capitalism, beyond the reach of state authorities to tax and tabulate. It includes all off-the-books transactions, from working “under the table” to dealing in narcotics.45 In the Bronze Age, the informal economy was that which took place beyond institutional oversight. It would constitute, therefore, the goods and services that were not recorded in textual records. Pig bones appear to be a fossil of one of these activities. They occur in large numbers in the zooarchaeological record, but not in texts. Indeed, difficult to tax, simple to raise, and largely ignored by institutions, pigs were ideally suited to the informal economy of Bronze Age cities.
The connection between urbanism and pig husbandry, mediated through class relations, is clear in southern Mesopotamia and the Khabur. But pork was important in locations without large cities, like western Anatolia and Egypt. Conversely, in Iran, large cities did not correspond to a rise in pig husbandry. Although there must have been a number of cultural variables at play, it is notable that these contexts show continuity in animal husbandry patterns from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. This suggests that, tradition, even in the face of radical socioeconomic change, played a determinative role in some contexts.
Western Anatolian economies in the 3rd millennium were unique in two ways. First, cities were small, rarely covering more than 10 hectares. Second, the main economic focus of institutions was trade and metal production, in contrast to the agrarian focus of Mesopotamian institutions.46 The animal economy was based on mixed livestock production, with high levels of rainfall supporting abundant cattle and pig husbandry. Pig bones typically represent 20–30 percent of the main species at 3rd and early 2nd millennia BC sites, including the iconic city of Troy.47 These percentages are in fact equivalent to those found at western Anatolian sites dating to the Late Neolithic and at Chalcolithic sites.48 Because pig husbandry neither served as a distraction from the accumulation of institutional wealth nor found a welcome niche in large urban environments, there was no incentive to increase pig production or limit it. People produced pork and other meat in roughly the proportions as their ancestors had done and in accordance with local environmental conditions.
Though a powerful and highly centralized state, Egypt also lacked large cities—at least ones of comparable size to the cities of southern Mesopotamia and the Khabur.49 Yet in Egypt, too, pigs often dominated the faunal assemblages of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2630–2130 BC) and Middle Kingdom (ca. 2050–1650 BC), often representing 50 percent or more of the livestock slaughtered for meat.50 The incredible preservation of Egyptian sites has provided additional insights into pig husbandry. For example, excavators uncovered intact pig pens, which included preserved hoofprints, at the Old Kingdom site of Dendara in Upper Egypt.51 Nevertheless, the role of pork in the Bronze Age Egyptian diet was not significantly greater than its role in the Neolithic and Predynastic periods. Again, the data suggest a continuation of inherited food traditions rather than an increase as in Mesopotamia.52
Egyptian elites held large agrarian estates and developed their wealth via control over secondary products and grain. As in Mesopotamia, it is possible that this led to a situation in which pigs were a more important source of food for the poor than the rich. In fact, the infrequency with which swine are mentioned in texts and depicted in tomb art has suggested to some that pigs may have lost status in the early 3rd millennium BC.53 This may be a reflection, again, of the fact that pigs, while eaten with great frequency, were no more considered wealth in Egypt than they were in Mesopotamia. Yet as in Mesopotamia and the Khabur, pork probably played a vital role in livestock-keeping among the lower classes.
Finally, Bronze Age communities in Iran produced very few pigs (5 percent or less), even though the region contained cities as large as those in Mesopotamia.54 On the one hand, the climate of the Iranian Plateau is hot and dry—not necessarily ideal for raising pigs.55 Indeed, this is likely a major reason pig husbandry failed to take off in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic.56 On the other hand, climate fails to explain why pig husbandry would not increase in cities, which are typically located close to major bodies of water and which represent prime environments for raising swine. Again, it is hard to shake the idea that communities in Bronze Age Iran were simply continuing to follow food traditions inherited from earlier periods, ones in which local natural environments would have placed limits on the scope of pig husbandry.
Western Syria and the Levant extends from the Negev Desert in the south to the Upper Euphrates River Valley in the north. In this region, swine had been a common part of the agricultural tableau prior to the Bronze Age. But beginning in the 3rd millennium BC, pig relative abundances declined. With a few exceptions, both regions saw pork progressively disappear from the diet from the Early through the Late Bronze Age.
Figure 5.2. Relative abundances of pigs in southern Levant. Numbers inside pig silhouettes show percentage of pigs. Numbers below indicate site.
Key to sites: 1, Pella; 2, Marj Rabba; 3, Tel Teo; 4, Meser; 5, Tel Aviv Jabotinsky St.; 6, Teleilat al Ghassul; 7, Abu Hamid; 8, Tel esh Shuna; 9, Tel Ali; 10, Bir es Safadi; 11, Horvat Beter; 12, Abu Hamid; 13, Shiqmim; 14, Gilat; 15, Grar; 16, Ai et Tell; 17, Tel Halif; 18, Megiddo; 19, Tell Abu al Kharaz; 20, Tel Yaqush; 21, Tel es Sakan; 22, Yiftahel; 23, Ashkelon; 24, Tel Hartuv; 25, Tel Bet Yerah; 26, Qiryat Ata I III; 27, Tel Dalit; 28, Tell Madaba; 29, Tel Lod; 30, Tel Yarmouth; 31, Tel Arad; 32, Tel Erani; 33, Khirbet al Minsahlat; 34, Kh. ez Zeraqon; 35, Tel es Safi; 36, Tell Handaquq; 37, Tell al ‘Umayri; 38, Tell Abu en Niaj; 39, Tel Dan; 40, Refaim Valley; 41, Tell el Hayyat; 42, Shiloh; 43, Tel Aphek; 44, Tel Yoqne’am; 45, Tel Haror; 46, Tell Jemmeh; 47, Tel Kabri; 48, Tel Hazor; 49, Tel Nagila; 50, Jericho; 51, Tel Harasim; 52, Beth Shean; 53, Lachish; 54, Tel Dor; 55, Beth Shemesh; 56, Tel Rehov; 57, Tel Kinrot; 58, Miqne Ekron; 59, Nahariya.
In the Levant, especially in the river valleys and oak-covered hills of the southern Levant, archaeologists frequently find that pig bones represent 25–40 percent of the main livestock remains from Chalcolithic sites. However, as Figure 5.2 shows, pigs made up only 10 percent or less of livestock remains from sties dating to the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC. An excellent example comes from the hilly Galilee region of northern Israel. At Chalcolithic Marj Rabba, pigs made up 32 percent of the livestock remains found in settlement debris dating to just before 4000 BC.57 By the middle to late 4th millennium BC, a period referred to in the Levant as the “Early Bronze I” (EB I, 3600–3000 BC), pig relative abundances remained the same or slightly lower. At the sites of Qiryat Ata II and Yiftahel II, pigs represented 30 percent and 16 percent of the livestock remains.58 Around 3000 BC, however, the numbers began to decline more precipitously. Pigs composed 21 percent of the remains of livestock taxa from the Early Bronze II phase (3000–2800 BC) at Qiryat Ata I59 and only 4 percent from EB II and III phases (3000–2500 BC) at Tel Bet Yerah on the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee.60
A roughly similar story unfolded in western Syria, the area extending from Damascus to the Middle-Upper Euphrates. There, the abundance of pigs had declined somewhat toward the end of the Chalcolithic period. This was in large part due to the influx of southern Mesopotamian colonists during the Uruk Expansion.61 Although the percentage of pigs rebounded impressively during the first half of the Early Bronze Age (3000–2600 BC), pork consumption plunged again after 2600 BC.62
There are two components to the decline of pig husbandry in the Levant and western Syria in the 3rd millennium BC. The first is economic. Communities would have felt drawn to the production of valuable commodities like wool and grain, which lent themselves to intensive secondary product exploitation. Several lines of evidence indicate that livestock keepers concentrated on raising sheep for wool. Sites dating to the 3rd millennium BC show much higher ratios of sheep to goats than in previous periods. Moreover, the ages at which both of these animals were slaughtered increased, a signature of intensive fiber exploitation.63 Finally, mid-3rd millennium BC palace archives from Ebla in western Syria demonstrate institutional officials’ almost singular focus on sheepherding and wool production.64
The second component of the decline in pig husbandry relates to the scale of urbanism in the Levant and western Syria. As in Mesopotamia and the Khabur, the production of animal fiber textiles, livestock, and cereals—and their collection through taxation—were key ingredients of institutional wealth in the Levant and western Syria. But in Mesopotamia and the Khabur, the massive size of cities and larger numbers of urban poor seeking alternative means of subsistence created a niche for swine husbandry. Such factors were not at play in the Levant, where cities were typically less than 30 hectares in size. And while larger than those in the Levant, western Syrian cities were only about half the size of their counterparts in the Khabur and southern Mesopotamia.65 In other words, the urban environments that had lent themselves to pig husbandry in Mesopotamia and the Khabur were far more limited in size in the Levant and western Syria, and both regions were less densely settled.66
The situation in the Levant and western Syria contrasts with that in Egypt. In both regions, societies were marked by low-level urbanism, a tradition of pork consumption inherited from the Chalcolithic, and an institutional focus on grain and other secondary products. One can speculate that differences in the structure of political and economic power may have had something to do with the stark disparities in pork consumption. Egypt was a highly centralized state with a deified monarch. Class differences were pronounced. The Levant, on the other hand, contained small-scale city-states, while western Syria contained regionally expansive states that were nevertheless much weaker than Egypt. In these regions prevailed a more tribal ethos based on extended patriarchal family units and, at times, more collective forms of governance.67 One wonders if the greater degree of economic inequality in Egypt inspired the development of a more robust informal economy or a distinct lower-class cuisine.
There is zooarchaeological evidence to suggest that a weak informal economy in pork may have operated in the Levant and western Syria. But disparities in pork consumption are apparent only in the urban-rural dichotomy rather than within cities themselves. Pig bones are found in much higher proportions (15–30 percent) in a few of the rural villages that served as satellite communities for the urban centers.68 This suggests that people living in the urban centers were able to pursue forms of livestock production that would enhance their wealth and prestige, while rural communities were excluded from those lifestyles—or possibly opted out of them. Instead, the people on the periphery pursued a strategy of mixed agriculture that sometimes included a healthy dose of pig husbandry. This informal sector, if indeed it was one, was spotty and ultimately unable to offset the decline of pig husbandry on a regional scale. By the end of the 2nd millennium BC, even in rural areas pig bones rarely represented more than 5–10 percent of livestock remains at sites in the region.
During the Holocene, the Near East experienced periodic aridification and steady deforestation.69 For decades, archaeologists have hypothesized that these environmental changes may have led to the regional decline in pig husbandry.70 Pigs certainly require more water than sheep and goats, and they do not thrive in grasslands like the ruminants. In the Levant and western Syria, sheep and goats claimed most of the percentage points lost by pigs in the Early Bronze Age.71 This might be an indication that herders were adapting their livestock choices to changing environmental conditions.
However, close inspection of the climatological and zooarchaeological data reveals that environmental change had less impact on pig husbandry than often suggested. The first line of evidence comes from the Early Bronze Age settlements of the Khabur. The communities living there practiced extensive cereal agriculture and livestock-herding that led to a significant depletion of local forests.72 Despite deforestation, pigs were extremely common, often the dominant form of livestock. This was because the urban niche provided a ready-made ecosystem for pigs. Pig husbandry also weathered the 4.2ka climatic downturn, which brought cooler and drier conditions to much of the Near East. In fact, the percentages of pigs remained more or less the same at sites with layers predating and postdating 2200 BC.73
Data from the Levant and western Syria also problematize an environmental explanation for the decline in pigs. At first glance, there appears to be a connection between aridification and pig husbandry. Beginning around 3000 BC, an episode of climate change caused rainfall to be less abundant in the region.74 This was precisely when people began raising fewer pigs in the Levant. However, between 3000 and 2600 BC, pig husbandry was more popular in western Syria and the Euphrates Valley than it had been in the late 4th millennium BC; in that region, proportions of swine fell only after 2600 BC and with the emergence of urban-based political systems.75 Additionally, in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC, communities in the Levant and western Syria raised large numbers of water-guzzling cattle (10–30 percent)76 and grew flax and grapes, both of which require a lot of water.77 These are hardly strategies adopted by people facing water shortages.
This is not to say that environmental changes had no impact on pig husbandry—they certainly did. But how they did so was neither uniform nor straightforward. Pig husbandry is flexible, adaptable to urban, forested, or other types of environments. Archaeologists must seek more nuanced ways to explain how environment, culture, and social pressures combine to present people with opportunities for altering agricultural practices, rather than attempting to explain pork consumption simplistically in terms of aridity. One avenue for future research is to investigate how pig-keepers shifted their husbandry practices in the face of environmental change. For example, no one has explored how the depletion of oak woodlands in parts of the Levant and Syria in the Bronze Age78 specifically affected extensive pig husbandry systems that relied on seasonal crops of acorns and other nuts. Asking more tailored research questions will enable archaeologists to better understand the interactions between climate change, anthropogenic impacts on the landscape, and agricultural choices.
Texts written in Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, and other languages provide glimpses of day-to-day life. These perspectives are, however, not unbiased. They reflect the interests and concerns of those wealthy enough to be literate or employ scribes. As such, much of the textual corpus details the management of livestock and the people dependent on institutions. These administrative texts are heavily skewed toward sheep, goats, and cattle,79, as Figure 5.1 shows. The relative paucity of texts detailing pig management has contributed to scholars’ general dismissal of the importance of swine across the ancient Near East. The zooarchaeological data demonstrate how mistaken this impression is.80
Texts are not entirely silent on pigs, however. Although institutions did not focus on pig production, written records establish that temples, palaces, and elite manorial estates owned and managed swine. Swine appear in some of the earliest Sumerian texts. For example, a tablet recovered from Uruk and dating to the late 4th millennium BC discusses a herd of 95 “grain-fed pigs” belonging to two temples.81 Even more intriguing is an archive dating to the 2300s BC that concerns the exploits of a Sumerian swineherd named Lugal-Pa’e from the city of Lagash. Lugal-Pa’e worked for the household of the governor’s wife, and the roughly 200 pigs put in his charge were referred to as “reed-thicket pigs,” a moniker that seems to denote swine raised under extensive husbandry in the marshlands around the city.82 The archive records herd statistics for seven consecutive years. During that time, Lugal-Pa’e increased the number of reproductive two- and three-year-old sows from 49 to 70 and oversaw three birth cycles per year. He also managed a small number of male “wild pigs,” which he used as breeding stock.83 Why he wanted to produce hybrids is unclear. Perhaps he wished to increase the size of his animals; zooarchaeological data make it clear that 3rd millennium pigs were quite small, about 60 cm tall at the shoulder.84
Egyptian texts of the Old and Middle Kingdoms also mention swine, although, again, not as frequently as they do other animals.85 Temples sometimes accepted pigs as sacrifices,86 and Egyptian institutions occasionally kept large numbers of swine. One 16th century regional elite (or “nomarch”)87 even claimed to possess 1,500 pigs—more than all of his sheep, goats, and cattle combined.88 As in Mesopotamia, specialist swineherds raised these animals for the institutions. In fact, swineherds are mentioned in what might be the oldest biography in the world on the tomb of an Old Kingdom official named Methen.89
Swine also make an appearance in one of the oldest parables of legal justice, The Eloquent Peasant, an Egyptian story composed in the late 3rd millennium BC. In the story, an estate overseer tricks a well-spoken peasant into trespassing onto a nobleman’s field with his donkey. Bronze Age justice ensues: The overseer confiscates the donkey and beats the peasant, who then pleads his case before the overseer’s boss, the nobleman. Following a lengthy trial and several more undeserved beatings, the nobleman comes to learn of his employee’s dishonesty. He returns the donkey and then compensates the peasant for his pain and suffering with some of his overseer’s livestock—including pigs.90
The Eloquent Peasant is a work of fiction, but bookkeeping documents corroborate that institutions gave pigs to members of the lower classes, although not for the purposes of justice. Instead, institutions sometimes distributed pork as rations to temple workers and soldiers in both Mesopotamia and Egypt.91 Institutions also provided their menial workers with rations of lard.92 While the size of these rations paled in comparison with that of grain rations, lard was something of a valuable commodity in the Bronze Age. In fact, there was a lively trade in lard in Egypt, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia.93 People, especially those of the lower classes, ate lard and probably used it for cooking. Lard was also applied as a lubricant to farm equipment—literally greasing the wheels of agriculture—and when mixed with lye (which can be leached from ash) was a key ingredient in soap.94 And while soap can be made from beef tallow and other types of animal fat, lard could be obtained without killing a high-value animal, such as a sheep or a steer.
Here, then, was an important product that pigs could provide, one that would be valued by institutions and members of the elite. Soap’s utility extended beyond personal hygiene; it was essential for woolen textile production. Anyone who has gotten close to a sheep knows that raw wool is a filthy mass of dirt, oil (lanolin), and feces. Washing raw wool was therefore critical to the institutional textile industry. In fact, Mesopotamian institutions regularly issued animal fat (often lard) to textile workers.
A Sumerian tablet dating to around 2200 BC95 reveals the scope of lard production. The tablet records the receipt or distribution of 22 jars of pig fat, each containing 18 liters for a total of 396 liters, which were probably intended for making soap. How many pigs went into making this much fat? At a density of 0.86 kg/liter, 396 liters equals 341 kg. A modern 100-kg hog can yield about 10 kg of lard. Assuming that a fattened pig could reach 75 kg—which is a generous assumption given the Bronze Age pig’s small size—then each pig could yield about 7.5 kg of lard. The 22 jars therefore represent at least 45 fattened adult pigs. To put that into perspective, Lugal-Pa’e’s herd of swine totaled around 80 adult animals, but most of those would be needed as breeding stock for the next generation. The 22 jars thus represented the off-take from several large herds of pigs.
In sum, while a small component of their overall economic activities, texts reveal that 3rd and 2nd millennia institutions in Mesopotamia and beyond did raise pigs. Curiously, however, there are very few documents relating to institutional pig-keeping after around 1600 BC, suggesting that institutions largely stopped owning pigs at that time.96 The reason for the abandonment is unclear, but it would ultimately put greater distance between the members of the elite and pigs in the Late Bronze Age.
The Late Bronze Age ushered in a new era defined by international connectedness and powerful empires. The tenor of this period is perhaps best captured by the Amarna Letters, a series of clay tablets composed in the 1360s–1330s BC that consist of correspondences between the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten and his contemporaries in the Levant, Cyprus, Assyria, the Hittite Empire, and other places.97 The Amarna Letters showcase the political machinations and the dance of Late Bronze Age empires. They do not discuss pigs.
While Akhenaten’s scribes were sending and reading letters, the workers of Amarna were, in addition to fulfilling their duties as artisans and laborers, raising swine. In fact, pork was the main source of meat consumed by Amarna’s nonelite.98 Excavations in the 1980s uncovered what have proved to be the best examples of ancient pig pens, complete with traces of pig bristles and coprolites (preserved dung). The Amarna Workmen’s Village contained a number of pens grouped into larger compounds.99 An example is what excavators labeled Building 400, a cluster of six pens and adjoining courtyards, shown in Figure 5.3. The pens themselves consisted of low mudbrick/stone walls about 1.5 meters in diameter—just enough room for a sow and her piglets—and contained small doorways through which the swine could enter and exit into common courtyards. One of these courtyards even contained a stone trough.100 Analysis of coprolite samples collected from the Amarna pens revealed that many swine were infected with tapeworm (Taenia solium) and roundworm (Ascaris suum) parasites, both of which are common in pigs and transmissible to humans. The dung also contained the remains of what these pigs ate: rye, emmer, and wheat seeds as well as small mammal bones.101
Figure 5.3. Pig sties in Building 400 at Amarna, Egypt.
The Amarna pens vividly document that pork remained a staple in the New Kingdom, the apogee of Egyptian imperial hegemony in the Near East.102 But the importance of pork in Egypt contrasts sharply with its status in other parts of the Near East. Although zooarchaeological data for the Late Bronze Age are unfortunately limited in many places, they suggest a general pattern of decline in pig husbandry. However, one must offer a caveat to this pattern: archaeologists have focused their excavations on elite areas of sites. With the exception of the Amarna Workmen’s Village and a handful of other excavations, the nonelite of the Late Bronze Age have been little explored. It is possible that pigs continued to be consumed in high proportions by the lower classes in the Late Bronze Age in certain places.
The available data from Mesopotamia and the Khabur, regions where pigs had been abundant in previous periods, show that swine typically represented less than 20 percent of the main livestock animals consumed at most settlements in the Late Bronze Age.103 In the Levant and western Syria, where many people had already largely given up on pig husbandry as a major means of food production, relative abundances of swine slid even further. Pig bones make up less than 5 percent of the main livestock taxa at almost every site for which there are published data.104 Only in Anatolia did levels of pig production hold steady. Pig remains typically make up around 20 percent of the remains of livestock recovered from the towns and cities of that region.105
Although people continued to eat pork and raise pigs, zooarchaeological data suggest that pigs had become less common in every major region of the Near East except Egypt and Anatolia. Part of the reason for this may have been that, despite the rise in imperial power throughout the Near East, urbanism contracted. By the Late Bronze Age, population numbers in much of Mesopotamia and the Levant were at their lowest since the Chalcolithic. Additionally, a greater proportion of the population resided in villages and small towns than in previous periods.106 The urban niche, which pigs had so successfully colonized in the Early Bronze Age, had shrunk. But the reduction of swine paralleled another important change: in some Late Bronze Age religious contexts, pigs had begun to develop a reputation as being ritually impure.
The combination of textual evidence and zooarchaeology provides considerable insight into the uses of pigs in celebrations, rituals, and religion in the Bronze Age, especially after around 2000 BC, when writing was more frequently used for purposes beyond bookkeeping. Together, the datasets shed light on how the ritual roles of swine evolved. We will focus on four key areas: the role of pork in feasts, pigs as sacrificial animals, their symbolic significance, and their connection to certain deities.
Although the most convincing zooarchaeological evidence for large-scale pig feasts dates to the Neolithic and Chalcolithic (Chapter 4), texts clearly indicate that Bronze Age people of all social classes feasted on pork. In fact, pork played a central role in some festivals. For example, early 2nd millennium BC Babylonian elunum celebrations took place around the time of the summer solstice and featured roasted piglets.107 Akkadian documents (2350–2150 BC) also attest to pork being eaten at wedding feasts and even in high-society gatherings meant to impress foreign and local dignitaries.108 In these Akkadian feasts, whole pigs were typically roasted over an open fire made from bundles of reeds.109
Nevertheless, there is some indication that pork’s status as a ritual animal or feast food eroded over the course of the Bronze Age. In Mesopotamia, despite pork’s role in Akkadian social gatherings, descriptions of public and royal feasts rarely mention swine; pork was generally left out of recipes prepared by institutional cooks.110 This suggests the exclusion of pork from Mesopotamian haute cuisine. Perhaps because of its associations with the hoi polloi, pork gradually lost its luster as a food worthy of the menus of elite feasts. Pigs were also infrequently depicted in art. In Egypt, pigs rarely appeared in tomb engravings and, when they did, tended to be shown in association with lower-class individuals.111 An intriguing example is found in a scene from the Old Kingdom Tomb of Kagemni at Saqqara. In it, a kneeling man, thought to be a peasant, places his lips on those of what appears to be a piglet (others have argued it is a strange-looking puppy), while another man offers him a jar.112 The meaning of the image is unclear: Is he orally providing his animal water or milk? Is this some sort of ritual? Is he kissing the animal? . . . Perhaps some mysteries are best left unexplored.
The value attached to pigs as livestock animals—their exclusion from the group of animals bearing wealth—influenced their limited role as animals sacrificed to the gods and in burial rituals. Ample zooarchaeological and textual evidence shows a clear bias against swine, especially in temple and mortuary contexts, in favor of the more valuable sheep, goats, cattle, and equids.113. Nevertheless, pigs were sacrificed on rare occasion with the dead. Pig bones, for example, were found in rock-hewn tombs at Saqqara in Egypt, dating to the 26th century BC,114 and a few other Early and Middle Bronze Age burials throughout the Near East.115
While uncommon in temple and mortuary contexts, pig sacrifice was common in rituals connected to fertility rites and magic. For example, archaeologists have uncovered pig or piglet sacrifices beneath buildings at a number of sites across the Bronze Age Near East.116 These sacrifices were probably foundation deposits intended to bless the buildings and their inhabitants. By offering a piglet, which magically conveyed fertility, families hoped to ensure health and reproductive success.
The association between pigs and fertility probably drew upon the fact that these animals are prodigious breeders, able to give birth to many offspring at once—something they hold in common with dogs.117 Examples of this connection can be found in literature and in art. A passage in The Benedictions of Labarna, a Hittite text dating to the 17th or 16th century BC, contains the words for bestowing a blessing on a vineyard in order for it to produce grapes in such great numbers “as a single pig gives birth to many piglets.”118 Similarly, Figure 5.4 shows a fist-sized clay amulet recovered from Nippur in Mesopotamia, probably dating to the 2nd millennium BC. On it, a boar mounts a sow, who is simultaneously nursing a litter of piglets.
Figure 5.4. Amulet or clay plaque from Nippur showing a boar mounting a nursing sow (probably Old Babylonian period, early 2nd millennium BC). 10.5 × 7 cm.
Pigs (along with dogs) were associated with lust and erotic excitement.119 But in addition to sows’ fecundity, swine’s connotations of lustiness may derive from the fact that copulating boars climax with a lengthy and voluminous ejaculation; over the course of several minutes, a breeding boar will release up to half a liter of semen. Akkadian and Babylonian sexual potency incantations for both men and women invoke pigs. A particularly vivid example comes from an early 2nd millennium BC tablet found at Isin in southern Mesopotamia:
Place your(m.) mind with my mind!
I hold you(m.) back just like Ištar held back Dumuzi,
(Just like) Seraš binds her drinkers,
(so) I have bound you(m.) with my hairy mouth,
with my urinating vulva,
with my urinating vulva.
May the enemy-woman not come to you!
The dog is lying, the boar is lying—
you lie forever in between my thighs.120
Additional evidence for the sacrifice of piglets in connection with fertility comes from what is perhaps the most exciting example of pig sacrifice in the Near East. In 1999, archaeologists digging at Tell Mozan in northern Syria uncovered a massive stone-lined pit near the southern wall of a palace.121 Dating to around 2300 BC, the pit was around 5 meters in diameter and over 6 meters deep. Within it were the remains of at least 60 piglets, 20 puppies, 60 sheep/goats, and 20 donkeys, in addition to a number of other offerings that included a ceramic jar in the shape of a pig’s head and another depicting a nude woman.122
The remains found in the Mozan pit bear similarities to deposits associated with chthonic rituals (those relating to the underworld). While it may seem counter-intuitive, chthonic and fertility rites are often connected through dialectical opposition—life and death give meaning to one another; they are frequently perceived as operating in a cyclical manner. In fact, rituals of the Hurrians, who are thought to have inhabited Tell Mozan, mention special ritual pits called abi, or channels to the underworld.123 Another parallel to the Mozan sacrifices derives from ancient Greece: the Thesmophoria festival.124 This festival took place in autumn to honor Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and fertility, whose daughter, Persephone, was abducted by Hades. The sacrifice of piglets, offspring of a highly reproductive animal, figured prominently in the rituals as a symbol of the seasonal cycles and Persephone’s sojourn in the land of the dead. Of course, Mozan was occupied almost 2,000 years before the earliest records of the Thesmophoria festival. Nevertheless, the parallels between the two suggest long-standing commonalities in the religious thought of Anatolian and Mediterranean peoples.125
Beyond fertility, and its connection to sexuality and death, the Mozan offerings might relate to another characteristic of pigs in ancient Near Eastern thought: pigs served as substitutes for humans in purification rituals. In other words, they could be sacrificed in place of a human being. They could also take on a curse or illness afflicting a person. In this way, pigs acted as a sort of ritual sponge that absorbed the burden of one’s sins or the evil eye. For example, in Bronze Age Mesopotamia and Anatolia, doctors used swine to expel illnesses from patients.126 Oftentimes, these rituals of substitution were connected to pigs’ chthonic association in magical rites designed to placate the gods. One example derives from a ritual prescribed by a Hittite priestess named Hanitassu to exonerate an individual following a moral transgression:
When night falls, the petitioner digs a hole in the ground and slits the throat of a piglet, letting its blood flow into the pit. Grains and liquids are offered into the pit as well. The doors to the Underworld are symbolically opened and the divine images of the Underworld deities are set around the pit to draw the deities up from the earth. Finally, they are invoked to plead with the Sun Goddess of the Earth, Queen of the Underworld, on behalf of the petitioner so that his offense may be forgiven.127
Pig sacrifice could even be prophylactic if malicious intent was suspected, as seen in one Babylonian royal ritual:
Then a white pig is slaughtered and the king spills its blood to the four cardinal directions [ . . . ] Both the figurine [of an enemy] and the dagger are enclosed in the pig’s skin, which makes a perfect container for impurity and evil, being pure and white from outside, while holding all the contagious materials inside. [It] is carefully sealed with a clay bulla, then the king puts his hand on the sealed package and orders the evil to depart.128
Swine’s feeding behavior may explain their usefulness as substitutes. Bronze Age city dwellers would have been well accustomed to seeing pigs consuming waste and filth, neutralizing it, and transforming something defiling (garbage, feces) into something innocuous (pork). In the same way, pigs could metaphorically collect and neutralize curses or bodily afflictions.129
The symbolic qualities that swine acquired during or even before the Bronze Age fostered connections with certain deities. Our evidence primarily derives from the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. For example, their service as substitutes probably drew pigs into affiliation with the Lamashtu, a demon-goddess who was believed to enter houses and murder newborn babies.130 Amulets and spells meant to appease, terrify, outmaneuver, or otherwise thwart Lamashtu are found throughout Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Levant in the 2nd millennium BC.131 While taking a variety of forms, the amulets often depict the demon-goddess suckling a puppy and piglet on her poisonous breasts. In other images, these animals accompany Lamashtu, as for example in Figure 5.5. One can interpret these amulets as a plea: take a piglet; leave the baby.132
Figure 5.5. Obsidian amulet of Lamashtu with dog and pig. Early 1st millennium BC. 5.7 × 4.7 × 0.9 cm.
Pigs or wild boar were associated with two other deities, Baal and Seth—the Levantine and Egyptian gods of storms, disorder, and fertility/male sexual potency. Baal’s connection to wild boar derives from a series of stories, known as the Baal Cycle, written in the middle to late 2nd millennium BC in the Canaanite city of Ugarit. The connection is brief, but in one passage, Baal hunts animals described as “the voracious ones” that inhabit oak forests and marshes and that possess armor and horns (tusks).133 Prestige objects from Ugarit, including boar-head-shaped bronze spear points found near the Temple of Baal, also depict these animals.134 Why Baal was associated with wild boar is not clear, but it perhaps symbolized the deity’s ferocity. Wild boar and boar hunting, symbols of masculinity and power in the Mediterranean and Anatolia, fit neatly with Baal’s persona.135
The Egyptian god Seth filled many of the same roles as Baal—in fact, the two were often syncretized. But the connection between pigs and Seth is better defined. In one myth, Seth, having murdered his brother Osiris, attacks Osiris’s son Horus in the form of a pig.136 This initiated a cosmic grudge against pigs, as described in the New Kingdom text The Book of the Dead:
So Re said to the gods: “Put him [Horus] on his bed, that he may recover.” It was Seth, who had assumed his form of black boar. Then he had struck him in the eye. So Re said to the gods: “Abominate the pig for Horus’ sake, so that he may recover.” Thus came about the pig-abomination for Horus’ sake by (the gods), his Train. (But) when Horus was (in) his childhood his sacrifices used to consist of his beef cattle and his pigs. (Now) his Train abominates (them).137
Egyptologist Richard Lobban138 has argued that the struggle between Seth and Horus mirrors that between Lower and Upper Egypt, especially after the Hyksos conquest of—and, later, expulsion from—Lower Egypt. Lobban even claims that the hatred of Seth (= Lower Egypt = the Hyksos) initiated a taboo on pork toward the end of the 2nd millennium BC. This is a neat hypothesis, but unfortunately one for which there is little evidence beyond vague textual allusions and the effacement of images of Seth in the 1st millennium BC.139 In fact, zooarchaeologists have clearly demonstrated that pigs remained a food source for the vast majority of Egyptians long after the expulsion of the Hyksos.140
Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the conclusion that pigs lost some of their status after 1600 BC in many regions of the Near East, at least among the elite. The shift was subtle and the evidence is far from overwhelming, yet the recording of unambiguously negative attitudes toward pigs (e.g., in The Book of the Dead), the zooarchaeological evidence for a decline in pig production in much of the Near East, and the abandonment of pig husbandry by institutions all point to a shift in attitudes toward swine in the Late Bronze Age. While pigs were associated with certain gods and occasionally depicted in art, it is noteworthy that most of these associations are negative—pigs are associated with demons and gods of chaos. Their roles in fertility rituals or as grave/house foundation deposits gradually eroded.141 In fact, beyond the folk magic/medical rites among the Hittites and in Mesopotamia, pigs seem to have disappeared from rituals by the Late Bronze Age. By the end of the 2nd millennium BC, they were no longer sacrificed to chthonic deities (as they may have been at Tell Mozan) or even eaten near temples.142
People also started to associate pigs with filth to a greater degree in the Late Bronze Age. The association had probably existed for a long time; swine’s connection to urban filth probably drove it home on a daily basis.143 But it took on a new intensity beginning in the Late Bronze Age and extending into the Iron Age. At this time, texts explicitly banned pigs—and their scavenging counterparts, dogs—from temples and other sacred areas in Anatolia and Mesopotamia because they were impure.144 Even the Hittites, who sacrificed pigs in magical rites, banned them from temples for fear they would pollute the sacred spaces and paraphernalia.145 In later Assyrian texts (8th–7th century BC), not only would pigs and dogs be labeled profane, but they would also called upon to defile and mutilate the corpses of enemy combatants.146
It is not hard to see why people might have assigned ritual impurity to pigs and dogs—those lustful, overfertile scavengers. But what is interesting is how the very same features that had made these animals ritually important had been flipped on their heads. Where once pigs could neutralize foulness, now they were carriers of impurity. Where once they symbolized fertility, holding in the balance death and life, now they were portents of chaos. People had recast pigs’ symbolic power in an entirely negative light, transforming them from (occasionally) sacred to profane. In this way, they were made taboo in certain—and quite restricted—contexts.
In terms of social, economic, and political changes, the Bronze Age was perhaps the most turbulent period in Near Eastern history. The evolving relationship between people and pigs was likewise dynamic. The first and perhaps most significant change was that pigs were excluded as sources of wealth. On the one hand, this meant that institutions were less interested in raising pigs. On the other hand, it mean that pig husbandry found a place within an informal economy, especially in Bronze Age cities in Mesopotamia. At the same time, cities provided ideal environments for pig husbandry—ones full of pooling wastewater, garbage, animal carcasses, and mud. Just as in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, burgeoning human settlements offered new opportunities for pigs to adapt and thrive.
However, one can argue that it was the initial exclusion of pigs as sources of wealth—something that evolved from the secondary products revolution in the Chalcolithic (and ultimately had roots in the Late Neolithic)—that set the wheels in motion for the incredible evolution of swine’s cultural significance in the Bronze Age. The fact that equids and ruminants equaled wealth generated a strong pull toward those forms of livestock production. Except in places where large urban environments made pig husbandry attractive and where members of the lower classes sought to opt out of ruminant economies increasingly controlled by institutions, that pull severely reduced the popularity of pig husbandry. This led to conspicuous losses of pig husbandry in some places in the Early Bronze Age, such as Levant and western Syria. I have argued that the virtual abandonment of pig husbandry had more to do with economic than other factors—for example, environmental ones. Whatever the case, Iron Age societies in these regions found themselves with an inherited food tradition largely lacking in pork. While there is no evidence to indicate that a taboo existed among the general populace, communities in the Early Bronze Age Levant developed culturally specific foodways that did not include much pork. Not eating pork, in other words, developed in the Bronze Age into a passive tradition passed on from generation to generation.
The transition toward more active forms of pork avoidance in the Iron Age Levant would largely be the result of the continued development of—and clashes between—culturally specific foodways, themselves articulating, as we have seen, with political and economic patterns. But the evolution of pigs’ ritual and religious roles also contributed to the changes that would take place in the Iron Age Levant. Pigs began the Bronze Age on the wrong foot, so to speak. As animals not conveying wealth, they were excluded as sacrifices fit for the temples. While they maintained important roles in rituals connected to fertility, sexual potency, and death, as well as in those requiring a substitute, by the Late Bronze Age the ritual meanings associated with pigs had shifted. Filth and pollution were emphasized. While one could easily find inspiration for these new attitudes toward pigs in the animals’ feeding and wallowing habits, these perceptional changes probably represent a case of symbolic inversion. In any case, by the end of the Bronze Age, pigs were banned from some temples, perceived as less valuable livestock, rarely useful in ritual, and often not even eaten in parts of the Near East. The stage was set for a more general and all-encompassing taboo—what we can call the pig taboo.