Cannibals and Kings (22 page)

The pig taboo recurs throughout the entire vast zone of Old World pastoral nomadism—from North Africa
across the Middle East and Central Asia. But in China, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Melanesia the pig was and still is a much-used source of dietary proteins and fats, as it is in modern Europe and the Western Hemisphere. The fact that the pig was tabooed in the great pastoral zones of the Old World and in several of the river valleys bordering these zones suggests that the Biblical taboos must be seen as an adaptive response valuable over a wide area in relation to recurrent ecological shifts brought about by the intensification and depletions associated with the rise of ancient states and empires.

The ancient Israelites even shared their abhorrence of the pig with their mortal enemies, the Egyptians. In the words of H. Epstein, one of the outstanding authorities on the history of animal domestication in Africa,

During Middle Dynastic times (2000
B.C.
) the Egyptians began to identify pigs with Set, the god of evil. Although pig raising survived into post-Dynastic times, the Egyptians never lost their prejudice against pork. Egyptian swineherds were members of a distinct caste. They used their herds to tread seeds into the Nile flood plain as part of the planting process, and this useful function—together with the availability of permanent wetlands and swamps in the Nile Delta—may help to account for the occasional eating of pork in Egypt up to the time of the Islamic conquest. Still, according to Herodotus, the swineherds constituted the most despised caste in Egypt and, unlike all others, were forbidden to enter the temples.

Something similar seems to have happened in Mesopotamia. Archaeologists have found clay models of domesticated pigs in the earliest settlements of Lower Mesopotamia in the fifth and fourth millennia
B.C.
About 30 percent of the animal bones excavated from Tell Asmar (2800–2700
B.C.
) belonged to pigs. Pork was eaten in Ur in pre-Dynastic times. In the earliest Sumerian dynasties there were specialist swineherds and pork butchers. After 2400
B.C.
, however, pork evidently became taboo and was no longer eaten.

The disappearance of the pig from the Mesopotamian diet coincides with severe ecological depletion and declining productivity in lower Sumeria, the cradle of the earliest Middle Eastern states. For 1,500 years Sumerian agriculture underwent continuous intensifications involving the construction of irrigation canals fed from the silt-laden waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The percentage of salt in the irrigation waters was harmless when the water was applied directly to the surface. However, the continuous irrigation of fields raised the level of the ground water. Through capillary action the accumulated salts were brought to the surface, rendering millions of acres unsuitable for growing wheat. Barley, more salt-resistant than wheat, was planted in zones that suffered less damage. But Sumeria became progressively weakened economically, leading to the collapse of the last Sumerian Empire, the Third Dynasty of Ur. By 1700
B.C
. wheat had completely disappeared in the south. Thereafter, the center of population shifted to the north as Babylon began to emerge under Hammurabi. And even that great “giver of abundant riches” could not afford to keep his people fed on pork.

With the rise of Islam, the ancient Israelite pig taboo was incorporated directly into still another set of super-naturally
sanctioned dietary laws. The pig was singled out for special opprobrium in the Koran, and today Moslems are as opposed as Orthodox Jews are to eating pork. Incidentally, the Koran contains an important bit of evidence in support of the ecological cost/benefit interpretation of animal taboos. The prophet Mohammed retained the Israelite taboo on the pig, but he explicitly released his followers from the taboo on eating camel flesh. The Arabian pastoralists, Mohammed’s earliest supporters, were camel nomads who inhabited true desert oases and who were often obliged to make long journeys across barren wastes where the camel was the only domesticated creature that could survive. While the camel was too valuable to be eaten regularly, it was also too valuable not to be eaten at all. Under emergency conditions associated with military campaigns and long-distance caravan trade, its flesh often meant the difference between life and death.

At this juncture I would like to clarify one point which I am eager not to see misrepresented. By tracing the origin of religious ideas to the cost/benefits of ecological processes, I do not mean to deny that religious ideas themselves may in turn exert an influence on customs and thoughts. The authors of Leviticus and the Koran were priests and prophets interested in developing a coherent set of religious principles. Once these principles were formulated, they became part of Jewish and Islamic culture down through the ages and undoubtedly influenced the behavior of Jews and Moslems who lived far from their middle Eastern homelands. Food taboos and culinary specialties can be perpetuated as boundary markers between ethnic and national minorities and as symbols of group identity independently of any active ecological selection for or against their existence. But I don’t think such beliefs and practices
would long endure if they resulted in the sharp elevation of subsistence costs. To paraphrase Sherborne Cook’s remarks about Aztec rituals, no purely religious urge can run counter to fundamental ecological and economic resistance for a long period of time. I doubt that modern-day observant Jews or Moslems suffer protein deficits as a result of spurning pork. Were this the case, I would expect them to begin to change their beliefs—if not at once, then in a generation or so. (Millions of Moslems do suffer from acute protein deficits, but no one has ever suggested a causal link between the taboo on pork and underdevelopment and poverty in Egypt or Pakistan.) I do not claim that the analysis of ecological costs and benefits can lead to the explanation of every belief and practice of every culture that has ever existed. Many alternative beliefs and alternative courses of action have no clear-cut advantages or disadvantages with respect to raising or lowering standards of living. Moreover, I admit that there is always some feedback between the conditions that determine ecological and economic costs and benefits and religious beliefs and practices. But I insist that on the evidence of prehistory and history the force they have hitherto exerted on each other has not been equal. Religions have generally changed to conform to the requirements of reducing costs and maximizing benefits in the struggle to keep living standards from falling; cases in which production systems have changed to conform to the requirements of changed religious systems regardless of cost/benefit considerations either do not exist or are extremely rare. The link between the depletion of animal proteins on the one hand, and the practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism, the evolution of ecclesiastical redistributive feasting, and the tabooing of the flesh of certain animals on the other,
demonstrates the unmistakable causal priority of material costs and benefits over spiritual beliefs—not necessarily for all time, but almost certainly for the cases in question.

One more link in this chain remains to be examined: namely, how it happened that in India the neolithic promise of meat for all culminated in the Hindu prescription of meat for none.

In India today only untouchables freely partake of red meat. Observant high-caste Hindus limit their diets to vegetable foods and dairy products. To eat meat is always undesirable, but the worst of all is to eat beef. High-caste Hindus feel about eating beef as an American feels about eating the family poodle. And yet there was a time when meat, especially beef, appealed to the inhabitants of India as much as steak and hamburgers now appeal to the inhabitants of North America.

Village life in India during the neolithic period was based on the production of domestic animals and grain crops. Much like Middle Eastern villagers, the earliest Indians raised cattle, sheep, and goats in combination with wheat, millet, and barley. At about 2500
B.C.
, when the first large settlements began to appear along the Indus River and its tributaries, vegetarianism was still a long way off. Among the ruins of the earliest cities—Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro—half-burned bones of cattle, sheep, and goats are mixed in with the kitchen debris. In the same cities, archaeologists have also found bones of pigs, water buffalo, hens, elephants, and camels.

The cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, notable for their fired-brick buildings and their extensive baths and gardens, seem to have been abandoned sometime after 2000
B.C.
, partly as a result of ecological disasters
involving changes in the course of the river channels upon which they depended for irrigation. In their weakened condition they became vulnerable to “barbarian tribes” moving into India from Persia and Afghanistan. These invaders, known as Aryans, were loosely federated, semimigratory pastoralist-farmers who first settled in the Punjab and later fanned out into the Ganges Valley. They were late bronze-age peoples who spoke a language called Vedic, the parent tongue of Sanskrit, and whose way of life strongly resembled that of the pre-Homeric Greeks, Teutons, and Celts beyond the pale of the centers of state formation in Europe and Southwest Asia. As Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro declined, the invaders took over the best lands, cleared the forests, built permanent villages, and founded a series of petty kingdoms in which they set themselves up as rulers over the region’s indigenous inhabitants.

Our information about what the Aryans ate comes largely from the holy scriptures written in Vedic and Sanskrit during the second half of the first millennium
B.C.
This literature shows that during the early Vedic period—up to 1000
B.C
.—they dined on animal flesh, including beef, frequently and with considerable gusto. Archaeological investigations at Hastinapur also strongly suggest that cattle, buffalo, and sheep were among the animals eaten by these earliest settlers of the Gangetic plain.

Om Prakash, in his authoritative study
Food and Drinks in Ancient India
, sums up the situation in the early Vedic period as follows:

In the later Vedic period,

The later Vedic and early Hindu texts contain many inconsistencies concerning the consumption of beef. Along with numerous descriptions of cattle being used for sacrifice are passages indicating that cows must never be slaughtered and that beef eating should be abandoned altogether. Some authorities—A. N. Bose, for example—claim that these inconsistencies can best be explained by the hypothesis that orthodox Hindu scholars interpolated the anti-beef-eating, anti-cow-slaughtering passages at a later date. Bose feels that “beef was the commonest flesh consumed” throughout most of the first millennium
B.C.
Perhaps a less controversial solution to the contradictions in the sacred texts is that they reflect gradual changes of attitudes over an extended period during which more and more people came to regard the eating of domesticated animals—especially cows and oxen—as an abomination.

What emerges with crystal clarity is that the late Vedic-early Hindu Ganges Valley kingdoms had a priestly caste analogous to the Lévites among the ancient Israelites and the Druids among the Celts. Its members were called Brahmans. The duties of the Brahmans are described in the Sanskrit works known as
Brahmanas
and
sutras
. There is no doubt that early Brahman ritual life, like that of the Druids and Lévites (and the earliest religious specialists of every chiefdom and statelet between Spain and Japan), centered on animal sacrifice. Like their counterparts all over the Old World, the early Brahmans enjoyed a monopoly over the performance of those rituals without which animal flesh could not be eaten. Brahmans, according to the
sutras
, were the only people who could sacrifice animals.

The
sutras
indicate that animals should not be killed except as offerings to the gods and in extending “hospitality to guests” and that “making gifts and receiving gifts” were the special duties of Brahmans. These prescriptions precisely duplicate the regulatory provisions for the consumption of meat characteristic of societies in which feasting and animal sacrifice are one and the same activity. The “guests” honored by early Vedic hospitality were not a handful of friends dropping by for dinner but whole villages and districts. What the
sutras
are telling us, in other words, is that the Brahmans were originally a caste of priests who presided over the ritual aspects of redistributive feasts sponsored by “open-handed” Aryan chiefs and war lords.

After 600
B.C
. the Brahmans and their secular overlords found it increasingly difficult to satisfy the popular demand for animal flesh. Like priests and rulers in the Middle East and elsewhere, they were unable to maintain high rates of animal slaughter and bountiful redistributions without the wasteful eating of animals needed to plow and manure the fields. As a result, meat eating became the privilege of a select group comprised of Brahmans and other high-caste Aryans, while the common peasants, lacking the power to tax or confiscate other people’s animals, had no choice but to preserve
their own domestic stock for traction, milk, and dung production. Thus the Brahmans gradually came to be part of a meat-eating elite whose monopoly over the privilege of slaughtering animals for redistributive feasts had been transformed into a monopoly over the privilege of eating them. Long after ordinary people in northern India had become functional vegetarians, the Hindu upper castes—later the most ardent advocates of meatless diets—continued to dine lustily on beef and other kinds of meat.