In Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, cattle served humans as objects of ritual and sources of meat, milk, and draft power, and in all three civilizations, they were the objects of much more intensive human attention than were sheep or goats. Draft animals were indispensable for working irrigated plots in desert and semiarid regions. Cattle required water and grass and needed considerable care. Using cattle for meat seems to have been less important than for draft. During the third Ur dynasty (2112-2004 B. C.), cattle products supplied only 10 percent of total meat needs (Adams 1981). In Mesopotamia, state authority was involved in the organization of cattle keeping, and cattle were called by different terms depending on their function (Zeder 1991).
Ritual use of cattle has been a Eurasian continuity. In ancient Egypt, cattle were regarded as sacred by several cults, particularly that of the goddess Isis, and in Crete, friezes more than 4,000 years old display evidence of bovine importance. At the palace of Minos, for example, the royal couple dressed up as a bull and a cow, and the Minoans also watched specially trained athletes who jousted bulls with acrobatic daring. The Phoenician cult of Baal had a god of fertility represented as a bull - a cult which spread to their colonies as far west as present-day Spain. The early Hebrews worshiped the bull, and in Canaan, the Baal cult was fused with the worship of Yahweh. During King Solomon’s reign, the temple housed bulls of bronze and horned sculptures.
In classical antiquity, there is a rich history of bulls offered in ritual sacrifice. Some of these rituals in Greece provided a mechanism to reaffirm the social hierarchy of the polls. Sacred cattle were kept at Eleu-sis where Demeter was worshiped. In ancient Rome, a white bull was sacrificed at the annual Feriae Lati-nae, and its meat was distributed in proportion to the relative importance of the member cities of the Latin League. In Europe and the Middle East, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all suppressed such sacred cattle cults as pagan manifestations that competed with their messages, although a lingering remnant is the contemporary Spanish bullfight, which reenacts a sacrifice to symbolize the eternal struggle between humans and nature. In its evolution, bullfighting lost its obvious religious content, which may explain its survival through 2,000 years of Christianity.
Europe
The westward diffusion of cattle throughout Europe was tied to the invention of the wooden plow. The harnessing of a powerful animal to that device made it possible to greatly extend cultivation without a corresponding increase in human population. At the same time, in any one community it freed surplus labor for other activities, which enabled the group to develop greater socioeconomic complexity. Castration of the bull to create an ox was a key element in the spread of the plow. Steady and strong - but docile - the ox made enormous contributions to agriculture. Osteometric evidence shows that oxen were already in use during the fourth millennium B. C., and a figure from Nemea in Greece shows yoked oxen dating from the third millennium B. C. (PuUen 1992).
Farther north in Europe, where wet summers provided abundant forage, cattle had a bigger role to play in livestock husbandry. Following the Middle Ages, an appetite for beef grew, and, in fact, the Europeans’ frenetic quest for spices was related to their growing carnivorous tastes. Until the late eighteenth century, cattle were the most important livestock in the uplands of the British Isles, where they grazed mainly on commonly owned natural pastures and secondarily were fed hay cut and stored for winter use. Other animals - sheep, pigs, goats, and horses - were made a part of a land-use system that also favored dairying and the cultivation of grains.
The relative isolation of each region resulted in locally limited gene pools for B. taurus, which led to different cattle phenotypes. Three of these, Aberdeen Angus, Shorthorn, and Hereford, have diffused overseas to become modern ranching stock in the Americas; other breeds, such as Devon, Skye, Galloway, Kerry, and Durham, are now rare. Characteristic of British livestock tradition was the close management and selective breeding that imparted a generally docile behavior to the animal. Fat cattle were the aesthetic ideal but also a practical outcome of the high value placed on tallow. Emphasis on pure bloodlines reflected, in part, competition among the landed gentry to produce the best animals, and, in fact, purebred cattle became a symbol of the British ruling class that dominated the world in the nineteenth century. Moreover, that class extended its insistence on purity to its own members as a way of separating the rulers from the ruled in the vast British Empire.
Africa
African bovines kept by humans are usually presumed to have originated as domesticated animals in southwestern Asia, with cattle funneled into Africa through the Sinai Peninsula and, possibly, the Straits of Bab-el Mandeb across the Red Sea, eventually spreading over vast areas of the continent. There is, however, an alternative explanation anchored in the possibility of an independent domestication of cattle in. Africa. Evidence that this may have been the case has been found in the northern Sahara, in Algeria, where cave paintings dating from 5,000 to 6,000 years ago indicate a pastoral way of life based on domesticated cattle (Simoons 1971). More recently, an argument has been made for independent cattle domestication in the eastern Sahara as well (Close and Wendorf 1992). Bovid bones found in faunal assemblages have been interpreted to be the remains of domesticated stock kept for milk and blood. Deep wells, dated from the ninth millennium B. C., provided the water without which these cattle could not have survived.
In Africa, more than on any other continent, cattle raising follows a paleotechnic, precapitalistic mode that depends on the natural vegetation of common lands. The transcendental importance of cattle is most apparent in the sub-Saharan eastern half of the continent, where more than 80 million head may be found in an arc across Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Numbers would be much higher than that if nagana disease (spread by tsetse flies) did not make large areas unsuitable for cattle. The ethnographic significance of this geographic concentration was realized only after Melville Herskovits (1926) published his landmark study on the “cattle complex” in East Africa. Subsequent research among different tribal groups - the Karamajong, Nandi, Dodot, Masai, Pakot, and Turkana, among others - validated his contentions of the centrality of cattle in East. African life.
Some groups are strongly pastoralist, others may also engage in agriculture. In either case, cattle, whose prestige value surpasses their economic contribution, dominate the pastoral life as well as the social and spiritual activities of each group. Every animal is named and categorized: Among the Masai, for example, each individual animal can be classified according to its matriarchal bovine lineage, a spatial pattern organized by households, and a color/age/sex physical description. A major reason for the naming of cattle in East Africa is that it manifests the affection felt toward bovines as members of the family.
Native religion in East Africa involves cattle sacrifice. Bruce Lincoln (1981) has explained this practice in terms of a “cattle cycle,” in which a celestial deity gave cattle to his people. When these animals were stolen by an enemy group (less common today), warriors were enlisted to recover the stolen cattle. The cycle was completed when priests subsequently sacrificed some of the cattle in order to propitiate the celestial deity.
A textbook example of how central cattle can be to the material and social existence of a people can be seen in the Nuer people of the Sudan (Cranstone 1969). Their language is rich in terms that describe and categorize cattle by horn shape, hide color, and age. Milk is a staple food, along with millet, and cattle blood is consumed. Rawhide provides tongs, drums, shields, and bedding, and cattle bones become scrapers, pounders, and beaters. The horns are used to make spoons and spearheads. Cattle dung can be a fuel, but it is also employed in plastering walls, dressing wounds, and, when dried, as a tooth powder. Cow urine is used in washing, cheese making, and dressing skins. The meat and fat of cattle are eaten, but the ritual involved in the slaughter is as important as the food.
Fewer cattle are kept in West. Africa than in East Africa, in part because it embraces more desert and forest. The relative importance of cattle varies from tribe to tribe. For example, a dearth of grass and water in the southern Sahara encourages the Tuareg to herd many more goats than cattle, but farther south in the Sahel zone, the Fulani (or Peul) people have become cattle specialists with a spiritual link to their bovines. Each nuclear family owns a herd and knows each animal by name. The Fulani have solved the problem of forage through a symbiosis with their agricultural neighbors to the south. In the dry season, they move their herds south to graze on the stubble of harvested fields. In recompense, the cattle leave manure as fertilizer. Like the tribal peoples of East Africa, the Fulani measure prestige in terms of numbers of animals. They use common pastures, but overstocking has led to range deterioration. One solution for this problem would be the introduction of a commercial system to regularly market young cattle.
World History
