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Painted model, found at Abydos (near Luxor), Egypt
3500 BC
Mention excavation in Egypt, and most of us see ourselves entering Tutankhamun’s tomb, discovering the hidden treasures of the pharaohs and at a stroke rewriting history. Aspiring archaeologists should be warned that this happens only very rarely. Most archaeology is a slow, dirty business, followed by an even slower recording of what has been found. And the tone of archaeological reports has a deliberate, academic, almost clerical dryness, far removed from the riotous swagger of Indiana Jones.
In 1900 a member of the Egypt Exploration Society excavated a grave in southern Egypt. He soberly labelled his discovery Grave A23 and noted the contents:
Body, male. Baton of clay painted in red stripes, with imitation mace-head of clay. Small red pottery box, four-sided, 9 inches × 6 inches. Leg bones of small animal. Pots and stand of 4 clay cows.
The four horned cows stand side by side upon fertile land. They’ve been grazing on their simulated patch of grass for about five and a half thousand years. That makes them really ancient Egyptian, more ancient even than the pharaohs or the pyramids. These four little clay cows, hand-moulded out of a single lump of Nile river clay, are a long way from the glamour of the pharaohs, but you could argue that cows and what they represent have been far more important to human history. Babies have been reared on their milk, temples have been built to them, whole societies have been fed by them, economies have been built on them. Our world would have been a different and a duller place without the cow.
On these models you can still see faint traces of black and white paint applied after the clay had been lightly baked, making them like toy farm animals of the sort many of us played with as children. They stand only a few centimetres high, and the clay base that they share is roughly the size of a dinner plate. Like other objects we will encounter, the presence of these artefacts in Grave A23, where they were buried with a man in a cemetery near the small village 0f El Amra in southern Egypt, speaks of the consequences of climate change and human responses to it.
All of the objects found in this grave were intended to be useful in another world, and, in a way never imagined by the people who placed them there, they are. But they’re useful for us, not for the dead. They allow us profound insights into remote societies, because the way of death casts light on the way of life of those people. They give us some idea not just of what people did but of what they thought and believed.
Most of what we know about early Egypt, before the time of the pharaohs and the hieroglyphs, is based on burial objects like these little cows. They come from a time when Egypt was populated only by small farming communities living along the Nile Valley. Compared to the spectacular gold artefacts and tomb ornaments of later Egypt, these little clay cows are modest. Funerals at that point were simpler; they didn’t involve embalming or mummifying, a practice that wouldn’t come for another thousand years.
The owner of our four clay cows would have been laid in an oval pit, in a crouched position and lying on a mat of rushes, facing the setting sun. And around him were his grave goods – items of value for his journey into the afterlife. Cow models like this one are quite common, so we can be quite confident that cows must have played a significant part in Egyptian daily life – such a significant part that they couldn’t be left behind when the owner passed through death and on into the afterlife. How did this humble beast become so important to human beings?
The story begins more than 9,000 years ago, in the vast expanses of the Sahara. Then, instead of today’s landscape of arid desert, the Sahara was a lush, open savannah with gazelles, giraffes, zebras, elephants and wild cattle roaming through it – happy hunting for humans. But around 8,000 years ago the rains that nourished this landscape dried up. Without rain, the land began to turn into the desert that we know today, leaving people and animals to seek ever-dwindling sources of water. This dramatic change of environment meant that people had to find an alternative to hunting. Of all the different animals these humans had hunted, only one could be tamed: cattle.
Somehow they found a way to tame wild cattle. They no longer had to chase them down, one by one, for food; instead they learnt how to gather and manage herds, with which they travelled and from which they could live. Cows became almost literally the lifeblood of these new communities. The needs of fresh water and pasture for the cattle now determined the very rhythm of life, as both human and animal activity became ever more intertwined.
What role did these early Egyptian cattle play in this sort of society? What did they keep cows for? Professor Fekri Hassan has excavated and studied many of these early Egyptian graves, and the villages associated with them. He and his colleagues found remains of animal enclosures, as well as evidence for the consumption of cattle. They found the bones of these animals. And he concludes that these particular items, these four models of cattle, were probably produced a millennium or more after cattle were introduced into Egypt.
Study of the cattle bones shows the ages at which the animals were killed. Surprisingly, many of them were old, too old if they were being kept only for food. So unless the early Egyptians enjoyed tough steak, these were not in our sense beef cattle. They must have been kept alive for other reasons – perhaps to carry water or possessions on journeys. But it seems more likely they were tapped for blood, which, if it is drunk or added to vegetable stews, provides essential extra protein. This is something we find in many parts of the world, and it is still done today by the nomadic peoples in Kenya.
Our four cows may well therefore represent a walking blood-bank. We can rule out what seems at first sight the more obvious answer, that they were dairy cows, because for several reasons milk was unfortunately off the menu. Not only did these early domesticated cows produce very little milk but, more importantly for humans, getting nutrition by drinking cows’ milk is an acquired skill. Martin Jones is an expert in the archaeology of food:
There is a range of other foods that our distant ancestors would not have eaten as readily as we do. Humans evolved the capacity to tolerate drinking milk as adults after cattle were domesticated, presumably because the ability to gain nutrients from cows’ milk helped individuals to survive and to pass on that ability to their children. But even today a great number of modern peoples around the world can’t tolerate drinking milk as adults.
So drinking cows’ milk would probably have made these early Egyptians very ill, but over centuries their descendants and many other populations eventually adapted to it. It is a pattern repeated across the world: substances that are initially very hard for us to digest become, by slow adaptation, central to our diet. We are often told that we are what we eat; it might be truer to say that we are what our ancestors, with great difficulty, learnt to eat.
In early Egypt, cows were probably also kept as a kind of insurance policy. If crops were damaged by fire, communities could always fall back on the cow for nourishment as a last resort; perhaps not the best thing to eat, but always there. They were also socially and ceremonially significant, but, as Fekri Hassan explains, their importance went even deeper:
Cattle have always had religious significance, both the bulls and the cows. In the desert a cow was the source of life, and we have many representations in rock art where we see cows with their calves in a more-or-less religious scene. We also see human female figurines, also modelled from clay, with raised arms as if they were horns. It seems that cattle were quite important in religious ideology.
The cattle from Grave A23 don’t show any outward signs of being particularly special. On closer inspection, however, they don’t look like the cows you find on the farm today, anywhere across Europe, North America or even modern Egypt. Their horns are strikingly different – they curve forwards and are much lower than those of any cows that we know.
All the cows alive in the world today descend from Asian stock. Our Egyptian model cows look different from the ones we know today because early Egyptian cows were descended from native African cattle, which have now become extinct.
Along the Nile Valley, the cow, a source of blood, meat, security and energy, eventually transformed human existence and became such a central part of Egyptian life that it was widely venerated. Whether actual cow worship started as early as the time of our little model is still a matter of debate, but in later Egyptian mythology the cow takes on a prominent role in religion, as the powerful cow-goddess Bat. She is typically shown with the face of a woman and the ears and horns of a cow. And the clearest sign of just how far cattle rose in status over the centuries is that Egyptian kings were subsequently honoured with the title ‘Bull of his Mother’. The cow had come to be seen as the creator of the pharaohs.