The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  In the Minotaur, Crete also had a profusion of bull images and Anne Baring and Jules Cashford make the point that, in ancient Crete (as elsewhere), the king was ritually sacrificed to ensure that the fertility of human, animal and plant life did not diminish with his (the king’s) failing powers, but that, at some stage, the bull was substituted for the king and sacrificed in his place.33 As we shall see in due course, this was an important substitution.

  The goddess culture was a marked feature of the early Bronze Age, say Baring and Cashford, and they trace goddess figures to Anatolia, the Indus Valley, to Egypt and Mesopotamia: Inanna, or Ishtar in Sumeria, Nammu, goddess of the primeval ocean, Ki-Ninhursag, the mother of the gods and humanity, the mother of wild animals and of the herd animals, cow, sheep and goat. (In Sumerian the word for sheepfold, vulva and womb are the same.) The milk of Ninhursag’s sacred herd, kept in the temple precincts and fields, nourished the people.34 Inanna was the Queen of the Earth, of grain and the vine, the date palm, cedar and olive. Inanna and Ishtar were goddesses of sexual love and inspired the practice of temple prostitution. Inanna and Ishtar had consorts in other areas of Mesopotamia called Tammuz and Dumuzi (presumably the same word originally). They were sometimes depicted as ‘Shepherds of the People’, titles that came originally from their relationship to the Mother Goddess as the Holy Shepherdess, though they could also be accompanied by a golden ram.35 Inanna was often shown naked.

  In Egypt, Isis was queen of heaven, earth and the underworld, often shown as cow-headed or with a crown of cow’s horns, and sometimes with her legs parted, giving birth on the back of a pig.36 Nephthys was shown as a serpent goddess and Sekhmet as lion-headed. Nut was the goddess of the sky and the mother of the sun, moon and stars.

  In Babylon, Tiamat was the original mother goddess but the best-known aspect of her is the story as laid down in the Enūma eliš, the Babylonian Creation myth (named after its opening words) and discovered in 1849 by Austin Henry Layard in the ruined library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh (present-day Mosul), Iraq. The version Layard discovered dates to the seventh century BC but the story was first composed between the eighteenth and sixteenth centuries BC, when it was known all over the ancient world. The central element in the story, certainly from our point of view, is the conquest of the primordial Mother Goddess by the sky, wind and sun god, Marduk, who takes the tablets of the law for himself.37

  Her body was distended and her mouth was wide open.

  He released the arrow, it tore her belly,

  It cut through her insides, splitting the heart.

  Having thus subdued her, he extinguished her life.

  He cast down her carcass to stand upon it.

  The lord trod on the legs of Tiamat,

  With his unsparing mace he crushed her skull.38

  The myth may refer to a real battle, when Babylon overcame Sumer, but it also refers to a much more widespread process that took place during the second millennium BC and culminating at the time the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age, after about 1200 BC. This was the almost universal replacement of the great goddess(es) by male gods. This was much more than a change in gender, as we shall see in due course and there were good reasons for it.

  One we have already encountered, at least in an initial sense. The domestication of the horse, the invention of the wheel and then the chariot, which transformed warfare, against a background of developing city-states and empires in the Old World, and which may or may not have developed against a sky that was much more turbulent and disturbing than it is now, created a world where war was much more prevalent – more terrible and more far-reaching – than ever before. In such a context, male values became more important than female values, society becoming more ‘heroic’, with the heroes inevitably being male.

  In addition to all this, there was one other factor, one other way of life which developed roughly speaking between 3000 and 1000 BC and never existed, could not have existed, in the New World. It too played an important role in the demise of the Great Goddess. This was the spread of nomadic pastoralism.

  THE RISE OF THE PASTORAL NOMAD

  As we saw in chapters 7 and 8, beyond the loess belt in north-western Europe, traditional farming – as developed in the Middle East – was more difficult on the more marginal soils. The development of the plough, pulled by oxen, helped enormously but an alternative adaptation was the evolution of pastoralism – farmers who cultivated some fields but also had flocks of herd animals who could graze on land that was not suitable for cereals (in the hills, for example). The initial effect this had on ideology was shown in the development of megaliths, the symbolic purpose of which was also explored in chapter 9. Elsewhere, and especially to the east, there was a more intensive development of this trend.

  One of the more remarkable features of Eurasia – though this is not always appreciated as much as it might be, particularly among the inhabitants of the predominantly maritime nations of western Europe – is the central steppe zone. This area is huge, larger than the continental United States, stretching from the puszta (plains) of Hungary for 10,000 kilometres west to east as far as Mongolia and Manchuria, from the Danube to the Great Wall of China. From north to south it extends for up to 600 kilometres, between 58° and 47° north. The principal characteristic, and the cause of the landscape, says Elena Kuzmina, of Moscow State University, is the ‘continentality’ of the climate and the deficiency of moisture (fewer than 500mm of annual precipitation). This dictates that the prevailing vegetation is comprised of narrow-leaved drought-resistant grasses with well-developed root systems which, when they decay, form soils rich in humus and attract ungulates and rodents (remember this is the very area where many mammals originally evolved – see above, chapter 6).39 This steppe encounters no real obstacles across its vast dimensions, though it is bordered on the north by dense Siberian forests and in the south, as Haim Ofek pointed out, by very high mountain ranges, from the Caucasus (between the Black and the Caspian Seas) to the Altai (in central Asia), and including the Hindu Kush (Afghanistan/Pakistan) and the Pamirs (stretching from Afghanistan to China). At its southern edges there are also a number of deserts of which the most terrible are the Taklamakan and the Gobi.40

  In some ways the steppes are the equivalent of the prairies in North America and the comparison is instructive because the steppes, though dwarfing even the vast reaches of the prairies, also show how much the type of animal – wild or domesticated – can alter the engagement that people have with otherwise similar landscapes.

  In the North American prairies, as we saw in chapter fourteen, the bison was the dominant animal, a sizeable skittish mammal too wild to domesticate, but a valuable source of meat and whose hunting was a form of ritual where, besides providing food, small tribes of hunter-gatherers could come together a few times a year for exchange purposes. This system was stable and endured for millennia, until the arrival of the European. The Eurasian prairies, the steppes, would develop very differently.

  They were in their configuration a vast east-west highway, a second one, in effect running parallel to that other east-west corridor, the southern coastline of Asia, as introduced in chapter 2, and shown in maps 1 and 4, along which people, animals, manufactured objects and ideas travelled, having a profound effect on the lineaments of Eurasian history: for example, on the formation of the Silk Road, and the rise of civilisation in Iran, India and China (the nomads of the steppe introduced wheeled transport – in particular the chariot, the horse, and metallurgy – to China).41

  In the words of A.M. Petrov, the Great Silk Road ‘is by no means just a road . . . It is a huge, fluid historical and cultural space over which, in ancient times and the Middle Ages, the trans-migration between different peoples from the extreme ends of Asia to the Western countries was realized.’42 Fernand Braudel, the French historian of ‘la long durée’, saw the presence of pastoral nomads as a disruptive force, ‘often interrupting periods of slow historical processes, allowing for rapid change and oscill
ation . . . In [an] epoch that seems to epitomize slowness, these people epitomize great rapidity and unexpectedness.’43 Gérard Chaliand agreed – he called the steppes Eurasia’s great ‘zone of turbulence’. We shall, in due course, see how right they all were.

  Pastoralism emerges in arid zones where, says A.M. Khazanov, of the Institute of Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow, it is superior to other forms of agriculture. Initially, on the fringes of the steppes, overlapping with areas of settled agriculturalists, sedentary pastoralism emerged, with herdsmen husbandry (much as in north-west Europe). As the fourth millennium gave way to the third, this type of pastoralism was established between the Volga and the Urals and took precedence over other forms of agriculture. Khazanov says it is difficult to imagine the emergence of pastoralism without domestication of the horse and, since the steppes are the natural home-land of the horse, it is no surprise to find that horse bones comprise 80 per cent of the osteological remains of fourth- and third-millennium BC sites.44

  The crucial change, to full-scale pastoral nomadism, took place, says Khazanov, only in the last half of the second millennium. There are signs that some pastoral nomads started to develop towards urban-isation but abandoned the attempt around 1800 BC. This is when herds grew large, which necessitated great migrations during the year, when dairying developed (because cereal cultivation had been given up), and when excellent horsemanship became the hallmark of what were now pastoral nomads. They also appear to have domesticated the Bactrian camel. Carts carrying their tents might be pulled by up to twenty-two oxen.45

  Nomad comes from the Latin nomas, which means ‘wandering shepherd’.46 And this final change occurred because, during the second millennium, the monsoon was weakening, the climate was drying, provoking nomadism right across the area of the steppe, as far as China, where it was observed of the nomads that ‘some of them do not use cereals for food’.47 Instead, the Chinese used to say, ‘They follow water and grass.’

  Wandering could be extensive. Nomads in north Eurasia, as an example, spent 4–5 months in winter pasture, two months in summer pasture, and 5–6 months travelling between the two.48 Estimates vary as to how many animals a family (of five members) needed in order to survive as pastoral nomads, from eight mares, one stallion, one bull and ten cows (20 large mammals in all) to 30–50 horses, 100 sheep, 20– 50 goats, 15–25 cows (225 in total) to 800 or even 1,500 sheep. In Inner Mongolia studies show that one person can look after 500 sheep if he has a horse.49 The steppes were vast but with herds of such size, and given that one sheep needs one hectare, the nomads’ requirements were equally vast and therein lay the problem.

  Nomadic herds are normally divided into large stock (cows and horses, or camels) and small stock (sheep and goats). In general, small stock was preferred closer to the Middle East, by the peoples who would be called Semitic, large stock was preferred in the deep steppes, where the ‘Aryans’ or Indo-Europeans were established, though there were fewer cattle and horses in Tibet, because it was so high. The steppe was and is for the most part temperate and that was important in determining migration routes. These were for the most part linear and meridional (i.e., north in the summer, south in the winter, the nutrition value of fodder being two-and-a-half times as poor in winter). Routes changed little over centuries and millennia.50

  The three traditional products of pastoral nomadism were (and still are) milk, meat and blood and the emergence of this economic package was important in extending food-production to remote and arid areas where other forms of agriculture couldn’t work. Strabo recorded that ‘even in the Crimea, one of the most fertile areas in the Eurasian steppes, the harvest only yielded thirty-fold, while in Mesopotamia it yielded three-hundred-fold’.51 Even today extensive pastoralism yields more than agriculture does in many areas.

  Of all the domesticated animals, and after the horse, the sheep was perhaps best adapted to the plains because it can graze the ground more closely than other cattle, meaning sheep can get more food from poor areas (though goats are more useful for clearing the tougher vegetation of forests). Sheep are more prolific than goats, producing an average of seven lambs and they can live on drier matter than deer and may even eat soil. By and large they are easy to handle – they flock in herds naturally (lambs play together), they run with goats, and castrated rams give little trouble.52 In excavations, their remains change morphologically most at around 3000 BC when there is a reduction in bone size and horn size. There was a general change in Eurasia from the use of flax for textiles in Neolithic times to wool in the Bronze Age, and we shall note the growing industrial importance of wool later in the book.

  Excavation shows that herd sizes could vary enormously, from 2,000 to 27,000 and that the animals were kept first for their milk and blood and only after that for meat, which was regarded as a prestigious foodstuff, to be consumed only on ritual occasions. That said, when animals were killed, pastoralists tried to do it in the autumn, so as to have fewer mouths to feed during the winter months.53

  Sheep were not widely worshipped – they figure as tribute in Assyria and there were sheep figurines in India and elsewhere. In general the shepherd’s life was regarded as solitary.54 M.L. Ryder tells us that sheep have changed the landscape more than any other animal, partly because pastoral nomads spread them over huge areas but also because they carried the seeds of plants on their wool and so helped them to spread.

  Goats were usually kept with sheep, having been domesticated (in the Anatolian Zagros mountains) at about the same time. Though very similar to sheep, they have three advantages that, in times of difficulty, can be important: their milk has slightly more protein and fat in it than do other milks; goats eat shrubs and small trees, rather than just grassland, as is true of sheep and cows; and their life expectancy (16–18 years) is greater than that of sheep (12–16 years). Goat wool is nowhere near as desirable as sheep wool but the advantages mentioned above (in addition to goat skins, and goat gut, both very useful) may occasionally have been decisive. Since sheep and goats run together quite contentedly it always made sense to have mixed flocks or herds.

  No less than the sheep, the domestication of the bull and the cow has had a profound effect on the development of civilisation. In chapter 8 the importance of ploughing and milking was explored but even before that bulls and cows may have been domesticated for religious reasons. Domesticated cattle throughout the world are descended from a single wild species, Bos primigenius, the recently extinct wild ox or ‘aurochs’. These prehistoric mammals stood two metres high and were three metres long and at their peak they were spread over the entire temperate region of Eurasia, though they never reached Ireland, Scandinavia or the Americas. The world then was wetter (and therefore greener) than today and they inhabited river valleys and marshy forests, becoming complete herbivores, not just grazers, feeding on grass and herbs, tree foliage and even bark.

  Our knowledge of the first human contact with aurochs comes from the great cave paintings, as we have seen, and one theory is that, around 7000 BC, when they were first domesticated, they were chosen because the shape of their horns resembled the moon at certain stages of its regular cycle and so they were looked upon as a symbol of fertility and regeneration.55 They may have been domesticated after the offspring were sacrificed, at which time more docile specimens would have been unconsciously selected. Cattle are naturally gregarious and once a small herd had been created, others would naturally have joined in.

  It is possible that cattle were domesticated in three areas – the Near East, the Indus Valley and the south-eastern Sahara – but everywhere they quickly became valuable sources of wealth and a stylised head of a cow was one of the first signs to be used in the Near Eastern tokens that, as we have seen, led to writing. In Hammurabi’s Code (see above) out of 282 laws twenty-nine of the decipherable entries concern crimes against oxen. Later, in Rome, a man was tried – and exiled – for killing an ox before the end of its working life. From the third millenniu
m BC, zebu cattle (with a hump on their back) evolved to tolerate higher temperatures, more humid environments and were less susceptible to insect-borne infections than taurine cattle. For these reasons, they began to be traded far and wide. The Shang in China famously used the shoulder bones of cattle to foretell the future, cracking the bones with hot rods and interpreting the resulting fissures.

  Bulls were everywhere admired for their strength and fertility, again as we have seen repeatedly, and were worshipped throughout the Near East, Egypt and India. Many kings had bull titles and in India there is a preponderance of bulls on seals and statuettes. Over time, every major culture adopted the Taurus Constellation in the heavens to represent their specific myths. The title of ‘Bull’ was translated into – or adapted to – Greek (Tauros), Latin (Taurus), Sanskrit (Vrishaba), Persia (Gav), and Arabic (Thaur).56 The fullest and best account of bull worship comes from the Rig Veda, the collection of hymns introduced in chapters two and nine, and purportedly written down by conquering Aryans, nomadic pastoralists from inner Asia, who brought their fertility bull-gods into India in the second millennium BC. We are running a little bit ahead of ourselves at this point for, as we shall see, there is considerable controversy as to whether the Aryans ever existed in India and, if so, who exactly they were. But bull and cow worship was (and is) extensive there, as it was in many other civilisations around the Mediterranean, such as in Crete, Greece and ancient Rome, where the taurobolium was a temple dedicated to the sacrifice of bulls.