The Intimate Bond by Brian Fagan

symbiotic relationship between the Nuer and their cattle was one of common interests, and of close physical contact.
    During the 1930s, the herders ranged over an enormous tract of open country, their movements determined by variations in the vegetation and water supplies. During the rainy season, from April to August, the people moved out into small camps. During the height of the dry season, they congregated in larger settlements near permanent water. During the flood season, camps lay on low mounds or on higher ground with enough space for humans and animals, as it is dangerous for cattle to stand in water for long periods of time. Today, Nuer cattle herding is a shadow of its former self, a victim of rising populations, political and social unrest, civil war in southern Sudan, and rampant modernization. Many Nuer now live in Nebraska. 12
    Change was afoot long before the twentieth century. Stock raising for cities, especially of goats and sheep, developed on a rapidly growing scale during the fourth millennium BCE . The ancient stockyards that supplied the relentless maw of cities, temples, and rulers became places where animals were statistics of numbers and weight rather than measures of social importance. As subsistence herding of farm animals gave way to a tapestry of religious ideologies, we find an ambivalence about humans and their relationships with beasts that would have been unthinkable for the Nuer.

CHAPTER 7

    â€œWild Bull on the Rampage”
    â€œHe walks around in the enclosure of Uruk / Like a wild bull he makes himself mighty, head raised [over others].” Thus reads the mythic Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, commemorated in an epic that is one of the classics of ancient literature. He was “the brave scion of [the city of Uruk], wild bull on the rampage.” His genealogy proclaimed him “suckling of the august Wild-Cow, the goddess Ninsun.” He “lords it over the men like a wild bull,” capable of shattering established order, while at the same time he is shepherd of the people. 1
The Epic of Gilgamesh
is far more than a tale of heroes. It’s an ideological document, an exploration of a king’s role in society where the divine and the human are interconnected and where rulers and priests sacrifice to the deities and appease them, using their unique knowledge and ritual acts to do so. Many of the ideas about animals laid out in the epic reflect the then-still-close links between animals, humans, and the forces of the supernatural world.
    By Gilgamesh’s time, there was an emerging symbolic ambiguity expressed in the daily life of cattle herds. Cows were symbols of the nurturing earth mother, sustainer of life. Lions and griffins had long been symbols of leadership, of prowess in the chase and in war. Inevitably, the bull was also seen as icon of masculine power, a fierce beast but the protector of its herd. Its ferocity implied connections with the powers of the wild and the unexplained. Such thinking became critical to the ways in which early rulers such as Gilgamesh projected their authority. Bulls possessed explosive power. They became the avatar of gods and rulers; the divine power of the bull reinforced that of the king. These beliefs shaped the religious ideas of Mediterranean society for many centuries. At the same time, the development of the wheeled cart andthe plow, perhaps in the fourth millennium BCE in Mesopotamia, introduced another element: the use of cattle as draft animals.
    Divine Kings, Holy Bulls
    By the fourth millennium, we can discern a divergence between cattle as numinous—symbols of power and sacrificial victims—and their more pragmatic role as draft animals pulling plows and transporting loads, and as sources of meat. The identification of rulers with bulls provided the leaders with respect and uncontrollable might. Egyptian pharaohs identified themselves with the divine bull. The Egyptians revered bulls through the cult of Osiris,