From Paleolithic Wild Boar to Neolithic Pigs

Wild boar are dangerous animals that Paleolithic peoples hunted infrequently for the first million years of human-suid contact. Projectile weapons, nets, and the domestication of dogs allowed Natufian hunter-gatherers (12,500–9700 BC) to find in wild boar a reliable source of food. By the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (9700–8500 BC), human populations had developed close relationships with local wild boar. Intensive hunting or perhaps game management took place at Hallan Çemi in Anatolia, and the introduction of wild boar to Cyprus by at latest 9400 BC indicates the willingness of humans to capture and transport wild boar. At the same time, the presence of sedentary villages and the waste they produced likely attracted wild boar to human habitats. These early relationships between people and suids—game management and commensalism—evolved over the course of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic into full-fledged animal husbandry that, by around 7500 BC, had selected for domestic pigs.

The Coming of the Taboo: Pigs in the Iron Age

Zooarchaeological evidence from the Iron Age southern Levant allows the reconstruction of a taboo among the ancient Israelites, which developed in large part as a reaction against the food habits of the Philistines. This taboo emerged more powerfully during the writing of the Torah in Judah in the late 8th–7th century BC. Biblical writers strove to develop an image of a heroic Israelite past as part of a project to create a sense of ethnic togetherness among Hebrew-speaking peoples. They drew upon two, possibly three, sources of inspiration. The first was a traditional diet focused on ruminant products and lacking in pork; the second, the existing (but at that point waning) pig taboo. The third element, less clear, was the taboo on pigs that applied to priests and temples in other parts of the Near East. The biblical authors found these existing traditions helpful in creating a picture of a glorious pastoral ancestry.

Urban Swine and Ritual Pigs in the Bronze Age

The elite-run institutions (temples and palaces) of Bronze Age societies sought to maximize the production of storable, taxable, and tradable agricultural commodities—especially grain and wool. This brought the secondary products revolution to full fruition and solidified the transformation of cattle, sheep, and goats into animals that embodied wealth. Later this privilege extended to equids for their role in warfare. While institutional forms of wealth excluded pigs, urbanism offered a new and ideal ecological niche for pig husbandry. Pigs became especially important among the urban lower classes, perhaps as a type of “informal economy.” Yet in regions without large cities or extant traditions of eating pork, pig husbandry failed to thrive. The Levant, in particular, saw the gradual erosion of pig husbandry in favor of wealth-bearing livestock husbandry. At the same time, pigs’ ritual roles began to shift. Whereas once the sacrifice of swine was thought to ensure fertility, communication with the dead, and the absolution of sin, by the Late Bronze Age pigs connoted impurity.

The Power of Pigs

This introductory chapter outlines the themes of the book. Pigs have long played important roles in the cultures of the Near East, especially in times of ethnoreligious conflict. The mass cull in 2009 of swine owned by the Zabaleen in Cairo is one of the most recent examples. Examining pigs provides a lens into the past, a unique means of studying Near Eastern cultures. Whereas previous scholarship has been content to study the pig in specific cultural contexts, often attempting to explain its history with reference to a single cultural or environmental process, this book covers the history of the pig from before its domestication to the present day. By adopting this long-term, wide-reaching perspective, I advance the argument that pigs, and the taboos placed upon them, can be understood only as evolving cultural elements.

Clash of Cultures in the Classical Period

The influence of Greek and Roman culture on the Near East, especially after Alexander’s conquests, brought a revival of pig husbandry, which had largely been lost in the Iron Age. Pigs and pork played fundamental roles in Greek and Roman culture—in the economy, in the diet, and in ritual. Greek and, especially, Roman writers celebrated pigs and pork. Zooarchaeological data indicate a surge in pig production in Near Eastern cities. But Greco-Roman love of pigs and pork ran into conflict with Jewish populations in the Levant. The ingestion of pork became entangled in the political and ethnic conflicts playing out between Jews and their Greek and Roman imperial masters. It became a metonym for submission; its avoidance a symbol of resistance. Pork avoidance was thus elevated from one of many taboos codified in Leviticus to a practice definitive of Jewish identity. Pork consumption also became a way for Christians to reject Judaism.

Animals in a Landscape

The geography of the Near East is laid out with specific reference to the environments most favorable to Sus scrofa, or pigs and wild boar—woodlands, marshes, and human settlements. Wild boar are nonruminating artiodactyls that evolved in Southeast Asia 10–5.3 million years ago. The domestication of pigs from wild boar developed in China and the Near East over a period of 10,000 years. Domestication is a biological process driven by human culture. It occurs when humans take control of animals, perceiving them as property, and animals develop genetic adaptations in response to human management. Humans have devised a number of methods for keeping pigs, generally ranging from the extensive (allowing pigs to roam the countryside or forests) to intensive (confining pigs to pens). Because of their uniqueness as a livestock species, several “pig principles” have been identified and have guided the study of pigs in the Near East.

The Complexity of Swine

The story of swine in the Near East reveals a complex evolution of one cultural element. Several processes stand out—the domestication of pigs from wild boar in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic and their occasionally haphazard integration into agricultural systems; the evolving ritual roles of pigs, especially during the Bronze Age; the economic roles that pigs played (or did not play) in state-level societies; and, ultimately, the formation and evolution of the pig taboo. The long and complex evolution of the pig taboo in Judaism and Islam has created a tradition that has, in some ways, developed a life of its own, trapping the people of the Near East and around the globe into a peculiar relationship with swine.

Out of the Cradle

Pigs, sheep, goats, and cattle constituted the package of domesticated animals that spread throughout the Near East, and later to Central and South Asia, Europe, and Africa. But domestic pig husbandry spread more slowly, often appearing centuries or even millennia after the domestication of ruminants. Environmental and cultural factors were likely responsible for this slow spread. During the Late Neolithic, people innovated agriculture and livestock-keeping strategies. These included intensive forms of pig husbandry, perhaps in order to supply pork for feasts. In addition, by the Chalcolithic period, people intensified ruminant management in order to maximize the exploitation of secondary products. This led to the “secondary products revolution.” As a result, while the other barnyard animals became increasingly tied to wealth in the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age—cattle for their ability to provide traction power, sheep and goats for their wool/hair—pigs were excluded from this development.

Islam and the Modern Period

The development and rapid spread of Islam in the 7th century AD laid the groundwork for the modern Near East. Islam’s early thinkers attempted to position their new religion as superior by threading the needle between Christianity and Judaism. Islam adopted a much more restricted version of the food taboos laid out in the Torah. The taboo on pork was one of the few the Quran, and it ultimately spelled the end of pig husbandry in much of the Near East. Nevertheless, pig husbandry and pork consumption have continued to this day, especially among Christian communities. The taboo also became increasingly tied to ethnoreligious intolerance and acts of hatred in the medieval and modern periods. The weaponization of pork, which can be traced at its earliest to the Classical period, became increasingly prevalent, as did the pejorative association of Christians with swine.

Theorizing the Taboo

Taboos are types of avoidance behavior surrounded by a high degree of social energy and sewn into the cultural fabric through their appeal to a cosmological moral order. Taboos exist on the cultural level, but often, as in the case of the pig taboo, are reproduced through the emotion of disgust. Many have sought to explain the origins of the pig taboo. While their theories hold some kernel of wisdom about the pig taboo in Judaism and Islam, they are ultimately unsatisfactory because they fail to account for its evolution. A theory of the taboo must account for the conditions that prepare the ground for it to develop, its early history, and its evolution over the long term.