The Genesis of the Near Eastern Pig
March 2020 | Vol. 8.3
By Max Price
Pork, banned by the Torah and Quran, is more likely to inspire disgust than appetite in the modern Near East. Yet it was here that hunter-gatherers first domesticated pigs from wild boar. How did this unique animal embark on the long journey from livestock to taboo? Over the past two decades, zooarchaeology, the analysis of animal remains from archaeological sites, has begun to decode the early history of pigs in the Near East.
Map of Near East showing center of pig domestication (c. 8000 BCE) and key sites mentioned in text. Map courtesy of author.
From Wild Boar to Domestic Pig
Domestication is a mutualistic relationship between humans and animals. When humans begin to manage animals as property rather than prey, some species respond by developing heritable features not found in nature. These include greater docility, varying coat colors, and smaller brains, bones, and teeth – transformations that make animals better livestock and more dependent on humans.
This process began in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (c. 9700-7000 BCE) in the region straddling the border between Syria and Turkey. At that time, the onset of the Holocene brought warmer and wetter conditions, inspiring people to settle permanently into villages. Populations grew, as did the intensity with which hunter-gatherers manipulated their local environments to increase the reliability and availability of food resources. Over time, these efforts would lead to the domestication of plants and four animal species: sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs.
Timeline of Near Eastern (pre-)history and key dates
For pigs, the process of domestication probably began as a result of two changes. First, wild boar found Neolithic villages, with their stores of cereal grains and garbage, attractive places for foraging food. At the same time, beginning around 9700 BCE, Neolithic people began to hunt wild boar with greater frequency – a departure from boar-avoiding hunting tactics of their Paleolithic ancestors. Domestic dogs, which appeared in the Near East around 11,000 BCE, were probably key elements of these hunts.
To make pork more reliable and available, humans began to interfere with wild boar populations. We don’t understand this process entirely. But we do know that people transported wild boar on boats in an effort to stock Cyprus with game. Back on the mainland, at Turkish sites such as Hallan Çemi (c.9500 BCE) and Çayönü Tepesi (c.9500-6500 BCE), unusually high proportions of piglet bones perhaps reflect initial attempts to tame or breed wild boar. Over the course of centuries, these management strategies evolved to the point where once free-living wild boar were now cared for and managed by humans. This set in motion the evolution of a new type of animal: domestic pigs.
By about 8000 BCE, the first clear signatures of domestication took root. Zooarchaeologists have been able to document this by measuring the reduction in the size of pig teeth and bones. There must also have been major behavioral changes in these animals that made them more docile and easier to handle. But these biological adaptations remain, at the moment, invisible to zooarchaeologists.
Size decrease in pig teeth during the Neolithic at three archaeological sites. Mean and distribution of measurements are plotted on a logarithmic scale relative to the average size of modern wild boar from Turkey. Bands on the left show typical size ranges for wild and domestic animals. Domestic pigs evolved gradually, with clear evidence for them by 8000-7500 BCE.
In the millennia that followed, pork production proved a successful component of village life. By 7000 BCE, people in neighboring regions adopted pig husbandry. Domestic pigs spread across the Old World. By around 5000 BCE, domestic pigs represented anywhere from 15-50% of the animals eaten in villages from southern Europe to Egypt to Mesopotamia.
Pigs Between Rich and Poor, Urbanized and Ruralized
Pigs are unique when placed alongside sheep, goats, and cattle. They are more intelligent and can eat a wider variety of food. However, they require lots of water and cannot subsist solely on grasses. These limitations restricted their roles in the arid regions of the Near East. More importantly, pigs do not provide storable and valuable commodities, such as milk, wool, or hair that can be spun into textiles. Unlike cattle, pigs cannot plow fields and thereby increase another valuable commodity: grain. In fact, domestic pigs often consume a significant amount of grain.
The lack of commodifiable products further isolated pigs in the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age (c. 5000-1200 BCE). The earlier part of this period saw people increasingly focus on exploiting milk, wool, and traction power for exchange. This economic development transformed sheep, goats, and cattle from sources of calories to wealth. In many cases, they literally became wealth. Bronze Age temples and palaces – the “institutions” of ancient Near Eastern economies – raised, bred, and taxed massive numbers of these animals, but not pigs.
Pigs, however, did find a place in cities, which emerged c. 3700 BCE. Urban settings, with their abundant water and waste, offer ideal environments to pigs. Pigs were especially important to the urban poor, offering a means to produce meat on limited resources, while also avoiding taxation. For this reason, the Bronze Age was an Age of Pork in Mesopotamian, Egypt, and Anatolian cities.
Yet in those regions where cities were small or absent, pigs were less common. This was especially the case in the Levant, where a steady erosion of pork consumption beginning around 3000 BCE indicates that herders gave up pigs to focus on wealth-bearing animals.
Proportions of pigs in southern Levantine archaeological faunal assemblages from the 5th through 2nd millennia BC. Pigs gradually replaced by sheep, goats, and cattle over the course of the Bronze Age in the Levant.
Thus, it was the economic developments involving animals, and the contradictions of class-based urban life, that helped create regionalized traditions of pork consumption. People in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean ate a lot of pork. Those in the Levant ate little. These traditions, enmeshed into the fabric of everyday life, would later lend themselves as markers of difference between groups of people, such as the Israelites (native to the Levant) and the Philistines (migrants from the Aegean) around 1200 BCE.
Galvanized in this manner, pork took on a new meaning. It became an indicator of “us” vs. “them” in Philistine-Israelite conflicts. Drawing on this, and with the likely intent of crystallizing ethnic traditions to shore up political power, the Biblical authors (writing in the early-mid-1st millennium BCE) declared pigs an abomination.
We know that pigs’ journey from domestication to taboo involved large-scale processes (e.g., climate change and urbanization) and human decisions (e.g., the pursuit of wealth-bearing animals instead of pigs). But major questions remain unanswered. For example, how exactly did the earliest pig farmers raise their stock? How did pigs evolve in urban environments? How did the spread of Islamic empires affect how people raised pigs? Zooarchaeologists, employing ancient DNA, stable isotopic analysis, and biometrics, hope to answer these questions and shed further light on this unusual animal.
How to cite this article:
Price, M. 2020. “The Genesis of the Near Eastern Pig”, The Ancient Near East Today 8.3. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/near-eastern-pig/.
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