Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (6 page)

One of the most striking figures is a clay man holding a fowl-like bird calmly in his arms, up against his chest, as men on the subcontinent still do before a cockfight. A rooster spur found at Harappa and a clay seal with what may be two roosters facing each other are
circumstantial evidence that cockfighting, still popular in India and Pakistan today, was practiced four millennia ago. Some southern Indian traditions combine cockfighting with religious rituals associated with a mother goddess that may be of ancient origin.

Strict Hindus forbid meat eating, and the specific taboo on the bird may stretch back to a time when the animal, like the cow, was considered especially sacred. But recent analysis of Indus cookware shows that they had most of the ingredients they needed for a good chicken curry, a term that likely derives from
kari
, the word for “sauce” in the South Indian language of Tamil. Baffled by that region's wide variety of savory dishes, seventeenth-century British traders lumped them all under the term
curry
. A curry, as the Brits defined it, was a mélange of onion, ginger, turmeric, garlic, pepper, chilies, coriander, cumin, and other spices cooked with shellfish, meat, or vegetables. But no one knew how old curry might be.

Working with other Indian and American archaeologists, the archaeologist Arunima Kashyap, then at Washington State University in Vancouver, applied novel methods for pinpointing the elusive remains from old cooking pots found at Shinde's site. They also obtained human teeth from a nearby cemetery dating back to the same era. Back in her lab Kashyap examined the samples using a technique called starch grain analysis. Starch is the main way that plants store energy, and tiny amounts of it can remain long after the plant itself has deteriorated. If a plant was heated—cooked in one of the tandoori-­style ovens often found at Indus sites, for example—then its tiny microscopic ­remains can be identified, since each plant species leaves its own specific molecular signature. To a layperson peering through a microscope, those remains look like random blobs. But to a careful researcher, they tell the story of what a cook dropped into the dinner pot forty-five hundred years ago.

Examining the human teeth and the pot residue, Kashyap spotted the telltale signs of turmeric and ginger, two key ingredients of a typical curry. Wanting to be sure, she and a colleague abandoned the lab for her kitchen. Using traditional recipes, they cooked the dishes and then examined the residues to see how they broke down. The
results matched what they had unearthed in the field, confirming that they had found the oldest examples of ginger and turmeric and the first spices from the Indus era. Ancient cow teeth from Harappa also showed signs of ginger and turmeric. The Indus people may have done what villagers still do and placed leftovers outside their homes for wandering cows to munch on.

And what would curry be without a side of rice? Archaeologists once thought that Indus farmers were restricted to a few grains like wheat and barley. Working with colleagues at two ancient sites near Delhi, the Cambridge University archaeologist Jennifer Bates found remains of rice, lentils, and mung beans. The rice discovery was a particular surprise, since the grain was long thought to have arrived only at the end of the Indus civilization. In fact, inhabitants of one village appear to have preferred rice to wheat and barley, though millet was their favorite grain. Shinde thinks that all the important ingredients were there for one of the most common dishes today in any Indian restaurant, and other archaeologists suspect that many of the traditions developed in the Indus era—religious, social, and ­technological—continued in later Indian civilizations, including tandoori chicken.

With all its exotic ingredients, curry took thousands of years to catch on in the Middle East and Europe, but the adaptable chicken was poised during this age of the first great civilizations to make its first leap to the West. At an Indus site called Lothal on the western edge of India, archaeologists uncovered chickenlike bones and personal seals owned by merchants who lived along the far-off Persian Gulf. In the middle of town, now excavated, is an enormous brick-lined reservoir, which many researchers believe was an artificial harbor. Nearby were warehouses, a bead factory, and a metalworking area.

Lothal was once a thriving center of the earliest oceangoing trade. From here, sailors could strike out across the Arabian Sea and cover a thousand miles of open ocean using the monsoon winds off the coast of Arabia, and then work their way up the Persian Gulf to the busy wharves of the Mesopotamian metropolis of Ur, then the largest, wealthiest, and most cosmopolitan city on earth.

The merchant paces back and forth impatiently on the busy quay. His large wooden ship, sails furled, is tied to the dock as a government bureaucrat methodically records every item that the sweating stevedores bring up from the packed hold. The smell of local mutton from the nearby food stalls mixes with the aroma of exotic spices. Between loads, the clerk glances at a bird in the wicker cage in the warehouse shade. “What do we call that?” he asks. The merchant shrugs—he knows nothing about birds—and the bureaucrat uses his pointed reed to impress symbols on a wet clay tablet as the next case of goods is set down. Once the documentation is complete, the merchant's first stop is the royal palace on a high mound above the harbor of Mesopotamia's great city of Ur. King Ibbi-Sin has a pleasure garden full of exotic animals, and he is sure to be pleased by the richly colored bird.

According to Genesis, Abraham, the legendary father of the Israelites, left his home and family in Ur for the greener pastures of Canaan at about this time. He was an exception. The city in 2000 BC drew traders from distant lands and women from local villages looking for work in its busy textile mills. With its huge temples and palaces and its busy wharves on the Euphrates River, which leads to the Persian Gulf, Ur lay at the center of a prosperous kingdom controlling a large part of what is now southern and central Iraq. The merchants here were the first to use money in the novel form of silver shekels rather than traditional but cumbersome units of grain. Scribes recorded even the smallest of transactions by etching cuneiform signs on damp clay tablets. The dynasty's founder, Ur-Nammu, created the world's first formal legal system, and his son Shulgi, who succeeded him, was not only literate—a rarity for any ruler at the time—but revised the curriculum of the scribal schools, built roads, and provided the first inns for travelers. Shulgi also is credited with creating the world's first zoo by collecting exotic animals from far-flung lands.

The royal pastime of collecting animals like camels and oryx that were unknown to Mesopotamia continued for several decades until
the reign of the dynasty's last king, Ibbi-Sin. The king of Marhashi—likely part of today's Iran—sent him what was reported by puzzled scribes as an extraordinary speckled dog that might have been a leopard or hyena. We know this thanks to the thorough bureaucrats of Ur, who in the space of little more than a century left behind more than a hundred thousand clay tablets. One tablet, dated to the thirteenth year of Ibbi-Sin's reign, mentions a bird of Meluhha among a list of other items at the palace at Ur. It is one of five known references in the archive to this creature. Some may have referred to live birds, and others to statues or curios made of wood or ivory.

The word used for the bird is
dar
in Akkadian, the intricate Semitic language predating Hebrew and Arabic that was used in Mesopotamia for more than twenty-five hundred years. Translating from a long-dead language to modern English is always treacherous, but scholars largely agree on the names for wrens, ducks, crows, sparrows, pigeons, and other native birds. Exotic animals, however, are much harder to identify in the historical record. Names for exotic animals can be confusing even today. A Turk invited to an American Thanksgiving might wonder why the New World main course is named for their Anatolian Old World country. In 1533, an Italian naturalist called the turkey “the wandering chicken,” and a French scientist later added in the Greek name for the guinea fowl, giving us today's scientific name of
Meleagris gallopavo
. Our common name comes from European confusion over the guinea fowl's native land, which is Africa rather than Turkey.

Names are often tied to specific local varieties. A modern rancher chatting about Texas shorthorns and Aberdeen Angus knows that he means different kinds of cattle, but a Seattle vegan hipster might have no clue that the guy in a cowboy hat is referring to cows. The difficulty extends beyond types of animals. Ancient Mesopotamians perceived color differently than we do. What is called “spotted” may be “speckled” or even “red” depending on which Akkadian specialist you ask.

Some specialists think that, based on a variety of clues, a
dar
is a predominantly dark-colored bird, possibly a black francolin, a wild pheasant native to the area. It would be an obvious bird to compare
the chicken with, since both are in the pheasant family and bear a strong resemblance to each other. At a time when transporting ­animals was expensive, difficult, and hazardous, dubbing the strange bird a “black francolin from India” made sense.

Other clues point to the chicken's arrival in Mesopotamia from the Indus. One is lodged among one of the oldest of recorded stories. Called “Enki and the World Order,” this legend tells of the god of water surveying the order he has brought to creation. In the land of Meluhha, Enki praises the forests and the bulls. “And may the
dar
 of the mountains wear carnelian beards!” he thunders. The Indus people used the deep-red stone called carnelian to make beads, many of which were exported to Mesopotamia through ports like Lothal, and a red-bearded bird certainly is a good description of a rooster's wattles.

Archaeologists are not likely to find any chicken bones to confirm that the bird was brought from the Indus to Mesopotamia in the first heyday of international trade, because not long after the scribes noted the arrival of the black francolin of India, tribes from the north and east swept down on Ur, sacked the metropolis, and carried off the king to captivity and then death in Iran. The catastrophe marked the end of southern Mesopotamia's control over the region. If the chickens imported from Meluhha survived, they did so in numbers far too small to show up in a dusty trench.

The skeleton mounted on a wooden stand high on a bookshelf in Joris Peters's office at a Munich university looks like a baby ostrich. Peters, a zooarchaeologist, laughs at my mistake. “No, no, the sternum in an ostrich would be flat,” he explains, grabbing the model and placing it on his cluttered desk. He points at the large curved bone shaped like a boat's keel. “The chicken has a sternum with a furcula—a wishbone—that helps it fly.”

Peters is a trim and clean-shaven Belgian scientist who spends much of his time at excavations in the Near East. He also oversees one of the world's largest collections of ancient chicken bones in a storage facility one floor below his office, although it takes up only a
few shelves. Unlike cow, sheep, and goat bones, chicken remains usually vanish in their entirety, since humans, dogs, or other scavengers typically make short work of a carcass.

While Peters worked on a dig in Jordan in the 1980s, his team ate a chicken a day and dumped the scraps just beyond the camp. He noticed that each night, predators made off with nearly every bit of the carcass. Curious, he checked each morning to see what was left behind. When the season was over, he calculated that only a single bone a year would survive in that desert environment. In wetter environments, where bone can degrade more quickly, the odds are even lower.

Until about twenty years ago, most archaeologists did not bother to save bird bones, which were not considered very interesting or significant at digs. Researchers now realize that these remains provide ­important clues to diet, social organization, trading patterns, and the state of the environment thousands of years ago. With a cheap fine-meshed screen, archaeologists now are finding hordes of tiny bird-bone fragments. Yet even when they survive the march of time, chicken bones can be as hard to interpret as Akkadian nomenclature. A francolin and a red jungle fowl femur look similar. And buried chicken bones behave differently than do the heavy ones of, say, a slaughtered sheep. They can slip lower in the soil and into older archaeological layers, and rodents digging underground can easily shift them about.