Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (7 page)

Used chicken bones also are treated differently from those of cattle or sheep. Large bones might be buried on a settlement's outskirts, while bits of chicken could simply be tossed away near dwellings. Over time, as buildings were torn down, repaired, and constructed, these remains could find their ways into later structures. A bone found next to a pot made in the time of Caesar might actually have come from a dinner served before Rome was founded.

Peters rifles through the large, plump freezer-sized plastic bags that cover half the surface area of his desk, opens one, and pulls out a smaller bag, then lays a half-dozen pale chicken bones next to a plate of chocolate eggs left over from Easter. These little bits of cartilage are, at the moment, the oldest known physical evidence of chickens
in the Near East or Europe. In Peters's collection since the 1960s, they were excavated from an ancient settlement in Turkey. Based on the layers in which they were found, they date to between 1400 BC and 1200 BC, about the time the chicken made its debut in Egypt.

The day before, Peters mailed four or five of the thirty-odd bones found at this Turkish site to a British colleague, who will individually date each bone using radiocarbon techniques and try to extract enough of the animal protein collagen from inside the bone to capture the ancient bird's genetic sequence. The collaboration is part of Peters's ambitious effort to follow the chicken's spread across Asia and into Europe using more precise dates and ancient DNA. That means laboriously examining hundreds and even thousands of bones sealed up in little plastic bags that may or may not still contain DNA.

Scientists like Meadow, Patel, and Peters have reason to be extra cautious in interpreting old chicken bones. In 1988, for example, a Chinese and a British archaeologist reported finding an eight-­thousand-year-old chicken bone in central China, more than a thousand miles to the north of the red jungle fowl's habitat. The news made global headlines, since the bone was twice as old as the chicken­like ones gathered in the Indus. The oldest textual evidence for Chinese chickens dates to about 1400 BC, the same era as its ­arrival in Egypt and Peters's Turkish sample.

If true, the discovery meant that chicken domestication likely took place long before agriculture emerged in the region and that it spread quickly out of the wild bird's habitat and into chilly northern latitudes. In this scenario, the early chicken may have worked its way east from northern China across Russia to Europe, bypassing India and the Middle East altogether. The specimen appeared to revolutionize our understanding of how humans and animals moved around in prehistoric times.

Peters recently went to China and examined the bone, however, and determined that it likely is no more than two thousand years old and worked its way from more recent to older layers. The archaeologists dated the layer, but not the bone itself. Other Chinese finds labeled as ancient chicken have turned out to be partridge. Until there
are better data from old bones, the chicken's path north from South Asia into China and then on to Korea and Japan remains theoretical.

Meadow and Peters themselves have nearly been fooled. When Meadow worked as a young student at a site in southeastern Iran, the team found a chicken-leg bone complete with spur from what seemed to be a large domestic rooster. The layer of the ancient settlement dated to 5500 BC, a full millennium and a half before the Indus civilization flourished a few hundred miles to the east. Were it that old, the bird's presence suggested that the chicken already was outside the red jungle fowl's range long before the emergence of the Indus and Mesopotamian civilizations. Meadow noted, however, that the bone was bleached whiter than other animal remains in that layer, and prudently concluded that it probably came from the first millennium BC and had worked its way to the older level. In 1984, Peters found a chicken bone in Jordan that appeared to date from the time of ancient Ur, around 2000 BC. In the early twenty-first century, an American archaeologist working at the same site found a similar bone in material dating to the same era, but radiocarbon dating of both samples showed the remnants came from a medieval chicken dinner.

Just beyond a military checkpoint, backed up against the high and rocky hills of northern Iraq, is the village of Lalish. The steep mountain road that leads to the small town eventually narrows to the width of a narrow street, and visitors remove their shoes before proceeding further uphill between tall stone buildings. Lalish is the sacred center of the Yezidi, an embattled religious minority in a country riven with sectarian strife. “We are the oldest religion on earth,” explains Baba Chawish as he offers me a seat on a velvet sofa while he folds his long limbs gracefully onto a cushion on the floor of the small reception room.

The Yezidi priest is a striking man, tall, with a long nut-brown face and a thick, dark beard below a flattened pale turban around a black skullcap. A black sash sets off his white robes and cream vest; even his cell phone is an elegant white. Long persecuted by Christians and
Muslims, the Yezidi revere an archangel named Tawûsê Melek who refused to bow down to any being but God. Their antagonists identify him as Satan, and accuse the Yezidi of devil worship. Scholars say that the religion has ancient roots that predate the Abrahamic faiths and has since absorbed a host of later traditions.

Tawûsê Melek takes the form of a peacock, another exotic bird from the East that was brought as early as 2000 BC to Ur, which lies five hundred miles to the south. According to Yezidi beliefs, the sacred peacock landed in Lalish and then met Adam in the Garden of Eden to instruct him on solar worship. The rooster is also held in high esteem. “He tells us when to pray,” the baba explains, and I notice a small stuffed cock standing on top of a clock in one corner of the room. Pious Yezidis face the sun five times a day to recite their prayers, and the cock's crow before dawn signals the start of the daily rite.

The earliest evidence for the chicken's role in religion was found less than one hundred miles to the south, along the Tigris River amid the ruins of the ancient Assyrian capital of Assur, just upstream from Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. A massive ziggurat, the stepped pyramid favored by Mesopotamians, towers above the valley, though its straight edges have melted over the millennia, forming a conical hill. Mounds of toppled temples and palaces rise in shorter clumps over vaulted underground tombs that have long held generations of royalty. Within one of those graves, beside the skull of a woman, German archaeologists found a delicate ivory box along with a matching ivory comb, gold beads, earrings, and a seal made from lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan. Incised on the box is the oldest known image of the chicken on its home continent of Asia.

In the Old Testament, Assyrians are likened to wolves, while historians today disparage them as heartless conquerors. We know that at the height of their empire in the eighth century BC they forced the migration of entire populations and ruthlessly suppressed their enemies, common practices at the time. Much of the exceptionally bad press comes from their effective propaganda carved in fearsome stone reliefs while they dominated the Near East for two centuries, until their total defeat in the seventh century BC. But for most of its long history, As
syria was a small and tight-knit merchant kingdom that used its central position between southern Mesopotamia and Turkey to the north, the Levant to the west, and Persia to the east for economic advantage. Assur was the spiritual heart of Assyria, as Lalish is for Yezidis today.

The little cylindrical box, a mere three inches high, dates to the late fourteenth century BC, a century or so after Thutmose III's invasion. The birds mentioned in the pharaoh's annals may have come from this area, and the box may be slightly older than Carter's potsherd and the silver bowl of the delta. Unlike the bloody scenes immortalized later in Assyria, the box pictures a stylized Garden of Eden, a peaceful setting of gazelles grazing under palm and conifer trees with cocks and hens on the branches. Between each set of trees, a sun blazes. “In addition to being exotic creatures, they may have had some magical or ritual significance related to the new day or their fertility,” says art historian Joan Aruz.

The bird, once a novel gift in Western courts, had taken on divine attributes. Assyrians worshipped Shamash, a sun god portrayed as a flaming disk, among their deities. He was the son of Sin, the moon god, and the power of light over the evil of darkness. A temple dedicated to both gods was built around 1500 BC in Assur, and one had long stood in Ur. After this brief glimpse of the bird, several centuries pass before it reappears in Babylon, which lay on the Mesopotamian plain between Ur and Assur.

Babylon in the sixth century BC was at its zenith. With help from the Medes and Persians to the east, Babylonians had destroyed Assur, vanquished the Assyrian Empire, and reasserted themselves as the center of power on the vast Mesopotamian plain. The multicolored Etemenanki—the seven-stepped ziggurat immortalized in the Bible as the Tower of Babel—stood as high as the Statue of Liberty in the center of a vast metropolis housing more than two hundred thousand people from all over the Middle East, at the time the largest urban center ever constructed. Marduk had been the patron deity and preeminent god of Babylon for more than a thousand years, but his popularity began to slip during and after Assyria's collapse as the sun and moon gods gained status.

The last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, who came to power in 556 BC and who may have been of Assyrian origin, accelerated this trend. While Egypt's Akhenaten focused on one solar deity, Nabonidus paid particular homage to Sin, the same primary deity of ancient Ur. He also worshipped the moon god's child Nusku, who symbolized light and fire and was associated with the rooster. Babylonian inscriptions of the era, written in the same cuneiform used by the Ur scribes fifteen hundred years earlier, mention the
tarlugallu
, translated as the “royal bird,” which some scholars suspect was the chicken. The bird also shows up suddenly and repeatedly in practical and common objects. Ancient Mesopotamians often carried a little stone cylinder on a cord around their necks. Each was engraved with scenes of gods, heroes, and animals that became visible when rolled across a bit of clay, and served as a personal signature or mark of an institution. Several cylinder seals from this era show roosters, perched on elaborate columns reserved for sacred symbols or servants of deities, accepting the offerings of adoring male priests. Often the crescent moon hovers nearby.

Nabonidus spent fifteen years living at an Arabian oasis, far from the bustling capital. Historians still debate his motives for decamping to the desert, but his absence and his religious ideas likely angered the priests of the traditional cults, unsettled the aristocracy, and disturbed the army. When he returned, Persians and Medes—former allies in the destruction of Assur—crossed the Tigris River, won over some disgruntled Babylonian generals, and defeated Nabonidus's forces just north of today's Baghdad. On October 29, 539 BC, the famous gates of Babylon, decorated with their blue-and-gold glazed lions and bulls, were thrown open and the wide streets strewn with green reeds and palms. Nabonidus was captured by the invaders.

The entry of the Persian conqueror Cyrus the Great into the world's greatest city marked the beginning of the chicken's sudden spread throughout West Asia and into Europe. His successors eventually controlled all the lands between the Indus River and the Nile, right up the Bosporus, which separates Europe from Asia. They granted a measure of self-government to this multiethnic society, modernized
the creaky old administration of Babylonia, and were careful not to interfere with religious freedom throughout the sprawling realm.

No ancient people, except possibly the Romans, would grant the chicken a greater role and higher status than the Persians and their Zoroastrian religion. “The cock is created to oppose the demons and sorcerers,” states a Zoroastrian tradition. “And when it crows, it keeps misfortune away from . . . creation.” The Persians held the rooster in such esteem that it was forbidden, as it was among Hindus, to eat the bird. It banished the sloth-demon Bushyasta, “who desires to keep people wrapped in slumber, even after the morning has dawned upon the earth,” as one commentator puts it. The bird landed “the death blow to the world of idleness,” as anyone who has attempted to sleep late in any rural area in South Asia quickly learns.

The sacred and royal nature of the cock may even have inspired one of the oldest symbols of kingship, the crenellated crown. Persian kings were the first to introduce that peculiar headgear, which remains in fashion among royalty. There are no contemporary explanations for the pointy bits on a circular diadem, and they may symbolize a castle wall, high mountains, or the rays of the sun. But the triangular shapes on the classic royal crown also resemble a cock's comb. Intriguingly, stone reliefs at the Persian capital of Persepolis include images of a crowned man with wings under a crescent moon. Another Persian sacred or royal hat, the
kurbasia
, was explicitly designed to resemble a cock's comb.