Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Read online

  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 thei
r 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.

  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 th
e 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, Assyria 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.