Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Read online

  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.

  The chicken arrived in Persia, today called Iran, between 1200 BC and 600 BC, also the range of dates given for the birth of Zoroaster. ­According to some traditions, he was born in Afghanistan, between Iran and Pakistan. Like Jesus and Muhammad, he was called, as a middle-­aged man, to reveal a new truth, overturn old traditions, and endure criticism from the clerical establishment. Zoroaster, some scholars say, sought to reform the old Iranian pantheon and elevated Ahura Mazda—a Persian deity with a name translated as light-­wisdom—to the role of omniscient, omnipotent, and uncreated god.

  Ahura Mazda created Angra Mainyu, a Satan-like figure who was the root of all sin and suffering and would at the end of time be destroyed. Like the Jewish Yahweh, Ahura Mazda was typically not represented in any statue or carving. And among Ahura Mazda’s assistants—immortals similar to the Yezidi, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic archangels—Sraosha opposes all evil while spreading the Zoroastrian gospel of good thoughts, good words, and good deeds. One of his tools is the rooster, which one ancient text says “raises voice and calls men to prayer.” Such Zoroastrian beliefs penetrated much of West Asia and India starting in the sixth century BC, as the empire’s good roads and stability sparked a trade boom by linking the Indian subcontinent with the Mediterranean Sea for the first time since the days of ancient Ur, which itself underwent a modest renaissance. A Persian coffin found near its silted harbor contained a tiny seal with the image of a triumphant rooster.

  The Persian prophet’s view of life as a constant struggle between light and dark, good and evil, and truth and deception deeply influenced Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Before the Persians came to Palestine, there was no Satan opposed to God, no hell to burn in, and no apocalypse to await. The only religious authorities said to have been present just after the birth of Jesus were not Jewish rabbis or Greek philosophers but the Zoroastrian priests called magi. Chickens are absent in the biblical Old Testament, but Christ mentions roosters and hens in the New Testament.

  A couple of centuries after Cyrus’s capture of Babylon, the bird had spread from Sudan to Spain, reached Kazakhstan in distant Central Asia, on the rim of Persian influence, and may even have braved the Atlantic with seafaring Phoenicians eager to exchange poultry for English tin. No longer solely an exotic gift, the chicken became enmeshed in the religious beliefs and practices of the ancient Western world. In Greece it became the sacred animal of a half-dozen gods and goddesses, and during Rome’s heyday it predicted the outcome of battles. The rooster’s crow marked the apostle Peter’s betrayal of Jesus in Jerusalem on Good Friday, and followers of the cults of Mithras and Isis sacrificed it in temples from Egypt to Britain. By early medieval times, by papal decree, it pointed the wind’s way on the churches of Christendom.

  Islam gave it special rank as well. “When you listen to the crowing of the cock,” the prophet Muhammad would tell his followers a millennium after the rise of the Persian Empire, “ask Allah for His favor as it sees Angels.” According to some Islamic traditions, Muhammad saw an enormous and indescribably beautiful rooster standing on the foundation of the seventh and lowest level of earth with its head in the heavens, proclaiming the glory of God.

  Amid the flocks of geese and doves, ibis and partridge, crows and vultures found all over the Middle East and Europe, the chicken became the premier sacred bird of awakening, courage, and resurrection. This triumph over so many competitors took place within a few short centuries. One scholar thinks that the very shape of the chicken reminded the ancients of an oil lamp—the common source of artificial light in the ancient world—with its spout resembling a protruding beak and its handle the upright tail. Others point to the hen’s productivity and the fierceness of t
he rooster as potent symbols of fertility and war. Its crow, of course, encouraged farmers to quit their beds and produce sustenance for their communities and revenues for the state. The bird’s origin in the mysterious and faraway East and its long tradition as a royal bird also may have set it apart from more prosaic farmyard animals.

  Yet even in distant China, the chicken was associated with the sun and the conquest of light over darkness. This may reflect Zoroastrian influence that stretched all the way to the Middle Kingdom, since one empress worshipped a god identified as Ahura Mazda in the early centuries AD, when Persians traded as far east as the Pacific coast. A Chinese legend from the third century AD claims that the bird descended from the Vermilion Lord, a human who changed himself into a chicken. Daoist priests in this period sacrificed chickens to consecrate a new temple, ward off evil spirits threatening the imperial household, and drive away epidemics. By holding a rooster to his mouth—a peculiar practice still common among ­cockfighters—a priest could breathe out unwanted demons. A jiren, or chicken officer, was responsible for the sacrificial birds, and maintaining a flock of different colors to meet the needs of various rituals.

  In that time, even the voice of the rooster was considered regal. When Chinese rulers wanted to announce a general amnesty, the imperial guard erected a giant cock with a head of pure gold in front of the palace on a post under a richly decorated pavilion. Thousands of people would vie to take a bit of earth from around the post to gain luck. Even today, one of the most prominent film awards given in China is a statue of a golden rooster. The Chinese ideogram for rooster sounds like the one for good omen, and the bird is one of the twelve zodiac signs. People born under its sign are considered to be keenly observant truth tellers. In early medieval Korea, chickens were raised in the royal court, and a white rooster is said to have heralded the birth of the founder of a clan and dynasty.

  In Japan, by the seventh century AD, white chickens sacred to the great Japanese Shinto goddess of the sun, Amaterasu-ōmikami, roamed temple grounds. They were the sole animals capable of drawing her out of the cave where she hid. The western Chinese minority group called the Miao still tell the story of the world’s early days, when the six suns refused to come out because they feared an archer would shoot them. No one knew what to do. Then a rooster appeared, quite literally saving the day. The small bird coaxed the sun to shine, simply by crowing. A team of Japanese researchers recently determined that this crowing originates from a sensitive circadian clock in the rooster that registers light before humans do.

  From Germanic graves to Japanese shrines, the chicken emerged at the start of our common era as a symbol of light, truth, and resurrection across dozens of religious traditions spanning Asia and Europe. Tibetan Buddhists shunned the bird as a symbol of greed and lust, perhaps because the animal until recently was impractical to rear on the cold Tibetan plateau. Across most of the Old World, however, the chicken’s growing spiritual role demonstrated not just the fowl’s remarkable utility on the farm but its capacity to reflect our changing beliefs. Like the Yezidi, the bird adapted as empires and religions rose and fell. Gods, creeds, and dogmas appeared, vanished, and transformed, but the chicken became a constant and essential part of our worship.

  3.

  The Healing Clutch

  You see this egg? That’s what enables us to overturn all the schools of theology and all the temples of the earth!

  —Denis Diderot, D’Alembert’s Dream

  As the poison numbed Socrates’s feet, legs, and then groin, the Western world’s most famous philosopher turned to his friend Crito and said, “We owe a cock to Asclepius,” referring to the Greek god of healing and medicine. “Pay the debt. Don’t forget.” His weeping friend agreed, and, moments later, when the potion reached his heart, Socrates expired. The last words of a condemned revolutionary thinker, who was praised by his famous student Plato as “the best and wisest and most righteous man,” were about a chicken.

  In ancient Greece, sacrificing a cock to Asclepius was a common practice of a sick person who wanted to recover his health or celebrate its return. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was sure that Socrates was making an ironic comment on life as a terminal disease. Others say he was expressing his pious belief that the sacrifice would ensure his immortality, since Asclepius was capable of raising the dead. The classicist Eva Keuls argues that the optimistic and irreverent philosopher was telling a dirty joke to cheer up his grieving companions. Before he died, she contends, Socrates lifted his cloak and exposed his erection, which resulted either from the poison or the touch of the attendant who felt his body to check the drugs’ progress—or both. He was making a pun on the Greek word for becoming cold, which can also mean rigid or enlivened, while referring to a bird associated with an insatiable sexual appetite as well as healing.

  In Socrates’s day in the late fifth century BC, the chicken was called the Persian bird. “Persian cock! Good Herakles! How on earth did he manage to get here without a camel?” says a character in The Birds by Aristophanes. Three centuries earlier, when Homer likely composed his famous sagas, the canny hero Odysseus didn’t encounter chickens on his long and treacherous voyage, which took him from Turkey to Egypt, to various Mediterranean islands, and finally to his island home off the Greek mainland. By 620 BC, the first images of the bird appear on Greek vases. A detailed and lifelike terra-cotta rooster from that era was found in Delphi, near the famous oracle and sanctuary dedicated to Apollo, god of the sun, light, and truth.

  The chicken in Greece was a powerful symbol of healing and resurrection. Aesop’s goose laid a golden egg, but a lesser-known tale attributed to him, “The Cock and the Jewel,” may be the oldest surviving story starring a chicken. In it, a rooster comes across a precious gem and recognizes its worth but realizes it is of little use to him. “Give me a single grain of corn before all the jewels in the world,” the wise creature concludes. Some ancient Greeks, like Persians and Indians, considered the bird too sacred for killing. As in Babylonia, it was associated with solar and lunar deities. “Nourish a cock, but sacrifice it not; for it is sacred to the sun and moon,” advised the mystic and mathematician Pythagoras in the sixth century BC. The bird also was associated with Persephone, the goddess of renewal who spent half her time in the underworld, bringing spring with her when she returned.

  These beliefs almost certainly reflect older views across the Aegean Sea in Asia. At the time of Socrates’s death in 399 BC, the Persian Empire stretched from Pakistan to the Hellespont, separating Asia from Europe. Though Greek propaganda paints the Persians as tyrannical degenerates, new goods, plants, animals, ideas, religions, and inventions were welcomed. In Athens, Persian clothes, architecture, and food were fashionable. A deliciously juicy new fruit called the Persian apple was popular in the stands of Athens’s marketplace, though the peach—its scientific name is still persica—actually originated in western China and worked its way east on Persian-­controlled trade routes.

  The chicken’s association with the superpower to the east made it a perfect foil for Aristophanes, who enjoyed poking fun at contemporary philosophers like Socrates as well as the political authorities of his day. “It was he”—the rooster—“who was the first king and ruler of the Persians, well before all those Dariuses and the Megabuzes,” says another character in the zany comedy, referring to the kings and priests of the neighboring empire. “That’s why he’s still called the Persian bird . . . he struts about like the Persian King!” Aristophanes’s strutting rooster wore heavy armor and a high comb that resembled the crown of the Persian king and sported, according to stage directions, an “extra-long, extra-red phallus.”

  The outrageous costume poking fun at the neighboring imperium surely delighted the male audience in a time and place when a smaller penis was considered more beautiful and less barbaric than a large one. And the rooster’s inevitable and insistent crow was an annoying reminder of its monarch’s power to command. �
�As soon as he sings his morning erection, everyone else has to get up too and go off to work,” complains one character. “The metal worker, the potter, the skin stretcher, skin puller, skin washer, whore, lyre and shield maker—all get up, still in the dark, put on their shoes, and off they go!”

  Produced fifteen years before Socrates was sentenced to death for corrupting youth and spreading impiety, the fantastical play is itself heretical, recalling a time when “it wasn’t the gods who were the kings and ruled over humans but you lot”—the birds. With the help of two Athenians, they build a city in the sky, reclaim their lost privileges, and lead a successful revolt against the Olympians. New laws forbid trapping, shooting, and eating birds. Guarding the walls of the new celestial acropolis was “Ares’ Killer Kid,” the fierce Persian bird favored by the god of war.

  Aristophanes’s satire about a power-drunk, bellicose, and sex-crazed bird reflects the multifaceted role that the chicken played in classical Greece, which adopted many of the older Near Eastern myths surrounding the creature. Because we have so few records from the Babylonian and Persian Empires, our first comprehensive view of the Western chicken comes from its early European beachhead. Roosters on Greek vases perch like those on earlier Babylonian seals, propped on columns in scenes of worship. They flank Athena, the goddess of wisdom, courage, and the peaceful arts, or are emblazoned on her armor. The helmet of the famous gold-and-ivory statue of Athena on the Acropolis was adorned with a cock. Roosters also show up in images of Hermes, the protector of gamblers and athletes.

  Laying hens were common by Socrates’s day, but pork and goat meat were far more available and popular than chicken. What set the bird apart from other animals, aside from its formidable fighting and sexual abilities, were its close ties to Asclepius, the half-human progeny of Apollo, the supreme god of light and healing. In the original Hippocratic oath, a doctor would swear by both Apollo and Asclepius, whose cult appears to have begun in an Apollo temple in Epidaurus, just across the Corinthian isthmus from Athens, about the time the chicken arrived in Greece by the seventh century BC. Small and slender vases from the seventh and sixth centuries BC picture a wriggling snake between two roosters. Called alabastrons, these little vessels held ointments and perfumes that also may have had medicinal value, since the snake was the other primary sacred animal associated with Asclepius.