Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

6
THE CATTLE AND THE STAR GODDESSES
About the time the rains were falling off in the desert, the people in the Nile Valley suddenly started taking an
interest in cows, building things with big stones, and getting interested in star worship and solar observatories. .
. .
FRED WENDORF, THE NEW SCIENTIST, JULY 28, 2000
The . . . risings of Sirius had been observed on Elephantine throughout all periods of ancient Egyptian history.
RONALD A. WELLS, SOTHIS AND THE SATET TEMPLE ON ELEPHANTINE
The Egyptians . . . were the first to discover the solar year, and to portion out its course into twelve parts. They
obtained this knowledge from the stars.
HERODOTUS, THE HISTORIES, BOOK II
TAMING THE AUROCH
In our modern world we take much for granted. One is the common domestic cow—one of the most gentle, most
accommodating, and most useful animals on our planet. When we drive along a country road or walk past an open field
and see these gentle and docile animals grazing or lazily walking about, we may give them a fleeting glance, but we soon
forget about them. To ancient people, however, cattle were the main display of prosperity. The pharaohs of Egypt, for
example, not only measured their wealth by the number of cattle they possessed but also were themselves, as were many
of their gods and goddesses, identified with cattle. Yet if cattle were of great importance to the ancient Egyptians, they
were of crucial importance to the prehistoric people of the Sahara. Their very survival depended on cattle. Without cattle
they simply could not have existed in the harsh conditions in which they lived. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to
say that without cattle there would have been no civilization, at least in the way we understand the word civilization
today.
When and from where, however, did cattle come, and what did humans do before cattle were domesticated?
Scientists agree that the now extinct auroch, or Bos primigenius, is the ancestor of domesticated cattle. The auroch,
however, was a much larger and certainly a much more ferocious creature than our common farm cow. Its height was
more than 2 meters (7 feet), and it weighed as much as 2 tons. The male auroch was black with faint stripes, and the
female was reddish brown. It is probable that the ancestor of the auroch itself existed in Africa some one million years
ago and eventually spread to Asia and Europe around two hundred fifty thousand years ago. At first, and for many
thousand of years that followed, the auroch was hunted for food by prehistoric man—a feat that must have been quite
terrifying and very dangerous indeed, requiring many able hunters who could work together to bring down such a wild
and powerful beast. Then, around 8000 BCE, the auroch was finally domesticated, although we don’t fully understand
where and how. Only a few years ago scientists thought domestication of cattle had originally taken place in Turkey or
southwest Asia and that, somewhere along the line, the domesticated breed spread into other parts of the world. Recent
research in the mitochondrial DNA of cattle stock from Africa, Asia, and Europe, however, strongly suggests that there
was not one domestication event, but several, which occurred independently in each continent in roughly the same epoch.
Normally, domestication of cattle and other animals follows the establishment of agriculture, but there are
exceptions. In Africa, for example, domestication took place before agriculture or even without agriculture. The Masai of
eastern Africa are well-known herders who do not practice agriculture, yet their lives are completely interwoven with
cattle: their protein intake—milk, blood, and sometimes meat—is almost totally derived from their cattle. The Masai very