64th RAI in Innsbruck 2018

Gabriela Kompatscher and Raija Mattila will give an introduction to the workshop in two parts: The first part will consist of an overview of the prerequisites, principles, policies, methods, tasks and interdisciplinary approaches of Human-Animal Studies. Subsequently, pioneers, theories and challenges of the Historical Animal Studies will be presented in order to point out the many opportunities and chances a new perspective on animals in history can offer like, for example, feminist history did by making visible women and their significance in historical processes and taking their perspective. A short look at Human-Animal Studies in the Classics will close this part.
The second part will discuss Human Animal Studies and the Ancient Near Eastern material. Human Animal Studies have in the past years drawn attention to the role of animals in the ancient sources. Much of the discussion so far has evolved round literary sources, including animals in fables, myths, and omen texts. In this workshop we wish to concentrate on real animals and their role in Ancient Near Eastern texts and history.  The viewpoint will be animal-oriented history that sees animals as agents, as co-designers of our past, and studies how animals were working in our past and how they shaped it. The workshop aspires to make Human Animal Studies better known among the researchers of the Ancient Near East and to contribute to the Human-Animal Studies with the help of the extraordinary richness of the Near Eastern sources.

The Third Dynasty of Ur (2110–2003 BC) is known as one of the periods best represented in administrative sources. Among the 97,000 published texts, a high proportion of documents include references to wild animals.
Officials of the Neo-Sumerian administration not only kept records of cattle and other domesticated animals, but of the management of wild and exotic fauna including stags, gazelles or bears, whose impact on the Sumerian economy is well documented. Some of these documents shed light on the ways these animals were cared for in this particular period.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the particular case of the lion. A corpus of over forty texts, originating from the centers of Puzriš-Dagān, Irisaĝrig, Ĝirsu and Umma, allows us to reconstruct some aspects of their care, including how they were managed, how they were feed, and by whom. We will also compare this case study with other animals for which we do not have this specific kind of information.

Tending animals was a part of the temple economy in Ancient Mesopotamia. The practice concentrated on obtaining the proper number of usually young specimens for offerings. The care over the herds, consisting of sheep and goats, cattle and ducks, was taken by the Neo-Babylonian temples, like Eanna in Uruk or Ebabbar in Sippar. Turtledoves and pigeons provided for offerings were caught and only occasionally fed. Horses and donkeys had their own role in the temple household but they were never sacrificed as offerings.
Tending animals by the Neo-Babylonian temple was undertaken either by the fattening house (bīt urê) or by the shepherds (rē’ûs) of the household. The structure and internal organisation of these two departments of animal husbandry have been described in previous studies.
My attention is focused only on two, very important aspects the fattening house organisation that have not been discussed in greater detail in previous literature. The method of barley fodder distribution throughout specifically and firmly fixed periods and the sheep relocation within established feeding groups (rabû, tardennu and šalšu). Our full knowledge about these comes from the records concerning distribution of barley for fodder for the animals.

In Human-Animal and Food studies, the longue durée history of meat tends to follow a predictable if understandable trajectory.  It begins with the domestication of animals, stops briefly in the purity laws of the Hebrew Bible and sacrifices of Classical antiquity, shifts to medieval Christendom and early-modern Europe, and then fills the majority of its pages with factory farming and the commodification of meat in 19^th and 20^th century Western world.  Despite some criticism (Fudge 2004), this trajectory takes modernism as the starting point in creating what Vialles (1994) calls the “ellipsis between animals and meat”—that is, the cultural, economic, and even spiritual processes that disassociated a slaughtered animal from its edible parts.  Explanations for this modern disassociation range from the rise of urbanism and industrial capitalism (Cronon 1992) to the start of scientific food monitoring (Rixon 2000) and even the metonymy of gender violence (Carol 2010).  In particular, some research posits an economic and administrative culture, intimately tied to modern capitalism and the administrative state, that effectively turned animals into lifeless, faceless numbers (Fitzgerald 2010, Scott 1998, White 2012).
This paper argues that Human-Animal studies, as well as Agricultural and Food historians, should turn their attention to elite meat consumption in ancient Mesopotamia, as it both challenges and complements their world-historical models.  Through a system of prebendal distribution, first millennium BC Mesopotamian temples followed a routinized and statutory routine for the distribution of sacrificial lambs by cuts of meat: for example, a shoulder went to the king, another shoulder to the priests, the kidneys to the butcher, a hock to the fuller, and so on.  We know that up to 4,300 lambs per year entered some Babylonian temples as animals and many exited as predetermined cuts of meat.
In addition, Mesopotamian administrative culture strongly anticipates another characteristic of slaughterhouse modernity: a dispassionate, bureaucratic, and impersonal relationship to the animals themselves.  Indeed, what is most striking about cuneiform animal management texts is their banality, as they exhibit simple binary classifications (e.g., sheep vs. goat, male vs female, young vs old), lack attention to animal breeds, characteristics, or individual attributes, use basic administrative modeling, and take a generally mundane and routinized approach to animal management.
In the end, I explain the parallels between Mesopotamia and modernity in three ways: first, an ancient understanding of the temple, like the modern slaughterhouse, as a place of enhanced purity and regulation, which mitigated fears of meat divorced from its source; second, shared cultural norms that prize urbanity and sophistication, in which the disjunction between animals and meat is part of larger systems where the ability both to segment and coordinate multiple processes takes on cultural distinction; and, finally, the simple need to deal with animals at scale, where administrative efficiency tends to flatten out and decolorize distinctions that take precedence in smaller scale, more intimate relationships.

In the world of ancient Egypt the web of relationships between humans and animals was not limited to the categories of companion- and production animals but also exerted a complex and significant influence on concepts of god / gods / the divine. Observations of animal behaviour were incorporated into religious beliefs and pictures. This lead to a modification in behaviour towards at least some individual animals. This phenomenon is considered through the findings of two Diploma theses: the first on the cat; the second on the dog and jackal.
Cat in ancient Egypt: The first paper examines the representation of the cat in ancient Egyptian society. A human-animal perspective (e.g. the concept of animal agency) is selectively applied. The study relates four categories to the situation of cats in ancient Egypt: The cat as production animal; as a pet; as a goddess (e.g. Bastet/ Sachmet); and as an “Osiris” (an animal mummy). The four categories represent several aspects of human-animal relationships. Archaeological finds have provided evidence of such relationships between humans and cats dating from the Old Kingdom and earlier. Through the study of animal mummies, an animal perspective can be gained on realities of religious practice in ancient Egypt. The four categories are shown to be useful in shedding more light on this less researched area of Egyptology.
Dog and Jackal in ancient Egypt: The second paper applies similar methodology to consider how the human-dog relationship in ancient Egypt differs from the human-jackal relationship. Instruments in the form of categories are adopted. These include: the dog as guardian and assistant; the dog as companion; the dog as sacrificial animal; and the dog as mummified animal. Similarly, they include: the jackal as a wild animal; and the jackal as a deified animal. The last category is divided between the canine deities Anubis, Chontamenti, Upuaut/Wepwawet, and Duamutef. A human-animal studies perspective is found to provide valid contributions to research in this area of Egyptology.

In the ancient Near East, animals have often been used as a model in artistic and literary creations. They are represented everywhere: in the glyptic, in the round, in painting, in ceramics, in terracotta, in bas-reliefs, in statuary. They are represented using different techniques, such as bas relief, round, intaglio, incision, drawing, and different materials, such as stone, terracotta, inlays, metal, faience.
They have always been of great importance not only for agricultural work, transport or food but also for the enjoyment of men. It is however, the wild animals that are the most represented for their fascinating character and symbolic meaning. The scribes on one side and the law-makers on the other made a distinction between wild animals (akk. nammašu / nammaštu) and domesticated animals (akk. būlu “herd”) which allows us to understand what they meant by “domesticated”. For the laws, the domesticated animal is the animal used in agricultural work, par excellence the ox, sometimes also the donkey and the horse and occasionally the animals chosen for consumption as pigs, goats, sheep. Popular proverbs and omens give information on the presence of other domesticated and wild animals in the city (the dog protects the potters' workshops, keeps foxes out of the city gates and can enter the master's house, pigs chase lost wolves out of the streets and clean up urban waste).
The domesticated animal par excellence is the farm animal and the order in which the domesticated animals are quoted in the lexical lists (sheep, goat, ox and donkey) and represented in art perfectly reflects the subsistence economy where caprids were more important than cattle. But the archaeological data (burials) and certain iconographic representations (man surrounding an animal with his arm) show that it is not the caprid that the men of Mesopotamia were passionate or fascinated about. It is rather the equids and the dogs that seem to have a special status, and to merit real affection.They are the only two animals that are entitled - like the man - to a burial. Sometimes they are even buried with men. They are the only two that accompany man to war and to hunting, two very real but also highly symbolic actions. Starting from these two animals, my communication explores the relationship with man. But there are other animals - wild this time - that have fascinated men to the extent of attributing to them actions and human gestures at least in the artistic representations.