Late Uruk Pigs and other Herded Animals

One of the less recognized attributes of the scholar honored in this volume is his lively interest in and appreciation of Near Eastern fauna; anyone who in his presence has mentioned some Iraqi creature will have with pleasure made this discovery. Pressed as he has been in past years both as author and as editor to see to publication hundreds of articles and monographs, above all concerning the material finds of the German excavations at Uruk-Warka, Rainer Boehmer has, however, seldom found occasion to pursue this inclination. Readers are occasionally offered but a glimpse of his knowledge in Boehmer's short excurses to depictions of animals in early Mesopotamian art and glyptic. 1 In a contribution to my recently edited ATU 5, Boehmer published twenty numbered seals which had been impressed on proto-cuneiform tablets excavated by German teams in the years 1928-1931 in Uruk.2 Most of these impressions consist of varying depictions of wild and domestic animals: fighting lions and dogs, wild goats, large ca!!le and onagers. The two seals which apparently contained depictions of boars may serve as a point of departure for a short discussion, dedicated to the honoree, on the exploitation during the late 4th millennium B.C. of swine and other beasts in the urban center which has occupied the greater part of his career. The first of these seals, found in 16 impressions on six fragments, depicts a lion flanked by two wild pigs in a lower frieze , in an upper frieze two lions surrounding another animal (see figure Ia). More interesting is the depiction in the third composite drawing (figure lc), found in 17 impressions on five fragments, of two boars standing or running amongst conventionally drawn reed thickets, confronted by the vaunted ruler of Uruk ("Stadtftirst") accompanied by two dogs. Boehmer interprets the staff in the hands of the ruler to be a possible punting pole used to propel a flat skiff, the so-called be/am, through the southern marshes surrounding Uruk, where wild pigs are known to have lived and been hunted in antiquity .3 This boat possibly the same form as that depicted in an impression from proto-Elamite Susa (ligure lg) and in Late Uruk and Early Dynastic reliefs (see below) would be lost in the lower part of the impression. Similar hunting scenes are known from a relief on a stone bowl from the Late Uruk period,