Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (8 page)

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 the 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

A
s 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.

By the time of Socrates, the god was a popular deity, and his temples evolved into the premier spas and healing centers of the Mediterranean world for the next eight centuries. Families would gather here to pray for or celebrate the recovery of a relative with sumptuous feasts that typically involved chicken sacrifice. There was a spacious Asklepion on the south side of Athens's acropolis, not far
from the theater where many of Aristophanes's plays were performed. At Epidaurus—often called the ancient Lourdes—the facility had 160 rooms for patients along with a sanctuary, and the one in Pergamon in Asia Minor was a luxurious complex for well-to-do clients boasting its own theaters and sports facilities. At the Asklepion on the island of Kos, where Hippocrates received his medical training, a third-century BC Greek poet records that two women sacrificed the rooster they had brought, cooked it, carved a drumstick for the priest, gave the sacred snake on the altar a morsel, and then packed up the leftovers to eat at home.

The apostle Paul's prohibition on Christians eating “idol food” was one factor in the decline of the Asklepion in the latter days of the Roman Empire. All that remains of this era, aside from the archaeological ruins and our words
hygiene
and
panacea
—derived from the names of Asclepius's daughters—is the wriggling snake coiled around his rod on the back of North American ambulances. But as late as the third century AD, initiates in the Eleusinian mysteries consecrated a cock to Asclepius or to Demeter, the goddess of the earth and the harvest, while abstaining from eating chicken during their rites.

For thousands of years, across many cultures, the bird served as a remarkable avian medicine chest. Its meat, bones, organs, feathers, comb, wattles, and eggs all figure frequently in ancient prescriptions. No matter what ailed—migraine, dysentery, insomnia, asthma, depression, constipation, severe burns, arthritis, or just a nagging cough—the chicken provided an all-purpose, twenty-four-hour, two-legged drugstore. Galen, the second-century AD Greek physician, prescribed dried rooster gizzard with juniper juice for bed-wetting. Others recommended chicken brains to make an infant's teeth grow or as an antidote to a snakebite. Cock dung, it was said, could cure an ulcerated lung. The eleventh-century Persian philosopher ­Avicenna served soup made from a young hen as a remedy for leprosy, and a French Renaissance recipe calls for squeezing a chicken and drinking the resulting juice to cure a fever. “Chicken offers so great an ­advantage to men in its use in medicine that there is almost no illness of the body, both internal and external, which does not draw its
remedy from these birds,” wrote a sixteenth-century Italian scientist.

In the ancient city of Milas on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey, raw chicken egg whites are still used to remedy burns, as recommended from Hippocrates to twentieth-century American physicians. A 2010 study of the practice in Milas published in the
Journal of Emergency Nursing
found that parents who used egg whites on their children's burns exacerbated the chance of infection. It is better to put the burn area in cold water and then cover with sterile gauze. Chicken soup, however, has stood the test of time and modern science. The Roman writer Pliny called it very effective for treating dysentery. A 2000 study in
Chest
found that the soup—the researcher used the recipe passed down by his wife's grandmother—was loaded with ingredients that together produce a mild anti-inflammatory effect mitigating the upper respiratory symptoms common from a cold. Another study confirmed that chicken soup cleared up the stuffy noses and chests of volunteers more effectively than hot water. A third investigation found that it strengthens the cilia in the nose that halt potentially damaging bacteria and viruses. And a 2011 study by an Iowa physician determined that a group of people sick with a viral illness who ate chicken soup—even store-brought brands—recovered faster than those who did not.

Chicken meat contains cysteine, an amino acid that is related to the active ingredient in a drug used to treat bronchitis, which might offer a clue to the soup's long-standing fame. Some researchers suspect that the soup reins in the immune system, and by doing so slows the inflammation that is the body's response to the viral attack.

Other more esoteric prescriptions have also been borne out by research. Rooster combs, for example, can indeed ease arthritis and smooth wrinkles. The combs, it turns out, are a rich source of hyaluronan, a compound that can reduce inflammation and has been used on racehorses for several decades. The pharmaceutical company Pfizer now breeds White Leghorns with enormous red combs to harvest the substance for patients with creaky knees. Its rival Genzyme uses the compound in a gel designed to act like Botox, puffing out sagging, aged skin. And proteins derived from chicken bones have
been shown to halt the pain of those with rheumatoid arthritis. But the bird's most vital behind-the-scenes role in human health is combating influenza, one of our most common and deadly scourges.

As a beeping truck backs into the loading dock in a cold drizzle, Peter Schu asks me to guess how many eggs the vehicle carries. About half the size of an American tractor trailer, it seems small but I guess high. “Fifty thousand,” I venture. I know by his smile that I'm way off. “One hundred and eighty thousand,” says the director of this GlaxoSmithKline pharmaceutical plant.

Each day at precisely 6 a.m. and at midnight, a black metal gate swings open to let an unmarked truck like this one rumble into a factory complex in the city of Dresden, a hundred miles south of the German capital of Berlin. The cargo is from dozens of farms scattered around the German and Dutch countrysides that produce a total of 360,000 eggs daily. Their locations are secret.