The earliest physical evidence of the modification of livestock horns was recently discovered at an ancient burial complex for elite individuals in Hierakonpolis, Upper Egypt. It is also the first evidence of horn modification for sheep.
At the site, six sheep showed signs of deformation, adding to the history of horn modification in Africa, which was a practice that has mostly been limited to cattle.
“This is the earliest physical evidence for horn modification in livestock. The practice also existed in cattle but is, for that early period, only attested by depictions in rock art,” said the archaeologist Dr. Wim van Neer.
Sheep were first introduced to Egypt from the Levant region around the 6th millennium B.C. By the 5th millennium B.C., they became one of the most important livestock resources in Egypt.
They were depicted on jars and ritual vessels. These portrayals revealed that the earliest sheep in Egypt had corkscrew-shaped horns.
Later, the corkscrew-horned sheep were incorporated into hieroglyphics and became symbols of religious iconography, represented as ram deities with corkscrew horns.
Then, ammon sheep started appearing in Egypt by the Middle Kingdom. They had crescent-shaped horns that pointed backward. Eventually, they replaced the corkscrew-horned sheep.
Archaeologists were conducting excavations at a burial complex in Hierakonpolis, which is about 62 miles from the modern Egyptian city of Luxor.
The elite were buried there in ornate tombs with wild or exotic animals, such as goats, cattle, crocodiles, leopards, wild cats, ostriches, baboons, elephants, hippos, hartebeests, and aurochs.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
Sheep were also interred with the elite individuals. In tombs 54, 61, and 79, researchers unearthed the skulls of six sheep with modified horns. The horns were removed entirely or pointed backward or parallel and upward.
Analysis of the remains suggested that some of the sheep had been castrated due to the elongated appearance of their bones and unfused bones, features that made them larger than sheep that were not castrated.
The horns’ alterations were made by fracturing, a process that involved fracturing the skull at the base of the horn core, repositioning it, and tying it together for a few weeks until the fractures healed.
The researchers determined this based on depressions at the base of the horn cores, the strangely thin bone in that area, and constrictions on the sides of the horn cores.
Even today, various African agro-pastoralist groups still use the same horn modification strategy. They typically do this to goats when they are about one year old. But why would the elite at Hierakonpolis want to manipulate the horns of sheep in this way?
“This is an indication that the rulers buried in the elite cemetery wanted to display their power not only by the keeping of wild and exotic animals (baboons, elephants, hippos, crocodiles, aurochs…) but also by modifying their domestic animals,” said Dr. van Neer.
“The sheep were castrated and thus larger than the average sheep bred for consumption. In addition, their shapes were modified by forcing the horns upward or by removing the horns. So, these were just two different ways of making ‘ordinary’ animals ‘special.'”
The study was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
