Human reverence in Animals

Humans and animals have always coexisted together for as long as man could remember and exist. They would hunt each other for survival, sometimes man would come out as the victor, and sometimes it was the animal. Mankind would feast on them like they would feast on us. With time, this relationship would change. The animals would become our companions as well as being our food. They would become our hunting tools, such as in tracking prey. They would later be used as our means of transport and also as labor tools, such as when humans would need help working on their farmland. Let’s not forget that they also provide us with entertainment, such as in a zoo or as a circus attraction. Although only some cultures still consider some animals as sacred, most of us look down on them, consider them inferior to us. There was however a time when we worshipped them more and even admired them. We will explore this worship and admiration of animals in this essay as we compare and contrast the depictions of animals in the Upper Paleolithic period in cave arts and in Ancient Egypt in order to identify the presence of a shift, if there was one, in our reverence of animals in between both periods.

If we were to put a time when mankind started worshipping animals, we would have to start during the Upper Paleolithic period during which most cave arts originated from. Why are cave arts indicative of the start of a reverence for animals, one might ask. Well, if we were to observe the way they depicted humans and animals in the cave arts, the amount of detail they put on animals indicate to us that there is a sort of admiration for an aspect of the animal, or even it as a whole. As Jean Clottes reported in his article about cave arts, “[the images of ani...

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...nimals were representatives of them. Basically, we passed from revering the animal directly to revering the animals as intermediates for higher beings. However, since animals are, in the Ancient Egyptians’ eyes, representatives of gods, they still put animals on a higher rank than themselves, like the cavemen seemed to also do, since they believed that those animals who are representatives of gods had the ability to ward off evil.

Works Cited

Clottes, Jean. “Paleolithic Cave Art in France.” Bradshaw Foundation. Bradshaw Foundation. n.d. Web. 08 Mar. 2014.

Das, Sheila Marie. Class Notes, Winter 2014

Ikram, Salima. Divine Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt. New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005. 1-15. Print.

Malek, Jaromir. The Cat in Ancient Egypt. London: British Museum Press for the Trustees of the British Museum, 1993. 73-92. Print.