Free Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? by Andrew Lawler

to oppose the demons and sorcerers,” states a Zoroastrian tradition. “And when it crows, it keeps misfortune away from . . . creation.” The Persians held the rooster in such esteem that it was forbidden, as it was among Hindus, to eat the bird. It banished the sloth-demon Bushyasta, “who desires to keep people wrapped in slumber, even after the morning has dawned upon the earth,” as one commentator puts it. The bird landed “the death blow to the world of idleness,” as anyone who has attempted to sleep late in any rural area in South Asia quickly learns.
    The sacred and royal nature of the cock may even have inspired one of the oldest symbols of kingship, the crenellated crown. Persian kings were the first to introduce that peculiar headgear, which remains in fashion among royalty. There are no contemporary explanations for the pointy bits on a circular diadem, and they may symbolize a castle wall, high mountains, or the rays of the sun. But the triangular shapes on the classic royal crown also resemble a cock’s comb. Intriguingly, stone reliefs at the Persian capital of Persepolis include images of a crowned man with wings under a crescent moon. Another Persian sacred or royal hat, the kurbasia , was explicitly designed to resemble a cock’s comb.
    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 bedestroyed. 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