Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/590/en

of the ancient Persian cultural epoch. The early breeds, like all later ones, are smaller in build than the presumed wild form of the aurochs and show from the outset a high variability of outward appearance. Precisely in the grazing animals — cattle, sheep and goats, the oldest domestic animals after the dog — it becomes evident how the derivation from their wild forms remains obscure. When one looks to the myths of the peoples — the sacrifice of Abel in the Old Testament, for instance, who was a herdsman — sheep and cattle above all stand at the centre of religious sacrificial acts. "Cultural-historical documents show that cattle in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia and India initially served solely for cultic purposes." In the ancient Egyptian myth, the heavenly goddess Hathor was venerated in the archetype of the cow, depicted as a cow bearing the solar disc cradled between her horns. In India today the cow is sacred among Hindus as she was in primordial times. Does this not point rather to the fact that the spirit-real experience of the being of cattle — that which supersensibly constitutes the group soul — stood as godparent to the process of domestication?