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dogs may have been bred for use as food. Dog bones found by archaeologists in that region are often scarred with knife marks.
    Nevertheless, the dog almost immediately became somethingmore. The uncanny ability of dogs to pick up on human moods and needs is almost certainly instinctive rather than bred, so we can imagine the slow courtship of human and beast as it would have played out over centuries. Without even having to be captured or trained, some tamed dogs would have begun to function as guard animals, alerting humans to potential intrusion, protecting food and other possessions from outside assault. Soon, with training, these ur-pets would have been hunting, pulling sleds, and, eventually, herding livestock—man and dog, creating civilization as one.
    Yet the hand that feeds the dog has forever been not merely bitten by it but, on occasion, devoured. In rabies, after all, every dog has a dark side lurking behind the soulful eyes; and even a healthy dog seldom hesitates to feast on the corpse of a dead human, even that of a former friend or master. In ancient India, the ambivalence toward dogs was eloquently expressed in one sacred text called the
NisīhaCuū,
which says that gods “come to the world of men in the shape of
yaksas,
dogs, that is. They are worshipped when they do good, and not, when they do not.” Indian literature itself is rife with images of dogs as battlefield scavengers; in one sacred text, hell is portrayed as a place where malign rulers are devoured by 720 dogs with fangs of steel. And yet dogs were kept as pets and bred by the elite, and the favors of a dog were sometimes auspicious. “If a dog comes face-to-face with [a man] in a joyous mood,” noted one ancient work, “frolicking and rolling on the ground in front of him, then…there will be a great gain of wealth [when he] starts on a journey.”
    Nowhere was the dichotomy in the dog starker than among the ancient Egyptians, whose highest god was the dog god Anubis and who bred graceful sight hounds—the lithe form of which is believed by some to survive to the present day in our pharaoh hounds. An excavated tomb at Abydos, dating to 3300 B.C. , built during the pre-pharaonic Upper Kingdom for an unknown ruler, shows evidence of the ritual burial of dogs, which would become a common practice in Egypt. A tomb at Hierakonpolis from approximately the same time(discovered during the late nineteenth century but then lost) was illustrated in full color with a hunting scene, complete with hounds, and contained the remains of multiple domesticated dogs; excavation of the tomb of Queen Herneith, who ruled a few hundred years later, found the skeleton of her dog stretched across the entrance to her tomb, guarding her home in the afterlife. In art, hounds were often depicted on leashes and as widely present in human society; ancient Egypt was a dog’s paradise, a place where (if we are to believe Herodotus) the death of a pet dog would prompt its owner to shave not just his head but his entire body.
    And yet even in Egypt, semi-feral dogs posed a constant threat in the streets of towns and villages; in
The Book of the Dead,
dogs are alluded to in one appeal by the deceased narrator to Ra, the sun deity, against a force that “carries off souls, who gulps down decayed matter, who lives on carrion, who is attached to darkness and dwells in gloom, of whom the feeble are afraid.” References to dogs as scavengers in Egypt are found not just in the Hebrew Bible’s accounts but in papyri documenting the Roman era there.
    Like the Egyptians, the Greeks loved their graceful hunting hounds and considered them loyal friends and companions. A new literary genre, the
cynegeticon,
sprang up in ancient Greece to extol the hound and to prescribe its proper breeding and care. The most prominent (and likely first) of these guidebooks was penned by the soldier-historian Xenophon, who himself had witnessed the power of
lyssa
during a military campaign: of a