Ritual spans millennia and continents

The UAE has a great history of bull butting with depictions of the humped animal found on pre-Islamic pottery.

FUJAIRAH // Bull-butting competitions have been held around the world, from Greece to Oman to Thailand, and have been chronicled across the centuries. "The custom of holding public contests between two bulls, or between bulls and men, is a very ancient and widespread one, confined to no particular age or ethnic group," C W Bishop wrote in a 1927 monograph for the Smithsonian Institution. He felt it was some sort of "nature worship" relating to the "fertility of the crops".

While the arrival of bull-butting in Fujairah is often incorrectly credited to Portuguese traders, the sport dates back millennia in the Middle East. Depictions of bull-butting as sport are painted on ancient Egyptian tombs that date from the third millennium BC onwards. "There is a ritual importance connected with bulls in pre-Islamic south Arabia," said Dr Michele Ziolkowski, an archaeologist based in Fujairah. "This is actually seen from south Arabia to Turkey, Iran and the Indus Valley and as far afield as the Minoans in Greece.

"As yet I have no idea how long bull-butting has existed as a 'sport' in the UAE. One would need to investigate signs of it in the archaeological record." Depictions of humped bulls on pre-Islamic pottery found in the UAE and Oman date to the same period they first appeared in Egypt. A ceramic vessel from Bahrain, dated 2000 BC to 1800 BC, depicts a man who appears to be holding a bull's horns and a rope attached to the bull's nose. Bronze figurines of bulls heads from Mleiha, in Sharjah emirate, date from about 200 BC to 100 BC.

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