ABSTRACT
In this paper, the author would like to present an argument concerning cultural attitudes towards domestic animals and characteristic aspects of the domestication process in the Mediterranean and Middle East. The former designates domestic animals, while the latter designates the subordinated domestic human beings as serf or slave. Under the term pasu, members of the two different semantic domains, domestic animals and subordinated domestic serfs or slaves, are classified in the same category. Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean peoples seem to have developed their ideology of nature along quite different lines from their Mongolian counterparts. Siberian hunters and Mongolian pastoralists justify their killing and consumption of animals by prohibiting the slaughter of a special individual held to be responsible for the herd's prosperity. In the discourses of the Old Testament concerning animals, the people find a similar attitude to domestic animals as to human domestic serfs.
