Reply #64: That's OK, I like to play Dueling Links...

[onager]

And I don't even have a Real Purty Mouth.

Kosher: The Origins of the Jewish Dietary Laws

Trichinosis as a food borne pathogen was not identified until 1835 (Arnold, 2005). It is highly unlikely that in antiquity people were aware that the food they were eating was causing health problems.

The incubation period and the onset of symptoms occurs ten days after the consumption of undercooked pork contaminated by Trichinosis (Regenstein, 2003).

Even if the Israelites were able to link some foods with immediate onset of symptoms with a disease it is very unlikely that they would be able to link Trichinosis with pork given this delayed response.

Furthermore, according to Dr. Joe Regenstein, a professor in Cornell’s Food Science department, mummified pork carcasses from ancient Egypt have been studied and reveal no evidence of Trichinosis at this time. Since Trichinosis forms cysts within the animal’s tissue it would be expected to visibly see this in a pork carcass.

http://courses.cit.cornell.edu/nes263/student2007/mrh43/page4.html

The oldest domestic pig remains presently known in Egypt come from the large Predynastic settlement site of Merimda Beni Salama in the western Delta, dated to the fifth millennium BCE.

Pig remains have been found throughout Egypt at sites such as Hierakonpolis, Maadi, Abydos, and Armant, near graves belonging to the poorer classes, indicating that pork was an element in their diet, at least at the Predynastic period. Cattle bones were found in graves belonging to more elite burials.

And look what else was found inside an Egyptian tomb!

In the early Fourth Dynasty tomb-chapel of Metjen at Saqqara, the deceased states that he received a bequest from his father that included "people, small livestock and pigs."

Pig-farming expanded during the New Kingdom. Inscriptions indicate that temples and wealthy citizens maintained large numbers of them on their country estates, and tomb-chapels of several nobles from the early 18th dynasty illustrate swine as well as other farmyard animals. The mayor of el-Kab relates that he owned a herd of fifteen hundred pigs.

A temple of Amenhotep III at Memphis was endowed with some 1000 pigs and 1000 piglets, and the mortuary temple of Seti I at Abydos held large herds of swine on its domains.

Pigs are also shown in use for farming itself, as they tread seed into the soil, even into the time of Herodotus.

Inscriptions on ostraca and other findings indicate that the workers at Deir el-Medina occasionally indulged in meals of pork. So pigs were bred, raised and occasionally eaten in different places.

What of the religious connection? Votive faience pig figurines dating to the first dynasty have been recovered from Abydos, Hierakonpolis, and Elephantine Island. The figurines from Abydos were found by Petrie inside what he considered to be the sacred compound of the god Osiris.

Sources:
Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt
Animals in Ancient Egypt by Patrick Houlihan
Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian Gods and Goddesses by George Hart
Ancient Egyptian Science, Vol I, by Marshall Clagett
Food: the Gift of Osiris by William J. Darby, Paul Ghalioungui and Louis Grivetti.

http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/pigs.htm