Shepherd

in a natural cave in Piedra River in the monk's old path from the monastery to the roe deer salt ponds, Aragon, Spain]] Shepherding is among the oldest occupations, beginning some 5,000 years ago in Asia Minor. Sheep were kept for their milk, their meat and especially their wool. Over the next thousand years, sheep and shepherding spread throughout Eurasia. Henri Fleisch tentatively suggested that the Shepherd Neolithic industry of Lebanon may date to the Epipaleolithic and that it may have been practised by one of the first cultures of nomadic shepherds in the Beqaa Valley. Some sheep were integrated in the family farm along with other animals such as chickens and pigs. However to maintain…

]] The shepherd, with other such figures as the goatherd, is the inhabitant of idealized Arcadia, which is an idyllic and natural countryside. These works are, indeed, called pastoral, after the term for herding. The first surviving instances are the Idylls of Theocritus, and the Eclogues of Virgil, both of which inspired many imitators such as Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender. The shepherds of the pastoral are often heavily conventional and bear little relation to the actual work of shepherds. In the poem "The passionate shepherd to his love", by Christopher Marlowe, a shepherd is depicted as a partaker of rural paradise, and capable of giving things worth more than that a town…