Indian monkey painting on Thera

From _New Scientist_, issue for 21/28 December 2019. Not sure how much of
the text is visible to non-subscribers, so I'll give it here. The
interesting picture should be visible, I think -- see first link below.

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A Bronze Age painting on a Greek island shows a monkey from thousands of
kilometres away in Asia. The finding suggests that ancient cultures
separated by great distances were trading and exchanging ideas.

The artwork is one of several wall paintings in a building at Akrotiri on
the Greek island of Thera (Santorini) in the Aegean Sea. Akrotiri was a
settlement of the Minoan civilisation in Bronze Age Greece that was buried
by ash from a volcanic eruption in around 1600 BC.

Many of the paintings show monkeys, yet there were no monkeys in Greece at
the time. Most of the monkeys have been identified as Egyptian species like
olive baboons. This makes sense because Egypt was in contact with the
Minoan civilisation, which was spread across several Aegean islands.
However, others were harder to identify.

Marie Nicole Pareja at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia
teamed up with primatologists to re-examine the mystery monkey paintings.
One stood out. =E2=80=9CWhen they looked at this wall painting, they all st=
raight
away unambiguously said =E2=80=98that=E2=80=99s a langur=E2=80=99,=E2=80=9D=
 says Pareja.

The team has identified the monkey as a grey langur (Semnopithecus). As
well as its distinctive fur, the monkey was depicted holding its tail in a
characteristic S shape.

Grey langurs live in southern Asia in what is now Nepal, Bhutan and India =
=E2=80=93
and particularly in the Indus Valley. During the Bronze Age, the region was
home to the Indus Valley Civilisation, one of the most important societies
of that time. Although it was past its peak, the Indus Valley Civilisation
was still advanced for its time, with large cities and elaborate water
supply systems.

Somehow, the artist who painted the monkey picture must have seen a grey
langur. But how?

Did Minoan Greeks visit the Indus? =E2=80=9CI wouldn=E2=80=99t be surprised=
 if someday in
the future we found evidence for that kind of direct contact,=E2=80=9D says=
 Pareja,
but right now there is none. It is also possible the visit was the other
way round, but again there is no evidence.

Instead, it may be that Greece and Indus were connected via Mesopotamia,
another Bronze Age civilisation centred on what is now Iraq. Langurs may
have been imported to Mesopotamia for menageries, where visiting Greeks saw
them.

=E2=80=9CIt=E2=80=99s evidence of this far-reaching trade, these relationsh=
ips with these
far-flung areas,=E2=80=9D says Pareja. Even in the Bronze Age, it seems the=
re was a
lot of exchange between seemingly separate civilisations.

Journal reference: Primates, DOI: 10.1007/s10329-019-00778-1

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My own take on this is that there was already a trade in exotic pets
brought to the west along what would later be called the Silk Road. We know
that this was already well established considerably later, in the 2nd
century BC, thanks to the mosaic of the Indian Rose-Ringed Parakeet found
at Pergamon. (It is a Rose-Ringed Parakeet, not an Alexandrine Parakeet as
wrongly restored, as can be seen from the surviving portion of the narrow
pink and black neck ring -- Alexandrines have a broad pink patch here.) See
link below.

RH

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