Curious tail of monkeys who crossed the ancient world

On a 3500-year-old fresco in Santorini, monkeys dangle from branches. But it has taken until now to spot something wrong with their tails.

A langur and baby at Taronga Park Zoo. Picture: Rick Stevens

The tails should have been a problem. On a 3500-year-old fresco in Santorini, monkeys frolic, dangling from branches. Despite the exquisite detail, it has taken until now to spot something wrong with their tails. They don’t go down, they go up.

And in that small difference, a study has argued, lies a fascinating insight into Bronze Age trade.

Because they are not the tails of monkeys from nearby North Africa. They are not even those of monkeys from Mesopotamia. Instead, you have to travel 5000km to the Indus Valley in Pakistan before you find tails that curve upwards like that.

All of which means, the scientist behind the findings said, that “the Silk Roads were open” almost 1500 years before they are credited as starting.

“This is showing us that what people later consider the Silk Roads are working even then, at least indirectly,” said Marie Nicole Pareja, from the University of Pennsylvania. “We talk about the Minoans, about the Egyptians, about the Indus peoples, all as if they are separate. But they are interconnected.”

Dr Pareja specialises in monkeys and apes in Aegean art. She came to this latest discovery by doing something unusual for someone in her field: chatting to biologists. “It felt really silly to examine an image of these animals as an archaeologist and art historian without asking for the input of people who look at them every day,” she said.

For a paper in the journal Primate, she sent off pictures of the monkeys to researchers around the world. The presumption had been that they showed creatures from Egypt, which had a history of depicting the animals.

Most of the images she sent did. They were hamadryas or olive baboons or vervets. But the Akrotiri frescoes, which were excavated in the 1960s and date to the Minoan civilisation, which originated in Crete but occupied Santorini, were different.

“There was consensus. All came back independently and said, ‘These are langurs’.”

There was no mistaking the way the tail flexed upwards. The monkeys playing on this Mediterranean fresco were native to the Indian subcontinent, most likely the Indus Valley, which had an advanced civilisation at the time.

More than that, because the attention to detail is quite unlike any in Egyptian or Mesopota­mian art, Dr Pareja thinks it is implausible they were copied. Either the monkey came to the artist, the artist travelled to the monkey, or the two met in the middle. “When you consider the distance of the Aegean to the Indus, compared to Egypt, it is incredible,” she said.

Peter Frankopan, professor of global history at Oxford University and author of The Silk Roads, said it was not unprecedented. “We sometimes get surprised to think people and goods moved over long distances in the past, but our ancestors were interested in rare and exotic things, just as we are. Long-distance trade, and connections between the Mediterranean, Asia and the Indian Ocean are well attested, even in this period, for high value, expensive objects,” he said.

“What makes this image so intriguing is that it raises the question of why the langur ended up here, which would on balance be more logical than a traveller sketching an animal from memory. Perhaps it was acquired as a pet by a wealthy elite; or perhaps it was a diplomatic gift, a way of showing the benefits of better ties to the luxuries of the east.”

Past finds provided clues that other goods were traded at this time. On Crete, an ivory monkey figurine with a cross and chevron motif on its base has a pattern and posture that match those used in eastern Persia and the Indus.

The Times