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The recent archaeological discovery also deepens our understanding of trade networks between India and the Roman Empire.
A relief depicting a monkey riding a crocodile from a pot found at Chandraketugarh, West Bengal, India, 199–100 BCE (image via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
How much interaction did the Romans have with Ancient India? A new article in the Journal of Roman Archaeology investigates the discovery of several burials for pet monkeys at the Red Sea port of Berenike on the Egyptian coast. The bones of these domestic pets suggest that some Romans, including soldiers, likely kept exotic pets in their households. But the skeletal remains are also strong indicators of the extensive trade networks that connected the Roman Empire with India via the Indian Ocean.
Romans were predominantly dog people. Although a recent study indicates that they occasionally kept cats, dogs were used for hunting, guarding houses, and companionship. What is less well known among historians today is how common pet monkeys were and their origins. It was long thought that Roman pet monkeys were Barbary macaques from Africa; however, three dozen newly excavated burials of Indian macaques dating from 1 to 200 CE in the Berenike animal cemetery tell a different story. The primates were buried among cats and dogs, each with a distinguishing collar indicating they were kept as pets. What is more surprising is the presence of piglet and kitten skeletons in the graves, suggesting monkeys even had their own pets.
But when did this monkey business start?
Detail of cat and birds mosaic from Santa Maria Capua Vetere, now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples (photo by Massimo Finizio via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 IT)
Since at least the Minoans in the second millennium BCE, monkeys were bought and kept as pets within the Greek world of the Aegean Sea. And in the Roman world, they seem to have been domesticated in homes since around the third century BCE, although they were thought to be largely procured from Africa. In the first century CE, the natural historian Pliny the Elder noted that monkeys were kept in Roman houses. By the early imperial period, knowledge of monkeys as pets appears to have already become common. The bones of a pet monkey were recovered in the ruins of a bath complex in Pompeii, and Roman reliefs from places like Ostia, the port of Rome, depict monkeys in storefronts, perhaps for sale or as companions, like cats in a bookshop.
Minoan frescoes from Akrotiri, Thera (today Santorini, Greece) (photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)
The new study, led by Polish archaeologists Marta Osypińska, Piotr Osypiński, and Iwona Zych, also examines who bought these monkeys. The burials indicate that it was perhaps Roman soldiers who purchased and valued pet monkeys as prestige items. The authors note that the military men posted in Early Roman Berenike were officers and soldiers from the III or XXII legions, who were often sent on missions to Africa and the Near East. “Their possession of such exotic animals,” the authors note, “may have influenced an elitist soldierly tradition that was evoked in the following centuries by the Gallo-Roman elite and others.” Archaeozoological evidence from the province of Roman Gaul indicates that monkeys may have been a prestige acquisition in the northern Roman provinces as well.
Berenike was an important port that today provides a window into an active ancient trade center, and as the authors note, the monkey burials found there “provide the first zooarchaeological evidence of trade in live animals from India.” A new generation of historians is increasingly finding that Roman imperial trade with India was vibrant, and not simply limited to spices, dyes, and ivory. If you were a Roman soldier, you might even want to bypass the pepper and simply bring home a pet monkey as living evidence of your travels.
Ring depicting Septimus Severus from Ancient India, Kushan period, early 3rd century CE (image via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The discovery of more extensive trade between the Roman Empire and India than previously thought sheds further light on the complex networks and diaspora communities that facilitated Indo-Mediterranean trade. As ancient historian Jeremy Simmons argues in his forthcoming book Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade, “The ancient world was a far more interconnected place than is often assumed.” The monkey skeletons from Berenike may seem like negligible oddities, but they are one more piece of evidence supporting the growing understanding that Indian Ocean exports had a wider impact on the people of the Roman Mediterranean than we ever knew.
