'Apes' vs 'Monkeys'
December 2007
Colin Groves, Professor, Australian National University
Ever wonder how we came to distinguish between the terms “ape” and “monkey”? IPPL Advisory Board member Prof. Groves pursues the historical roots of this semantic distinction—a trail that leads back to ancient times.
The Greco-Roman world knew monkeys, but not very well. Baboons, of course, were well known in ancient Egypt, and so were vervet monkeys from the Sudan; vervets were evidently traded as pets to Bronze Age Greece and turn up in brightly-colored frescos in Knossos and on Thera. After the fall of Minoan Crete in about 1400 BC, the links with Egypt were severed, and by
classical times monkeys were little more than a rumor.
In 146 BC, Rome finally established itself as the dominant power in the Mediterranean region by conquering and destroying
Carthage, in North Africa. Among the animals that subsequently became familiar in the Roman world were Barbary macaques
(Macaca sylvanus), which were called “Simia,” meaning snubnosed. Barbary macaques, unlike almost all other Old World
monkeys (a couple of other species of macaques being the only exceptions), have just a tiny knob for a tail and appear pretty much tailless. And so it was, right up until nearly 1480 AD, that the only nonhuman primate that was known in Europe was a tailless one.
The word “apa” first appears (in about 700 AD) in the Épinal Glossary, a compilation giving the Old English (Anglo-Saxon)
equivalents of Latin words. The plural was “apan,” which became “apen,” and finally, by about 1350, “apes.”
In medieval Christendom (and Islam), animals were not interesting for their own sakes, but as religious symbols. “Apes”
were regarded as a sort of devil’s jest; usually, as God had made the human form, the devil had created one which mocked it. More kindly, “apes” could be seen not as evil in themselves but as warnings: an English translation (1398) of Bartholomew the Englishman’s De Rerum Proprietatibus (“On the Nature of Things”) says, “Some bestes be yordeynede for mannes merthe,
as apes and marmusettes and popyngayes.” (“Some beasts are created for human amusement, such as apes and marmosets and parrots.”) “Apes,” of course, meant Barbary macaques; “marmoset” (meaning, literally, a small marble figure) meant a gargoyle, hence any grotesque figure, even an ugly little boy.
From the 12th century, the stories of Reynard the Fox—essentially satires of the establishment, including the church—became popular throughout Western Europe.
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Above, a Barbary macaque monkey from Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner’s bestiary, printed in the mid-1500s; this monkey is identified as “Ein Aff”—An Ape! Top, a long-tailed monkey (possibly a vervet) frolics through the sketch books of Renaissance painter Antonio Pisanello (1395-1455).
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Several of the characters in the stories are apes, including Reynard’s uncle Martin, who is a bishop’s clerk. Martin has a son, Moncke or Moneke (Low- German) or Monnequin (French); the names are either diminutives of the old Spanish mona (“ape”), or derived from “mannekin” (diminutive of “man”). Whether this character occurs in the English versions we do not know, but the similarity to the word “monkey” is irresistible. (The word “monkey” did not itself appear in written English until the early 16th century.)
The first evidence for monkeys with tails in Europe is some colored sketches by the artist Giovannino de’Grassi in the
1390s. He depicted the inevitable Barbary macaque, along with a long-tailed monkey which looks to me like the West African green monkey, Chlorocebus sabaeus. This was at the very beginning of the age of European expansion, and monkeys from Africa and Asia thereafter became more and more familiar, at least in European art. They were called monkeys, and contrasted with
the tailless “apes,” the Barbary macaques. Knowledge of what we now call apes still had to wait for over 200 years.
In 1610, the Rev. Samuel Purchas, who was compiling tales of overseas travels, met a sailor, Andrew Battell, who had been held captive by the Portuguese in Angola for some 20 years, and his tale became part of the final book Purchas His Pilgrimes, published in 1625. Battell had either seen or, more likely, heard tales of gorillas and chimpanzees, and he described (with much fabulous adornment) the gorilla under the name “Pongo” and mentioned (but forgot to describe) the chimpanzee as “Engecko.” Names resembling these two words are still used for gorillas and chimpanzees, respectively, in languages of the peoples north of the Congo estuary.
Meanwhile, a Dutch physician in Indonesia, Jakob de Bondt (known as Bontius), examined what he called a female “satyr,” but his account was not published until 1658, long after his death, in a book on tropical medicine, Historiae Naturalis et Medicae Indiae Orientalis. To this day there is controversy whether he was describing an orangutan, although the crude drawing that accompanied his posthumous account, though much reproduced, is certainly a hairy woman.
Even by the time Linnaeus got around to classifying the animal kingdom in 1758, and the humanlike creatures in 1760, the major division within what he called Simia was between those with and without tails. The ones without tails were Barbary
macaques and an amalgam of everything that was rumored (“known” would be too kind a word) about great apes. The Old English division between tailed monkeys and tailless apes was thereby perpetuated. His successors gradually distinguished between one kind of ape and another, and recognized that the Barbary macaque was related to tailed monkeys.
Ironically, therefore, the species to which the word “ape” first applied became no longer to be considered an ape (although
one can still find it called “Barbary ape” in publications as late as the 1950s), leaving that word to the hominoids—a group
that includes today’s gibbons, chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans—which were completely unknown to Europeans until the early 17th century!
More to come from Colin Groves
Be on the lookout for the forthcoming book by Prof. Groves, Extended Family: The Story of People and Other Primates, to be published next February. He describes this latest work of his as “a personal history of primatology.” The book includes tales of his own encounters with monkeys and apes—from the London Zoo to the wilds of Africa—and goes on to examine the evolving folklore and science that have marked the relationship between human and nonhuman primates.
