Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2020 November 24

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November 24

What's the origin of this story please?

There is an image that crops up again and again in European art through the middle ages, of a sleeping pedlar being robbed by monkeys. The earliest mention of it I can find is in the Decretales Gregorii IX and although I can't read the text, there are images of monkeys robbing a man while he sleeps. Then similar scenes appear on a vase in the mid 1400s [[1]]. Then Peter Van Der Heyden does an engravng after Pieter Bruegel the Elder of the scene, as does Claes Jansz. Visscher after Pieter Feddes van Harlingen around the early 1600s. And a version of it crops up in London in the 1660s being sold by Robert Pricke. The Dutch wikipedia page for Marskramer has a mention of it [2]. All the images contain the same motifs and themes, and some of them even have notes describing the scene, but nowhere can I find an origin of a folk tale or fable or song or any clue to the story's origin, or even a description of the story beyond the basics. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.150.44.199 (talk) 17:19, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

There is no provable origin for that motif outside of art history if I'm to believe Bonnie Young's statement that "A story of monkeys robbing a pedlar does not seem to occur in either classical or medieval literature" (p. 443), unless, as she says, it has developed out of a Classical story of a hunter trying to catch monkeys using weighted boots. Failing that it can only be said that it's a comment on human covetousness and dishonesty, monkeys being seen as a sort of parody of mankind, and being attracted by such bright, shiny objects as pedlars carry. --Antiquary (talk) 20:41, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Persian versions of ancient Greek names

While there are many examples of Grecised Persian names, like Xerxes (Xsayarsa), Mardonius (Marduniya), did the reverse thing happen, i.e. Persized versions of ancient Greek names? Or did Persians simply transliterate the Greek names instead (particularly during the Greco-Persian Wars)? Thanks. 212.180.235.46 (talk) 18:17, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

We don't have much Achaemenid Persian "literature" as such. What has survived is the Zoroastrian scriptures (often difficult to date -- to the degree that there's disagreement as to which millennium Zoroaster lived in), and various royal inscriptions, the longest at Behistun. AnonMoos (talk) 22:01, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

The writing systems, Old Persian cuneiform versus the Greek alphabet, were sufficiently different that there would not have been a straightforward and simple transliteration. The Graecization of Persian names has two components: an adaptation to the phonemes of Ancient Greek, and the application of inflectional suffixes to fit the declensional paradigms of Ancient Greek, as in (Ionic) Xérxēs–Xérxō–Xérxēi–Xérxēn–Xérxē. Old Persian had its own phonology and was, like Ancient Greek, a highly inflected language with different declensions and lots of cases, so it is highly likely that the Persians would have done likewise.  --Lambiam 10:15, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

Why did the Soviet Union's other East Asian populations never become as large as the Soviet Union's Korean population did?

In 1989 (please use Google Translate for this), the Soviet Union had almost 439,000 Koreans but just 11,000 Chinese, almost 3,000 Mongols, and less than 1,000 Japanese:

http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/sng_nac_89.php

What exactly explains this extremely massive discrepancy? Why exactly did the Soviet Union's other East Asian populations never become anywhere near as numerous as the Soviet Union's Korean population became?

(And the situation for the Soviet Union's Vietnamese wasn't much better, with there only being 3,000 of them in 1989, roughly equivalent to the Soviet Union's Mongol population during this time and over 100 times less than the Soviet Union's Korean population during this time.)

Thoughts? Futurist110 (talk) 22:46, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Migration seems to be the best answer: ethnic Chinese would have found China much more attractive than ethnic Koreans (still) find North Korea. A better comparison might be Chinese and Koreans, ca. 1962-82. DOR (HK) (talk) 23:16, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Well, neither China nor North Korea likely allowed much free emigration between 1962 and 1982, so ... Futurist110 (talk) 00:09, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

So, no possibility of people crossing the border without legal permission? Not exactly the Berlin Wall level of security up there. DOR (HK) (talk) 17:23, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

@Futurist110: Have you given our article on Koryo-saram a read? I think you will find it a useful springboard to finding an answer to your question. bibliomaniac15 23:39, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

Yes, actually I did. In fact, reading that article as well as an article by Jonathan Otto Pohl about this topic motivated me to ask this question. Futurist110 (talk) 00:09, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

One reason is that many ethnic Koreans were effectively stateless and could not leave. Korea was under Japanese occupation from 1910 through the end of 1945, and divided after 1945. Koreans who were in the Soviet Union during and after World War II had no connection or documentation from either new Korean state. At most, they had documents from the Japanese administration of Korea, if even that, but the postwar Japanese government did not regard ethnic Koreans as having Japanese nationality or any right to immigrate. See for example Sakhalin_Koreans#Repatriation_refused. --Amble (talk) 23:02, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

Ethnic Chinese in Russia seems to indicate that the number of Chinese was much higher than 11,000, though it does not give a figure for 1989.--Wikimedes (talk) 21:03, 28 November 2020 (UTC)