Re: [tied] Re: laguage of bird names ?= Old European

> > My memory might be faulty, but I thought that chickens were a late
> > domesticate from India and started to appear in the Mediterranean
> in the later half of the 1st millenium BCE.
> >
> > Can anybody confirm or reject this?
>
> Piotr has, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/15944 ,
> in response to a vague feeling of their being introduced in Roman
> times.

In classical Greece, roosters were traditional gifts from male lovers to the
youth they wished to have their wicked way with. As one of my Greek art
books puts it (explaining the famous vase of Ganymede in the Louvre) when
older males wished to show their affection for a youth, they gave him a
cock. So Greek vase painting shows unambiguously that chickens (in both
senses!) were present in Greece in the middle of the 1st millennium BC.

Peter