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Home , Arnon (river), Cher (river), Florentine dialect, French name, Rodano, Samuel Bochart

ONOMÀSTICA 5 (2019): 157–185 | RECEPCIÓ 8.3.2019 | ACCEPTACIÓ 30.9.2019

European fluvial , Hebrew sources, and imagined history Ephraim Nissan London [email protected]

Abstract: The article begins by discussing aspects of the of the river Arno in (e.g. a tenth-century reference in the Book of Yosippon, and the cultural context of a 19th-century academic in Pisa who associated the Arno with the name of the biblical river ; etymological hypotheses for the name Arno; the sculpted Arno riverine god: misidentification, and an early modern myth in art history). A second section discusses the names for the river Rhône in southern . Next, the article considers a river name reinterpreted from pagan antiquity (Canaanite Na‘aman) to extant belief systems ( Na‘mayn with an Islamic hagiographical etiology). Another section briefly considers the two Hebrus rivers: the Iberian Ebro and the Balkan Maritza/ Evros. The article then examines how some hydronyms have been affected by a more ludic dimension. Key words: river names (of the Arno, Calabrone, Rhône, Charente, Lot, Garonne, Don, Dnieper, Dniester, Berezina, , Donwy, Ebro, Maritza/Evros, Tagliamento, , Jordan, Arnon, Besor, Na‘aman/Na‘mayn/Belos, Thirsty Snake Creek), ‘Akko/‘Akko/ Acre/Ptolemais (city), Ancona, etymology, romantic etymologies, resemantization, folk-etymology, mock-etymology, playful etiologies, statues of riverine gods, Anakites, Book of Yosippon, Salvatore De Benedetti, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, Phoenicians, Phoenicomania

Noms fluvials europeus, fonts hebrees i història imaginada Resum: L’article comença discutint aspectes del nom del riu Arno a la Toscana (per exemple, els noms de l’Arno en contextos jueus: la referència del segle X en el Llibre de Yossippon i el context cultural d’un erudit de Pisa del segle XIX que relaciona l’Arno amb el nom del riu bíblic Arnon; hipòtesis etimològiques sobre Arno; l’escultura del déu Arno: es tracta d’una identificació errònia i d’un mite modern de la història de l’art). Un altre apartat extens parla dels noms del riu Roine, al sud de França. Tot seguit, es considera un nom de riu reinterpretat, des de l’antiguitat pagana (el cananeu Na‘aman) fins a les creences actuals (àrab Na‘mayn amb una etiologia hagiogràfica islàmica). Una altra secció considera breument els dos rius Hebrus: l’Ebre ibèric i la Maritza / Evros dels Balcans. A continuació s’exemplifica com a vegades els noms dels rius es veuen afectats per la dimensió lúdica. Paraules clau: noms de riu (de l’Arno, Calabrone, Roine, Charanta, Lot, Garona, Don, Dnieper, Dniester, Berezina, Danubi, Donwy, Ebre, Maritza/Evros, Tagliamento, Nil, 157 Ephraim Nissan

Jordà, Arnon, Besor, Na‘aman/Na‘mayn/Belos, Thirsty Snake Creek), ‘Akko/‘Akko/ Acre/Ptolemaida (ciutat), Ancona, etimologia, etimologies romàntiques, resemantització, etimologia popular, etimologia simulada, etimologies lúdiques, estàtues de déus fluvials, Anakites, Llibre de Yossippon, Salvatore De Benedetti, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, fenicis, feniciomania

1 THE RIVER ARNO 1.1 Derivatives or compounds of Arno: the names of abandoned stretches of the Arno river-bed, of its medieval diversion channel, and other terminology

After the Tiber, the Arno is the most important river in central , their respective lengths being 405 km and 250 km. In this subsection, we are concerned with derivatives or compounds of the hydronym, the Arno. Consider the following derivatives: the adverb oltr’Arno or oltrarno ‘beyond the Arno’ (but colloquially in , di là d’Arno) with respect to the historical center (on the Arno’s right bank) of the city of Florence; the noun Oltrarno referring to the area of Florence on the left bank of the Arno; and the noun lungarno or Lungarno, denoting, in cities crossed by the river Arno, the streets along either of its banks (also in the plural: i lungarni fiorentini, i lungarni pisani).1 In Rome, lungotevere denotes such a street that runs along one of the banks of the Tiber. In 1606, the mouth of the Arno was moved northward, by of the Grand Ferdinand I de’ Medici (b. 1549, r. 1587, d. 1609), downstream of the town of Barbaricina, and the old, abandoned river-bed of that stretch of the course of the Arno is known as Arnino (a ). Other abandoned stretches of the river-bed are known as Arni morti (singular: Arno morto): see Repetti2 (1833, s.v. Arno morto); cf. Arno Vecchio. Moreover, Arnaccio (a pejorative) – whose synonyms included Rio Arnonico, Rio di Pozzale, and Rivus Arnonicus – was the name of a

1 http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/oltrarno/ and http://www.treccani.it/ vocabolario/lungarno/. 2 Emanuele Repetti (Carrara, Tuscany 1776 – Florence 1852) was a Tuscan geographer, historian, and natural scientist. He was, and continues to be, acclaimed for his monumental Dizionario Geografico Fisico Storico della Toscana, published initially in instalments between 1833 and 1846. On Ferdinand I, see e.g. Ostrow (2015). 158 European fluvial names, Hebrew sources, and imagined history channel (no longer in use by the early 19th century) that diverted water from the lower course of the Arno to the mouth of the Calabrone (or Bocca di Calambrone [sic]): either excavated in 1176 for defense purposes or canalized in conjunction with the three branches of the Arno at its estuary, as mentioned by Strabo (Repetti 1833, s.v.Arnaccio and s.v. Acqua (Madonna dell’)). In the next subsection, we consider two imagined pasts in relation to the river Arno. In the first, a scholar has proposed an etymology for the river’s name that derives from a biblical river while, in the second, we see how, in the 17th century, ancient statues of riverine gods were interpreted as representations of the god of the river Arno, whereas in fact, in Roman antiquity, the Arno was not included in the typology of sculpted riverine gods.

1.2 Names for the Arno in Jewish contexts: a tenth- century reference in the Yosippon and the cultural context of a 19th-century academic in Pisa associating the Arno with the name of the biblical river Arnon

Nissan (in this issue, Sec.2) documents that a tenth-century Hebrew book from Italy, the Yosippon, refers to the river Arno, not by the name Arno, but as “the river [of] Pisa”. In fact, Elijah Capsali’s 1517 version distorted the name into “Pisia” (even though the Cretan rabbi Capsali, a Venetian subject, had studied in , in the territory of the ). In this subsection, we consider another Jewish connection for names used for the Arno. Unlikely etymologies – at times daring or even risky – may sometimes be proposed in scholarly works. In the early 1880s, Asher Salah reports, “Salvatore De Benedetti, in one of the lectures he delivered at Pisa University, while aiming to show the spiritual and etymological affinities between Hebrew and Italian, derived the name of the Florentine river Arno from the biblical Arnon,3 making it thus easier to acclimatise the

3 In contrast, it was poetic license that allowed Rabbi Lelio [Hillel] Della Torre (Cuneo, 1805 – Padua, 1871), on p. 37 of his book of Hebrew poems, Tal Yaldut (published in Padua in 1868), to refer to the Arno as Arnon in Hebrew. 159 Ephraim Nissan sceneries of ancient Israel to Dante’s homeland” (2013, 183–184). The river Arno is Tuscany’s main river just as, in Biblical (and Modern) Hebrew, the Arnōn is the name of a prominent river in . Its present- day is Wadi Mujib. An eastern tributary of the Dead , it enters this lake today at 420 m below sea level, at almost the same latitude as Gaza. In biblical times, it constituted Moab’s northern border. In all likelihood, De Benedetti’s etymological hypothesis was a pious folk-etymology, amounting to a minor modern scholarly myth. Marco Di Giulio (2016, 94) has remarked that whereas for the coeval linguist, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli4 (a Milanese academic), his dual Italian and Jewish identity was

reflected in a concern to illuminate the connections and influences linking Semitic and Indo-European languages and cultures[,5 i]n De Benedetti’s work, his dual identity is more directly represented by his interest in developing parallels between ancient Israel and contemporary Italy. Each of the two scholars responded to the secularizing leanings of the unified state by representing Jewishness as a cultural rather than a religious heritage.6

The etymology of the Biblical Hebrew river nameArnōn is unclear, and no solution is immediately apparent (though Arnon is also an Israeli and,

4 Àscoli (Gorizia, 1829 – , 1907) was a great scholar who was responsible for a leap in quality and exercised a lasting impact on linguistic research in Italy. He introduced the concept of substrate into historical linguistics. 5 Graziadio Isaia Ascoli – for more about his life, see Morgana and Bianchi Robbiati (2009) – wrote about the “Aryo-Semitic nexus” (the supposed relation between Indo- European and Semitic languages) in “Del nesso ario-semitico” in Il Politecnico, but which was addressed as open letters, the first to Adalbert Kuhn in Berlin (Ascoli 1864a) and the second to the linguist Franz Bopp (Ascoli 1864b). He later published “Studj ario- semitici” (Ascoli 1867). 6 Born in , Salvatore De Benedetti (Novara, 1818 – Pisa, 1891) had, anyway, an entirely secular outlook: “Unlike Ascoli, De Benedetti, when he became a professor, was not yet a scholar. Rather, he was an educator, a journalist, and an intellectual who had committed himself to the ideals of the liberal revolution” (Di Giulio 2016, 100). His scholarly value lay in the fact that he translated from Hebrew, including the hymns of the great medieval poet Yehudah Halevy (Canzoniere sacro di Giuda Levita, tradotto dall’ebraico e illustrato, published in Pisa in 1871). In Pisa, he held the chair of (1862–1891). 160 European fluvial names, Hebrew sources, and imagined history even, Thai ).7 I suspect that the Biblical Hebrew tree name óren (Isaiah 44:14)8 is unrelated, at any rate the tree genus originally denoted – namely the bay-tree (the laurel: Laurus nobilis), according to Feliks (1997, 159–161),9 whereas, in present-day Hebrew, óren denotes the pine – is not especially conspicuous on the banks of that river, although over 300 plant species have been documented in the Arnon basin.10 Note, on the other hand, Syriac arnā ‘mountain goat’. Part of the Arnon/Wadi Mujib river- bed runs in a deep gorge. Ibex are found on high ground near the where freshwater can be accessed (e.g. in Ein-Gedi). Indeed, wild goats are part of the in the Wadi Mujib natural reserve. Note, also, that Ărān is the name that appears in Genesis 36:28 in a list of descendants of Seir (Śē‘īr) the Hurrite, which is extremely relevant for Transjordan, the through which this river flows.

7 Examples include Avraham Arnon (1887–1960), an Israeli educator and recipient of the Israel Prize; Baruch Arnon (b. 1940), a Jewish American pianist and music teacher; Daniel I. Arnon, a biologist working in the field of photosynthesis; and Ruth Arnon, an Israeli biochemist. Note, also Poj Arnon, a Thai film director. 8 In a sarcastic description of the manufacture of idols. The identification of the wood as being that of the bay-tree is plausible, as bay-tree wood is sometimes used in furniture making. 9 Feliks was relying upon two Talmudic occurrences of ‹ʔrwnym› (in Rosh HaShana, 23a) or ‹ʕrwnym› (Bava Batra 81a); in particular, in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Bava Batra 81a, top, Hebrew ‘aronim ‹ʕrwnym› is defined in Aramaic as ‘arei ‹ʕry›, i.e., ‘bay-trees’. In Arabic, the name for ‘laurel, bay-tree’ is γār (ghār), the initial phoneme ayin of the Hebrew‘ עbeing a voiced velar fricative (cf. an uvular r). Historically, the letter and Aramaic alphabet has stood not only for those languages’ phoneme /ʕ/ (the voiced pharyngeal fricative), but also for the Proto-Semitic phoneme of the Arabic letter ghayn, a phoneme later lost from Hebrew and Aramaic, later than the Roman period: it is not unproblematic that there is an interchangeability of ‹ʔrwnym› (aronim) or ‹ʕrwnym› (‘aronim? gharonim?). Feliks (1997, 159) mentions that in Akkadian, erinu denotes the cedar tree. The Jonathan Targum rendered in Aramaic the only occurrence in the Hebrew Bible of óren ‹ʔrn› with órnā ‹ʔrnʔ›, clearly a cognate, unhelpfully for identification. 10 A spelling error in a manuscript is instructive: Feliks (1997, 159, fn. 3) mentions that in the Perush ha-Gadol (Greater Commentary), attributed to Rav Hai Gaon, to the Mishnah at Parah 3:6, one comes across the spelling ‹ʔrnwn› (which happens to be the same as that of the river name Arnōn), but it should be the plural form of the tree name, ‹ʔrnyn›, as in an authoritative manuscript of the Mishnah. See Mishnah, tractate Parah 3:8. 161 Ephraim Nissan There is an iconic stretch of the river Arnon where the water flows inside a canyon and tourists wade through water that comes up to their waists. The facing rocky walls, with their uneven surfaces, are so close, that in Roman times, this apparently inspired a rabbinic legend: when Moses led the Children of Israel in this area, they were unaware of Amorite troops lying in ambush in the caves high in the rocks, but miraculously the walls were pushed together, the troops being crushed by the out-jutting rocks. Still unaware, Israel took the path above the walls of the narrow canyon, instead of that which ran below through the valley (which given the actual setting, presumably corresponded to the river-bed). Only knowledge of the arresting scenery of the Arnon canyon could have inspired this story. In Louis Ginzberg’s digest of this and other legends (1911, 337–339), his retelling obscures somewhat the story in the original homiletical text. It is a parallel of the passage of the and the biblical text of the passage of the Arnon, followed with a song (Numbers 21:14).

The Arnon river canyon, near the Dead Sea. Backpackers wade through the water (theplanetd.com).

162 European fluvial names, Hebrew sources, and imagined history 1.3 Etymological hypotheses for the name Arno

Latin Arnus occurs in Pliny,11 3.50; in Tacitus, Annales, 1.79; and in Livy, 22,2 (but in the latter it is, apparently, an interpolated gloss, “arnus”, where the text just says “fluvius”). Consider that the current status quaestionis of the etymology of Arno presents little consensus. The philologist, Hans Krahe, examined the river name Arno on a paleo- European basis *Ar‑n‑, derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *er‑ ‘flow, move’.12 (Likewise, consider non-Anatolian13 Proto-Indo-European *wer- / *wēr- / *ur- ‘flowing water’.)14 Importantly, there exist rivers with similar names: for example, the Arn in southern France; the Arna/Arne, a tributary of the Suippe in the department of the river Marne; and in the Lombard , the Arno, a creek near Varese; and a lake, Lago d’Arno, in Val Camonica.15

11 It makes no sense to claim, as has been done, that the name Arno is related to the Frankish king Arno. 12 Cf. Greek ’óρνῡμαι ‘move, stir oneself’, and Germanic terms for ‘zeal’ such as English earnest, and Old Norse ern ‘clever, energetic’. 13 Proto-Indo-European *er-, *or- ‘stir, move’ is the most likely etymology of Hittite aruna- ‘sea’, for which a “Hattic origin, from the place-nameURU Arinna (URUTÚL‑na) via *arinna- ‘fountain’” (Weeks 1985, 8, §1.32) has also been proposed. [Incidentally, the Hittite word for ‘water’ is watar, genitive wetenas (ibid., 7, §1.31).] The Hittite transitive verb for ‘to move’ is arnu- (ibid., 89, §10.61; cf. 10, §10.11): “10.61 — CARRY — A basic sense ‘transport, (re)move, deliver’ etc. underlies the many shades of meaning apparent

in arnu‑, a caus[ative] (*r0‑new‑/r0‑nu‑) to IE *er- ‘move’, matching Skt [=Sanskrit] ṛṇóti ‘arise’, Av[estan] ərənoiti, Gk. ὄρνῡμι ‘rouse, set in motion’” (Weeks 1985, 89, §10.61). Cf. ibid., 157, §20.47: “arnuwala- ([whose Sumerogram is] NAM.RA) ‘displaced person, deportee’, fr[om] arnu- ‘move, remove, transport, bring’, etc., caus[ative] to ar- ‘move, stir’”. 14 While he never actually mentions the river Arno in his book, the former Soviet, naturalized Israeli linguist Aharon Dolgopolsky (2008) made the PIE root *wer- / *wēr- / *ur- ‘flowing water’, into part of his Nostratic root 2509, on pp. 2340– 2341. He claimed derivatives also in Uralic (for ‘river-bed’), Dravidian (as, in Telugu, e.g. varru ‘flow’, ‘flood’; and in the Kui language, vāru ‘stream, torrent’), as well as in ancient Egyptian and East Chadic (within Hamito-Semitic). 15 Since the 19th century, because of the involvement of German historical linguists researching Italian, all too often Germanic etymologies have been proposed for Italian lexical or onomastic items, even when these are historically or prehistorically unlikely. For example, it is unlikely in the case of Arno, which one can even find as having been etymologized (by a Web étymologisant) from Germanic *Arn in relation to *arnō‑, *arnōn, 163 Ephraim Nissan Significantly, there is also a river Arnon in central France, with a length of 150.5 km. It is a left tributary of the river , into which it flows near . While it makes sense that the etymology can be correlated with that of other rivers with similar names in formerly Celtic areas, I wonder whether the precise form Arnon may have resulted from an adaptation to the name of the biblical river Arnon, of which the clergy would have been aware. Massimo Pittau has related Arno to Etruscan antiquity, but he also points out, as being of possible relevance, an Istrian noun denoting ‘rocky bay’: “arno «insenatura rocciosa in cui entra il mare» (AEI 27, 482) (voce prelatina; AEI, DELI, Etim), che sono da connettere col lat. Arnus «Arno» (fiume dell’), col gentilizio lat. Arnius e da confrontare con quello etr. Arna (Ad 2.32) e infine con l’appellativo etr.arna (Ta 5.4)” (from Pittau’s entry for Italianarnia ‘beehive’, which he relates to Medieval arna “vas apium” [i.e. a container of bees]). Because of the perceived sense of ‘cavity’ attributed to such possible cognates, in the case of the

*arna‑, *arnan, *arn. A semantic root has been suggested from ‘eagle’, based on the claim that the upper course of the Arno resembles the shape of this bird of prey. This is not at all cogent, all the more so as the area was not Germanic. Significantly, the proponent of this etymology was at such pains to exclude ancient Roman occurrences of Arnus (so that the river name could be Germanic because of the Barbaric invasions), that he insists on a theory that Tacitus’ Annales were forged by Poggio Bracciolini. To lay to rest such bizarre “etymologies”, especially as far as Arno is concerned, might I suggest (in jest) that Arno is related to the Greek verb ἀρνέομαι, i.e., ‘I deny’ (cf. Armenian uṙanam ‘deny’). In contrast, an argument based on shape/form has been made, and is more cogent, for Bríndisi < Latin Brundisium < Messapic Brunda used to name a port city in Apulia (cf. Old Greek Βρεντέσιον, Old Italian Brandizio, Brindisine Brínnisi). An etymon in the Messapic language, brunda ‘head of a stag’, ‘trophy with antlers’ (Brention), is still currently accepted (including in lay reception: even in the name of the local Pizzeria Brindisi Brunda; see http://www.pizzeria.brindisi.br.it/), based on an etymological statement in Strabo 282, because this particular form is suggested by the shape of the harbour. In Strabo’s Greek, the name of the city was derived from Βρένδος ‘deer’ and Βρέντιον ‘head of a deer’, Greek words only documented in that etymological statement. Besides, (d. 636), writing in Latin in his Etymologies, XV.i.49, claimed: “The Greeks built Brundisium, and it is called Brundisium in Greek[!] because brunda means ‘head of a stag’, it being the case that in the shape of the city the horns and head and tongue may be seen”. 164 European fluvial names, Hebrew sources, and imagined history hydronym Arno, it was suggested that the semantic motivation is from ‘river-bed’ (cf. Italian àlveo ‘river-bed’ vs alveare ‘beehive’).16 Another etymology for Arno, provided by Boriosi, links the name to the Arni, a tribe of Umbrian, non-Etruscan origin, and for which he cited the inscriptions of Toppole d’Anghiari. The present-day region of Umbria lies east of Tuscany, whereas the course of the river Arno begins in Tuscany’s easternmost province. The Arni resided in the upper valley of the Tiber, and in the Arno valley in the area of Subbiano and Rassina near Anghiari. Incidentally, Arni is a hamlet on Monte Altissimo in northwestern Tuscany: see Repetti 1833, s.v.Arni . Emanuele Repetti devoted a paragraph to discussing the etymology of Arno (1833, s.v. Arno): “Piacque a taluni scrittori derivare la parola Arno da greca origine (Αρνος) significante agnello, mentre altri credettero che alla Tribù di Roma Arnense dasse [sic] il suo nome Arno, piuttosto che l’antico paese di Arna posto nel confine dell’Umbria fra Città di Castello e Perugia” [“It pleased some authors to derive the word Arno from the Greek Αρνος, i.e. ‘lamb’, whereas others believed that the Arnense Tribe of [ancient] Rome took its name from the Arno, rather than from the ancient village of Arna, located in Umbria between Città di Castello and Perugia”].

1.4 The sculpted Arno riverine god: misidentification, and an early modern myth in art history

In the early modern period, a myth emerged concerning the river Arno, but its origins lay in art history and in false claims that ancient sculpted riverine gods included a personification of the river Arno. In her paper “Riverine Gods”, Claudia Lazzaro explains (2011, 73–74):

16 Arno is so defined in an email received by the author from Massimo Pittau (27 February 2018): “Fiume della Toscana. L’idronimo deriva dal lat. Arnus, il quale è da riportare al gentilizio etr. Arna, Arnai (ThLE), corrispondente a quello lat.Arnius (RNG). Esso inoltre è da connettere con l’appellativo etr.arna probabilmente «cavità (sepolcrale)» e all’ital. arna, arnia «alveare» col significato fondamentale di «cavo, cavità». Pertanto Arno probabilmente significa «scavato, incavato, incassato nel terreno» (evidentemente in alcuni suoi tratti particolari). Sul piano linguistico è da confrontare con gli altri appellativi italiani alveo di fiume e alveare”. 165 Ephraim Nissan

Ancient statues could also be appropriated by giving them new identities, in some cases through restoration, as in another river god discovered in Rome in the early sixteenth century, which was transformed into the Arno, [Florence’s river,] a type that did not exist in antiquity […]. The statue is a composite, or integration, as the practice became known. The sixteenth- century restorer completed the statue with both a modern head and a right arm from another antique sculpture, and he also carved a Medici diamond ring around the rim of the vase and inside it the face of a lion. The result is a subtle but clever conceit: the river’s water emerges from the mouth of a Florentine lion. (The current designation as theTigris dates from a late eighteenth-century misreading of the lion’s face.) The sixteenth-century head is unmistakably Michelangelesque in form and pathos, and a contemporary anecdote attributed to Michelangelo himself the idea for the unusual knotted beard. In addition, Vasari credited its rustic setting in the Vatican to the Florentine sculptor. The date is uncertain, but one or the other Medici popes, Leo X or Clement VII, claimed the ancient statue as the Arno and as Florentine, with the stylistic ‘’ of Florence’s most famous sculptor and with Medicean and Florentine emblems.

2 THE RIVER RHÔNE

The river Rhône (in English alsoRhone ) is called Rhodanus by Julius Caesar in Latin (stress on the antepenult); Ródano in Spanish and Portuguese; Rodano in Italian, Basque, and Esperanto; Rodan in Polish; Roine in Catalan; Rhone or Rotten in German;17 Ροδανός (Rodhanós) in Modern Greek (but Ptolemy in the second century C.E., and later the Tabula Peutingeriana, employ the form Rodoumna); Ron in Romanian; Rhôna in Czech and Slovak; Rona in Slovenian, Lithuanian, and Latvian; Рона (Rona) in Russian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian.18 Moreover, in Japanese, the Rhône is called ローヌ川 (Rōnugawa). with a diacritical) רֹון rwn›) or›) רון The spelling ofRhône in Hebrew is because of the different orthographical , ר אָ ן dot), but in it is

17 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhône states: “Där Rottu en walser. En allemand la forme die Rhone est usitée, sauf en Haut-Valais où on utilise der Rotten sous l’influence du walser”. 18 https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhône. 166 European fluvial names, Hebrew sources, and imagined history conventions about how to represent the o vowel when using the Hebrew script in order to write Hebrew as opposed to using it to write Yiddish. Ròdano is a small town in the . would typically recognize the River Rhône of southern France in the name Ròdano. Rovno or Rivne is a city in the Ukraine, but, because of a typographical error, it appears as “Rodano” s.v. ‘Volinia’ in the Enciclopedia Universale Garzanti (1996 edition): “e parte delle province di Zitomir e Rodano”. The French nameRhône \ʁon\ – pronunciation [ʁon] in and ['ʁo.nə] in regional French (e.g. for le Rhône, [lø'ʁɔ.nə] in Avignon) – as well as of its Franco­provençal form, Rôno, is documented in antiquity in the Latin form Rhodanus. Cf. the French adjective rhodanien.19 Note also these forms: • (Lo) Rôno [ (lɔ).ˈro.nɔ] en arpitan. Les noms des rivières n’ont normalement pas d’article, mais l’utilisation d’un article est aujourd’hui commune pour certains grands fleuves sous l’influence du français. • (Lo) Ròse [ (lu).ˈrɔ.ze] en occitan provençal.20

The ‹rh› spelling is a strong indication that the Romans knew the river name through a Greek channel. The coast near the mouth of the Rhône had been settled by the Greeks (in their colony at Massilia, i.e. Marseille), as well as by the Phoenicians. Note, however, that sometimes, in turning the ‹r› spelling into ‹rh›, hypercorrection may be involved, because of the familiarity with the spelling of classical languages, at least of Latin (and of Greek words occurring in Latin texts). Consider, for example, the case of the Florentine humanist Rinuccio, whose name was Latinized as Rhinuccinus.21 Or the spelling of the name of the town of

19 Consider also that along with the English river name Rhine, the adjectival form, Rhenish, exists. 20 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhône. 21 Folk-etymology may cause proper names, not only common names, to be written differently. Consider the following example.Rino is an Italian , backclipped from a longer one. Rinuccio is an endearing form of address, derived from Rino, and not to be mistaken for Ranuccio. During the Renaissance, there was a Florentine humanist by the name of Rinuccio whose name was Latinized as Rinucius. He translated Lucian’s Charon from Greek into Latin. When, in October 1518, André Cratander and Servatius Kruffter published his translation ofCharon , they gave it the 167 Ephraim Nissan Rho in , a town whose inhabitants are known as rodigini in Italian. The name of this town occurs as Raude in the and its etymology is controversial.22 Moreover, on occasion erroneous aetiology intervenes: the case, for example, of Ammianus Marcellinus when associating the rhubarb plant with the river Rha, i.e. the Volga. In his Sino-Iranica, Berthold Laufer (1919, 547) remarked that the general Iranic name for ‘rhubarb’ is the lexical type whose form in Middle Persian is rēwās. From Iranic, as a loanword, the term reached Arabic, Turkish, Russian (in the latter, asreven ’), and Serbian (as reved). “It is assumed also that Greek ῥῆον (from *rewon) and ῥᾶ are derived from Iranian, and it is more than likely that Iran furnished the rhubarb known to the ancients” (ibid., 548). Laufer went on to explain (ibid.):

The two Greek names first appear in Dioscorides [III, 2], who states that the plant grows in the beyond the Bosporus, for which reason it was subsequently styled rha ponticum or rha barbarum (hence our rhubarb, Spanish ruibarbo, Italian rabarbaro, French rhubarbe) – an interesting case analogous to that of the Hu plants of the Chinese. In the fourth century, Ammianus Marcellinus [XXII. viii, 28] states that the plant receives its name from the River Rha (‘Ρᾶ, Finnish Rau, Rawa), on the banks of which it grows. This is the Volga, but the plant does not occur there. Pliny [XXVII, 105] describes a root termed rhacoma, which when pounded yields a color like that of wine but inclining to saffron, and which was brought from beyond the . Certain it is that this drug represents some species of Rheum, in my opinion identical with that of Iran.

: “Luciani Charon Rhinuccino [sic] Florentino interprete”, that is to say: “Lucian’s Charon, as translated by Rhinuccino (or Rhinuccinus)”. They interpolated an h after the initial R of the personal name of the translator, as though they were transliterating a Greek letter rho, and as though the name was derived from the Greek for ‘nose’, in the same way as in the English words rhinoceros and rhino. Lucian’s Charon in the translation by Rinuccino is listed as an entry (§2116) on p. 396 in the list of Latin editions of Lucian that had been translated in the 15th century (pp. 370–403) in Lauvergnat-Gagnière (1988). 22 Hypotheses forwarded for the name of the town of Rho include a derivation from Latin aratus ‘ploughed’, or from a personal name Rodo, or from a “pre-Latin” *raud ‘r e d ’. 168 European fluvial names, Hebrew sources, and imagined history There is still no consensus as for the actual etymology of the name Rhodanus.

L’origine et la signification du nom de ce fleuve sont encore sujettes à discussion. D’après l’hypothèse celtique, Rhodanus ou Rodanus viendrait de Rhôdan, qui signifie «tourner vivement»; mais la forme de ce nom paraît plus grecque que celtique et Pline l’Ancien, dans son Histoire naturelle, estimait que le Rhône tire son nom de Rhoda ou Rhodanusia, colonie de Rhodiens bâtie jadis à l’une de ses embouchures, aux environs d’Aigues-Mortes. Albert Dauzat propose un radical indo-européen *rod‑, alternance de *red- «couler» suivi par un suffixe atone pré-latin ‑ănus. Mais il n’exclut pas un préfixe intensif ro- et le radical celtique ou pré-celtique dan‑. Cette hypothèse est corroborée par Pierre-Yves Lambert qui signale le même élément danu- dans le nom celtique du Danube (Danuuios) et le rapproche de l’irlandais dánae «audacieux, hardi, violent». La racine indo-européenne *dānu- «fleuve», présente également dans le nom du Don, de*dā- «couler».23

And, indeed, the non-Anatolian Indo-European root *dhōnu- ‘river’ (derived from *dhen- ‘stream, flow, leak’) yields Avestandānu - ‘river’ and Ossetian don ‘river’, as well as various names for particular rivers, including Don (in Greek Ταναΐς), Dnieper (in Ukrainian Dnipro, in Greek Δάναπρις), Dniester (in Greek Δάναστρις, in Latin Danastius or Danaster), and in Celtic, the name of the Danube, which when borrowed by Latin became Dānuvius, and the name of the river Donwy in Wales.24 In a copy made of the Tabula Peutingeriana in in the 13th century, the Rhône is called Roidomna. The scholarly literature notes that this name displays the same ending ‑onna as found in older forms of the names of the rivers Saône and Garonne. It has also been noted that the

23 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhône. 24 Dolgopolsky (2008, 530) uses the data in this paragraph on river names in a Nostratic context, which one may or may not accept, the Nostratic hypothesis being quite controversial. Dolgoposlky (2008) made these data into part of his Nostratic root 543, in which he also included (Dolgopolsky 2008, 529) data from Chadic, such as dúŋ in Sura (a West Chadic language) for ‘river’ (but in other West Chadic languages, the same word denotes ‘lake, pool, spring’, or ‘swampy area, pond’), or from Dravidian. Because of such far-flung supposed cognates, one can see why there is sustained opposition to the Nostratic hypothesis; for a debate, see the papers collected in Renfrew and Nettle (1999). 169 Ephraim Nissan Rhodon is a tributary of the river which it joins at Roanne, and that an earlier spelling is Rodon. It has been pointed out that this name, too, displays the Indo-European root *rod‑. We also come across the interpretation “*ro-*dan- = rapide rivière (?)”, or “fleuve impétueux”, from Celtic. The waters of the river Rhône – which flow out of Lake Geneva in Geneva, then cross southeastern France, downstream from Lyon in a north-south direction – can be turbulent at times. In his Tableau de la France,25 the historian Jules Michelet wrote: “Le peuple n’a pu se persuader que ce fleuve ne fut un fleuve; il a bien vu que la violence du Rhône était de la colère, et reconnu les convulsions d’un monstre dans ses gouffres tourbillonnants”. In Provençal, the Rhône is known as Rose, and there is an idiom, davala coume un Rose, which de Fourvières (1975, 661, s.v. Rose) defines in French as “se précipiter comme un torrent”. The river Jordan is known in Hebrew as Yardḗn, the most likely etymology being related to the Hebrew verb for ‘to descend’. This is a highly transparent etymology, and an apt one. The course of the river Jordan (330 km in length) from the sources of its tributaries on Mount Hermon in the north, through the Huleh plain (a former lake and marshes) and the Sea of (Lake Tiberiad) to the Dead Sea in the south, has a high average gradient of 1.70 m per kilometer. Indeed, the course of the Jordan takes it, time and again, through turbulent stretches. An etymology of Rhodanus from Phoenician (Northwest Semitic) *Yĕrōdān is unlikely, because the Celtic etymology is plausible. Nevertheless, the coast was visited by Phoenicians, and we might speculate that if these visitors referred to the Rhône by its local Celtic name, it is not unthinkable (albeit quite romantic)26 that they (or other Phoenicians

25 In Vol. 2 of Jules Michelet’s Histoire de France, published by Hetzel in 1831. Quoted from Michelet (1947, 47) in https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhône. 26 One could say: “se non è vera, è ben trovata”. In fact, it is something akin to the romantic etymologies from Semitic proposed for the name of the river Ebro and for Hispania. Nineteenth-century Phoenicomania (especially in Britain, Ireland, and France) is the subject of much of Ch. 9 in a book by Josephine Crawley Quinn (Quinn 2018). In the early modern period, authors who claimed Phoenician (actually Hebrew) etymologies for several place names include Samuel Bochart in his Geographia sacra, of 1646, and Aylett Sammes in his book of 1676:Britannia antiqua illustrata, or, The Antiquities of Ancient Britain Derived from the Phoenicians. 170 European fluvial names, Hebrew sources, and imagined history hearing a report about the Rhône) would perceive it by folk-etymology as being somewhat similar to *Yĕrōdān, with the same transparent semantic motivation as for Yardḗn ‘Jordan’. Hebrew and Northwest Semitic root yrd is associated with ‘to descend, go/come down’. Generally speaking, the concepts ‘to flow’ and ‘to go down’ are typologically amenable to semantic shift from one to the other, and indeed they converge in denotation: e.g. in the denotation that Classical Ethiopic (i.e. Ge‘z) gives the root nhr, a root that in Hebrew is associated with both ‘river’, ‘to flow, to stream’, and ‘to flock, to rush’ (e.g. as somebody’s followers). Analogies should not be drawn from the fact that both the river Jordan and the Rhône (downstream of Lyon) flow from north to south, in relation to the sense ‘to descend’ of the Northwest Semitic root yrd (which corresponds more closely to the idea of flowing turbulently, and in the case of the Jordan, to the relatively steep gradient of its river valley). Equally, we should be cautious of our unquestioning habit of placing the north on top, the convention of Western maps in the age of modernity (as opposed to medieval Islamic maps, which placed the south on top).

3 A RIVER NAME REINTERPRETED: FROM PAGAN ANTIQUITY TO EXTANT BELIEF SYSTEMS

It is well-known that religious change did not necessarily erase the pagan past from toponomastics, but it did sometimes result in reinterpretations being made. The following example – not from – combines a Canaanite past, a Hellenistic and Roman phase, followed by an Islamic interpretation. Near ‘Akko, i.e. Acre, a port-city in the Western Galilee, there is a creek called Na‘aman in Israeli Hebrew as well as in Arabic. The Hebrew form was perhaps influenced by the name of the Aramaean general healed of his leprosy by the prophet Elisha, according to 2 Kings 5. Na‘aman, however, was the Canaanite name of the deity corresponding to the Greek Adonis. In Hebrew it can be interpreted as ‘pleasant’, a quality befitting a handsome young man as Adonis was imagined to be. Whatever the case, this local creek, the Na‘aman, bears a name that is ancient and that has been derived from the Canaanite pantheon. The name was also preserved in Arabic, but interpreted by shifting the etiology to Islamic sacred history. Na‘m (Na‘am) means ‘yes’ in Arabic, and the name of 171 Ephraim Nissan the river was interpreted as though that word was inflected with the dual ending, Na‘mayn (Na‘mēn). The aetiological story narrates that a holy man (identified with Muḥammad) asked the river to let him cross, and the river, quite eagerly, replied: Na‘mayn! ‘Yes and yes!’, i.e. ‘You are most welcome!’. Clearly the explanatory trajectory required first interpreting the name as ‘twice yes’, and then by figuring out that this was a reply given (by the creek so named) to a character important enough, in the cultural canon, to warrant such an eager response. In the Hellenistic Period, ‘Akko was renamed Ptolemais, but the name ‘Akko was derived from Greek ἀκή ‘healing’, a clear association with the story of Heracles who reached the local creek, the Belos (now Na‘aman), and was healed there (Stern 1988/9 [1995], p. 50 [170]). Concerning Greek ἀκή ‘healing’, cf. ἀκεσις ‘healing’, ἀκέομαι ‘I heal’. In Hippocrates (edn. Kühn, 853, 866), ἀκή denotes ‘healing’, but in the grammarians, ἀκή sometimes denotes ‘(sharp) point’, ‘tip’, ‘(sharp) end’ (cf. ἀκίς), and sometimes denotes ‘silence’ (cf. ἀκήν, ἀκέον). As for the etymology of Hebrew ‘Akkō, Arabic ‘Akka, consider that the ‑ō ending of ‘Akkō corresponds to a Hebrew regular ending ‑ōn, and that possibly /kk/Anatolia or the Aegean and that, moreover, the city sits on the northern tip of a bay on a coast otherwise bereft of bays. I suspect that the semantic motivation was the same as for the name (originally Greek, then in Latin Ancon or Ancona) of Italy’s Adriatic port city of Ancona. The latter was settled by the Greeks, who called the place “harbour (coast-bend) of the Greeks”. The shape described by the coast at Ancona is perfect for a port. Greek ἄγκος denotes ‘bend’, as well as ‘ravine’ (that is, a bend in a mountain’s contours) and ‘bend in the coast’ (cf. Italian gomito della costa, literally ‘elbow of the coast’). Hebrew ‘Akkō and Arabic ‘Akka are written with an initial letter‘ayin (Hebrew) or ‘ayn (Arabic) for a voiced pharyngeal fricative. For proper names from the biblical patriarchal era, an initial letter ‘ayin occurs in a few instances where the etymology has a Greek cognate, in relation to Sea Peoples or earlier Aegean or Hittite settlements. Consider Aner‘ānēr ( , cf. Greek ἀνήρ ‘man’), one of Abraham’s allies at a time when he resided near the city of Hebron, where there was a community of perceived Hittite ancestry (Abraham’s florid of negotiation with them is indeed 172 European fluvial names, Hebrew sources, and imagined history Hittite and not the arid business register of , typical also of the business register in Western civilization). Importantly, the biblical account of the origins of Hebron associates this with the Children of the ‘Anaq, the latter arguably being an ethnic name, but also denoting ‘giant’. Cf. Greek ἄναξ or Ϝάναξ ‘lord’, ‘sovereign’. (For comparison, consider that we call the Inca people and culture by the name of their emperor.) Chattaway (1994) remarked: Given the popular but by no means proven belief that the Philistines came from the Aegean, some have noted the ‘fairly tall stature’ of skeletons from the Minoan culture in Crete and sought to establish a connection between the Cretans and the Philistine giants (cf. Dothan & Dothan [1992], 112). […] Moshe Dothan, an excavator with years of experience on the Philistine sites, has sought to equate the Anakim with the early Aegean settlers on linguistic and archaeological grounds. Between the Canaanite and Philistine layers at Ashdod (one of the Anakite cities in Joshua 11:22), he discovered evidence of a Mycenaean settlement that pre-dated the later Philistine culture. Dothan thus called these early settlers Anakim, “taking [his] cue from the Bible” (Dothan & Dothan [1992], 169). Dothan’s hypothesis for the origin of the name itself is that “Anak” or “Anakim” may be derived from the Greek “Wanax”, which he describes as “a generic name for the king or head of a community or of tribes.” He says the one major difficulty with his theory is that “it is not so easy to transform the Greek omega and make it an ‘ayin in Hebrew in this period” (Dothan, in Shanks [1993], 47).

Originally, however, it would not have been an omega, ω, but rather the Greek letter digamma (whose phonetic value appears to have been [w]) and which eventually became obsolete. It was used in order to transcribe the Greek title for a ruler, which in Mycenaean had been wanaka, but which was later reduced to ’αναξ (nominative form, whose base is ’ανακ‑). The argument concerning the difficulty with the Hebrew letter‘ayin (for the voiced pharyngeal stop) rendering the digamma was made by Shmuel Ahituv, in his entry for ‘Anaq in the Hebrew-language Biblical Encyclopaedia (Vol. 6, 312–313). Ahituv was refuting Maclaurin’s (1965) etymological identification of‘Anaq with ’αναξ. Margalith (1988, 175, n. 108), however, refuted Ahituv’s refutation of Maclaurin, noting that the transition into Hebrew must have taken place at a time when ’αναξ was not being pronounced with a digamma, i.e. as w, and the Hebrews 173 Ephraim Nissan did not always differentiate between the glottal stop of the letteraleph and the voiced pharyngeal of the ‘ayin. Cf. Margalith (1979/80), Lipinski (1974), and Sitchin (1994). Othniel Margalith (1988) discussed “the children of the ‘Anaq” in Sec. 3.3.1 (ibid., 45–51) and in its respective endnotes. He endorsed Maclaurin’s conjecture (mentioned earlier) to the effect that originally ‘Anaq was the title of a ruler, just as the Philistines were ruled by a séren, the biblical term being etymologically related to the Greek τυραννος, and the role being the same as that of the tyrants who ruled the Greek city- states. The Anakites may have been (like the Philistines) a people who originated from southern Anatolia, with being their native region. They apparently brought over with them the title of ’αναξ for their kings. The Greek plural is ’ανακτες. Apollo has the epithetAnaktor or Anax. The Greek myth about the eponymous founder of the city of Miletus, Apollo’s son Miletus, claims he led Cretans to Caria, then ruled by Asterion the son of Anax. The country itself was until then called Anaktoria. As late as 152 B.C.E., ’αναξ was the title of Eupator, the ruler of Cyprus.

4 THE TWO RIVERS CALLED HEBRUS: A FEW REMARKS

The Ebro (for the ancient Romans, Hebrus) is a Spanish river that flows into the Mediterranean. In the , the river Maritza flows through Bulgaria and then down forming the border between Greece and Turkey. “The Maritsa, Meriç or Evros (Bulgarian: Марица, Marica; Ancient Greek: Ἕβρος, Hébros; Greek: Έβρος, Évros; Latin: Hebrus; Romanized Thracian: Evgos or Ebros; Turkish: Meriç) is, with a length of 480 km (300 mi) […], the longest river that runs solely in the interior of the Balkans […]. It has its origin in the Rila Mountains in Western Bulgaria, flowing southeast between the Balkan and Rhodope Mountains, past Plovdiv and Parvomay (where the Mechka and the Kayaliyka join it) to Edirne, Turkey”.27 The formHebro is found in Italian from the Renaissance.

27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritsa. On the names of ’s and the Balkans’ Hebrus rivers, see also a brief, somewhat romantic, study by Enrique Cabrejas Iñesta (2015), “ del nome del río Ebro”. 174 European fluvial names, Hebrew sources, and imagined history In his memoirs about his own and Florentine, Bernardo Michelozzi’s, travels to the Holy Land (1497–98) via the Balkans and Constantinople, Bonsignore Bonsignori has the following to say about Plovdiv (Philippopolis), in present-day Bulgaria: “Partiti di lì el terzo g[i]orno g[i]ungnemo in Filipopoli, città facta di Filippo imperatore che fu il primo imperador Christiano, altri dicono che è detta da Philippo re di Macedonia padre d’Alexandro Magno. Achanto a questa città è el fiume Hebro, hoggi detto la Marozza” (Borsook 1973, p. 157, fn. 69) [“After we departed from there (Sofia), on the third day we reached Filippopoli, a city built by the emperor Philip, the first Christian emperor. Others say it is so called after Philip, King of Macedonia, the father of Alexander the Great. Beside this city, there is the river Hebro, now called the Marozza (Maritza).”] Some have claimed an identification with a Northwest Semitic etymon ʕbr› (the first phoneme being a voiced pharyngeal fricative) for the› עבר Iberian river Ebro or Hebrus (the supposed semantic motivation being from ‘beyond’, as in Biblical Hebrew ‹ʕbr hnhr› ‘Ēber-hanNāhā́ ŕ , ‘beyond the river’, i.e. ‘Transeuphrates’, in relation to the name of the Hebrews, and post-biblical Hebrew ‘Ēber-hayYardḗń , ‘beyond the Jordan’, i.e. ‘Transjordan’), just as in the modern period, some have claimed a Semitic etymology for Hispania (the semantic motivation supposedly being “a place of hyraxes”: and yet, there are no members of Hyracoidea in Spain, as their diffusion only extended as far as the . It is likely that the European authors who defended this etymology for Hispania identified Biblical Hebrew šāfān i.e. ‘hyrax, Procavia capensis’, plural šefannīm, with the rabbit, a misunderstanding that was typical among Ashkenazi Jews because hyraxes are absent from Europe).28

28 called after an animal include the Canary Islands, found by explorers sent by Mauretania’s King Juba II (a scholar and geographer of the Augustan period) to discover the Islands of the Blessed. Juba’s report on the islands, originally part of his now lost Greek-language Libyka, was summarized by Pliny the Elder, who gave Latin names to the islands, including Capraria (‘Goats Place’), and Canaria (‘Dogs Place’). There is an Isola dei Cani off Tunisia, so called in Italian. And in London, there is the Isle of Dogs, this being a north of the Thames, facing the Greenwich peninsula. Off ’s coast, there are the islands of Caprera (‘Goats Place’), owned by Giuseppe Garibaldi who is buried there, and (its name takes the article: l’Asinara, all’Asinara), home to wild dwarf donkeys that roam free, and to a high-security prison. (‘Goats 175 Ephraim Nissan Note what is certainly the etymologically unrelated place-name of the first phoneme in the Semitic name being an unvoiced ,(חברון) Hebron pharyngeal fricative. In the Western media, it is spelled Hebron. As indeed it is in present-day Italian newspapers; however, Italy’s leading desk encyclopedia, the Enciclopedia Universale Garzanti, lists it as Ebron (a headword followed by the variant Hebron), in line with traditional Italian , Ēbeŕ‘ ,(עבר) Bibles. Moreover, consider the pre-Noachic patriarch ‘Eber whose name is often speltHeber in the Western tradition.

5 THE LUDIC DIMENSION OF TOPOnyms AND HYDRONYMS 5.1 The River Tagliamento: An Italian Joke and Playful Etiology At times we come across evidence of humour in the naming of European rivers, where the spelling adopted is critical for the success of a pun. In 1989, the Reader’s Digest published (in the March issue as sold in the , but in the April issue as sold abroad) an entry credited to Linda Thompson under the rubric ‘Toward More Picturesque Speech’ (on p. 147). The question is: “What is the source of the Rhine and the Rhone rivers?”, the answer being: “The Rhane”, a homophone forrain . The two river names, as written in English, differ only as regards their first vowel. By applying the same pattern to the modified spelling of the word rain, the punchline conveys the idea that what is denoted is strongly akin. The river Tagliamento is in northeastern Italy, and its name is transparently formed as an action name for ‘cutting’ (cf.movimento for ‘movement’): as though it cuts through the land. Standard Italian is based on the Florentine from Tuscany, and Tuscans distinguish in their pronunciation between é and è (though usually the accent is not indicated in writing, other than at the end of a word), but northern Italians do not make the same distinction between the two sounds. However, even for Tuscans, the same e vowel is found in the morpheme ‑ménto of action

Place’) occurs as the name of an both in the Tuscan Archipelago in the , and in the Trèmiti Islands in the southern , off the northern shores of the Gargano peninsula of northern Apulia. 176 European fluvial names, Hebrew sources, and imagined history names and in the noun ménto for ‘chin’. Now, consider the following possible Italian-language riddle:

Q. Che fiume prese nome da un barbiere? A. Il Taglia…mento. Q. Which river was named after a barber? A. The Chin-Cutter (Taglia-mento).

This punchline is short, and the pun implies a narrative that is left to the listener to figure out. By contrast, the following version proposes a fully fledged etiological tale:

Q. Se è vero che un certo fiume prese nome da un barbiere, quale mai ne sarà stata la ragione? A. Si tratta del Tagliamento. A parte il mento, quel barbiere tagliava anche le guance, e sotto la mascella. Ma una volta tagliò proprio il mento ad un re, che lo fece conciare per le feste, e impose quel nome al fiume locale come punizione collettiva e per tutte le generazioni a venire. Q. Is it true a certain river was named after a barber and, if so, why? A. You’re referring to the river Tagliamento (Chin-Cutter). As well as the chin, this barber was also prone to cut the cheeks and jowls of his customers. But one day he cut the chin of a king, who thrashed him to make an example of him and decreed, by way of collective punishment, that the local river would henceforth be known by that name, one that would last for all generations to come.

This story fits within a narrative discourse of crime and punishment and is, as such, moralistic, although it also underscores the fact that the punishment meted out to the barber for his incompetence was out of all proportion to his misdeeds.

5.2 Punning on River Names in Early Modern Hebrew: Examples from Königsberg and Baghdad

In early modern Hebrew, creative naming – or neologization – at times resorted to punning on Biblical river names. I am aware of two examples: (A) In his biography of Moses Mendelssohn, Alexander Altmann recounts as follows the founding of Ha‑Me’assef (Altmann 1998, 365): 177 Ephraim Nissan

The great moment in [Copenhagen-born, Königsberg-based Isaac Abraham] Euchel’s life came when, together with Menachem Mendel Breslau and others, he founded the “Society of the Friends of the Hebrew Tongue” (Hevrat Doreshey Leshon ‘Ever) in 1783. A prospectus entitled Nahal Ha‑Besor [River/Creek of Besor] (I Samuel 30) announced the news (besora; a pun on Besor, the name of a river) that a Hebrew monthly called Ha‑Me’assef (“The Collector”) was to be published. The first issue appeared in 1784.

bśwr› (with› בשור The river Besor, i.e. Beśṓr – its name spelled in the Hebrew script of Biblical Hebrew, and ּבְ (ׂשֹור :diacritical marks pronounced [b'so:r] or [be'so:r] (phonemically /bśor/) – is a seasonal stream or wadi, the longest of the northern desert. The beds of such seasonal streams29 are dry during most of the year, but they can be

29 The seasonal streams of the Negev desert have Bedouin and Israeli Hebrew names, rather than Biblical Hebrew names, like the Besor. Arguably, the most eloquent of these names – given to a seasonal stream deep in the central Negev – is “the creek of the thirsty Náḥal hanNāhā́š haṣṢāmē.́ Its נחל הנחש הצמא snake”, “Thirsty Snake Creek”, in is related to that of Ma‘ălḗ hanNāhā́š haṣṢāmḗ “the Slope of the Thirsty Snake”, where a series of tunnels are also to be found. The plan, in the 1970s, was to use them as emergency oil reservoirs for the Eilat-Ashkelon oleoduct, but they were found to be unsuitable because of longitudinal fissures. Today they are sometimes visited by tourists (https://www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/1.982181, https://www.makorrishon.co.il/ nrg/online/1/ART2/234/261.html, http://meny.co.il/caves/?p=516). The tunnels are known as Minhārṓt hanNāhāš́ haṣṢāmḗ, and also as the “Reservoirs of the Thirsty Snake” (Ma’ăgūrṓt hanNāhāš́ haṣṢāmḗ). Note that Náḥal hanNāhāš́ haṣṢāmḗ in the Negev is not the same as Náḥal Nāhāš́ (“Creek of the Snake”) in the north of the country, a seasonal stream on the eastern slopes of Mount Carmel. Snakes and scorpions are routinely associated with deserts (e.g. in rabbinic homiletic , it is claimed that the well into which Joseph was thrown was “empty, with no water in it”, but that it did contain snakes and scorpions. A later exegete even claimed that this was so because of nature’s horror vacui. What is more, European cultures influenced by the Hebrew Bible associated deserts or wastelands with the presence of other harmful, even monstrous, creatures. In medieval French epics, the wilderness was considered to generate monsters: the wastelands (gastinois) are cocatrigenois, i.e., they generate cockatrices (Godefroy 1883, Vol. 2, p. 165, s.v. cocatrigenois). The Genesis account of creation mentions “the large tanninim” (i.e., “the large snakes / crocodiles”). In Hebrew, tannim are actually jackals. The wording that can be literally taken to mean “and in the chaos of ululation of the wilderness”, in Deuteronomy 32:10, was interpreted by Rashi (as per the printed editions) as “a land of desolation and wilderness, a place of the ululation of ‹tnynym› [instead of tanním ‹tnym› ‘jackals’] and ostriches”. Rashi lived in 11th-century Troyes in Champagne, France. 178 European fluvial names, Hebrew sources, and imagined history dangerous: water may flush the river-bed suddenly, drowning unaware persons or animals. The lower course of the Besor (that is its northern stretch) flows north-northwest, entering the Mediterranean south of Gaza. Its longest tributaries (both joining the Besor’s right bank) are seasonal streams: one crosses the city of Beer-Sheva and is now named after that city and the other, lying further to the north, passes near the site of the ancient Philistine city of Gerar (‹grr›, Gerāŕ , [g'ra:r] or [ge'ra:r]) and today bears the name of that ancient city. The upper course of the Besor flows westward after the modern town of Yeroḥam, the river having its source nearby to the south-southeast of the town. (In the Hebrew Bible, Yeroḥam, Yeroḥāḿ , ‹Yrḥm›, is the name of various male figures, including the paternal grandfather of the prophet Samuel: see 1 Samuel 1:1.) Clearly, when the “Society of the Friends of the Hebrew Tongue” published its report (Hebrew beśōrā́, /bśor/, [bsora] but in their Ashkenazic pronunciation: [b'soyro]) – doing so in a prospectus entitled Náḥal habBeśṓr (in their Ashkenazic pronunciation: ['naxal hab'soyr]) – they were only aware of the three biblical occurrences (1 Samuel 30:9, 30:10, 30:21): David, when a vassal to the Philistine King of Gath, Akhish (against the advice of his courtiers), was based with his Hebrew militia in the town of Ṣiqlāg. On returning to the town one day, he found that an Amalekite raid had leftṢ iqlāg burnt, and that the women and children had been taken away as captives (including David’s wives Ahinoam and Abigail). Having obtained a favorable oracle from the priest Ebiatar, David and his 600 men reached the Besor, where he left 200 of them behind; David and the other 400 men came across an Egyptian youngster who led them to the Amalekite troop, and David’s surprise attack was successful.

In the name of this seasonal stream in the Negev, and in the name for the neighbouring slope, the snake is deemed to be thirsty, to symbolize the extreme desert conditions. But mention should perhaps be made of a tale type – see Hasan El-Shamy’s Types of the Folktale in the (Shamy 2004), tale-type 285B* from the international folklore classification – that is widespread in the Arab world: Snake“ Enticed out of Man’s Stomach. Patient fed salt: animal comes out for water”. In some versions it is a snake, but in others, a worm. Moreover, in some versions it is salt that does the trick, whereas in other stories other expedients are employed: e.g. a watermelon kept beside the person with a snake or worm in their belly. It seems logical that the tale type was originally inspired by tapeworms, parasitic worms infesting the intestines of humans and other vertebrates. 179 Ephraim Nissan David and his men then rejoined the others at the Besor and shared the spoils with them.

(B) Rabbi Yosef Ḥayyim al‑Ḥhakam (1833–1909) was a famous Baghdadi rabbi. His best-known book, addressed to a broad audience, is Ben Ish Ḥay (Yosef 1986), first published in 5658 = 1897/8 and 5770 = 1909/10. It is a collection of weekly lessons concerning ritualistic matters, organized over a two-year period. In Ben Ish Ḥay, Year Two, pericope Terumah, a passage about the processing and consumption of coffee refers to the lexical concept ‘coffee’ (the drink) or ,(משקה קהוא) or mašqē qahwā (קהװא or קהוא) either by qahwa • .(מי שחור) by recycling a biblical phrase: mēy Šiḥṓr •

The latter occurs in Jeremiah, 2:18 with the sense ‘water of the Nile’: “And now, why do you take the road of Egypt to drink water from the Nile? And why do you take the road of Assyria to drink water from the in the new sense ‘water (מי שחור) ‹Euphrates?”. Resorting to ‹my Šḥwr of blackness’; thus, ‘black liquid’, ‘black drink’, i.e. ‘coffee’, was enabled by a double entendre. In fact, ‹šḥwr› if read Šiḥṓr is one of the names for ‘the Nile’, but ‹šḥwr› more often occurs as standing forš āḥór ‘black’.

5.3 European Fluvial Names and a Playful Interpretation in a Work of Present-Day Hebrew Literature

The river Berezina in Belorussia – a tributary of the Dnieper, famously crossed by ’s troops in late November 1812 – is unrelated to the Algerian town of Brézina, situated south of the Saharan Atlas range, on the river Oued Seggeur. However, the names of these two rivers lend themselves to a humorous folk-etymologization in Modern Hebrew: i.e. “The river was formed when somebody forgot to turn off the tap (bérez) ”. I made up playful etiological tales for individual toponyms in my own literary work, Tsurát ha-Aratsót30 (Speculum totius orbis), in archaizing Hebrew (of the Roman-age and medieval strata) mostly written during

30 Tsurát ha-Aratsót, ‘the shape of countries’, is an early modern Hebrew name for ‘geography’ as a discipline. 180 European fluvial names, Hebrew sources, and imagined history the 2000s, resulting in a fanciful world history – a fabled world, at times, an enchanted and, at others, a pointedly nugatory mythical world history – using as pegs punning explanations of toponyms.31 Unified stories were told, for example, for (a) The towns and rivers of two départements in western France: Charente (Sharonít) and Charente-Maritime (Sharonít shella-Yám, after a region, the Sharon, in Israel’s coastal plain). Many toponyms in these regions are explained in relation to a biblical narrative about Midian and, especially, to the way in which this was developed in traditional homiletics. (b) The towns and rivers of the Lot and Lot-et-Garonne départements of France, in relation to the biblical narrative about Moab and Ammon, descendants of Lot, Abraham’s nephew.

That (a) and (b) lay claim to ancient migrants from Transjordan to France (Moab, Ammon, and Midian) is “justified” as an extrapolation of the medieval phrase ‘the Edomites who are in Sarephat (France)’, in biblical commentaries originating from that country. (Incidentally, cf. Hans Lewy’s 1938 paper ‘Imaginary Journeys from to France’.) Unified fanciful etiology for several typonyms from a given region is more challenging than simply devising a backstory that playfully explains a single toponym. Why was it possible to satisfy many conflicting constraints and so achieve compelling mock-etiologies? Is it feasible to provide such a clear analysis that computer scientists could provide a “computational” or “semialgorithmic” account? These are both intriguing

31 In a sense, this builds upon some European early-modern foundation myths resorting to what can be considered etymology. In Nissan (2014), a study mainly analyzing Gerson Rosenzweig’s 1892 Talmudic parody, Tractate America, about Jewish immigrant communal life in New York City, see these sections: 16 Punning Mock-Etymology 16.1 Research into Playful Etymologies 16.2 Japanese Toponomastics in Speculum totius orbis 17 Concocting a Fanciful History for a Place: In Tractate America and Elsewhere 17.1 The of the , and How Norway’s Fjords Came into Being 17.2 Myths of Origin, and Hebrew Derivations 17.3 Narrative Strategy and Tactics: Fable vs. Satire 18 A Tradition of Foundation Myths 181 Ephraim Nissan and challenging questions, which actually motivated my writing this literary work, along with the GALLURA project, in which I have tried to analyze the kind of creativity occurring there and playfully explaining onomastic items.

6 CONCLUDING REMARKS

I have devoted most of my attention in this study to various aspects of the of the river Arno in Tuscany, aspects ranging from word- formation (e.g. as in Arnino, Arnaccio, and lungarno) and etymological hypotheses to romantic etymology (in relation to the river Arnon as Moab’s northern border), reflecting the circumstances of a particular proponent at a given point in modern history (that is, in Italy’s newly unified national state), and the misidentification of an ancient sculpted riverine god, the Arno, in the early modern period. I have similarly devoted a long section to an analysis of the hydronym, the Rhône. I then specifically examined the cultural phenomena of resemantization that reshape a river’s name in keeping with a contemporary belief system, of an imagined past as the backdrop of romantic etymology, and of treating hydronyms playfully, in jokes, literary writing, and punning at the service of neologization or naming.

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