Sea Names in Europe

Naming the Seas of Europe A historical survey Tjeerd Tichelaar 1 1. The Sea as a geographical super-object In many languages, the word for ‘sea’ started out as a singulare tantum, which in common usage it remained - the plural form, artificially created, essentially belonging to poetic discourse. Behind its singularity stands an ancient conceptual dichotomy: ‘sea’ and ‘land’ together cover the surface of Planet Earth. One notion that did not require adaptation when Renaissance scientists and their Enlightened successors rediscovered the planet – redefining Earth as a sphere held together by centripetal gravitation, instead of a terrestrial disc sheltered by a celestial dome – was that of the fragmented landmass, inhabited by humans, washed on all sides by the waves of the Sea. Sea, in this sense, was not a geographical object like a mountain, a river, a settlement or a lake. It was the uninhabitable limit of the habitable world (οἰκουμένη). Its subdivision into smaller water bodies was essentially academic and subjective, generally unneeded except for the purpose of communication by such specialists as geographers, fishermen and navigators. The major categories of specialists interested in conceptual subdivision of The Sea, geographers and navigators, entered known European history in ancient times. As Phoenicians and Hellenes (Greeks), they reached for the setting sun from the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean basin - the very shores bounding the fertile crescent that had given birth to the Western Eurasian civilization. 2. The Godly integrity of The Sea – mythology and/or allegorical geology The Hellenes maintained the integrity of The Sea by deifying it. The titan Oceanus (Ὠ κεανός), son of the God of the Sky Uranus and the Earth Goddess Gaia, took the shape of a giant river encircling the world – a mythological way to account for the currents observed by the early navigators. It is interesting to see how the first stages of their Theogony, inherited rather than invented by the Hellenes, in the earliest 2 version that was literally saved for eternity by Hesiod (ca. 700 B.C.) seem to represent a cosmic evolution that even to our modern eyes makes sense: the Sky impregnating Earth with the Ocean, with the next generation of Gods more ‘down to Earth’ representing the Sea (Ποσειδῶν) and the ancient rivers (Νεῖλος, Ἴναχος), connecting themselves to nymphs giving birth to Mankind (Μελίαι) and the Goddess of the Farther Shore (Λιβύη) born by the founding mother of the earliest human civilization (Μέμφις). Not only did the Hellenes inherit their primeval Gods, perhaps at the time they took possession of the land that would come to bear their name: the concept of the Sea itself was passed on to them as well. Their mythological equation of Oceanus to a giant river may contain an echo of their ancestors lacking a clear geographical concept of ‘sea’. The ancient Greek words for ‘sea’, in any way, are suspected to be either pre-Indo-European (θάλασσα, thalassa) or derived from a pre-Hellenic Indo- European root meaning ‘plain’ (πέλαγος, pelagos < *plāk-). It seems to demonstrate that even the Hellenes, earning fame as long-distance navigators since Mycenaean times, at one point in their past started out as a land people not yet familiar with the Sea – a feature they share with most of the European peoples still known today. The Hellenes were aware they had not always been familiar with the Sea. According to their own historiography, they were introduced to navigation – along with many other cultural and technological innovations – by other peoples, like the Phoenicians, the Cretans and the Egyptians. They were one of the many early civilizations of Europe who, like the Macedonians, Celts, Romans and Germans, started out as land people before they first set sail. Only some of Europe’s ancient peoples, like the Illyrians and Venetes, were from the very onset – i.e. from the time their name became known – associated with sea fare. Even the famous marauding ‘Sea Peoples’ of Pharaonic history, inscribed at Karnak as they fell upon the Egyptian and Canaanite shores, may have been less maritime than their appellation suggests. Their individual names are thought to refer to peoples like the Sards, Sicels, Achaeans (Mycenaean Greeks) and possibly Etruscans, all known to have been quite civilized but not (yet) boasting a long seafaring tradition at the time, which coincided with the 13th-12th century B.C. setting of the mythic Trojan War and great 3 attested migratory movements all around the Eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea. Migrating peoples take ship in order to cross the sea and settle beyond, not to sail and explore. The train of thought above leads us to the conclusion that, together with the art of navigation, sea terminology – not only the names, but the generic terms as well – came at some point in history to many, if not most of the European nations as an exogenous innovation. 3. Attaching labels to the Sea The point of this digression into ancient history is, to show that not so many people in Europe were familiar enough with the Sea to independently give it a more than generic name, let alone subdivide it into different conceptual bodies of water that by naming (labelling) could ultimately be set apart as separate geographical objects. Naming practices evolved from generic to specific with the development of maritime traditions. In the toponymic evolution, the following stages may be recognized: 1. Generic term only: typical for a land people attaching little relevance to the sea. In several books of the Hebrew Bible, the Mediterranean is simply referred to as ‘The Sea’. The same was done, according to Strabo, by the ancient Pontic Greeks, who referred to the Black Sea by the name Πόντος (Roman latinized: Pontus) – their own Godly personification of The Sea. The Pontic example incidentally warns us not to apply the term ‘generic’ without due caution: it is clearly not applicable for reference to a unique, ‘one- of-a-kind’ object or phenomenon. The nouns describing ‘Heaven’, ‘Earth’, ‘Universe’, ‘God’, as emphasized – in English usage – by their capitalization, are by the uniqueness of the phenomena they refer to used in the same way as specific names. The very practice of deification of geographical objects – the Greek pantheon including gods like Oceanus/ Pontus, Memphis, Libya, 4 Nilus, Aliacmon and Inachus (the river Panitsa draining the Argive plain), the Gauls recognizing an eponymous god in every major river – demonstrates that the effect of naming is nothing less than redefinition of the generic into something unique, specific. It should be noted here as well that, due to indifference or lack of geographical awareness, sometimes no distinction is (was) made between the Sea and any .(Yām) ים other large body of water – cf. the Hebrew generic 2. A qualitative or quantitative description, based on observation rather than geographical awareness. Examples: in some other books of the Hebrew Bible, the Mediterranean is referred to as ‘Great Sea’; to the Pharaonic Egyptians it was the ‘Big Green’. For the North Sea, an old Germanic or Celtic (?) form Morimarusa was recorded by Plinius the Elder, a name supposed to carry the meaning of ‘dead sea’. It is thought to refer to the quality of ‘dead water’ resulting from the presence of unmixed layers of fresh and salt water on top of each other, as first described by Fridtjof Nansen in 1893. If this phenomenon may really be held to account for the name, which reportedly has medieval equivalents in the Old High German Mere Giliberōt and Middle Dutch Lebermer, it presupposes self-propelled navigation in North Sea waters in Celtic/proto-Germanic times. Specifying terms added to the unique, rather than generic name of an object (‘The Sea’) might be considered epithets: variable descriptions of the same object – in the same way as the ancients used to refer to their Gods: cf. Apollo, Phoebus (‘The Shining One’), Musagetes (‘Chief of the Muses’). Especially the Romans were keen on incorporating foreign gods into their own pantheon, if possible by amalgamating/equating them with their domestic deities. Considering this practice, it is not inconceivable that Oceanus Germanicus received its (his?) Latin name through the same process by which for instance Hercules Magusanus, the Romanization (by equation to the Graeco-Roman demigod) of the native warrior god of the Batavian Germans on the lower Rhine received his. To post-Roman Germanic peoples the use of epithets was not unfamiliar either. Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon poems are full of so-called ‘kennings’, including many appellations for the Sea like bæð-weġ (‘bath-way’) 5 in Andreas; seġl-rād (‘sail-road’), swan-rād (‘swan-road’) and hron-rād (‘whale-road’) in Beowulf; hwæl-weġ (‘whale-way’) in The Seafarer. Whether or not they should be interpreted as epithets, the demonymic adjectives serving as specific additions to Oceanus in this 1648 Blaeu interpretation of Ptolemy seem not to disturb the Ocean’s integrity. 3. Topological description, differentiating between parts of the Sea (or bodies of water) according to the relative position of the nomenclator. This may be strictly positional or astronomical (using cardinal points). To quote the Hebrew Bible once again, some books use ‘Hinder’ or ‘Western Sea’ (Mediterranean) as opposed to ‘Eastern Sea’ (the Dead Sea). The Romans, until their stand-off with Carthage still overwhelmingly a land people without any maritime tradition but after conquering most of the Etruscan territory in the 4th century B.C. nevertheless in control of both coasts of the central Apennine Peninsula, adopted the Etruscan appellations of ‘Lower Sea’ (Mare Inferum, the Tyrrhenian Sea) and ‘Upper Sea’ (Mare Superum, the Adriatic Sea). The Turkish names for the Mediterranean (Akdeniz, ‘White Sea’) and the Black 6 Sea (Karadeniz, the current names in English and most other languages were translated from Ottoman Turkish) also fit into this stage, as the Turks and many other peoples originating from the Eurasian steppes ‘colour-coded’ the cardinal directions.

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