A twelfth-century T and O map from a manuscript of Isidore's Etymologiae identifying the three continents
31 January 2024
The name of Africa, the second largest continent in both size and population, comes from the Latin Africanus. The Latin name, in turn, probably comes from Ifran, the name of a people in what is now Tunisia and eastern Algeria, ancestors of the modern Amazigh (Berber) people. Various origins for the tribal name have been suggested including afar, a Tamazight (Berber) word for dust (“dusty land”), and ifri, a Tamazight word for cave (“land of cave dwellers”). But the definitive origin has probably been lost to the ages.
Its use as a place name in English dates to the Old English period. It appears in the opening of the Old English translation of Orosius’s Historiarum adversum paganos (History Against the Pagans). Orosius wrote it in the early fifth century CE, and the Old English translation dates to the turn of the ninth century. The text is less of a translation and more of an adaptation and expansion of Orosius’s Latin text:
Ure yldran ealne ðysne ymbhwyrft ðyses middangeardes, cwæþ Orosius, swa swa Oceanus ymbligeþ utan, þone man garsægc hatað, on þreo todældon and hy þa þry dælas on þreo tonemdon: Asiam and Europem and Affricam, þeah ðe sume men sædon þæt þær næran buton twegan dælas, Asia and þæt oþer Europe. Asia is befangen mid Oceanus þæm garsecge suþan and norþan and eastan and swa ealne middangeard from eastdæle healfne behæfð. Þonne on ðæm norþdæle, þæt is Asia on þa swiþran healfe in Danai þære ie, ðær Asia and Europe togædre licgað. And þonne of þære ilcan ie Danai suþ andlang Wendelsæs and þonne wiþ westan Alexandria þære byrig Asia and Affica togædere licgeað.
(Orosius said that our ancestors divided the whole circle of this earth into three parts, surrounded by the sea called Ocean, and they named these three parts Asia and Europe and Africa, though some people said that there were only two parts, Asia and the other being Europe. Asia is encompassed by the sea of Ocean south and north and east and contains all the eastern half of the earth. In the northern part, that is Asia on the right side of the river Don, there the boundaries of Asia and Europe run together. And then from the river Don the border runs south along the Mediterranean and then Asia and Africa meet west of the city of Alexandria.)
Sources:
Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020, s.v. Africa. Oxfordreference.com.
Godden, Malcolm R., ed. The Old English History of the World: An Anglo-Saxon Rewriting of Orosius. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 44. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 24.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2012, s.v. African, n. and adj.
Image credit: London, British Library, MS Royal 12 F.IV, fol. 135v. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.