How did the continents get their names?
Wait, Asia was *there*?
Here’s one I made earlier: this went to paying subscribers back in February. As ever, if you want to read this stuff as it comes out, rather than late, or possibly never, you know what to do:
In fact, what the hell, it’s the summer holidays:
Right, that’s enough selling, here’s some actual content:
The planet Earth has, by common consent, seven different continents. Actually, this is a surprisingly contested figure, an observation I’ve repackaged as content on multiple occasions, including in the very first edition of this newsletter, but for our purposes today let’s assume there are seven. This is a good number for this kind of a listicle, if only because it enables me to stop writing.
Where, then, did they get their names? Well I’m very glad you asked.
Africa: A label originally applied by the Romans to the chunk of the landmass around its great rival, Carthage, covering roughly what we would call Tunisia. Various imperial reorganisations extended the label first to neighbouring provinces (Tripolitania, Numidia, Mauretania Caesariensis), then to much of the north African coast west of Egypt. Finally, long after the Romans had ceased to be a going concern, their successors in the European imperialist game applied the name to the entire landmass.
The name seems to come from the Afri tribe, who lived in the area around Carthage, but that was an exonym – a word applied by outsiders – so just shifts the question to why the tribe was called that. It may have come from the Latin word aprica – “sunny”; the Berber word ifri, “cave”; the Greek word aphrike (ἀφρίκη), “without cold”; or, given the Carthaginians’ origins, the Phoenician word afar, “dust”.
So, to sum up, we don’t know. And since it is anyway attached to places thousands of miles from anywhere those who came up with the word were even aware of, it hardly seems to matter. Moving on:
Asia: Another one whose roots are lost in the mists of ancient history. The Hittites, who dominated what is now Turkey in the 2nd millennium BCE, referred to the western extremities of their empire on the eastern bank of the Aegean sea as “Assuwa”. That seems to have ended up as the Greek Ἀσία, “Asia”, applied to all or part of what we’d today call Anatolia. That label, too, was adopted by the Romans as a name of a province.
What the word originally meant, no one has the faintest idea. Possible roots include “Asis”, an Aegean word for “muddy and silty” (for the nature of its coasts); or asu, a Semitic word meaning “rising” or “light” (for the direction of the sunrise, a name which suggests an eastern land; although how anyone squares this with the fact it was to the Hittites’ west I have no idea). Anyway the name, like Africa, came gradually to extend over a much vaster landmass, to the extent that the land it originally applied to quite possibly wouldn’t be in the first dozen countries you’d list if asked to name a state in Asia.
Europe: Originally the Greek name for the western bank of the Aegean sea, because – unfamiliar with the geography far to the north as the Greeks then were – it seemed plausible at that time it was an entirely different landmass, rather than two halves of the same thing which met on the far side of the Black Sea. The roles of wars against eastern powers in both ancient literature (the Iliad) and contemporary reality (Persia) probably encouraged the Greeks to distinguish the two regions, too. More on this in A History of the World in 47 Borders, available now (from Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles, Bert’s Books), book fans!
But what of the etymology?
Well, stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before, but – no one seems to know! In Greek mythology, Europa was a Phoenician princess, and the name probably means “broad faced”, which is a charming way to describe a princess. It might also be from various Semitic cognates meaning “west” or “to set” because, well, see what I said about Asia, only reverse it. Then again, it might not come from any of those things.
America: The most popular theory is that the continents were named after the 16th century explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who referred to himself by the Latinised name “Americus Vespucius”. He in turn was named after St Emeric, a Hungarian named after his uncle, the 11th century Holy Roman Emperor, Henry II.
An alternative theory, put forward by the Edwardian antiquarian Alfred Hudd, is that the explorer whose voyages the new world was named after wasn’t Vespucci at all, but John Cabot, an Italian who sailed to the new world around the same time on behalf of King Henry VII of England. On his return to Bristol, he was paid two pensions by customs officers, the more senior of whom was the city’s High Sheriff, Richard Ameryk. Cabot, delighted with his pensions and a generally grateful chap, named the lands he had found after the man who literally handed him the money.
It is probably not a coincidence that Alfred Hudd lived in Bristol. It is also probable that his theory was, and let’s be honest about this, not true. At any rate, the Americas are probably the only continent named after an actually existing person, even if we’re not quite sure which person.
Incidentally, the habit of referring to what are clearly two separate continents with the same name, a sort of reversal of the Asia/Europe phenomenon, is an old one. Maps from the 16th or 17th centuries sometimes showed the two landmasses as “America Mexicana” and “America Peruana”. Cool.
Antarctica: Oh thank god, an easy one. From the greek antarktikos (ἀνταρκτικός), from anti (ἀντί) and arktikos (ἀρκτικός), meaning, well, opposite the Arctic. And how, you may ask, did the Arctic get its name? From another ancient Greek word: ἄρκτος, a reference to a constellation, Ursa Major, visible only in the northern hemisphere.
This, pleasingly, means that the Arctic, where you find polar bears, is named “bear”, while the Antarctic, where you don’t, is named “anti-bear”. Cool.
Australia: “Southern land” in what is intriguingly termed “Neo-Latin”, the type of Latin used in scholarly work in the Renaissance, quite some time after the original Latin-speakers had gone the way of, well, the Romans.
The name was taken from Terra Australis Incognita, the “unknown southern land”, a hypothetical southern continent theorised by the ancients who’d noticed that there was a whole lot more land in the north of the planet than the south, and concluded that this would have to be balanced in some way. It doesn’t – honestly, how did they imagine that worked? What a stupid idea – but when Europeans started pootling around the south seas it began popping up as a potential label, until it was finally accepted by the British Admiralty, on the advice of the New South Wales governor Lachlan Macquarie, for the continent containing his colony and which had previously been known as New Holland.
So, to sum up, one of the largest landmasses on the globe was named by a British government department on the advice of a bloke who was inspired by some long dead Romans who’d been wrong about everything anyway. Makes you grateful for the ones where we’re not quite sure, doesn’t it?
Australia, incidentally, is sometimes treated as a mere subset of a broader area. Australasia, which might literally mean “south of Asia” or might just be a way of saying “more than just Australia”, is a basket term for Australia, New Zealand, and possibly the nearby Melanesia (”islands of black-skinned people”) island group, too. Add the other Pacific island groups, Micronesia (small islands) and Polynesia (many islands – curiously unspecific, this; also this one can also include New Zealand?), and the whole thing is called Oceania, because... well, you can probably get there on your own.
And so, in conclusion, the idea that the Earth can be divided neatly into seven things we call continents is just another comforting fiction of the sort we tell our children when they’re too young to cope with the horrific ontological reality.
A reminder of this special offer because, come on, where else are you going to find stuff like this?
Lastly, a reminder that you should check out my mentee Matt Taylor’s Substack:
