400 words
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It’s a long way from the Horn of Africa to the South Atlantic Sea. But before it got its present name (the South Atlantic) it went by the name “Ethiopic Sea/Ocean” or “Ethiopian Sea/Ocean”. The puzzling thing of course is the Atlantic runs along the west side of the African continent, whereas Ethiopia, which gives its name to the sea, is on the east side of Africa and is landlocked. Its nearest waterways are the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden which flow into Indian Ocean❶.
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| On some ancient maps like this one, which Herodotus would be familiar with, the far southern ocean is identified as the “Austral Sea” |
Who do we blame for this geographical anomaly? The ancient Greeks of course…and the state of utterly fanciful cartography in that BC age of only very limited exploration. The Greeks called it Okeanos Aithiopos and although it was wildly inaccurate, it somehow had staying power, hanging around on maps and atlases until the 19th century! it’s highly conceivable this long persistence over millennia of the errant name reflects the paucity of standardised naming on maps prior to the 19th century.
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| On this 1710 map it is still being referred to as “Ocean Ethiopien” |
As to why it was ascribed in the first place, the Greeks, such as Homer and other Hellenic writers in the archaic era, tended to use the word “Aethiopia” as bit of a broad sweep descriptor for all lands that they surmised lay below Egypt on the African mainland, ie, in sub-Saharan Africa (with an absence of clear borders in antiquity the ancients had a very poor conception of what actually comprised this as yet unknown region)❷. The same went for all the peoples who inhabited them, the ancient Greeks used “Aethiopian” as a catch-all term to identify these various and different peoples with the common trait of dark skin. The etymology is Gk: aitho (“burn”) + –ops (“face”).
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❶ the early Greeks also identified the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantikôi Pelágei or Okeanos Atlantikôi , Latin: Mare Atlantique/Oceanus Atlanticus, but the name seems to have been restricted to the northern part of the ocean and only started to be used to describe it in it’s entirety around the 17th century
❷ Aethiopia gets mentioned several times in both the Iliad and the Odyssey as being at the far ends of the earth, near the ocean stream
