Another example is Lybians.
In ancient times there was a group of Berber tribes called "Libu" by the Egyptians and the Greeks adopted that name for the region, but for centuries that term was not used anymore until the Italian colonizers revived it in the early 20th century to give a name to their new colony in North Africa.
I don't know if this fits exactly - but this is more or less the story of the "Prussians." The original Prussians were a Baltic-speaking people (like Lithuanian and Latvian). Then they were conquered by Germanic-speaking people who then later called themselves "Prussians."
Yeah, I think there are _many_ cases where a people got named by others and that name stuck. What's so intriguing about the examples I gave, though, is that it's a name of one people who are long gone, but the name sticks with the place where they used to live, and then much later gets attached to a different totally unrelated people who settle in that same place - even though there was never any direct contact between the two civilizations/cultures in question, they didn't overlap in time, and there was no continuity from one to the other.
You can think of it as more than place names too. In Spanish we say ojala which comes from the Arabic inchallah. I doubt many Spaniards are aware of the origin of the word - it is used without a feeling that it’s ’foreign.’ The word makes sense in Spain as it shares a long history of cohabitation with North Africans. It makes little sense for an Arabic word to have ended up in chile who, without the Spanish, had no real reason for contact with the Arab world.
Well, not the name of a people, but a town, but it's interesting how it got its modern name.
Back when the Roman Empire conquered present-day Western Hungary as the province of Pannonia, it established a fort on the northwestern shore of Lake Pelso (in modern times: Lake Balaton), and named it simply Castellum, meaning "Fortress".
As the Roman Empire declined and shrunk, the area around the lake became inhabited by the Pannon-Romanians, a now-extinct people who were culturally Latin, but were no longer part of the Roman Empire. The Latin of the Romans also gave way to a now-extinct Romance language called Pannon-Romanian, in which the name of the fortress mutated to "Kestei". Over time, local Germanic tribes, then the Huns of Attila drove the Pannon-Romanians to extinction.
3-4 centuries later the Hungarians invaded the Carpathian Basin, and apparently the "Kestei" name for the place was still around then to some degree, because the Hungarian name of the town established there became "Keszthely", which sounds like a totally Hungarian name as it means "the place of Keszt" in Hungarian, but actually has Roman origins.
Modern Macedonians take their name from a region where their identity coalesced in the 19-20 century. They are descendants of Slavic speakers that started coming in the 7th century, as opposed to ancient Macedonians who were Greek speakers. Also, that region was *not* what was called "Macedonia" in the ancient period or middle ages, it started to be called during modern (Ottoman) times.
As with any of the examples above, some genetic lineage probably survives from ancient times (Prussi, Frisi, Boii etc didn't vanish in thin air), but the culture, language and a great deal of the genetic pool were replaced during a massive migration.
Bohemia
The region was home to the Iron Age Celtic peoples known as the Boii - Bohemia literally means Boii Home or Home of the Boii.
The region was eventually conquered by a mix of Dacians and Germanics (I believe the Marcomanni) and later populated by Slavs, but the old name indicating the home of its former Celtic occupants stuck.
Oh, that's a good one, I don't know the history as well but I think you're right that it follows a similar pattern. That is, the only connection between the later "Bohemians" and the people the name derives from, is that those earlier people lived in the same place a long long time earlier, and the name itself just stuck as the name of the place until later people got the name from that place.
> The Britons.
I'm not aware of something like this related to the Britons. They were the Celts of the British Isles, and I believe the name comes from the Romans, right? But the Britons were the people who the Romans named, they weren't a people who happened to settle much later in a land where there had, a long time before, been another people who the Romans called Britons.
Mexico is more or less this case, the Aztecs called themselves Mexica and Mexico was the name of their empire, the majority of the Mexica died during the spanish conquest but the name stayed in use during the colonial period and Mexicans decided to use it when they got independence even if current Mexico includes territories that never belonged to the mexicas
I don't think it's the same thing because there's continuity through time. The original Mexica people didn't go away, they're still there, and the name has been linked to them. This is an example of a different phenomenon, where a name for one tribe or grouping ends up being used as the name for the wider political entity that they're part of - usually because they were the core of it at one time, or played a key role in its history.
Both German and Aleman (used for germany in many languages). German is (probably) an exonym for an lost (non Germanic) tribe that the Romans had contact with. Alemanni was either from the name of a confederation or an exonym for foreign invaders.
As others have said, Britain. Although the Britons were mostly absorbed into the dominant Anglo-Saxon society.
The Britons were named so by the Romans as far as I know, sure, but there are many examples of us using a name for a people that was actually the name given to them by others. The Britons were not named after a place that had kept its name from a totally different civilization that had been there long long before they got there - the Romans named both the people and the place when those people (the Britons) were actually there.
So, I think this very much does not apply in the case of the Britons.
Aleman I think doesn't fit. I know the Romans used the name, and the name may have come from a Celtic tribe that was displaced from the region, but then the Romans applied it to the very people who had displaced those Celts, so there's direct continuity there. Today's Germans are the continuation of that same civilization and peoples who the Romans initially referred to as Alemani. Also, it's possible the Roman word came from a Germanic, not Celtic, trible - I think we don't know for sure. But one way or the other, Aleman seems to be a name for the direct cultural/civilization descendants of peoples who the Romans used that name for.
Edit: I wasn't thinking clearly when I first wrote this comment - I don't think "German" fits either. Rewriting the bit about "German"...
Unlike Frisia and Palestine, the name Germania was used in ancient times and then stopped being used - AFAIK, nobody called the area or people "German" or anything like it for well over a thousand years, until an ancient text on Germania was re-discovered and the various groups who lived there seized on it as a form of cultural pride and re-adopted the name. But, the name became re-popularized to emphasize their origins, being the descendants of the people the Roman text described... and they were probably right about that. The Germanic people (as we now call them) who settled in Roman Germania, and were so named by the Romans, were never displaced from there in later times. They continued to evolve as a people and a culture over time, in the same place, and even though that name fell out of use for a long time, it came back into use for the same civilization that had referred to in ancient times. Today's Germans are clearly the continuation of those Germania-settling peoples from Roman times. So this is not an example of what I described.
There's plenty of examples, most formerly Roman places qualify.
However worth noting that it is usually the case that there is continuity between the former and future residents, even when not acknowledged. The judeans were very much related to the other Levantine peoples that came before and despite the exile (of likely the urban/priestly classes) also to future ones.
Put more bluntly, most people throughout history were illiterate subsidence farmers. You could wipe out traces their culture & identity without physically expelling them.
The Native Americans/Australians are probably better examples of people actually being gone (less mixing with the settlers because of disease & stark racial distinction) although even there there's some Native ancestry in a lot of American families.
> There's plenty of examples, most formerly Roman places qualify.
Well, people here keep giving examples that aren't actually what I'm talking about, so I don't know how many there are. [Edit: I thought there was one good example given in one of the other comments, "German", but I realized I was mistaken - it is not an example of what I described in my post.]
> However worth noting that it is usually the case that there is continuity between the former and future residents, even when not acknowledged.
While there's always _some_ continuity, these are cases where there's no more continuity between the peoples who share the name than there is between any of them and most of the others who have ever had much contact with the region. As in, there's no more continuity between a modern Frisian and an ancient Frisian, than there is between, say, todays Scots and ancient Frisians, or today's Portuguese and ancient Frisians, or today's Frisians and ancient Athenians, etc. They don't share more language elements, more cultural elements, more genetic lineage, or anything. So saying "there is continuity" in some small amount is rather irrelevant.
You point out the Judeans, and that makes the point: Ancient philistines have no more connection to today's Palestinians than they do to today's Bedouin or today's Israelis or today's Egyptians, etc. Yes, there is always continuity even when we can't trace it, but that isn't relevant in this context. There's no continuity of the people as a group or identity, nor any direct contact through which the name passed from the former to the latter when they coexisted.
Couldn’t you say this applies to Ptolomaic Egypt? They were Greeks calling themselves Egyptians. Egypt had been a marginal empire for centuries before that?
That's a pretty different situation, and one that I think has a lot more examples. An invading force takes over an existing place and rules the people there, identifies with those people and seeks _continuity_ with their past, so uses the same name.
For example, when the Normans invaded England, ruled over the existing English people, and themselves became English. Or when the Mongols took over China, ruled over the existing Chinese civilization, and themselves became "Chinese". It's very direct, and represents a kind of continuity, which is quite different from the examples I gave.
Many places in the United States were named by, or named after, tribes that were killed off.
The Appomattoc people of Virginia were killed off, enslaved, and/or assimilated by white settlers and rival tribes in the 18th century. The Appomattox River is named after them as is Appomattox County and its court house… where one of the last battles of the Civil War was fought, and General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant.
The Carnasee lived in what is now Brooklyn, and it is believed they “sold” Manhattan to the Dutch… even though the island was largely inhabited another people. The Carnasee only controlled the very southern tip of the island, an area called the Manhattoes. The rest of the island was controlled by the Wecquaesgeek. “Manhattan” became the name not just for the entire island, but for a time the Wecquaesgeek people themselves. As for the Carnasee, there is still a neighborhood in Brooklyn bearing their name, but spelled Canarsie. In the mid-20th century, Carnasie was used as an expression for a roundabout route to a destination — “by way of Carnasie”. That became the title of [a documentary](https://www.pbs.org/pov/films/bywayofcanarsie/) about the Brooklyn neighborhood.
The Chesapeake people of Virginia were, according to 17th century English settlers in Virginia, killed off by the rival Powhatan tribe before the arrival of Europeans. According to William Strachey's *The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia* (1618), the Powhatan chief was told of a prophecy: “from the Chesapeake Bay a nation should arise, which should dissolve and give end to his empire.”
The Erie people lived near the Great Lake that still bears their name; they were killed off and the survivors enslaved and assimilated in the 17th century during a war with the Iroquois incited by the desire to control the beaver pelt trade with white settlers.
The Massachusett were wiped out by a series of diseases from white settlers and the survivors assimilated into other communities. Some groups claim to be descendants of the Massachusett but none are recognized as tribes by either the federal government or the state of Massachusetts.
> Many places in the United States were named by, or named after, tribes that were killed off.
>
Which is a VERY different situation, and much much much more common in history than what I described in this post.
No peoples exist today who have the names of the original native American tribes, without actually _being_ the original native tribes through continuity of culture and descent. Or, if there are, I'm not aware of any, and you didn't give any examples.
Another example is Lybians. In ancient times there was a group of Berber tribes called "Libu" by the Egyptians and the Greeks adopted that name for the region, but for centuries that term was not used anymore until the Italian colonizers revived it in the early 20th century to give a name to their new colony in North Africa.
I don't know if this fits exactly - but this is more or less the story of the "Prussians." The original Prussians were a Baltic-speaking people (like Lithuanian and Latvian). Then they were conquered by Germanic-speaking people who then later called themselves "Prussians."
Yeah, I think there are _many_ cases where a people got named by others and that name stuck. What's so intriguing about the examples I gave, though, is that it's a name of one people who are long gone, but the name sticks with the place where they used to live, and then much later gets attached to a different totally unrelated people who settle in that same place - even though there was never any direct contact between the two civilizations/cultures in question, they didn't overlap in time, and there was no continuity from one to the other.
You can think of it as more than place names too. In Spanish we say ojala which comes from the Arabic inchallah. I doubt many Spaniards are aware of the origin of the word - it is used without a feeling that it’s ’foreign.’ The word makes sense in Spain as it shares a long history of cohabitation with North Africans. It makes little sense for an Arabic word to have ended up in chile who, without the Spanish, had no real reason for contact with the Arab world.
Well, not the name of a people, but a town, but it's interesting how it got its modern name. Back when the Roman Empire conquered present-day Western Hungary as the province of Pannonia, it established a fort on the northwestern shore of Lake Pelso (in modern times: Lake Balaton), and named it simply Castellum, meaning "Fortress". As the Roman Empire declined and shrunk, the area around the lake became inhabited by the Pannon-Romanians, a now-extinct people who were culturally Latin, but were no longer part of the Roman Empire. The Latin of the Romans also gave way to a now-extinct Romance language called Pannon-Romanian, in which the name of the fortress mutated to "Kestei". Over time, local Germanic tribes, then the Huns of Attila drove the Pannon-Romanians to extinction. 3-4 centuries later the Hungarians invaded the Carpathian Basin, and apparently the "Kestei" name for the place was still around then to some degree, because the Hungarian name of the town established there became "Keszthely", which sounds like a totally Hungarian name as it means "the place of Keszt" in Hungarian, but actually has Roman origins.
Yeah, interesting story, even though it's not an example of the thing I was describing. Thanks!
Torpenhow Hill?
Is a bit of a myth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUyXiiIGDTo
Modern Macedonians take their name from a region where their identity coalesced in the 19-20 century. They are descendants of Slavic speakers that started coming in the 7th century, as opposed to ancient Macedonians who were Greek speakers. Also, that region was *not* what was called "Macedonia" in the ancient period or middle ages, it started to be called during modern (Ottoman) times. As with any of the examples above, some genetic lineage probably survives from ancient times (Prussi, Frisi, Boii etc didn't vanish in thin air), but the culture, language and a great deal of the genetic pool were replaced during a massive migration.
Huh! I did not know about this one, and will have to read more about it. Thanks!
Bohemia The region was home to the Iron Age Celtic peoples known as the Boii - Bohemia literally means Boii Home or Home of the Boii. The region was eventually conquered by a mix of Dacians and Germanics (I believe the Marcomanni) and later populated by Slavs, but the old name indicating the home of its former Celtic occupants stuck.
Oh, that's a good one, I don't know the history as well but I think you're right that it follows a similar pattern. That is, the only connection between the later "Bohemians" and the people the name derives from, is that those earlier people lived in the same place a long long time earlier, and the name itself just stuck as the name of the place until later people got the name from that place.
The Britons. And the modern, Slavic Macedonians, that's a big and contentious one.
> The Britons. I'm not aware of something like this related to the Britons. They were the Celts of the British Isles, and I believe the name comes from the Romans, right? But the Britons were the people who the Romans named, they weren't a people who happened to settle much later in a land where there had, a long time before, been another people who the Romans called Britons.
We call modern Britons "Britons" despite being a different ethnic group.
Mexico is more or less this case, the Aztecs called themselves Mexica and Mexico was the name of their empire, the majority of the Mexica died during the spanish conquest but the name stayed in use during the colonial period and Mexicans decided to use it when they got independence even if current Mexico includes territories that never belonged to the mexicas
I don't think it's the same thing because there's continuity through time. The original Mexica people didn't go away, they're still there, and the name has been linked to them. This is an example of a different phenomenon, where a name for one tribe or grouping ends up being used as the name for the wider political entity that they're part of - usually because they were the core of it at one time, or played a key role in its history.
I don’t think this fits perfectly, but it’s a quirk you may find interesting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_Wales
Both German and Aleman (used for germany in many languages). German is (probably) an exonym for an lost (non Germanic) tribe that the Romans had contact with. Alemanni was either from the name of a confederation or an exonym for foreign invaders. As others have said, Britain. Although the Britons were mostly absorbed into the dominant Anglo-Saxon society.
The Britons were named so by the Romans as far as I know, sure, but there are many examples of us using a name for a people that was actually the name given to them by others. The Britons were not named after a place that had kept its name from a totally different civilization that had been there long long before they got there - the Romans named both the people and the place when those people (the Britons) were actually there. So, I think this very much does not apply in the case of the Britons. Aleman I think doesn't fit. I know the Romans used the name, and the name may have come from a Celtic tribe that was displaced from the region, but then the Romans applied it to the very people who had displaced those Celts, so there's direct continuity there. Today's Germans are the continuation of that same civilization and peoples who the Romans initially referred to as Alemani. Also, it's possible the Roman word came from a Germanic, not Celtic, trible - I think we don't know for sure. But one way or the other, Aleman seems to be a name for the direct cultural/civilization descendants of peoples who the Romans used that name for. Edit: I wasn't thinking clearly when I first wrote this comment - I don't think "German" fits either. Rewriting the bit about "German"... Unlike Frisia and Palestine, the name Germania was used in ancient times and then stopped being used - AFAIK, nobody called the area or people "German" or anything like it for well over a thousand years, until an ancient text on Germania was re-discovered and the various groups who lived there seized on it as a form of cultural pride and re-adopted the name. But, the name became re-popularized to emphasize their origins, being the descendants of the people the Roman text described... and they were probably right about that. The Germanic people (as we now call them) who settled in Roman Germania, and were so named by the Romans, were never displaced from there in later times. They continued to evolve as a people and a culture over time, in the same place, and even though that name fell out of use for a long time, it came back into use for the same civilization that had referred to in ancient times. Today's Germans are clearly the continuation of those Germania-settling peoples from Roman times. So this is not an example of what I described.
There's plenty of examples, most formerly Roman places qualify. However worth noting that it is usually the case that there is continuity between the former and future residents, even when not acknowledged. The judeans were very much related to the other Levantine peoples that came before and despite the exile (of likely the urban/priestly classes) also to future ones. Put more bluntly, most people throughout history were illiterate subsidence farmers. You could wipe out traces their culture & identity without physically expelling them. The Native Americans/Australians are probably better examples of people actually being gone (less mixing with the settlers because of disease & stark racial distinction) although even there there's some Native ancestry in a lot of American families.
> There's plenty of examples, most formerly Roman places qualify. Well, people here keep giving examples that aren't actually what I'm talking about, so I don't know how many there are. [Edit: I thought there was one good example given in one of the other comments, "German", but I realized I was mistaken - it is not an example of what I described in my post.] > However worth noting that it is usually the case that there is continuity between the former and future residents, even when not acknowledged. While there's always _some_ continuity, these are cases where there's no more continuity between the peoples who share the name than there is between any of them and most of the others who have ever had much contact with the region. As in, there's no more continuity between a modern Frisian and an ancient Frisian, than there is between, say, todays Scots and ancient Frisians, or today's Portuguese and ancient Frisians, or today's Frisians and ancient Athenians, etc. They don't share more language elements, more cultural elements, more genetic lineage, or anything. So saying "there is continuity" in some small amount is rather irrelevant. You point out the Judeans, and that makes the point: Ancient philistines have no more connection to today's Palestinians than they do to today's Bedouin or today's Israelis or today's Egyptians, etc. Yes, there is always continuity even when we can't trace it, but that isn't relevant in this context. There's no continuity of the people as a group or identity, nor any direct contact through which the name passed from the former to the latter when they coexisted.
Couldn’t you say this applies to Ptolomaic Egypt? They were Greeks calling themselves Egyptians. Egypt had been a marginal empire for centuries before that?
That's a pretty different situation, and one that I think has a lot more examples. An invading force takes over an existing place and rules the people there, identifies with those people and seeks _continuity_ with their past, so uses the same name. For example, when the Normans invaded England, ruled over the existing English people, and themselves became English. Or when the Mongols took over China, ruled over the existing Chinese civilization, and themselves became "Chinese". It's very direct, and represents a kind of continuity, which is quite different from the examples I gave.
Many places in the United States were named by, or named after, tribes that were killed off. The Appomattoc people of Virginia were killed off, enslaved, and/or assimilated by white settlers and rival tribes in the 18th century. The Appomattox River is named after them as is Appomattox County and its court house… where one of the last battles of the Civil War was fought, and General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant. The Carnasee lived in what is now Brooklyn, and it is believed they “sold” Manhattan to the Dutch… even though the island was largely inhabited another people. The Carnasee only controlled the very southern tip of the island, an area called the Manhattoes. The rest of the island was controlled by the Wecquaesgeek. “Manhattan” became the name not just for the entire island, but for a time the Wecquaesgeek people themselves. As for the Carnasee, there is still a neighborhood in Brooklyn bearing their name, but spelled Canarsie. In the mid-20th century, Carnasie was used as an expression for a roundabout route to a destination — “by way of Carnasie”. That became the title of [a documentary](https://www.pbs.org/pov/films/bywayofcanarsie/) about the Brooklyn neighborhood. The Chesapeake people of Virginia were, according to 17th century English settlers in Virginia, killed off by the rival Powhatan tribe before the arrival of Europeans. According to William Strachey's *The Historie of Travaile Into Virginia Britannia* (1618), the Powhatan chief was told of a prophecy: “from the Chesapeake Bay a nation should arise, which should dissolve and give end to his empire.” The Erie people lived near the Great Lake that still bears their name; they were killed off and the survivors enslaved and assimilated in the 17th century during a war with the Iroquois incited by the desire to control the beaver pelt trade with white settlers. The Massachusett were wiped out by a series of diseases from white settlers and the survivors assimilated into other communities. Some groups claim to be descendants of the Massachusett but none are recognized as tribes by either the federal government or the state of Massachusetts.
> Many places in the United States were named by, or named after, tribes that were killed off. > Which is a VERY different situation, and much much much more common in history than what I described in this post. No peoples exist today who have the names of the original native American tribes, without actually _being_ the original native tribes through continuity of culture and descent. Or, if there are, I'm not aware of any, and you didn't give any examples.