Barbarian
A barbarian is, etymologically, a foreigner, specifically someone whose language and customs differed from those of the speaker. In ancient Greece, the term designated non-Greeks, while in the Roman world it referred more generally to peoples living outside the cultural and political sphere of the empire. In modern English, the word has developed a pejorative sense, commonly meaning a "rude, wild, uncivilized person".
The term originates from the . In ancient Greece, the Greeks used the term not only for those who did not speak Greek and follow classical Greek customs, but also for Greek populations on the fringe of the Greek world with peculiar dialects. In ancient Rome, the Romans adapted and applied the term to tribal non-Romans such as the Huns, Germans, Celts, Iberians, Helvetii, Thracians, Illyrians, and Sarmatians. In the early modern period and sometimes later, the Byzantine Greeks used it for the Turks in a clearly pejorative manner.
The Greek word was borrowed into Arabic as well, under the form بربر, and used as an exonym by the Arab invaders to refer to the indigenous peoples of North Africa, known in English as Amazigh or Berbers, with the latter thereby being a cognate of the word "barbarian".
Etymology
Ancient Greece
The ancient Greek name βάρβαρος 'barbarian' was an antonym for πολίτης 'citizen', from πόλις 'city'. The earliest attested form of the word is the Mycenaean Greek ???,, written in Linear B syllabic script.The Greeks used the term barbarian for all non-Greek-speaking people, including the Egyptians, Persians, Medes, and Phoenicians, emphasizing their otherness. According to Greek writers, this was because the language they spoke sounded to Greeks like gibberish represented by the sounds "bar..bar..;" the alleged root of the word, which is an echomimetic or onomatopoeic word. In various occasions, the term was also used by Greeks, especially the Athenians, to deride other Greek tribes and states and also fellow Athenians in a pejorative and politically motivated manner. The term also carried a cultural dimension to its dual meaning. The verb βαρβαρίζω in ancient Greek meant to behave or talk like a barbarian, or to hold with the barbarians.
Plato rejected the Greek–barbarian dichotomy as a logical absurdity on just such grounds: dividing the world into Greeks and non-Greeks told one nothing about the second group. Yet Plato used the term barbarian frequently in his seventh letter. In Homer's works, the term appeared only once, in the form βαρβαρόφωνος, used of the Carians fighting for Troy during the Trojan War. In general, the concept of barbaros did not figure largely in archaic literature before the 5th century BC. It has been suggested that the ‘barbarophonoi’ in the Iliad signifies not those who spoke a non-Greek language but simply those who spoke Greek badly.
A change occurred in the connotations of the word after the Greco-Persian Wars in the first half of the 5th century BC. Here a hasty coalition of Greeks defeated the vast Persian Empire. Indeed, in the Greek of this period 'barbarian' is often used expressly to refer to Persians, who were enemies of the Greeks in this war.
Ancient Rome
The Romans used the term barbarus for uncivilised people, opposite to Greek or Roman, and in fact, it became a common term to refer to all foreigners among Romans after the reign of Augustus. As, among the Greeks, the Persians. This included the Germanic peoples, Persians, Gauls, Phoenicians and Carthaginians.Other cultures
The Greek term barbaros was the etymological source for many words meaning "barbarian", including English barbarian, which was first recorded in 16th century Middle English.A word barbara- is also found in the Sanskrit of ancient India, with the primary meaning of "cruel" and also "stammering", implying someone with an unfamiliar language. The Greek word barbaros is related to Sanskrit barbaras. This Indo-European root is also found in Latin balbutire / balbus for "stammer / stammering" and Czech brblat "to stammer". The verb baṛbaṛānā in both contemporary Hindi as well as Urdu means 'to babble, to speak gibberish, to rave incoherently'.
In Aramaic, Old Persian, and Arabic context, the root refers to "babble confusedly". It appears as barbary or in Old French barbarie, itself derived from the Arabic Barbar, Berber, which is an ancient Arabic term for the North African inhabitants west of Egypt. The Arabic word might be ultimately from Greek barbaria.
English semantics
The Oxford English Dictionary gives five definitions of the noun barbarian, including an obsolete Barbary usage.- 1. Etymologically, A foreigner, one whose language and customs differ from the speaker's.
- 2. Hist. a. One not a Greek. b. One living outside the pale of the Roman Empire and its civilization, applied especially to the northern nations that overthrew them. c. One outside the pale of Christian civilization. d. With the Italians of the Renaissance: One of a nation outside of Italy.
- 3. A rude, wild, uncivilized person. b. Sometimes distinguished from savage. c. Applied by the Chinese contemptuously to foreigners.
- 4. An uncultured person, or one who has no sympathy with literary culture.
- †5. A native of Barbary. Obs. †b. Barbary pirates & A Barbary horse. Obs.
In classical Greco-Roman contexts
Historical developments
Greek attitudes towards "barbarians" developed in parallel with the growth of chattel slavery – especially in Athens. Although the enslavement of Greeks for non-payment of debts continued in most Greek states, Athens banned this practice under Solon in the early 6th century BC. Under the Athenian democracy established ca. 508 BC, slavery came into use on a scale never before seen among the Greeks. Massive concentrations of slaves worked under especially brutal conditions in the silver mines at Laureion in south-eastern Attica after the discovery of a major vein of silver-bearing ore there in 483 BC, while the phenomenon of skilled slave craftsmen producing manufactured goods in small factories and workshops became increasingly common.Furthermore, slave-ownership no longer became the preserve of the rich: all but the poorest of Athenian households came to have slaves in order to supplement the work of their free members. The slaves of Athens that had "barbarian" origins were coming especially from lands around the Black Sea such as Thrace and Taurica, while Lydians, Phrygians and Carians came from Asia Minor. Aristotle characterises barbarians as slaves by nature.
From this period, words like barbarophonos, cited above from Homer, came into use not only for the sound of a foreign language but also for foreigners who spoke Greek improperly. In the Greek language, the word logos expressed both the notions of "language" and "reason", so Greek-speakers readily conflated speaking poorly with stupidity.
File:Visigoths sack Rome.jpg|thumb|The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Barbarians by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, 1890
Further changes occurred in the connotations of barbari/''barbaroi in Late Antiquity, when bishops and catholikoi were appointed to sees connected to cities among the "civilized" gentes barbaricae such as in Armenia or Persia, whereas bishops were appointed to supervise entire peoples among the less settled.
Eventually the term found a hidden meaning through the folk etymology of Cassiodorus. He stated that the word barbarian was "made up of barba and rus'' ; for barbarians did not live in cities, making their abodes in the fields like wild animals".
Hellenic stereotypes
From classical origins the Hellenic stereotype of barbarism evolved: barbarians are like children, unable to speak or reason properly, cowardly, effeminate, luxurious, cruel, unable to control their appetites and desires, politically unable to govern themselves. Writers voiced these stereotypes with much shrillness – Isocrates in the 4th century B.C., for example, called for a war of conquest against Persia as a panacea for Greek problems.However, the disparaging Hellenic stereotype of barbarians did not totally dominate Hellenic attitudes. Xenophon, for example, wrote the Cyropaedia, a laudatory fictionalised account of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire, effectively a utopian text. In his Anabasis, Xenophon's accounts of the Persians and other non-Greeks whom he knew or encountered show few traces of the stereotypes.
In Plato's Protagoras, Prodicus of Ceos calls "barbarian" the Aeolian dialect that Pittacus of Mytilene spoke.
Aristotle makes the difference between Greeks and barbarians one of the central themes of his book on Politics, and quotes Euripides approvingly, "Tis meet that Greeks should rule barbarians".
The renowned orator Demosthenes made derogatory comments in his speeches, using the word "barbarian".
In the Bible's New Testament, St. Paul uses the word barbarian in its Hellenic sense to refer to non-Greeks, and he also uses it to characterise one who merely speaks a different language. In the Acts of the Apostles, the people of Malta, who were kind to Paul and his companions who had been shipwrecked off their coast, are called barbarians .
About a hundred years after Paul's time, Lucian – a native of Samosata, in the former kingdom of Commagene, which had been absorbed by the Roman Empire and made part of the province of Syria – used the term "barbarian" to describe himself. Because he was a noted satirist, this could have indicated self-deprecating irony. It might also have suggested descent from Samosata's original Semitic-speaking population – who were likely called "barbarians by later Hellenistic, Greek-speaking settlers", and might have eventually taken up this appellation themselves.
The term retained its standard usage in the Greek language throughout the Middle Ages; Byzantine Greeks used it widely until the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire, in the 15th century.
Cicero described the mountain area of inner Sardinia as "a land of barbarians", with these inhabitants also known by the manifestly pejorative term latrones mastrucati. The region, still known as "Barbagia", preserves this old "barbarian" designation in its name – but it no longer consciously retains "barbarian" associations: the inhabitants of the area themselves use the name naturally and unaffectedly.