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Afri

For other uses, see Afri (disambiguation).

Āfrī (singular Āfer)[1] was a Latin name for the inhabitants of Africa, referring in its widest sense to all the lands south of the Mediterranean (Ancient Libya).[2][3] Latin speakers at first used āfer as an adjective, meaning "of Africa". As a substantive, it denoted a native of Āfrica; i.e., an African.[citation needed]

Etymology

The etymology of the term remains uncertain. It may derive from a Punic term for an indigenous population of the area surrounding Carthage.[citation needed] (See Terence for discussion.) The name is usually connected with Phoenician ʿafar "dust"[4] (also found in other Semitic languages), but a 1981 hypothesis asserted that it stems from the Berber ifri (plural ifran) "cave", in reference to cave dwellers.[5][6] (See Tataouine.) The same word[6] may be found in the name of the Banu Ifran from Algeria and Tripolitania, a Berber tribe originally from Yafran (also known as Ifrane) in northwestern Libya.[7] The classical historian Flavius Josephus asserted that descendants of Abraham's grandson Epher invaded the region and gave it their own name.[citation needed]

Africa

This ethnonym provided the source of the term Africa. The Romans referred to the region as Africa terra (land of the Afri), based on the stem Afr- with the adjective suffix -ic, giving Africus, Africa, Africum in the nominative singular of the three Latin genders.[citation needed] Following the defeat of Carthage in the Third Punic War, Rome set up the province of Africa Proconsularis. Afer came to be a cognomen for people from this province.[citation needed]

The Germanic tribe of the Vandals conquered the Roman Diocese of Africa in the 5th century; the empire reconquered it as the Praetorian prefecture of Africa in AD 534. The Latin name Africa came into Arabic after the Islamic conquest as Ifriqiya.[8]

The name survives today as Ifira and Ifri-n-Dellal in Greater Kabylie (Algeria). A Berber tribe was called Banu Ifran in the Middle Ages, and Ifurace was the name of a Tripolitan people in the 6th century.[9]

Herodotus wrote that the Garamantes, a North African people, used to live in caves. The Greeks called an African people who lived in caves Troglodytae.[citation needed]

See also

References

  1. ^ Chapter 3, Charles E. Bennett (1907) The Latin Language – a historical outline of its sounds, inflections, and syntax. Allyn & Bacon, Boston.
  2. ^ Georges, Karl Ernst (1913–1918). "Afri". In Georges, Heinrich (ed.). Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch (in German) (8th ed.). Hannover. Archived from the original on 16 January 2016. Retrieved 20 September 2015.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  3. ^ Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879). "Afer". A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Retrieved 20 September 2015.
  4. ^ Venter & Neuland, NEPAD and the African Renaissance (2005), p. 16
  5. ^ Names of countries Archived 2019-06-27 at the Wayback Machine, Decret and Fantar, 1981.
  6. ^ a b Geo. Babington Michell, "The Berbers", Journal of the Royal African Society, Vol. 2, No. 6 (January 1903), pp. 161–194.
  7. ^ Edward Lipinski, Itineraria Phoenicia, Peeters Publishers, 2004, p. 200. ISBN 90-429-1344-4.
  8. ^ Names of countries Archived 2019-06-27 at the Wayback Machine, Decret & Fantar, 1981
  9. ^ Rouighi, Ramzi (2019-08-02). Inventing the Berbers: History and Ideology in the Maghrib. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 44. ISBN 978-0-8122-5130-2.
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