Barbarian
For other meanings of Barbarian see Barbarian (disambiguation)The word
"barbarian" generally refers to an uncivilized, uncultured person, either in a general reference to a member of a nation or
ethnos perceived as having an inferior level of
civilization, or in an individual reference to a brutal, cruel, insensitive person whose behavior is unacceptable in a civilized society. While the latter sense is always pejorative, the former one has not invariably been so, as described below.
The word "Barbarian" comes into English from
Medieval Latin ', from Latin ', from Latin
, from the ancient
Greek word which meant a non-Greek, someone whose (first) language was not Greek. The word is imitative, the
bar-bar representing the impression of random hubbub produced by hearing spoken a language that one cannot understand, similar to
blah blah or
babble rhubarb in modern English. Related imitative forms are found in other
Indo-European languages, such as
Sanskrit barbara-, "stammering" or "one with curly hair" , and the forms are connected to a reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European *baba-, "to stammer".
[An alternative etymology of "barbarian" from the Latin barba, meaning beard is spurious [1].]Originally the term is empty of content beyond 'not Greek'. The Greeks encountered scores of different
foreign cultures, including the
Egyptians,
Persians,
Phoenicians,
Etruscans,
Romans,
Carthaginians,
Basques, which had no characteristics in common. It is not the case that Greeks automatically despised all alien cultures. In fact, they were aware of the greater antiquity of the much more developed civilizations of Egypt, Phoenicia and
Mesopotamia, from whom they borrowed extensively.
Plato (
Statesman 262de) rejects the Greek"barbarian dichotomy as a logical absurdity on just such grounds: dividing the world into Greeks and non-Greeks tells one nothing about the second group.
In Homer the term appears only once (
Iliad 2.867), in the form
barbarophonos ("of incomprehensible speech"), used of the
Carians fighting for the Trojans. Notably the Trojans themselves, who despite bearing Hellenized names in the Homeric telling are emphatically not Greek, are not called
barbaroi. In general the concept of
barbaros does not figure largely in archaic literature (before the fifth century BC).
A change occurred in the connotations of the word after the
Greco-Persian Wars in the first half of the fifth century. Here a hasty coalition of Greeks defeated a vast empire. Indeed in the Greek of this period 'barbarian' is often used expressly to mean
Persian. In the wake of this victory they began to see themselves as superior militarily and politically. A stereotype developed in which hardy Greeks live as free men in city-states where politics are a communal possession, whereas among the womanish barbarians everyone beneath the Great King is no better than his slave. This marks the birth of the cultural view termed "
orientalism".
A parallel factor was the growth of
chattel slavery especially at Athens. Although enslavement of Greeks for non-payment of
debt continued in most Greek states, it was banned at Athens under
Solon in the early sixth century . Under the
Athenian democracy established
ca 508 BC
slavery came to be used on a scale never before seen among the Greeks. Massive concentrations of slaves were worked under especially brutal conditions in the silver mines at
Laureion—a major vein of silver-bearing ore was made there in 483 BC—while the phenomenon of skilled slave craftsmen producing manufactured goods in small factories and workshops became increasingly common. Furthermore, slaves were no longer the preserve of the rich: all but the poorest of Athenian households came to have slaves to supplement the work of their free members. Overwhelmingly, the slaves of Athens were "barbarian" in origin, drawn especially from lands around the Black Sea such as
Thrace and
Taurica (
Crimea), while from
Asia Minor came above all
Lydians,
Phrygians and
Carians. It is hard not to despise the people you are keeping as your slaves, even essential: in the intellectual justification of slavery (
Aristotle Politics 1.2-7; 3.14), barbarians are slaves by nature. From this period words like
barbarophonos, cited above from Homer, began to be used not only of the sound of a foreign language but of foreigners speaking Greek improperly. In Greek the notions of language and reason are easily confused in the word
logos, so speaking poorly was easily conflated with being stupid—an association not of course limited to ancient Greeks.
Out of those sources the Hellenic stereotype was elaborated: 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. These stereotypes were voiced with much shrillness by writers like
Isocrates in the
4th century BC who called for a war of conquest against
Persia as a
panacea for Greek problems. Ironically, many of the former attributes were later ascribed to the Greeks, especially the
Seleucid kingdom, by the Romans.
However, the Hellenic stereotype of barbarians was not a universal feature of Hellenic culture.
Xenophon, for example, wrote the
Cyropaedia, a laudatory fictionalised account of
Cyrus, the founder of Persian empire, effectively a
utopian text. In his
Anabasis, Xenophon's accounts of the Persians and other non-Greeks he knew or encountered hardly seem to be under the sway of these stereotypes at all.
The renowned
orator Demosthenes made derogatory comments in his speeches, using the word "barbarian."
Barbarian is used in its Hellenic sense by
St. Paul in the
New Testament (
Romans 1:14) to describe non-Greeks, and to describe one who merely speaks a different language (
1 Corinthians 14:11). The word is not used in these scriptures in the modern sense of "
savage".
Historically, the term
barbarian has seen widespread use. Many peoples have dismissed alien cultures and even rival civilizations as barbarians because they were unrecognizably strange. The Greeks admired
Scythians and
Eastern Gauls as heroic individuals— even in the case of
Anacharsis as philosophers—but considered their culture to be barbaric. The
Romans indiscriminately regarded the various
Germanic tribes, the settled
Gauls, and the raiding
Huns as barbarians all.
The
Chinese (
Han Chinese) of the
Chinese Empire regarded the
Xiongnu,
Tatars,
Turks,
Mongols,
Jurchen,
Manchu, and
Europeans as barbaric. The Chinese used different terms for barbarians from different directions of the compass. Those in the east were called
Dongyi (东夷), those in the west were called Xirong (西戎), those in the south were called Nanman (南蛮), and those in the north were called Beidi (北狄). However, despite the conventional translation of such terms (especially 夷) as 'barbarian', in fact it is possible to translate them simply as 'outsider' or 'stranger', with far less offensive cultural connotations. The use of the translation 'barbarian' may have been a deliberate attempt by European powers to justify their policies against China.
The
Japanese adopted the
Chinese usage. When Europeans came to
Japan, they were called
nanban (南蛮), literally
Barbarians from the South, because the Portuguese ships appeared to sail from the South and the Dutch were called Kōmō" ,紅毛, literally meaning "Red Hair".
Converted barbarians have historically proved sometimes the staunchest supporters of the more developed culture they have recently subverted. Historic examples are the
Lombards and the
Manchu. "The best Romans," wrote
Henry James, "are often northern barbarians." A running theme in all histories of China is that of the conquering outsiders who become utterly Chinese,
sinicized: for the English-speaking world the outstandingly familiar example is
Kublai Khan.
Italians in the
Renaissance often called anyone who lived outside of their country a barbarian. The term has also been used to refer to people from
Barbary, a region encompassing most of North Africa. The name of the region,
Barbary, comes from the Arabic word
Barbar, possibly from the Latin word
barbaria, meaning "land of the barbarians".
Even today,
barbarian is used to mean someone violent, primitive, uncouth or uncivilized in general, in very much the same disapproving and superior sense that
Edward Gibbon used the term in
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which recounts how "the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians" a usage epitomized in Gibbon's
Book I, chapter 38:
Beyond the Rhine and Danube, the northern countries of Europe and Asia were filled with innumerable tribes of hunters and shepherds, poor, voracious, and turbulent; bold in arms, and impatient to ravish the fruits of industry. The Barbarian world was agitated by the rapid impulse of war; and the peace of Gaul or Italy was shaken by the distant revolutions of China.
Compare the modern usage of
Philistine.
A non-pejorative, simply functional concept of "barbarian", as sociologists have redefined the term, depends upon a carefully-defined use of "
civilization", denoting a settled,
urban way of life that is organized on principles broader than the
extended family or tribe, in which surpluses of necessities can be stored and redistributed, and division of labor produces some
luxury goods (even if only for gods and kings). The barbarian is technically a
social parasite on civilization, who depends on settlements as a source of
slaves, surpluses and portable luxuries: booty, loot and plunder. In this limited sense, without cities there can be no barbarians.
The nomad subsists on the products of his flocks, and follows their needs. The nomad may barter for necessities, like metalwork, but does not depend on civilization for plunder, as the barbarian does.
The culture of the
nomad is not to be confused with the barbarian. "Culture" should not simply connote "civilization": rich, deep authentic human
culture exists even without civilization, as the German writers of the early Romantic generation first defined the opposing terms, though they used them as polarities in a way that a modern writer might not.
A famous quote from
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss says: "The barbarian is the one who believes in barbary"
, a meaning like his metaphor in Race et histoire ("Race and history", UNESCO, 1952), that two cultures are like two different trains crossing each other: each one believes it has chosen the good direction.The modern sympathetic admiration for such fantasy barbarians as Conan the Barbarian is a direct descendant of the Enlightenment idealization of the "noble savage". The German Romantics recharacterized the barbarian stereotype. Now it was the civilized Roman " or that modern Romanized Gaul, the Frenchman " who was effeminate and soft, and the stout-hearted German barbarian who exemplified manly virtue. The reforming of Arminius as "Hermann" the noble barbarian countering evil Rome provided a prototype from the 16th century onwards.
In fantasy novels and role-playing games, barbarians (or berserkers) are still depicted as brave uncivilized warriors, often able to attack with a crazed fury. Conan is simply best known of the type.* List of words meaning outsider, foreigner or "not one of us"
* Barbarian kings of Italy: in fact merely a list of the highly civilized Ostrogothic rulers, who avoided the term "king".
* Michael Wall's 1989 play Amongst Barbarians
* Conan the Barbarian
* Barber* Oriental, of or pertaining to the Orient, East Asia, now also with pejorative connotations.*Hall, E. (1989) Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford/New York).
*Terry Jones and Alan Ereira (2006), Barbarians, BBC Books, ISBN 0563493186 (hardcover)* "Decline and fall of the Roman myth", an excerpt from the Terry Jones' book.
* "Official Website of Barbaric Barbarians", A humorous view of Barbarians
