Eritrea

Eritrea

Eritrea

Ancient Greek

“Eritrea is Greek for red: an Italian colonial name taken from the sea beside it.”

The Greek adjective erythros means red. By the 3rd century BCE, Greek sailors were calling the body of water along the Horn of Africa the Erythraia Thalassa, the Red Sea. The name appears in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a 1st-century CE merchant guide to the trade routes of the Indian Ocean basin. The color in the name referred most likely to the reddish sediment and coral that navigators associated with the shallower coastal waters.

Rome adopted the Greek naming without alteration. Mare Erythraeum appears in Latin texts from Virgil onward, always naming the sea between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. Italian writers persisted with a local form, Mar Eritreo, as the standard term through the 18th and 19th centuries. When Italy established its colony on the western shore of that sea in 1890, the colonial administration took the name of the sea for the land.

The Italian colony of Eritrea was formally established on January 1, 1890, with its capital eventually fixed at Asmara. It was Italy's first formal African colony and remained under Italian administration until British forces captured it in 1941. The territory was federated with Ethiopia in 1952 under a United Nations arrangement. When Eritrea achieved independence in 1993 after a thirty-year war, the name given by colonists had become the country's own.

The independence referendum of 1993 returned a vote of 99.8 percent in favor of separation from Ethiopia. The country of roughly 120,000 square kilometers holds more than 2,000 kilometers of Red Sea coastline. The name has completed a strange circuit: Greek sailors named a sea for its color, Italy named a colony for the sea, and the colony chose that name for its republic. The word red now belongs to a country.

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Today

The Republic of Eritrea is a country of about 120,000 square kilometers along the western shore of the Red Sea. Its coastline stretches over 2,000 kilometers, one of the longest in Africa relative to land area. The nation won independence in 1993 after one of the longest liberation wars in African history, and kept the Italian colonial name, finding in a borrowed label something worth claiming.

There is something honest in the etymology. Eritrea is red by name because the sea that defines it was red by Greek legend, and the sea still defines the country. A name borrowed from a colonial power and held through thirty years of war carries weight that a freshly invented name does not. The name is older than the state by twenty-four centuries. A borrowed name, kept long enough, becomes your own.

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Frequently asked questions about eritrea

What does Eritrea mean?

Eritrea means red. The name comes from the Italian colonial term Eritrea, which derived from the Greek erythros meaning red. It was the ancient Greek name for the Red Sea, which lies along Eritrea's eastern coastline.

What language does Eritrea come from?

The name Eritrea comes from ancient Greek through Italian. Greek sailors named the Red Sea the Erythraia Thalassa, from erythros meaning red. Italian colonists adopted this as Eritrea when they established the colony in 1890.

How did Eritrea get its name?

Italy named its colony on the western shore of the Red Sea Eritrea in 1890, taking the Italian name for the Red Sea, Mar Eritreo, which itself came from the Greek Erythraia Thalassa. When Eritrea gained independence in 1993, it kept the colonial name.

What is Eritrea's connection to the Red Sea?

Eritrea takes its name directly from the Red Sea. The ancient Greek term for the Red Sea was the Erythraia Thalassa, from erythros meaning red. Italy named its colony for this sea, and the modern country holds over 2,000 kilometers of Red Sea coastline.