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Historians in centuries past used to be obsessed with how places got their names. In order to understand a place, it was often thought, you have to begin with the name. The problem is, usually you can never know where the names come from - sometimes they go way back into the fog of antiquity. But I’ll begin this blog where historians of ages past might have begun, namely with names.

That troublesome “antiquity fog” has definitely fallen over much of the eastern Adriatic. There are very few written sources before Classical times that tell us anything about this araea. However, we do think we know where some of the most important names originated. And that’s where the barbarians come in.

Some of the earliest settlers we know about in the eastern Adriatic were the Illyrians. This is a group of people who came to what’s today Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and elsewhere in the Balkans roughly during the Bronze Age. They weren’t Slavs. In fact, there may never even have been a cohesive group that understood themselves as “Illyrians.”

However, there were definitely some different tribes that lived in particular areas. The Greeks, and later the Romans, came into contact with these tribes. And the names that the Greeks used for these tribes began to be used for the areas where those tribes lived.

So in the northeastern part of the Adriatic you had the Histris tribe. From there we get the modern-day name of Istria. Farther south lived the Delmatae - and hence “Dalmatia.” It’s even thought that some of the geographical names we still use come down from these ancient tribesmen, via the Greeks’ recording of the names. For instance, today’s river Krka in Croatia comes from the name Greek geographers gave it, the Katarbates, which they might well have gotten from the Illyrian tribesmen lounging around its banks. Likewise, today’s island of Mljet the Greeks called “Melita,” which may be a corruption of the Illyrian word.

What do we conclude from all this? The Eastern Adriatic has been inhabited for a very long time, and if the barbarians are long gone - most of them, anyway - some of their names are immortalized forever.

Want to know more about the Illyrians? Get barbaric to your heart’s content at http://www.ancientillyrians.com

That peninsula is Istria. Anybody see any barbarians?