Europe
The structure of persons' names has varied across time and geography. In some communities, individuals have been mononymous; that is, each person has received only a single name. Alulim, first king of Sumer, is one of the earliest names known; Narmer, an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, is another. Later, Biblical names were typically mononymous, as were names in the surrounding cultures of the Fertile Crescent. Ancient Greek names also followed the pattern, with second names only used to avoid confusion, as in the case of Zeno the Stoic and Zeno of Elea.
A notable departure from this custom occurred among the Romans, who by the Republican period and throughout the Imperial period used multiple names: a male citizen's name comprised three parts, praenomen (given name), nomen (clan name) and cognomen (family line within the clan) — the nomen and cognomen being virtually always hereditary. Post-antiquity most of them are, however, mononymous in most contexts: examples are Cicero (also known as Tully: Marcus Tullius Cicero), Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus), Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), Nero (Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus) or Juvenal (Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis).
In other cultures the following can be named: Euripides, Xenophon, Aristotle and, further afield, Boudica and Jugurtha.
During the early Middle Ages, mononymy slowly declined, with northern and eastern Europe keeping the tradition longer than the south; an example is Edeko, the East Germanic chieftain whose son ruled Italy as Flavius Odoacer. By the end of the period, however, surnames had become commonplace: Edmund Ironside, for example, ruled England, Brian Boru was High-king of Ireland, Kenneth MacAlpin had united Scotland, and even in Scandinavia surnames were taking hold. The Dutch Renaissance scholar and theologian Erasmus is a late example of mononymity; though sometimes referred to as "Desiderius Erasmus" or "Erasmus of Rotterdam", he was christened only as "Erasmus", after the martyr Erasmus of Formiae.
Read more about this topic: Mononymous Person, History
Famous quotes containing the word europe:
“In everyone’s youthful dreams, philosophy is still vaguely but inseparably, and with singular truth, associated with the East, nor do after years discover its local habitation in the Western world. In comparison with the philosophers of the East, we may say that modern Europe has yet given birth to none.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Can we never extract this tape-worm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The people of Western Europe are facing this summer a series of tragic dilemmas. Of the hopes that dazzled the last twenty years that some political movement might tend to the betterment of the human lot, little remains above ground but the tattered slogans of the past.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)