When I was a young kid, I visited Spain. It was my first overseas trip, and I really enjoyed it. We drove all over the southern part of the country, visiting half a dozen cities in just a couple of weeks. I haven't returned since, but I still have strong memories from that trip.
One thing that I know know, but didn't know then, was how significant the Phoenician settlement was in that area. I've written about Semitic origins of the name Spain, and the city of Malaga. But I only recently discovered that two of the cities I visited on my trip also may have Phoenician origins as well.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the name of the city of Seville has a Semitic etymology:
inland port city in Spain, Spanish Sevilla, ultimately from Phoenician, from sefela "plain, valley."
That makes it cognate with the Hebrew root שפל - "to become or be low." The Hebrew word shefela שפלה is similar to the Phoenician sefela. It means "lowland." And if the theory we discussed here is true, then it is cognate with the English word "asphalt" as well, since it may have been named for a source of asphalt - the Dead Sea, which was possibly known as Yam Shafelet ים שפלת - "the low sea."
Another city I visited was Cordoba. There are a few theories as to the etymology, most of which offer a Semitic origin. Those include:
- It comes from the Phoenician-Punic qart ṭūbah meaning "good town", which would be cognate with the Hebrew קריה טובה kirya tova. The city of Carthage, as we mentioned here, has a similar origin: Qart-Hadasht, related to the Hebrew kirya hadasha קריה חדשה - "new city".
- Another theory also says the first half of the name comes from qart, but says that the second half derives from the name Juba, a Numidian general who died around 230 BCE in that area. So the town would have originally been known as the "City of Juba."
- The Online Etymology Dictionary gives this origin: the name is said to be Carthaginian, from Phoenician qorteb "oil press." I've seen this theory mentioned in many books and websites (sometimes spelling it korteb or corteb). However, they're all fairly recent - from the last century, and it's unclear to me where it originated. More significantly, I can't find a word in any Semitic language that resembles qorteb and means anything like "oil press." The only word I could find even somewhat similar is kurtov קרטוב, which as we discussed here meant a volume of liquid, and came from Greek. I don't see how that would come to mean "oil press," and I don't know how likely the Phoenicians were to have borrowed from the Greeks at that time. If any readers can shed light on this question, I'd love to hear from them.
*** Update ***
The first to say that Cordoba came from Phoenician word meaning "oil press" was
Samuel Bochart, who wrote an entire book discussing Semitic origins to place names, including those settled by the Phoencians:
Geographia Sacra seu Phaleg et Canaan (1646).
Bochart based his etymology on the word
kotev קטב or
kotbi קטבי. It appears in the Mishna (
Sheviit 8:6), but the meaning isn't entirely clear. Rambam says it means an small oil press, which would support Bochart's etymology. However, Bochart actually quotes the
Arukh, who says
kotev refers to the wooden beam used to hold the millstone that presses the olives. (Certainly both explanations are related to the production of olive oil). In his expansion on the Arukh, the
Arukh Hashalem connects this meaning of
kotev to the homonym
kotev meaning "axis, pole" as we've discussed
here.
Jastrow makes the same connection, but Ben Yehuda and
Klein do not connect the two meanings.
The addition of the "r" to
kotev, to eventually arrive at "Cordoba" was Bochart's conjecture. As
Klein notes here:
ר often serves for the dissimilation of the reduplication of a consonant. So, e.g., דַּרְמֶשֶׂק is a dissimilated form of דַּמֶשֶׂק (= Damascus). In this way many bases and words have been enlarged into quadriliterals; cp. e.g. BAram. כָּרֽסֵא (= chair), which is prob. a loan word from Akka. kussu (= chair, throne), whence prob. also Heb. כִּסֵּא; base כרסם (= to chew, gnaw, devour), dissimilated from כסם (= to shear, clip); שַׁרְבִיט (= scepter), enlarged from שֵׁבֶט (of s.m.); סַרֽעַפָּה (= branch), enlarged from סֽעַפָּה (of s.m.); שַׂרְעַפִּים (= thoughts), enlarged from שֽׂעִפִּים (of s.m.).
So it's not unprecedented for a resh to be added to a Semitic word. And indeed, the name Cordoba in Hebrew was written as קורטבא (or קרטבא), the same spelling as קוטב, with only the resh added. You can see this spelling in the writings of the rabbis who lived in Spain (see here for example of a responsa by the Rosh, who also mentioned Seville). But I was surprised to find that the name appears even in the Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 115b:
יצחק ריש גלותא בר אחתיה דרב ביבי הוה קאזיל מקורטבא לאספמיא ושכיב
Yitzḥak the Exilarch, son of the sister of Rav Beivai, was walking from Cortva to Spain and died along the way.
Jastrow claims that this was a Babylonian town, Kardu, also known as Karduniaš. But Steinsaltz, in his notes on Yevamot, writes that according to the context (which also mentions Spain), the town was likely Cordoba, which was an important city in Talmudic times. (Spain, or more precisely Hispania, did not always control Cordoba, so the trip from Cordoba to Spain could make sense depending on the time).
Ultimately, this was a theory by Bochart, writing in the 17th century, without access to modern research. Y comments:
Back to Cordoba, since Bochart's additional r is ad hoc, and since a
city is unlikely to be named after a technical term referring to a part
of an oil mill, the etymology can be rejected. The "Phoenician" part is
also an unsupported speculative extrapolation.
While I'm certainly not fully convinced of the etymology, I'm a little more generous with the possibility than Y. If the kotev referred to the olive oil press in general, and since Spain has long been associated with olives and olive oil, it's not impossible that it was the source of the name. But whether Bochart was correct or not, I certainly appreciate the scholarship of my readers today, who are always ready to answer the questions that leave me puzzled.
