Water's in a name: how place names reveal societies built on water
Detail of Antique Hand Knotted Tabriz Persian Wool Rug,. Source: rugs.com
"Settlement names form the narrative fabric of a nation's history; unravelling them unlocks the story of how societies came to be."
Place names are basically ancient Post-it notes. So what were our ancestors trying to remember about water? Out of curiosity, I ran an analysis that looks into place names around the world; how many settlement names relate to water features? The idea is to consider to which extent water, in name, has been a historic fabric of society. Of course, names might have lost their meaning, lost in translation, or even have been meaningless from their inception, resulting that there is no clearcausation between water feature and location. How, for example, did Rio de Janeiro got mistaken for a river (on January 1st 1502), while it actually was a bay? Though both would qualify as a water feature. Or, how Reykjavik, "Smoky Bay", Norse settlers mistook steam rising from geothermal hot springs as smoke from fires instead, around 870 CE.
Still, it should be no surprise that in the Netherlands at least a quarter of the settlement names carry that association with water. Much of the country was once open water or wetland, over the centuries being poldered or drained to create permanent land—a process that accelerated after the sixth century CE. For example, Amsterdam was founded exactly 750 years ago, just a few years after the dam on the Amstel river was constructed. Even long before that, local names already contained water features. The cities of Utrecht and Maastricht, for instance, were Roman foundations (c. 50 CE). Their -trecht and -tricht endings are local adaptations of Latin traiectum; a river crossing. Here, the syllables have hardened over the centuries. Maas- points to the river as it is still called today, and Ut- reflects a localization of the Latin Ultra, commonly interpreted as "beyond the river crossing".
For the rest of the world, there is some spread over the different continents, but globally, an estimated one in eight settlement names appears to be based on water features, which is still significant. Other features on which settlements are being named are, in order of popularity: geography (excluding water), people, water, flora/fauna, religion, political/historical, mixed, or unknown. It has to be acknowledged that naming is power: but renamings and indigenous toponyms matter, and gaps in indigenous coverage likely understate water associations in specific regions. It is therefore important not to only follow names of settlers, explorers, or colonizers, but to also base this on indigenous, local and historic languages. Because of this multilingualism and the extensive GeoNames database of 11 million place names, AI assistance was used.
The analysis here was run with different iterations, different prompts of several AI assistants, they all show similar distributions, though slight differences in percentages. The strength of AI assistants is that they are based in Large Language Models, which are really smart in combining different languages, to different geographies to different times, yet they are not perfect or to be trusted without rationale; which in this context is my contribution.
It is a given that ancient civilizations were hydraulic empires, built on their proximity to rivers; Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus, Khmer, etcetera. Also at a lower level, for most settlements, this association with water is one of opportunity. Opportunity to cross a river (e.g. bridge, or ford), opportunity for a life under flood protection (e.g. dam), the opportunity to access water (river, lake, spring, wadi), or the opportunity to board ships (e.g. harbor, port, haven). In general, water features provide an extra level of connectivity, but could these locations by name actually provide better opportunity than other places?
So, the next step in the analysis was to explore whether any connection to water (in name) would be a facilitator of its historic development. This analysis focuses on settlements that made water explicit in their naming, not because other settlements lack water connections, but because the act of naming reveals what a community considered most defining about their location and central to their identity and development. In order to evaluate this, the analysis was redone on a selection of place names that qualify as capital cities (national, state, and provincial capitals). It is assumed that capital cities -at any level- form some sort of hierarchy (political, trade, cultural, defense, historic) over other settlements.
The findings reveal a consistent pattern: across different datasets, all AI assistants conclude that settlement names referencing water features are overrepresented among capital cities by a factor of two (i.e. one in four), suggesting that the advantages conferred by water indeed have positive influence on the development into more prominent settlements. Though the general pattern of representation of water features in settlement names is already an indicator of the importance of water to building societies, there seems to be a signal that water has been a facilitator of both settlement and development. This signal persists across histories, cultures, geographies and empires. Even today, new settlement names continue to be shaped by water infrastructure projects.
Of course, this analysis should be considered exploratory; an invitation for linguists, etymologists, historians, and geographers to research these patterns with the scientific rigor they deserve.
What's in a name? It is not the name itself that makes water important, rather the act of naming. Water has been, and will continue to be, one of the threads that weaves society together. Yet this analysis captures only what persists; those places still on our maps. Settlements that are lost to flooding, drought, or coastal erosion will have vanished from both landscape and record, taking their water stories with them. This makes the lesson more urgent: as climate change reshapes water systems worldwide, understanding how societies have historically built around water offers valuable lessons for the adaptations ahead.
Nikolai Sindorf
Delft, Netherlands
"Delft refers to the canal or ditch (delft) that was dug in this area, likely in the 11th century. The city developed around this artificial waterway, which was crucial for drainage, transportation, and defense in the low-lying landscape of the Netherlands."
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