How the Atlantic Ocean Got its Name

in Greek mythology before the dawn of man and even before the rule of gods it was the Titans who commanded the earth sea and stars under their leader Chronos the Father time it wasn't until the son of Cronus Zeus king of the gods rebelled against the Titans that this all changed Zeus the other gods and their allies fought a tremendous war against their predecessors and one afterwards most of the Titans were cursed to the depths of Tartarus but certain ones were given particular punishments one of the Titans Atlas was condemned to the westernmost point on the earth to hold on his shoulders the weight of the sky and stars for eternity okay I'm gonna change topics real fast but I want you to remember this story it'll come back up in just a second over 2,000 years ago the Greeks thought the world looked like this kind of like an O with the T inside here was Europe here was Africa and here was Asia making up the T was the Nile River and the tania's River which today we'd call the Don River and is way less impressive than the map makes it out to be the body of the T was of course then the Mediterranean Sea the O which encompassed all land on earth was called Oceanus after the Titan Oceanus which later just became the ocean there was no real distinction between the oceans as to the Greeks there was just one the earliest mention of the Atlantic Ocean as a separate entity by name came from an early poet named Stasi kurrus in the mid 6th century BCE he called it the Atlantic Oy Peleg a or the Atlantic sea his writings are poorly preserved and nondescript so we're not going to talk any more about him the next example of its usage came from Herodotus around a hundred years later remember this guy yeah well he's given a lot of things their names and he's sort of known as the father of history I might make a whole video on him someday anyway you see on his map that he started breaking up the ocean into smaller seas in his writings he refers to the most westward see as the Atlantis Thalassa or the sea of Atlantis and it's described as the sea beyond the pillars of Herakles Heracles by the way was just the original Greek name for Hercules and one story says he erected the two pillars to alleviate atlas of his burden to hold the sky but these pillars weren't just mythological but in fact they were real world landmarks the European pillar is widely known today as the Rock of Gibraltar and the African one Walt disputed is most likely Jebel Musa and Morocco as they can both be seen while entering the Mediterranean through the narrow strait of gibraltar it's interesting to note that what Herodotus labelled as the sea of Atlantis was just the northern half of what we'd call the Atlantic Ocean while the entire southern portion of the Atlantic received the larger and more general name of the Ethiopian Ocean this name stuck around for some time and you can even see it in maps up to the 19th century but after that the Atlantic came to mean the entire body of water between the old and new world but okay let's get back to the sea of Atlantis this breaks down further to basically mean the sea of Atlas that guy I talked about from the beginning of the video remember he was said to be on the westernmost point of land so anything beyond him was on the ocean so the waters there were attributed to him funnily enough the term Atlantic wasn't first used for the ocean but for these mountains in northwestern Africa where Atlas was said to be they were referred to as the Atlantic Mountains today they're just called the Atlas Mountains the sea of Atlantis fell onto use though because it became too closely associated with the legendary sunken city of Atlantis and so the name of the neighboring Mountain sort of just came to mean the ocean there as well so the Atlantic Ocean got its name from the mythological character atlas or at least that's how it was later deduced but this is another instance of things being too old to really tell which came first the name or the character theories on where the name atlas originated from are spotty but let's go into a few the ancient Roman poet Virgil had the hobby of tracing etymologies and he came to the conclusion that Atlas was derived from the word Duras meaning hard or enduring Duras durable yeah which makes sense you'd certainly call the guy holding up the sky enduring going back even further the name Doris was also attached to what we call the Atlas Mountains suggesting the ancient people named Atlas after the land where they thought he was then his name would come to mean enduring and eventually the meaning split so Atlas became just a name while Duras became an adjective the last theory the name Atlas comes from the ancient Berber name for the Atlas Mountains ahdre this is the least supported of the three ideas but nevertheless important to consider what no matter what the name seems to have its origins in the name for this mountain range either duros Doris or a drawer gave us Atlas which yielded the sea of Atlantis and the Atlantic Mountains the legend of the lost city of Atlantis sort of killed the name Atlantis for anything else so Atlantic was borrowed thanks for watching I hope you guys enjoyed this one if you did why not give this video a like if you want to learn the origin on the rest of the oceans name stick around and subscribe so you don't miss those and if you're curious about how the continents got their names hey I already did all those and they're in this nice little playlist right here so check those out now if you want other than that follow me on Twitter and I'll have another video coming soon thanks [Music]

Channel: Atlas Pro

Views: 168,695

Rating: 4.9325995 out of 5

Keywords: education, geography, science, Atlantic, ocean, Etymology, origin, Atlas, Atlantik, mountains, herodotus, stesichorus, mediterranean, sea

Id: kN88RP3XWUU

Length: 5min 13sec (313 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/geographerthinking]

amazing

[u/OutOfSocks]

Another great quality video, you deserve more subscribers. Keep it up please!

[u/kiniget]

Love it, great video! Awesome that you included the different theories

[u/Ampatent]

I appreciate the production values and the very clear research that went into this.

However, if I could offer some personal opinion... there's a LOT of information to digest and the break neck pacing of this video makes it very difficult to stay caught up. If you're producing this type of content for a layman viewer you'll have trouble keeping people attentive while actually getting the message across without giving them some time to breath.

Maybe your analytics suggest otherwise, but I think you could stretch the length out to six minutes without losing much in terms of content to fluff ration or viewer attention.