On names

Another digression, this one starting with the book about Inka knots at reference 1. From there I thought I needed some more background on ancient writing and moved to reference 2. During which a chance encounter with Shan names led me to think about the invention of names for people. Which, after pausing at reference 3, results in the present post. For which reference 4 has been a useful source.

Chimpanzees have neither language nor writing, but they do have individuals. One chimpanzee recognises another from the same band and knows something about them. There are likes and dislikes. 

One supposes that the use of names started at some time after the arrival of speech. 

I have no idea about how the arrival of speech interacted with the organisation of small bands into larger groupings, say tribes for lack of a better word. Nevertheless, we further suppose that the need for names to facilitate and enhance social life was local, in bands of tens rather than hundreds.

In these circumstances, one word names will be enough, although there may also have been compounds like ‘bright fire’ or ‘fierce lion’. Names were probably not assigned at birth – which was, in those far off days, a fairly chancy business.

Less important members of the group may have been named by relation to their head of household, bearing in mind that there may have been societies where the family household we know was not the basic unit of organisation . So A might be named ‘son of B’, ‘wife of B’ or ‘mother of B’, this last in the case that she was a widow. In some places I have read of ‘son six of B’. Maybe you got proper names in the event that you achieved maturity or independence.

As groups got larger and more complicated, even the heads of households needed qualifiers, which might be patronymics like ‘Williamson’, tribal like ‘O’Brien’, occupational like ‘Fletcher’ or place oriented, this last being either the name of a feature like ‘Field’ for short range naming or the name of a place like ‘of Cork’ for long range naming. Our patronymics have long morphed into the surnames we have now, but the Russians, amongst others, are still doing them to this day.

Surnames have a long history in this country, being fairly well established by the fourteenth century and even more so by the sixteenth century with its poor laws and parish registers. Nothing new about rich areas trying to stop poor areas from exporting their riff-raff.

Or, as we were told by the Preacher, well before the (re)birth of our Lord:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun [Chapter 1, verse 9, his emphasis]

We now turn to what might have been going on in the highly organised, partly urban societies of the Iraq of five thousand or so years ago which featured at reference 3.

In these more organised societies, dominance and rank hierarchies became important and the expression of those hierarchies became part of how we addressed one another. Expression which was expanded by tone, posture and dress. Maybe badges of office and of status: the chain of office of a mayor and the red spot of the high caste Indian.

Further confusion in that, in some contexts, role or occupation was more important or more convenient that a personal name. So, for example, when a delivery lorry arrived at some yard or warehouse, he would be ‘driver’ rather than ‘Peter’ or even ‘Thompson’

While in the army, one might address an immediate subordinate by his surname (an officer would not necessarily know the names of all those under his command), a superior by his rank and his peers by their given names, diminutives or nick-names – these last being very common in some parts of the world, particularly those with a limited supply of given names, perhaps controlled by the church.

Ans then there were other kinds of honorifics and titles. Where in honorific I includes things like ‘Your Grace’ for a bishop and in title I include things like ‘President of France’. A job title or role. All of which serve, inter alia, to remind one that in thinking about the invention and evolution of names, that one needs to think about what they are for, what they were and are used for.

And when it came to writing things down, it might get even more elaborate, with the snap above being taken from the English Middle Ages. A petition from the good people of Niort, in northern France, to their overlord, King Henry III of England. See reference 5.

Shan names

[The Shan states were, collectively, a member of the Union of Burma at the time of independence. The current, rather unsavoury, regime has worked hard to absorb them into Myanmar. I have no idea how accurate the opium part of the map is – but I did once own a set of opium weights from this part of the world]

This part of the inquiry was prompted by meeting a lady on my recent holiday who had the same surname as my late brother-in-law, who was a Shan. Gemini’s opening was:

In the early twentieth century, naming in the Shan States was a sophisticated system that blended Buddhist tradition, astrology, and a strict social hierarchy. Unlike Western customs of the time, there were no surnames; instead, a person’s name acted as a map of their status, gender, and even the day of the week they were born.

Then, a bit later:

For a high-ranking Shan noble (such as a Saopha or a senior official) engaging in a land transaction at the beginning of the twentieth century, the name on a document would not be a simple "first and last name." Instead, it would be a string of titles and descriptors that established his authority to hold or transfer that land.

All this was supplemented with a wealth of plausible detail, and while I dare say one might quarrel with a lot of the detail, I dare say also that he has got the general scheme of things about right. Good enough for present purposes.

A few of his details:

The first letter of the given name was chosen from the group of letters assigned to the day of the week of birth, with an astrologer advising on the choice.

A Shan could change his name as an adult – probably at least until recently – without the deed-poll business that we have to go through.

In the case of, for example, land transactions, the name of a high ranking Shan would be supplemented by a seal, very much like the seal used by our own kings and queens.

It seems that Shans who live in England for one reason or another, adapt their Shan name to our binary given-name/surname format, which makes everything easier all round. We just need to bear in mind that these surnames are not the same as ours.

All of which is a useful reminder that there are other ways of doing things. But I am reminded that the binary system of naming plants and animals, made popular by Linnaeus, rules the world.

More from Withycombe

In the margins, I have learned that Withycombe was both an interesting lady in her own right and an expert on English given names, a lot of which are derived either from what used to be called Aryan languages – or, with the coming of the church, Hebrew.

Particularly in the case of men, a small number of given names dominated. So in the 13th century, Henry, John, Richard, Robert and William accounted for well over half. Which, a few fads and fashions apart, continued until the 18th century. While now, there is lots of fashion in given names – and I have always been rather amused by the one which reverted to obscure Biblical names.

According to Chambers, Withycombe did a stint with the Commonwealth Forestry Bureau in Australia. A misprint in Chambers? A first job after graduating, before moving into publishing? Which would make this article even older than at first appears. But there is a connection to Patrick White, who is Australian.

Security

Once you have writing, you having copying, forgery and all kind of wrongdoing. How can one be sure that the document one is looking at is the real thing?

Putting a name, a date and a place on a document provides some security. ‘William, Count of Cornwall, puts his hand to this document after the Easter feast at Truro. Year of our Lord …’. With good faith, William is likely to remember doing some such thing, but what about the details?

[The two sides of the first Great Seal of James I]

An elaborate seal provides another layer of security. William would only entrust his seal to someone he trusted, his Keeper of the Seal. The way that it was fixed on provided some protection against tampering, and William could be reasonably satisfied that this was indeed the document that he had signed at the Easter feast.

[Some collective responsibility]

A third layer is provided by the signatures and seals of worthy witnesses, such as abbots, bishops and archbishops, people who were not supposed to have worldly interests, which brought a degree of collective assent to whatever it is that the document mandates.

[A lot of collective responsibility]

All rather more important than the signature, or ‘his mark’ in the case of an illiterate. All rather more elaborate than the simple but effective cylinder seals of reference 3 – which probably had a much longer working life.

And then one had the signet ring. Which could be used to stamp a mark on a seal in something of the same way. But could also be given to a trusted messenger to authenticate his message to a third party. A slightly different answer to the security problem, addressing a slightly different need. Useful in circumstances when a full-on seal might be a bit clumsy and awkward.

The addition of titles to names here, reminds me that computer systems often qualify names, which are not unique, with identifiers like mobile phone numbers, email addresses or postcodes. All of which would be made much simpler if we got over our dislike of national systems of identification, such as adults had during the second world war. There have been several goes at this in my time, but all have foundered.

Conclusions

At the time that writing was being invented in Iraq, in the context of trade and tribute, maybe five thousand years ago, it seems likely to me that places and job-titles were going to have been more important than personal names. The tax gatherer of place A, the lord of place B. And the fancy titles used in letters in medieval England would have been a bit superfluous on the clay docket attached to a jar of olives or whatever.

Being able to write down names was a useful by-product which came a little later.

PS 1: Wikipedia used to be knocked on the grounds that it just was a bunch of amateurs and that it was bound to be full of mistakes. No proper peer review (which is not really true). Now Wikipedia is a very big encyclopaedia and I dare say that there are plenty of mistakes – but I do not come across them very often – despite using it a great deal. Furthermore, the only study of the matter that I came across – albeit a difficult thing to do – concluded that the error rate was not that much different from that in a regular encyclopaedia. Perhaps the same will turn out to be true of these AI assistants over time?

PS 2: I now remember from the days when HM Treasury used to keep its records in the basement, before they were outsourced to some expensive shed in the docklands, that some of the older files still had seals hanging out of them. No idea what sort of documents attracted them.

References

Reference 1: Signs of the Inka Khipu – Gary Urton – 2005.

Reference 2: Archaic bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East – Hans J. Nissen, Peter Damerow, Robert K. Englund, Paul Larsen (translator) – 1993. 

Reference 3: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/01/names-and-numbers.html. 

Reference 4: Names – Elizabeth Gidley Withycombe – before 1959. A five-column article starting on page 653 in volume 9 of the 1959 edition of Chambers Encyclopaedia. 

Reference 5: The chronicles and memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages: Royal and other historical letters illustrative of the reign of Henry III - Master of the Rolls, The Lords of Her Majesty's Treasury - 1857. With thanks to the Internet Archive and the University of Toronto.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Gidley_Withycombe. 

Reference 7: Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names – Withycombe, E.G – 1963. Still available from good libraries and Abebooks. At this last, for next to nothing. Demand for old reference books must be very weak.

Reference 8: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/11/leaves.html. A recent outing for Linnaeus.