We all have surnames or last names. Or to be more precise, the majority of humans that are currently alive have surnames. Last names or surnames are so immersed in today’s society that people rarely ask themselves how we got them or who was the first in the line of our ancestors to have this exact last name.
For me, this is a rather interesting question for which most of us can’t find the right answers. What do I mean by that? Well, for the majority of the population, it is almost impossible to find out relevant information about their ancestors past the 200 years barrier. If that much.
Mostly we have some info about our great-grandparents (the parent of a person’s grandparent) but not much more. Information about our great-great-great-grandparents is mostly unknown to the majority of people. We don’t even know if they had the same or similar last names. Perhaps, during the course of 200 years, their (our) surname molded into something different, as is the case in numerous examples throughout history.
Those with info about their last names for 500 or more years are mostly aristocratic families (noble houses or kingship groups). Ordinary people can gather some info about their ancestors via different church books, but this is also relatively obscure.
I spent a good amount of time trying to find out, but as mentioned, below 200 years barrier, it’s almost impossible to find anything relevant. So obviously this is a rather interesting and important topic.
But going even further, curiosity leads us to the following question. How did the first people (in history) get their surnames? This topic is something that is fascinating to dive into deeper.
Hence, let’s see if we have any ancient relics that will give us more data about the first person with surname and reasons for that exact surname.
History of Last Names
It needs to be mentioned here that the concept of the last name (or family name) is a fairly recent historical development, evolving from a medieval naming practice called a ‘byname.’ The hunt for the oldest surname in the world is a rather challenging task, and it can take us to many different corners around the globe.
Nevertheless, most of those corners lead us to several last names (or their variations) such as – COHEN, HATT, KATZ, KING, O’BRIEN, PRIEST, or SMITH. Looking at the writings of many different researchers, Biblical figures, the Teutonic Name system, and many others, it seems like there is no agreement on the original surname.
Some say it’s Smith, some Cohen, and some mention completely different ideas on first potential surnames. Some would then think that perhaps Christ could be a good contender for the initial surname. But one must then know that Christ is actually not the last name but a title. Christ is the English form of the Greek word, which means “Anointed One.”
Messiah is the English form of the same word in Hebrew. The term is a clear reference to the way that kings were chosen. So obviously, we can’t find out what the first surname was and even when it happened. But perhaps even more interesting is how numerous surnames developed during thousands of years.
As mentioned previously, most of us don’t even know how our surname was created, who created it and did it change from the beginning. Clearly, someone from my family tree (or anyone’s) was the first one in the family to have this last name or some synonym of that last name. But what was the process of creating it? This is the interesting part for me.
Apparently, China was one of the first nations to use surnames. Then also, probably in Middle Ages, last names came to Europe. So, since I was born in Europe, there must be some relation of myself to the first human with the first surname in Europe. Well, not so fast. It is not that simple.
Obviously, in Middle Ages, we didn’t have only one person living in the whole of Europe. There were many. To be more precise, there were around 61 million people living in Europe during the year 1100. Out of those millions of people who got their surnames first? No one knows. But what we do know is the naming logic to some extent.
As mentioned, in Europe, last names can be traced to the Middle Ages. At that time, people lived in small villages and mostly didn’t have contact with other villages. This is largely because other villages were far away. So, people from one village didn’t communicate or meet with people from other villages. Villages were like a community of people where everyone knew everyone in that specific village but not much outside of that village. Hence, no need for last names.
However, this changed as villages grew and people started traveling to other villages for trade or any other activity. So, for example, Joe from Village 1 traveled to Village 2, and there he met another Joe.
Well, that scenario created a problem. If Joe wanted to trade with other Joe, how would they distinguish themselves in different trade records or in spoken communication? And so, the invention of surnames seemed like a great way of distinguishing one person from another.
Creation of Surnames
But how did they create those surnames – based on what? Well, mostly based on place of birth, occupation, father’s name or nickname. Thus, we have the four most notable ways of surname creations: toponymic (topographic), occupational, patronymic and nickname-based. For example, a person named Joe that is coming from Boston would then be named Joe Boston. Occupational names are perhaps most known, and we have them in every country. Smith perhaps comes to mind first. Derived from the Anglo-Saxon smitan, meaning “to smite or strike,” Smith is an occupational name for a person who works with metal (smith or blacksmith), probably one of the earliest jobs for which specialist skills were required.
During hundreds of years, some surnames grew while some not so much. Obviously, in bigger nations, there were more last names with huge prevalence. Based on that, in today’s global world, all those last names started to mix, and one could conclude that last names with big occurrence or incidence will somehow prevail in the long run, and last names with small occurrences will perhaps go extinct in a couple of thousands of years. Could this lead to the extinction of many last names? Perhaps. For example – did you know that about 200 surnames disappeared from England and Wales in the last 100 years. Today, more surnames are lost than new ones created. Before, we had new surnames created based on someone’s job or location. This is obviously not the case anymore. When did you last time hear about the creation of a new last name? Probably never. This leads us to other examples around the world which are fueling surname extinction theory.
If we look at ancient China, they had around 12000 surnames and now only around 4000. That’s a big reduction especially comparing it to amount of people in today’s China. And out of those, some are much more spread out than others. For example, the family names of Li, Wang, and Zhang represent around 8 percent of the overall population. A report in 2019 gives the most common Chinese surnames as Wang and Li, each shared by over 100 million people in China, with Zhang, Liu, Chen, Yang, Huang, Zhao, Wu, and Zhou making up the rest of the ten most common Chinese names.
Will Surnames Cease to Exists?
Mathematically, in this case, the entire population can by some models converge into one or several surnames in the whole world. That’s in thousands of years. Or perhaps in 200 hundred generations.
This is an interesting hypothesis, and it has a basis in some mathematical models. For example, you can find out the likelihood of your surname disappearing on sites such as Forebears.io. For example, surname Smith has a global incidence of around 4,5 million (circa population of my country Croatia). On the other hand, my surname (Pernar) has a global incidence of 920 people. Therefore, it can be easily predicted that my last name will disappear in perhaps ten generations.
That again raises an interesting question: Why are there so many Smiths (or any other popular last name), and will those surnames prevail globally in the next one hundred thousand or million years so that we’ll perhaps have only 100 last names overall? Who knows, but it is an interesting hypothesis that does have a lot of grounds in basic mathematics.
For example, let’s imagine an isolated world where we only have the above-mentioned number of Smiths and the number of people carrying my last name – Pernar. Let’s also imagine that half of those are females and half males. In most cases, the female takes over their last name from a male. All Smith’s marrying all Pernar’s, and the amount of Smith’s easily grows generation by generation. So, in this case, the “battle” is basically being run between the group of 4,5 million people and 920 people.
Figuratively speaking, this battle would be over before you could even calculate the odds of winning vs. losing. This little example is perhaps silly, but it does paint an interesting picture of the evolution of surnames in the not-so-distant future. Perhaps we will not even have surnames in, say, 1000 years. Maybe we’ll be given surnames in a completely different way.
Perhaps last names, and first names, for that matter, will mold into something similar to today’s IP addresses.
Who knows, but surely this world of surnames is an interesting one, and I hope one day we’ll have clear and concrete evidence of the first official surname and perhaps its detailed evolution.
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