Kinda, greeks used it for anyone not speaking greek. Just good ol racism:
Persians, Romans, Phoenicians, Scythians, and Egyptians - Barbarians.
Romans took it to mean those out of greco-roman influence, hence the talk of barbarians.
Greeks also specifically named modern day Red Sea African countries (Sudan-Eritrea-Somalia) as Barbaria, their people as Barbars/Berbers.
From here it entered semitic languages like Arabic to mean people whose language is not understandable, and when Arabic expanded to north africa due to muslim conquests, they started naming Amazigh peoples of the saharan desert as berbers, since their language was different.
And berbers started receiving that name in Europe, settling their name forever after, because of feared berber piracy on the mediterranean.
So it’s indeed based on the greek word (most likely), but every group through time and geographic places has used to mean different peoples: non-greeks, non-grecoromans, non-semitics (for arameic languages and arabic speakers the people of Somalia spoke weird language compared to arameic languages in eritrea-ethiopia-sudan at the time), etc.
They called it Barbaria because they didnt understand, might have thought the language to be too unique for the region, it happened too long ago to be sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbaria_(region)
In general, a lot of people dont understand that even Chinese Han Empire and Roman Empire actually had contacts, they just never explored them any further “because my culture is clearly superior anyways”. They were aware the world was bigger than they controlled, but Persia was always inbetween
It’s actually a Greek word to refer to non-Greeks
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Kinda, greeks used it for anyone not speaking greek. Just good ol racism: Persians, Romans, Phoenicians, Scythians, and Egyptians - Barbarians.
Romans took it to mean those out of greco-roman influence, hence the talk of barbarians.
Greeks also specifically named modern day Red Sea African countries (Sudan-Eritrea-Somalia) as Barbaria, their people as Barbars/Berbers.
From here it entered semitic languages like Arabic to mean people whose language is not understandable, and when Arabic expanded to north africa due to muslim conquests, they started naming Amazigh peoples of the saharan desert as berbers, since their language was different.
And berbers started receiving that name in Europe, settling their name forever after, because of feared berber piracy on the mediterranean.
So it’s indeed based on the greek word (most likely), but every group through time and geographic places has used to mean different peoples: non-greeks, non-grecoromans, non-semitics (for arameic languages and arabic speakers the people of Somalia spoke weird language compared to arameic languages in eritrea-ethiopia-sudan at the time), etc.
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They (grecoromans) did travel the Red Sea, because Egypt traded through there with Asia, so they were interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periplus_of_the_Erythraean_Sea
They called it Barbaria because they didnt understand, might have thought the language to be too unique for the region, it happened too long ago to be sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbaria_(region)
In general, a lot of people dont understand that even Chinese Han Empire and Roman Empire actually had contacts, they just never explored them any further “because my culture is clearly superior anyways”. They were aware the world was bigger than they controlled, but Persia was always inbetween