Tubal, תובל or תבל in Genesis 10 (the "Table of Nations"), was the name of a son of
JaphethJapheth is one of the sons of Noah in the Abrahamic tradition...
, son of
NoahNoah was, according to the Hebrew Bible, the tenth and last of the antediluvian Patriarchs. The biblical story of Noah is contained in chapters 6–9 of the book of Genesis, where he saves his family and representatives of all animals from the flood by constructing an ark...
.
Many authors, following the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (1st century AD), related the name to
Iber-
Caucasian IberiaIberia , also known as Iveria , was a name given by the ancient Greeks and Romans to the ancient Georgian kingdom of Kartli , corresponding roughly to the eastern and southern parts of the present day Georgia...
. Concerning the question of the ethnic affinity of the population of Tubal, Josephus wrote: "Tobal gave rise to the
ThobelesThe Tibareni were a people referred to in Herodotus, Xenophon, Strabo and other classical authors. In classical times, they and other related tribes, the Chalybes and the Mossynoeci, were considered the founders of metallurgy...
, who are now called Iberes" -
Caucasian IberiaIberia , also known as Iveria , was a name given by the ancient Greeks and Romans to the ancient Georgian kingdom of Kartli , corresponding roughly to the eastern and southern parts of the present day Georgia...
. This version was repeated by Patriarch
Eustathius of AntiochEustathius of Antioch, sometimes surnamed the Great, was a bishop and patriarch of Antioch in the 4th century.He was a native of Side in Pamphylia. About 320 he was bishop of Beroea, and he became patriarch of Antioch shortly before the Council of Nicaea in 325...
, Bishop
TheodoretTheodoret of Cyrus or Cyrrhus was an influential author, theologian, and Christian bishop of Cyrrhus, Syria . He played a pivotal role in many early Byzantine church controversies that led to various ecumenical acts and schisms...
, and others. However,
JeromeSaint Jerome was a Roman Christian priest, confessor, theologian and historian, and who became a Doctor of the Church. He was the son of Eusebius, of the city of Stridon, which was on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia...
,
Isidore of SevilleSaint Isidore of Seville served as Archbishop of Seville for more than three decades and is considered, as the historian Montalembert put it in an oft-quoted phrase, "le dernier savant du monde ancien"...
, and the Welsh historian
NenniusNennius was a Welsh monk of the 9th century.He has traditionally been attributed with the authorship of the Historia Brittonum, based on the prologue affixed to that work, This attribution is widely considered a secondary tradition....
stated another tradition that Tubal was ancestor to not only
IberiansIberia , also known as Iveria , was a name given by the ancient Greeks and Romans to the ancient Georgian kingdom of Kartli , corresponding roughly to the eastern and southern parts of the present day Georgia...
, but also the 'Italians' [i.e., Italic tribes] and 'Spanish' [who were also called
IberiansThe Iberians were a set of peoples that Greek and Roman sources identified with that name in the eastern and southern coasts of the Iberian peninsula at least from the 6th century BC...
]. A divergent tradition recorded by Hippolytus of Rome (3rd cent.) lists Tubal's descendants as the "Hettali" (or Thessalians in some later copies), while the
Book of the BeeThe Book of the Bee is an historical/theological compilation containing numerous bible legends. It was written by Syrian Nestorian Solomon, Bishop of Bassora . It was written in Syriac.-Book:...
(c. 1222) states that he was progenitor of
BithyniaBithynia was an ancient region, kingdom and Roman province in the northwest of Asia Minor, adjoining the Propontis, the Thracian Bosporus and the Euxine .-Description:...
ns.
The
Caucasian IberiansCaucasian Iberians was a Greco-Roman designation for ancient Georgians, Ibero-Caucasian people who inhabited the east and southeast of the Transcaucasus region in prehistoric and historic times...
were ancestors of modern
GeorgiansGeorgia is a sovereign state in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the southwest by Turkey, to the south by Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital of...
. Some modern Georgians also claim descent from Tubal,
TogarmahTogarmah third son of Gomer, and grandson of Japheth, brother of Ashkenaz and Riphat...
and
MeshechIn the Bible, Meshech is named as a son of Japheth in Genesis 10:2 and 1 Chronicles 1:5.Another Meshech is named as a son of Aram in 1 Chronicles 1:17 .-Interpretations:...
; a Georgian historian,
Ivane JavakhishviliIvane Javakhishvili was a Georgian historian whose voluminous works heavily influenced the modern scholarship of the history and culture of Georgia...
, considered
TabalTabal was a Luwian speaking Neo-Hittite kingdom of South Central Anatolia. According to archaeologist Kurt Bittel, the kingdom of Tabal first appeared after the collapse of the Hittite Empire....
, Tubal, Jabal and Jubal to be ancient Georgian tribal designations.
Tabal was a post-Hittite Luwian state in
Asia MinorAsia Minor is a geographical location at the westernmost protrusion of Asia, also called Anatolia, and corresponds to the western two thirds of the Asian part of Turkey...
in the
1st millennium BCThe 1st millennium BC encompasses the Iron Age and sees the rise of many successive empires, and spanned from 1000 BC to 1 BC.The Neo-Assyrian Empire, followed by the Achaemenids. In Greece, Classical Antiquity begins with the colonization of Magna Graecia and peaks with the rise of Hellenism. The...
, and is often connected with Tubal (similar to their neighbors, the
MushkiThe Mushki were an Iron Age people of Anatolia, known from Assyrian sources. They do not appear in Hittite records. Several authors have connected them with the Moschoi of Greek sources and the Georgian tribe of the Meskhi. Josephus Flavius identified the Moschoi with the Biblical Meshech...
, traditionally associated with
MeshechIn the Bible, Meshech is named as a son of Japheth in Genesis 10:2 and 1 Chronicles 1:5.Another Meshech is named as a son of Aram in 1 Chronicles 1:17 .-Interpretations:...
). Some historians further connect Tabal and Tubal with the tribe on the Black Sea coast later known to the Greeks as
TibareniThe Tibareni were a people referred to in Herodotus, Xenophon, Strabo and other classical authors. In classical times, they and other related tribes, the Chalybes and the Mossynoeci, were considered the founders of metallurgy...
, though this identification is uncertain. The Tibareni and other related tribes, the
Chalybes (Khalib/Khaldi) and the
MossynoeciMossynoeci is a name that the Greeks of the Euxine Sea applied to the peoples of Pontus, the northern Anatolian coast west of Trebizond.-Herodotus:...
(
Mossynoikoi in Greek), were sometimes considered the founders of
metallurgyMetallurgy is a domain of materials science that studies the physical and chemical behavior of metallic elements, their intermetallic compounds, and their mixtures, which are called alloys. It is also the technology of metals: the way in which science is applied to their practical use...
.
According to
Catalan legendCatalan myths and legends are the traditional myths and legends of the Catalan-speaking world, especially Catalonia itself, passed down for generations as part of that region's popular culture.Among the figures of Catalan mythology are:*Aloja...
, Japheth's son Tubal is said to have sailed from
JaffaJaffa is an ancient port city believed to be one of the oldest in the world. Jaffa was incorporated with Tel Aviv creating the city of Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel. Jaffa is famous for its association with the biblical story of the prophet Jonah.-Etymology:...
with his family and arrived at the
FrancolíThe Francolí is a river in Catalonia . Its source is in the Prades Mountains and it flows into the Mediterranean Sea at Tarragona....
river of Spain in 2157 BC, where he founded a city named after his son
Tarraho, now
TarragonaTarragona is a city located in the south of Catalonia on the north-east of Spain, by the Mediterranean. It is the capital of the Spanish province of the same name and the capital of the Catalan comarca Tarragonès. In the medieval and modern times it was the capital of the Vegueria of Tarragona...
. He then proceeded to the
EbroThe Ebro or Ebre is one of the most important rivers in the Iberian Peninsula. It is the biggest river by discharge volume in Spain.The Ebro flows through the following cities:*Reinosa in Cantabria.*Miranda de Ebro in Castile and León....
(like Iberia, named after his second son
Iber), where he built several more settlements, including
AmpostaAmposta is the capital of the comarca of Montsià, in the province of Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain.It is located at 8 metres above the sea, by the Ebre river, not far from its end. Population 18,841 ....
. His third son's name is given as
Semptofail. Noah himself is said to have visited them here about 100 years later. Tubal is said to have reigned for 155 years, until he died while preparing to colonize
MauretaniaMauretania is a part of the historical Ancient Libyan land in North Africa. It corresponds to present day Morocco and a part of western Algeria...
and was succeeded by Iber. Other traditions make Tubal son of Japheth (sometimes confounded with
Tubal-CainTubal-cain is an individual mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, in . He was a descendant of Cain, the son of Lamech and Zillah, and the brother of Naamah.-Name:...
son of Lamech, a figure from before the flood) to be the founder of
RavennaRavenna is the capital city of the Province of Ravenna in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy and the second largest comune in Italy by land area, although, at , it is little more than half the size of the largest comune, Rome...
in Italy,
SetúbalSetúbal is the main city in Setúbal Municipality in Portugal with a total area of 172.0 km² and a total population of 118,696 inhabitants in the municipality. The city proper has 89,303 inhabitants....
in Portugal, and
ToledoToledo's Alcázar became renowned in the 19th and 20th centuries as a military academy. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 its garrison was famously besieged by Republican forces.-Economy:...
and many other places in Spain. Various authors state that his wife's name was Noya, that he was buried at
Cape St. VincentCape St. Vincent , next to the Sagres Point, on the so-called Costa Vicentina , is a headland in the municipality of Sagres, in the Algarve, southern Portugal.- Description :This cape is the southwesternmost point in Portugal...
in Portugal, or that he had 65,000 descendants when he died. The source for many of these legends seems to have been the
Pseudo-Berosus published by
Annio da Viterbo in 1498, now widely considered a forgery. However, the earlier
Chronicle of San Juan de la Peña by the historian-king Pedro IV of Aragon (c. 1370) includes the basic premises, that Tubal was the first person to settle in Spain, that the Iberians were descended from him as Jerome and Isidore had attested, and that they had originally been called
Cetubales and been settled along the Ebro, before changing their name to 'Iberians' after that river. An earlier scholar-king,
Alfonso X of CastileAlfonso X was a Castilian monarch who ruled as the King of Castile, León and Galicia from 1252 until his death...
(c. 1280), also included similar details in his history, but claiming Tubal had settled in the
"Aspa" mountainsAspe peak, also known as Pico de la Garganta de Aísa, is a mountain in the western Pyrenees of Huesca, situated on the west side of the Aragon Valley near the towns of Villanúa and Canfranc . The peak is 2,645 meters AMSL high....
(part of the
PyreneesThe Pyrenees is a range of mountains in southwest Europe that forms a natural border between France and Spain...
), and deriving the first part of the name
Cetubales from
cetus, which he said meant "tribe". In his version, they later changed their name to '
CeltiberiansThe Celtiberians were Celtic-speaking people of the Iberian Peninsula in the final centuries BC. The group used the Celtic Celtiberian language.Archaeologically, the Celtiberians participated in the Hallstatt culture in what is now north-central Spain...
'. A still earlier version is found in the history of the Muslim conquest of Spain by Abulcasim Tarif Abentarique, written around AD 750. It holds that Japheth's son Tubal or (Sem Tofail) divided Iberia among his 3 sons — leaving his eldest Tarraho the northeast section (called
Tarrahon, later Aragon); to his second son, Sem Tofail the younger, he left the west, along the ocean (later called
Setubal); and to his youngest, Iber, he left the eastern part, along the Mediterranean, called
Iberia. Tubal then built for himself a city he called
Morar (today
Mérida, SpainMérida is the capital of the autonomous community of Extremadura, western central Spain. It has a population of 57,127 . The Archaeological Ensemble of Mérida is a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1993.- Climate :...
) — where Abentarique claimed to have seen a large stone above the main city gate inscribed with these details, which he translated into Arabic.
Basque intellectuals like Poza (16th century) have named Tubal as the ancestor of Basques, and by extension, the Iberians. The French Basque author Augustin Chaho (19th century) published
The Legend of Aitor, asserting that the common patriarch of the Basques was
AitorAitor is a Basque masculine given name, created by Agosti Xaho for a Basque ancestral patriarch descending from the Biblical Tubal in his work "The Legend of Aitor" ....
, a descendant of Tubal.
Tubal's sons are given different names in rabbinic sources. In
Pseudo-PhiloPseudo-Philo is the name commonly used for a Jewish pseudepigraphical work in Latin, so called because it was transmitted along with Latin translations of the works of Philo of Alexandria but is very obviously not written by Philo...
(written c. AD 70), his son's names are
Phanatonova and
Eteva, and they were given the land of "Pheed". The later mediaeval
Chronicles of JerahmeelThe Chronicles of Jerahmeel is a voluminous work that draws largely on Pseudo-Philo's earlier history of Biblical events and is of special interest because it includes Hebrew and Aramaic versions of certain deuterocanonical books in the Septuagint....
gives these sons' names as
Fantonya and
Atipa, and says they subdued "Pahath"; elsewhere these chronicles include information derived from Jerome, identifying Tubal's descendants with Iberia and Hispania. In still another place, the
Chronicles of Jerahmeel reproduces a more detailed legend taken from the earlier
Yosippon (c. 950): Tubal's descendants, it says, camped in
TuscanyTuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of about 23,000 square kilometres and a population of about 3.75 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence ....
and built a city called "Sabino", while the
KittimKittim in the genealogy of Genesis 10 in the Hebrew Bible, is the son of Javan, the grandson of Japheth, and Noah's great-grandson....
built "Posomanga" in neighboring
CampaniaCampania is a region in southern Italy. The region has a population of around 5.8 million people, making it the second-most-populous region of Italy; its total area of 13,590 km² makes it the most densely populated region in the country...
, with the
TiberThe Tiber is the third-longest river in Italy, rising in the Apennine Mountains in Emilia-Romagna and flowing through Umbria and Lazio to the Tyrrhenian Sea. It drains a basin estimated at...
river as the frontier between the two peoples. However, they soon went to war following the rape of the Sabines by the Kittim. This war was ended when the Kittim showed the descendants of Tubal their mutual progeny. A shorter, more garbled version of this story from
Yosippon is also found in the later
Book of JasherThe Sefer haYashar is a Hebrew midrash also known as the Toledot Adam and Dibre ha-Yamim be-'Aruk. It is known in English translation mostly as The Book of Jasher...
, known from c. 1625, which additionally names Tubal's sons as
Ariphi,
Kesed and
Taari.
The Arabic dictionary
Taj al-Arus by al-Zubaidi (1790) notes that although some Islamic authors make the
KhazarsThe Khazars were semi-nomadic Turkic people who established one of the largest polities of medieval Eurasia, with the capital of Atil and territory comprising much of modern-day European Russia, western Kazakhstan, eastern Ukraine, Azerbaijan, large portions of the northern Caucasus , parts of...
descendants of Japheth's son Khasheh (Meshech), others hold both the Khazars and
SaqalibaSaqaliba refers to the Slavs, particularly Slavic slaves and mercenaries in the medieval Arab world, in the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily and Al-Andalus. It is generally thought that the Arabic term is a Byzantine loanword: saqlab, siklab, saqlabi etc. is a corruption of Greek Sklavinoi for...
(Slavs) to have come rather from his brother, Tubal.
Literature
- Ivane Javakhishvili. "Historical-Ethnological problems of Georgia, the Caucasus and the Near East" (a monograph), Tbilisi, 1950, pp. 130–135 (in Georgian)
- Giorgi Melikishvili
Giorgi Melikishvili was a Georgian historian known for his fundamental works in the history of Georgia, Caucasia and the Middle East. He earned an international recognition for his research of Urartu....
. "About the history of ancient Georgia" (a monograph), Tbilisi, 1959, pp. 9, 13, 14, 18, 72–78, 108–110, 121, 175, 226, 227, 253 (in Russian)
- Simon Janashia
Simon Janashia was an outstanding Georgian historian and public benefactor, one of the founders and Academician of the Georgian Academy of Sciences , Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor....
. "Works", vol. III, Tbilisi, 1959, pp. 2–74 (in Georgian)
- Guram Kvirkvelia. "Foreign scientists about the metallurgy of the ancient Georgian tribes" (a monograph), Tbilisi, 1976, pp. 3–90 (in Georgian, Russian summary).
- Nana Khazaradze. "The Ethnopolitical entities of Eastern Asia Minor in the first half of the 1st millennium BC" (a monograph), Tbilisi, 1978, pp. 3–139 (in Georgian, Russian and English)
- *Electronic edition of G. Pujades, Crónica Universal del Principado de Cataluña (in Spanish)
- Jon Ruthven. The Prophecy That Is Shaping History: New Research on Ezekiel's Vision of the End. Fairfax, VA: Xulon Press, 2003. http://www.jon-ruthven.org/rosh.pdf. A major study on the historical geography of Rosh, Meshech
In the Bible, Meshech is named as a son of Japheth in Genesis 10:2 and 1 Chronicles 1:5.Another Meshech is named as a son of Aram in 1 Chronicles 1:17 .-Interpretations:...
, Tubal and the other northern nations listed in Ezekiel 38–39 and elsewhere.