I was reading this Places Journal essay by the architect Jola Idowu about a kind of concrete made with shells called “tabby” when I came to this excursus on the word:
Over the course of about five centuries, knowledge of how to make concrete using oyster lime traveled from North Africa to Spain to Spanish Florida and then to the British colonies, a history that can be traced through the etymology of tabby. The word descends from the Spanish building material tapia, or rammed earth. When tapia was used in North Africa, it shrunk under the hot sun, compelling builders to develop a formula that could withstand drier weather. The North African tabbi added lime from shells and stone fragments to make a stronger, more resistant form of rammed earth, which the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties of the Moorish caliphate used for military construction from the 13th to 16th centuries. Later, the conquistadors who crossed the Atlantic to explore and colonize the West Indies brought tabbi to the Americas.
When Juan Ponce de León arrived in Puerto Rico as its first Spanish governor, he built his home with tabbi, then known in Spanish as tapia real. This is the oldest continuously inhabited residence in the Western hemisphere, and it was built with local stone mixed with shells and lime sourced from Cuba. But shipping was too expensive for large architectural projects; builders needed a local solution. So in 1580 the colonists began making tapia with oyster shells from nearby reefs. Tabique de hostion, or oyster concrete, was used for the old walls of San Juan and other construction projects on the neighboring island of Hispaniola. Soon this architectural knowledge spread to Spanish Florida, and up the coast to Georgia and the Carolinas.
But as far as I can tell, tabby, tapia, and tabique have separate origins. The OED says of the first that the ‘concrete’ sense “may be a different word, though it may also have originated in a fancied resemblance of colour to that of the tabby cat,” which “is generally held to have been so named from the striped or streaked colour of its coat” after the “general term for a silk taffeta, apparently originally striped,” itself from “French tabis, earlier atabis […], Spanish tabi, Portuguese tabi, Italian tabi, medieval Latin attābi […], apparently < Arabic ʿattābiy, name of a quarter of Baghdad in which this fabric was manufactured, named after ʿAttāb, great-grandson of Omeyya.” Now, the OED entry is from 1910, but Wiktionary agrees; it says Spanish tapia ‘wall; wall made of adobe bricks’ is probably of Germanic origin, from Proto-Germanic *tappô ‘tap, plug,’ and tabique is from Arabic تَشْبِيك (tašbīk). Anybody know anything about this tangle?
Hm. The U.S. National Park Service says the current Taos Pueblo buildingshave probably were probably built around 1400. They’re residences, and from what I can tell, there’s no reason to doubt they’ve been inhabited continuously, though they’ve been modified a lot over the centuries.
The DRAE says tapia is “de or[igen] inc[ierto]”. It has both the “wall” and “rammed earth” meanings, but defines “tapia real” only as a wall of earth mixed with lime.
I am not a conchologist or a materials scientist, but I am initially surprised by the notions that the shells readily available in Cuba were so different from those readily available in Puerto Rico, for purposes of usefulness in mixing into concrete, that the Spanish imported from from the former island to the latter for some considerable time before adapting to local supply.
In the old times, oyster shells for lime would have come from the old middens rather than directly from the sea. The population of Puerto Rico might not have left shell middens big enough for the huge colonial construction projects, though.
Spanish tapia
The discussion of on the family of Old Provençal tapia ‘wall of rammed earth’, Spanish tapia, etc., is here in the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. And Coromines–Pascual on this family of words is here.
I have no idea where the Germanic stuff in the Wiktionary comes from. As Coromines–Pascual note, the formation actually looks old, and the word is specific to Occitan and Iberian Romance. I associate rammed earth with the south of France and the Mediterranean world in general, but I don’t know if this perception is accurate for earlier times. (A friend of mine constructs elegant rammed earth houses, which are very suitable for local conditions, around Urfa, Turkey.) I would be interested to learn if there was any widespread rammed earth in Northern Europe in antiquity.
tabique is from Arabic تَشْبِيك (tašbīk)
Arabic تشبيك tašbīk ‘latticework, trelliswork, grillwork, network’ is the regular verbal noun (pattern taqtīl) of the verb šabbaka ‘entangle, entwine, interlace, reticulate’, a derivative of the root šbk (Hebrew שְׂבָכָה śəḇāḵāh ‘lattice, net, etc.’, Syriac ܣܒܟ sbak ‘adhere, catch, grab on to, stick to’).
Corriente attributes the form tabique to crossing with tabica; see here. The expected taxbique is attested as in Juan de Valdés, Diálogo de la lengua (c. 1535) for example:
If you would like to see the passage in the best manuscript of the work, scroll down to image 85 here.
For lagniappe… I really like the explanation of the t- of Old Provençal tapera, Provençal tapeno, Catalan tàpera ‘caper’ as the result of crossing of the reflex of Latin capparis with the family of Old Old Provençal tapia ‘wall of rammed earth’, since caper bushes are frequently found growing out of walls. (As noted here, for example.) This is the tapeno in tapenade.
Great stuff — thanks for that!
Guy Le Strange (1900) Baghdad During the Abbasid Caliphate, from Contemporary Arabic and Persian Sources provides a synthesis of what was known at the time of geography of Baghdad and offers a reconstruction of the layout of the city. Le Strange gives the location of the ʿAttābiyya quarter on the map following page 136 here, around the 9 and 10 o’clock position of the Round City, north of the Four Markets. (To read this map, it will be probably easier to download the pdf and rotate the view in your pdf viewer.) Compare the general map of Baghdad following page 46 here. Le Strange has a brief discussion of the quarter on pages 137–138 here.
Boy, that takes me back — I read Le Strange when I was obsessed with the history of Middle Eastern cities thirty or so years ago, and I’m pretty sure I have a copy of that map I had the NYPL Xerox for me at the time. (Hey, kids, remember Xerox?)
My thurneysen is in this form.
…the tabby cat,” generally held to have been so named from the striped or streaked colour of its coat” after the “general term for a silk taffeta, apparently originally striped,”
About the appearance of medieval tabby cloth….
Ibn al-Bayṭār (1197–1248) mentions ʿattābī cloth in his pharmacopoeia entitled Kitāb al-Jāmiʿ li-Mufradāt al-ʾAdwiya wa-l-ʾAġḏiya (Compendium on Simple Medicaments and Foods), in his entry for luffāḥ. This is a term for the fragrant fruit of mandrakes, but also applied in Syria and Egypt to a kind of melon:
Šammāmāt is the plural of šammāma. In the southeast of Turkey, this kind of fragrant melon (Cucumis melo var dudaim) is an everyday item even today. The word for one of them in Mardini Arabic is still šammāme (Kurmanji şemamok; Turkish şemama, and regionally variously şemene, eşememe, şebeden, alabaş, cırdalaş, etc.). The Arabic root is šmm ‘smell, perceive an odor through the nose, sniff’. I buy these melons in season and put one in every room. The variety known in Mardin is only grown for its fragrance—the flesh itself is mawkish and mushy, although the perfume can be extracted and used to flavor sweets. In North America, seed companies apparently sell these kinds of melons under such names as Queen Anne’s pocket melons or plum granny melons.
In any case, note the ‘tabby’ appearance of these melons even today, eight hundred years after Ibn al-Bayṭār: reddish stripes on a tawny yellowish background, as in this video (in which the YouTuber mentions the name in Mardin around around the 0:23 mark) or this video.
Xerîb, can you anyhow characterise/identify the Youtuber’s accent in the first link? (for some intuitive reason it surprised me a bit)