Etymology

The etymology of Brazil remains unclear. Traditionally, the word “Brazil” comes from brazilwood, a timber tree that many sailors traded from Brazilian regions to Europe in the 16th century.

In Portuguese, brazilwood is called pau-brasil, with the word brasil commonly given the etymology “red like an ember”, formed from Latin brasa (“ember”) and the suffix -il (from -iculum or -ilium). This theory is taught as official in schools of Brazil and Portugal.

However, the Brazilian scholar José Adelino da Silva Azevedo has postulated that the word is much older, either of Celtic or Phoenician origin. The Phoenicians traded a red dye extracted from a mineral mined in Celtic lands, from Iberia to Ireland.

In Irish mythology there is a Western island called Hy-Brazil, and this is seen by some, including Tolkien, as one of the most likely etymological sources for the name “Brazil”. The same theory was also advanced by 16th century scholars.

In the Guarani language, an official language of Paraguay, Brazil is called “Pindorama”. This was the name the natives gave to the region, meaning “land of the palm trees”.

Pre-Colonial History

Fossil records found in Minas Gerais show evidence that the area now called Brazil has been inhabited for at least 8,000 years by indigenous people. The dating of the origins of the first inhabitants, who were called “Indians” (índios) by the Portuguese, are still a matter of dispute among with archaeologists.

The current most widely accepted view of anthropologists, linguists and geneticists is that they were part of the first wave of migrant hunters who came into the Americas from Asia, either by land, across the Bering Strait, or by coastal sea routes along the Pacific, or both.

The Andes and the mountain ranges of northern South America created a rather sharp cultural boundary between the settled agrarian civilizations of the west coast (which gave rise to urbanized city-states and the immense Inca Empire) and the semi-nomadic tribes of the east, who never developed written records or permanent monumental architecture.

For this reason, very little is known about the history of Brazil before 1500. Archaeological remains (mainly pottery) indicate a complex pattern of regional cultural developments, internal migrations, and occasional large state-like federations.

At the time of European discovery, the territory of current day Brazil had as many as 2,000 nations and tribes. The indigenous peoples were traditionally mostly semi-nomadic tribes who subsisted on hunting, fishing, gathering, and migrant agriculture.

When the Portuguese arrived in 1500, the Natives were living mainly on the coast and along the banks of major rivers. Initially, the Europeans saw the natives as noble savages, and miscegenation of the population began right away.

Tribal warfare, cannibalism and the pursuit of Amazonian brazilwood (see List of meanings of countries’ names) for its treasured red dye convinced the Portuguese that they should “civilize” the Natives.

But the Portuguese, like the Spanish in their South American possessions, had unknowingly brought diseases with them, against which many Natives were helpless due to lack of immunity. Measles, smallpox, tuberculosis and influenza killed tens of thousands.

The diseases spread quickly along the indigenous trade routes, and whole tribes were likely annihilated without ever coming in direct contact with Europeans.