I read somewhere that last names first came into use in 17th Century England, but how would this work with last names such as Caesar used in Roman Society? Was the way Romans used last names different from how we use them today, or was it another technology/social convention that was lost in the Dark Ages to be rediscovered in the Renaissance?
hi!
you'll find several posts on last names in the FAQ:
Regarding Roman naming conventions:
in general
a few scenarios
some specific names
Why were Roman Emperor's obsessed with having Caesar in their name?
Why is the name Flavius a sign of social status in the Late Roman Empire? ... although be aware of this one Why did virtually every Roman Emperor from Constantine I to Heraclius (c. 300CE-600CE) have the name Flavius? Had Flavius become the new Caesar?
Was Galen (Aelius Galenus) a member of the gens Aelia or not?
"Last name" isn't a very useful term, because the last name in a string may be your father's family name, your mother's famnom, your personal name, a nickname, or tell where you come from. I prefer "inherited family name" which is not something all cultures have or had. They still aren't used in, say, Iceland or Myanmar. Some countries like Indonesia and India have many cultural habits going on at once, side by side.
The earliest use of family names was the nobility of Shang China. Their clan names may at first have been matrilineal, based on the included character for "woman." (Louie, Chinese-American Names) The Chinese put the family name first. You can see where this habit spread to Korea and Japan, and eventually Vietnam.
The next we have a record of are the Etruscans, who left their 3-part naming habit to the Romans (Helmut Dix, Die Etruscanishe cognomen). The family name is the middle name. As the society broke down so did naming habits. Add that conquered areas like Britain and Gaul never got really attached to using family names, and they wound up just vanishing.
People began using them again in the Middle Ages, piecemeal. The oldest claims are the Estes of Italy and some Scots using clan names, about 1200. They didn't become anything like widespread until the 1400s. In the time of Henry VIII, a Welshman of property still identified himself as A son of B son of C son of D. (Camden, Remaines Concerning Britain)
A number of European groups, notably the Hungarians, put the family name first and the personal name last. The Spanish put the personal name followed by the father's famnom, the word for "and", and the mother's famnom, like Luis San Emeterio y Orbe ("y" being Spanish for "and"), my maternal grandfather. In the New World the habit developed of dropping the y, so if he came from Costa Rica he would have been Luis San Emeterio Orbe.
In some traditions, the family name changes to indicate son, daughter, or wife. You can't mistake Turganev for Turganevna, or Tsiolsky for Tsiolskaya.
So you can say that in Europe, family names were a temporary aberration, only taken up again in the Renaissance, at different speeds, and in different manners across the continent. It wasn't lost because they were kept up in Byzantium-- just no one else cared. The royal family of France never had a family name, formally. For commoners, many countries only forced the use of famnoms in the later 1800's for recods-keeping and ID. Culturally, in Russia the old pattern is still used in social intercourse, of personal name + patronym, like Vladimir Ilyich, or Anastasia Nikolaiovna.
Source: Ingraham, People's Names