I remember from a geology class that Barcans were a type of sand dune formation. A little digging shows that Barca is a city in Libya, so Barcan is probably the adjective/genitive form. The question: Is this referring to the Libyan city, or something else? Would the average person in early-to-mid 1800s have known what that was if it is the Libyan city?
http://www.msu.edu/~cloudsar/thanatop.htm
Bryant wrote in an era when educated people were expected to be familiar with classical Greek and Roman literature. So mention of an ancient Greek site in Libya, which was part of the Roman Empire, could have formed part of a poet’s vocabulary. In modern Arabic, Barqah is still the name of the Cyrenaica region of Libya.
The word barchan referring to a certain type of curved sand dunes is unrelated to Barca in Libya. It comes from a Central Asian Turkic word, barkhan, and is now mostly used in reference to Martian surface features.
Please entertain a little turnabout. Are we to believe his learned audience would have known how it feels to be “the quarry-slave at night, scourged to his dungeon”?
The classical education argument is a very valid point, but respectfully, Jomo Mojo, it’s only one nail in the coffin. So to speak. To the Western World, Libya of 1814 was Sherwood Forest, only this time, Robin Hood was a Romantic Berber. As a fun twist, back then the Bogeyman was sometimes a dark-skinned chap with one eye and a hook for a hand. It’s not so far out to think that Bryant’s “Barcan desert” might just be the same thing as the “Karbalan scrub” of a modern poet.
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It’s pretty obvious this is not what the poet meant, but I thought I’d mention it. Barcan is also the adjective form of Barca, the surname of the famous Carthaginian family that Hannibal was a member of. What if any connection they had to the place in Libya I don’t know.
El Cid… What the fuck are you talking about?
My mistake.
Well, anyway, thanks for the responses, and for correcting me on my incorrect etymological assumption. It’s been a long, long time since my geology class, and I guess I just took the spelling. . . for granite! It appears that I was. . . barcan up the wrong tree!