Cleopatra. Hatshepsut. Boudica. Seondeok. Wu Zetian. These are only some of the famous female rulers of antiquity. Their names live on in history, and notice that none of them bear any surname, except for the Chinese empress who carried her family name. That is because the Chinese have a longer history of using family names which started in 2000 BC.
Most other ancient civilizations didn't have surnames or family names as we have them today. In the West, the practice of having surnames started after the Norman Conquest of 1066. The reason was simple. They needed to distinguish between people who had the same given names in the same area.
In the Arab world, patronymics have been used since at least the 6th century AD. Family names indicated a person's tribe, profession, a famous ancestor, or place of origin. In ancient Greece, patronymics were also used, although they are a bit complicated if one does not know the structure of the language.
The Romans also used naming conventions. The nomen gentilicum, or nomen for short, referred to one's gens (family or clan) by patrilineal descent. In the Roman Republic, men usually had three names: the praenomen, the nomen, and the cognomen. Essentially, those refer to the given name, family name, and some kind of title or nickname to distinguish someone, usually describing a military feat that the individual achieved. Women, on the other hand, rarely had a praenomen, only being referred to by their nomen.
Since the Middle ages, we have been using surnames passed down from one generation to the next. In some cultures, when women get married, they get to keep their surnames and simply add their husband's name to their own. In others, married women carry their husband's surname. The map above shows which countries have a majority of women carrying their own surname or their husband's surname.
Many Asian, African, and Latin American countries have majority of their women carrying their own last name, while most Western societies have majority of their women carrying their husband's last name.
The more interesting part of this post are the comments by Redditors, particularly about the Spanish tradition of married women keeping both surnames, which they also passed onto their colonies. There's even further discussion about how the names would be ordered.
Traditionally, the children would take the father's surname first and then their mother's surname. For example, if Juan García Pérez and María López Sánchez have a son named Pedro, then he will be called Pedro García López. However, as many commented, that no longer applies as couples can choose the order of the surnames for their children as long as it will be the same order for all their children.
(Image credit: Lover of Geography Instagram/Reddit)