Point of Interest. Africa, Afriki, and the Lost Ten Tribes
In the Talmud (Sanhedrin 94) it says:
# Where were they [the Ten Tribes] exiled to? Mar Zutra said, "To Afriki." Rabbi Hanina said: 'To the Mountains of Slug[Snow].' #
'Mountains of Snow' probably means the Caucasus. The name 'Caucasus' according to Pliny meant "Mountains of Snow." 'Afriki' can mean North Africa, or Iberia (Georgia) in the Caucasus, or even another name for Britain.
Where was Afriki?
Other sources speak of Afriki. The Girgashites (a Canaanite People) were reported to have left the Holy Land and gone to Afriki (Talmud Yerushalmi, Shevitt, 6;1). This is believed to have been in the Anatolian or Caucasus region. The Gentile Georgians from the Caucasus were identified with Canaanite Girgashites in some Jewish sources. Egyptian records (ca, 1000s BCE) speak of the Kirkhasha or Kirgasha people in the same area. These may be names indicative of the Girgashites.
Other Rabbinical Traditions said that the Girgashites and other Canaanites went to North Africa.
The Canaanites of Africa
The Origins of the Berbers according to Medieval Muslim and Jewish Authors
Paul Fenton
https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199959808.003.0014
This chapter shows that, from the Middle Ages onward, certain Arab historians came to identify the North African Berbers with the Middle Eastern Canaanites. Influenced by rabbinic traditions which upheld that the Canaanites emigrated to Africa, their accounts are mixed with other legends that represent the Berbers as descendants of Goliath, hero of the Philistines. According to fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun, the Canaanites and the Philistines were all descendants of Ham, and the former helped the latter in their wars against the Israelites. The identification of the Berbers with the Philistines is also found in medieval Jewish sources; in later times, even the North African Jews originating from the Berber regions came themselves to be called Philistines.
Afriki in Western Europe?
Francis Wilford, "An Essay on the Sacred Isles in the West, " New Delhi, India, 1809:
# The word "Aparica" [i.e. Africa] is then synonymous with Ibericus, Iberka, etc. The Latin word Apricus seems to have been used to denote a westerly situation. ... Iberia, the ancient name of the Western parts of Europe, including Gaul and Spain. ...
# It is well known to the learned, that, at a very remote period, Europe and Africa were considered but as one of the two grand divisions of the world; and that the appellation of Africa was even extended to the Western parts of Europe, all along the shores of the Atlantic. Hence the West wind, or Zephyrus, is called the Lybian or African wind...