Umbrella comes from Latin for shade—rain came later
An umbrella’s folding canopy on ribs and a pole blocks sun or rain. English umbrella traces to Latin umbra, shadow; the OED’s first sense citation is 1611. Parasol blends Latin parare and sol; French parapluie adds pluie for rain.
The first umbrellas, from the early 1200s in warm countries, were strictly sunshades; rain protection came later. Egyptian art of the Fifth Dynasty, around 2450 BC, shows palm-leaf or feather fans on long handles, and Sargon of Akkad's victory stele of about 2310 BC holds the oldest surviving depiction. Assyrian reliefs at Nineveh show one held over the king's head around 710 BC, reserved for the bald monarch alone, and Persepolis carvings include umbrellas complete with stretchers and runner.
Chinese tradition credits the wife of the carpenter Lu Ban in the Warring States period. The Rites of Zhou, some 2,400 years old, describes a canopy with 28 ribs for imperial carriages, and the Book of Han records that Wang Mang had a collapsible one with bendable joints made for his ceremonial carriage in 21 AD; a 1st-century folding umbrella has been recovered from a tomb at Lelang in Korea. Oil-paper umbrellas spread to ordinary people after the Eastern Han and reached Japan, Southeast Asia and India from the Tang dynasty onward.
Across Asia and Africa the device signalled power. The Mahabharata tells of the sun offering Renuka an umbrella to appease her husband Jamadagni, who had fired an arrow at it. The kings of Ava styled themselves lords of the twenty-four umbrellas, and in 17th-century Siam only the king could carry the multi-tiered kind. The Aztecs used a feather-and-gold umbrella as a military standard, and the Dutch are said to have given one to Osei Kofi Tutu I, after which Asante chiefs twirled great coloured umbrellas at Kumasi festivals.
Americans long mocked umbrellas as effeminate, yet in 1828 the German woodcarver Francis Beehler opened the country's first umbrella factory in Baltimore, using whalebone ribs since steel ones came only after 1852. British slang offered gamp, after Dickens's Mrs. Gamp, and brolly, while bumbershoot is a whimsical late-19th-century Americanism.
Source: Umbrella
