Anatolia

The Hittite name Aššuwa, a confederation of states in northwestern Anatolia, including Troy, that rose against the Hittite king Tudhaliya around 1400 BCE and was crushed. It is a real Bronze Age place-name of the region, written aš-šu-wa in the cuneiform of the Hittite archives, and it is generally taken to be the origin of the Greek Asía: roughly contemporary Mycenaean Greek tablets name a-si-wi-ja, apparently captives from the same area, an even closer match to the later Greek form.

Aššuwa is the Bronze Age headwater of one of the most consequential names in the world, though no one who used it could have guessed where it would go. A minor Anatolian league, defeated and dissolved before 1200 BCE, lent its name first to the Greek coast of Anatolia, then to the peninsula, then to everything east of it, until Asia spanned a third of the planet. The largest continent on earth is named, at the end of a very long chain, for a cluster of small kingdoms that lost a war to the Hittites.

The Greek name Asía, at first a name for the western Anatolian coast, the Lydian and Ionian country around the Cayster, where Homer already knows an “Asian meadow.” Taken most likely from the Bronze Age Aššuwa, it spread in Greek geographical thinking to mean the whole landmass east of the Aegean, one of the three continents whose boundaries Herodotus discusses and disputes. The Romans would make Asia a province of the western peninsula, and the New Testament’s seven churches are the churches of this province of Asía.

Asía is the pivot on which a regional name became a continental one. As the Greeks learned how much land lay to their east, the name they had for the near coast of Anatolia stretched to cover all of it, and then the peninsula it had started from needed a new label, Mikrá Asía, Asia Minor. Few names have travelled so far from their origin: a word for one stretch of the Anatolian shore now names the continent from the Bosphorus to the Pacific, and the small peninsula where it began is, by its own former name, merely the lesser Asia.

The Latin name Asia, taken from the Greek, used both for the continent and, more concretely, for the Roman province of Asia formed in 133 BCE out of the bequest of the last king of Pergamon, covering the rich western third of Anatolia. To a Roman, Asia most often meant this province, the wealthiest in the East, proverbial for its luxury; the broader continental sense ran alongside it. The distinction between greater and lesser Asia, Asia Maior and Asia Minor, sharpened in late antiquity.

Asia in Latin carried both senses of the Greek word into the languages of Europe, the continent and the peninsula, and the modern world still uses both: Asia the continent and Asia Minor the peninsula, the latter now largely displaced by Anatolia. The Roman province fixed the name firmly to western Anatolia even as the continental sense expanded without limit, so that the same Latin word names, to this day, both the largest continent and a corner of Turkey, the grandest and the most local of geographies under one name.

The Syriac name Asya, taken from the Greek of the New Testament, where Asía is the Roman province of western Anatolia, the setting of much of Paul’s work at Ephesus and of the seven churches of the Revelation. The Peshitta carries the name through Acts, where Jews “from Asya” are present at Pentecost and a riot of the Ephesian silversmiths defends the cult of Artemis, and into the letters to the churches. For the Syriac church, Asya was the near western land of the Greek-speaking provinces.

Asya is the name as the Aramaic-speaking East received it, a Greek geographical term taken whole through scripture. It belongs to the narrower, provincial sense of Asia, the western Anatolian coast rather than the continent, and it shows the name still attached, in late antiquity, to the very region it had first denoted, before centuries of expansion and the rise of Anatolia would complicate it. The churches of Asya sat almost exactly where the old Aššuwa had been.

The Greek word Anatolḗ, “the rising,” from anatéllō, “to rise,” meaning the place of the sunrise and so “the East,” the exact counterpart of the Latin Oriens and the mirror of the West. In late antiquity and the Byzantine empire it became a name for the eastern lands, and specifically for Anatolia: the great Byzantine military province of central Asia Minor was the Anatolikon theme, “the eastern one,” and from this administrative usage the peninsula took the name it still bears.

Anatolḗ is a purely relative name, meaningful only from a particular spot: it calls the peninsula “the east” because it lay east of Constantinople, the city doing the naming. As the Greek Asía had widened beyond Anatolia, this second Greek name narrowed onto it, so that the land ended with two Greek names of opposite tendencies, one that had outgrown it and one that had settled onto it. Through the Turkish Anadolu and the Arabic Anāḍūl, it is Anatolḗ, the sunrise, that became the peninsula’s usual modern name.

The Geʿez name Asya, carried into Ethiopic from the Greek of the New Testament, where it names the province of Asia of Paul’s mission and the Apocalypse’s seven churches. Like its Syriac counterpart it belongs to the scriptural, provincial sense of the name and reached Ethiopia through the Bible rather than through any direct knowledge of the peninsula.

Asya marks the southernmost reach of the Asia name in this atlas, and the narrowest in meaning, fixed to the New Testament’s western Anatolian province. It is a reminder of how much the word Asia could hold at once in late antiquity: a single Greek term that, depending on the speaker, might mean a continent stretching past the edge of the known world or just the seven small cities to which John wrote, and which the Ethiopic church, reading those letters, knew only in the latter sense.

The Arabic name al-Rūm, “the Romans,” used for the Byzantine empire and, by extension, for the Anatolian peninsula that was its heartland after the loss of Syria and Egypt. The word descends from the Byzantines’ own self-designation, Rhōmaîoi, “Romans,” for they were the Roman empire’s continuation; a sura of the Qurʾān is named al-Rūm and opens with a prophecy of their defeat and coming victory. As the Turks took Anatolia, the land they had conquered from the Byzantines kept the name: the Seljuk state there was the Sultanate of Rūm.

al-Rūm is the third of the peninsula’s names and the one that calls it after a people rather than a direction or a Bronze Age league. It preserves a long historical irony in a single syllable: the easternmost survival of the name of Rome, attached not to Italy but to Anatolia, because the empire that called itself Roman had moved its center to Constantinople. The poet Jalāl al-Dīn, who lived and wrote in Seljuk Anatolia, is known to the world as Rūmī, “the one from Rūm,” the Anatolian, his name a quiet monument to the day the land of the Hittites became, in Arabic, the land of the Romans.

The Arabic and Ottoman form Anāḍūl (also Anāṭūlī), taken from the Byzantine Greek Anatolḗ. As the Turks established themselves in the peninsula from the eleventh century onward, they took over the Greek name of the land along with the land itself, and Anāḍūl, later Turkish Anadolu, became the standard name of the Anatolian peninsula in the Islamic world, beside the older al-Rūm.

Anāḍūl is the Greek “sunrise” passed into Arabic and Turkish, the form that has won out as the peninsula’s name in the modern Middle East. Its survival completes an irony of perspective: the land is called “the East” not only by Europeans but by its own later inhabitants, who inherited the Byzantine Greeks’ Constantinople-centered geography along with their territory, and went on calling their own country “the sunrise” long after the city that the sun was rising east of had become their capital.