Athens

The Mycenaean Greek form a-ta-na appears on a single Linear B tablet from Knossos in the phrase a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja, “the Lady of Athana,” an offering to a goddess. If a-ta-na is the place Athens, this is by far the oldest mention of the city, some seven centuries before its classical greatness; the form would be the Bronze Age ancestor of Athēnai, here in the genitive or locative behind the title of its patron goddess.

The reading is genuinely disputed, which is why it is marked so. The phrase can be understood as “the Mistress of Athana,” naming the city or its citadel, or simply as the divine name “the Lady Athana,” the goddess later called Athena, with no place intended at all; the two cannot be told apart from a single damaged tablet, and the relation of the goddess Athena to the city Athens is itself an ancient puzzle. a-ta-na is thus either the deepest root of this page, the name of Athens at its first appearance in writing, or it belongs to the goddess alone and only seems to be the city. It is included here as the possible Bronze Age headwater of the name, with the doubt left standing.

The endonym, Athēnai, the standard Greek name of the city, a grammatical plural like a number of other Greek place-names. It is inseparable from the goddess Athena, Athēnā, the city’s patron, to whom the Parthenon was raised; the city is the place of the Athēnai and the goddess the singular Athēnā, and ancient and modern opinion alike has been unable to decide whether the goddess took her name from the city or the city from the goddess. The name is already present in the Bronze Age: a Linear B tablet from Knossos names a-ta-na po-ti-ni-ja, the “Lady of Athana,” in the earliest Greek writing.

Athēnai is the headwater of every other form on this page, and the source of the page’s central observation. Where the great cities of Mesopotamia each splintered into a dozen mutually unrecognizable names, the Greek Athēnai passed nearly unchanged into Latin, Syriac, and Arabic, because those languages received it not from contact in deep antiquity but late, and through the single prestige-channel of Greek itself. The plural that the Athenians used of their own goddess-city is, recognizably, the Athens of every later tongue.

The Latin name for the city, Athēnae, taken over from the Greek and keeping its plural form. For educated Romans, Athens was the university of the Mediterranean: Cicero studied there, the sons of the senatorial class were sent to its schools, and Athēnae stood in Latin as a byword for learning and eloquence. The form is the Greek Athēnai with no more than the regular Latin spelling of the diphthong.

Athēnae shows the name passing the first of its later boundaries without distortion. A Roman reading Athēnae and a Greek saying Athēnai were plainly naming one place; nothing was lost in the crossing. It is the first confirmation of this page’s pattern, the name that travels without fragmenting, and the form through which medieval and modern Europe received Athens.

The Syriac name for the city, Atēnos, taken from the Greek of the New Testament and attested in the Peshitta account of Paul at Athens: his companions bring him “as far as Athens,” and there, waiting, he is provoked at the city full of idols and disputes in the marketplace and on the Areopagus with the Athenians, Atēnāyē. The form keeps the Greek nominative ending -os rather than reducing it, marking it as a borrowing straight from the Greek text.

Atēnos is the name as the Syriac church received it, through scripture rather than through any older contact, which is exactly why it stays so close to the Greek. Where Syriac took the Mesopotamian cities by long descent and gave them thoroughly Aramaic shapes, it took Athens whole from the Greek of Acts, an imported word for an imported story. The city of Greek philosophy kept its Greek name even in the Aramaic of its Christian readers.

The Babylonian Aramaic name for the city, Atuna, attested in the Talmud in the phrase sabe de-be Atuna, “the elders of Athens,” the sages whom Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah is sent to confound in a long cycle of riddling disputations in tractate Bekhorot. The form is the Greek Athēnai in Aramaic dress: the aspirate reduced to a plain t, and the Greek plural ending replaced by the Aramaic determined state in final -a.

Atuna is the one name on this page that reached Athens through neither Rome nor the church. In the Babylonian rabbinic imagination Athens is less a city than a topos, the standing emblem of pagan Greek cleverness against which the wisdom of the academy is tested and found greater; its philosophers appear only to be out-argued. The name traveled east not with merchants or missionaries but with a story, surfacing in the Aramaic of Sasanian Babylonia as the home of the clever Greeks, the eastern counterpart to the Atēnos that Syriac drew from the Greek of Acts.

The Coptic name for the city, Athēnas, a Greek word carried unchanged into the Coptic versions of the Acts of the Apostles, where Paul is brought down “as far as Athens” and there disputes with the philosophers on the Areopagus. Coptic took the Greek place-name whole, keeping its final sibilant; like the Syriac of the Peshitta, it received Athens through scripture rather than through any older contact, an imported word for an imported story.

Athēnas sits especially easily in Coptic, and that is its point on this page. Coptic is the most thoroughly Hellenized of the Egyptian languages: it is written in an alphabet adapted from Greek, and a large part of its vocabulary is Greek loanwords absorbed wholesale. Where Syriac and Babylonian Aramaic took Athens as a visibly foreign name, Coptic received it as one more Greek word among the thousands already at home in the language, the city of Greek learning slipping unremarked into the tongue of Christian Egypt.

The Geʿez name for the city, Atēna, carried into the Ethiopic New Testament from the Greek of Acts, where it appears in the account of Paul at Athens: wa-ʾenza yeṣanneḥomu Pāwlos ba-Atēna, “now while Paul waited for them at Athens” (Acts 17:16). The Athenians in turn are sabʾa Atēna, “the people of Athens.” A variant Atēnas preserves the Greek nominative ending, but the standard liturgical form drops it, giving the plain Atēna.

Atēna is the southernmost reach of the name on this page, and it belongs to the same scriptural road as the Syriac Atēnos and the Coptic Athēnas: Athens entered Geʿez not through any contact between the Aksumite world and Greece, but through the Bible the Ethiopian church translated from Greek. Where Syriac kept the Greek -os and the variant Atēnas the -s, Geʿez naturalized the word fully, smoothing it to a shape that sits easily in Ethiopic; the city of Greek philosophy reached the highlands of Aksum as a name in scripture, its ending quietly filed away.

The Arabic name for the city, Athīniyya, known to the Arabic-writing world chiefly through the history of philosophy. The translators and historians of the Abbasid age, who rendered Aristotle and Plato into Arabic and wrote the lives of the Greek sages, knew Athens as the home of the philosophers, the city of Socrates and his school; it appears in the doxographies and universal histories as the seat of Greek wisdom rather than as a place anyone had recently seen. The form descends, like the others, from the Greek Athēnai.

Athīniyya completes the pattern across the page’s last language. Arabic met Athens not through trade or conquest but through books, the inheritance of Greek learning that the Abbasid translators carried into Arabic, and it kept the Greek name almost unaltered. Of the great ancient cities, Athens is the one whose name traveled farthest with the least change, because what carried it was not empire but philosophy, and philosophy quotes its sources.