The Black Sea

The Greek name of the Black Sea, Póntos Eúxeinos, “the Hospitable Sea,” or simply Póntos, “the Sea.” Strabo preserves the telling history of the name: the sea was first called Áxeinos, “Inhospitable,” for its storms and the hostility of the Scythian coasts, and was only later renamed Eúxeinos, “Hospitable,” once the Ionians had planted their colonies around it. The change is a classic euphemism, a dangerous thing renamed for its opposite so as not to provoke it.

But the original Áxeinos was itself almost certainly a Greek misreading. Behind it lies an Iranian word, axšaina, “dark” or “black,” the colour-name the Scythian and Persian world used for the sea; Greek ears reshaped the foreign axšaina into the familiar áxeinos, “inhospitable,” and then softened that into eúxeinos, “hospitable.” So the modern “Black Sea” and the ancient Iranian “dark” are the same name, and the Greek “hospitable” is a double mistake, a euphemism laid over a folk-etymology, the true sense surfacing again only when the modern languages went back to calling it black.

The Latin name of the sea, Pontus Euxinus, taken from the Greek and keeping the euphemism intact. It had a famous Roman exile: Ovid spent his last years banished to Tomis on the western shore of the Pontus, and his letters from there, the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, complain bitterly of the cold, the barbarians, and the storms, the very “inhospitality” that the sea’s older name had recorded and its newer one denied.

The Latin Pontus also became the name of the land: the kingdom of Pontus on the southern shore, the realm of Mithridates, Rome’s great eastern enemy, took its name from the sea it bordered. Through Latin the Greek name passed into the European languages as the learned name of the sea, Pontus Euxinus, even as the vernaculars increasingly preferred to call it, with the Iranian sense restored, simply black. Ovid, shivering on its coast, would have found the older Áxeinos the truer word.

The Arabic name of the Black Sea, Baḥr Nīṭas, in which Nīṭas is the Greek Póntos arabized, the word for the sea taken over from the Byzantines who still held its southern coast. The geographers also call it the Sea of the Khazars or of the Bulgars, after the peoples of its northern steppe, but Baḥr Nīṭas preserves the old Greek name directly.

The form shows the Greek Póntos surviving at the far eastern edge of its range, passed to the Arabs through Byzantine usage centuries after Ovid. The same sea thus carries, in Arabic, a fossil of its Greek name alongside the colour-name the Turkic and Persian peoples of its shores used; medieval Arabic geography knew it both as Nīṭas, from the Greek, and, echoing the older Iranian sense, sometimes as a “dark” sea. The euphemism and the colour traveled side by side to the end.

The medieval Latin name of the Black Sea, Mare Maius, “the Greater Sea.” William of Rubruck opens his Itinerarium of 1253 with it: he entered “the Sea of Pontus, which is commonly called Mare Maius,” his vulgariter marking the name as the working usage of the sailors who carried him, the Latin of the Italian mariners’ mare Maggiore. The name belongs to the great age of Genoese and Venetian commerce in the sea, and it is the standard label of the portolan charts, the practical harbor-to-harbor maps of the Mediterranean sailing world; “greater” measures the sea against the small Sea of Azov beyond its strait, and against the familiar basins of the sailors’ home sea.

The page’s Greek entry records a name of fear managed by flattery, Póntos Eúxeinos, the Hospitable Sea, the euphemism that renamed an Áxeinos, an Inhospitable one. The medieval name has no such literature in it. It is a measurement, coined on deck by men who crossed the sea for freight and needed to distinguish it from the smaller water next door; Rubruck learned it not from a book but from the ship he boarded. Between the two names lies the whole difference in how the sea was held: the Greeks approached it as colonists propitiating a power, the Italians worked it as a route. The sea the ancients flattered, the medievals simply sized.