Cappadocia

The Babylonian rendering of Cappadocia in the Achaemenid royal inscriptions, Katpatukka, written ka-at-pa-tuk-ka: the third voice of the trilingual chancellery, beside Old Persian Katpatuka and Elamite Qatbaduqa. The province appears in the land-lists of Darius’s inscriptions at Behistun, Persepolis, and Naqsh-e Rustam and in Xerxes’s daiva inscription, and the Babylonian version names it for the empire’s Mesopotamian readers in a spelling that tracks the Persian sound for sound.

Unlike its neighbors on this page’s map, the name had no Mesopotamian past to draw on. Assyria had known central Anatolia for over a millennium, as the karum-colony country of the Old Assyrian traders and later as the lands of Tabal and Mushku, yet the Babylonian scribes of Darius reached for none of those names; whatever Katpatuka meant, and its etymology is still unsettled, it was the Persian administration’s own label, and all three chancellery languages simply transcribed it. The page’s Greek and Latin entries descend from the same act of administrative naming, which makes Cappadocia a country whose every surviving name, east and west, radiates from a single Persian word; the Babylonian column shows the moment even Mesopotamia, with a millennium of its own names for Anatolia in its archives, took dictation.

The Old Persian name of Cappadocia, Katpatuka, one of the satrapies Darius lists among his lands at Behistun and at Naqsh-e Rustam, the highland of eastern Anatolia governed for the Great King and crossed by the Royal Road. In the trilingual royal inscriptions the Elamite and Babylonian versions render the same name, the standard Achaemenid pattern of one province named in parallel across the three chancellery languages.

Katpatuka is the source of the region’s classical and modern name: the Greek Kappadokía is the Persian satrapy-name Hellenized, taken over directly rather than translated. The etymology of Katpatuka itself is uncertain, perhaps an older Anatolian name absorbed into Persian administrative usage, but its history is clear, an imperial label that outlasted the empire. Cappadocia is among the cleanest cases in this atlas of a place known to the world by the bookkeeping of the Achaemenid chancellery.

The Greek name of the region, Kappadokía, taken over from the Old Persian satrapy Katpatuka. Herodotus knows the Cappadocians well, noting that the Greeks call them Syrians (the “White Syrians,” Leukosyrioi, of the later geographers) and tracing the Royal Road through their country; Strabo gives the fullest classical description of the highland and its two halves, Pontic and Taurine.

Kappadokía is the Persian administrative name reshaped by Greek phonology, and it is the form that reached the modern world: the satrapy became, in turn, a Hellenistic kingdom, a Roman province, and the name on the map today. The Greeks did not coin a name of their own for the region but accepted the Persian one whole, an unusual deference that makes Cappadocia a rare instance of an eastern imperial name passing intact into the western tradition. The chain runs Katpatuka to Kappadokía to Latin Cappadocia with the original simply worn smooth at each step.

The Latin name of the region, Cappadocia, taken from the Greek; Tacitus records its reduction to a Roman province under Tiberius in 17 CE, and it remained an imperial frontier district facing Armenia and Parthia. Cappadocian horses and Cappadocian slaves were stock items of Roman commerce, and the name kept the faintly exotic, eastern tone it had carried in Greek.

The Latin completes the transmission of the Persian satrapy-name into the European languages: from Katpatuka through Kappadokía to Cappadocia, the form Darius’s scribes recorded reached the modern map essentially intact. Few names in this atlas travel so far with so little change of substance, an administrative coinage of the sixth century BCE surviving, through three empires that successively ruled the highland, as its ordinary name ever since.

The Middle Persian name of Cappadocia, written kpwtkyʾy in the trilingual inscription of Šābuhr I at the Kaʿba-ye Zardušt, c. 262 CE, where the king records that he burned, ruined, and plundered the province of Kappadukiyā along with Syria and Cilicia in his third campaign against Rome; the priest Kirdēr’s inscriptions of the following generation name it again among the western lands the Persian armies reached. The form is not the old satrapy name carried down within Persian: its doubled pp and its ending mark it as a fresh borrowing of the Greek Kappadokía, the name of a Roman province taken in the shape Rome’s Greek-speaking east gave it.

The entry closes a loop that this page’s Old Persian Katpatuka opens. Darius’s chancellery coined the administrative name; Greek Hellenized it into Kappadokía; and when a Persian empire next had occasion to carve the province’s name in stone, it took the Greek form back rather than reaching for its own ancestor. Five centuries of Hellenistic and Roman Anatolia lie between the two Persian spellings, and the second is the first refracted through the enemy’s language. An empire can bequeath a name to the world and still, when it returns, have to borrow it home.