Cappadocia

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.