The Caspian Sea

The Greek name of the Caspian, Kaspía Thálassa, after the Káspioi, the Caspii, a people of its southwestern shore. Herodotus, remarkably, gets the sea right where later writers got it wrong: he states plainly that the Caspian is “a sea by itself, having no connection with any other,” enclosed on every side, against the common Greek view, taken from Alexander’s surveyors, that it was a gulf of the encircling northern Ocean. Beside Kaspía the Greeks also used Hyrkanía Thálassa, the “Hyrcanian Sea,” after the rich Iranian province of Hyrcania on its southern coast.

The two Greek names are the first instances of the sea’s habit of being renamed for whatever people held its shore. Kaspía fixed on the Caspii of the southwest, Hyrkanía on the Hyrcanians of the south, and the same impulse would later give the Arabs their Baḥr al-Khazar and Baḥr Jurjān. The sea too large to belong to anyone became a sea named, in rotation, for everyone, and the Greeks, alone unsure even whether it was open or closed, started the rotation with two names at once.

The Latin name of the sea, Mare Caspium, taken from the Greek, with the alternative Mare Hyrcanum used just as the Greeks used both names. Pliny inherits and repeats the old error that it opens by a narrow channel into the northern Ocean, a mistake that persisted in European geography for centuries; the Romans never reached it closely enough to correct what Alexander’s surveyors had reported.

The Latin carried Caspium and Hyrcanum into the European learned tradition, and it is the Caspian of the Caspii, the southwestern people, that finally prevailed in the modern languages over the Hyrcanian of the southern province. Of all the names the sea collected, shore by shore and empire by empire, the one that lasted was the Greeks’ first choice, a small people on one corner of a sea so vast that no one could see all of it at once.

The Arabic name of the Caspian, Baḥr al-Khazar, “the Sea of the Khazars,” after the Turkic people whose powerful khaganate dominated its northern steppe and the lower Volga through the early Islamic centuries. Beside it the geographers use Baḥr Jurjān, their form of Hyrcania, and Baḥr Ṭabaristān after the Iranian province on its southern shore, three names for one sea.

The Arabic naming continues exactly the pattern the Greeks had begun: the sea labeled, in each age, for whatever people held the stretch of coast the namers knew best. As the Caspii had given the Greeks Kaspía and the Hyrcanians Hyrkanía, so the Khazars now gave the Arabs Baḥr al-Khazar. When the Khazar khaganate fell, its name faded with it, and the sea reverted in the wider world to the oldest of its labels, the Caspian; but for the medieval Arab geographers it was, above all, the Khazars’ sea.