Cilicia

The Bronze-Age name of the Cilician plain, Kizzuwatna, a kingdom of the second millennium that controlled the passes between Anatolia and Syria and the cult-city of Kummanni. Its allegiance was the prize of a long struggle between the Hittites and the Hurrian empire of Mitanni; the treaty of Šunaššura, by which Kizzuwatna passed into the Hittite sphere, is one of the central documents of Hittite diplomacy, and the land was eventually absorbed into the Hittite realm.

Kizzuwatna is the deepest stratum of Cilicia’s names, the country two full naming-layers before the classical Kilikía. It records a moment when the plain was a kingdom in its own right, fought over by the great powers of the Late Bronze Age, rather than a province of any of them. When the Hittite empire fell, the name fell with it, and the same coast re-emerged in the Assyrian records under the wholly different names Que and Ḫilakku, with no memory of the Bronze-Age kingdom that had held it.

The Assyrian name of rough, western Cilicia, Ḫilakku, the rugged highland of the Taurus foothills, paired in the royal inscriptions with Que, the fertile eastern plain around Tarsus. The Assyrians campaigned repeatedly into both: Que they could hold as a province, but mountainous Ḫilakku remained a refractory frontier of hillmen that no king fully subdued.

Ḫilakku is the Assyrian middle layer of Cilicia’s names, and it is the likeliest ancestor of the classical one: the Greek Kilikía is widely, though not certainly, derived from it. If the connection holds, the region’s enduring name began as the Assyrian word for only its wild half, the part the empire could never tame, later spread to cover the whole. The Assyrian two-part division, the plain Que and the highland Ḫilakku, thus underlies the single classical Kilikía that papered over the distinction.

The Greek name of the region, Kilikía, the coast and plain behind the Taurus reached through the famous pass of the Cilician Gates. Herodotus traces the Royal Road across it; Xenophon’s Ten Thousand marched through the Gates and were received by its queen. The Greeks derived the name in legend from a hero Kilix, son of the Phoenician king Agenor, brother of Cadmus and Europa, but the name is more plausibly the old Assyrian Ḫilakku in Greek dress.

Kilikía is the classical layer laid over the region’s older names, the single Greek term that replaced both halves of the Assyrian Que and Ḫilakku and erased the Bronze-Age Kizzuwatna entirely. Through Latin Cilicia it became the standard and modern name. The Greek hero-etymology, attaching the land to the Phoenician royal house, is a characteristic move: faced with a foreign name it could not parse, Greek tradition supplied a Greek ancestor to explain it, here covering over an Assyrian original the Greeks no longer recognized.

The Latin name of the region, Cilicia, taken from the Greek; it became a Roman province whose most famous governor was Cicero, who wrote a stream of letters from his unwilling year of command there in 51 BCE. Earlier, the rugged Cilician coast had been the great base of the Mediterranean pirates whom Pompey cleared in 67 BCE, the campaign that first brought the region firmly under Rome.

The Latin carries the Greek form to the modern world as the region’s standard name. By Cicero’s day the layered history of the names had collapsed into one: the Bronze-Age Kizzuwatna was forgotten, the Assyrian Que and Ḫilakku survived only in cuneiform no one could still read, and Cilicia stood alone. The plain that had been named and renamed by Hittites, Assyrians, and Greeks in turn kept, in the end, only the last of its names.