Ephesus

Apaša, written URU a-pa-ša in the cuneiform of the Hittite archives, was the capital of the kingdom of Arzawa, the major power of western Anatolia that the Hittite king Muršili II broke around 1320 BCE, driving its king Uḫḫa-ziti into exile and carrying off thousands of its people. The name belongs to the Late Bronze Age, four centuries before the Ionian Greeks, and is recorded in the Hittite royal annals and correspondence among the great matters of the empire’s western frontier.

Apaša is here as the probable Bronze Age ancestor of Éphesos, but the identification is marked disputed because that is what it is, an identification rather than a documented equation. The case is strong: the names match closely in sound, and Late Bronze Age remains on the Ayasuluk hill above the later Ephesus place an important Arzawan center exactly where one would want it. Most scholars now accept that the Arzawan capital and the Greek city are the same place under successive names. But no Hittite text says so, and no Greek author remembered Arzawa; the bridge between Apaša and Éphesos is built by modern scholarship from a phonetic match and a hill of potsherds, and the entry keeps the doubt that honest reconstruction requires.

The Greek name of the city, Éphesos, borne by the Ionian Greek foundation that grew up around the sanctuary of Artemis on the Anatolian coast. The name is not Greek in origin but pre-Greek and Anatolian, inherited by the Ionian settlers from the older population of the land, like so many names of the western Anatolian seaboard. To the Greek and Roman world it was among the greatest of cities, the home of one of the Seven Wonders and, later, the capital of Roman Asia.

Éphesos is the head of the family and the hinge between two worlds. Forward, it gives the Latin Ephesus and, through the Greek of the New Testament, the Syriac and Arabic forms; backward, it points to the Bronze Age, for the name is most likely the Greek continuation of Apaša, the Arzawan capital of the Hittite records. Ephesus is therefore one of the rare Greek cities whose name has a documented prehistory in cuneiform, an Anatolian word that the Hittites wrote a thousand years before Homer and the Greeks took over with the coast.

The Latin name of the city, Ephesus, taken from the Greek, the form under which Rome governed the city it made the administrative heart of the province of Asia. Roman Ephesus was a metropolis of a quarter-million people, its theater and its harbor and its temple of Artemis-Diana known throughout the empire; Pliny and the geographers place it among the great cities of the East.

Ephesus carries the Greek name west with no change but the Latin ending, and through Latin it reached the European languages as the standard form. It is the unremarkable middle link of the family, the Greek name frozen in Latin in the usual way, but it sits on a page where that ordinary western transmission is flanked by two more unusual ones: the Bronze Age Anatolian original behind the Greek, and the eastern Christian forms ahead of it. Latin holds the center, the imperial name of the city of Artemis between its Hittite past and its scriptural future.

The Syriac name of the city, Efesos, taken from the Greek of the New Testament, and one of the more prominent foreign place-names in Syriac Christian writing. Ephesus is the city of Paul’s two-year stay and the riot of the silversmiths in Acts, the addressee of one of the Epistles, the Efesāyē, and one of the seven churches of Revelation; above all it is the seat of the Council of Ephesus of 431 CE, whose condemnation of Nestorius split the Syriac-speaking churches, the Church of the East holding to the teaching the council rejected.

Efesos is thus a name the Syriac tradition had every reason to know well, and it carries a heavier charge than most scriptural toponyms. To the East Syriac church, Ephesus was not only a city of Paul but the place where the council met that drove their forebears into schism and exile, so that the name marks both the apostolic past and the doctrinal wound. The Greek name reached Syriac, as so often, straight from the New Testament, but here it came freighted with a history the eastern churches lived rather than merely read.

The Arabic name of the city, Afsūs, a transcription of the Greek, the form under which Ephesus was known to the medieval Islamic world. The name is bound up above all with the legend of the Seven Sleepers, the Aṣḥāb al-Kahf, the youths who slept for centuries in a cave to escape persecution, a story the Qur’an tells in its eighteenth sūra and that Christian tradition had located at Ephesus; through it Afsūs became a place of pilgrimage and wonder in Arabic geography.

Afsūs carries a characteristic ambiguity worth noting. The Arab geographers often attached the Seven Sleepers, and so the name Afsūs, not to the real coastal Ephesus, by then a declining Byzantine town, but to a homonymous inland site near Elbistan in their own territory, so that the medieval Arabic name floats between the historical city and a legendary double. It is the Islamic and easternmost stage of the name of Ephesus, the Greek city of Artemis remembered in Arabic chiefly as the city of the sleepers in the cave, half real place and half holy legend.