Ionia

The Greek name of the region, Iōnía, the coast of central western Anatolia settled by the Íōnes, one of the major divisions of the Greek people, and organized as a league of twelve cities that Herodotus enumerates, Miletus, Ephesus, Colophon, and the rest. Ionia was the intellectual cradle of the Greek world: the home of Thales and the first natural philosophers, of Heraclitus, of the historian Hecataeus, and, by tradition, of Homer.

Iōnía is the self-name of the region, but its larger significance lies in where the name Íōnes traveled. Because the Ionians were the Greeks the eastern peoples encountered first, their name became the standard eastern designation for Greeks of every kind; the whole family of forms it generated, Old Persian and Elamite Yauna, Akkadian Yāmān, Hebrew Yāwān, Aramaic Ywn, Sanskrit Yavana, and Arabic al-Yūnān, is set out on the page for Greece. Ionia is the headwater: the corner of Anatolia whose inhabitants’ name the entire East adopted for all Greeks.

The Old Persian name Yauna, in origin the Ionians specifically, the Greeks of the Anatolian coast whom the Achaemenids first ruled and listed among their subject lands at Behistun and Naqsh-e Rustam. The royal inscriptions distinguish varieties of Yauna, including those “by the sea” and those “across the sea” and the shield-bearing Yaunā takabarā, as Persian knowledge of the Greek world widened.

Yauna is the pivot of the whole Ionian naming family. Taken from the Greek Iōnes through the Anatolian coast, it began as the Persian word for the Ionians and then broadened, in Persian usage and in every language that borrowed it from Persian, into the general word for Greeks; the full chain, Elamite and Babylonian Yauna, Sanskrit Yavana, and the rest, is treated on the page for Greece. This entry marks the moment of transfer: the name still meaning Ionia at the point where it set out to become the East’s word for all of Hellas.

The Latin name of the region, Ionia, taken unchanged from the Greek; under Rome it was the heart of the wealthy province of Asia, its old cities, Ephesus above all, among the greatest in the empire. The Latin keeps the form and the meaning, the land of the Iones, and adds nothing but its own administrative weight.

The Latin matters here less for itself than for the contrast it completes. While Ionia the place-name stayed a modest regional label in Greek and Latin, the people-name behind it, Iōnes, had already conquered the East as the word for Greeks in general. The same root thus lived two lives: a quiet geographical one in the classical West, where Ionia was just one district of Asia Minor, and a vast one in the East, where from Persia to India “Ionian” had become the ordinary word for any Greek at all.