Jerusalem

The Akkadian name of the city, Urusalim, written URU ú-ru-sa-lim with the determinative for “city,” is the form Jerusalem takes in the Amarna letters, the cuneiform dispatches its ruler Abdi-Ḫeba sent to the Egyptian court in the fourteenth century BCE, begging Pharaoh for troops against his enemies. A variant spelling ú-ru-ša₁₀-lim also occurs. It is the earliest attestation of the city’s name that can be set down in its own script, and already carries the -salim that the Hebrew Yĕrûšālēm would keep.

Urusalim is the headwater of every later form on this page. Three centuries before David, the name was already essentially the one the city bears today, “foundation of Shalem,” the West Semitic god of dusk; the Amarna scribes simply spelled a Canaanite name in the international cuneiform of the age. The Bronze Age city wrote to Egypt in Akkadian and signed itself with a name that Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and Arabic would all inherit, the rare case in this atlas where the oldest recoverable form and the living one are, across thirty-three centuries, the same word.

The Hebrew name Yĕrûšālayim, the endonym of the city, generally understood as “foundation of Shalem,” from the West Semitic root yry/yrw, “to found,” and Shalem, a Canaanite deity; the same name is already present, a thousand years before the Hebrew Bible, in the Bronze Age Egyptian and Akkadian records noted on this page. The Hebrew vocalization carries a curious dual ending, -ayim, which looks grammatically like a dual (“two Jerusalems”), perhaps an old reflex later read as referring to the upper and lower city; the consonantal text usually writes the shorter Yĕrûšālēm. It is the city of David in the books of Samuel and Kings, the site of the Temple, and the center of the kingdom of Judah.

Yĕrûšālayim is the source of nearly every other name on this page, and the original of a name about to be transformed. When the Greeks rendered it Hierosólyma, they heard its first syllable as their own word hieros, “holy,” and so the city’s ordinary name became, by accident of sound, a claim about its sanctity, a claim that the later Arabic al-Quds, “the Holy,” would make again on purpose. The folk-etymology that links the Hebrew name to shalom, “peace,” reading “Jerusalem” as “city of peace,” works the same way: a name that probably honored an old god has been heard, in language after language, as describing what the city came to mean. Few names have been so thoroughly reinterpreted by the people who carried them.

The Hebrew name Ṣiyyôn, Zion, which begins as the name of the specific fortified hill that David captured, “the stronghold of Zion, that is, the city of David,” and widens until it can stand for the whole of Jerusalem, for the Temple mount, and for the people of Israel themselves. Its etymology is uncertain, perhaps “citadel” or “dry height”; unlike Yĕrûšālayim it is not a transmission name but a second, parallel designation native to Hebrew, the word the Psalms and prophets reach for when they speak of the city in song and prophecy.

Ṣiyyôn is the one major name for Jerusalem that did not radiate outward into the other languages as a city-name, and yet it has had an afterlife rivaling any of them, because it traveled as an idea rather than a label. It remained largely within Hebrew and the religious vocabularies built on it, where it became charged with longing and return, “by the rivers of Babylon we wept when we remembered Zion,” and from there it gave the modern world “Zionism” and a freight of metaphor, a heavenly Zion, that has nothing to do with geography. On this page it is the inward name beside the outward ones: while Hierosólyma and al-Quds are how the world addressed the city, Ṣiyyôn is how the city’s poets sang it.

The Aramaic form Yĕrûšlem, the name of the city in the Aramaic that was the administrative language of the Persian Empire and the everyday speech of post-exilic Judaea. It appears in the Aramaic chapters of Ezra, in the correspondence with the Persian court about the rebuilding of the city and its Temple, and in the Aramaic of Daniel; it is the name as the returning exiles and their neighbors actually spoke it under Persian and Hellenistic rule, when Hebrew was increasingly a language of scripture rather than the street.

Yĕrûšlem is the living, spoken bridge between the Hebrew Yĕrûšālayim and the Greek and Syriac forms that followed. The Aramaic-speaking world of Judaea is where the name was actually in daily use during the centuries when it passed into Greek, and Syriac, the eastern Aramaic of the Church, carried this same form on into Late Antiquity as Ūrišlem. It is the unglamorous middle of the name’s history, the form on the tongues of the people who rebuilt the city, sitting between the Hebrew of its scriptures and the Greek that would make it famous to the wider world.

The Greek name for Jerusalem, Hierosólyma, the form Josephus and much of Greek literature use, beside the more literal transliteration Ierousalēm that the Septuagint and parts of the New Testament prefer. Hierosólyma is no neutral borrowing: Greek ears reshaped the Semitic name so that its first element became hieros, “holy,” and its second was heard as Sólyma, a name some Greek writers connected to the Solymoi, a people in Homer. The result is a Hellenized name that reads, to a Greek, as “the holy Solyma,” a small act of folk-etymology that built the city’s sanctity into its very name.

Hierosólyma is the pivot of the whole page, the moment Jerusalem’s name turned into a word about holiness. That reading passed into Latin as Hierosolyma and colored the way the Christian world heard the name ever after; and it rhymes, across a gulf of language and religion, with the independent Arabic decision to call the city al-Quds, “the Holy,” and Bayt al-Maqdis, “the house of the sanctuary.” Greek did by accident, mishearing a Canaanite god’s name as “holy,” what Arabic would later do on purpose. Of all the reshapings in this atlas, few have been so consequential: a single misheard syllable helped make the name of a hill-town synonymous, in language after language, with holiness itself.

The Latin name Hierosolyma, taken from the Greek and used by Roman writers like Pliny and Tacitus for the city before its destruction in 70 CE, alongside the scriptural transliteration Hierusalem that the Vulgate also carries. Latin inherited the Greek reshaping intact, so the hieros, “holy,” that Greek had read into the name came with it, and the Latin Christian tradition received Jerusalem already as a name about holiness. The two Latin forms, the classical Hierosolyma and the biblical Hierusalem, run side by side through medieval usage.

Hierosolyma is the form through which the name reached the modern European languages, the Greek-via-Latin link this atlas traces for so many places. English Jerusalem, French Jérusalem, and their cousins descend through the Latin Hierusalem with the initial aspirate worn away. But the page’s drama is not in this smooth descent; it is in what Rome did to the city’s name with its other hand. While Latin literature kept Hierosolyma for the old Jewish city, the Roman state, after crushing the revolt of 135 CE, abolished that name on the ground and refounded the place as Aelia Capitolina, an attempt to erase Jerusalem from the map even as Latin letters kept writing its name.

The Roman name Aelia Capitolina, imposed on Jerusalem by the emperor Hadrian, who refounded the city as a Roman colony around 130 CE on the ruins left by the siege of 70 CE. The name fuses Hadrian’s own family name, Aelius, with that of Jupiter Capitolinus, to whom a temple was raised on the former Temple site; it was a deliberate act of erasure, and Hadrian paired it with renaming the surrounding province Syria Palaestina, severing both city and land from the Jewish names they had borne. For two centuries the official name of Jerusalem, in Roman administration, was Aelia.

Aelia Capitolina is the page’s one name designed to abolish the others, and it is a measure of how that attempt fared that it survives at all only as a fossil inside a later name. The Romans’ Aelia outlived the pagan colony: when the Arab armies took the city in 638 CE they knew it by the clipped Roman name Īliyāʾ, which served as an Arabic name for Jerusalem for centuries before al-Quds displaced it. So the imperial name meant to wipe Jerusalem off the map ended as a loanword in Arabic, a ghost of Hadrian’s project carried, unwittingly, by the very conquerors who would give the city its enduring name of holiness.

The Syriac name Ūrišlem, the form of Jerusalem in the Peshitta and the Syriac Christian tradition, inherited directly from the Aramaic Yĕrûšlem of which Syriac is a later dialect. It keeps the Semitic name close to its spoken Aramaic shape, untouched by the Greek reinterpretation as “holy”; for the Aramaic-speaking churches of the East, Jerusalem remained simply Jerusalem, the name passed down within its own language family. It survives in use among Aramaic-speaking Christians, and Arabic-speaking Christians still call the city Ūrshalīm after the same tradition.

Ūrišlem is the Semitic counterweight to the Greek and Latin forms on this page. While the western churches received Jerusalem in the Hellenized Hierosólyma, with holiness folded into its first syllable, the eastern church kept the older Aramaic word, so that the two halves of Christianity prayed to the same city under names that had diverged a thousand years before. It is a reminder that the Greek “holy Jerusalem” was a road taken, not a necessity: the name had a perfectly ordinary Semitic life running alongside it the whole time, in the Aramaic that Jerusalem itself had spoken.

The Babylonian Aramaic name of the city, Yĕrûšālayim, the form that runs through the Talmud, where Jerusalem is named on nearly every other page as the lost center and the city of the age to come. The rabbinic spelling characteristically adds a second yod, yršlym, making explicit the dual-sounding ending -ayim that the older defective writing yršlm left unmarked.

Yĕrûšālayim is the form that won. The Bronze Age Urusalim and the biblical Yĕrûšālēm are written without the second yod; it is the rabbinic plene spelling, with its -ayim, that became standard and gives the Modern Hebrew name of the city today. The Babylonian academies, writing of a Jerusalem they no longer held, fixed the orthography by which Jews have named it ever since, the longing for the city quietly preserved in an extra letter.

The Geʿez name Iyarusalēm, the form of Jerusalem in the Ethiopic scriptures, taken through the Greek of the Septuagint and New Testament from which the Ethiopic Bible was translated. It is among the most resonant foreign names in the Ethiopian Christian tradition, which made Jerusalem a model for its own sacred geography: the medieval rock-hewn churches of Lalibela were laid out as a new Jerusalem, with a river named the Jordan, so that the Geʿez name pointed both to the distant holy city and to its deliberate copy in the Ethiopian highlands.

Iyarusalēm is the farthest-flung member of the Yĕrûšālēm family, the city’s name carried by scripture across the Red Sea into the Horn of Africa. It belongs with the Greek, Latin, and Syriac forms as part of Christianity’s diffusion of the name, the southern branch of the same spread that gave Ethiopia its names for Israel and Judah. That a kingdom should not only adopt Jerusalem’s name from scripture but rebuild the city in stone in its own mountains is the strongest instance on this page of a name carrying a whole idea of holiness with it, far beyond the reach of the place it named.

The Arabic name Bayt al-Maqdis, “the house of the sanctuary,” an early and enduring designation for Jerusalem in Islam, from the same root q-d-s, “holy,” as al-Quds. It is a calque of the Hebrew Bēt ha-Miqdaš, “the Temple,” literally “the house of the sanctuary,” the name of the Jerusalem Temple, transferred from the building to the city as a whole; the tenth-century geographer al-Muqaddasī took his very name from it, “the man of Bayt al-Maqdis.” The fuller form al-Bayt al-Muqaddas and the shortened al-Quds belong to the same family of holy-house names.

Bayt al-Maqdis is the most directly inherited of Jerusalem’s Arabic names, a translation not of a city-name but of the name of its lost Temple. Where al-Quds abstracts the city to “the Holy” and Īliyāʾ preserves a Roman accident, Bayt al-Maqdis reaches back past both to the Hebrew sanctuary itself, carrying the Temple’s own name into Arabic centuries after the Temple was destroyed. It completes the page’s recurring theme from a new angle: not the city renamed for holiness, but the holy house outliving its destruction in the name of the city that held it, the sanctuary gone but its name still standing for the place.

The early Arabic name Īliyāʾ, the Roman Aelia carried into Arabic. When the armies of the caliph ʿUmar took Jerusalem from the Byzantines in 638 CE, they knew the city by the name the Roman world had given it five centuries earlier, and the document of surrender is traditionally remembered as the assurance “to the people of Īliyāʾ.” For the first two centuries of Islamic rule Īliyāʾ was a standard Arabic name for Jerusalem, used in the histories and on the earliest Islamic coins struck in the city, before al-Quds gradually replaced it.

Īliyāʾ is the strange survival on this page, a pagan Roman name meant to erase Jerusalem, living on in the language of the city’s next conquerors. Hadrian had named his colony Aelia Capitolina to abolish the Jewish city; that name died as Roman power waned, yet its first word reached Arabic intact and served the new Muslim city for generations. It is the clearest case in this atlas of a name outliving every intention behind it: coined to suppress Jerusalem’s identity, it ended as simply one more of the city’s many names, eventually retired in favor of al-Quds, the very statement of holiness that Aelia had been built to deny.

The Classical Arabic name al-Quds, “the Holy,” which from around the ninth century CE came to supersede the older Arabic names of Jerusalem and is the city’s ordinary name in Arabic to this day. It is a shortening of fuller phrases such as Madīnat bayt al-maqdis, “the city of the sanctuary,” and al-Quds al-Sharīf, “the Noble Holy”; the root q-d-s, “to be holy,” is the same Semitic root as the Hebrew qodesh. The city is sacred in Islam as the site of the Prophet’s Night Journey and the first qibla, the original direction of prayer, and the name registers that status directly.

al-Quds is the third and most explicit instance, on a page full of them, of Jerusalem being named for its holiness. The Greek Hierosólyma made the city “holy” by mishearing a syllable; the Hebrew folk-etymology read “peace” into the old name; Arabic dispensed with the inherited name altogether and simply called the place “the Holy,” from the same Semitic root for sacredness that the Hebrew Temple’s own name used. Three religions and three languages, each arriving, by accident or design, at the same word: that Jerusalem is, above all, the holy city. al-Quds says outright what Hierosólyma only stumbled into.