Magan

The Sumerian name of the copper-land down the Gulf, Magan, written má-gan with the place-determinative and entering the record in the Sargonic period. In Sumerian texts it is above all a name for material: Gudea of Lagash records bringing diorite from Magan to carve into his statues, and the phrase “diorite of Magan” became almost a formula, the black stone of royal statuary named for its far source. The Ur III archives document the working trade behind the formula, boats of the merchants of Ur going down to Magan with wool and garments and returning with copper, and the literary tradition keeps the land in view a while longer, pairing Magan with Dilmun and Meluhha as the exotic south from which good things come by sea. The name’s own meaning is unknown, and it is likely the local country’s name as the scribes of the plain received it.

On this page Magan is the anchor, the earliest and plainest form of a name whose later history is all argument. Within Sumerian itself the word is concrete to the point of homeliness: not a myth-country like Dilmun across the water, but a supplier, the place your statue and your kettle ultimately came from. That very concreteness is what gives the page’s later entries their interest, because when the name possibly resurfaces after a thousand years in Persian and Greek dress, it does so stripped of all this commercial reality, a label on a remote province. Here, at the head of the page, it still smells of copper smoke.

The Akkadian name of Magan, Makkan, the same name as the Sumerian in a Semitic mouth, written for the most part with the same má-gan signs. Its most dramatic attestations are military: Naram-Sin of Akkad records marching against Magan and capturing Manium, its lord, the only time a Mesopotamian king claims to have conquered the far side of the Lower Sea, and booty of Magan stone was carved with his name. Thereafter the name follows the trade until the trade dies, and then does something stranger: it refuses to die itself. The Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions revive Makkan as a grand archaism, no longer for Oman but for Egypt, so that Esarhaddon, conqueror of the Nile, can style himself king of the kings of Muṣur, Paturisi, and Kūsi and have the scribes gloss the far southwest as Magan and Meluhha, the edge-of-the-world words of the Sargonic golden age.

Makkan is this atlas’s clearest case of a name outliving its referent and then drifting clean off it. For the scribes of Nineveh the word no longer pointed at a place; it pointed at an idea, the uttermost south reachable by ships, and when Egypt became that uttermost south the old name simply slid west to cover it, a deliberate echo of Naram-Sin by kings who wanted his stature. The drift is also the strongest internal evidence that by the seventh century BCE no one in Mesopotamia any longer knew, in any practical way, where old Magan had been, which is exactly the darkness out of which the Achaemenid Maka, treated later on this page, so intriguingly surfaces.

The Old Persian Maka, a province of the Achaemenid Empire, listed at Behistun among the countries that came to Darius and again in the satrapy rolls of Persepolis and Naqsh-e Rustam, where the Maciyā, the men of Maka, also stand carved among the throne-bearing peoples of the empire. The Persepolis Fortification tablets, in the Elamite of the imperial chancellery, know the land as Makkaš and record a satrap and rations for travelers between it and the heartland. The province lay along the southern coasts, and its identification is the dispute this entry’s label declares: many scholars place Maka on the Oman peninsula and read the name as old Magan resurfacing, while others set it in Gedrosia, the Makran coast of the Iranian side, whose modern name may itself continue Maka. The Babylonian version of the royal lists gives the land a wholly different name, Qadê, the term the Assyrians had used for an Omani kingdom with its seat at Izki, which shows that the Achaemenid chancellery did not connect Maka with the cuneiform tradition’s Makkan.

The entry earns its place on this page as the most consequential maybe in the Gulf’s onomastic history. If Maka is Magan, then a Bronze Age trade-name survived a thousand years of silence in local mouths, unheard by any scribe, to re-enter writing from below when a new empire needed a label for the old copper coast, and both shores of the strait have carried it since, Makran on one side and, more remotely, perhaps even Oman’s medieval nisba on the other. If it is not, the resemblance of the names is a coastal coincidence, and Magan’s thread truly ended with the Assyrian archaists. The evidence does not settle the question, and the honest reading of this entry is that a single syllable’s worth of similarity is bearing a very great deal of historical weight.

The Greek Máketa, the great cape that Nearchus, bringing Alexander’s fleet home from the Indus in 325 BCE, sighted jutting from the Arabian shore at the mouth of the Gulf, the promontory known today as Ras Musandam at the tip of the Oman peninsula. The name is preserved in Arrian’s Indica, the account built on Nearchus’s own log: the pilots point the headland out across the strait, name it Maketa, and note it as a source of the cinnamon trade to Assyria, and Nearchus refuses his officers’ urging to steer for it, holding the fleet to the Persian coast. It is a sailor’s landmark, not a country: one fixed point of Arabia as seen from a passing deck.

Its claim to this page is the name’s shape. Máketa looks like Maka with a Greek ending, and Maka may be Magan; if both links hold, then the one time Greek eyes fell on the copper coast of the Bronze Age, the word they wrote down for it still carried the old name, and the chain Magan to Maka to Máketa runs unbroken from Naram-Sin’s war to Alexander’s fleet. Neither link is secure, which is why the label on this entry reads as it does, and the geography invites caution as much as romance, since a cape is not a province. But the possibility is the point: on the strength of two syllables, a Macedonian sailing log may be the last ancient text to name Magan while still pointing, however incidentally, at the actual place.

The Classical Arabic name of the Oman peninsula, ʿUmān, the name the land of Magan has carried from the coming of Islam to the present day. The geographers know it as a fertile and seafaring province on the outer ocean, its ports the outfitting places of the India and China trade; Yāqūt records the etymologies the philologists offered, an eponymous founder or a place in Syria transferred by settlers, none of them certain. The name is in fact older than Arabic writing: the first-century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and Pliny both know an Omana on this coast, so the Arabic form continues a local name already current in the classical geographers half a millennium before the hijra.

ʿUmān closes the page as the third and only surviving thread in the land’s onomastic braid. The Magan of the cuneiform world died with the Gulf trade; the Maka of the Persian chancellery, whatever its ancestry, died with the empire; but Omana, surfacing quietly in a merchants’ pilot-book while those older names were already antiquarian, proved to be the one with the future. There is a fitting symmetry in that: Magan’s name was always a trader’s word, and when the land finally renamed itself for good, it did so in a trade manual. The copper country of Naram-Sin sails on under the name the pilots used.