Miletus

Milawanda, written URU mi-la-wa-an-da (with the geminate variant Millawanda) in the cuneiform of the Hittite archives, was a port on the western Anatolian coast in the orbit of Aḫḫiyawa, the Mycenaean Greek power across the sea, and a recurring concern of the Hittite kings: the Tawagalawa and Milawata letters show it slipping between Hittite and Aḫḫiyawan control in the thirteenth century BCE. It is the Bronze Age city on the site of, or beside, later Miletus.

Milawanda is marked disputed because, like Apaša for Ephesus, the equation with the Greek city is an identification rather than a documented statement; but it is among the most secure such equations in the whole field. The name matches closely, Milawanda yielding Milātos and so Mílētos; the Hittite texts put it on the coast under Aḫḫiyawan influence exactly where Miletus stands; and the Bronze Age levels at Miletus are full of Minoan and then Mycenaean material, a Greek foothold on the Anatolian shore. Milawanda is the place where the Hittite and Mycenaean worlds met and rubbed, and it is the same place the Greeks would call Miletus, named in the cuneiform of the empire that watched the Greeks arrive.

In the Linear B tablets of Pylos, Miletus appears not as a place but as a people: the mi-ra-ti-ja, the “women of Miletus,” Milātiai, listed among the dependent or captive women of the palace alongside women of Knidos, Lemnos, and other places of the eastern Aegean and Anatolian coast. The bare place-name is not attested in Linear B; what survives is the ethnic, the women named by where they came from, the oldest trace of the name of Miletus in any Greek writing.

mi-ra-ti-ja is a small entry with a large implication. That a palace in the Peloponnese should list women from Miletus among its workforce is direct evidence of Mycenaean reach across the Aegean to the Anatolian coast, the same contact the Hittite Milawanda records from the other side. And the form preserves the Bronze Age vocalism: Milāt-, with the a that classical Greek would raise to the ē of Mílētos, the same older vowel kept in the Cretan town of Milatos. The name of Miletus enters Greek, three centuries before the alphabet, attached to the women carried off from it.

The Greek name of the city, Mílētos, borne by the greatest of the Ionian cities, the home of Thales and the mother of colonies from the Hellespont to the Black Sea. Like the other names of the western Anatolian seaboard it is pre-Greek and Anatolian in origin, taken over by the Ionian settlers from the older inhabitants of the coast rather than coined in Greek.

Mílētos is the head of a family with an unusually deep root. Forward it gives the Latin Miletus and the European forms; backward it reaches into the Bronze Age twice over, as the Hittite Milawanda and as the Mycenaean Greek mi-ra-ti-ja. The classical ē of Mílētos, against the a of the Bronze Age Milāt- preserved in the Linear B spelling and in the Cretan town Milatos, marks the dialect change that separates the city’s Bronze Age name from its classical one; the name is the same, worn by a thousand years of Greek mouths between the Pylos tablets and Herodotus.

The Latin name of the city, Mīlētus, taken from the Greek, the form under which Rome knew the old Ionian metropolis, by then a venerable Greek city of the province of Asia famous for its philosophers, its wool, and its colonies. Pliny and Mela list it among the great cities of the Ionian coast.

Mīlētus is the ordinary western link of the family, the Greek name in Latin dress, and through it Mílētos reached the modern languages as “Miletus.” Its interest lies less in itself than in what it sits beside: on this page the Latin form is the latest and plainest of the family, the end of a line that runs back through classical Greek to two separate Bronze Age scripts. Rome’s name for Miletus is the same word the Pylos scribes pressed into clay and the Hittite kings cut in cuneiform, smoothed by transmission into the familiar classical shape.