Rome

Roma is the Latin name of the city on the Tiber and, by extension, of the state and empire it founded, attested continuously in Latin from the archaic period onward. The form is stable across the whole of Latin literature and epigraphy, appearing on the earliest Republican coinage as ROMA and ROMANO and standing without variation from Ennius and Plautus through the imperial poets and the legal corpus. What the name originally meant, however, is not recoverable from Latin itself. Ancient tradition derived Roma from Romulus, the city’s eponymous founder, but the relationship runs the other way: Rōmulus, “the Roman one,” is a back-formation from Roma, not its source, and the founder is widely held to be a figure generated to account for the name rather than one who gave it.

The leading modern view traces Roma to Etruscan, most often to the gentilic Ruma, a clan name attested in the Etruscan cities to Rome’s north, in the period when Rome lay within the Etruscan political orbit and was ruled by the Etruscan Tarquin kings. An older proposal connects it instead to Rumon, an archaic name for the Tiber, which would make Roma “the town on the river.” Both leave the name pre-Latin in origin, and that is the irony at the center of it: the city that made Latin the administrative language of the Western world, whose name Greek would borrow as Rhṓmē and the Semitic, Iranian, and Indian languages would carry east in turn, bore from the start a name its own language could not explain. The Greeks heard in it their word rhṓmē, “strength,” and made the pun into an etymology; the Romans heard in it their founder; the philologist hears in it an Etruscan word that Rome outgrew along with the people who first spoke it.

Rhṓmē is the Greek name of Rome, current in Greek prose from the fourth century BCE, when writers such as Aristotle and the early historians first register the city, and standard thereafter through Polybius, who made the rise of Rome the subject of his Histories, and on into the Greek of the Roman and Byzantine east. The form transcribes Latin Roma with the substitutions Greek phonology required: the initial r takes the rough breathing that Greek imposed on every word-initial rho, so that the name is written Ῥ- and sounded with an aspirate, and the long Latin a of the final syllable is rendered by ē (η) under the regular correspondence between the two languages’ long vowels. Greek writers also preserved a memory that the name was foreign, recording a tangle of foundation stories in which Rome is named for a Trojan woman Rhṓmē, for a son or grandson of Aeneas, or for the city’s own strength.

That last derivation is the one that left a mark, because Greek heard in the borrowed name one of its own words: rhṓmē, “strength, might.” The coincidence was close enough that it hardened into an etymology and then into cult, the personified goddess Rhṓmē receiving temples in the Greek cities of the east as the divine embodiment of Roman power. The pun is false to the name’s origin, which is Italic and pre-Latin, but it shaped the form’s career, for it was this Greek Rhṓmē, aspirate and all, and not the Latin Roma, that the languages further east received: the rough breathing that Greek alone supplied survives as the initial h- of Coptic Hrōmē and Middle Persian Hrōm, while the languages that took the name by other routes kept the bare r-. Rome conquered the Greek world, but it was the Greek form of Rome’s name, carrying a Greek meaning the Romans never intended, that the rest of antiquity inherited.

Kittîm is the name Second Temple Hebrew used for Rome, though it began as something else entirely. The word derives from Kition (Citium), a Phoenician city on Cyprus, and in the older books it names first the Cypriots and then, broadening, the maritime peoples of the western Mediterranean: the “ships of Kittim” of Numbers 24:24 and Daniel 11:30, the “isles of Kittim” of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. By the second and first centuries BCE the term had become the standard Hebrew designation for the menacing fleet from the west, and the community at Qumran applied it specifically and repeatedly to Rome: in the Pesher Habakkuk the Kittîm who sweep up the nations and sacrifice to their standards are unmistakably the Roman legions, and the Greek translators of Daniel already rendered its Kittim of 11:30 as Rhōmaîoi, “Romans.”

The identification is disputed, and honestly so: the base meaning of Kittîm is Cyprus and its coastlands, and across the sources the word is applied variously to Macedonians, to the Seleucid Greeks, and to Rome, with some Qumran manuscripts keeping a Hellenistic referent. That very instability is the entry’s point. Hebrew did not borrow a name for Rome at all; it reached for an existing category, the western sea-people, and let history decide which empire filled it, so that the same word that had meant Cyprus came to mean first the Greek kingdoms and finally Rome as each in turn arrived by sea from the west. Kittîm is also, in the genealogy of Genesis 10, a son of Yāwān, Greece, which places Rome inside the same Ionian family of names as its Greek forebear. Alone among the names on this page, Rome’s Hebrew name is not its own: it inherited Cyprus’s.

Dàqín (大秦) is the name by which the Han histories knew the Roman empire, or more exactly its eastern, Near Eastern face, reached by the overland and maritime trade routes. It is described at length in the Hou Hanshu’s account of the western regions, drawn from reports brought back along the Silk Road around 90–120 CE: a wealthy and orderly realm of walled cities and posting stations, of honest rulers and fair markets, lying at the far western end of the world beyond Anxi, the land of the Parthians. The name recurs through the later dynastic histories, the Weilüe and the Jin shu among them, as the fixed Chinese term for Rome; a separate, phonetic name, Fúlǐn, would later be used for Byzantium.

What sets this name apart from every other on the page is that it does not echo the sound of Roma or Ῥώμη at all. Dàqín means “Great Qin,” and it names Rome by analogy to China’s own first empire, the Qin: the histories present Dàqín as a kind of counterpart-realm at the opposite end of Eurasia, a western mirror whose people the historians found upright in their dealings and fair in their markets, an empire worthy of comparison with the Middle Kingdom itself. Where the Persians named Rome as an enemy, the Syriac Christians as a co-religionist, and the Indians as a coordinate, the Chinese named it as an equal. Alone among the names for Rome, Dàqín does not record how the city sounded; it measures the empire against China and finds it a peer.

Rhōmā is the Syriac name of the city of Rome, written ܪܗܘܡܐ, with the derived gentilic Rhōmāyē (ܪ̈ܗܘܡܝܐ) naming the Romans and, in the usual late antique sense, the Roman empire ruled from Constantinople. As a form of Aramaic written by the eastern churches, Syriac took the name from Greek Ῥώμη and kept the rough breathing of the source as the h of its spelling, the reš and he standing together at the head of the word. It is the ordinary word for Rome across the Syriac corpus, from the Peshitta to the chronicles, and the land of the Romans is named Bēth Rhōmāyē, “the house of the Romans.”

This entry is the link the Arabic name points back to. Classical Arabic al-Rūm did not come straight from Greek but through Aramaic and Syriac Christian usage, and Rhōmāyē is the form that stands in the middle of that road: Greek Rhōmaîoi, “Romans,” reshaped by Aramaic speakers and passed on to Arabic, where it lost the aspirate and raised its vowel to give Rūm. Syriac thus occupies the hinge of the western transmission, the language in which the Greek name for Rome was already worn smooth before Arabic received it, so that when the Qur’an names al-Rūm it repeats a word the Syriac churches had been saying for four centuries. To those churches Rome was the seat of the empire whose creed they shared and whose councils divided them, and their well-worn Rhōmāyē, handed on to the Arab conquest, is the form in which Rome’s name finally passed out of the Christian world and into Islam’s.

Hrōm is the Middle Persian name for Rome and, by extension, for the Roman empire and its eastern Byzantine continuation. It is attested from the beginning of Sasanian epigraphy: in the trilingual inscription of Šāpur I at the Kaʿba-ye Zardošt (c. 260 CE), the king recounts his wars against Hrōm and the three emperors he faced, Gordian killed, Philip made to sue for peace, and Valerian taken with his own hands. The form passes from there into the Pahlavi books, where Hrōm names the western empire and Hrōmāy its people. The initial Hr- marks the word as a borrowing from Greek Ῥώμη rather than from Latin Roma, the rough breathing of the Greek form surfacing as the h- that Latin never had.

In Persian the name almost never denotes a city. Where Latin Roma and Greek Rhṓmē begin from the settlement on the Tiber, Hrōm enters Iranian as the name of an empire and a frontier, the standing adversary across the western border whose defeat a Sasanian king records on stone as the first of his deeds. The same political reading governs the later split the project notes elsewhere, in which Middle Persian distinguishes Yunān, the Greeks of antiquity and philosophy, from Hrōm, the Greek-speaking Roman state at Constantinople: the two halves of the Greco-Roman world are sorted not by language but by whether they are heritage or rival. To the Romans their name began with a founder; to the Persians it began with a war.

frwm is the Parthian name for Rome and the Roman empire, attested in the Parthian text of Šāpur I’s inscription at the Kaʿba-ye Zardošt (c. 260 CE), where it stands beside the Middle Persian Hrōm and the Greek Ῥώμη as one of the three parallel versions of the king’s account of his Roman wars. The same trilingual monument that gives the Middle Persian form gives this one, so that Rome is named three times on a single stone, once in each of the chancellery languages of the victor. The Manichaean Parthian texts later preserve the word in a vowel-marking script, confirming the reading frōm.

The Parthian form is the Iranian sibling of Middle Persian Hrōm, and it preserves a different treatment of the initial: where Middle Persian has Hr-, Parthian has fr-, and the Parthian form is generally taken as the older Iranian rendering from which the Middle Persian descends, and behind it the whole eastern chain that ends in Arabic al-Rūm and New Persian Rūm. The two stand together on Šāpur’s monument as a matched pair, the western and eastern Middle Iranian languages naming the same defeated enemy with the same borrowed Greek word shaped two ways. Here Rome is neither a city nor a founder’s legend but a name cut into rock to record its humbling, listed in three scripts so that no reader of the empire, in any of its tongues, could miss who had won.

Hrōmē is the Coptic name of Rome, taken directly from Greek Ῥώμη and written ϩⲣⲱⲙⲏ in the Sahidic dialect, where the initial ϩ renders the rough breathing of the Greek source. It appears wherever the city is named in Coptic Christian literature, most prominently in the Sahidic New Testament: Paul addresses “those who are in Rome” (ⲛⲉⲧϩⲛ ϩⲣⲱⲙⲏ) at Romans 1:7 and 1:15, and the closing chapter of Acts follows him to the city itself. As a Greek loanword carried into Egyptian by the church, the form belongs to the large stratum of Greek vocabulary that entered Coptic with Christianity rather than to the inherited Egyptian lexicon.

The borrowing produced a collision inside Coptic. The native Egyptian word for “man, human being” is rōme (ⲣⲱⲙⲉ), descended from earlier Egyptian rmṯ, and the imported city-name Hrōmē sits one aspirate away from it, near-homophones of wholly unrelated origin: one the oldest word a speaker had for a person, the other the newest word for the capital of the empire that ruled them. The Egyptian language had named Egypt itself from within, by its black soil, for three thousand years; when it came to name Rome it did not reach for its own resources at all but simply received the Greek sound, aspirate intact, the way the rest of the Christian east did. In Coptic the foreign city shadows the native word for “human,” a near-rhyme that no one designed and that the language only acquired once Rome had become unavoidable.

Romaka is the Sanskrit name for Rome and the Romans, formed from Roma with the common adjectival suffix -ka and reaching India along the channels of Greco-Roman science and Indian Ocean trade rather than of conquest. Its central attestation is astronomical: one of the five canonical schools summarized in Varāhamihira’s Pañcasiddhāntikā (c. 550 CE) is the Romaka-siddhānta, the “Roman doctrine,” a body of calculation ultimately resting on Hellenistic and Roman astronomy and named for the western empire from which it was understood to come. The dictionary tradition records Romaka alongside it as the term for a Roman and for the western region, and the related city-name Romaka-pura, “city of the Romans,” appears in the later astronomical literature.

Rome plays an unexpected role in the Sanskrit cosmographies. In the four-city scheme of the Sūrya-Siddhānta and its successors, the inhabited world is anchored by cardinal points, with Laṅkā on the reference meridian and Romaka set in the far west; Rome becomes a coordinate, the western marker against which longitudes and the lengths of days are reckoned. This is the easternmost reach of the city’s name in the ancient world, and it arrives stripped of everything political. Persia knew Rome as an enemy and Greece as a power; to the Indian astronomers Rome was neither, but a fixed point on the rim of the earth, the place where the sun set on the known world and the day’s reckoning began.

Rōm is the Geʽez name for Rome and the Roman empire, written ሮም and used in the literature of Christian Aksum and its medieval successors. Like the Coptic and Iranian forms it rests on Greek Ῥώμη, transmitted into Ethiopia through the Greek-speaking Christian world with which the Aksumite kingdom was in contact from the fourth century, when the conversion of King ʿEzana brought the realm into the orbit of the eastern church. The collective Rōmāwi names a Roman, and the name carries in Geʽez the same widened sense found across the Christian east, denoting the Roman empire in its Byzantine continuation as much as the city on the Tiber.

The Geʽez name draws a contrast with the other eastern names for Rome on this page. To Sasanian Persia, Hrōm was the adversary across the frontier; to early Islam, al-Rūm were the rival power to the north. Aksum stood in a third relation: a Christian kingdom on the Red Sea, joined to the Roman world by trade through the port of Adulis and by a shared faith, for whom Rōm named less an enemy than the great co-religionist empire beyond the sea. The same borrowed Greek syllable could mean rival or partner depending on who received it, and in Geʽez, alone among the eastern names assembled here, Rome is named by a people who counted themselves on its side.

al-Rūm is the Classical Arabic name for the Romans and the Roman state, which by the rise of Islam meant the surviving eastern empire ruled from Constantinople. It is the title of the thirtieth sura of the Qur’an, Sūrat al-Rūm, whose opening verses refer to a defeat of al-Rūm by the Persians and foretell their coming victory, set against the Byzantine-Sasanian wars of the early seventh century. The collective al-Rūm denotes the people and the realm; the city of Rome itself is named Rūmiya (رومية). The form descends from Greek Ῥωμαῖοι, “Romans,” carried into Arabic through Aramaic and Syriac usage, with the Greek ō raised to ū and the aspirate of the source lost along the way.

From the Arabic side, the same political sense of Rome’s name governs the word as in the Iranian world. al-Rūm is not primarily a city but a people and a power, the Christian empire to the north and west, and Arabic carries the cultural-versus-political distinction in parallel with Middle Persian: al-Yūnān are the ancient Greeks of philosophy and learning, while al-Rūm are the Greek-speaking Romans of the contemporary Byzantine state. The same population is sorted into two names by epoch and posture, the Greeks one inherits wisdom from and the Romans one shares a border and a frontier war with. That a single sura should be named for them, and should stake a prophecy on the outcome of their next campaign, measures how large al-Rūm loomed on the seventh-century horizon: not a far-off antiquity but the great power next door.