Sidon

The Ugaritic name of the city, Ṣdn, written in the alphabetic cuneiform of Ugarit and attested in its tablets, where Sidon appears among the Phoenician harbor cities of Ugarit’s coastal world. It is the Bronze Age West Semitic form, contemporary with the Akkadian Ṣiduna of the Amarna letters, and like every Semitic name of the city it opens with the emphatic ṣ.

Ṣdn sets Sidon’s name beside Tyre’s at their earliest alphabetic stage, the two neighbors named in the same Ugaritic archives with the same initial consonant. The Bronze Age form is already the name that Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic would carry down unchanged; what makes Sidon’s later history distinctive is only what the Greeks did with that ṣ, hearing in it the plain s of Sidṓn where for Tyre they heard a t. At Ugarit, before any Greek had written either name, the two cities were simply Ṣdn and Ṣr.

The Akkadian name for the city, Ṣiduna, written ṣi-du-na and keeping the emphatic ṣ of the Phoenician. In the Amarna letters Zimreddi, ruler of Ṣiduna, writes to the Egyptian court, a rival to Abimilki of Tyre in the local rivalries of the fourteenth century BCE; in the Assyrian royal inscriptions the Sidonians, Ṣidunaya, are a recurrent people of the conquered coast. The form is the same name as the Phoenician Ṣīdūn, in the cuneiform of Mesopotamia.

Ṣiduna anchors the Semitic branch in the Bronze Age, the city’s name set down by the scribes of empire long before any Greek wrote it. Beside its sister-entry on the Tyre page, the Akkadian Ṣurru, it shows the two cities as the cuneiform world knew them, a matched pair of emphatic-ṣ names on the Phoenician shore. Both kept the consonant intact for a millennium of Near Eastern record; only at the Greek frontier would the two part ways.

The Hebrew name for the city, Ṣīdōn, with the emphatic ṣ, the city Genesis names as the firstborn son of Canaan and so the eldest of the Phoenician foundations. Sidon is the marker of the northern edge of Canaanite territory, the home of the goddess Astarte whom the Bible calls the “abomination of the Sidonians,” and a recurrent name in the prophets’ oracles against Phoenicia. The Israelites used “Sidonians” broadly for the Phoenician traders and craftsmen they dealt with.

Ṣīdōn keeps the city firmly in the Semitic branch, its ṣ the same as the Phoenician neighbors’. As “the firstborn of Canaan,” it carries a genealogical priority that the Bible grants Sidon over Tyre, a memory perhaps of the centuries when Sidon, not Tyre, led the Phoenician cities. On a page about a single consonant’s two fates, the Hebrew is the form that holds the original sound most familiarly for the Western reader, the Sidon of English Bibles still recognizably this Ṣīdōn.

The endonym for the city in the language of its people, Ṣīdūn, written ṣdn in the Phoenician alphabet and most plausibly derived from a root meaning “to fish” or “to hunt,” giving a sense like “fishery.” It appears on the city’s own royal inscriptions, including the famous sarcophagus of King Eshmunazar, and on its coinage. So dominant was Sidon among the Phoenician cities that Ṣīdūn could stand for the Phoenicians at large; the Bible’s “Sidonians” often means Phoenicians in general.

Ṣīdūn is the headwater of every form on this page, and the keeper of the consonant that makes the page’s chief point. Like Tyre’s Ṣūr, it begins with the emphatic ṣ, and across the Semitic languages that ṣ holds firm. The interest lies in what the Greeks did with it: where they turned the identical sound in Ṣūr into a t, they kept it in Ṣīdūn as an s. The fate of the two sister-cities’ names in the West turns on the single decision, made twice and differently, of how to hear one Phoenician consonant.

The Greek name for the city, Sidṓn, taken from the Phoenician Ṣīdūn with the emphatic ṣ rendered as a plain s. Sidon is the Phoenician city Homer knows best: Menelaus brings treasures from Sidṓn, and the Sidonians, Sidónioi, are the master metalworkers of the epics, makers of the finely wrought silver bowls that pass as kingly gifts. Through Homer and the later Greeks the city was known under this name across the Mediterranean.

Sidṓn is the entry that completes this page’s contrast with Tyre. The Greeks met the two cities’ names beginning with the very same Phoenician consonant, the emphatic ṣ, and chose differently for each: Ṣūr they made Týros, with a t, but Ṣīdūn they made Sidṓn, with an s. There is no fully settled reason for the divergence, and it may simply record two separate moments of borrowing; but the result is that the West inherited one sister-city under a t and the other under an s, a small permanent asymmetry in how Europe names the Phoenician coast.

The Latin name for the city, Sidōn, taken from the Greek Sidṓn and keeping the s. Virgil makes Dido a Sidonia, a woman of Sidon, recalling the Phoenician origins of Carthage; the adjective Sidonius came to mean “Phoenician” generally, and even, by way of the city’s purple, a poetic word for the color. Latin carried the name and its associations into the Romance and other European languages, giving the modern Sidon.

Sidōn is the Western terminus of the s-branch, the form English took. Set beside the Latin Tyrus on the Tyre page, it shows the asymmetry the Greeks introduced now fixed and inherited: two neighboring Phoenician cities whose names began alike enter the Western tradition with different initial consonants, Tyrus with a t and Sidon with an s, and the modern atlas keeps them so. The single Phoenician sound that distinguished neither city in its own land became, in the languages of Europe, two different letters.

The Syriac name for the city, Ṣidon, the Semitic name continued in the Aramaic of the Syriac churches with its emphatic ṣ intact. The Peshitta uses it where the Hebrew has Ṣīdōn, in the Table of Nations, where Sidon is again “the firstborn of Canaan,” and in the Gospels’ “Tyre and Sidon.” Lying in the Aramaic-speaking Levant, the city kept its old emphatic name as a living local word, the form the Syriac church knew.

Ṣidon belongs to the Semitic branch, faithful to the ṣ, and stands opposite the Greek-derived Sidṓn of the western church. Here the divergence that the Greeks introduced is laid bare within Christendom itself: the same city is Ṣidon with an emphatic sibilant in the Syriac Bible and Sidon with a plain s in the Greek and Latin one, the eastern and western churches naming one Phoenician town with two different first consonants, as they do for Tyre.

The Babylonian Aramaic name of the city, Ṣaidan, the form Sidon takes in the Talmud and the rabbinic literature, where it appears in the geography of the northern coast alongside Tyre. The spelling ṣydn, with the yod, reflects a vocalization with the diphthong that also stands behind the later Arabic Ṣaydā, a step beyond the older Ṣīdōn.

Ṣaidan is the rabbinic form, and it sits one sound-change closer to the modern name than the biblical Ṣīdōn. Where Hebrew and the Bronze Age forms have a long ī, the Babylonian Aramaic shows the ay diphthong that Arabic would inherit as Ṣaydā, the name of the town today; the emphatic ṣ, as everywhere in the Semitic line, is untouched. Sidon’s name changes only in its vowels as it descends, and the rabbis of Babylonia already pronounce it almost as the modern Lebanese coast does.

The Geʿez name for the city, Sidona, carried into Ethiopic from the Greek Sidṓn of the Septuagint and the New Testament. Like its companion Ṭiros on the Tyre page, it follows the Greek rather than the Semitic form, here with the plain s the Greeks supplied; it appears in the Ethiopic scriptures wherever “Tyre and Sidon” are named together as the Phoenician coast Jesus visited.

Sidona is the s-branch reaching the Ethiopian highlands, the Greek form of the name carried south by the Bible. The pairing with Ṭiros preserves, in Geʿez, the very asymmetry the Greeks created: a Semitic language receiving two neighboring Semitic city-names through Greek, and so calling them Ṭiros and Sidona, with a t and an s, when its own emphatic ṣ could have rendered both alike. The Greek division of one Phoenician sound followed the names all the way to Ethiopia.

The Arabic name for the city, Ṣaydā, the Semitic name come down to the present with its emphatic ṣ and, by a happy chance, an audible link to its likely meaning: the Arabic word ṣayd means “hunting, fishing, game,” exactly the sense from which the ancient Ṣīdūn, “fishery,” is thought to derive. After the Muslim conquest Ṣaydā remained a notable port of the Lebanese coast, described by the geographers and fortified in the Crusades; it is the name the town bears today.

Ṣaydā is the ṣ-branch alive in the present, the Eastern continuation of the name on the very ground it began. As with Tyre, where the Arabic Ṣūr still names the living town while Tyre survives in Western books, here the Arabic Ṣaydā holds the city’s original emphatic name in daily use, and the Greek-derived Sidon belongs to the maps and the scriptures of the West. The fishery on the Phoenician shore is still, to those who live there, Ṣaydā.