Tyre

The Ugaritic name of the city, Ṣr, written in the alphabetic cuneiform of Ugarit and attested in its economic and administrative tablets, where Tyre appears among the coastal cities of the Levantine seaboard with which Ugarit dealt. It is the Bronze Age West Semitic form of the name, contemporary with the Akkadian Ṣurru of the Amarna letters, and keeps the emphatic initial ṣ that the whole Semitic tradition preserves.

Ṣr is the oldest of the alphabetic spellings on this page, and it anchors the city’s name a step deeper in time than the Phoenician. Ugaritic and Phoenician wrote the same Northwest Semitic word for “rock” with the same emphatic consonant centuries apart, ṣr and Ṣūr, and the Bronze Age form already shows the shape the Greeks would later flatten into Týros: the consonant that the East kept and the West lost was there from the start.

The Akkadian name for the city, Ṣurru, keeping the emphatic ṣ of the Semitic original. In the Amarna letters of the fourteenth century BCE the city’s ruler Abimilki writes repeatedly to the Egyptian court from Ṣurru, begging for water and wood and complaining of his rival at Sidon; in the Assyrian royal annals of centuries later Ṣurru is the island-fortress that the great kings besieged but could rarely take. The form coincides with the ordinary Akkadian word ṣurru, “flint, hard stone,” the same notion of rock that underlies the name.

Ṣurru is the oldest securely written form on the page and a solid anchor for the Semitic branch. Through the long record of Mesopotamian contact with the Levant, from Bronze Age diplomacy to the campaigns of Assyria, the city is always Ṣurru, the emphatic sibilant never wavering. It is exactly this consonant, faithfully kept in cuneiform for seven hundred years, that the Greeks would later fail to reproduce, turning the rock of Ṣurru into the Týros of the West.

The Hebrew name for the city, Ṣōr, the same Semitic “rock” as the Phoenician, with the emphatic ṣ. Tyre is a constant presence in the Hebrew Bible: its king Hiram supplies cedar and craftsmen for Solomon’s temple; its merchants are the traders of the world; and it is the subject of one of the most extended and majestic of the prophetic oracles, Ezekiel’s lament over the great ship of Ṣōr foundering at sea, laden with all the wealth of the nations. The city is at once Israel’s commercial partner and a type of proud worldly splendor brought low.

Ṣōr sits at the center of the Semitic branch, the form in which the city entered the scriptures that carried its fame to the world. The Hebrew kept the rock intact, ṣ and all, as the Phoenician neighbors did, so that the prophets’ Ṣōr and the Tyrians’ own Ṣūr were essentially one word. It was only when this name passed out of the Semitic world, into Greek, that the rock began to change its shape.

The endonym for the city in the language of its own people, Ṣūr, the Phoenician word for “rock,” after the island of rock on which Tyre was built. It is written ṣr in the consonantal Phoenician alphabet and appears on the city’s own coins and inscriptions. The same word names the rocky site and the city upon it, a plain geographic description that became the proper name of one of the ancient Mediterranean’s great powers.

Ṣūr is the headwater of every other form on this page, and the source of the page’s central split. Carried unchanged across the Semitic languages, with its emphatic ṣ intact, it is also the form the Greeks reshaped into Týros, beginning the Western branch. From this one Phoenician word, “rock,” descend both the Ṣūr that still names the town in Arabic and the Tyre of English maps, the same island-name traveling east and west out of the harbor that launched Carthage.

The Greek name for the city, Týros, taken from the Phoenician Ṣūr but with the emphatic ṣ rendered as a plain t, a substitution Greek made because it had no sound matching the Semitic emphatic sibilant. Herodotus visited Tyre, he says, to ask the priests of its great temple of Heracles how old the city was, and was told it had stood since the founding of the temple, twenty-three hundred years before; under this name the city enters Greek history and geography.

Týros is the head of the Western branch, the moment the rock changes its consonant. The Greeks, hearing the Phoenician Ṣūr, had no ṣ to give back and reached for t, and the choice has shaped the city’s name in every European language since. From this single Greek adaptation come Latin Tyrus, English Tyre, and the adjective Tyrian, as in Tyrian purple, so that the West knows the city, its dye, and its alphabet-bearing traders all under a t that the city itself never had.

The Latin name for the city, Tyrus, taken from the Greek Týros and continuing the Western t. Rome knew Tyre as the mother-city of its great enemy Carthage, and Virgil makes the Carthaginians Tyrii, Tyrians, in the Aeneid; the city’s purple, Tyrium, was a byword for imperial luxury. Through Latin the name spread into the Romance and other European languages and reached English as Tyre.

Tyrus fixed the Western form for the modern world. The adjective Tyrius gave English Tyrian, the deep red-purple of the murex dye that was Tyre’s most famous export, so that the city’s name survives in English not only as a place but as a color. The rock of the Phoenicians, having lost its emphatic ṣ to Greek and passed through Latin, ends as the Tyre of the atlas and the Tyrian of the dyer’s vocabulary, a Semitic island-name turned, in the West, into a shade of royal purple.

The Syriac name for the city, Ṣur, the Semitic “rock” continued in the Aramaic of the Syriac churches with its emphatic ṣ. It renders Tyre throughout the Peshitta, in Ezekiel’s oracle and in the Gospels, where Jesus journeys to the region of Tyre and Sidon and declares that Tyre and Sidon would have repented had they seen the works done in Galilee. Lying within the Aramaic-speaking Levant, the city kept its old name as a living local word.

Ṣur is the Semitic branch carried into the Christian East, faithful to the rock. While the Greek-speaking church to its west called the city Týros, the Syriac church, sharing the language and the soil of Phoenicia, said Ṣur, exactly as the Phoenicians had. The single consonant that distinguishes the two traditions, the emphatic ṣ against the Greek t, runs right through the middle of Christendom, the same city named two ways on either side of the line between Greek and Aramaic.

The Babylonian Aramaic name of the city, Ṣor, the form Tyre takes in the Talmud, where it figures in the geography of the northern coast, most memorably in Sullam Ṣor, “the Ladder of Tyre,” the headland that the rabbis took as a boundary of the Land of Israel, and in the standard of the Tyrian coinage used for sacred dues. The spelling keeps the emphatic ṣ of the older Semitic name unchanged.

Ṣor carries the emphatic consonant into the latest of the Semitic languages on this page. From Bronze Age Ugaritic Ṣr through Phoenician, Akkadian, and Hebrew to the Aramaic of the rabbinic academies, the initial ṣ held for two thousand years, and it holds still in the Modern Hebrew Ṣor and the Arabic Ṣūr that name the town today. The East never gave up the sound that the Greeks could not hear; Tyre is a t only to those who received it through Athens and Rome.

The Geʿez name for the city, Ṭiros, carried into Ethiopic from the Greek Týros of the Septuagint and the New Testament. It follows the Western branch, beginning with a t (the emphatic ṭ) rather than the Semitic ṣ, because the Ethiopic scriptures received the name through Greek rather than directly from the Semitic Levant. It appears in the Ethiopic Ezekiel and in the Gospel passages on Tyre and Sidon.

Ṭiros is a small irony of transmission: a Semitic language receiving a Semitic name in its Greek disguise. Geʿez is a cousin of Phoenician and Hebrew and has its own emphatic ṣ; had it taken the name directly from the Levant it might have said something like Ṣur. Instead it took it from the Greek Bible, and so an Ethiopian reader meets the rock of Tyre under the Western t, the consonant the Greeks supplied, rather than the ṣ that Geʿez itself possessed all along.

The Arabic name for the city, Ṣūr, the same Semitic “rock,” unbroken from the Phoenician through the long Aramaic-speaking centuries into Arabic, with the emphatic ṣ intact. After the Muslim conquest Ṣūr remained a notable port of the Syrian coast, and the geographers describe it on its peninsula, the old island now joined to the shore by Alexander’s silted causeway. It is the name the town bears to this day.

Ṣūr is the Semitic branch come down to the present. Of the two roads the name traveled, it is the Eastern one, the rock kept faithfully in the languages of the Levant, that still names the living town; Tyre survives in Western books and on Western maps, but on the ground, where the city actually stands, it is Ṣūr. The oldest name has outlasted the more famous one in the very place that bore them both.