Caspians

Ethnic map of the Caucasus in the 5th and 4th centuries BC.

The Caspians (Greek: Κάσπιοι Kaspioi, Aramaic: kspy, Georgian: კასპიელები kaspielebiʿ, Old Armenian: կասպք kaspkʿ, Persian: کاسپیان‎ Kāspiān) were a people of antiquity who dwelled along the southern and southwestern shores of the Caspian Sea, in the region known as Caspiane.[1] Caspian is the English version of the Greek ethnonym Kaspioi, mentioned twice by Herodotus among the Achaemenid satrapies of Darius[2] and applied by Strabo.[3] The name is not attested in Old Iranian.[4]

The Caspians have generally been regarded as a pre-Indo-European people. They have been identified by Ernst Herzfeld with the Kassites,[5] who spoke a language not identified with any other known language group and whose origins have long been the subject of debate. However onomastic evidence bearing on this point has been discovered in Aramaic papyri from Egypt published by P. Grelot,[6] in which several of the Caspian names that are mentioned—and identified under the gentilic כספי kaspai—are in part, etymologically Iranian. The Caspians of the Egyptian papyri must therefore be considered either an Iranian people or strongly under Iranian cultural influence.[4]

References

  1. ↑ "A Cyro Caspium mare vocari incipit; accolunt Caspii" (Pliny, Natural History vi.13); for a Greek ethnonym of the Aegean Sea, however, see the mythic Aegeus.
  2. ↑ Herodotus, iii.92 (with the Pausicae) and 93 (with the Sacae).
  3. ↑ Strabo (11.2.15) gives a lost work of Eratosthenes as his source.
  4. 1 2 Rüdiger Schmitt in Encyclopedia Iranica, s.v. "Caspians". Accessed on April 4, 2010 at:
  5. ↑ Herzfeld, The Persian Empire, (Wiesbaden) 1968:195-99, noted by Rüdiger.
  6. ↑ Grelot, “Notes d'onomastique sur les textes araméens d'Egypte,” Semitica 21, 1971, esp. pp. 101-17, noted by Rüdiger.
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