Caspians
The Caspians (Persian: کاسپیها, Kaspyn; Greek: Κάσπιοι, Káspioi; Aramaic: ܟܣܦܝ, kspy; Old Armenian: Կասպք, Kaspk’;[1] Latin: Caspi, Caspiani) were an Iranic people of antiquity who dwelt along the southwestern shores of the Caspian Sea, in the region known as Caspiane.[2] Caspian is the English version of the Greek ethnonym Kaspioi, mentioned twice by Herodotus among the Achaemenid satrapies of Darius the Great[3] and applied by Strabo.[4] The name is attested in Old Iranian.[5] The successor of these people are the Iranic ethnic groups of Gilaks & Talysh peoples who live on the south shores of the Caspian Sea.
The Caspians have generally been regarded as a Indo-European Iranic people. 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 are therefore generally considered as an Iranian people.[5]
In the 5th century BC, during the Iranian rule in Egypt, a regiment (Aramaic degel) of Caspians was stationed in Elephantine, as attested in the Elephantine papyri. They are called kspy in Aramaic and shared their regiment with Khwarezmians, Bactrians and other Iranian peoples.[7]
The Caspians are called Caspiani in Mela's De situ orbis, Caspi in Pliny's Natural History, and Caspiadae in Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica. In the last work, the Caspians are allies of King Perses of Colchis and appear amongst the Iranic Scythian peoples.[8] They are said to used to have fighting dogs that they take to their graves. This might in fact reflect a variant of the Zoroastrian custom of sky burial, one in which the deceased is left for the dogs to devour.[9]
The Caspiadeans reappear in the medieval Historia de via Hierosolymitana among the people arrayed against the forces of the First Crusade (1096–1099). The anonymous poet, drawing on Flaccus, probably sought to connect the Iranic Turks of the Seljuk dynasty, the Crusaders' actual enemy, with the ancient Iranic Scythians.[10]
References
[edit]- ^ Robert H. Hewsen. The Geography of Ananias of Širak: Ašxarhacʻoycʻ, the Long and the Short Recensions. — Reichert, 1992. — P. 254.
- ^ "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.
- ^ Herodotus, iii.92 (with the Pausicae) and 93 (with the Sacae).
- ^ Strabo (11.2.15) gives a lost work of Eratosthenes as his source.
- ^ a b Rüdiger Schmitt, Caspians, in Encyclopedia Iranica. Accessed on 4 April 2010.
- ^ Grelot, “Notes d'onomastique sur les textes araméens d'Egypte,” Semitica 21, 1971, esp. pp. 101–17, noted by Rüdiger.
- ^ Karel van der Toorn (2016), "Ethnicity at Elephantine: Jews, Arameans, Caspians", Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, 43(2), 147–164. doi:10.1080/03344355.2016.1215532
- ^ Smith, William (1849). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. C.C. Little and J. Brown. p. 272.
- ^ Henri J. W. Wijsman (ed.), Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica, Book VI: A Commentary (Brill, 2000), p. 59.
- ^ Nicholas Morton, Encountering Islam on the First Crusade (Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 203.