From Pontos to Black Sea: Prejudices, Hypothesizes and Facts.


The aims of this article are to investigate the term π?ντος and its meaning in antiquity, and to follow the development of that word to the term Black Sea. To begin with, why is it that this particular word was used in ancient Greek for the Black Sea? Why has this body of water been known by so many different names throughout time? Ancient and modern prejudices, hypothesizes and facts behind the process of naming this body of water, beginning with Pontos and ending with the Black Sea.

The Black Sea was known by many names in antiquity. The earliest Greek authors of the Homeric age took the Pontic Sea to be second ocean, and for that reason especially they called it simply Pontos. However, the term π?ντος could be non-Greek in origin. It is connected with the root pons, pont - or bent -, which is common to such languages as Latin, Thracian and Armenian. Greeks also used the adjective-epithet aksenos (inhospitable) to describe the sea. This term may have been adopted from a word of Old Iranian-Avestan origin, axšaena, meaning dark or black, referring to the darkness of its waters, as in the modern name Black Sea. It may also have reflected sailors’ apprehension about sailing its stormy waters, as well as the simple fact that the water itself, because of the sea’s great depth, appears darker than the shallower Mediterranean. Subsequently the euphemistic, but secondary, version euksenos (hospitable) was clearly coined by the earliest Greek colonizers to describe the sea. However, later in the classical world, the name Pontos was not confined only the sea, but was also used as a geographical term for the coast around it. The adjectival form of pontikos, ponticus could also be used to describe animals, plants, individuals and groups of people, who dwelt around the sea.

The most common name in Byzantine sources was simply Pontos (the sea). That usage made its way also into Arabic texts as Bahri Bundus, which amounts to the intriguingly redundant “Sea Sea”. But many other names were in use in the Middle Ages, especially in Arabic and Ottoman writings, and were often associated with particularly prominent cities, whence Sea of Trabzon and Sea of Constantinopolis, etc. The destination “Great Sea” also appears in the Middle Ages in various forms, including the Italian Mare Maius or Mare Maggiore. Still other names were derived from whichever group happened to dominate around the coasts in a particular time, such as Scythian Sea, Sarmatian Sea, and Sea of the Khazars, of the Bulgars, of the Georgians, etc.

Compared to all these versions, the term “Black Sea” is rather young. It appears already in early Ottoman sources in various forms. Its first appearance in western European language comes at the end of the fourteenth century, although it did not receive broad currency at that time. However, three centuries later it started to be used widely throughout the entire word. Since then in any language the name of the sea has same meaning as “Black Sea”.