CS Knowledge Base

The ancient Cappadocian language was spoken during antiquity in the historical region of Cappadocia in central Anatolia. There are no known texts in Cappadocian, and the extant knowledge about the language mostly derives from contemporary references in Hellenistic Greek texts. It was likely an Anatolian language related to Luwian. After the sixth century AD, Cappadocian became extinct, being replaced by Greek and eventually Turkish. Linguistically, Cappadocian is not Greek and has had no demonstrable influence on the modern variety of Cappadocian Greek.

Cappadocia is a historical region in Anatolia in modern-day Turkey. The first-century-BC Greek geographer Strabo defines Cappadocia as being bounded by the "Cilician Taurus" to the south, Armenia and Colchis to the east, the Euxine to the north, and tribes of Paphlagonians and Galatians to the west. During the Bronze Age (c. 1600 – c. 1200 BC), Cappadocia was dominated by the Hittite Empire, until it collapsed in the Bronze Age collapse.^[1] At the start of the Iron Age in the tenth century BC, a loose group of polities known as Tabal emerged in Cappadocia and the southern Anatolian plateau. Tabal is not a precise geopolitical term but designates the area in central Anatolia displaying Syro-Anatolian culture, including the usage of Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions.^[2]

The Syro-Anatolian polities survived until around the turn of the seventh century BC, when the kingdom of Phrygia and the Assyrian Empire expanded from the west and east into central Anatolia.^[3] By the sixth century BC, any traces of polities using Luwian as a written language had disappeared.^[4] By the fifth century BC, Cappadocia had become a satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire under Darius the Great. In the fourth century BC, the final satrap of Cappadocia, Ariathes, founded the Kingdom of Cappadocia, defying Alexander the Great, who had conquered Anatolia. The Ariarathid dynasty ruled the Kingdom of Cappadocia until it was annexed as a Roman province in 17 AD.^[5] Despite being Persian in origin, Ariarathid rulers were philhellene, promoting the Greek culture and language. However, Cappadocian remained spoken as a language into the first millennium AD.^[6]

There are no known extant texts written in Cappadocian, making it unattested. Thus, it cannot be securely classified. The only positive statement about Cappadocian's affiliation comes from Strabo, who states that it was related to "Cataonian", another unattested language in the neighboring region of Cataonia.^[7] However, Strabo notes that by his time, the people of Cataonia had been completely assimilated into Cappadocian culture, no longer retaining any distinctive language.^[8]

Cappadocian is not closely related to Greek. The fourth-century-AD theologian Gregory of Nyssa, one of the Cappadocian Fathers, cites words for heaven in various languages:^[9]

ἡμεῖς οὐρανὸν τοῦτο λέγομεν, σαμαΐμ ὁ Ἑβραῖος, ὁ Ῥωμαῖος κελούμ, καὶ ἄλλως ὁ Σύρος, ὁ Μῆδος, ὁ Καππαδόκης, ὁ Μαυρούσιος, ὁ Σκύθης, ὁ Θρᾷξ, ὁ Aἰγύπτιος

We call it ouranós, the Hebrew šamáyim, the Roman caelumcode: lat promoted to code: la , and still otherwise the Syrian, the Mede, the Cappadocian, the Moor, the Scythian, the Thracian, the Egyptian.

The linguist Mark Janse concludes from this that Cappadocian was not Greek or any of the other languages mentioned, and that it was also unlikely that Cappadocian was a Northwest Semitic language or closely related to Aramaic, since the Cappadocian fathers seem to be unfamiliar with Aramaic. For example, in the quote above, Gregory of Nyssa seems to be unaware that the Aramaic word for heaven, šěmayyâ, was very similar to the Hebrew šamáyim.^[10]

Cappadocian is possibly a descendant or relative of the Luwian language spoken in the Neo-Hittite kingdom of Tabal, which was spoken in the same region. This would make it part of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European languages. According to Mark Janse, this is the most likely hypothesis, but the evidence remains unclear.^[11] Cappadocia had previously been part of the Hittite Empire and was near several other contemporary Anatolian languages, including Lycian, Pisidian, and Sidetic. The people of Cappadocia were also known as Leucosyri 'White Syrians' in Greek sources, which Janse connects to the Hittite dominance of Syria during the Bronze Age. In the Old Babylonian and Middle Babylonian periods of Akkadian, the term māt Ḫatti 'land of the Hittites' had also been used to denote Cappadocia, but came to denote Syria in the Neo-Babylonian period starting in the first millennium BC.^[12] The linguist Zsolt Simon identifies the region of sura—mentioned in Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions—with Cappadocia on the basis of the Greek term.^[13]

Basil of Caesarea, one of the Cappadocian fathers, wrote that in Greek, the wording of the doxology may vary between "with (σύν) God's Holy Spirit", and "and (καί) God's Holy spirit", but in his native Cappadocian language, the use of "and" instead of "with" is obligatory.^[14]

Some words have been attributed a Cappadocian origin by Greek writers in glosses:

• The Cappadocians used the word μῶλυ (mōlu) for a kind of plant, which has been suggested to be Peganum harmala, the wild rue.^[15] In commenting on this word, Zsolt Simon equates Cappadocian with Luwian, presuming that the word is of Luwian origin.^[16]
• According to the sixth-century lexicographer Hesychius of Alexandria, νηεξίς (nēexis) is a word for a Cappadocian rodent.^[15]
• In a treatise on baking, Chrysippus of Tyana describes a type of Cappadocian pastry named πλίκιον (plikion).^[17] It has been compared to the Hittite word punniki, which also refers to a kind of baked good.^[18]
• The third-century-AD writer Athenaeus writes: "In Cappadocia, I emptied three times a golden κόνδυ kondu containing three cotyles, full."^[19] This word has been compared with the Hittite word kankur, which also denotes a large drinking vessel of some kind, but Simon, labeling the Greek word as "of unknown origin", is skeptical of the connection to Hittite.^[20]
• In the ninth-century Byzantine encyclopedia Etymologicum Genuinum, the word κομμανα (kommana) is glossed as 'shady' in the related Cataonian language, and is cited as the etymology for the names of the kingdom of Commagene and the city of Comana.^[19] This gloss has been compared with the Hittite word kumarra, which was thought to mean 'shade, darkness'. The Hittite word is now known to mean 'mist, fog', but still considered a plausible origin for the Cataonian word by the historian Oliviere Casabonne.^[21]

It is uncertain when Cappadocian became extinct. References to the language by the Cappadocian fathers confirm that it was alive in the fourth century AD, but there are no known sources that discuss the language of the Cappadocians, native or otherwise, in the second half of the first millennium.^[24] The historian Speros Vryonis writes that by the 6th century, Greek had replaced the indigenous languages of western and central Anatolia, including Cappadocia,^[25] dismissing claims that any had survived into the second millennium for being without evidence.^[26]