I have written before about the different names which have been given over the centuries to what is now the largest city in Turkey. What the early Greeks called Byzantion, Latinised to Byzantium, was eventually changed in the 400s AD to Greek Konstantinoupolis, Latin Constantinopolis “the city of Constantine [the Great]” when it became the capital of the Eastern Roman empire and then later of the Christian Greek-speaking Byzantine empire. From the 10th century on, the city came to be known, via Stamboul, as Istanbul, a Turkish name perhaps ultimately also derived from Greek, from the phrase stim boli “to the city”.
However, when the Ottoman empire finally collapsed after its defeat at the hands of the forces of Great Britain, France, Russia and the other allies at the end of the first world war, the capital of the new nation of Turkey was shifted from Istanbul, which now found itself situated on the western edge of the new country, to Ankara, which was at the geographical centre of the Anatolian peninsula and thus of the new country itself.
There were no Turkish-speaking people anywhere near Ankara until relatively recently – and by “relatively” I mean about 1,000 years ago: the first urban civilisations in Anatolia date back to before 1400BC.
The main linguistic Turkification of the Anatolian peninsula, also known as Asia Minor, took place between AD1000 and AD1500, as nomadic Turkic-speaking peoples who had originally lived in Siberia and elsewhere in north-eastern Asia gradually migrated westwards across Central Asia and around the Caspian Sea into the Middle East.
At the time when these new arrivals from the east gradually started penetrating into Asia Minor, the sub-continent was already inhabited by many other peoples including Greeks, Phrygians, Lydians, Persians, Armenians, and Kurds, all speaking Indo-European languages.
Also in the mix were the Galatians, whose capital was Ankara. We know of them through, among other things, St Paul’s biblical Epistle to the Galatians. Rather remarkably, the Galatians were a Celtic group who, living far to the east of all other Celtic peoples, spoke a language closely related to Gaulish, the language of Ancient Gaul in western Europe, as well as more distantly related to Welsh, Cornish, Irish and Scottish Gaelic.
These Galatians were descended from Celts who had invaded Greece in the third century BC, the original Galatian settlers having entered through Thrace. In 25BC, Galatia became a province of the Roman empire, with Ancyra as its capital.
All of these peoples had been preceded into Anatolia by the Hittites, who are mentioned in the Bible as well as the Hebrew scriptures, and whose language was also a very ancient member of the Indo-European language family, which was related to Ancient Greek. Between the 15th and 13th centuries BC, the Hittites became one of the dominant civilisations in the Middle East, which brought them into conflict with the Pharaohs of Egypt. The Hittites’ name for Ankara was Ankuwash.
The city has also been known at times by the variant name of Angora, which has given us our modern name for the wool and other fabrics made from the hair of the Angora goat (now often called mohair) or of the Angora rabbit.
MOHAIR
The word mohair first appeared in English in the 16th century in the form of mokayre, which seems to have been borrowed from Arabic mukayyar “choice, top quality”. In the mid-1600s, folk etymological forms ending in -hair, such as mohair, which were due to a mistaken association with the word hair, began to appear and were quite soon established as the norm.
