Pontus and Chaldia at the time of the Greeks

Pontus:

Pontus (Greek: “sea”) is a historical Greek designation for a region on the southern coast of the Black Sea, located in modern-day northeastern Turkey. The name was applied to the coastal region in antiquity by the Greeks who colonized the area, and derived from the Greek name of the Black Sea: Pontos Euxeinos (“Hospitable Sea”), or simply Pontos.

Having originally no specific name, the region east of the river Halys was spoken of as the country “on the [Euxeinos] Pontos”, and hence acquired the name of Pontus, which is first found in Xenophon’s Anabasis.

The extent of the region varied through the ages, but generally it extended from the borders of Colchis (modern Georgia) until well into Paphlagonia in the west, with varying amounts of hinterland. Several states and provinces bearing the name of Pontus or variants thereof were established in the region in Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine times.

Pontus is known for the residence of the Amazons, with the name Amasia not only used for a city (Amasya) but for all of Pontus in Greek mythology. Archaeological research shows that Amasya was first settled in 5500 BC by the Hittites and subsequently by Phrygians, Cimmerians, Lydians, Persians, Armenians.

Amasya, the Amaseia of antiquity, is the capital of the administrative district of Amasya Province in northern Turkey. It is located in the mountains above the Black Sea coast, in a narrow valley along the banks of the Yeşilırmak River.

Amasya is one of the provinces in north-central Anatolia Turkey which is distinct for its natural setup and historical values. Located in a narrow cleft of the Yesilirmak (Iris) river, it has a past of 7,500 years during which many civilizations left remains.

Although near the Black Sea, this area is high above the coast and has an inland climate, well-suited to growing apples, for which the province of Amasya is famed. Amasya is set apart from the rest of Anatolia in its tight mountain valley and hides its beauty.

In antiquity, Amaseia was a fortified city high on the cliffs above the river. It has a long history as provincial capital, a wealthy city producing kings and princes, artists, scientists, poets and thinkers, from the kings of Pontus, through Strabo the geographer, to many generations of the Ottoman imperial dynasty, and up to being the location of an important moment in the life of Ataturk.

According to Strabo the Greek name comes from Amasis, the queen of the Amazons, who were said to have lived here. The name has changed little throughout history, Amaseia, Amassia and Amasia all being found in ancient Greek and Roman coinage and continuing to be used through modern times by Greeks.

The Amazons is seen as an all female tribe warriors, well known in Greek Mythology. They are said to have lived mainly in Pontus with some also living in Taurica (Crimea) which is also an important place with Pontic Greeks.

Pontus became their area of residence, a kingdom for the Amazon women, as Amasya, a city in Pontus, itself is named after the legendary Amazon women.

Considering that the Anatolian Peninsula lies near to Sinai Peninsula, which is the isthmus across which various species of hominids have migrated out of Africa and into Asia, Pontus in particular has probably been inhabited by known and unknown tribes of various species and ethnicities throughout its history.

The Caucasian Kartvelian languages, such as Laz, probably represent the tongues of the earliest-know inhabitants of the area. According to some researchers, one of the early Pontic tribes were called the Leucosyri.

Other names for the earliest-known, probably Caucasian, tribes that inhabited the area include the Moskhians, the Mares, the Makrones, the Mossynoikians, the Tibarenians, the Tzans (Armenian: Chaniuk, probably the Laz), and the Chaldians (Armenian: Khaghtik).

In light of the strong possibility that Indo-European languages originated in the Anatolian peninsula, tribes speaking Indo-European languages such as Armenian, Hittite, or another Anatolian language may have inhabited the area more or less contemporaneously with tribes speaking Caucasian languages.

Regardless of that possibility, though, the historical record makes clear that seafaring Greeks, speakers of a different Indo-European language, began colonizing the area at a later date, displacing Caucasian tribes in the process.

The first travels of Greek merchants and adventurers to the Pontian region occurred probably from around 1000 BC, whereas their settlements would become steady and solidified cities only by the 8th and 7th centuries BC as archaeological findings document. This fits in well with a foundation date of 731 BC as reported by Eusebius of Caesarea for Sinope, perhaps the most ancient of the Greek Colonies in what was later to be called Pontus.

The epical narratives related to the travels of Jason and the Argonauts to Colchis, the tales of Heracles’ navigating the Black Sea and Odysseus’ wanderings into the land of the Cimmerians, as well as the myth of Zeus constraining Prometheus to the Caucasus mountains as a punishment for his outwitting the Gods, can all be seen as reflections of early contacts between early Greek colonists and the local, probably Caucasian, peoples.

The earliest known written description of Pontus, however, is that of Scylax of Korianda, who in the 7th century BC described Greek settlements in the area.

Chaldia:

Scholars such as Carl Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt (1910) believed that the people of Urartu called themselves Khaldini after their god Khaldi. The Nairi, an Iron Age people of the Van area, are sometimes considered related or identical.

The Chalybes or Chaldeans (Georgian: khalibebi) were an Anatolian tribe of Classical Antiquity who inhabited the area of Pontus and Cappadocia, located in modern Turkey. They lived in the northern area of Anatolia known as Chaldia, near the shores of the Black Sea, from the Halys to Pharnakeia and Trabzon in the east and as far south as eastern Asia Minor. According to Sayce they derived the Greek name Chalybe from Hittite Khaly-wa, “land of Halys”.

The first local inhabitants, the Chaldeans, together with the Tibareni and the Mossynoeci (Mossynoikoi in Greek) were sometimes considered the founders of metallurgy and counted among the earliest ironsmith nations by Classical writers. Indeed, the Greek name for steel is chalybas, possibly deriving from them. These three tribes still neighbored each other, along the Black Sea coast of Anatolia (ancient Pontus), as late as in Roman times.

The main sources for the history of the Chaldoi are accounts from classical authors, including Homer, Strabo, and Xenophon. In Roman times, the Chaldaei and Chalybes are mentioned by Plutarch (Lucull. c. 14) as settled in Pontus and Cappadocia, or the Pontus Cappadocicus section of the Roman province of Pontus.

The historian Igor M. Diakonoff had written in his book The Pre-history of the Armenian People: “The Greeks evidently used the name Chalybes for all of the inhabitants of the Pontus who traded in iron ore (see Pauly, s.v. Chalybes); in some cases we might suspect that the Moschi (in Pontus) and/or the Chalybes were foreign designations for the Chaldians (Halitu, Xaghtik’) who actually did live between the Tibareni in the west, the Mosynoeci in the north, and the Matieni in the southeast.”

Initially, the name Chaldia, derived from a people called the Chaldeans that inhabited the region in Antiquity, was consigned to the region around Gümüşhane, but in middle Byzantine times, the name was extended to include the coastal areas, and thus the entire province around Trapezus (Trebizond, modern Trabzon).

The name was used throughout the Byzantine period and was established as a formal theme, known as the Theme of Chaldia, by 840. During the late Middle Ages, it formed the core of the Empire of Trebizond until its fall to the Ottomans in 1461.

Forming the easternmost part of the Pontus region, Chaldia was bounded to the north by the Black Sea, to the east by Lazica, the westernmost part of Caucasian Iberia, to the south by Cappadocia and Armenia Minor, and to the west by the western half of Pontus.

Its main cities were the two ancient Greek colonies, Kerasus (modern Giresun) and Trapezus, situated in the coastal lowlands. The mountainous interior to the south, known as Mesochaldia (“Middle Chaldia”), was more sparsely inhabited and described by the 6th-century historian Procopius as “inaccessible”, but rich in mineral deposits, especially lead, but also silver and gold. The mines of the region gave the name Argyropolis (“silver town”, modern Gümüşhane) to the principal settlement.

The first Greek colony was that of Trapezus, founded by Greek traders from Miletus, traditionally dated to 756 BC. Greek colonization was restricted to the coast, and in later ages Roman control remained likewise only nominal over the tribes of the interior.

The coastal regions, however, belonged to the Roman province of Pontus Polemoniacus. Only during the reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565) were the warlike tribes, the Sannoi or Tzannoi, subdued, Christianized, and brought under central rule. Justinian included the entire region in the newly constituted province of Armenia I Magna with Trapezus as its capital (under Emperor Maurice, it was renamed Armenia III).

In the second half of the 7th century, with the establishment of the theme system, the region (Pontus Polemoniacus with the portion of Armenia I known as Keltzene) became part of the Armeniac Theme, initially as the tourma (division) of Chaldia, and later as a semi-distinct duchy (doukaton) or archontate. By 840, and perhaps as early as 824, it was constituted as a theme in its own right.

Arab geographers of the 9th and 10th centuries report differently on the theme: Ibn Khordadbeh reports that it counted six fortified places, Qudama ibn Ja’far that its troops numbered 4,000, while Ibn al-Faqih writes that its governing strategos commanded 10,000 men (certainly exaggerated) and had tow subordinate tourmarchai.

According to 10th-century documents, the strategos of Chaldia received twenty pounds of gold as an annual salary, of which half was paid by the state treasury and the rest came from the tax proceeds of his province, including the kommerkion tax on the important trade routes from the East that converged on Trapezus. In the early 10th century, the theme’s southern portion, the district of Keltzene, was detached and added to the newly established theme of Mesopotamia.

Until the eastern gains in the latter 10th century, Chaldia remained the northeastern frontier of the Byzantine Empire. During the periods 1091/1095–1098 and 1126–1140, the theme was practically autonomous from the Byzantine government.

During the first period, under its doux, Theodore Gabras, the region had been cut off from the remaining Byzantine territories by the Seljuk Turks, while during the second period, doux Constantine Gabras had rebelled against Emperor John II Komnenos. Following the dissolution of the Byzantine Empire by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the region became part of the new Empire of Trebizond. Indeed, by the 14th century, the Empire was reduced practically to the territory of the old theme.

The Empire of Trebizond managed to survive through successive upheavals by a combination of its inaccessible location, a small but capable army, and a sound diplomacy based on marriage alliances, before finally falling to the Ottomans in 1461. Even thereafter, isolated fortresses in the interior continued to resist. Only in 1479 was the region subdued, when the castle of Golacha, the last remaining Christian stronghold in Asia Minor, fell. Significant numbers of Pontic Greeks remained in the region throughout the Ottoman period, until the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey.

Proto Iberians and Armenians:

Moschians are mentioned in the cuneiform tablets of Tiglath-Pileser I of Assyria dating to 1115-1100 B.C. He led a campaign against them in the North of Commagene and mountains of Georgia and Armenia.

Hecataeus of Miletus (c. 550 – 476 BCE) speaks of the Moschi as “Colchians”, situated next to the Matieni. According to Professor James R. Russell of Harvard University, the Georgian designation for Armenians Somekhi, preserves the old name of the Mushki.

Mossynoeci (Greek: Mossynoikoi “dwellers in wooden towers”) is a name that the Greeks of the Euxine Sea (Black Sea) applied to the peoples of Pontus, the northern Anatolian coast west of Trebizond. They are mentioned in the works of Hecataeus, Herodotus, Xenophon and Strabo.

According to the renowned scholar of the Caucasian studies Cyril Toumanoff, the Moschians were the early proto-Georgian tribes which were integrated into the first early Georgian state of Colchis.

According to Xenophon’s Anabasis (5.4.26-34), the Mossynoeci were “fair-complexioned and white-skinned”, “with their backs variegated and their breasts tattooed with patterns of all sorts of flowers”. The Mossynoeci accepted the rule of a common metropolis.

According to Herodotus, the equipment of the Moschoi was similar to that of the Tibareni, Macrones, Mossynoeci and Mardae, with wooden caps upon their heads, and shields and small spears, on which long points were set.

According to Herodotus (450 BC) they were subjugated by the Achaemenid Persian Empire in the 6th-5th centuries BC and were incorporated into the XIX Satrapy established by Darius of Persia and fought under Xerxes I. The satrapy as a whole was to yield three hundred talents.

Xenophon described that he had led his troops through Mossynoeci territory during the spring after the battle of Cunaxa, so 400 BCE. During this time the Mossynoeci also ruled over the Chalybes. When Xenophon was at Trebizond, those Mossynoeci in the vicinity had fallen out of favor with those of the metropolis; so Xenophon’s army attacked the metropolis and defeated its king.

There are many references to the Macrones in the Classical accounts. Xenophon (430-355 BC) places them east of Trapezus (modern Trabzon, Turkey). They are described as a powerful and wild people wearing garments made of hair, and as using in war wooden helmets, small shields of wicker-work, and short lances with long points.

The Macrones lived along the border with the Machelonoi, another “Sannic” tribe evidently closely related to the Macrones. The Macrones were an ancient Colchian tribe in the east of Pontus, about the Moschici Mountains (modern Yalnizçam Dağlari, Turkey).

The Macrones are identified by modern scholars as one of the proto-Georgian tribes whose presence in Northeastern Anatolia might have preceded the Hittite period, and who survived the demise of Urartu. They are frequently regarded as the possible ancestors of the Mingrelians, a subethnic group of the Georgian people, known since at least the 5th century BC. (cf. margal, a Mingrelian self-designation).

Strabo (xii.3.18) remarks, in passing, that the people formerly called Macrones bore in his day the name of Sanni, a claim supported also by Stephen of Byzantium, though Pliny speaks of the Sanni and Macrones as two distinct peoples. By the 6th century they were known as the Tzanni. According to Procopius, the Byzantine emperor Justinian I subdued them in the 520s and converted them to Christianity.

Marres, an ancient western Georgian (Colchian) tribe, entered ancient history with the writings of Hecataeus of Miletus. He gives a brief description of the tribe and mentions that they lived between closely akin ancient Georgian tribal groups Macrones and Mossynoeci. They inhabited southeast periphery of the Black Sea, more precisely – mountains of Northeast Anatolia, which constitutes (Along with South Caucasus) the proposed homeland of the Ancient Georgian peoples and the convergent territory in which they were molded into nation.

According to Herodotus, they had the same leader as the Colchians (who were the larger entity created through a process of political consolidation and amalgamation of Ancient Georgian tribes).

The Machelones, closely related ethnically to the neighboring Macrones, were a Colchian tribe located to the far south of the Phasis (modern-day Rioni River, western Georgia). It may be the same group known as the Machorones of Pliny (NH 6.4.11) who placed them between the Ophis (modern Of, Turkey) and Prytanis rivers. There are several references to them in Classical sources.

The 1st century AD writer Lucian also comments about the Machlyai and their ruler, but the account seems to be entirely fictional. Ptolemy, in the early 2nd century AD, mentions the town of Mechlessos on the border of Colchis, but adds nothing substantive. His contemporary author, Arrian, lists on a west to east orientation the Sannoi, Drilae, Machelonoi, Heniochoi, Zudreitai, and Lazoi (Perip. 1 1.1-2).

Writing in the early 3rd century about an event a hundred years earlier (AD 117), Dio Cassius (68.19) relates that the Machelonoi and the neighboring Heniochoi were ruled by a single “king”, Anchialos, who submitted to the Roman emperor Trajan.

There is a special mention in the anonymous (probably post-4th century) Periplus Ponti Evcines that both the Machelones and Heniochoi were once called Ekcheireis. The country called Machelonia, a client state of the Sassanid Persian Empire, figures in the so-called Res Gestae Divi Saporis (Ka’ba-i Zartosht), the mid-3rd-century AD trilingual inscription concerning the political, military, and religious activities of Shapur I, and appears, in this case, to be synonymous to Colchis.

Strabo locates the Moschoi in two places. The first location is somewhere in modern Abkhazia on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, in agreement with Stephan of Byzantium quoting Hellanicus.

The second location Moschice (Moschikê) – in which was a temple of Leucothea, once famous for its wealth, but plundered by Pharnaces and Mithridates and divided between the Colchians, Armenians and Iberians (cf. Mela, III. 5.4; Pliny VI.4.).

Strabo mentions the Moschian Mountains as joining the Caucasus (Geography, 11.2.1). He says that the Moschian country lay above the rivers Phasis, Glaucus, and Hippus (Geography, 11.2.17). In it “lies the temple of Leucothea, founded by Phrixus, and the oracle of Phrixus, where a ram is never sacrificed; it was once rich, but it was robbed in our time by Pharnaces, and a little later by Mithridates of Pergamum.” (ibid).

These latter Moschoi were obviously the Georgian Meskhi. Procopius calls them Meschoi and says that they were subject to the Iberians (i.e., Georgians), and had embraced Christianity, the religion of their masters.

Pliny in the 1st century AD mentions the Moscheni in southern Armenia (“Armenia” at the time stretching south and west to the Mediterranean, bordering on Cappadocia). In Byzantine historiography, Moschoi was a name equivalent to or considered as the ancestors of “Cappadocians” (Eusebius) with their capital at Mazaca (later Caesarea Mazaca, modern Kayseri).

The ancient city of Mtskheta, near Tbilisi, is believed by Georgian experts to be the former capital of the Mushki state. According to the medieval Georgian Chronicles, the city was built by the legendary patriarch Mtskhetos, one of five sons of Kartlos, the legendary patriarch of the Georgian nation (who was in turn said to be a son of Torgom, the Georgian spelling of Biblical Togar Mah, son of Gomer, son of Japheth, son of Noah).Wilhelm Gesenius suggested that the Moschians were descended from the Biblical Meshech tribe.

According to the Chronicles, during Mtskhetos’ lifetime the descendants of Torgom (including Georgians, Armenians and other South Caucasian nations) were united and successfully resisted the attacks of the “Nimrodians”, which Georgian experts interpret as a reference to ancient conflict between the Mushki and Assyria. Excavations in Mtskheta have confirmed the town dates back at least as far as 1000 BC.

The Chronicles, the older Conversion of Kartli, and the older still Armenian chronicles of Moses of Chorene, all give conflicting accounts of Mtskheta’s history prior to and during the conquests of Alexander the Great.

According to the Conversion, Mtskheta remained the chief city of “Kartli”, the medieval native name for Georgia, up until Alexander’s arrival, who changed the ruling dynasty in Mtskheta by installing Azo, said to be a prince from Arian Kartli.

According to the Chronicles, after Mtskhetos’ death, Kartli broke up into several smaller, warring regions, until unity was restored by Azo, said to be one of Alexander’s Macedonian generals, who was in turn expelled by the (half-Persian) local prince Parnawaz, and it was Parnawaz who founded the new ruling dynasty of Kartli. Moses of Chorene says that Alexander installed a Persian satrap named Mithridates in Mtskheta.

Georgian experts generally agree about a decline of the Mushki state and rise of Persian influence before the arrival of Alexander, who, perhaps more as a side-effect than by any effort on his part, ushered in a new era of unity in much of the Mushki state’s former territories under a new dynasty, who preferred the name Kartli over Mushki. Mtskheta remained the capital of the Kartli state, which became known in most languages as Iberia, until the 5th century AD.

People in what is now a south-central Georgian region continued to favor a variant of the old Mushki name, and today call themselves Meskhs and their region Meskheti. They speak a dialect of Georgian called Meskhuri, which among Georgia’s regional dialects is relatively close to official Georgian. The town of Mtskheta is not in today’s Meskheti region, but lies about 100 km to its northeast, in the Kartli region.

Identification of the Eastern with the Western Mushki is uncertain, but it is of course possible to assume a migration of at least part of the Eastern Mushki to Cilicia in the course of the 10th to 8th centuries, and this possibility has been repeatedly suggested, variously identifying the Mushki as speakers of a Georgian, Armenian or Anatolian idiom.

Moschia (Meskheti, Mushki) is a mountainous region of Georgia between Colchis, Iberia and Armenia. The Moschian Mountains were the connecting chain between the Caucasus and Anti Taurus Mountains. The people of that area were known as the Moschians.

Meskheti Range (Meskh/Meskhet/Meskhetian Range, Adzhar-Imereti Range, Adzhar-Akhaltsikh Range also Moschian Mountains) is a part of the Lesser Caucasus mountain range in Meskheti region, in southwestern Georgia.

The length of the range is 150 km and the highest point is Mount Mepistskharo at an elevation of 2,850 m above sea level. The Meskheti Range range is characterized by high amounts of precipitation. The territory around Mt. Mtirala (the Ajarian section of the range) was the wettest region within the Soviet Union and is the most humid area of the Caucasus with an annual precipitation of approximately 4500mm/year.

The slopes of the Meskheti Range are mainly covered by deciduous forests (oak, chestnut, maple, hornbeam, beech) below 1,200 m above sea level and by coniferous forests (spruce, fir and in some cases pine) from 1,200-1,800 m. The highest regions of the range are covered by sub-alpine and alpine meadows.

The Mingrelians are descendants of several Colchian tribes (Such as: Manraloi, Heniochi, Machelones, Macrones, Mossynoeci, Drilae, Zydretae) and constitute one of the building blocks of the unified Georgian nation that emerged after the kingdoms of the west (Colchis) and east (Iberia) were united under Christianity in the middle of the first millennium AD. Early in the Middle Ages, Mingrelian aristocracy and clergy, later followed by laymen, adopted the national Georgian tongue as a language of literacy and culture.

The Mingrelians speak the Mingrelian, and are mostly bilingual also in Georgian. Both these languages belong to the Kartvelian (South Caucasian) language family.

Samegrelo/Samargalo or Megrelia, Mingrelia is a historic province in the western part of Georgia, formerly also known as Odishi.

Samegrelo is inhabited by the Mingrelians, an ethnic subgroup of the Georgians. They also live in considerable numbers in Abkhazia and Tbilisi. The region is bordered by the secessionist region of Abkhazia to the north-west, Svaneti to the north, Imereti to the east, Guria to the south and the Black Sea to the west.

Pontic Greeks:

Pontic Greek, sometimes called Rumaiic, is a form of the Greek language originally spoken in the Pontus area on the southern shores of the Black Sea, northeastern Anatolia, Eastern Turkish/Caucasus province of Kars, southern Georgia, and today mainly in northern Greece. Its speakers are referred to as Pontic Greeks or Pontian Greeks, although many Greeks mistakenly refer to some Pontic Greek speakers from Georgia as Russo-Ponti.

The linguistic lineage of Pontic Greek stems from Ionic Greek via Koine and Byzantine Greek and contains influences from Georgian, Russian, Turkish and to a lesser extent, Persian (via Ottoman Turkish) and various Caucasian languages. Pontic is most closely related to Cappadocian Greek, and the Greek spoken in Mariupolis (and formerly in Crimea, Ukraine) (see Mariupolitan Greek).

Historically the speakers of Pontic Greek called it Romeyka (Romeika, Greek: Ρωμαίικα), which, in a more general sense, is also a historical and colloquial term for the modern Greek language as a whole. When they wished to differentiate it from other forms of Greek, they called it Lazika. The term “Pontic” originated in scholarly usage, but has been adopted as a mark of identity by Pontic Greeks living in Greece.

Similarly, in Turkish the language is called Rumca, derived from the Turkish word Rum denoting ethnic Greeks living in Turkey in general; this term also comprises other Greek speakers in Turkey such as those from Istanbul or Smyrna who speak a language close to Standard Modern Greek.

The Greek genocide, part of which is known as the Pontic genocide, was the systematic extermination of the Christian Greek population from its historic homeland in Asia Minor, central Anatolia, and Pontus during World War I and its aftermath (1914–1923).

It was instigated by the government of the Ottoman Empire against the Greek population of the Empire and it included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, summary expulsions, arbitrary executions, and destruction of Christian Orthodox cultural, historical and religious monuments.

According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. Some of the survivors and refugees, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire.

After the end of the 1919–22 Greco-Turkish War, most of the Greeks remaining in the Ottoman Empire were transferred to Greece under the terms of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey.

Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Armenians, and some scholars consider those events to be part of the same policy of extermination.

The Allies of World War I condemned the Ottoman government-sponsored massacres as crimes against humanity. More recently, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution in 2007 affirming that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire, including the Greeks, was genocide. Some other organisations have also passed resolutions recognising the campaign as a genocide, as have the parliaments of Greece, Republic of Cyprus and Sweden.

Greek Mythology:

In Greek mythology, Aeëtes (also spelled Æëtes), was a King of Colchis, son of the sun-god Helios and the Oceanid Perseis (a daughter of Oceanus), brother of Circe and Pasiphae, and father of Medea, Chalciope and Apsyrtus. His consorts were Eidyia (mother of Medea) and either Asterodia the Oceanid, Neaera the Nereid, or Eurylyte. According to others, he was brother of Perses, a king of Tauris, husband of his niece Hecate, and father of Aegialeus, Absyrtus, Medea, Circe and Chalciope. Yet other versions make Aeëtes a native of Corinth and son of Ephyra, or else of a certain Antiope.

In Greek mythology, Eidyia was a daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, and queen to Aeetes, king of Colchis. Mother of Medea, Chalciope and Apsyrtus, she was also the youngest of the Oceanides. Some sources called her the goddess of knowledge.

In Greek mythology, Medea was the daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, niece of Circe, granddaughter of the sun god Helios, and later wife to the hero Jason, with whom she had two children, Mermeros and Pheres. In Euripides’s play Medea, Jason leaves Medea when Creon, king of Corinth, offers him his daughter, Glauce. The play tells about how Medea avenges her husband’s betrayal.

The myths involving Jason have been interpreted by specialists as part of a class of myths that tell how the Hellenes of the distant heroic age, before the Trojan War, faced the challenges of the pre-Greek “Pelasgian” cultures of mainland Greece, the Aegean and Anatolia. Jason, Perseus, Theseus, and above all Heracles, are all “liminal” figures, poised on the threshold between the old world of shamans, chthonic earth deities, and the new Bronze Age Greek ways.

Medea figures in the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, a myth known best from a late literary version worked up by Apollonius of Rhodes in the 3rd century BC and called the Argonautica. However, for all its self-consciousness and researched archaic vocabulary, the late epic was based on very old, scattered materials. Medea is known in most stories as an enchantress and is often depicted as being a priestess of the goddess Hecate or a witch. The myth of Jason and Medea is very old, originally written around the time Hesiod wrote the Theogony. It was known to the composer of the Little Iliad, part of the Epic Cycle.

The Medes (from Old Persian Māda-) were an ancient Iranian people who lived in an area known as Media and who spoke a northwestern Iranian language referred to as the Median language. Their arrival to the region is associated with the first wave of Iranic tribes in the late second millennium BCE (the Bronze Age collapse) through the beginning of the first millennium BC.

The original source for different words used to call the Median people, their language and homeland is a directly transmitted Old Iranian geographical name which is attested as the Old Persian “Māda-“. The meaning of this word is not precisely established. The linguist W. Skalmowski proposes a relation with the proto-Indoeuropean word “med(h)-” meaning “central, suited in the middle” by referring to Old Indic “madhya-” and Old Iranic “maidiia-” both carrying the same meaning and having descendants including Latin medium, Greek méso, and German mittel.

The Median people are mentioned by that name in many ancient texts. According to the Histories of Herodotus; «The Medes were called anciently by all people Aryans; but when Medea, the Colchian, came to them from Athens, they changed their name. Such is the account which they themselves give.»