Note 434 — Chapter XIX

Loftus, "Travels in Susiana," p. 425 ff. Nöldeke ("Göttingen G. G." 1874, s. 173 ff.) has treated exhaustively of the various names of ancient Elam, as Susiana is invariably called among the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Hebrews. He proves that the name Κισσίη which is in use among the older Greeks, Aeschylus, Hecataeus, and Herodotus, must be derived from the Kossaeans, a tribe who inhabited the northern and higher part of Susiana, and the mountainous edge towards Iran. Of later writers Polybius only uses the name Cissians, who also uses the name Matieni in the sense of Herodotus. Uwaya, the name common among the Persians for Susiana, is taken from the Uxians, who were the eastern neighbours of Persia, i. e. the tribe in Susiana which dwelt nearest to Persia; it is retained in the new Persian Chuz and Chusistan. Among the Greeks the name Elymaeans is first used by the companions of Alexander as the name for a tribe, and then in the second century B.C. as the name of a new kingdom which restored the ancient Elam. Yet to this tribe which inhabited the plain and the hills of Susa and Shuster was due the foundation and government of the kingdom which once ruled in the valley of the Euphrates, which so long resisted the Assyrians, but was entirely unknown to the Greeks. The rivers of Susiana are difficult to fix, as both Persian and native names are indifferently used. The name Choaspes, which contains açpa, is plainly Persian; it is no doubt the Kerkha. On the Eulaeus, Koprates, and Pasitigris, see Droysen, "Hellenismus," 12, 266 n.