🔼The name Attalia: Summary
- Meaning
- Place Of Daddy's Little One
- Yearling Land, Land Of The Bull Calf, Ever More Enlightened
- Etymology
- From αττα (daddy), and the suffix "-los": "little one of ...".
- From εταλον (etalon), yearling or bull calf, from ετος (etos), year.
🔼The name Attalia in the Bible
The name Attalia occurs only once in the Bible, namely in Acts 14:25, where we read that Paul and Barnabas visited Attalia, although it's not clear how long they stayed there. Attalia was a city of Lycia, on the south coast of Anatolia, roughly in between the islands of Rhodes and Cyprus. Its modern name is Antalya.
🔼Etymology of the name Attalia
The name Attalia derives from Ατταλος (Attalos), the name of its founder, namely Attalos II Philadelphus, who was a king of Pergamum in the second century BC and after whom also the city of Philadelphia was named. The first of the Attalid dynasty was Attalus I Soter — the epithet Soter means Savior, which was first appropriated by Ptolemy, one of four successors of Alexander and the one who inherited Egypt. In the New Testament, this epithet Savior is mostly ascribed to Christ (see our concordance entry on soter).
Where the name Attalos comes from is no longer clear. In the classics there is sporadic mention of a tribe called Attalis in Athens, but no further details survive. The word αττα (atta) is a familiar word for father (i.e. daddy), which is not incomparable to the Aramaic term Abba. The second half of our name could be explained by the fairly common Proto-Indo-European suffix "-los", which expresses diminution or pertaining (hence also the English "-el" in words like shovel or tunnel).
Perhaps phonetically, our name Attalia resembled the name Italy, which is thought to stem from the Latin word vitulus, meaning yearling or bull calf, which in Greek is εταλον (etalon) from ετος (etos), meaning year:
ετος
The noun ετος (etos) means year, and is also used in compounds such as διετια (dietia), meaning two-years, and τριετια (trietia), three-years. The noun ενιαυτος (eniautos) could also mean year but rather described a full circle of time of any period (up to 600 years).
Formally unrelated, adjective ετος (etos) or ετεος (eteos) means true or genuine. Derived verb εταζω (etazo), to examine, try or test.
But also note the similarities between our mystery name Attalia and Hebrew names such as Athaliah and Attai.
🔼Attalia meaning
The name Attalia means Of Attalos, but what that name may originally have conveyed is no longer clear. To Greek ears, however, it probably sounded very much like Daddy's Little One, with the "daddy"-part probably referring to the paternal deity (the name Jupiter means Father God). Others may have figured that it closely resembled Italy and meant Italian, which in turn meant Like A Yearling, in that it referred to the incremental rising of the sun in spring: Ever More Enlightened.
Note that around the time of Christ, all relevant players pretty much agreed that no great empire comes about by force and only by wisdom and can only be sustained by wisdom. The art of writing was of course quickly recognized as the vehicle of all wisdom (see our article on YHWH), but still all wannabe emperors helped themselves to epithets that declared how peaceful, wise and salvific they were. It's not emphasized often enough that the familiar titles of Jesus of Nazareth — King of Kings, Son of God, Savior of the World, and so on — all originated as imperial titles of Augustus, whose birthday was celebrated all over the empire as the original evangelion or Good News.