Syracuse meaning

Meaning

Syro-Something (like Syro-Cushite)

Exiles, Passage

Sickness, Moldy, Swampy

Rock Of Seagulls, or Cups, or Thrones

Etymology

From the name Syria (plus, say, the name Cush).

From the verb συρω (suro), to draw or drag along, or the noun συριγξ (syrinx), pipe or hole.

From the verb צרע (sara'), to be diseased or have patches.

From the noun צור (sur), rock, plus כוס (kus), cup or some sort of bird.

Related names

• Via אשר ('asher): Ahishar, Asarel, Asher, Asherah, Asriel, Asshur, Asshurim, El-Elohe-Israel, Israel, Jashar, Asharelah-Jesharelah, Jesher, Jeshurun, Sharon, Shiloh, Syria, Telassar

• Via כוש: Cush, Cushi, Cushan, Cushan-rishathaim

• Via συρω (suro): Syrtis

• Via צרע (sara'): Zeruah, Zorah

• Via צור (sur): Abel-mizraim, Beth-zur, Elizur, Helkath-hazzurim, Izri, Jezer, Mizraim, Pedahzur, Tyrannus, Tyre, Zarethan, Zer, Zererath, Zereth, Zereth-shahar, Zeri, Zeror, Zeruiah, Zur, Zuriel, Zurishaddai

Before it was carried to the New World and became the name of a city in the state New York, the name Syracuse belonged to a major city near the southern end of the eastern coast of the island of Sicily (off the tip of the boot of Italy). Syracuse was the place where in 295 BCE general Pyrrhus married Lanassa, daughter of the king of Sicily, which is arguably the event that set the destruction of the whole world in motion (see our article on Pyrrhus for more on this). Syracuse's more constructive claim to fame is perhaps that Archimedes was born there. In 212 BCE, a small Roman military force invaded Syracuse and killed Archimedes while at it (who famously cried out: "Noli turbare circulos meos!", as he was calculating pi, or so the tales tell). The town's main fortress held out for another eight months, until a local traitor gave the Romans access through the wall, near the Fountain of Arethusa, and the city fell. To the poetically inclined, this may have reminded of the way Troy was finally defeated, which in turn may have resembled the sack of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

Sicily's older and apparently original name was Τρινακρια (Trinakria), which was explained as τρι (tri), three, and ακρις (akris), peak or point, but which very well may have reminded of ακρατος (akratos), unmixed or un-governed, as a quiet wink to unarmed anti-Roman rebellion (1 Corinthians 15:24: Greek for Golgotha is κρανιον τοπος, kranion topos, place of a skull: Matthew 27:33).

Today, Sicily is proudly Italian but back in Biblical times, there was no Italy to speak of, and Syracuse was one of the many colonies of the greater Hellene world of trade — specifically a colony of Corinth — which in the eighth century BCE had begun to replace the legendary but inevitably declining Phoenician trading empire, which was first centered upon Tyre and later upon Carthage.

Syracuse is mentioned only once in the Bible, namely in Acts 28:12, where it is reported that Paul and company stayed at Syracuse for three days — which really means two nights, with any arbitrary period of daylight on either end: a "three-day" stay could start at dusk of the first day and end at dawn of the third day, barely thirty hours later — on their way from Malta to Rome via Rhegium and Puteoli. A three day (i.e. two nights) stay anywhere would remind any student of the Bible of Christ's stay in the grave, but Luke wrote the story of Paul's journey with the very clear intention of catering to his Greco-Roman audience, and particularly in recognition of the popular Nostoi, or "return-home" genre, of which the Odyssey and the Aeneid were the most obvious examples.

Nobody in Luke's original audience would have missed Luke's reworking of Odysseus' landing on the magical island of Scheria, home of the Phaeacians, who treated Odysseus to a feast during which he confesses to be the king of Ithaca (Matthew 27:11) and tells the whole of his 20 year adventure (10 years of Trojan War followed by 10 years of studying different methods of societal government; see Od.1.3 and Isaiah 9:6). After telling his story, the Phaeacians provided Odysseus with a super-fast ship home to Ithaca, where they left him asleep on the beach, with the obvious implication that Odysseus had originally landed on Ithaca, and fell asleep for two nights and a day in between during which he dreamt of the generous Phaeacians (compare Psalm 121:4 to Luke 8:23-24, and see our article on ναυς, naus, "ship").

With the help of wise Athena (throughout antiquity known as the Virgin: Isaiah 7:14), Odysseus continued his quest for his home in Ithaca in the guise of an old disheveled man (which indeed confirms that the Phaeacian riches are no longer with him: Philippians 2:7). The divine city-builder sends her charge to his family's swineherd named Eumaeus (sounds like Emmaus), who tends the herd near Raven Rock (Luke 12:24; see our article on Arabia) and the Spring of Arethusa (Od.13.408).

This name Αρεθουσα (Arethousa), Arethusa, reminds of the noun αρετη (arete), excellence, and the name Ares (the god of war: see Areopagus), but is rather thought to have to do with αρδω (ardo), to water, and θεω (theo), to run fast (which reminds of the rivers of Eden: Pishon, Gihon, Haddakel and Parat). Hence, this name was attributed to several springs in ancient Greece. One more famous Arethusa was a nymph from the Peloponnese (the peninsula west of Corinth, where Sparta dominated), who was forced to flee from the advances of a competing fluvial deity named Alphaeus (and rivers were widely deployed to refer to local cultures and their information technologies: see our article on Tigris). Arethusa dove "underground" and reappeared in Syracuse, where she became a famous fountain. The subsequent Sicilian story goes that a wooden cup tossed into the Alphaeus in Greece will pop up in the Fountain of Arethusa in Syracuse.

The name Συρακουσαι (Surakousai), or Syracuse, is a plural word, which is not at all unusual for Greek toponyms (see for instance Athens and Colossae). Our name is old enough to have an unclear and contested etymology. The first bit, namely Συρα (Syra) is identical to Greek for Syrian (woman), whereas the word for Syrian man would be Συρικος (Surikos), which is not hugely far removed from our name. Since Syria was once very large, there are all sorts hybrids mentioned in the classics, such as Συραιγυπτιος (Suraiguptios), meaning Syro-Egyptian (man) or Συραττικος (Surattikos), meaning Syro-Attic (man), or Συροφοινισσα (Surophoinissa), meaning Syro-Phoenician (woman), which actually occurs in the New Testament, in Mark 7:26. In the Septuagint occurs the name Χους (Chous) for Cush, son of Ham, so perhaps our name Syracuse could pass for Syro-Cushite, or some very early equivalent of that.

The name Syria itself is hugely old and stems from the name Assyria, but its Greek spelling comes also tellingly close to the verb συρω (suro), to draw or drag along:

Our name may even have to do with a cluster of "sur-" words that have an inexplicable etymology, come from an unknown language and may not even be Indo-European. One member of that cluster is the noun συριγξ (syrinx), which appears to have originally referred to pipe-like items such as flutes (which may actually put it in proximity of the aforementioned verb συρω, suro) or quivers or the nave-hole of a wheel, but which also came to refer to subterranean passages and mines, and may very well have become descriptive of the narrow passage between Sicily and mainland Italy. Our English noun "syringe" derives from this noun.

Our name is certainly old enough to stem from the time when the Phoenicians dominated the area, and some ancient sources insist that Syracuse was named after a nearby swamp, and especially a swamp that was suspected to harbor and dispense diseases. That would place our name in proximity of the Hebrew verb צרע (sara'), to be sick (and note that the guttural letter ע, 'ayin, may very well develop into a Greek hard κ, kaph):

Theocritus wrote in his Idyll XXVIII about Syracuse being the "sap and marrow of the Isle of Three Peaks". The word for marrow, namely μυελος (muelos), was used to refer to any sort of soft and blubbery bodily tissue (marrow, fat, brain), and although it usually carried the connotation of delicacy, here it may also be a tongue-in-cheek reference to Syracuse's swampy environs.

In his exhaustive tome The Phoenicians and the Odyssey (Paris, 1903, pp 515, with a confirming reference to pp 54 of W.M. Leake's Travels in Northern Greece, 1835, London), the renowned French Hellenist scholar Victor Bérard described a walk though Ligia, on the island Lefkada, of what is thought to be historic Ithaca, and mentions Raven Rock (Pierre de Corbeau; "pierre" is French for Peter, which means rock, from which probably also stem the words parakeet and parrot) and the fountain Arethusa, and also a cliff locally called Pierre aux Mouettes or Rock of the Seagulls. This, Bérard asserts without providing further sources, would translate the Phoenician term Sour ha-Kousim, which colonists took to Sicily as the name of their main city: Syracuse.

Since Phoenician is closely related to Biblical Hebrew, the term Sour ha-Kousim can be easily reconstructed in Hebrew. The first part is the same as the name Tyre, and means rock:

The second part of our name is the definite ה (he), meaning 'of' or 'of the'. The third part of our name, apparently, is the word כוס (kus), of which there are two: one means "cup" (hence the striking existence of the story of the traveling cup, told in Sicily, which we mentioned earlier), and the other refers to an owl or seagull type of bird:

The name Syracuse is so old that certainty about its pedigree does not exist, and may very well have emerged from some original and long lost term that was amended or informed by expressions or nicknames in any of several languages, European and Semitic. It may have to do with an original Syrian colony, or refer to a Mine or the narrow Passage between Sicily and Italy. It may be named after a swamp that induced Sickness. And it may mean Seagull Rock. Ultimately, it means all of these.