Armenia

When Darius I had his victories carved into the rock face at Behistun in 522 BCE, he listed a place called Armina among the lands he had subdued. The Armenians themselves had no such name for their land: they called it Hayastan, after the patriarch Hayk, who in their founding myth defeated the Babylonian giant Bel. Armina was a Persian administrative label, and the people it described would have found it unfamiliar.

The Greeks encountered the name through Persian intermediaries. Hecataeus of Miletus wrote of Armenians around 500 BCE, and Xenophon's Anabasis from 401 BCE describes marching through the territory. Greek geography fixed the form Armenía onto maps that shaped European understanding for two millennia. Latin adopted it directly from Greek, and Roman writers from Cicero to Tacitus treated Armenia as one of the great kingdoms at the edge of their world.

The country's position between Rome and Parthia made it a perpetual prize. Tigranes the Great briefly built an empire that stretched from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean, ruling from 95 to 66 BCE. Armenia became the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion in 301 CE under King Tiridates III. Through all of this, the name Armenia in Greek and Latin corresponded to a country that still called itself Hayastan.

The Armenian alphabet, invented by Mesrop Mashtots around 405 CE, gave the language a script that preserved Hayastan in native writing for the first time. The Persian-derived Armenia lived on in foreign documents: Byzantine, Arabic, Crusader, and Ottoman records all used some form of it. English borrowed the name from Latin geography. The two names have coexisted ever since, one inside the country and one for the world beyond it.