Ἄρτεμις

The name Artemis has resisted etymological certainty for over two thousand years. Ancient Greek commentators tried to connect it to artemes, meaning 'safe' or 'sound,' casting the goddess as a protector. Others linked it to artamos, 'butcher' or 'slaughterer,' pointing to her role as a huntress who killed swiftly and without mercy. Modern linguists suspect the name is pre-Greek entirely — a borrowing from an older Anatolian language that the Greeks absorbed when they arrived in the Aegean basin around 1600 BCE.

Whatever its origin, the name attached itself to the natural world early. The plant genus Artemisia — which includes wormwood, mugwort, and sagebrush — was named in the goddess's honor by the 1st century CE. Pliny the Elder attributed the naming to Queen Artemisia II of Caria, who in turn bore the goddess's name. Artemisia absinthium became the key ingredient in absinthe, the drink that fueled 19th-century Parisian bohemia. A pre-Greek deity name flavored the green liquor in Toulouse-Lautrec's glass.

The city of Ephesus, on the western coast of modern Turkey, built its identity around the Temple of Artemis — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Completed around 550 BCE and funded partly by King Croesus of Lydia, the temple was four times the size of the Parthenon. When Herostratus burned it down in 356 BCE to make himself famous, the Ephesians rebuilt it even larger. The name Artemis was worth that much to them.

In 2017, NASA named its program to return humans to the Moon after Artemis — twin sister of Apollo, whose name had christened the first lunar missions in the 1960s. The choice was deliberate: Artemis would land the first woman on the Moon. A name that predates Greek civilization itself, that may have belonged to a forgotten Anatolian mother-goddess, now labels humanity's next step into space.