Perspective Chapter: Bάλτοi – The Reception of Western Asian Colors-Cardinal Points System along the Boundaries of the Hellenic Oikumene

Abstract

This contribute delineates a “cultural history of language” along the boundaries of the Hellenic world from antiquity to the Byzantine period. The aim is to conceive an area where separate linguistic labels – Greek, Illyrian, Slavic, and so on. – cannot represent the complexity of a koine in which East and West mingled. Specifically, the encyclopaedic meaning of several toponyms carrying the dictionary meaning “white” – λευκός, βάλτος, ἄσπρον – is examined to confirm the hypothetical acquisition of the accessory meaning “western” or “northwestern” borrowed in Greek as a semantic calque following contacts with the Turkic-Slavo-Persian oikumene. In the region outstretched toward the Hindu Kush, the Little Altai, and the Sarmatic Plain, certain place names and ethnonyms signal a marked Western Asian influence on Greek perception of vast spaces, both linguistically and cognitively. Implementing the methodological principles of cognitive linguistics, this reflection about the cultural meaning of ethnonyms and choronyms as Baltoi and Baltiyul, Lucania and Indike Leuke, and Leukosyroi and Leukosyria offers a cultural and historical perspective alternative to the merely philological one and underscores the necessity to conceive the northeastern part of the Classical World as a place where faded boundaries connected, rather than being separate, with people belonging to distinct nations but part of a common Sprachbund.