Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian

The etymology of the old name for the area of the northwestern part of Asia Minor
with a Luwian-Lycian population, called in the Hittite texts AÍÍuwa 236 and in Mycenaean
Greek a-si-wi-jo-, may be important for the question being discussed. Although the
name of Asia was well known to Mycenaean Greeks, it would have been of Anatolian
(“Asianic” in somewhat antiquated terms) origin. 237 The idea of deriving it from the
Hittite adjective aÍÍu- “good” 238 does not seem particularly successful, since in Luwian
the corresponding word has the form waÍÍu-, and the name would have originated in a
Luwian environment. For this reason alone it is tempting to derive it from the name for
horse, which was so important for the historical and military context of the whole
Trojan narrative (the story of the wooden horse may be a characteristic example;
another is the folk motif of a prophesying horse, etc.). It seems remarkable that in the
Iliad a hero called “Asian” comes with his horses from the town of Arisbe, since in such a
formula the same ancient name for horse might reappear several times in different
variants.
IV. Thracian. Among those Paleobalkanic Indo-European languages that are
supposed to belong to the satPm group, Thracian might have retained an old term for
horse, possibly seen in the proper names Ezbeniw/Hezbenus/Esbenus/Esbeneiow
(having the characteristic -n- suffix; see above on the type of Latin asinus and a possible
Hurrian parallel) with a (partial) voicing of the intervocalic consonants preserved as
voiceless in the second part of the compounds Bet-espiow, Ouet-espiow, Out-
aspiow. Since in the inscriptions of the Varna region these compounds function as
epithets of the Thracian god-rider Heros, all of them can be understood as equivalent to
Epipiow = ef-ippiow “riding the horse”; the first element of the compound,
etymologically connected to Old Indian ud-, was deciphered on the basis of Cypriote
utuxa = §p‹ tÊx˙. 239
236 Goetze 1974, 180; Gindin 1993, 130 with bibliography.
237 Watkins 1995, 151, 290.
238 Heubeck 1961, 72-73, n.76.
239 Detschev 1952, 80, n.2; Gindin 1993, 18; Poghirc 1983, 65 (5.2.2), 66; 81. On the type of compounds like
Greek ÉEf¤ppow, see Milewski 1969, 117, II 7. For the suffix, cf. Old Indian a≈viya-.