Hyrcania

Hyrcania (/hərˈkeɪniə/) or Verkâna was a satrapy located in the territories of the present day Gilan, Mazandaran and Golestan provinces of Iran and part of Turkmenistan, lands south of the Caspian Sea. To the Greeks, the Caspian Sea was the "Hyrcanian Sea".

Etymology

Hyrcania (Ὑρκανία) is the Greek name for the region in historiographic accounts. It is a calque of the Old Persian Verkâna as recorded in Darius the Great's Behistun Inscription (522 BCE), as well as in other Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions. Verkā means "wolf" in Old Iranian, cf. Avestan vəhrkō, Gilaki and Mazandarani Verk, Modern Persian gorg, and Sanskrit Vŗka (वृक). See also Warg. Consequently, Hyrcania means "Wolf-land". The name was extended to the Caspian Sea and underlie the name of the city Sari (Zadracarta), the first and then-largest city in northern Iran ( Mazandaran, Golestan and Gilan ) and the capital of ancient Hyrcania.

Another archaic name, Dahistān (not to be confused with dehestan – a modern Iranian word for "district" or "county") is sometimes used interchangeably with Hyrcania. Dahistān refers, strictly speaking to the "place of the Dahae": an extinct people who lived immediately north of Hyrcania, as early as the 5th Century BCE. Apart from the geographical proximity of the Dahae, their ethnonym may have etymological similarities to "Hyrcanians"; for example, religious historian David Gordon White, reiterating a point made by previous scholars, suggests that Dahae resembles the Proto-Indo-European *dhau "strangle", which was apparently also a euphemism for "wolf".

Hyrcania (fortress)

Hyrcania (Ancient Greek: Ὑρκανία; Arabic: Khirbet el-Mird) was an ancient fortress in the Judean Desert of the West Bank.

The site is located on an isolated hill about 200 m above the Hyrcania valley, on its western edge. It is about 5 km west of Qumran, and 16 km east of Jerusalem. The site has not yet been thoroughly excavated. Current knowledge about the ruins of the site is based on a limited number of test pits.

Hyrcania was apparently built by John Hyrcanus or his son Alexander Jannaeus in the 2nd or 1st century BC. The first mention of the fortress is during the reign of Salome Alexandra, the wife of Jannaeus, c. 75 BC: Flavius Josephus relates that, along with Machaerus and Alexandrion, Hyrcania was one of three fortresses that the queen did not give up when she handed control of her strongholds to the Pharisee party.

The fortress is mentioned again in 57 BC when Alexander of Judaea, son of Aristobulus II, fled from the Roman governor of Syria, Aulus Gabinius, who had come to suppress the revolt Alexander had stirred up against Hyrcanus II. Alexander made to re-fortify Hyrcania, but eventually surrendered to Gabinius. The fortress was then razed. The Greek geographer Strabo also notes the destruction, along with that of Alexandrium and Machaerus, the "haunts of the robbers and the treasure-holds of the tyrants", at the direction of Gabinius's superior, the Roman general Pompey.