Miletus meaning

Meaning

Of The Smilax

Storage Facility

Honey Pot

Etymology

From σμιλαξ (smilax), a plant.

From the verb מלא (male'), to be filled.

From the noun μελι (meli), honey.

Related names

• Via מלא (male'): Beth-millo, Bimhal, Imla, Mallothi, Melea, Milalai, Millo

• Via μελι (meli): Malta

The name Miletus belongs to a now largely forgotten but once great Greek city situated in Lydia, on the western coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey), about 50 kilometers south of Ephesus and 300 south of Troy. It's been a city since deep antiquity (meaning that when history began to be recorded by the Hittites, Miletus was already there) and became a stronghold of the Cretan Minoans first, then the late-bronze Mycenaean Greeks. By the time of the Trojan War, Miletus was held by the Carians, a local tribe that spoke a local language, and had evidently successfully resisted any Minoan or Mycenaean claim to the land.

Some commentators have proposed that Hellen of Troy's mere beauty could launch a thousand ships, but such notions depend on a sense of romance that did not exist in antiquity. Instead, when Hellen of Sparta (who was married to the king of Sparta) eloped with Paris of Troy (formally a princely son of Priam, but in practical reality an orphan raised by shepherds), two vast worlds collided in a conflict whose effects last until today: (1) the world of freedom and feelings, and (2) the world of law and duty. The famous war that followed was a war in which the entirety of human civilization tried to decide which had the greater authority, the rational mind (collective) or the emotional heart (personal), and by extension whether the dynamics of human society should be dictated by the whims of any overlord, or that the overlord was just as much subject to the ultimate authority of the same law as any citizen: one law that governed the individual as much as the whole community, and the poorest pauper as much as the richest master (see our article on ελευθερια, eleutheria, freedom-by-law).

At the time of the Trojan War, the law governed marriage under the umbrella of property rights, which was still not ideal but a great deal better than nothing. Formal property rights is the first and most essential step away from the law of the jungle (in which the biggest and strongest bully gets all the resources and nothing of any sophistication has a change to rise) and toward a civilization that is more than natural, that evolves beyond biological boundaries and will ultimately knock on the very door of heaven, as a worthy Bride of the Creator. Ultimately, the invention of marriage was humanity's first step away from the animal world, and the beginning of a law that would produce the supernatural animal that humans would become. By the Bronze Age it began to be understood that if any king wanted his society to be truly stable, he would honor any man's property rights and that included any man's marriage, and the emergence of this understanding is told in the Bible via the delightful triptych that stretches from Genesis 12:17 to Genesis 20:3 to Genesis 26:8-9 (also see our articles on the noun γαμος, gamos, marriage, and the verb δαμαζω, damazo, to tame or synchronize).

It's upon this very complex stage that the Carians of Miletus sided with the Trojans against the Achaean coalition (Il.2.868), and the ultimate effect of this was that Miletus was destroyed along with Troy in what today is referred to as the Bronze Age Collapse (which is also the setting of the story of the Exodus).

Post collapse, the Anatolian coast was repeopled by Greeks. A vastly influential school of thought emerged on Miletus, and in the seventh century BC, a man was born who would shake the entire world to its very core: Thales of Miletus, the first of the Seven Sages and widely considered the first natural philosopher. Thales of Miletus was the first European who proposed to explain the world rationally and by mathematics and natural law rather than mythological speculation, which is of course a great idea only if one's mythology is flawed to begin with (see our article on Gog and Magog). Fortunately for Thales of Miletus and subsequently the whole Western World, Miletus and environs were strongly informed by the cultures of the Middle East: Mesopotamia and the Levant, which were in turn strongly dominated by the Jews and their obsession with information technology (see our article on the name YHWH) and free global communication (hence the invention of the formal postal service, from which evolved the Internet).

Miletus was noted to have spawned more colonies than any other known city, and its own signature grid of streets became imitated by Roman ones, and subsequently by many modern cities today. The front of the lengthy wars between the European Greeks and the Persians swept multiple times over Miletus, making it Persian for a few decades, then Greek again, then Persian, until in 334 BC Alexander the Great-To-Be definitively defeated the Persians at the Battle of Miletus. This victory at Miletus would be the first step in the formation of the Greek world. In 133 BC Miletus became part of the Roman province of Asia Minor.

This once most significant of cities is mentioned in the New Testament in Acts 20:15 and 20:17 and 2 Timothy 4:20 only, each time in a sense that suggests a melancholic nod to Miletus' former independence and important formative role in history. Almost as if he speaks for Miletus from the grave (and otherwise somewhat in want of dramatic context), Paul says to the summoned elders of Ephesus: "Therefore, I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all men, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole purpose of God. Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood" (Acts 20:26-28).

Because of the role that Miletus played in the formation of the region (and ultimately the world at large), the origin of its name is generally declared to be entirely unknown (and to probably stem from some long extinct pre-Greek language). But it nevertheless has been overly contemplated and explained by mythology. Mythology, it should be immediately emphasized, is not simply a compendium of make-belief, but rather a natural principle that allows the free market to sort fictional accounts according to people's tastes. Like many little ants that together build an amazingly complex nest that no individual ant had ever considered or could have designed, so mythology leads to a kind of clairvoyant lens that gives insights into the otherwise hidden subconsciousness of human society. Mythology is difficult to keep pure, especially in a world that is fraught with corruption and propaganda, but in some parts of the world, mythologies have been found that "remembered" events that had happened tens of thousands of years before the modern age and whose ruins and remnants were found deep in the ground or out at sea beneath many dozens of meters of water.

That said, Miletus was reportedly named after its founder, namely Miletus, son of Apollo and the nymph Areia of Crete (and these characters personify very real elements of human culture and collective consciousness). For complicated reasons, Areia found it necessary to hide her newborn infant — which is a theme widely visited in the Bible: think of Moses among the papyri and Jesus wrapped in cloth, which are both references to literacy; see our article on the Proto-Indo-European root "teks-", to weave — and hid him in a bed of Smilax, a kind of berry-bearing shrub (and see our discussions of the noun μορον, moron, mulberry, and the name Rhodes).

The plant named Smilax was in turn named after a nymph named Smilax, and where she got her name from is no longer clear (it's pre-Greek). But, or so the bards sang, the name Smilax was relieved of its leading sigma (which is a thing that happened quite a lot in Greek: see our article on the noun σειρα, seira, cord), and what remained, "milax", was turned into the name Miletus.

To any observer with a Phoenician leaning, and that would have included anybody from Miletus at the time of the great Thales, the name Miletus would have seemed notably reminiscent of the name Millo, meaning Storage Facility, from the verb מלא (male'), to be filled. Note in particular the nouns מלאה (millu'a) and מלאת (mille't):

Anybody with a Greco-Roman or Indo-European background would probably have heard relations between our name and that of Malta, from the noun μελι (meli), meaning honey:

In Biblical times, the name Miletus had a decisive academic ring to it, like toponyms such as Princeton, Cambridge and Oxford do in our times. And Paul's decision to skip Ephesus and go to Miletus instead and ask the elders of Ephesus to join him there, is a tongue-in-cheek way for Luke to say that the elders of Ephesus needed to brush up on the latest scientific theories (1 Thessalonians 5:21, 1 Kings 4:33-34) and philosophical methods (Isaiah 1:18).

The name Miletus itself may have reminded well-informed mythologists of the various berry and infant-hiding stories of several traditions, and perhaps the Smilax tree after which Miletus was supposedly named. Others would have known Miletus for the cultural and scientific Power House or Storage Facility or Honey Jar it had become.