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Comment by qersist3nce | Hacker News Reader

In Sassanian sources he was refereed as "Alaksandar ī hrōmāy" and "Eskandar the Gajostak [accursed]".

Note they used hrōmāy (Roman) in spite of him being Greek, possibly due to Hellenic influence on Roman civilization.

Accursed cause he burned the original Avesta and plundered ērān-šahr (country of Iran) and moved all its gold to the original homeland.

Fun fact, in Persian, the name of the country Greece is Yunan referring to the Iona region in western Anatolia (current day Turkey).

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> Fun fact, in Persian, the name of the country Greece is Yunan referring to the Iona region in western Anatolia (current day Turkey).

Same in Indian languages. Modern Indian languages borrow the Persian term, though more often Indians encounter the term in the name of the (still fairly popular in some circles) traditional system of medicine the Central Asians bought to India - Yunani.

In Ancient India, from the time that Alexander came to India, the Greeks were referred to as Yavana. In ancient times, Greek mercenaries were common across the country, with Indo-Greek kingdoms based in North West India & Afghanistan for several centuries after Alexander. Greeks were so prevalent that the ancient sources apply the Yavana term to any outsider.

"Yunnani" medicine comes from the region of Yunnan [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yunnan ] and is unrelated to Yunan.

Nope, Yunani/Unani medicine in India is derived from the Greek system of Galen and developed by the Arabs.

https://www.britannica.com/science/Unani-medicine/Modes-of-t...

http://www.jtcm.org/yunani-medicine/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unani_medicine?oldformat=true

Roman, because that's how the Greeks named themselves at the time of the Sasanian Empire, being the time of Romania (a.k.a. the Byzantine Empire).

Wow. I'm fully aware that the Byzantines called themselves the Romans until at least the fall of Constantinople, and still found that section of the article confusing. For some stupid reason it never occurred to me other people would call them Roman.

Same way a large number of European and Islamic empires continued to use some variation of Caesar to mean King or Emperor (eg. Tsar in Slavic cultures, Kaiser in Germanic cultures, Geysar/Qeysar/Kesar in Indo-Iranian and Ottoman culture)

I've always attributed that to the full Roman empire, though it probably was both, as I was under the impression Basileus was more commonly used when speaking Greek like the Byzantines did.

I think this comes from my modern perspective, where I think "nobody considers the Byzantines 'Roman' though that's what they called themselves." Of course that wouldn't be true in 1000 AD.

Later they came to be called the Greeks mostly by the Latins, to kind of steal the legacy, i.e. you're not Roman, you're Greek. But for the Ottomans it was always Rum (Roman), even now it is more Istanbulite to call the "European" side Rum. Same as there is this story from the liberation wars, where Greek kids from an island came running to see the soldier. The soldiers asked, what are you looking for, and they say: "Greeks!". The soldiers say: "But you, too are Greeks". The kids answer, "No, we're just Romans."

And in Hebrew it's Yavan. Probably Babylonian captivity influence.

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