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POLICE: ITS ORIGIN in the GREEK WORD ΠÓΛΙΣ

by Bill Casselman

Our word police derives ultimately from πóλις polis, the archaic Greek word for ‘big town.’ They were small as cities go today. We’d call them towns. But even in classical Greek polis meant not the city of streets and buildings but the citizens of the town as a political group and their administration of their town and surrounding countryside and also polis included many of the procedures and social structures necessary to operate the town and some of the countryside around the town, often called in English-written histories of Greece: a city state, itself probably a loan-translation of a German scholarly term Stadtstaat.

 

What πóλις Meant in Ancient Greek

When the Greeks referred to the city as a place of buildings and streets and temples and markets they used another ancient Greek word: astu, a word that does not have any common derivatives in modern English. But those who have read The Odyssey closely may remember Hector’s son and that son’s affectionate nickname, Astyanax. The people of Troy called the lad ‘prince of the city,’ because he was so like Hector, his beloved Trojan father, the boy’s name being compounded of astu Greek ‘city, town’ + anax Greek ‘lord’ or ‘prince.’ Astu is likely to contain the Indo-European root *sta ‘stand, stay’ and so its prime sense would have been ‘the place where we stay’ as opposed to the many unnamed camps where as nomads we formerly pitched brief tents.

 

A coin of the city state of ancient Athens, showing Athena, goddess and legendary founder of the city and glaux, the little Greek owl that was the totemic animal of the city, its chief symbol, probably reaching far back in Greek history to a primitive owl cult associated with the worship of Athena as patroness of wisdom.

 

Greek Words Related to πóλις

One of the first derivatives of polis in ancient Greek itself was a word that meant ‘citizen of a city’ and that was polites from which sprang politeia, the abstract noun for citizenship. Then appeared the common Greek phrase he politike episteme ‘political knowledge,’ that is, the conduct of government. Our English word politics ultimately derives from such a Greek expression. We borrowed it directly from Medieval French la politique, which in turn had it from the Latin adjective politicus.

 

Here Come The Police!

Late Latin used politia to mean ‘citizenship’ and then ‘government’ and then ‘administrative branch of government.’ Medieval French borrowed the word policie ‘political organization’ from which English gets the word policy. A variant spelling in French was police. In 1687 CE a Roman Catholic theologian and writer named François Fénelon published a parental guidebook for the raising of pious daughters. In L’Éducation des filles appears the first printed use of the French word police in its modern meaning of a group of civil employees hired to enforce the law. About 100 years later, the word police appears in English print with the same meaning. Another word, later adopted into English from the same Latin root, was polity ‘the form of political organization.’

Here’s a note on early use of the term police from The Oxford English Dictionary:

“The earliest use in this sense occurs in Marine Police, the name given to the force instituted c1798 (originally by private enterprise) to protect merchant shipping on the River Thames in the Port of London. The police force established for London in 1829 was for some time known as the New Police.”

Uniform of the London Police, 1829

Etymology & PIE Roots of Polis

Polis, as a Greek word from a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root, is derived from and related to PIE roots like *ple- and *pel- and their extensions *plen and *pler whose basic meanings are ‘full.’ Our English adjective full descends from the same PIE root *pel. Consider too one of its Latin reflexes, plenus, the Roman adjective meaning ‘full’ in words like plenty and plenitude and plenary session. In the case of polis, its prime meaning was ‘a place full of many people,’ hence a quite sizeable town. From the same Indo-European root derives the Greek adjective polys and poly ‘many.’ In Greece during the sixth-century BCE such a polis may have comprised only a few hundred Greeks and a fewe thousand acres of nearby land.

Pleres = Full in Greek, Equivalent to Plenus in Latin

While the Latin word for ‘full’ is plenus, the ancient Greek is pleres. Nowadays only a few learned technical terms in English theology use the Greek adjective. Pleroma comes into English from Hellenistic Greek where it meant ‘fullness.’ In theology, pleroma is the fullness of God's being. Plerophory means literally ‘full assurance’ and as a theological term it specifies ‘certainty about an article of Christian faith.’

Polis is also related to a word in a fellow Indo-European language, Lithuanian, where pilìs means ‘citadel’ or ‘castle,’ very much as acropolis meant in ancient Greek, the high (akros Greek), defensible part of a settlement. The Greek word acropolis is thus the ‘high town.’ Athens was not the only Greek city with an acropolis. There was nearby part of a famous Greek city called Acrocorinth. Sparta too had an acropolis.

Polis is cognate with the Sansrkit word for city, pura, which we still see in the names of many well-known localities of India and Southeast Asia. The common Indo-European /l/ for /r/ rule is operative here, where polis is one Greek reflex of the Indo-European root, and -pur and –puram are Sanskrit reflexes of the same root.

Think of:

Jodhpur, जोधपुर in Hindi, is the second largest city in the Indian state of Rajasthan. It means “the city of Jodha” so named because it was founded in 1459 by a chief of the Rathore clan, Rao Jodha.

Equestrians know a word derived from the name of this Indian city, jodhpurs, tight trousers used for horseback riding. A type of short riding boot is also called a jodhpur boot.

 

Singapore is the “city of lions” from Hindi singha ‘lion’ + pur ‘city.’

Although the island had many earlier names, it became Singa Pura during the thirteenth century CE. A Hindi-speaking prince named Malay Ammals mistook an island creature for a lion and called the island ‘lion city.’ Singa Pura eventually became Singapore. Hindi is a language derived from Sanskrit.

 

Mirzapur carpets from northern India, where Mirzapur is Persian for ‘city of the prince.’

 

Jaipur from Hindi जयपर 'city of Jai’    Jaipur is the largest city in Rajasthan and was built in the eighteenth century by Sawai Jai Singh as India’s first planned city.

The dozens of other Indian cities with this root in their names include: Ajjampura, Jabalpur, Kancheepuram, and Sitapur.

 

Sevastopol or Севастополь in Ukrainian and Russian

This little harbour city in the Ukrainian playground of the Crimea is ‘city of the august one,’ named after Augusta Catherine the Second of Russia who founded the place in 1783.

The name derivation of Sevastopol works like this. The standard Greek translation of the Roman honorific for emperors, namely Augustus, was Σεβαστός ‘venerable, revered, worshipped.' The Russkies were being high-falutin' and wanted no mere Slavic name for this pretty little port about to be christened to pay homage to an empress! We need a Greek name, Boris. Vel, how about Sebastopolis? Then literally it will mean ‘Augusta’s City.’ Da!

Map of the Ukraine, with Sevastopol shown in the south on the east coast of the Crimean peninsula

 

Chersonesos & Peninsula Footnote

Crossing the Black Sea, ancient Greek sailors had beached their ships upon Crimean shores and in the fifth century BCE, Greeks founded a port colony called Chersonesos, whose ruins may still be seen today in the western part of the city of Sevastopol. Chersonesos is the cute compound word that the Greeks used to mean ‘peninsula.’ It is made up of chersos Greek ‘dry land, as opposed to water’ + nesos Greek ‘island.’ So a peninsula to the ancient Greeks was a dryland island. Peninsula itself is Latin paene ‘almost’ + insula ‘island.’ To the Romans then, a peninsula was an ‘almost island.’

Nesos, Greek ‘Island’

That Greek word for island lurks in many world place names today. Think of Indonesia, Micronesia ‘place of small islands,’ and Polynesia ‘place of many islands.’

 

Annapolis, Maryland ‘Anne’s City’ was named in 1694 in honour of then British Princess Anne, later to be Queen Anne.

Minneapolis, Minnesota is the “city of lakes’ containing the Dakota word minne ‘lake’ or ‘water’ + polis Greek ‘city.’ The largest Minnesota city contains 22 natural lakes. The state’s name is purer Dakotan. Minnesota means ‘sky-blue water.’

The fictional Princess Minnehaha, in The Song of Hiawatha poem (1855 CE), meant, according to the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ‘Laughing Water.’

 

Other Polis Words

Polis has literally thousands of derivatives in hundreds of languages, especially in the West, but also in farthest-flung crannies of the earth.

Metropolis had the first meaning of ‘mother city’ from Greek meter, metros ‘mother.’ Metropolitan things belong to large cities.

Cosmopolitan is an adjective that means, originally, a citizen of a cosmopolis, a ‘world’ city from Greek kosmos ‘universe, planet.’

Nowadays the adjective cosmopolitan has these meanings:

1. Pertinent or common to the whole world: an issue of cosmopolitan import.

2. Having constituent elements from all over the world or from many different parts of the world: the ancient and cosmopolitan societies of Syria and Egypt.

3. So sophisticated as to be at home in all parts of the world or conversant with many spheres of interest: a cosmopolitan traveler.

4. Ecology Growing or occurring in many parts of the world; widely distributed.

As a noun, a cosmopolitan is a person of the world; a cosmopolite.

 

A necropolis is a ‘city of the dead’ or a graveyard, from Greek nekros ‘dead.’

Chalcolithic or Bronze Age necropolis burial with gold at Varna in Bulgaria (early 5th century BCE)

Some Hidden Poleis (Greek plural of polis)

Istanbul

The root polis is obscured in the name of the once Greek, now Turkish city of Istanbul. The city’s name sounds resolutely Turkish. But it’s from a Greek phrase, eis ten poli ‘to the city.’ Say it quickly and shorten those Greek vowels, and soon you are saying Istanbuli. Now just remove the short /i/ and voilà — Istanbul. Note that the Greek stress is retained, even into English: is-tan-BUL. The noun poli (now -bul) is stressed, not the preposition or the definite article. Almost as if one were still saying the old Greek phrase.

Constantinople

Likewise, Constantinople was an earlier name for Istanbul, as was Byzantium. Constantinople is simply the city of Emperor Constantine, in Greek Konstantinopolis.

Naples

Naples in Italy is another city named with a hidden or at least somewhat obscured polis. Originally a Greek colony and hence a new city, it was dubbed by the Greeks Neapolis ‘new city’ and transformed by the Italian tongue to Napoli.

Nablus

In the Palestinian West Bank of Israel lies the city of Nablus. By order of the Roman emperor Vespasian, the place was founded in 72 CE and named, in honour of himself, Flavia Neapolis ‘Flavius’ new city’ in Latin, the second word later shortened to Nablus. Vespasian's full name was Titus Flavius Vespasianus.

Today Nablus’ names in Arabic and Hebrew are:

Arabic نابلس Nablus

Hebrew שכם Shechem. Hebrew uses the much older Jewish name for the town. Shechem predates the Roman settlement of Judea.

 

Well, I think we’ve gone to town in style with this study of terms associated with the word police.

 

© 2008 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

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