Rūm (Arabic:روم[ruːm], collective;singulative:روميRūmī[ˈruːmiː];plural:أروامʼArwām[ʔaˈrwaːm];Persian:رومRum orرومیانRumiyān, singularرومیRumi;Turkish:Rum), ultimately derived fromGreek Ῥωμαῖοι (Rhomaioi, literally 'Romans'), is theendonym of the pre-Islamic inhabitants ofAnatolia, the Middle East and theBalkans and date to when those regions were parts of theEastern Roman Empire.
The termRūm is now used to describe:
The termRūm inArabic andNew Persian was derived fromMiddle Persianhrōm, which had in turn derived fromParthianfrwm, which was used to label "Rome" and the "Roman Empire" and was derived from theGreekῬώμη.[1] The Armenian and Georgian forms of the name were also derived from Aramaic and Parthian.[a] According to theEncyclopedia of Islam, Rūm is a Persian and Turkish word used to refer to the Byzantine Empire.[2]
The Greek (Ῥώμη), Middle Persian (hrōm), Parthian (frwm) versions ofRūm are found on theKa'ba-ye Zartosht, a monument declaringShapur I's victory overMarcus Antonius Gordianus.[3] The inscriptions on the Ka'ba-ye Zartosht date from around 262 AD.[4]
Rûm is found in the pre-IslamicNamara inscription[5] and later in theQuran (7th century) in which it is used to refer to the contemporaryEastern Roman Empire under its Greek-speaking emperors (theHeraclian dynasty). The empire was the most prominent Christian state during the period ofMuhammad's life and during the composition of the Quran, theWestern Roman Empire having fallen two centuries earlier, during the 5th century.[6]
TheQur'an includesAr-Rum, thesura dealing with "the Romans", which is sometimes translated as "The Byzantines" to reflect a term that is now used in the West. The Romans of the 7th century, who are referred to asByzantines in modern Western scholarship, were the inhabitants of the surviving Eastern Roman Empire. Since all ethnic groups in the Roman empire had been grantedcitizenship by 212 AD, the eastern peoples had come to label themselvesΡωμιοί orῬωμαῖοι (Romioi or Romaioi,Romans) by using the word for Roman citizen in the easternlingua franca ofKoine Greek. The citizenship label became رومRūm in Arabic. To designate the inhabitants of the western city of Rome, the Arabs use instead the word رومان Rūmān or sometimes لاتينيونLātīniyyūn (Latins), and to designate European Greek speakers, the term يونانيونYūnāniyyūn is used (from يونانYūnān (Ionia), the name for Greece). The word "Byzantine", which is now used by Western historians to describe the Eastern Roman Empire and itsGreek lingua franca, was not used anywhere at the time.
The Roman and later Eastern Roman (Byzantine) state encompassed the entirety of the eastern Mediterranean for six centuries, but after the advent of Islam in Arabia in the 7th century and during the subsequentIslamic conquest of what is now Syria, Egypt and Libya in the 7th and the 8th centuries AD, the Byzantine state shrank to consist only of Anatolia and the Balkans in the Middle Ages. TheSeljuks of theSultanate of Rum took their name fromar-Rum, the word for the Romans in the Qu'ran.[7] During the early Renaissance (15th century) the Byzantine state finallyfell to the Muslim Turkic conquerors, who had begun migrating into what is now Turkey from Central Asia from the 12th to the 14th centuries. Thus, during the Middle Ages, theArabs called the native inhabitants of what is now Turkey, the Balkans, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine "Rûm" (literally Romans but in modern historiography often called Byzantines), called what is now Turkey and the Balkans "the land of the Rûm" and referred to theMediterranean as "the Sea of the Rûm".
After thefall of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Turkish conqueror SultanMehmed II declared himself to have replaced the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) ruler as the newKayser-i Rum, literally "Caesar of theRomans". In the Ottomanmillet system, the conquered natives of Turkey and the Balkans were now categorized as the "Rum Millet" (Millet-i Rum) for taxation purposes and were allowed to continue practicingOrthodox Christianity, the religion that had been promulgated by the former Byzantine state. In modern TurkeyRum is still used to denote theOrthodox Christian native minority of Turkey, together with its pre-conquest remnant institutions such as theRum Ortodoks Patrikhanesi, the Turkish designation of the Istanbul-basedEcumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the figurehead for all of Orthodox Christianity and former religious leader of the Eastern Roman state.
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Muslim contact with the Byzantine Empire most often took place inAsia Minor, the bulk of which is now in Turkey, since it was the heartland of the Byzantine state from the early Middle Ages onward and so the termRûm became fixed there geographically. The term remained even after the conquest of what is now central Turkey in the late Middle Ages bySeljuk Turks, who were migrating fromCentral Asia. Thus, the Turks called their new state theSultanate of Rûm, the "Sultanate of the Rome."
After the Ottoman conquest of theBalkans, the area was calledRumelia (Roman lands) as it was predominantlyinhabited by the newly conquered-nation, which the Ottomans calledRûm.
Al-Rūmī is anisbah that designates people originating in the Eastern Roman Empire or lands that formerly belonged to it, especially those that are now called Turkey. Historical people so designated include the following:
The Greek surnameRoumeliotis stems from the wordRûm borrowed by Ottomans.[citation needed]
During the 16th century, thePortuguese usedrume andrumes (plural) as a generic term to refer to theMamluk-Ottoman forces that they faced in theIndian Ocean.[8]
The termUrums, also derived from the same origin, is still used in contemporaryethnography to denote Turkic-speaking Greek populations. "Rumeika" is a Greek dialect identified mainly with theOttoman Greeks.[citation needed]
The Chinese during theMing dynasty referred to the Ottomans asLumi (魯迷), derived fromRum orRumi. The Chinese also referred to Rum asWulumu 務魯木 during theQing dynasty. The modern Mandarin Chinese name for the city of Rome isLuoma (羅馬).[citation needed]
Among the Muslim aristocracy ofSouth Asia, thefez is known as theRumi Topi (which means "hat of Rome orByzantium").[9]
Non-Ottoman Muslims in the classical period called the Ottomans Rumis because of the Byzantine legacy that was inherited by the Ottoman Empire.[10]
In theSassanian period (pre-Islamic Persia), the wordHrōmāy-īg (Middle Persian) meant "Roman" or "Byzantine" and was derived from the Byzantine Greek wordRhomaioi.[citation needed]
The Latinalphabet used forMalay is endonymically calledtulisan Rumi (lit. 'Roman writing').[11]
This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Duncan Black MacDonald (1911). "Rum, a very indefinite term in use among Mahommedans at different dates for Europeans generally and for the Byzantine empire in particular". InChisholm, Hugh (ed.).Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.