Names of Georgia
The country's names derive from an ancient word for wolf.
Georgia is the Western exonym for the country in the Caucasus known natively as Sakartvelo. The name likely derives from Old Persian roots meaning 'land of the wolves', reflecting a linguistic connection to the wolf in ancient Iranian languages. The first recorded use of the spelling 'Georgia' appears on a 1320 Italian mappa mundi by Pietro Vesconte.
Quick Facts
- Native name
- Sakartvelo (საქართველო)
- First recorded exonym spelling
- Georgia (1320, on Pietro Vesconte's mappa mundi)
- Official name per constitution
- Georgia
- Former official name
- Republic of Georgia (until 1995)
- Earliest reference to sakartvelo
- c. 800 CE, in a chronicle by Juansher Juansheriani
Facts from the source article.
Endonym
The country's name in Georgian is Sakartvelo (საქართველო). This word is built from two elements. The root, kartvel-i, first appears in an Old Georgian inscription found in Jerusalem and originally referred to a person from the central Georgian region of Kartli, which classical and Byzantine writers called Iberia. By the early 800s, the meaning of Kartli had broadened to include other areas of medieval Georgia that were connected by shared religion, culture, and language. The Georgian circumfix sa-X-o is a standard way to form a place name meaning "the area where X lives," with X standing for an ethnic group. The earliest known use of Sakartvelo is in a Georgian chronicle written around the year 800 by Juansher Juansheriani. Over the next two centuries, the term changed to describe the unified Georgian state that emerged when Bagrat III politically united Kartli and Apkhazeti in 1008, though it did not become common in official documents until the early 1200s. Even after the Kingdom of Georgia broke apart in the 1400s into three kingdoms and five principalities, the idea of a single Sakartvelo survived. Later rulers kept the titles of all-Georgian kings, claiming to be their rightful successors. This vision of unity strongly influenced Prince Vakhushti, an early 1700s Georgian scholar and royal, whose work Description of the Kingdom of Georgia shaped later views of Sakartvelo. Georgia was ruled by the Ottoman, Iranian, and Russian empires from the 1400s through the 1800s. It was briefly reunited as the Democratic Republic of Georgia in 1918, became the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1921, and regained independence as the Republic of Georgia in 1990. The 1995 constitution set the official name as Sakartvelo.
Exonyms
One theory proposes that the name Iberia derives from the Armenian designation for Georgia, Vrastan (Վիրք, Իվիրք, Իվերք), connected to the Kartvelian word Sver (or Svir). The letter 's' served as a prefix for the root 'Ver' (or 'Vir'), and following Ivane Javakhishvili's theory, the ethnic designation 'Sber' derived from 'Hber' ('Hver'), leading to Iberia and the Armenian variants Veria and Viria. The European name 'Georgia' likely stems from the Persian designation gurj (گرج), which reached Western European crusaders and pilgrims in the Holy Land, who rendered it as Georgia (also Jorgania, Giorginia) and erroneously explained its origin by the popularity of St. George among Georgians. Another theory, popularized by Jean Chardin, linked 'Georgia' to Greek γεωργός ('tiller of the land'), citing classical authors such as Pliny and Pomponius Mela, who used 'Georgi' for agricultural tribes. In the 19th century, Marie-Félicité Brosset favored derivation from the river Mtkvari via Kuros-Cyrus-Kura-Djurzan. Several modern scholars suggest 'Georgia' was borrowed in the 11th or 12th century from Syriac and Arabic, derived from New Persian, itself from Middle Persian of unclear origin but resembling the toponym Gorgan, which comes from Old Persian meaning 'land of the wolves'. The Russian exonym Gruziya (Грузия) is also of Persian origin.
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