Assyrian

Some of these are of women held in servitude (as study of the society implied by the content reveals). They were used in trades, such as cloth-making, and usually came with children. The epithet lawiaiai, “captives”, associated with some of them identifies their origin. Some are ethnic names. One in particular, aswiai, identifies “women of Asia”.[29] Perhaps they were captured in

Asia, but some others, Milatiai, appear to have been of Miletus, a Greek colony, which would not have been raided for slaves by Greeks. Chadwick suggests that the names record the locations where these foreign women were purchased.[30] The name is also in the singular, Aswia, which refers both to the name of a country and to a female from there. There is a masculine form, aswios. This Aswia appears to have been a remnant of a region known to the Hittites as Assuwa, centered on Lydia, or “Roman Asia”. This name, Assuwa, has been suggested as the origin for the name of the continent “Asia”.[31] The Assuwa league was a confederation of states in western Anatolia, defeated by the Hittites under Tudhaliya I around 1400 BCE.

Alternatively, the etymology of the term may be from the Akkadian word (w)aṣû(m), which means ‘to go outside’ or ‘to ascend’, referring to the direction of the sun at sunrise in the Middle East and also likely connected with the Phoenician word asa meaning ‘east’. This may be contrasted to a similar etymology proposed for Europe, as being from Akkadian erēbu(m) ‘to enter’ or ‘set’ (of the sun).

T.R. Reid supports this alternative etymology, noting that the ancient Greek name must have derived from asu, meaning ‘east’ in Assyrian (ereb for Europe meaning ‘west’).[27] The ideas of Occidental (form Latin occidens ‘setting’) and Oriental (from Latin oriens for ‘rising’) are also European invention, synonymous with Western and Eastern.[27] Reid further emphasizes that it explains the Western point of view of placing all the peoples and cultures of Asia into a single classification, almost as if there were a need for setting the distinction between Western and Eastern civilizations on the Eurasian continent.[27] Kazuo Ogura and Tenshin Okakura are two outspoken Japanese figures on the subject.[27]