The Caspians have generally been regarded as a pre-Indo-European people. They have been identified by Ernst Herzfeld with the Kassites,[6] who spoke a language not identified with any other known language group and whose origins have long been the subject of debate. However, onomastic evidence bearing on this point has been discovered in Aramaic papyri from Egypt published by P. Grelot,[7] in which several of the Caspian names that are mentioned—and identified under the gentilic כספי kaspai—are, in part, etymologically Iranian. The Caspians of the Egyptian papyri are therefore generally considered as either an Iranian people or strongly under Iranian cultural influence.[5]
The Caspiadeans reappear in the medievalHistoria de via Hierosolymitana among the people arrayed against the forces of the First Crusade (1096–1099). The anonymous poet, drawing on Flaccus, probably sought to connect the Seljuk Turks, the Crusaders' actual enemy, with the ancient Scythians.[11]
^Robert H. Hewsen. The Geography of Ananias of Širak: Ašxarhacʻoycʻ, the Long and the Short Recensions. — Reichert, 1992. — P. 254.
^"A Cyro Caspium mare vocari incipit; accolunt Caspii" (Pliny, Natural History vi.13); for a Greek ethnonym of the Aegean Sea, however, see the mythic Aegeus.
^Herodotus, iii.92 (with the Pausicae) and 93 (with the Sacae).
^Strabo (11.2.15) gives a lost work of Eratosthenes as his source.
^Herzfeld, The Persian Empire, (Wiesbaden) 1968:195–99, noted by Rüdiger.
^Grelot, “Notes d'onomastique sur les textes araméens d'Egypte,” Semitica21, 1971, esp. pp. 101–17, noted by Rüdiger.
^Karel van der Toorn (2016), "Ethnicity at Elephantine: Jews, Arameans, Caspians", Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University, 43(2), 147–164. doi:10.1080/03344355.2016.1215532
