Name of Greece
[1] Of those, the Ionians largely lived in Anatolia, aka Asia Minor, ergo the most in contact with the Asian world, so their ethnonym became commonly used for all of the Hellenes, to civilizations to east of Greece.
[4] Today, words derived from Yūnān can be found in Persian, Pashto, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kurdish, Malay, Indonesian, Armenian (as Yūnānistan "land of Yūnān"; -istan "land" in Persian), Arabic, Hebrew (Biblical and Modern) (Yavan יָוָן), Aramaic (identical to Hebrew, but in Syriac abjad ܝܘܢ Yaw'n).
Similarly, ancient China referred to the Hellenistic Greco-Bactrian Kingdom in Central Asia as Daxia (Tokhara, or Bactria), and the various city-state confederations around the Ferghana Valley as Dayuan, meaning "Great Ionians".
Chinese contact was made first by Han Dynasty diplomat Zhang Qian in 139 BC during his mission to seek an anti-Xiongnu alliance with Greater Yuezhi.
The Hellenistic dominance was pushed out of Central Asia and remained further south as the Indo-Greek Kingdom, until eventually replaced by the expansion of Indo-Scythians and the Kushans.
William Smith notes in his Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography that foreigners frequently refer to people by a different name (an exonym) from their native one (an endonym).
[5] According to Hesiod, in his Catalogue of Women, Graecus was the son of Pandora and Zeus and gave his name to the people who followed the Hellenic customs.
However, because it lasted almost 1000 years longer than the Western Roman Empire, Persians, Arabs, and Turks, all in the East, used and sometimes still use terms from Rhomania or Rome, such as Rûm, to refer to its land or people.
The second major form, used in many languages and in which the common root is yun or ywn, is borrowed from the Greek name Ionia, the Ionian tribe region of Asia Minor, derived from Old Persian and meant for people with youthful appearances.
In Sanskrit literature in India, the word यवन yavana is derived from this origin and meant the people with youthful appearances.
