The name was applied to the coastal region and its mountainous hinterland (rising to the Pontic Alps in the east) by the Greeks who colonized the area in the Archaic period and derived from the Greek name of the Black Sea: Εύξεινος Πόντος (Eúxinos Póntos), "Hospitable Sea",[3] or simply Pontos (ὁ Πόντος) as early as the Aeschylean Persians (472 BC) and Herodotus' Histories (circa 440 BC).

Having originally no specific name, the region east of the river Halys was spoken of as the country Ἐν Πόντῳ (En Póntō), lit.

[4] In the wake of the Hittite empire's collapse, the Assyrian court noted that the "Kašku" had overrun its territory in conjunction with a hitherto unknown group whom they labeled the Muški.

[5] Iron Age visitors to the region, mostly Greek, noted that the hinterlands remained disunited, and they recorded the names of tribes: Moskhians (often associated with those Muški),[6] Leucosyri,[7] Mares, Makrones, Mossynoikoi, Tibarenoi,[8] Tzans[9] and Chalybes or Chaldoi.

[10] The Armenian language went unnoted by the Hittites, the Assyrians, and all the post-Hittite nations; an ancient theory – first conjectured by Herodotus – is that its speakers migrated from Phrygia, past literary notice, across Pontus during the early Iron Age.

During the late 8th century BC, Pontus further became a base for the Cimmerians, another Indo-European speaking people; however, these were defeated by the Lydians, and became a distant memory after the campaigns of Alyattes.

This fits in well with a foundation date of 731 BC as reported by Eusebius of Caesarea for Sinope, perhaps the most ancient of the Greek colonies in what was later to be called Pontus.

[13] The epical narratives related to the travels of Jason and the Argonauts to Colchis, the tales of Heracles' navigating the Black Sea, and Odysseus' wanderings into the land of the Cimmerians, as well as the myth of Zeus constraining Prometheus to the Caucasus mountains as a punishment for his outwitting the Gods, can all be seen as reflections of early contacts between early Greek colonists and the local, probably Caucasian, peoples.

[14] By the 6th century BC, Pontus had become officially a part of the Achaemenid Empire, which probably meant that the local Greek colonies were paying tribute to the Persians.

As the Encyclopaedia Iranica states, the most famous member of the family, Mithradates VI Eupator, although undoubtedly presenting himself to the Greek world as a civilized philhellene and new Alexander, also paraded his Iranian background: he maintained a harem and eunuchs in true Oriental fashion; he gave all his sons Persian names; he sacrificed spectacularly in the manner of the Persian kings at Pasargadae (Appian, Mith.

Under him, the realm of Pontus included not only Pontic Cappadocia but also the seaboard from the Bithynian frontier to Colchis, part of inland Paphlagonia, and Lesser Armenia.

[21] In response to a Gothic raid on Trebizond in 287 AD, the Roman Emperor Diocletian decided to break up the area into smaller provinces under more localized administration.

Restored to the Byzantine Empire by Alexios I Komnenos, the area was governed by effectively semi-autonomous rulers, like the Gabras family of Trebizond.

[23] Following Constantinople's loss of sovereignty to the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the Pontus retained independence as the Empire of Trebizond under the Komnenos dynasty.

[24] Under the subsequent Ottoman rule which began with the fall of Trebizond, particularly starting from the 17th century, some of the region's Pontic Greeks became Muslim through the Devşirme system.

Neither state came into existence and the Pontic Greek population was subjected to genocide and expelled from Turkey after 1922 and resettled in the Soviet Union or in Macedonia.