Mars takes its name from the Roman god of war, a connection drawn thousands of years ago because of the planet’s striking blood-red appearance in the night sky. Ancient Romans looked up, saw that ruddy glow, and thought of battlefields. But Rome was far from the only civilization to notice the planet’s color and project meaning onto it, and the story of how a Roman deity’s name ended up on modern star charts involves a winding path through Babylonian temples, Greek mythology, and centuries of European astronomical tradition.
Why the Romans Chose the God of War
To the naked eye, Mars is one of the most visually distinctive objects in the night sky. Its reddish-orange hue sets it apart from the white and blue-white points of most stars and from the steady glow of Jupiter or Venus. For the Romans, that color had an unmistakable association: blood. Mars, or Mārs in Latin, was the god of war, second only to Jupiter in the Roman pantheon. He was fierce, violent, and revered. The planet’s color made the connection feel natural, almost inevitable. Roman writers referred to the planet as Mārs or sometimes the “star of Mars,” and the name became embedded in the Latin-speaking world’s understanding of the heavens.
Roman planetary naming was systematic. The five planets visible without a telescope each received the name of a major deity. The fastest-moving point of light became Mercury, named for the swift messenger god. The brightest became Venus, for the goddess of beauty. The stately, slow-moving giant became Saturn, for the god of time. The largest and most luminous of the outer planets became Jupiter, king of the gods. And the red one became Mars. This naming convention was not random; Romans were borrowing and adapting a much older tradition.
Older Names From Mesopotamia and Greece
Long before Rome existed as a republic, Babylonian astronomers in Mesopotamia were tracking Mars across the sky. They called it Nergal, after their god of war, plague, and the underworld. Babylonian records of planetary movements date back well over two thousand years, and these astronomers were meticulous observers. They cataloged Mars’s positions, tracked its strange retrograde motion, and wove it into their religious and astrological frameworks. The association between the red planet and a war deity appears to have originated in Mesopotamia, or at least that is the oldest written record we have of the connection.
The Greeks inherited much of Babylonian astronomical knowledge, either directly through trade and cultural exchange or indirectly through intermediary civilizations. They called the planet Ares, after their own god of war, who was a more chaotic and less respected figure than his Roman counterpart. The Greek name Ares is still used today in scientific contexts: the adjective “areographic” describes the surface of Mars, and the prefix “areo-” appears in technical planetary science. But it was the Latin name, not the Greek one, that stuck in everyday use, largely because the Roman Empire’s language dominated European scholarship for centuries.
The path from Nergal to Ares to Mars illustrates a pattern that repeated across the ancient Mediterranean world. Each successive civilization adopted the previous one’s planetary associations and translated them into its own mythology. The planet kept its warlike identity; only the god’s name changed. By the time Roman culture became the dominant intellectual force in Europe, “Mars” was the standard label, and it never lost that position.
The Color That Started Everything
The entire naming tradition rests on one physical fact: Mars looks red. That color is not an illusion or a trick of the atmosphere. The planet’s surface is coated in iron oxide, the same chemical compound we call rust. Billions of years of chemical reactions between iron-rich minerals and trace amounts of oxygen and water produced a thin layer of fine, reddish dust that covers much of the Martian landscape. When sunlight hits that dust, the reflected light carries a warm, orange-red tint that is visible even from hundreds of millions of kilometers away.
Fine Martian dust also gets kicked into the planet’s thin atmosphere, which gives the sky itself a butterscotch hue when viewed from the surface and contributes to the planet’s reddish appearance from Earth. During Martian dust storms, which can occasionally engulf the entire planet, the effect intensifies. Ancient observers obviously did not know the chemistry behind the color, but they did not need to. The reddish glow was consistent and unmistakable, and across cultures separated by oceans and millennia, it prompted remarkably similar reactions.
Mars in Chinese, Hindi, and Egyptian Traditions
The Romans were not unique in associating Mars with fire, blood, or destruction. In ancient China, the planet was called Yínghùo, often translated as “sparkling deluder” or “fire star.” Chinese astronomers grouped it with the element fire in their five-element cosmological system. Its appearance and movements were carefully recorded and interpreted as omens, often of war or famine. The Chinese name focused on the planet’s deceptive, flickering quality in the sky, but the fire association was fundamentally about color.
In the Hindu astronomical tradition, the planet is called Mangala, a name associated with the god of war and also linked to the concept of auspiciousness. Mangala gives Tuesday its name in Hindi and several other Indian languages, just as Mars gives Tuesday its name in several Romance languages (Martes in Spanish, Mardi in French). The Egyptian name for Mars, often reconstructed as “Her Desher” or “the red one,” is perhaps the most literal of all ancient names. Egyptian astronomers dispensed with the mythological middleman and simply described what they saw.
What is striking about these independent naming traditions is not that they are identical, because they are not, but that they converge on the same visual feature. Red meant fire, blood, or war in enough cultures to make Mars the most consistently “branded” planet in the solar system. Venus attracted associations with beauty and femininity across many traditions, and Jupiter with kingship and authority, but Mars’s link to warfare and destruction is arguably the most universal.
Mesoamerican and Indigenous Observations
Cultures in the Americas also tracked Mars with precision. The ancient Maya, whose astronomical accomplishments are well documented, devoted considerable attention to the planet’s movements. Pages of the Dresden Codex, one of the few surviving pre-Columbian Maya manuscripts, record detailed tables tracking Mars’s synodic cycle, meaning the time it takes for the planet to return to the same position relative to the Sun as seen from Earth. More recent analysis of the Codex has revealed that Maya astronomers also tracked the sidereal motion of Mars, using two types of empirical sidereal intervals: a longer one of about 702 days that included a retrograde loop and a shorter one that did not.1PubMed Central. Ancient Maya documents concerning the movements of Mars This level of observational sophistication is remarkable and shows that careful planetary tracking was not limited to the Old World.
Among Indigenous Australian cultures, Mars appears in multiple oral traditions, though the ethnographic record is uneven. The Kamilaroi people of eastern Australia referred to Mars as “gumba,” meaning “fat.” The Anmatyerre-speaking people of the Central Desert called it “lherrm-penh,” a term meaning “something that has been burnt in flames,” a description that resonates with the fire and blood associations found halfway around the world. The Kokatha people of the Western Desert linked Mars and the red star Antares with Kogolongo, the red-tailed black cockatoo, connecting the planet’s color to a bird whose plumage shares that same deep red.2Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Planetary Science. The Planets in Indigenous Australian Traditions These traditions show that Mars’s redness was culturally meaningful far beyond the Mediterranean world.
How the Roman Name Won
Given that dozens of cultures had their own names for the red planet, the question is really why “Mars” is the one that ended up on every modern English-language star chart, textbook, and space mission patch. The answer is straightforward: Latin was the language of European scholarship for more than a thousand years. When medieval and Renaissance astronomers in Europe wrote about the planets, they used Latin names. When Copernicus published his model of the solar system in 1543, he used Latin. When Galileo pointed his telescope at the sky, the planets already had their Roman names firmly established in every educated European’s vocabulary.
As European colonial and scientific influence spread globally from the sixteenth century onward, the Latin-derived planetary names became the international standard, at least in scientific contexts. Many languages still use their own traditional names in everyday speech. In Japanese, Mars is Kasei, meaning “fire star,” echoing the Chinese tradition. In Arabic, it is al-Mirrikh. But in international astronomy and space science, “Mars” is universal. The International Astronomical Union, which governs the official naming of celestial bodies, uses the Roman names for all the classical planets.
Tuesday and Other Linguistic Traces
Mars left fingerprints across the calendar and across languages in ways that many people do not realize. In Romance languages descended from Latin, Tuesday is Mars’s day: Martes in Spanish, Mardi in French, Martedì in Italian. The English word “Tuesday” follows the same logic but through a Germanic filter. When Germanic-speaking peoples encountered the Roman calendar, they swapped Roman gods for their closest Norse equivalents. Mars, the war god, was matched with Tíw (also spelled Týr), the Norse god of war and combat. Tíw’s day became Tuesday.
The month of March also derives from Mars. In the earliest Roman calendar, March was the first month of the year, the month when the weather warmed enough to resume military campaigns. Naming the start of the fighting season after the god of war made practical as well as religious sense. So when you say “Tuesday in March,” you are invoking the Roman war god twice without thinking about it.
Naming the Surface of Mars
The influence of classical mythology did not stop with the planet’s name. When telescopes became powerful enough to reveal dark and light patches on Mars’s surface in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, astronomers needed labels for those features. They turned, predictably, to classical literature. The system of naming that grew out of this era is a dense web of allusions to Greek and Roman mythology, geography, and epic poetry. Modern planetary scientists working with Mars data sometimes encounter feature names whose origins are obscure even to well-read scholars.3ScienceDirect. The origins of Martian nomenclature
The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who mapped Mars extensively in the late 1800s, was particularly influential in establishing this classical naming tradition. He labeled features with names like Syrtis Major (after a gulf in Libya), Hellas (the Greek name for Greece), and Elysium (the paradise of Greek mythology). His use of the Italian word “canali” to describe linear features he observed was famously mistranslated into English as “canals,” sparking decades of speculation about intelligent life on Mars. The features were real, though their nature was misunderstood; the implication of artificial construction was a translation error that took on a life of its own.
When spacecraft began visiting Mars in the 1960s and 1970s, the flood of new surface data created a naming challenge. The International Astronomical Union established formal rules for Martian nomenclature. Large craters are named after deceased scientists and writers who contributed to Mars studies. Smaller craters are named after towns on Earth. Valleys are named using the word for “Mars” or “star” in various languages, a nod to the planet’s multicultural naming history. The result is a map where Schiaparelli’s classical names sit alongside features named in Inuit, Navajo, Thai, and dozens of other languages.
Mars Versus Ares in Modern Science
One quirk of the naming legacy is that both the Roman and Greek names survive in modern scientific vocabulary, but they serve different functions. “Mars” and “Martian” are used in almost all general and applied contexts: Martian soil, Martian atmosphere, Mars rovers. The Greek-derived prefix “areo-” appears in more specialized technical terms. Areography is the study of the physical features of Mars’s surface, analogous to geography for Earth. Areology is sometimes used as the Martian equivalent of geology. Areocentric means centered on Mars, used in orbital calculations.
The split is not consistent, and there is no formal rule dictating when to use one root versus the other. In practice, “Martian” dominates popular and most scientific writing, while “areo-” terms show up in niche planetary science literature. The coexistence of both naming roots is a small reminder that the Greeks and Romans both left their marks on how we talk about the red planet, even if Rome got the headline credit.
Why Mars Was Never Renamed
Unlike Uranus, whose name was debated for decades after William Herschel discovered it in 1781, Mars has never faced a serious renaming effort. This is partly because Mars was known to every ancient civilization with a written record. There was no moment of “discovery” to attach a new name to. By the time modern international astronomy established formal naming conventions, “Mars” had been in continuous use for well over two thousand years. Changing it would have been like renaming the Moon.
There have been occasional proposals in popular culture and science fiction to refer to Mars by other names, sometimes drawn from non-Western traditions, as a way of decolonizing planetary nomenclature. These proposals have generated interesting discussion but no traction within the IAU. The practical argument for keeping the name is overwhelming: every map, every paper, every mission, every international agreement already uses “Mars.” The cultural argument is more nuanced, but the naming conventions for surface features offer a partial compromise. By drawing crater and valley names from languages around the world, the IAU has acknowledged that the planet belongs to all of humanity’s sky-watching traditions, even if its headline name comes from one particular tradition.
What persists across every culture’s name for the planet, from the Roman war god to the Aboriginal “something burnt in flames,” is recognition of that color. The iron oxide on a world 225 million kilometers away, on average, was vivid enough to become one of the oldest shared observations in human history. Every name humans have given the planet is, in one way or another, a name for the color red.