Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: What is the Caspian Sea named for?
Turkic languages refer to the lake as "Khazar Sea". In Turkmen, the name is , in Azeri, it is , and in modern Turkish, it is . In all these cases, the second word simply means "sea", and the first word refers to the historical Khazars who had a large empire based to the north of the Caspian Sea between the 7th and 10th centuries. An exception is Kazakh, where it is called , "Kaspiy teñizi" (Caspian Sea).
The ecoregion is approximately contained within the Caspian Depression, and sunken geological region feeding in to the Caspian, the surface of which is itself at below worldwide sea level. The northern section is almost 900 km wide, and stretches up to 300 km inland across Russia and Kazakhstan. The sector along the southeast coast of the Caspian is mostly in Turkmenistan. Elevations throughout the ecoregion range between -28 and +100 meters. The dry areas were once underwater, but as the sea has slowly receded the dry areas have revealed a landscape of sand dunes, ridges, salt domes, salt pans ('shors'), and clay deserts ('takyrs'). 
The climate of the ecoregion is represented by that in the Volga delta, in the Astrakhan Nature Reserve, where the climate is cool semi-arid (Köppen climate classification BSk). This climate is characterized by high variation in temperature, both daily and seasonally; with low precipitation. Average annual precipitation in the Caspian lowlands is 198 mm. Average temperature in January is , and in July is
Neogobius pallasi, the Caspian sand goby or the Caspian monkey goby, is a species of fish native to fresh and brackish waters of the Caspian Sea basin including the Volga drainage up to the vicinity of Moscow. It has been introduced into the Aral basin. This species of goby can reach a length of SL. It is also important to local commercial fisheries.
Archeological studies of Gobustan petroglyphs indicate that there once had been dolphins and porpoises, or a certain species of beaked whales and a whaling scene indicates large baleen whales likely being present in Caspian Sea at least until when the Caspian Sea ceased being a part of the ocean system or until the Quaternary or much more recent periods such as until the last glacial period or antiquity. Although the rock art on Kichikdash Mountain is assumed to be of a dolphin or of a beaked whale, it might instead represent the famous beluga sturgeon due to its size (430 cm in length), but fossil records suggest certain ancestors of modern dolphins and whales, such as "Macrokentriodon morani" (bottlenose dolphins) and "Balaenoptera sibbaldina" (blue whales) were presumably larger than their present descendants. From the same artworks, auks, like Brunnich's Guillemot could also have been in the sea as well, and these petroglyphs suggest marine inflow between the current Caspian Sea and the Arctic Ocean or North Sea, or the Black Sea. This is supported by the existences of current endemic, oceanic species such as lagoon cockles which was genetically identified to originate in Caspian/Black Seas regions.
The Convention grants jurisdiction over 15 miles of territorial waters to each neighboring country, plus additional 10 miles of exclusive fishing rights on the surface, while the rest is international waters. The seabed, on the other hand, remains undefined, subject to bilateral agreements between countries. Thus, the Caspian Sea is legally neither fully a sea nor a lake.
The Republic of Kazakhstan is a landlocked sovereign country located across both Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world as well as the world's largest landlocked country, it has a territory of 2,727,300 km² (greater than Western Europe). It is bordered by Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and China. The country also borders on a significant part of the Caspian Sea.
The species is distributed throughout brackish and fresh waters of the Ponto-Caspian basin. It is found in the Caspian Sea, the Sea of Azov, rivers Volga, Don, Kuban and Danube; in the rivers up to over 500 km upstream. All the previous mentionings of "P. baeri" outside the Caspian Sea should probably be attributed to "P. bakuensis". The ranges of "P. bakuensis" and "P. baeri" partly overlap: they can be found together in the Caspian Sea.
There is considerable topographical variation within Kazakhstan. The highest point is the top of the mountain Khan Tengri, on the Kyrgyz border in the Tian Shan range, with an elevation of above sea level; the lowest point is the bottom of the Karagiye depression at below sea level, in the Mangystau province east of the Caspian Sea. Most of the country lies at between above sea level, but Kazakhstan's Caspian shore includes some of the lowest elevations on Earth. The peak Khan Tengri in the Tian Shan Mountains (and on the border with Kyrgyzstan and China) is Kazakhstan highest elevation at ( with ice cap).
Casper is a city in and the county seat of Natrona County, Wyoming, United States. Casper is the second largest city in the state, according to the 2010 census, with a population of 55,316. Only Cheyenne, the state capital, is larger. Casper is nicknamed "The Oil City" and has a long history of oil boomtown and cowboy culture, dating back to the development of the nearby Salt Creek Oil Field. In 2010, Casper was named the highest-ranked family-friendly small city in the West, and ranked eighth overall in the nation in Forbes magazine's list of "the best small cities to raise a family".
Kazakhstan is located in Central Asia and Eastern Europe at . With an area of about 2,724,800 square kilometers, Kazakhstan is more than twice the combined size of the other four Central Asian states and 60% larger than Alaska. The country borders Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan to the south; Russia to the north; Russia and the Caspian Sea to the west; and China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region to the east.
Endorheic drainage basins are inland basins that do not drain to an ocean. Around 18% of all land drains to endorheic lakes or seas or sinks. The largest of these consists of much of the interior of Asia, which drains into the Caspian Sea, the Aral Sea, and numerous smaller lakes. Other endorheic regions include the Great Basin in the United States, much of the Sahara Desert, the drainage basin of the Okavango River (Kalahari Basin), highlands near the African Great Lakes, the interiors of Australia and the Arabian Peninsula, and parts in Mexico and the Andes. Some of these, such as the Great Basin, are not single drainage basins but collections of separate, adjacent closed basins.
By his own account, generally believed now to be accurate, Cyrus was preceded as king by his father Cambyses I, grandfather Cyrus I, and great-grandfather. Cyrus married Cassandane who was an Achaemenian and the daughter of Pharnaspes who bore him two sons, Cambyses II and Bardiya along with three daughters, Atossa, Artystone, and Roxane. Cyrus and Cassandane were known to love each other very much – Cassandane said that she found it more bitter to leave Cyrus than to depart her life. After her death, Cyrus insisted on public mourning throughout the kingdom. The Nabonidus Chronicle states that Babylonia mourned Cassandane for six days (identified from 21–26 March 538 BC). After his father's death, Cyrus inherited the Persian throne at Pasargadae which was a vassal of Astyages. It is also noted that Strabo has said that Cyrus was originally named Agradates by his step-parents; therefore, it is probable that, when reuniting with his original family, following the naming customs, Cyrus's father, Cambyses I, named him Cyrus after his grandfather, who was Cyrus I.
For almost all of her history, the territory of the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan was a part of the various Iranian/Persian empires or Persianate empires, specifically during the reign of dynasties such as Median, Achaemenid, Parthians, Sassanid, the Shirvanshah, various dynasties of the Iranian Intermezzo, the Kara Koyunlu, the Ak Koyunlu, the Safavids, the Afsharids, the Zands, and the Qajars. The South Caucasus, in general, has been influenced by Iranian culture for thousands of years. In the course of the 19th century, following the occupation of the Caucasus by Russian troops during the Russo-Persian War (1804-1813) and Russo-Persian War (1826-1828), Qajar Iran was forced to cede what is now Azerbaijan, alongside Georgia, Dagestan, and Armenia to Imperial Russia under the terms of the treaties of Gulistan and Turkmenchay. Due to historical, cultural, ethnical, and religious ties, the Republic of Azerbaijan is considered as a part of Greater Iran.
East Kazakhstan Region (; , "Vostochno-Kazakhstanskaya oblast") is a region of Kazakhstan. It occupies the easternmost part of Kazakhstan, along both sides of the Irtysh River and Lake Zaysan. Its administrative center is Oskemen (also known as Ust-Kamenogorsk). The region borders Russia in the north and northeast and the People's Republic of China in the south and southeast. The easternmost point of the Oblast is within about 50 kilometres of the westernmost tip of Mongolia; however, Kazakhstan and Mongolia do not share a common border, the two countries being separated by a small part of Russia and China. East Kazakhstan Region borders the Kazakh regions of Pavlodar Region to the north west, Karaganda Region to the west, Almaty Region to the south, Russia's Altai Krai and Altai Republic to the north and China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to the east. Population: 318,800 (as of 4/1/2011) live in the capital. The area has many Russians and Ukrainians; the capital itself has more of those two groups than Kazakhs themselves. The area is 283,300 square kilometers.
Kazakhstan is officially a democratic, secular, unitary, constitutional republic with a diverse cultural heritage. Kazakhstan shares borders with Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, and also adjoins a large part of the Caspian Sea. The terrain of Kazakhstan includes flatlands, steppe, taiga, rock canyons, hills, deltas, snow-capped mountains, and deserts. Kazakhstan has an estimated 18.3 million people . Given its large land area, its population density is among the lowest, at less than 6 people per square kilometre (15 people per sq mi). The capital is Astana, where it was moved in 1997 from Almaty, the country's largest city.
Kazakhstan declared itself an independent country on December 16, 1991, the last Soviet republic to do so. Its communist-era leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, became the country's new president. Since independence, Kazakhstan has pursued a balanced foreign policy and worked to develop its economy, especially its hydrocarbon industry. While the country's economic outlook is improving, President Nazarbayev maintains strict control over the country's politics. Several opposition leaders and journalists have been killed in recent years, and Western observers generally do not consider Kazakhstan's elections to be free and fair. Nevertheless, Kazakhstan's international prestige is building. It is now considered to be the dominant state in Central Asia. The country belongs to many international organizations, including the United Nations, NATO's Partnership for Peace, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In 2010, Kazakhstan will chair the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. In 2011, it formed a customs union with Russia and Belarus.
Cyrus II of Persia ( "Kūruš"; New Persian: "Kuruš"; ; c. 600–530 BC), commonly known as Cyrus the Great  and also called Cyrus the Elder by the Greeks, was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, the first Persian Empire. Under his rule, the empire embraced all the previous civilized states of the ancient Near East, expanded vastly and eventually conquered most of Western Asia and much of Central Asia. From the Mediterranean Sea and Hellespont in the west to the Indus River in the east, Cyrus the Great created the largest empire the world had yet seen. Under his successors, the empire eventually stretched at its maximum extent from parts of the Balkans (Bulgaria-Paeonia and Thrace-Macedonia) and Eastern Europe proper in the west, to the Indus Valley in the east. His regal titles in full were The Great King, King of Persia, King of Anshan, King of Media, King of Babylon, King of Sumer and Akkad, and King of the Four Corners of the World. The Nabonidus Chronicle notes the change in his title from simply "King of Anshan", a city, to "King of Persia". Assyriologist François Vallat wrote that "When Astyages marched against Cyrus, Cyrus is called ‘King of Anshan’, but when Cyrus crosses the Tigris on his way to Lydia, he is ‘King of Persia’. The coup therefore took place between these two events."
Pergamon lies on the north edge of the Caicus plain in the historic region of Mysia in the northwest of Turkey. The Caicus river breaks through the surrounding mountains and hills at this point and flows in a wide arc to the southwest. At the foot of the mountain range to the north, between the rivers Selinus and Cetius, there is the massif of Pergamon which rises 335 metres above sea level. The site is only 26 km from the sea, but the Caicus plain is not open to the sea, since the way is blocked by the Karadağ massif. As a result, the area has a strongly inland character. In Hellenistic times, the town of Elaia at the mouth of the Caicus served as the port of Pergamon. The climate is Mediterranean with a dry period from May to August, as is common along the west coast of Asia Minor.
The Balkan Peninsula is bounded by the Adriatic Sea to the west, the Mediterranean Sea (including the Ionian and Aegean seas) and the Marmara Sea to the south and the Black Sea to the east. Its northern boundary is often given as the Danube, Sava and Kupa Rivers. The Balkan Peninsula has a combined area of about (slightly smaller than Spain). It is more or less identical to the region known as Southeastern Europe.
The term is criticized for having a geopolitical rather a geographical meaning and definition, as a multiethnic and political area in the Southeastern part of Europe. The geographical term of a peninsula defines that the water border must be longer than land, with the land side being the shortest in the triangle, but that's not the case with the Balkan Peninsula. Both Eastern and Western water cathetus from Odessa to Cape Matapan (ca. 1230-1350 km) and from Trieste to Cape Matapan (ca. 1270-1285 km) are shorter than land cathetus from Trieste to Odessa (ca. 1330-1365 km). The land has a too wide line connected to the continent to be technically proclaimed as a peninsula - Szczecin (920 km) and Rostock (950 km) at the Baltic Sea are closer to Trieste than Odessa yet it is not considered as another European peninsula. Since the late 19th and early 20th-century literature is not known where is exactly the Northern border between the peninsula and the continent, with an issue, whether the rivers are suitable for its definition. In the studies the Balkans natural borders, especially Northern border, are often avoided to be addressed, considered as a "fastidious problem" by André Blanc in "Geography of the Balkans" (1965), while John Lampe and Marvin Jackman in "Balkan Economic History" (1971) noted that "modern geographers seem agreed in rejecting the old idea of a Balkan Peninsula". Another issue is the name because the Balkan Mountains which are mostly located in Northern Bulgaria are not dominating the region by length and area like the Dinaric Alps. An eventual Balkan peninsula can be considered a territory South of the Balkan Mountains, with a possible name "Greek-Albanian Peninsula", but Greece is rarely defined as a Balkan nation both geographically and in international relations. The term influenced the meaning of Southeast Europe which again is not properly defined by geographical factors yet historical borders of the Balkans.
Asia is the largest continent on Earth. It covers 9% of the Earth's total surface area (or 30% of its land area), and has the largest coastline, at . Asia is generally defined as comprising the eastern four-fifths of Eurasia. It is located to the east of the Suez Canal and the Ural Mountains, and south of the Caucasus Mountains (or the Kuma–Manych Depression) and the Caspian and Black Seas. It is bounded on the east by the Pacific Ocean, on the south by the Indian Ocean and on the north by the Arctic Ocean. Asia is subdivided into 48 countries, three of them (Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey) having part of their land in Europe.
The lower part of the river flows through the Kura-Aras Lowland, which covers most of central Azerbaijan and abuts the Caspian Sea. The Kura is the third largest, after the Volga and Ural, of the rivers that flow into the Caspian. Its delta is the fourth largest among the rivers that flow into the Caspian Sea, and is divided into three main sections, or "sleeves", composed of sediment the river deposited during different periods of time. Before 1998, the river flowed all the way to the tip of the delta, where it discharged into the Caspian. In that year, the river escaped its channel and started to flow off to the west, leaving the last few kilometers abandoned. The course change is believed to be the result of a rise in the level of the Caspian Sea coupled with a major flood of the Kura.
The Caspian turtle ("Mauremys caspica"), although found in neighboring areas, is a wholly freshwater species. The zebra mussel is native to the Caspian and Black Sea basins, but has become an invasive species elsewhere, when introduced. The area has given its name to several species, including the Caspian gull and the Caspian tern. The Caspian seal ("Pusa caspica") is the only aquatic mammal and is endemic to the Caspian Sea, being one of very few seal species that live in inland waters, but it is different from the those inhabiting freshwaters due to the hydrological environment of the sea.
The Caspian Sea is the world's largest inland body of water, variously classed as the world's largest lake or a full-fledged sea. It is an endorheic basin (a basin without outflows) located between Europe and Asia, to the east of the Caucasus Mountains and to the west of the broad steppe of Central Asia. It is bounded by Kazakhstan to the northeast, Russia to the northwest, Azerbaijan to the west, Iran to the south, and Turkmenistan to the southeast. The Caspian Sea is home to a wide range of species and may be best known for its caviar and oil industries. Pollution from the oil industry and dams on rivers draining into the Caspian Sea have had negative effects on the organisms living in the sea.
The Black Sea-Caspian Steppe is an informal name for that part of the Eurasian Steppe that extends south between the Black and Caspian Seas. It is usually treated as part of the Pontic-Caspian steppe which includes the area north of the Black and Caspian Seas, but there is some reason to treat it as a distinct place. Its natural boundaries are the Sea of Azov and Black Sea on the west, the Caucasus Mountains on the south and the Caspian Sea on the east. Its northern boundary may be taken as the triangle formed by the lower Don River and Volga River which are about 60 km apart to the west of Volgograd. This article excludes the north slope of the Caucasus which is not steppe and has a distinct geography and history.