The city is named for the
Murgap River. Folk etymology claims that "Murgap" comes from the Turkmen root words
mur - "water" as in
yagmur/yagmyr, literally translated as "drops of water" or "raindrops", plus
gap, a dish or box, denoting the land as a place with water. However, Atanyyazow explains that the name is of Persian, not Turkic, origin; it was in earlier times Margab, and that later, as a result of folk ethnology, the first syllable's
a sound was replaced by a
u, making
murg ab, "bird water". Atanyyazow notes as well that Hafiz-i-Abru recorded in the 15th century that the name was originally Merab, "River of Merv", and that al-Istakhri wrote, "...this river was named after the place where it flowed," and thus ultimately comes from an ancient variant name of the city of Mary. During the
Soviet period the then-"town of urban type" () was named Stalino in honor of
Joseph Stalin. Following
Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1961, the name was changed to Moskovskiy (), in honor of
Moscow, the capital city of the
Soviet Union, then still later to Murgap (). ==Overview==