The word asylum has travelled an unusually long way: from an ancient Greek religious sanctuary, through medieval churches, to psychiatric hospitals and modern refugee law.
It derives from the Greek asylon (ἄσυλον), meaning “inviolable place” or “sanctuary.” The word combines a- (“not”) with sylon, associated with seizure or plunder. An asylon, therefore, was somewhere from which a person could not lawfully be dragged away.
In ancient Greece, certain temples and sacred places offered protection to fugitives. The principle was religious rather than humanitarian in the modern sense: violating a sanctuary risked offending the god to whom it belonged. The Romans adopted both the idea and the word. According to Roman tradition, Romulus even established an asylum on the Capitoline Hill where fugitives and outsiders could find refuge and become members of the new community.
The word entered Latin as asylum and eventually passed into English, appearing from around the fifteenth century. Medieval Europe already possessed a closely related institution: church sanctuary. Someone accused of a crime might take refuge in a church and receive temporary protection from arrest.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, asylum increasingly acquired the broader meaning of a place of refuge or protection. This produced expressions such as “orphan asylum” and “lunatic asylum.” By the nineteenth century, the latter usage became particularly prominent as purpose-built institutions were established for people suffering from mental illness.
During the twentieth century, asylum gradually disappeared from the official vocabulary of mental healthcare because of its association with institutionalisation and poor treatment.
Meanwhile, its much older meaning of refuge from danger survived and became increasingly important in international law. Hence today we speak of seeking political asylum: asking another country for protection from persecution.
Curiously, then, the modern asylum seeker uses the word in a sense remarkably close to its original Greek meaning more than two thousand years ago—a person seeking a place where they cannot simply be seized and carried away.