Who are the sons of Yavan in the Table of Nations?
Genesis 10:4 names Yavan's sons as Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim — islands and coastlands of the Aegean and western Mediterranean. Kittim is Cyprus; Dodanim (or Rodanim) is Rhodes. None are Anatolian interior peoples, placing Yavan firmly in the Aegean world.
One of the most useful anchors for understanding what "Yavan" means in Daniel 8 is looking at who Yavan's children are. Genesis 10:4 gives us the list:
וּבְנֵי יָוָן אֱלִישָׁה וְתַרְשִׁישׁ כִּתִּים וְדֹדָנִים
"And the sons of Yavan: Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim." — Genesis 10:4 (MT)
The Table of Nations works by geography — descendants cluster in the territories their ancestor-name represents. So the sons of Yavan locate Yavan for us. Elishah is associated with Cyprus or the Greek coast. Tarshish is a distant western port, often identified with southern Spain. Kittim (כִּתִּים, H3794) is Cyprus, and the name was later extended to western maritime powers broadly — in Daniel 11:30, "ships of Kittim" were understood in Second Temple Judaism to mean Rome. Dodanim (or Rodanim in some manuscripts) is Rhodes. Every one of these is an island, a coastland, or a western maritime civilization. Not one is an Anatolian interior people.
The most direct confirmation comes from 1 Maccabees 1:1 (a deuterocanonical text, so not Scripture, but a witness to Second Temple interpretation written within a generation of the events it describes). It calls Alexander "the Macedonian who came out of the land of Chettiim" — Kittim, a son of Yavan. The Jewish author of 1 Maccabees, writing decades after Alexander's campaigns, understood Alexander as coming from the lineage of Yavan. He connected the dots between the Table of Nations and the man who changed the world.
It is also worth noting that by the first century AD, the Greek word for Yavan — Hellēn (Ἕλλην, G1672) — had already expanded to cover not just ethnic Greeks but the entire Greek-civilizational world. Acts 19:10 calls the people of Roman Asia (present-day Turkey) "Greeks." The Seleucid Empire, which ruled from Antioch in southeastern Turkey, was a Greek empire. Turkey was already inside the category of "Yavan/Greek" by the time the New Testament was written — which makes the claim that Yavan excludes Turkey from Daniel's prophecy very difficult to sustain.