QUESTION:
How did Saturn get its name?

ANSWER from FAQ on June 11, 1999:
Nearly all ancient human cultures created names for, and stories about,
the Sun, the Moon, the planets and stars. Like so many things in
history, the naming of the planets happened by accident. The ancient
Babylonians recognized five specks of light moving across the night
skies long before the Greeks and the Romans did. They developed a belief
that these specks were the moving images of five of their most important
gods. Not surprisingly, they named the moving lights after these gods.
When the Greeks (probably the Pythagoreans, in the fifth century BC)
came into contact with the Babylonian skylore, they assigned to the
same five moving lights the names of those Greek gods who seemed to
correspond to the appropriate Babylonian deities most closely. Thus we
got the Greek names of the five planets Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares, Zeus,
and Kronos. In due course (perhaps in the second century BC) the Romans
became acquainted with the Greek astronomy and the Greek planetary
names. As must have been natural, the Romans rendered the Greek names to
fit their own gods. This is how we obtained Mercury, Venus, Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn, the names we still use two thousand years later.