Names of the Levant


Over recorded history, there have been many names of the Levant, a large area in the Middle East, or its constituent parts. These names have applied to a part or the whole of the Levant. On occasion, two or more of these names have been used at the same time by different cultures or sects. As a natural result, some of the names of the Levant are highly politically charged. Perhaps the least politicized name is Levant itself, which simply means "where the sun rises" or "where the land rises out of the sea", a meaning attributed to the region's easterly location on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea.

Antiquity

Retenu

ian texts called the entire coastal area along the Mediterranean Sea between modern Egypt and Turkey rṯnw. In the Amarna letters, written in Akkadian cuneiform, Reṯenu is subdivided into five regions:
Prior to the formation of the Israelite/Hebrew identity and polities in the region, the land was referred to natively as Canaan. Though it was once thought that the Hebrews were foreign settlers in Canaan, the modern consensus of most scholars is that Hebrew identity developed in situ'' as a direct indigenous evolution of earlier Canaanite tribes; the continuity from Bronze Age Canaanite civilization to Iron Age Israelite/Judean civilization is indeed so seamless that many scholars stress that any dichotomy between the two is essentially arbitrary—with culture, language, etc., being indistinguishable during the transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age. The Phoenicians—also descended from the Bronze Age Canaanites, and close relatives and neighbors of the Israelites—likewise continued to speak a Canaanite language and practice Canaanite religion at their Mediterranean ports, and referred to themselves natively as "Canaanites", and their land as "Canaan".

Phoenicia

In ancient times, the Greeks called the whole of Canaan Phoiníkē, literally " of the Tyrian purple|purple". Today, general consensus associates the Phoenician homeland proper with the northwest coastal region of the Levant, centered at Phoenician cities such as Ugarit, Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. Today, this place is usually equated with modern Lebanon and the coast of modern Syria. Also there is a modern town in Turkey called Finike which is thought to have derived by the Lycians who traded with Phoenicians in ancient times.

Israel and Judea

Israel:
Judea:
The kingdoms of Israel and Judah were Iron Age Semitic nations spanning from Edom to Assyria. Today the modern State of Israel controls much of the former territory of the ancient Israelite/Judean kingdoms. According to the Deuteronomic history in the Bible, the polities of Israel and Judah originally split off from an earlier, united Kingdom of Israel, ruled by illustrious kings such as David and Solomon; though modern archaeology, biblical scholarship, and historians are generally somewhat skeptical of the historicity of the alleged united monarchy of Israel, suggesting instead that the two kingdoms developed separately, with the southern kingdom of Judah probably dependent on the northern kingdom of Israel as a satellite state at first.
The term Judaea is used by historians to refer to the Roman province that extended over parts of the former regions of the Hasmonean and Herodian kingdoms. It was named after Herod Archelaus's ethnarchy of Judea of which it was an expansion, the name being derived from the earlier provincial designations Yehud Medinata and Yehud : all ultimately referring to the former Hebrew kingdom of Judah.

Assyria and Syria

During Persian rule of the Near East, the Greeks and Romans came to call the region "Syria", believed to have been named after Assyria and the Aramaic language they spread over the entire region. However, Herodotus used the combined name "Syria Palaistinē". "Greater Syria" refers to a larger area that is supported by some nationalists.
During the Syrian Wars between the Seleucid dynasty and the Ptolemaic dynasty, the region was known as Coele-Syria traditionally given the meaning 'hollow' Syria. The later Hellenistic term Koile Syria that appears first in Arrian's Anabasis Alexandri in AD 145 and has been much discussed, is usually interpreted as a transcription of Aramaic kul, "all, the entire", identifying all of Syria.

Palestine

Palestine:
An early version of the name Palestine was first recorded by the ancient Egyptians as Peleset. Herodotus later called the whole area Syria Palaistinē in his Histories, and included the entire territory of ancient Israel and Judea, not specifically the coastal Philistine territory. The Romans applied the term Syria Palaestina to the southern part of the region—beginning in AD 135, following the Bar Kokhba revolt—to complete the disassociation with the former identity of Judaea. The name continued to be used for the province throughout later Byzantine and Islamic rule.
†As a side note, Standard Hebrew has two names for Palestine, both of which are different from the Hebrew name for ancient Philistia. The first name Palestina was used by Hebrew speakers in the British Mandate of Palestine; it is spelled like the name for Philistia but with three more letters added to the end and a Latin pronunciation given. The second name Falastin is a direct loan from the Arabic form, and is used today specifically to refer to the modern Palestinians and to political aspirations for a Palestinian state.

Philistia

Philistia:
Eber-Nari was the name of a satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire which roughly corresponded with the southern Levant. It means "Beyond the River" or "Across the River" in both Akkadian and Aramaic. It is also sometimes referred to as Transeuphratia by modern scholars.

Medieval and modern history

Ash-Shaam

The name Ash-Shām comes from an Arabic root meaning "left" or "north" — became the name of the Levant after the Islamic conquest.
In ancient times, Baalshamin or Ba'al Šamem, was a Semitic sky-god in Canaan/Phoenicia and ancient Palmyra. Hence, Sham refers to heaven or sky.

Levant

Medieval Italians called the region Levante after its easterly location where the sun "rises"; this term was adopted from Italian and French into many other languages.

Outremer

called the Levant Outremer in French, which means "overseas." In France, this general term was colloquially applied more specifically to the Levant because of heavy Frankish involvement in the Crusades and the foundation of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and other Latin settlements scattered throughout the area.

Eastern Mediterranean

Eastern Mediterranean is a term that denotes the lands or states geographically in the eastern, to the east of, or around the east of the Mediterranean Sea, or with cultural affinities to this region. The Eastern Mediterranean includes Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Jordan. The term Mediterranean derives from the Latin word mediterraneus, meaning "in the middle of earth" or "between lands". This is on account of the sea's intermediary position between the continents of Africa and Europe.

Holy Land

In different languages:
The Holy Land is a term used in Abrahamic tradition to refer to sacred sites of the Levant — such as Shiloh, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth — but is also often used to refer to the Levant as a whole. A related term is Promised Land.