Timeline of the name "Palestine"


This article presents a list of notable historical references to the name Palestine as a place name in the Middle East throughout the history of the region, including its cognates such as "Filastin" and "Palaestina."
The term "Peleset" is found in five inscriptions referring to a neighboring people or land starting from circa 1150 BC during the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt. The first known mention is at the temple at Medinet Habu which refers to the Peleset among those who fought with Egypt in Ramesses III's reign, and the last known is 300 years later on Padiiset's Statue. The Assyrians called the same region "Palashtu/Palastu" or "Pilistu," beginning with Adad-nirari III in the Nimrud Slab in c. 800 BC through to an Esarhaddon treaty more than a century later. Neither the Egyptian nor the Assyrian sources provided clear regional boundaries for the term.
The first appearance of the term "Palestine" was in 5th century BC Ancient Greece when Herodotus wrote of a "district of Syria, called Palaistinê" between Phoenicia and Egypt in The Histories. Herodotus applied the term to both the coastal and the inland regions such as the Judean mountains and the Jordan Rift Valley. Later Greek writers such as Aristotle, Polemon and Pausanias also used the word, which was followed by Roman writers such as Ovid, Tibullus, Pomponius Mela, Pliny the Elder, Dio Chrysostom, Statius, Plutarch as well as Roman Judean writers Philo of Alexandria and Josephus. The word is not found on any Hellenistic coin or inscription, and is first known in official use in the early second century AD. It has been contended that in the first century authors still associated the term with the southern coastal region.
In 135 AD, the Greek "Syria Palaestina" was used in naming a new Roman province from the merger of Roman Syria and Roman Judaea after the Roman authorities crushed the Bar Kokhba Revolt. Circumstantial evidence links Hadrian to the renaming of the province, which took place around the same time as Jerusalem was refounded as Aelia Capitolina, but the precise date of the change in province name is uncertain. The common view that the name change was intended to "sever the connection of the Jews to their historical homeland" is disputed.
Around the year 390, during the Byzantine period, the imperial province of Syria Palaestina was reorganized into Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Salutaris. Following the Muslim conquest, place names that were in use by the Byzantine administration generally continued to be used in Arabic. The use of the name "Palestine" became common in Early Modern English, was used in English and Arabic during the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem. In the 20th century the name was used by the British to refer to "Mandatory Palestine," a territory from the former Ottoman Empire which had been divided in the Sykes–Picot Agreement and secured by Britain via the Mandate for Palestine obtained from the League of Nations. Starting from 2013, the term was officially used in the eponymous "State of Palestine." Both incorporated geographic regions from the land commonly known as Palestine, into a new state whose territory was named Palestine.

Historical references

Ancient period

Egyptian period

Persian (Achaemenid) Empire period

Late Roman Empire (Byzantine) period

Rashidun, Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates period

Early Ottoman period



in the 1803 Cedid Atlas, showing the term "ارض فلاستان" in large script on the bottom left

Late Ottoman period


's 1898 use of the word "Palestinians" in the preface to his translation of :File:Olesnitsky A. The Holy Land. Vol. 1.djvu|A Description of the Holy Land
" written at the 1897 First Zionist Congress

. The word stretches from Quds to Al-Arish
Palaistinê is generally accepted to be a translation of the Biblical name Peleshet. Peleshet and its derivates are used more than 250 times in Masoretic-derived versions of the Hebrew Bible, of which 10 uses are in the Torah, with undefined boundaries, and almost 200 of the remaining references are in the Book of Judges and the Books of Samuel. The first use is found in Genesis 10, in the Generations of Noah.
By the time the Septuagint was translated the term Palaistínē, first used by Herodotus, had already entered the Greek vocabulary. However, it was not used in the LXX – instead the term Land of Phylistieim is used. The Septuagint instead used the term "allophuloi" throughout the Books of Judges and Samuel, such that the term "Philistines" has been interpreted to mean "non-Israelites of the Promised Land" when used in the context of Samson, Saul and David, and Rabbinic sources explain that these peoples were different from the Philistines of the Book of Genesis.
The five books of the Pentateuch / Torah include a total of 10 references, including:
The Historical books include over 250 references, almost 200 of which are in the Book of Judges and the Books of Samuel, including:
Wisdom books include only 6 references, all in the Psalms, including:
Books of the Major prophets and Minor prophets include around 20 references, including:
Per Martin Noth, the name likely comes from the Aramaic word for Philistine. Noth also described a strong similarity between the word Palestine and the Greek word "palaistês", which has the same meaning as the word "Israel." This was expanded by David Jacobson to theorize the name being a portmanteau of the word for Philistines with a direct translation of the word Israel into Greek (in concordance with the Greek penchant for punning on place names.