The name "Palestine" is the cognate of an ancient word meaning "Philistines" or "Land of the Philistines". The earliest known mention is thought to be in Ancient Egyptian texts of the temple at Medinet Habu which record a people called the P-r-s-t (conventionally Peleset) among the Sea Peoples who invaded Egypt in Ramesses III's reign. The Hebrew name Peleshet-usually translated as Philistia in English, is used in the Bible to denote the southern coastal region that was inhabited by the Philistines to the west of the ancient Kingdom of Judah.
The Assyrian emperor Sargon II called the same region Palashtu or Pilistu in his Annals. In the 5th century BCE, Herodotus wrote in Ancient Greek of a 'district of Syria, called Palaistinê" (whence Palaestina, whence Palestine). According to Moshe Sharon, Palaestina was commonly used to refer to the coastal region and shortly thereafter, the whole of the area inland to the west of the Jordan River. The latter extension occurred when the Roman authorities, following the suppression of the Bar Kokhba rebellion in the 2nd century CE, renamed "Provincia Judea" (Iudaea Province; originally derived from the name "Judah") to "Syria Palaestina" (Syria Palaestina), in order to complete the dissociation with Judaea.
During the Byzantine period, the entire region (Syria Palestine, Samaria, and the Galilee) was named Palaestina, subdivided into provinces Palaestina I and II. The Byzantines also renamed an area of land including the Negev, Sinai, and the west coast of the Arabian Peninsula as Palaestina Salutaris, sometimes called Palaestina III. The Arabic word for Palestine is Philistine. Moshe Sharon writes that when the Arabs took over Greater Syria in the 7th century, place names that were in use by the Byzantine administration before them, generally continued to be used. Hence, he traces the emergence of the Arabic form Filastin to this adoption, with Arabic inflection, of Roman and Hebrew (Semitic) names. Jacob Lassner and Selwyn Ilan Troen offer a different view, writing that Jund Filastin, the full name for the administrative province under the rule of the Arab caliphates, was traced by Muslim geographers back to the Philistines of the Bible.
The use of the name "Palestine" in English became more common after the European renaissance. The name was not used in Ottoman times (1517–1917). Most of Christian Europe referred to the area as the Holy Land. It was officially revived by the British after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and applied to the territory that was placed under British Mandate. Some other terms that have been used to refer to all or part of this land include Canaan, Greater Israel, Greater Syria, the Holy Land, Iudaea Province, Judea, Israel, "Israel HaShlema", Kingdom of Israel, Kingdom of Jerusalem, Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael or Ha'aretz), Zion, Retenu (Ancient Egyptian), Southern Syria, and Syria Palestina.
1 comment:
syria palaestina doesn't mean philistine syria. paleaste is greek for wrestler and is as close as herodotus and other greek speakers could get to pronouncing israel. (they couldn't pronounce it, so they translated it). paleastina is israel, that is the northern kingdom of israel, judaea being the southern kingdom.
generations of people have grown up thinking that it was related to the word philistine (plst) because they don't know greek.
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