Palestine (region)
The region of Palestine, also known as historic Palestine or land of Palestine, is a geographical area in West Asia. It generally encompasses the area inhabited by the modern states of Israel and Palestine, though over history it has also been used to refer to an area both smaller and larger. Other names for part or all of this region include Canaan, the Promised Land, the Land of Israel, the Holy Land, and Judea.
The earliest written record referring to Palestine as a geographical region is in the Histories of Herodotus in the 5th century BCE, which calls the area Palaistine, referring to the territory previously held by Philistia, a state that existed in that area from the 12th to the 7th century BCE. The Roman Empire conquered the region in 63 BCE and appointed client kings to rule over it until Rome began directly ruling over the region and established a predominately-Jewish province named "Judaea" in 6 CE. The Roman Empire killed the vast majority of Jews in Judaea to suppress the Bar Kokhba revolt during 132-136 CE; shortly after the revolt, the Romans expelled and enslaved nearly all of the remaining Jews in the historical Judah region centered on Jerusalem, depopulating that area. Roman authorities renamed the province of Judaea to "Syria Palaestina" in c. 135 CE to punish Jews for the Bar Kokhba Revolt and permanently sever ties between Jews and the province. In 390, during the Byzantine period, the region was split into the provinces of Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda, and Palaestina Salutaris. Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant in the 630s, the military district of Jund Filastin was established. While Palestine's boundaries have changed throughout history, it has generally comprised the southern portion of the wider Syria or Levant region.
As the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, Palestine has been a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics. In the Bronze Age, it was home to Canaanite city-states; and the later Iron Age saw the emergence of Israel and Judah. It has since come under the sway of various empires, including the Neo-Assyrian, the Neo-Babylonian, the Achaemenid Persian, the Macedonian, and the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires. The brief Hasmonean dynasty ended with its gradual incorporation into the Roman Empire, and later the Byzantine Empire, during which Palestine became a center of Christianity. In the 7th century, Palestine was conquered by the Muslim Rashidun Caliphate, ending Byzantine rule in the region; Rashidun rule was succeeded by the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid caliphates. Following the collapse of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which had been established through the Crusades, the population of Palestine became predominantly Muslim. In the 13th century, it became part of the Mamluk Sultanate, and after 1516, spent four centuries as part of the Ottoman Empire.
During World War I, Palestine was occupied by the United Kingdom as part of the Sinai and Palestine campaign. Between 1919 and 1922, the League of Nations created the Mandate for Palestine, which came under British administration as Mandatory Palestine through the 1940s. Tensions between Jews and Arabs escalated into the 1947–1949 Palestine war, which ended with the establishment of Israel on most of the territory, and neighboring Jordan and Egypt controlling the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, respectively. The 1967 Six-Day War saw Israel's occupation of both territories, which has been among the core issues of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Etymology
Modern archaeology has identified 12 ancient inscriptions from Egyptian and Assyrian records recording likely cognates of Hebrew Pelesheth. The term "Peleset" is found in five inscriptions referring to a neighboring people or land starting from 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. Seven known Assyrian inscriptions refer to the region of "Palashtu" or "Pilistu", beginning with Adad-nirari III in the Nimrud Slab in through to a treaty made by Esarhaddon more than a century later. Neither the Egyptian nor the Assyrian sources provided clear regional boundaries for the term.The first clear use of the term Palestine to refer to the entire area between Phoenicia and Egypt was in 5th century BCE ancient Greece, when Herodotus wrote in The Histories of a "district of Syria, called Palaistínē", which included the Judean mountains and the Jordan Rift Valley. Approximately a century later, Aristotle used a similar definition for the region in Meteorology, in which he included the Dead Sea. Later Greek writers such as Polemon and Pausanias also used the term to refer to the same region, which was followed by Roman writers such as Ovid, Tibullus, Pomponius Mela, Pliny the Elder, Dio Chrysostom, Statius, Plutarch as well as Romano-Jewish writers Philo of Alexandria and Josephus.
Many classical-era sources referred to the inland region inhabited by Jews as Judea, distinguishing it from the Philistine coastal area. The Roman Empire conquered the region and in 6 CE established a predominately-Jewish province named "Judaea." The Roman Empire killed the vast majority of Jews in Judaea to suppress the Bar Kokhba Revolt during 132-136 CE; shortly after the revolt, the Romans expelled and enslaved nearly all of the remaining Jews in Judaea, depopulating the region. Roman authorities renamed the province of Judaea to "Syria Palaestina" in c. 135 CE to punish Jews for the Bar Kokhba Revolt and permanently sever ties between Jews and the province. This was the only case where the Roman Empire renamed a province specifically in response to a rebellion. There is circumstantial evidence linking Hadrian with the name change, but the precise date is not certain.
Palestina or Palestine is generally accepted to be a cognate of the biblical name Peleshet. The term 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 term is rarely used in the Septuagint, which used a transliteration Land of Phylistieim, different from the contemporary Greek place name Palaistínē. It is also theorized to be the portmanteau of the Greek word for the Philistines and palaistês, which means "wrestler/rival/adversary". This aligns with the Greek practice of punning place names, since the latter is part of the etymological meaning for Israel.
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.
During the Byzantine period, the region of Palestine within Syria Palaestina was subdivided into Palaestina Prima and Secunda, and an area of land including the Negev and Sinai became 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 and was revived as an official place name with the British Mandate for Palestine.
Some other terms that have been used to refer to all or part of this land include Canaan, Land of Israel, the Promised Land, the region of Syria, the Holy Land, Iudaea Province, Judea, Coele-Syria, "Israel HaShlema", Kingdom of Israel, Kingdom of Jerusalem, Zion, Retenu, Southern Syria, Southern Levant and Syria Palaestina.
History
Overview
Situated at a strategic location between Egypt, Syria and Arabia, and the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, the region has a long and tumultuous history as a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics. The region has been controlled by numerous peoples, including ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Achaemenids, ancient Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Sasanians, Byzantines, the Arab Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Mongols, Ottomans, the British, and modern Israelis and Palestinians.Ancient period
The region was among the earliest in the world to see human habitation, agricultural communities and civilization. In the late 4th millennium BCE, during the Early Bronze Age, there were areas of permanent Egyptian settlement in the southern Levant; land beyond these areas was inhabited by the Egyptians seasonally. The area of permanent settlement included Tell es-Sakan on the Mediterranean coast, which is the oldest known fortified Egyptian settlement and was likely the administrative centre of the region. During the Bronze Age, independent Canaanite city-states were established, and were influenced by the surrounding civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Minoan Crete, and Syria. Between 1550 and 1400BCE, the Canaanite cities became vassals to the Egyptian New Kingdom who held power until the 1178BCE Battle of Djahy during the wider Bronze Age collapse.Three cities listed in the Egyptian Onomasticon of Amenope - Gaza, Isdud and Asqalan - are mentioned in association with a people named as Peleshet. This is the first indication for the emergence of the Philistine pentapolis, five city-states each ruled by a king, and that for some 550 years, exercised some independence, even when subjected to overarching and alternating Egyptian or Assyrian imperial rule.
It is theorized that Israelites emerged from a dramatic social transformation that took place in the people of the central hill country of Canaan around 1200BCE, with no signs of violent invasion or even of peaceful infiltration of a clearly defined ethnic group from elsewhere. During the Iron Age, two related kingdoms, Israel and Judah emerge. The Kingdom of Israel emerged as an important local power by the 10th century BCE before falling to the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 722BCE. Israel's southern neighbor, the Kingdom of Judah, emerged in the 8th or 9th century BCE and later became a client state of first the Neo-Assyrian and then the Neo-Babylonian Empire before a revolt against the latter led to its destruction in 586BCE.
The region of Palestine as a whole became part of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from which was itself replaced by the Neo-Babylonian Empire in. In 587/6BCE, Jerusalem was besieged and destroyed by the second Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar II, who subsequently exiled the Judeans to Babylon. The Kingdom of Judah was then annexed as a Babylonian province. The Philistines were also exiled. The defeat of Judah was recorded by the Babylonians.
In 539BCE, the Babylonian empire was conquered by the Achaemenid Empire. According to the Hebrew Bible and implications from the Cyrus Cylinder, the exiled Jews were eventually allowed to return to Jerusalem. The returned population in Judah were allowed to self-rule under Persian governance, and some parts of the fallen kingdom became a Persian province known as Yehud. Except Yehud, at least another four Persian provinces existed in the region: Samaria, Gaza, Ashdod, and Ascalon, in addition to the Phoenician city states in the north and the Arabian tribes in the south. During the same period, the Edomites migrated from Transjordan to the southern parts of Judea, which became known as Idumaea. The Qedarites were the dominant Arab tribe; their territory ran from the Hejaz in the south to the Negev in the north through the period of Persian and Hellenistic dominion.