Palestine (region)

Palestine, ; la, Palaestina; ar, فِلَسْطِينَ, , , ; he, פלשתינה, is a geographical region in West Asia. It is usually considered to include modern-day Israel and the State of Palestine, though some definitions also include parts of northwestern Jordan. Other historical names for the region include Canaan, the Promised Land, the Land of Israel, or the Holy Land.

The first written records referring to Palestine emerged in the 12th-century BCE Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt, which used the term ''Peleset'' for a neighboring people or land. In the 8th century BCE, the Assyrians referred to a region as ''Palashtu'' or ''Pilistu''. In the Hellenistic period, these names were carried over into Greek, appearing in the '' Histories'' of Herodotus in 5th century BCE as ''Palaistine''. The Roman Empire conquered the region and in 6 CE established the province known as Judaea, then in 132 CE in the period of the Bar Kokhba revolt the province was expanded and renamed Syria Palaestina. In 390, during the Byzantine period, the region was split into the provinces of Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda, and Palaestina Tertia. 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 regions such as Syria or the Levant.

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 Empire, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the Achaemenid Empire, the Macedonian Empire, and the Seleucid Empire. 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 Rashidun Caliphate, ending Byzantine rule in the region; Rashidun rule was succeeded by the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Fatimid Caliphate. 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, 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 became under British administration as Mandatory Palestine. 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" (transliterated from hieroglyphs as ''P-r-s-t'') is found in five inscriptions referring to a neighboring people or land starting from c. 1150 BCE 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 c. 800 BCE 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 of a "district of Syria, called ''Palaistinê''" ( grc, Συρίη ἡ Παλαιστίνη καλεομένη) in '' The Histories'', 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. The term was first used to denote an official province in c. 135 CE, when the Roman authorities, following the suppression of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, renamed the province of Judaea " Syria Palaestina". There is circumstantial evidence linking Hadrian with the name change, but the precise date is not certain.

The term is generally accepted to be a cognate of the biblical name ''Peleshet'' ( ''Pəlésheth'', usually transliterated as Philistia). The term and its derivates are used more than 250 times in Masoretic-derived versions of the Hebrew Bible, with undefined boundaries, and almost 200 of the remaining references are in the Book of Judges and the Books of Samuel.Robinson, 1865, p.15: "Palestine, or Palestina, now the most common name for the Holy Land, occurs three times in the English version of the Old Testament; and is there put for the Hebrew name פלשת, elsewhere rendered Philistia. As thus used, it refers strictly and only to the country of the Philistines, in the southwest corner of the land. So, too, in the Greek form, Παλαςτίνη, it is used by Josephus. But both Josephus and Philo apply the name to the whole land of the Hebrews; and Greek and Roman writers employed it in the like extent." The term is rarely used in the Septuagint, which used a transliteration ''Land of Phylistieim'' (''Γῆ τῶν Φυλιστιείμ''), different from the contemporary Greek place name ''Palaistínē'' (''Παλαιστίνη''). It also theorized to be the portmanteau

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