This article presents a list of notable historical references to the name Palestine as a place name for the region of Palestine throughout history. This includes uses of the localized inflections in various languages, such as Latin Palaestina and Arabic Filasṭīn.
The term Peleset is found in five inscriptions referring to a neighboring people, starting from during the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt. The word is transliterated from hieroglyphs as P-r-s-t-w, as Egyptians did not use the consonant "l" in writing, substituting it with "r" instead, and it is generally accepted that this is an ethnonym referring to the Philistines. The Assyrians used the terms "Palashtu/Palastu" or "Pilistu," beginning in c. 800 BCE through to refer to the region inhabited by the Philistines.Sharon (1988), p. 4.Ehrlich, Carl S. (2001). "Philistines". The Oxford Guide to People and Places of the Bible. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (eds.). Oxford University Press. Neither the Egyptian nor the Assyrian sources provided clear regional boundaries for the term.Eberhard Schrader wrote in his seminal "Keilinschriften und Geschichtsforschung" ("KGF", in English "Cuneiform inscriptions and Historical Research") that the Assyrian term "Pilistu" referred to "the East" in general. See KGF pp. 123-124 and Abraham Samuel Anspacher, "Tiglath Pileser III", p. 48. The terms used in these inscriptions are considered cognates of the Biblical term Pəlīštīm used in the Hebrew Bible. This Biblical term, commonly translated as Philistines, is ambiguous in its original usage: the 10 uses in the Torah neither define the boundaries of the region, nor provide any meaningful description, and the detailed usage in two later books describing the inhabitants of five coastal cities has been interpreted to mean "non-Israelites of the Promised Land", due to the Septuagint’s consistent replacement of Pəlīštīm with (, 'other nations').
The ancient Greek term that forms the basis for the term Palestine first appears in the 5th century BCE when the historian Herodotus wrote of a "district of Syria, called Palaistinê" between Phoenicia and Egypt in The Histories. Herodotus provides the first historical reference clearly denoting a wide region for Philistia, extending beyond the coast to the inland regions such as the Judean Mountains and the Jordan Rift Valley.: "The Greek historian Herodotus (1.105, 3.5) called Cisjordan the Palestinian Syria or sometimes only Palaestina. Thus, there is a tradition from at least the fifth century BCE for the use of this name" : "As early as Herodotus, who is followed by other classical writers, as Ptolemy and Pliny, the phrase Συρίε ἡ Παλαιστίνη (Syrian Palestine, Palestine of Syria) denotes both the littoral and the neighboring inland region (Judea and Palestine), as well as the entire interior as far as the Arabian desert" Nur Masalha, The Concept of Palestine: The Conception Of Palestine from the Late Bronze Age to the Modern Period, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, Volume 15 Issue 2, Page 143-202: "Herodotus uses the name accordingly and Aristotle, for example, used the term in a way that includes the regions of Transjordan, or 'Eastern Palestine', beyond the Jordan Rift Valley. Herodotus' conception of Palaistine included the Galilee and applied to Palestine in the wider sense.": "The first known occurrence of the Greek word Palaistine is in the Histories of Herodotus, written near the mid-fifth century B.C. Palaistine Syria, or simply Palaistine, is applied to what may be identified as the southern part of Syria, comprising the region between Phoenicia and Egypt. Although some of Herodotus' references to Palestine are compatible with a narrow definition of the coastal strip of the Land of Israel, it is clear that Herodotus does call the "whole land by the name of the coastal strip."..."It is believed that Herodotus visited Palestine in the fifth decade of the fifth century B.C."..."In the earliest Classical literature references to Palestine generally applied to the Land of Israel in the wider sense." 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, these examples covering every century from the 4th BCE to the 1st CE. There is, however, no evidence of official use of the name in the Hellenistic period on any coin or inscription, and it is absent from the New Testament.
In the early 2nd century CE, the Roman province called Judaea was renamed Syria Palaestina following the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–136 CE), the last of the major Jewish–Roman wars. A commonly held yet contested historical interpretation sees the name change as a punitive measure aimed at severing the symbolic and historical connection between the Jewish people and the land. Other Roman provincial renamings had never followed a rebellion, making this instance unique. Around the year 390, during the Byzantine period, the imperial province of Syria Palaestina was reorganized into Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Salutaris.Kaegi (1995), p. 41. Following the Muslim conquest, place names that were in use by the Byzantine administration generally continued to be used in Arabic,Cavendish, Marshall (2007), p. 559. and Jund Filastin became one of the military districts within the Umayyad and Abbasid province of Bilad al-Sham.
The use of the name "Palestine" became common in Early Modern English,Gudrun Krämer (2008) A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel Translated by Gudrun Krämer and Graham Harman Princeton University Press, p.16 and was used in English and Arabic during the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem. The term is recorded widely in print as a self-identification by Palestinians from the start of the 20th century onwards, coinciding with the period when the printing press first came into use by Palestinians. 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 states whose territory was named Palestine.
Etymological considerations The English term "Palestine" itself is borrowed from Latin ,: "While it is true that there is no evidence as to precisely who changed the name of Judaea to Palestine and precisely when this was done, circumstantial evidence would seem to point to Hadrian himself, since he is, it would seem, responsible for a number of decrees that sought to crush the national and religious spirit of the Jews, whether these decrees were responsible for the uprising or were the result of it. In the first place, he refounded Jerusalem as a Graeco-Roman city under the name of Aelia Capitolina. He also erected on the site of the Temple another temple to Zeus." which is, in turn, borrowed from Ancient Greek , , used by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. (tr. from Greek, with notes)
How the term entered the Greek is uncertain. The first known mention of the Philistines as Peleset is at the temple of Ramesses in Medinet Habu, which refers to the Peleset among those who fought against Egypt during Ramesses III's reign, and the last known is 300 years later on Padiiset's Statue. The last is the only Egyptian inscription to use Peleset to refer to a region, rather than a people. The Assyrians used the terms "Palashtu/Palastu" or "Pilistu," beginning with Adad-nirari III in the Nimrud Slab in c. 800 BCE through to an Esarhaddon treaty more than a century later, to refer to the region.Sharon (1988), p. 4.Ehrlich, Carl S. (2001). "Philistines". The Oxford Guide to People and Places of the Bible. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (eds.). Oxford University Press. Neither the Egyptian nor the Assyrian sources provided clear regional boundaries for the term.Eberhard Schrader wrote in his seminal "Keilinschriften und Geschichtsforschung" ("KGF", in English "Cuneiform inscriptions and Historical Research") that the Assyrian term "Pilistu" referred to "the East" in general. See KGF pp. 123-124 and Abraham Samuel Anspacher, "Tiglath Pileser III", p. 48. It is likely to have reached the Greek from an Aramaic loanword.
Whilst the term was used in Egyptian and Assyrian times, prior to the time period in which the Bible is thought to have been written, scholars generally conclude that the term is cognate with the Biblical Hebrew .Philistine, n. and adj. , Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, March 2006Sicker (1999), p. ix. Quote: "The name Palestine has its origin in the Hebrew Peleshet, first mentioned in the Bible (Exodus 15:14) in reference to the land of the Pelishtim, or Philistines, one group of the Sea Peoples that invaded the region during the early biblical period." The further etymology is uncertain; it is unknown whether the term was an endonym or exonym, no word for Philistia has been found in the sparse attestations of the Philistine language, and it is unknown whether the Hebrew, Egyptian, and Assyrian terms derived from a common source, or if they simply borrowed the name from one another and changed it to match their own phonological customs.
This uncertainty has engendered several speculative theories. For example, Martin Noth and David Jacobson see a derivation from παλαιστής, in the Greek form, a noun meaning "wrestler/rival/adversary". and have speculated that Palaistinê was meant as both a transliteration of "Philistia" into Greek and a direct translation of the Hebrew name "Israel" – which refers to Jacob wrestling with the angel, in line with the Greek penchant for punning transliterations of foreign place names."Palestine and Israel", David M. Jacobson, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 313 (February 1999), pp. 65–74; "The Southern and Eastern Borders of Abar-Nahara," Steven S. Tuell, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 284 (November 1991), pp. 51–57; "Herodotus' Description of the East Mediterranean Coast", Anson F. Rainey, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 321 (February 2001), pp. 57–63; Herodotus, Histories
In English versions of the Bible, Pəlīštīm is translated as "Philistines"; however, it is thought that the word means different things in different parts of the Bible. The word and its derivates are used more than 250 times in Masoretic-derived versions of the Hebrew Bible,All 247 occurrences of words beginning Philis* in the KJV. of which 10 uses are in the Torah (the first use being in Genesis 10, in the Generations of Noah),Smith, 1863, p. 1546. with undefined boundaries and no meaningful description, and almost 200 of the remaining references are in the later Book of Judges and the Books of Samuel that contain the well known biblical story of a coastal state in conflict with the Israelites.Robinson, Edward, Physical geography of the Holy Land, Crocker & Brewster, Boston, 1865, p.15. Robinson, writing in 1865 when travel by Europeans to the Ottoman Empire became common asserts that, "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."