WHAT DID ROME CALL THE LAND OF ISRAEL — & WHERE WERE ITS BORDERS?
by Elliott A Green The name “Palestine” flies around a great deal nowadays in the press and political discussion. Syria too is much in the news. Yet neither Palestine nor Syria is an indigenous name for the country either is nowadays supposed to represent. These were originally names given by outsiders, sailors and merchants coming from the west, to loosely defined regions along the eastern Mediterranean coast and their hinterlands. Syria was the more inclusive term of the two and indeed, as used by early Greeks and by later Greeks and Romans, it included the notion of Palestine, as we see from Herodotos, who wrote of “Palestinian Syria” (using the word as an adjective, not a noun). Hence for him it was merely a section of Syria. Typically the name “Syria” for classical writers loosely referred to a large region at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. It included the Syria of today, plus Israel, Lebanon, the settled western part of Jordan, and much of southeastern Turkey. Syria was ma
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- WHAT DID ROME CALL THE LAND OF ISRAEL -- & WHERE WERE ITS BORDERS?
