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Syria (region)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Syria
ٱلشَّام
Ash-Shām[1]
Greater Syria[1]
Syria-Palestine[2]
1851 map of Ottoman Syria
1851 map of Ottoman Syria

The historic region of Syria (Arabic: الـشَّـام‎, romanizedash-Shām, Hieroglyphic Luwian: Sura/i; Greek: Συρία; in modern literature called Greater Syria, Syria-Palestine,[2] or the Levant[3]) is an area located east of the Mediterranean sea. The oldest attestation of the name Syria is from the 8th century BC in a bilingual inscription in Hieroglyphic Luwian and Phoenician. In this inscription the Luwian word Sura/i was translated to Phoenician ʔšr "Assyria."[4] For Herodotus in the 5th century BC, Syria extended as far north as the Halys (the modern Kızılırmak River) and as far south as Arabia and Egypt.

For Pliny the Elder and Pomponius Mela, Syria covered the entire Fertile Crescent. In Late Antiquity, "Syria" meant a region located to the East of the Mediterranean Sea, West of the Euphrates River, North of the Arabian Desert and South of the Taurus Mountains,[5] thereby including modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the State of Palestine, and parts of Southern Turkey, namely the Hatay Province and the Western half of the Southeastern Anatolia Region. This late definition is equivalent to the region known in Classical Arabic by the name ash-Shām (Arabic: اَلـشَّـام/ʔaʃ-ʃaːm/,[6] which means the north [country][6] (from the root šʔm Arabic: شَـأم‎ "left, north")). After the Islamic conquest of Byzantine Syria in the 7th century CE, the name Syria fell out of primary use in the region itself, being superseded by the Arabic equivalent Shām, but survived in its original sense in Byzantine and Western European usage, and in Syriac Christian literature.[7] In the 19th century the name Syria was revived in its modem Arabic form to denote the whole of Bilad al-Sham, either as Suriyah or the modern form Suriyya, which eventually replaced the Arabic name of Bilad al-Sham.[7] After World War I, the name Syria was applied to the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon and the contemporaneous but short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria.

Throughout history, the region has been controlled by numerous different peoples, including ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Assyria, Babylonia, the Achaemenid Empire, the ancient Greeks, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Fatimid Caliphate, the Crusaders, the Ayyubid dynasty, the Mamluk Sultanate, the Ottoman Empire, the United Kingdom and the French Third Republic.

The boundaries of the region have changed throughout history, and were last defined in modern times by the proclamation of the short lived Arab Kingdom of Syria and subsequent definition by French and British mandatory agreement. The area was passed to French and British Mandates following World War I and divided into Greater Lebanon, various Syrian-mandate states, Mandatory Palestine and the Emirate of Transjordan. The Syrian-mandate states were gradually unified as the State of Syria and finally became the independent Syria in 1946. Throughout this period, pan-Syrian nationalists advocated for the creation of a Greater Syria.

Geography

Map depicting Syria as the land ranging from the Taurus mountains to the Sinai Peninsula to the Euphrates, but not including Upper Mesopotamia

In the most common historical sense, 'Syria' refers to the entire northern Levant, including Alexandretta and the Ancient City of Antioch or in an extended sense the entire Levant as far south as Roman Egypt, but not including Mesopotamia. The area of "Greater Syria" (سُوْرِيَّة ٱلْكُبْرَىٰ, Sūrīyah al-Kubrā); also called "Natural Syria" (سُوْرِيَّة ٱلطَّبِيْعِيَّة, Sūrīyah aṭ-Ṭabīʿīyah) or "Northern Land" (بِلَاد ٱلشَّام, Bilād ash-Shām),[1] extends roughly over the Bilad al-Sham province of the medieval Arab caliphates, encompassing the Eastern Mediterranean (or Levant) and Western Mesopotamia. The Muslim conquest of the Levant in the seventh century gave rise to this province, which encompassed much of the region of Syria, and came to largely overlap with this concept. Other sources indicate that the term Greater Syria was coined during Ottoman rule, after 1516, to designate the approximate area included in present-day Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel.[8]

The uncertainty in the definition of the extent of "Syria" is aggravated by the etymological confusion of the similar-sounding names Syria and Assyria. The question of the ultimate etymological identity of the two names remains open today, but regardless of etymology, the two names have often been taken as exchangeable or synonymous from the time of Herodotus.[9] However, in the Roman Empire, 'Syria' and 'Assyria' began to refer to two separate entities, Roman Syria and Roman Assyria.

Killebrew and Steiner, treating the Levant as the Syrian region, gave the boundaries of the region as such: the Mediterranean Sea to the west, the Arabian Desert and Mesopotamia to the east, and the Taurus Mountains of Anatolia to the north.[3] The Muslim geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi visited the region in 1150 and assigned the northern regions of Bilad al-Sham as the following:

In the Levantine sea are two islands: Rhodes and Cyprus; and in Levantine lands: Antarsus, Laodice, Antioch, Mopsuhestia, Adana, Anazarbus, Tarsus, Kirkesia, Ḥamrtash, Antalya, al-Batira, al-Mira, Macri, Astroboli; and in the interior lands: Apamea, Salamiya, Qinnasrin, al-Castel, Aleppo, Resafa, Raqqa, Rafeqa, al-Jisr, Manbij, Mar'ash, Saruj, Ḥarran, Edessa, Al-Ḥadath, Samosata, Malatiya, Ḥusn Mansur, Zabatra, Jersoon, al-Leen, al-Bedandour, Cirra and Touleb.

For Pliny the Elder and Pomponius Mela, Syria covered the entire Fertile Crescent. In Late Antiquity, "Syria" meant a region located to the east of the Mediterranean Sea, west of the Euphrates River, north of the Arabian Desert, and south of the Taurus Mountains,[10] thereby including modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the State of Palestine, and the Hatay Province and the western half of the Southeastern Anatolia Region of southern Turkey. This late definition is equivalent to the region known in Classical Arabic by the name ash-Shām (ٱلشَّام /ʔaʃ-ʃaːm/,[6] which means the north [country][6] (from the root šʔm شَأْم "left, north"). After the Islamic conquest of Byzantine Syria in the seventh century, the name Syria fell out of primary use in the region itself, being superseded by the Arabic equivalent Bilād ash-Shām ("Northern Land'"), but survived in its original sense in Byzantine and Western European usage, and in Syriac Christian literature. In the 19th century, the name Syria was revived in its modern Arabic form to denote the whole of Bilad al-Sham, either as Suriyah or the modern form Suriyya, which eventually replaced the Arabic name of Bilad al-Sham.[7] After World War I, the name 'Syria' was applied to the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, and the contemporaneous but short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria.

Etymology

Syria

The oldest attestation of the name 'Syria' is from the 8th century BC in a bilingual inscription in Hieroglyphic Luwian and Phoenician. In this inscription, the Luwian word Sura/i was translated to Phoenician ʔšr "Assyria."[4] For Herodotus in the 5th century BC, Syria extended as far north as the Halys (the modern Kızılırmak River) and as far south as Arabia and Egypt.

The name 'Syria' derives from the ancient Greek name for Syrians, Greek: Σύριοι Syrioi, which the Greeks applied without distinction to various Near Eastern peoples living under the rule of Assyria. Modern scholarship confirms the Greek word traces back to the cognate Greek: Ἀσσυρία, Assyria, ultimately derived from the Akkadian Aššur.[11]

The classical Arabic pronunciation of Syria is Sūriya (as opposed to the Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation Sūrya). That name was not widely used among Muslims before about 1870, but it had been used by Christians earlier. According to the Syriac Orthodox Church, "Syrian" meant "Christian" in early Christianity.[citation needed] In English, "Syrian" historically meant a Syrian Christian such as Ephrem the Syrian. Following the declaration of Syria in 1936, the term "Syrian" came to designate citizens of that state, regardless of ethnicity. The adjective "Syriac" (suryāni سُرْيَانِي) has come into common use since as an ethnonym to avoid the ambiguity of "Syrian".

Currently, the Arabic term Sūriya usually refers to the modern state of Syria, as opposed to the historical region of Syria.

Shaam

Greater Syria has been widely known as Shaam (Arabic: ٱلشَّام‎, Ash-Sām). The term etymologically in Arabic means "the left-hand side" or "the north", as someone in the Hejaz facing east, oriented to the sunrise, will find the north to the left. This is contrasted with the name of Yemen (اَلْيَمَنal-Yaman), correspondingly meaning "the right-hand side" or "the south". The variation ش ء م‎ (š-ʾ-m), of the more typical ش م ل‎ (š-m-l), is also attested in Old South Arabian,