Palestine A Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha

Palestine always played a special role in the imagination, sacred literature and historical representations of the West (Said 1980: 9). This began with the earliest classical literature and seminal works of the Greek writers, especially Herodotus and Aristotle in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. It was in the writings of Herodotus (who lived in the 5th century BC (c. 484–425 BC)

that the name took on its Greek form Παλαιστίνη (Palaistinê or Phalastin)

and was used as the name of the region. Herodotus talks about Palaestine, Palaestine-Syria and the ‘Syrians of Palestine’ and he distinguishes the Phoenicians from the ‘Syrians of Palestine’ (Herodotus 1841: 135). He also describes the physical geography of the region which is associated today with the modern Middle East as follows:

The other [region] starts from the country of the Persians, and stretches into Erythraean sea, containing first Persia, then Assyria, and after Assyria, Arabia. It ends, that is to say it is considered to end, though it does not really come to termination, at the Arabian gulf ...

between Persia and Phoenicia lies a broad and ample tract of country, after which the region I am describing skirts our [Mediterranean] sea, stretching from Phoenicia along the coast of Palestine-Syria till it comes to Egypt, where it terminates. This entire tract contains but three nations. (Herodotus 1860: 27)

In his geographic representation of Παλαιστίνη (Palaistinê or Phalastin)

Herodotus uses the term in its wider sense and not merely in reference to Philistia, or the coastal strip of land from Carmel to Gaza, but also the interior of the country (Herodotus 1841: 135). He 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 not only mentions Palestine as an autonomous district of Syria but describes it geographically, as the country we know today, but also including some adjoining areas in the Sinai and the north, as well as the area east of the river Jordan. Herodotus also adds that southern Palestine sea ports from Cadytis to Jenysus (or Ienysos, modern Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip) were occupied by Arabians (Herodotus 1841: 135).

Herodotus’ conception of Palaistinê included the Galilee and referred to Palestine in the wider sense. In effect, this conception applied to the region of the ‘Levant between Phoenicia and Egypt’ (Jacobson 1999). This classical conception of Palestine also influenced modern representations of the country and a map of Palestine in c. 450 BC, according to Herodotus, was reconstructed in 1897 by John Murray, one of the most important and influential publishers in Britain.

Herodotus’ wider conception of Palestine also reflected the expansion of the province of Idumaea in the south, following the destruction of Iron Age Edom by the Babylonian Nabonidus. The Idumites were identified by some scholars to be of Nabataean Arab origins. Idumaea’s centre, first in Hebron (al-Khalil) and later centred in Lakish, in the southern foothills, created boundaries stretching from the Transjordan plateau to the Mediterranean. In 132 CE, under the Romans, Idumaea was joined to the provinces of Judaea and the Galilee and the Latin form Palaestina was used to refer to the whole of the southern Levant.

Herodotus was a contemporary of Socrates and is widely referred to as ‘the Father of History’ (Cicero, 1st century BC). He was the first historian to systematically investigate historical subjects, arranging material into a historical narrative. Herodotus’ Histories (also known as The History, 1987) is one of the most famous historical texts on the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars, a text known to academics, historians and history students throughout the world. Histories is now considered a foundational text in the Western academy. It serves as a key record of ancient oral traditions, politics, geography and the clashes of various powers that were known in Greece, Western Asia and North Africa. When it comes to ancient Palestine and toponymic memory, modern Western Christian writing relies partly on Herodotus’ classic work (1987).

In this classical text (written from the 450s to the 420s BC), Herodotus writes about a ‘district of Syria, called Palaistinê’ and lists place names of ancient Palestine. Herodotus himself visited Palestine in the fifth decade of the 5th century BC. He travelled extensively through ‘the part of Syria called Palestine, I myself saw’,1 and acquired first-hand knowledge of the country and its people (Jacobson 1999). Herodotus refers to Παλαιστίνη (Palaistinê), Syria, or simply Palaistinê, many times as an area comprising the whole region between Phoenicia and Egypt (see also Herodotus 2014: 724, Map 10).

Herodotus’ text includes the description of key towns and ports, the road later to be called Via Maris, and many other places he had seen and recorded. He describes in detail the city of Ascalon, an ancient seaport city which dates back to the Neolithic Age. At the time of Herodotus Palestine was polytheistic and he consequently describes Ascalon as having a temple for Aphrodite Urania. This signified ‘celestial love’ and the ‘spiritual’, as distinct from the more earthly aspect of Aphrodite Pandemos, ‘Aphrodite for all the people’. The cult of Aphrodite Urania was associated with body and soul and with spiritual love, beauty, fertility, procreation and pleasure, and its sacred doves still flocked on the roofs of the city in Roman times (Lewin 2005: 156). The cult of Aphrodite Urania was also associated with the sea and existed in several Palestinian cities, including the ancient port city of Jaffa, often referred to in Arabic by Palestinians as ‘Arus al-Bahr’ (Bride of the Sea).

Classical Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides (c. 460–c. 400

BC), in contrast with the authors of the Old Testament, sought to separate myth (muthos) from reality based on reasoned argument (logos) and histories of the gods from histories of humans; they disregarded political and myth-narratives in favour of facts on the ground. Their histories were also strongly geo-ethnographic. Geo-ethnography is central to Herodotus’ account of ancient Palestine and its inhabitants. Greek historians and geographers were fully conscious of the fact that the Mediterranean and Red Seas were a major route of international trade and a major source of wealth for Palestine. Herodotus refers to the Arabs who occupied Mediterranean sea ports in southern Palestine (Herodotus 1841: 135) and north Sinai and controlled the incense trade route from the Eastern Mediterranean to southern Arabia and via the Red Sea to India – the frankincense road of Antiquity which comprised a network of major ancient land and sea trading routes linking the Mediterranean world with eastern and southern sources of incense, spices and other luxury goods. Stretching from the Mediterranean ports of Palestine and Egypt through Arabia and beyond, and involving the Nabataean Arabs (and Petra at its height at the beginning of the 2nd century AD), the long-distance land trade in incense flourished between the 7th century BC and the 2nd century AD.

Thus Herodotus records his many conversations with the Philistines and other groups he meets, and interesting facts he learnt about their lives, such as the practice of male circumcision (originally polytheistic) learnt from the Egyptians: the ‘Syrians called Palestinians’ ‘confess that they learnt the custom of the Egyptians’ (Herodotus 1858, Book II, Ch. 104; 1836, Vol. 1, Book II: 247). Egypt had the oldest documented evidence for male circumcision dating back to 2345–2182 BC (World Health Organization 2007: 3). David Asheri (1925‒2000), Professor of Ancient History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities (1972‒1975), in A Commentary on Herodotus, Books 1‒4, writes:

the ‘Syrians called Palestinians’, at the time of Herodotus were a mixture of Phoenicians, Philistines, Arabs, Egyptians, and perhaps also other peoples ... Perhaps the circumcised ‘Syrians called Palestinians’ are the Arabs and Egyptians of the Sinai coast; at the time of Herodotus there were few Jews in the coastal area. (Asheri et al. 2007: 402)

Herodotus, who travelled widely in Palestine and Syria and beyond the coastal region, does not mention Judaea or refer to Jews. He does not mention terms such Cana’an or Canaanites or Israelites in Palestine; nor does he describe monotheism in the country. First, as archaeological evidence shows, monotheism was a much later development in Palestine and the Near East (Masalha 2007). Second, also significantly, many of the Old Testament religio-ideological dogmas evolved centuries after Herodotus.

Interestingly the ancient Philistine and Greek toponyms for Palaistinê, Tantur (Tantura) and Ascalon (‘Asqalan) were preserved in local Palestinian Arab tradition and by medieval Arab historians, geographers and travellers, and ‘Ascalan’ became known to the Palestinians as ‘Asqalan (or Majdal ‘Asqalan), depopulated by the Israel army in 1950 (Masalha 1997). This shows how, by and large, the local names of Palestinian villages and towns were fairly stable throughout the ancient, medieval and modern history of Palestine.