Another giant of the Hellenistic world, the highly influential Alexandrian cartographer and writer Ptolemy: Claudius Ptolemaeus (c. AD 100–c. 170)

produced the first known map to describe Palestine; Ptolemy clearly distinguished between the so-called Syria-Coele, Phoenicia and Palestine, proving the latter was conceived and treated as a separate and autonomous entity. The toponym Syria-Coele or Coele-Syria (Greek: Κοίλη Συρία, Koíle Syría; Latin: Cava Syria; English: Hollow-Syria) is often confounded or equated by some historians with the modern invented term ‘Southern Syria’ (e.g. Cohen 2006: 41). This strategy is partly designed to camouflage the existence of historic Palestine as a geo-political unit, thereby denying the widespread use of the term Palestine throughout Classical Antiquity.

Rendered as Coelosyria and Celesyria, Coele-Syria was a geographical designation of a region in Syria in Classical Antiquity. Although the term Coele itself was possibly a transcription of the Aramaic kul, all (Arabic kul)

of the region of Syria, the term actually acquired a different meaning in both Greek and Latin: Cava Syria or Hollow-Syria. Crucially, it was often applied in a narrower sense to the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon (Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, Book V (c. 78 AD; Sartre 1988) and later to the Roman province of Syria-Coele in northern Syria.

After the collapse of the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great in 323 BC the Hellenistic Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings fought over Palestine.