history Of Palestina

The history of Palestine is the account of events in the greater geographic area in the Southern Levant known since Hadrian's time as Palestine, which includes the West Bank and Gaza and the State of Israel, as well as portions of Jordan and the Golan Heights. The name "Palestine," in the form of the Greek toponym Syria-Palaistinê Syria-(Greek: Παλαιστίνη) is derived from the Greek "Philistin" and is recorded first in the work of the 5th century BCE Ionian historian Herodotus as a geographical description of part of greater Syria. He used it to denote the coastal land of the Mediterranean Sea from Phoenicia down to Egypt, the land originally inhabited by the sea-people, the Philistines.

The term was first used politically to describe all of Provincia Judaea, Galilee, Samaria, and Gaulantis after Roman domination of the Hebrew nation in the Bar Kochba revolt of 132-135 CE. The Romans changed the region's name from Judaea in order to historically disconnect the Jews from their land as punishment for their rebellion against Roman rule.^[1] Jerusalem was re-named Aelia Capitolina.

Herodotus may have taken the name from several regional languages, such as the Ancient Egyptian P-r-s-t, Assyrian Palastu, and the Old Hebrew Pleshet, the latter used in the Bible to refer to land inhabited by the Greco-Aegean non-Semite Philistines.

However, the name for the non-Semitic Philistines was already in existence in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew word plishtim (פלישתים) appears in the Bible in reference to a non-Semitic seafaring people hailing from Greece. The plishtim, translated into English as "Philistines," settled on the coast of Eretz Yisrael, in what is now Gaza.

The Arabic word Filastin has been used to refer to the region since medieval Arab geographers adopted the Greek name. The appellative "Filastini" (فلسطيني), also derived from the Latinized term Palaestina (Παλαιστίνη), made appearances in Arabic dating to the 7th century CE.

For more on the use of the term "Palestine", see Boundaries and name of the region of Palestine. The history of Palestine covers a different area than historical Israel in that it applies only to the area of the coastal strip from Gaza to Ekron, as well as Wadi Arabah as far as Eilat (historically part of Edom), and does not include those areas trans-Jordan considered part of Israelite Gilead.