Levant

From ArchaeoWiki

For the journal publication with the same title, see Levant (journal).

The Levant (Arabic الشام, Ash-Shām) is an approximate, imprecise geographical term that refers to an extensive region area of the Near East situated south of the Taurus Mountains, washed by the Eastern Mediterranean Sea on the west, and bordered by the northern Arabian Desert and Upper Mesopotamia to the south and the east.

The term Levant excludes the Caucasus Mountains, any part of the Arabian Peninsula proper, and Anatolia—on occasion, however, the coastal Anatolian region of Cilicia may be included. The Sinai Peninsula is sometimes included within the Levant, but usually excluded as a marginal area forming a land bridge between the Levant (Asia) and northern Egypt (Africa).

Origins and Etymology

The term Levant derives from the Middle French levant, the participle of lever "to raise"—as in le soleil levant "the rising sun"—from the Latin verb levare. It thus referred to the direction of the rising sun from the perspective of those who first used it. As such, Levant is broadly equivalent to the Arabic term Mashriq, "the land where the sun rises". The term Levant is first attested in the English language in 1497, employed originally with the wider sense of "Mediterranean lands east of Italy".

An alternative etymology posits that the term Levant originally stems from the more precise geographical designation Lebanon, noting that Spanish translators of Arabic would use the letters b and v interchangeably as a consequence of their Spanish pronunciations. Thus, the Levant refers to the areas surrounding the Lebanon, itself deriving from the Aramaic word for white in reference to the snow-capped Lebanese mountains.

The term became current in English during the second half of the 16th century, along with the first English merchant adventurers in the region: English ships appeared in the eastern Mediterranean in the 1570s and English merchants signed agreements ("capitulations") with the Grand Turk (Great Sultan) in 1579, leading to the formation of the Levant Company in 1581, trading out of ports in western Anatolia and the eastern Aegean Sea (explaining the alternative name, the Turkey Company), until being opened to free trade in 1754 and the company's eventual dissolution in 1825.

In keeping with this Anatolian focus, the adjevtive Levantine was widely applied to people of Italian (especially Venetian and Genoese), French, or other western Mediterranean origin who lived in Turkey under the Ottoman Empire. The majority of these people were descendants of traders or of the inhabitants of the various Crusader states.

Popular 19th century travel writing incorporated eastern regions under then current or recent governance of the Ottoman Empire, including Greece, under the term "Levantine".

When the United Kingdom took over Palestine in the aftermath of the First World War, some of the new rulers adapted the term pejoratively to refer to inhabitants of mixed Arab and European descent and to Europeans (usually French, Italian, or Greek) who had "gone native" and adopted local dress and customs.

The French Mandates of Syria and Lebanon from designated the Levant states from 1920 until their Independence in 1946. The term became prevalent in archaeology at that time alongside discoveries made during excavations at Mari and Ugarit, and is today most typically used by archaeologists and historians with reference to the prehistory, archaeology, ancient and medieval history of the region.