Levant

• 1. Introduction

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  The Levant is a region whose name means "rising." It comes from the Italian word levante, pointing to the place where the sun rises in the east. For Italian merchants in the 13th and 14th centuries, it meant the lands east of Venice: Greece, Anatolia, Syria-Palestine, and Egypt. For an archaeologist today, it means something far more precise. For some dictionaries, it means almost nothing at all, because they mark the word as archaic.

  How did a single term come to describe Cyprus, a French colonial mandate, an ancient land bridge between continents, and a name some people use for a militant organization? The answer runs through Venetian trade ledgers, a 16th-century English merchant company, and the careful boundary-drawing of modern scholars. This subregion of West Asia sits along the Eastern Mediterranean and forms part of the Middle East. What follows traces how its meaning kept shifting, who lives there now, and why the name still provokes disagreement.

• 2. A Word For The Sunrise

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  Levare, the Latin verb meaning "lift, raise," sits at the root of it all. From it came the French levant, and from French the term entered English. It first appears in English in 1497, where it meant "the East" or "Mediterranean lands east of Italy."

  Languages across Europe and beyond reach for the same idea. The Greek Anatolē, the source of Anatolia, means "the direction of sunrise." Germanic speakers say Morgenland. In Italian there is the Riviera di Levante, the stretch of the Liguria coast east of Genoa. Hungarian uses Kelet, Spanish and Catalan use Levante and Llevant, and Hebrew uses mizraḥ. Even "Orient" belongs to this family, since its Latin source oriens means "east" and literally means "rising," from the verb orior.

  There is an Arabic parallel too. The Levant is broadly equivalent to the Mashriq, meaning "eastern place, where the Sun rises." The term "Levantine" once carried a specific social meaning. It first referred to European residents of the eastern Mediterranean, then later shifted to describe regional native and minority groups. That shift in who the word pointed to foreshadows how the whole region's name would keep changing hands.

• 3. Merchants And Mandates

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  English ships appeared in the Mediterranean in the 1570s, and the merchant company signed its agreement with the Ottoman Sultan in 1579. These agreements were called "capitulations." Two years later, in 1581, the English Levant Company was founded to trade with the Ottoman Empire. In 1670 a French company was founded for the same purpose. At that time, traders called the Far East the "Upper Levant."

  The word kept narrowing and widening with the politics of trade. Eventually it was restricted to the Muslim countries of Syria-Palestine and Egypt. Early 19th-century travel writing sometimes pulled the term wider again, taking in certain Mediterranean provinces of the Ottoman Empire, independent Greece, and especially the Greek islands.

  The French mandate of Syria and Lebanon, which ran from 1920 to 1946, was called the Levant states. That colonial label left a mark on the word's modern range. Because of it, Levant came to refer to modern Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, and Cyprus.

• 4. Drawing The Boundaries

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  The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant, published in 2013, sets exact edges for the region. Its subtitle covers roughly 8000 to 332 BCE. The handbook treats the Levant as synonymous with the Arabic "bilad al-sham," the land of Syria, which in Western parlance becomes greater Syria.

  The boundaries are drawn on all four sides. To the north lie the Taurus Mountains or the Plain of 'Amuq. To the east stretch the deserts: the Euphrates and the Jebel el-Bishrī area, then the Syrian Desert east of the Anti-Lebanon range, whose southernmost part is Mount Hermon, and the highlands and eastern desert of Transjordan. To the south sits Wadi al-Arish in Sinai. To the west, the Mediterranean Sea.

  Within those edges, scholars split the land in two. The Litani River marks the division between the Northern Levant and the Southern Levant. A third subregion belongs to the set as well. Cyprus, though geographically distinct, is included for its proximity and its natural resources, copper in particular, which built close cultural ties. The UCL Institute of Archaeology has dated the connection between Cyprus and the mainland Levant to the early Iron Age.

• 5. The Politics Of A Name

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  Syria-Palestine was the older scholarly label, and scholars deliberately moved away from it. They adopted "Levant" because it offered a wider yet relevant cultural corpus without the political overtones of the earlier term. Archaeologists seeking an orientation that is neither biblical nor national reached for phrases like Levantine archaeology and archaeology of the Southern Levant.

  For a long time the word stayed boxed inside archaeology and literature. A recent effort tries to reclaim it as a category of analysis in political and social sciences. Two academic journals launched in the early 2010s carry the word. The Journal of Levantine Studies is published by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and The Levantine Review is published by Boston College. Several institutions fold Cyprus into Levantine studies, including the Council for British Research in the Levant, the UCLA Near Eastern Languages and Cultures department, and the UCL Institute of Archaeology.

  The name carries a sharper controversy too. The word Levant has been used in some translations of the term ash-Shām as deployed by the organization known as ISIL or ISIS. Whether that translation is accurate remains a matter of disagreement.

• 6. Who Lives Here

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  Roughly 57.6 million people live within the modern Levant border, counting the populations of Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine. The largest figure in the 2023 count belongs to Syria at over 25 million. Across these states, the source records life expectancies clustered in the seventies, with a total figure of 76.4 years.

  The majority of Levantines are Muslims, though that was not always so. Islam arrived with the Muslim conquest of the Levant in the 7th century, yet a Muslim majority was only reached by the 13th century. Most Levantine Muslims are Sunnis following the four madhhabs: Hanafi, Shafi'i, Hanbali, and Maliki. Minorities include the Alawites and Nizari Ismailis in Syria, and Twelver Shiites in Lebanon.

  The region is the birthplace of Christianity, and many churches endure here, among them the Greek Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, and Eastern Catholic communities such as the Maronite and Melkite. Armenians mostly belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church. Other groups include Jews, Samaritans, Yazidis in Iraq, and Druze in Syria and Lebanon. The people themselves include Levantine Arabs, Jews, Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, Chechens, and Circassians.

• 7. Tongues Of The Region

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  Levantine Arabic, known as Šāmī, is what most of the region speaks. It descends from the pre-Islamic Arabic dialects of Syria and from Hejazi Arabic, while keeping strong traces of Western Middle Aramaic. Scholars split it into North Levantine Arabic, spoken in Lebanon, Syria, and parts of Turkey, and South Levantine Arabic, spoken in Palestine and Jordan.

  The map of languages does not stop at Arabic. Cyprus has two official languages, Turkish and Greek, with Greek most used in the south and Turkish in the north. Cyprus also recognizes two minority languages: Armenian, and Cypriot Maronite Arabic. That last one blends mostly medieval Arabic vernaculars with influence from Turkish and Greek, and only about 1,000 people speak it. In Israel, Modern Hebrew is the official language, spoken by almost the entire population, while Arabic serves the Arab minority and English is widely used.

  One ancient survival clings to three villages. Western Neo-Aramaic is still spoken in Maaloula, Jubb'adin, and Bakhah in Syria. The land that gave its name to the sunrise still holds, in a handful of mountain villages, a tongue spoken since before the Arabic conquest arrived.