Palestine

The Philistines arrived on the Levantine coast around 1200 BCE as part of the Sea Peoples migrations that disrupted the entire eastern Mediterranean. They established five city-states: Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gath, and Ekron. The Egyptians called them Peleset; the Hebrews called them Pelishtim. Neither name was intended as a compliment.

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, was the first Greek author to use Palaistine Syria as a geographic label for the region between Phoenicia and Egypt. He meant the coastal area the Philistines had occupied, not the entire inland territory. But Greek and then Roman usage expanded the name gradually until it covered a much larger area.

The decisive act of naming came in 135 CE. After the Bar Kokhba revolt, the Roman emperor Hadrian renamed the province of Judaea to Syria Palaestina, a move widely understood as deliberate erasure of Jewish connection to the land by invoking their old coastal enemies. The Latin form Palaestina stuck through Byzantine rule and beyond.

Arab conquest in the seventh century produced the Arabic form Filastin, which became the name of a province under Umayyad and Abbasid rule with its capital at Ramla. The name passed through Crusader chroniclers, Ottoman administrative records, and British Mandatory documentation before arriving, with enormous political weight, in modern usage. Every era of governance found it useful to name this place, and each adoption kept the memory of the Philistines alive a little longer.