jan 1, 450 BC - Herodotus

Description:

Greek historian Herodotus describes the Levant while it was under Persian rule. He refers to parts of the southern Levant with the Greek geographic term Palaistinē and speaks of “Syrians of Palestine,” but he never identifies a state or people called Palestinians, nor does he call the Jewish population by that name. In fact, his terminology for the region is broad and sometimes inconsistent; in one passage he even describes the coast from Phoenicia to Egypt as “Palestine.”

At the same time, independent evidence identifies the Jewish homeland around Jerusalem as Yehud, the Persian province descended from the Kingdom of Judah. Herodotus does not explicitly mention Yehud/Judea, Jerusalem, Israel, or the Jews, despite writing during the same Persian period. His account is therefore valuable evidence for how a Greek author described the wider Levant, but not evidence that Judea had been renamed “Palestine” or that a Palestinian political entity had replaced it. The official Roman provincial name Syria Palaestina would only appear centuries later, after the Jewish revolts against Rome.

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