Place Names of Palestine - History

History

The preservation of place names in Palestine "with amazing consistency" is noted by Yohanan Aharoni in The Land of the Bible (1979). He attributes this continuity to the common Semitic background of Palestine's local inhabitants throughout the ages, and the fact that place names tended to reflect extant agricultural features at the site in question. According to Uzi Leibner, this preservation of names is "a function of continuity of settlement at the site itself, or at least in the immediate region," and most of the sites in question were inhabited during the Byzantine and Middle Islamic periods.

The indigenous population of Palestine used Semitic languages, such as Hebrew, Samaritan, Palestinian Syriac, Jewish Aramaic and Arabic, for thousands of years. Almost all place names in Palestine have Semitic roots, with only a few place names being of Latin origin, and hardly any of Greek or Turkish origins. The Semitic roots of the oldest names for places in Palestine continued to be used by the indigenous population, though during the period of classical antiquity in Palestine, many names underwent modifications due to the influence of local ruling elites well versed in Greek and Latin. With the Arab expansion into Palestine, many of the preclassical Semitic names were revived, though often the spelling and pronunciation differed. Of course, for places where the old name had been lost or for new settlements established during this period, new Arabic names were coined.

In his 4th century work, the Onomasticon, Eusebius of Caesarea provides a listing of the place names of Palestine with geographical and historical commentary, and his text was later translated into Latin and edited and corrected by Jerome. Though oft visited by European travellers in the centuries to follow, many of whom composed travel accounts describing its topography and demography, towards the end of Ottoman imperial rule, there was still much confusion over the place names in Palestine. Existing Turkish transliterations of the Arabic and Arabicized names made identification and study into the etymology of the place names even more challenging.

Edward Robinson identified more than 100 biblical place names in Palestine, by pursuing his belief that linguistic analysis of the place names used by the Arab fellahin would reveal preserved traces of their ancient roots. The PEF's Names and Places in the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha, with their Modern Identifications (1895) lists more than 1,150 place names related to the Old Testament and 162 related to the New, most of which are located in Palestine. These surveys by Robinson the PEF, and other Western biblical geographers in late 19th and early 20th centuries, also eventually contributed to the shape of the borders delineated for the British Mandate in Palestine, as proposed by the League of Nations.

With the establishment of Israel, in parts of Palestine, many place names have since been Hebraized or are referred to by their revived Biblical names. Even sites with only Arabic names and no pre-existing ancient Hebrew names or associations have been given new Hebrew names.