The
Levant (pronounced
/ləˈvænt/) (
Arabic ,
Bilad ash-Shām, also known as المشرق (
Mashriq)) describes, traditionally, the
Eastern Mediterranean at large, but can be used as a geographical term that denotes a large area in
Western Asia formed by the lands bordering the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, roughly bounded on the north by the
Taurus Mountains, on the south by the
Arabian Desert, and on the west by the
Mediterranean Sea, while on the east it extends towards the
Zagros Mountains. The Levant includes the countries of
Lebanon,
Israel,
Syria,
Jordan,
Iraq, and occasionally
Cyprus and the
Sinai. The
UCL Institute of Archeology describes the Levant as the "crossroads of western Asia, the
eastern Mediterranean and
northeast Africa".
[1]The term Levant, which first appeared in English in 1497, originally meant a wider sense of "Mediterranean lands east of Venetia", as in French soleil levant "rising Sun" — from the verb lever, "to rise", from Latin levare "to raise". It thus referred to the Eastern direction of the rising Sun from the perspective of those who first used it and has analogues in other languages, notably Morgenland – or a closely related word meaning morning land – in most Germanic languages.
This is similar to the Ancient Greek name Ανατολία (Anatolía), which means the "land of the rising Sun", or simply the East. It derives from ἀνατολή "the rise", especially "the sunrise", resp. from ἀνατέλλω = to rise, esp. said of the Sun or Moon (ἀνά = up, above + τέλλω = to go, rise, come into existence). For the Greeks, Ανατολία (Anatolía) is a synonym of Μικρά Ασία (Mikrá Asía = Asia Minor), not of Levant, which is Λεβάντες (Levándes) in Modern Greek. Likewise, the Arabic term Mashriq, derived from the Arabic consonantal root sh-r-q (ش ر ق), relating to "the east" or "the sunrise", refers to "the land where the Sun rises", and designates a broad area encompassing the Levant. However, the most equivalent historically used Arabic term for the Levant is the "Sham" (الشام), now mostly used by Arabs in reference to Greater Syria; the same name "Sham" is also one of the Arabic names for Damascus.
The term became current in English in the 16th century, along with the first English merchant adventurers in the region English ships appeared in the Mediterranean in the 1570s and the English merchant company signed its agreement ("capitulations") with the Grand Turk in 1579 (Braudel).
