Greater Syria
Greater Syria (), also known (in a historic context) simply as Syria, is a term that denotes a historic region in the Middle East bordering the Eastern Mediterranean Sea or the Levant.
The classical Arabic name for Syria is Sham (), which in later ages became to refer only to Damascus in Levantine Arabic, while the pre-Islamic name of the territory, Syria, became used again until the collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1918.
History and territory
The area designated by Syria has changed over time. In the most common historical sense, it usually refers to the region bordering the estern Mediterranean, which includes modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Alexandretta in which lies Antioch, the pre-Islamic capital of Syria.
In the more ancient and wider sense of the word, Syria stretches inland to include Mesopotamia, and has an uncertain border to the northeast that Pliny the Elder describes as including, from west to east, Commagene, Sophene, and Adiabene, "formerly known as Assyria".
By Pliny's time, however, this larger Syria had been divided into a number of provinces under the Roman Empire (but politically independent from each other): Judaea, later renamed Palaestina in AD 135 (the region corresponding to modern day Palestine and Israel, and Jordan) in the extreme southwest, Phoenicia corresponding to Lebanon, with Damascena to the inland side of Phoenicia, Coele-Syria (or "Hollow Syria") south of the Eleutheris river, and Mesopotamia.
The region was annexed to the Islamic Caliphate after the Muslim Rashidun victory over the Byzantine Empire at the Battle of Yarmouk, and became known afterwards by its Arabic name, Sham. During Umayyad times, Sham was divided into four junds or military districts. They were Jund Dimashq (Damascus), Jund Halab (Aleppo), Jund Filistin and Jund al-Urrdun. The city of Damascus was the capital of the Islamic Caliphate until the rise of Abassid Dynasty
In the later ages of the Ottoman times, it was divided into the vilayets or sub-provinces of Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut in addition to the two special districts of Mount Lebanon and Jerusalem. Aleppo consisted of northern modern-day Syria plus parts of southern Turkey, Dmascus covered southern Syria and modern-day Jordan, Beirut covered Lebanon and the Syrian coast from the port-city of Latakia southward to the Galilee, while Jerusalem consisted of the land south of the Galilee and west of the Jordan River and the Wadi Arabah.
Although the region's population was dominated by Sunni Muslims, it also contained sizable populations of Shi'a Muslims, Maronite, Greek Orthodox and Melkite Christians, as well as Mizrahi Jews, Alawite and Ismaili Muslims and Druzes.
Names for Syria
"Greater Syria" is not always precisely synonymous with Levant, since Greater Syria can refer to a smaller region, while the Levant can refer to a larger region. Today the term is most commonly used by historians to describe the area in earlier times. For much of the history of the Middle East, Syria was closely integrated and shared a common culture and economy. The colonialism of the post-WWI years and the rise of a number of states in the region has ended this unity. It is still useful for historians looking at pre-twentieth century history to consider it as a region, however.
The name Syria derives from the ancient Greek name for Syrians, , which the Greeks applied without distinction to various Assyrian people. Modern scholarship confirms the Greek word traces back to the cognate , , ultimately derived from the Akkadian , [First proposed by Theodor Nöldeke in 1881; cf. .]
Syria was known to Arabian Arabs as Sham, which comes from the root SH--M, meaning "misfortune" and ultimately the "left direction," as seen in alternative Arabic spellings such as? and? (whereas Yemen comes from the root Y-M-N meaning "fortune" and "right direction"). Note that the name Sham has no valid etymological connection with the Biblical figure Shem son of Noah, which appears in Arabic as Sam? (with a different initial consonant, and without any internal glottal stop consonant). There is also no connection with the word shams "sun" (as in Majdal Shams or ash-Shams).
The traditional Arabic pronunciation of Syria is Suriyya (as opposed to the MSA common pronunciation: "Surya"). This name was not widely used among Muslims before about 1870, though it had been used by Christians earlier. According to the Syrian Orthodox Church, "Syrian" used to mean "Christian" in early Christianity, and the special Arabic word suryani? (singular) / suryan? (plural) means one who belongs to the Syrian Orthodox Church, as opposed to the general Arabic adjective for "Syrian" suri? (singular) / suriyun? (plural).
Currently, the Arabic term Suriyya refers to the modern state of Syria (as opposed to the whole Greater Syria region), but this distinction was not as clear before the mid 20th-century. The Hashemite dream of a Greater Syrian Arab kingdom was frustrated after WW1 due to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the uniting of the separate French mandates in Syria into one unified entity in 1936.
Greater Syria and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party
In the Syrian nationalist irredentist ideology developed by the founder of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, the Lebanese Antun Saadeh, Greater Syria is seen as the geographic environment in which the Syrian nation state evolved. Initially considered co-terminus with historic Syria as described above, Saadeh later expanded it to include the Sinai, Iraq, Kuwait and Cyprus. He pointed to what he considered to be the region's distinct natural boundaries, and described it as extending from the Taurus range in the northwest and the Zagros Mountains in the northeast to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea in the south and includes the Sinai Peninsula and the Gulf of Aqaba, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the west, including the island of Cyprus, to the arch of the Arabian Desert and the Persian Gulf in the east.
See also
 Damascus Protocol
Greater Lebanon
Greater Israel
Land of Israel/Region of Palestine
Levant
Mashriq
Names of the Levant
Sources
Article "Al-Sham" in the Encyclopedia of Islam by C.E. Bosworth, volume 9, p. 261 (1997).
Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic by Hans Wehr (4th edition, 1994).
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