Information about Levant

The Levant

The Levant (IPA: /lə'vænt/) is an imprecise geographical term historically referring to a large area in the Middle East south of the Taurus Mountains, bounded by the Mediterranean Sea on the west, and by the northern Arabian Desert and Upper Mesopotamia to the east. The Levant does not include the Caucasus Mountains, or any part of the Arabian Peninsula.

See also: Levanter

Etymology

Inhabitants of the Levant, late nineteenth century.

The term Levant is first attested in English in 1497, originally used in the wider sense of "Mediterranean lands east of Venetia". It derives from the Middle French levant, the participle of lever "to raise" — as in soleil levant "rising sun" — from the Latin levare. It thus referred to the Eastern direction of the rising sun from the perspective of those who first used it. As such, it is broadly equivalent to the Arabic term Mashriq, "the land where the sun rises".

An alternative, though unlikely, etymology suggests that the term stems from Lebanon — the letters b and v are, in fact, one letter in Hebrew and Aramaic and interchange according to pronunciation. Spanish translators of Arabic would use the letters b and v interchangeably as a consequence of their Spanish pronunciations. Thus, the Levant would refer to the areas surrounding Lebanon, itself deriving from the Hebrew and Aramaic word for white in reference to the snow-capped Lebanese mountains.

The modern Levant

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).

In 19th century travel writing, the term incorporated eastern regions under then current or recent governance of the Ottoman empire, such as Greece.

The name Levantine is additionally applied to people of Italian (especially Venetian and Genoese), French, or other Euro-Mediterranean origin who have lived in Turkey or the East Mediterranean coast (the Levant) since the period of the Crusades, the Byzantine period and the Ottoman period. The majority of them are descendants of traders from the maritime republics of the Mediterranean (such as the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa and the Republic of Ragusa) or of the inhabitants of Crusader states (especially the French Levantines in Turkey and Lebanon). They continue to live in İstanbul (mostly in the districts of Galata, Beyoğlu and Nişantaşı) and İzmir (mostly in the districts of Bornova and Buca).

When the United Kingdom took over Palestine in the aftermath of the First World War, some of the new rulers adapted the term pejoratively to refer to inhabitants of mixed Arab and European descent and to Europeans (usually French, Italian, or Greek) who had "gone native" and adopted local dress and customs.

The French Mandates of Syria and Lebanon from 1920 to 1946 were called the Levant states. The term became common in archaeology at that time, as many important early excavations were made then, such as Mari and Ugarit. Since these sites could not be classified as Mesopotamian, North African, or Arabian, they came to be referred to as "Levantine."

Today "Levant" is typically used by archaeologists and historians with reference to the prehistory and the ancient and medieval history of the region, as when discussing the Crusades. The term is also occasionally employed to refer to modern or contemporary events, peoples, states, or parts of states in the same region, namely Israel, Jordan, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, and Syria.

Regions

References

Braudel, Fernand, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II
http://www.levantine.plus.com/index.htm. Levantine Heritage Site. Includes many oral and scholarly histories, and genealogies for some Levantine Turkish families.

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Regions of the world

	Africa	Central Eastern Northern Southern Western
	Americas	Anglo Caribbean Central Latin Middle North Northern South
	Asia	Central Eastern Northern Southern Southeastern Southwestern / Western
	Europe	Central Eastern Northern Southern Western

	Oceania	Australasia Melanesia Micronesia Polynesia
	Other	Asia Pacific Caucasus Far East Indian subcontinent Middle East
	Polar	Arctic Antarctic
	Oceans	World Arctic Atlantic Indian Pacific Southern

See also

This chart shows concisely the most common way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is applied to represent the English language.

See International Phonetic Alphabet for English for a more complete version and Pronunciation respelling for English for phonetic
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Middle East is a historical and political region of Africa-Eurasia with no clear boundaries. The term "Middle East" was popularized around 1900 in Britain, and has been criticized for its loose definition.
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Taurus Mountains (Turkish: Toros Dağları) are a mountain range in the southern Anatolian plateau, from which the Euphrates (Turkish: Fırat) descends into Syria.
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Mediterranean is a sea of the Atlantic Ocean almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Europe, on the south by Africa, and on the east by Asia. It covers an approximate area of 2.
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Arabian Desert is a vast desert wilderness stretching from Yemen to the Persian Gulf and Oman to Jordan and Iraq. It occupies most of the Arabian Peninsula with an area of 2,330,000 square kilometers (900,000 mi²)^[4].
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Mesopotamia was a cradle of civilization geographically located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq. Sumer in southern Mesopotamia is commonly regarded as the world's earliest civilization.
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Caucasus Mountains

Countries | Russia,Georgia,Azerbaijan,Armenia

Length | 1,100 km (684 mi)
Width | 160 km (99 mi)
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Arabian Peninsula (in Arabic: شبه الجزيرة العربية, or جزيرة العرب) is a peninsula in Southwest Asia at the junction of
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Levanter may refer to

A Levanter, a person who was born in the Levant, especially one of mixed European-Oriental ancestry
Viento de Levante, a wind that blows in the western Mediterranean Sea
The Levanter, a novel by Eric Ambler

Levant

Etymology

Regions

See also

References

See also

Events

1500s

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