Greater Syria ( ), also
known simply as Syria, is a term that denotes a
region in the Near East bordering the
Eastern Mediterranean
Sea
or the Levant.
The
classical Arabic name for Syria is Sham (
ash-Shām), 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.
Historic Syria
The area known as Syria has changed over time.
In the most common
historical sense, it usually refers to the region bordering the
eastern Mediterranean, which includes modern-day Syria
, parts of
Iraq
, Israel
, Jordan
, Lebanon
, the
Palestinian
territories
and parts Iran and parts of southern of Turkey
including
Alexandretta
and the ancient city of 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 States of the French Mandate
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,
ash-Shām. During
Umayyad times, Shām was divided into five
junds or military districts. They were
Jund
Dimashq', Jund Hims
, Jund
Qinnasrin, Jund Filastin
and Jund al-Urdunn.
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
wilayahs or
sub-provinces the borders of which and the choice of cities as
seats of government within them varied over time.
The vilayets or
sub-provinces of Aleppo, Damascus, and 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, Damascus
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,
Syriac Orthodox,
Maronite,
Greek
Orthodox and
Melkite Christians, as well
as
Mizrahi Jews,
Alawite and
Ismaili Muslims
and
Druzes.
Following the
San Remo
conference and the defeat of
King
Faisal's short-lived monarchy in Syria at the
Battle of Maysalun, the French general
Henri Gouraud, in breach of the
conditions of the mandate, subdivided the
French Mandate of Syria into six
states.
They were the states of Damascus (1920), Aleppo (1920), Alawites (1920), Jabal Druze (1921), the autonomous
Sanjak of
Alexandretta
(1921)
(modern-day Hatay), and the French Mandate of Lebanon (1920)
which became later the modern country of Lebanon.
Syrian nationalism
In the nationalist ideology developed by the founder of the
Syrian Social
Nationalist Party,
Antun Saadeh,
Syria is seen as the geocultural environment in which the Syrian
nation state evolved, an area Sa'adeh
called the Syrian
Fertile
Crescent.
Sa'adah rejected both language and religion as defining
characteristics of a nation, and instead argued that nations
develop through the common development of a people inhabiting a
specific geographical region.
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
-including the Sinai Peninsula
and the Gulf of Aqaba
in the south, and from the eastern Mediterranean
Sea including the island of Cyprus
in the west,
to the arch of the Arabian Desert and
the Persian
Gulf
in the east.
In the
1940s, Britain
secretly advocated the creation of a Greater Syrian
state that would secure Britain preferential status in military,
economic and cultural matters, in return for putting a complete
halt to Jewish ambition in Palestine. France
and the
United
States
opposed British hegemony in the region, which led
to the creation of Israel.
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 ,
Syria was
known to Arabian Arabs
as Shām, which comes from the root , meaning "sublime" and
"victorious" a well known arabic name comes from is hisham 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
Sām سام (with a different initial
consonant, and without any internal
glottal
stop consonant).
There is also a connection with the word
shams "sun" (as in Majdal Shams
or ash-Shams).
The classical Arabic pronunciation of Syria is
Sūriyya (as
opposed to the
MSA common
pronunciation
"Sūrya"). 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"
(
sūriy سوري) used to mean "Christian" in early
Christianity. In English, "Syrian" historically meant a
Syrian Christian (as in, e.g.,
Ephraim the Syrian).
Following the
declaration of the Syrian Arab Republic
in 1936, the term "Syrian" became to designate
citizens of that state regardless of ethnicity. The
adjective "Syriac" (
suryāni سرياني) has come into common
use since as a demonym to avoid the ambiguity of "Syrian."
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.
See also
References
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