Greater Syria
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Greater Syria (Arabic: سوريّة الكبرى) or Natural Syria (Arabic: سوريّة الطبيعية), Bilad ash-Sham (Arabic: بلاد الشام), is a nationalist term that denotes a geographical definition of a hypothetical united Arab state, used by pan-Arabists since early 20th century. The term denotes the restoration of the Arab province during the Middle Ages, encompassing the Eastern Mediterranean Sea or the Levant and Western Mesopotamia at the peak glory of the Arab Muslim civilization. The classical Arabic name for Syria is Sham (Arabic: الشام ash-Shām), which in later ages came to refer only to Damascus in Levantine Arabic.
The pre-Islamic, Hellenistic name of the territory, Syria, was revived by the Ottomans, creating the Vilayet of Syria, until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. The wave of the Arab nationalism in the region evolved towards the creation of a new "Great Syria" over French governed Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, declared as Hashemite Kingdom on March 1920, claiming extent over the entire Levant. Following the Franco-Syrian War, in July 1920, French armies defeated the newly proclaimed Arab Kingdom of Syria and entered Damascus, aborting the Arab state. The area was consequently partitioned under French and British Mandates into Greater Lebanon, various Syrian states, Mandatory Palestine and Transjordan. The Syrian states were gradually unified as the State of Syria and finally became the independent Republic of Syria in 1946.
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[edit] Historic background
To some opinions, the origin of the Hellenistic term Syria is bound in the etymology of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. A "Greater Syria" in this wider sense could correspond to "Greater Assyria" and include all of the Levant and Mesopotamia.[dubious ]
In the most common historical sense, Syria refers to the entire northern Levant, including Alexandretta and the ancient city of Antioch, (the pre-Islamic capital of Syria), or in an extended sense the entire Levant as far south as Egypt, but not including Mesopotamia.
The uncertainty in the definition of the extent of "Syria" is aggravated with the etymological confusion of the similar-sounding names Syria and Assyria. The question of the ultimate etymological identity of the two names remains open today, but regardless of etymology, the two names have often been taken as exchangeable or synonym from the time of Herodotus.[1] In the Roman Empire Syria and Assyria already referred to two separate entities, Roman Syria and Roman Assyria).
[edit] Assyria
Herodotus uses Συρία loosely to refer to Cappadocia (Pipes 1992).[1]
[edit] Hellenistic Syria
In Greek usage, Syria and Assyria were used almost interchangeably, but in the Roman Empire, Syria and Assyria came to be used as distinct geographical terms. "Syria" in the Roman Empire period referred to "those parts of the Empire situated between Asia Minor and Egypt", i.e. the western Levant, while "Assyria" was part of the Persian Empire, and only very briefly came under Roman control (116-118 AD, marking the historical peak of Roman expansion).
[edit] Roman Syria
In the Roman era, the term Syria is used to comprise the entire northern Levant 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".[2]
In 64 BC, Syria became a province of the Roman Empire, following the conquest by Pompey. Roman Syria bordered Judaea to the south, Anatolian Greek domains to the north, Phoenicia to the West, and was in constant struggle with Parthians to the East. In AD 135, Syria-Palaestina became to incorporate the entire Levant and Western Mesopotamia.
In AD 193, the province was divided into Syria proper and Syria Coele along the western bank of the Euphrates. Sometime between 330 and 350 (likely ca. 341), the province of Euphratensis was created out of the territory of Syria Coele and the former realm of Commagene, with Hierapolis as its capital.[3] After ca. 415 Syria Coele was further subdivided into Syria I, with the capital remaining at Antioch, and Syria II or Salutaris, with capital at Apamea on the Orontes. In 528, Justinian I carved out the small coastal province Theodorias out of territory from both provinces.[4]
[edit] Bilad al-Sham
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 Filastin and Jund al-Urdunn. Later Jund Qinnasrin was created out of part of Jund Hims. The city of Damascus was the capital of the Islamic Caliphate until the rise of the Abassid Dynasty.
[edit] Ottoman Syria
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, Alawite and Ismaili Muslims, Syriac Orthodox, Maronite, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics and Melkite Christians, Mizrahi Jews and Druzes.
[edit] French Mandate
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), Alawite State (1920), Jabal Druze (1921), the autonomous Sanjak of Alexandretta (1921) (modern-day Hatay,Turkey), and Greater Lebanon (1920) which later became the modern country of Lebanon.
[edit] 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. [5]
[edit] 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. 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-World War I 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, Σύριοι Syrioi, which the Greeks applied without distinction to various Assyrian people. Modern scholarship confirms the Greek word traces back to the cognate Ἀσσυρία, Assyria, ultimately derived from the Akkadian Aššur,[6]
Syria was known to Arabian Arabs as Shām, which comes from the root SH-ʔ-M, meaning "sublime" and "victorious". A well known Arabic name that comes from this 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 World War I due to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the uniting of the separate French mandates in Syria into one unified entity in 1936.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ a b "Herodotus VII.63". http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/ancient/greek-babylon.html. "VII.63: The Assyrians went to war with helmets upon their heads made of brass, and plaited in a strange fashion which is not easy to describe. They carried shields, lances, and daggers very like the Egyptian; but in addition they had wooden clubs knotted with iron, and linen corselets. This people, whom the Hellenes call Syrians, are called Assyrians by the barbarians. The Chaldeans served in their ranks, and they had for commander Otaspes, the son of Artachaeus."
- ^ Pliny (AD 77). "Book 5 Section 66". Natural History. University of Chicago Website. ISBN 84-249-1901-7. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Pliny_the_Elder/5*.html.
- ^ Kazhdan, Alexander (Ed.) (1991). Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Oxford University Press. p. 748. ISBN 978-0-19-504652-6.
- ^ Kazhdan, Alexander (Ed.) (1991). Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Oxford University Press. p. 1999. ISBN 978-0-19-504652-6.
- ^ Britain’s treachery, France’s revenge [1]
- ^ First proposed by Theodor Nöldeke in 1881; cf. Harper, Douglas (November 2001). "Syria". Online Etymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Syria. Retrieved 2007-06-13..
[edit] 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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