Levant

Lore & Background

It is ultimately from Latin 'levare' meaning 'lift, raise'. In the 13th and 14th centuries, 'levante' was used for Italian maritime commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean, including Greece, Anatolia, Syria-Palestine, and Egypt.

Reader's Guide

The Levant has undergone a dynamic process of historical evolution in usage, meaning, and understanding. Today, 'Levant' is the term typically used by archaeologists and historians in relation to the history of the region, adopted to identify a 'wider, yet relevant, cultural corpus' without the 'political overtones' of Syria-Palestine. The term is also used for modern events, peoples, states or parts of states in the same region, including Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey. Scholars have recently attempted to reclaim the notion of the Levant as a category of analysis in political and social sciences, with academic journals such as the Journal of Levantine Studies and The Levantine Review launched in the early 2010s. The Levantine corridor represents the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia, described as the crossroads of West Asia, Eastern Mediterranean, and Northeast Africa.

Did You Know?

• The term Levant derives from Italian 'levante' meaning 'rising', implying the rising of the Sun in the east.
• The conventional division between the Northern and Southern Levant is often placed at the Nahr al-Kabir river or around Mount Lebanon, not the Litani River.

Geographic Scope and Shifting Boundaries

The Levant occupies a distinctive position along the Eastern Mediterranean, serving as a subregion of West Asia within the broader Middle East. Its geographic identity has never been fixed; rather, it has expanded and contracted depending on the era and the discipline doing the defining. In its broadest historical conception, the region stretched from Greece all the way to Egypt and Cyrenaica in eastern Libya, encompassing the entire Eastern Mediterranean basin. At the other extreme, archaeologists and specialists in related fields confine the term to Cyprus and the territories bordering what was historically called the Levantine Sea—specifically Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, and the southern portion of Cilicia in modern Turkey. Geologically, the area sits on the northwest edge of the Arabian plate, and the Levantine corridor functions as a natural land bridge connecting Africa to Eurasia. This positioning has earned it the description of a crossroads where West Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Northeast Africa converge.

Etymology and the Language of the East

The word Levant carries a remarkably transparent etymology rooted in the simple observation of the sun's daily arc. It traces back to the Latin verb levare, meaning to lift or raise, which gave rise to the Italian levante and the French levant, both evoking the rising of the sun in the east. The term first appeared in English in 1497, initially signifying the Mediterranean lands east of Italy. This solar imagery is not unique to one linguistic tradition; parallel concepts appear across the region's languages. Greek offers Anatolē, the direction of sunrise, which also gave its name to Anatolia. Germanic languages produced Morgenland, literally morning land, while Hebrew uses mizraḥ for east. Spanish and Catalan share Levante and Llevant, Hungarian has Kelet, and Italian geography preserves the concept in Riviera di Levante, the stretch of Ligurian coast east of Genoa. Even the word Orient shares this root, deriving from the Latin orior, to rise. The Arabic equivalent, Mashriq, similarly means the eastern place where the Sun rises, making the Levant broadly equivalent to that concept.

Commerce, Empire, and Political Naming

For centuries, the Levant was inseparable from maritime trade and imperial ambition. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Italian merchants used the term levante to describe their commercial sphere across the Eastern Mediterranean, spanning Greece, Anatolia, Syria-Palestine, and Egypt—essentially all lands east of Venice. The English presence followed in the 1570s, when merchant adventurers sent ships into the Mediterranean and secured capitulations with the Ottoman Sultan in 1579. The Levant Company was formally established in 1581 to conduct trade with the Ottoman Empire, and the French Compagnie du Levant was founded in 1670 for a similar purpose. At that time, the Far East was even called the Upper Levant. In the early nineteenth century, travel writers sometimes extended the term to include Ottoman provinces and independent Greece, particularly the Greek islands. After World War I, the French mandate over Syria and Lebanon was officially designated the Levant States, a usage that cemented the term's association with the modern political geography of the region.

Academic Adoption and Cultural Reclamation

In contemporary scholarship, the Levant has found a particularly comfortable home in archaeology and the humanities. Scholars favor the term because it offers a wider yet relevant cultural corpus without the political overtones that labels like Syria-Palestine carry. Archaeologists routinely speak of Levantine archaeology or the archaeology of the Southern Levant, seeking a neutral orientation free from biblical or national framing. The 2013 Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant equates the region with the Arabic bilad al-sham, or the land of Sham, and sets its northern boundary at the Taurus Mountains or the Plain of 'Amuq. Beyond archaeology, the term extends into food studies as Levantine cuisine, and Latin Catholics from the region are sometimes called Levantines. In the early 2010s, a deliberate effort emerged to reclaim the Levant as a category in political and social sciences, exemplified by the launch of the Journal of Levantine Studies from the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and The Levantine Review from Boston College. Despite this academic vitality, several dictionaries still classify the word as archaic in everyday English.

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