Palestine

How can you trace an idea, a name, and a place across three millennia of shifting empires? In Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, Nur Masalha argues that “Palestine” is not a modern invention or a colonial label but a continuous geographic and cultural reality. He takes you from Bronze Age inscriptions to Ottoman bureaucratic records, showing how the name, the people, and the territory persist through radical political transformations. The book’s core claim is that you cannot erase a region’s history simply by renaming it; the evidence—from epigraphy, archaeology, administration, and culture—reveals uninterrupted continuity.

Masalha’s central focus is the evolution of “Palestine” as both name and lived space: its early appearance as “Peleset” or “Philistia,” its classical and Roman formalization as “Palaestina,” its Islamic-era adaptation as “Filastin,” and its endurance into Ottoman and modern times. Alongside the toponymic thread runs another: the challenge to Eurocentric narratives, especially those derived from biblical literalism and colonial historiography, which treat Palestine as a void awaiting invention or return.

Reclaiming Historical Time

Masalha asks you to shift historical focus away from scriptural chronology and toward the tangible record—inscriptions, coins, mosaics, and administrative documents. He reminds you that Egyptian texts mention “Peleset” as early as the 13th century BCE, that Assyrian annals speak of “Pilistu,” and that Herodotus in the 5th century BCE already uses “Palaistinê” to describe the southern Levant. This long temporal arc demonstrates that “Palestine” is not a retrospective invention, but a continuous spatial imagination that surviving empires kept reusing.

The Roman transformation of Judaea into Syria Palaestina after Hadrian’s reorganization in 135 CE, and the subsequent Byzantine subdivision into three Palestines, gave bureaucratic shape to an already established toponym. When Arabic became the governing language, Filastin inherited those boundaries, showing how administrative function and linguistic translation work to preserve place memory rather than abolish it.

Archaeology Against Biblical Literalism

Where previous historians used scripture as archive, Masalha insists on treating archaeology as archive. Excavations at Ascalon, Gaza, Ekron and elsewhere reveal a cosmopolitan, urban civilization in Iron Age Philistia—contradicting depictions of the Philistines as barbarian invaders. The material record shows maritime networks, coinage, and urban planning that form the economic foundation of later Palestine. Similarly, the archaeological absence of evidence for the Exodus or the Davidic-Solomonic “United Kingdom” exposes how political myth often replaces empirical history.

Continuity Through Empires

Across Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic periods, governance keeps the outlines of Palestine practically intact. Caesarea, Gaza, and Jerusalem persist as administrative or sacred capitals, with Byzantium’s “Three-in-One” provinces (Palaestina Prima, Secunda, Salutaris) echoed later in the Islamic junds (Filastin, al-Urdun). The Arab Christian Ghassanids, often neglected in mainstream accounts, become crucial intermediaries: Arab federate rulers who maintain frontier defense and patronize Arabic culture long before Islam. Their existence dismantles the false start date of Arab history as 622 CE.

From Filastin to Falastin: Language as Heritage

By following the toponym through Arabic geographies and Ottoman records—Jund Filastin, Ard Filastin, Ahl Filastin—you see how a place name becomes a marker of lived legality and identity. Jurists like al-Ramli and historians like Mujir al-Din keep “Filastin” alive in their writings, while 19th- and early 20th-century teachers and journalists revive it as “Falastin” in the vernacular. The transition from formal to colloquial naming mirrors a shift from imperial subjects to popular citizens; it’s how geography turns into collective belonging.

Empire, Erasure, and Resistance

Masalha frames the modern Zionist and British colonial projects as the latest waves in a long contest over naming and memory. The 19th-century mapping of Palestine by the Palestine Exploration Fund, and later the institutional renaming campaigns after 1948, attempt to overwrite Arabic geography with biblical Hebrew equivalents. Yet this “toponymic colonization,” he argues, exposes its own anxiety: if erasure requires institutional effort, it means the past remains stubbornly present. The persistence of older Arabic names in refugee memory and oral tradition signals continuity against power’s amnesia.

Essential argument

Palestine is not a modern fabrication but a palimpsest of civilizations whose name, geography and institutions have never vanished—only translated through languages and empires. Understanding this continuity reclaims historical agency for Palestinians and challenges the politics of erasure that have sought to dissolve their antiquity into myth.

To understand how the story begins, you return to the Late Bronze and Iron Ages, when the southern Levant’s coastal cities form the heart of Philistia. Masalha reinterprets the Philistines not as seaborne outsiders but as indigenous, maritime city-states creating one of the eastern Mediterranean’s earliest urban networks. Their ports—Ascalon, Gaza, Ashdod, Ekron—anchor political and commercial life and offer a template for later Palestinian continuity.

Archaeological Foundations

Egyptian inscriptions under Ramesses III describe the Peleset, while Assyrian tablets centuries later mention Pilistu and Palashtu. Excavations in Gaza and Ashkelon reveal elaborate pottery, imported goods and fortified cities. Those finds redefine the Philistines as cosmopolitan builders, trading with Phoenicians, Egyptians and Arabian merchants. Their coinage—the Philisto-Arabian silver currency—demonstrates economic autonomy and political sophistication far beyond the caricature of marauding tribes.

Land, Trade and Identity

Situated along the Via Maris, Philistia controls trade between Egypt and the Levant, linking the Mediterranean to the Arabian spice route. Maritime commerce integrates inland agriculture with sea transit, giving the region both wealth and a hybrid identity that blends Aegean, Semitic and Near Eastern traits. This hybridity—and its territorial coherence—provide the first nucleus of what later becomes known as Palestine.

Because Philistia functions as a clear geopolitical entity, later empires adopt the name when organizing their provinces. The “part-for-the-whole” toponymic process explains how Peleset (a coastal label) evolves into Palaestina (a regional one). Each linguistic transition—Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Latin, Arabic—transmits the same idea: a settled, identifiable land along the southern Levant.

Historical takeaway

Once you see Philistia as a developed local polity rather than a biblical foil, you also see the emergence of Palestine as a natural continuity of settlement, trade and naming across millennia.

Roman and Byzantine Palestine marks a new stage where imperial administration and intellectual life reinforce the region's identity. Hadrian’s creation of Syria Palaestina in 135 CE unified diverse lands—Judaea, Samaria, Philistia—under a single provincial title. Byzantine successors refine it into Palaestina Prima, Secunda, and Salutaris, establishing a decisive imperial frame that persists through Islamic times.

Administrative Innovations

Byzantium institutionalizes Palestine as a structured space. The Dux Palaestinae commands its armies from Caesarea, while ecclesiastical authority rises in Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem). The Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) grants the Church of Jerusalem autocephaly, cementing the link between governance and sacred status. These bureaucratic and religious hierarchies ensure the province endures as a recognized entity across centuries.

Cultural Centres: Caesarea and Gaza

Caesarea becomes a late‑antique metropolis of learning: home to Origen, Eusebius and a celebrated library. Gaza, meanwhile, blossoms as a rhetorical hub whose Christian sophists keep classical learning alive. The Madaba Map—mosaic cartography from the 560s—offers a vivid record of Byzantine Palaestina’s towns and sacred sites. These monuments prove how intangible identity is materialized in trade, urbanism and art.

Transition to Islamic Rule

When Muslim armies conquer the Levant (637–638 CE), they inherit these frameworks. The new province, Jund Filastin, preserves administrative lines and many cities. Its religious and bureaucratic continuity—from Aelia Capitolina to Iliya al‑Quds, Caesarea to Ramla—shows adaptation rather than rupture. Early Islamic coinage minted in Filastin continues the line of local economies established centuries earlier.

Core insight

Through Roman and Byzantine bureaucracies, Palestine gains durable institutions of identity—religious, administrative and cultural—that survive conquest and language change.

Masalha urges you to distinguish between myth and material record. Ancient Palestine was neither monolithic nor exclusively monotheistic. Herodotus and later evidence describe temples to multiple deities such as Aphrodite at Ascalon, while archaeology unearths a spectrum of pagan and syncretic cultic practices extending into Late Antiquity. This pluralism complicates the biblical image of a single covenantal society.

Evidence vs. Narrative

Archaeological absence of the Exodus route, Jericho walls or Solomonic palaces suggests that biblical narratives often serve theological rather than historical ends. Archaeologists like Zeev Herzog and writers like Keith Whitelam highlight how modern scholarship built “ancient Israel” as a textual rather than empirical construct. When you approach Palestine through stratigraphy and artifacts, a polyethnic urban world replaces the narrow tribal picture.

Politics of Sacred Geography

The stakes are not merely academic. Protestant Restorationism and later Zionist discourse exploit biblical geography to legitimize colonial settlement. The famous slogan “a land without a people” rests on this erasure of plural pre‑biblical Palestine. By privileging archaeology and local history, Masalha reclaims Palestine as a shared, anciently diverse homeland rather than an empty or exclusively divine promise.

Lesson

When you treat texts as literature and sites as the true archive, Palestine emerges as a cosmopolitan civilization challenging ethnonational myths.

One of Masalha’s strongest correctives is to restore Arabs to pre‑Islamic Palestine. The Arab Christian Ghassanids, migrating north in the 3rd century CE, become Byzantine allies and defenders of the southern frontier. Their federate kingdom stretches across the “three Palestines,” with capitals and monasteries tying Arabic culture to imperial Christianity. They demonstrate that Arab presence, governance and language predate Islam’s political rise.

Cultural Mediation

Ghassanid courts patronize Arab poets such as al‑Nabigha al‑Dhubyani, promote Arabic as a literary medium, and bridge Greek, Syriac and Arabic traditions. Their Monophysite faith complicates the idea of a single Christian orthodoxy, and their tensions with Chalcedonian Byzantium resemble later sectarian diversity under Islam. When the Muslim armies arrive, these Arab Christian communities integrate smoothly—many even welcome the new rulers due to shared language and relative tolerance.

Political Function

The Ghassanids act as frontier phylarchs: collecting revenues, defending trade routes and managing diplomacy with Persians and rival Arabs. Their model of semi‑autonomous rule provides a template later echoed by Islamic ajnad provinces and Ottoman mutasarrifates. By recovering this continuum of Arab governance, Masalha erases the artificial gap between Byzantine and Islamic Palestine.

Under early Islam, Palestine becomes Jund Filastin—one of the military provinces of al‑Sham. Masalha highlights the pragmatic continuity: rather than destroy Byzantine divisions, Muslim rulers preserve them. The province’s structure endures from the 7th to 11th centuries, keeping Palestine a distinct fiscal, administrative and sacred unit within the broader caliphate.

Dual Capital System

Early Filastin operates with two functional centers: Jerusalem as spiritual capital (Iliya al‑Quds) and Ramla as the administrative seat. The pattern mirrors the older Aelia Capitolina‑Caesarea duality. The Umayyads invest heavily in Jerusalem’s sanctuaries—the Dome of the Rock and al‑Aqsa—while Ramla prospers as a minting and governance hub. Al‑Maqdisi’s 10th‑century writings praise Ramla’s markets, mosques and civic order, confirming the province’s vitality.

Economy and Ports

Coins inscribed “Filastin” circulate across the region. Ports such as Aylah (Aqaba) link Mediterranean and Red Sea commerce, connecting Palestinian grain and oil to Arabian and Indian trade. The Jericho hoard reveals local mints’ dominance, tracing fiscal autonomy back to Byzantine precedents. These tangible signals—the minted names, the mapped routes—prove Palestine remained both administrative fact and economic engine throughout the early Islamic centuries.

After Crusader and Ayyubid eras, the Mamluks revive Jerusalem and urban crafts, paving the way for Ottoman governance. In this medieval sequence, “Filastin” endures as legal and cultural shorthand for the region. Jurists like al‑Ramli and Mujir al‑Din use the term constantly in fatwas and chronicles, proving the name’s persistence in law and consciousness.

Urban and Craft Renewal

Mamluk Jerusalem blossoms with madrasas, baths and markets; Hebron glass and tilework become famous exports. This crafts culture keeps local identity material and visible, embedding memory in architecture and production. When the Ottomans arrive, they inherit a distinctively Palestinian urban landscape already oriented around internal autonomy.

Eighteenth‑Century Local States

The rise of Dhaher al‑Umar in Galilee marks a new episode of indigenous state‑building. Starting as a tax farmer (multazim), al‑Umar uses the Iltizam system to transform local revenue collection into real authority. By consolidating cotton trade, protecting peasants and encouraging religious pluralism, he builds an autonomous Emirate from Acre to Safed (1730s–1775). His successor Ahmad Pasha al‑Jazzar continues this quasi‑independent rule. These regimes show how Palestinian autonomy repeatedly regenerates under imperial suzerainty.

Masalha treats the Iltizam system—Ottoman tax farming—as both economic engine and political incubator. By auctioning revenue collection to local elites (multazims), the state inadvertently empowers frontier dynasties in Palestine’s Galilee and coastal plains. Leaders who control taxes, caravans and trade soon wield military power; the frontier turns into a crucible of proto‑state formation.

Economic Context

The 18th century’s global cotton boom links Galilean fields to European mills. Acre and Nablus become hubs of export. Dhaher al‑Umar’s rule thrives on this trade: predictable taxation and secure routes encourage commerce, producing revenue for fortifications, khans (Khan al‑Tujjar) and aqueducts. Cotton thus ties local governance to world markets, showing how global capitalism underwrites Palestinian statehood centuries before colonial modernization.

Frontier Autonomy and Vulnerability

Because the Ottoman center is distant, multazims fill the vacuum, sometimes oppressive, sometimes reformist. Al‑Umar illustrates the reformist potential: he protects cultivators, supports Christians and Jews, and attracts European merchants. Yet his power rests on personality; his death in 1775 exposes the fragility of frontier autonomy. Still, the precedent endures, influencing 19th‑century local politics and Arab notions of dawlah (statehood).

By the 1870s, Ottoman reorganization formalizes Palestine into recognizable modern boundaries. The Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem (1872) and the sanjaks of Nablus and Acre together form what Masalha calls the “Three‑in‑One” Palestine —a territorial unit largely identical to that later used by the British Mandate. This decisive act of cartographic governance crystallizes centuries of evolving geography into a politically meaningful entity.

Administrative and Symbolic Effects

Placing Jerusalem under direct Istanbul oversight elevates its global profile amid European rivalry after the Crimean War. Maps, military manuals and Ottoman correspondence start using “Filastin” explicitly, fixing a new official geography. The structure echoes Byzantine and Islamic precedents (Palaestina Prima/Secunda/Tertia; Jund Filastin/al‑Urdun), demonstrating deep territorial memory beneath modern bureaucratic form.

Mapping, Empire and Knowledge

Parallel to Ottoman reform, European mapping projects—the Palestine Exploration Fund and Ordnance Survey—translate sacred interest into strategic cartography. Napoleon’s cartographer Jacotin and Victorian surveyors like Charles Warren produce the first scientific maps of the region, which later serve imperial and Zionist objectives. Masalha exposes how maps turn scholarly knowledge into territorial claim, laying the groundwork for colonial appropriation in the 20th century.

Against the backdrop of European imperial competition, Russian Orthodox institutions become a surprising incubator of Palestinian culture. The Imperial Russian Orthodox Palestine Society (founded 1882) builds schools, seminaries and translation presses in Nazareth and Jerusalem, educating thousands of Arab students. Figures like Khalil Beidas, graduate of Maskobiya schools, translate Russian classics and create a vernacular Arabic literary scene.

Birth of Vernacular Nationalism

By 1911, this intellectual seed bears fruit: the newspaper Falastin appears in Jaffa, the first to use the colloquial form of the name. Its editors, the al‑Issa cousins, speak for peasants and merchants against land sales to Zionist agencies. Writers like Ruhi al‑Khalidi denounce settlement as a colonial threat. Through language, education and press, Palestinian identity transitions from imperial administration to popular political consciousness.

Key message

Education and vernacular media are not mere cultural trivia—they transform geography into self‑awareness and prepare the ground for collective political identity.

Masalha concludes by confronting the modern renaming of Palestine as a conscious act of erasure. From early Zionist committees to Israel’s post‑1948 Governmental Names Committee, the systematic Hebraization of Arabic place‑names seeks to overwrite memory with myth. This process mirrors the 2,000‑year contest over who speaks for the land, but its scale is unprecedented in modern nation‑building.

Mechanisms of Erasure

Techniques include phonetic translation (al‑Majdal → Migdal‑Ad), semantic replacement (Qatra → Gedera), and biblical superimposition. Forestry projects such as Canada Park conceal ruins of erased villages, while museums rename Palestinian collections under Israeli titles. Data compiled by Walid Khalidi reveal hundreds of destroyed villages, their names surviving only in refugee memory.

Memory as Resistance

Against state renaming stands cultural remembrance—oral histories, maps, folklore and the continued use of Arabic toponyms. By showing how renaming manufactures legitimacy, Masalha invites you to see memory itself as a political act of reclamation. The landscape of Palestine, he argues, still carries its older names beneath official signage, waiting to be read again.