Talk:Syria (region)/Archive 1

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Archive 1

Creation

Once, i hope you agree to my edits to the lead. I think they are reasonable and constructive. Further i would challenge your redirects from "Historic Syria" or "Syria (historic region)" to here, because in my understanding "historic" region is a strictly irredentist (nationalist) term, used for "Historic Syria", "Historic Turkey", "Historic Israel" - to emphasize the greatest period of expansion and hence claiming the peak territories in nationalist attitude. I would like to redirect all "historic" Syrias to the "Greater Syria" article, or at least disambiguate them. do you agree? Greyshark09 (talk) 19:41, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Greyshark, those are helpful edits.
As to the question of the use of the term "historical", I have a different perspective - to my mind it is not intended to suggest a nationalist perspective of "historical rights" or similar, rather that the term is only used today when referring to the region in a historical context. We do it in the Palestine article (see "This article is about the historical geographic region.") For example, noone would talk about Israel today as being in the region of Syria, but people would talk about Byzantine Palaestina Prima or Ottoman Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon as being in the region of Syria. How would you prefer we make that nuance clear?
As to the redirects, for the sake of simplicity could we agree to differ and send them to the disambiguation page?
Oncenawhile (talk) 20:39, 1 June 2013 (UTC)
Nuances, so i assume we resolve this by making "Historic Syria" a disambig page (differing "Syria (region)" and "Greater Syria"), it that agreed?Greyshark09 (talk) 20:55, 1 June 2013 (UTC)
Fine for me - i'd send them to Syria (disambiguation) which already includes both. Oncenawhile (talk) 21:41, 1 June 2013 (UTC)
Case closed. Good work.Greyshark09 (talk)

Ambiguous terms

from the article:

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".

Ironically, the meaning of this is ambiguous. The first sentence is attributed to a church with no citation. Who within the church says this? It then comments on the use of both an English word and an Arabic word in "early Christianity". "Early Christianity" is an extremely broad term, but I doubt that many of the very early Christians spoke English or Arabic. For example, Ephrem the Syrian was clearly a Middle Aramaic (viz "Syriac") speaker, perhaps also literate in Greek or Latin. So, we get no sense of who would be using these English and Arabic terms to refer to whom. Then we are told about the use of the English term after the founding of the modern state of Syria; but perhaps it is meant to instead imply the use of the aforementioned Arabic term in addition or instead. We are then given a different pair of English and Arabic words without being told who uses them or which concept they refer to.

Anyone with additional insight into how these terms are used would do well to clean this up a bit.—Greg Pandatshang (talk) 22:49, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

There are two different etymologies given for the Arabic "ash-sham", as well as the same information, repeated in detail, about it not being related the son of Noah (Shem) and its distinction from Yemen. This should be rewritten with reference to a reliable source. TomS TDotO (talk) 07:48, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Regarding Sham, or Syria, it had always seemed clear to me that it must be related to Shams, or Sun, since Syria lies at the East of the Mediterranean, and is thus the land of the rising sun, as the French also called it the Levant. It is true that Syria lies to the north of Arabia, and thus to the left when facing the rising sun. However, this does not exclude the Sun meaning, on the contrary, if Sham also means left or north, it confirms it. Also, when facing the Sun's place in the south from, say, Egypt, then Syria is also to the east and to the left hand. In early times there were also different usages in different dialects and so on. Old school etymology tends to overlook obvious similarities and focus on blindly on slight differences. I believe this tendency is dying out and is being replaced by a more diffuse acceptance of ancient roots. If one could go back far enough, it would not be surprising if Shem and son were also related to Sun. JPLeonard (talk) 06:49, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Syria which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 19:58, 29 November 2014 (UTC)

Maronite Christians

@HD86:, re this edit, where does Salibi say the Maronites brought the name back into use? I think that is wrong. Oncenawhile (talk) 13:13, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Also, where does he write "and was adopted officially by the Ottoman government before the turn of the 20th century"? Oncenawhile (talk) 13:28, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

I read this information several years ago. I thought it was in this book. Did you read carefully in the book? Anyways, you can definitely find it in other sources if you just try to read in sources (it is always easier on Wikipedia to delete information than to read in sources).
It is certain that the Ottomans used the word "Surya" officially before the end of the 19th century. The Vilayet of Damascus was officially called the Vilayet of Surya already in the late 19th century.--HD86 (talk) 01:43, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
That's true. The official yearbooks used the name Suriye by the 1870s at the latest. An example is here. We need a source that states it, though. It is also plausible that the Arabic and Turkish documents didn't always use the same name. Zerotalk 02:18, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
How about this. It says the name was official from 1865. Zerotalk 02:21, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
Yes this is good.
I have looked again in the book A House of Many Mansions. This book does indeed have the things which I wrote in the article. The book talks about the emergence of "Syrian nationalism" in the 19th century and the author makes it clear that it was the Maronite Christians of Lebanon who invented that idea. It seems that User:Oncenawhile never actually looked in the book. He looked in the single page which I mentioned in the citation, and he then proceeded to deleting the things which I wrote.--HD86 (talk) 18:04, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

Cilicia and Syria

It is not true that Syria in Late Antiquity included Cilicia. I am sure the Muslims considered Cilicia part of ash-Sham, but the Byzantines and Romans had varying opinions on this matter. If I had the time I would have pointed this out in the articles with citations, but I cannot do that.--HD86 (talk) 01:57, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

Sham in Akkadian

@Attar-Aram syria: Sham (بالمدة آ شآم) means sky. if you ask any Syrian about (بلاد الشآم), he would reply that it means "sky land". the origin of this etymology comes from the Akkadian texts in which the meaning can be easily interpreted in Hebrew ! CadAPL (talk) 00:34, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Im a Syrian. But folk myth has nothing to do with reality. This is the Arabic name, and it means according to most opinions: the left, in contrast to Yemen (the right). Now, did the Arabs adopted this word from Akkadian ? If there is an academic source to prove it, then I will be happy.--Attar-Aram syria (talk) 01:05, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
First of all, Who said that Sham is an Arabic word ?! every Arabic word could be simplified and taken back to its triliteral root, so can you do that to Sham? The left in Arabic is (يسار) or (شمال), which comes from that the east is the front (ancient Semitics used to say قدام, you can check Cadmus etymology) so the left is North (شمال) ! however, it seems that Arabs have really raped the history of Syria, how sad !! CadAPL (talk) 20:03, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
I said its the Arabic name not word. Now, you need an academic source by a linguist that connect the Arabic name to an Akkadian root. Thats how Wiki work. (I remember reading that Sham is taken from شؤم which is what the "left" inspire in Arabs).--Attar-Aram syria (talk) 20:52, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
؛Personal opinions have no place here. And Syrians do not say it means the Sky Land, they'll say it means Damascus. The name Sham in its reference to Levant is not found in any language other than Arabic. There's no Akkadian mention of this word. And its trilateral root is Sh-'-M ش ء م as you can find it any Arabic dictionary modern or ancient, as well as in . https://www.almaany.com/ar/dict/ar-ar/%D8%B4%D8%A7%D9%85/ In addition, here's an Islamic Hadith recounting the pre-Islamic Arabic names of the different regions were named: https://hadith.maktaba.co.in/single-book/146/%D8%B5%D8%AD%D9%8A%D8%AD-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A8%D8%AE%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%8A/101827/3260 "The Yemen was named such because it is to the right corner of the Kaaba, and the Sham because it is to the left corner of the Kaaba, and the Sham-side is the left-side in Arabic". And left isn't north, Arabic words for Left and North are from different roots descending from the different Protosemitic roots. Moreover, in opposition to the Sham-corner of the Kaaba there's the Northern-corner as well, just in case you still ignorantly think that "Left is North", which is never attested in any Arabic resources. Last but not Least, Quddam = Front or Forward is yet another attested Protosemitic root and found in almost all Semitic languages, so Linguistically speaking there's no chance that it derives from Cadmus. Its template is attested as well with many words following it. Again, Wikipedia is not a place for unfounded personal opinions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines Ahmad Massalha (talk) 20:37, 2 October 2020 (UTC)  

Sham and Shaam?

@Leo1pard: has made several edits which imply a difference between "Sham" and "Shaam". It's unclear to me what that difference is, and I see no sources that support this distinction. power~enwiki (π, ν) 06:25, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

@Power~enwiki: Shaam is another way to spell Shām, and both are English transliterations of Arabic: شَـام, which would originally refer to the Syrian region.[1][2] That said, 'Shaam' is not the same as the English word 'Sham', which can mean 'Fraud'. In a word that is transliteration from another language, if you have a letter with a diacritic, such as 'ā' or 'â', then it can mean that there is an emphasis on its length in the language from which the word was transliterated. For example, the names for Jesus and Moses in the Qur'an are respectively Arabic: عِـيْـسَى[3][4] and Arabic: مُـوْسَى,[5][6] which can be transliterated like these:

  • ʿĪsā and Mūsā
  • ‘Îsá and Mûsá
  • ʿEesaa and Moosaa
  • ‘Iisaa and Muusaa

'Ī', 'Î', 'Ee' and 'Ii' were transliterated from Arabic: ي,[3][4] 'ā', 'á' and 'aa' were transliterated from Arabic: ى,[3][4][5][6] and 'ū', 'û', 'oo' and 'uu' were transliterated from Arabic: و.[5][6] Leo1pard (talk) 07:42, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

The sentence The Sham region of Shaam is sometimes defined as the area that was dominated by Damascus, long an important regional centre implies that there are two distinct concepts here. Did you mean "The Sham region (or Shaam)"? power~enwiki (π, ν) 22:45, 27 February 2018 (UTC)

Though Shaam (Arabic: شَـام) could refer to the city of Damascus in Syria,[7] it would originally refer to the region that is bordered by the Taurus Mountains of Anatolia in the north, the Mediterranean Sea in the west, the Arabian Desert in the south, and Mesopotamia in the east. This is the narrow definition of the Levant that was used by Killebrew and Steiner.[8] Leo1pard (talk) 07:02, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Article "AL-SHĀM" by C.E. Bosworth, Encyclopaedia of Islam, Volume 9 (1997), page 261.
  2. ^ Salibi, K. S. (2003). A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered. I.B.Tauris. pp. 61–62. ISBN 978-1-86064-912-7. To the Arabs, this same territory, which the Romans considered Arabian, formed part of what they called Bilad al-Sham, which was their own name for Syria. From the classical perspective however Syria, including Palestine, formed no more than the western fringes of what was reckoned to be Arabia between the first line of cities and the coast. Since there is no clear dividing line between what are called today the Syrian and Arabian deserts, which actually form one stretch of arid tableland, the classical concept of what actually constituted Syria had more to its credit geographically than the vaguer Arab concept of Syria as Bilad al-Sham. Under the Romans, there was actually a province of Syria, with its capital at Antioch, which carried the name of the territory. Otherwise, down the centuries, Syria like Arabia and Mesopotamia was no more than a geographic expression. In Islamic times, the Arab geographers used the name arabicized as Suriyah, to denote one special region of Bilad al-Sham, which was the middle section of the valley of the Orontes river, in the vicinity of the towns of Homs and Hama. They also noted that it was an old name for the whole of Bilad al-Sham which had gone out of use. As a geographic expression, however, the name Syria survived in its original classical sense in Byzantine and Western European usage, and also in the Syriac literature of some of the Eastern Christian churches, from which it occasionally found its way into Christian Arabic usage. It was only in the nineteenth century that the use of the name was revived in its modern Arabic form, frequently as Suriyya rather than the older Suriyah, to denote the whole of Bilad al-Sham: first of all in the Christian Arabic literature of the period, and under the influence of Western Europe. By the end of that century it had already replaced the name of Bilad al-Sham even in Muslim Arabic usage.
  3. ^ a b c Quran 3:45–59
  4. ^ a b c Quran 3:144 (Translated by Yusuf Ali)
  5. ^ a b c Quran 17:1–7
  6. ^ a b c Quran 20:9–99
  7. ^ Tardif, P. (2017-09-17). "'I won't give up': Syrian woman creates doll to help kids raised in conflict". CBC News. Retrieved 2018-03-06.
  8. ^ Killebrew, A. E.; Steiner, M. L. (2014). The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant: C. 8000-332 BCE. OUP Oxford. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-19-921297-2. The western coastline and the eastern deserts set the boundaries for the Levant ... The Euphrates and the area around Jebel el-Bishrī mark the eastern boundary of the northern Levant, as does the Syrian Desert beyond the Anti-Lebanon range's eastern hinterland and Mount Hermon. This boundary continues south in the form of the highlands and eastern desert regions of Transjordan.

Page views

Leo1pard (talk) 07:18, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Modern literature?

The lead says modern literature names Syrian region as Greater Syria or Syria-Palestine. Can we have at least a reference for this?GreyShark (dibra) 13:32, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

Greater Syria (which is why I prefer to keep that as a redirect to this page, and this was discussed before)[1]
Syria-Palestine[2] Leo1pard (talk) 17:47, 2 September 2018 (UTC)Leo1pard (talk) 16:09, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Mustafa Abu Sway. "The Holy Land, Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Qur'an, Sunnah and other Islamic Literary Source" (PDF). Central Conference of American Rabbis. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-28. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  2. ^ Pfoh, Emanuel (2016-02-22). Syria-Palestine in The Late Bronze Age: An Anthropology of Politics and Power. Routledge. ISBN 1-3173-9230-2.

Merge into Syria (region) from Greater Syria

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.
Map of the Levant in a narrow sense, with the countries of the Syrian region, including the modern country of Syria, in green, excluding the southern part of Turkey
Antoun Saadeh's SSNP map of a "Natural Syria", based on the etymological connection between the name "Syria" and "Assyria"

These two article (Syria (region) and Greater Syria) cover the same concept. Onceinawhile (talk) 21:13, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

I agree with you, you can go on with the merging process Walidou47 (talk) 20:47, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

  • Comment: Before agreeing or disagreeing, I think we need more research into the topic. Greater Syria seems to be a political concept or aim by Pan-Syrian nationalists (who also call it "natural" Syria), while Syria the region is a historical region since the days of the Greeks. The material in Greater Syria article do indeed fit better in the Syria region article, but I think we need to have to articles, the first (the region) to cover the historic region, and the second (the greater) to cover the political concept (in short, we can move the material from the "greater" article but we shouldnt merge it, but re-write it).--Attar-Aram syria (talk) 23:44, 24 November 2019 (UTC)

Agree @Onceinawhile and Attar-Aram syria: Strictly speaking, the region referred to as Bilād Ash-Shām (بِلَاد ٱلشَّام) in Arabic is called "Greater Syria" or "Levant" in English, to help distinguish the region from the modern country of Syria (Arabic: سُوْرِيَا, romanized: Sūriyā): [1], [2]. As for the political concept of Greater Syria by Antoun Saadeh's SSNP, there is another page for that, Greater Syria in pan-Syrian nationalism, which redirects to this section, which explains what they envisioned, and their concept of Greater Syria (which encompasses the Sinai Peninsula, Cyprus, Iraq, Kuwait, the Ahvaz region of Iran, and the Kilikian region of Turkey) isn't the same as the traditional view of this region: [3]. Leo1pard (talk) 18:20, 30 November 2019 (UTC); edited 18:25, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Subsection of Sham

Regarding the last paragraph of the subsection Sham of Section Etymology which states: Historically, Baalshamin (Aramaic: ܒܥܠ ܫܡܝܢ‎, romanized: Ba'al Šamem, lit. 'Lord of Heaven(s)'), was a Semitic sky god in Canaan/Phoenicia and ancient Palmyra. Hence, Sham refers to (heaven or sky). Moreover; in the Hebrew language, sham (שָׁמַ) is derived from Akkadian šamû meaning "sky".[18] For instance, the Hebrew word for the Sun is shemesh, where "shem/sham" from shamayim [note 1] (Akkadian: šamû) means "sky" and esh (Akkadian: išātu) means "fire", i.e. "sky-fire".[citation needed]

This whole paragraph is wrong.

  1. Canaanite ܫܡܝܢ שמים is indefinite form of ܫܡܝܐ שמי from the Protosemitic root ܫ-ܡ-ܝ ש-מ-י (https://he.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9D https://sedra.bethmardutho.org/lexeme/get/3238 ) and is independent from and unrelated to the Arabic root Sh-'-M ش,ء,م https://ar.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B4%D9%8E%D8%A7%D9%85 Thus Sham doesn't refer to Baal Shamin at all. The conclusion "Hence, Sham refers to (heaven or sky)." is unfounded and isn't supported by any reference for itself.
  2. While Hebrew Sham and Shamayyim are related to Akkdian Shamu, descending from the same root. The Hebrew word itself isn't from Akkadian but descends from Canaanite itself related to Aramaic Shmayya ܫܡܝܐ. It is from a Hebrew root Sh-M-Y acordiong to the Hebrew Language academy. https://hebrew-academy.org.il/keyword/%D7%A9%D7%81%D6%B8%D7%9E%D6%B7%D7%99%D6%B4%D7%9D/
  3. Proceeding from the previous note, the word Shemesh, Hebrew for Sun, is not a portmanteau from Sham-Esh שמ-אש, but rather from the attested, independent Semitic root Sh-M-Sh ܫܡܫܐ شمس שמש https://hebrew-academy.org.il/keyword/%D7%A9%D7%81%D6%B6%D7%9E%D6%B6%D7%A9%D7%81/ https://he.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%9E%D7%A9

This whole paragraph is unfounded, misleading, and isn't supported by any concluding reference, and it is apparently a personal opinion that wasn't checked. In addition to the resources I used, you can further revert to https://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/response.cgi?root=config&morpho=0&basename=\data\semham\semet&first=1 http://www.semiticroots.net/index.php?r=root http://www.semiticroots.net/ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Semitic_stems @Zero0000: regarding reverting my supported, not-personal-opinion editing out of this paragraph. Ahmad Massalha (talk) 19:47, 2 October 2020 (UTC)

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1RR

@HD86: you have just crossed 1RR. This page is subject to ARBPIA sanctions. Please self revert. Can I suggest you bring your edit comment here to the talk page so we can discuss? Many thanks Onceinawhile (talk) 17:59, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

I had a perfect illustrative image showing the historical Syria region on a 19th century map. For no reason, the map was replaced by an image of the "Temple Mount," which does not illustrate anything.
I am not really active on this website. I stopped being active long ago. I came back to this page only by accident. If you really want to put that image of the Temple Mount, just wait a little bit until I am gone and then do whatever you want.--HD86 (talk) 20:48, 27 July 2021 (UTC)
HD86, please will you self revert, so that we can then discuss? Onceinawhile (talk) 11:44, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
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