Timeline of the name Palestine

This article presents a list of notable historical references to the name Palestine as a place name for the region of Palestine throughout history. This includes uses of the localized inflections in various languages, such as Arabic Filasṭīn and Latin Palaestina.
A possible predecessor term, Peleset, is found in five inscriptions referring to a neighboring people, starting from c. 1150 BCE during the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt. The word was transliterated from hieroglyphs as P-r-s-t.
The first known mention of Peleset is at the temple of Ramesses in Medinet Habu, which refers to the Peleset among those who fought against Egypt during Ramesses III's reign, and the last known is 300 years later on Padiiset's Statue. The Assyrians called the same region "Palashtu/Palastu" or "Pilistu," beginning with Adad-nirari III in the Nimrud Slab in c. 800 BCE through to an Esarhaddon treaty more than a century later. Neither the Egyptian nor the Assyrian sources provided clear regional boundaries for the term. Whilst these inscriptions are often identified with the Biblical Pəlīštīm, i.e. Philistines, the word means different things in different parts of the Bible. The 10 uses in the Torah have undefined boundaries and no meaningful description, and the usage in two later books describing coastal cities in conflict with the Israelites – where the Septuagint instead uses the term allophuloi (Αλλόφυλοι, 'other nations') – has been interpreted to mean "non-Israelites of the Promised Land".
The term Palestine first appeared in the 5th century BCE when the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote of a "district of Syria, called Palaistinê" between Phoenicia and Egypt in The Histories. Herodotus provides the first historical reference clearly denoting a wider region than biblical Philistia, as he applied the term to both the coastal and the inland regions such as the Judean Mountains and the Jordan Rift Valley. Later Greek writers such as Aristotle, Polemon and Pausanias also used the word, which was followed by Roman writers such as Ovid, Tibullus, Pomponius Mela, Pliny the Elder, Dio Chrysostom, Statius, Plutarch as well as Roman Judean writers Philo of Alexandria and Josephus. There is no evidence of the name on any Hellenistic coin or inscription.
In the early 2nd century CE, the Roman province called Judaea was renamed Syria Palaestina (literally, "Palestinian Syria"), and also incorporated some other, smaller, territories. This may have occurred either before or after the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135.
Around the year 390, during the Byzantine period, the imperial province of Syria Palaestina was reorganized into Palaestina Prima, Palaestina Secunda and Palaestina Salutaris. Following the Muslim conquest, place names that were in use by the Byzantine administration generally continued to be used in Arabic, and the Jund Filastin became one of the military districts within the Umayyad and Abbasid province of Bilad al-Sham.
The use of the name "Palestine" became common in Early Modern English, and was used in English and Arabic during the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem. The term is recorded widely in print as a self-identification by Palestinians from the start of the 20th century onwards, coinciding with the period when the printing press first came into use by Palestinians. In the 20th century the name was used by the British to refer to "Mandatory Palestine," a territory from the former Ottoman Empire which had been divided in the Sykes–Picot Agreement and secured by Britain via the Mandate for Palestine obtained from the League of Nations. Starting from 2013, the term was officially used in the eponymous "State of Palestine." Both incorporated geographic regions from the land commonly known as Palestine, into a new state whose territory was named Palestine.
The English term "Palestine" itself is borrowed from Latin Palaestīna, which is, in turn, borrowed from Ancient Greek Παλαιστῑ́νη, Palaistī́nē, used by Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. Per Martin Noth, while the term in Greek likely originated from an Aramaic loanword, its Greek form showed clear derivation from παλαιστής, palaistês, the Greek noun meaning "wrestler/rival/adversary". David Jacobson noted the significance of wrestlers in Greek culture, and further speculated that Palaistinê was meant as both a transliteration of the Greek word for "Philistia" and a direct translation of the Hebrew name "Israel" – as the traditional etymology of which also relates to wrestling, and in line with the Greek penchant for punning transliterations of foreign place names.
Whilst the term was used in Egyptian and Assyrian times, prior to the time period in which the Bible is thought to have been written, scholars generally conclude that the term is cognate with the Biblical Hebrew פְּלִשְׁתִּים‎ Pəlīštīm. The further etymology is uncertain; it is unknown whether the term was an endonym or exonym, no word for Philistia has been found in the sparse attestations of the Philistine language, and it is unknown whether the Hebrew, Egyptian, and Assyrian terms derived from a common source, or if they simply borrowed the name from one another and changed it to match their own phonological customs.
In English versions of the Bible, Pəlīštīm is translated as "Philistines"; however, it is thought that the word means different things in different parts of the Bible. The word and its derivates are used more than 250 times in Masoretic-derived versions of the Hebrew Bible, of which 10 uses are in the Torah (the first use being in Genesis 10, in the Generations of Noah), with undefined boundaries and no meaningful description, and almost 200 of the remaining references are in the later Book of Judges and the Books of Samuel that contain the well known biblical story of a coastal state in conflict with the Israelites.
By the time the Septuagint (LXX) was translated, the term Palaistínē (Παλαιστίνη), first popularized in written form by Herodotus, had already entered the Greek vocabulary. However, the term was not used in the LXX to describe Philistia. Instead, the term Land of the Phylistieim (Γη των Φυλιστιειμ) is used from the books of Genesis through Joshua. The Septuagint later uses the alternate term "allophiloi" (Αλλόφυλοι, "other nations") from the Books of Judges onward, such that post-Judges invocation of "Philistines" in Septuagint-based translations have been interpreted to mean "non-Israelites of the Promised Land" when used in the context of Samson, Saul and David. Rabbinic sources explain that these peoples were different from the Philistines of the Book of Genesis.
Writers during this period also used the term Palestine to refer to the entire region between Syria and Egypt, with numerous references to the Jewish areas within Palestine. It has been contended that some first century authors associated the term with the southern coastal region.
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The five books of the Pentateuch / Torah include a total of 10 references, including:
The Historical books (see Deuteronomistic history) include over 250 references, almost 200 of which are in the Book of Judges and the Books of Samuel, including:
Wisdom books include only 6 references, all in the Psalms, including:
Books of the Major prophets and Minor prophets include around 20 references, including:
a. †Coele-Syria
b. †Syria Palaestina
c. †Achaemenid Empire