19/09/2026
Unconected sadly
“But Herodotus called it Palestine!”
An argument I hear too often from pro Palis who feel that they have hit some jackpot of a historical argument.
To those unfamiliar:
Herodotus was a Historian and Geographer who lived in the 5th century BCE.
Now, if he already referred to the land as “Palestine”, then the Israeli argument about the name Palestine being given to Judea by Romans in the 1st century CE- would sound inaccurate.
But did he?
First-
Even if he did-
Palestinians are Arabs, Philistines were European.
Meaning, modern day Palestinians still have nothing to do with ancient Philistines and with whichever name the land was contemporarily called.
Second- what land exactly did he refer to?
It most certainly was not the “West Bank”:
• Not Judea, which was part of autonomy called- Yehud Medinata, which literally translates from Aramaic as “Judean province”.
• Not Samaria, which was called Shamrayn Medinata- “Samarian province”.
It also wasn’t Jerusalem,
Which also was part of the same Yehud Medinata autonomy.
Here is the quote by Herodotus himself:
“And from Phoenicia this peninsula runs beside our sea [the Mediterranean] by way of the Syrian Palestine and Egypt, which is at the end of it..."
So, in other words:
“The peninsula between Phoenicia in the north and Egypt in the south”.
The Phoenician southern limits under the Persian rule in the 5th century BCE- included the sea ports of Jaffa and Ashkelon.
The center of Ashkelon is less than ten kilometres away from Gaza…
So, when Herodotus said “Palestine”, he roughly meant a slightly widened version of the Gaza strip-
where 700 years prior to that, the seafarers from Crete have settled.
That’s it.
✍️
And to restate the obvious- the modern day Palestinians have nothing to do with those seafarers.
