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This article presents a list of notable historical references to the name Palestine as a place name for the region of Palestine throughout history.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 Herodotus provides the first historical reference clearly denoting a wider region than biblical Philistia, as he applied the term to both the coastal and the inland regions such as the Judean Mountains and the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 following the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–136 CE), the last of the major Jewish–Roman wars. According to the prevailing scholarly view, the name change was a punitive measure aimed at severing the symbolic and historical connection between the Jewish people and the land. Unlike other Roman provincial renamings, this was a unique instance directly triggered by rebellion. Other interpretations have also been proposed. 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.