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The Levant
The eastern Mediterranean shore and the land behind it
The Levant is the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and the country that rises behind it, a strip perhaps 200 kilometers wide running from the Taurus foothills in the north down to the Sinai. The word comes from the French for rising, as in where the sun comes up, which is another way of saying that this region, too, was named by people looking east from Europe. Its core is not disputed: Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. Cyprus is often added and the Turkish province of Hatay usually is, while Sinai and the Iraqi desert drift in and out depending on the map. Archaeologists use the term more confidently than diplomats do.
Four bands run north to south, parallel to the coast: a narrow fertile plain, a coastal mountain wall, a rift valley, and then desert. The mountains, Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, catch enough winter rain to hold cedar and snow, and Qurnat as Sawda reaches 3,088 meters. The rift is the northern end of the Great Rift Valley, and it carries the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee, and the Dead Sea, whose surface, more than 430 meters below sea level, is the lowest exposed land on earth. East of the rift, steppe fades into the Syrian Desert. Water, not soil, is the scarce commodity here, and it is fought over.
Fewer than 60 million people occupy this small, loud corner of the world, whose ports, Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, Acre, Jaffa, gave the Mediterranean its alphabet through the Phoenicians and much of its trade for millennia. The Levant is where Judaism and Christianity began and where Islam took early root; Jerusalem, Damascus, and Aleppo rank among the longest continuously inhabited cities anywhere. Empires from the Egyptians and Assyrians to the Romans, Umayyads, Crusaders, and Ottomans all held it, because whoever holds it controls the land bridge between Africa and Asia. The post-Ottoman borders sketched by France and Britain in 1916 still frame its conflicts, and Syria's civil war has displaced millions.