Tomaž Vargazon
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Practicing atheistNov 21

Does Palestine have an ancient history like Israel does? I searched for
Israel's ancient history and got results but not when I search for
Ancient Palestine (It even states that Palestine was just another name
for Ancient Israel.)
Here’s a little bit of information I just learned. The Arab alphabet:

Which letter does Palestine begin with and why is it important?

Palestine is a Latin transliteration of the name Fistiline, from
Fistilines or Philistines, the people who inhabited the area during the
bronze age. The oldest information we have is the area was conquered by
Egypt from native Caananites, you may recognise that name from some holy
texts. Later an Egyptian inscription on a stelle (royal stone praising
the achivements of the pharaoh) speaks of the destruction Egyptian
armies brought in Israel, although it’s not clear if it talks of a state
or a region.

After that the area came under the control of the Persians, then
Macedonian Greeks, Seleucid and Ptolematic dynasties fought over it
until Rome conquered or took over both and eventually Arabs came in the
7th century and the familiar part of the history begins, with the
crusades and everything else.

The closest thing to an “Ancient Palestine” is an Israeli-Philistinian
kingdom that may have had independence in the period approximately
1300–800 B.C.E. The ethnicity of these folks is disputed, but we know
significant communities abstained from pork and practiced male genital
mutilation (circumcision), although the area was a mix of two cultures.
Presumably this is why we call is Israelite-Philistine period. Before
and after the area was a border province between two mighty empires -
Egyptian on one side and whomever controlled Babylon or the other, until
the familiar part of history begins. It was not all that important for
people who didn’t live there until Christianity and Islam made it
important by being holy. To make it triply complicated, the people who
did live there considered it especially holy themselves and maintained a
close link to the region through religion for almost 2000 years.

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