Palestine

The Name and Its History

Whoever created the meme misread the map, which is clearly dated to 1828. It was published in Amsterdam, but clearly precedes the map made by the brilliant Dutch surveyor Charles William Meredith van der Velde in 1858. The land was known as Palestine at the time, and the portion of it West of the River Jordan was called Western Palestine, while that East of the Jordan was called Eastern Palestine. Oddly, it was only the Westerners who visited the land who referred to the local population as 'Palestinians'. Down to the 1840s the local population were divided into two groups known as 'Qais' and 'Yemenis'. Palestine (or, to be more accurate, 'filastin' is, in fact, an Arabic word, borrowed from earlier languages going back to the Bronze Age, although the original language, or even language family isn't certain. To say that it isn't an Arabic word now would be akin to saying that any word in modern English which was borrowed from another language (as opposed to being an evolved version of an Old English word) isn't an English word, and that would mean that modern English effectively isn't a language, which would be silly (which is an Old English word).