re: #98 Wild Knight

All right. I’ve got a problem. Perhaps someone can help me with it. I’m a Classics student and I’ve been wondering where the word Palestine came from. Yes, I know that the British mandate used this term but most British officials at the time had a classical education. They got the name from the Roman province of Palaestina which is derived from the Greek Παλαισ&# x03C4;ίνη. Now, some people claim that the Greeks got this word from the Philistines or the Hebrew word for the Philistines. I’m not convinced. Παλαισ&# x03C4;ίνη is mentioned by Herodotus and I’d like to know whether Herodotus:

1) Coined the word himself
2) Derived it from a purely Hellenic combination
3) Used a foreign derivative.

My Liddell and Scott doesn;t even cite Παλαισ&# x03C4;ίνη so I have no dependable source to which to turn. Any ideas?

You might try the 100-year-old Online Century Encyclopedic Dictionary.

It has a few leads on possible derivations — also written in Greek — which might give you some answers, one being a unit of measurement and the other referring broadly to wrestling and an area where wrestlers were trained. Interesting reading, nonetheless.

The first time you log on to Century, you’ll be required to download a small harmless plug-in (from Lizard Tech, coincidentally!) to enable you to view the dictionary pages most efficiently, but that’s a one-time install and it only takes a minute or so. On the Century opening page make sure that you instruct Century to use ALL VOLUMES of their references and not just the dictionary, in order to find ‘Palestine’.

Luck.
.