Adriaan Reland in the context of "Austronesian language family"

The archaeology of Israel is the study of the archaeology of the present-day Israel, stretching from prehistory through three millennia of documented history. The ancient Land of Israel was a geographical bridge between the political and cultural centers of Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Despite the importance of the country to three major religions, serious archaeological research only began in the 15th century. Although he never travelled to the Levant, or even left the Netherlands, the first major work on the antiquities of Israel is considered to be Adriaan Reland's Antiquitates Sacrae veterum Hebraeorum, published in 1708. Edward Robinson, an American theologian who visited the country in 1838, published its first topographical studies. Lady Hester Stanhope performed the first modern excavation at Ashkelon in 1815. A Frenchman, Louis Felicien de Saucy, embarked on early "modern" excavations in 1850.

The Austronesian languages (/ˌɔːstrəˈniːʒən/ AW-strə-NEE-zhən) are a language family widely spoken throughout Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Madagascar, the islands of the Pacific Ocean and Taiwan (by Taiwanese indigenous peoples). They are spoken by about 328 million people (4.4% of the world population). This makes it the fifth-largest language family by number of speakers. Major Austronesian languages include Malay (one variant standardized as Indonesian), Javanese, Sundanese, Tagalog (standardized as Filipino), Malagasy and Cebuano. According to some estimates, the family contains 1,257 languages, which is the second most of any language family.

In 1706, the Dutch scholar Adriaan Reland first observed similarities between the languages spoken in the South East Asia Archipelago and by peoples on islands in the Pacific Ocean. In the 19th century, researchers (e.g. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herman van der Tuuk) started to apply the comparative method to the Austronesian languages. The first extensive study on the history of the phonology was made by the German linguist Otto Dempwolff. It included a reconstruction of the Proto-Austronesian lexicon. The term Austronesian was coined (as German austronesisch) by Wilhelm Schmidt, deriving it from Latin auster "south" and Ancient Greek νῆσος (nêsos "island"), meaning the "Southern Island languages".

This article presents a list of notable historical references to the name Palestine as a place name for the region of Palestine throughout history.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 Latin Palaestina and Arabic Filasṭīn.

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.