Syria (Arabic: ٱلشَّام, romanized: Ash-Shām or Shām), also known as Greater Syria or Syria-Palestine, is a historical region located east of the Mediterranean Sea in West Asia, broadly synonymous with the Levant. Throughout history, the term Syria-Palestine referred to the area between the Taurus Mountains in the north and Arabia-Sinai in the south, however in modern times the term "Syria" is used to refer solely to the Syrian Arab Republic.
The term is originally derived from Assyria, an ancient Semitic-speaking civilization centered in northern Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. During the Hellenistic period, the term Syria was applied to the entire Levant as Coele-Syria. Under Roman rule, the term was used to refer to the province of Syria, later divided into Syria Phoenicia and Coele Syria, and to the province of Syria Palaestina. Under the Byzantines, the provinces of Syria Prima and Syria Secunda emerged out of Coele Syria. After the Muslim conquest of the Levant, the term was superseded by the Arabic equivalent Shām, and under the Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid caliphates, Bilad al-Sham was the name of the metropolitan province encompassing most of the region. In the 19th century, the name Syria was revived in its modern Arabic form to denote the whole of Bilad al-Sham, either as Suriyah or the modern form Suriyya, which eventually replaced the Arabic name of Bilad al-Sham.
