Was greater Syria ever a recognized concept historically or academically?
Like greater Iran was?
>>1103999
Nice trips
Yes, it was a concept in Crusader and later Ottoman times, though it didn't have political independence
The French took the idea when they gained colonial control of the reason
>>1104009
And what made "Syria" Syria?
>>1104046
Sykes Picott.
A lot of countries in the Middle East (even in Africa despite not having to do anything at all with the Picott treaty) have the same borders as colonial divisions.
Many of these borders are delimited by merely geographical features. A lot of rivers, mountains, etc, are borders in the Middle East. If not, imaginary lines created to simply separate a chunk of land from the other.
When these colonies gained their independences they kept their original colonial borders instead of regrouping different peoples under the same flag.
The result is what you see today. In Iraq for example, Kurds Suniis and Shiites are under the same flag because Iraq's borders are esentially the same of colonial Iraq (except for Kuwait is rightful Iraqi clay).
>>1103999
"Syria" is a meme region that basically refers to whatever is not Anatolia, not Mesopotamia, and not Palestine.
The modern nation state of Syria is no more Syrian, in a classical sense, than Lebanon or even Jordan. To this day, in Arabic "Syria" is interchangeable with "the Levant".
>>1104275
>meme region
Fuck off.
>>1104275
Palestine was actually seen as part of Syria
Arabs opposed the name Palestine untill the 1960's and wanted to name it south Syria
>>1104305
That's due to historical circumstance. The Syriac population was traditionally concentrated in northern Syria.
>>1104324
Cool
I read before that middle easterners don't see their region in terms of countries so much as a dominant city and everything it controls
Like instead of England and France it's "Damascus" and "Baghdad"
>>1104355
This was the most usual division, though there were larger geographic ones as well such as the Jazira, the region ISIS now controls which is sandwiched between he Tigris and Euphrates up to the Baghdad narrowing point.
>>1104402
Elaborate
>>1104452
Classical Arabic geography labeled things in relation to Arabia, but these names eventually got attached to geographic areas that went beyond the city-state division. Shams, Ifriqiya, Jazira, and Iraq were all historical territories the Arabs would have recognized and related to. The trouble is these regions don't exactly correlate with modern national borders either.
>>1104474
Intriguing
>>1103999
Since when did Syria have any claim on Cyprus?
>>1103999
If you mean like in that map, then no. Syria was basically the Levant. Mesopotamia was a separate region, the northern part being Jazira, which is now basically ISIS, and the southern part being Iraq (only the Shia part of the modern country).
Syria/The Levant was generally culturally and politically tied with Egypt, while Iraq was tied with Iran (there were actually two Iraqs; Arab Iraq and Iranian Iraq, which meant western Iran). Jazira was somewhere in between.
>>1103999
It has to do with wanting to unify lands that were ruled by Ancient Assyria/Neo-Assyria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyria
>>1104849
At one point Ancient Assyrian controlled Cyprus
>>1106313
That was barely much and Assyrian culture never amounted anything on the island. Even fucking France has more claim over Cyprus than Syria does
>>1106341
I wasn't saying that it is justified, I was just posted what I understood to be the motivation for people who advocate a modern greater-Syria.
There have been a dozen other empires throughout history that have controlled the entire Levant region with many of them doing it for longer then Assyria, stuff like historical claims to land is all relative and just made of opinions anyway.
>>1106341
false
