North arabia

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With northern Arabia , in contrast to southern Arabia mostly those parts of the Arabian Peninsula called the north of central Arabia (Inner Arabia), respectively. Saudi Arabia lie. The region is bounded by non-Arab Iran in the east, non-Arab Turkey in the north and the Mediterranean in the west.

A corresponding subdivision into Western Arabia (Hejaz and Asir on the Red Sea ) and Eastern Arabia (" pirate coast " on the Arab-Persian Gulf ) is used less often, one speaks more of the Hejaz and the Gulf States , since Western Arabia also includes the entire Maghrib (Far West) and Eastern Arabia are equated with Mashrik (Arab East). The north Arab states, however, only make up the north of Mashreq.

Northern Arabia thus includes the states of Jordan , Iraq , Syria , Lebanon and Palestine ( Israel ), in a broader sense also Kuwait , the Iranian province of Arabistan and the Turkish sanjak of Alexandrette or all Turkish areas south of the 37th parallel, i.e. Greater Syria .

Historically, northern Arabia developed differently from the south of the peninsula, both before and after Islamization , but was always connected to it by caravan routes. The Syrian capital Damascus is one of the three oldest (permanently inhabited) cities in the world, along with Sana and Jericho. The trade along the Frankincense Route gave rise to the empires of the Nabataeans , Ghassanids and Lachmids in northern Arabia . In contrast to other Arab regions, Northern Arabia has recently been under Ottoman-Turkish rule the longest.

Northern Arabs

What is meant by the term North Arabian in the region differs from one another and has often been highly controversial:

  • Pan-Syrian theories emphasize that it is only a question of an Arabized mixture of non-Arab Semites who lived in northern Arabia before Islamization and Arab immigration, but which can no longer be proven today; the nationalist Antun Saada therefore propagated a Greater Syrian Phoenicianism ;
  • Pan-Arab respectively pansemitische contrast theories collect all these early (non-Muslim) Semitic peoples of the region as a "northern Arabs";
  • Historically, however, the term Northern Arabs  - represented by the Syrian tribe of the Banu Kalb  - primarily as a term for the power of the Umayyad dynasty - in contrast to the oppositional "Southern Arabs" .

See also

  • North Arabic (term in the classification of Semitic languages)