In the 5th Century BCE, Herodotus, the first historian in Western civilization (the “father of history”) referenced "Palestine" numerous times in his chronicle of the ancient world, The Histories.
A hundred years later, Aristotle made reference to Palestine and the Dead in his Meteorology. "Again if, as is fabled, there is a lake in Palestine...”
Two hundred years later, in the mid-2nd Century BCE, ancient geographer Polemon wrote of a place "not far from Arabia in the part of Syria called Palestine," while Greek travel writer Pausanias wrote in his Description of Greece, "In front of the sanctuary grow palm-trees, the fruit of which, though not wholly edible like the dates of Palestine, yet are riper than those of Ionia."
Contemporaries of Jesus also routinely referred to Palestine as, well, “Palestine.” In the first decade of the 1st Century, the Roman poet Ovid mentioned Palestine in both his famed mythological poem Metamorphoses and his erotic elegy The Art of Love. He also wrote of "the waters of Palestine" in his calendrical poem Fasti.
Around the same time, another Latin poet, Tibullus, wrote of "the crowded cities of Palestine" in a section "Messalla’s Triumph" in his poem Delia.
The Jewish historian Josephus (c.37-100 CE), makes copious references to both “Palestine” and “Palestinians” in his The Jewish War, Antiquities of the Jews, and Against Apion.
When the Muslim Arabs arrived in Palestine in the 7th century CE (and liberated its Jewish population from Byzantine oppression), they retained the administrative organization of the territory of Palestine as it had been under the Romans and the Byzantines. They referred to the territory as Filastin (no “P” in Arabic.)
European tourist books of the nineteenth century refer to "Palestine," as did Theodor Herzl in his correspondence and the 1917 Balfour Declaration as well as the League of Nations British Mandate.
