Syria

At that time the king of Assyria had subjugated all Syria, a very large nation, and had made the king of Arabia his vassal;

Thus he continued his march and came in the usual number of days to the place on the boundaries between Media and Syria from which he had originally started.

for in previous times people in Media and in Syria and in Arabia, and all the people in Asia used the chariot just as the Cyrenaeans now do.

and when at last, with countless toils, I had reached Syria, I found I could not be with the philosopher, for he had departed for Egypt.

If anyone writes in Syria, this is nothing to us.

And you surely remember the history, that all Judaea was tributary to David, and the land of Idumaea and the Moabite country, and as much of Syria as bordered on it and what lay farther off as far as Mesopotamia;

(17) Their fancy about the jinn of al-Shām and of al-Hind.

the men of charms and seizures and incantations and magic and sleight of hand claim that the number and the strength among the jinn and the satans belong to the settled folk of al-Shām and India;

and what points to what Abū Isḥāq said of their settling in the lands of the wild beasts and among the vermin and the beasts of prey is what Abū Mushir related to us from a bedouin of the Banū Tamīm who settled in a district of al-Shām;

We have before us numerous travel-books written and published in the course of the two last centuries about Syria and Egypt, in which are fabrications that have no foundation save in the mind of the writer or of his prompter.

Upon this principle they make the names of the cities feminine even when their form is not feminine, so that we say 'Baghdād was conquered' and 'Miṣr was peopled' or 'al-Shām', implying the word «city».

In our view it is Hebrew or Phoenician, its original being “Habaʻl” הבעל, which is the name of the greatest of the idols of the Phoenicians or the Canaanites and of those neighbouring them among the nations of Syria, such as the Moabites, the Midianites, the Babylonians and the Libyans.

I have wearied myself in the weighing of him and the searching of him out until I grew sick of it over long-drawn years, and I have found nothing that set him back among the people of Egypt and Syria, and made their souls loathe him and hold him cheap and call him a liar and charge him with unbelief, except pride and self-satisfaction and an excess of passion for the headship of the shaykhly offic …

'These things Antiochus said, both then at Alexandria, and many years afterward much more emphatically, when he was with me in Syria a little before he died.

but we know that the soil of Libya is redder and somewhat sandy, and Arabia and Syria are lands of clay and stones.

besides, Egypt is like neither the neighboring land of Arabia nor Libya, not even like Syria (for Syrians inhabit the seaboard of

it is a land of black and crumbling earth, as if it were alluvial deposit carried down the river from Aethiopia;

Cicero in his eleventh Philippic, says, that Cassius went into Syria, which might be considered as another’s province, if men adhered to written laws, but if these were abolished, it would be considered as his own by the law of nature.

Have not Phoenicia and Syria been devastated because of the war?

In Syria also- as men say- a spot

Is to be seen, where also four-foot kinds,

As if there slaughtered to the under-gods.

And were you to see a Shāmī steal, do not judge that all the people of al-Shām are thieves;

So the king of the Persians cut off the noses of a whole people in Syria, whence the place has the name Rhinocolura.

As yet the Syrias reek with the odors of corpses;

Thence he marched one stage, five parasangs, to the Gates between Cilicia and Syria.

Thence he marched through Syria nine stages, fifty parasangs, and they arrived at the Araxes river.

There was the palace of Belesys, the late ruler of Syria, and a very large and beautiful park containing all the products of the seasons.