Q. The term “Levant” often heard in the news roughly corresponds to which of the following regions?

  • Region along the eastern Mediterranean shores
  • Region along North African shores stretching from Egypt to Morocco
  • Region along Persian Gulf and Horn of Africa
  • The entire coastal Mediterranean Sea of areas

Answer: (a) Region along the eastern Mediterranean shores

Levant
  • It is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Western Asia.
  • In its narrowest sense, which is in use today in archaeology and other cultural contexts, it is equivalent to a stretch of land bordering the Mediterranean in southwestern Asia, i.e. the historical region of Syria (“greater Syria”), which includes present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine and most of Turkey southwest of the middle Euphrates.
  • Its overwhelming characteristic is that it represents the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia.
  • The Levant has been described as the crossroads of western Asia, the eastern Mediterranean and northeast Africa.
  • The name Levant States was given to the French mandate of Syria and Lebanon after World War I, and the term is sometimes still used for those two countries, which became independent in 1946. A similar term, Al-Mashriq (“Where the Sun Rises”), exists in Arabic, although this term refers to a broader geographic region.
Levant