This article is about The historical geographical region in the Eastern Mediterranean. Not to be confused with Levante or Levent. Baba ganoush original Mediterranean region of Western Asia. The term entered English in the late 15th century from French.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, the term levante was used for Italian maritime commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean, including Greece, Anatolia, Syria-Palestine, and Egypt, that is, the lands east of Venice. As a name for the contemporary region, several dictionaries consider Levant to be archaic today. The term Levant appears in English in 1497, and originally meant ‘the East’ or ‘Mediterranean lands east of Italy’. Most notably, “Orient” and its Latin source oriens meaning ‘east’, is literally “rising”, deriving from Latin orior ‘rise’. The notion of the Levant has undergone a dynamic process of historical evolution in usage, meaning, and understanding.

While the term “Levantine” originally referred to the European residents of the eastern Mediterranean region, it later came to refer to regional “native” and “minority” groups. Today, “Levant” is the term typically used by archaeologists and historians with reference to the history of the region. Scholars have adopted the term Levant to identify the region due to its being a “wider, yet relevant, cultural corpus” that does not have the “political overtones” of Syria-Palestine. While the usage of the term “Levant” in academia has been restricted to the fields of archeology and literature, there is a recent attempt to reclaim the notion of the Levant as a category of analysis in political and social sciences. The word Levant has been used in some translations of the term ash-Shām as used by the organization known as ISIL, ISIS, and other names, though there is disagreement as to whether this translation is accurate. In The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Levant: c. Levant for the specific purposes of the book is synonymous to that of the Arabic “bilad al-sham, ‘the land of sham ‘”, translating in Western parlance to greater Syria.