Most modern Arab state names and borders were European inventions

Evidence

The main factor in this period was the growing solidity and reality of the individual states. To begin with, most of these were artificial enough—carved out of former provinces of the Ottoman or Western empires, with frontiers that were lines drawn on maps by European statesmen. With the exception of Egypt and to a lesser extent of Lebanon, they had no tradition of separate existence or even of regional autonomy. Even their names reveal their artificiality—Jordan is a river, Lebanon a mountain, Iraq the name of a medieval province, not coincid­ ing with the boundaries of the present state of that name; Syria and Libya are Greek names borrowed and used for the first time in modern Arabic. Even Palestine was a name unused since the early Middle Ages among the Muslim inhabitants of that country, until it was adopted to designate the southern parts of the Ottoman provinces of Damascus and Beirut, together with the separate district of Jerusalem, assigned to British Mandate. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 924

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the Said-adjacent argument that the modern Middle East state system is a Western cartographic imposition with shallow indigenous roots. — connects to: Most Arab states were artificial creations with invented names
• SHARE: The detail that Palestine’s name had been unused for centuries by its Muslim inhabitants until the Mandate era is a striking tidbit for anyone working on Levant state formation.