Syrian Coastal Mountain Range

Name

Classically, this range was known as the Bargylus, a name mentioned by Pliny the Elder. The name probably had its roots in the name of an ancient city-kingdom called Barga, located in the vicinity of the mountains; it was a city of the Eblaite Empire in the third millennium BC, and then a vassal kingdom of the Hittites, who named the mountain range after Barga.

In the medieval period they were known as the Jabal Bahra (جبل بهراء) after the Arab tribe of Bahra'. They are also sometimes known as the Nusayriyah Mountains or the Ansarieh Mountains (جبال النصيرية Jibāl an-Nuṣayriyah) or the Alawiyin Mountains (جبال العلويين Jibāl al-‘Alawīyin); both of these names refer to the Alawi ethnoreligious group which has traditionally lived there, though the former term is based on an antiquated label for the community that is now considered insulting.

Geography

The western slopes catch moisture-laden winds from the Mediterranean Sea and are thus more fertile and more heavily populated than the eastern slopes. The Orontes River flows north alongside the range on its eastern verge in the Ghab Plain, a 64 km longitudinal trench, and then around the northern edge of the range to flow into the Mediterranean. South of Masyaf there is a large northeast-southwest strike-slip fault which separates An-Nusayriyah Mountain from the coastal Mount Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon mountains of Lebanon, in a feature known as the Homs Gap.

Between 1920 and 1936, the mountains formed parts of the eastern border of the Alawite State within the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon.

References

References

1. Federal Research Division, Library of Congress (2005) [http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles/Syria.pdf "Country Profile: Syria"] (PDF), page 5.
2. 325913985
3. Millar, Fergus. (15 March 1995). "The Roman Near East: 31 BC–AD 337". Harvard University Press.
4. William Smith. (1857). "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography: Iabadius-Zymethus". Little, Brown and Company.
5. Forrer, Emil Orgetorix Gustav. (1928). "Reallexikon der Assyriologie". Walter de Gruyter & Co.
6. (2002). "Eblaitica: Essays on the Ebla Archives and Eblaite Language, Volume 4". Eisenbrauns.
7. Gordon Douglas Young. (1981). "Ugarit in Retrospect: Fifty Years of Ugarit and Ugaritic". Eisenbrauns.
8. James Orr. (1930). "The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia".
9. (2005). "A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered". I. B. Tauris.
10. [http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/578856/Syria/29930/Relief#ref=ref404080 Encyclopædia Britannica – Syria]