The Etymology of Levant
Levant is the participle of a sunrise. French Levant, present participle of the verb lever (to rise), means literally the rising — and as a noun, the place where the sun rises. The construction is parallel to Italian Levante, Spanish Levante, and Latin oriēns (rising, the source of Orient). Late-medieval European traders dealing with the eastern Mediterranean — the ports of Alexandria, Beirut, Tripoli, Aleppo — used Levante and Levant to designate the whole eastern coastline together with its overland trade routes. English borrowed Levant in the 15th century, and the term names a culturally and politically distinctive region: the lands east of the Aegean and west of Mesopotamia, including modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Cyprus, and parts of southern Turkey. The verb to levant — meaning to flee, particularly to abscond on a debt — is a separate 18th-century English use, also from lever in the sense to take oneself up and away suddenly.