ABSTRACT Different societies have various definitions and names for their units of residence, such as “cities” or “villages”. This article examines the categories people had for settlements in Palestine from the seventh to the thirteenth century. A rich corpus of textual sources is used, comprising chronicles, geographies, letters and epigraphy, in Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and Greek. The article presents a coherent set of five contemporary terms up to the eleventh century, including city (madīna), town (qarya), village (kafr or ḍayʿa), fortress (ḥiṣn) and monastery (dayr), and introduces the changes in that terminology that occurred in the twelfth–thirteenth centuries. The results of this analysis help to reconstruct – through texts alone – the relations between neighbouring places and changes in these regional systems over time. The article discusses the meaning of these terms, as well as ribāṭ and metropolis (e.g. qaṣaba), and calls for a more refined interpretation of these terms in modern research.

中文翻译：

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7 世纪至 13 世纪初巴勒斯坦的城市、里巴和其他定居点类型：术语练习

摘要 不同的社会对其居住单位有不同的定义和名称，例如“城市”或“村庄”。本文考察了人们对 7 世纪到 13 世纪巴勒斯坦定居点的分类。使用了丰富的语料库，包括阿拉伯语、希伯来语、拉丁语和希腊语的编年史、地理、信件和碑铭。这篇文章提出了直至 11 世纪的一组连贯的五个当代术语，包括城市 (madīna)、城镇 (qarya)、村庄 (kafr or ḍayʿa)、堡垒 (ḥiṣn) 和修道院 (dayr)，并介绍了其中的变化出现在十二至十三世纪的术语。这种分析的结果有助于重建——仅通过文本——相邻地方之间的关系以及这些区域系统随时间的变化。