Names of the Levant homeland proper with the northwest coastal region of the Levant, centered at Phoenician cities such as Ugarit, Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. Today, this place is usually equated with modern Lebanon and the coast of modern Syria. Also there is a modern town in Turkey called "Finike" which is thought to have derived by the Lycians who traded with Phoenicians in ancient times. Israel: Judea: The kingdoms of Israel and Judah were Iron Age Semitic nations spanning from Edom to Assyria. Today the modern State of Israel controls much of the former territory of the ancient Israelite/Judean kingdoms. According to the
Syria–Turkey relations high-level trade negations with Syrian authorities, which included the first ever visit to Turkey by a Syrian President, in the 1990s and Erdoğan's own recently successful bid to initiate a Turkish EU accession which would allow Europe, "to extend its reach to the borders Syria, Iraq and Iran." In 2008, Turkey was, as a sign of mutual trust in Damascus and Tel Aviv, invited to play the role of facilitator between Syria and Israel to solve their dispute over control over the Golan Heights, but these talks were abandoned after four rounds, following the deterioration in Turkey-Israel relations over the