The term "Palestine" comes via ancient Greek from a Semitic toponym for the general area dating back to the late second millennium BCE., a reflex of which is also to be found in the Biblical ethnonym Philistines. It has been used to refer to the area at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea beside Syria. In the 5th century BCE., in his work The Histories Herodotus used the term to describe a "district of Syria, called Palaistine" in which Phoenicians interacted with other maritime people