Levant

The Levant (/ləˈvænt/; Arabic: المشرق /ʔal-maʃriq/) is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the eastern Mediterranean. In its widest historical sense, the Levant included all of the eastern Mediterranean with its islands, that is, it included all of the countries along the eastern Mediterranean shores, extending from Greece to Cyrenaica. The term Levant entered English in the late 15th century from French. It derives from the Italian Levante, meaning "rising", implying the rising of the sun in the east. As such, it is broadly equivalent to the Arabic term Mashriq, 'the land where the sun rises'. The western counterpart in Arabic is the Maghreb, and Ponente in Italian, meaning 'west, where the sun sets'.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, the term levante was used for Italian maritime commerce in the eastern Mediterranean, including Greece, Anatolia, Syria-Palestine, and Egypt, that is, the lands east of Venice. Eventually the term was restricted to the Muslim countries of Syria-Palestine and Egypt. In 1581 England set up the Levant Company to monopolize commerce with the Ottoman Empire.

SOLEIL

SOLEIL ("Sun" in French) is a synchrotron facility near Paris, France. It performed its first acceleration of electrons on May 14, 2006. The name SOLEIL is a backronym for Source optimisée de lumière d’énergie intermédiaire du LURE (LURE optimised intermediary energy light source), LURE meaning Laboratoire pour l'utilisation du rayonnement électromagnétique.

The facility is run by a civil corporation held by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique (CEA), two French national research agencies. It is located in Saint-Aubin in the Essonne département, a south-western suburb of Paris, near Gif-sur-Yvette and Saclay, which host other facilities for nuclear and particle physics.

The facility is a member of the UniverSud Paris.

SOLEIL also hosts IPANEMA, the European research platform on ancient materials (archaeology, palaeontology, past environments and cultural heritage), a joint CNRS / French Ministry of Culture and Communication research unit.