Tarshiha
Tarshiha is believed to have been built on the site of a Canaanite settlement, Haki, dating back to the 2nd-3rd millennium BC. Excavations of a 4th century burial cave in the village unearthed a cross and a piece of glass engraved with amenorah.
Crusader sources from the (12th and 13th century) refer to Tarshiha as Terschia, Torsia and Tersigha. During the Crusader period, Tarshiha was the site of battles between Christians and Arabs. According to popular Arabic etymology (no reference), the name may have meant "Artemisia Mountain" in the Canaanite language, where Arabic Tuur for "mountain" and shiiH for "artemisia" (mugwort, or common wormwood) could be identified, or alternatively from Taar shiiHaa ("Shiha flew"), i.e. Shiha Jamaluddin (a legendary hero) rushed to the battlefield to fight the Crusaders.
In 1573, under the Ottoman Empire, the village of Tarshiha was raided by the Lebanese feudal chief, Mansur ibn Furaykh. Thedaftar of 1596 show the village to be under the administration of the nahiya of Akka, with a population of 110 households ("khana"). The inhabitants paid taxes on "occasional revenues", bees and goats. The village was also taxed for a press, used either of olives or for grapes. In the early eighteenth century, the village was under control of Shaikh Husayn, while later in the Ottoman period it became one of the major cotton-producing villages of Galilee, and the administrative center of the nahiya.
V. Guérin wrote in the 1860s that the principal mosque in Tarshiha had been built by Abdullah Pasha, (the Governor of Acre at the time.) In the "Survey of Western Palestine" in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Tarshiha was described as: "a very large village, containing about 1,500 Moslems and 300 Christians; there is a fine mosque with minarets newly built, also an old one; the houses are well-built; a new and handsome church has been built in the Christian quarter".
Tarshiha was in the
