When “The Clarion of Syria” was penned between September 1860 and April 1861, its anonymous author – “a patriot” – had just witnessed his homeland undergo unprecedented violence in what many today consider Lebanon’s first civil war. Drawing on Reinhardt Kosellek’s semantic triad: event-history-language, I argue this event also marked a rupture in Arabic intellectual and conceptual history. Nafir Suriyya was a foundational text of the Nahda that inaugurated the search for new vocabulary to capture modern phenomena and socio-political developments.