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The Fertile Crescent is a region in the Middle East incorporating present-day Israel, West Bank, and Lebanon and parts of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, south-eastern Turkey and south-western Iran. The term "Fertile Crescent" was coined by University of Chicago archeologist James Henry Breasted.

The Fertile Crescent has an impressive record of past human activity. As well as possessing many sites with the skeletal and cultural remains of both pre-modern and early modern humans (e.g. at Kebara Cave in Israel), later Pleistocene hunter-gatherers and Epipalaeolithic semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers (the Natufians), this area is most famous for its sites related to the origins of agriculture. The western zone around the Jordan and upper Euphrates rivers gave rise to the first known Neolithic farming settlements (referred to as Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA)), which date to around 9,000 BC (and includes sites such as Jericho). This region, alongside Mesopotamia (which lies to the east of the Fertile Crescent, between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates), also saw the emergence of early complex societies during the succeeding Bronze Age. There is also early evidence from this region for writing, and the formation of state-level societies. This has earned the region the nickname "The Cradle of Civilization."

Since the Bronze Age, the region's natural fertility has been greatly extended by irrigation works, upon which much of its agricultural production continues to depend. The last two millennia have seen repeated cycles of decline and recovery as past works have fallen into disrepair through the replacement of states, to be replaced under their successors. Another ongoing problem has been salination - the seepage of salt water into irrigated farmland.

As crucial as rivers were to the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, they were not the only factor in the area's precocity. The Fertile Crescent had a climate which encouraged the evolution of many annual plants, which produce more edible seeds than perennials, and the region's dramatic variety of elevation gave rise to many species of edible plants for early experiments in cultivation. Most importantly, the Fertile Crescent possessed the wild progenitors of the eight Neolithic founder crops important in early agriculture (i.e. wild progenitors to emmer, einkorn, barley, flax, chick pea, pea, lentil, bitter vetch), and four of the five most important species of domesticated animals - cows, goats, sheep, and pigs - and the fifth species, the horse, lived nearby.

Scholars may disagree on the location of the cradle of the human race, but on the cradle of its civilization there is no disagreement. It lies in the area which, in this study, is called the Near East and is comprised of the Fertile Crescent --with its two horns of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), Syria, and Palestine--Egypt, Anatolia ( Asia Minor, Turkey), and Persia or Iran. The "Near East," originally a European geographical term loosely used to designate that part of southwestern Asia nearest Europe, was borrowed by America, parts of which are nearer the Far East. This was the prevailing usage until the second World War, when the British Government created a military province extending from Iran to Libya and named it the Middle East, a term until then traditionally applied to India and adjacent territory. A Middle East supply center was thereupon established in Cairo and later became an Anglo-American project, thus giving sanction to the new terminology.

The area's geographic and historic significance stems from its position athwart the international highways linking Africa, Europe, and Asia; its having provided the stage for some of the earliest, most spectacular and enduring discoveries and achievements of man; and its having been the original homestead of our three monotheistic religions. The Near East passed on to later generations a matchlessly rich heritage of science, art, literature, and philosophy--all the fruits of which we still enjoy. The area encompasses not only the world's earliest centers of civilization but also those with the best records and the longest lives. No other region can display a record of civilization as a going concern for over five thousand years.

Long before the curtain rose on written records, Near Easterners had developed urban life with ordered governments, religions, and social and economic institutions. Still earlier, those who occupied the arch of the Fertile Crescent and nearby territory had discovered metal, realized its potentialities, and worked it into tools and weapons that replaced the more primitive stone implements of the preceding generations. In those crude tools of flint and copper lay a dim vision of the gigantic machines and engines so vital to our modern life. Even earlier, and probably in that same general area, primitive man learned through long and sustained experience, initiated by chance, that certain wild plants could be cultivated and certain wild animals could be domesticated. He then lifted himself from the status of a food gatherer--wandering from place to place in quest of sustenance--to that of a food producer, with a dependable reservoir of food which made possible a settled life with its accumulation of wealth, an increase in population and leisure time part of which could be devoted to the cultivation of the higher things of life. Civilization first developed where it did because this was the one region of the globe that provided the climate, vegetation, and fauna necessary for transition from a life of nomadic grazing and hunting to a settled one.

Through migration, invasion, or cultural osmosis these remarkable accomplishments eventually found their way into the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean islands and thence into the European mainland where they provided a prelude to the classical civilization Of Greece and Rome, parent to our civilization. After all, Europe is but a peninsular projection of Western Asia. The ancestor of the wheat and barley cultivated in early Europe seems to have been the wild cereals that still grow in north Syria, al-Biqa' of Lebanon and Palestine. The domesticated sheep of Europe have evidently descended from the animal that once roamed wild on the plateaus extending from Anatolia to Iran. Crete in the Mediterranean and Mycenae in southern Greece served as the main stepping stones; Anatolia, Phoenicia, and Egypt provided the bridges. In its metallurgy Crete followed the Egyptian and north Syrian tradition. Similarity marks certain of the ceramics of Western Asia and Eastern Europe. That ancient Near East culture formed the background of the early European civilization was a fact barely realized a hundred years ago. Nor was the debt that Greece and Rome owed this area fully appreciated until recently, a debt that does not necessarily make the grandeur that was Greece less grand, or the greatness that was Rome less great. In fact, it was not until the early nineteenth century that scholars began to rediscover the empires of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria and to reconstruct their cultural institutions. As for the Hittites and their empire in Anatolia, their discovery began as late as the twentieth century.

But Europeans were not mere borrowers and imitators. They adopted, adapted, and originated. The measure of energy, inventiveness, and independence which they introduced into the old world enabled them to set the old on new paths and subsequently to create institutions of government and bodies of science, philosophy, and art which far excelled what had preceded them.

Domestication of plants and animals, metallurgy, pottery, and other material objects are not the only gifts from the Near East. Our sevenday week stems from the story of creation as recorded in Genesis and from an early Semitic system of numeration in which the number seven figured. The Babylonians considered seven celestial bodies to be planets. To the first of these they dedicated the first day of the week, hence our Sunday; to the second, the moon, the second day was devoted, whence comes our Monday. The seventh, Saturn, gave us Saturday. From those same Mesopotamians we inherited the sexagesimal system represented today by our division of the hour into sixty minutes, the minutes into sixty seconds and the circle into three hundred and sixty (a multiple of sixty) degrees. The division of the day into twelve hours comes from Egypt. From Egypt also comes the solar calendar introduced by Julius Caesar and reformed by Pope Gregory.

Great as all these cultural contributions in our heritage may be, still greater are the spiritual and intellectual elements initiated by Palestine and Phoenicia. Islam, the third great monotheistic religion, was an historical outgrowth of Judaism and Christianity. All three are the products of the religious experience of one people, the Semitic-speaking people, living within an area of a few-hundred-miles square. Long after those palaces, temples, towers, and pyramids that were built by Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Chaldaeans shall have crumbled into dust (and most of them have already done so), the prophetic voice of ancient Israel, emphasizing for the first time in the history of mankind the virtues of mercy, justice and righteousness, and the record of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, laying stress on love as a fundamental law of life--all recorded in letters derived from those developed and disseminated by Phoenicians on the coast of Lebanon--shall remain a source of inspiration and enlightenment to numberless men and women throughout the world. The clocks we see, the calendar we use, the religions we profess, the ethical and legal codes we apply, the art we cherish, the writing we employ, the languages we speak, the names we give our children all bear witness to the debt we owe the ancients of the Near East. Uncountable, indeed, are the elements in that composite body of practices and beliefs constituting Western civilization which were earlier gleaned from the vanished cultures of Western Asia, enriched and transmitted to later generations.

Nor did the Near Eastern contributions cease in later times. As the medieval representatives of the Semitic peoples and heirs of the Hellenistic civilization, the Arabs held aloft the torch of enlightenment for centuries throughout the world. From their Syrian capital, Damascus, they ruled an empire extending from the Atlantic to the confines of China. In their later capital, Baghdad--heir of Ctesiphon, Babylon, and Ur--they translated Greek, Persian, and Hindu works of science and philosophy which were subsequently enriched by original contributions. Between the middle of the eighth and the early thirteenth centuries, Arabic was the medium for the expression of the highest and richest thought in philosophy, literature, art and science. Such words as algebra, zero and the Arabic numerals in mathematics; zenith, nadir and the names of stars in astronomy; alcohol, alkali, alchemy in medicine; sugar, coffee, candy, orange, lemon, atlas, satin in agriculture and industry; divan, mattress, sofa and jar in everyday vocabulary testify to the height and extent of Arab culture.

Such free transmission and dissemination of cultural elements from the cluster of civilizations centered in that area would not have been possible but for the geography of the region, both as to local physical characteristics and global setting. The entire area may be considered as one super-peninsula, mostly arid and partly sandy. A minor but distinct unit within the larger one is the Fertile Crescent, a semicircular belt of arable land enclosed on all sides by deserts, mountains and seas. The eastern end constitutes the fertile plain of Mesopotamia, the western the equally fertile valley of Egypt. Assyria, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine may be considered the arc of the Crescent framing the Desert, itself a continuation of the Arabian peninsula. Deserts were primitive man's thoroughfares and did not within certain limits greatly impede his movements. As the scene of some of man's greatest cultural achievements, the Fertile Crescent is the most significant part of our area.

The Anatolian plateau is continued into the Iranian, with intervening but not impassable mountains. Globally the whole region is so strategically posed as to form a link between Europe, Asia and Africa and a bridge between two oceanic areas, the one washed by the Atlantic and its long Mediterranean projection and the other by the Arabian-Indian Ocean and its Red Sea and Persian Gulf arms. When the known world was much smaller and its people had not ventured beyond the Pillars of Hercules ( Gibraltar), the Mediterranean appropriately acquired its name "the Middle of the Earth." Across the bridges of the eastern islands of this sea, which unites and divides the three historic continents, Eastern civilization first advanced to Europe.

Somewhere in this intercontinental, interoceanic region whenever a man in the course of history--from Alexander to Napoleon--dreamed of a world empire, he found himself sooner or later fighting for the realization of his dream. Its military history is epitomized in those multi-lingual inscriptions at the mouth of the Dog River on the Lebanon coast memorializing the passage, among others, of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses, the Assyrian invader Esarhaddon, the Neo-Babylonian empire builder Nebuchadnezzar and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. The semi-legendary Trojan wars were fought some 1200 years before Christ for the control of the Dardanelles; the Anglo-Egyptian clashes of the mid-twentieth century were occasioned by the desire for the control of the Suez Canal. In the nineteenth century, rivalry between the three great European powers--Russia, Great Britain, and France-for spheres of influence in the declining Ottoman Empire resulted in more than one armed conflict. In the terminology of modern geostrategists the Near East is "the heart land of the Euro-Asian-African world island."

The story of the Near East is, therefore, not only the story of Moses and Christ, Zoroaster and Muhammad, but also of Darius and Alexander, Caesar and Cleopatra, Chingiz Khan and Hulagu, Napoleon and Allenby. Its Eastern Mediterranean waters served as a Phoenician and then as a Greek lake before becoming a part of Rome's mare nostrum (the control of which was contested by Carthage); subsequently it became the center of the Ottoman crescent empire and lastly as the scene for the clashing of rival ambitions of Great Britain, France, and Russia.

The recent discovery and exploitation of petroleum, vital for industry in peace and even more vital in war, has greatly enhanced the strategic importance of the area. Sixty-two per cent of the total oil reserves of the world is estimated to be embedded in the soil of Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. Meantime the advent of the age of air navigation turned such cities as Cairo and Beirut into centers of communication for the all weather round-the-world trips. The contemporary struggle between the great powers of democracy and of communism has brought the states of the area into the international limelight, as both contending parties realized that the political orientation of Turks, Persians, and Arabs may have a decisive effect on the shape of things to come.

To the different states of the Near East which in the last few years have embraced the Western European doctrine of nationalism, the rediscovery of their past glory and ancient history has been a source of infinite pride and inspiration. The contemporary Arabs never tire of reciting the story of the caliphate centered in Damascus, where it attained unprecedented heights, and later in Baghdad, when it enjoyed the golden age of Arabic literary activity. The Iranians, whose memory of the greatest period in their historic career--that of Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes and others of the Achaemenid dynasty--had been dimmed by the vicissitudes of time, did not awake to the full realization of that heritage and to the claim of superiority based on descent until the late nineteenth century. Even the Kemalist Turks began to evoke the ghost of the Hittite past and take national pride in the archeological finds in the terrain not occupied by them until later times. Surely the ancient Near East is still living in modern Europe and America as well as in the hearts and minds of modern Near Easterners.

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