Fertile Crescent
The Fertile Crescent (
The Fertile Crescent is believed to be the very first region where settled farming emerged as people started the process of clearance and modification of natural vegetation to grow newly domesticated plants as crops. Early human civilizations such as Sumer in Mesopotamia flourished as a result.[5] Technological advances in the region include the development of agriculture and the use of irrigation, of writing, the wheel, and glass, most emerging first in Mesopotamia.
Terminology
The term "Fertile Crescent" was popularized by
It lies like an army facing south, with one wing stretching along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and the other reaching out to the Persian Gulf, while the center has its back against the northern mountains. The end of the western wing is Palestine; Assyria makes up a large part of the center; while the end of the eastern wing is Babylonia. [...] This great semicircle, for lack of a name, may be called the Fertile Crescent.
There is no single term for this region in antiquity. At the time that Breasted was writing, it roughly corresponded with the territories of the Ottoman Empire ceded to Britain and France in the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Historian Thomas Scheffler has noted that Breasted was following a trend in Western geography to "overwrite the classical geographical distinctions between continents, countries and landscapes with large, abstract spaces", drawing parallels with the work of Halford Mackinder, who conceptualised Eurasia as a 'pivot area' surrounded by an 'inner crescent', Alfred Thayer Mahan's Middle East, and Friedrich Naumann's Mitteleuropa.[12]
In current usage, the Fertile Crescent includes
Biodiversity and climate
As crucial as rivers and
The area has borne the brunt of the
The Fertile Crescent had many diverse
History
This section needs additional citations for verification. (June 2021) |
As well as possessing many sites with the skeletal and cultural remains of both pre-modern and early
This region, alongside Mesopotamia (Greek for "between rivers", between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, lies in the east of the Fertile Crescent), also saw the emergence of early complex societies during the succeeding Bronze Age. There is also early evidence from the region for writing and the formation of hierarchical state level societies. This has earned the region the nickname "The cradle of civilization".
It is in this region where the first libraries appeared about 4,500 years ago. The oldest known libraries are found in Nippur (in Sumer) and Ebla (in Syria), both from c. 2500 BCE.[14]
Both the Tigris and Euphrates start in the Taurus Mountains of what is modern-day Turkey. Farmers in southern Mesopotamia had to protect their fields from flooding each year. Northern Mesopotamia had sufficient rain to make some farming possible. To protect against flooding they made levees.[15]
Since the
Early domestications
Prehistoric seedless
Cosmopolitan diffusion
The ancient Near East |
---|
Modern analyses
The studies further suggest a diffusion of this diverse population away from the Fertile Crescent, with the early migrants moving away from the Near East—westward into Europe and North Africa, northward to Crimea, and northeastward to Mongolia.[19] They took their agricultural practices with them and interbred with the hunter-gatherers whom they subsequently came in contact with while perpetuating their farming practices. This supports prior genetic[27][28][29][30][31] and archaeological[19][32][33][34][35][36] studies which have all arrived at the same conclusion.
Consequently, contemporary in situ peoples absorbed the agricultural way of life of those early migrants who ventured out of the Fertile Crescent. This is contrary to the suggestion that the spread of agriculture disseminated out of the Fertile Crescent by way of sharing of knowledge. Instead, the view now supported by a preponderance of evidence is that it occurred by actual migration out of the region, coupled with subsequent interbreeding with indigenous local populations whom the migrants came in contact with.[19]
The studies show also that not all present day Europeans share strong genetic affinities to the Neolithic and Bronze Age inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent; the closest ties to the Fertile Crescent rest with Southern Europeans. The same study further demonstrates all present-day Europeans to be closely related.[19]
Languages
This section needs additional citations for verification. (June 2021) |
Linguistically, the Fertile Crescent was a region of great diversity. Historically,
The evidence that does exist suggests that, by the third millennium BCE and into the second, several language groups already existed in the region. These included:[37][38][39][40][41][42]
- substratum language of the people that introduced farming into Southern Iraq in the Early Ubaid period. (5300–4700 BCE) The linguistic consensus today is that multiple unknown substrata contributed to the formation of the artifacts in Sumerian names that motivated the Proto-Euphratean substrate hypothesis, including fossilized archaic elements from earlier stages of Sumerian itself.[43]
- Sumerian: a non-Semitic language isolate that displays a Sprachbund-type relationship with neighbouring Semitic Akkadian
- Elamite language: a non-Semitic language isolate
- Carthaginian)
- Hattic: a language isolate, spoken originally in central Anatolia
- Indo-European languages: generally believed to be later intrusive languages arriving after 2000 BCE, such as Hittite, Luwian and the Indo-Aryan material attested in the Mitanni civilization, but recent evidence suggests that the language family emerged from the Fertile Crescent as early as 6000 BCE[44]
- Egyptian: a stand-alone branch of the Afroasiatic languages confined to Egypt
- Hurro-Urartian languages, a small family. The Kassite language spoken in the northern part of the region may have belonged to this family.
Links between Hurro-Urartian and Hattic and the indigenous languages of the Caucasus have frequently been suggested, but are not generally accepted.
See also
- Beth Nahrain – Areas between and surrounding the Euphrates and Tigris rivers
- Hilly Flanks – Area around the Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia
- History of agriculture
- History of Mesopotamia
- Hydraulic empire – Government by control of access to water
References
- ISBN 978-1111833442.
- ISBN 978-1560041665.
- ^ "Countries in the Fertile Crescent 2024".
- ^ Quam, Joel; Campbell, Scott (31 August 2022). "North Africa & the Middle East: Regional Example – The Fertile Crescent".
- ^ The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica . "Fertile Crescent". Encyclopædia Britannica. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 28 January 2018.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-226-0011-04.
- ^ Goodspeed, George Stephen (1904). A History of the ancient world: for high schools and academies. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 5–6.
- ^ Breasted, James Henry (1914). "Earliest man, the Orient, Greece, and Rome" (PDF). In Robinson, James Harvey; Breasted, James Henry; Beard, Charles A. (eds.). Outlines of European history, Vol. 1. Boston: Ginn. pp. 56–57. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2022-10-09. "The Ancient Orient" map is inserted between pages 56 and 57.
- ^ Breasted, James Henry (1916). Ancient times, a history of the early world: an introduction to the study of ancient history and the career of early man (PDF). Boston: Ginn. pp. 100–101. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2022-10-09. "The Ancient Oriental World" map is inserted between pages 100 and 101.
- JSTOR 593554.
- ISBN 978-0-691-02582-7.
Textbooks...The true texts brought all of these strands together, the most important being James Henry Breasted, Ancient Times: A History of the Early World (Boston, 1916), but a predecessor, George Stephen Goodspeed, A History of the Ancient World (New York, 1904), is outstanding. Goodspeed, who taught at Chicago with Breasted, antedated him in the conception of a 'crescent' of civilization.
- S2CID 6707201.
- ^ OCLC 35792200.
- S2CID 61069680.
- ISBN 978-0-395-87274-1.
- National Geographic News. Archived from the originalon June 2, 2006. Retrieved 6 March 2017.
- ^ "Genographic Project: The Development of Agriculture". National Geographic. Archived from the original on June 5, 2013. Retrieved 14 April 2016.
- PMID 17600185.
- ^ PMID 16371462.
- S2CID 25142338.
- ^ Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East
- ^ Barker, G. (2002). Bellwood, P.; Renfrew, C. (eds.). Transitions to farming and pastoralism in North Africa. pp. 151–161.
- ^ Bar-Yosef O (1987), "Pleistocene connections between Africa and SouthWest Asia: an archaeological perspective", The African Archaeological Review; Chapter 5, pp 29–38
- S2CID 42150441.
- ^ Lancaster, Andrew (2009). "Y Haplogroups, Archaeological Cultures and Language Families: a Review of the Multidisciplinary Comparisons using the case of E-M35" (PDF). Journal of Genetic Genealogy. 5 (1). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-05-06. Retrieved 2010-02-23.
- ).
- PMID 12167671.
- ^ Estimating the Impact of Prehistoric Admixture on the Genome of Europeans, Dupanloup et al., 2004
- PMID 15069642.
- ^ "Paleolithic and Neolithic lineages in the European mitochondrial gene pool", Cavalli-Sforza 1997.
- ^ "Clines of nuclear DNA markers suggest a largely Neolithic ancestry of the European gene", Chikhi 1997.
- ^ M. Zvelebil, in Hunters in Transition: Mesolithic Societies and the Transition to Farming, M. Zvelebil (editor), Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK (1986) pp. 5–15, 167–188.
- ^ P. Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, Blackwell: Malden, MA (2005).
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- ^ Steadman & McMahon 2011, p. 233.
- ^ Steadman & McMahon 2011, p. 522.
- ^ Steadman & McMahon 2011, p. 556.
- ^ Potts 2012, p. 28.
- ^ Potts 2012, p. 570.
- ^ Potts 2012, p. 584.
- S2CID 163985956.
- PMID 37499002.
Bibliography
- Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, 1997.
- Anderson, Clifford Norman. The Fertile Crescent: Travels In the Footsteps of Ancient Science. 2d ed., rev. Fort Lauderdale: Sylvester Press, 1972.
- Deckers, Katleen. Holocene Landscapes Through Time In the Fertile Crescent. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011.
- Ephʻal, Israel. The Ancient Arabs: Nomads On the Borders of the Fertile Crescent 9th–5th Centuries B.C. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1982.
- Kajzer, Małgorzata, Łukasz Miszk, and Maciej Wacławik. The Land of Fertility I: South-East Mediterranean Since the Bronze Age to the Muslim Conquest. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.
- Kozłowski, Stefan Karol. The Eastern Wing of the Fertile Crescent: Late Prehistory of Greater Mesopotamian Lithic Industries. Oxford: Archaeopress, 1999.
- Potts, Daniel T. (21 May 2012). Potts, D. T (ed.). A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Vol. 1. ISBN 9781405189880.
- Steadman, Sharon R.; McMahon, Gregory (15 September 2011). The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia: (10,000-323 BCE). ISBN 9780195376142.
- Thomas, Alexander R. The Evolution of the Ancient City: Urban Theory and the Archaeology of the Fertile Crescent. Lanham: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010.
External links
- Ancient Fertile Crescent Almost Gone, Satellite Images Show– from National Geographic News, May 18, 2001. Archived October 16, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
- http://www.claudiusptolemy.org/AbshireGusevStafeyev_ProceedingsVenice2017.pdf Corey Abshire , Dmitri Gusev , Sergey Stafeyev The Fertile Crescent in Ptolemy’s “Geography”: a new digital reconstruction for modern GIS tools