Fertile Crescent

Coordinates: 36°N 40°E / 36°N 40°E / 36; 40
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Map of the Fertile Crescent
A 15th century copy of Ptolemy's fourth Asian map, depicting the area known as the Fertile Crescent.
A 15th century copy of Ptolemy's fourth Asian map, depicting the area known as the Fertile Crescent

The Fertile Crescent (

Arabic: الهلال الخصيب, Hebrew: הסהר הפורה) is a crescent-shaped region in the Middle East, spanning modern-day Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, together with northern Kuwait, south-eastern Turkey, and western Iran.[1][2] Some authors also include Cyprus and northern Egypt.[3][4]

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

James H. Breasted
, who popularised usage of the phrase.

The term "Fertile Crescent" was popularized by

archaeologist James Henry Breasted in Outlines of European History (1914) and Ancient Times, A History of the Early World (1916).[6][7][8][9][10][11] He wrote:[6]

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

Iranian plateau to the east.[citation needed
]

Biodiversity and climate

As crucial as rivers and

Saharan pump theory posits that this Middle Eastern land bridge was extremely important to the modern distribution of Old World flora and fauna, including the spread of humanity.[citation needed
]

The area has borne the brunt of the

plates and the converging Arabian and Eurasian plates, which has made the region a very diverse zone of high snow-covered mountains.[citation needed
]

The Fertile Crescent had many diverse

cows, goats, sheep, and pigs; the fifth species, the horse, lived nearby.[13] The Fertile Crescent flora comprises a high percentage of plants that can self-pollinate, but may also be cross-pollinated.[13] These plants, called "selfers", were one of the geographical advantages of the area because they did not depend on other plants for reproduction.[13]

History

Area of the fertile crescent, c. 7500 BCE, with main sites of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period. The area of Mesopotamia proper was not yet settled by humans. Includes Göbekli Tepe, a site in modern-day Turkey that is dated circa 9000 BCE.

As well as possessing many sites with the skeletal and cultural remains of both pre-modern and early

farming settlements (referred to as Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA)), which date to around 9,000 BCE and includes very ancient sites such as Göbekli Tepe, Chogha Golan, and Jericho (Tell es-Sultan)
.

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

salination
—gradual concentration of salt and other minerals in soils with a long history of irrigation.

Early domestications

Prehistoric seedless

lentils and chickpea
were domesticated in this region.

.

Cosmopolitan diffusion

Maunsell's map, a Pre-World War I British Ethnographical Map of the Fertile Crescent area
Diffusion of agriculture from the Fertile Crescent after 9000 BCE

Modern analyses

Canary Islanders of the same time period, as the studies demonstrate those ancient peoples to be "clearly associated with modern Europeans". Additionally, no evidence from the studies demonstrates Cro-Magnon influence, contrary to former suggestions.[19]

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

Linguistically, the Fertile Crescent was a region of great diversity. Historically,

language isolates were found, including; Elamite, Gutian and Kassite in Iran, and Hattic, Kaskian and Hurro-Urartian
in Turkey. The precise affiliation of these, and their date of arrival, remain topics of scholarly discussion. However, given lack of textual evidence for the earliest era of prehistory, this debate is unlikely to be resolved in the near future.

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]

Links between Hurro-Urartian and Hattic and the indigenous languages of the Caucasus have frequently been suggested, but are not generally accepted.

See also

References

  1. .
  2. .
  3. ^ "Countries in the Fertile Crescent 2024".
  4. ^ Quam, Joel; Campbell, Scott (31 August 2022). "North Africa & the Middle East: Regional Example – The Fertile Crescent".
  5. ^ The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica . "Fertile Crescent". Encyclopædia Britannica. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 28 January 2018.
  6. ^ .
  7. ^ Goodspeed, George Stephen (1904). A History of the ancient world: for high schools and academies. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 5–6.
  8. ^ 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.
  9. ^ 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.
  10. JSTOR 593554
    .
  11. . 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.
  12. .
  13. ^ .
  14. .
  15. .
  16. on June 2, 2006. Retrieved 6 March 2017.
  17. ^ "Genographic Project: The Development of Agriculture". National Geographic. Archived from the original on June 5, 2013. Retrieved 14 April 2016.
  18. PMID 17600185
    .
  19. ^ .
  20. .
  21. ^ Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East
  22. ^ Barker, G. (2002). Bellwood, P.; Renfrew, C. (eds.). Transitions to farming and pastoralism in North Africa. pp. 151–161.
  23. ^ Bar-Yosef O (1987), "Pleistocene connections between Africa and SouthWest Asia: an archaeological perspective", The African Archaeological Review; Chapter 5, pp 29–38
  24. S2CID 42150441
    .
  25. ^ 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.
  26. Parthenocarpic figs and Nile shellfish (please refer to Natufian culture#Long-distance exchange
    ).
  27. .
  28. ^ Estimating the Impact of Prehistoric Admixture on the Genome of Europeans, Dupanloup et al., 2004
  29. PMID 15069642
    .
  30. ^ "Paleolithic and Neolithic lineages in the European mitochondrial gene pool", Cavalli-Sforza 1997.
  31. ^ "Clines of nuclear DNA markers suggest a largely Neolithic ancestry of the European gene", Chikhi 1997.
  32. ^ 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.
  33. ^ P. Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, Blackwell: Malden, MA (2005).
  34. S2CID 161324951
    .
  35. .
  36. .
  37. ^ Steadman & McMahon 2011, p. 233.
  38. ^ Steadman & McMahon 2011, p. 522.
  39. ^ Steadman & McMahon 2011, p. 556.
  40. ^ Potts 2012, p. 28.
  41. ^ Potts 2012, p. 570.
  42. ^ Potts 2012, p. 584.
  43. S2CID 163985956
    .
  44. .

Bibliography

External links

36°N 40°E / 36°N 40°E / 36; 40