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 theOttoman Empire ceded to Britain and France in theSykes–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 ofHalford Mackinder, who conceptualised Eurasia as a 'pivot area' surrounded by an 'inner crescent',Alfred Thayer Mahan'sMiddle East, andFriedrich Naumann'sMitteleuropa.[12]
The area has borne the brunt of thetectonic divergence between the African and Arabianplates 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 diverseclimates, and major climatic changes encouraged the evolution of many"r" typeannual plants, which produce more edible seeds than"K" typeperennial plants. The region's dramatic variety in elevation gave rise to many species of edible plants for early experiments in cultivation. Most importantly, the Fertile Crescent was home to the eightNeolithic founder crops important in earlyagriculture (i.e., wild progenitors toemmer wheat,einkorn,barley,flax,chick pea,pea,lentil,bitter vetch), and four of the five most important species ofdomesticated animals—cows,goats,sheep, andpigs; the fifth species, thehorse, lived nearby.[13] The Fertile Crescent flora comprises a high percentage of plants that canself-pollinate, but may also becross-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]
It is in this region where the firstlibraries appeared about 4,500 years ago. The oldest known libraries are found inNippur (in Sumer) andEbla (in Syria), both fromc. 2500 BCE.[14]
Both the Tigris and Euphrates start in theTaurus Mountains of what is modern-dayTurkey. 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 theBronze Age, the region's naturalfertility has been greatly extended byirrigation 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 beensalination—gradual concentration of salt and other minerals in soils with a long history of irrigation.
Early domestications
Prehistoric seedlessfigs were discovered atGilgal I in theJordan Valley, suggesting that fig trees were being planted some 11,400 years ago.[16]Cereals were already grown inSyria as long as 9,000 years ago.[17] Small cats (Felis silvestris) also were domesticated in this region.[18] Also,legumes includingpeas,lentils andchickpea were domesticated in this region.
Maunsell's map, a Pre-World War I British Ethnographical Map of the Fertile Crescent areaDiffusion of agriculture from the Fertile Crescent after 9000 BCE
Modern analyses[19][20] comparing 24 craniofacial measurements reveal a relatively diverse population within the pre-Neolithic,Neolithic andBronze Age Fertile Crescent,[19] supporting the view that several populations occupied this region during these time periods.[19][21][22][23][24][25][26] Similar arguments do not hold true for theBasques andCanary 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 demonstratesCro-Magnon influence, contrary to former suggestions.[19]
The studies further suggest adiffusion of this diverse population away from the Fertile Crescent, with the early migrants moving away from theNear East—westward intoEurope andNorth Africa, northward toCrimea, and northeastward toMongolia.[19] They took their agricultural practices with them and interbred with thehunter-gatherers whom they subsequently came in contact with while perpetuating their farming practices. This supports priorgenetic[27][28][29][30][31] andarchaeological[19][32][33][34][35][36] studies which have all arrived at the same conclusion.
Consequently, contemporaryin 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]
A 2005 craniometric study found that not all present-dayEuropeans share strong affinities to theNeolithic andBronze Age inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent; the closest ties to the Fertile Crescent rest with Southern Europeans. The same study further demonstrates all present-dayEuropeans to be closely related.[19] Genetics research finds that most present-day Europeans, across Europe, derive from at least three ancient populations, including theEarly European Farmers, who descended from the Near Eastern migrants that brought agriculture to Europe. This ancient farmer population was genetically distinct from European hunter-gatherers and close to present-day Near Easterners.[37]
Linguistically, the Fertile Crescent was a region of great diversity. Historically,Semitic languages generally prevailed in the modern regions ofIraq,Syria,Jordan,Lebanon,Israel,Palestine,Sinai and the fringes of southeastTurkey and northwestIran, as well as theSumerian (alanguage isolate) in Iraq, whilst in the mountainous areas to the east and north a number of generally unrelatedlanguage isolates were found, including;Elamite,Gutian andKassite inIran, andHattic,Kaskian andHurro-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:[38][39][40][41][42][43]
Proto-Euphratean language: a hypothetical non-Semitic language previously hypothesized to be thesubstratum language of the people that introduced farming into SouthernIraq in the EarlyUbaid 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.[44]
Indo-European languages: generally believed to be later intrusive languages arriving after 2000 BCE, such asHittite,Luwian and theIndo-Aryan material attested in theMitanni civilization, but recent evidence suggests that the language family emerged from the Fertile Crescent as early as 6000 BCE[45]
^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.
^Kuklick, Bruce (1996)."Essay on methods and sources".Puritans in Babylon: the ancient Near East and American intellectual life, 1880–1930. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 241.ISBN978-0-691-02582-7.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.
^Scheffler, Thomas (2003-06-01). "'Fertile Crescent', 'Orient', 'Middle East': The Changing Mental Maps of Southwest Asia".European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire.10 (2):253–272.doi:10.1080/1350748032000140796.ISSN1350-7486.S2CID6707201.
^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
^M. Zvelebil, inHunters 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).
^Zvelebil, M. (1989). "On the transition to farming in Europe, or what was spreading with the Neolithic: a reply to Ammerman (1989)".Antiquity.63 (239):379–383.doi:10.1017/s0003598x00076110.S2CID162882505.
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.
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.
