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Fertile Crescent
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Map showing the generally defined area of the Fertile Crescent in red
The Fertile Crescent (also known as the "cradle of civilization") is a crescent-shaped region where agriculture and early human civilizations like the Sumer and Ancient Egypt flourished due to inundations from the surrounding Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris rivers.[1] Technological advances in the region include the development of writing, glass, the wheel, agriculture, and the use of irrigation.
Modern-day countries with significant territory within the Fertile Crescent are Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, as well as the southeastern fringe of Turkey and the western fringes of Iran.[2][3] The term is also used in international geopolitics and diplomatic relations.
Contents
[hide]
1 Terminology
2 Biodiversity and climate
3 History
3.1 Early domestications
4 Languages
5 See also
6 Notes and references
7 Bibliography
8 Further reading
9 External links
Terminology[edit]
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).[4][5][6][7][8][9] Breasted wrote:[4]
This fertile crescent is approximately a semicircle, with the open side toward the south, having the west end at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean, the center directly north of Arabia, and the east end at the north end of the Persian Gulf (see map, p. 100). 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.1 It may also be likened to the shores of a desert-bay, upon which the mountains behind look down—a bay not of water but of sandy waste, some eight hundred kilometres across, forming a northern extension of the Arabian desert and sweeping as far north as the latitude of the northeast corner of the Mediterranean. This desert-bay is a limestone plateau of some height—too high indeed to be watered by the Tigris and Euphrates, which have cut cañons obliquely across it. Nevertheless, after the meager winter rains, wide tracts of the northern desert-bay are clothed with scanty grass, and spring thus turns the region for a short time into grasslands. The history of Western Asia may be described as an age-long struggle between the mountain peoples of the north and the desert wanderers of these grasslands—a struggle which is still going on—for the possession of the Fertile Crescent, the shores of the desert-bay.

1 There is no name, either geographical or political, which includes all of this great semicircle (see map, p. 100). Hence we are obliged to coin a term and call it the Fertile Crescent.
In current usage, the Fertile Crescent includes Iraq, Kuwait, and surrounding portions of Iran and Turkey, as well as the rest of the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean Sea, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon. Water sources include the Jordan River. The inner boundary is delimited by the dry climate of the Syrian Desert to the south. Around the outer boundary are the Anatolian highlands to the north and the Sahara Desert to the west.
Biodiversity and climate[edit]
As crucial as rivers and marshlands were to the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, they were not the only factor. The area is geographically important as the "bridge" between Africa and Eurasia, which has allowed it to retain a greater amount of biodiversity than either Europe or North Africa, where climate changes during the Ice Age led to repeated extinction events when ecosystems became squeezed against the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The 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.
The area has borne the brunt of the tectonic divergence between the African and Arabian plates and the converging Arabian and Eurasian plates, which has made the region a very diverse zone of high snow-covered mountains.
The Fertile Crescent had many diverse climates, and major climatic changes encouraged the evolution of many "r" type annual plants, which produce more edible seeds than "K" type perennial 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 eight Neolithic founder crops important in early agriculture (i.e., wild progenitors to emmer wheat, 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; the fifth species, the horse, lived nearby.[10] The Fertile Crescent flora comprises a high percentage of plants that can self-pollinate, but may also be cross-pollinated.[11] These plants, called "selfers", were one of the geographical advantages of the area because they did not depend on other plants for reproduction.[10]
History[edit]
Further information: History of the Middle East
The ancient Near East
Regions and states
Fertile Crescent
Mesopotamia
Akkadian Empire
Assyria
Babylonia
Neo-Assyrian Empire
Neo-Babylonian Empire
Sumer
Egypt
Ancient Egypt
Persia
Achaemenid Empire
Elam
Medes
Anatolia
Hittites
Hurrians
Neo-Hittite states
Urartu
The Levant
Ancient Israel
Phoenicia
Archaeological periods
Chronology
Bronze Age
Bronze Age collapse
Iron Age
Languages
Akkadian
Aramaic
Assyriology
Cuneiform script
Elamite
Hebrew
Hittite
Hurrian
Phoenician
Sumerian
Urartian
Literature
Babylonian
Hittite texts
Sumerian
Mythology
Babylonian
Hittite
Mesopotamian
Egyptian
Other topics
Cradle of civilization
Assyrian law
Babylonian astronomy
Babylonian law
Babylonian mathematics
Cuneiform law
History of the Middle East
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As well as possessing many sites with the skeletal and cultural remains of both pre-modern and early modern humans (e.g., at Tabun and Es Skhul caves in Israel), later Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, and Epipalaeolithic semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers (the Natufians); the Fertile Crescent 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 BCE (and includes sites such as Göbekli Tepe and 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 the region for writing and the formation of hierarchical statelevel societies. This has earned the region the nickname "The cradle of civilization".
It is in this region where the first libraries appeared, some 5,000 years ago. The oldest known library was found in northern Syria, in the ruins of Ebla, a major commercial center that was destroyed around 1650 BCE.[12]
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, except northern Mesopotamia which had just enough rain to make some farming possible. To protect against flooding, they made levees.[13]
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 — gradual concentration of salt and other minerals in soils with a long history of irrigation.
Early domestications[edit]
Prehistoric seedless figs were discovered at Gilgal I in the Jordan Valley, suggesting that fig trees were being planted some 11,400 years ago.[14] Cereals were already grown in Syria as long as 9,000 years ago.[15] Small cats (Felis silvestris) also were domesticated in this region.[16]

Languages[edit]
Linguistically, the Fertile Crescent was a region of great diversity. Historically, Semitic languages generally prevailed in the lowlands, whilst in the mountainous areas to the east and north a number of generally unrelated languages were found including Elamite, Kassite, and Hurro-Urartian. 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 which does exist suggests that by the third millennium BCE and into the second, several language groups already existed in the region. These included:[17][18]
Proto-Euphratean language – a non-Semitic language considered to be the substratum language of the people that introduced farming into Southern Iraq in the Early Ubaid period (5300-4700 BC).
Sumerian – a non-Semitic language which displays a Sprachbund-type relationship with neighbouring Akkadian
Semitic languages – Akkadian, Amorite, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Canaanite.
Hurro-Urartian languages – a small family. (The otherwise isolated Kassite language may be related.)
Hattic – a language isolate, spoken originally in central Anatolia.
Indo-European languages – generally believed to be later intrusive languages, such as Hittite and the Indo-Aryan material attested in the Mittani civilization.
Links between Hurro-Urartian and Hattic and the indigenous languages of the Caucasus have frequently been suggested, but are not generally accepted.
See also[edit]
Hilly Flanks
History of Mesopotamia
History of agriculture
Hydraulic empire
Near East
Beth Nahrain
Notes and references[edit]
Jump up ^ "Fertile Crescent". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 28 January 2018.
Jump up ^ Haviland, William A., et. al (2013). The Essence of Anthropology (3rd ed.). Belmont, California: Wadsworth. p. 104. ISBN 1111833443.
Jump up ^ Ancient Mesopotamia/India. Culver City, California: Social Studies School Service. 2004. p. 4. ISBN 1560041668.
^ Jump up to: a b Abt, Jeffrey (2011). American Egyptologist: the life of James Henry Breasted and the creation of his Oriental Institute. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 193–194, 436. ISBN 978-0-226-0011-04.
Jump up ^ Goodspeed, George Stephen (1904). A History of the ancient world: for high schools and academies. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 5–6.
Jump up ^ Breasted, James Henry (1914). "Earliest man, the Orient, Greece, and Rome". In Robinson, James Harvey; Breasted, James Henry; Beard, Charles A. Outlines of European history, Vol. 1 (PDF). Boston: Ginn. pp. 56–57. "The Ancient Orient" map is inserted between pages 56 and 57.
Jump up ^ 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. "The Ancient Oriental World" map is inserted between pages 100 and 101.
Jump up ^ Clay, Albert T. (1924). "The so-called Fertile Crescent and desert bay". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 44: 186–201. doi:10.2307/593554. JSTOR 593554.
Jump up ^ 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. 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.
^ Jump up to: a b Diamond, Jared. (March 1997). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-03891-2.
Jump up ^ Diamond, Jared. (March 1997). Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-03891-2.
Jump up ^ Murray, S. (2009). The Library: An Illustrated History. New York, NY : Skyhorse Pub., 2009.
Jump up ^ Beck, Roger B.; Black, Linda; Krieger, Larry S.; Naylor, Phillip C.; Shabaka, Dahia Ibo (1999). World History: Patterns of Interaction. Evanston, IL: McDougal Littell. ISBN 0-395-87274-X.
Jump up ^ Norris, Scott (1 June 2006). "Ancient Fig Find May Push Back Birth of Agriculture". National Geographic Society. Retrieved 6 March 2017.
Jump up ^ "Genographic Project: The Development of Agriculture", Archived 2016-04-14 at the Wayback Machine. National Geographic
Jump up ^ Driscoll, et al., "The near eastern origin of cat domestication", Science 2007;317:519-23
Jump up ^ Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia. Ed. Steadman & McMahon. 2011. Pg 233, 522, 556.
Jump up ^ A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Ed: T Potts, 2012. Pg 28, 570, 584.
Bibliography[edit]
Jared Diamond, Guns, germs and steel. A short history of everybody for the last 13'000 years, 1997.
Library resources about
Fertile Crescent
Online books
Resources in your library
Resources in other libraries
Further reading[edit]
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.
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Fertile Crescent.
Ancient Fertile Crescent Almost Gone, Satellite Images Show – from National Geographic News, May 18, 2001.
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VIAF: 243180655
GND: 4517565-2
Coordinates: 36°N 40°E / 36°N 40°E / 36; 40
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fertile_Crescent&oldid=833517117"
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