The Fertile Crescent at maximum defined extent, with the

names of ancient civilizations found there.

The Neolithic
Mesolithic
Fertile crescent
Levantine corridor
Heavy Neolithic
Shepherd Neolithic
Trihedral Neolithic
Qaraoun culture
Tahunian culture
Yarmukian Culture
Halaf culture
Halaf-Ubaid Transitional
period
Ubaid culture
Byblos
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Fertile Crescent is a crescent-shaped region
containing the comparatively moist and fertile land
of otherwise arid and semi-arid Western Asia, and
the Nile Valley and Nile Delta of northeast Africa.
The term was popularized by University of Chicago
archaeologist James Henry Breasted. Having
originated in the study of ancient history, the
concept soon developed and today retains meanings
in international geopolitics and diplomatic relations.
In current usage, all definitions of the Fertile
Crescent include Mesopotamia, the land in and
around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The
modern-day countries with significant territory
within the Fertile Crescent are Iraq, Kuwait, Syria,
Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Cyprus, and
Egypt, besides the southeastern fringe of Turkey and
the western fringes of Iran.
[1][2][3]
The region is often called the cradle of civilization;
it saw the development of many of the earliest
human civilizations. Some of its technological
inventions (but not necessarily first nor uniquely)
are writing, glass, the wheel and the use of
irrigation. The earliest known western civilizations
manifestly arose and flourished using the water
supplies and agricultural resources available in the
Fertile Crescent. They were not necessarily the first nor the only
source of civilization, as Breasted believed. Moreover, plants and
animals were not domesticated there but in the surrounding nuclear
area, where the original plant species still grow wild.
1 Terminology
2 Languages
3 Geography
3.1 Vegetation
3.2 History
4 Notes and references
5 Bibliography
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Jericho
Tell Aswad
atalhyk
Jarmo
Europe
Boian culture
Cernavod culture
Coofeni culture
Cucuteni-Trypillian culture
Dudeti culture
Gorneti culture
GumelniaKaranovo culture
Hamangia culture
Linear Pottery culture
Malta Temples
Petreti culture
Sesklo culture
Tisza culture
Tiszapolgr culture
Usatovo culture
Varna culture
Vina culture
Vuedol culture
Neolithic Transylvania
Neolithic Southeastern Europe
China
Peiligang culture
Pengtoushan culture
Beixin culture
Cishan culture
Dadiwan culture
Houli culture
Xinglongwa culture
Xinle culture
Zhaobaogou culture
Hemudu culture
Daxi culture
Majiabang culture
Yangshao culture
Hongshan culture
Dawenkou culture
Liangzhu culture
Majiayao culture
Qujialing culture
Longshan culture
6 See also
7 External links
The term "Fertile Crescent" was popularized by University of
Chicago archaeologist James Henry Breasted, beginning with his
high school textbooks Outlines of European History in 1914 and
Ancient Times, A History of the Early World in 1916.
[4]
Breasted's
1916 textbook description of the Fertile Crescent:
[4]
The westernmost extension of Asia is an irregular region
roughly included within the circuit of waters marked out by
then Caspian and Black seas on the north, by the
Mediterranean and Red seas on the west, and by the Indian
Ocean and the Persian Gulf on the south and east. It is a region
consisting chiefly of mountains in the north and desert in the
south. The earliest home of men in this great arena of Western
Asia is a borderland between the desert and the mountains, a
kind of cultivable fringe of the desert, a fertile crescent having
the mountains on one side and the desert on the other.
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 downa
bay not of water but of sandy waste, some five hundred miles
(800 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 heighttoo high indeed to be
watered by the Tigris and Euphrates, which have cut caons
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
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Baodun culture
Shijiahe culture
Erlitou culture
Tibet
South Asia
Mehrgarh
farming, animal husbandry
pottery, metallurgy, wheel
circular ditches, henges, megaliths
Neolithic religion
Chalcolithic
age-long struggle between the mountain peoples of the north
and the desert wanderers of these grasslandsa struggle which
is still going onfor 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 island of
Cyprus and the rest of the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean Sea,
Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon. Water sources include
the Jordan River. At its maximum extent, the Fertile Crescent also
may include Egypt and the Nile Valley and Delta within it. The inner
boundary is delimited by the dry climate of the Syrian Desert to the
south. Around the outer boundary are the arid and semi-arid lands of the Caucasus to the North, the Anatolian
highlands to the west, and the Sahara Desert to the west.
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 already by the third millennium BC, and into the second, several
language groups existed. These included:
[5][6]
Sumerian - a non-Semitic language which displays a Sprachbund-type relationship with neighbouring
Akkadian
Semitic languages - notably Akkadian.
Hurrian - a language isolate, later attested in the Urartian Empire. Some scholars postulate a link to
Northeastern Caucasian languages.
Hattic - another language isolate, spoken originally in central Anatolia. Some scholars also postulate a
link to Northeastern Caucasian languages
Indo-European languages - generally believed to be later intrusive languages, such as Hittite and the
Indo-Aryan attested in the Mittani civilization.
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As crucial as rivers and marshlands were to the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, they were not the only
factor in the area's precocity. The area is important as the "bridge" between Africa and Eurasia. This "bridging
role" has allowed the Fertile Crescent 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. Coupled with the Saharan pump theory, this Middle
Eastern land-bridge is of extreme importance 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, fertile broad alluvial basins and desert plateau, which has also increased its biodiversity further and
enabled the survival into historic times of species not found elsewhere.
Vegetation
The Fertile Crescent had many diverse climate, 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 of 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 animalscows, goats, sheep, and pigsand the fifth species, the
horse, lived nearby.
[7]
History
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 Palestine),
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 the region for writing and the formation of statelevel societies. This has earned the region
the nickname "The Cradle of Civilization."
Both the Tigris and Euphrates start in the Taurus Mountains of what is today 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.
[8]
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.
In the current era, river waters remain a potential source of friction in the region. The Jordan River lies on the
borders of Israel, the Kingdom of Jordan and areas administered by the Palestinian Authority. Turkey and Syria
each control about a quarter of the river Euphrates, on whose lower reaches Iraq is heavily dependent. In Syrian
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nationalism, the region is held to be a natural nation and is referred to as the Syrian Fertile Crescent.
[9]
Our Syria has distinct natural boundaries and extends from the Taurus range in the northwest and the
Zagros mountains in the northeast to the Suez canal and the Red sea in the south and includes the Sinai
peninsula and the gulf of Aqaba, and from the Syrian sea in the west, including the island of Cyprus, to
the arch of the Arabian desert and the Persian gulf in the east. This region is also known as the Syrian
Fertile Crescent.
[10]
^ Haviland, William A., et. al (2013). The Essence of
Anthropology (3rd ed.). Belmont, California:
Wadsworth. p. 104. ISBN 1111833443.
1.
^ Ancient Mesopotamia/India. Culver City,
California: Social Studies School Service. 2004. p. 4.
ISBN 1560041668.
2.
^ "Fertile Crescent" (http://kids.britannica.com
/elementary/art-54537/The-Fertile-Crescent-includes-
the-river-valleys-of-the-Nile?&articleTypeId=38).
Encyclopaedia Britannica. Retrieved 17 December
2013.
3.
^
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 (http://books.google.com
/books?id=YEc0bc93LwYC&pg=PA193)194
(http://books.google.com
/books?id=YEc0bc93LwYC&pg=PA194), 436
(http://books.google.com
/books?id=YEc0bc93LwYC&pg=PA436).
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
(http://books.google.com
/books?id=vmubAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA5)6
(http://books.google.com
/books?id=vmubAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA6).
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
(http://archive.org/download/outlinesofeurope01robi
/outlinesofeurope01robi.pdf). Boston: Ginn.
pp. 5657. "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
(http://archive.org/download/cu31924027764996
/cu31924027764996.pdf). Boston: Ginn.
pp. 100101. "The Ancient Oriental World" map is
4.
Fertile Crescent - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertile_Crescent
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inserted between pages 100 and 101.
Clay, Albert T. (1924). "The so-called Fertile
Crescent and desert bay". Journal of the American
Oriental Society 44: 186201. JSTOR 593554
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/593554).
Kuklick, Bruce (1996). "Essay on methods and
sources". Puritans in Babylon: the ancient Near East
and American intellectual life, 18801930. 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."
^ Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia. Ed.
Steadman & McMahon. 2011. Pg 233, 522, 556.
5.
^ A Companian to the Archaeology of the Ancient
Near East. Ed: T Potts, 2012. Pg 28, 570, 584.
6.
^ Diamond, Jared. (March 1997). Guns, Germs, and
Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton &
Company. ISBN 0-393-03891-2.
7.
^ Beck, Roger B.; Linda Black, Larry S. Krieger,
Phillip C. Naylor, Dahia Ibo Shabaka, (1999). World
History: Patterns of Interaction. Evanston, IL:
McDougal Littell. ISBN 0-395-87274-X.
8.
^ Kader, Haytham (1990). The Syrian Social
Nationalist Party: its ideology and early history.
University of Michigan. p. 42.
9.
^ Saadeh, Antun. "Syrian Social Nationalist Party".
www.ssnp.com.
10.
Jared Diamond, Guns, germs and steel. A short history of everybody for the last 13'000 years, 1997.
History of Mesopotamia
Hilly Flanks
History of agriculture
Ancient Fertile Crescent Almost Gone, Satellite Images Show (http://news.nationalgeographic.com
/news/2001/05/0518_crescent.html) - from National Geographic News, May 18, 2001
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fertile_Crescent&oldid=610433512"
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