Dictionary:
Fer·tile Crescent (fŭr'tl)  |
A region of the Middle East arching across the northern part of the Syrian Desert and extending from the Nile Valley to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The civilizations of Egypt, Phoenicia, Assyria, and Babylonia developed in this area, which was also the site of numerous migrations and invasions.
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| Archaeology Dictionary: Fertile Crescent |
A term invented in 1916 by James Breasted, first director of the Oriental Institute, Chicago. What he referred to was the roughly crescent-shaped area of land between Egypt, through the Levant, into southern Anatolia and on to Mesopotamia and the Zagros Mountains. Conditions here were favourable for the development of farming, and it is here that many of the earliest farming sites have indeed been found. The term is less heavily used today, however, because early farming sites have also been found outside the Crescent and in more marginal landscapes.
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Term used by historians and prehistorians to describe the ancient Near East's agricultural heartland, which produced the Neolithic revolution and the rise of the world's first civilizations.
The Fertile Crescent stretches from the Mediterranean coast north across the Syrian Desert to Mesopotamia and then south to the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Parts of Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran are within it.
The first civilization of Sumer and the civilizations of the Bible - Assyria, Akkad, Persia, and ancient Egypt, as well as the Jewish kingdoms of Judah and Israel - all developed in the Fertile Crescent, with cities, agricultural towns and villages, and herders of domesticated sheep and goats. Both ancient Greece and Rome invaded to control the richness of the region, and the Roman Empire continued through the Islamic conquests of the 700s, its Byzantine emperors ruling from Constantinople until the Ottoman Turks conquered the capital in 1453, making it their own capital of Istanbul.
Under the Ottoman Empire, the crescent had districts or provinces (vilayets) and subdistricts (sanjaks). After World War I, with the defeat of the Ottomans, Britain and France administered most of it under League of Nations mandates. Beginning in the 1920s, Arab leaders developed various plans for unifying it, and the Hashimites were especially eager to see it ruled by one of their amirs. After World War II, the concept of pan-Arabism was championed by Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser and by the Baʿthist political parties of Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Today, Fertile Crescent unity is little talked about, but the Islamist political resurgence and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) remind many that common interests and common heritage may yet serve to unite the Arab world, much of which now exists in the Fertile Crescent.
Bibliography
Braver, M., ed. Atlas of the Middle East. New York: Macmillan, 1988.
— ZACHARY KARABELL
| Wikipedia: Fertile Crescent |
The Fertile Crescent is a region in the Near East, incorporating the Levant and Mesopotamia, and often incorrectly extended to Egypt. Mesopotamia is considered the cradle of civilization and saw the development of the earliest human civilizations and is the birthplace of writing and the wheel. The region broadly corresponds to present-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Kuwait, Jordan, south-eastern Turkey and west and south-western Iran. The term "Fertile Crescent" was coined by University of Chicago archaeologist James Henry Breasted in his "Ancient Records of Egypt", around 1900.[1] The region was named so due to its rich soil and crescent shape.
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As crucial as rivers were to the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, they were not the only factor in the area's precocity. Ecologically 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 due to ecosystems becoming 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 fact that this area has borne the brunt of the tectonic divergence between the African and Arabian plates, and the converging Arabian and Eurasian plates, has also made this region a very diverse zone of high snow-covered mountains, fertile broad alluvial basins and desert plateaux, which has also increased its biodiversity further and enabled the survival into historic times of species not found elsewhere.
Furthermore the Fertile Crescent had a climate diversity and major climatic changes which encouraged the evolution of many "r" type annual plants, which produce more edible seeds than "K" type perennial plants, and 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 possessed the wild progenitors of 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 — and the fifth species, the horse, lived nearby.[2]
As a result 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 Israel), 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 BCE (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 this region for writing, and the formation of state-level 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.[3]
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 — the gradual concentration of salt and other minerals in soils with a long history of irrigation.
In the contemporary era, river waters remain a potential source of friction in the region. The Jordan lies on the borders of Israel, the kingdom of Jordan and the areas administered by the Palestinian Authority. Turkey and Syria each control about a quarter of the length of the Euphrates, on whose lower reaches Iraq is still heavily dependent.
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Archaeology Dictionary. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology. Copyright © 2002, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more |
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| Mideast & N. Africa Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Fertile Crescent". Read more |
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