Everything about The Fertile Crescent totally explained
The
Fertile Crescent is a
crescent-shaped region in the
Middle East incorporating the
Levant,
Ancient Mesopotamia, and
Ancient Egypt, known as the "
Cradle of Civilization." The term "Fertile Crescent" was coined by
University of Chicago archaeologist
James Henry Breasted, around
1900. The region was named the "Fertile Crescent" because of its rich soil and half-moon shape. The Fertile Crescent was divided into 1) the eastern portion, consisting of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys, called Mesopotamia (land between the the rivers), and 2) the western, or Mediterranean, portion.
Watered by the
Nile,
Euphrates and
Tigris rivers and covering some 400,000-500,000 square kilometers, the region extends from the eastern shore of the
Mediterranean Sea around the north of the
Syrian Desert and through the
Jazirah and
Mesopotamia to the
Persian Gulf. These areas correspond to the present-day
Egypt,
Israel, and
Lebanon and parts of
Jordan,
Syria,
Iraq,
Kuwait, south-eastern
Turkey and south-western
Iran. The population of the Nile River Basin is about 70 million, the Jordan River Basin about 20 million, and the Tigris and Euphrates Basins about 30 million, giving the present-day Fertile Crescent a total population of approximately 120 million, or at least a quarter of the population of the Middle East.
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 aluvial 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, as
Jared Diamond shows in
Guns, Germs, and Steel, the Fertile Crescent possessed the wild progenitors of the eight
Neolithic founder crops important in early
agriculture (for example 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.
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 (for example 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.
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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Fertile Crescent'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://fertile_crescent.totallyexplained.com">Fertile Crescent Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
