Fertile Crescent

A map of the Fertile Crescent

The Fertile Crescent is a crescent-shaped strip of fertile land stretching from Iraq and western Iran through eastern Turkey and down the Syrian, Lebanese, and Israeli coasts. In defining the Fertile Crescent, some authorities include Cyprus and/or the northern coast of Egypt with the Nile Delta.

The Fertile Crescent is believed to be the first region where settled farming emerged as people started the process of clearance and modification of natural vegetation to grow newly domesticated plants as crops. Early human civilizations such as Sumer in Mesopotamia flourished as a result. Technological advances in the region include the development of agriculture and the use of irrigation, of writing, the wheel, and glass, most emerging first in Mesopotamia.

Quotes

• Western Asia may be roughly divided into three belts of country, the Mountains or high Table-lands, the Fertile Lands, and the Desert. Of these three, the first and last have been ceaseless in their pressure on the second, and the history of Western Asia is largely the story of the actions and reactions on each other of the peoples from the mountains of the north, and from the southern Desert, in the effort to occupy and to hold the Fertile Lands between them. This central belt stretches in a crescent (Breasted, Ancient Times, c. iv, gives it the name of the ' Fertile Crescent ') from the border of Egypt, north and north-eastwards through Palestine and the Lebanon to the Euphrates, then eastwards to the Tigris, and then southwards through the Mesopotamian plain to the head of the Persian Gulf. Assyria occupies about the centre of the crescent, Babylonia its eastern wing, while its western wing includes Syria and Palestine, and is produced into the Nile valley to the edge of the African deserts. Round this crescent ran the main roads from Mesopotamia to Egypt, which trade or aggression was bound to follow.
  • Alfred Walter Frank Blunt, Israel in World History. Oxford University Press. 1927. p. 9. 

• 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.
  • James Henry Breasted, Ancient Times: A History of the Early World. Ginn & Company. 1916. p. 100. 

• The names of the ancient cities in the fertile crescent ring out the beginning of the known history of mankind: Memphis, Jericho, Babylon, Suza, Assur, Nineveh and many others, where not only agriculture, but pottery and music, graphic arts and writing, were born, and geometry came to regulate land ownership, and arithmetic, perhaps to calculate taxation.
  • Alexander (or Alexandre) Dorozynski, (1977). "Change comes again to the fertile crescent". IDRC reports 6 (4): 3–6.

• The Fertile Crescent has always been in close touch with other parts of the Middle East: Turkey, Iran, the Arabian peninsula, and Egypt. Indeed the ties binding it to each of those subregions have usually been stronger and more numerous than those between any other two.
  With the Arabian peninsula there was, first of all, the blood tie. For millennia, the Fertile Crescent has been periodically replenished by waves of peoples and tribes migrating from the desert and settling in the steppes or sown areas of Syria and Iraq. In addition, the beduin tribes, following their camel pastures and the availability of water, travel each year hundreds of miles between their winter quarters in the peninsula and their summer abodes in the crescent. The nomads and semi nomads supplied the settled areas of Syria and Iraq with camels, the essential means of transport in the Middle East; with fine horses, used for ceremony and war, and with various animal products such as goat and camel hair.
  • Charles Philip Issawi, The Fertile Crescent, 1800-1914: A Documentary Economic History. Studies in Middle Eastern history. Oxford University Press. 1988. p. 3. ISBN 0195049519. 

• The Fertile Crescent is considered the first of at least seven centers of agriculture origin in the world (Smith 1998). Barley, along with wheat (Tritium spp.), pea (Pisum sativum L.), lentil (Lens culinaris L.), goat (Capra aegagrus hircus), sheep (Ovis aries), and cow (Bos taurus), set the stage for the evolution of agriculture in the Near East, which eventually spread to North Africa, further east and north in Asia, and to Europe (Smith 1998).
  • Steven Edward Ullrich, "Chapter 1. Significance, Adaptation, Production, and Trade of Barley". Barley: Production, Improvement, and Uses. Volume 12 of World Agriculture Series. John Wiley & Sons. 2010. pp. 3–13. ISBN 0470958626.  (quote from p. 3; edited by Steven E. Ullrich)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Fertile Crescent on Wikipedia
• The Fertile Crescent, explained. UChicago News.
• (January 54, 2020)"Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent - A Short History". World History Encyclopedia, YouTube.