The Fertile Crescent is believed to be the very 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.[5] 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.
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.
There is no single term for this region in antiquity. At the time that Breasted was writing, it roughly corresponded with the territories of the
Ottoman Empire ceded to Britain and France in the
Sykes–Picot Agreement. Historian Thomas Scheffler has noted that Breasted was following a trend in Western geography to "overwrite the classical geographical distinctions between continents, countries and landscapes with large, abstract spaces", drawing parallels with the work of
Halford Mackinder, who conceptualised Eurasia as a 'pivot area' surrounded by an 'inner crescent',
Alfred Thayer Mahan'sMiddle East, and
Friedrich Naumann'sMitteleuropa.[12]
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.[citation needed]
The Fertile Crescent had many diverse
climates, and major climatic changes encouraged the evolution of many
"r" typeannual plants, which produce more edible seeds than
"K" typeperennial 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.[13] The Fertile Crescent flora comprises a high percentage of plants that can
self-pollinate, but may also be
cross-pollinated.[13] These plants, called "
selfers", were one of the geographical advantages of the area because they did not depend on other plants for reproduction.[13]
It is in this region where the first
libraries appeared about 4,500 years ago. The oldest known libraries are found in
Nippur (in Sumer) and
Ebla (in Syria), both from
c. 2500 BCE.[14]
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. Northern Mesopotamia had sufficient rain to make some farming possible. To protect against flooding they made levees.[15]
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
Prehistoric seedless
figs were discovered at
Gilgal I in the
Jordan Valley, suggesting that fig trees were being planted some 11,400 years ago.[16]Cereals were already grown in
Syria as long as 9,000 years ago.[17] Small cats (Felis silvestris) also were domesticated in this region.[18] Also,
legumes including
peas,
lentils and
chickpea were domesticated in this region.
Modern analyses[19][20] comparing 24 craniofacial measurements reveal a relatively diverse population within the pre-
Neolithic,
Neolithic and
Bronze Age Fertile Crescent,[19] supporting the view that several populations occupied this region during these time periods.[19][21][22][23][24][25][26] Similar arguments do not hold true for the
Basques and
Canary Islanders of the same time period, as the studies demonstrate those ancient peoples to be "clearly associated with modern Europeans". Additionally, no evidence from the studies demonstrates
Cro-Magnon influence, contrary to former suggestions.[19]
The studies further suggest a
diffusion of this diverse population away from the Fertile Crescent, with the early migrants moving away from the
Near East—westward into
Europe and
North Africa, northward to
Crimea, and northeastward to
Mongolia.[19] They took their agricultural practices with them and interbred with the
hunter-gatherers whom they subsequently came in contact with while perpetuating their farming practices. This supports prior
genetic[27][28][29][30][31] and
archaeological[19][32][33][34][35][36] studies which have all arrived at the same conclusion.
Consequently, contemporary in situ peoples absorbed the agricultural way of life of those early migrants who ventured out of the Fertile Crescent. This is contrary to the suggestion that the spread of agriculture disseminated out of the Fertile Crescent by way of sharing of knowledge. Instead, the view now supported by a preponderance of evidence is that it occurred by actual migration out of the region, coupled with subsequent interbreeding with indigenous local populations whom the migrants came in contact with.[19]
The studies show also that not all present day
Europeans share strong genetic affinities to the
Neolithic and
Bronze Age inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent; the closest ties to the Fertile Crescent rest with Southern Europeans. The same study further demonstrates all present-day
Europeans to be closely related.[19]
Linguistically, the Fertile Crescent was a region of great diversity. Historically,
Semitic languages generally prevailed in the modern regions of
Iraq,
Syria,
Jordan,
Lebanon,
Israel,
Palestine,
Sinai and the fringes of southeast
Turkey and northwest
Iran, as well as the
Sumerian (a
language isolate) in Iraq, whilst in the mountainous areas to the east and north a number of generally unrelated
language isolates were found, including;
Elamite,
Gutian and
Kassite in
Iran, and
Hattic,
Kaskian and
Hurro-Urartian in Turkey. 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 that does exist suggests that, by the third millennium BCE and into the second, several language groups already existed in the region. These included:[37][38][39][40][41][42]
Proto-Euphratean language: a hypothetical non-Semitic language previously hypothesized to be the
substratum language of the people that introduced farming into Southern
Iraq in the Early
Ubaid period. (5300–4700 BCE) The linguistic consensus today is that multiple unknown substrata contributed to the formation of the artifacts in Sumerian names that motivated the Proto-Euphratean substrate hypothesis, including fossilized archaic elements from earlier stages of Sumerian itself.[43]
Indo-European languages: generally believed to be later intrusive languages arriving after 2000 BCE, such as
Hittite,
Luwian and the
Indo-Aryan material attested in the
Mitanni civilization, but recent evidence suggests that the language family emerged from the Fertile Crescent as early as 6000 BCE[44]
^Breasted, James Henry (1914).
"Earliest man, the Orient, Greece, and Rome"(PDF). In Robinson, James Harvey; Breasted, James Henry; Beard, Charles A. (eds.). Outlines of European history, Vol. 1. Boston: Ginn. pp. 56–57.
Archived(PDF) from the original on 2022-10-09. "The Ancient Orient" map is inserted between pages 56 and 57.
^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.
JSTOR593554.
^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.
ISBN978-0-691-02582-7. 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.
^Barker, G. (2002). Bellwood, P.; Renfrew, C. (eds.). Transitions to farming and pastoralism in North Africa. pp. 151–161.
^Bar-Yosef O (1987), "Pleistocene connections between Africa and SouthWest Asia: an archaeological perspective", The African Archaeological Review; Chapter 5, pp 29–38
^M. Zvelebil, in Hunters in Transition: Mesolithic Societies and the Transition to Farming, M. Zvelebil (editor), Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK (1986) pp. 5–15, 167–188.
^P. Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, Blackwell: Malden, MA (2005).
^Dokládal, M.; Brožek, J. (1961). "Physical Anthropology in Czechoslovakia: Recent Developments". Curr. Anthropol. 2 (5): 455–477.
doi:
10.1086/200228.
S2CID161324951.
^Zvelebil, M. (1989). "On the transition to farming in Europe, or what was spreading with the Neolithic: a reply to Ammerman (1989)". Antiquity. 63 (239): 379–383.
doi:
10.1017/s0003598x00076110.
S2CID162882505.
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.