A Concise History of the Middle East

Some Descriptive Geography ••• 7

is "east" for France and Italy is "west" for India and China. Logically, we

could say "Southwest Asia," but would that not leave out Egypt and Euro¬

pean Turkey? Our conventional view of the "Old World" as having three

continents—Europe, Asia, and Africa—breaks down once we consider

their physical and cultural geography. Do Asia and Africa divide at the

Suez Canal, at the border between Egypt and Israel, or somewhere east of

Sinai? What differences are there between peoples living east and west

of the Ural Mountains or the Bosporus? For us humans, continents are

not really logical either.

So let us define a "Middle East" that the press, radio, and television have

made familiar to us. Its geographical limits may be disputed, but this book

will treat the Middle East as running from the Nile Valley to the Muslim

lands of Central Asia (roughly, the valley of the Amu Darya, or Oxus,

River), from southeast Europe to the Arabian Sea. We may stretch or shrink

the area when discussing a given historical period in which political reali¬

ties may have altered the conventional outline. After all, the lands south and

east of the Mediterranean were the East to our cultural forebears, until they

went on to India and China, whereupon the Muslim lands became the

Near East. World War II made it the Middle East, and so it has remained,

despite UN efforts to rename it "West Asia." For navigation and aviation,

peacetime commerce and wartime strategy, and journalism and politics,

the area is in the middle, flanked by centers of population and power.

SOME DESCRIPTIVE GEOGRAPHY

History waits upon geography. Before you can have a play, there must be a
stage. Perhaps we should spend a lot of time on topography and climate,
flora and fauna, and other aspects of descriptive geography. Some text¬
books do, but they may remind you of the bad old way of teaching geogra¬
phy by making schoolchildren memorize the names of mountains, rivers,
capitals, and principal products of countries. Let us stick to the few essen¬
tial points that you need to master before starting your study of Middle
East history. We can add the details later.

Climate

The Middle East tends to be hot and dry. Most parts get some rainfall, but

usually in amounts too small or too irregular to support settled agricul¬

ture. Yet the world's oldest farming villages have been unearthed in the

highlands of Anatolia (Asiatic Turkey), Persia, and Palestine. Others have