SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 117Crescent, has been one of the traditional foci of Western as well as Eastern
imagination and historiography. Following this ancient highway, we cannot
but recall Abraham who went before us, from Ur of the Chaldees by way of
Harrān to the land of Canaan in Genesis, and on to Mecca according to
Muslim tradition.^89 But the Fertile Crescent’s unity, and by extension that of
the Mountain Arena that contains it, has been obscured—as already noted—
by the natural and political frontier which is deemed to separate its eastern
from its western segment. I proposed a preliminary description of the Moun-
tain Arena in my Empire to commonwealth.^90 Here I offer a new version of
that account.
Speaking very generally, the Mountain Arena may be envisaged as “a rough
parallelogram... as large as India,”^91 whose perimeter abuts on and interacts
with, but does not embrace, the Black Sea in the North, the Iranian plateau
in the East, the Indian Ocean in the South (with India itself beyond it), and
in the West the Eg yptian and Sahara Deserts and the Mediterranean Sea.
Slightly more precisely, one might compare it to a Greek stadium, its square
end the South Arabian coast and its half- circle end the Fertile Crescent in the
North. I will loosely here call it an “arena,” appealing for the general concept
to the younger Pliny’s description of the Tuscan coast: “Picture to yourself a
vast amphitheatre such as could only be a work of Nature. The great spread-
ing plain is ringed round by mountains... .”^92 The geographer Ibn Hawqal,
born and raised at Nisibis in the Jazīra (Upper Mesopotamia) and writing
about the year 988 (therefore the chronicler Elias bar Shenaya’s fellow towns-
man and elder contemporary), describes this heartland as like a bird, with
Syria its head, the Jazīra its chest, yemen its tail, and Basra (Iraq) and Eg ypt
its wings.^93
The arena in the strict sense, the great Syro- Arabian plain, is rimmed by an
almost continuous line of mountains, Amanus and Taurus (and related
ranges beyond^94 ) in the North, Zagros to the East, then in the South the
highlands of Oman, and of yemen mirrored by Ethiopia’s rugged plateau,
“hard of access and covered in snow... where storms and cold are constant
89 R. Firestone, Journeys in holy lands (Albany, N.y. 1990) 25–26, 63–71.
90 Fowden, Empire to commonwealth [4:53] 15–19, and the map following 205. For a superb pan-
oramic representation of the Mountain Arena, see I. I. Nawwab and others, Aramco and its world ( Wa s h-
ington, D.C. 1980) 6–7, and the map inserted at the end of the volume.
91 T. E. Lawrence, The complete 1922 Seven pillars of wisdom: The ‘Oxford’ text (Fordingbridge
2004) 12–13.
92 Pliny the younger, Letters [ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford 1963); tr. B. Radice (London 1963)]
5.6.7.
93 Ibn Hawqal, The form of the earth (Sūrat al- ard) [ed. J. H. Kramers (Leiden 1938–39^2 ); tr.
(French) J. H. Kramers and G. Wiet, Configuration de la terre (Beirut 1964)] 209 (of the Arabic text,
noted in the translation).
94 Ibn Hawqal, Form of the earth [4:93] 169; cf. C. E. Bosworth, “al- Kabk,” EIs^2 4.342a.