TWO
The Middle East
Before Muhammad
When does the history of the Middle East start? At what point should this
supposedly concise history begin? Every profession has its unique hazards.
For historians, it is the urge to trace causal relationships as far back as pos¬
sible. We are trained to see that every event or trend must have come from
something, which in turn must have been caused by something else. Does
this quest take us back to Adam, Eve, and the serpent in the Garden of
Eden? If history can be denned as humanity's recorded past, then the Mid¬
dle East has had more history than any other part of the world. Although
the human species probably originated in Africa, the main breakthroughs
to civilization occurred in the Middle East. It is here that most staple food
crops were initially cultivated, most farm animals first domesticated, and
the earliest agricultural villages founded. Here, too, arose the world's oldest
cities, the first governments, and the earliest religious and legal systems.
Writing and the preservation of records were Middle Eastern inventions.
Without them history would be inconceivable.
Also inconceivable would be a complete coverage of all aspects of Mid¬
dle East history in a concise narrative. It is easy to cut out trivia, but we
hate to omit the whole span of recorded history from the earliest river val¬
ley civilizations up to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This sub¬
ject is by no means trivial, but its omission reduces the time we must cover
from sixty centuries to fifteen. History courses on Western civilization or
the ancient world usually drop the Middle East after Rome's fall. The con¬
ventional date of this event is 476 c.E. ("of the common era," the equiv¬
alent of A.D.), but perhaps you know that the center of Roman power
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