Ancient Middle East and North Africa: History, Terminology, Definitions | Middle East And North Africa

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ANCIENT MIDDLE EASTERN HISTORY

Modern Levant
The Middle East is the source of three of the world’s great religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — and the home of the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures, All but one of the Seven Wonders of the World were roughly in the Middle East area and the first alphabets, first writing, first schools, first calendars and the first code of laws originated there. The world oldest inhabited city (Damascus) is there as well as most of the places mentioned in the Bible.

The primary ethnic groups of the Middle East are the Arabs, Turks, Iranians and Israelis (newly evolved from ancient Hebrews and Jews from around the world).

The horse arrived in the Sahara around around 1650 B.C. when the Hyksos conquered northern Egypt by chariot. The camel arrived in the Sahara around 200 B.C. A bas-relief from the Sumerian city of Ur — dated to 2500 B.C. — shows four onagers (donkeylike animals) pulling a cart for a king.

Websites on Islamic History: History of Islam: An encyclopedia of Islamic history historyofislam.com ; Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World oxfordislamicstudies.com ; Sacred Footsetps sacredfootsteps.com ; Islamic History Resources uga.edu/islam/history ; Internet Islamic History Sourcebook fordham.edu/halsall/islam/islamsbook ; Islamic History friesian.com/islam ; Muslim Heritage muslimheritage.com ; Chronological history of Islam barkati.net ; Arabs: Arab American National Museum arabamericanmuseum.org ; Summary of the History of the Arabs, Library of Congress loc.gov ; Arab News arabnews.com

Arab World

20120210-Africa_(Arab_Maghreb_Union).png
Maghreb

The word Arab appeared in pre-Islamic poetry to describe the Semitic-speaking tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. The use of the word Arab in the Koran is connected primarily wit the pastoral Bedouin tribes of the region. Culturally the Arab world is divided into two spheres — the Middle East and North Africa — with Egypt serving a the junction between the two.

The Arab world describes the countries in the Middle East and North Africa where the majority people speak Arabic and belong to the Arab ethnic group. It excludes Israel, Turkey and Iran, which are dominated, respectively, by Jews, Turks and Persians, but includes the Maghreb countries of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, which are sometimes not regarded as part of the Middle East.

The Arab world is made up of nineteen countries: Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Yemen, Oman and Iraq. There are also significant Arab populations in Iran, Turkey, East Africa, South America, Europe, North America, Southeast Asia and Australia.

Culturally the Arab world is divided into two spheres—the Middle East and North Africa—with Egypt serving a the junction between the two.

If the North African countries of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia are included the Middle East describes an area that stretches from the Atlantic coast of northern Africa to Afghanistan, a distance of around 5,600 kilometers and encompasses around 350 million people. Often the term Middle East is shortened to Mideast. West Asia sometimes used to the area between Afghanistan and Turkey.

Muslim World

The Muslim world refers to the countries whose populations are made up predominately of Muslims. These include the countries of the Middle East, the Maghreb countries plus non-Arab countries with majority Muslim populations such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Djibouti, Somalia, Niger, Senegal. Some Sub-Saharan African counties, particularly in West Africa and to a lesser extent East Africa, have large numbers of Muslims.

About 40 percent of Muslims are from South and Southeast Asia. About 30 percent live in the Middle East (including Turkey and Iran), about 25 percent live in Africa (including Egypt and North Africa). About 4 percent are in Europe and the former Soviet Union, and 1 percent are in North and South America. The Muslim world has geopolitcal importance because much of the world's oil reserves lie under land in Muslim countries. In addition the mostly Muslim Middle East lies were Asia, Africa and Europe all come together.

According to Pew Research Center, Although many countries in the Middle East-North Africa region, where the religion originated in the seventh century, are heavily Muslim, the region is home to only about 20 percent of the world’s Muslims. A majority of the Muslims globally (62 percent) live in the Asia-Pacific region, including large populations in Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran and Turkey. Indonesia is currently the country with the world’s largest Muslim population.[Source: Michael Lipka, Pew Research Center, August 9, 2017]

Near East, Middle East, Levant and Southwest Asia

West Asia

These days many people think of the Middle East as embracing the Arab countries of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, and Iraq. Some people also include Cyprus, Turkey, Israel and Iran, and a lesser degree Afghanistan, which are all not Arab. Sometimes Libya is included in the Middle East but is generally thought of being in North Africa. Sometimes Sudan and Mauritania are included but they are generally thought of being in Africa.

The term “Near East” was traditionally used to describe the region between the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to present-day Afghanistan. The term was commonly used to describe the region until the 1960s, when it started becoming more fashionable to use the term Middle East. The French and the U.S. State Department (2003) still use the term Near East. The United Nations uses the terms Near East, Middle East and West Asia.

The Near East is a Eurocentric term that was first used in the mid 19th century to distinguish it from the Far East which was defined in the 1852 Oxford English Dictionary as “the extreme eastern regions of the Old World. The term Nearer East was used before Near East. The first recorded use of the Middle East was in Catholic World magazine in 1897.

Southwest Asia, West Asia or Western Asia is the term many academics, UN bodies and other institutions use to describe what the popular press refers to as the Middle East. Southwest Asia embraces Anatolia, the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, Mesopotamia, the Armenian highlands, the Levant, the island of Cyprus, the Sinai Peninsula and the South Caucasus. It is separated from Africa by the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt, and separated from Europe by the waterways of the Turkish Straits and the watershed of the Greater Caucasus. The Middle East is a political term that has changed many times depending on political and historical context while West Asia is a geographical term with more consistency. It excludes most of Egypt and the northwestern part of Turkey, and includes the southern part of the Caucasus. [Source: Wikipedia]

The Levant is the area between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Referred to in the Bible as the “land flowing with milk and honey,” it usually refers an area occupied by modern-day Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

North Africa, the Maghreb and the Sahara

North Africa is used to describe the countries of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. Often Egypt is left out even though it is part of Africa. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya make up the Maghreb region of North Africa. Maghreb (also spelled Maghrib) literally means “the West” or “west of the setting sun” in Arabic. It refers to the western side of the Arab world and includes all of North Africa. It usually refers Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria and sometimes also Libya and Mauritania.

Much of the Maghreb countries is occupied by the Sahara Desert. The Sahara is the world's largest desert. According to the Guinness Book of Records, it stretches 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) east to west at is widest point, between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea, and measures between 1,290 and 2,250 kilometers (800 and 1,400 miles) from north to south, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahel of Africa, and cover 9,270,000 square kilometers (3,579,000 square miles), an area equal to the United States including Alaska. It contains half the desert surface in the world and is seven times largest than next biggest desert, the Gobi in China and Mongolia.

Contrary to what most people think the Sahara is not an endless expanse of sand dunes. Only about 15 percent of the Sahara Desert is covered by sand dunes and ergs (basins filled with sand dunes and sand seas). Most of it is composed of plains, with wind-burnished gravel and boulders, and stony upland plateaus (hamadas) and isolated mountain ranges. Most of Sahara lies on a series of plateaus that have an average elevation of around 305 meters (1,000 feet). Across it from southeast to northwest runs a broad rocky ridge. Caravans have traditionally given the sand seas a wide berth. The largest one, occupying an area the size of France, is the Libyan Erg near Egypt. Other large ones include the Great Western Erg, the Iguid Erg and the Great Eastern Erg.

In the heart of the desert are ranges of spectacular sandstone mountains on top of the Tasili n’Aijer plateau. These mountain embrace huge cliffs, spires of rock, archways, columns, shallow caves and mushroom-shaped rock formations. The formations have mostly been carved by winds that pick up sand and gravel and scour the rock like a sandblaster. Most of the sand is quartzite itself originally scoured from sandstone rock.

Jericho

plastered skull from Jericho

Jericho — the Biblical city of Joshua, trumpets and falling walls — is regarded by some as the oldest city in the world. Established around 7,500 B.C. in an arid valley 600 feet below sea level in Palestine near the Dead Sea., ancient Jericho was home to 2000 to 3000 people that survived on plants that thrived in a fertile area around an oasis. Strains of wheat and barley and obsidian tools have been discovered that came from elsewhere. Ancient Jericho had an elaborate system of walls, towers and moats. The circular wall that surrounded the settlement had a circumference of about 200 meters and was four meters high. The wall in turn was surrounded by a 30-foot-wide, 10-foot-deep moat. The technology used to build them was virtually the same as those used in medieval castles. [Source: "History of Warfare" by John Keegan, Vintage Books]

Located near a permanent spring a few miles west of the Jordan River and excavated by Kathleen Kenyon, Jericho is certainly one of the world’s oldest fortified settlement but whether it qualifies as a city is a matter of some debate. There are indications of settlement after 9000 B.C.. This settlement grew to city-like status by 7000 B.C. The archaeological site is situated in the plain of the Jordan Valley two kilometers northwest of modern Jericho city. It is a large artificial mound, rising 21 meters high and covering an area of about one acre.

In 7000 B.C., Jericho encompassed of about eight to ten acres and was home to estimated two to three thousand people. It was inhabited by people who depended on collecting wild seeds for food. It is appears that they did not plant seeds, but harvested wild grains using scythes with flint edges and straight bone handles and used stone mortars with handles for grinding them. Some people lived in caves, while others occupied primitive villages with round huts made from sun-dried bricks. They buried their dead with jewelry in graves made out of rock.

Ain Ghazal

Ain Ghazal, an archeological site in Amman, Jordan was one of the largest population centers in the Middle East (three times larger than Jericho) from 7200 to 5000 B.C., a period in human history when sem-nomadic hunters and gathers were adapting to farming and animals herding and organizing themselves into cities. Ain Ghazal means

Ain Ghazal covers about 30 acres. The people were farmers and hunters and gatherers. They used stone tools and weapons and made clay figures and vessels. They lived in multi-room houses with stone walls and timber roof beams and cooking hearths. Plaster with decorations covered the walls and floors. They are meat and milk products from goats, grew wheat barely, lentils, peas and chickpeas, hunted wild cattle, boar and gazelles and gathered wild plants, almonds, figs and pistachios.

Mysterious human figures unearthed at Ain Ghazal, are among the oldest human statues ever found. Made of lime plaster and dating back to 7000 B.C., the figures were about 3½ feet tall and have bitumen accented eyes and look like aliens from outerspace. Scholars believe they played a ceremonial role and may have been images of gods or heros.

The figures come in two types: full figures and busts. Both types were made by forming plaster over a skeleton made of bundles of reed wrapped in twine. Facial features were probably made by hand with simple tools made of bone, wood or stone. The plaster technology that was used was fairly advanced and required heating limestone to temperatures if 600̊ to 900̊C

Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent

Ain Ghazal statue

Mesopotamia is Greek for “land between two rivers.” Located in southwest Asia (the Near East of Middle East), it refers to the geographic region which lies near the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. It doesn't really refer to particular civilization. Over the course of several millennia, many civilizations developed, collapsed, and were replaced in this fertile region.

Mesopotamia roughly corresponds to modern Iraq. Iraq is also home to some of the most important landmarks of the Judeo-Christian tradition, including the reputed Garden of Eden and Ur, the birthplace of the patriarch Abraham. The area had a rebirth of sorts in the Middle Ages, when Baghdad became a capital of the Islamic world and culture and art thrived there and mosques sprang up throughout the region. When war occurred in Iraq in the 1980s, 90s and 2000s, many in the art and historical fields worried about what might be damaged or destroyed. [Source: Deborah Solomon, New York Times, January 5, 2003]

The Fertile Crescent is region of fertile irrigated land that stretched across Mesopotamia and reached down the Mediterranean coast and included present-day Iran, Syria, southeastern Turkey, Lebanon and Israel. The Fertile Crescent gave birth to the Judaism and Christianity and shaped Muslims-Arab culture. The fertile land around the Tigris and the Euphrates was the product of alluvial material and silt deposited by the rivers when they flooded in the spring. So fertile was the land it gave birth to story of the Garden of Eden. The fertile land was greatly coveted by the nomadic tribes that lived around it in Arabia, Turkey and Iran. Periodically they sweep down out of their homelands and try to claim parts it.

Mesopotamia is also referred to as the Cradle of Civilization. Most of the early Sumerian city-states in were near the mouth of the Euphrates in the southeastern Iraq and spread northward. The Babylonians were based near where the Tigris and Euphrates approach and diverge in central Iraq. The Assyrians were based around the Tigris in northern Iraq.

Mesopotamia, Indian and Middle Eastern Trade

The Persian Gulf lies between two of the major breadbaskets of the ancient world, the Tigris-Euphrates area (Mesopotamia, meaning "between the rivers") in present-day Iraq and the Nile Valley in Egypt. Mesopotamia, a part of the area known as the Fertile Crescent, was important not only for food production but also for connecting East to West. [Source: Helen Chapin Metz, Persian Gulf States: A Country Study, Library of Congress, 1993 *]

Rivers provided the water that made agriculture possible. Agriculture, in turn, enabled people to settle in one area and to accumulate a food surplus that allowed them to pursue tasks besides growing food, namely, to create a civilization. They chose leaders, such as kings and priests; they built monuments; they devised systems of morality and religion; and they started to trade.*

seal from the Indus Valley

Mesopotamia became the linchpin of ancient international trade. The fertile soil between the Tigris and the Euphrates produced a arge surplus of food; however, it did not support forests to produce the timber necessary to build permanent structures. The region also lacked the mineral resources to make metals. Accordingly, the early inhabitants of Mesopotamia were forced to go abroad and trade their food for other raw materials. They found copper at Magan, an ancient city that lay somewhere in the contemporary state of Oman and, via Magan, traded with people in the Indus Valley for lumber and other finished goods.*

Trade between Mesopotamia and India was facilitated by the small size of the Persian Gulf. Water provided the easiest way to transport goods, and sailors crossed the gulf fairly early, moving out along the coasts of Persia and India until they reached the mouth of the Indus. Merchants and sailors became middlemen who used their position to profit from the movement of goods through the gulf. The people of Magan were both middlemen and suppliers because the city was a source of copper as well as a transit point for Indian trade. Over time, other cities developed that were exclusively entrepôts, or commercial way stations. One of the best known of these cities was Dilmun.*

Green Sahara Becomes A Desert

During the last 300,000 years there have been major periods of alternating wet and dry climates in the Sahara which in many cases were linked to the Ice Age eras when huge glaciers covered much of Europe and North America. Wet periods in the Sahara often occurred when the ice ages were waning. The last major rainy period in the Sahara lasted from about 12,000, when the last Ice Age began to wan in Europe, to 7,000 years ago. Temperatures and rainfall peaked around 9,000 years ago during the so-called Holocene Optimum.

During wet periods in the Sahara oak and cedar trees grew in the highlands and the Sahara itself was a savannah grassland with acacia trees and hackberry trees and shallow lakes and braided rivers. Rock and cave paintings from that time depict abundant wildlife — including elephants and giraffes that lived in the savannahs and hippopotami and crocodiles that lived in the rivers and lakes — and people, who hunted with bows and arrows, herded animals, collected wild grains and fished.

rock art from Tadrart Acacus, Libya

Remnants from the wet periods discovered by scientists include ostrich egg shells, high water marks around lakes that are presently dried up, swamp sediments, pollen from trees and grass and bones of elephants, giraffes, hippopotami, lions, fish, rhinoceros, frogs and crocodiles. Prehistoric inhabitants of Egypt may have raised ostriches. Large numbers of ostrich egg shells have been at excavations at a 9,000-year-old site at Farafra Oasis.

Beginning around 7,000 years the Sahara began changing from a savannah to a desert. The climates changes in the Sahara occurred in two episodes — the first 6,700 to 5,500 years ago and the second 4,000 to 3,600 years ago. These changed are may have occurred when the African monsoons and Mediterranean winds returned to their normal locations.

As the Sahara region dried out grasslands and lakes disappeared. Desiccation occurred relatively quickly, over a few hundred years. Desertification processes were accelerated as vegetation, which helped generate rain, was lost, causing even less rain, and the soil lost its ability to hold moisture when it did rain. Light-colored land without plants reflects rather than absorbs sunlight, producing less warm, moist cloud-forming updrafts, causing even less rain. When it did rain the water washed away or evaporated quickly. The result: desert. By 2000 B.C. the Sahara was as dry as it is now. The last lake dried up around 1000 B.C. The people that lived in the region were forced to leave and migrate south to find food and water. Some scientist believe some of these people settled on the Nile and became the ancient Egyptians.

Garamantes

Temperatures in the Sahara have reached 58 degrees C (136 degrees F). It is so hot there that building weather stations in the desert is impractical according to NASA. Yet, people live there and despite the inhospitable conditions, an empire the size of Germany once flourished there — its survival made possible an underground tunnel system. The ascendancy of the civilization, known as the Garamantes Empire, was “remarkable given a climate comparable to the modern-day Libyan Sahara Desert,” according to new research presented to the Geological Society of America on October 16, 2023 [Source: Brendan Rascius, Miami Herald, October 24, 2023]

The Garamantes were ancient people that inhabited the Sahara. Descended from Berbers and Saharan pastoralists, they first appeared around 1000 B.C. and were described by Herodotus in the 5th century B.C. as an exceedingly numerous people who herded cattle and hunted “troglodyte Ethiopians” from horse chariots. The Garamantes produced one of the largest totally desert-based kingdoms ever before dying out.

The Garamantes occupied a southern section of modern-day Libya and Algeria between 400 B.C. and A.D. 400. At their height around A.D. 150 they controlled an area of 181,700 square kilometers (70,000 square miles) in southern Libya, with a capital in Garama. “The Empire was focused on a main City Germa at the base of a large escarpment,” Frank Schwartz, a professor at The Ohio State University, told McClatchy News. “Away from the Germa area,” Schwartz said, “ ... there were small outposts. These were stopping places with water along the trade routes through the desert. The land area was perhaps 350,000 square kilometers with a population of several 10,000s of people.”

Garamante Culture

The Garamantes were a tough and aggressive people. They had to be to prosper in the middle of the Sahara. They took slaves to keep their empire going and penetrated as far south as Nigeria to collect slaves. Some slaves were obtained as tribute. Other were obtained in slaving raids. Rock art from the period depicted men in two-wheeled chariots with weapons.

Garamantes traded with the Romans and other people in northern African and the Mediterranean. They imported wine, olive oil and luxury good. and exported slaves and served as middlemen for gold, amazonite, carnelian and ivory being taken from Africa to the Mediterranean. Judging from the jewelry and high quality glassware and statuary and baths and temples unearthed in Garamantes region they did quite well for themselves.

Garamantes produced rock engravings of horsemen accompanied by as yet undeciphered inscriptions in Libyco-Berber, a writing system that dates to the 3rd century B.C. The rock art was often placed at the foot of massive escarpments. They worshipped many Egyptian gods, with the primary god being Ammon (the god of the desert) and his son the bull-headed deity Gurzil. Some members of the elite were buried under small pyramids.

Garamante Water Mining

qanat
The Garamantes made the desert bloom using system of underground wells, shafts and tunnels similar to the qanats in Iran, Afghanistan and western China. They built about 550 tunnels, which are known in Berber as “foggias”, that together measured 800 kilometers (500 miles). The shafts were 10 meters apart and up to 40 meters deep, with an average depth of about the 10 meters. In fields nurtured with these wells they grew grapes, figs, sorghum, barely, pulses and wheat.

The Garamantes wells and tunnels — the largest ever built outside Iran — were dug by a workforce of between 1,000 and 2,000 slaves. The fact they were underground kept the water from evaporating. It was difficult, arduous and dangerous work. In places where the shafts and tunnels were dug in gravel and sand there was always the danger of cave ins. No doubt many people died. In places where holes where dug through limestone the work was not as dangerous but no doubt it wasn’t much fun chisel away at rock with hand tools under the hot Saharan sun.

The Garamantes tunnel system mined fossil water rather than redirecting water from a lake or river. They borrowed the technology from the Persians when they introduced it to Egypt to tap into water laden sandstone aquifers, The Garamantes civilization lasted as long as the water supply estimated at 30 billion gallons lasted. When the water ran out in A.D. 4th century the civilization collapsed.

Brendan Rascius wrote in the Miami Herald: The Garamantes were the first urban society to appear in a riverless desert, Their hand-dug subterranean channels, much like aqueducts, used gravity to deliver water from aquifers to agricultural areas. “Knowledge (of foggaras) came along trade route links from Persia to the east,” Schwartz said. “Eventually, these systems were put in place across North western Africa, the Middle East and Spain.” [Source: Brendan Rascius, Miami Herald, October 24, 2023]

It was “surprising” that these desert tunnels were able to carry any water at all given the extremely arid climate. The Garamantes base was situated near a large sandstone aquifer, which had been leftover from an era when the Sahara was less arid, Schwartz said. “There was no recharge, but because that aquifer was so big, it was able to contribute water for at least 800 or 1,000 years during the Garamantian period,” Schwartz said. This method, though, proved unsustainable as the aquifer’s water levels eventually fell below the foggaras’ intake. “With the power of the Empire sapped by Romans and drying of the foggara (tunnels) people just diffused away,” Schwartz said. Initially there were likely slaves to do digging early on — but these were lost as well. Experience shows that humans will not stay in one place and starve. A large collection of people might fight to acquire other peoples’ wetter lands. Others will just move to more hospitable places.”

Greco-Roman Period in the Middle East

After Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C. his generals spent 40 years fighting among themselves before three main dynasties emerged: the Antigonids of Asia Minor and Greece; the Ptolemies in Egypt; and the Selecuids, who occupied a stretch of land that extended from present-day Lebanon to Persia. The eastern part of the Selecuid empire broke off to become the Parthian Empire.

Much of what is now the Muslim world was under Roman rule for many centuries. Romans conquered most of Asia Minor in 188 B.C., Syria an Palestine in 64 and 63 B.C. and Egypt in 30 B.C. "No distinction between realm of Caesar and the realm of God."

The only inland invasion of Arabia by a European power took place in 24 B.C. when the legions under Aelius Galus marched southward to capture the Frankincense Trail kingdoms. Betrayed by local guides and tired and thirsty, they retreated back home before reaching their destination of Saba in present-day Yemen.

With the arrival of Islam in the seventh century, Roman influences largely disappeared. The Romans left behind Al Jizah, a stone-block basin started in Roman times that now holds 23 million gallons of water, enough to supply a large city should a three-year drought occur.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons, The Louvre, The British Museum

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Mesopotamia sourcebooks.fordham.edu , National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, especially Merle Severy, National Geographic, May 1991 and Marion Steinmann, Smithsonian, December 1988, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated June 2024