Middle East, geographic and cultural region located in southwestern Asia and northeastern Africa, originally referred to the Asian region south of the Black Sea between the Mediterranean Sea to the west and India to the east. In modern scholarship, and for the purposes of this article, the term refers collectively to the Asian countries of Bahrain, Cyprus, Iran, Iraq, Israel (and the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank), Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, and the African country of Egypt. A broader, more cultural definition might include the Muslim countries of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

The first civilizations of the Middle East, which grew in the valleys of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates rivers, are among the oldest in the world. Alphabets, law codes, and cities, as did the world’s three great monotheistic religions, Judaism (13th century BC), Christianity (1st century to 4th century AD) and Islam (7th century AD) all began in the Middle East. Of the three, Islam continues to mark the region most profoundly. More than 90 percent of the people of the Middle East are Muslims.

History

Civilization as we know it began in the Middle East. The cultivation of cereals, first undertaken in the Middle East around 8000 BC, led to the creation of the first settled communities with permanent dwellings. Large archaeological mounds called tells contain the remains of some of these communities. Tells have been found in present-day Turkey and throughout the Fertile Crescent, an ancient agricultural region containing parts of present-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan. Jericho in the present-day West Bank and Çatal Hüyük in present-day Turkey are two of the best known of these sites.

The first civilizations—groups with complex, hierarchical political organizations—began about 3000 BC in the valleys of the Nile and of the Tigris and Euphrates. Civilizations grew out of the need to organize the distribution of water for irrigation and to protect the land around the rivers from floods. These developments improved agricultural yields and made economic diversification possible. Complex urban societies with codified legal systems, often centered on religious-based monarchies, evolved. Their rulers gained control of long-distance trade, which was especially important given the scarcity in the river valleys of mineral resources and of timber for building. Writing systems using hieroglyphs, pictorial characters representing recognizable objects, began as a means of facilitating administration. Alphabets with symbols representing sounds rather than objects evolved about 1500 BC.

Mesopotamia and Egypt

The earliest civilizations in an area between the Tigris and Euphrates known as Mesopotamia (Greek for “between the rivers”; the area is now Iraq) were the Sumerians to the south and the Akkadians to the north. From about 2330 BC the Akkadians expanded southward, extending their control from Syria to the head of the Persian Gulf and east into Persia (now Iran). Two other dynasties, the Amorites and the Elamites, succeeded the Akkadians, and the area split into a number of smaller states including Assyria and Babylon. Hammurabi, the king of Babylonia during the first half of the 18th century BC, developed one of the earliest systematic collections of laws (see Code of Hammurabi). The Hittites, whose empire extended through much of present-day Turkey and into northern Mesopotamia by the 14th century BC, traded with their contemporaries in Greece. As a result of this trade, many Mesopotamian ideas reached Greece.

Egyptian civilization also began about 3000 BC when a single ruler united southern and northern Egypt. Egypt exhibited a greater degree of political continuity than Mesopotamia. There were no major foreign invasions or externally imposed changes of regime until the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. While Mesopotamian kings were often also priests, Egyptians believed their kings were gods who could control the waters of the Nile. The pyramids, richly treasured tombs in which kings were buried, serve as lasting symbols of this divine monarchy. The Great Pyramid at Giza, built during the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, remains among the most notable structures in the history of architecture. Over the centuries Egypt extended control south to mine the extensive gold deposits of Nubia (a region of southern Egypt and northern Sudan), and northeast toward present-day Syria.

The Birth of Judaism

Late in the 2nd millennium BC the Aramaeans moved into present-day Syria, establishing the ancient country of Aram. They spoke a Semitic language (see Aramaic language) from which Hebrew and Arabic are derived. Other Semitic peoples, a confederation of Hebrew tribes called the Israelites, settled in the region of Palestine during the same time period (see Hebrews (people)). Israelite religion and institutions were shaped under Hebrew prophet and lawgiver Moses about 1300 BC and subsequently under Saul and David, the first two kings of ancient Israel, in the 11th and 10th centuries BC. The Israelites believed that they, the Jews, were the chosen people of their one God. They were the first ethnic and religious group to adopt monotheism. The region was attacked by Assyria in 722 BC and by Assyria’s successor, Babylonia, in 586 BC. On both occasions many thousands of Jews were forced into exile.

Persian, Greek, and Roman Empires

In the 9th century BC the empire of the Assyrians expanded beyond Mesopotamia to include the entire Fertile Crescent region. It endured until 612 BC when the Babylonians and the Medes, a polytheistic tribal culture from the northeastern part of present-day Iran, conquered the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. In 550 BC Persian ruler Cyrus the Great overthrew the Medes and founded the Achaemenid dynasty. At the height of its rule under Darius I, the Persian Empire extended from northern Greece and present-day Libya in the west as far east as the Indus Valley in present-day Pakistan. During this period another monotheistic religion, Zoroastrianism, developed in Persia. Its tolerance of Judaism and of the various polytheistic religions of the region helped maintain the empire's unity for the next two centuries. Now almost extinct, Zoroastrianism flourished for many centuries throughout Persia. The conquests of Macedonian king Alexander the Great between 334 and 323 BC briefly united an area covering present-day Greece, Turkey, Greater Syria (present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan prior to partitioning after World War I), Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. After his death the region remained a vast commercial and cultural area, often referred to as the Hellenistic world (from the Greek word Hellas, which means “Greece”). This Hellenistic Age, in which Greek became an international language, many new cities were founded, and Greek religion and arts blended with native ways, lasted until the Romans rose to power in the Mediterranean region at the beginning of the 2nd century BC. Roman general Pompey the Great had conquered the territory from the Mediterranean Sea to western Persia by 62 BC, and Egypt fell to Rome in 30 BC. The Parthians, an independent kingdom in present-day Iran and Afghanistan, blocked Roman attempts to advance further east. Jewish revolts against the Romans during the 1st and 2nd centuries AD led to exile and major migrations of Jews from Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia to other parts of the Roman world.

The Rise of Islam

Islam, the last of the three great monotheist religions, began with the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad at the beginning of the 7th century in Mecca and Yathrib (now Medina), both in present-day Saudi Arabia. Over the next century, Arab armies brought the faith as far west as Spain, as far north as the Black Sea, and as far east as the Indus Valley in present-day Pakistan. In the process they defeated the Sassanids of Persia and forced the Byzantines out of eastern Anatolia, the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and North Africa. In general, this expansion met with little resistance. After the rule of the first four caliphs, or successors to the prophet, the political center of Islam moved away from the Arabian Peninsula, first to Damascus, Syria, from 661 to 750 under the Umayyad caliphate and then to the new city of Baghdād in Mesopotamia during the early years of the Abbasid caliphate (750-1258). The political unity of the Muslim world gradually disintegrated in the 9th and 10th centuries, but the region retained a considerable degree of cultural unity through a common legal and commercial system and a common language of literature, high culture, and religion. During this period local dynasties in Iran inspired a national cultural revival, keeping alive Persian traditions, including literature and court ceremonies, which influenced the Arab caliphates. Meanwhile the Fatimids, an Ismaili Shia caliphate with origins in North Africa, conquered Egypt and established the city of Cairo, from where they ruled all of North Africa, Palestine, and Syria until the late 12th century. The Seljuks, a Turkish dynasty from Central Asia that converted to Sunni Islam in the 10th century, expanded their control to Anatolia, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, and Syria in the 11th century. They expanded the supremacy of Sunni Islam by founding theological colleges in most of the major cities. Graduates of these colleges staffed the political, religious, educational, and judicial institutions of the state.

The Ottoman Empire

Late in the 13th century, a Muslim warrior known as Osman began to lead successful raids against the Byzantine strongholds in western Anatolia. His followers, the Ottomans, extended control in all directions, forging an empire that would be the principal political force in the western Islamic world for 600 years. At its height in the second half of the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire included southeastern Europe, Anatolia, Iraq, western Iran, Greater Syria, Egypt, the western Arabian Peninsula, and the coast of North Africa between Egypt and eastern Morocco. Further east the Ottomans' contemporaries and rivals the Safavids established a dynasty in Iran and Afghanistan between 1501 and 1722, imposing Twelver Shia Islam as the official religion and founding the modern Iranian state. Both the Ottomans and the Safavids ruled some of the most advanced and militarily and economically secure states of their time. In the early 18th century the Ottoman Empire began a long process of decline and decay, brought about by a combination of internal strife and external pressures from the rise of the European powers to economic, scientific, and political domination.

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