ABSTRACT
The Near East was the birthplace of the world's earliest civilizations, and through military campaigns and trade its accomplishments spread to other areas, both east and west. Though the discovery of agriculture and domestication of animals also occurred in eastern Asia and the Americas, the Near Eastern agricultural revolution produced most of the domesticated crops and animals still used in the West today. Some of the most crucial contributions of the ancient Near Eastern civilizations were in the area of mathematics and science, including technology and engineering. Mesopotamian mathematicians knew the principle of the Pythagorean Theorem a millennium before Pythagoras, and they could solve the problems of Euclidian geometry more than a thousand years before Euclid. Modern Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian are living descendants of ancient Near Eastern languages. Greek art and architecture, major influences on later Western cultures, borrowed many elements from the Near East.
