The Near East

The first settlements of an urban degree of complexity emerged, probably during the late fourth millennium BCE, ¹ in the Near Eastern region often referred to as the ‘Fertile Crescent’ (see Figure 1.1). An ambiguous geographical term, the Fertile Crescent in its fullest sense denotes the sequence of river valleys and alluvial plains stretching from the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and eastern Syria), along the Orontes and Jordan in the Levant, to the Nile in Egypt. The trading activity of the first cities stimulated urbanization elsewhere during the later third millennium, notably in the Indus Valley to the east, and in the Mediterranean region to the west – where the first European cities, those of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, developed. This chapter on the Near East, therefore, logically introduces Chapters 2 and 3 on early European urbanization. As one authority on the region has put it, ‘the history of the Western world begins in the Near East, in the Nile Valley and in Mesopotamia, the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates’ (Postgate, 1992, p.xxi). Figure 1.1 The ancient Near East; north of the isohyet, rainfall was usually at least 200 mm a year – enough to support agriculture without recourse to irrigation https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203984376/4f208d80-5c23-4999-9a8d-99bed47a9492/content/fig1_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>