Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Near East is a transcontinental region around the Eastern Mediterranean that historically encompassed the Fertile Crescent, the Levant, Anatolia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian Peninsula. According to the National Geographic Society, the Near East and Middle East denote the same territories: the Arabian Peninsula, Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Syria, and Turkey.
The term Near East acquired its specific regional meaning during the Crimean War of 1853-1856, when British imperial administration began using it to refer to the Ottoman Empire as distinct from the Far East. One of the earliest printed uses reaching the general public was a letter by Thomas Taylor Meadows in Littell's Living Age in 1855, which described supporting the sick man in the Near East as an arduous and costly affair.
Near East originally referred specifically to the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans, while Middle East was coined around 1900 by Thomas Edward Gordon and Alfred Thayer Mahan to describe the Persian Gulf and Iranian region. As of 2024, both terms are used interchangeably by politicians and journalists. The Food and Agriculture Organization defined the Near East as a subregion of the Middle East in 2012.
Near East acquired a negative reputation in the 1890s largely because of its association with the Hamidian Massacres targeting Christian Armenians, and with the instability of the Ottoman Empire. By 1916, writers such as Captain T. C. Fowle dropped the phrase entirely in favor of Middle East, and Middle East gradually prevailed in diplomatic and military circles.
The Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the US Department of State is the most influential agency still using the term, handling all official American diplomacy across the region. The Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the US Department of Defense and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy also retain the term, the latter adopting it to align with State Department conventions.
The ancient Near East is a 20th-century scholarly term covering the ancient nations, peoples, and languages of the Fertile Crescent, from the Nile Valley through Anatolia and south to Mesopotamia. A landmark text in this field is James Bennett Pritchard's Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, first published in 1950.