Fertile Crescent
The Fertile Crescent, known in Arabic as al-hilāl al-ḵaṣīb, struck one archaeologist as a military formation. James Henry Breasted wrote that the region "lies like an army facing south, with one wing stretching along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean." The other wing, in his words, was "reaching out to the Persian Gulf." The center of this army pressed its back against the northern mountains. That image of a vast semicircle of land is how the region got the name it still carries. Yet a name is only a surface. Why did settled farming take hold in an arc of land with desert on one side and highlands on the other? Where did its people find their crops, their animals and their first cities? And how did farmers from this land come to shape the ancestry of people living far away?
Breasted's Outlines of European History appeared in 1914, and his Ancient Times, A History of the Early World followed in 1916. Between them, these books popularized the term Fertile Crescent. In his description, he placed Palestine at the end of the western wing, Assyria across much of the center, and Babylonia at the end of the eastern wing. He offered the label because, as he put it, the great semicircle lacked a name.
No single term for this region existed in antiquity. Historian Thomas Scheffler notes that Breasted was following a trend in Western geography. That trend aimed to "overwrite the classical geographical distinctions between continents, countries and landscapes with large, abstract spaces." Scheffler draws parallels with Halford Mackinder, who pictured Eurasia as a "pivot area" surrounded by an "inner crescent." He also points to Alfred Thayer Mahan's Middle East and Friedrich Naumann's Mitteleuropa.
Modern Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria all lie within the Fertile Crescent, along with northern Kuwait, south-eastern Turkey and western Iran. Some authors add Cyprus, and current usage also counts Egypt. The Tigris and Euphrates supply much of the water, and the Jordan River adds another source. Dry country marks the limits: the Syrian Desert to the south and the Sahara to the west. The Anatolian and Armenian highlands close the north, and the Iranian plateau closes the east. Inside those limits, mountains and rivers shaped a living world unlike its neighbors.
During the Ice Age, shifting climates in Europe and North Africa repeatedly squeezed ecosystems against the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The result was a series of extinction events. The Fertile Crescent, a land bridge between North Africa and Eurasia, escaped the worst of this pressure. It therefore kept more biodiversity than either of its neighbors. The Saharan pump theory holds that this bridge strongly influenced how Old World plants and animals are distributed today. On that theory, the spread of humanity followed the same path.
The African and Arabian plates are pulling apart, while the Arabian and Eurasian plates are pressing together. The Fertile Crescent has borne the brunt of this tectonic activity. The strain has produced a very diverse zone that includes high snow-covered mountains.
Plants called "r" type annuals thrive when the climate changes dramatically, and the Fertile Crescent had many diverse climates. Major shifts encouraged the evolution of such annuals, which produce more edible seeds than "K" type perennials. The region's dramatic range of elevation added many edible species for early experiments in cultivation. Among the plants this landscape produced were eight that would anchor early agriculture.
Emmer wheat, einkorn, barley, flax, chick pea, pea, lentil and bitter vetch all had wild ancestors in the Fertile Crescent. Researchers call the cultivated forms the eight Neolithic founder crops. The region also held wild stock of four of the five most important domesticated animals: cows, goats, sheep and pigs. The fifth, the horse, lived nearby.
Many of the region's plants are "selfers" that can pollinate themselves, though they may also be cross-pollinated. Because selfers did not depend on other plants for reproduction, they counted among the area's geographical advantages.
At Gilgal I in the Jordan Valley, archaeologists found prehistoric seedless figs. This suggests that fig trees were being planted some 11,400 years ago. Cereals were already grown in Syria as long as 9,000 years ago. Legumes, including peas, lentils and chickpeas, were domesticated in the region as well. The list of animals reaches beyond the big four. Small cats of the species Felis silvestris and the domestic goose were also brought under human care here. With crops and animals in hand, the question became where people first built permanent farming communities.
The caves at Tabun and Es Skhul hold skeletal and cultural remains of both pre-modern and early modern humans. Later Pleistocene hunter-gatherers also left traces in the region. So did the Natufians, semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers of the Epipalaeolithic. Even so, the Fertile Crescent is most famous for sites tied to the origins of agriculture.
Around 9,000 BCE, the western zone around the Jordan and the upper Euphrates gave rise to the first known Neolithic farming settlements. Archaeologists label this phase Pre-Pottery Neolithic A. Its sites include Göbekli Tepe, Chogha Golan and Jericho, which is also known as Tell es-Sultan.
Mesopotamia, a Greek word meaning "between rivers," lies between the Tigris and Euphrates in the east of the Crescent. Together with the western zone, it saw early complex societies emerge during the Bronze Age. The region offers early evidence for writing and for hierarchical, state-level societies. These achievements earned it the nickname "the cradle of civilization." Empires rose and fell in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, among them Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia.
About 4,500 years ago, the first libraries appeared here. The oldest known ones stood at Nippur in Sumer and at Ebla in Syria, both dating to around 2500 BCE. Writing, the wheel and glass were among the technologies that most often emerged first in Mesopotamia. Keeping such cities fed depended on controlling the water of two great rivers.
Both the Tigris and the Euphrates begin in the Taurus Mountains of modern Turkey. Farmers in southern Mesopotamia had to protect their fields from flooding every year, and they built levees to do so. Northern Mesopotamia received enough rain to make some farming possible without such defenses.
Since the Bronze Age, irrigation works have greatly extended the region's natural fertility. Much of its agricultural production still depends on them. Over the last two millennia, the region has gone through repeated cycles of decline and recovery. Old works fell into disrepair when one state replaced another, and successor states then rebuilt them.
Salination remains an ongoing problem. It is the gradual concentration of salt and other minerals in soils that have been irrigated for a very long time.
Modern analyses comparing 24 craniofacial measurements reveal a relatively diverse population in the Fertile Crescent. The pattern holds across the pre-Neolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age, which supports the view that several populations lived there. The same studies show the Basques and Canary Islanders of that era to be "clearly associated with modern Europeans." They also find no evidence of Cro-Magnon influence, contrary to earlier suggestions.
The studies suggest that this diverse population spread outward. Early migrants moved west into Europe and North Africa, north to Crimea, and northeast to Mongolia. They carried farming with them and interbred with the hunter-gatherers they met along the way. Local peoples then absorbed the agricultural way of life from these newcomers.
This view runs against the suggestion that agriculture spread simply through shared knowledge. A preponderance of evidence now favors actual migration out of the region, followed by interbreeding with local populations.
A 2005 craniometric study found that not all present-day Europeans share strong affinities with the Neolithic and Bronze Age inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent. The closest ties belong to Southern Europeans, though the study also shows all present-day Europeans to be closely related. Genetics research finds that most Europeans descend from at least three ancient populations. One of them, the Early European Farmers, descended from the Near Eastern migrants who brought agriculture to Europe. That farmer population was genetically distinct from European hunter-gatherers and close to present-day Near Easterners.
Semitic languages generally prevailed across modern Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Sinai. They also reached the fringes of south-eastern Turkey and north-western Iran. Sumerian, a language isolate, was spoken in Iraq. In the mountains to the east and north, a number of generally unrelated isolates were found. Elamite, Gutian and Kassite belonged to Iran, while Hattic, Kaskian and Hurro-Urartian belonged to Turkey. Scholars still debate how these languages are related and when they arrived. Because there is no textual evidence for the earliest prehistory, the debate is unlikely to be settled soon.
By the third millennium BCE and into the second, several language groups already existed in the region. One hypothetical candidate was the Proto-Euphratean language, a non-Semitic tongue once proposed as the base layer beneath the people who introduced farming into southern Iraq. That was in the Early Ubaid period, 5300-4700 BCE. Today the linguistic consensus is that multiple unknown substrata shaped the Sumerian names that inspired the idea. Some of those traces are fossilized archaic elements from earlier stages of Sumerian itself.
Sumerian displays a Sprachbund-type relationship with its Semitic neighbor Akkadian, which is also called Assyrian and Babylonian. The Semitic family also included Eblaite, Amorite, Aramaic and Ugaritic. The Canaanite languages belonged to it as well, including Hebrew, Moabite, Edomite and Phoenician, which is also called Carthaginian. Elamite was another non-Semitic isolate. Hattic, an isolate, was spoken originally in central Anatolia. Egyptian formed a stand-alone branch of the Afroasiatic family, confined to Egypt. Hurro-Urartian is a small family, and the Kassite language of the northern region may have belonged to it. Links between Hurro-Urartian and Hattic and the indigenous languages of the Caucasus have often been suggested. They are not generally accepted.
Hittite, Luwian and the Indo-Aryan material attested in the Mitanni civilization are Indo-European. Scholars generally believe these tongues were later intruders, arriving after 2000 BCE. Yet recent evidence suggests that the Indo-European family itself emerged from the Fertile Crescent as early as 6000 BCE.
Continue browsing
Updated
Common questions
Where is the Fertile Crescent located?
The Fertile Crescent is a crescent-shaped region of the Middle East. It spans modern Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria, together with northern Kuwait, south-eastern Turkey and western Iran.
Who coined the term Fertile Crescent?
The archaeologist James Henry Breasted popularized the term in Outlines of European History in 1914 and Ancient Times, A History of the Early World in 1916. There was no single term for the region in antiquity.
Why is the Fertile Crescent called the cradle of civilization?
The Fertile Crescent earned the nickname because it offers early evidence for writing and for hierarchical, state-level societies. The first known Neolithic farming settlements also appeared here, around 9,000 BCE.
What were the founder crops of the Fertile Crescent?
The eight Neolithic founder crops were emmer wheat, einkorn, barley, flax, chick pea, pea, lentil and bitter vetch. The region also held wild stock of cows, goats, sheep and pigs.
Which rivers water the Fertile Crescent?
The Tigris and Euphrates are the main rivers, and the Jordan River is another source. The Tigris and Euphrates both begin in the Taurus Mountains of modern Turkey.
What problems have irrigation caused in the Fertile Crescent?
Salination is an ongoing problem, because salt and other minerals gradually concentrate in soils with a long history of irrigation. Irrigation works have also repeatedly fallen into disrepair when states were replaced.
How did agriculture spread out of the Fertile Crescent?
The view now supported by a preponderance of evidence is that farming spread through actual migration out of the region. The migrants interbred with local hunter-gatherers and perpetuated their farming practices.
What languages were spoken in the Fertile Crescent?
Semitic languages generally prevailed in much of the region, alongside Sumerian, a language isolate in Iraq. Isolates such as Elamite, Kassite and Hattic were found in the mountains to the east and north.
All sources
41 references cited across the entry
- 1BookThe Essence of AnthropologyWilliam A. Haviland et al. — Cengage Learning — 13 January 2013
- 2BookAncient Mesopotamia/IndiaSocial Studies School Service — 2003
- 4North Africa & the Middle East: Regional Example – The Fertile CrescentJoel Quam et al. — 31 August 2022
- 5Fertile Crescent((The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica )) — Cambridge University Press
- 6BookAmerican Egyptologist: the life of James Henry Breasted and the creation of his Oriental InstituteJeffrey Abt — University of Chicago Press — 2011
- 7BookA History of the ancient world: for high schools and academiesGeorge Stephen Goodspeed — Charles Scribner's Sons — 1904
- 8BookOutlines of European history, Vol. 1James Henry Breasted — Ginn — 1914
- 9BookAncient times, a history of the early world: an introduction to the study of ancient history and the career of early manJames Henry Breasted — Ginn — 1916
- 10JournalThe so-called Fertile Crescent and desert bayAlbert T. Clay — 1924
- 11BookPuritans in Babylon: the ancient Near East and American intellectual life, 1880–1930Bruce Kuklick — Princeton University Press — 1996
- 12Journal'Fertile Crescent', 'Orient', 'Middle East': The Changing Mental Maps of Southwest AsiaThomas Scheffler — 2003-06-01
- 13BookGuns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human SocietiesJared Diamond — W.W. Norton & Company — March 1997
- 14BookA Review of "The Library: An Illustrated History": Murray, Stuart A.P. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2009, 310 pp., $35.00, hard cover, ISBN 978-1602397064.Stuart Murray — Skyhorse Publishing, Inc. — 9 July 2009
- 15BookWorld History: Patterns of InteractionRoger B. Beck et al. — McDougal Littell — 1999
- 16NewsAncient Fig Find May Push Back Birth of AgricultureScott Norris — National Geographic News — 1 June 2006
- 18JournalThe near eastern origin of cat domesticationCarlos A. Driscoll et al. — 27 July 2007
- 19JournalThe questionable contribution of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age to European craniofacial formC. Loring Brace et al. — 2006
- 20JournalCranial Discrete Traits in a Byzantine Population and Eastern Mediterranean Population MovementsF. X. Ricaut et al. — Aug 2008
- 21JournalGenomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near EastIosif Lazaridis et al. — 2016-08-25
- 22BookTransitions to farming and pastoralism in North AfricaG. Barker — 2002
- 23Bar-Yosef O (1987), "Pleistocene connections between Africa and SouthWest Asia: an archaeological perspective", The African Archaeological Review; Chapter 5, pp 29–38
- 24JournalEarly domesticated fig in the Jordan ValleyME Kislev et al. — 2006
- 26Findings include remains of food items carried to the Levant from North Africa —— Parthenocarpic figs and Nile shellfish (please refer to Natufian culture#Long-distance exchange).
- 27JournalY genetic data support the Neolithic demic diffusion modelL Chicki et al. — 2002
- 28JournalEstimating the Impact of Prehistoric Admixture on the Genome of EuropeansI. Dupanloup — July 2004
- 29JournalOrigin, Diffusion, and Differentiation of Y-Chromosome Haplogroups E and J: Inferences on the Neolithization of Europe and Later Migratory Events in the Mediterranean AreaO. Semino et al. — May 2004
- 30JournalPaleolithic and Neolithic lineages in the European mitochondrial gene poolL. L. Cavalli-Sforza et al. — July 1997
- 31JournalClines of nuclear DNA markers suggest a largely Neolithic ancestry of the European gene poolLounès Chikhi et al. — 1998-07-21
- 32M. Zvelebil, in Hunters in Transition: Mesolithic Societies and the Transition to Farming, M. Zvelebil (editor), Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK (1986) pp. 5–15, 167–188.
- 33P. Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, Blackwell: Malden, MA (2005).
- 34JournalPhysical Anthropology in Czechoslovakia: Recent DevelopmentsM. Dokládal et al. — 1961
- 35JournalThe Natufian culture in the Levant, threshold to the origins of agricultureO. Bar-Yosef — 1998
- 36JournalOn the transition to farming in Europe, or what was spreading with the Neolithic: a reply to Ammerman (1989)M. Zvelebil — 1989
- 37JournalAncient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day EuropeansLazaridis I, Patterson N, Mittnik A, Renaud G, Mallick S, Kirsanow K, Sudmant PH, Schraiber JG, Castellano S, Lipson M, Berger B, Economou C, Bollongino R, Fu Q, Bos KI, Nordenfelt S, Li H, de Filippo C, Prüfer K, Sawyer S, Posth C, Haak W, Hallgren F, Fornander E, Rohland N, Delsate D, Francken M, Guinet JM, Wahl J, Ayodo G, Babiker HA, Bailliet G, Balanovska E, Balanovsky O, Barrantes R, Bedoya G, Ben-Ami H, Bene J, Berrada F, Bravi CM, Brisighelli F, Busby GB, Cali F, Churnosov M, Cole DE, Corach D, Damba L, van Driem G, Dryomov S, Dugoujon JM, Fedorova SA, Gallego Romero I, Gubina M, Hammer M, Henn BM, Hervig T, Hodoglugil U, Jha AR, Karachanak-Yankova S, Khusainova R, Khusnutdinova E, Kittles R, Kivisild T, Klitz W, Kučinskas V, Kushniarevich A, Laredj L, Litvinov S, Loukidis T, Mahley RW, Melegh B, Metspalu E, Molina J, Mountain J, Näkkäläjärvi K, Nesheva D, Nyambo T, Osipova L, Parik J, Platonov F, Posukh O, Romano V, Rothhammer F, Rudan I, Ruizbakiev R, Sahakyan H, Sajantila A, Salas A, Starikovskaya EB, Tarekegn A, Toncheva D, Turdikulova S, Uktveryte I, Utevska O, Vasquez R, Villena M, Voevoda M, Winkler CA, Yepiskoposyan L, Zalloua P, Zemunik T, Cooper A, Capelli C, Thomas MG, Ruiz-Linares A, Tishkoff SA, Singh L, Thangaraj K, Villems R, Comas D, Sukernik R, Metspalu M, Meyer M, Eichler EE, Burger J, Slatkin M, Pääbo S, Kelso J, Reich D, Krause J — September 2014
- 38JournalOn the Alleged "Pre-Sumerian Substratum"Gonzalo Rubio — January 1999
- 39JournalLanguage trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languagesPaul Heggarty et al. — 2023-07-28
- 40BookA Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near EastDaniel T. Potts — John Wiley & Sons — 21 May 2012
- 41BookThe Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia: (10,000-323 BCE)Sharon R. Steadman et al. — OUP — 15 September 2011