Near East

• 1. Origins Of The Term

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  In 1855, a letter to The Times by Thomas Taylor Meadows introduced the phrase Near East to describe Ottoman territories. This official Chinese interpreter of ten years active service wrote from within the Oriental Club, an organization formed by the Duke of Wellington. His words appeared in Littell's Living Age as a reprint of correspondence sent earlier that year. Before this moment, European powers used Levant or East Indies to describe regions under Ottoman control. The Crimean War had just ended, and British administrators needed new vocabulary for their expanding empire. They began promulgating specific regional meanings for terms like Near East and Far East. These compound nouns replaced older phrases that gradually receded into minor usage. The term originally applied to what was known as the Levant, which fell under the jurisdiction of the Ottoman Porte. Europeans could not set foot on most shores of the southern and central Mediterranean without permits from Constantinople. One region beyond the Ottoman Porte included North Africa west of Egypt, occupied by piratical kingdoms of the Barbary Coast since the eighteenth century. Iran also entered the definition because it could not easily be reached except through the Ottoman Empire or neighboring Russia.

• 2. The Eastern Question

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  At the height of its power in 1683, the Ottoman Empire controlled territory stretching across the Near East and North Africa, as well as Central and Southeastern Europe. By 1914, however, the empire had lost all its European territories except Constantinople and Eastern Thrace. Nationalist Balkan states rose up, claiming independence for the Kingdom of Greece, Kingdom of Serbia, Danubian Principalities, and Kingdom of Bulgaria. Up until 1912, Ottomans retained Albania, Macedonia, and Adrianople Vilayet before losing them in the two Balkan Wars of 1912, 13. The press began portraying the Ottoman Empire as the sick man of Europe. Starting in 1894, the Ottomans struck at Armenians and Assyrians on explicit grounds that they were non-Muslim peoples threatening the Muslim empire. Hamidian Massacres, Adana Massacres, and Massacres of Badr Khan targeting Assyrians and Armenians aroused indignation throughout the Christian world. In the United States, Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, joined the Red Cross to respond to these events. Relations of minorities within the Ottoman Empire became known as the Eastern question because the Ottomans lay east of Europe. It now became relevant to define the east of this eastern question. In about the middle of the nineteenth century, Near East came into use to describe that part of the east closest to Europe.

• 3. Archaeological Evolution

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  The London Review of 1861 defined an imperfect conspectus of arrow-headed writings covering nearly the whole period of postdiluvian Old Testament history. These scholars meant cuneiform texts when referring to such writings. They described primeval nations piling glorious homes on the Euphrates, Tigris, and Nile with archives in hand. Their inventory included countries lying between the Caspian, Persian Gulf, and Mediterranean: Assyria, Chaldea, Mesopotamia, Persia, Armenia, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Ancient Israel, Ethiopia, Caucasus, Libya, Anatolia, and Abyssinia. India was explicitly excluded from their list. No mention appeared regarding the Balkans. British archaeologist D.G. Hogarth published The Nearer East in 1902, delineating a region with regular lines as though surveyed. His map included Iran, the Balkans, but not Danube lands or Egypt beyond North Africa. Except for the Balkans, his analysis matched later definitions of the Middle East while differing from contemporary Ottoman Empire boundaries by including Greece and Iran. Hogarth gave no evidence of familiarity with contemporaneous initial concepts of the Middle East. By 1950, James Bennett Pritchard released Ancient Near Eastern Texts relating to the Old Testament, marking a high point in use of ancient Near East for biblical scholars. Leonard Woolley completed The Art of the Middle East, Including Persia, Mesopotamia and Palestine two weeks before his death in 1960.

• 4. Diplomatic Agency Definitions

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  The Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs remains perhaps the most influential agency still using the term Near East within the United States Department of State. Under the Secretary of State, it implements official diplomacy called statecraft by Hillary Clinton during her tenure. All official Middle Eastern affairs refer to this bureau despite there being no distinct Middle East division. Working closely with the State Department definition is the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies (NESA), an educational institution under the Department of Defense. NESA teaches courses and holds seminars for government officials and military officers working within its region. Its name indicates that region combines State Department regions, yet NESA identifies the State Department region carefully. For example, its region includes Mauritania, a member of the State Department's Africa Sub-Sahara category. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy bundles countries of Northwest Africa together under North Africa while adopting convention calling them the Near East to conform with State Department practices. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization defined the region similarly in 1997 but also included Afghanistan. Later in 2012, FAO defined Near East as subregion of Middle East including Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syrian Arab Republic, and Turkey.

• 5. Rise Of Middle East

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  In 1900 Thomas Edward Gordon published an article titled The Problem of the Middle East beginning with concerns over railway construction from Russia to Persian Gulf. This threat caused Gordon, diplomat and military officer, to publish his work though he had not used the term previously before then. Alfred Thayer Mahan commented in 1902 about naval vulnerability of trade routes in Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean believing himself innovating the term Middle East. It was already there to be seen by others however. Bertram Lenox Simpson combined both terms in his 1910 work The Conflict of Colour: The Threatened Upheaval Throughout the World as the Near and Middle East. According to Simpson, combined region consisted of India, Afghanistan, Persia, Arabistan, Asia Minor, and Egypt explaining these regions were politically one region despite academic divisions. In 1916 Captain T.C. Fowle wrote of a trip from Karachi to Syria just before war without using single instance of Near East. Instead entire region considered Middle East where formerly Near Eastern sections now called Turkish rather than Ottoman. Subsequently with disgrace of Near East in diplomatic and military circles, Middle East prevailed while Near East continued in some circles at discretion of defining agency or academic department.