The ancient Near East, where farming, writing, money and the wheel began
A strip of land from Egypt to the Iranian plateau gave humanity a startling list of firsts. Year-round intensive farming started there, and with it came the earliest dense cities, written script, alphabet, coinage, law codes and the wheel, along with the foundations of astronomy and mathematics.
The region covers Mesopotamia, the Levant, Egypt, Elam, Anatolia, the South Caucasus and the Armenian highlands, and northern Arabia including Dilmun. Its story opens with Sumer in the 4th millennium BC. Scholars disagree about where it closes: some pick the Persian Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BC, others Alexander's Macedonian conquest two centuries later.
Even the name is a Victorian leftover. British statesmen split the east into near and far theatres during the Crimean War era, with the Near meaning roughly the Ottoman lands. When that empire fell, diplomats shifted to Middle East, while historians held on to the older phrase for antiquity.
Mesopotamia shows the pattern best. The oldest dig in Sumer, Tell el-'Oueili, reaches back to the 7th millennium BC. The Uruk period, from about 4000 to 3100 BC, brought urban life, and cuneiform slowly took shape between 3400 and 3200 BC. Schools appeared around 3000 BC. Sargon the Great then founded the Akkadian Empire, often called the world's first, which later broke into Assyria and Babylonia.
Around those centres, a crowd of peoples rose and fell. Amorite nomads from the west ended up ruling Isin, Larsa and Babylon, which then spent 435 years under Kassite kings. Assyria was a great power from 1365 to 1076 BC, rivalling Egypt. The Hittites dominated Anatolia and the Levant until about 1200 BC, weakened partly by the spread of Luwian speakers. The city of Mari on the Euphrates thrived from 2900 BC until Hammurabi sacked it in 1759 BC. Gradually, stateless societies became states, and then militaristic empires swallowed them all.
Source: Ancient Near East
