What is the fertile crescent?

Question

What is the fertile crescent?

Answer 1

The fertile crescent is the area that starts in Lebanon and up through northern Syria and Iraq and down between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Answer 2

My first answer would be "The arc of land that lies between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers" There's a map:

http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/orig_a... that shows this.

The fertile crescent is the name given to where agriculture first appeared. Most date agriculture as being established by 8000 BCE. As agriculture means settlements and then cities it's a major advancement in human history. Once agriculture is established, people can then specialize in certain trades and there's a need for writing, counting, measurements and the trappings of government.

The location is somewhat fluid. Here are some other locations:

"The label “Fertile Crescent” was coined by J.H. Breasted to describe the crescent-shaped region of land in the Middle East where the land's fertility was high enough to allow for the development of some of humanity’s earliest sedentary civilizations.

Where is the Fertile Crescent?:

The Fertile Crescent begins in what is now southern Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers empty into the Persian Gulf. It extends north along with the rivers, turns westward in what was ancient Assyria, and then turns back south in what is modern Syria. The Fertile Crescent then extends down into southern Palestine; sometimes the Nile River region is included in the Fertile Crescent despite the fact that it and southern Palestine are separated by the distinctly un-fertile Sinai peninsula."

http://atheism.about.com/od/bibleplacesc...

"Fertile Crescent, Middle Eastern region arching across the northern part of the Syrian Desert and extending from the Nile Valley to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The name Fertile Crescent reflects the early development of irrigation and urban civilization in the region, especially in Mesopotamia."

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_7615...

"The Fertile Crescent is a catch-all phrase for an area of land around the Mediterreanean Sea which historians believe it is the first and one of the most important cradles of civilization historically. It is located in the Middle East of the Eurasian continent"

Based on this, the fertile crescent is more determined by agriculture then geography.

Answer 3

this is the land between the Tigris and Euphrates river. this is called fertile because the land is perfect for farming.

Answer 4

Today Middle East.

Answer 5

A region of the Middle East arching across the northern part of the Syrian Desert and extending from the Nile Valley to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The civilizations of Egypt, Phoenicia, Assyria, and Babylonia developed in this area, which was also the site of numerous migrations and invasions.

Answer 6

It is the area of arable land north of the Arabian desert, east of the Mediterranean, and south of the Anatolian massif and Zagros mountains. It stretches from Palestine and the Jordan valley in the west, through the Levant, through Mesopotamia in the east.

Edit: (in response to some other answers) it doesn't include the Nile valley.

Answer 7

The Fertile Crescent is a crescent-shaped region in the Middle East incorporating the Levant, Ancient Mesopotamia, and Ancient Egypt, known as the "Cradle of Civilization." The term "Fertile Crescent" was coined by University of Chicago archaeologist James Henry Breasted, around 1900. The region was named the "Fertile Crescent" because of its rich soil and half-moon shape. The Fertile Crescent was divided into 1) the eastern portion, consisting of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys, called Mesopotamia (land between the the rivers), and 2) the western, or Mediterranean, portion.

Watered by the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris rivers and covering some 400,000-500,000 square kilometers, the region extends from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea around the north of the Syrian Desert and through the Jazirah and Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf. These areas correspond to the present-day Egypt, Israel, West Bank, Gaza strip, and Lebanon and parts of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, south-eastern Turkey and south-western Iran. The population of the Nile River Basin is about 70 million, the Jordan River Basin about 20 million, and the Tigris and Euphrates Basins about 30 million, giving the present-day Fertile Crescent a total population of approximately 120 million, or at least a quarter of the population of the Middle East.

As crucial as rivers were to the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, they were not the only factor in the area's precocity. Ecologically the area is important as the "bridge" between Africa and Eurasia. This "bridging role" has allowed the Fertile Crescent to retain a greater amount of biodiversity than either Europe or North Africa, where climate changes during the Ice Age led to repeated extinction events due to ecosystems becoming squeezed against the waters of the Mediterranean sea. Coupled with the Saharan pump theory, this Middle Eastern land-bridge is of extreme importance to the modern distribution of Old World flora and fauna, including the spread of humanity. The fact that this area has borne the brunt of the tectonic divergence between the African and Arabian plates, and the converging Arabian and Eurasian plates, has also made this region a very diverse zone of high snow-covered mountains, fertile broad aluvial basins and desert plateaux, which has also increased its biodiversity further and enabled the survival into historic times of species not found elsewhere.

Euphrates River in Iraq.

Euphrates River in Iraq.

Furthermore the Fertile Crescent had a climate diversity and major climatic changes which encouraged the evolution of many "r" type annual plants, which produce more edible seeds than "K" type perennial plants, and the region's dramatic variety of elevation gave rise to many species of edible plants for early experiments in cultivation. Most importantly, as Jared Diamond shows in Guns, Germs, and Steel, the Fertile Crescent possessed the wild progenitors of the eight Neolithic founder crops important in early agriculture (i.e. wild progenitors to emmer wheat, einkorn, barley, flax, chick pea, pea, lentil, bitter vetch), and four of the five most important species of domesticated animals — cows, goats, sheep, and pigs — and the fifth species, the horse, lived nearby.

As a result the Fertile Crescent has an impressive record of past human activity. As well as possessing many sites with the skeletal and cultural remains of both pre-modern and early modern humans (e.g. at Kebara Cave in Israel), later Pleistocene hunter-gatherers and Epipalaeolithic semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers (the Natufians), this area is most famous for its sites related to the origins of agriculture. The western zone around the Jordan and upper Euphrates rivers gave rise to the first known Neolithic farming settlements (referred to as Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA)), which date to around 9,000 BCE (and includes sites such as Jericho). This region, alongside Mesopotamia (which lies to the east of the Fertile Crescent, between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates), also saw the emergence of early complex societies during the succeeding Bronze Age. There is also early evidence from this region for writing, and the formation of state-level societies. This has earned the region the nickname "The Cradle of Civilization."

Both the Tigris and Euphrates start in the Taurus Mountains of what is today Turkey. Farmers in southern Mesopotamia had to protect their fields from flooding each year, except Northern Mesopotamia which had just enough rain to make some farming possible.[citation needed]

Since the Bronze Age, the region's natural fertility has been greatly extended by irrigation works, upon which much of its agricultural production continues to depend. The last two millennia have seen repeated cycles of decline and recovery as past works have fallen into disrepair through the replacement of states, to be replaced under their successors. Another ongoing problem has been salination — the gradual concentration of salt and other minerals in soils with a long history of irrigation.

In the contemporary era, river waters remain a potential source of friction in the region. The Jordan lies on the borders of Israel, the kingdom of Jordan and the areas administered by the Palestinian Authority. Turkey and Syria each control about a quarter of the length of the Euphrates, on whose lower reaches Iraq is still heavily dependent.

Answer 8

Mesopotamia.  Currently, Iraq.  The land betweent the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

Answer 9

Nile floodplain.