‘Fertile Crescent’, ‘Orient’, ‘Middle East’: The Changing Mental Maps of Southwest Asia

This article looks at three types of mental maps projected on Southwest Asia during the twentieth century and examines how they were assimilated, reframed or refused by political actors in the region itself. (1) The concept of the ‘Fertile Crescent’ was connected to the archaeological exploration of ancient memorial landscapes that testified to the region’s ancient superiority and, hence, could be integrated into local efforts of territorial nation-building. (2) By contrast, the invention of the ‘Middle East’ was not rooted in historical considerations but corresponded to the strategic needs of Western geopolitics. Backed by military power, institutions, and economic incentives, the concept became, however, a reality imposed upon and sometimes accepted by the region’s political actors. (3) Ideas of the ‘Orient’ have a much longer history: corresponding to Southwest Asia’s long-term role in shaping the ancient, medieval and modern Mediterranean world, the ‘East’ is a palimpsest of conflicting connotations, comprising reminders of its ancient fertility and centrality (ex oriente lux) as well as of its decline, romantic/imperialist stereotypes about the correspondence between Islam and the Desert as well as visions of a revived Levant as part of an enlarged Mediterranean region. The ‘Fertile Crescent’ in Ancient and Modern Times Coined in 1916 by the American archaeologist James Henry Breasted (1865– 1935), the term ‘Fertile Crescent’ has now its place in all the better guidebooks on the Middle East. The term refers to a crescent-shaped area of fertile land stretching from the northern littoral of the Persian Gulf up Mesopotamia and Western Iran to Southern Anatolia and from there southward along the eastern shore of the Eastern Mediterranean to the Sinai desert. This region, Breasted claimed, had been, together with ancient Egypt, the cradle of European civilisation: ‘Civilisation arose in the Orient, and early Europe obtained it there.’ In antiquity, however, the term ‘Fertile Crescent’ had been unknown. No ancient king had ever claimed to rule the ‘Fertile Crescent’, nor would he have been able to even think of it. For, in order to understand the ‘crescent’ metaphor, a bird’s-eye view from outer space or a modern map would have been required. Moreover, the macro-region thus designed is geo-morphologically far from uniform: it encompasses mountain highlands and sea coasts, river valleys, alluvial plains, oases and steppes, areas allowing for rain-fed agriculture as well as arid zones requiring irrigation. Once invented, however, the term provided a catchy explanatory image that could be used not only for explaining the interplay of space, culture and politics from an environmental point of view but also for advancing hidden political agendas. 1. J.H. Breasted, Ancient times: A History of the Early World: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient History and the Career of Early Man, Boston, 1916, §§ 131–32, pp. 100–01.