The 

Fertile Crescent (Arabic: ‫)الهالل الخصيب‬, (Turkish: Cebel-i Bereket (Osmaniye) Sancağına) is a

crescent-shaped region in the Middle East, spanning modern-
day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan, together with the northern region of Kuwait,
southeastern region of Turkey and the western portion of Iran.[1][2] Some authors also
include Cyprus and Northern Egypt.
The Fertile Crescent is believed to be the very first region where settled farming emerged as people
started the process of clearance and modification of natural vegetation to grow newly domesticated
plants as crops. Early human civilizations such as Sumer in Mesopotamia flourished as a result.
[3]
 Technological advances in the region include the development of agriculture and the use
of irrigation, of writing, the wheel, and glass, most emerging first in Mesopotamia.

Terminology[edit]

1916 map of the Fertile Crescent by James H. Breasted, who popularised usage of the phrase.
The term "Fertile Crescent" was popularized by archaeologist James Henry Breasted in Outlines of
European History (1914) and Ancient Times, A History of the Early World (1916).[4][5][6][7][8][9] He wrote:[4]
It lies like an army facing south, with one wing stretching along the eastern shore of the
Mediterranean and the other reaching out to the Persian Gulf, while the center has its back against
the northern mountains. The end of the western wing is Palestine; Assyria makes up a large part of
the center; while the end of the eastern wing is Babylonia. [...] This great semicircle, for lack of a
name, may be called the Fertile Crescent.
There was no single term for this region in antiquity. At the time that Breasted was writing, it roughly
corresponded with the territories of the Ottoman Empire ceded to Britain and France in the Sykes–
Picot Agreement. Historian Thomas Scheffler has noted that Breasted was following a trend in
Western geography to "overwrite the classical geographical distinctions between continents,
countries and landscapes with large, abstract spaces", drawing parallels with the work of Halford
Mackinder, who conceptualised Eurasia as a 'pivot area' surrounded by an 'inner crescent', Alfred
Thayer Mahan's Middle East, and Friedrich Naumann's Mitteleuropa.[10]
In current usage, the Fertile Crescent includes Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt,
and Jordan, as well as the surrounding portions of Turkey and Iran. In addition to
the Tigris and Euphrates, riverwater sources include the Jordan River. The inner boundary is
delimited by the dry climate of the Syrian Desert to the south. Around the outer boundary are
the Anatolian and Armenian highlands to the north, the Sahara Desert to the west, Sudan to the
south, and the Iranian plateau to the east.[citation needed]
Biodiversity and climate[edit]
As crucial as rivers and marshlands were to the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, they were
not the only factor. The area is geographically important as the "bridge" between North
Africa and Eurasia, which has allowed it 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 when ecosystems became squeezed against the waters of
the Mediterranean Sea. The Saharan pump theory posits that this Middle Eastern land bridge was
extremely important to the modern distribution of Old World flora and fauna, including the spread of
humanity.[citation needed]
The area has borne the brunt of the tectonic divergence between the African and Arabian plates and
the converging Arabian and Eurasian plates, which has made the region a very diverse zone of high
snow-covered mountains.[citation needed]
The Fertile Crescent had many diverse climates, and major climatic changes encouraged the
evolution of many "r" type annual plants, which produce more edible seeds than "K" type perennial
plants. The region's dramatic variety in elevation gave rise to many species of edible plants for early
experiments in cultivation. Most importantly, the Fertile Crescent was home to 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; the fifth species, the horse, lived
nearby.[11] The Fertile Crescent flora comprises a high percentage of plants that can self-pollinate, but
may also be cross-pollinated.[11] These plants, called "selfers", were one of the geographical
advantages of the area because they did not depend on other plants for reproduction.[11]