UNDERSTANDING THE MIDDLE EAST:
History, Religion, and the Clash of Cultures
400 pages
Copyright © 2007 by Beechmont Crest Publishing
First edition, 2007
0-9748330-6-1
C H A P T E R 1:
The Ancient Middle East
The ancient roots of today’s headlines
The English-speaking civilization of North America has a history of about 400 years. Even Europe----the land that generations of Americans have routinely referred to as “the old country”---is relatively young. Historians usually mark 500 A.D.-----a generation after the fall of the Roman Empire---as the birth of a distinctly “European” culture.
The history of the Middle East must be measured by a completely different scale. The modern state of Israel was born in 1948; but the Israelis trace their roots to a desert tribe that wandered into the region thousands of years ago. The Lebanese city of Tyre----which figured prominently in the July 2006 clashes between Israel and Hezbollah----was once the Phoenician city of Tyre. The West Bank town of Jericho was mentioned regularly on CNN after it became a base of operations for Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. Jericho is also mentioned in the Old Testament. In fact, Jericho’s history can be traced back even further. Jericho is one of the oldest continuously occupied settlements on earth; the town had a population of about 2,000 people in 7000 B.C.
The modern conflicts in the Middle East also have ancient parallels. Iran and Iraq fought a brief war in the mid-1970s, and a long, bloody conflict during the 1980s. This was history repeating itself. The ancient residents of Iran and Iraq were also at each other’s throats from time to time. Israel has been attacked by its neighbors on numerous occasions since 1948; but this, too, is nothing new. The ancient Israelites were attacked first by the Assyrians, and then by the Babylonians---who hailed from the region that is today Iraq.
This chapter explores the ancient civilizations that are the forerunners of the modern nations of the Middle East: Sumer, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Israel, Egypt, and others. To understand the Middle East today, it is essential to understand how the Middle East evolved. The chapter begins at the very beginning---with the rise of civilization in the area.
Copyright 2005 Beechmont Crest Publishing
