Editing Fertile Crescent (section)

==Terminology==
[[File:Fertile Crescent concept 1916.png|thumb|260px|right|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).<ref name="Breasted 1914/1916">{{cite book|last=Abt|first=Jeffrey|year=2011|title=American Egyptologist: the life of James Henry Breasted and the creation of his Oriental Institute|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YEc0bc93LwYC|location=Chicago|publisher=University of Chicago Press|isbn=978-0-226-0011-04|pages=193–194, 436}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|url= https://archive.org/details/historyofancient00gooduoft |last=Goodspeed |first=George Stephen |year=1904 |title=A History of the ancient world: for high schools and academies |location=New York |publisher=Charles Scribner's Sons |pages=[https://archive.org/details/historyofancient00gooduoft/page/5 5]–6}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Breasted|first=James Henry|year=1914|chapter=Earliest man, the Orient, Greece, and Rome|editor1-last=Robinson|editor1-first=James Harvey|editor2-last=Breasted|editor2-first=James Henry|editor3-last=Beard|editor3-first=Charles A.|title=Outlines of European history, Vol. 1|chapter-url= https://archive.org/download/outlinesofeurope01robi/outlinesofeurope01robi.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/https://archive.org/download/outlinesofeurope01robi/outlinesofeurope01robi.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live |location=Boston|publisher=Ginn|pages=56–57}} "The Ancient Orient" map is inserted between pages 56 and 57.</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Breasted|first=James Henry|year=1916|title=Ancient times, a history of the early world: an introduction to the study of ancient history and the career of early man|location=Boston|publisher=Ginn|pages=100–101|url=https://archive.org/download/cu31924027764996/cu31924027764996.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/https://archive.org/download/cu31924027764996/cu31924027764996.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live}} "The Ancient Oriental World" map is inserted between pages 100 and 101.</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last=Clay|first=Albert T.|year=1924|title=The so-called Fertile Crescent and desert bay|journal=Journal of the American Oriental Society|volume=44|pages=186–201|jstor=593554|doi=10.2307/593554 | issn=0003-0279 }}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Kuklick|first=Bruce|year=1996|chapter=Essay on methods and sources|title=Puritans in Babylon: the ancient Near East and American intellectual life, 1880–1930|chapter-url=https://archive.org/details/puritansinbabylo0000kukl|chapter-url-access=registration|location=Princeton|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-0-691-02582-7|page=[https://archive.org/details/puritansinbabylo0000kukl/page/241 241]|quote=Textbooks...The true texts brought all of these strands together, the most important being James Henry Breasted, ''Ancient Times: A History of the Early World'' (Boston, 1916), but a predecessor, George Stephen Goodspeed, ''A History of the Ancient World'' (New York, 1904), is outstanding. Goodspeed, who taught at Chicago with Breasted, antedated him in the conception of a 'crescent' of civilization.}}</ref> He wrote:<ref name="Breasted 1914/1916" />

{{Blockquote|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 is 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|Alfred Thayer Mahan's]] [[Middle East]], and [[Friedrich Naumann|Friedrich Naumann's]] ''[[Mitteleuropa]]''.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Scheffler |first=Thomas |date=2003-06-01 |title='Fertile Crescent', 'Orient', 'Middle East': The Changing Mental Maps of Southwest Asia |url=https://doi.org/10.1080/1350748032000140796 |journal=European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire |volume=10 |issue=2 |pages=253–272 |doi=10.1080/1350748032000140796 |s2cid=6707201 |issn=1350-7486}}</ref>

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 boundaries are delimited by the dry climate of the [[Syrian Desert]] to the south, the [[Sahara Desert]] to the west, the [[Anatolia]]n and [[Armenian highlands]] to the north and the [[Iranian plateau]] to the east.{{Citation needed|date=June 2021}}