The Middle East

The Middle East is a subcontinent between Africa and Asia, though it also connects to Europe. It is considered the birthplace of civilization, as the earliest evidence of farming has been found in the Fertile Crescent, a patch of land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which now run through the modern day countries of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.

This area has also been one of the most contested and fought over areas throughout history, with five major empires all claiming it before 500 AD. The first of these Empires was the Babylonian Empire, one of the first known empires as it originated in the Fertile Crescent. Next came Persia, originating in the area around Turkey. Persia took the middle east and held on to it until Alexander the Great came through and took it in his expansive, but ridiculously short-lived empire. After Alexander died one of his generals took the area and named his empire “Parthia” This lasted until the Romans swept through and toppled the Parthians. As Rome began to deteriorate, however, it split in half. The Western section kept the Mediterranean and Europe, but the Eastern half, called the Byzantine Empire, retained the Middle East. The Byzantines then had a rivalry with the remnants of Persia (which had been hiding further east) until Persia was finally toppled by the brand new religion of Islam, which primarily took the form of the Ottoman Empire in the 700s, and took North Africa in it’s empire. Islam also took power from Byzantium, but they would survive a while longer.

Funnily, none of those empires would leave a legacy in the Middle East, since the Muslim Ottomans would convert everything to Islam. The Europeans were nearly entirely Christian at this point, the same way the Middle East was Muslim. The problem with this was that both Christianity and Islam considered the Middle East their own Holy Land, and thought it should be kept from the other. The Europeans sent their knights on crusades to reclaim their Holy Land from the 1100s to the 1600s, though they were nearly entirely unsuccessful, and ended up finishing off their own ally, Byzantium. The Muslims meanwhile converted all of the Christian churches built there into Muslim churches. The only territory that the Crusaders managed to hold was the Island of Rhodes, which eventually fell in 1522, though the Crusaders only backed up to the neighboring island of Malta, where you can still see the Christian influences.

By the 1750s, which is where my knowledge fails me, the Ottomans controled most everything in the Middle East, though the empire is starting rot, just like the ones before it.