The Middle East, also known as the Near East, is home to one of the Cradles of Civilization and has seen many of the world's oldest cultures and civilizations. The region's history started from the earliest human settlements and continues through several major pre- and post-Islamic Empires to today's nation-states of the Middle East.

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The Sumerians became the first people to develop complex systems that were to be called "civilization" as far back as the 5th millennium BC. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh.^[1] Mesopotamia was home to several powerful empires that came to rule almost all of Middle East, particularly the Assyrian Empires of 1365–1076 BC and the Neo-Assyrian Empire of 911–609 BC. From the early 7th century BC and onward, the Iranian Medes, followed by the Achaemenid Empire (First Persian Empire) and other subsequent Iranian states and empires, dominated the region. In the 1st century BC, the expanding Roman Republic absorbed the whole Eastern Mediterranean, which included much of the Near East. The Eastern Roman Empire, now commonly known as the Byzantine Empire, ruled from the Balkans to the Euphrates, became increasingly defined by and dogmatic about Christianity and gradually creating religious rifts between the doctrines dictated by the establishment in Constantinople and believers in many parts of the Middle East. From the 3rd century to the course of the 7th century AD, the entire Middle East was dominated by the Byzantines and the Sasanian Empire (Neo-Persian Empire). From the 7th century, a new power was rising in the Middle East, that of Islam. The dominance of the Arabs came to a sudden end in the mid-11th century with the arrival of the Seljuq dynasty. In the early 13th century, a new wave of invaders, the armies of the Mongol Empire, mainly Turkic, swept through the region. By the early 15th century, a new power had arisen in western Anatolia, the Ottoman emirs, who were linguistically Turkic and religiously Islamic and in 1453 captured the Christian Byzantine capital of Constantinople and made themselves sultans.

Large parts of the Middle East became a war ground between the Ottomans and the Iranian Safavid dynasty for centuries, starting in the early 16th century. By 1700, the Ottomans had been driven out of the Kingdom of Hungary and the balance of power along the frontier had shifted decisively in favor of the Western world. The British Empire also established effective control of the Persian Gulf, and the French colonial empire extended its influence into Lebanon and Syria. In 1912, the Kingdom of Italy seized Libya and the Dodecanese islands, just off the coast of the Ottoman heartland of Anatolia. In the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, Middle Eastern rulers tried to modernize their states to compete more effectively with the European powers. A turning point in the region's history came when oil was discovered, first in Persia in 1908 and later in Saudi Arabia (in 1938) and the other Persian Gulf states, and also in Libya and Algeria. A Western dependence on Middle Eastern oil and the decline of British influence led to a growing American interest in the region.

During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, Syria and Egypt made moves towards independence. The British, the French, and the Soviets departed from many parts of the Middle East during and after World War II (1939–1945). The Arab–Israeli conflict in Palestine culminated in the 1947 United Nations plan to partition Palestine. Later in the midst of Cold War tensions, the Arabic-speaking countries of Western Asia and Northern Africa saw the rise of pan-Arabism. The departure of the European powers from direct control of the region, the establishment of Israel, and the increasing importance of the petroleum industry, marked the creation of the modern Middle East. In most Middle Eastern countries, the growth of market economies was inhibited by political restrictions, corruption, cronyism, overspending on arms and prestige projects and overdependence on oil revenues. The wealthiest economies in the region per capita are the small oil-rich countries of Persian Gulf: Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

A combination of factors—such as the 1967 Six-Day War,^[2] the 1970s energy crisis beginning with the 1973 OPEC oil embargo in response to US support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War,^[2][3] the concurrent Saudi-led popularization of Salafism/Wahhabism,^[4] and the 1978–79 Iranian Revolution^[5]—promoted the increasing rise of Islamism and the ongoing Islamic revival (Tajdid). The Fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought a global security refocus from the Cold War to a War on Terror. Starting in the early 2010s, a revolutionary wave that is popularly known as the Arab Spring brought major protests, uprisings, and revolutions to several Middle Eastern and Maghreb countries. Clashes in western Iraq on 30 December 2013 were preliminary to the Sunni pan-Islamist ISIL uprising.

The term Near East can be used interchangeably with Middle East, but in a different context, especially in discussing ancient history, it may have a limited meaning, namely the northern historically-Aramaic-speaking Semitic people area and adjacent Anatolian territories, marked in the two maps below.

Geographically, the Middle East can be thought of as Western Asia with the addition of Egypt (which is the non-Maghreb region of Northern Africa) and with the exclusion of the Caucasus. The Middle East was the first to experience a Neolithic Revolution (c. the 10th millennium BCE), as well as the first to enter the Bronze Age (c. 3300–1200 BC) and Iron Age (c. 1200–500 BC).

Historically human populations have tended to settle around bodies of water, which is reflected in modern population density patterns. Irrigation systems were extremely important for the agricultural Middle East: for Egypt that of the lower Nile River, and for Mesopotamia that of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Levantine agriculture depended on precipitation rather than on the river-based irrigation of Egypt and Mesopotamia, resulting in preference for different crops. Since travel was faster and easier by sea, civilizations along the Mediterranean, such as Phoenicia and later Greece, participated in intense trade. Similarly, Ancient Yemen, being much more conducive to agriculture than the rest of the Arabian Peninsula, sea traded heavily with the Horn of Africa, some of which it lingually Semitized. The Adnanite Arabs, inhabiting the drier desert areas of the Middle East, were all nomadic pastoralists before some began settling in city states, with the geo-linguistic distribution today being divided between Persian Gulf, the Najd and the Hejaz in the Peninsula, as well as the Bedouin areas beyond the Peninsula.

Since ancient times the Middle East has had several lingua franca: Akkadian (c. 14th–8th century BC), Hebrew (c. 5th century BC – 2nd century AD), Aramaic (c. 8th century BC – 8th century AD),^[6] Greek (c. 4th century BC – 8th century AD), and Arabic (c. 8th century AD – present). Familiarity with English is not uncommon among the middle and upper classes.^[7][8] Arabic is not commonly spoken in Turkey, Iran, and Israel, and some varieties of Arabic lack mutual intelligibility, thus qualifying as distinct languages by this linguistic criterion.

The Middle East was the birthplace of the Abrahamic, Gnostic, and most Iranian religions. Initially the ancient inhabitants of the region followed various ethnic religions, but most of those began to be gradually replaced at first by Christianity (even before the 313 AD Edict of Milan) and finally by Islam (after the spread of the Muslim conquests beyond the Arabian Peninsula in 634 AD). To this day, however, the Middle East has, in particular, some sizable, ethnically distinct Christian minority groups,^[9] as well as Jews, concentrated in Israel, and followers of Iranian religions, such as Yazdânism and Zoroastrianism. Some of the smaller ethnoreligious minorities include the Shabak people, the Mandaeans and the Samaritans. It is somewhat controversial whether the Druze religion is a distinct religion in its own right or merely a part of the Ismailist branch of Shia Islam.^[10][11][12]

The Arabian Tectonic Plate was part of the African Plate during much of the Phanerozoic Eon (Paleozoic–Cenozoic), until the Oligocene Epoch of the Cenozoic Era. Red Sea rifting began in the Eocene, but the separation of Africa and Arabia occurred in the Oligocene, and since then the Arabian Plate has been slowly moving toward the Eurasian Plate.

The collision between the Arabian Plate and Eurasia is pushing up the Zagros Mountains of Iran. Because the Arabian Plate and Eurasia plate collide, many cities are in danger such as those in south eastern Turkey (which is on the Arabian Plate). These dangers include earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes.

The earliest human migrations out of Africa occurred through the Middle East, namely over the Levantine corridor, with the pre-modern Homo erectus about 1.8 million years BP. One of the potential routes for early human migrations toward southern and eastern Asia is Iran.

Haplogroup J-P209, the most common human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroup in the Middle East today, is believed to have arisen in the region 31,700±12,800 years ago.^[13][14] The two main current subgroups, J-M267 and J-M172, which now comprise between them almost all of the population of the haplogroup, are both believed to have arisen very early, at least 10,000 years ago. Nonetheless, Y-chromosomes F-M89* and IJ-M429* were reported to have been observed in the Iranian plateau.^[15]

There is evidence of rock carvings along the Nile terraces and in desert oases. In the 10th millennium BC, a culture of hunter-gatherers and fishermen was replaced by a grain-grinding culture. Climate changes and/or overgrazing around 6000 BC began to desiccate the pastoral lands of Egypt, forming the Sahara. Early tribal peoples migrated to the Nile River, where they developed a settled agricultural economy and more centralized society.^[16]

Neolithic agriculturalists, who may have resided in Northeast Africa and the Near East, may have been the source population for lactase persistence variants, including –13910*T, and may have been subsequently supplanted by later migrations of peoples.^[17] The Sub-Saharan West African Fulani, the North African Tuareg, and European agriculturalists, who are descendants of these Neolithic agriculturalists, share the lactase persistence variant –13910*T.^[17] While shared by Fulani and Tuareg herders, compared to the Tuareg variant, the Fulani variant of –13910*T has undergone a longer period of haplotype differentiation.^[17] The Fulani lactase persistence variant –13910*T may have spread, along with cattle pastoralism, between 9686 BP and 7534 BP, possibly around 8500 BP; corroborating this timeframe for the Fulani, by at least 7500 BP, there is evidence of herders engaging in the act of milking in the Central Sahara.^[17]

The ancient Near East
Regions and states Fertile Crescent Mesopotamia Sumer Hamazi Subartu Suhum Uruk Akkadian Empire Armani Gutian Dynasty Simurrum Sumerian Empire Assyria Babylonia Tukri Kassites Chaldea Assyrian Empire Babylonian Empire Adiabene Egypt Early Dynastic Period Old Kingdom Middle Kingdom New Kingdom Ptolemaic Kingdom Roman Egypt Iran Elam Lullubi Medes Achaemenid Empire Parthian Empire Sasanian Empire Anatolia Hattians Hurrians Hittites Carchemish Arzawa Assuwa Luwians Kaskians Hayasa-Azzi Shupria Colchis Neo-Hittite States Lydia Phrygians Diauehi Urartu Bithynia Pontus Commagene The Levant Kish Civilization Ebla Armi Mari Nagar Amorites Qatna Mukish Amurru Yamhad Ugarit Hurrians Urkesh Urshu Mitanni Canaan Ancient Israel and Judah Ancient Palestine Phoenicia Alashiya Aram Neo-Hittite states Nabatea Iturea Seleucid Empire Coele-Syria Roman Syria Arabia Dilmun Magan Gerrha Awal Tylos Saba Maʿīn Qedar Ḥaḍramawt Awsān Thamud Qatabān Lihyan Nabataea Himyar Hatra Tanukh Ghassanids Salīḥids Lakhmid Kinda
Archaeological periods Chronology Copper Age Bronze Age Bronze Age Collapse Iron Age
Languages Akkadian Amorite Arabic Old Arabic Nabataean Arabic Nabataean Script Ancient North Arabian Dadanitic Hismaic Safaitic Taymanitic Thamudic Aramaic Armazic Eastern Aramaic Western Aramaic Imperial Aramaic Old Aramaic Aramaic Script Avestan Avestan Script Canaanite Ammonite Edomite Hebrew Moabite Phoenician Phoenician Alphabet Proto-Sinaitic Script Paleo-Hebrew Script Eblaite Egyptian Egyptian Hieroglyphs Elamite Linear Elamite Elamite Cuneiform Eteocypriot Cypriot Syllabary Gutian Hattic Hittite Hittite Cuneiform Hurrian Kaskian Kassite Luwic Carian Carian Script Kalasmaic Luwian Anatolian Hieroglyphs Lycian Lycian Script Milyan Pisidian Sidetic Lydian Lydian Script Median Mysian Palaic Parthian Inscriptional Parthian Manichaean Script Old Persian Old Persian Cuneiform Middle Persian Manichaean Script Pazend Script Philistine Phrygian Phrygian Script Samalian South Arabian South Arabian Script Sumerian Cuneiform Script Sutean Taymanitic Ugaritic Ugaritic Script Urartian
Literature Akkadian Egyptian Hittite Persian Sumerian Syriac Ugaritic
Religion and mythology Religion and mythology Mesopotamian Babylonian Sumerian Egyptian Semitic Arabian Nabataean Canaanite Hebrew Punic Armenian Hurrian Anatolian Hittite Luwian Iranian Persian Scythian Ossetian Cosmology Ancient near eastern cosmology Flat earth Firmament Cosmic ocean Abzu Ancient Mesopotamian underworld Mashu
Other topics Archaeology Genetic History Cradle of Civilization Ancient Near East Conflicts Egypt Egyptology Mathematics Technology Medicine Assyria Assyriology Law Babylonia Astronomy Law Mathematics Hittites Hittitology Law Cuneiform Law Early Alphabet History of the Ancient Levant History of the Middle East Timeline List of Cities
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The ancient Near East was the first to practice intensive year-round agriculture and currency-mediated trade (as opposed to barter), gave the rest of the world the first writing system, invented the potter's wheel and then the vehicular and mill wheel, created the first centralized governments and law codes, served as birthplace to the first city-states with their high degree of division of labor, as well as laying the foundation for the fields of astronomy and mathematics. However, its empires also introduced rigid social stratification, slavery, and organized warfare.

The earliest civilizations in history were established in the region now known as the Middle East around 3500 BC by the Sumerians, in southern Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), widely regarded as the cradle of civilization. The Sumerians and the Akkadians—who extended their empire to northern Mesopotamia (now northern Syria)—and later Babylonians and Assyrians all flourished in this region.

"In the course of the fourth millennium BC, city-states developed in southern Mesopotamia that were dominated by temples whose priests represented the cities' patron deities. The most prominent of the city-states was Sumer, which gave its language to the area, and became the first great civilization of mankind. About 2340 BC, Sargon the Great (c. 2360–2305 BC) united the city-states in the south and founded the Akkadian dynasty, the world's first empire."^[18]

During this same time period, Sargon the Great appointed his daughter, Enheduanna, as High Priestess of Inanna at Ur.^[19] Her writings, which established her as the first known author in world history, also helped cement Sargon's position in the region.

Soon after the Sumerian civilization began, the Nile valley of Lower and Upper Egypt was unified under the Pharaohs approximately around 3150 BC. Since then, Ancient Egypt experienced 3 high points of civilization, the so-called "Kingdom" periods:

• The Old Kingdom (2686–2181),
• The Middle Kingdom (2055–1650) and, most notably,
• The New Kingdom (1550–1069).

The history of Ancient Egypt is concluded by the Late Period (664–332 BC), immediately followed by the history of Egypt in Classical Antiquity, beginning with Ptolemaic Egypt.

Thereafter, civilization quickly spread through the Fertile Crescent to the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea and throughout the Levant, as well as to ancient Anatolia. Ancient Levantine kingdoms and city states included Ebla City, Ugarit City, Kingdom of Aram-Damascus, Kingdom of Israel, Kingdom of Judah, Kingdom of Ammon, Kingdom of Moab, Kingdom of Edom, and the Nabatean kingdom. The Phoenician civilization, encompassing several city states, was a maritime trading culture that established colonial cities in the Mediterranean Basin, most notably Carthage, in 814 BC.

Mesopotamia was home to several powerful empires that came to rule almost the entire Middle East—particularly the Assyrian Empires of 1365–1076 BC and the Neo-Assyrian Empire of 911–605 BC. The Assyrian Empire, at its peak, was the largest the world had seen. It ruled all of what is now Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Cyprus, and Bahrain—with large swathes of Iran, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Sudan, and Arabia. "The Assyrian empires, particularly the third, had a profound and lasting impact on the Near East. Before Assyrian hegemony ended, the Assyrians brought the highest civilization to the then known world. From the Caspian to Cyprus, from Anatolia to Egypt, Assyrian imperial expansion would bring into the Assyrian sphere nomadic and barbaric communities, and would bestow the gift of civilization upon them."^[20]

From the early 6th century BC onwards, several Persian states dominated the region, beginning with the Medes and non-Persian Neo-Babylonian Empire, then their successor the Achaemenid Empire known as the first Persian Empire, conquered in the late 4th century BC by the very short-lived Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great, and then successor kingdoms such as Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid state in Western Asia.

After a century of hiatus, the idea of the Persian Empire was revived by the Parthians in the 3rd century BC—and continued by their successors, the Sassanids from the 3rd century AD. This empire dominated sizable parts of what is now the Asian part of the Middle East and continued to influence the rest of the Asiatic and African Middle East region, until the Arab Muslim conquest of Persia in the mid-7th century AD. Between the 1st century BC and the early 7th century AD, the region was completely dominated by the Romans and the Parthians and Sassanids on the other hand, which often culminated in various Roman-Persian Wars over the seven centuries. Eastern Rite, Church of the East Christianity took hold in Persian-ruled Mesopotamia, particularly in Assyria from the 1st century AD onwards, and the region became a center of a flourishing Syriac–Assyrian literary tradition.

Zdroj:https://en.wikipedia.org?pojem=Modern_Middle_East
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