246. The Composite Culture of the Near East
In this western end of Asia, then, from the Hellespont to Persia and from the Caucasus to the Arabian desert, beginning five thousand years ago and probably more, a motley of nations was thrown together—autochthonous peoples of several sorts, Semites, Indo-Europeans, possibly Ural-Altaians. Their contacts enabled each to acquire many of the new devices developed by the others, to combine these with their own attainments, and thus to be a source of culture stimulation over again for the others. The largest tract of rich lowland in the area was the Fertile Crescent which bowed from Jerusalem northward and eastward into Mesopotamia and then down the course of the Tigris and Euphrates to their mouths, and here, for several millenia, civilization tended to advance most intensively. Within this Crescent, again, its southeastern end, the drainable and irrigable alluvial plain of Babylonia, averaged in the lead from the earliest known Sumerian times until shortly before the Christian era. Yet political dominance often shifted elsewhere: to Egypt, which conquered to the Euphrates in the fifteenth century B.C.; to the Hittites of Asia Minor in the fourteenth and thirteenth; to the Assyrians of the middle Tigris in the twelfth and eleventh and again in the eighth and seventh centuries. Culturally, too, almost every one of the many nations or tracts comprised within the west Asiatic area developed a degree of independence; each added features or modified those which it borrowed; each gave to its local civilization a cast of its own, without losing touch with the others.