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THE L E V A N T AND NORTHERN
MESOPOTAMIA
The Taurus and Anti-Taurus mountains form the southern rim of Anatolia and the
Transcaucasus, beyond which stretch the Levant and Mesopotamia. To follow the
road south through the Bitlis pass from the lands around Lake Van to the plains
below is to drop some 1500 metres into a different world.
Northern Mesopotamia is the territory south of the mountains and east of the
Euphrates. Occasional small ranges such as the Tur Abdin are foothills to the main
mountains to the north. Otherwise this is a land of rolling plains cut by the river
Euphrates and its affluents. It is open country where armies can manoeuvre with
ease, and although the largest and most ancient sites tend to be close to the rivers
there are no other obvious constraints on where people live. The Levant is the territory
south of the mountains, west of the Euphrates, flanked by the Mediterranean
and extending as far as Sinai and the Red Sea. Compared to northern Mesopotamia
the Levant is much more circumscribed by relief. Its key features are a narrow
coastal strip, broader in the south than the north; a parallel belt of mountains, at
its highest in the Lebanon where it divides into two ranges, the Lebanon and Anti-
Lebanon, with the Beqa valley between; and beyond that inland plains and plateaux
that stretch east to the desert. Through much of the Levant major routes have to
follow the lines created by the principal rivers, the Orontes, the Litani, and the
Jordan, and cross the ranges at the available passes. Unlike northern Mesopotamia
this is a landscape of obvious strategic choke points. Settlement too has tended to
concentrate in particular zones, either on the Mediterranean coast or beyond the
mountains where there is enough water to make agriculture flourish. Ancient cities
are found on the coast; but they are also found inland: Jerusalem, Damascus, and
Aleppo. But to repeat a point made for the Balkans and Anatolia, one should not
ignore the mountains. The fertility and water supply of Mount Lebanon—to take
as an example one of the Levantine ranges—can offset its isolation and difficulty of
access, even when those factors are not viewed as positive assets (Naval Intelligence
Division 1943a: 11-37; 1943^ 12-32).
In 1916 James Henry Breasted coined the term 'Fertile Crescent' for the arc of
agricultural lands that stretch from Egypt via the Levant to Iraq and the Persian
Gulf, and it remains a useful descriptor (Scheffler: 2003). Northern Mesopotamia
and the Levant form the northern and western sides of the Crescent. The most obvious
shared feature of the region as a whole is the relationship with the desert. Inside
the Crescent is the Syrian desert, a huge arid area, beyond which to the south is the
Arabian desert, vaster still. From the desert margin of northern Mesopotamia to the
south coast of Arabia is over 2000 kilometres. This huge area is not an undifferentiated
sea of sand. There is rock desert and lava desert; there are mountains and oases,
and areas where with water agriculture is possible; but overall the desert before
the discovery of oil was by definition an extremely poor environment that could
support no more than a minimal population. Most desert dwellers (even ascetics)
inevitably looked to the settled world of the Fertile Crescent for employment,
opportunity, and support. The contrast between the 'desert' and the 'sown' is not
absolute, but the proximity of two such very different environments is a distinctive
and highly influential feature of the regional geography. Within a few kilometres
one can move from farmland to an apparent waste (Fisher 1978: 494-500).
Breasted's definition of the Fertile Crescent included Egypt, but even leaving
Egypt aside for the moment, the Fertile Crescent is far from being an undifferentiated
whole. Central and southern Iraq, which make up most of the eastern arm of
the Crescent, are dependent on a complex irrigation system to harness the waters
of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Without the man-made channels and ditches, and
without the labour to keep them clear, the landscape would revert to its natural
state, an arid dust bowl with areas of marsh (Christensen 1993). By contrast most of
the northern and western sectors of the Crescent—in effect those territories that lay
within the Roman Empire—were inside the 200-millimetre isohyet, in other words
within the area that receives sufficient rainfall to allow agriculture without irrigation.
The Roman Empire was familiar with irrigation. Irrigation systems allowed
the agricultural zone to be pushed out further towards the desert. But Rome, unlike
any empire that ruled Iraq, was not an irrigation state. Compared with any zone
dependent upon complex and large-scale irrigation, the Levant offered many more
and varied ways of making a living.
EGYPT
The imperial capital was at Constantinople on the Balkan side of the Bosporos,
but up to the 640s the empire's economic heartland was Egypt. Seen from
space the importance of Egypt is obvious. Egypt is the Nile, the valley and
the delta. In satellite photographs these stand out against the surrounding
desert as a bright green strip ending in the huge green triangle of the delta
(http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=i2748). The desert can barely support
human life, but the valley and the delta added in antiquity up to about 27,000
square kilometres of the most fertile land in the Mediterranean (Butzer 1976: 82). It
is a world of irrigation channels and ditches, but unlike Iraq, the irrigation system
was effectively natural. The key to Egypt's prosperity was as much the annual Nile
flood that deposited a new layer of mineral-rich alluvium on the farmers' fields
as it was human effort. The result was levels of agricultural output not matched
elsewhere in the Mediterranean. High output multiplied by an area of some 27,000
square kilometres made Egypt an agricultural producer on a scale that dwarfed any
other Roman province. It has been convincingly suggested that a quarter of the
sixth-century empire's population lived in Egypt, and that it provided 40 per cent
of the empire's fiscal revenues (Bowman and Rogan 1999; Sarris 2006:10-11).