![]() After 90 years of citations, the editors of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary published its 26th and final volume in 2011. This allowed scholars to trace how the meanings and uses of words evolved over thousands of years.Ī feat of this magnitude takes time. Located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Mesopotamia’s name comes from a Greek term meaning “the land between the rivers.”įar more than a list of words, each entry cites every major instance of a word preserved from antiquity. Mesopotamia, a region that includes all of modern-day Iraq as well as parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran, formed a significant part of the Fertile Crescent. The effects of such ethnocentric theories on race-about who is “civilized” and who is not-by Breasted and many other scholars of his era are still felt today. ![]() He argued that these ancient civilizations were the ancestors to Europeans and the ones primarily responsible for contemporary western civilization-not people living in other parts of Africa and Asia. ![]() He wrote that the cultures who lived in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent were white, a designation informed by his own invented racial geography. Though Breasted moved the marker from Europe to Western Asia and North Africa, he was selective in the areas he chose to study. Rockefeller Jr., Breasted established the Oriental Institute-an interdisciplinary research center and archaeology museum dedicated to exploring the rise of the world’s first villages, cities and empires.ĭuring the first few decades of the OI’s existence, archaeological teams conducted several large-scale expeditions across the Fertile Crescent. In Ancient Times: A History of the Early World, originally intended as a high school textbook, Breasted wrote: “The earliest home of men in this great arena of Western Asia is…a kind of cultivable fringe of the desert, a fertile crescent having the mountains on one side and the desert on the other.”įor decades, Breasted dreamed of establishing a research institution dedicated to the study of early civilizations in Western Asia and North Africa. The term “Fertile Crescent” was coined and popularized by James Henry Breasted, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago. How did the Fertile Crescent get its name? Many scholars believe that urbanization-the formation of cities-first occurred in the Fertile Crescent. A city has a centralized government and economy, specialized jobs, large-scale architecture and surplus agriculture. The Fertile Crescent, often referred to as “the cradle of civilization,” is the crescent-shaped region in Western Asia and North Africa that spans the modern-day countries of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and, for some scholars, Egypt.Īnthropologists today don’t agree on what constitutes “civilization,” but one common definition describes it as: a complex society of cities (the word “civilization” comes from the Latin “civitas” or “city”). If you’ve spent any significant time in social studies classes in school, you’ve probably heard of the term “Fertile Crescent.” How are we studying the Fertile Crescent and the Middle East today?.How do we know what life was like in the Fertile Crescent?.What civilizations lived in the Fertile Crescent?.How did the Fertile Crescent get its name?.However, the region remains archaeologically significant and continues to yield discoveries that fundamentally shape our understanding of ancient life. Today, the term “Fertile Crescent” has been scrutinized both as a concept and as the main origin point for human civilization. ![]() In 1919, Breasted founded the Oriental Institute (OI), kicking off a century of archaeology and research in the region. A small but revolutionary group pursued a new idea: That civilization began in the ancient Middle East. Until the 19th century, Western scholars believed that “civilization” began in Europe-specifically Greece and Rome. Formed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the Mediterranean Sea, this region gave rise to some of the world’s earliest civilizations. The “Fertile Crescent,” a term coined by University of Chicago Egyptologist James Henry Breasted, refers to a crescent-shaped region in Western Asia. Editor’s note: This is part of a series called “The Day Tomorrow Began,” which explores the history of breakthroughs at UChicago. ![]()
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