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The So-Called Fertile Crescent and Desert Bay

1924; American Oriental Society; Volume: 44; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/593554

2169-2289

Albert T. Clay,

African history and culture analysis

SOME YEARS AGO a geographical term was coined in connection with the description of Syria and Mesopotamia in ancient times, known as the fertile crescent, the shores of the desert which has since been extensively used in text books of ancient history. Prof. James H. Breasted, who is credited with having introduced the term, says: fertile crescent is approximately a semicircle, with the open side toward the south, having the west end at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean, the center directly north of Arabia, and the east end at the north end of the Persian Gulf. * . . This great semi-circle, for lack of a name, may be called the fertile crescent. It may also be likened to the shores of a desert bay, upon which the mountains behind look down-a bay, not of water but of sandy waste, some five hundred miles across, forming a northern extension of the Arabian desert, and sweeping as far north as the latitude of the northeast corner of the Mediterranean [i. e. about 370]. This desert bay is a limestone plateau of some height-too high to be watered by the Tigris and the Euphrates which have cut canyons obliquely across it. Prof. Breasted's map shows about one hundred and fifty miles of territory through which the Tigris flows, and about four hundred through which the Euphrates flows, in the so-called desert bay. 1 In recent years I have been interested in the history and geography of this land, called in ancient times Amurru, the land of the Amorites, which includes the country extending from Babylonia to the Mediterranean. In 1919 I published a work entitled The Empire of the Amorites, in which an effort was made to reconstruct the history of Amurru, and to show not only that its civilization had a great antiquity, but that the Amorites had a capital in the fourth millennium B. c., at Mari, on the Euphrates, in the very heart of the so-called desert which was powerful enough to rule Babylonia. The evidence I had at the time to prove the existence of such an empire was fragmentary, and very