Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The cultural homogeneity of ancient China as revealed by the archaeological re-
cord contrasts remarkably with the multiplicity and diversity of peoples, states,
and cultures in the ancient Middle East. Beginning about 3000
B.C
., Egyptians,
Sumerians, Semites, Akkadians, Amorites … Assyrians, Phoenicians, Hittites,
Medes, Persians, and others jostled one another in a bewildering flux of … war-
fare and politics. The record is one of pluralism with a vengeance. Irrigation
helped agriculture in several centers—the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the In-
dus valleys.… Languages, writing systems, and religions proliferated.
3
This classical legacy of division remains with us most profoundly across the chasm of
the millennia, and is therefore crucial to the volatile politics of the Greater Middle East
today. While Arabic has come to unify much of the region, Persian and Turkish predomin-
ate in the northern plateau regions, and this is not to mention the many languages of Central
Asia and the Caucasus. As Hodgson shows, many individual Middle Eastern states, while
products of arbitrary, colonial-era map drawing, also have a sturdy basis in antiquity, that
is, in geography. Yet the very multiplicity of these states, as well as the religious, ideolo-
gical, and democratizing forces that operate within them, further reify their designation as
