Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Middle East - Essay Example

Sociology The Middle East includes four separate culture areas: Arab, Turkish, Iranian, and the Israeli civilization. The great Islamic empires, the Arab, Turkish, and Iranian civilizations symbolize three distinct variations within the worldwide Islamic culture. The Ottoman Empire, ruled over the majority of the Middle East, for almost 500 years, until the end of World War I. The modern state of Turkey and the majority of the contemporary Arab nation-states arose later. According to history Middle East is known as the cradle of civilization or the beginning of human civilization. The two major rivers, the Nile Valley in Egypt, and the Tigris-Euphrates in Iraq were the places of the worlds early civilizations. The three major religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam originated from the Middle East and here is where urban life and centralized forms of political organization arose. The archaeologists are rebuilding the cultural advancement that transformed the human ancestors from nomadic hunters and gatherers into established villagers who cultivated varieties of wheat and barley and set aside domestic sheep and goats. The most important era in human history, which can be dated back to 8000 B.C., has been considered to as the Agricultural Revolution, to emphasize its importance in the progress of human cultural past. The evolution from hunting and gathering for one’s food to one depended on food production and established society life was the introduction to the next step in human intellectual growth, the start of civilization, which goes back to about 5000 B.C in the Middle East (Rassam n.pag 2007). The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers Flowing southward to the Persian Gulf across southern Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, give life into the parched land transforming this area of desert is part of the Fertile Crescent. This region became the Middle Eastern civilization more than 8,000 years before. The agricultural revolution transformed nomadic hunter-gatherers into a socially multifaceted, enduring civilization. Approximately a hundred centuries later, another type of agricultural revolution is in progress in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent, because of the major infrastructure advance in Turkey’s Southeast Anatolia area which will provide irrigation to 1.7 million hectares of fresh farmland. One of the most accomplishments of the project in 1994 was the two water-delivery tunnels which will vent out lake behind the Ataturk Dam to water the regions of southeastern Turkey that lie north of the Syrian border. Before the completion of the first tunnel, the water available for irrigation came from deep bore wells, which used only for restricted crop production. From the year 2002 onwards, irrigated cotton area grew by more than 50 percent, extending cultivation to an additional 450,000 acres. Although irrigation is critical for most of the farming in the region, it is not only the sole source of water used for agriculture. Normally, rainfall in the Middle East is intense within a comparatively short period of the year between late October and early April. Therefore, the major rain-fed crops of the region, wheat and barley, are grown during the winter months and are ready for harvest in early summer. The Harran Plains and the strip of green to the east along the Tigris River give evidence to the power of water to change a desert into agricultural land. Southern Turkey is one of the several places around the globe that the Production Estimates and Crop Assessment Division (PECAD) of the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service observe with satellite images. The idea is to offer early information of abnormal crop events, growing conditions, or agriculture damage that may seriously affect U.S. agricultural markets and trade (Lindsay and Reynolds n.pag 2006). The transformation from hunter-gatherers to farmers around 8000 BC was the great cultural progress in the history of the human. The growth of food crops and the domestication of animals caused to change human behaviour overnight. However, it is necessary to understand that this revolution took many centuries to spread and reach large parts of the globe. Farming removed the doubt from the mind of human beings in obtaining food and people no longer need to wander from place to place for food since it could be produced in plentiful every year. Abundant and reliable food supplies promoted population growth and in turn caused advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material development in human society, marked by progress in the arts and sciences, the extensive use of writing, and the appearance of complex political and social institutions. Two million years ago, the human population on Earth has been calculated at 100,000. From the start of the agricultural revolution this number had gone up to five million. During 3000 BC, world population went up to almost 100 million. At the beginning of Christian era world population was well over 200 million. It seems that agriculture was a step by step progress. Early gatherers initially came to understand the connection between plants, the foods they produced, and their cultivation cycle. At some point the ancestors learned the idea how to promote the plants they wanted and restrain those of no use. Next came the steps of collecting seeds, planting seeds, watering and nurishing the plants. The method of preserving seeds from the healthy and most productive plants for replanting, the farmers broke and changed the process of natural selection to improve the yield of the utility plants. It is believed that the first domesticated grain have been a wild wheat that grew in southern Turkey. Ancient gatherers had to learn how to harvest the grain seeds, separate the wheat kernel, grind it, and bake it, before they possessed the knowledge to grow the plant and select it so that it improved productivity. Since it was a complex learning process it took time. There is no clear understanding about how and when the rice plant was domesticated. The agricultural revolution increased the speed of progress as innovations raised land fit to be cultivated, crop yields, and farmers output per unit of labor. Land was prepared by digging first, and then plowing. Irrigation made sufficient water for farming. Fertilization and crop rotation and use of specific tools increased productivity. Dogs were domesticated mainly as companions, guards, and hunting purposes. The first domesticated animal might be the goat, a source of meat, milk, and waterproof hides. Domestication of the goat was followed by sheep, cattle, horses, pigs, chickens and others.Cattle are considered the most important domestication because in addition to providing meat, milk, and hides, they were also used for carrying loads. They are used for ploughing the land for farming (Wikibooks n.pag 2006). The study of the Middle East history is crucial to any understanding of the development of contemporary global societies and cultures. The Middle East was one of the three world historical centers in which agriculture, the state, and urban civilization developed particularly Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley. The civilizations of Anatolia, the Nile and Mesopotamian valleys, and the coastal region of the Mediterranean, Arabian, and Red Seas are the sources of religious, philosophic, and legal traditions that deeply inform world culture today. Judaism, Christianity and Islam whose supporters together number half of humanity, all came up within a relatively small area of the region and have developed spirituality globally. The Middle East was a central area of human civilization throughout the centuries. Work Cited Lindsay R. and Reynolds C. A Modern Agricultural Revolution in the Fertile Crescent (2006). 1 November, 2007 Rassam, A. Introduction to the Middle East (2007) 1 November, 2007 Wikibooks, Conhistory/Agricultural Revolution (22 December 2006) 1 November, 2007 Read More