A History of the Middle East (2 page)

I am grateful to Luis Cañizares, to whom Peter dedicated his
History
, for trusting me to don Peter’s mantle and update the text; to my agent Michael Sissons for seeking me out; and to Simon Winder of Penguin for his patience. My contribution has benefited greatly from the editors I have been fortunate to work with during my years in the region: Barbara Smith and Xan Smiley, Middle East editors at
The Economist
; Roula Khalaf at the
Financial Times
, and Rob Malley at International Crisis Group. Throughout my travels I have benefited from the insight and encouragement of countless friends and colleagues, including several in conflict zones who risked their well-being to ensure mine. Above all thanks go to my wife, Lipika, who dreamt as a child in lush Bengal that she would be cast out to a desert, and for almost two decades has supported me in making it come true.

Nicolas Pelham
Jerusalem, February 2010

‘The Middle East’ is a modern English term for the most ancient region of human civilization. Before and during the First World War, ‘the Near East’, which comprised Turkey and the Balkans, the Levant and Egypt, was the term in more common use. ‘The Middle East’, if employed at all, referred to Arabia, the Gulf, Persia (Iran)/ Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Afghanistan. After the First World War Allies had destroyed the Ottoman Turkish Empire and established their hegemony over its former Arab provinces, ‘the Middle East’ gradually came to encompass both areas. This trend was reinforced during the Second World War, when the entire region was seen as a strategic unit in the struggle against the Axis powers. Egypt was the site of the Allies’ Middle East Supply Centre. At the end of the war, Cairo also became the headquarters of the Arab League, which linked Egypt with the independent Asian Arab states. The Turkish Republic, which had joined NATO and saw its destiny as part of Europe, scarcely belonged to the Middle East any more.

The term ‘the Middle East’ is Eurocentric. The people of the Indian subcontinent understandably find it irritating. For them after all, the region is ‘the Middle West’. ‘Why not “West Asia”?’ they might ask. But this has the disadvantage of excluding Egypt. Similarly, ‘the Arab world’, now in common usage, excludes Israel and Iran which, to say the least, are both at the centre of the region’s concerns, although ‘the Arab world’ does have the advantage of including the North African Maghreb states, which are increasingly partners in the affairs of the region in spite of the practical failure to achieve political union of the two halves of the Arab world. ‘The Middle East’ seems likely to continue in use for some time. It is not even confined to European languages: in Arabic –
Asharq al-Awsat
–
it is the title of the Saudi Arabian newspaper with the largest international circulation of all Arab newspapers.

Common usage, however, should not allow us to lose sight of the drawbacks of the term, of which the most important is that it assumes a Western domination of the world. That distinguished scholar the late General John Bagot Glubb enjoyed reminding his readers that, in terms of civilization and culture, the Middle East region was in advance of western Europe for all but the last five hundred of the five thousand or so years for which human history can be traced back. Archaeologists will continue to dispute whether the Nile Valley and Delta, narrow but richly fertile, or Mesopotamia, the land of the twin rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, can claim precedence as the cradle of human civilization, but it is their joint role in the development of mankind which matters.

Hammurabi, King of Babylon in the eighteenth century
BC
, formulated the first comprehensive code of law which has survived. Akhenaten, Pharaoh of Egypt in the fourteenth century
BC
, had the first conception of a single all-powerful deity. Some fifty years later Rameses II – ‘the Great’ – created an empire which covered most of the Middle East region.

In the huge arc of territory which stretches from the Euphrates around the northern edge of the Syrian Desert along the eastern Mediterranean to the Nile Valley, much of human history was made. It was the Fertile Crescent, because either river irrigation or winter rainfall nurtured productive farmland and settled populations. The central portion of this arc is the isthmus of land which connects Egypt with Anatolia (central Turkey). Bounded on the west by the Mediterranean and on the east by the Syrian Desert, it is some 500 miles long and 75 miles wide. Later called the Levant, it today comprises Lebanon, Israel and the western parts of Syria and Jordan. All the great powers of the ancient world fought over and occupied this stretch of land; it contains the oldest continuously inhabited towns on the earth, such as Jericho and Byblos (Jubail). It was the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity. The name of its most famous city, Jerusalem, still arouses more passionate responses than any other.

The glorious if violent history of this territory was shaped by its geography. Its features run north and south. First the narrow coastal plain, then the upland chain from the Alawite or Nusairiyah mountains of Syria to the north, through Mount Lebanon, Galilee, Samaria and Judaea to Beersheba. To the east of this a deep rift is formed by the valley of the Orontes, the Bekaa Plain, the Jordan Valley leading to the Dead Sea, the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea, and then another mountain chain – the Anti-Lebanon, Mount Hermon, Kerak and the mountains of Moab. Because the winter rains are blown in from the west, the land is most fertile on the coast and the western slopes of the mountains. Eastwards the farmlands become pasture, until they merge into the limestone steppe of the Syrian Desert stretching to Mesopotamia. The city of Damascus stands like a port on the western edge of this wilderness, which was always a more formidable barrier than the Mediterranean Sea.

This short causeway along the eastern Mediterranean between Egypt and present-day Turkey was the scene of an astonishing and productive mixture of peoples and cultures. They came from all directions. The non-Semitic and highly civilized Sumerians from Mesopotamia dominated Syria for about a thousand years, from 3500
BC
. They were defeated by the Semitic Amorites, nomads from central Arabia, but the Sumerians taught their conquerors how to write and how to farm the land. Babylonians in the middle of the third millennium were followed by Egyptians, who first conquered the coastal plain of Syria at about the same time. The Egyptians were frequently driven out by the new invaders such as the warlike Hittites from Asia Minor, who took all of Syria in 1450
BC
, but just as often they returned and recovered control.

The settled inhabitants of Syria and Palestine were known as Canaanites from about 1600
BC
. Almost certainly they did not constitute a single race but were formed through a mingling of peoples, some of whom came from the sea and some from the desert. They never created a powerful imperial state of their own; they submitted to the successive waves of conquerors, paid them tribute and traded with them. They were skilful workers in metal.

One people who came to settle on the Levant coast in about 1400
BC
was the extraordinary seafaring Phoenicians, who established trading colonies on most of the Mediterranean shore and even on the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa. Carthage, Tyre and Sidon are the most famous of these. The name ‘Phoenician’ derives from the Greek word for purple – the Tyrian purple dye was renowned throughout the ancient world. Many Lebanese of today like to think of the Phoenicians as their ancestors.

Another wave of invaders came from central Arabia – the Aramaeans. By about 1200
BC
they had gained control over Damascus. They took their culture from the more civilized, settled inhabitants of Syria, but it was their Semitic language – Aramaic – which became the
lingua franca
of the region and was spoken by Jesus Christ a thousand years later.

About a century after the Phoenicians the Hebrews, having escaped from Egypt, invaded the land of Canaan from the east, seized Jericho and gradually subdued its settled population in the hills. But they had to contend with a new wave of invaders from across the Mediterranean – the Philistines – who settled on the coastal plain, giving their name to the region: Palestine
(falastin
in Arabic). The struggle ebbed and flowed until David, King of Israel, united the Hebrew tribes, captured the Jebusite town of Jerusalem and made it his capital. There his son Solomon built the first Jewish temple. The Kingdom of Israel lasted some two centuries before it split into two – the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah. In about 720
BC
the newest great power from northern Iraq – the Assyrians – overran the two little Jewish states and caused them to disappear. From then on there was never an independent Jewish state until the twentieth century, although the Jews had a degree of autonomy in the Maccabean kingdom (166–163
BC
) and its successor, the House of Herod. When the Jews rebelled against the Roman Empire in
AD
70, the Emperor Titus destroyed Jerusalem. Their final revolt was put down by Hadrian in
AD
135 and the Jews were scattered; only a few thousand remained in Galilee.

The Jews stood apart from the other peoples who invaded and
settled in Syria and Palestine in two important respects. One was that in general they did not intermarry and assimilate with the other peoples of the region. The other was their religious genius, which produced the first of three great monotheistic faiths. The Ten Commandments and the Judaic legal code which derives from them were by far the highest system of morality to be developed by mankind before the coming of Christ. But because the Jews regarded themselves as a distinctive people, specially chosen by God, Judaism was never a proselytizing religion. There was no question of huge masses of humanity converting to the Jewish faith, as was the case with its two successors – Christianity and Islam.

From about the end of the ninth century
BC
, the character of the invasions of Syria/Palestine began to change. It was now less a matter of migrating peoples seeking a better place in which to settle – ‘a land of milk and honey’ – than of great powers aiming to conquer and impose their rule over the existing inhabitants. The Assyrians, who had their capital at Nineveh near Mosul in modern Iraq, first appeared in Syria in about 1100
BC
, but it was their King Shalamaneser III (859–824
BC
) who founded the Assyrian Empire, which lasted for more than two centuries and finally conquered Egypt. The former great empire of the Pharaohs had been in sad decline since the time of Rameses III of the Twentieth Dynasty (twelfth century
BC
), who was the last to display military genius in the field of battle. Irrigation works fell into disuse and trade decayed. Egypt was governed by local despots in the cities of the Nile Delta, which were constantly attacked and finally defeated by the Assyrians.

The Assyrians were in turn defeated and overthrown by the Chaldean dynasty of Babylon. In 597
BC
their King Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem. But the Chaldean Empire was short-lived. Further east, in present-day Iran, a new and dynamic state was formed by the uniting of Medes and Persians. Their King Cyrus II – ‘the Great’ – reigned from 559 to 530
BC
and founded an empire which covered the whole of western Asia in the modern Middle East and more, from the Indus River to the Aegean Sea and the borders of Egypt.

In 525
BC
the successors of Cyrus conquered Egypt with little
difficulty, and it could be said that for the Egyptians two thousand years of foreign rule had begun.

The Persians were then masters of the whole civilized world of the time, apart from China. In the western province of Syria and Palestine, Aramaic was the official language. Administration was efficient, roads were built and taxes were collected regularly. The region enjoyed two hundred years of peace and prosperity.

As we have seen, the local indigenous population was a meltingpot of races, both non-Semites who had come mainly from the west and north and Semites who had come mainly from the east – the Arabian peninsula. The word ‘Semite’ derives from Shem, the eldest son of Noah, from whom all the Semitic peoples are supposed to be descended. However, it is not a racial but a linguistic term, invented in the late eighteenth century by the German historian Schlözer to denote the languages which were spoken in Mesopotamia, Syria and the Arabian peninsula and which from the first millennium
BC
spread into North Africa. All the Semitic languages have striking similarities in their syntax and basic vocabularies, just as there are affinities between the social institutions, religious beliefs and even the psychological traits of the peoples who speak them. Almost certainly there was once a single ‘proto-Semitic’ language spoken by the people of Arabia which had dialectical variants.

The northwards migration of Semitic peoples from the Arabian peninsula was continuous, tending to reach a peak about every thousand years. The Arabs are first mentioned in Assyrian inscriptions of about 850
BC
as a nomadic people of the north Arabian desert who paid their tribute to their Assyrian overlords in the form of camels – which had first been domesticated in the Arabian peninsula some five hundred years earlier.

The racial origins of the Arabs are highly obscure. The Arabs of today have inherited a tradition that they come from two stocks – the Qahtanis and Adnanis. The former originated in the rain-fed highlands of south-western Arabia and are descended from the patriarch Qahtan. The latter came from the north and centre of the peninsula and are descended from the patriarch Adnan. Almost every Arab
tribe claimed descent from one or the other. Of the two, it is the southerners or Yemenis who now form half the population of Arabia and are called the ‘true Arabs’, the sons of Adnan being called
Mustarib
or arabized peoples. Although today there is no obvious racial difference between those who call themselves Qahtanis and those who call themselves Adnanis, there are two recognizable racial types among the general population of Arabia. The tall people with clean-cut, hawk-like features come mainly from the north; while those in the south tend to be shorter with softer and more rounded features – in origin they are probably related to the Ethiopians. It is therefore ironic that it is the southerners who are considered the ‘true Arabs’, for it is the northerners who provide the popular image of the Arab and it was in central and northern Arabia that the classical Arabic tongue – the vehicle of Arab/Islamic civilization – developed.