<P> This 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 (see map, p. 100). It lies like an army facing south, with one wing stretching along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and the other reaching out to the Persian Gulf, while the center has its back against the northern mountains . The end of the western wing is Palestine; Assyria makes up a large part of the center; while the end of the eastern wing is Babylonia . This great semicircle, 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 eight hundred kilometres across, forming a northern extension of the Arabian desert and sweeping as far north as the latitude of the northeast corner of the Mediterranean . This desert - bay is a limestone plateau of some height--too high indeed to be watered by the Tigris and Euphrates, which have cut cañons obliquely across it . Nevertheless, after the meager winter rains, wide tracts of the northern desert - bay are clothed with scanty grass, and spring thus turns the region for a short time into grasslands . The history of Western Asia may be described as an age - long struggle between the mountain peoples of the north and the desert wanderers of these grasslands--a struggle which is still going on--for the possession of the Fertile Crescent, the shores of the desert - bay . There is no name, either geographical or political, which includes all of this great semicircle (see map, p. 100). Hence we are obliged to coin a term and call it the Fertile Crescent . </P> <P> In current usage, the Fertile Crescent includes Iraq, Kuwait, and surrounding portions of Iran and Turkey, as well as the rest of the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean Sea, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon . Water sources include the Jordan River . The inner boundary is delimited by the dry climate of the Syrian Desert to the south . Around the outer boundary are the Anatolian highlands to the north and the Sahara Desert to the west . </P> <P> As crucial as rivers and marshlands were to the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, they were not the only factor . The area is geographically important as the "bridge" between Africa and Eurasia, which has allowed it to retain a greater amount of biodiversity than either Europe or North Africa, where climate changes during the Ice Age led to repeated extinction events when ecosystems became squeezed against the waters of the Mediterranean Sea . The Saharan pump theory posits that this Middle Eastern land - bridge was extremely important to the modern distribution of Old World flora and fauna, including the spread of humanity . </P> <P> The area has borne the brunt of the tectonic divergence between the African and Arabian plates and the converging Arabian and Eurasian plates, which has made the region a very diverse zone of high snow - covered mountains . </P>

The fertile crescent is different from much of the middle east because it
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