Essential background: how the modern map was drawn

This chapter is the whole region on a few pages. It is the frame that every country chapter hangs on. Read it once and the later chapters will click into place.

The land shapes the story

Three landscapes set the stage:

• The Fertile Crescent. An arc of well-watered land curving from the Mediterranean coast (today's Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, western Syria) up through northern Syria and down the Tigris and Euphrates rivers into Iraq. This is where farming and the first cities began. The eastern part is Mesopotamia, Greek for "between the rivers."
• The Arabian Peninsula. A vast, mostly dry plateau (today's Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the Gulf states). Its edges, especially the green highlands of Yemen, supported old kingdoms; its deserts shaped a mobile, tribal way of life.
• Anatolia. The high peninsula that is most of modern Turkey, a bridge between Asia and Europe, fought over for its position for thousands of years.

Two facts follow from this map. First, whoever controlled the trade routes and water grew rich. Second, the region has always been a crossroads, which is why so many peoples, faiths, and empires meet here.

The deep past, in one sweep

The history below moves fast on purpose. Each country chapter slows down on its own piece.

The first civilizations (about 3500 to 500 BCE). In Mesopotamia the Sumerians built the first cities and the first writing (cuneiform), followed by the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian empires. Along the eastern Mediterranean the Phoenicians (in today's Lebanon) became famous traders and spread the alphabet. The Israelites established kingdoms in the southern Levant. In the southwest, the Egyptians built one of the longest-lasting states in history. In Yemen, incense-rich kingdoms such as Saba (the biblical Sheba) grew wealthy on trade.

The classical age (about 500 BCE to 600 CE). The Persian empires ruled much of the region from the east. Alexander the Great (around 330 BCE) spread Greek culture across it. Then Rome absorbed the Mediterranean lands, and after Rome split, the eastern Christian Byzantine Empire ruled from Constantinople (today's Istanbul). To the east, the Persian Sasanian empire was Byzantium's great rival. Christianity began in Roman Judea and spread across the region long before Islam.

The rise of Islam and the caliphates (from 610 CE). In the Arabian city of Mecca, the Prophet Muhammad began preaching Islam around 610 CE. Within a century of his death in 632, Arab Muslim armies had conquered an empire stretching from Spain to Central Asia. The great early states were the Rashidun (the first four caliphs), the Umayyads (capital Damascus), and the Abbasids (capital Baghdad), under whom a golden age of science, medicine, and philosophy flourished.

The middle centuries (about 1000 to 1500). Power fragmented. The Fatimids ruled from Egypt; Seljuk Turks pushed in from the east; European Crusaders seized parts of the coast for about two centuries before being driven out, notably by Saladin. The Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258. The Mamluks, a soldier-ruler caste based in Egypt, then dominated the region until the Ottomans.

Don't be confused: Arab, Muslim, Persian, Turk. These are not the same. Arab is mainly a language and culture (Arabic-speaking peoples). Muslim is a follower of Islam, of any nationality; most of the world's Muslims are not Arab. Persian (Iranian) and Turk are distinct peoples with their own languages. Iran is Muslim but not Arab; Turkey is Muslim but neither Arab nor Persian.

The Ottoman centuries (about 1517 to 1918)

From the early 1500s, the Ottoman Empire, ruled from Istanbul by a Turkish dynasty, governed almost everything in this book: the Levant, the holy cities of Arabia, Egypt, and more, for roughly four hundred years. The Ottomans get their own chapter (next) because their long rule, and the way it ended, explains most of the modern map.

The hinge: World War I and the mandates

The Ottomans fought on the losing side of World War I (1914 to 1918) and their empire collapsed. What replaced it was decided largely by Britain and France:

• In the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, Britain and France agreed to divide the Ottoman Arab lands into spheres of influence.
• The British Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised support for "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, while also pledging not to harm the rights of the existing non-Jewish population. Both halves of that promise would be fought over for a century.
• After the war the League of Nations handed Britain and France "mandates," meaning temporary rule, over the new units: the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon, and the British Mandate for Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq.

These outside decisions drew borders that often ignored how people actually lived, grouping rivals together and splitting communities apart. Much of the friction in later chapters traces back to this moment.

The modern era, in four waves

1. Independence (1930s to 1971). One by one the countries became independent states: Saudi Arabia unified in 1932, Lebanon and Syria in the 1940s, Jordan in 1946, the Gulf states by 1971. Turkey reinvented itself as a republic in 1923.

2. The Arab-Israeli conflict. The state of Israel was founded in 1948. The war around its creation displaced most Palestinian Arabs, an event Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe). A series of wars followed (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973), and the unresolved question of Palestinian statehood remains the region's most persistent conflict.

3. Ideologies, oil, and the Cold War. Pan-Arab nationalism, led for a time by Egypt's Nasser, competed with monarchies and with political Islam. The discovery of vast oil reserves, above all in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, reshaped the economy and global politics. The United States and the Soviet Union backed rival governments throughout.

4. Revolution, war, and the present. Iran's 1979 revolution made it a Shia Islamic republic and a rival to Sunni Saudi Arabia. The Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 toppled some leaders and triggered civil wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. The 2010s and 2020s have been shaped by those wars, by the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, by the rise and fall of the extremist group ISIS, by the war in Gaza that began in 2023, and by the fall of Syria's Assad government in 2024.

One-screen timeline

With the shape of the whole story in mind, we turn to the empire whose long rule and sudden collapse drew the modern map: the Ottomans. 👉