Added by Mehssen Macary on 23 septembre 2014.

The huge area of dry grasslands and rich fertile river plains, with many different types of climate and landscape, the Middle East was the natural home to the first agricultural agglomeration. The region where large parts are covered by desert or grassland; elsewhere there are highlands and mountains covered by forests. Running through all these zones are long rivers, especially the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, and the Nile in Egypt.

The highlands of the Middle East are the natural habitat of grasses, such as wild wheat and barley, and it was almost inevitable that agriculture based on these crops, which would eventually cover so much of the world, would begin here, around 10,000 years ago. Farming had spread around the Middle East by 6000 BC, and was gradually pushing westward into Europe and eastward into India and South Asia.

Large parts of the Middle East lie within a hot, dry zone, where rainfall is insufficient to grow crops such as wheat and barley. The melting snows in the high mountains and the spring rains in the hills carry fresh water and silt down into the lowlands, flooding the dry river plains and depositing a rich mud for miles around, and Lebanon with its mountains witnesses on that. This means that the land surrounding the lower reaches of these rivers is potentially very fertile. However, it is too dry for farming most of the year – except during the spring and early summer, when there is too much water!

Farmers gradually mastered this challenging environment by developing irrigation techniques, beginning around 5000 BC. This created a wonderfully productive agriculture, lead to the rise of the first civilizations in world history, those of the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt in the Nile Valley, and certainly of the Phoenician Canaanite in Lebanese coasts.

Large parts of the Middle East lie within a hot, dry zone, where rainfall is insufficient to grow crops such as wheat and barley. »

The Middle East was by this time dominated by large and powerful states, and the relationships between them as they competed with one another for power and influence. For the first time in world history, a group of major powers were involved in a long-lasting system of alliances, in which sophisticated diplomacy regulated the relationships between them. This alliance system was underpinned by marriage agreements and exchanges of gifts, and the territories between the leading powers were partitioned into spheres of influence. When these alliances were not able to contain the aggression of one power or another, war broke out, on a scale not seen before. An exceedingly gifted and widely cultivated soil further pushed this region to become the cradle of civilizations.

The highest point of the Bronze-Age civilization in the Middle East brought with her two major cultural and technological advances: Iron and the Alphabet. Between Iron the symbol of war, destruction and death, and the Alphabet the icon of understanding, dialogue and Diplomacy the Middle East fall down in chaos and wars.

Phoenicians emerge, being a trading people, having literate merchants and craftsmen was a valuable asset, they pioneered long-distance trade routes as far as Spain, and even into the Atlantic, eventually reaching southern Britain. They grew prosperous and wealthy on the proceeds of trade, but they would also transmit the use of the alphabet to the peoples of the Mediterranean, they helped prevailing stable conditions in a puzzled region. Until two other people emerged into the light of history of that time: The Philistines had come to the region as part of the Sea Peoples, and settled in a confederacy of five city-states on the coast of Canaan, and the other were the Israelites. These had invaded Palestine sometime in the troubled times. They had formed a loose coalition of tribes before being united under one king. The Israelites had brought with them the first (as far as we know) monotheistic religion in world history.

In the Middle East, in the Semitic tradition, various monotheism values was born and which, beliefs “revealed religions”, claimed with universal and which, from the eschatological point of view, gave each other the mission of converting all humanity. Jesus and his disciples were taken in their God of the twelve tribes of Israel a religion intended for all the men and constituted it in Church. Later, to the 7th century, out of Arab ground, Islam preached a strict monotheism; being based on Koran, which, divine word, were not to be translated, its proselytism diffused a religion offering the ideal of a single human community. A religion is a set of principles that provides structure to that faith.

These religions however adapted to the historical circumstances and the national cultures which accommodated them. Buddhism, which disappeared then from the Indian sub-continent, extended to all Asia located east of Iran. The monotheism Christian (in the shape nestorienne of the Church of the East) and Manichean extended their Churches in Central Asia, in the cold steppes and as far as China; the Manichaeism became official religion of the kingdom Ouïgour to the 7th century.

But they yielded in front of the expansion of the Islam, which reached even the Southeast Asia to the 14th century.

The Middle East is the cradle of the three monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The common theme of monotheism, or the belief in one God, along with their shared History in the Middle East, has tied these religious traditions together. They shared a number of features outside this central tenet of monotheism, particularly in focus on law, social justice and eschatology (Life after Death). Furthermore, religion and religious have been a key theme in the Middle Eastern political life of today. The crisis in the Middle East brings matters of faith and religion to the front. In my opinion, the mistaken Arab conviction that faith is the belief that man isn’t the be-all and the end-all of existence and that knowing and doing God’s will is the purpose of that existence, is the key difficulty. The major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, began in the Middle East and spread from there. Beneath the surface they play a major role in animating what’s evolving in the region now.

The Middle East is the cradle of the three monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The common theme of monotheism, or the belief in one God, along with their shared History in the Middle East, has tied these religious traditions together. »

Indeed the Middle East is not only the cradle of the three great monotheistic world religions; it also seems to be the area most intensely affected by the present global resurgence in religions. One of the reasons is undoubtedly historical, in the past, except for Turkey, secularization was either the product of colonial influence or failed political movements (Nationalism, Socialism). For this reason alone despite Westernization and Globalization, religious structures of thought and action have retained a central role in public consciousness and the self –identity of the state, both in the Arab-Islamic world and Israel, albeit for different reasons.

READ MORE HERE: http://www.cultures-et-croyances.com/storm-house-middle-east-vicious-circle/