Fertile Crescent

The Fertile Crescent

The Fertile Crescent was the first area to develop agriculture. It was the first to harness the power of agriculture because of geographic luck. Geographic luck is the fact that where a civilization was on the earth relates to how well the civilization did in becoming a supreme power on the earth. If the civilization was started near a place heavy with crops highly nutritious, then it did well. If it did not have nutritious crops, then it did not do as well as some other civilizations. Geography also related to what animals they domesticated.

In Jared Diamond’s book, he describes the fact that a civilization’s power originates from the fact that it had writing, guns, germs, and/or steel. The fact that civilizations had these things all depended on their being geographically lucky. Although the Fertile Crescent was the first to develop agriculture and developed guns, germs, and steel they still couldn’t compare to the power of Europeans in the 17th century. This paper shows how the Fertile Crescent was geographically lucky and how they developed guns, germs, and steel. It will also show how middle-eastern civilizations lost their jumpstart onto the path to being the largest power in the world.

The Fertile Crescent is an area between the Mediterranean Sea, the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. The climate in the Fertile Crescent is mostly dry, but is near bodies of water. The Fertile Crescent is also near a lot of mountainous regions. That is where the crops of wheat first started to show up. The Fertile Crescent was blessed with many wild wheat plants, which thrived in this climate. The geography of the Fertile Crescent led to many advantages for them.

The climate was perfect for growing wheat and the animals around them they were able to domesticate were sheep, goats, and cattle. Cattle were the most advantageous animals ever domesticated; every part of it can be used. The Fertile Crescent had one important independently domesticated crop. Wheat is the most cultivated crop in the world. There are many reasons why wheat became the first domesticated crop in the Fertile Crescent. First of all, wheat is highly nutritious and is very easy to grow in a temperate climatic zone. Wheat is the most successful crop because it can be stored for long periods of time.

As soon as the climate started to get warmer, wheat started growing in the mountains. With the decrease of animals from the Ice Age still affecting them, the people native to the Fertile Crescent started to rely on the crops growing around them. With the native people relying on the crops, more and more permanent settlements would start to show up. With the permanent settlements, the villages could have lots of food storage because in the Fertile Crescent, they mostly grew wheat and it’s a very easy to store crop.

With a storable crop, like wheat, many food surpluses would accumulate. With a lot of food surpluses you can have a larger population, because with hunting and gathering, only a small population could be supported. With so many food surpluses you can develop both parts needed to have what all great civilizations had in common, a large population and advanced technology. Civilizations can develop advanced technology by having specific people who only concentrate on doing that also known as specialists. The specialists needed the food surpluses to feed them. Wheat supplied these food surpluses.

The specialists would then go to develop the technologies needed to protect these food surpluses вЂ" guns and steel. Without the food surpluses the specialists would need to gather their own food, so they wouldn’t have the time to develop the advanced technologies. That’s why the hunter-gatherer communities never developed the advanced technologies that the agriculturist communities did.

The hunter-gatherers also never developed germs either. They never did because they never were living closely to their animals that they domesticated. Diseases spreading from the animals to the humans is called zoonosis. The also weren’t sedentary because they always followed their own food so dumps never accumulated. Therefore, the sewage never seeped into their water supply, which would start the epidemics. The hunter-gatherers never developed immunities to the epidemics because they never had any.

With specialists developing these new advanced technologies, the Fertile Crescent can now become one of the prominent places of the world. With all these developments that the society is making, they will later go on to develop guns, germs and steel.

The peoples of the Fertile