Talk:Fertile Crescent

I have a question, who was the rular of the Fertile Cresent? -Juliet

comment

There is a catastrophic failure in the wording at the start of this article. Unnatural fertility? What about it is even remotely unnatural. Who ever wrote that needs to be shot. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.241.84.25 (talk) 07:14, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Nile Delta

According to the picture, the Nile Delta is part of the Fertile Crescent. --Brunnock 15:35, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

You mention in an earlier edit that you "added Egypt as Breasted had intended."

No, I did not. Please don't put words in my mouth. --Brunnock 19:11, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

I did an image search for maps of the Fertile Crescent (on ones hosted at educational institutions) and found two camps; one including the Nile region, and one not. In the text accompanying some of the maps that did include the Nile valley, a statement was made to the effect of, "the Fertile Crescent often includes the Nile Valley."

Excluding Nile

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] this is all wrong

Including Nile

[7] [8] [9] [10] ("Areas of greatest fertility")

This suggests that perhaps inclusion of the Nile Valley was an afterthought. Can you find a source documenting Breasted's intention to include the Nile Valley?

The map that's currently on the article includes Egypt. --Brunnock 19:11, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Also, look at James Henry Breasted. --Brunnock 19:21, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

I see that the current map includes the Nile Valley in Egypt and that the page for Breasted includes the word Egypt. I was only making the point that many maps exclude Egypt, and I've been unable to find (on the Web) a direct quote from Breasted that indicates whether or not Egypt was included as part of his coined definition. Jasmol 19:33, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Also, what's wrong with including the names of modern countries whose territory includes the historical areas described? Jasmol 18:43, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

There's already a sentence in the article which describes the boundaries using current geographic terms. --Brunnock 19:11, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Question I wished this had answered: My perception of the Fertile Crescent area is that it is close to desert. If that is correct, why is it called "Fertile Crescent"? Was at some point the area much more lush & fertile than today?

The area within the Fertile Crescent is well-watered by major rivers and oases. It is characterised by a typically Mediterranean climate --- hot and dry in the summer, cooler and wet in the winter. It's not a desert, although it does border some more arid regions in Syria, Iraq and north Africa. Rattus 01:30, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Egypt was not included by Breasted

Breasted, who coined the term Fertile Crescent, did not include Egypt in his description of the Fertile Crescent. He explicitly says:

This fertile crescent is approximately a semicircle . . . . 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.

Reference: James Henry Breasted, Ancient Times or a History of the Early World (1916, reprinted 2003), Vol. 1, pages 100-101. ISBN 0766149463. Accessed through Google Books using keywords ("James Henry Breasted" "fertile crescent") and following the first link.  – HYC 18:50, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

It should also be noted that Breasted, who was an Egyptologist, put his description of Egypt in a separate chapter in that book. He didn't lump the Fertile Crescent and Egypt together.  – HYC 22:08, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Template

The new Template here is the master of a series in progress that is being modeled after the Greek myth series. See for example Template:Greek myth (sea). Some of the sub-regions may require a list of deities to complete underneath this master such as in Template:Fertile Crescent myth (Mesopotamia).

The Fertile Crescent page could modify this master for a more interesting template or could expand to include a discussion of religion in the region, unless there is already a page doing that that I have not yet found.

In any case, it makes this page more interesting, since the region in ancient times was so important not only as a cradle of civilization, but as a cradle for religion. Castanea dentata 01:14, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

I think that the Fertile Crescent article should focus on its intended subject- the birthplace of agriculture. Perhaps you want to put your template on Cradle of Humanity or Cradle of Civilization. --Brunnock 13:34, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

The template seems out of place on this article. Brunnock's suggestion for moving it makes sense. --NormanEinstein 02:01, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Arabic name.

Dear colleagues, why we cite arabic name in the head paragraph? Did James Henry Breasted derive this term from Arabic one? Dr Bug (Vladimir V. Medeyko) 12:22, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the Arabic translation isn't significant and should not be included in the article. The translation has no relation to the origin of Breasted's term and provides no benefit to the article. Readers interested in the Arabic language version should use the interwiki links to view the Arabic Wikipedia. --NormanEinstein 12:53, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree! 195.182.156.71 19:36, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Ecology

I have added a paragraph about biodiversity and ecology, which does much to explain some of the importance of the Fertile Crescent.

Regards John D. Croft 03:27, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Remove Egypt

Is there an objection to removing Egypt from this description? As mentioned above this was not part of Breasted's definition and is not the way this is commonly defined. It is perhaps appropriate to mention that some people define it this way but this should not be considered the "standard" definition.

--Mcorazao (talk) 05:27, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Certainly the fact that Breasted did not include Egypt when he coined the term is an argument to not include it in the article, at any rate the article should not unequivocally list Egypt, but if some uses that include Egypt can be cited, then perhaps it should be noted in the article that Egypt is sometimes included; though not always. Brando130 (talk) 18:45, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

History of term

OK, it's clear that Breasted coined it, and was using it by 1916. But can anyone tell me when (and where) he first used the term? --Iustinus (talk) 06:18, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Fertile Crescent Plan

• As you know, there are many plans for Fertile Crescent: American invasion of Iraq, etc. This is an article about a region and its people, not everybody's plans.--Raayen (talk) 21:29, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

• There are many panNationalistic ideas and proposals for unions. Should every country or region's article have a section for it?! Wikipedia would be a mess full of panNational ambitions.--Raayen (talk) 20:07, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

The Geography section is a mess

It seems like someone just wrote some stuff that sounded plausible to themselves. The "Many scientists believe ...extinct" part is just terrible. I've never read anything remotely suggesting that, and simply referring to "many scientists" is vague and very bad form. It is also factually incorrect. Just visiting the list of extinct plants, there are very few ones that went extinct around 10,000 years ago, the time concerned. The Holocene extinction event was primarily of big mammals, not crop plants. And its primary cause was human hunting, not climate change, a mistake that the article makes again in the very next paragraph. The section seriously needs some reworking. Punkrockrunner (talk) 03:17, 25 May 2009 (UTC)punkrockrunner

merge?

Cradle of civilization merge. should be in The Ancient Near East Portal? I can read, but I am bad at editing. Romanfall (talk) 04:40, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Let's get started

The fact that some material exists here gives the impression that the article has been started. Not so. It is quite open. We need to start completely over right from the top. There are certain obstacles to the imagination. One is those strange Danish tags at the top. What do we care? Most people do not read Danish. I don't see any Danes stepping up to translate the Danish or Norwegians the Norwegian articles. What are you trying to tell us? You'd like to see the article started? Thank you for your concern. It does not matter in the least what those articles say. They are only suggestions for some sources. One big problem is, we want our sources in English. So, let us thank the Danish and the Norwegian editors for their suggestions and totally ignore the tags. The article has not been started, is not going to follow the Danish or Norwegian articles. You Danes and Norwegians can work on it all you like just like anyone else provided your work is in good English. Don't hesitate. We're pretty good at fixing English. No one has any obligation or responsibility to use Danish or Norwegian material. As soon as they article is credibly started they can come out.

Second. The commentators are trying to criticize this "article" as some kind of finished product. Thank you for your suggestions and comments. We can consider those in developing this article. There is nothing here to criticize really. There is no obligation to "correct" anything. There is nothing to correct. There is nothing here. I would not even use the prose of the fill-in material. It is bad. So just ignore all those comments. Go right ahead, work up an outline, start the article. The commentators do give us a sense of a changing concept. This is not a fixed concept we are going to present. This will have to be a "history of the concept" type of thing. Get ready to do some Internet and library research.

Third. The language of the commentators. For some reason the English of the commentators is mainly broken. I do not know why this topic should attract the interest of so many foreigners. Well, welcome to the English WP. However, I would consider carefully if I were you whether your English is actually good enough for an English encyclopedia. If you can't really manage it then why not work on the WP in your native language instead of this? This is not a very painless way to learn English. I would not try to learn Danish by writing for the Danish WP. You need a non-judgemental context and this ain't it.

Fourth. Syrian nationalism. That has to go. Sorry. It is not mainstream. I never heard of it until this moment. The article to which it refers is totally unverified. But, let's say there is such a point of view. It is highly specialized and from the point of view of English, oddball. It should be in a subsection near the bottom not in the introduction. But of course there is no article, so how can it have a bottom?

Well I can appreciate your eagerness to see an article here. This is not it. The fact that all this critique of nothing at all exists undoubtedly holds anyone back from starting it. You commentators have expressed your various philosophies. Thank you. Why don't you back out now and let someone do the article? When something is there then you may critique it.Dave (talk) 09:20, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Merge what?

There is nothing here to merge. In any case I'm against. The Fertile Crescent is a concept from early archaeology. It innovators were under the impression that civilization started there and that agriculture started there. It was soon replaced by the notion of nuclear area. Today we know there have been multiple nuclear areas and multiple starts to civilization. It isn't one line of cultural descent. So, this article should be reserved for the historic concept. it can't really be expanded to cover the entire modern archaeological situation. Let's start with the origin and scope of the fertile crescent idea and depict its development. Then let's leave it there as an antique that did not live up to expectation, showing what went wrong and pointing to other articles.Dave (talk) 09:20, 24 June 2011 (UTC)