Ancient West Asia

Ishtar Gate, Babylon

West Asia was where farming started, and where the world's first chiefdoms, states, empires, and organized religions got started. From the Stone Age to the Islamic Empire, a lot of people lived in West Asia, so they needed more food and more government than other places. As early as 9000 BC, even before farming, Semitic people in what's now Lebanon were cooperating to build big stone temples. By 5000 BC, most people in West Asia were growing wheat and barley and keeping sheep and goats for their food.

Around 3500 BC, many West Asian people began to organize themselves into city-states, with kings and priestesses and taxes. To help run these states, they invented writing, and to help feed all the people, they invented irrigation farming. With irrigation farming, the Sumerians, like the Egyptians, could afford to feed people who didn't farm themselves. West Asia started to have artists, writers, architects, priests and priestesses, and musicians. By 2300 BC, Sargon of Akkad was founding the world's first empire. Shortly after that, about 2000 BC, the movement of Indo-Europeans from Central Asia into and through West Asia created the Hittite kingdom and the beginnings of modern Iran, but the states and empires and farming still continued. Around 650 BC, West Asians began to use gold and silver coins to pay their soldiers.

About 500 BC, more big changes arrived: Cyrus the Great (himself an Indo-European) was the first to unite all of West Asia under one empire - the Persian Empire. Around the same time, many people in West Asia began to follow organized religions - Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism.

The conquests of the Roman Empire, about 100 BC, left West Asia split between two Indo-European empires: the western third, along the Mediterranean coast, became part of the Roman Empire, while the eastern two-thirds remained under Parthian control. Both halves remained rich. In the Roman half, craftsmen invented blown glass. This glass, along with West Asian wool carpets, was traded to China along the Silk Road for Chinese silk and Indian spices, and to Africa for ivory and gold.

It wasn't until the 600s AD that the original Semitic people got control of West Asia again, in the form of the Islamic Empire. The Islamic Empire brought together the Roman and the Parthian halves of West Asia into one empire again. But by the 1200s, the Semitic rulers of the Islamic Empire were pushed aside by Turkic and Mongol leaders from Central Asia, and West Asia became part of an even larger Mongol Empire covering all of Asia. Even after the Mongol Empire collapsed in the 1300s, Turkic people still ruled West Asia. The old split between the two parts of West Asia came back as well, with the Ottoman Empire ruling the west, and the Persian Safavid Empire ruling the east.