West Asian Environment
Iran
Iraq
But running from the hills of Turkey down through the whole desert of Syria and Iraq, on down into the Persian Gulf, are the two big rivers of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The land between these two rivers, and for a little bit on either side of them, is very green and fertile, and as it gets down toward the Persian Gulf it turns into enormous salty marshes or swamps. This land is called Mesopotamia (mess-oh-po-TAME-ee-ah), which means the land between the rivers, in Greek.
But a lot has changed here in the last 12,000 years, and much of it is because of things people did.
The first, and most important, change had nothing
to do with people. It was the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000
BC.
Gradually the earth began to get warmer, and the big glaciers began
to melt. The climate of West Asia got a little warmer and drier, and
some places which had been forests turned into grassland, and some places
which had been grassland turned into deserts. The story of the Garden
of Eden may be a memory of this happening (which would have been
very hard on the hunter-gatherers
living in West Asia at this time, and may have led to the first experiments
with farming).
Another effect of the warming was that the melting glaciers added a
lot of water to the oceans all over the world, and sea level rose in
the Mediterranean Sea. By around 7000 BC,
this led to a big ecological change in the Black Sea, which seems to
have been a freshwater lake before this time (for more on this, which
has only recently been discovered, click here).
More about the West Asian environment (page two)
Egyptian
Environment Page
Indian Environment Page
Greece Environment Page
African Environment Page
Main West Asian page
Main Environment page
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