Michael Rank - From Muhammed to Burj Khalifa: A Crash Course in 2,000 Years of Middle East History

Key idea : The Middle East has been important throughout world history due to its location at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa . This is the reason that so many empires in ancient history competed for its real estate.
Why this matters to you : After this lesson, you will understand how ownership of key land has been at the center of Middle Eastern conflict from the beginning of civilization to the present day.

As long as we define "Middle East" as a geographical region, the beginning of Middle East history is synonymous with the beginning of civilization. When most Westerners were in social studies class back in high school, they likely learned about a dizzying array of civilizations such as the Hittites, Sumerians, Akkadians, Phoenicians, and Babylonians. It is highly unlikely that the average person knows or remembers much about these empires, unless they studied archeology or were an Age of Empires aficionado. There's no use in pretending a line of cultural or linguistic continuity linked all these different civilizations, so we are not going to try. But before skipping over the ancient past, one thing worth mentioning is that at least one factor did link these civilizations together: They all destroyed a previous inhabitant of the Middle East and were subsequently destroyed themselves.

Why? Because they inhabited some of the best real estate on the planet. While much of the region from North Africa to modern-day Iran is dry and arid, a swath of fruitful land from the Nile River to the Caspian Sea cuts through this region. Known as the Fertile Crescent, it is the convergence point for Eurasia and Afric a for both land and sea. A silk merchant traveling by ship from China to Rome (which could be done even 2,200 years ago) would have to make many stops in the Middle East to stock up on supplies, pay tariffs to local rulers, and secure safe passage over land from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean across Egypt. So if any sort of long-distance trade or military adventures were to take place, it had to involve the Middle East. And if anyone could control this area, then they stood to reap all the profits of these activities, whether through taxing spice merchants or leasing out battle-hardened soldiers to foreign armies.

Long-distance trade first connected the Middle East to the rest of the glob e in 3,000 BC, when routes opened up between the Indus Valley in Pakistan and Mesopotamia. For the next five millennia, the Middle East was the center of global activity, until the discovery of the New World altered the flow of commerce and military activity. It is the value of this real estate that has made the Middle East a dynamic - and highly volatile - place throughout history and up to this day.