The Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia

The term "Fertile Crescent" was coined by the American Orientalist James Henry Breasted in his 1916 textbook Ancient Times, A History of the Early World, to describe the crescent-shaped arc of arable, well-watered land stretching from the Nile Valley through the Levant, present-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, and into Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern Iraq and southeastern Turkey. The concept groups together several distinct river and rainfall systems united mainly by their capacity to support early agriculture in a region otherwise dominated by desert and steppe, and the phrase remains a standard, if geographically loose, organizing term in both archaeology and historical geography.