Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/89

 Western Asia: Babylonia, Assyria, and Chaldea 57 back against the northern mountains. 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 The desert- fertile crescent.^ It may also be likened to the shores of a ^^^ desert-bay, upon which the mountains behind look down — a bay, not of water but of sandy waste, some five hundred miles across, forming a northern extension of the Arabian desert, and sweeping as far north as the latitude of the northeast corner of the Mediterranean. After the meager winter rains much of the northern desert-bay is clothed with scanty grass, and spring thus turns the region for a short time into grasslands. Much of the history of western Asia may be described as an age-long struggle between the mountain peoples of the north and the desert wan- derers of these grasslands — a struggle which is still going on — for the possession of the fertile crescent, the shores of the desert-bay. Arabia is totally lacking in rivers and enjoys but a few weeks The Arabian of rain in midwinter ; hence it is a desert very little of which is the s^emkic habitable. Its people are and have been from the remotest ages no"^ad a great white race called Semites, with two of whose tribes we are familiar, the Arabs, and the Hebrews whose descendants dwell among us. They all spoke and still speak dialects of the same tongue, of which Hebrew was one. For ages they have moved up and down the habitable portions of the Arabian world, seeking pasturage for their flocks and herds. Such wandering shepherds are called nomads. From the earliest times, when the spring grass of the northern Ceaseless wilderness is gone, they have been constantly drifting in from nomad from the sandy sea upon the shores of the northern desert-bay. If ^^^ desert to, -^ the fertile they can secure a footing there, they slowly make the transition crescent from the wandering life of the desert nomad to the settled life 1 There is no name, either geographical or political, which includes all of this great semicircle (see map, p. 56). Hence we are obliged to coin a term and call it the " fertile crescent,"