We learnt in school about how the Fertile Crescent was the cradle of western civilisation, etc. But nowadays countries like Israel, Iran, Iraq look pretty arid. Did it used to be more, well, fertile? Higher rainfall, maybe?
My recollection from anthropology class was that it was quite fertile in the vicinity of the Tigris-Euphrates river conjunction. But surrounded by arid desert if you went out beyond the fertile area. This translated into an exploding population with nowhere to go once it overstepped the ability of the immediate ecosystem to support it, and that in turn pushed people to consider agriculture, which is a shitload of work and investment in long-term future in a way that hunter-gatherers didn’t have to deal with.
I’m sure my anthro folks were pushing towards a conclusion they’d reached, but I was inclined to nod along with them: human folks adopted agriculture reluctantly, where they had to; but once they had, it facilitated the rise of city-states and conquering and all that shit.
Israel, Iran, and Iraq all have a higher percentage of arable land than, say, Brazil or Russia. Of course irrigation could be better in Iran and agriculture in Iraq got screwed after the Gulf War and required reconstruction. Agriculture in Israel is rather highly developed (food is not necessarily super cheap there, though).
The Middle East is the West now? 
If we look at the satellite map, there’s clearly plenty of arable farmland in the area to this day;
While the Fertile Crescent still has fertile farmland, there are significant areas that have eroded and become arid/scrub due to poor land management. Some areas were deforested. Some became crappy due to irrigation techniques that resulted in salts building up in the soil.
(pre)Historically, there have been major climate-driven aridifcation events in the region, like the 8.2 kiloyear event and the Younger Dryas. So yes, it used to be wetter and less arid.
This information on the history of the Persian Gulf might be useful:
The shallow basin that now underlies the Persian Gulf was an extensive region of river valley and wetlands during the transition between the end of the Last Glacial Maximum and the start of the Holocene, which, according to University of Birmingham archaeologist Jeffrey Rose, served as an environmental refuge for early humans during periodic hyperarid climate oscillations, laying the foundations for the legend of Dilmun.
It was fertile in the sense that it was an area where things grew without massive agricultural engineering and intensive farming to make them work. Very arid areas are often ‘fertile’ because we pump or move water hundreds of miles and use chemical fertilisers. Much more of Iran and Iraq is fertile when money is crumpled up and thrown at it as mulch.
The Tigris and Euphrates were like the Nile in that they had high natural fertility and proximity to water in a self-sustaining ecosystem. An important part of this was the marshlands in the lower parts of the river. Draining for agricultural production has severely damaged these areas over time, and they were heavily drained late in the 20th century as part of Saddam Hussein’s campaigns against internal dissidents.
Agriculture, engineering, literature, alphabets, irrigation, cities, monotheism; but aside from that, what did the Middle East ever do for us?
To quote Benjamin Disraeli:
“Yes, I am a Jew — and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in [an unknown island], mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”
One issue I read about - all water contains a small residue of dissolved salts. When the British built the first Aswan dam to stop the annual Nile floods, and even more with the current dam, farmers realized that irrigating their field resulted in a gradual build-up of salt which severely affected fertility. Fortunately, there’s so muc water in the Nile that the solution (sorry) was to overwater and let the run-off take the salt away.
The other problem is that over time, fields with minimal vegetation cover some of the year will allow water to soak down and leach up from any layers of deep salt. (A problem in the US midwest too.)
I’ve read in various places that over the millennia the agriculture and irrigation of the Tigris-Euphrates valleys has resulted in excessive salt levels, limiting its fertility. Also consider climate change over the millennia - in Biblical times, Lebanon for example as the “tail end” of the fertile crescent, was noted for its cedar forests (featured on the flag of Lebanon). Some of the problems are excess population, but certainly climate is an issue.
Just on salt in soil - trees act as natural water pumps, dropping the level of ground water and the dissolved salts that it carries. Deforestation may clear land for agriculture, but at the long-term risk of the water table getting higher and the ground becoming too saline for useful cropping.
This dates back quite a bit (in a relative sense). The pre-Islamic Sasanians probably enjoyed a higher land revenue than the Arab Umayyads (certainly pre-Heraclius). But regardless the Umayyad Caliphate itself seems to have enjoyed relatively stable revenues,at least relative to the already degraded state of the very late Sasanians. However revenue started declining steadily and eventually massively under the Abbasid Caliphate. Records indicate a large drop in wheat production (more fragile) and a modest increase in barley and rice (more saline tolerant). Wheat prices rose steadily, wages declined, land was abandoned, populations shrank. Clean drinking water even became scarce in the vicinity of Basra.
These themselves are not entirely of genuinely ancient origin, but were substantially created around 628 during the Heraclian invasion of the Sasanian state. The Sasanians had a fairly sophisticated but very centralized system of irrigation/water management which did not respond well to political instability. The Tigris burst its banks that year and no central government was in a position to arrest it. This caused the abandonment of a large chunk of previously agricultural land. More was lost with further dyke breaches during the Arab invasions.
Medieval Arab water management and land reclamation meanwhile was mostly not highly centralized, but rather farmed out to local land grant nobles. This land grant class shifted with the political winds (rather less dynastic than in medieval Europe) and the drive for short-term profits, lack of large amounts central capital and small-scale, unorganized efforts all led to a decline in sound water management. It all gets rather complicated with assorted tax-farming systems down the centuries, but the end result (combined with increasing aridity) was a massive collapse is cultivated land and land productivity.
The other thing is that the undammed Nile floods didn’t just bring water, they brought silt as well, which was captured and allowed to settle over weeks. So the soil itself was getting seasonally replenished.
Yes. IIRC there was a quote by Herotodus about how fast the soil accumulated over the years.
But the main difference was that the Nile valley is realtively narrrow, so fields are generally close to the river; and there is a massive flow of water, so no shortage for anyone to water as much as they could. (Concern now that a new dam in Sudan will slow the flow for a decade or more as it fills up, and beyond that due to much larger evaporation from the reservoir). By contrast, the flows in the Tigris and Euphrates are not as strong or reliable, and excessive irrigation along its length has reduced the water amounts een more. The delta was once notable for the environment that sustained the “marsh Arab” inhabitants; Saddam apparently started divesions to drain the marshes to eliminate a hiding place for his enemies, but today it is suffering also from lack of river flow.
Ethiopia.
wrong thread
I believe that genetic evidence does reinforce the idea that for the most part the people who invented agriculture generally spread out and displaced hunter gatherers rather than hunter gatherers adopting the new farming techniques as the technology spread.
The Levant was deforested much later, during the Roman era. Roman society is very strange, in some ways more similar to the modern era than the medieval ages that are between us and the Romans, and in other ways very archaic. But one way they were modern is an almost industrial efficiency when it came to harvesting natural resources.
Supposedly there was a Greek poet who said that before the Romans showed up, a squirrel could travel from Gibraltar to the Pyrenees without setting foot on the ground, because of how heavily forested the land was (like almost every good quote, it’s apocryphal…)
But the point stands - the Romans messed up Iberia to an extent it still hasn’t recovered from, not just by chopping all the trees but also by mining in the most environmentally destructive ways imaginable. In Spain they mined mercury for use in industrial processing of gold ore, and then spilled the used mercury all over the countryside.
ETA: oops, didn’t notice this was a necro thread
That’s not really a problem here. You made some good points, so we’re cool with it.
I had always heard it as “from Maine to Florida” or “from the Atlantic to the Mississippi” before the White People showed up.
Many thousands of years before that, Elrond said “Time was when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard.”