The Fertile Crescent
The arc of land from the Levant through Upper Mesopotamia to the Zagros foothills where farming, herding and the first permanent settlements took hold.
The Fertile Crescent is less a place than a coincidence of conditions: reliable rainfall, wild wheat and barley, and animals that would tolerate domestication. Between roughly 10,000 and 7000 BC communities across this arc stopped moving with the seasons and stayed put. Everything that followed — surplus, storage, inequality, accounting — grew out of that decision, which is why the earliest proto-cities cluster along its length. Read the full story in our article on Proto-Cities before Writing: Jericho, Çatalhöyük, and the Trypillia Mega-Sites.
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