Middle East

Ancient history

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The ancient Middle East was home to some of humanity’s earliest civilizations. Mesopotamia, the region between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, gave rise to early urban settlements in the 5th millennium bce. By the late 4th millennium the Sumerians had built the earliest civilization with its own written record (see cuneiform). They were succeeded by the Akkadians and later by the Babylonians. Meanwhile, civilization was also taking shape in ancient Egypt in the 4th millennium, the beginning of what is often referred to as the pharaonic period. Neolithic settlements are also known from this time in Arabia.

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Empires in Mesopotamia and Egypt had profound influence in the Levant in the Bronze and Iron ages, as reflected particularly in Ugarit, Phoenicia, and Palestine. In the classical era, the Achaemenians, Seleucids, and Parthians spread Persian and Hellenistic influence throughout the region, although some Middle Eastern peoples managed to assert independent kingdoms of their own, most notably Hasmonean Judaea and Nabataea.

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After the Seleucid empire disintegrated in the 1st century bce, the Roman Empire expanded into the vacuum. In the Romans’ second century of rule, they expelled the Jewish people into a 2,000-year diaspora. After the capital was moved to Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 330 ce, the empire’s eastern provinces—particularly Asia Minor (Anatolia), the Aegean basin, and parts of the Levant—gained increased prominence in the Eastern Roman Empire, also called the Byzantine Empire. The Levant was the bridge between some of the empire’s most important cities: Constantinople in Asia Minor, Alexandria in Egypt, and Antioch in the northern Levant. Meanwhile, the Sasanians had supplanted the Parthians in Persia, and their Iranian empire stretched as far west as Edessa (now Şanlıurfa, Turkey). The proximity of the two empires fueled an intense rivalry and recurrent conflict. The people who lived along the frontier—most notably Armenian- and Syriac-speaking Christians—were frequently caught in the middle of the imperial tug-of-war. Confederations of Arab tribes on the southern fringes, especially the Ghassanids (Jafnids) and Lakhmids (Nasrids), were played against one another as clients of the Byzantines and the Sasanians, respectively.

Rise of Islam

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After more than a century of fighting wore down the two empires, a uniting force came northward out of Arabia in the form of Islam, a religious movement that in 622 ce established a firm sociopolitical presence in Medina. Its message, delivered in the common language of Arabia, melded religious traditions across sects in a way that also shed the shackles of ecclesiastical and imperial authority, and it allowed an Arab prophet, Muhammad, and his companions to take the mantle of leadership. The first generation of Muslims, under the leadership of the Rashidun caliphs, quickly exerted control over the Levant and Mesopotamia, pushing the Byzantine frontier into Asia Minor and defeating the Sasanians altogether by the time Yazdegerd III, the last Sasanian king, died in 651. The Umayyad empire, the first dynastic Islamic empire (661–750), stretched at its height from Spain to Sindh and implemented an extensive program of Arabization and common administration across the empire. The ability of a broad population to move freely and communicate in a common language set the stage for the free exchange of knowledge—and therefore a flourishing of science and culture—under the Abbasid dynasty (750–1258), while also bringing the geographic center of the global trade network, especially between Europe and Asia, under the control of a single empire. The dominance of the Middle East in global trade persisted until the late 15th century, when Portuguese navigators explored a sea route around the Cape of Good Hope that allowed merchants to bypass the Middle East for trade with South Asia and East Asia.

Turkic migration

From the 11th to the 15th century a succession of Turkic peoples migrated into the Middle East at a nearly continuous rate. The migrations can be divided into three phases: Seljuqs (1055–92), Mongols (1256–1411), and Timurids (1369–1526). The Seljuqs, who had recently converted to Sunni Islam, first took Baghdad—then the center of Islamic culture—and expanded Islamdom into Anatolia after their success in the Battle of Manzikert (1071), a defining blow against the Byzantines that led to their expulsion from the peninsula and the retreat of the Christian empire from the broader Middle East. This trauma to Christendom inspired the Crusades, a series of military expeditions by western European Christians to push back the advance of Islam into Europe and take control of the Holy Land in the southern Levant. The Crusaders were turned back at the Battle of Ḥaṭṭīn (1187) by the forces of Saladin, whose Ayyubid dynasty from Syria had already unseated the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt.

The Ayyubid dynasty was short-lived, usurped in the 13th century by the leaders of a class of enslaved soldiers, the Mamluks. The Mamluks were then faced with the challenge of staving off the incursions of Genghis Khan’s successors, the Mongols, whose empire and khanates had reached the Euphrates River and Central Asia. They also reached as far south as Delhi and, building upon a period of Mongol revivalism under Timur (Tamerlane) and a fusion of Mongolic, Turkic, and Persian influence under his descendants, the Timurids eventually overtook the sultanate in Delhi (1526) and established the Mughal empire.

The gunpowder empires

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At the time of the Mughals’ ascent in India, the Ottomans in Anatolia and the Safavids in Azerbaijan were also on the rise at the expense of the Mongols’ decline. Although the Ottoman Empire was founded about the turn of the 14th century, it was only in the late 15th century that its focus on expansion gave way to stable, codified governance. Its sultans centralized administration, including bringing the epicenter of Islamic authority under the control of the Ottoman state, but the Sufi Ṣafavī order in Ardabīl (now in Iran), which was located far from any contemporary center of power, offered a spiritual alternative to the Sunni Ottoman orthodoxy by appealing to popular veneration of ʿAlī, a practice generally discouraged by the Ottomans as heterodox. The Ṣafavī leaders also gave political organization to Turkmen tribes (called Kizilbash), who were caught between the Uzbeks to the northeast and the Ottomans to the west. Relying on the military strength of the Kizilbash, the Safavids expanded southward into Persia, where they established Twelver Shiʿism as the imperial creed.

The consolidation of the three empires (Mughal, Ottoman, and Safavid) allowed them to adopt and utilize some of the most advanced (and expensive) military technology of the period—artillery and firearms—which, in the 20th century, earned them the name “gunpowder empires.” But as the three empires were reaching their peak, Europeans again sought ways to push back against an Islamic empire in Europe and the nearby Maghreb region and to bypass the Ottomans altogether in trade with the Far East.

Portuguese navigators pioneered a sea route around Africa and into the Indian Ocean, opening up an era of European exploration and maritime trade that culminated in the commercial and economic decline of the Ottoman Empire. It also led to a major shift in the commercial activity in the Indian subcontinent away from the Mughal-controlled Indo-Gangetic Plain toward the coastal ports, eventually dominated by the British East India Company. The Safavid was the first of the three empires to collapse in the 18th century, because of a variety of pressures internal and external. The Mughal dynasty was ultimately unseated by the British raj in the 19th century. The Ottoman Empire fell in the early 20th century after World War I.

The modern Middle East

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the rise of new nation-states, which at first were governed by the European powers that had defeated the Ottomans in World War I. Among the most consequential legacies of the transitional period was the British mandate of Palestine, which oversaw the large-scale immigration of Jews to Palestine in fulfillment of the Balfour Declaration (1917)—despite the objections raised by the Arab inhabitants there, who believed that they too were promised self-determination in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence (1915–16). The result was a lasting Israeli-Palestinian conflict and frequent war between Israel and its Arab neighbors (see Arab-Israeli wars). For decades the displacement of Palestinians was felt region-wide, and the push for Palestinian self-determination became a uniting flag of the Pan-Arabist movement, led especially by Egyptian Pres. Gamal Abdel Nasser. However, Nasser’s humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War (1967) and his inability to unite the Arab states spelled the decline of Pan-Arabism, further accelerated after the conclusion of the Camp David Accords (1978) and an Israel-Egypt peace treaty (1979) less than a decade after his death.

That same decade, the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf—whose leaders were conservative, religious, and traditional—saw an enormous influx of wealth, in part as a result of the Arab oil embargo, and they invested that wealth in both development and outreach. Meanwhile, the shah of Iran, restored to power in the 1950s by a foreign-led coup, was ousted in an Islamic Revolution (1979) that had both populist and anticolonial undertones. As many Middle Easterners looked for answers for why independence and nationalism had failed to lift their condition, they looked to the political and economic achievements in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere and found the answer in Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, whose slogan read: “Islam is the solution.” For decades the region was caught in a contest between authoritarian leadership, often stale remnants of the Pan-Arabist past, and an Islamist-led opposition, whose overtures for democratic reform nonetheless left secularists and minority groups in the margins of political life. In the 2010s the Arab Spring brought broad coalitions to the streets seeking democracy and liberalization, but Islamist groups proved well positioned to lead the polls or, in cases where the regime attempted to suppress popular uprisings altogether, armed rebellion.

By the 2020s the dynamics of the region were changing in new ways: Israel gained growing acceptance with the Abraham Accords, authoritarians in the region were stabilizing their hold while also liberalizing their economic and social policies, and Iran’s influence was severely diminished during the Israel-Hamas War (especially in 2024) and by the Israel-Iran Conflict (2025).