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The term Levant appears in English in 1497, and originally meant 'the East' or 'Mediterranean lands east of Italy'. [23] It is borrowed from the French levant 'rising', referring to the rising of the sun in the east, [23] or the point where the sun rises. [24] The phrase is ultimately from the Latin word levare, meaning 'lift, raise'.
Map of the Middle East between North Africa, Southern Europe, Central Asia, and Southern Asia Middle East map of Köppen climate classification. The Middle East (term originally coined in English language) [note 1] is a geopolitical region encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq.
Topographic map of parts of the Near East. The Near East (Arabic: الشرق الأدنى) is a transcontinental region around the Eastern Mediterranean broadly synonymous with the modern Middle East, encompassing the historical Fertile Crescent, the Levant, Anatolia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Iranian Plateau, and coastal areas of the Arabian Peninsula. [1]
Nicolas Sanson, Map of Eastern Mediterranean, 1651. The eastern Mediterranean region is commonly interpreted in two ways: The Levant, including its historically tied neighboring countries, Balkans and islands of Greece. The region of Syria with the island of Cyprus (also known as the Levant), Egypt, Greek Dodecanese and Anatolian Turkey. [11]
Subsequently, the Medes controlled much of the ancient Near East from their base in Ecbatana (modern-day Hamadan, Iran), most notably most of what is now Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and the South Caucasus. Following the fall of the Medes, the Achaemenid Empire was the first of the Persian Empires to rule over most of the Near East and far beyond, and ...
The Levantine corridor is the relatively narrow strip in Western Asia, between the Mediterranean Sea to the northwest and deserts to the southeast, which connects Africa to Eurasia. This corridor is a land route of migrations of animals between Eurasia and Africa.
Much of North Africa became a peripheral area to the main Muslim centres in the Middle East, but Iberia and Morocco soon broke away from this distant control and founded one of the world's most advanced societies at the time, along with Baghdad in the eastern Mediterranean.
As the word Mashriq refers to Arab countries located between the Mediterranean Sea and Iran, it is the companion term to Maghreb (Arabic: المغرب), the western half of the Arab world comprising Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and western Libya. Libya may be regarded as straddling the two regions.