Levant in the context of Lihyan

In modern historiography, ancient Rome is the Roman civilisation from the founding of the Italian city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. It encompasses the Roman Kingdom (753–509 BC), the Roman Republic (509‍–‍27 BC), and the Roman Empire (27 BC – 476 AD) until the fall of the western empire.

Ancient Rome began as an Italic settlement, traditionally dated to 753 BC, beside the River Tiber in the Italian Peninsula. The settlement grew into the city and polity of Rome, and came to control its neighbours through a combination of treaties and military strength. It eventually controlled the Italian Peninsula, assimilating the Greek culture of southern Italy (Magna Graecia) and the Etruscan culture, and then became the dominant power in the Mediterranean region and parts of Europe. At its height it controlled the North African coast, Egypt, Southern Europe, and most of Western Europe, the Balkans, Crimea, and much of the Middle East, including Anatolia, the Levant, and parts of Mesopotamia and Arabia. That empire was among the largest empires in the ancient world, covering around 5 million square kilometres (1.9 million square miles) in AD 117, with an estimated 50 to 90 million inhabitants, roughly 20% of the world's population at the time. The Roman state evolved from an elective monarchy to a classical republic and then to an increasingly autocratic military dictatorship during the Empire.

The Mediterranean Sea (/ˌmɛdɪtəˈreɪniən/ MED-ih-tə-RAY-nee-ən) is an intercontinental sea situated between Europe, Asia, and Africa. It is surrounded by the Mediterranean basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the east by the Levant in West Asia, on the north by Anatolia in West Asia and Southern Europe, and on the south by North Africa. To its west it is connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Strait of Gibraltar that separates the Iberian Peninsula in Europe from Morocco in Africa by only 14 km (9 mi); additionally, it is connected to the Black Sea through the Bosporus strait that intersects Turkey in the northeast and the Red Sea via the Suez Canal in the southeast.

The Mediterranean Sea covers an area of about 2,500,000 km (970,000 sq mi), representing 0.7% of the global ocean surface; it includes fifteen marginal seas, including the Aegean, Adriatic, Tyrrhenian, and Marmara. Geological evidence indicates that around 5.9 million years ago, the Mediterranean was cut off from the Atlantic and was partly or completely desiccated over a period of some 600,000 years during the Messinian salinity crisis before being refilled by the Zanclean flood about 5.3 million years ago.

The Near East (Arabic: الشرق الأدنى) is a transcontinental region around the Eastern Mediterranean encompassing the historical Fertile Crescent, the Levant, Anatolia, Egypt, the Balkans, Mesopotamia, and coastal areas of the Arabian Peninsula. The term was invented in the 20th century by modern Western geographers and was originally applied to the Ottoman Empire, but today has varying definitions within different academic circles. The term Near East was used in conjunction with the Middle East and the Far East (China and beyond), together known as the "three Easts"; it was a separate term from the Middle East during earlier times and official British usage. As of 2024, both terms are used interchangeably by politicians and news reporters to refer to the same region. Near East and Middle East are both Eurocentric terms.

According to the National Geographic Society, the terms Near East and Middle East denote the same territories and are "generally accepted as comprising the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestinian territories, Syria, and Turkey". Also, Afghanistan is often included.

Mycenaean Greece (or the Mycenaean civilization) was the last phase of the Bronze Age in ancient Greece, spanning the period from approximately 1750 to 1050 BC. It represents the first advanced and distinctively Greek civilization in mainland Greece with its palatial states, urban organization, works of art, and writing system. The Mycenaeans were mainland Greek peoples who were likely stimulated by their contact with insular Minoan Crete and other Mediterranean cultures to develop a more sophisticated sociopolitical culture of their own. The most prominent site was Mycenae, after which the culture of this era is named. Other centers of power that emerged included Pylos, Tiryns, and Midea in the Peloponnese, Orchomenos, Thebes, and Athens in Central Greece, and Iolcos in Thessaly. Mycenaean settlements also appeared in Epirus, Macedonia, on islands in the Aegean Sea, on the south-west coast of Asia Minor, and on Cyprus, while Mycenaean-influenced settlements appeared in the Levant and Italy.

The Mycenaean Greeks introduced several innovations in the fields of engineering, architecture and military infrastructure, while trade over vast areas of the Mediterranean was essential for the Mycenaean economy. Their syllabic script, Linear B, offers the first written records of the Greek language, and their religion already included several deities also to be found in the Olympic pantheon. Mycenaean Greece was dominated by a warrior elite society and consisted of a network of palace-centered states that developed rigid hierarchical, political, social, and economic systems. At the head of this society was the king, known as a wanax.

The olive (botanical name Olea europaea, "European olive") is a species of subtropical evergreen tree in the family Oleaceae. Originating in Asia Minor, it is abundant throughout the Mediterranean Basin, with wild subspecies in Africa and western Asia; modern cultivars are traced primarily to the Near East, Aegean Sea, and Strait of Gibraltar. The olive is the type species for its genus, Olea, and lends its name to the Oleaceae plant family, which includes lilac, jasmine, forsythia, and ash. The olive fruit is classed botanically as a drupe, similar in structure and function to the cherry or peach. The term oil—now used to describe any viscous water-insoluble liquid—was originally synonymous with olive oil, the liquid fat derived from olives.

The olive has deep historical, economic, and cultural significance in the Mediterranean. It is among the oldest fruit trees domesticated by humans, being first cultivated in the Eastern Mediterranean between 6,000 and 4,000 BC, most likely in the Levant. The olive gradually disseminated throughout the Mediterranean via trade and human migration starting in the 16th century BC; it took root in Crete around 3500 BC and reached Iberia by about 1050 BC. Olive cultivation was vital to the growth and prosperity of various Mediterranean civilizations, from the Minoans and Myceneans of the Bronze Age to the Greeks and Romans of classical antiquity.

The Late Bronze Age collapse was a period of societal collapse in the Mediterranean basin during the 12th century BC. It is thought to have affected much of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East, in particular Egypt, Anatolia, the Aegean, eastern Libya, and the Balkans. The collapse was sudden, violent, and culturally disruptive for many Bronze Age civilizations, creating a sharp material decline for the region's previously existing powers.

The palace economy of Mycenaean Greece, the Aegean region, and Anatolia that characterized the Late Bronze Age disintegrated, transforming into the small isolated village cultures of the Greek Dark Ages, which lasted from c. 1100 to c. 750 BC, and were followed by the better-known Archaic Age. The Hittite Empire spanning Anatolia and the Levant collapsed, while states such as the Middle Assyrian Empire in Mesopotamia and the New Kingdom of Egypt survived in weakened forms. Other cultures, such as the Phoenicians, enjoyed increased autonomy and power with the waning military presence of Egypt and Assyria in West Asia.

The Achaemenid Empire (/əˈkiːmənɪd/ ə-KEE-mə-nid; Old Persian: 𐎧𐏁𐏂, Xšāça, lit. 'The Empire' or 'The Kingdom') was an ancient Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty in 550 BC. At peak, its territorial extent was roughly 5.5 million square kilometres (2.1 million square miles), making it the largest empire of its time. Based in the Iranian plateau, it stretched from the Balkans and Egypt in the west to the Indus Valley in the east, including Anatolia, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, the Levant, parts of Eastern Arabia, and large parts of Central Asia.

By the 7th century BC, the region of Persis, located in the southwestern part of the Iranian plateau, had been settled by Persians. From Persis, Cyrus rose and defeated Media, Lydia, and the Neo-Babylonian Empire, thus marking the establishment of a new imperial polity in the ancient Near East. While its conquests were largely successful in most regions, the Achaemenid Empire's attempts to expand into Greece proved extremely difficult over the course of decades of wars and multiple kings, ultimately resulting in its defeat in the Greek mainland.

Ancient Egypt was a cradle of civilization concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in Northeast Africa. It emerged from prehistoric Egypt around 3150 BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology), when Upper and Lower Egypt were amalgamated by Menes, who is believed by the majority of Egyptologists to have been the same person as Narmer. The history of ancient Egypt unfolded as a series of stable kingdoms interspersed by the "Intermediate Periods" of relative instability. These stable kingdoms existed in one of three periods: the Old Kingdom of the Early Bronze Age; the Middle Kingdom of the Middle Bronze Age; or the New Kingdom of the Late Bronze Age.

The pinnacle of ancient Egyptian power was achieved during the New Kingdom, which extended its rule to much of Nubia and a considerable portion of the Levant. After this period, Egypt entered an era of slow decline. Over the course of its history, it was invaded or conquered by a number of foreign civilizations, including the Hyksos, the Kushites, the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks and then the Romans. The end of ancient Egypt is variously defined as occurring with the end of the Late Period during the Wars of Alexander the Great in 332 BC or with the end of the Greek-ruled Ptolemaic Kingdom during the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC. In AD 642, the Arab conquest of Egypt brought an end to the region's millennium-long Greco-Roman period.

Phoenicians were an ancient Semitic people who inhabited city-states in Canaan along the Levantine coast of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily in present-day Lebanon and parts of coastal Syria. Their maritime civilization expanded and contracted over time, with its cultural core stretching from Arwad to Mount Carmel. Through trade and colonization, the Phoenicians extended their influence across the Mediterranean, from Cyprus to the Iberian Peninsula, leaving behind thousands of inscriptions.

The Phoenicians emerged directly from the Bronze Age Canaanites, continuing their cultural traditions after the Late Bronze Age collapse into the Iron Age with little disruption. They referred to themselves as Canaanites and their land as Canaan, though the territory they occupied was smaller than that of earlier Bronze Age Canaan. The name Phoenicia is a Greek exonym that did not correspond to a unified native identity. Modern scholarship generally views the distinction between Canaanites and Phoenicians after c. 1200 BC as artificial.

West Asia (also called Western Asia or Southwest Asia) is the westernmost region of Asia. As defined by most academics, UN bodies and other institutions, the subregion consists of Anatolia, the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, Mesopotamia, the Armenian highlands, the Levant, the island of Cyprus, the Sinai Peninsula and the South Caucasus. The region is separated from Africa by the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt, and separated from Europe by the waterways of the Turkish Straits and the watershed of the Greater Caucasus. Central Asia lies to its northeast, while South Asia lies to its east. Twelve seas surround the region (clockwise): the Aegean Sea, the Sea of Marmara, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aqaba, the Gulf of Suez, and the Mediterranean Sea. West Asia contains the majority of the similarly defined Middle East. The Middle East is a political term invented by Western geographers that has historically included various territories depending on political and historical context, while West Asia is a geographical term with more accuracy and consistency. It excludes most of Egypt and the northwestern part of Turkey, and includes the southern part of the Caucasus.

West Asia covers an area of 5,994,935 km (2,314,657 sq mi), with a population of about 313 million. Of the 20 UN member countries fully or partly within the region, 13 are part of the Arab world. The most populous countries in West Asia are Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Syria, officially the Syrian Arab Republic, is a country in West Asia located in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to the north and northwest, Iraq to the east and southeast, Jordan to the south, and Israel and Lebanon to the southwest. It is a republic under a provisional government and comprises 14 governorates. Damascus is the capital and largest city. With a population of 26 million across an area of 185,180 square kilometres (71,500 sq mi), it is the 56th-most populous and 87th-largest country.

The name "Syria" historically referred to a wider region. The modern state encompasses the sites of several ancient kingdoms and empires, including the Eblan civilization. Damascus was the seat of the Umayyad Caliphate and a provincial capital under the Mamluk Sultanate. The modern Syrian state was established in the mid-20th century after centuries of Ottoman rule, as a French Mandate. The state represented the largest Arab state to emerge from the formerly Ottoman-ruled Syrian provinces. It gained de jure independence as a parliamentary republic in 1945 when the First Syrian Republic became a founding member of the United Nations, an act which legally ended the French Mandate. French troops withdrew in April 1946, granting the nation de facto independence. The post-independence period was tumultuous, with multiple coups and coup attempts between 1949 and 1971. In 1958, Syria entered a brief pan-Arab union with Egypt, which was terminated following a 1961 coup d'état. The 1963 coup d'état carried out by the military committee of the Ba'ath Party established a one-party state, which ran Syria under martial law from 1963 to 2011. Internal power-struggles within Ba'athist factions caused further coups in 1966 and 1970, the latter of which saw Hafez al-Assad come to power. Under Assad, Syria became a hereditary dictatorship. Assad died in 2000, and he was succeeded by his son, Bashar.

Turks (Turkish: Türkler), or Turkish people, are the largest Turkic ethnic group, comprising the majority of the population of Turkey and Northern Cyprus. They generally speak the various Turkish dialects. In addition, centuries-old ethnic Turkish communities still exist across other former territories of the Ottoman Empire. Article 66 of the Constitution of Turkey defines a Turk as anyone who is a citizen of the Turkish state. While the legal use of the term Turkish as it pertains to a citizen of Turkey is different from the term's ethnic definition, the majority of the Turkish population (an estimated 70 to 75 percent) are of Turkish ethnicity. The vast majority of Turks are Sunni Muslims, with a notable minority practicing Alevism.

The ethnic Turks can therefore be distinguished by a number of cultural and regional variants, but do not function as separate ethnic groups. In particular, the culture of the Anatolian Turks in Asia Minor has underlain and influenced the Turkish nationalist ideology. Other Turkish groups include the Rumelian Turks (also referred to as Balkan Turks) historically located in the Balkans; Turkish Cypriots on the island of Cyprus, Meskhetian Turks originally based in Meskheti, Georgia; and ethnic Turkish people across the Middle East, where they are also called Turkmen or Turkoman in the Levant (e.g. Iraqi Turkmen, Syrian Turkmen, Lebanese Turkmen, etc.). Consequently, the Turks form the largest minority group in Bulgaria, the second largest minority group in Iraq, Libya, North Macedonia, and Syria, and the third largest minority group in Kosovo. They also form substantial communities in the Western Thrace region of Greece, the Dobruja region of Romania, the Akkar region in Lebanon, as well as minority groups in other post-Ottoman Balkan and Middle Eastern countries. The mass immigration of Turks also led to them forming the largest ethnic minority group in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. There are also Turkish communities in other parts of Europe as well as in North America, Australia and the Post-Soviet states. Turks are the 13th largest ethnic group in the world.

The Hittites (/ˈhɪtaɪts/) were an Anatolian Indo-European people who formed one of the first major civilizations of the Bronze Age in West Asia. Possibly originating from beyond the Black Sea, they settled in modern-day Turkey in the early 2nd millennium BC. The Hittites formed a series of polities in north-central Anatolia, including the kingdom of Kussara (before 1750 BC), the Kanesh or Nesha Kingdom (c. 1750–1650 BC), and an empire centered on their capital, Hattusa (around 1650 BC). Known in modern times as the Hittite Empire, it reached its peak during the mid-14th century BC under Šuppiluliuma I, when it encompassed most of Anatolia and parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia, bordering the rival empires of the Hurri-Mitanni and Assyrians.

Between the 15th and 13th centuries BC, the Hittites were one of the dominant powers of the Near East, coming into conflict with the New Kingdom of Egypt, the Middle Assyrian Empire, and the Empire of Mitanni. By the 12th century BC, much of the Hittite Empire had been annexed by the Middle Assyrian Empire, with the remainder being sacked by Phrygian newcomers to the region. From the late 12th century BC, during the Late Bronze Age collapse, the Hittites splintered into several small independent states, some of which survived until the eighth century BC before succumbing to the Neo-Assyrian Empire; lacking a unifying continuity, their descendants scattered and ultimately merged into the modern populations of the Levant and Mesopotamia.

The Seljuk Empire, or the Great Seljuk Empire, was a high medieval, culturally Turco-Persian, Sunni Muslim empire, established and ruled by the Qïnïq branch of Oghuz Turks. The empire spanned a total area of 3.9 million square kilometres (1.5 million square miles) from Anatolia and the Levant in the west to the Hindu Kush in the east, and from Central Asia in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south, and it spanned the time period 1037–1308, though Seljuk rule beyond the Anatolian peninsula ended in 1194.

The Seljuk Empire was founded in 1037 by Tughril (990–1063) and his brother Chaghri (989–1060), both of whom co-ruled over its territories; there are indications that the Seljuk leadership otherwise functioned as a triumvirate and thus included Musa Yabghu, the uncle of the aforementioned two.

Selim I (Ottoman Turkish: سليم الأول; Turkish: I. Selim; 10 October 1470 – 22 September 1520), also known as Selim the Grim or Selim the Resolute (Turkish: Yavuz Sultan Selim), was the sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1512 to 1520. Despite lasting only eight years, his reign is notable for the enormous expansion of the Empire, particularly his conquest between 1516 and 1517 of the entire Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, which included all of the Levant, Hejaz, Tihamah and Egypt itself. On the eve of his death in 1520, the Ottoman Empire spanned about 3.4 million km (1.3 million sq mi), having grown by seventy percent during Selim's reign.

Selim's conquest of the Middle Eastern heartlands of the Muslim world, and particularly his assumption of the role of guardian of the pilgrimage routes to Mecca and Medina, established the Ottoman Empire as the pre-eminent Muslim state. His conquests dramatically shifted the empire's geographical and cultural center of gravity away from the Balkans and toward the Middle East. By the eighteenth century, Selim's conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate had come to be romanticized as the moment when the Ottomans seized leadership over the rest of the Muslim world, and consequently Selim is popularly remembered as the first legitimate Ottoman Caliph, although stories of an official transfer of the caliphal office from the Mamluk Abbasid dynasty to the Ottomans were a later invention.

The ancient Near East was home to many cradles of civilization, spanning Mesopotamia, the Levant,, Egypt, Iran, Anatolia and the Armenian highlands, and the Arabian Peninsula. As such, the fields of ancient Near East studies and Near Eastern archaeology are one of the most prominent with regard to research in the realm of ancient history. Historically, the Near East denoted an area roughly encompassing the centre of West Asia, having been focused on the lands between Greece and Egypt in the west and Iran in the east. It therefore largely corresponds with the modern-day geopolitical concept of the Middle East.

The history of the ancient Near East begins with the rise of Sumer in the 4th millennium BC, though the date that it ends is a subject of debate among scholars; the term covers the region's developments in the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, and is variously considered to end with either the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BC, the establishment of the Macedonian Empire in the 4th century BC, or the beginning of the early Muslim conquests in the 7th century AD.

The Middle East is a geopolitical region encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, the Levant, and Turkey.

The term came into widespread usage by Western European nations in the early 20th century as a replacement of the term Near East (both were in contrast to the Far East). The term "Middle East" has led to some confusion over its changing definitions. Since the late 20th century, it has been criticized as being too Eurocentric. The region includes the vast majority of the territories included in the closely associated definition of West Asia, but without the South Caucasus. It also includes all of Egypt (not just the Sinai region) and all of Turkey (including East Thrace).