Before continuing our investigation of the world’s environment 5,203 years ago, I would like to introduce a renowned archaeologist added today under this website’s Archaeology tab: James Henry Breasted, Founder of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, and some say, the model for Indiana Jones, who fictionally received his doctorate at the OI . You will find a set of introductory background material on Dr. Breasted under his entry in the list of Archaeologists.
Having established the climatic setting 5,203 years ago, we can now focus upon the geographic area of interest: the Middle East as defined in the modern map below. The colors pretty well demonstrate how arid the Middle East has become, since the Sahara dried up in the late Holocene.
Source Map Credit: The raised relief map I purchased and from which I erased all place markings to derive the above “blank slate” is titled “Middle East Raised Relief Map”Copyright©1998-2014, 1-World Maps Online. All rights reserved. I have had the original hanging beside my desk since 2003, while I researched and wrote the Raising Up Pharaoh epic. The original is also useful in following daily news. It is the best I’ve found.
World Maps Online
What we’re going to do with the map above is to mark it up for vegetation 5,203 years ago, which will be more lush that what you’d see today. I had already modified the coastline of the Mesopotamian delta in the map to reflect its extension southward, due mainly to silting.
There are many ways to estimate vegetation coverage in 5,203 B.P. throughout the Middle East. I’ve made a broad brush (Photoshop) revision to the map and cite one source, Roberts et al, from this web site’s Bibliography tab. If you want more sources, see Roberts bibliography.
In the map below, I summarize the forestation, savannahs, steppes, desert, dunes, and glaciers on the map from that and similar sources. This setting is important to the Raising Up Pharaoh story to make explicit that we are dealing with a vastly more fertile Middle East in 5,203 BP–but one only briefly freed from the killing drought that accompanied the prior Glacial Maximum only 15,000 years earlier, and which had only seen the return of adequate river flows and rains for the preceding 7,000 years.
Some might think that man was dim-witted for taking until the Holocene to develop widespread agriculture, but that’s a bum rap on man. The facts are that it was miraculous that those men who had gone north from Africa had survived the last glacial maximum, and prior Ice Ages.
Above is the terrain and vegetation map for the Raising Up Pharaoh epic. Next time we will look at technological advances that took man out of subsistence foraging and into well-fed cities.
I toured the Oriental Institute in the late 70s-early 80s. What a marvelous place. I still remember the Lion Gates of Nineveh.
So where, in the above maps of the Middle East, do your “Known map of the World East/West fit in?
The maps in the front of my novels that are titled “West” and “East” are two halves of one map — in lieu of having one fold out map like you would find in early printings of Lord of the Rings. Actually, two halves are easier to use (e.g.place names can be larger), just as they’re easier to print (a fold-out map would be impossible for the Print-on-Demand presses of today’s highly efficient new publishing world). You could cut the two maps out and make one map with scotch tape–but you would gain nothing. As you progress through the six novels of the Raising Up Pharaoh epic, you will notice that the two maps grow to encompass larger portions of the full map shown in blog Post #3. By the 5th book, the two halves combined encompass the full map shown in Post #3. As the maps grow and add new place names, they are cumulative i.e. no place names drop off. The reason for this is that no place drops out of the story. Rather, the story (as does its cast of characters) grows throughout, encompassing the full map in the last two novels.