Near East

at the beginning of "the eastern question." The term is only meaningful as a contrast to Far East. Much of the original extent is south; moreover, countries such as Greece disavow any association with the east as a matter of cultural pride. They are in part founders of "western" civilization. Even the Republic of Turkey prides itself on its "westernization."]]

The Near East (French, Proche-Orient) is a geographical term that covers different countries for archeologists and historians, on the one hand, and for political scientists, economists, and journalists, on the other. The term originally applied to the maximum extent of the Ottoman Empire, which had been settled to the north by the Great Turkish War of the late 17th century, ending with the Treaty of Karlowitz, June 26, 1699. This war determined that Austria, Hungary and the Ukraine would not be in the Ottoman Empire and therefore ultimately would not be Near Eastern.

The eastern questions

At the beginning of the 19th century the empire included all of the Balkan Peninsula north to the southern edge of the Hungarian plain, but by the mid-1890's had lost all of it except Constantinople to the expansion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the independence of Greece and various smaller wars of independence resulting in the creation of "the Balkan States". Some of these states were independent and some were still nominally under the Ottomans although occupied by Austro-Hungarian troops.

The Ottoman Empire, believed to be about to collapse, was portrayed in the press as "the sick man of Europe". The Balkan states were primarily Christian. Starting in 1894 the Ottomans struck at the Armenians on the explicit grounds that they were a non-muslim people and as such were a potential threat to the muslim empire within which they resided. The unprovoked Hamidian Massacres aroused the indignation of the entire Christian world. In the United States the now aging Julia Ward Howe, authoress of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, leaped into the war of words and joined the Red Cross. Relations of minorities within the Ottoman Empire and the disposition of former Ottoman lands became known as "the eastern question," as the Ottomans were on the east of Europe.

It now became relevant to define the east of the eastern question. In about the middle of the 19th century "Near East" came into use to describe that part of the east closest to Europe. The term "Far East" appeared contemporaneously meaning Japan, China, Korea, Indonesia and Viet Nam; in short, the East Indies. "Near East" applied to what had been mainly known as the Levant, which was in the jurisdiction of the Ottoman Porte, or government. Those who used the term had little choice about its meaning. They could not set foot on most of the shores of the southern and central Mediterranean from the Gulf of Sidra to Albania without permits from the Ottoman Empire.

Some regions beyond the Ottoman Porte were included. One was North Africa west of Egypt. It was occupied by piratical kingdoms of the Barbary Coast, de facto independent since the the 18th century. Formerly part of the empire at its apogee, they were aggressively Muslim. Iran was included because it could not easily be reached except through the Ottoman Empire. In the 1890's the term tended to focus on the conflicts in the Balkan states and Armenia. The demise of the sick man of Europe left considerable confusion as to what was to be meant by "Near East". It now generally describes the countries of Western Asia between the Mediterranean Sea and (including) Iran, especially in historical contexts.

Background

The geographical terms "Near East" and "Far East" referring to areas of the globe in or contiguous to the former British Empire and the neighboring colonies of the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and Germans, fit together as a pair based on the opposites of far and near, suggesting that they were innovated together. They appear together in the journals of the mid-19th century. Both terms were used before then with local British and American meanings: the near or far east of a field, village or shire.

Ideas of the east up to the Crimean War

There was a linguistic predisposition to use such terms. The Romans had used them in near Gaul / far Gaul, near Spain / far Spain and others. Before them the Greeks had the habit, which appears in Linear B, the oldest known script of Europe, referring to the near province and the far province of the kingdom of Pylos. Usually these terms were given with reference to a geographic feature, such as a mountain range or a river.

Ptolemy's Geography divided Asia on a similar basis. In the north is "Scythia this side of the Himalayas" and "Scythia beyond the Himalayas." To the south is "India on this side of the Ganges" and "India beyond the Ganges." Asia began on the coast of Anatolia ("land of the rising sun"). Beyond the Ganges and Himalayas (including the Tien Shan) were Serica and Serae (sections of China) and some other identifiable far eastern locations known to the voyagers and geographers but not to the general European public.

By the time of John Seller's Atlas Maritima of 1670, "India Beyond the Ganges" had become "the East Indies" including China, Korea, southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific in a map that was every bit as distorted as Ptolemy's, despite the lapse of approximately 1500 years. That "east" in turn was only an English translation of Latin Oriens and Orientalis, "the land of the rising sun," used since Roman times for "east." The world map of Jodocus Hondius of 1590 labels all of Asia from the Caspian to the Pacific as India Orientalis, shortly to appear in translation as the East Indies.

, 1767, gateway to trade with the Levant. Painting by Antoine de Favray.]]

Elizabeth I of England, primarily interested in trade with the east, collaborated with British merchants to form the first trading companies to the far-flung regions, using their own jargon. Their goals were to obtain trading concessions by treaty. The queen chartered the Company of Merchants of the Levant, shortened to Levant Company, and soon known also as The Turkey Company, in 1581. In 1582, the ship The Great Susan transported the first ambassador, William Harebone, to the Ottoman Porte (government of the Ottoman Empire) at Constantinople. Compared to Anatolia, Levant also means "land of the rising sun," but where Anatolia always only meant the projection of land currently occupied by the Republic of Turkey, Levant meant anywhere in the domain ruled by the Ottoman Porte. The East India Company (short for a much longer formal name) was chartered in 1600 for trade to the East Indies.

It has pleased western historians to write of a decline of the Ottoman Empire as though a stable and uncontested polity of that name once existed. The borders did expand and contract but they were always dynamic and always in "question" right from the beginning. The Ottoman empire was created from the lands of the former eastern Roman Empire on the occasion of the latter's violent demise. The last Roman emperor died fighting hand-to-hand in the streets of his capital, Constantinople, overwhelmed by the Ottoman military, in May, 1453. The victors inherited his remaining territory in the Balkans.

The populations of those lands did not accept Turkish rule. The Turks to them were pagans from the east who spoke a different language and had barbaric customs, such as the enslavement of foreigners. Intervals when there was no unrest were rare. The Hungarians had thrown off Turkish rule by 1688. Serbia was created by the Serbian Revolution, 1815-1833. The Greek War of Independence, 1821-1832, created modern Greece, which recovered most of the lands of ancient Greece, but could not gain Constantinople. The Ottoman Porte was continuously under attack from some quarter in its empire, primarily the Balkans. Also, on a number of occasions in the early 19th century American and British warships had to attack the Barbary pirates to stop their piracy and recover thousands of enslaved Europeans and Americans.

In 1853 the Russian Empire on behalf of the Slavic Balkan states began to question the very existence of the Ottoman Empire. The result was the Crimean War, 1853-1856, in which the British Empire and the French Empire supported the Ottoman Empire in its struggle against the incursions of the Russian Empire. It was at this time that the sick man of Europe appeared and the European physicians began to look at his territories with an eye to the future. Repeated efforts by the moslims to suppress Christianity within their borders only resulted in more revolutions, more interventions until finally most of the Balkans had been removed from the empire.

The original diplomatic concept of near east

Until about 1855 the words near east and far east did not refer to any particular region. The far East, a phrase containing a noun, East, qualified by an adjective, far, could be at any location in the "far east" of the speaker's home territory. The Ottoman Empire, for example, was the far East as much as the East Indies. The Crimean War brought a change in vocabulary with the introduction of terms more familiar to the late 19th century. The Russian Empire had entered a more aggressive phase, becoming militarily active against the Ottoman Empire and also against China, with territorial aggrandizement explicitly in mind. Rethinking its policy the British government decided that the two polities under attack were necessary for the balance of power. It therefore undertook to oppose the Russians in both places, one result being the Crimean War. During that war the administration of the British Empire began promulgating a new vocabulary, giving specific regional meaning to "the Near East," the Ottoman Empire, and "the Far East," the East Indies. The two terms were now compound nouns often shown hyphenated.

In 1855 a reprint of a letter earlier sent to the Times appeared in Littel's Living Age. Its author, an "official Chinese interpreter of 10 years' active service" and a member of the Oriental Club, Thomas Taylor Meadows, was replying to the suggestion by another interpreter that the British Empire was wasting its resources on a false threat from Russia against China. Toward the end of the letter he said:

"To support the 'sick man' in the Near East is an arduous and costly affair; let England, France and America too, beware how they create a 'sick giant' in the Far East, for they may rest assured that, if Turkey is [a] European necessity, China is a world necessity."

Much of the colonial administration belonged to this club, which had been formed by the Duke of Wellington. Meadows' terminology must represent usage by that administration. If not the first use of the terms, the letter to the Times was certainly one of the earliest presentations of this vocabulary to the general public. They became immediately popular, supplanting "Levant" and "East Indies," which gradually receded to minor usages and then began to change meaning.

The original archaeological concept of nearer east

"Near East" remained popular in diplomatic, trade and journalistic circles, but a variation soon developed among the scholars and the men of the cloth and their associates: "the Nearer East," reverting to the classical and then more scholarly distinction of "nearer" and "farther." They undoubtedly saw a need to separate the Biblical lands from the terrain of the Ottoman Empire. The Christians saw the country as the land of the Old and New Testaments, where Christianity had developed. The scholars in the field of studies that eventually became Biblical archaeology attempted to define it on the basis of archaeology.

For example, The London Review of 1861 (Telford and Barber, unsigned) in reviewing several works by Rawlinson, Layard and others, defined themselves as making:

"an imperfect conspectus of the arrow-headed writings of the nearer east; writings which cover nearly the whole period of the postdiluvian Old Testament history ...."

By arrow-headed writings they meant cuneiform texts. In defense of the Bible as history they said:

"The primeval nations, that piled their glorious homes on the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Nile, are among us again with their archives in their hands; ...."

They further defined the nations as:

"... the countries lying between the Caspian, the Persian Gulf, and the Mediterranean ...."

The regions in their inventory were Assyria, Chaldea, Mesopotamia, Persia, Armenia, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Ethiopia, Caucasus, Libya, Anatolia and Abyssinia. Explicitly excluded is India. No mention is made of the Balkans.

British archaeologist D.G. Hogarth published The Nearer East in 1902, in which he stated his view of "The Near East."

The Balkan confusion

The rise of the Middle East

The term middle east as a noun and adjective was common in the 19th century in nearly every context except diplomacy and archaeology. An uncountable number of places appear to have had their middle easts from gardens to regions, including the United States. The innovation of the term "Near East" to mean the holdings of the Ottoman Empire as early as the Crimean War had left a geographical gap. The East Indies, or "Far East," derived ultimately from Ptolemy's "India Beyond the Ganges." The Ottoman Empire ended at the eastern border of Iraq. "India This Side of the Ganges" and Iran had been omitted. The archaeologists counted Iran as "the Near East" because Old Persian cuneiform had been found there. This usage did not sit well with the diplomats; India was left in an equivocal state. They needed a regional term.

The use of the term Middle East as a region of international affairs apparently began in British and American diplomatic circles quite independently of each other over concern for the security of the same country: Iran, then known to the west as Persia. In 1900 Thomas Edward Gordon published an article, The Problem of the Middle East, which began:

"It may be assumed that the most sensitive part of our external policy in the Middle East is the preservation of the independence and integrity of Persia and Afghanistan. Our active interest in Persia began with the present century, and was due to the belief that the invasion of India by a European Power was a probable event."

The threat that caused Gordon, diplomat and military officer, to publish the article was resumption of work on a railway from Russia to the Persian Gulf. Gordon, a published author, had not used the term previously, but he was to use it from then on.

Current meaning

Diplomatic

In the 20th century after decades of intense warfare and political turmoil terms such as "Near East", "Far East" and "MIddle East" were relegated to the experts, especially in the new field of political science. The new wave of diplomats often came from those programs. Archaeology on the international scene although very much of intellectual interest to the major universities fell into the shadow of international relations. Their domain became the Ancient Near East, which could no longer be relied upon to be the Near East. The Ottoman Empire was gone, along with all the other empires of the 19th century, replaced with independent republics. Someone had to reconcile the present with the past. This duty was inherited by various specialized agencies that were formed to handle specific aspects of international relations, now so complex as to be beyond the scope and abilities of a diplomatic corps in the former sense. The ancient Near East is frozen in time. The living Near East is primarily what the agencies say it is.

The views of several influential agencies concerning what nations are in the Near East are stated in the table below. The agencies are:

Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, a division of the United States Department of State. Under the Secretary of State, it implements the official diplomacy of the United States, called also statecraft by Secretary Clinton. The name of the bureau is traditional and historic. There is, however, no distinct Middle East. All official Middle Eastern affairs are referred to this bureau.

Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a non-profit organization for research and advice on Middle Eastern policy. It regards its target countries as the Middle East but adopts the convention of calling them the Near East to be in conformance with the practices of the State Department. Its views are independent.

U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an independent agency under the Department of State established in place of the Marshall Plan for the purpose of determining and distributing foreign aid. It does not use the term Near East, but its definition of Middle East corresponds to that of the State Department, which officially prefers the term Near East.

The Eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus is also included in several definitions of the Near East, based on its geographical location as well as its cultural and historical background. USAID places Cyprus in their reports on the Near East. Additionally, the Near East University is situated in the country's capital, Nicosia.

Legend: included; ✗ excluded

Archaeological

See also

Ancient Near East

Eastern Mediterranean

Fertile Crescent

Greater Syria

Levant

Mashriq

Mesopotamia

Middle East

Transcaucasia

Western Asia

References

Bibliography

Category:Western Asia