History
See also: History of Western Asia and Ancient Western AsiaWestern Asia has been a key region for human development for most of history. The majority of modern paleontologists believe that Homo Sapiens originated in East Africa and spread out of Africa through Western Asia. As such this region contains some of mankind's oldest homelands and human settlements.
Apart from its place as an early crossroads for human migration, the region was important to social and cultural development. The first Agricultural Revolution, the invention of agriculture which enabled the development of permanent settlements, occurred here. Not surprisingly, the first civilizations emerged here as well. Indeed, the First Persian Empire is considered by many historians to be the world's first superpower. Those innovations that enabled the development of civilization gradually spread throughout Africa, South Asia, and Europe forming the basis for the development of civilization in all of those regions.
Western Asia continued to be the source of many of mankind's most important innovations. The invention of the first written language occurred here in Mesopotamia. This region has also been credited with the invention of the wheeled cart, the boat sail, and the windmill.
For most of the last three millennia, the region has been united under one or two powerful states; each one succeeding the last, and at times, eastern and western based polities. The main states in this regard were the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Achaemenid Empire, the Seleucid Empire, the Parthian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Sassanid Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Safavid Empire, and the Ottoman Empire.
Western Asia is the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as other monotheistic religions. In recent history the region has been largely dominated by the Islamic faith.
Read more about this topic: Western Asia
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)