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Geographically defined, the Near East comprised of the lands situated between the Mediterranean in the west (bordered by the Phoenician and Palestinian coastal strips), the Taurus mountains in the north (with the hill countries of Commagene and Osrhoene opening up into the northern sections of Syria and Mesopotamia), the “land between the rivers” Euphrates and Tigris in the east, and the more sparsely populated steppe zone stretching into the Arabian peninsula in the south. Intersected by the great rivers and their tributaries, the various sub-regions were very different from each other as far as topography and geology are concerned.

Taken as a whole, these lands had always been – as already emphasized by the great Russian scholar Mikhaïl Rostovtzeff in a classic paper (1935a; see id. 1941b) – a transit region, a meeting-place for the three great civilizations of the ancient world: the Mesopotamian, the Egyptian, and the Aegean. At the same time, the enormous zone beyond Anatolia and the Mediterranean Sea was a region of great geographical and cultural diversity (see now Cameron 2019 on the relevant writings by the ancient geographers). Even if the geographical (and environmental) divisions cannot explain all the cultural variety, the fact that all sub-regions had their own, quite specific geological characteristics will have had some bearing on the cultural developments within them (for helpful overviews see the relevant chapters in different volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History , by Musti 1984; Kennedy 1996b; Sartre 2000, 2005b; and also the overview article by Rey-Coquais 1978).