Near east was a concept used to refer to Western Asia, and originally used to refer to the Ottoman Empire in its maximum extent.
Nowadays it has fallen into disuse and became substitued by the term Middle East that emerged during the 20th century.
Near East appeared to distinct the Near and Far interest East regions for the British Empire during the Crimean War. But lets explore a bit the history of this concept and how was it used to refer to the area compressed by the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Palestina, Syria and Turkey, or in other words the area of the eastern Roman Empire
1. The concept was coined by westerns to refer to the east region closest to Europe. Before it was known as Levant, but as it happened with Near East, as the new term emerged it became popular an Levant fell into disuse.
2. The term mainly referred to the British colonized areas and also the Spanish, German, Dutch and Portuguese colonies.
3. A variant, Nearer East, was created to refer to the Christian lands in the east where christianity was born and Europeans need to separate from the Ottoman and more muslim lands -later we talk a bit of the importance of the religion within this geographical area -.
4. In the begining Near East was used to refer to the maximum extent of the Ottoman Empire, when it began to fall the use of Near East in diplomacy was reduced significantly in favor of the Middle East.
5. From a historical point of view, it is important to remind that Near East, before being Near East, was where intensive year-round agriculture was first practiced, leading to the rise of the first dense urban settlements and the development of many familiar institutions of civilization, such as social stratification, centralized government and empires, organized religion and organized warfare. It also saw the creation of the first writing system and law codes, early advances that laid the foundations of astronomy and mathematics, and the invention of the wheel.
6. Finally, the concept of Near East, and its fall into disuse has an important imperialist connotation. In that period states became increasingly large, until by the end the region was controlled by military empires who had conquered a number of different cultures and countries.
Map of the colonizated territories and the conquerors.
It depends on the media we look, in the books we read or in the TV we watch that the Near East term is used in a different meaning, now the term Near East is not used by the media, and it is usually linked to the Median East term, but some press continues using the term Near East as a synonim of Middle East; only scholars use the term Near East in some especifically aspects and issues, mainly archeological ones. Here are different conceptions about what is the Near East and its territory:
