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Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures pp 1–15Cite as

Agriculture in the Ancient Near East

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Agriculture in the ancient Near East is a topic mainly studied by archaeologists and philologists who contribute to our knowledge with the earliest archaeological evidence of cultivation as well as with complex descriptions of field management through the study of cuneiform texts. Extensive contributions also derive from biological and environmental sciences studying the genetics and origins of our modern crops and the ancient environmental conditions of agricultural development by investigating archaeobotanical, zooarchaeological, and geoarchaeological remains from archaeological sites in this large geographic area.

This article sets a geographic focus on the Fertile Crescent, an area of relatively high precipitation that stretches from the Levant in the west to the Turkish-Syrian border in the north and Iraq and Iran down to the Persian Gulf in the southeast. The Fertile Crescent is the area where agriculture is known to have evolved and developed into an economy that supported the...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Archaeological Sciences, University of Tübingen, Rümelinstr. 23, 72070, Tübingen/Deutschland, Germany

    Simone Riehl

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  1. Simone Riehl
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Correspondence to Simone Riehl .

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  1. Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA

    Helaine Selin

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Riehl, S. (2014). Agriculture in the Ancient Near East. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_10189-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_10189-1

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