1. The whole Sahara + mideast was a lot greener a few thousand years ago due to ice ages et al, not due to soil depletion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period

2. The Euphrates floodplain is still quite green, like the Nile's. It's not like the US midwest where you have thousands of square miles of grass, but you do have a strip of extremely reliably fertile land (and for civilization-building, reliable seasons are super important).

Until 8000 years ago most of the present Persian Gulf was fertile valley. It is a good bet that archaeological sites critically important to understanding the rise of civilization are under it now.

Deforestation is a common cause of desertification worldwide. Trees help to capture moisture from the air and bring it to ground. Cut them down, and the moist air blows past. Trees are commonly cleared for farmland, and then the farmland has to be abandoned when it gets too dry.

In the Amazon basin and along the northwest coast of North America, trees were the basis of productive agriculture, carefully chosen mixes of trees of different sizes and species. To this day the Amazon basin is dominated by tree species that were once cultivated throughout, supporting tens of millions until they were wiped out by smallpox and other pandemics. In North America, such tree gardens can still be found centuries after they were abandoned.

> Deforestation is a common cause of desertification worldwide. Trees help to capture moisture from the air and bring it to ground. Cut them down, and the moist air blows past. Trees are commonly cleared for farmland, and then the farmland has to be abandoned when it gets too dry.

Trees alone do not help. There are a lot of tree farms which do not capture moisture and are prone to forest fires. We need forests with good ecosystems not tree plantations.

Planting trees (particularly the wrong ones) might not help much, but cutting down trees seems to reliably do harm.

From everything I’ve read the Middle East used to be a kind of paradise. Maybe not as lush as Central Europe or Southern Asia but it was not as arid as it is now. The common reason is that early agriculture was not efficient, or understood, and sometime in the Bronze Age an equivalent of the Great Dust Bowl occurred as Early societies basically salted the Earth they depended on (completely on accident.)

Also certain places, e.g, Israel, were actual forests just 10-12,000 years ago.

I believe it had to do with the way they irrigated. They would flood their fields, which would leave sediment from the river as the water evaporated. The sediment contained salt, which slowly accumulated, and made the fields infertile.

the last ice age only ended about 12,000 years ago[0]. The fertile crescent and ancient egypt's golden age was half way from then to today & the climate was a lot cooler overall.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period

But how does that square with things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period ?

This was thousands of years later (significantly closer to our time than it was to the ancient civilizations of the fertile crescent - remember that the pyramids were older to Cleopatra than she is to us). Climate isn't linear and that was one of several fluctuations, but 5000-6000 years ago it was cooler in that area than today.

I agree with the chronology. But what is your claim on the fertility of the region in classical antiquity? Remember that Egypt was considered a "breadbasket", and the eastern portion was the richer one in general.

I'm not an expert on the matter. I just read about the fertile crescent & how at its peak it wasn't a desert like it is today and that temperatures and sea-level were both lower than today. For example the persian gulf (today underwater) "was an extensive region of river valley and wetlands" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf#History when the ancient civilisation of Sumar developed there.

I have no knowledge about the eastern portion of Egypt (Sinai?) being richer than the western one, afaik the wealth of Egypt was always centered around the nile and nile delta (even today). That's probably what the breadbasket refers to.

I first heard it in Short History of Progress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsPMaGdg_38

Wheat yields progressively fell as salt accumulated in the ground. They switched to barley until that crop failed too.

According to the book, almost all ancient agriculture was unsustainable. If not because of the irrigation, it was because plowing caused too much soil erosion. The only places that could get away with it long-term were Egypt and China, because of the flooding and lime replenished the soil.

That's the version told in the "Fall of Civilisations" podcast <https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/> (highly recommended).

I don't think middle-east climate change was man made, as there is evidence that the same thing happened in North Africa.

There is evidence of lush farms in what is now the Sahara desert and civilizations that existed there had significantly more resources.

Early Egyptians documented this as well. ...and the Carthaginians were likely the last holders of that fertile land before civilization moved north in the Roman Empire.

Global temperatures rose causing desertification along that entire latitude.

Yes Arabia was once a jungle and lush, not a dry desert like today. Same for much of the Sahara. There was a dramatic climate shift over the last few thousand years.

As an aside, I find it fascinating how we apparently randomly changed prepositions. "By accident" somehow became "on accident" and "wait for" someone became "wait on" someone (which used to be what waiters do).

Language is great.

That's why the Tigris/Euphrates was so important. Even to this day, despite recent mucking about with waterflow, there is still a fairly large series of swamplands/marshes in southern Iraq that most people don't imagine when they are asked to describe the geography of Iraq.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamian_Marshes

There are references in the bible to the "un-penetrable forests of Lebanon". That's on the order of 3K years ago.

I would think that the the cause is complex but humans removing trees until they are gone is probably part of the problem.

More than the Bible; the cedars of Lebanon were perhaps the single-most famous natural land feature in the ancient near east. You'll find references to them in virtually every ancient text of the area that has any length, including the Epic of Gilgamesh.

An ambitious project to regreen the Sinai desert, with John D. Liu, known for successfully greening the barren Loess Plateau: https://www.greenthesinai.com/home

Goats.