A thousand sights, a thousand nights, a thousand years, a thousand tears...
"They say in the Middle East - a pessimist is simply an optimist with experience."
– Ehud Barak
The Middle East is a region that broadly spans from Egypt in the west to India in the east with northern and southern borders being the Black & Caspian sea and the Arabian Sea respectively. In the middle of all of this is over 6000 years of civilization, at least half-a-dozen awesome and significant cultures, more history than you can shake a...anything at really and also a fuckton of culture, wars and mineable stuff. The importance of the region and it's myriad of cultures has not lessened in the 20th and 21st centuries as the region continues to be, if not exactly influential, then influenced due to the resources and politics going on around it and within it.
Since it is Europe's closest neighbour, the region and it's societies have been interacting with the smorgasbord of Europe's cultures since at least the Bronze Age so there are a number of analogues of Middle Eastern societies in fantasy and even sci-fi. Dungeons and Dragons has Al-Qadim, Lord of the Rings has Harad, Game of Thrones has Mereen and so on. And this is not even counting Video Games either.
The Middle East, being one of the ¨cradles of civilization¨ has metric gigatons of history under it's belt, more than even China so the sections below will be the broadest overviews by necessity. Still the history van be roughly divided into 4 periods with a number of sub-periods within each. So strap yourself in as we dive into the deep end of history.
Ancient History (4000 BC - 500 AD) - Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of... After the period of various neolithic cultures discovering agriculture, the first human towns and city-states began to form (these could go back to as early as 9000-7000 BC as attested by Catal Huyuk and Jericho). The most prominent cities of this period were Uruk, Babillon, Elam and others. Two civilizations of note arose in this era around 3500 BC - Sumer and Akkad which are famous for their ziggurats (OG pyramids) and for laying the basis for much of civilization in the west since their stuff was picked up by Egyptians, then Greeks and so on. In about 2340 BC Sargon the Great united the various city-states in the south and thus founded the Akkadian dynasty - the world's first empire.
This set a kind of precedent for future powerful empires that would come to rule almost the entire Middle East. After Akkadians, of note are the Assyrian Empires of 1365–1076 BC and the Neo-Assyrian Empire of 911–605 BC. The Assyrian Empire at its peak was the largest the world had yet seen. It ruled all of what is now Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Cyprus, and Bahrain—with large swathes of Iran, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Sudan, and Arabia.
From the early 6th century BC onwards there were several Persian states that dominated the region, beginning with the non-Persian Neo-Babylonian Empire, then their successor the Achaemenid Empire also known as the first Persian Empire. In the 300s BC a gigachad guy called Alexander the Great decided that he wanted to rule the world and so he went ahead and conquered everything from Greece to Egypt all the way to the border of India. Sadly he died just as he was getting to the process of ruling his mega-empire and in a final moment of chadery he declared that his empire would belong "to the strongest" and within 5 minutes there were a bunch of successor empires like the Seleucids, Bactrians, Ptolemaic Egypt and others, and virtually all of them had a city called Alexandria but the one in Egypt mattered most.
After Alexander, the various Alexandrian successor states were dicking around with each other, not noticing the big roman-shaped shadow rising in the west. In 66–63 BC the Roman general Pompey got shit done and conquered much of the Middle East in one felč swoop. The Romans united the region into yet another giga-empire and integrated the region with most of Europe and North Africa in terms of politics and economics, not to mention the globalising effect of free transit for imperial citizens and dependents. Even areas not directly under Rome were strongly influenced by the Empire which was the most powerful political and cultural entity for centuries.
Though Romans brought much of their culture, law and customs to the region, the Greek culture and language continued to dominate as well, being another strong cultural factor. The region effectively became the Empire's "bread basket" as the key agricultural producer and as a somewhat of a consolation for egyptians who survived as a culture this long - Ægyptus became by far the most wealthy Roman province and a center of learning.
It's also worth mentioning that to the east of Roman Empire were also two major polities - the Parthian and the Kushan empires. The former represented a constant threat to Rome's eastern boundaries before transitioning into the Sassanid Empire due to internal strife while Kushan would do it's own thing. There is also evidence of Tang China doing trade with the region and even being aware of Rome. Lastly, starting from the 30s AD - Christianity would see a significant spread from Palestine/Judea though it would not advance much farther east than Euphrates-Tigris border in a significant manner.
After the fragmentation of the Western Roman Empire, the eastern half decided that it really liked the color purple and rebranded itsečf as...the Roman Empire (Byzantium being an anachronistic modern name but we will roll with it for the sake of convenience). Byzantium continued to trudge along, occupying the western portion of the region and even expanding to reconquer a respectable amount of the former Roman Empire in the 500s though from there it would decline in favour of other powers.
Medieval History (500 - 1300) - You want it? It's yours sadiq, so long as you have enough gold!
