Middle East is a geopolitical region commonly encompassing Arabia (including the Arabian Peninsula and Bahrain), Asia Minor (Asian part of Turkey except Hatay Province), East Thrace (European part of Turkey), Egypt, Iran, the Levant (including Ash-Sham and Cyprus), Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), and the Socotra Archipelago (a part of Yemen).
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The term "Middle East" has led to some confusion over its changing definitions, and has been viewed by some to be discriminatory or too Eurocentric.
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Middle East generally has a hot, arid climate, especially in the Peninsula and Egyptian regions.
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Term "Middle East" may have originated in the 1850s in the British India Office.
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Middle East labeled the area surrounding the Persian Gulf as the Middle East, and said that after Egypt's Suez Canal, it was the most important passage for Britain to control in order to keep the Russians from advancing towards British India.
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Until World War II, it was customary to refer to areas centered around Turkey and the eastern shore of the Mediterranean as the "Near East", while the "Far East" centered on China, and the Middle East then meant the area from Mesopotamia to Burma, namely the area between the Near East and the Far East.
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Description Middle East has led to some confusion over changing definitions.
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Term Middle East has been criticised by journalist Louay Khraish and historian Hassan Hanafi for being a Eurocentric and colonialist term.
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The Persian equivalent for Middle East is ?????????, the Hebrew is ????? ?????? (hamizrach hatikhon), the Turkish is Orta Dogu and the Greek is ?es? ??at??? (Mesi Anatoli).
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Greater Middle East was a political term coined by the second Bush administration in the first decade of the 21st century, to denote various countries, pertaining to the Muslim world, specifically Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey.
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The region is one of the regions where agriculture was independently discovered, and from the Middle East it was spread, during the Neolithic, to different regions of the world such as Europe, the Indus Valley and Eastern Africa.
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Middle East is widely and most famously known as the Cradle of civilization.
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The Near Middle East was first largely unified under the Neo Assyrian Empire, then the Achaemenid Empire followed later by the Macedonian Empire and after this to some degree by the Iranian empires, the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire.
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Arabs constitute the largest ethnic group in the Middle East, followed by various Iranian peoples and then by Turkic peoples.
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Middle East is very diverse when it comes to religions, many of which originated there.
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