Levant
Eastern Mediterranean coastal zone — cradle of Canaanite and early Islamic Civilization
Also known as: Levant
The eastern Mediterranean coastal zone — cradle of Canaanite and early Islamic Civilization and a recurring case in Quigley's civilizational analysis (T&H 20).
Quigley's Framing
The Levant is one of Quigley's standard reference zones in The Evolution of Civilizations: the strip of coast from Anatolia south to the Sinai that hosted successive civilizational starts — Canaanite, Phoenician, Israelite, Hellenistic, early Christian, and early Islamic. Its function in his typology is to demonstrate that a single geographic zone can host serial civilizations as instruments of expansion (mixture, ideology, military technology) are renewed and exhausted.
Strategic Role
In the twentieth-century narrative the Levant is the contested ground of the post-Ottoman settlement — the Sykes-Picot territories, the British and French mandates, the founding of Israel, and the recurring Arab-Israeli wars. Quigley is critical of the great-power diplomacy that produced the modern Levantine boundaries, and he reads the resulting instability as a predictable outcome of imposing nation-state forms on a civilizational geography that did not naturally generate them.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 20 Quigley
The Levantine coast hosted successive civilizational starts — Canaanite, Phoenician, Israelite, Hellenistic, early Christian, and early Islamic.