About ancient Near East
The ancient Near East was home to many cradles of civilization, spanning Ancient Mesopotamia, the ancient Levant, ancient Egypt, ancient Elam, ancient Anatolia or Asia Minor, the ancient South Caucasus and Armenian highlands, and ancient Northern Arabia. It is generally not considered to include Pre-Islamic Arabia as a whole, the ancient Berbers, or ancient Nubia, though it is sometimes classified as encompassing ancient Iran, ancient Cyprus, Ancient Carthage, and the Aegean civilization. Due to their subject matter and scope, ancient Near East studies and Near Eastern archaeology, including the subfields of Assyriology, Sumerology, Egyptology and Hattology, are among the most prominent research fields in ancient history. Other fields include Classics, Classical archaeology, biblical studies, biblical archaeology, Jewish studies, Christian studies, Iranology, Sinology, and Indology, some of which overlap with them. Historically, the Near East denoted an area roughly encompassing central West Asia and Egypt, having been focused on the lands between Greece in the west, Iran in the east, the Caucasus in the north, and Arabia in the south. It therefore largely corresponds with the central core area of the modern-day geopolitical concept of the Middle East. It was strongly influential on Christianity, the later Islamic world and civilization, which conquered and absorbed its remannts with the exception of indigenous non Arabized Jews, Assyrians, Mandaeans, Syriac Arameans and Armenians, all of who directly descend from it, and moderately so on the later Western world and civilization via the Aegean civilization, the Orientalizing period, the Greco-Persian wars, the Hellenistic period, the Roman and Eastern Roman empires, and Christianity, while being distinct from yet to some degree culturally related and ancestral to them.
