Looking Back

The Euphrates river rises on the edge of the Taurus mountains in eastern Turkey. Initially it flows south west, and looks as if it is heading for the extreme north east corner of the Mediterranean, somewhere north of Lebanon, where the Syria/Turkey border meets the sea. But then it turns sharply left, flows south into Syria then turns left again to flow south east across Syria and Iraq, heading for the Persian Gulf

The river Tigris follows a remarkably similar, parallel route, but shifted east a few tens of kilometers. After this 1200km courtship, they eventually join to create the Shatt al Arab - a name familiar from grim news reports of the Iran-Iraq and the US-Iraq war

The fertile flood plains between and beside these rivers is the place where, 10,000 years ago, certain grasses were selected, harvested, planted in cultivated ground and developed into the earliest varieties of wheat and barley. This was the origin point of agricultural cultivation. The famous 'fertile crescent' 

But hang on. The route followed by two almost parallel rivers creates a strip - or at best an wedge - not a crescent. To create a crescent, you must include an extension from those same Turkish Taurus mountains down the entire eastern coast of the Mediterranean and including the Jordan river valley - incorporating the west coast of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian West Bank, and terminating... at Gaza*

It does not in any way help comprehend the awfulness of the current events there to know this, but somehow (when I read it today in a book that is nothing to do with the conflict) it helped me find a bit more connection. Gaza is not some far-flung barren outpost, it is not just "an open-air prison camp" as it is often described. This place is the origin for all of us; this is where the kind of civilisation that has come to define us first began; it is the inheritance of us all

Our garden remains astonishingly colourful, some things are still blooming new flowers. This was the most dessicated thing I could find. On a day when the light, the air, the sounds around us seemed subdued and melancholy, suited to the equally bleak news, I find it fits the mood

*Sometimes the civilisation along the Nile is included in the 'fertile crescent', but that does mean you have to jump over the Sinai desert from Gaza to get there