Astral Codex Ten

Fertile Crescent

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Fertile Crescent

Article

Fertile Crescent is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 30, 2021 and June 10, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “life in the Fertile Crescent possible”; “made life in the Fertile Crescent possible for millions of Jewish refugees”; “the upland and lowland sectors of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East”. It most often appears alongside California, 50,000 BC, Africa.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: April 30, 2021
  • Last seen: June 10, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
In "Water," again, the Wizards have a solid track record. The Wizardly California State Water Project transformed a desert into the most productive farmland and state in the nation; the National Water Carrier Project of Israel-Palestine made life in the Fertile Crescent possible for millions of Jewish refugees. Desalination projects (expensive, but with nearly bottomless potential, given how huge our oceans are) have de-escalated the fight for shrinking groundwater resources in California and the Middle East. In this arena, the Prophets have been a little more successful in offering alternative conservation-oriented solutions that have stuck: storm and wastewater reclamation, drip irrigation, and behavioral change campaigns to encourage more frugal water usage that have seeped (pun intended) so deeply into the public consciousness that running the tap while brushing your teeth feels as illicit as lighting up a cigarette. All of these measures do little, though, to solve the fundamental underlying problem of massive urban growth in water-scarce areas like the American Sunbelt; if anything, growing water efficiency among consumers exacerbates the problem by shrinking utility profits and forcing them to either cut back on much-needed infrastructure repair and service improvement or raise water costs. Conservation and reclamation can only do so much; they can’t provide water to the exploding populations of Arizona or Sub-Saharan Africa.
Inline links: California State Water Project, National Water Carrier Project, shrinking utility profits and forcing them to either cut back on much-needed infrastructure repair and service improvement or raise water costs
Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything
June 10, 2022 · Original source
the process of plant domestication in the Fertile Crescent was not fully completed until much later: as much as 3,000 years after the cultivation of wild cereals first began (. . . to get a sense of the scale here, think: the time between the putative Trojan War and today).
Nor did the agricultural revolution, even as it was occurring, result in one way of living; it seems like during the transition toward farming very different societies were possible, even those that lived in proximity to one another, the exact same as hunter-gatherer societies. Consider the upland and lowland sectors of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East; sectors which are themselves demarcated by Göbekli Tepe, the world’s oldest construction of stone megaliths, dated to around 9,000 BC.
In comparison, lowland villages of the Fertile Crescent also attached a great importance to human heads, but treat them in an altogether different manner, in a way one might describe as touching (despite its macabre nature), like the ‘skull portraits’ found in lowland Early Neolithic villages.