Near East

[1] The term was invented by modern Western geographers and was originally applied to the Ottoman Empire,[2] but today has varying definitions within different academic circles.

[10] At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire included all of the Balkans, north to the southern edge of the Great Hungarian Plain.

Starting in 1894, the Ottomans struck at the Armenians and Assyrians on the explicit grounds that they were non-Muslim peoples and as such were a potential threat to the Muslim empire within which they lived.

In the United States, the then aging Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, leapt into the war of words and joined the Red Cross.

Europeans could not set foot on most of the shores of the southern and central Mediterranean from the Gulf of Sidra to Albania without permits from the Ottoman Empire.

Beyond the Ganges and Himalayas (including the Tien Shan) were Serica and Serae (sections of China) and some other identifiable far eastern locations known to the voyagers and geographers but not to the general European public.

By the time of John Seller's Atlas Maritima of 1670, "India Beyond the Ganges" had become "the East Indies" including China, Korea, southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific in a map that was every bit as distorted as Ptolemy's, despite the lapse of approximately 1,500 years.

The world map of Jodocus Hondius of 1590 labels all of Asia from the Caspian to the Pacific as India Orientalis,[15] shortly to appear in translation as the East Indies.

They became immediately popular, supplanting "Levant" and "East Indies", which gradually receded to minor usages and then began to change meaning.

In defense of the Bible as history they said: "The primeval nations, that piled their glorious homes on the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Nile, are among us again with their archives in their hands; ..."[20] They further defined the nations as "... the countries lying between the Caspian, the Persian Gulf, and the Mediterranean ..."[21] The regions in their inventory were Assyria, Chaldea, Mesopotamia, Persia, Armenia, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Ancient Israel, Ethiopia, Caucasus, Libya, Anatolia and Abyssinia.

As the book was a big success, he was off to the Balkan states with his wife in 1896 to develop detail for a sequel, The People and Politics of the Near East, which Scribners planned to publish in 1897.

Having portrayed the Armenians as revolutionaries in the name of freedom with the expectation of being rescued by the intervention of Christian Europe, he states "but her hope was vain."

The countries and regions mentioned are Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina (which was Muslim and needed, in his view, to be suppressed), Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Romania.

For his authority Miller invokes the people, citing the "collective wisdom" of Europe, and introducing a concept to arise many times in the decades to follow under chilling circumstances: "... no final solution of the difficulty has yet been found.

"[28] Miller's final pronouncements on the topic could not be ignored by either the British or the Ottoman governments:[29] It remains then to consider whether the Great Powers can solve the Eastern Question ... Foreigners find it extremely difficult to understand the foreign, and especially the Eastern policy of Great Britain, and we cannot wonder at their difficulty, for it seems a mass of contradictions to Englishmen themselves ... At one moment we are bringing about the independence of Greece by sending the Turkish fleet to the bottom of the bay of Navarino.

It has had an undue share of political misfortunes, and had lain for centuries in a kind of spiritual paralysis between East and West—belonging to neither, partaking paradoxically of both, and wholly unable to rally itself decidedly to one or the other.

Mustafa Kemal, its founder, a former Ottoman high-ranking officer, was insistent on this social revolution, which, among other changes, liberated women from the strait rules still in effect in most Arabic-speaking countries.

The innovation of the term Near East to mean the holdings of the Ottoman Empire as early as the Crimean War had left a geographical gap.

The use of the term Middle East as a region of international affairs apparently began in British and American diplomatic circles quite independently of each other over concern for the security of the same country: Iran, then known to the west as Persia.

Our active interest in Persia began with the present century, and was due to the belief that the invasion of India by a European Power was a probable event.The threat that caused Gordon, diplomat and military officer, to publish the article was resumption of work on a railway from Russia to the Persian Gulf.

Naval force has the quality of mobility which carries with it the privilege of temporary absences; but it needs to find on every scene of operation established bases of refit, of supply, and, in case of disaster, of security.

The British Navy should have the facility to concentrate in force, if occasion arise, about Aden, India, and the Gulf.Apparently the sailor did not connect with the soldier, as Mahan believed he was innovating the term Middle East.

[citation needed] Bertram Lenox Simpson, a journalist who served for a period as an officer for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, combined both terms in his 1910 work The Conflict of Colour: The Threatened Upheaval Throughout the World as "the Near and Middle East."

This is so absolutely true that no candid person will be inclined to dispute it.The spirit of the Crusaders may thus be said still to linger in those latitudes which, to give geographical and political cohesion, are here broadly named the Middle and Near East; and, to use a somewhat dangerous but illuminating figure of speech, it may be even be maintained that to-day, as of old, the white man and the Cross remain as blindly opposed to the brown man and Islamism, Hinduism and what these creeds postulate, as the most uncompromising bigot could desire.According to Simpson, the reason why the "Problem of the Nearer East" remained so misunderstood in the Western world (compared to diplomatic and political issues in the Near East) was due to the fact that "there is no good work dealing with these problems as one whole, and much misunderstanding consequently exists.

The countries of the former empires of the 19th century have in general abandoned the term and the subdivision in favor of Middle East, North Africa, and various forms of Asia.

Its duties are defined as "support on Middle Eastern and North African countries, as well as on the South Asian nations of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

Its list of countries is limited by the Red Sea, comprises the entire eastern coast of the Mediterranean, including Israel, Turkey, the small nations of the Caucasus, Iran and the states of the Arabian Peninsula.

The last great book written by Leonard Woolley, British archaeologist, excavator of ancient Ur and associate of T. E. Lawrence and Arthur Evans, was The Art of the Middle East, Including Persia, Mesopotamia and Palestine, published in 1961.

Parallel with the growth of specialized agencies for conducting or supporting statescraft in the second half of the 20th century has been the collection of resources for scholarship and research typically in university settings.

One such institution is the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD) founded by and located centrally at Oxford University, Great Britain.