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The Persian-Egyptian conflict was actually one phase of continuous conflict between successive Near Eastern imperial powers and Egypt, which contested for control of the Levant (Syria-Palestine). This began ca. 1500 bc, when Egypt extended its authority over much of the Levant. Conflict was almost continuous in the ninth–sixth centuries, when the Assyrians mounted repeated campaigns and ultimately incorporated the Levant into the Assyrian Empire, instigating Egyptian military and diplomatic opposition, which led to Assyrian conquest of Egypt and installation of a native client king and the beginning of the 26th or Saite Dynasty. Saite kings opposed Babylonian takeover of the Levant and prompted numerous Babylonian campaigns through the 560s. Once the Persians took over the Babylonian Empire in 539, they inherited their predecessors’ Egyptian problem, making a Persian attempt to conquer Egypt inevitable.

The Neo-Babylonian Empire dominated a large part of the Middle East from 612 BC, after the final defeat of its Assyrian rival, until 539 BC, when it fell at the hands of the Persians under Cyrus the Great. This chapter attempts to approximate how the Babylonian kings conducted their state correspondence, which has not been recovered so far. Royal communication strategies can be reconstructed on the basis of information found in the numerous letters of the temple correspondence of two major sanctuaries, at Sippar and Uruk.

Cyrus the Great’s conquest of Babylonia in 539 had important implications, not least among them being that Cyrus now ruled more territory than any previous king. In both Babylonian and Judean traditions, Cyrus was identified as the chosen agent of the deity, Marduk and Yahweh, respectively. Through the royal inscriptions Cyrus commissioned in Babylonia, especially the Cyrus Cylinder from Babylon, it is possible to see how he shaped his ideological messaging for a Mesopotamian audience and, further, how subtle modifications to age-old Mesopotamia formulae laid the foundations for a nascent, unique Persian vision of rule for his successors. Facilitating the return of exiled Judeans to Jerusalem is one example of Cyrus’ magnanimity.

This chapter analyses the structure of the Book of Daniel's text that shows Near Eastern history from the sixth century up to the 160s bc The Book of Daniel, written in the 160s bc, incorporates a series of narratives relating the impact on the Jewish community of Near Eastern empires, going back through the Persian Empire of the Achaemenids to the Babylonian and Assyrian empires.

The Story Now Moves beyond the mid-Holocene. By around 4000 B.C.E., viable agrarian settlements had appeared in many parts of the world. Not only could larger populations be supported, but surplus food produced by toiling farmers enabled the differentiation of labour and social status. Settlements expanded, made trading connections, and formed larger collective polities. Hierarchical authority and power began to replace horizontal flows of local information and decision-making. The vagaries of climate, however, lurked on the horizon. Agrarian societies, with their increasing dependence on harvest staples, were painting themselves into a corner. Also, as populations grew and settlements coalesced, mutant strains of animal-hosted microbes that made a successful crossing from livestock or urban pests to humans took advantage of larger, intermingling host populations. A few of these adventurers, such as the measles virus, not only initiated new epidemics but continued circulating, between outbreaks, as endemic “crowd diseases.” Measles, a microbial success story, is still with us today. The advent of property, food stores, and occupied land in nearby populations stimulated both war and conquest, each having diverse, debilitating, and often bloody consequences for health and survival. Climatic conditions in Sumer, sitting at the meteorological crossroads of the Middle East, began changing about 3600 B.C.E., one-third of the way into the fourth millennium B.C.E. . There was a general cooling and drying in the northern hemisphere as the first phase of the Holocene Climatic Optimum waned and as the Icelandic Low and Siberian (Asiatic) High circulations intensified, funnelling colder air southwards. Rainfall declined in southern Mesopotamia, compounded by a southerly drift of the rain-bearing Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone and the regional monsoon. Further west, the Sahara was changing from green to brown, and Egyptian agriculture was faltering. As rainfall declined and arrived later in the year, farming became more difficult; farmers now needed to make a year-round effort, with double-cropping and shorter fallow periods. By extending their irrigation systems, the Sumerians compounded another problem: several centuries of overirrigation and deforestation had already begun to turn the soil saline.

For most of two centuries, the United States was a nation of small farms and many farmers, raising much of their own food along with one or more cash crops and livestock for local markets. Today, farms run by families of weatherbeaten farmers, pie-baking farm wives, and earnest 4-H offspring are disappearing. Americans live on supermarket or take-out food, mostly produced on extensive, highly mechanized and chemical-dependent industrial-scale “conventional” farms, raising single-crop monocultures or single-breed livestock. The larger farms cover tens of thousands of acres, too much for single families to manage. It is not agriculture, but agribusiness— an industry run by corporations. Conventional industrial agriculture is highly productive, and supermarket food is cheap. So why should anyone worry about growing food with chemical fertilizers, expensive equipment, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals? The reasons, acknowledged even by the industry, are that agribusiness “saddles the farmer with debt, threatens his health, erodes his soil and destroys its fertility, pollutes the ground water and compromises the safety of the food we eat.” Croplands presently encompass some 57 million acres in the 11 western states (table 2.1). Giant plantations consume huge amounts of natural resources—soil, fertilizers, fuels, and water. Synthetic fertilizers keep overused soils in production, until they become too salty (salinated) and must be abandoned. Industrial farming has taken over large areas of wildlife habitat, including forest, scrub, desert, or prairie, to replace degraded croplands. The clearings and massive pesticide applications threaten or endanger large and increasing numbers of plant and animal species in the western United States. Pesticide exposures sicken family farmers and agribusiness workers in the fields, and add environmental poisons to our diet. Pesticides and other problematic agricultural chemicals accumulate in our bodies. Agribusiness consumes especially huge amounts of increasingly costly, nonrenewable petroleum. “Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten” to run fleets of immense plowing, planting, cultivating, harvesting, and processing machines, plus countless irrigation pumps. Growing a pound of American beef consumes half a gallon of petroleum. A top executive of the giant agriculture-chemical corporation Monsanto has admitted that “current agricultural technology is not sustainable.” High-tech agriculture, such as cloning and genetically modifying crops, does not help conventional agriculture become more sustainable.

For millennia, humans have been dependent upon rivers and their resources for food, transport, and irrigation, and by mid-Holocene times (about 5,000 years ago), humans harnessed hydraulic power that in part contributed to the rise of civilization. It is generally accepted that the earliest civilizations to develop such linkages with irrigation and cultivation of crops arose in the Old World, in Mesopotamia and the Levant, the Indus Valley, and the Central Kingdom, associated with, respectively, the Tigris, Jordan, Euphrates, and Nile; the Indus; and the Huang He (Yellow) and Changjiang (Yangtze) rivers—and, of course, their associated deltas. In this chapter, I examine the role of selected coastal deltas that were important in the development of these early Old World civiliza­tions, and how those people began to alter the shape and character of the highly productive and constantly changing deltaic environments. Before we begin, how­ever, I need to provide some basic definitions. First, I use the definition of civilization provided by Hassan, “a phenome­non of large societies with highly differentiated sectors of activities interrelated in a complex network of exchanges and obligations.” Second, I use the defini­tion of delta presented by Overeem, Syvitski, and Hutton, “a discrete shoreline protuberance formed where a river enters an ocean or lake, … a broadly lobate shape in plain view narrowing in the direction of the feeding river, and a sig­nificant proportion of the deposit … derived from the river”. Although I will at times discuss linkages between development of human settlements and river reaches upstream from the coastal delta, my primary focus in this chapter is on coastal deltaic regions, in particular those of the Nile, Indus, Yellow, and Yangtze rivers, which provide the best examples for link­ages between relatively recent early human populations and coastal deltas. I will address other deltas later in the book. My rationale for beginning this book with a discussion of the relationship between Old World civilizations and deltas is that this long- term interaction has been so dramatically altered over the past few millennia— essentially, it is a good relationship “gone bad.”