Since When Was There a "Middle East"?

The Question Hiding in a Familiar Word

We say "the Middle East" the way we say "the sky" — as if it had always been there, a fixed and natural feature of the world. It is on every news broadcast, in every atlas, in every classroom. It feels permanent.

It is not. The name is modern, foreign to the region, and strategic in origin. And once you see how recently it was invented and who invented it and why, a second and much larger question opens beneath it: if the name is this new, what about the people? Are the populations of those lands today simply the unbroken continuation of the ancient peoples of the Bible — Israel, Judah, Canaan, Aram, Egypt, Cush — or has something happened across the centuries that the modern map quietly hides?

This article asks two plain questions and tries to answer them honestly. Since when was there a "Middle East"? And are the people there the same people who were there then?

I. A Name Younger Than the Automobile

Here is the fact that surprises almost everyone: the term "Middle East" was coined around 1900–1902.

It became common currency in 1902, when the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan used it in an article — "The Persian Gulf and International Relations," published that September in the British journal The National Review — to describe the strategic waters between Arabia and India. Mahan himself claimed the coinage; in his own words he wrote: "The Middle East, if I may adopt a term which I have not seen, will some day need its Malta, as well as its Gibraltar." He was not naming a homeland or a culture. He was naming a chokepoint — the sea-lanes and shores around the Persian Gulf that the British Empire needed to control to keep Russia from advancing toward British India.

Shortly after, The Times correspondent Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol expanded the term in a series of essays to cover the regions of Asia commanding the approaches to India — and by the time the series ended, the newspaper had quietly dropped the quotation marks. An invented phrase had become, in barely a year, simply "the truth."

So the answer to the first question is precise and a little startling. There was no "Middle East" in the time of Moses, or David, or Jesus, or Muhammad, or Saladin, or even Napoleon. There was no "Middle East" when the United States declared independence. The name is about as old as the radio.

II. Near, Middle, Far — Measured From London

The word did not arrive alone. It came as one of a set — and the set gives the game away.

European usage divided the East into three: the Near East (the Ottoman lands closest to Europe — the Balkans, Anatolia, the eastern Mediterranean shore), the Middle East (Persia, the Gulf, the route to India), and the Far East (China, Japan, and beyond). Together they were called the "three Easts."

Read those three names together and ask the obvious question: near, middle, and far from where? The answer is always the same — from Europe. From London. Every one of the three measures its distance from the imperial capital. The region was not named by the people who lived in it but by outsiders who needed a convenient way to organize an empire.

And here is the quiet absurdity at the heart of it: the region is not "middle" or "near" or "far" to the people who live there. To them it is the center of their own world — the place where their cities, their rivers, their holy sites, their ancestors' graves have always been. "Middle East" is an address written from someone else's house.

The peoples of those lands had their own names, far older and entirely internal:

These are names from the inside — what the inhabitants called their own homes, some of them thousands of years before Mahan picked up his pen. "Middle East" is the external label laid over all of them, roughly 1,900 years after the biblical events it now blankets. The old names say who lived here. The new name says how far this is from us.

III. The Land That Was Conquered Again and Again

To answer the second question — are the people the same? — we have to look at what actually happened to those lands across three thousand years. And the honest summary is this: few places on earth have been conquered, emptied, and refilled as many times.

The pattern runs straight through the Bible and the historical record:

In 722 BCE, the Assyrian Empire conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and deported its population — the origin of the "lost ten tribes." The Assyrians then resettled the land with peoples from elsewhere in their empire. In 586 BCE, the Babylonian Empire destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple and carried the people of Judah into the Babylonian exile. Then came the Persians, the Greeks under Alexander and his successors, the Romans, the Arab conquests of the 7th century, the Crusaders, the Turkic peoples and the Ottomans — wave upon wave, each conquest bringing new rulers, new settlers, new languages, and new bloodlines into the same stretch of earth.

Every one of those conquests did to the people what Mahan would later do to the name: it overwrote what was there before. Populations were killed, enslaved, deported, scattered, and replaced. The land kept its hills and its rivers, but the human map on top of it was redrawn again and again.

The Babylonian and Assyrian deportations — the people of Israel and Judah carried away from the land · 722 and 586 BCE

IV. Herod: An Outsider Crowned Over the People

There is one figure who shows, in a single life, how thoroughly conquest reshuffled who counted as "the people" of this land — and how empire installed rulers over them from outside.

Herod the Great, the "King of the Jews" of the Christmas story, was not a Judean by blood at all. He was an Idumean — that is, an Edomite, the people the book of Genesis traces to Esau, Jacob's brother. His father, Antipater, was an Idumean noble; his mother, Cypros, was a Nabatean Arab princess from Petra. Neither parent was ethnically Jewish. Herod was raised a Jew only because, a couple of generations earlier, the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus had conquered Idumea and forced its people to convert to Judaism.

And how did this Idumean become king over Judea? Not by the will of the Judeans — by the decree of Rome. Herod hurried to Rome, won over Mark Antony and Octavian, and the Roman Senate proclaimed him "King of the Jews" in 40 BCE; he then took the throne by force with the backing of a Roman army. Josephus called him a "half-Jew"; later Jewish tradition remembered him as the "Hasmonean slave." Being both an Idumean convert and a creature of Rome made him, to the people he ruled, an outsider twice over.

Herod is the whole theme in one man: a people conquered, their neighbors forcibly converted and absorbed, and then an imperial power crowning a ruler over the native population who was not of them — and propping him up with foreign legions. The "King of the Jews" was installed by the very empire occupying the Jews.

Herod the Great — Idumean father, Nabatean mother, crowned King of the Jews by the Roman Senate · an outsider installed over his own subjects by a foreign empire

V. So — Are They the Same People?

Now the honest answer to the second question, and it must be handled carefully, because it is both fascinating and easy to abuse.

The answer is: not simply, and not as a whole. The modern population of the lands we call the "Middle East" is the product of all those waves — Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Turkic, Crusader, Ottoman — layered over the ancient peoples. The modern regional population is not a clean, unbroken continuation of the people of the Bible.

To find the ancient people, you often have to look not at the modern map of the "Middle East" at all, but at the long trails of exile that led away from it.

VI. Looking Past the Map

So, since when was there a "Middle East"? Since about 1902 — a strategic coinage by a naval officer, measuring an ancient homeland by its distance from London.

And are the people there the same? Not the regional population as a whole; that is the layered result of three thousand years of conquest. The ancient lines survive, but scattered — carried out along the roads of exile, preserved in specific communities, often far from the land itself.

The lesson is the same for anyone trying to recover a heritage that empire has buried: do not mistake the modern map for the ancient truth. The names we were handed — "Middle East," and before it the conquerors' renamings going back to antiquity — were acts of power, written from the outside, for the purposes of the namer. Beneath "Middle East" lie Israel and Judah and Canaan and Aram and Mizraim and Cush. Beneath the modern population lie the scattered descendants of peoples conquered and carried away.

The map shows you where things sit relative to London. It does not show you who was there first, or where they went. To find them, you have to look past the map — to the older names, and to the long trails of the scattered.