Three members of the Department of Geography at the University of Durham have collaborated to produce an important reference work on the current state of the region stretching from Morocco to Iran and from Turkey to the Sudan. Using a single map through nearly the whole book, the authors look at natural geography, history, culture, population, economics, transportation, waterways, boundaries, and wars.
The section on economics is the largest and perhaps the most informative. Map after map highlights several points: the imbalance that results from extreme oil wealth and no other significant economic activity; the way in which Turkey and Israel stand out from all the other countries of the region; and the clustering of economic activity near two seas, the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Other, more unexpected facts also emerge: Saudi Arabia has a pre-eminent role in the Middle East's matrix of air routes; and 58 percent of state boundaries follow geometric guidelines, whereas only 35 percent follow natural physical features.
Just one major mistake flaws this fine atlas. A misconceived effort to portray the ethno-linguistic regions of the Middle East falls into the old but still common trap of equating language with ethnicity. The results — treating Arabs and Jews as members of the Semitic "ethno-linguistic group," for example — are as nonsensical as lumping together all English-speaking Americans and calling them Anglo-Saxons.
