Fertile Crescent Disappearing

The birthplace of civilization and empire, the Fertile Crescent, is drying up.  New Scientist posted a worrisome story that modern Iraq is in dire straits as dams upstream in Turkey are threatening to reduce the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to a quarter of their natural levels.  This is happening in a land already parched by drought.  The marsh lands in lower Mesopotamia are again threatened after a brief period of hope they could be restored from Saddam Hussein’s ecological terror (see 05/01/2003 and 06/06/2006).  Scientists estimate the fertile lands of Mesopotamia where empires first thrived will be gone this century.

Sumer, Akkad, Ur, Kish, Babylonia, Assyria – so many great empires rose and fell here.  The Bible is filled with stories of events in Mesopotamia.  Great kings and armies strode through this region.  Great cities emerged and collapsed, forgotten in the dust till unearthed by archaeologists.  It’s hard to imagine the lush “land between the rivers” becoming a desert.  Perhaps politics will turn, treaties will change the situation, and the rivers can continue to bring life to the vast Iraqi desert; perhaps not.  Geography is not guaranteed.  If empires had not risen here, they would have elsewhere.  Nothing on the planet is forever.  Whatever happens, we can hope that freedom in the resurrected Iraq will allow archaeologists to continue to bring evidence to light about the first civilizations that arose in this area.
    Evolutionists believe that anatomically-modern human beings migrated throughout Europe and Asia for at least 40,000 years, if not 100,000 or a million years, never writing a stone tablet, building a city, riding a horse or inventing a wheel.  Given the rapid emergence of culture and invention that burst onto the scene in the 3rd millennium B.C., that is simply not credible.  The Bible’s timeline after the Flood (see the Table of Nations, Genesis 10) fits the evidence.  Wherever man is found, there is evidence of curiosity, artistry, language, culture, invention, religiosity, trade, violence and war.  The first written records of Sumer were already recording economic transactions implying a socioeconomic infrastructure already in place.  Why should anyone believe the evolutionary story?  Just look at Egypt and Mesopotamia where monumental achievements spoke of fully-capable humans doing what humans do, without tens of thousands of years of imaginary evolution.