The Middle East

It depends on the reading, and no standard settles it. This catalogue keeps Iraq and Iran under the name and files the rest of the countries usually called Middle Eastern under narrower regions: the Levant, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula, Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean. Wider readings reach from Morocco to Afghanistan. Both kinds of reading are in ordinary use, and the catalogue takes no position on which is correct.

From naval strategy at the turn of the twentieth century. Alfred Thayer Mahan used it in the National Review of September 1902 for the sea approaches to the Persian Gulf, remarking that he had not seen the term before, though it had appeared in print slightly earlier. The British wartime command at Cairo later stretched the phrase westward over Egypt and North Africa.

The M49 standard of the UN Statistics Division has no Middle East grouping at all. It places Iraq in Western Asia and Iran in Southern Asia, together with Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, and it states that the groupings exist for statistical convenience and carry no political meaning.

In outline it follows the Treaty of Zuhab of 17 May 1639, adjusted at Erzurum in 1847, at Constantinople in 1913 and in 1937. The disputed part is the final stretch in the Shatt al-Arab, the river formed by the Tigris and the Euphrates at al-Qurnah. The Algiers accord of 6 March 1975 and the treaty of 13 June 1975 placed the boundary on the thalweg, the deepest line of the channel.