The same biblical peoples who had created the great city of Babylon set in motion its destruction. Islam and goats had little impact. And the failure to restore the land was due not to nomadic peoples but to the wholly sedentary Ottoman Empire, based in faraway Istanbul, which ruled the area from the fifteenth century until the end of the First World War. In its bureaucratic way, the empire extracted wealth from the area while refusing to invest in it. Still, Lowdermilk got one big thing right: the Fertile Crescent had become a desert and a major cause was human incompetence with water.
