Ranting to /dev/null

If I recall correctly my Iranian history, a lot of the country has never recovered from the destruction wrought by the Mongol hordes back in the day (it used to be thoroughly irrigated, with massive systems of canals and such stretching through much of what is now lifeless desert). Its a lot easier to break things than fix them (even over long, long periods of time), especially when it comes to water flow.

That would certainly explain a lot. There's still intensive irrigation between the Tigris and Euphrates, but most of the region is barren. The landscape we look at today doesn't strike me as the kind of place Alexander would bother conquering. He did turn back after conquering Libya and Egypt, because there wasn't anywhere else to go. But he hadn't run out of cities to found or conquer when he headed East. And the terrain we look at today does not suggest that an empire as long-lived and influential as the Persians could have come from there. Certainly nothing strong enough to challenge Babylon. I want to know what happened to turn

Well, the landscape be ugly, but the woman sure aren't!

The story of Iran is really quite fascinating. I don't have time to dig around too much, but here's a quick quote I found:

"Of far more devastating consequence were the Mongol invasions that began in the thirteenth century. First Genghis Khan blazed a trail of slaughter and destruction across Iran, followed by his grandson Hulagu, who extended the bloody Mongol conquests farther west, sacking Baghdad in 1258. The Mongols did terrible and, in many cases, permanent damage -- destroying fragile underground water tunnels and massacring so many Iranian males as to radically alter parts of Iran's topography and demography. A second wave under Tamerlane (Timur the Lame or Timur Lang) in the fourteenth century was gentler only by comparison with its predecessors -- the razing of the great cities of Isfahan and Shiraz being cases in point. The Mongols were skilled at obliterating things but poor at building anything lasting of their own. They left behind little but a legacy of misery after their passing."
http://www.iranian.com/Books/2004/November/KP/index.html

Nothing like a Mongol Horde to give you a bad millennium or so.

I suppose it's worth pointing out that the fertility of Iran may have always been linked to extensive irrigation. I think we tend not to give the ancients the respect that is their due. Even with a functionally unlimited supply of slave labor, building something like the pyramids takes doing, and suggests that large-scale irrigation projects were entirely within their grasp. The whole-scale irrigation of Iran should be theoretically possible, if you're patient enough.

But I think what we're seeing now is long term ecological damage. It isn't just that the terrain is dry. It looks to me as if it's totally lacking soil of any kind. Just bare rock and sand. I don't see many signs of even wild vegetation.

By the way, I found what remains of civilization in Iran. It's centered in the northwest part of the country, around the Caspian Sea. No surprise there. Take a look. There's your extensive irrigation. The line between where people live and uninhabited wasteland is razor sharp.

You are correct about the irrigation (that's why the Mongols were able to ruin it; it was an artificial system that was constructed over many centuries).

There are of course other forces at work besides the Mongol problem (typical third world ecological/agricultural stuff like deforestation due to the use of wood as a fuel source and desertification due to bad agricultural practices), but it does seem that the Mongols have managed to give the Persians a bad millenium or so (it seems to me that their history has been pretty much downhill since then).

I once read a really interesting account of the irrigation of the Sahara, as accomplished by the Romans. According to it, they managed to reclaim as productive farmland approximately half of what we now know as the Western Sahara desert, starting with the Tunisia/Algeria region and working down towards Chad, Mali, and Nigeria. The irrigation systems apparently fell into disarray as the northern part of the Roman empire collapsed, though; the photographs (of clearly Greco-Roman buildings far further into the Sahara than you would think possible) were fascinating. Of course, I haven't read this anywhere else (though histories of the Sahara are a bit difficult to find at the local bookstore), so I'm not presenting it as fact, just as something that seems possible. You're right that we tend to underestimate our ancestors. I think that's a more or less permanent Western pathology.

As a side note, those colors you see in the Caspian... they're not a good sign, if they're what I think they are (algae growth as a result of agricultural runoff pollution).