x A Short History of the Middle East
Egyptian Sudan, Cyrenaica, and Tripolitanla); Asia Minor or
Anatolia, which now forms the greater part of the Turkish Re-
public; and Persia or Iran. The Arabic-speaking lands form, both
geographically and historically, the central core of this region, and
it is with them mainly that this work is concerned; but they cannot
be studied in isolation, either in the past or the present, from the
linguistically-foreign lands of Anatolia and Persia which border
them on the north.