--- title: The Middle East and Central Asia — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «The Middle East and Central Asia», a lesson of the geography course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: People who live there often prefer names such as South-West Asia and North Africa. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Geography](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/) / The Middle East and Central Asia # The Middle East and Central Asia Lesson 12 of the geography course of Mova's primary school: 18 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/). - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/1/) — People who live there often prefer names such as South-West Asia and North Africa. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/2/) — These lands are mostly dry, so people built cities where water is: on rivers like the Tigris and Euphrates, and at oases along the old Silk Road. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/3/) — That is why Mesopotamia, the land between those two rivers, saw some of the first cities on Earth. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/5/) — In Europa Universalis 5 this map looks very different: in 1337 Mamluk Egypt rules the Levant, Persia is a great power, and Constantinople is still Byzantine until the Ottomans take it in 1453. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/6/) — Today's countries are much younger than those states. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/7/) — Think of a road trip along the Silk Road: from Istanbul across Iran to Samarkand in Uzbekistan, every stop is a city that grew where travellers and camels could find water. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/8/) — The Middle East usually means the lands from Egypt and Turkey to Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, and the name comes from a European view of the world. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/9/) — Turkey's capital is Ankara, chosen by the new republic in 1923 because it lies in the middle of the country, away from the old sultans' court, but its largest city is Istanbul, which spans Europe and Asia on both sides of the Bosporus. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/10/) — Istanbul was Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, which the Ottomans conquered in 1453. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/11/) — Iran, long called Persia in Europe, has had several capitals over the centuries, such as Tabriz and Isfahan, and today its capital is Tehran, a city of about 9 million people at the foot of the Alborz Mountains. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/12/) — Saudi Arabia, with its capital Riyadh, contains Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities of Islam, and it is the largest country in the world with no river that flows all year. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/13/) — Iraq's capital is Baghdad on the Tigris, and Mesopotamia (a Greek name meaning «between the rivers»), the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, saw some of the first cities, such as Uruk, over 5,000 years ago. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/14/) — The Gulf states include the United Arab Emirates (capital Abu Dhabi, not Dubai), Qatar (Doha), Kuwait (Kuwait City), Bahrain (Manama) and Oman (Muscat). - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/15/) — Israel's government sits in Jerusalem, which it calls its capital, but most countries keep their embassies in Tel Aviv because Jerusalem's status is disputed, and Palestinians seek East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/16/) — Syria's capital is Damascus, one of the oldest cities in the world that has been lived in without a break, while Lebanon's capital is Beirut and Jordan's is Amman. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/18/) — The ending «stan» comes from Persian and means «land of» or «place of». - [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/19/) — Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country in the world, and Uzbekistan is one of only two doubly landlocked countries, with Liechtenstein: all its neighbours have no sea coast either, so it must cross two countries to reach an ocean. - [20](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/12-middle-east-and-central-asia/20/) — Samarkand and Bukhara in Uzbekistan were great cities of the Silk Road, and Timur made Samarkand his capital from 1370. - ← previous: [East, South and South-East Asia: countries and capitals](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/11-east-south-and-south-east-asia/) - next →: [Africa: countries and capitals](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/13-africa-countries-and-capitals/) - ↑ back to [Geography](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/geography/)