Middle East physical map
The geography of the Middle East has to be considered according to the definition that we take for the Middle East, if we refer to the geographical area between the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea: the Levantine Sea, to the west; the line drawn by the border between Iran on the one hand and Pakistan and Afghanistan on the other, to the east; the Turkish-Iranian border with the countries of the Caucasus, the Turkish with Bulgaria and Greece on the north-west and the respective terrestrial borders of Egypt and the maritime borders of Yemen and Oman on the south; this geographical area includes a total of sixteen countries for a total area of 6,997,934 km². Map 2004.
Straddling Europe, Asia and Africa, the Middle East is surrounded by the Red Sea, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. The four largest rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates that roam Turkey and Iraq, the Shatt al-Arab which is on the border between Iran and Iraq and the Nile in Egypt.
We can distinguish different geographical entities: the Anatolian plateau, formed by the Taurus mountains and the Pontic mountains, the fertile crescent starting from the Nile valley, which runs through the regions of Palestine and Syria, watered by the Mediterranean precipitations and which extends into Iraq on the outskirts of the Tigris and Euphrates and the Arabian Peninsula, consisting of deserts (the largest being the Arabian Desert) and mountains, which ends in Yemen and Oman.