As the Middle East is often called the cradle of civilization, it is also the source of some of the earliest philosophical literature. Much of it is devoted to what the Western tradition calls Ethics, although the philosophies of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia are also rich with astronomical writings (classifiable as Natural Philosophy) and cosmogony and cosmology, the origin of the universe and the nature of creation. It is likely that this earliest body of work influenced the Ancient Greeks.
Jewish philosophy and Christian philosophy developed in this region and, only later, in Europe as well. The thinkers of the Babylonian Talmudic academies drew on both Greek and Islamic philosophy, and later Jewish philosophy was strongly influenced by Western philosophy, especially the works of Aristotle, rediscovered during the European Middle Ages and transmitted far and wide. In an instance of cultural and intellectual reciprocity, Middle Eastern philosophers who wrote commentaries on Aristotle and other ancient Greek thinkers enriched the medieval European understanding of this classical tradition.
Prior to the emergence of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) in the Middle East, the Iranian spiritual leader Zoroaster (who lived probably during the second millennium BC) evolved a theology and philosophy of religion and cosmogony that combined monotheism with a dualist opposition of good and evil. Zoroastrianism shaped such Iranian religious philosophies as Manichaeism, Mazdakism, and Zurvanism, and it went on to inspire and influence the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).
After the Muslim conquests, beginning in the seventh century AD, Islamic philosophy displaced Zoroastrianism and built upon Greek philosophical traditions, especially Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism, to create what has been called the Islamic Golden Age (eighth to fourteenth centuries AD), which featured many innovations in philosophical, scientific, and mathematical thought as well as in medicine. The Aristotelian tradition was elaborated into such Islamic intellectual and spiritual movements as Illuminism, Sufism, and Transcendent theosophy, which, in various ways, carried even into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the so-called Arab Renaissance, also known as the Nahda. During the early Middle Ages, in addition to harmonizing and even synthesizing Aristotle and other classical Greek philosophers with Islam, the Middle East became the keeper of the classical Western intellectual flame, not only preserving but interpreting the work of Plato, Aristotle, and others, which was then transmitted to Europe.
