Middle East frontiers were drawn by European statesmen with rulers on maps

Evidence

If we look at the map of Europe, we see a number of lines on the map, most very irregular lines, except for a few that follow geographical features; lines drawn by a thousand years of history and struggle. The frontiers on the map of the Middle East are to a remarkable extent straight lines. They were mostly drawn by statesmen with rulers on maps—statesmen who were not Arab, not Persian, not Turkish, but British or French or occasionally Italian. In this respect the map of the Middle East looks rather like the map of North America where similar reasons produced similar results, with the extraordinary difference that this was not an area of new settlement but of ancient civilizations. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1608

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relevant to my tree-infrastructure essay’s theme of imposed foreign order onto landscapes — here applied to political cartography rather than ecology.
• XREF: The straight-line frontier as imposed Western legibility device parallels Said’s account of Orientalist map-making rendering the region administratively tractable. — connects to: The region called the Middle East was invented by imperial and Cold War interests