Most modern Middle East states are recent colonial or Ottoman constructs

Evidence

Apart from Egypt, there are very few other countries where one can detect and trace back a continuing identity through a very long period of time. Yemen is one; Morocco is another; and the rest become more doubtful. Algeria and Tunisia are really Ottoman creations, owing their identity in their present forms to developments during the Ottoman period. Others are still more recent: the states of the Fertile Crescent fashioned in the Anglo-French carve-up; and Libya, invented by an official in the Italian Colonial Ministry and endowed with a name taken from Roman political geography. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1621

Categorization

• QUESTION: Libya ‘invented by an official in the Italian Colonial Ministry’ is a striking specific worth verifying and sourcing further.
• CANDY: The detail that Libya’s very name was chosen by an Italian colonial bureaucrat is a crisp elevator-conversation fact.