High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Near East (French: Proche-Orient) is a geographical term that covers different countries for geographers, archaeologists, and historians, on the one hand, and for political scientists, economists, and journalists, on the other. The term originally applied to the maximum extent of the Ottoman Empire, which had been settled to the north by the Great Turkish War of the late 17th century, ending with the Treaty of Karlowitz, June 26, 1699. This war determined that Austria, Hungary and Ukraine would not be in the Ottoman Empire and therefore ultimately would not be Near Eastern.