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Indeed, and in the Bronze Age Cypriots were Asian. In fact, they were mostly Phoenician.
I think your analysis is fair for the Hellenistic Mediterranean and onward, but it doesn't fit for the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean. At that point, the Phoenicians ruled the Mediterranean, the Greeks and Romans were irrelevant (and deeply culturally indebted to the Phoenicians), and the Phoenicians themselves looked to Egypt and Babylo-Assyria for cultural influence. Prior to the rise of the Greek city-states to prominence circa the 5th century AD, the entire Mediterranean was very east-oriented. The Phoenicians weren't just geographically and linguistically Asian; they were also very much so culturally Asian.
By the time Carthage rises to prominence, the situation is different, and Greek culture has spread throughout the Mediterranean basin. This is long after Phoenicia's heyday, however, as Tyre takes a secondary place to her North African colony. Again, though, Phoenicia proper proved remarkably resistant to outside cultural dominance even after being annexed in turn by Assyria, Egypt, Macedon, Seleucia, and Rome.
Plus I actually think Civ6's Middle East is rather sparsely populated...I do agree that North Africa is rather empty, but I'd rather keep Phoenicia and fill North Africa with the Berbers or Numidia.
On a serious note I was just reading a review of a rather massive multi-volume tome in which a historian argues that American regional culture is the result of the regions of Britain from which those regions were settled even into the present day. I think his argument was oversimplified, but I also think he made some compelling points. The book is Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer, should anyone be interested.
