Early medieval timeline: Dome of the Rock mosque, Jerusalem (600s AD) Europe in the Early Middle Ages In the Early Middle Ages, many empires around the world collapsed into smaller [...]
Eid al-Adha: an Islamic image of Abraham and Ishmael What is Eid al-Adha? Eid al-Adha is an Islamic holiday. It falls a few months after the end of Ramadan, Eid [...]
Layla and Majnun at school together, from a manuscript of the Khamsa that belonged to Timur's son and is now in the Hermitage Museum (1431 AD). An Iranian story This [...]
Isaac Newton, mathematician and physicist About 1000 AD, in the Islamic Empire, Ibn Sina came up with the idea that an object moving in a vacuum would just keep moving forever without slowing [...]
Kids playing tetherball using centrifugal force Who first explained centrifugal force? When something is going straight, it always keeps going straight unless something else stops it or turns it. (The [...]
Saladin's castle in Cairo, where Maimonides worked Maimonides and health care In the 1100s AD, when Maimonides wrote his book about medicine, doctors didn't have very many medicines or medical treatments that worked. The Guide [...]
Islamic medicine: From an Ottoman manuscript, two doctors telling the pharmacist how to make different medicines Writing medical encyclopedias Doctors made big scientific advances in medicine during the Islamic empire. The [...]
Indian numbers and medieval Islamic mathematics Indian numbers About 630 AD, just before the Islamic empire got started, people in West Asia learned from traders or traveling scholars about "Arabic" numbers. Indian mathematics The invention [...]
Medieval Islamic science: Al Tusi's diagram of linear motion from circular motion Indian and African science In the Early Middle Ages, before the formation of the Islamic Empire, Buddhists ran the world's biggest [...]
Where ibn Sina came from: Uzbekistan Ibn Sina and the Samanids in Uzbekistan Ibn Sina (known to Europeans as Avicenna) was a scientist. He was born about 980 AD in the north-eastern part of [...]
