Grapes on a Seljuk period plate Nasruddin lived in the time of the Seljuk Sultans. One day Nasruddin was coming from the vineyard with baskets of grapes on his donkey. The children crowded around [...]
Arabic language: Sabataean writing Where did Arabic come from? Arabic is in the Semitic language group. Semitic languages seem to have gotten started before the beginning of writing. That would be before [...]
A page from Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, from Herat, Afghanistan, about 1444 AD. Now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Islamic historians began by translating Greek historians like Herodotus and Thucydides into Arabic. But soon historians wrote in [...]
Muslims playing chess in Spain What is exponential growth? About 1260 AD, Ibn Khallikan, a Kurdish historian living in the Abbasid Empire (modern Iraq), wrote an encyclopedia with biographies of many famous men [...]
Princess (ca. 1540 AD) How old are the Arabian Nights stories? People in India and Iran have been telling these stories for a long time - nobody knows how long. Around 850 AD, an Iranian [...]
An Islamic oil lamp like Aladdin's lamp, from the University of Michigan Scheherazade tells Aladdin's story This is one of the stories Scheherazade told the king. Scheherazade's Arabian Nights Sinbad [...]
A scene from the Ramayana: Rama in the forest (a Gupta carving of the 400s AD, now in New Delhi) What is the Ramayana? The Ramayana is a story from [...]
A monkey eating a mango Crocodile's mother asked him to bring her Monkey's heart to eat, so Crocodile tried to trick Monkey and get his heart. "Hey Monkey!" he said, "Let me [...]
Cotton bolls hanging from the plants I began as a bloom of cotton, outdoors. Then they brought me to a room where they washed me. Then the hard strokes of the [...]
Spinning thread in the garden, like Lalla Arifa (1400s AD) Lalla Arifa growing up Lalla Arifa lived in the 1300s AD, in Kashmir, in northern India. Most people in medieval Kashmir [...]
