Boys in Mauretania learning Quran verses in a maktab from wooden tablets Schools in the Islamic Empire In the Islamic empire and in Africa, as in West Asia before Islam, most kids never went to [...]
Shirij Madrassa, Fez, Morocco, about 1350 AD Who went to a madrassa? If you had done well at your maktab (elementary school), your parents might decide to send you on to a [...]
A plate from the Fatimid period (1000s AD), Egypt Some Islamic rulers bought or captured young Turkish, Mongol, Kurdish and Christian boys. The rulers took these boys away from their families to be special slaves. [...]
Medieval Islamic people: A plate from the Fatimid period (1000s AD), Egypt Children in the medieval Islamic world Children in the Islamic Empire generally did what their parents did (as many [...]
Medieval Islamic families: The Birth of Mohammed (Iran, about 1315 AD, now in Edinburgh) Did men have four wives? According to the Quran, Muslim men could have as many as four wives if they were [...]
Put the slips of paper in a jar To see how caste worked in ancient India, try dividing your class or your family into castes. Take a box or a [...]
Kidnapping Helen of Troy (from Pompeii) In ancient Greece, xenia meant "the way you treat strangers or foreigners". It comes from a very old Proto-Indo-European (Yamnaya) word that means "stranger" [...]
Greek slaves: An enslaved woman playing a kithara. You can tell she is a slave because she has short hair. What did Greek slaves work at? In ancient Greece, most [...]
Ancient Greek people: boys playingknucklebones (ca. 440-430 BC, now in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles) Like other Indo-European people, the Greeks had a general tendency to divide the world into [...]
Greek friendship: People call this "After the Party": the boy's puking on a slave. Greeks thought that was funny. Greek friendship Among the Greeks, teenaged boys and young men often [...]
