The Manchu leader Nurhaci (1600s AD) Where did the Manchu come from? The Manchu people were descended from the Jurchens. They spoke a language probably closely related to Turkic and [...]
A melon stall in Central Asia After Tamerlane died in 1405, his Altaic people kept on ruling Central Asia, but not as one big empire. There were lots of little [...]
Modern Afghanistan: the Dar-ul-Aman Palace outside Kabul (1920s) World War I From 1880 until the end of World War I, the British controlled Afghanistan along with British India. Afghanistan mostly [...]
Dost Mohammed Khan In 1834 AD Dost Mohammed Kahn pushed aside Ahmed Shah Durrani's grandson to become the ruler of Afghanistan. He found himself caught ruling a small, poor country [...]
Ahmad Shah Durrani's burial mausoleum (Kandahar, Pakistan) Afghanistan after the Mongol Empire After the Mongol Empire collapsed, Afghanistan's land was mostly split between the Mughal Empire of India and the Safavid [...]
Russian rye bread Beef and yogurt In 1500 AD, most people in Central Asia were still cattle herders, and they ate beef, yogurt, and milk from their cows just they [...]
Grasslands of Central Asia - the steppe In 1500 AD, most of Central Asia was grassland. Nomads rode horses and tended big herds of cattle there. Only in the western part of [...]
Turkmenistan painting in a Chinese-Islamic style The collapse of the Mongol Empire in the end of the Middle Ages meant that artists scattered to the courts of many smaller states [...]
Inside the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg (1700s AD) After 1500, architects in Central Asia divided into those who looked west, to Western Europe, for inspiration, those who looked south, to [...]
Eohippus - an early kind of horse When mammals first began to grow larger, after the dinosaurs became extinct about 70 million years ago, some of them evolved into the [...]
