Persia and the Jews – West Asian history
Persia and the Jews: The remains of the Second Temple in Jerusalem The Persians let the Jews go home In 536 BC, Cyrus the Great, the king of the Persians, conquered the Babylonian [...]
Persia and the Jews: The remains of the Second Temple in Jerusalem The Persians let the Jews go home In 536 BC, Cyrus the Great, the king of the Persians, conquered the Babylonian [...]
Mordecai is leading Esther (on the horse) to talk to the Persian king. A fresco from the world's oldest preserved synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria (244 AD) Who was Esther? [...]
Daniel in the lion's den, from the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, 359 AD in Rome Who was Daniel? In the Bible story, Daniel was one of the Jews who was [...]
Ostrich eggshell from Diepkloof Rock Shelter, South Africa (60,000 BC) When did people start dyeing eggs? Easter eggs go back long before Easter, and even long before the beginning of farming. As [...]
A briar patch - a big thorn bush A story about Br'er Rabbit So Br'er Fox had caught Br'er Rabbit and this time Br'er Fox said he was going to cook Br'er [...]
A velocipede Early wooden bicycles Bicycles were invented bit by bit in many different countries. They grew out of earlier inventions like wheels (from Central Asia) and wheelbarrows and cranks (from China), but Karl [...]
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 [...]
Al Tusi in his observatory (ca. 1259 AD) Nasir al Tusi was born in Iran in 1201 AD, as the Seljuk Empire was falling apart. The Seljuks were Turkic people. But al Tusi, [...]