Medieval African science: The walls of Timbuktu, in Mali, West Africa Medieval African science In the 700s AD, the Islamic Empire conquered North Africa and began to trade a lot with East Africa. Islamic government did [...]
Islamic North Africa: Kairouan mosque (ca. 800 AD) The Eastern Roman reconquest of North Africa in the 530s AD ended the Vandal kingdom there. But trade declined until the Islamic invasions of North [...]
African daily life: Mary and Jesus, from Ethiopia (ca. 1500 AD) (Now in the J. Paul Getty Museum) Inequality in African society Ancient African society didn't have the huge differences [...]
The constellation Orion What did Mesopotamians invent? From the Stone Age through the Islamic empires, great scientific discoveries have streamed out of West Asia. West Asia is one of the places where farming got started, [...]
An Iranian fire sacrifice Zoroaster/Zarathustra himself Around 1000 BC (probably), about the same time that people in India were writing the Rig Veda, a man named Zoroaster (also called Zarathustra) was a priest in a small [...]
West Asian people: Ur-Nanshe, the king's chief musician in Mari, 2400s BC Oppression of women What we notice most about the way people lived in West Asia is the widespread [...]
Parthian architecture - the so-called Arch of Sapor - Parthians - Ctesiphon, Iraq, probably about 500 AD Romans and Parthians About 100 BC, the Hellenistic Greek kingdoms gave way to [...]
Shah Mosque, Ishfahan, Iran (1611-38) West Asia was divided into two big empires in the 1500s AD - the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid Empire. Both the Ottomans and the Safavids followed Islam, but they followed two different kinds of [...]
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 [...]
