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 [...]
Islamic geographers: al-Idrisi's map of the world (1100s AD) Universities in the Islamic Empire Silk Road and Indian Ocean trade made many people in the Islamic Empire rich enough to send [...]
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 [...]
Tomb of Ali, the first Imam and the fourth caliph, in Iraq (it was rebuilt about 1500 AD by the Safavids) Mohammed died in 632 AD. His second wife's father, a rich [...]
Sultan Mehmed II (by the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini, 1479 AD) After the old Seljuk kingdom in Anatolia (Turkey) fell apart, one of these Seljuks, a man named Osman, started in 1299 AD to [...]
Cordoba mosque, Spain By the late 600s AD, the Moors, people from North Africa who had converted to Islam, were regularly attacking Visigothic Spain. At first these raids were not very serious, and the Spanish [...]
The Seljuks defeat the Persians (1040 AD) The Seljuks were Turkic nomads from Turkmenistan. They were related to the Uighurs. They entered the Abbasid empire around 950 AD and gradually converted to Sunni Islam. By 1030 AD the Seljuks [...]
