The first alphabet letters: the Canaanite alphabet Early Canaanite alphabet Each of the letters of the early Canaanite alphabet was the first sound of the most ordinary words in their language. The [...]
Ba'al from Ugarit (Louvre Museum, Paris) He who shall not be named? All along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, in what's now Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, and down into [...]
The goddess Astarte in the Late Bronze Age The goddess Astarte As early as about 3000 BC, Astarte was a Semitic goddess of love and fertility. People worshipped her in Mesopotamia and in the [...]
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 [...]
Standard of Ur This is the Middle Bronze Age in West Asia, about 2100 BC to 1700 BC. It corresponds roughly to the First Intermediate Period in Egypt, and just as in Egypt this [...]
The Persian shah, Xerxes, from the 400s BC. Death of Xerxes and revolt In 465 BC, someone killed the Persian King Xerxes. His assassin may have been his son Ardashir [...]
The Persians came from the Central Asian steppe The Persians and the Medes Around 1200 BC, some Indo-European people from Central Asia moved south into West Asia. These people were [...]
Jews and the Levant: Tel Kabri, a Canaanite palace ca. 1600 BC When we first meet them... By the end of the Stone Age, the people who would eventually become known [...]
Taqi al-Din in his observatory Ottoman scholars built many libraries in Istanbul and in other cities of the Ottoman Empire. They translated many earlier books into Turkish or Arabic, like [...]
Pope Gregory the Great writing, from the 900s AD. Ivory, probably from Kenya. (Now in Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum) A theologian (thee-oh-LOW-gin) is a person who studies religion. The word comes from [...]
