Islamic art: Mosaic from the Great Mosque in Damascus (about 710 AD) Umayyad art: no people or animals As soon as the Islamic Empire formed, under the Umayyad dynasty, artists began exploring the [...]
Ancient India trade: Indian herbal medicines What did most people do for work? Most people in ancient India were farmers. That's the same as in other parts of Asia and Europe at this [...]
Earliest science in Europe A Neanderthal stone awl - early European inventions For a long time, northern Europe was a scientific backwater: new ideas came from other places to northern [...]
An early playing card (Ming Dynasty, ca. 1500 AD) People in T'ang Dynasty China made the first playing cards, about 800 AD. They used their new material, paper, to make [...]
Papyrus plant When the Egyptians began to write, about 3000 BC, they wrote from the beginning in ink, on papyrus (pah-PIE-russ). Papyrus is a plant that grows wild all over [...]
Early sealing from West Asia About 3000 BC, as people started to live in cities and the world got more crowded, they also started to want a way to mark [...]
Chinese paper money What came before paper money? For almost two thousand years, people used metal coins for money, or they used letters of credit (like a check today). History [...]
History of money: A Lydian gold coin What is money? Money is an agreement between people. It is an agreement that this much of something will be worth this much bread, [...]
Chinese scroll project made by kids at Laurelhurst School, Portland Oregon Early Chinese writing Chinese people began to write about 1500 BC. People usually wrote vertically, from the top of the [...]
Paper-making project: Chinese paper money This is a good sit-down project for a sunny day. Factories in China made paper out of cloth rags and mulberry bark (more on Chinese [...]
