Saladin (Salah al-din) When the Mamluk general Imad-ed-din Zangi died, he was succeeded by his son Nureddin, who added Damascus to the land his father had gathered together. And after Nureddin died in 1174 AD, [...]
Castle of Edessa After the First Crusade After the First Crusade in 1096 AD set up Christian kingdoms all along the coast of Israel and Lebanon, of course the Fatimid caliphs who had ruled that area before [...]
Early Middle Ages: Interior of Hagia Sophia When is the Early Middle Ages? The Early Middle Ages comes after the fall of Rome, about 400 AD. But all the way through the [...]
Map of the Arabian peninsula Where is the Arabian Peninsula? The Arabian Peninsula is part of West Asia that sticks out to the south. It's only separated from Africa by the narrow Red Sea. And [...]
Pseudo-Apuleius, Herbarium (about 600 AD, now in Leiden) Papyrus came first Scribes carved the first writing on wet clay tablets, but soon after that, about 3000 BC, the Egyptians invented papyrus. By about 500 [...]
Islamic astronomers taking observations West Asian astronomy before Islam West Asian astronomers had been world leaders in astronomy for thousands of years before the Islamic conquests in the 600s AD. In the last centuries BC, [...]
Fatimids built Bab Zuweila (Cairo, 1092 AD) Overthrowing the Abbasids in Egypt In 908 AD, a new family rose up in Egypt. They took control of Egypt from the Abbasids. This family [...]
Islamic government: The Umayyad caliph Muawiyah Caliphs and viziers From the beginning, the Islamic Empire was a monarchy like the Roman Empire or the Sassanian Empire before it. One man ruled the Islamic Empire. [...]
Medieval Islamic games: Muslims playing chess in Spain Chess from India The big new game of the Islamic Empire was chess. The Arabs learned to play chess from the Sassanians when [...]
Orange tree: medieval Islamic food included new sweet oranges What did medieval people eat? Around the Mediterranean, people continued in the Islamic period to rely on the three main foods from [...]
