Mesopotamian architecture: The Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon, built during the Neo-Babylonian period (600s BC). Now in Berlin. Mesopotamian architecture Builders in Mesopotamia always had a serious problem. There was not [...]
Sumerian architecture: the ziggurat at Warka (reconstructed by Saddam Hussein) Mud-brick and brick Like other people around the world, the Sumerians started to build big temples on artificial platforms around 3500 BC. [...]
History of beds: Drawing of the grass bed inside a reed hut from Ohalo II (Galilee, 21000 BC) When were beds invented? When people came to West Asia from Africa about 60,000 BC, they [...]
On the walls of one of the Assyrian palaces, Assyrian soldiers attack a town. Some are swimming, using balloons made of goatskins to hold themselves up. Palace of Ashurnasirpal II, Nimrud, [...]
Iranian science: A Safavid astrolabe from the 1600s AD New ideas come to Iran Iranian scientists in the Safavid Empire, and then in the country of Iran, were well placed to hear [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Ottoman literature: A copy of one of Mustafa Ali's books, from about 1600 AD Ottoman literature in the 1500s and 1600s Despite the lack of printing presses, some writers and [...]
Ibrahim Mutafferika's illustration of American bison (1728 AD) One of the great new inventions of Renaissance Europe was the printing press with movable type. But one of the great disadvantages [...]
Safavid Iran: the Battle of Hormuz Abbas fights Nur Jahan Abbas, the Shah of Iran, after conquering most of what is now Iraq from the Ottomans, turned east again and [...]
