While war is a perennial subject for historians, stories of friendships and exchanges, especially when set aside in the dustier corners of contemporary memory, make equally memorable material for history. A case study is the story of India and Egypt, the subject of East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World between the Wars in…
The Louvre Museum’s recent major exhibition on the Mamluk Sultanate explores the dynasty’s rich legacy in terms of the art and architecture of Egypt and Syria. The exhibition—a first for Europe—comes more than forty years after a touring exhibition in the United States curated by Dr Esin Atil. “Mamluks (1250-1517)” brings together 260 works from…
A fluent Arabic speaker, Justin Marozzi has spent much of his career as a journalist and author trying to understand the Middle East through an historical lens. His earlier books include Islamic Empires, a history of Islamic civilisation told through some of its greatest cities, and Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood, which won…
Mesopotamia is having a moment. Moudhy Al-Rashid’s Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History, joins among others Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000-Year History of Iraq by Bartle Bull, The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present by Allen James Fromherz…
The new exhibit at Hong Kong’s Palace Museum is somewhat undersold by its title: “Wonders of Imperial Carpets”. There are indeed carpets—marvelous and quite extraordinary carpets—but the lesson of the exhibition—that of the two-way artistic and cultural influence between China and Islamic world—is mostly carried in the other exhibits, the bronzes, pottery, books, drawings and…
Few cities in the world can be as unknown to outsiders as Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and The Book of Sana’a is the first major collection of Yemeni fiction in translation.
The work of Charles Tripp—professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) for over three decades—has shaped a distinct approach to the study of Middle East politics: an analytical sensibility that is empirically rich, theoretically insightful, and historically sensitive.
Of all the horrors of this benighted century, the genocide of the Yazidis at the hands of ISIS a decade ago stands out for its extreme brutality and inhumanity. At the time, few people outside the region were aware of the group’s existence; as non-Muslims (Yazidism has pre-Zoroastrian roots), Yazidis were specifically targeted. The world…
Geographic labels are sometimes misnomers. The Dead Sea’s name is not, for the most part. Its high salinity levels kill most forms of life, barring a couple hardy microbes and algae—and even these are threatened by environmental change. Except the Dead Sea has been part of human history for millennia. Jericho, the world’s oldest city,…
The Dead Sea—and its environs of Jericho and the Jordan River—is perhaps second only to Jerusalem as a place where history, archaeology, religion, politics and international relations meet and mix. It is, as Nir Arielli points out in his new book, quite a bit older, and today is as much a place of environmental as…
Whether it’s in commerce or conflict, today’s world pays rapt attention to the Persian Gulf. But the centrality of the Gulf to world history stretches far beyond the oil age—its ancient ports created the first proper trading system and the launching point for the spread of global Islam.
Bartle Bull’s objective in the very readable Land Between the Rivers is to demonstrate that the modern country of Iraq is not a mere colonial creation but rather has a historical reality going back millennia.
A severely injured nineteen-year-old soldier caught at the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War tries to piece together his life as he waits for aid that may never arrive. As he inches toward death, he recalls the minor and major events of his life and his country that led him so close to death. Told…
Moving on from the theme of communication examined in her last novel, Bitter Orange Tree, International Booker-prize winner Jokha Alharthi turns her exacting focus and lyrical style to marriage and motherhood in contemporary Oman. Sensitively translated to reflect Alharthi’s ability to switch seamlessly between the different voices of her two central characters, one pragmatic, one…
The Mesopotamian high priestess Enheduana lived over 4,000 years ago, but her words ring down to the present: “I am Enheduana.”