The arabian nights: Did you mean...?

An army of 250,000 volunteers, both men and women, working in many different services, ensured life went on during the London Blitz, a period of sustained bombing by the German Air Force on the British capital...

Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld is a Sumerian poem pre-dating The Epic of Gilgamesh and featuring its central characters. It is sometimes included in modern-day translations as Book...

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is a narrative poem of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) inspired by the love affair between Xuanzong (r. 712-756 CE), the seventh emperor of the dynasty, and his consort Lady Yang. It was written...

Did you know the ancient history of the UAE stretches back over 130,000 years? The country now known as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was established on 2 December 1971, but the region has a long history...

Eritrea, located on the Red Sea coast of the Horn of Africa, was the ‘firstborn’ colony of Italy. The potential of a trade centre and naval base at Assab first attracted Italian interests in 1869. The Kingdom of Italy...

I was recently invited to an archaeological symposium at the site of AlUla in Saudi Arabia. I had known about AlUla since 2018 and seen photographs of the amazing...

Physicians in ancient Rome manufactured a wide variety of pharmaceuticals used to treat health concerns. Roman medicine was highly sophisticated, and Roman medical literature describes early antiseptics, narcotics...

The Phoenicians, based on a narrow coastal strip of the Levant, put their excellent seafaring skills to good use and created a network of colonies and trade centres across the ancient Mediterranean. Their major trade...

Ptolemaic Egypt rapidly established itself as an economic powerhouse of the ancient world at the end of the 4th century BCE. The wealth of Egypt was owed in large part to the unrivalled fertility of the Nile, which...

Following the conquest of North Africa by Muslim Arabs in the 7th century CE, Islam spread throughout West Africa via merchants, traders, scholars, and missionaries, that is largely through peaceful means whereby...