From Morocco to Iran, from Egypt to the Caucasus.
43 stories from this region.
Two years after Baghdad's destruction, a Mongol army stood poised to take Egypt — the last great power of the Islamic world. At Ain Jalut in Galilee on 3 September 1260, the Mamluk sultan Qutuz and his general Baibars destroyed it: the first major Mongol defeat that was never avenged. Weeks later, Baibars murdered Qutuz and took the throne.
Read the story →In late May 526, during the crowds of Ascension week, an earthquake levelled Antioch — then among the greatest cities of the Roman East — and the fire that followed burned most of what stood. The chroniclers' toll of 250,000 is likely inflated but marks a catastrophe of extraordinary scale. The patriarch died; his successor was chosen from the rubble.
Read the story →On a July night in 356 BC a man named Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus — one of the Seven Wonders — and confessed under torture that he had done it purely to make his name immortal. The Ephesians executed him and made speaking his name a capital offence. It didn't work: one historian wrote it down, and the arsonist got exactly what he wanted.
Read the story →The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal assembled at Nineveh the greatest library of the ancient Near East — some 30,000 clay tablets. When Nineveh burned in 612 BC, the fire that ended Assyria baked the clay hard and buried it safe. Dug up from 1849, the tablets yielded the Epic of Gilgamesh — and a flood story older than Genesis that stunned Victorian Britain.
Read the story →Ferdinand de Lesseps's canal joined the Mediterranean and Red Seas after ten years of digging — the early years by Egyptian corvée labour in the tens of thousands, with a heavy and uncounted toll of dead. The 1869 opening was the party of the century; within six years Britain owned Egypt's shares, and within thirteen it owned Egypt.
Read the story →Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi worked at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad under Caliph al-Ma'mun in the 820s. His *al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa-l-muqābala* gave Europe the word algebra. The Latinised version of his name — algoritmi — gave Europe the word algorithm. He introduced the Hindu decimal numeral system to the Arabic-speaking world and from there to Europe.
Read the story →Alexander the Great's Macedonian army of approximately 47,000 defeated Darius III's Persian army of approximately 100,000 east of the Tigris river on 1 October 331 BCE. Darius fled the field. The Persian Empire that had existed for two centuries collapsed within months. Darius was murdered by his own satrap nine months later. Alexander died of fever at Babylon four years after that.
Read the story →The Ottoman government deported the Armenian population of eastern Anatolia eastward into the Syrian desert from April 1915. Approximately one million Armenians died in the marches, the concentration camps along the Euphrates, or in direct massacres. The killing was organised by the Ottoman Special Organisation under the cabinet of the Committee of Union and Progress. The Turkish Republic has not, as of 2026, formally acknowledged the killings as genocide.
Read the story →Cleopatra VII killed herself at Alexandria on approximately 10 August 30 BCE, eleven days after her partner Mark Antony's suicide and three weeks after the city's fall to Octavian. The conventional account of the Egyptian cobra concealed in a basket of figs is first attested by Plutarch a century later. A 2010 reanalysis by Christoph Schaefer argued for a self-administered poison mixture as the more plausible cause of death.
Read the story →A young Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib threw a stone into a cliffside cave above the western shore of the Dead Sea in spring 1947 looking for a lost goat. He heard pottery break. The cave contained seven 2,000-year-old leather scrolls. The discovery of approximately 25,000 fragments from 11 caves over the next decade fundamentally changed the modern reconstruction of Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity.
Read the story →A US-led coalition of 35 nations launched Operation Desert Storm against Iraqi forces in occupied Kuwait at 02:38 local time on 17 January 1991. The air campaign lasted 39 days. The ground offensive of 24-28 February 1991 liberated Kuwait in approximately 100 hours. Coalition military dead were 292; Iraqi military dead were approximately 25,000-50,000.
Read the story →Hannibal Barca crossed the Alps in October 218 BCE with 37 war elephants. All but one were dead within four months. At the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE, Hannibal's 80 fresh African elephants panicked at Roman trumpet signals, turned, and trampled their own infantry. The defeat ended the Second Punic War and Carthaginian power.
Read the story →Hatshepsut ruled Egypt as pharaoh from approximately 1479 to 1458 BCE, the longest reign of any female ruler of ancient Egypt. About twenty years after her death her stepson Thutmose III ordered her cartouches systematically chiselled out of the public monuments she had built. Most of the erasures missed inaccessible interior surfaces, which is how Egyptologists reconstructed her reign in the 19th century.
Read the story →Ibn Sina's *Canon of Medicine*, compiled at Isfahan around 1025, synthesised Greek, Roman, Persian, and Arabic medical traditions into a five-volume systematic treatise. Translated into Latin in Toledo by Gerard of Cremona around 1180, it became the standard medical-school textbook at Paris, Padua, Montpellier, and Bologna for almost five centuries. The first English translation appeared in 1930.
Read the story →Iranian student militants stormed the US Embassy in Tehran on 4 November 1979 and took 52 American diplomats hostage. The hostages were held for 444 days, surviving a failed US military rescue at Desert One on 24 April 1980 that killed eight US servicemen. The hostages were released on 20 January 1981 — minutes after Ronald Reagan's inauguration.
Read the story →Hulagu Khan's Mongol army of approximately 150,000 besieged Baghdad on 29 January 1258. The Abbasid Caliph al-Musta'sim surrendered on 10 February. The Mongol sack ran from 13 to 20 February 1258. Casualty estimates range from 200,000 to 800,000 dead. The Tigris reportedly ran black with ink from the destroyed libraries and red with blood from the killed. The Abbasid Caliphate of 750-1258 ended.
Read the story →Saladin died at Damascus in 1193 and was buried in a simple wooden sarcophagus inside a small mausoleum north of the Umayyad Mosque. The substantial wooden tomb remained unchanged for seven centuries. Kaiser Wilhelm II visited in November 1898, was substantially moved, and paid for the marble tomb that now sits next to the original.
Read the story →Saladin's Ayyubid army of approximately 30,000 destroyed the combined Crusader army of approximately 20,000 under King Guy of Lusignan at the Horns of Hattin in Galilee on 4 July 1187. The Crusaders had marched in dry summer heat without adequate water. Saladin captured Jerusalem on 2 October 1187. The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem effectively ended.
Read the story →The First Crusade reached Jerusalem on 7 June 1099 with approximately 12,000-15,000 surviving soldiers. The city of approximately 20,000-30,000 mostly Muslim and Jewish residents fell on 15 July 1099 after a five-week siege. The two-day massacre that followed killed an estimated 10,000-30,000 inhabitants. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was established within the month and lasted until 1187.
Read the story →Constantin von Tischendorf visited Saint Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in May 1844 looking for old biblical manuscripts. He spotted 43 vellum leaves of an unfamiliar Greek script in a wastebasket of materials the monks were preparing to burn for fuel. The leaves were 4th-century — the oldest substantially complete Christian Bible manuscript known. He took 43 leaves home. A second 1859 visit secured the rest.
Read the story →Howard Carter's workmen uncovered the first sealed step of Tutankhamun's tomb on 4 November 1922 in the Valley of the Kings. Carter had been hired by the Earl of Carnarvon in 1907 and had spent six years on the specific Tutankhamun excavation. Carnarvon had been about to cancel funding. The discovery of the substantially intact 18th-Dynasty royal tomb was the most significant Egyptological find of the 20th century.
Read the story →Xerxes I of Persia ordered the Hellespont — the strait between Europe and Asia at modern Dardanelles — to be bridged in spring 480 BCE for his invasion of Greece. A storm destroyed the first bridge. Xerxes had the engineers beheaded, ordered the sea given 300 lashes, and had a pair of fetters thrown into the water. The second bridge held.
Read the story →Ptolemy Philadelphus was born to Cleopatra and Mark Antony in 36 BC, the third of their three children together. He was four years old when his parents died and his siblings were taken to Rome. The Roman record loses him after approximately 30 BC. His fate is unknown.
Read the story →Mehmed II besieged Constantinople from 6 April to 29 May 1453 with a substantial Ottoman army of approximately 80,000 and a previously unknown size of bronze siege cannon — including the 8.2-metre Orban bombard cast specifically for the siege. The walls held for 53 days. They had held for 1,123 years.
Read the story →When the Emperor Justinian closed the Athenian Academy in 529 AD, the surviving senior pagan philosophers led by Damascius migrated east to the court of the Sasanian Persian king Khusrau I. Khusrau received them with substantial honour, supported their philosophical work for several years, and eventually negotiated their safe return to the Roman Empire in 532.
Read the story →Strabo of Amaseia wrote the seventeen-book *Geographika* between approximately 20 BC and 23 AD. The work was substantially the last great Hellenistic geographical synthesis. Strabo disagreed with most of Eratosthenes's specific positions on geographical method, but cited him so extensively in the process of disagreeing that Strabo is now the principal surviving source for Eratosthenes's lost work.
Read the story →Between 21 March and 6 April 1983, approximately 800 Palestinian schoolgirls in the West Bank developed acute symptoms including dizziness, fainting, and abdominal pain. The episode is one of the best-documented modern mass psychogenic illness outbreaks. Its political context — Israeli occupation, contested origin theories — made the medical diagnosis substantially difficult to communicate.
Read the story →Serapis was a deliberately syncretic Greco-Egyptian deity created under Ptolemy I around 305 BC to unite the Ptolemaic kingdom's Greek and Egyptian populations under a shared imperial cult. The Serapis cult flourished across the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean for six centuries before the 391 AD Christian suppression substantially erased it.
Read the story →Eratosthenes's famous measurement of the Earth's circumference depended on a peculiar geographical fact about the southern Egyptian town of Syene. On the summer solstice, the Sun stood exactly at the zenith there — a single annual moment that defined the line we now call the Tropic of Cancer.
Read the story →The 27-metre red granite column that stands on the Alexandrian acropolis where the [Serapeum once was](/articles/serapeum-destruction-391) is the largest free-standing ancient column in the Mediterranean world. The Crusaders gave it the name "Pompey's Pillar" in the 14th century. It was actually erected in 297 AD as a victory monument for the Roman emperor Diocletian, 350 years after Pompey was dead.
Read the story →Claudius Ptolemy's *Mathēmatikē Syntaxis* — known to Europe as the *Almagest* through its 9th-century Arabic translation — was the single dominant astronomical reference work of the Western world from approximately 150 AD to 1543. Most of its observational content was inherited from Hipparchus of Rhodes three centuries earlier.
Read the story →Theophilus of Alexandria served as patriarch from 385 to 412. He was the principal Christian figure behind the 391 destruction of the Serapeum, was substantially responsible for the systematic dismantling of Alexandrian Hellenistic-pagan religious institutions, and was succeeded by his nephew Cyril — under whose patriarchate Hypatia was murdered in 415.
Read the story →When the Knights Hospitaller built the Castle of Saint Peter at Bodrum in the early 15th century, they used the marble of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World — as quarry stone. The Mausoleum had stood for 1,700 years. The castle stands today.
Read the story →Synesius of Cyrene studied Neoplatonism under Hypatia at Alexandria, became a reluctant Christian bishop of a Libyan port that was being raided by camel-mounted nomads, and wrote his old teacher letters about both. He died around 413. Hypatia was murdered two years later.
Read the story →In August 1578 the 24-year-old King Sebastian of Portugal led 17,000 men into Morocco to depose its sultan. Three kings died in a single day. Sebastian had no heir. Two years later his great-uncle Philip II of Spain claimed the empty Portuguese throne. The Armada disaster of 1588 followed.
Read the story →Moses Maimonides was expelled from Córdoba as a teenager, fled across the Mediterranean, and ended up as court physician to Saladin and Saladin's son in Cairo. In between he wrote the most important medieval Jewish work of philosophy.
Read the story →In 391 the Patriarch of Alexandria, with imperial authority, took a mob to the Serapeum and tore it apart. The temple had been the most important Egyptian library outside the Mouseion. After this day there was no library at Alexandria worth the name.
Read the story →Around 240 BC the chief librarian at Alexandria measured the planet's circumference using two shadows and a piece of arithmetic. He was off by about two percent.
Read the story →In 1906 a Danish scholar in Istanbul opened a medieval Greek prayer book and noticed faint mathematics underneath the prayers. It was Archimedes.
Read the story →On 4 August 2020 the same chemical that destroyed Texas City in 1947 destroyed central Beirut. It had been quietly stored in a port warehouse for six years.
Read the story →Hypatia of Alexandria was the most famous philosopher in the eastern Mediterranean. In March 415 a crowd dragged her from her carriage and killed her with roof tiles.
Read the story →Caesar's fire, the Christian mob, the Caliph's order — every famous ending of the Library of Alexandria is wrong, or only partly true. It died slowly.
Read the story →For sixteen hundred years the Pharos of Alexandria threw light over a sea. Three earthquakes finished what nothing else could.
Read the story →