Mesopotamia

By the late 9th and early 10th centuries, Baghdad's unequaled brilliance, which had flourished under the Abbasids for generations, began to face the pressures of scale, complexity, and external pitfalls. The megacity, which had formerly been a strict... more

By the 9th century, Baghdad had surfaced not only as the political and profitable heart of the Abbasid Caliphate but also as the preeminent mecca of culture and wisdom in the medieval world. The megacity's thoroughfares, conduits, palaces, and kirks ... more

By the late 8th and early 9th centuries, the Abbasid Caliphate had extended its dominion across a vast home, from the Maghreb in the west to the borders of Central Asia and the Indian key in the east. Baghdad, the strictly planned Round City on the T... more

The gutters of Mesopotamia, winding like tableware vestments through the vast plains of Iraq, were the lifelines of civilization. Along their banks, metropolises had risen and flourished for centuries, but none so profoundly as Baghdad. Yet indeed th... more

By the 9th century, Baghdad had evolved from a strictly planned executive center into the luminous heart of the Islamic world. Its thoroughfares, requests, and conduits palpitated with life, each movement of goods, ideas, and people contributing to a... more

Themid-8th century was a period of immense turbulence and metamorphosis across the Islamic world. The Umayyad Caliphate, which had ruled for nearly a century, faced adding dissent from colorful coalitions Persian converts to Islam who begrudged Arab ... more

The night had settled across the Roman hutment like a heavy cloak, suffocating the usual meter of dogfaces' breaths and the murmurs of insomniac men who generally set up solace in quiet discussion. On this night, still, serenity had been replaced by ... more

The battleground of Beneventum still dallied in Rome's collaborative memory as a strange admixture of triumph and apprehension. Pyrrhus had withdrawn, defeated not by a single decisive blow but by prostration, by the stubborn grind of Roman adaptabil... more