Coin from a Queen of the Sassanid Empire, 630 AD
Here’s a really fantastic animated map from some folks at Maps of War that takes you through more than 53,000 years of the history of the Middle East and Mediterranean Basin in 90 seconds. It’s a simple, graphic, illuminating depiction of how often that region has changed hands. There were two empires I’d never heard of (Sassanid and Seljuk, being the last pre-Islamic Persian empire and the Medieval Sunni Muslim empire, respectively), and I had not quite grasped the extent of the Macedonian or Mongol empires. Whoa.
In the modern era, it’s pretty horrible to see how Westerners just sort of carved the place up for their own purposes (and still are).
Since this region is so important to the first two sections of the reading list, I thought it was relevant. Found via StumbleUpon.
