Middle East

Anthony Bryer describes how, during the second half of the thirteenth century, the ruler of the Mongols discussed with Edward I of England a joint attempt to recover Jerusalem from the Turks.

Robert Gavin outlines how, just as it was about to become the “Sick Man of Europe”, the Turkish Empire showed surprising vigour in re-imposing its grasp upon Arabia to the dismay of Egypt.

John Andrew Boyle describes how, in the early thirteenth century, the Mongol hordes devastated Turkestan and Persia, where the grandson of Genghis Khan founded a dynasty.

S.G.F. Brandon explains how, from the religious conceptions of the ancient Hebrew people, sprang the traditional idea of how mankind originated.

J.J. Saunders continues the story of the first, and perhaps the greatest, of Islam’s Commanders of the Faithful. The Caliph Omar, after triumphantly laying the foundations of the Arab Empire, fell to a Persian Christian assassin in the year 644.

J.J. Saunders describes how, under Muhammad's second successor, the Caliph Omar, the great era of Arab expansion began, that carried the faith of Islam westwards, to Spain, and eastwards, far into the Orient.

Possibly some innate realism prevented the Mesopotamians from seeing death other than objectively. But the Epic of Gilgamesh remains an eloquent witness to the poignancy of their interrogation of the meaning of human life and destiny. S.G.F. Brandon.

In this article, a British military commentator attempts to sum up the force of events that led to the establishment of the state of Israel.

By occupying Syria and the Holy Places of the Hijaz, Ali Bey sought to make Egypt the dominant power in the 18th-century Arab world. P.M. Holt suggests that his policy of expansion, which included an alliance with Russia, has some interesting modern parallels.

S.G.F. Brandon poses the question: was Josephus, the famous Jewish historian of the first century A.D., an arch Quisling of the ancient world? He “could scarcely have given a worse impression of himself than that to be derived from the Jewish War,” whence he emerges as an unscrupulous opportunist whose conduct is rendered even more distasteful by a hypocritical profession of the highest motives.