For 400 years, landlocked Hyderabad has been the city at the center of India's trade in pearls, unbeatable for variety, quality and price. Today, business is still booming near the old market where dozens of shops, many of them generations old, uphold the city's reputation.

A score of Greco-Roman cities lay along the Euphrates River. One was Samosata, capital of the wealthy frontier kingdom of Commagene; another was Zeugma, site of a bridge across the great river. Samosata was lost beneath the waters of the Atatürk Dam several years ago, and archeologists are trying to learn what they can about Zeugma before a new dam submerges much of it, too.

In 1786, the three-year-old United States of America dispatched Thomas Barclay on a nine-month journey to Marrakech. There he negotiated a "Treaty of Peace and Friendship," the first between an Arab state and the US. It helped secure safe passage for the young nation's Mediterranean trade and remains unbroken today.

The graceful 16th-century Ottoman footbridge over the Neretva River in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina came to symbolize an urban history enriched by the interwoven identities of Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Jews. Destroyed in the war in 1993, its rubble is now being dredged from the river, and reconstruction plans are afoot.

When 17th-ranked France beat Brazil to win the 1998 World Cup, the hero of the final 3-0 upset—and of French soccer in general—was the soft-spoken son of an Algerian night watchman from Marseilles, Zinedine Zidane, affectionately known to millions as Zizou. His stardom is proving a tonic in a nation strained by inter-ethnic tensions.