As the Mediterranean Sea's largest and most central island, Sicily has lured invaders, traders and travelers since antiquity, and each one has left its layers of legacy. From the ninth to the 12th century, Arabs and Normans dominated the island. Along its western coast, in its capital Palermo, the Arab-Norman royal court of King Roger I rose to become one of the most influential seats of power of its time. Since 2015 the UN has recognized a set of nine buildings whose syntheses of Byzantine, Arab and Norman designs epitomize the best of a time whose multiculturalism remains a foundation for Palermo today.

In northwest Saudi Arabia, scattered across an area twice the size of Portugal, archeolog|sts and aerial surveyors have identified more than 1,000 roughly built, low, rectangular stone structures that date back 7,000 years to an era when today's deserts were savannas. These mustatils-"rectangle" in Arabic-have been long-known to regional tribes, and in 2018 archeologists began to investigate and excavate. Discoveries of animal bones and horns point toward ritual purposes. The great number of mustatils may be evidence of population and social organization. But why are there so many-and in so many different places? While no two are quite the same in length and width, all are close in height and shape. Amid more questions than clues, archeologists continue to dig.

It wasn’t until he found himself thousands of kilometers from his native Australia in September 2001 that Coller, a UCLA-Irvine professor of history, began to realize that his seemingly disparate early interests in French culture, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, his longing to understand the Middle East and his determination to speak Arabic were all parts of his innate fascination with people. 

The black eyeliner known widely today as kohl was used much by both men and women in Egypt from around 2000 BCE—and not just for beauty or to invoke the the god Horus. It turns out kohl was also good for the health of the eyes, and the cosmetic’s manufacture relied on the world’s first known example of “wet chemistry”—the use of water to induce chemical reactions.

One of the world's oldest games, mancala needs only two players, some seeds or beads and shallow pits in the earth. Over more than a millennium and under different names, mancala spread out from East Africa, and now there are almost as many variations as there are cultures that enjoy it.

Nearly all modern maps of Jerusalem’s Old City show it divided into four quarters labeled Christian, Muslim, Armenian and Jewish. But the idea that gave rise to these labels dates back only to the mid-19th century and surveys of the city by colonial mapmakers—and specifically to the pen of a young British chaplain.

With its rose windows and soaring, pointed arches, Gothic architecture is a crowning achievement of medieval Western Christendom but not, writes Oxford-educated Arabist Diana Darke, an independently developed one. 

Four thousand years ago she was a princess and high priestess in the Sumerian city of Ur in modern-day Iraq. She was also a poet whose verses scribes wrote down in cuneiform on clay tablets and then did something new: They attributed the work to her by name—and now Enheduanna is more famous than ever.

In 622 CE the Prophet Muhammad and his first followers rode some 450 kilometers from Makkah to Madinah along a segment of the caravan route that had long linked the Arabian Peninsula to North Africa and the Levant. In 2005 the discovery of an isolated monolith led to a 15-year archeological quest that has identified 55 similar and regularly spaced stones that appear to predate the ninth century CE. The discoveries are now helping locate with precision historic sites, thanks to the measure of distance between the milestones: 1,609 meters, give or take a few. Whether intact or broken; standing, fallen or partially buried, each stone is now being studied, and together they tell stories of history, faith and science.