In Treasured, Riggs, a professor of the history at Durham University in England, details and analyzes complex cultural and political forces behind the scenes, both in Egypt and around the world, that have shaped and determined the nature of King Tut’s post-mortal second act. Here AramcoWorld talks with her about pulling together the real story behind the blue-and-white-striped death mask—and everything the blank-eyed golden face of Tutankhamun has come to represent, both to herself and to the world.

Opulent pieces found from some 700 years ago are now understood to be made of a common metal alloy that, in the 12th century CE, metalsmiths in the Turkic Seljuk dynasty transformed into luxury ware. Today, such pieces are as iconic of Islamic art as lavishly illustrated manuscripts or tilework tessellated with arabesques and geometry.

With origins from Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, the Gotha Research Library features more than 1 million objects and manuscripts—including 800 years of Islamicate scholarship and the collection of 19th-century German physician Ulrich Jasper Seetzen.

Avoiding main roads due to threats to his life, in 622 CE the Prophet Muhammad and his followers escaped north from Makkah to Madinah by riding through the rugged western Arabian Peninsula along path whose precise contours have been traced only recently. Known as the Hijrah, or migration, their eight-day journey became the beginning of the Islamic calendar, and this spring, the exhibition "Hijrah: In the Footsteps of the Prophet," at Ithra in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, explored the journey itself and its memories-as-story to expand understandings of what the Hijrah has meant both for Muslims and the rest of a the world. "This is a story that addresses universal human themes," says co-curator Idries Trevathan.

Amidst "the stillness of a world that never knew an engine... he found at last a life he longed to know and share.

Until the 1990s, the reed marshes of Iraq were Eurasia's most extensive wetlands, with a unique ecology that supported the Marsh Arabs' distinctive way of life. Then the marshes were drained and the people scattered. Azzam of Alwash, the emigré son of an Iraqi hydrologist, now works with international aid groups and Iraqi authorities to restore the desiccated marshlands. Reeds are sprouting, birds and fish are returning-and so are people. "A 7000-year-old culture doesn't die in a decade, he says.

In late 1967, photographer Tor Eigoland traveled for more than: a month, mostly by canoe, among the countless villages of southern Iraq's vast marshes. Now, 45 years later, writer Anthony Sattin calls his photographs a "rare and ethnographic record of a lost world. They bring us back to a time and place where people lived in harmony with their environment and respected the balance the natural world needs to thrive.'

To Thesiger, life among the Marsh Arabs today would still be familiar. But to a man passionately opposed to what is called progress, it would also come as a dreadful shock—as Michael Spencer suggests in this article written after his first visit to the Marshes last year.

For more than 4,000 years. people have adopted, adapted and adjusted the lute, resulting in its countless variations. Along the way. some innovations have proved both consequential and simple.