Curated playlist
Eastern Mediterranean
- AssyriaAssyria began as a city with fewer than 10,000 people inside its walls and no army.
- LevantThe Levant gets its name from a word meaning "rising," as in where the sun rises.
- CyprusIn March 2008, a wall that had cut across Ledra Street in the heart of Nicosia was demolished. The wall had stood for decades, and it had come to symbolise a division of the island that lasted 32 years. On the 3rd of April 2008, Ledra…
- LibyaLibya, now a country in North Africa, first appears in the record as a name carved into Egyptian stone. The Great Karnak Inscription describes a war fought in year 5 of the pharaoh Merneptah, in 1208 BC. King Meryey led a confederacy…
- Near EastThe phrase Near East took hold during the Crimean War of 1853-1856. Britain used it for the Ottoman Empire.
- SyriaIn December 2024, rebels took Damascus and ended the Assad family's 53-year rule of Syria.
- Fertile CrescentThe Fertile Crescent, known in Arabic as al-hilāl al-ḵaṣīb, struck one archaeologist as a military formation. James Henry Breasted wrote that the region "lies like an army facing south, with one wing stretching along the eastern shore of…
- Nile DeltaUnder the Nile Delta lies Heracleion, a sunken city called Egypt's Atlantis. Divers found its main temple in July 2019.
- LebanonLebanon takes its name from a Phoenician root, lbn, which means white. The word apparently describes the snow on its mountain peaks. The name is far older than the modern country. It turns up in Middle Bronze Age texts from the library of…
- IsraelIsrael sits at one of the strangest addresses on the planet. Its eastern side drops to the Dead Sea, the lowest point on the surface of the Earth. Its western coast meets the Mediterranean, and its southern tip touches the Red Sea. On land…
- EgyptAbout 99% of Egyptians live on roughly 5.5% of the country's land. The rest is desert and scattered oases.
- TurkeyAlmost everyone in Turkey lives with some risk of earthquakes. Two major fault lines border the Anatolian plate.