Curated playlist
Former countries in West Asia
- Safavid IranSafavid Iran was born from a Sufi dervish order in the city of Ardabil, and within a single generation it became one of the largest empires the Islamic world had ever seen. Shah Ismail I captured Tabriz in July 1501, crowned himself King…
- Republic of MahabadThe Republic of Mahabad lasted exactly 327 days. Proclaimed on the 22nd of January 1946 in a small Kurdish city in northwestern Iran, it vanished on the 15th of December of that same year when Iranian forces marched in and shuttered its…
- Mandate for Syria and the LebanonThe Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon was born on the 29th of September 1923, when France was formally assigned control over a vast stretch of the eastern Mediterranean world. It covered the territories of present-day Syria, Lebanon, and…
- PhoeniciaThe Phoenicians left behind thousands of inscriptions scattered from Cyprus to Morocco, yet for centuries they were called a lost civilization. They wrote no surviving history of themselves. Almost everything we know comes from the people…
- Roman RepublicThe Roman Republic began with an act of violence and ended with one. In 509 BC, according to Roman tradition, a noblewoman named Lucretia was raped by Sextus Tarquinius, son of the king. The outrage that followed swept the monarchy from…
- Kingdom of JerusalemThe Kingdom of Jerusalem was born on a specific summer day: the 15th of July, 1099, when Crusader armies stormed the holy city after a weeks-long siege. Within a week, a council convened in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to choose a…
- Byzantine EmpireThe Byzantine Empire never called itself Byzantine. Its citizens used the term Roman Empire and called themselves Romans, in Greek Romaioi. Their Islamic contemporaries named their realm the land of the Romans, Bilad al-Rum. The word…
- Mandatory PalestineMandatory Palestine existed for less than three decades, yet within that compressed span it became the site of one of the most contested political experiments of the twentieth century. On the 20th of June 1920, Sir Herbert Samuel, a…
- Roman SyriaRoman Syria began its life not as a conquest but as a disposal. In 64 BCE, Pompey the Great had the last Seleucid king, Antiochus XIII Asiaticus, executed and installed a Roman governor in his place. What had been the rump of a once-vast…
- ColchisColchis, the ancient Georgian polity that Greek poets called a land of gold, sits at the eastern edge of the Black Sea in what is now western Georgia. Between 70 and 300 languages were spoken in the single city of Dioscourias alone,…
- Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet RepublicThe Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic was born from a Soviet invasion, lasted barely fourteen years, and helped write the founding charter of the USSR itself. Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, three ancient nations…
- Soviet UnionOn the 26th of December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev officially recognized the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ending nearly seven decades of Soviet rule. The country he led had spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until that day. It was the…
- Roman EmpireThe Roman Empire was one of the most expansive and enduring political structures the ancient world produced, stretching from Hadrian's Wall in drizzle-soaked northern England to the sun-baked banks of the Euphrates in Syria. At its height…