Curated category
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…
- 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…
- 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…
- PhoeniciaThe Phoenicians left behind thousands of inscriptions scattered from Cyprus to Morocco, yet for centuries they were called a lost civilization.
- 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…
- 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.
- Byzantine EmpireThe Byzantine Empire never called itself Byzantine. Its citizens used the term Roman Empire and called themselves Romans, in Greek Romaioi.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- Soviet UnionOn the 26th of December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev officially recognized the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ending nearly seven decades of Soviet rule.
- Roman EmpireListen to the Roman Empire as more than emperors: the roads, the graffiti, and the slow unbraiding of a state that ran from Scotland to the Sahara.