Curated category
Former monarchies of West Asia
- Fatimid CaliphateThe Fatimid Caliphate ruled over a stretch of land so vast it reached from the western Mediterranean all the way to the Red Sea.
- Seleucid EmpireThe Seleucid Empire was born in the chaos that followed Alexander the Great's death in 323 BC. Alexander had conquered the Persian Empire under its last…
- AssyriaAssyria began as a city so small that, under its earliest independent rulers, fewer than 10,000 people lived within its walls and it possessed no military…
- Abbasid CaliphateThe Abbasid Caliphate began not with a coronation but with a revolt carried out under the sign of the Black Standard, launched from the distant eastern…
- Timurid EmpireThe Timurid Empire was born from a single man's refusal to accept the limits of his origins. Timur, a warlord from the Barlas tribe, a Mongol group that had…
- Palmyrene EmpireThe murder of Roman emperor Alexander Severus in 235 triggered a chain reaction that shattered the empire. Generals squabbled for control while frontiers…
- 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.
- Empire of TrebizondIn April 1204, Alexios Komnenos and his brother David marched from Georgia to seize the city of Trebizond. They arrived with troops provided by their aunt…
- IranIran sits on one of the world's oldest continuous major civilizations, and the people of present-day Iran were first unified under the Medes in the 7th…
- Kingdom of Armenia (antiquity)The Kingdom of Armenia endured for nearly eight centuries, from 331 BC to 428 AD, outlasting empires that most schoolchildren learn as the dominant powers of…