Curated playlist
Historical regions of Asia
- GalileeGalilee is a region in northern Israel and southern Lebanon that has been inhabited, fought over, and renamed for more than three thousand years. Its name appears in Ancient Egyptian inscriptions from the 15th century BC, when scribes…
- LevantThe Levant is a region whose name means "rising." It comes from the Italian word levante, pointing to the place where the sun rises in the east. For Italian merchants in the 13th and 14th centuries, it meant the lands east of Venice:…
- TibetTibet sits higher than anywhere else on Earth, with an average elevation of 4,380 meters above sea level. Mount Everest, which marks its border with Nepal, rises to 8,848 meters, the tallest peak on the planet. This is a place where the…
- OrientOrient is a word that has traveled farther than almost any traveler who ever used it. At its root, it comes from the Latin oriens, meaning "rising," borrowed from the daily fact of the sun climbing in the east. Across dozens of languages,…
- East IndiesThe East Indies entered history as 'the Indies,' a blanket label Portuguese explorers applied to the Indian Ocean world. Their voyages began in the last three years of the 15th century. That label covered a vast sweep: the coasts of the…
- ChamparanChamparan is a region in the northwestern corner of Bihar, India, that most of the world knew nothing about until 1917, when a lawyer from South Africa arrived by train and changed everything. Mahatma Gandhi had never set foot in Champaran…
- KashmirKashmir is the northernmost geographical region of the Indian subcontinent, and for more than six decades it has been described as one of the most militarised zones in the world. Three nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable countries, India,…
- Syria PalaestinaSyria Palaestina was a Roman province born from an act of political erasure. In the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-136 AD, the Roman authorities did something they had never done before and would never do again: they stripped a…
- 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,…
- Palestine (region)Palestine sits at the meeting point of three continents, wedged between Egypt, Syria, and Arabia, and for at least five thousand years every empire that reached for the wider world has had to pass through it or fight for it. It is the…