Write a composition on the ancient Islamic civilization.
Typical Essay:
People first came to the Arabian Peninsula probably about 150,000 BC, in the Old Stone Age. They were hunters and gatherers. By 2000 BC (or possibly earlier) Semitic-speaking people had moved into the Arabian Peninsula, also coming from the north. They were nomads when they arrived, who travelled around with their sheep and goats pasturing them in different pastures at different times of year. And they stayed nomads: many of them are nomads today.
In the southern part of the peninsula, on the other hand, the people were farmers. Nobody is sure where they came from, but the Queen of Sheba mentioned in the Bible may be one of these people.
By the time of Alexander the Great, we start to know a little more about the Arabs, because the Greeks were trading with them. The Romans also traded with the Arabs, who got spices and other things from India and sold them to the Romans for gold.
In the long war between the Sassanids and the Romans, different tribes of Arabs fought on each side. In this Late Antique period, the kingdom of Saba (Sheba) fell apart.
The Prophet Mohammed was born in the northern Arabian trading city of Mecca between 570 and 580 AD. When he was forty years old, he heard the angel Gabriel speaking to him and telling Mohammed that he was a prophet in the line of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, who would continue the faith those prophets had started. Mohammed's faith was called Islam (iz-LAMM). After a slow start, Mohammed made a lot of converts to his religion, and after he won some military battles, most of the other Arabic tribes also converted to Islam. After they had done that, Mohammed's successors attacked first the Romans and then the Sassanids to convert them. By 640 (after the death of Mohammed) the Arabs controlled most of West Asia, and soon after that, under the rule of the Umayyad caliphs, they conquered Egypt. By 711, the Umayyads controlled all of Western Asia except Turkey (which was still part of the Roman Empire), and all of the southern Mediterranean: Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and most of Spain.
Write a composition on the achievements of the Islamic civilization in architecture.
Typical Essay:
The first buildings that were built in the Islamic Empire were designed by Greek architects who had already been living in the area when the Arabs conquered it. Because of that, these buildings look a lot like earlier buildings in the area - Late Roman Empire buildings. But because they were now building Islamic mosques and not Christian churches, these Greek architects were able to experiment with some new forms, developing a new Islamic style. One of the earliest mosques is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, from the 600's AD. It's octagonal, like Hadrian's Pantheon, instead of being cross-shaped like a Christian church. In the late 700's AD, the new Arab rulers of North Africa marked their new territory by building great mosques like the one at Kairouan (modern Tunisia) and the one at Cordoba in Spain.
In the Abbasid period, beginning about 800 AD, the capital of the Islamic empire moved further east, to Baghdad, and so the caliphs needed a lot of new beautiful palaces and mosques built in Baghdad. Because Baghdad was in the old Sassanian Empire, the architects who lived there followed Sassanian architectural traditions, and these buildings, like the mosque at Samarra, looked very different from the ones built by the Greek architects.
In the end, though, the Islamic Empire made it so easy to travel around that all the architects got to know each other's styles, and there got to be one main style of building all across the Islamic Empire. As the empire broke down into a lot of smaller kingdoms, the ruler of each kingdom needed to show how important he was, so he built mosques and palaces in his own capital. The Fatimids, for example, built the Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo in the 900's AD. In Spain in the late 1200's AD, the Almohads, built their own palace at Granada, the Alhambra.
The Ottoman sultan built the last great Islamic building before 1500 AD - his palace in Istanbul, which he built in the late 1400's AD.