5,000 Years of Rule in the Middle East

With the Iraq war very current for the US, especially in the media, it sometimes helps to take a bit of an historical view of the region. Simply put, the Middle East has been in claimed by lots of different empires in the last 5,000 years. Luckily for those with a tenuous grasp of the history of the region, the good folks at Maps of War have put together this handy flash map! It shows all the empires that have claimed the region in the last 5,000 years. It’s a rather impressive display that I think puts some of today’s tensions in historical context. In the US (and elsewhere for that matter), we like to think of the “Middle East” as one big homogenous region. The map shows that the region has been subjugated to lots of different, and often contentious, cultural and political forces.

Recent Mapstodon posts

Loading Mastodon feed...

Archives

Categories