The land between the Nile and the Indus saw the first cities, the first writing and the first empires. These articles cover Mesopotamia, Anatolia, the Levant and Persia, from Uruk and Akkad to the powers that fought over the same rivers for three thousand years.
Baghdad fell to Hülegü on February 13, 1258; the caliph died on February 20. A chronicle counted "more than 800,000" dead; copyists made it two million.
· 1258In 1142 the Count of Tripoli gave Hisn al-Akrad to the Hospitallers. In 1271 Sultan Baybars took its keep with a forged surrender letter, Ibn al-Furat records.
· 1271He left Tangier on June 14, 1325; dictation ended in Fez on December 9, 1355. Delhi's salary and Mali's court are recorded; the Bulghar ride is invented.
· 1325A gazelle-skin fragment names about twenty source charts, including one by Columbus. Found at Topkapi in 1929, it carries a disputed Antarctica claim.
· 1513On August 23, 1514, Selim I's janissaries fired from behind gun-carriages at Shah Ismail's cavalry near Khoy. Tabriz fell and was lost; peace came in 1555.
· 1514Suleiman camped at Vienna in September 1529 and quit after three weeks as winter came early. He then took Baghdad, wrote law and built the Süleymaniye.
· 1529Arakel of Tabriz dated the Julfa deportation to October 21 to November 19, 1604. Its merchants rebuilt across from Isfahan in 1605; a press came in 1636.
· 1605Shah Abbas laid out a 524-by-158-meter square at Isfahan and began the Masjed-e Shah there in 1611; deported Julfa Armenians carried his silk.
· 1611A fire started outside Istanbul's Cibali gate on September 2, 1633, and burned a fifth of the city. The same day, Murad IV ordered the coffeehouses shut.
· 1633Rawlinson copied the Behistun inscription between 1835 and 1847; in 1857 four sealed translations of one Assyrian text tested the decipherment.
· 1847Egypt granted the Suez concession, bought 44 percent of the shares and supplied the labor. In November 1875 a bankrupt khedive sold that stake to Britain.
· 1869Calvert began digging Hisarlık in 1863; its nine layers span 3,000 years. Hittite texts name Wilusa, and in 2001 Korfmann and Kolb fought over its size.
· 1871On December 3, 1872, George Smith, self-taught in cuneiform, told a society what a Nineveh tablet said: a flood, a ship, a dove, a swallow, a raven.
· 1872A 50-year tobacco monopoly granted on March 8, 1890 for 15,000 pounds a year; a fatwa ended it by January 1892, and the bill was 500,000 pounds.
· 1891Thousands camped in Tehran's British legation garden in July 1906 until the shah decreed an assembly. That Majles was shelled in 1908 and shut in 1911.
· 1906William Knox D'Arcy signed a 60-year Persian oil concession on May 28, 1901. Seven years later, a well at Masjed Soleyman struck oil on May 26, 1908.
· 1908The Hejaz Railway reached Medina on September 1, 1908, funded by subscription under Sultan Abdulhamid II, a 2010 study of Ottoman newspapers shows.
· 1908Balfour's letter to Lord Rothschild, approved by the Cabinet and dated November 2, 1917, set beside the McMahon letter of 1915, the 1922 mandate and 2017.
· 1917Sèvres (1920), signed by the sultan's ministers, partitioned Anatolia; Ankara drove Greece from Smyrna, ended the sultanate and won Lausanne in 1923.
· 1923A Bedouin shepherd found seven scrolls in a Qumran cave in 1947. A 1954 Wall Street Journal advertisement offered four of them for sale.
· 1947Dulles to Eisenhower, March 1, 1953; the embassy's "Mosadeq victor" cable of August 16; a decree dated August 13. What the 2017 FRUS volume prints.
· 1953From 1966 to 1973 David Whitehouse dug Siraf, a Persian Gulf port, and found Chinese stoneware in a mosque platform of about 800. Its end is still argued.
· 1966OAPEC cut output 5 percent a month from October 17, 1973, and embargoed the United States. A barrel went from $2.90 to $11.65; the ban ended in March 1974.
· 1973On November 6, 1991, the Emir of Kuwait extinguished the last of the oil-well fires Iraqi forces had set, the Senate recorded, ending a nine-month effort.
· 1991
