The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years

"As the Birthplace of three religions and many civilizations, the Middle East has for centuries been a center of knowledge and ideas, of techniques and commodities, and, at times, of military and political power. With the historical - and still growing - importance of the Middle East in modern politics, historian Bernard Lewis's cogent and scholary writing brings a wider understanding of the cultures of the region to a popular audience." "In this immensely readable and broad history, Lewis charts the successive transformations of the Middle East, beginning with the two great empires, the Roman and the Persian, whose disputes divided the region two thousand years ago; the development of monotheism and the growth of Christianity; the astonishingly rapid rise and spread of Islam over a vast area; the waves of invaders from the East and the Mongol hordes of Jengiz Khan; the rise of the Ottoman Turks in Anatolia, the Mamluks in Egypt and the Safavids in Iran; the peak and decline of the great Ottoman state; and the changing balance of power between the Muslim and Christian worlds."