The Persian World & West Asia

A brief introduction to the Qu’ran. Includes audio by Qamar Adamjee, Malavalli Family Foundation Associate Curator of Art of the Indian Subcontinent.

Islam is one of the world’s major religions. It shares with Judaism and Christianity a belief in a single god. The Arabic name for God is Allah. The word Islam means “surrender (to God).” The followers of Islam are called Muslims, which in Arabic means “one who surrenders to God.”

“Asia” is a term invented by the Greeks and Romans, and developed by Western geographers to indicate the land mass east of the Ural Mountains and Ural River, together with offshore islands such as Japan and Java.

The earliest surviving representations of the Buddha date from hundreds of years after his death, so they are not portraits in the usual sense. Buddha images vary greatly from place to place and period to period, but they almost always show these conventional features . . .

Students will use map resources to label a map of Afghanistan with its current bordering countries, current key cities, and ancient sites/cities: Students will learn the geographical placement of Afghanistan in Asia and its neighboring countries. This knowledge will bring a heightened awareness of the influence and exchange among nearby countries with Afghanistan—culturally, politically, and militarily. They will also become familiar with the names of ancient sites and their location in present-day Afghanistan.

Scholars often refer to the Tang (618–906) and Song (960–1279) dynasties as the “medieval” period of China. The civilizations of the Tang (618–906) and Song (960–1279) dynasties of China were among the most advanced civilizations in the world at the time. Discoveries in the realms of science, art, philosophy, and technology—combined with a curiosity about the world around them—provided the men and women of this period with a worldview and level of sophistication that in many ways were unrivaled until much later times, even in China itself.