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The Zamzan well in Mecca, dating back maybe 5000 years, and an important source of wealth for Mecca all that time. First it was an oasis where traders stopped to get water. Now thousands of pilgrims come to Mecca every year to drink the holy water, and they bottle Zamzam water and sell it all over. #islamicholidays #eidaladha #zamzamwater #mecca #ishmael #islam

A doll probably from Babylon, under Parthian rule, about 100 BC-200 AD. She's moldmade, mass produced. The Louvre (where she is now) doesn't actually say she's a doll: they say a statue of a child. But she looks like a doll to me. Just a reminder that while life was going on in the Roman Empire, lots of other people had similar lives in the Parthian Empire. That's modern Iraq and Iran. #parthians #historyoftoys #babylon #iraq #ancientdolls (at Iraq - Al-Hillah, Babylon)

Happy Eid al-Adha! It's the feast of sacrifices - celebrating Allah's mercy in sending the sheep to save Ishmael (or Isaac). We, too, renew our commitment to generosity, kindness, and mercy. #eidaladha #eid2017 #abrahamandishmael #islamicholidays (at Mecca, Saudi Arabia)

The best known board game from Africa is Mancala. You can play Mancala just by making two rows of little holes in the ground, and using little rocks or seeds as the playing pieces. Many people did play that way in Africa, and possibly people have played that way since prehistoric times. People often used farming words like "sowing" to describe how you moved in Mancala, so maybe the game got started about the same time as farming, about 8000 BC. But the earliest actual Mancala board we have comes from Axum (modern Ethiopia), where it was cut into stone about 600 AD. #africanhistory #earlyafrica #mancala #axumempire #ethiopia #earlyboardgames #historyoffarming (at Axum, Ethiopia)

Another one of daily life in town, for @drannywong : this is men out buying bread in Pompeii. What I like: the bread guy sitting cross-legged on his stand - wow, that's different from how we do it! - and that everyone in this image is a guy. No ladies buying bread? Weird. Things the same/not the same. #ancientrome #dailybread #womenshistory #crisscrossapplesauce #historyoffood #economichistory (at Pompeii - Parco Archeologico)

A Roman fast food joint from Ostia, the port of ancient Rome. Two people are sitting down and one is standing; clay cups hang from a rack on the wall. Most Romans probably ate a lot of their meals in a place like this - a pub or a bar - so they didn't have to cook. #thermopolium #ostiaantica #romanitaly #ancientrome #fastfoodfriday (almost!) (at Ostia Antica)

Layla and Majnun at school. This is a famous Iranian love story from the 800s AD, best known in the form of a poem written by Nizami in the 1100s AD. In the story, Majnun and Layla meet at school, as this later illustration shows. So did girls sometimes actually go to school? The story doesn't say this was in any way unusual. I'm guessing this might have been a Sufi thing? Like with the medieval Indian poet Lalla Arifa? #laylamajnun #maktab #islamicwomen #medievaliran #safavids #quran #sufi #lallaarifa #nizami

Queen of Sheba and Solomon, in a stained glass window from Cologne cathedral, around 1280 AD. Earlier European images of the Queen of Sheba generally show her as white, but in the high Middle Ages there was a run of black Queens of Sheba. Then in the 1400s and 1500s, arises went back to showing her as white again. Why? Maybe something to do with increased European use of African people as slaves on sugar plantations in Cyprus and in the Canary Islands? Looking into it. #canaryislands #peopleofcolor #medievalpoc #colognecathedral #koln #medievaleurope #stainedglass #queenofsheba #kingsolomon

What made the buildings in and around the Roman forum fall down? It's not actually the fall of Rome, or people wrecking things. It was earthquakes AD that knocked down a lot of buildings. Then people decided to move across the Tiber river and rebuild in a different neighborhood rather than fix the old buildings. Naturally they also came back and used the old buildings as a quarry for stone for the new ones. #ancientrome #templeofcastorandpollux #romanforum #earthquakes #medievalrome

A Chinese ceramic camel and camel-driver from the T'ang Dynasty, about 700 AD. Camel caravans were an important part of the Silk Road that brought glass, Persian carpets, steel, wool clothing, and horses to China at this time. Going the other way, they carried embroidered silk, of course, but also paper and porcelain. #silkroad #tangdynasty #sogdians #camels #historyofpottery #centralasia

Going out to #houstonrescue people - St. Christopher rescues Jesus. By Joachim Patinir, from the 1500s AD. I know he's technically not a saint anymore, but that just makes me love him more somehow. Poor St Christopher! And he's so nice! # #hurricaneharvey #stchristopher #firstresponders #flooding #houstontexas

Texas on my mind... this is Noah's flood, from the Vienna Genesis manuscript, from Syria about 500-550 AD. Syria's got its own problems now, too. 😪 #houston #flooding #hurricanharvey #noahsark #viennagenesis #syriahistory

Thinking of those poor flooded people in Houston. This is the story of Noah's Ark, from St Mark's basilica in Venice - a place that knows something about flooding. 1000s-1200s AD. #medievaleurope #flood #noahsark #hurricaneharvey #stmarksvenice #veniceitaly #mosaic

This Sumerian tablet, from about 2000 BC, was a school math book for teaching kids how to calculate inheritance. The problem asks how much each of seven boys would get when their father died, according to Babylonian law. Apparently the law said they should each get a different proportion, with the oldest getting the most and the younger kids less and less. Whoever did the math worked up from the bottom (which was not normal), and also made a mistake in his or her calculations! #backtoschool #backtoschool2017 #historyofmath #inheritance #teachersofinstagram #cuneiform

Once people in West Asia figured out how to write down numbers, about 3500 BC, they quickly began to want to use cuneiform to write down other mathematical ideas. The earliest example of this that we have is from about 2700 BC. It shows a multiplication table to help people figure out the area of a space by multiplying width by length. The first column is the width, the second is the length, and the third column is the area. It uses a system for writing down large numbers in base 60 (the way our clocks work today). #multiplicationtables #historyofmath #westasia #mesopotamia #sumerians #bronzeage

New evidence that the first people came to the Americas by boat, not walking over the Bering Land Bridge. This is a shell fish hook from Cedros Island (Baja California), dated to 9500 BC. It looks just like shell fish hooks from early Japan, from 22,000 BC. Early people relied on ocean resources which were stable and healthy - not just fish but also seaweed. "At Monte Verde, once 90 kilometers from the coast, archaeologist Tom Dillehay of Vanderbilt University in Nashville found nine species of edible and medicinal seaweed dated to about 14,000 years ago." #monteverde #beringlandbridge #fishhooks #fishinghistory #firstamericans #seashells