The period of Mu'āwiya b. Sufyān, as governor overSyria and al-Jazīra under the caliph 'Uthmān from atleast 25–6/646–7, and then as Umayyad caliph inDamascus 41–60/661–80, was crucial for the firstimpetus of Arab expansion in the easternMediterranean. Egypt had been conquered by 'Amr b.al-'Āṣ during 'Umar's caliphate, and the great portof Alexandria passed definitively into Arab hands by21/642. Alexandria possessed famed dockyards, andhad a Greco-Egyptian population which the Arabs wereable to press into service for manning theirwarships operating out of the Egyptian ports and outof the harbours along the Syrian coast, such asJaffa, Acre, Beirut and Tripoli.

In 305 B.C. Demetrius I Poliorcetes of Macedonia (r.321–283), pursuing his ambition of reuniting theempire of Alexander, marched against the island cityof Rhodes, which since the partition of 323 had beenable to reassert its independence and pursue its ownforeign policies. The ensuing siege, one of the mostfamous military campaigns of Hellenistic times, wasa failure, and in 304 Demetrius was obliged to admitdefeat and withdraw, leaving behind his siege trainand large amounts of other military stores. Thejubilant Rhodians gathered up this equipment andsold it for 300 talents, which, in gratitude fortheir deliverance, they used to commission aspectacular monument to the sun god Helios, thefocus of a lively cult at Rhodes. The sculptorselected for the task was Chares, an artist from thetown of Lindos (about 40 kilometres south of thecapital) and a student of the renowned Lyssipus, whohad recently erected a great bronze statue of Zeusat Tarentum in Italy.

The expansion of Islam and the proliferation of theArabic language and culture throughout the Near Eastduring the seventh and eighth centuries created agrowing need amongst Jews living within the Muslimempire for translating the Hebrew Bible into Arabic,their spoken tongue and the linguafranca of their age.

Annette Susannah Beveridge (1842–1929) was one of theoutstanding oriental scholars of the early twentiethcentury. The work which established her reputationis her translation of theBābur-nāma, the autobiographicalmemoir of the first Mughal emperor, published in1922 by the Royal Asiatic Society. It was the firstEnglish translation from the Chaghatai Turki inwhich Babur wrote his famous account. A monumentalwork of scholarship, it is all the more remarkablefor having been completed at a time when Chaghatailanguage studies were in their infancy. Thetranslation is characterized by utter reliabilityand precision, exhaustive footnotes and numerousappendices: Western and Asian scholars continue toconsult it as the standard translation of thisclassic Timurid text. Yet, despite the stature ofher work, little is known about Beveridge herself,an unusual figure in the British orientalistlandscape if only because she was a woman who raisedfour children and learned oriental languages whenshe was past the age of 50.

Marco Polo's book — The Travels, TheDescription of the World, II Milione, orwhatever we prefer to call it — is unquestionablythe best known of all contemporary sources on thatunprecedented historical phenomenon, the MongolEmpire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.That is not to say that it is by any means the bestsource. As history, it cannot compare, for example,with Rashīd al-Dīn's Jāmi'al-tawārīkh, and as a European travelaccount (if that is what it is), it is not remotelyin the same class as Friar William of Rubruck'sItinerarium. Nevertheless, whileFriar William may have been completely forgotten andChinggis Khan remembered only as someone a politicalreactionary can, by dint of great effort, gethimself (or herself, one should hasten to add) tothe right of, there are many who know at leastsomething about Marco Polo: perhaps principally thefact that he went to China — as almost everyone hashitherto supposed that he did.