The rise of Islam ushered in an entirely new era for the people of the Arabian Peninsula as early as the 7th century CE. Islam extended itself across the Middle East and then began its conquest of North Africa, reaching into Spain and Eastern Europe.  The 1200s saw Islam's spread into India as wel...

By the fifth millennium BCE, China had developed the basic elements that were to identify it as a civilization, such as social structure, agricultural skills and the domestication of animals (Schmidt pp). It was also developing concepts related to the order of the natural environment, to ...