Otherwise known as the Achaemenid Empire, the First Persian Empire was founded by ruler Cyrus the Great in the 6th Century BC. The Empire gradually expanded into the largest empire the world had seen at the time, controlling regions as far as the Indus River to the East and the Balkans and Macedonia to the west.
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Before the Revolution, Alexandria’s coffee houses and patisseries were the hub of bourgeois society. Artists, writers and socialites mingled in the city’s coffee shops like the Athineos, The Trianon and Pastroudis.
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Bread is an essential part of the Egyptian diet and served with nearly every meal. You could say that Egyptians eat food with bread, and not bread with food. Egypt boasts over 80 varieties of bread.
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There were once thousands of caravanserai, staging posts for the weary traveller, dotted throughout Asia, North Africa and the South-Eastern parts of Europe. The Silk Road, an important and extensive trans-continental network of routes, was dotted with them. Many still survive, but more, like the one in the Lut desert of Iran (above) are abandoned and slowly turning to dust.
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The Normans who emerged from Normandy in France in the 10th century were famed for their martial spirit and had a major political impact in medieval Europe.
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