Long before modern society began challenging ideas about gender and sexuality, the women of the Ouled Naïl tribe in Algeria lived by a set of values that gave them remarkable independence. They earned their own fortunes, chose their partners freely, and eng…
These early photographs, taken by Émile Béchard in Cairo, Egypt during the 1870s, present vivid portraits of local figures such as shopkeepers, street merchants, workes, and dancers. Béchard, active in Cairo from 1869 until 1880, focused on capturing Eg…
This collection of autochromes taken in the 1920s by Gervais Courtellemont and W. Robert Moore for National Geographic reveals the everyday life of Egyptian women, men, merchants, and children. They show familiar Cairo city locations and famous sites su…
These stunning color postcards of Tunisia show its vibrant streets, spectacular architecture, and the everyday life of Tunisian people. Produced in 1899, the postcards were printed using the popular Photochrom technique invented by a Swiss printer in th…
Tucked away among the canyons and mountainous terrain in southern Jordan, the city of Petra has stood for well over 2,500 years. In that time, Petra has gone from an early settlement to a crucial and wealthy trading hub in the region, and then to a forg…
The Lebanese Civil War was both an internal Lebanese affair and a regional conflict involving a host of regional and international actors. It revolved around some of the issues that dominated regional politics in the Middle East in the latter part of th…
By the late eighteenth century, Egypt had been reduced to nothing more than an impoverished and neglected corner of the Ottoman Empire, crippled by endless power struggles among its Mamluk leadership. Then in 1798, Napoleon arrived at the head of a Fren…
These street pictures of the City of a Thousand Minarets capture the rapid growth and transformation of Old Cairo at the turn of the 20the century. The foundations of Cairo were laid in AD 969 by the Fatimid dynasty, but the city’s history goes further …
These rare photos from the end of the 19th century capture a range of Bedouins at a time of change. As modern governments projected their power into previously ungovernable tracts of the desert, many Bedouins chose or were forced to abandon a purely nom…
The Zangaki brothers were two Greek photographers, active between the 1870s-1890s, who worked in Egypt, producing prints for the tourist trade. They produced some of the finest images of late Victorian Egypt, yet so little is known about them. They w…
During the Victorian era of the 1800s, Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt threw open the Gates of Egypt’s history for the Europeans. At that time, mummies were not accorded the respect that they deserved from the European elites and in fact, mummies could be pur…
The assassins' bullets ended the life of a man who earned a reputation for making bold decisions in foreign affairs, a reputation based in large part on his decision in 1977 to journey to the camp of Egypt's foe, Israel, to make peace. President Sadat w…