Marked Mecca

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The end of the Ottoman Middle East

The First World War ended the Ottoman empire. Britain and France divided its Arab lands between them under secret agreements and League of Nations mandates, drawing borders that still shape the Middle East, and in 1923 Turkey became a republic.

Place
Mecca · Damascus · Baghdad · Ankara · LausanneThe Middle East
Laid out as
A theme across timeOne idea followed through the eras it crosses.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IThe Arab Revolt
  2. IISykes–Picot
  3. IIIThe Balfour Declaration
  4. IVMandates
  5. VAtatürk and the Turkish Republic
  6. VIBorders that lasted

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Sharif Hussein
  • Faisal I
  • T. E. Lawrence
  • Gertrude Bell
  • Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Objects

  • The Sykes–Picot map
  • The Treaty of Lausanne

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1914 to 1923. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?