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1) "Art was born around 25,000 years ago, when the subhuman Neanderthal evolved into our human ancestor, Cro-Magnon man. With greater intelligence came imagination and the ability to create images in both painting and sculpture." [yeesh.]

2) "For Western civilization the nineteenth century was an age of upheaval. The church lost its grip, monarchies toppled, and new democracies suffered growing pains. In short, tradition lost its luster and the future was up for grabs. Unfamiliar forces like industrialization and urbanization made cities bulge with masses of dissatisfied poor. The fast pace of scientific progress and the ills of unrestrained capitalism caused more confusion."

3) "American midwestern architect Louis Sullivan's credo of 'form follows function' became the rallying cry of the day. The new designs were to express a building's commercial purpose, without any overlay of historical ornament. It was somehow fitting that the first new school of architecture to emerge in centuries was born in Chicago, 'Stormy, husky, brawling, /City of the Big Shoulders,' as poet Carl Sandburg would later call it. Chicago was a city without a past, a city of new immigrants that seemed to be making itself up as it went along."

1) "I have three great loves in life: Roberta, computers and boats. That said, this is not a book about any of those things, although the first two of those are important to the story."

2) "If you want to win in life, find something to sell, and sell it. Learn to accept and even cherish rejection. [...] The newspaper had never seen anyone like me. I was a selling machine. I loved selling, and I especially loved making money. I claimed every sales award and couldn't stop selling."

3) "Did I mention that I know how to sell? Being a starving seventeen-year-old, our first date was not particularly amazing. We went to a local Mexican restaurant and talked for hours. A couple weeks and a handful of dates later, I informed Roberta that we were to be married. She thought I was insane or joking, but that's only because she didn't know me. That was about to change. Her dad became my strongest ally, and saw in me a chance to rescue his errant daughter. He pushed Roberta from his end, and threw roadblocks in the way of other suitors. It took a few dates to sell Roberta on the idea of marriage but closing a sale is what I do best."

4) "We needed to form a real corporation for her to buy part of, transfer ownership of all the games into the corporation, and then sell her some stock. With the help of lawyers she referred us to, all of that was quickly accomplished. Unfortunately, during this process I discovered that there was already a large company that had our company name, 'On-Line Systems.' I was very proud of my background dealing with networks and knew, even at the time, that networking would someday be key to Sierra's future. I wanted to keep the 'on-line' part of the business name. Renaming the company did not require a lot of creativity. We were located near Yosemite National Park in the Sierra Nevada mountains, near the famous landmark Half Dome. So, overnight we became Sierra On-Line, with Half Dome as our logo."

5) "Instead of just doing a revved up version of Wizard and Princess, Roberta had started a new game, to be called King's Quest. IBM was giving us upfront money, as royalty advances, to help fund the development of the game. In hopes of bringing back some of the laid off employees, I flew to IBM and pitched them on additional games, and even a word processor! During that meeting I showed them the progress we were making on King's Quest and they were blown away."

6) "We overworked our developers, and this resulted in union organizing. This was a low point for morale around the company. I was personally devastated. From my perspective, I was doing whatever it took to provide jobs and grow the company. However, the employees felt the company was abusing them. In fact, both sides were correct."

7) "As Sierra would rise and fall over the years there would be employees who were laid off, or just didn't make the cut. DJ, our older son, was bullied in school by the children of former Sierra employees who had a grudge against Sierra. One parent, an ex-Sierra employee, even slugged DJ. Question: What adult slugs an elementary school kid? The answer, 'Someone with a grudge against their employer.' It was a company town, with all the good and bad that goes with it."

8) "One day toward the end of 1996, I received an email. In it, Gabe Newell said he had an early build of a game ready for presentation. Sierra had no interest in publishing games that we hadn't developed internally, but given the circumstances, I took the meeting. I figured that, in the worst case, I'd get the inside scoop on how they were able to obtain rights to the Quake engine. In November, Sierra and Valve had set a meeting, which ended up happening during a rare Washington snowstorm. I do not recall many details from the meeting itself, except that within half an hour of Valve's presentation of their game, called Half-Life, I made my pitch and offered to publish their game."

9) "Walter Forbes and his management team had lied to Sierra and were destroying the company we had spent seventeen years of our lives building. At that point, all Roberta and I wanted was to get away from CUC. I tried to put the best possible face on the disaster, but there was no denying that the merger was a total mess. That said, I remained convinced that Walter and his team were smart business people and that the software business would recover. Perhaps without the Davidsons and myself the company would shift to focusing on product and stop being sidetracked by anything to do with the former leaders. Roberta was even more upset than I was and insisted that we sell our stock along with my resignation. We talked about selling stock over a long period of time, but there had been a stock market crash in Asia and it rattled us. We decided to just blow out our CUC stock all at once. That decision would turn out to have been a very lucky one."

10) "This book is full of my opinions. I absolutely guarantee you that some of my opinions in this book are bad ideas. The problem is that I don't know which ones."

1) ["Somnium," Johannes Kepler] "In the year 1608, when quarrels were raging between the brothers, Emperor Rudolph and Archduke Matthias, people were comparing precedents from Bohemian history. Caught up by the general curiosity, I applied my mind to Bohemian legends and chanced upon the story of the heroine Libussa, famous for her magic art. It happened then on a certain night that after watching the stars and moon, I stretched out on my bed and fell sound asleep."

2) [Ibid.] "Brahe, greatly delighted with the letter I gave him, began to ask me many questions which I, unfamiliar with the language, did not understand except for a few words. He therefore imposed upon his students, whom he supported in great numbers, the task of talking with me frequently: so it came about, through this generosity of Brahe and a few weeks' practice, that I spoke Danish fairly well. I was no less ready to talk than they were to question and I told them many new things about my homeland in return for the marvels they related to me. Finally the captain of the ship that had brought me returned. But when he came to fetch me, he was sent away. And I was very happy."

3) [Ibid.] "Volva waxes and wanes no less than our moon, the cause being the same: the presence of the sun or its departure. Even the time is the same, if you look to nature; but they reckon in one way, we in another. They consider as a day and a night the time in which all the waxings and wanings of their Volva occur."

4) [Ibid.] "Those to whom breathing is more necessary introduce the hot water into the caves by means of a narrow canal, in order that, being taken into the innermost parts through a long course, the water may gradually become cool. They stay there for the greater part of the day, and use the water for drinking; and when evening approaches they go forth to seek food. In the case of plants, bark, in the case of animals, skin, or whatever may take its place, accounts for the major part of the corporeal mass, and it is spongy and porous; if anything is caught in the daylight, it becomes hard and burnt on top, and when evening approaches the outer covering comes off. Things growing from the soil, although on the mountain ridges there are few, are usually produced and destroyed on the same day, new growth springing up daily. A race of serpents predominates in general. It is wonderful how they expose themselves to the sun at midday as if for pleasure, but only just inside the mouths of caves, in order that there might be a safe and convenient retreat."

5) ["The First Men in the Moon," H. G. Wells] "'I suppose anyhow—on any planet, where there is an intelligent animal, it will carry its brain case upward, and have hands and walk erect...' Presently he broke away in another direction. 'We are some way in,' he said. "I mean—perhaps a couple of thousand feet or more.' 'Why?' 'It's cooler. And our voices are so much louder. That faded quality—it has altogether gone. And the feeling in one's ears and throat.' I had not noted that, but I did now. 'The air is denser. We must be some depth—a mile even we may be—inside the moon.' 'We never thought of a world inside the moon.'"

6) ["Journey to the Moon," Cyrano de Bergerac] "'Oho,' they said, taking me by the arm, 'so you want to play the clown. My Lord the Governor will know you all right!' They led me towards their troop, where I learned that I was indeed in France—in New France. Some little time later I was presented to the Viceroy, who asked me my country, my name, and my quality. I satisfied him by relating the happy outcome of my voyage and, whether he believed it or only pretended to do so, he had the goodness to arrange for me to be given a room in his house. My joy was great at meeting a man capable of lofty reasoning, who was not at all surprised when I told him that the earth must have revolved during the course of my levitation, since I had begun my ascent two leagues away from Paris and had come down almost perpendicularly in Canada."

7) [Ibid.] "After fortifying my courage with a bottle of a cordial essence, I returned to look for my machine. I did not find it, however, for some soldiers, who had been sent into the forest to cut wood to build a fire for the feast of St. John, had chanced upon it and brought it to the Fort, where several explanations of what it could be were advanced. When the device of the spring was discovered, some said a quantity of rockets should be attached to it, so that when their speed had lifted them high enough and the motor was agitating its great wings, no one could fail to take the machine for a fire dragon. Meanwhile I spent a long time searching for it, but at last I found it in the middle of the square in Quebec just as they were setting fire to it. My dismay at discovering my handiwork in such danger so excited me that I ran to seize the arm of the soldier who was setting light to it. I snatched the fuse from him and threw myself furiously into my machine to destroy the contrivance with which it had been surrounded, but I arrived too late, for I had hardly set my two feet inside it when I was borne up into the blue."

8) ["The True History," Lucian] "The storm went on for seventy-nine days, but on the eightieth the sun suddenly shone through and revealed an island not far off. It was hilly and covered with trees, and now that the worst of the storm was over, the roar of the waves breaking against the shore had died down to a soft murmur. So we landed and threw ourselves down, utterly exhausted, on the sand. After all we had been through, you can imagine how long we lay there; but eventually we got up, and leaving thirty men to guard the ship, I and the other twenty went off to explore the island. We started walking inland through the woods, and when we had gone about six hundred yards we came across a bronze tablet with a Greek inscription on it. The letters were almost worn away, but we just managed to make out the words: 'Hercules and Dionysus got this far.' We also spotted a couple of footprints on a rock nearby, one about a hundred feet long, and the other, I should say, about ninety-nine. Presumably Hercules has somewhat larger feet than Dionysus."

9) [Ibid.] "The infantry numbered approximately sixty million, and special steps had to be taken before they could be suitably deployed. There are, you must understand, large numbers of spiders on the Moon, each considerably larger than the average island in the Archipelago, and their services were requisitioned to construct a continuous cobweb between the Moon and Lucifer. As soon as the job had been done and the infantry had thus been placed on a firm footing, Nycterion, the third son of Eudianax, led them out on to the field of battle."

10) [Ibid.] "Well, that is what it was like on the Moon. If you do not believe me, go and see for yourself."

1) [Introduction] "...an anthology that holds space for writers who are compulsive gamers, former gamers, parents of gamers, and game writers. Reluctant gamers and avid gamers and people who wouldn't call themselves gamers at all. This book—the first of its kind, as far as I and my coeditor can tell—has more room inside it than you'd expect. What a pleasure and a gift to be at its helm." [A bold claim!!]

2) ["This Kind of Animal," Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah] "You look at your sisters weeping, your mother dry-eyed. Empathy: 'You couldn't have been different. You are all you knew.' Suggestion: 'You could have been anything. There's so many ways to be.' Logic: 'What you are is what you are.' Inland Empire: 'Everything is nothing and nothing is everything.' To his body, as a way to speak to him, you say, 'I love you and I wish you were here.' Inland Empire: 'I love you and where I am now, love is all that's left.'

3) [Ibid.] "I'm not here to tell you to play the game. I'm here to say that Disco Elysium is a magnificent literary experience. Literary is a slippery and sometimes problematic word, but in this context I mean: via the precise use of language, it changes the reader. It makes you grow, gives you a new way of looking at the world, which is a mirror of all of us together, and it asks you really, truly, honestly, Who are you? Who are your dead? And gives you the space to try to answer."

4) ["Staying with the Trouble," Octavia Bright] "We know the world that made the story of Leisure Suit Larry all too well, but how do we stay with the trouble it presents? By not letting it slip into the soothing fog of nostalgia, or under cover of the so-called harmless joke? By facing the fact that the trouble at the heart of the story it tells, and the world that story then goes on to make, is that masculinity is something a person can win or lose at? If, as Haraway argues, 'it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts,' then it also matters what games game games."

5) ["The Cocoon," Ander Monson] "I remember the sudden jump scares, too, as you came out of an airlock or around a corner and anything could be there. It was cheap but effective: more visceral than you'd think, considering this was 1994. Video was ascendant, not games, which of course still came on cartridges. My friends and I consumed a ton of both, often in whoever's apartment had the system we wanted to use. It was walking distance to downtown, I think. Someone or someone's brother worked at Very Video in Hancock, across the bridge, and was allowed to bring home for the weekend whatever systems they hadn't rented, one of which was this new one: the Atari Jaguar."

6) [Ibid.] "Playing as a human becomes a game of collection. Shotgun rounds collected. Food collected. Medkit collected. Pulse Rifle rounds collected. Security card #03 collected. Collecting is central to many of my passions: I collect for pleasure. But here you collect to survive. The Aliens collect for reproduction only. The Predator collects too. It keeps skulls as trophies. It seems to be having the most fun, which is probably why it's most fun to play as it. After all, it doesn't have to be here. This isn't about survival. It's about sport. What is fun is the Alien area, with its labial doorways, its green-and-black palette, its gooey strands of whatever, its weird reptilian wall textures. For an early game, the design is well done. It's weird enough to convey the alienness. The Predator area is similarly distinctive, if a little less so on account of there being less Predator decor on offer to work with from the movies. Its yellow-and-brown tie-dye-looking textures gives the impression of being inside some kind of psychedelic animal ship or a college dorm room circa 1995."

7) ["Ninjas and Foxes," Alexander Chee] "The draw to play is still there. I see games now that interest me, like Ghost of Tsushima, but I'm almost an old man now, and I'm getting along fine without them. More importantly, I feel like the main character in my life now. I don't need the game to offer me the cheap alternative. As I think about what I've learned about the impulse to play in a world that is like the world I want but not that world, I ask myself: Why would I want to be a samurai, or a ninja, or a martial arts legend, in America now? And on whose terms? Is there something about being in this country that makes me long for that? My late father actually was a martial artist, and I think of the amused disgust he would feel at seeing me play this game from the afterlife, though it is maybe even the case that playing these games was and is a way of missing him. It may also be there is still something I need to figure out this way, and in the end, that is how I will think of it: each game just another mask to wear in search of the truth, whatever that truth might be. One truth might be this: it may be that now I could play a game like that just for the fun of it. At last."

8) ["No Traces," Stephen Sexton] "The work of poetry, which often stretches into the early hours, is play. When it's going well, I feel outside myself, strange to myself, outside the usual flow of time. I don't know how to get there, but for the briefest time, I sense that circuit—subject and object, writer and reader, player and icon—complete itself through me. It's like catching your reflection in the glass of your front door as you reach for the handle, either leaving or coming home—you can't, for the moment, tell which."

9) ["We're More Ghosts Than People," Hanif Abdurraqib] "The building where I worked as a debt collector in the 2000s looked like it could have been a portal to anywhere. Like anything could have been inside of it. This is how all the debt collection buildings looked in Columbus, Ohio. Large, gray, nondescript slabs. Brick sometimes, if you were lucky. All of them on the outskirts of the city, nudging up against a suburb's borders but never in the suburb. Places where good people went to do bad work because they had to survive. I needed a job. I had, by that point, accumulated a small criminal record, with a larger one to come. I had to find a place where I could build some form of legitimacy, and no one else would hire me. Debt collection companies would take anyone. There was a boom in the industry. This was right after the early-2000s recession but before the more robust late-2000s recession. Broadly, this meant that there were more people in dire straits than there had been before. Misery as a gateway to opportunity; you might even call it the American Dream."

1) "to wound the autumnal city. So howled out for the world to give him a name. The in-dark answered with wind. All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you've held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute. A whole minute he squatted, pebbles clutched with his left foot (the bare one), listening to his breath sound tumble down the ledges. Beyond a leafy arras, reflected moonlight flittered. He rubbed his palms against denim. Where he was, was still. Somewhere else, wind whined. The leaves winked. What had been wind was a motion in brush below. His hand went to the rock behind. She stood up, two dozen feet down and away, wearing only shadows the moon dropped from the viney maple; moved, and the shadows moved on her."

2) "Across the water the city flickered."

3) "This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain. Very few suspect the existence of this city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it by. Rumor says there is practically no power here. Neither television cameras nor on-the-spot broadcasts function: that such a catastrophe as this should be opaque, and therefore dull, to the electric nation! It is a city of inner discordances and retinal distortions."

4) "'Which way does the sun come up?' Loufer chuckled. 'I know you won't believe this—' they walked again—'but when I first got here, I could have sworn the light always started over there.' As they stepped from the curb, he nodded to the left. 'But like you can see, today it's getting light—' he gestured in front of them—'there.' 'Because the season's changing?' 'I don't think it's changed that much. But maybe.' Tak lowered his head and smiled. 'Then again, maybe I just wasn't paying attention.' 'Which way is east?' 'That's where it's getting light.' Tak nodded ahead. 'But what do you do if it gets light in a different place tomorrow?' 'Come on. You could tell by the stars.' 'You saw how the sky was. It's been like that or worse every night. And day. I haven't seen stars since I've been here—moons or suns either.' 'Yeah, but—' 'I've thought, maybe: It's not the season that changes. It's us. The whole city shifts, turns, rearranges itself. All the time. And rearranges us...' He laughed. 'Hey, I'm pulling your leg, Kid. Come on.'"

5) "What is this part of me that lingers to overhear my own conversation? I lie rigid in the rigid circle. It regards me from diametric points, without sex, and wise. We lie in a rigid city, anticipating winds. It circles me, intimating only by position that it knows more than I want to. There, it makes a gesture too masculine before ecstatic scenery. Here, it suggests femininity, pausing at gore and bone. It dithers and stammers, confronted by love. It bows a blunt, mumbling head before injustice, rage, or even its like ignorance. Still, I am convinced that at the proper shock, it would turn and call me, using those hermetic syllables I have abandoned on the crags of a broken conscience, on the planes of charred consciousness, at the entrance to the ganglial city. And I would raise my head. 'You...' he said, suddenly. It was dark. 'Are you happy, I mean, living like this?' 'Me?' She breathed a long breath. 'Let me see... before I came here, I was teaching English to Cantonese children who'd just arrived in New York's Chinatown. Before that, I was managing a pornographic bookstore on 42nd Street. And before that, for quite a while, I was a self-taught tape-jockey at WBAI-FM, in New York, and before that, I was doing a stint at her sister station KPFA, in Berkeley, Cal. Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.' And suddenly, in the dark, she rolled against him."

6) "'When it began, I mean after it began—first we thought that whole side of the city was on fire—after we could see what it was—' he shook his head at somebody who started a comment—'no, no, I don't know what the fuck it was. Don't ask me. After we could see it, we went up the steps to watch. Didn't we?' Dragon Lady sat, smiling and shaking her head, which, when she noticed the shift of attention, changed to nodding: the smile stayed. 'We just climbed up there and watched the whole thing. Go up. And go down.' Nightmare whistled. 'Jesus Christ!' We live, Kid thought; and die in different cities."

7) "Kamp laughed. 'I'm dissatisfied with my life on earth. How's that? Not clear, I guess. Look—I'm not the same person I was before I went to the moon—maybe this is the sort of thing you were asking about. Perhaps it's the sort of thing that should only be told to one person. But I've told a couple of dozen: You know the world is round, and that the moon is a small world circling it. But you live in a world of up and down, where the land is a surface. But for me, just the visual continuity from that flat surface to a height where the edge of the earth develops a curve, to where that curve is a complete circle, to where the little soap-colored circle hanging in front of you enlarges to the size the Earth was, and then you come down. And suddenly that circle is a surface—but up and down is already not quite the same thing. We danced when we got out on the moon. What else could we do with that lightness? You know, seeing a film backward isn't the same experience as seeing it forward in reverse. It's a new experience, still happening forward in time. What falls out is all its own. Returning from the moon was not the same as going, played backward. We arrived at a place where no one had walked; we left a place where we had danced. The earth we left was peopled by a race that had never sent emissaries to another cosmological body. We returned to a people who had. I really feel that what we did was important—folks starving in India notwithstanding; and if there's a real threat of world starvation, technology will have to be used to avoid it; and I can't think of a better way to let people know just how far technology can take us. I was at a point of focus, for six and a half hours. I'm happy with that focus. But I'm not too terribly satisfied with the life on either side. The things that are off are like the things off about the way Bellona looked when we were driving through the first day I got here: there aren't many people, but there's no overt signs of major destruction—at least I didn't see any. It's grey, and some windows are broken, and here and there are marks of fire. But, frankly, I can't tell what's wrong. I still haven't been able to figure out what's happened here.' 'I'd like to go to the moon.' 'Cut your hair and stop taking dope.'"

8) "They play me into violent postures. Adrift in the violent city, I do not know what stickum tacks words and tongue. Hold them there, cradled on the muscular floor. Nothing will happen. What is the simplest way to say to someone like Kamp or Denny or Lanya that all their days have rendered ludicrous their judgments on the night? I can write at it. Why loose it on the half-day? Holding it in the mouth distills an anger dribbling bitter back of the throat, a substance for the hand. This is not what I am thinking. This is merely (he thought) what thinking feels like."

9) "At Bunny's gesture, Kid closed the door. 'Thank you, thank you. A million times, thank you. I've got to run along to greet my audience with—' Bunny thrust out a hip and closed an eye— 'the real thing. You're a perfect love. Ta-ta!' Halfway up the hall Bunny turned back and flung out one hand while the other wound among the optic beads. 'And have a fabulous time at your party. You were too good to ask me. Thank you, thank you. You really are too good. Drink a glass of champagne for old Bun-buns, and remember, whatever happens, give 'em hell!'"

10) "The falsification of this journal: First off, it doesn't reflect my daily life. Most of what happens hour by hour here is quiet and dull. We sit most of the time, watch the dull sky slipping. Frankly, that is too stupid to write about. When something really involving, violent, or important happens, it occupies too much of my time, my physical energy, and my thought for me to be able to write about. I can think of four things that have happened in the nest I would like to have described when they occurred, but they so completed themselves in the happening that even to refer to them seems superfluous. What is down, then, is a chronicle of incidents with a potential for wholeness they did not have when they occurred; a false picture, again, because they show neither the general spread of our life's fabric, nor the most significant pattern points. To show the one is too boring and the other too difficult. That is probably why (as I use up more and more paper trying to return the feeling I had when I thought I was writing poems) I am not a poet... anymore? The poems perhaps hint it to someone else, but for me they are dry as the last leaves dropping from the burned trees on Brisbane. They are moments when I had the intensity to see, and the energy to build, some careful analog that completed the seeing. They stuck at me for two weeks? For three? I don't really know if they occurred. That would take another such burst. All I have been left is the exhausting habit of trying to tack up the slack in my life with words."

1) "A more important question is that of the originality of the Qur'an. Scholars have tried to place it in the context of ideas current in its time and place. Undoubtedly there are echoes in it of the teaching of earlier religions: Jewish ideas in its doctrines; some reflections of eastern Christian monastic piety in the brooding on the terrors of judgement and the descriptions of Heaven and Hell (but few references to Christian doctrine or liturgy); Biblical stories in forms different from those of the Old and New Testaments; an echo of the Manichaean idea of a succession of revelations given to different peoples. There are also traces of an indigenous tradition: the moral ideas in some ways continue those prevalent in Arabia, although in others they break with them; in the early revelations the tone is that of the Arabian soothsayer, stammering out his sense of an encounter with the supernatural. Such traces of the past need cause no anxiety to a Muslim, who can regard them as signs that Muhammad came at the end of a line of prophets who all taught the same truth; to be effective, the final revelation might use words and images already known and understood, and if ideas or stories took a different form in the Qur'an, that might be because adherents of earlier prophets had distorted the message received through them. Some non-Muslim scholars, however, have drawn a different conclusion: that the Qur'an contains little more than borrowings from what was already available to Muhammad in that time and place. To say this, however, is to misunderstand what it is to be original: whatever was taken over from the religious culture of the age was so rearranged and transmuted that, for those who accepted the message, the familiar world was made anew."

2) "In the space of a few years, then, the political frontiers of the Near East had been changed and the centre of political life had moved from the rich and populous lands of the Fertile Crescent to a small town lying on the edge of the world of high culture and wealth. The change was so sudden and unexpected that it needs explanation. Evidence uncovered by archaeologists indicates that the prosperity and strength of the Mediterranean world were in decline because of barbarian invasions, failure to maintain terraces and other agricultural works, and the shrinking of the urban market. Both Byzantine and Sasanian Empires had been weakened by epidemics of plague and long wars; the hold of the Byzantines over Syria had been restored only after the defeat of the Sasanians in 629, and was still tenuous. The Arabs who invaded the two empires were not a tribal horde but an organized force, some of whose members had acquired military skill and experience in the service of the empires or in the fighting after the death of the Prophet. The use of camel transport gave them an advantage in campaigns fought over wide areas; the prospect of land and wealth created a coalition of interests among them; and the fervour of conviction gave some of them a different kind of strength."

3) "The absorption of such a large area into a single empire had in due course created an economic unit important not only by its size but because it linked together two great sea basins of the civilized world, those of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. The movement of armies, merchants, craftsmen, scholars and pilgrims between them became easier, and also that of ideas, styles and techniques. Within this vast sphere of interaction it was possible for there to grow up strong governments, large cities, international trade and a flourishing countryside, maintaining the conditions for each other's existence. The creation of the Muslim Empire, and then of states within its former territories, led to the growth of large cities, where palaces, governments and urban populations needed foodstuffs, raw materials for manufacture, and luxuries to display wealth and power, and where the changes and complexities of city life led to a desire for novelty and for imitation of the fashions of the powerful or the stranger. Urban demand and the relative ease of communications gave new directions and methods of organization to the long-distance trade which had always existed. Very bulky goods could not profitably be carried a very long way, and for most of its food the city had to look to its immediate hinterland; but on some goods the return was such as to justify their being carried over long distances. Pepper and other spices, precious stones, fine cloth and porcelain came from India and China, furs from the northern countries; coral, ivory and textiles were sent in return. The Middle Eastern cities were not only consumers but producers of manufactured goods for export as well as their own use. Some of the production was on a large scale - armaments of war produced in state arsenals, fine textiles for the palace, sugar refineries and paper mills - but most took place in small workshops for textiles or metalwork."

4) "A similar process took place in Egypt and Tunisia but ended differently, in the imposition of direct control by a European state; both these were countries where, for various reasons, a single state was able to intervene decisively. In Tunisia, the growth of indebtedness to European banks had the same immediate result as in the empire: the creation of an international financial commission in 1869. There followed a further attempt to reform the finances, reorganize justice and extend modern education. The more the country was opened to foreign enterprise, however, the more it attracted the interest of foreign governments, in particular that of France, already installed across the western frontier in Algeria. In 1881 a French army occupied Tunisia, partly for financial reasons, partly to forestall the growth of a rival influence, that of Italy, and partly to secure the Algerian frontier. Two years later an agreement was made with the bey by which France would assume an official protectorate and take responsibility for administration and finance. In Egypt too larger openings for foreign enterprise gave greater incentives to intervention. Under the successors of Muhammad 'Ali, and particularly under Isma'il (1862-79), the attempt to create the institutions of a modern society continued. Egypt became virtually independent of the empire. Education was extended, some factories were opened, above all the process by which the country became a plantation producing cotton for the English market was carried further. The American civil war of 1861-5, which cut off the supply of cotton for a time, was an incentive to increased production. This continued after the war, and involved expenditure on irrigation and on communications; Egypt entered the railway age early, from the 1850s onwards. Another great public work was carried out: the Suez Canal, built with mainly French and Egyptian capital and Egyptian labour, was opened in 1869. Its opening was one of the great occasions of the century. The Khedive Isma'il took the opportunity to show that Egypt was no longer part of Africa, but belonged to the civilized world of Europe. The guests included the Emperor of Austria, the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III of France, the Crown Prince of Prussia, French writers and artists - Théophile Gautier, Émile Zola, Eugène Fromentin - Henrik Ibsen, and famous scientists and musicians. Ceremonies were conducted by Muslim and Christian men of religion, and the Empress in the imperial yacht led the first procession of boats through the new canal; at almost the same time, the Opera House in Cairo was opened with a cantata in honour of Isma'il and a performance of Verdi's Rigoletto. The opening of the canal inevitably drew to Egypt the attention of Britain, with its maritime trade with Asia and its Indian Empire to defend."

5) "The creation of an educated élite by means of higher education was, of course, a process which had begun long before in some of the Arab countries, but the pace increased with the winning of independence. In 1939 there had been half a dozen universities, most of them small and foreign-controlled; by 1960 there were some twenty full universities, three-quarters of them national, and several other institutions of higher learning. The number of university students was of the order of 100,000, excluding those studying in Europe or America. Far the largest number were in Egypt, with Syria, Lebanon and Iraq coming next. The increase was less rapid in the Maghrib, however. When the French left Tunisia, there were only 143 indigenous doctors and 41 engineers; in Morocco, there were only 19 Muslim and 17 Moroccan Jewish doctors, 15 Muslim and 15 Jewish engineers, but rather more lawyers, teachers and officials. The training of an élite therefore had to start from a lower level."