Histories and Mysteries

I decided that instead of four new articles I would update three old articles. These articles are three book reviews and my article about the blogs I read. In January, I introduced a new book review format and I will be updating my past three book review articles to line up with that format. It will kind of be like a new article because I basically scratched the old ones and rewrote them. The verses, intros, conclusions, and notices are all timed to the old article. Only the actual reviews themselves are new. I will try to remind you guys about this change in the previous articles. Here are the four articles I will be updating: February 19, 2018:  2017 Summer Reads ~ Part 1 February 26, 2018:  2017 Summer Reads ~ Part 2 March 19, 2018: Late 2017 and Early 2018 Book Reviews March 26, 2018: Blogs I Read And on another note, Anna at Intertwining Melodies did the Book Lover's Questionnaire Tag: http://intertwiningmelodies.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-book-lovers-questionnaire-t

Histories and Mysteries looks different (again). The tan brown was really bugging me so I decided to go with gray, black, and white. The fonts are also different because there was  some difficulties with the title of the blog on the mobile site. And you may or may not have noticed that I added a "Today in History" feature on the sidebar of my blog. I will probably only change it on the weekdays because I am apt to forget to change it on the weekends. I also condensed the labels for my posts because I had a lot of those before. I hope you like the new design.  The geographical map of the Middle East  Today's article continues our study of geography. There are quite a few countries in the Middle East. I am going to do a short overview of the geography of the Middle East for this article, and next month I will post about the country of Israel. I did post a geography/history article over the Middle East, but that was more centered on modern history.  But firs

It's another history article finally. It's been a three-month break from my regular routine so I am glad that we are back on schedule. In the past history articles, we discussed the first chapters of Genesis as well as laying some precedents for a study of the first civilization, Sumer. Today, we will begin our study of Sumer. First of all, Sumer would have been located in southern Iraq. It is part of the Fertile Crescent and Lower Mesopotamia. Some historians choose to group it with Babylonia which we will discuss way later. The civilization began circa  2300 BC. The Old Testament in the Bible covers approximately 4000 years of history from the creation of the world (c. 4000 BC) to about 400 years before the New Testament. The intertestamental period (the years between the Old Testament and the New Testament) is about 400 years. This means that the Old Testament covers 4000 BC to 400 BC because the New Testament begins in approximately BC 3 with the Christmas story. Ano