Paleontologists and geneticists have traced the human race all the way back to Africa; historians focus on the development of civilizations, and most agree that the Middle East is the origin of much of the richness in culture and knowledge that we enjoy today. The fertile valleys of Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, were home to the first settled agricultural societies, ones that had more time to spend developing the arts, music, and language. Linguists are particularly interested in finding words and concepts that originated in these societies. Some of these words are part of today’s standard English vocabulary.

algebra
The ancient Babylonians developed a sophisticated mathematical system that was adopted by the Greeks and expanded on by Arabic scholars, who were the preeminent mathematicians in the thousand years leading up to the Renaissance. The word comes from the title of a treatise written in the 9th century titled Kitab al-Jabr wa-i-Muqabala (which translates roughly to “Book on Calculation by Completion”).

coffee, café
The Arabic word qahwa gave us our English word for the bitter stimulating drink, via the Italians; the word and the drink reached Europe in the late 16th century. By the 17th century, there were established cafés across the continent, providing places where one could drink coffee.

lemon
With the spread of the Islamic caliphate across the Mediterranean basin, Europeans were introduced to citrus fruit. The Arabic word limun refers to all citrus fruit in general, and our English word comes from the Italian limon. In French, limon means “lime” and “lemon” is citron, while in English a citron is not a lemon, but a larger fruit whose peel is often candied and added to fruitcake.

magazine
In the 13th century, this word (from the Arabic makhazin) meant storehouses in general, but later became specifically associated with storehouses of weapons or gunpowder. It’s possible that the first printed magazine was a listing of an army’s arsenal, but by the mid-18th century the term was applied to any written collection of various pieces of information.

If you’re interested in Arabic literature, you might enjoy the 12th-century poetry of Omar Khayyám; he was also a famous mathematician, and wrote a treatise on algebra. For a more modern perspective, we recommend the works of Naguib Mahfouz, whose novels describing life in Cairo brought him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.