The Vikings' network of arduous riverine trade routes connected settlements from Scandinavia and the Baltic right across European Russia to the Muslim Abbasid and Samanid Empires. Silver was the goal of commerce and the fuel that powered the Viking expansion of the ninth and 10th centuries. The only records of this little-known cultural synapse were penned by Arabs, and among them, the meticulous account of Ibn Fadlan is peerless.

Once a company newsletter that included news from "the field," then an internal magazine meant to increase employee understanding of an unfamiliar land and culture, Aramco World is now a bimonthly window on the Arab and Muslim worlds, a magazine read and referred to in classrooms, libraries and homes in 130 countries. Aramco World has its own history, one that colorfully reflects the constancies and changes in relations among the cultures of East and West.

More than three millennia ago, the language of international diplomacy was Akkadian, a Babylonian tongue written in cuneiform script, and long-distance couriers circulated inscribed tablets among kings and chieftains. A remarkable collection of surviving tablets is made up of letters received by Egypt's iconoclastic pharaoh Akhenaten, who moved his capital from Thebes to Amarna.

A "daring confrontation" of tradition, landscape and high technology, said the jury of the 1998 Aga Khan Awards for Architecture, and bestowed a prize on the Tuwaiq Palace, a dramatic architectural highlight of Riyadh's Diplomatic Quarter. The issue of a "forced marriage" of two competing architectural firms, the palace fuses the desert archetypes of tent, fortress and oasis.