As futuristic as a Star Wars film set and as organic as a melon patch, the new hospital in Kaedi, Mauritania used local ideas and local bricks to build an award-winning extension that has everything, it seems, except straight lines.

Driven from his native Baghdad by a jealous music teacher, a young virtuoso named Ziryab—"blackbird"—landed in Muslim Spain in 822, where he opened the first music school. Under the ruler's aegis, he also brought or invented many cultural changes—in table manners, hair styles, clothing and gastronomy as well as music—whose influence is still discernible in Europe and the New World after more than a millennium.

Large, tawny dogs with black faces, up-curled tails and spiked collars guard herds of sheep on the Anatolian plateau.  They are kangals, a very old and much treasured breed whose single-minded protectiveness has won them admirers well beyond Turkey.

When daughters were born in the farming and herding lands of what is now Uzbekistan, their mothers would soon begin embroidering elaborate textiles called suzanis for the future dowry, and the girls would join the work as soon as they could wield a needle. Produced for home use—not for trade, as carpets were—suzanis are still relatively little-known today, but they are among Central Asia's most elegant textile arts.

As the exhibition "Art of the First Cities" shows, today's globalization got its start with the trans-Asian trade system of the third millennium BC, which transported art objects, techniques and ideas throughout the continent. Today's curators used the trans-global trade system of the third millennium of our era to make their exhibition possible, arranging loans of priceless objects from 51 museums in 15 countries.

If you sought respite from the midsummer swelter at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis by visiting one of the fair's dozens of ice-cream stands, you might have met Ernest Hamwi curling thin waffles into cones and asking, "You want your zaiabia with one scoop or two?" Was that the beginning of America's love affair with the ice-cream cone? Not quite, says Albert Doumar of Norfolk, Virginia.