Middle Eastern and Islamic World Rulers

Rulers of the ancient and Islamic era Middle East and Persia, spanning Mesopotamian kings such as Hammurabi, Sargon of Akkad and Nebuchadnezzar II, the Achaemenid, Parthian and Sassanid Persian empires from Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great onward, and the Islamic caliphates, sultanates and empires that followed: the Abbasid and Umayyad caliphs, the Ottoman sultans from Osman I to Mehmed VI, and the Safavid and Afsharid shahs of Persia such as Shah Abbas I and Nader Shah. The group covers this one broad region and its successive civilizations across roughly four thousand years rather than one narrower period, distinguishing it from the separate Byzantine Emperors group to its northwest and from the South and Southeast Asian Rulers group, which holds the Mughal and Delhi Sultanate rulers of the Indian subcontinent even though those dynasties are also Islamic in religion, because their own realm and history belong to South Asia rather than the Middle East. The report that proposed this group level named it Ottoman and Islamic World Rulers; it is renamed here to Middle Eastern and Islamic World Rulers because the live membership includes many pre-Islamic Mesopotamian and Persian rulers that name would not cover.