1. There are plenty of places that claim to be the oldest continuously inhabited capital in the world, but there’s only one winner: Damascus. Syria’s capital was founded in around 753 BC, meaning that its 3,000th birthday isn’t far off.
2. The driest inhabited place in the world is Aswan, in Egypt, it receives, on average, 0.02 inches of rain a year.
3. El Azizia in Libya claims to be the hottest place in the world. In 1922 temperatures reached 66°C placing it ahead of the famed Death Valley in California by some degrees.
4. Jordan’s Dead Sea coastline is the lowest point on Earth at 400 metres below sea level. Next on the list is the area around Syria’s Lake Tiberias.
5. Egypt’s capital, Cairo, comes in as the biggest city in the Arab world, with a population of around 6.8 million people.
6. Around 2 million people travelled to Mecca on Hajj last year, making it one of the largest annual movements of people in the world.
7. Bahrain ranks fifth in the world in terms of population density. The Gulf state fits in 1,035 people per square kilometre. The highest real population density is actually held by the Gaza Strip.
8. The River Nile, reaching the sea in Alexandria, Egypt, is the longest river in the world at an amazing 6,825 km in length.
9. Arabic is the sixth most widely-spoken language in the world, with 265 million speakers. Of course that’s nothing when you compare it to Mandarin Chinese, which has over 1 billion speakers.
10. Turkey’s capital, Istanbul, is the only city found in two continents. Spanning the Bosporus, the city is a literal a bridge between East and West, otherwise known as Asia and Europe.
