Located near Tehran, the capital of Iran, the city of Rayy was inhabited nearly continuously from the third millennium B.C.E. From the seventh through the sixteenth centuries, Rayy was an important political, scholarly, and artistic center of the early and medieval Islamic empires that ruled in the region. The city's strategic location also made it a nexus for trade. While the medieval city is no longer extant, Rayy's material culture illustrates the city's position as an economic, scientific, and literary cross-roads.

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