Empires of the middle east - a seriously fascinating site

This is going to win some kind of award. A flash animation displays a few thousand years of conquest of the middle east. They stop short of the American conquest of Baghdad. I'd never heard of the Sassanid and Seljuk empires.

It's a fantastic display, and the same site has another map for religion. I hope they'll do quite a bit more of this work.

PS. In writing this I discovered a nasty Firefox bug. If a Flash animation is playing, and I'm using the FF rich text service via Blogger, I lose keyboard interaction. I have to quit the Flash and the rich text widget to restore a keyboard response.