The Umayyad Dynasty ended its great reign in 750 CE as it fell to its successor, the Abbasid Dynasty. The Umayyad Dynasty began in 664 as the first Islamic empire and came to be run by hereditary caliphs from the Umayyad family. The Umayyad Dynasty boasted many achievements that expanded and empowered Islam through changes. It lead to great expansion of the empire, from Arabia out to North Africa, Spain, some of Persia, and more. They moved the capital of the empire from Medina to the great city of Damascus. Perhaps the less known but most influential achievements of the Umayyad Dynasty came from their changes to government. They created a centralized Arabic coinage system to connect the empire, they developed the jizya tax system for conquered people to support the empire, they empowered Arabs to replace others and take places as high level officials, they increased communication around the empire from a postal system, and they made Arab the official state language of the empire. The Umayyad Dynasty also led to a flourish in architecture, including the construction of two of the greatest sites in the entire Islamic world, the Dome of the Rock and the Umayyad Mosque. Intellectually, the Umayyad Dynasty achieved by creating a center of learning in Cordoba. Here there were over 70 libraries, the largest of which boasted over 500,000 volumes. The universities and law schools here were highly sought after, and thousands came to Cordoba to study. Overall, the Umayyad Dynasty was a highly achieving time where the world of Islam flourished.
Unfortunately, the Umayyad Dynasty found its end from a combined number of problems. It began sometime around their military loss in Spain to a Byzantine army. The empire then began to experience a financial crisis from a lowering of taxes on non-Arab people of the empire, as well as feuds between
