Connection and disconnection

This study analyzes the impact of trade on architectural structures and examines how caravanserais and khans gradually transformed into commercial centers. Sixty-one structures built between the 13th and 20th centuries in the Southeastern Anatolia Region were identified, though historical information was unavailable for 12 of them. Among the 49 examined buildings, four belonged to the Seljuk period, 3 to the Early Ottoman period, and 42 to the Ottoman period. Eight well-preserved structures with clearly identifiable architectural elements and documented construction dates were selected for detailed analysis. The selection process included examples from the Seljuk (13th century), Early Ottoman (14th-15th century), and Ottoman (16th century and beyond) periods. Field studies were conducted to document the structures' current condition. In contrast, archival documents and official records were used to analyze architectural plans, facade designs, and the relationship between open and closed spaces. Comparative analyses were carried out through visuals, tables, and drawings, which were systematically converted into schematic representations and categorized based on their construction periods. The findings reveal that trade routes and economic changes directly influenced the architectural plans of khans and caravanserais. While security-focused structures were common in the 13th century, declining trade in the 14th century led to the preference for smaller, enclosed plans. From the 15th century onwards, courtyards were reintroduced, and during the Ottoman period, khans evolved into commercial centers. After the 16th century, shop units were added, the number of floors increased, and aesthetic elements became more prominent in the 18th and 19th centuries. This study highlights the architectural transformation of khans and caravanserais, emphasizing the impact of trade on their identity and the significance of factors contributing to the preservation of cultural heritage.

The Iranian Plateau is characterized by diverse tectonic domains, including the continental collisions (e.g. the Zagros and Alborz Mountains) and oceanic plate subduction (e.g. Makransubduction zone). To derive a detailed image of the crust–mantle (Moho) and lithosphere–asthenosphere (LAB) boundaries in some tectonically units of the Iranian Plateau, we used a large number of S receiver functions obtained from teleseismic events recorded at 68 national permanent stations (19 broadband and 49 short period stations). The S receiver functions clearly imaged the base of the crust and lithosphere and their variations within the different tectonic zones of the Iranian Plateau. Our new seismic images show a significant variation of the lithospheric thickness in the different geological features. The most complex structure was detected beneath the Zagros Mountains where the Arabian Plate is believed to underthrust beneath centralIran. We found the thickest crust under the Sanandaj-Sirjan metamorphic zone (SSZ)which proposes the overthrusting of the crust of central Iran into the Zagros crust along the main Zagros thrust (MZT), in agreement with the results of Paul et al., (2010). Furthermore, our results clearly show a shallow LAB at about 80-90 km depth beneath the Alborz, the central domain (CD) and central Iranian micro plate (CIMP) zones. Based on our results, the Arabian LAB, beneath the Zagros fold and thrust belt (ZFTB), SSZ and the Urumieh-Dokhtar magmatic assemblage (UDMA) is 200 km and may contain a dipping structure at depths ranging from 100 beneath the ZFTBto 150 km beneath the SSZ and the UDMA. This dipping structure interpreted as the presence of remnants of the fossil Neo-Tethys subduction. The location of the boundary between the Arabian and central Iranian lithospheres is beneath the UDMA, which is shifted northeastward relative to the surficial expression of the MZT.

In this study, 68 wells were selected from different locations for the area located between Tigris river and Lower Zab river, and its suburbs south of Makhmor Mount. A series of chemical and physical tests were carried out for the groundwater of each well, where the calcium , total hardness (T.H)., total dissolved soled (T.D.S)., Electrical conductivity (EC), pH, Turbidity, Alkaline were examined..Results were compared and evaluated with the limits permitted by the Iraqi standards for drinking water and with the specifications of industrial and agricultural consumption. The results showed the disqualification of most of these wells for drinking purposes because the high content of salt and high hardness, where exceed the limits of Iraqi standards for drinking water except one well. Also, the results show that 36 wells were suitable for irrigation and agriculture with taking precautions to proportion of salts, while 32 wells were not well within the specifications of irrigation water. The industrial consumption has been found that all wells were not identical to the specifications used in the food industry.

The Upper and Lower Zab Rivers are two of main and most important tributaries of Tigris River in Northern Iraq region. They supply Tigris River with more than 40 % of its yield. The forecasting of flows for these rivers is very important in operation of the existing Dokan Dam on the Lower Zab River and the proposed Bakhma Dam on the Upper Zab River for flood mitigation and also in drought periods. Three types of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are investigated and evaluated for flow forecasting of both rivers. The ANN techniques are the feedforward neural networks (FFNN), generalized regression neural networks (GRNN), and the radial basis function neural networks (RBF). The networks’ performance varied with different cases involved in the study; however, the FFNN was almost better than other networks. The effect of including a time index within the inputs of the networks is investigated. In addition, the ANNs’ performance is investigated in forecasting the high and low peaks and in forecasting river flows using the data of the other river.

T he water problem in the Middle East is popular among writers. Numerous peo ple, from academics to intelligence analysts, have worked on the topic and focused on differ ent aspects of the issue. For Middle East water problem scholars, the area watered by the Tigris and Euphrates and their tributaries-known as Mesopotamia-is an attractive topic. The Tigris and Euphrates river systems are often treated as one basin, because they unite in the Shatt-al-Arab waterway shortly before emptying into the Persian Gulf. Both rivers rise in Turkey and flow through or along Syr ian territory before entering Iraq. Although the Euphrates flows through Syria for a consid erable distance, the Tigris never enters Syria entirely; it forms that country's border with Turkey for some forty kilometers before enter ing Iraq. Tributaries flowing from the Zagros Mountains in Iran also contribute significantly to the Tigris River.1 The Tigris-Euphrates basin spans portions of four countries: Turkey (28 percent), Syria (17 percent), Iraq (40 percent), and Iran (15 percent). Turkey contributes most of its flow (approximately 88 percent)-the remainder originaties in Syria.2 The Tigris River receives 38 percent of its water directly from Turkey and approximately 11 percent from tributaries also originating in Turkey.3 A dispute between Turkey, on the one hand, and Syria and Iraq, on the other, has arisen because Turkey, an upstream country sheltering the source of a large flow of water, is construct ing public works likely to deprive downstream states of their usual hydraulic resources. Syrians and Iraqis are afraid that once the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) is complete and opera tional, the total flow of water will decrease from thirty to sixteen billion cubic meters from Turkey to Syria, and from sixteen to five billion cubic meters from Syria to Iraq. Downstream riparian states also claim that use of fertilizers, use of agricultural chemicals, and salinization in Turkey will negatively affect water quality.4 Turkey's GAP is among the world's larg est development projects. It incorporates the construction of twenty-two dams and nineteen hydropower plants on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The Tigris River is scheduled to irrigate 625,000 hectares of land, and the Euphrates River one million hectares. The GAP will have a 7,500-megawatt installed capacity with an average annual production of twenty-six bil lion kilowatt-hours. These figures represent 19 percent of the 8.5 million hectares of Turkey's economically irrigable land and 20.5 percent of its hydropower, respectively.5 To date, nine dams and five hydropower plants are operational.6 The overall completion rate is slightly more than 50 percent.7 Four consecutive financial crises in Turkey dur ing the last decade have considerably slowed construction; at the current rate, it will take nineteen more years to complete the proj ect.8 Turkey remains determined to finalize the scheme, which is expected to generate large amounts of foreign exchange from the sale of new crops. High priority is also given to the GAP's potential for raising Southeastern Ana tolia's standard of living. It is hoped that this will alleviate the discontent of local Kurds, a majority in the region.9 To alleviate tensions with lower riparian countries, Turkey has agreed to guarantee each of them a supply of five hundred cubic meters per second.'0 This has not eliminated the dis Murat Metin Hakki is a student in the legal practice course at BPP Law School in London. Copyright

The monogeneric family Calomyscidae includes the brush-tailed mice, genus Calomyscus, which have a Palearctic distribution ranging from the Hindu Kush Mountains in western Pakistan to the eastern Mediterranean region. Zagros Mountains—stretching from northwest to south of Iran—was assumed for long as the range of a single species, Calomyscus bailwardi; however, recent studies revealed considerable heterogeneities among the geographical populations presumably referring to the persistence of undescribed diversity. One such group from the western Zagros Mountains has recently been recognized as C. behzadi Akbarirad, Dezhman, Aliabadian, Siahsarvie, Shafaeipour, and Mirshamsi, 2021. Using molecular, morphometric, geometric morphometric, and karyotypic data, we examine the divergence of 2 additional groups from western Iran and name these as new species. The first of these species is distributed in the northern Zagros and western Alborz Mountains in northwestern Iran was recovered as the sister species to C. urartensis from the South Caucuses. The second species from a single locality in the central Zagros Mountains was clustered closely with C. grandis from the western Alborz Mountains. Morphologic analyses, karyological features, and genetic distances disentangled these 2 new species from their sister species.

The Late Modern Origins of Early Modern Governance Antonis Hadjikyriacou (bio) Keywords Early Modern, Governance, Historiography, Ottoman Empire The conceptual tools associated with the historiography of early modernity have received scant attention.1 The lexicon for the study of this period currently includes concepts such as fluidity, ambiguity, adaptability, permeability, malleability, flexibility, accommodation, elasticity, pragmatism, exchange, or encounter. I will here discuss the context within which this trend emerged, and then shift attention to a recently popular term used to describe imperial rule: governance. The idea of early modernity as an explanatory, analytical or heuristic tool—different those purposes as they may be—gained traction in Ottomanist historiography sometime in the 1990s. The timing was not by chance. Firstly, as more than one contributor to this volume has pointed out, this was the result of the historiographical quest to offer a valid alternative to the orientalist decline paradigm. Early modernity implied that the Ottoman Empire was not inherently different from its European counterparts and experienced similar or identical historical processes. One of the pioneers of early modernity in the Ottoman context, Rifa‘at Abou-El-Haj, insisted on a social history agenda— interestingly, something that was gradually abandoned by later proponents of the approach. The early modern perspective opened new vistas for comparative studies, something that radically changed the field. However, the development of this perspective proved unable to account for historical questions at the explanatory level—unless one assumes that the Ottoman Empire failed to transition from early modernity to modernity proper, thereby adopting a developmentalist stage-theory approach of national state building. [End Page 37] This brings us to the second reason why the concept of early modernity appeared in the 1990s: That modernization theory had by then reached its explanatory capacity. The quest for a teleological path to the modern nation-state had restricted historians for too long. Scholars no longer accept long-standing binaries such as institutionalized/informal practices, centralization/decentralization, consolidated/fluid identities, or market/moral economy. Rather, the current consensus understands these processes as coexisting in non-mutually exclusive ways. This lack of consistency with modernization theory and its foundational assumptions did not preclude the development of modern structures. On a different level, the waning of area studies was another associated development, giving room for global, connected or entangled history.2 Equally important is the political/ideological context of this conjuncture. The end of the Cold War heralded the victory of liberal democracy and its values. The notion of multiculturalism rose in prominence both as ideology and policy in order to provide answers to questions of cultural and religious diversity or integration in the face of waves of migrants and refugees in the western world. Influenced by this intellectual climate, which concurrently included a temporary (if superficial) receding of nationalist ideology and historiography, historians turned to multiethnic and multireligious empires for answers and inspiration. The Ottoman Empire was a particularly fertile ground to elaborate on and document what an early modern multicultural polity looked like and how it administered and managed its populations. Despite the value and usefulness (if not necessity) of abandoning the rigid categories of modernization theory, there are various problems with the way early modernity has been conceptualized. I will limit my comments here to the lexicon of early modernity that I have referred to in my introductory paragraph. To name one implication that has escaped attention, the ease with which such concepts are employed renders early modernity a reflection of the current condition of late modernity. In other words, the language of the present globalized condition is projected back to a romanticized primordial pre-modern past. Such a linear periodization means that the flexibility and fluidity of early and late modernity were interrupted by a modern “digression,” which temporarily consolidated the human condition. Thus, it reifies modernity itself as the central and defining element of the preceding and subsequent era. The sense conveyed by most studies celebrating the multi-ethnic and multi-religious nature of Ottoman rule is that of a paradise lost, a cosmopolitan milieu that [End Page 38] twentieth-century nationalist modernity may have obliterated, but is coming back with a vengeance. Click for larger view View...

The long era of Muslim political ascendancy that began in a small region of western Arabia reached its pinnacle some nine hundred years later with the siege of Vienna by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1529. Suleiman then concluded that, given the increasingly volatile geopolitical environment, Muslim expansionism in Eurasia had run its course. The subsequent decline of Ottoman power also meant, in effect, the decline of political Islam, which had been intimately bound to it for centuries. As Sicker shows, the problems faced by the Ottoman Empire were also faced by the Persian Empire and both underwent an extended period of political decline and territorial retrenchment in the face of imperialist pressures from Europe and Asia. The greatest challenge to the world of political Islam came from Western Europe, especially France and Great Britain. The Ottoman and Persian empires assumed a global importance in the 19th century, not because of anything in them of intrinsic economic value, but because of their geopolitical and geostrategic significance. They became, in effect, a buffer zone separating Europe from the wealth of the East, at a time when European imperialism was on the march in Asia. It thus came about that the rivalries of the Great Powers, most especially those of Great Britain, France, and Russia, were played out in the Middle East. This book will serve as a vital resource for students, scholars, and other researchers involved with Middle East History, Political Islam, and Modern European History.

One of the most complex issues in history is explaining how great powers emerge and, eventually, how they decline and disappear. The first written explanation of the rise and fall of great empires was offered by the "Father of History," Herodotus, in the 5th century BCE. Among many other topics, he sought to explain the rise and fall of the great powers of his time, such as the Persian Empire, the Median Empire, the Egyptian Kingdoms, and others. His main thesis attributed the rise and fall of these great powers to individual charisma and divine intervention and fate. Thucydides, writing later in the same century, offered a different perspective. He emphasized material conditions and the dynamics of relative power: as one power emerges, it challenges the established great power. War is highly probable unless the established power yields to the demands of the emerging power. This situation has come to be known as the Thucydides Trap, a concept revisited in this century to describe the alleged antagonism between the emerging power of China and the established power of the United States. I apply this theory of rising and falling great powers to the Ottoman Empire, which emerged in the 13th century and was dissolved in the early 20th century, primarily due to its economic and military competition with the emerging power of England after the 15th century. I adopt a cliometric approach, relying on available quantitative data to test the theory. Specifically, I examine the territorial extent of the Ottoman Empire and the GDP per capita of England to quantify the level of their greatness during this 600-year period. The evidence suggests that the Ottoman Empire reached its peak just before the First Industrial Revolution, which occurred in Europe, primarily in England, in the mid-18th century. Thereafter, the empire began to decline, and by the end of the Second Industrial Revolution in 1912 and World War I in 1918, the Ottoman Empire had effectively dissolved, eventually being replaced by Türkiye in 1923. Keywords: Ottoman Empire, Türkiye, England, Industrial Revolution, Great Powers, Cliometrics

NANCY BISAHA, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 320 pp. $59.95.JONATHAN BURTON, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579-1624. Newark, DE: Delaware University Press, 2005. 319 pp. $55.00.CAROLINE FINKEL, Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923. London: John Murray, 2005. 704 pp. £30.00.L. P. HARVEY, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 462 pp. $40.00.WALTER G. ANDREWS AND MEHMET KALPAKLI, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 440 pp. $94.95Few will need reminding how greatly the world has changed since 1937 when Samuel C. Chew's study, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance, first appeared, priced at $5. Yet in terms of Anglophone scholarship on Chew's general topic, any impartial jury would surely conclude that a great deal of work is still waiting to be done. Following Chew's comprehensive survey of how English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represented the peoples and cultures of the Ottoman and Persian empires, Clarence Dana Rouillard in 1940, Dorothy Vaughan in 1954, and Robert Schwoebel in 1969 produced general accounts of French, Italian, and German writings about the so-called Turks. These scholarly surveys remain indispensable for their broad coverage of the contemporary vernacular materials. The limitation of this first wave of pioneering surveys-and it is one that continues to reappear in studies being produced in the field today- might be their one-way approach, for none of these scholars knew or cared very much about the peoples that their European sources purported to represent (other than what they could deduce from those very sources.) In all fairness to Chew, Rouillard, Vaughn, and Schwoebel, none ever claimed that they were doing more than investigate the ways that early European writers regarded those they called Turks and the world of Islam they inhabited, but their indifference to who and what was being represented marks a cautionary absence. For the result of this one-way analysis is that misinformation all too often reappears as fact, past prejudices resurface as reliable judgments, and before very long fantasy returns as history. All four scholars, for instance, recycled the early modern European usage of Turk as synonymous with both -regardless of origin-and with Ottoman, while to the Ottomans themselves, the term referred disparagingly to the Anatolian peasantry over whom they had come to rule.1 Many continue in this habit, one rendered even more confusing and potentially misleading since the Turkish Republic declared all inhabitants to be Turks in order to erase Kurds, Armenians, Laz, and other ethnicities from the national landscape.Examining how and why Europeans represented the Muslim world during our period is arguably the most exciting and certainly the most important scholarly endeavor on the agenda of early modern cultural studies today. Understanding what those representations or images meant then, and might mean today, however, necessarily requires accurate knowledge of the peoples and cultures being described. We must also grasp how, and to what ends, those early images distorted and misrepresented the populous and complex world that they claimed to be portraying, and we must be able to recognize when and why they were accurate. How did the early modern Muslim world record and represent itself?The immediate challenge facing scholars who would avoid the one-way method arises from two distinct directions. The first is the enormous difficulty of access to, and interpretation of, sources in languages such as Farsi, Ottoman Turkish, and the various Arabic dialects-a difficulty greatly compounded by the unfamiliar nature of such archives as do exist and are available. …

One of the largest empires in world history, the Ottoman Empire had its golden age in the 16th century. However, in this period, when the Ottoman Empire was the strongest and unbeatable, some problems began to occur. The empire, which could not keep up with the developments and innovations in the world required by the period, collapsed over the centuries due to its weak internal structure. In the meantime, Europeans found new trade routes and colonised many places with geographical discoveries, advanced in science, art, and technology with the Age of Enlightenment, mechanised with the Industrial Revolution, and democratised with the French Revolution. While all those developments took place in Europe, the Ottoman Empire could not provide the necessary modernisation. In this direction, with its weakened internal structure in the military, economic, political, administrative, and educational fields, it could not prevent that process. Thus, it gradually became a state that fall behind in every area from Europe over the centuries and eventually collapsed. Accordingly, this study has comprehensively analysed the Ottoman disintegration process, which had started in the 16th century, by considering the significant historical developments in Europe and the gradually weakening Ottoman internal structure.

The Makhoul Dam project proposed to be established is considered one of the strategic projects in Iraq as it works to insurance large quantity of water spare in flood seasons, increase the storage capacity of the dams in Iraq, as well as increase food security. The Makhool Dam is located on Tigris River in Salah al-Din Governorate, and 8 km south of the meeting point of the Tigris River with the Lower Zab River. The lake area is about 256 km2. In this research, a mathematical model was prepared by using HEC-RAS Two Dimension Software to analyze the velocity patterns and water depths inside makhool dam reservoir at the highest operational water elevation, based on the designs prepared by the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources which is 150.25 m.a.s.l. The present study was conducted to investigate velocity patterns with the difference outlet discharges and changing the operation of the spillway gates within Makhool reservoir. The velocities were predicted and evaluated by utilizing modeling efficiency was 99.7%. This shows that the velocity distribution can be described the pattern with a good accuracy. The obtained velocities were ranged from -0.5 m/s to 5.1 m/s, the maximum velocities were near the dam axis.

The text aims to look at the three functions of the Daugava River: border, obstacle, and trade route. We will focus on the river in the Early Modern Period (from the 16th to the 18th century). We will go beyond the chronological framework, during which we will attempt to answer the following questions. Was the border on the Daugava shaped? To what extent was the dividing line permanent? What was the defensive value of the river? Due to the differences during the border and fighting conducted, the river has been divided into two sections: Livonian (today Latvian) and Ruthenian (today Belarussian and Russian). The article is of review character, and the basis for writing this paper is a large amount of literature. In some cases, sources were used, and in exceptional circumstances, we reached for sources. To compare the Daugava River to other rivers, we used the literature on the Vistula, the Volga River, the Dnieper, and the Danube. The border of the Livonian section of the Daugava, which was established in the 16th–18th centuries, survived until the 20th century. It shows the river’s role as a border, which can only be compared with the Danube. Daugava was not an insurmountable obstacle. Most of the fighting was fought near the river, as was the case with the Dnieper and Danube. The rivers compared were also the most important routes in the region. There were natural and institutional obstacles to navigation. We travelled on very similar boats that could be used in military operations. There are differences in the trade of goods. On no other large river, the transport of forest goods was so dominant.

Sediment deposition by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers created the physical landscape on which the civilizations of ancient Iraq evolved. Scholars in the past century have combined material with textual evidence to capture the complexity of this sedimentary context and assess its role in human history over the long term. This essay uses untapped archival sources generated by the Ottoman Empire to shine a new light on the subject, emphasizing the impact of sedimentation on irrigation agriculture and channel movement during the early modern period. Ottoman documents, moreover, improve our understanding of how states and societies adapted to the opportunities and challenges provided by sediment transport. In their capacity as giant conduits for sedimentary movement, the Tigris and Euphrates formed selective pressures on the Ottoman state in Iraq that shaped and was reshaped by it. For the study of river systems worldwide, the early modern history of the Tigris and Euphrates reveals the utility of taking fluvial sediment into account when analyzing other hydrological processes such as avulsion.

The Eastern crisis is an early issue. It is based on the clash of interests of the great powers in the territories of Southeast Europe. Its return to the nineteenth century came due to the weakening of the Ottoman Empire and the resistance of the peoples who were under this empire, as well as the growing interests of the great powers of Europe. Germany appeared in the Near and Middle East, which affected the interests of France, Britain and Russia. It entered into agreements with Austria-Hungary, Italy and then Turkey, while France made alliances with England, Russia and the United States. Under the Treaty of Kainarja, the Ottoman Empire was forced to relinquish part of its possessions. With this treaty, Russia for the first time secured significant territorial gains, which provided it with access to the Black Sea. These would then inevitably lead to its empowerment. Georgia in this period was a battlefield according to the interests of the Ottoman, Russian and Persian empires, but also of other great powers, such as Britain, France, etc. A series of Russo-Turkish wars for territory took place. Behind them, what benefited most, was Russia, which annexed Georgia, while Turkey Islamized the population of the lands in possession, part of which later emigrated to the Ottoman Empire.