El asalto y conquista de los castillos de Cambil y Alhavar en la sillería del coro de la catedral de Toledo

The purpose of the research paper is to systematise and analyse the migration and ethnopolitical heritage of Sabirs in Southeastern Europe. The main focus is on their role in military conflicts, interaction with Byzantium and the Sasanian Empire, as well as their influence on the formation of early medieval political entities such as the Bulgarian and Onogur Confederations. The research aims to identify the cultural and linguistic heritage of the Sabirs, which is preserved in place names and linguistic data, as well as to study their unique social structure, including the role of women in Sabir society. The scientific novelty. The novelty of the research lies in a comprehensive approach to the study of Sabirs, combining the analysis of ancient, Byzantine and Arabic sources with modern research. Special attention is paid to previously insufficiently studied aspects, such as the influence of the Sabirs on Hungarian culture and their participation in the formation of early medieval political formations. For the first time, the role of women in Sabir society is considered in detail, in particular, the ruler of Boaryk, who led the army and entered into an alliance with Byzantium. The study also contributes to the understanding of Sabir military innovations, such as the development of siege engines, which influenced the military art of Byzantium and the Sasanian Empire. Conclusions. The study showed that the Sabirs played a significant role in shaping the ethnopolitical map of Southeastern Europe and the Caucasus. Their migrations, caused by external threats and internal changes, have led to their settlement in vast territories and participation in key military conflicts. The Sabirs not only acted as mercenaries, but also influenced the cultural and political development of the region. Their cultural heritage can be traced through geographical names and linguistic data, and their unique social structure, including the role of women, highlights their contribution to the development of steppe traditions. Thus, the Sabirs represent an important link in the chain of migrations and cultural interactions that determined the development of Eurasia in the early Middle Ages.

Drawing from an extensive list of writings about Indonesian Islam that have appeared over the past fifteen years, Federspiel defines approximately 1,800 terms, phrases, historical figures, religious books, and place names that relate to Islam and gives their Arabic sources. This dictionary will be indispensable to English-speaking students and researchers working in Indonesian or Southeast Asian studies. It will also be useful for scholars working in Bahasa Indonesian, reading texts written about Islam by Indonesian Muslims, as well as for Southeast Asia area scholars generally who are using sources in Western languages.

The Ruthenian translation of the medieval treatise Secretum Secretorum (“The Secret of Secrets”) was made in Kiev during the second half of the 15th century from a Hebrew version that dates back to late 13th‒early 14th centuries, when it was translated from the Arabic original, which probably originated in its final form during the 10th century. The Ruthenian translation contains certain interpolations that had been already present in the Hebrew version before it was translated into Ruthenian. They had been extracted from several Arabic and Hebrew sources, such as the treatise Al-Mansuri by Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyā al-Rāzī (865‒925) and the treatises On Poisons, On Coitus, and On Asthma by Maimonides (1135/1138‒1204).The author argues that the same Ruthenian translation also contains a minor (one-page long) interpolation that through Hebrew mediation goes back to The Canon of Medicine written in Arabic by Avicenna (980‒1037). It is still to be established which of the seven known Medieval Hebrew translations and/or the around 30 commentaries on it (all unpublished) was used as the immediate source for the Kievan translation. Nevertheless, the newly identified Arabic origin of this particular interpolation to the Ruthenian version of the treatise The Secret of Secrets sheds some light on the prehistory of this particular text’s portion and compliments the list of sources used by the Hebrew-to-Ruthenian translators in Kiev during the second half of the 15th century.

Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies offers a platform in which the old meets the new, in which archaeological, papyrological, and philological research into Meroitic, Old Nubian, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic sources confront current investigations in modern anthropology and ethnography, Nilo-Saharan linguistics, and critical and theoretical approaches present in post-colonial and African studies. Dotawo gives a common home to the past, present, and future of one of the richest areas of research in African studies. It offers a crossroads where papyrus can meet internet, scribes meet critical thinkers, and the promises of growing nations meet the accomplishments of old kingdoms. Place names in Nubia have only received limited attention so far. The need for such a study guided the decision to dedicate the fourth volume of Dotawo to this very issue. Place names are by nature dynamic and may shift over the course of the centuries. Therefore, toponymy is particularly apt to diachronical studies and offer fertile ground for multi-disciplinary analysis. The contents of the volume embrace a wide time frame (from the beginning of recorded history until today) and consist of contributions from scholars active in all fields of Nubian Studies (philology, linguistics, history, archaeology, etc.). The goal has been to gather into one publication the fruits of the collaboration of specialists working with all sorts of theoretical and methodological tools on the successive periods of Nubian history with a focus on the names that identified the micro- and macro-localities where this history was taking place.

This paper examines the Arabic origins of some common place names in English, German, French, Latin, Greek, Russian, and Sanskrit from a consonantal radical or lexical root theory perspective. The data consists of the names of around 60 key cities like Birmingham, Brighton, Cambridge, Chester, Derby, Essex, Exeter, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Oxford, Queensville, York, etc. The results clearly show that all such names have true Arabic cognates, with the same or similar forms and meanings whose different forms, however, are all found to be due to natural and plausible causes and different courses of linguistic change. Furthermore, they show that place names play an important role in both near and distant genetic relationships. As a consequence, the results indicate, contrary to Comparative Method and Family-Tree Model claims (e.g. Campbell 2013; Harper 2012-18),� that Arabic, English, and all Indo-European languages� belong to the same language, let alone the same family. Therefore, they prove the adequacy of the consonantal radical theory in relating English, German, French, Latin, and Greek to Arabic as their origin all because, unlike any other language in the group, it shares cognates with all of them in addition to its huge linguistic repertoire phonetically, phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, and semantically.Keywords: Place names, Arabic, English, German, French, Russian, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, historical linguistics, consonantal radical/lexical root theory

This article attempts to explain the origins of the many personal and place names of apparent Arabic origin in the Duero Basin in Northern Spain and Portugal. The abundance of such names is surprising in a region that seems to have been only briefly under direct Andalusi control. The three hypotheses that have been used to explain the phenomenon will be studied in turn. The first hypothesis considers the names to be the result of migration to the North of persecuted Christians from al-Andalus during the ninth and tenth centuries. Although such migration seems to have taken place, I argue against it being responsible for the names in question. The second hypothesis considers acculturation from across the Andalusi border. There seems to be some validity to this hypothesis as an explanation for many descriptive place names to be found in the southern extremes of the region, but it fails to explain the abundance of Arabic names further north. Examining a third possibility—the so-called “Berber hypothesis”—I conclude that the northernmost concentrations of Arabic names in fact have their origins in the eighth-century conquest and settlement of the area by Romance-speaking North Africans and the early conversion of a significant part of the autochthonous population.

After many centuries, much of Europe is now largely deforested. Today, plans for reforestation are ongoing. These plans have the potential to significantly impact the landscape. As a contribution to the current debate on large-scale reforestation in the Netherlands, we have tried to conduct a quick and overall scan to determine whether the spatial distribution of woodland-related place names can have an evidential value for locating surviving woodland in the high and late Middle Ages (AD 1000–1500). To do so, we have made extensive use of digital data sets and existing inventories (place names, field names, historical maps, charcoal production sites, ancient woodland, ancient woodland indicator plants). Two different indicative distribution maps (period maps) were produced and tested: period map 1 (AD 750–1350), based on woodland-related place names, and period map 2 (AD 1250–1650), based on historical woodland references. Results suggest that although the spatial reconstructions produced are biased due to multiple factors, pre-1500 place names in combination with historical woodland references and other woodland proxies can indeed be used to quickly and roughly reconstruct the distribution of woodland and even of specific historical woodland types. A precondition is the availability of existing inventories and digital data sets.

Le sud du Portugal, aujourd'hui connu sous le nom d'Algarve (« l'occident », en arabe) a été, depuis le 8e jusqu'au 13e siècle, l'une des extrémités du monde de l'Islam médiéval. Au-delà de cette partie de la péninsule Ibérique, l'océan seul s'étendait, mer des ténèbres mystérieuses qui signalait la fin des terres connues. Marginale par sa situation géographique et placée dans les limites occidentales du territoire (la dār al-Islām), cette région n'était cependant pas isolée des mouvements qui marquèrent la création et le développement des sociétés islamiques du Moyen Age dans cette partie de l'Europe. Dans les pages qui suivent, je veux essayer de retracer l'histoire du processus par lequel cette partie du monde devint islamique et acquit des signes d'identité musulmane ; autrement dit, comment une société médiévale, située aux confins du monde conquis par les armées de l'Islam, put s'insérer dans le système idéologique importé par un pouvoir politique étranger et avec une vocation universelle.

Research objectives: The purpose of this study is to analyze the reliability of Idegei’s “Kureish genealogy” from the “Jami al-tawarikh” by Kadyr Ali-bek and the treatise “On the family of the Yusupov princes”, as well as the reconstruction of Idegei’s genealogy according to all primary sources known to us. Results and novelty of the research: The materials of the study comprise: “Jami al-tawarikh” by Kadyr Ali-bek; the treatise “On the family of the Yusupov princes” which speaks of the Arab origins of Idegei from Baba Tukles Shashty Aziz, a descendant of Caliph Abu Bakr. However, there are other sources about his origin. Most alternative sources refer to him as originating from the Mongol tribe Mangyt, sometimes indicating the subgenus Ak Mangyt. In the Epic of the Forty Batyrs of Crimea, the genealogy is indicated up to a certain Anshibai, the father of Parparia, who is also known as Baba Tukles Shashty Aziz. In previous publications, we have put forward a hypothesis about the origin of Idegei from Yandzhi, the son of Kurmisha, whom we identified with Anshibai. In this article, this hypothesis is argued further and developed on the basis of data from the Arabic source, Zubdat al Fikr. The theory about the origin of Idegei from Emir Chagan of the Mangyt clan, who lived during the Mongol Empire, is substantiated. The subgenus Ak Mangyt (“White Mangyt”) in the Golden Horde could come from Chagan Noyan (a translation of the name that in Mongolian means “white”) from the clan Mangyt. This article also explains where Idegei’s “Kureish genealogy” came from.

Understanding “Sectarianism”: Sunni-Shiʿa Relations in the Modern Arab World

Reviewed by: Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World by David Wacks Mary-Anne Vetterling Wacks, David. Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World. U of Toronto P, 2019. ISBN: 978-1-48750-501-1. Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World is a very scholarly book that focuses on crusade literature written in Spain between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is carefully written, extensively researched and contains a fascinating new approach to the subject. In his introduction, Wacks situates Medieval Iberia in a multilingual Mediterranean environment. He convincingly portrays the difference between Northern European crusades (to the [End Page 135] East, especially to Jerusalem) and those located in Iberia, during the re-conquest. He mentions how the holy site of Santiago de Compostela and the relics in Seville and Toledo helped justify the conversion of Jews and Muslims in the name of a “holy war,” an ideal subsequently carried to the New World by the Conquistadores. In the first chapter, Wacks analyzes a little-known work of thirteenth-century (1250) crusade literature in Arabic (Andalusi) named Ziyad ibn ‘Amir al-Kinat in the greater context of Medieval Iberian, Latin, French and Arabic literatures. He carefully notes the Northern European (especially Arthurian), Iberian and Arabic influences on this work, in which the author’s hero converts the “pagans” (in this case, Christians) to Islam. He includes a fascinating segment on astrology. He translates into English key passages from this work, which are a delight to read, especially in the context of the background provided. The Ziyad is an example of crusader-inspired fiction from non-Christian-dominant societies. Chapter 2 focuses on the Libro del Caballero Zifar (1300). Wacks includes details about the Andalusi-French-Latin-Arabic background to this book and makes several extremely important points about its source and authorship. The Zifar is based on a tale of St. Eustace yet also draws on Arabic sources, with the use of Arabic place names and quasi-Arabic personal names and narrative motifs. Wacks convincingly demonstrates that the putative author of the Zifar, Ferrant Martínez (an elite member of the Church of Toledo) used the prologue to his book to publicize the return of the bones (sacred relics) of Cardinal Gudiel from Rome to Spain, thus strengthening the role of Christianity in Toledo. Furthermore Wacks finds two passages in the Zifar that appear to be from an imaginative tradition linked to Celtic and Arthurian literatures with parallel passages in the Ziyad. Zifar’s polygamy, argues Wacks, could also be inspired by Ziyad’s. The way in which Zifar is described as a hero-knight links him with the crusader/converter mentality. The Zifar illustrates Christian-Iberian crusading ideals being carried out in a fictionalized Eastern location. Wacks, in chapter 3, focuses on Ramon Lull’s work of fiction, Blaquerna (1287–1289), and its historical and literary background. He concentrates on Lull’s other writings as keys to an understanding of Blaquerna. He points out that Lull had a sophisticated understanding of Islam doctrine, thanks to his studies of Arabic, which he learned in order to convert the entire world to Christianity through persuasion. The hero Blaquerna is a religious person, a member of a chivalric crusading order, and even becomes Pope. Wacks has translated a number of passages from this book and provides their originals in Catalán in the footnotes. Blaquerna demonstrates a different kind of crusade mentality which is missionary in nature and consists of conquering through persuasion, not through battle. Chapter 4 includes a detailed analysis of the Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor (c. 1290) and its historical background. Wacks stresses the importance of the fact that this fictional tale (possibly translated from a manuscript in Arabic that is, however, most likely an invention of the author) is different from its French counterpart because of the role that Moorish Spain and Arabic culture play in the tale. The Crónica contains historical material interwoven with a fictional tale in such a way as to serve the political purposes of various Spanish monarchs. One fascinating detail from this story is that the daughter of Flores and Blancaflor becomes the mother of Charlemagne...

When translating Korean literature, we often come across words and phrases that might not have a direct equivalent in the target language. One of the most difficult genres to translate is, in our opinion, the comic, or the manhwa. We try to offer illustrative examples of translation from the source language, which is Korean, into the target language, which is English, with emphasis on translating words and phrases that might pose problems, such as culture-bound words, names of places, and characters. We will also discuss other linguistic phenomena that are common to graphic novels, such as mots expresifs, onomatopoeia, charactonyms, also tackling issues regarding historical references, cultural references, behavior, and customs pertaining to the source, but also a target, social groups. The reason why we are focusing on translating manhwa2 is the fact that it has started to become more and more popular in other cultures/countries. We chose the manhwa called 신과 함께 (Along with the Gods), as it is one of the most popular of its kind, and it is one that intertwines Korean folklore, tradition, history, and mythical creatures with contemporaneity.

This paper represents an attempt at a detailed analysis of woodland presence and dynamics during the Middle Ages (AD 500-1500), as a contribution to the current debate on large-scale reforestation in the Netherlands. Palynological data for this particular period are scarce and allow only global reconstructions. To widen our search for historical woodland proxies, we investigated the potential of archaeologically excavated tree-trunk wells. We carried out a nation-wide inventory of this type of well, in which the shaft is formed by hollowed-out tree trunks, typically large oak trees. Our suspicion that such trees indicate the local presence of (old) woodland in the past was confirmed by a marked positive correlation with spatial reconstructions based on other sources of information: archaeological (charcoal kilns) and non-archaeological (place names and historical references). The observed correlations suggest that mapping the distribution of precisely dated tree-trunk wells can indeed contribute to achieving fairly detailed reconstructions of medieval woodland cover.

In this study, we investigate the methods and results of nomenclature and toponymity of roads, streets and alleys in the city of Changsha, in China. We conducted ethnographic fieldwork and library research, in order to extensively collect primary and secondary data. As such, we explored, in ethnographic detail, the history of Changsha as a cultural city of heritage, and its place naming, and the ways in which cultural connotations can differ in terms of the hypernym of toponym. This is evident in the translation of the terms for roads, streets, and alleys, more so in their references to their geographical, cultural, and historical references and features. This comparative study thus emphasises the similarities and differences between Chinese an Anglo-American nomenclature practices, drawing on the work of Blair and Tent (2021), to analyse the methods of such nomenclature in Changsha, China. Owing to the strong correlation between the evolution of society and the development of place-naming in Changsha, we conducted the ethnography and the analysis of the data through both diachronic and synchronic methods.

A book such as Alice in Wonderland, written for a girl, but nowadays understandable only by adults, the translation of proper nouns can reveal the audience for which translators have addressed their works. This article looks at the translation of proper nouns. These cultural traits are first names, historical references, place names and names of languages: should these be changed to facilitate comprehension by children? This study is then used to evaluate some aspects of theories proposed by Shavit and Oittinen concerning adaptation and translation.