History Of East Research Articles

Ordinary Ottomans: post-World War I settlements and experiences of the end of empire

ABSTRACT In the introduction to this special issue, we address the concepts of ordinariness and Ottomanness, and how they intersect within the general context of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. 1 Given the already existing scholarship on ordinary groups or individuals in the history of the Middle East, we first position ordinariness as context-specific; that is, we understand it as subjected to various forms of exclusion from the elite. Second, within the framework of the major political changes that characterise the end of Empire we explore ordinariness and how it is embedded in everyday life and practices. We interrogate the capacities of individuals to maintain regularity through ordinary practices, after or despite a disruptive episode. We argue that persisting with everyday life practices despite crisis can serve as a strategy to reclaim spaces of autonomy from power structures. However, we also demonstrate that ordinary individuals, being vulnerable subjects or citizens, are also subject to change. These questions eventually lead us to rethink the debate on ‘continuities and ruptures’ within the post-Ottoman context. We suggest that framing Ottomanness as a time-marker, rather than as an identity-marker (Ottoman-era), allows us to focus on how groups and individuals coped with these changes, rather than attempting to define them.

The Use and Misuse of East Asian History in IR Theorizing

Abstract The past two decades have witnessed a wave of research into the history of East Asian international relations (IR). Scholars seek to broaden the historical frames of reference in IR for both theory testing and theory generation. The article reviews this recent trend, examining its limitations and exploring future agenda. In studying historical East Asian IR, scholars have different expectations regarding whether their research would support, complement, or undermine mainstream Western IR. The spatial and temporal scope of their historical inquiries, as well as theoretical ambitions, therefore, differ significantly. Scholars no longer treat all East Asian history as simply one case, but as multiple cases with divergent patterns, and they recognize that the system consisted not solely of China but of multiple actors. In addition to contrasting East Asia with Western Europe, they explore also the similarities between East Asia and other non-Western regions. To advance the agenda, however, scholars must scrupulously navigate three tensions. They are: the tension between the “East” and “West”; the tension between the two disciplines of history and IR; and the tension between past and present. Future studies, therefore, must broaden their horizons in order to better transcend ethnocentrism and exceptionalism, refine their methodology both to avoid selection bias and conduct more sophisticated comparisons, and to maintain a proper distance from contemporary politics. Most importantly, they should combine high-quality historical research with cutting-edge IR theoretical trends to construct dynamic theories that could be applied to other regions.

AI-Enhanced Digital Learning: Revolutionizing Middle East History Education

This abstract highlights the transformative impact of AI-enhanced digital learning on Middle East history education. By integrating artificial intelligence technologies into educational platforms, personalized learning experiences are offered, catering to diverse student needs and preferences. Through dynamic content delivery, interactive activities, and real-time feedback, learners engage more deeply with complex historical narratives, fostering critical thinking skills and a nuanced understanding of the region’s cultural, political, and social dynamics. This innovative approach not only enhances accessibility to historical knowledge but also revolutionizes traditional pedagogical methods, ushering in a new era of engaging and effective history education in the Middle East.

Exploring business history of the Middle East and North Africa region

Exploring business history of the Middle East and North Africa region

When Realpolitik Triumphs over Uyghur Rights in Xinjiang

The ongoing human rights violations against the Uyghur ethnic minority, predominantly Turkic speaking Muslims, in the China-ruled Xinjiang region are deeply disturbing. This article is an attempt to situate the persecution, violence and Uyghur concerns in a broader framework that highlights four critical dimensions of this issue. These include, the contrasting narratives about the history of East Turkestan/Xinjiang; understanding the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which China has been portraying as a significant security ‘concern’; highlighting Xinjiang’s geostrategic importance to China vis-à-vis Central, West and South Asia and finally, Washington’s counter-terrorism strategies (post-9/11) which many see as a significant factor in abetting the Uyghur predicament. In short, the article tries to understand if these issues have contributed to aiding or aggravating the continuing Uyghur crisis and via assessing these segments, it shall also try to provide a brief insight into ‘why’ and ‘how’ China is managing to do what it is doing in Xinjiang

Identification of solar halo terms in observations recorded in historical Korean documents

AbstractWe investigate solar halo terms in observations recorded in the Crown Prince Sohyeon’s Donggung‐Ilgi (Seventeenth century) and identify their equivalent terminologies in modern atmospheric optics. We refer to related historical Korean and Chinese materials (e.g. Pungun‐Gi, Observation Log for Wind and Clouds, for 6 December 1748), analyse the distributions of each term according to the sun elevation and consult modern studies on halo simulations. Then, we compare our findings with the results of previous works. This study will contribute to the understanding of halo events recorded in historical East Asian documents.

MASA PERADABAN DINASTI MAMLUK DI MESIR

The birth of the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt in the 13th century marked an important period in the history of the Middle East. This dynasty was born from a military slave system which then took over political power. The Mamluk lifestyle was manifested by great military power, a prosperous economy, and a rich cultural heritage. The Mamluk dynasty also had an influence on Islamic civilization, including in the fields of architecture, art, science, science, and others. But before giving its glor to Islamic civilization The Mamluk dynasty went through a very long and difficult process. The destruction of Baghdad by the Mongol army made the Mamluk dynasty the savior of Islamic civilization with the success of the Mamluk troops who were able to repel the threat of destruction from the Mongol troops which ultimately made Egypt, Iraq and the surrounding areas intact and safe. So that Islamic civilization can develop religious values. The end of the Mamluk dynasty’d rule came in the 16th century when they faced external pressure and internal upheaval, ending their dominance in the region. Based on the background above, the focus of this article is: (1) the birth of the Mamluk Dynasty. (2) lifestyke of the Mamluk Dyasty (3) the collaps of the Mamluk Dynasty. This article uses a qualitative method, namely by collecting information or darta from literature and journal analysis as a reference. The purpose of this article (1) to find out the history of the founding of th Mamlu dynasty? (2) what wasthe lifestyle of the Mamluk dynasty? (3) how did the reign of the Mamluk dynasty end? The fina step that the author obtains the results of the research and writes the results into a scientific work so that readers know the history of the founding of te Mamluk kingdom until the collapse of the dynasty. The Mamluk dynasty was a dynasty that was founded in the 13th century in Egypt and this dynasty had a fairly lon history which resulted in the enthusiasm of the Mamluk to eradicate the threat from the Mongols.

Unraveling the Enigmas: Deciphering the Causes of Discord in the Middle East: A Review

Turbulence and conflict are part of the Middle East's history. It's often impossible to say where the present rumbles came from--or why they won’t go away. This is not a single area, but rather a magnificent mosaic that harbors an assortment of cultures, religious traditions, and customs. Here the history spans many thousand years, and so we are unable to describe it as a simple theme but rather as a complex pattern: People from different places with differing religious and cultural beliefs mean an eternal fight that can only exist under heaven. How can one come face to face with the Middle East? The hole that this region is spiraling down can make for a series. To cover the numerous aspects of the Middle East would require far more than several articles. Some key components of conflict in the area that we will look at here to try and make them clear. May carry in abundant hope, we can look at these factors and as they interact with each other both in terms of cause-effect relationships or symptom management for a set visit. At the least, may we keep a few honest records? Hopefully we can create still greater understanding and peace throughout this region.

Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller, Daniel T. Potts: The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East. Volume I: From the Beginnings to Old Kingdom Egypt and the Dynasty of Akkad. Oxford: Oxford UP 2020.

Karen Radner, Nadine Moeller, Daniel T. Potts: The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East. Volume I: From the Beginnings to Old Kingdom Egypt and the Dynasty of Akkad. Oxford: Oxford UP 2020.

Modern and Contemporary History of the Middle East - Causes of the Palestine-Israel Crisis as Perceived by Israeli Muslims

Modern and Contemporary History of the Middle East - Causes of the Palestine-Israel Crisis as Perceived by Israeli Muslims

ТАРИХИ КАРТАЛАР ЖӘНЕ ГЕОСАЯСАТ: БАЙЫРҒЫ МӘДЕНИЕТ, МЕМЛЕКЕТТІК МҮДДЕ ЖӘНЕ ШЕКАРАЛЫҚ ШИЛЕНІСТЕР ТҰРҒЫСЫНДА

The article discusses a scientific definition, function, and history of the emergence of geographical maps and their importance in the history of human development. Information is provided about the oldest maps of the Earth currently found, about the cities and countries in which they were created. The art of mapping in ancient Egypt, the map of Chatalhoyuk in Mesopotamia, the latest scientific research on it, and the map of the Babylonian world are also described, as well as the meaning of its objects. It provides an overview of the history of the ancient Middle East. An overview of the contributions of ancient Greek philosophers in the history of cartography, and did a comparative analysis of the Anaximander, Eratosthenes, Strabo, Ptolemy, and ancient Roman maps. In the article, the authors examines the importance of the map "Al-Mamun" during the time of the caliph Al-Mamun and the map "Image of the Earth" by Al-Idrisi, which are examples of the cartographic development that came with the Islamic civilisation. Many historical names of the Caspian Sea are explained based on the Al-Idrisi map. A unique map due to our historical statehood is the map of Abraham Ortelius. This map is comprehensively considered in the article. Brief descriptions of the way of life, economy and culture of Tumens, Kazakhs, Nogais and Muslim Turks on the map have been translated into Kazakh. Especially on the map, the inscription of the country "Cassakia" in the region called "Tartaria", where the Turkic peoples lived at that time, is emphasized as a historical and scientific proof of the continuous statehood of Kazakhstan. The influence of historical maps on modern geopolitics is demonstrated by the example of Israel and Palestine.

Analysis and Investigation of the Naming of the Silk Road Based on Economic Geography

The road that is known as silk today has been the longest and one of the most used trade routes throughout the history of East. A large part of this road, which connected the westernmost regions of China to the easternmost shores of the Mediterranean, passed through Great Khorasan (from Qoms to Jayhun).In the 19th century, in European studies, the name "Silk Road" was used for this road and soon it became popular. Even today, everyone, from the east and the west, knows and calls this historical road by the same name. This naming is due to the fact that according to these researchers, silk was the main and most important commodity that was exchanged along the road.In this research, the question of correctness or incorrectness of this naming has been investigated. Based on the findings of this research, this naming cannot be based on historical and objective facts for two main reasons.The first is that until before the 19th century, none of the Islamic, Afghan and Iranian geographical sources mentioned the name of silk, and most of it was called "Khorasan Road". It has been mentioned and the second is that the study of economic geography and traded goods was carried out. Look, it shows that silk is only one of the hundreds of traded goods and has no special advantage over other goods.

Across Cultures, Across Languages. Interconnectivity in the Late Bronze Age Ugarit

The spread of cuneiform writing and associated linguistic and literary traditions represents one of the key moments in the cultural history of the ancient Near East. This complex and multilayered process can indisputable be considered an excellent example of cultural transfer. Its long duration and the state of preservation of the sources allow us to follow this process in its entirety, but also to focus on specific details. The aim of this article is to identify the importance of cultural transfer in the Akkadian texts of Ugarit, more specifically with respect to the origins of the phrase “according to the loyalty of someone’s heart”.

Introduction

This introduction to the special section “Inter-Asian Cold War Linkages” shows how an interdisciplinary group of ten scholars take up the understudied Cold War linkages between the Middle East, on the one hand, and East and South Asia on the other. They examine how the inter-Asian lens allows us to rethink the history of the twentieth-century Middle East. Central to such rethinking is the destabilization of some of the dichotomous categories that were normalized during the Cold War and that have greatly shaped how we view culture, economy, politics, and society. These include the categories of state/nonstate, national/transnational, revolution/counterrevolution, religion/secularism, and private/public. Instead of taking these dualities for granted, the scholars here foreground the blurred and dialectical relationship between them, utilizing the Middle East as a site of critical analysis, learning, and theorizing and putting its study in conversation with the more Asia-centric and transnationally attuned literatures of the global Cold War.4 In the process, alternative genealogies and relationalities of the Middle East emerge, ones that place the Middle East in the world rather than prioritize how “the world” has acted on the Middle East, usually as a periphery or site of intervention. Doing so brings into view new ways, periodizations, and scales of studying the global Middle East in general and the Cold War in particular.

‘Izz al-Dīn al-Zanjānī and His Scientific Contribution to Mathematics and Astronomy

In this research paper, light is shed on unknown life of a forgotten mathematician. He achieved a fame through his writings and literary works that highlighted his scientific personality. He lived in a tense and dark period of Islamic history in Islamic East. This mathematician is ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Zanjānī, who lived in the first half of seventh century AH/ thirteenth century AD during Mongol invasion of Islamic East. We also try to enumerate his various works in mathematics and astronomy with their locations in different libraries of the world, and refer to books of his authorship that were attributed to others.

FINDS OF THE CLASSICAL PERIOD AT OGLANKALA

Studies show that the settlement of Oglankala, located in the north-east of the Sharur region of Azerbaijan, was inhabited in different periods of history. The strata of this settlement reflect various periods of the Iron Age. Despite the fact that research on the territory of Nakhchivan revealed finds relating to various periods of the Iron Age, however, the classical period has been studied very little. In this regard, architectural remains and other finds of the classical period, revealed by excavations of the Oglankala settlement, are of importance. Archaeological excavations carried out by the Azerbaijan-USA joint expedition in 2008-2011 showed that the citadel and its environs were inhabited in the Oglankala settlement in the classical period. The finds found in Oglankala show that a center for local authority was built here, and after the campaign of the Alexander Great, great construction work was carried out on the settlement. During the excavations, remains of architectural remains, and especially the remains of a columned hall and pottery belonging to various stages of the classical period, were revealed. Cultural strata of Oglankala dating back to the 4th-1st centuries BC are important for studying the history of the Middle East, the South Caucasus, including Nakhchivan.

Nadezhda Abramovna Kanover — “Above all for Her Were Books”

The article tells about the Far Eastern librarian Nadezhda Abramovna Kanover, a follower of the bibliographer Z.N. Matveev, who played a great role in the development of librarianship in Vladivostok. The publication is based on the documents from the Current Archive of the Presidium of the Far East Branch of Russian Academy of Science (FEB RAS), Central Scientific Library (CSL) of FEB RAS and Society for Study of Amur Region (SSAR) that for the first time reveal unknown facts from N.A. Kanover life and characterize the situation in library science in the Russian Far East in 1930s — 1950s. Heading several libraries including the future CSL FEB RAS and library of Primorskiy branch of State Geographical Society (SFGS), N.A. Kanover put much efforts in collecting collections and making conditions for book storage, as well as promoted book culture by publishing articles and organizing book exhibitions. Thanks to her, Vladivostok received a unique old-believers’ collection that belonged to bibliophile S.Ya. Ponosov. Printed editions of the collection are now kept in the SSAR library (former SFGS library), icons and religious artefacts are in the Primorsky Picture Gallery and the V.K. Arsenyev Museum of Far East History. These organisations presented a part of Ponosov’s collection at the joint exhibition “Legend of Belovodie” (Vladivostok, February 18 — July 30, 2023). The pages of Kanover’s biography connected with the last months of life of V.K. Arsenyev, the famous traveller and explorer of the Far East, are remarkable. While working in the library of SFGS, N.A. Kanover became its last secretary, dealing with the correspondent network of the branch. Unfortunately, almost nothing is known about the last years of her life, but N.A. Kanover’s work in the field of Far Eastern library science is not forgotten.

The Effect of (Historical) Language Variation on the East Slavic Lects Lematisers Performance

Abstract The need to develop tools for historical and regional variations is becoming more urgent in natural language processing. In this paper, we present two candidate systems for lemmatising historical East Slavic lects (Late Old East Slavic and Middle Russian), as well as modern regional East Slavic lects (Belogornoje and Megra): BERT-based end-to-end pipeline with language-specific heuristics and sequence-to-sequence BART-based encoderdecoder. To evaluate their predictions, we use accuracy score and string similarity measures, such as Levenshtein distance. The BERT-based model is more suitable for the regional data, achieving 85% accuracy score, and only 74% on the historical data. BART-based model climbs up to 92.6% accuracy score on the historical data, yet gets only 80% on the regional data. We provide an error analysis and discuss ways to enhance models, such as dictionary lookup and spellchecker.

Obsidian exchange networks and highland-lowland interaction in the Lesser Caucasus borderlands

Obsidian sourcing studies have a long history in the Near East, but relatively few have focused on obsidian exchange after the Early Bronze Age. Here, we present a multi-technique analysis of an assemblage of 111 obsidian artifacts from excavated Late Bronze and Early Iron Age (LBA-EIA; c. 15th-6th c BCE) contexts at Mtsvane Gora, southern Georgia. Because the site is situated in the lowland Kura Valley and the nearest obsidian sources are in the highlands to the south and west, obsidian provenance can serve as a proxy for mapping highland-lowland interactions. Chemical compositions analyzed via portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (pXRF), electron microprobe analysis (EMPA), and laser ablation inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), were compared with existing geological datasets of chemical analyses to identify the source of all but one of the artifacts analyzed. The results show that Chikiani, a source in the highlands of southern Georgia, was the geological origin of >90% of the objects analyzed. While acknowledging that obsidian exchange is just one aspect of highland-lowland interaction, this finding implies that Mtsvane Gora’s connections with the adjacent highlands were skewed towards greater engagement with some highland areas relative to others. More generally, the research suggests that geographic adjacency of highlands and lowlands does not necessarily mean that they were highly interconnected.

The Richmonds, Palestine and the Catholic Press, 1967-80

After retiring from a successful diplomatic career in 1966, Sir John Richmond (1909-90) and his wife Diana (1914-97) settled in Durham, where he had accepted a lectureship in Modern Near East History at the University’s School of Oriental Studies. Following the Six-Day War in June 1967, the Richmonds became increasingly concerned at the suffering of Palestinians living in the occupied territories and the strong media bias prevalent at that time. They were instrumental in founding the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) and over the next few years devoted themselves to campaigning on behalf of Palestinians. In addition to monitoring and criticising the secular newspapers, the Richmonds—who were both converts to Catholicism—took a close interest in the leading Catholic papers: The Tablet, The Catholic Herald and The Universe. They engaged in extensive correspondence with their editors—both on the newspaper pages and in private—as well as involving a wider circle of influential Catholic writers and clergy. This article, drawing heavily from the Richmond Papers held at Exeter University’s Special Collections, examines the motives and methods of the Richmonds’ campaign, and attempts to assess whether or not their efforts achieved their aim of changing attitudes.