Architecture without Images

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 585-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh

The Venetian nobleman Ambrosio Bembo (1652–1705) included this panorama of Aleppo by the French artist G.J. Grélot (see Figure 1), as one of the fifty-one carefully observed line drawings of cities, buildings, and people integral to his travelogue, proudly entitled Travels and Journal through Part of Asia during about Four Years Undertaken by Me, Ambrosio Bembo, Venetian Noble. During his visits to Aleppo between 1672 and 1675, Bembo may have crossed paths with the great Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi (1611–82?), who included his own description of that commercial capital of the eastern Mediterranean in his monumental Seyahatname (Book of Travels). Evliya's book does not include a single illustration. This divergence is emblematic of the distinct ways in which early modern societies (in this case, Middle Eastern and European) visualized cities and architecture, and highlights a major challenge to writing the architectural and urban history of the Middle East before the 19th century: the almost complete absence of images that represent architecture.

This is a comprehensive, illustrated catalogue of the 200+ marine chronometers in the collections of Royal Museums Greenwich. Every chronometer has been completely dismantled, studied and recorded, and illustrations include especially commissioned line drawings as well as photographs. The collection is also used to illustrate a newly researched and up-to-date chapter describing the history of the marine chronometer, so the book is much more than simply a catalogue. The history chapter naturally includes the story of John Harrison’s pioneering work in creating the first practical marine timekeepers, all four of which are included in the catalogue, newly photographed and described in minute detail for the first time. In fact full technical and historical data are provided for all of the marine chronometers in the collection, to an extent never before attempted, including biographical details of every maker represented. A chapter describes how the 19th century English chronometer was manufactured, and another provides comprehensive and logically arranged information on how to assess and date a given marine chronometer, something collectors and dealers find particularly difficult. For further help in identification of chronometers, appendices include a pictorial record of the number punches used by specific makers to number their movements, and the maker’s punches used by the rough movement makers. There is also a close-up pictorial guide to the various compensation balances used in chronometers in the collection, a technical Glossary of terms used in the catalogue text and a concordance of the various inventory numbers used in the collection over the years.


2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-565
Author(s):  
Charles D. Smith

The subject of a promotional campaign by Harvard University Press, Empires of the Sand purports to challenge established scholarship with respect to the drawn-out demise of the Ottoman Empire from 1789 to 1923. The Karshes argue that European imperialism was more benevolent than threatening and coexisted with Middle Eastern imperialisms—Ottoman, Egyptian, or Arab. In their view, European imperial powers “shored up” the Ottoman Empire rather than sought to deprive it of territories under its domain during the 19th century. To be sure, there was some European “nibbling at the edges of empire” (Algeria, Tunisia, Libya), but these incursions had little impact on the Ottomans; Cyprus (1878) is ignored. The only true “infringement on Ottoman territorial stability,” the British takeover of Egypt, happened by “chance not design,” with the blame attributed to Sultan Abdul Hamid's mismanagement of the crisis. The same story of Ottoman incompetence and attempts to manipulate European powers explains Ottoman loss of territory in the Balkans.


Author(s):  
Eric Schnakenbourg

In the Early Modern era, the Baltic Sea was called the Nordic Mediterranean because of its unique outlet on the high seas and its narrowness. Like its southern counterpart, the Baltic is at the crossroads of several peoples and cultures. Also like the Mediterranean Sea, the Baltic had different populations on each of its shores, yet in another way facilitated relations and became a space for interconnections. Throughout its history, peoples from Scandinavia, Poland, Germany, Russia, and the Baltic lands developed not only all sorts of peaceful relations and exchanges, but also competed with each other in long-lasting rivalries or military confrontations. Between the 16th century and the first half of the 19th century, the Baltic region experienced dramatic internal and external changes resulting from its ever-growing connections with the rest of Europe. Baltic issues, however, did not have the same importance for all the surrounding countries: it was the only horizon for Sweden, which enjoyed sovereignty over Finland until 1809, and the main horizon for Denmark, which ruled Norway until 1814. For Scandinavians, the Baltic Sea was a necessary interface for various kinds of exchanges with the external world, whether regional neighbors or continental Europe. In one way or another, the history of the Swedish and Danish kingdoms is interwoven with the history of the Baltic. Scandinavians devoted great attention to this neighboring sea for their shipping and trade, as well as for their security and political influence. The situation is somewhat similar for the Baltic provinces (Estonia, Livonia, and Ingria), which were always under foreign rule, first Swedish then Russian, in the Early Modern period. On the other side of the sea, for the German states, the Polish Republic, and the Russian Empire, the Baltic was simply one theater of foreign policy among others, even though its importance changed over time according to the political or economic context. As for commerce, while during the Middle Ages the Baltic region traded with the rest of Europe, starting in the 16th century, the situation changed as the continental economy shifted from the Mediterranean to the northwest. European population growth and the development of long-distance shipping and commerce meant increasing needs for grain and naval stores. This created new demand for Baltic economic resources and products and for transporting those exports. Consequently, new international rivalries and struggles occurred in the Baltic. At first, these conflicts were among the regional countries, but increasingly the main European powers as well. The Baltic Sea then became an important theater for European international politics, and almost every continental war had a Baltic component. The history of the Baltic Sea from the 16th century to the middle of the 19th century must be considered from two perspectives: first, relations among the regional countries and peoples; and second, relations with the world outside the Baltic, whether foreign powers and regions or even other seas, for political, military, and trade matters.


Author(s):  
Guadalupe García

The Cuban city of San Cristóbal de la Habana has been a nodal point of economic, commercial, political, and cultural exchange since its 1519 founding on Cuba’s northern shore. Residents’ decision to locate the city next to the natural deepwater harbor that became today’s harbor, illustrates the importance of geography, space, and environment in Havana’s early history. Through the distinct environs of Havana, enslaved, free black, Spanish, immigrant, criollo (and later Cuban) residents defined and gave new meaning to a geography marked by the city’s colonial origins. The end of the 19th century and early 20th century marked the end of Spanish colonialism in Cuba (1898) and the beginning of the US occupation of the island (1899–1902). The political transition solidified the importance of Havana as the economic and political center of Cuba. The city became a broker of a new set of cultural, social, and political exchanges as the country’s economic prosperity—the result of an affinity for US and global capitalist markets—also inaugurated a booming and pervasive tourist economy. Western influence and a neocolonial relationship between Cuba and the United States engendered an urban renaissance that emphasized cosmopolitanism and a dynamic, highly mobile urban population. Havana’s built environment oriented residents and visitors alike to its modern architecture, seaside resorts, and dynamic nightlife. The city’s concentration of wealth, however, underscored continued disparities between Cuba’s urban and rural populations as well as within sectors of the urban population. There is a well-developed body of scholarship that addresses the complicated history of the city, especially for the colonial period and the early 20th century. Until recently, there was a scarcity of literature on the city following the revolutionary transition of 1959. This changed, however, with the onset of the 1980s. In 1982 UNESCO declared the colonial core city of Havana a World Heritage Site. Urban renewal and preservation became topics of scholarly discussions around administrative efforts to preserve, restore, and orient the direction of the city. Then, in the early 1990s, urban development in Havana (like all development in Cuba) come to an immediate halt after the dissolution of the USSR ended Soviet subsidies and precipitated one of the worst economic disasters in Cuban history. The country’s political and economic situation and the liberalization of the economy and the growth of tourism brought an ever-increasing interest in the issues and environment of the city, with scholars taking up the now familiar themes of access to the city, political inclusion and exclusion, and urban patrimony in their scholarship. As a field of study the literature on Havana mirrors the frameworks found in the broader field of urban history. The literature breaks down into two distinct subfields; those studies that examine “the history of the city” and those that examine “histories that unfold within cities” (See Brodwyn Fisher’s article Urban History in Oxford Bibliographies). The former has long dominated the literature on Havana, and only recently has new scholarship begun to approach the city as a subject in its own right or from the vantage points of disciplinary perspectives outside of history, architecture, and planning. In this essay I have chosen to introduce readers to the vast literature that centers explicitly on the development of the city, much of which was published in Cuba from the 19th century onward. This literature forms part of a well-known cannon in Cuba (including work in the Spanish-language press produced outside of the island) but might be lesser known to non-specialists. I have also included well-established, as well as recent and emerging, works where Havana assumes a central role in the narrative. I have done this in order to broaden the categorical analysis of what constitutes a history of or about Havana. As with any bibliographic essay, I have excluded much in order to provide an overview of Havana and familiarize readers with scholars who explore thematic interests in questions of race, slavery, or culture through the social fabric of the city. Where appropriate, I have organized the essay according to time period or publication date (in order to give the reader an idea of the scholarship on colonial architecture, for example). Finally, most titles on this list can easily be placed in more than one of the categories listed in the Table of Contents; for the sake of space I have cross-listed only a few of these works, but indicated when readers might find other sections of the essay useful.


2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (5) ◽  
pp. 1651-1658 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan M. Flowers ◽  
Khaled M. Hazzouri ◽  
Muriel Gros-Balthazard ◽  
Ziyi Mo ◽  
Konstantina Koutroumpa ◽  
...  

Date palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.) is a major fruit crop of arid regions that were domesticated ∼7,000 y ago in the Near or Middle East. This species is cultivated widely in the Middle East and North Africa, and previous population genetic studies have shown genetic differentiation between these regions. We investigated the evolutionary history of P. dactylifera and its wild relatives by resequencing the genomes of date palm varieties and five of its closest relatives. Our results indicate that the North African population has mixed ancestry with components from Middle Eastern P. dactylifera and Phoenix theophrasti, a wild relative endemic to the Eastern Mediterranean. Introgressive hybridization is supported by tests of admixture, reduced subdivision between North African date palm and P. theophrasti, sharing of haplotypes in introgressed regions, and a population model that incorporates gene flow between these populations. Analysis of ancestry proportions indicates that as much as 18% of the genome of North African varieties can be traced to P. theophrasti and a large percentage of loci in this population are segregating for single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that are fixed in P. theophrasti and absent from date palm in the Middle East. We present a survey of Phoenix remains in the archaeobotanical record which supports a late arrival of date palm to North Africa. Our results suggest that hybridization with P. theophrasti was of central importance in the diversification history of the cultivated date palm.


2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Başak Tuğ

Starting with Said's critique of Orientalism but going well beyond it, poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques of modernity have challenged not only one-dimensional visions of Western modernity—by “multiplying” or “alternating” it with different modernities—but also the binaries between the modern and the traditional/premodern/early modern, thus resulting in novel, more inclusive ways of thinking about past experiences. Yet, while scholars working on the Middle East have successfully struggled against the Orientalist perception of the Middle East asthetradition constructed in opposition to the Western modern, they often have difficulties in deconstructing the traditionwithin, that is, the premodern past. They have traced the alternative and multiple forms of modernities in Middle Eastern geography within the temporal borders of “modernity.” However, going beyond this temporality and constructing new concepts—beyond the notion of tradition—to understand the specificities of past experiences (which are still in relationship with the present) remains underdeveloped in the social history of the Middle East.


Spatium ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 53-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dragana Corovic ◽  
Ljiljana Blagojevic

This paper traces urban history of Belgrade in the 19th century by looking into its waterscape in the context of its transformation as the capital of the Princedom of Serbia. Aiming to underline the importance of water as a resource, with the view to contemporary environmental concerns, we explore how citizens historically related to waterscape in everyday life and created a specific socio-spatial water network through use of public baths on the river banks and public fountains, water features and devices in the city. The paper outlines the process of establishing the first modern public water supply system on the foundations of the city?s historical Roman, Austrian and Ottoman waterworks. It also looks at the Topcider River as the most telling example of degradation of a culturally and historically significant urban watercourse from its natural, pastoral and civic past to its current polluted and hazardous state. Could the restitution of the Topcider River be considered as a legacy of sustainability for future generations, and are there lessons to be learned from the urban history which can point to methods of contemporary water management?


Al-Farabi ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-172
Author(s):  
Aytek Mammadova ◽  

The article examines the creativity and activities of the Kazan scientist Damulla Mohammed Abdulkarim Hazrat and his great-grandson Hilmi Ziya Ulken. Damulla Muhamamad Abdulkarim Hazrat was known in Kazan in the 19th century as a religious figure and cleric (mudarris). Here are the differences in views between Muhammad Abdulkarim and the famous contemporary Muslim theologian and orientalist Shigabutdin Mardjani in terms of their religious views. In the article, from the point of view of a systematic approach and a historical method, the reasons for the disagreements created under the influence of time and events were considered, in connection with which Sh. Marjani spoke from the position of a reformist scientist in relation to the ideas of the conservative scientist Muhammad Abdulkarim. The article notes that Kazan scientists had relations with the Ottoman state in the 19th century, and the resettlement of Muhammad Abdulkarim to Istanbul with his family took place in 1863. Here, after his move to Istanbul, the Ottoman state paid him and seven members of his family a salary, which was noted in the documents of those times. In this document, Muhammad Abdulkarim was presented as a scientist of scholars and a creator of good deeds. The article says that the granddaughter of Damulla Muhammad Abdulkarim Hazrat - Musfika khanum (1881-1978) was the mother of Hilmi Ziya Ulken. Hilmi Zia Ulken (1901-1974) made a great contribution to the development of science and philosophy in Turkey with his works. The study examines the rich creative heritage of Hilmi Zia Ulken, presents the researches of the scientist on the history of Eastern philosophy, in particular, religion. The article says that the thinker presented the Koran as a valuable source, which is both sacred and vital for the ideology of all Muslims, especially the Turkic peoples living in the countries of the Near and Middle East. Hilmi Zia Ulken regarded the emergence of human religions as a revolutionary event, showing that these religions teach humanity to spiritual uplift and improvement. The study says that religious and philosophical issues also play an important role in the work of Hilmi Ziya Ulken, who, like his great-grandfather, Kazan cleric Damulla Muhammad Abdulkarim Hazret, became famous for his works in various fields of science.


1995 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mansour Bonakdarian

In recent Middle Eastern history, the experience of political exile has become a prevalent theme, as large numbers of Palestinians, Kurds, Iranians, and Afghans, among others, have sought refuge in various countries. Although the earlier numbers would pale in comparison with the present size of the Middle Eastern diaspora scattered around the globe, it was in the 19th century that the first noticeable groups of exiles from the Middle East began taking sanctuary in European countries, among other locations. Perhaps the best known of these exile communities were the Young Ottomans in France in the late 19th century.


2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. E5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Srinivas Chivukula ◽  
Gregory M. Weiner ◽  
Johnathan A. Engh

Two key discoveries in the 19th century—infection control and the development of general anesthesia—provided an impetus for the rapid advancement of surgery, especially within the field of neurosurgery. Yet the field of neurosurgery would not have existed in the modern sense without the development and advancement of techniques in hemostasis. Improvement in intraoperative hemostasis came more gradually but was no less important to enhancing neurosurgical outcomes. The history of hemostasis in neurosurgery is often overlooked. Herein, the authors briefly review the historical progression of hemostatic techniques since the beginning of the early modern era of neurosurgery.


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