Scientific Method in Late-Antique Paganism: The (Rational) Empiricism of al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya (The Nabatean Agriculture)

Arabica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 68 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 510-556
Author(s):  
Elaine van Dalen
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Method ◽  
Analogical Reasoning ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Agricultural Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Islamic Science ◽  
Early Islamic

Abstract The reputation of the late-antique or early Islamic al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya (The Nabatean Agriculture) as an esoteric forgery has recently begun to shift and its value as a source for the study of early-Islamic or late-antique Near Eastern paganism has been restored. This article contributes to a further reinterpretation of the work by elucidating its value for the history of late-antique and early Islamic science. It argues that the work distinguishes between the epistemological categories of the rational and the marvelous and critically approaches both based on a rational empiricism which it shares with contemporary disciplines such as medicine and astrology. The concepts of experience (taǧriba) and reason (qiyās) are central to al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya’s epistemology, and the work relies on observation and experiments, combined with methods of deductive and analogical reasoning to obtain applied botanical and agricultural knowledge. Al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya also contains competing views regarding prophecy and astrological knowledge which are illustrative of epistemological debates within Pagan late-antique scholarship.

A History of the Muslim World Manuscript Collection at the Columbia University Libraries

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 258-281
Author(s):  
Kaoukab Chebaro ◽  
Jane Rodgers Siegel
Keyword(s):  
Columbia University ◽  
University Libraries ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Phases Of Development ◽  
Islamic Science ◽  
The University ◽  
The City ◽  
Near Eastern Studies

Abstract In this article, we explore the history of the development of the Islamicate manuscript collection at the Columbia University Libraries (approximately 575 manuscripts across a wide range of languages, subjects, and periods). The story of the collection is one of checkered growth and engagement, and of serendipitous development. We focus on the key actors responsible for collecting activities, mainly donors and faculty, and provide biographical information as well as details regarding the specific contributions made. Three broad phases of development are identified: the birth of the collection (1880–1930); a period of growth: the Smith-Plimpton Islamic science manuscripts (1930–1950); Arthur Jeffery, the Burke Collection and the last gasp of orientalist philological research at Columbia (1950–1970). We try to account for the ebb and flow of interest in the collection within the larger scholarly context of Islamic and Near Eastern studies in the city and at the University.

Khanāṣira and Andarı̄n (Northern Syria) in the Umayyad Period and a New Arabic Tax Document

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Hoyland
Keyword(s):  
Eighth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Islamic

This chapter provides the first edition and translation of an early eighth-century documentary text on marble found in the course of excavations at the Late Antique/early Islamic town of Andarīn in modern-day northern Syria. As well as presenting the text itself, which is of a fiscal nature, the author considers various related issues, such as the identity of the sender of the document, the archaeological context of its discovery, the practice of writing on marble, the history of Andarīn and its relationship to nearby settlements (especially Khanāṣir/Anasartha), early Islamic fiscal practice, and the activities of the Umayyad family in northern Syria.

The Arabian Context of the Qur’an

2020 ◽  
pp. 96-110
Author(s):  
Harry Munt
Keyword(s):  
Seventh Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Islamic

The Qur’an is the most important surviving Arabic prose text from mid-seventh-century Arabia. It is, however, a text with numerous well-known problems regarding its context and usefulness as a historical source. This chapter introduces the Qur’an’s own view of history alongside some of the ways in which modern scholars have made use of the text of the Qur’an as a source for the history of Arabia—and especially of the Ḥijāz—in the early-to-mid seventh century. It ends by making some further suggestions for how the text might be used in the future by historians of late antique and early Islamic Arabia.

Classical Conceptions of Visuality and Representation in John of Damascus' Defense of Holy Images1

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-308
Author(s):  
James A. Francis
Keyword(s):  
Violent Conflict ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Second Sophistic ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
John Of Damascus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Classical Culture ◽  
Common Era ◽  
Iconoclastic Controversy

The Defense of Holy Images by John of Damascus stands as the archetypal exposition of the Christian theology of images. Written at the outbreak of the Iconoclastic Controversy, it has been mostly valued for its theological content and given scholarly short shrift as a narrowly focused polemic. The work is more than that. It presents a complex and profound explication of the nature of images and the phenomenon of representation, and is an important part of the “history of looking”in western culture. A long chain of visual conceptions connects classical Greek and Roman writers, such as Homer and Quintilian, to John: the living image, the interrelation of word and image, and image and memory, themes elaborated particularly in the Second Sophistic period of the early Common Era. For John to deploy this heritage so skillfully to the thorny problem of the place of images in Christianity, at the outbreak of a violent conflict that lasted a further 100 years after his writing, manifests an intellect and creativity that has not been sufficiently appreciated. The Defense of Holy Images, understood in this context, is another innovative synthesis of Christianity and classical culture produced by late antique Christian writers.

The Making of the Medieval Middle East

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Tannous
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Middle Ages

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. This book argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, the book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. The book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

Towards a Contemporary Philosophy of Islamic Science

1990 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Anwar Ibrahim
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Work ◽  
Single Observation ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Stephen Hawking ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theoretical Physicist ◽  
Islamic Science ◽  
Rational Mind ◽  
Understanding Of Science

Our understanding of science itself as a body of knowledge and as asystem of analysis and research has changed over the last decades, just asover the last two centuries, or especially after the age of Enlightement inEurope, science has become more powerful, more sophisticated and complex.It is rather difficult to determine where science ends and where technologybegins. In fact there is a gmwing awareness that the physical or nam sciences,as a means of studying and understanding nature, are relying on the more“humanistic“ and cultural approaches adopted by the social sciences or thehumanities. The tradition of natural science is being challenged by newdiscoveries of the non-physical and non-natural sciences which go beyondthe physical world.Certainly research is vital for the growth and development of all sciencesthat attempt to discover and understand the “secrets” of nature. The validityof any scientific theory depends on its research and methodological premisesand even that-its proposition or theories (in the words of a leading cosmologistand theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking) -is tentative. Hawlung says: “Anyphysical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis:you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experimentsagree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the resultwill not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theoryby finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions ofthe theory.”The history of Western science is rooted in the idea of finding the ’truth’by objectivity. Nothing can be believed until there is a scientific proof ofits existence, or until it can be logically accepted by the rational mind. Theclassical scenario of scientific work gives you an austere picture of heroicactivity, undertaken against all odds, a ceaseless effort to subjugate hostileand menacing nature, and to tame its formidable forces. Science is depicted ...

ABOUT THE PERIODIZATION AND CHRONOLOGY OF THE HISTORY OF TAURIC CHERSONESUS IN THE PRE-ROMAN AND THE LATE ANTIQUE PERIODS

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (72) (3) ◽  
pp. 127-148
Author(s):  
S. V. Ushakov
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Transitional Time ◽  
Early Byzantine

Hundreds of scientific works are devoted to the study of the Tauric Chersonesus, but the problem of chronology and periodization of its ancient history is not sufficiently developed in historiography. Analysis of scientific literature and a number of sources concerning this subject allows to define the chronological framework and to reveal 10 stages of the history of ancient Chersonesos (as a preliminary definition). The early stage, the Foundation and formation of the Polis, is defined from the middle/last third of the VI century (or the first half of the V century BC) to the end of the V century BC. The end of the late-Antique − early-Byzantine (transitional) time in Chersonesos can be attributed to the second half of the VI – first third of the VII centuries ad).

Scribal Repertoires in Egypt from the New Kingdom to the Early Islamic Period

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
The People ◽  
Modern Egypt ◽  
Early Islamic Period ◽  
Early Islamic ◽  
Point Of Departure

This volume deals with the possibility of glimpsing pre-modern and early modern Egyptian scribes, the people who actually produced ancient documents, through the ways in which they organized and wrote those documents. Breaking with the traditional conception of variation in scribal texts as ‘free’ or indicative of ‘corruption’, this volume reconceptualizes scribal variation in pre-modern Egypt from the point of view of contemporary historical sociolinguistics, seeing scribes as agents embedded in particular geographical, temporal, and sociocultural environments. This volume comprises a set of studies of scribal variation, beginning from the well-established domain of scribal variation in pre-modern English as a methodological point of departure, and proceeding to studies of scribal variation spanning thousands of years, from Pharaonic to Late Antique and Islamic Egypt. This volume introduces to Egyptology concepts such as scribal communities, networks, and repertoires, and applies them to a variety of phenomena, including features of lexicon, grammar, orthography, palaeography, layout, and format.

Empires of Antiquities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Billie Melman
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
World War ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Mandate System ◽  
First World

Empires of Antiquities is a history of the rediscovery of the imperial civilizations of the ancient Near East in a modern imperial order that evolved between the outbreak of the First World War and the decolonization of the British Empire in the 1950s. It explores the ways in which near eastern antiquity was redefined and experienced, becoming the subject of imperial regulation, modes of enquiry, and international and national politics. A series of globally publicized spectacular archaeological discoveries in Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, which the book follows, made antiquity material visible and accessible as never before. The book demonstrates that the new definition and uses of antiquity and their relations to modernity were inseparable from the emergence of the post-war international imperial order, transnational collaboration and crises, the aspirations of national groups, and collisions between them and the British mandatories. It uniquely combines a history of the internationalization of archaeology and the rise of a new “regime of antiquities” under the oversight of the League of Nations and its institutions, a history of British attitudes to, and passion for, near eastern antiquity and on-the-ground colonial policies and mechanisms, as well as nationalist claims on the past. It points to the centrality of the new mandate system, particularly mandates classified A in Mesopotamia/Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan, formerly governed by the Ottoman Empire, and of Egypt, in the new archaeological regime. Drawing on an unusually wide range of materials collected in archives in six countries, as well as on material and visual evidence, the book weaves together imperial, international, and national histories, and the history of archaeological discovery which it connects to imperial modernity.

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