The Postclassical Oral World and the Unity of Sūra 74

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-43
Author(s):  
George Archer
Keyword(s):  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Past ◽  
Oral Cultures ◽  
Rhetorical Methods ◽  
Key Questions

AbstractThis paper uses observations from studies of highly oral cultures to demonstrate the structural unity of Q 74, 30-31. That passage mysteriously says that over hell stands “nineteen”. This number is then followed by a strangely long aside that argues that this “nineteen” refers to angels and that “We have made their number only as a test for the disbelievers”. The reference to the nineteen has in the past been seen as unclear and the verse that follows as structurally bizarre in several ways, prompting many to argue that it is an interpolation. This article will use structural and oral rhetorical methods to suggest that this is not the case. Their content, style, and structure are all deliberate and are a response to various debates about numbers and numerology. More specifically, the passage is a correction of the Christological use of numbers by Near Eastern Christians in the Postclassical age. This article aims to show how the application of orality as a hermeneutical tool can resolve key questions regarding the coherence of the Qurʾānic text.

Jaziret Fadel

2021 ◽  
pp. 104-126
Author(s):  
Amal Adel Abdrabo
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Arab Countries ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Mutual Interaction ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Preliminary Research ◽  
The Village ◽  
Key Questions

The plight of refugees fleeing from Palestine in 1948 raises several key questions regarding their historical fragmentation as a nation and their future. From a social anthropological point of view, the existing literature seems to tackle the Palestinian case from different perspectives influenced by the mass exodus of Palestinians from their homeland. Such perceptions took for granted the recognition of the state of “refugeeness” of the exiled Palestinians around the globe, while, in reality, it is a mutual interaction between people, place, and time. In the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War at the beginning of the year 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes in Palestine to the nearby Arab countries, among them was Egypt. Some thousands settled in different areas all over Egypt. Based on a preliminary research on the literature, the author can argue that this is the first ethnographic study of the social life of the village of Jaziret Fadel and its Palestinian inhabitants in Egypt. The chapter is about tackling the historical trajectories, genealogies, memories, and present of the inhabitants of this village who seemed to be torn between two nostalgic pasts. The author's emphasis within this chapter is about how the narratives of the past memories could reveal a lot about the present time of the human societies and their future.

How Ancient and Modern Memory Shapes the Past

2020 ◽  
pp. 217-231
Author(s):  
Davide Nadali
Keyword(s):  
State Agencies ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Eastern State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
Canonical Status

Ancient Near Eastern state agencies that produced monumental art and architecture and crafted rare works out of luxury materials were essentially materializing their own interpretations of reality and thereby producing memories. Because elite memories were rendered into tangible forms and images, they dominated and endured. Thus, ruling bodies curated their particular memories through a range of canonical sites, buildings, monuments, and artworks, which they would have viewed as most representative of their power and legitimacy. Modern canons of ancient Near Eastern art and architecture are an indirect legacy of antiquity’s broken and biased record. Modern aesthetic and political agendas have isolated certain archaeological finds and elevated them to canonical status as representatives of a past best suited to modern needs. This chapter aims to detangle the ancient and modern canons, and, using the Assyrians as a case study, proposes a new memory-based paradigm for canon construction.

The Southern Levant and the Ancient Near Eastern Canon

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-65
Author(s):  
Rachel Hallote
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Southern Levant ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

When the artistic canon of the Southern Levant coalesced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars thought of the region, then Ottoman Palestine, as the locus of the Bible. The small-scale nature of the archaeological finds as well as their relative dearth reinforced a reliance on biblical narratives as a framework for understanding the culture of the region. Moreover, early scholarship did not recognize the complex regionalism of the Southern Levant or the diversity of its populations. Consequently, the artistic canon that developed did not represent the historical and archaeological realities of the region. This chapter examines the history of how the artistic canon of the Southern Levant formed over the past century of scholarship, why various scholars of the early and middle twentieth century included particular items in the canon, and why these now entrenched representations may or may not be helpful to the discipline’s future.

Artisans to Producers

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-148
Author(s):  
Fanny Bessard
Keyword(s):  
Central Asia ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Food Processing ◽  
Near East ◽  
Physical Change ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Islam

This chapter considers the physical change of the workspace chronologically, geographically, and by industry. From the case studies of pottery, glass, and textile making, as well as food processing, it discusses the standardization of the Roman practice, as seen at Timgad in North Africa, of zoning and conglomerating crafts in early Islam across the Near East and Central Asia. While acknowledging this continuity with the past, it examines the novelty and significance of manufacturing after 800, when ‘post-Roman’ ceased to be a meaningful description of Near Eastern economy, and questions whether urban crafts experienced differentiated or similar forms of development.

From Control to Ownership: China's Managerial Revolution

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew G. Walder
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Governance ◽  
Government Agencies ◽  
Corporate Sector ◽  
New Variety ◽  
The Past ◽  
Corporate Elite ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Assets ◽  
And Control ◽  
Key Questions

Over the past decade, the ownership and control of China's corporate sector has finally begun to depart fundamentally from patterns typical in the socialist past. Students of corporate governance have watched these changes with an intense curiosity about their impact on firm performance. Students of comparative economic institutions have examined them for hints of a new variety of Asian capitalism and have sought to anticipate China's international competitiveness and impact. But these changes potentially will create a new corporate elite with greater compensation, personal wealth, and independence from government agencies than ever before. This transformation of China's political economy may eventually alter the Chinese state itself, although the extent and nature of this change are still far from clear. The key questions of interest are the social origins of the new elite, the scale of the economic assets they control, and especially their continuing relationships with party and government agencies. The answers will vary decisively by sector, four of which are described here: a state-owned sector, a privatized sector, a transactional sector, and an entrepreneurial sector. The evolving mix of these sectors will determine the future contours of the Chinese corporate economy.

Sexual motivation: problem solved and new problems introduced

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Pfaff ◽  
Farid Saad
Keyword(s):  
Behavioral Change ◽  
Sexual Motivation ◽  
Laboratory Animals ◽  
The Past ◽  
Epigenetic Effects ◽  
Androgenic Hormone ◽  
Brain States ◽  
To Come ◽  
Intervening Variables ◽  
Key Questions

AbstractBackgroundDuring the past 50 years, motivational studies have evolved from the logical inference of logically required “intervening variables” to explain behavioral change, to electrophysiological and molecular analyses of the mechanisms causing such changes.AimThe purpose of this review article is two-fold: first to describe the logic of sexual motivation in a way that applies to laboratory animals as well as humans, and the second is to address some of the problems of sexual motivation experienced by men.ResultsWhen problems of motivational mechanisms are stripped down to their essentials, as performed in the laboratory animal models and are available for reductionistic studies, then the problems can be solved with certainty, as illustrated in the first part of this review. However, with respect to human sexual motivation, the various determinants which include so many behavioral routes and so many brain states come into play, that definite conclusions are harder to come by, as illustrated in the second part of this review.ConclusionsThis review highlights a number of key questions that merit further investigation. These include (a) What mechanisms do cultural and experiential influences interact with androgenic hormone influences on human sexual motivation? (b) How would epigenetic effects in the human brain related to changes in motivation be investigated? (c) What are the effects of unpredictable traumatic and stressful human experiences on sexual motivation; (d) How such mechanisms are activated upon unpredictable traumatic and stressful insults? (e) What are the outstanding differences between sexual motivational drive and motivations driven by homeostatic systems such as hunger and thirst?

scholarly journals Near Eastern Landscapes and Declassified U2 Aerial Imagery

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Hammer ◽  
Jason Ur
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Aerial Imagery ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Northern Iraq ◽  
Modern Agriculture ◽  
The Past ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Southern Iraq ◽  
Aerial Perspective

AbstractRecently declassified photographs taken by U2 spy planes in the 1950s and 1960s provide an important new source of historical aerial imagery useful for Eurasian archaeology. Like other sources of historical imagery, U2 photos provide a window into the past, before modern agriculture and development destroyed many archaeological sites. U2 imagery is older and in many cases higher resolution than CORONA spy satellite imagery, the other major source of historical imagery for Eurasia, and thus can expand the range of archaeological sites and features that can be studied from an aerial perspective. However, there are significant barriers to finding and retrieving U2 imagery of particular locales, and archaeologists have thus not yet widely used it. In this article, we aim to reduce these barriers by describing the U2 photo dataset and how to access it. We also provide the first spatial index of U2 photos for the Middle East. A brief discussion of archaeological case studies drawn from U2 imagery illustrates its merits and limitations. These case studies include investigations of prehistoric mass-kill hunting traps in eastern Jordan, irrigation systems of the first millennium BC Neo-Assyrian Empire in northern Iraq, and twentieth-century marsh communities in southern Iraq.

Legal indeterminacy and authoritarianism: Notes on William Scheuerman’s The End of Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 019145372097472
Author(s):  
Peter Caldwell
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
German Law ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
Principles Of Justice ◽  
Key Questions

Scheuerman’s book is one of the handful of significant attempts to rethink Schmitt’s work systematically over the past four decades. In so doing, he raises three key questions for me. First, is Schmitt’s work a sincere contribution to legal and political theory, or an attempt to argue for setting the rule of law aside for authoritarianism, that is, an instrumental critique of indeterminacy? Second, to what extent is Schmitt – critical of the ‘bourgeois’ rule of law, critical of globalization – really a thinker defending capitalism? Can he really be associated with the Ordoliberals (even if they adopted his arguments from 1931 to 1932 in their own writing of the time)? Third, to what extent were Schmitt’s early contributions to National Socialist law aimed at responding to legal indeterminacy, and to what extent did they in fact point towards a radicalism of German law within the Nazi system, especially insofar as they endorsed making decisions based on the principles of justice of the Nazi state – and potentially against the express language of statutes?

The Head of Humbaba

2013 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah B. Graff
Keyword(s):  
Visual Narratives ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Supernatural Power ◽  
The Past ◽  
Second Millennium Bce ◽  
Gilgamesh Epic ◽  
Large Corpus

Abstract A large corpus of terracotta plaques bearing the image of the demon Humbaba/ Huwawa, a major character in the Gilgamesh epic, have been excavated from late third and early second millennium BCE contexts at numerous sites in Mesopotamia. This essay explores the motif of Humbaba’s severed head within its ancient Near Eastern context in order to demonstrate that the head differs from other images of decapitation, as a representation whose supernatural power is unaffected by death. It concludes that the terracotta plaques were interpreted in sophisticated and multivalent ways by ancient audiences: as visual narratives representing a key moment in the epic; as apotropaic images displayed to guard transitions; and as important omens recorded in the past, which had the potential to reappear in the present.

Comments

2000 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-73
Author(s):  
Stuart Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Near East ◽  
Level Of Detail ◽  
Late Neolithic ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Archaeological Material ◽  
Exceptional Preservation ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Degree Of Isolation

Because of the climate and the nature of the sites, most archaeological material in the Near East has survived the passage of time in a reasonably well preserved state (at least, until recent decades). It remains true, however, that occasional deposits with exceptional preservation provide a level of detail that opens up new areas of interpretation to archaeologists. The classic examples are, perhaps, Çatalhöyük and Nahal Hemar. The ‘Burnt Village’ at Sabi Abyad is proving to be another where the new evidence is leading to a series of publications offering interpretations of the settlement which will have profound implications for our perception of the late Neolithic in northern Mesopotamia. This stimulating article amplifies one area of discussion, attempting to bring some of the most striking features of the ‘Burnt Village’ into a single, unified interpretation. Importantly, this unified interpretation draws on a range of contemporary approaches to understanding the past and, given the tendency of near eastern archaeologists to function in a degree of isolation from wider archaeological trends, this article is to be particularly welcomed. Inevitably it can be criticised in certain areas and it might have gone further in others but these comments start from the basis of welcoming, enjoying and being stimulated by this piece of work.

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