ARCHAEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTATION OF HISTORICAL EVENTS IN THE HOLY QURAN - STORIES OF THE PROPHETS AS A MODEL-

The modern scientific revolution has imposed on the researcher to broaden his view by referring to more than one science in addressing his research issues, and in the light of the contemporary ideological debate that the unspoken and the accepted are recognized to without the slightest prestige, it is necessary to discuss what these debates erupt with objectivity and impartiality. The issue of the historical existence of the Qur’anic events, which was taken - according to Arab modernists - from the school of archaeological criticism of the Bible as an example, and since the prevailing belief among Muslims is the infallibility of the Holy Qur’an from distortion and falsification through recurrent and because it contained - equivalent to a third - on Historical events, including stories, and previous facts, it is not possible “beliefly” and “realistically” that the divine news contradict the achieved historical reality, and since the main purpose of the Holy Qur’an - including the verses of the stories - is guidance , the Qur’an has transmitted history To achieve this purpose without being a book of history that delves into the details and identifies the dates and respects the chronologies with precision and detail, it is not possible “methodologically” and “realistically” to require the archaeological evidence for each Qur’anic event, especially since the nature of the archaeological research itself He suffers from technical and epistemological gaps that make his discoveries and reading of him between the hypothesis of the results of the auxiliary sciences and the self-interpretation of the archaeologist, and the process of archaeological documentation of historical events in Holy Qur’an remains - if it is achieved - as a matter of concerted evidence - despite its suspicion - that raises the believer's faith - and faith in degrees. - It also obliges the non-believer in the Qur’an as a divine source to conform to the material evidence of the divine revelation or what is termed in Islamic thought with the « scientific miracles of the Holy Qur’an ».

Foreigners and Religion at Ugarit

During the Late Bronze Age, Syria was mostly dominated by the larger powers of the ancient Near East—Mitanni (the Hurrians), the Hittite Empire, and Egypt. The ancient city of Ugarit yielded numerous texts and artifacts that attest to the presence of foreigners and their influences on local religious traditions. Textually, the best-preserved influences are those of Hurrian origin, although these were probably promoted thanks to the Hittites, who incorporated many Hurrian deities and cults. Hurrian traditions thus influenced both Ugaritic cults and divine pantheons. Egyptian influences, in contrast, are observable mostly in art and material evidence. Art of Egyptian origin was considered prestigious and because of that was prominently seen in trade and international exchange gifts, but it also entered the religious sphere in the form of cultic statues and ex-voto gifts for deities. Egyptian art was also often imitated by local artists. The same can be said of art from the Mediterranean area. Some evidence suggests that foreigners actively related to local traditions as well. Ritual tablets from Ugarit (namely KTU3 1.40 and its variants) illustrate that there were always frictions in a multicultural/national society. These tablets also indicate that such frictions could have been dealt with through ritual action, and thus emphasize the role religion played. The city of Ugarit is used in this paper to illuminate some processes that can be observed in the whole of ancient Syria. Nevertheless, every site has its own outcome of interactions with other cultures.

Varieties of international reconciliation: the configuration of interest and reflection after conflict

After conflict, states occasionally succeed in reconciling with former adversaries. When they do, they do so in different ways. Some grudgingly sign a treaty to signal the end of a conflict. Others provide for not only reparations and compensations but also economic assistance as material evidence of reconciliation. Yet others offer apologies, official and unofficial, and engage their former adversaries in reflective dialog that transforms their relationship from enmity to amity. Is there a way to systemically organize different ways in which states reconcile? Can different types of reconciliation be identified? If so, what explains the types? We address these questions in this article. Based on our survey of war terminations in the post-World War II period, we identify four different types of reconciliation that former injurious states have made with their victim states – procedural, material, ideational, and substantial. We hypothesize that their choice of a reconciliation type can be explained in terms of a configuration of national interest and national reflection. In this article, we engage in a structured comparative analysis of the cases of reconciliation between France-Algeria, Japan-Korea, Germany-Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic, and Germany-Poland – that we argue closely resemble the four ideal types – and demonstrate that our hypotheses are confirmed. We conclude with a consideration of how likely it is for ideational and material reconciliation to develop into substantial reconciliation

Resilient Social Actors in the Transition from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Age on Cyprus

Our understanding of the earliest Iron Age on Cyprus has long remained somewhat obscure. This is the result of both a relative lack of material evidence and the fact that scholarly attention has focused more on the preceding Late Bronze Age and on the subsequent Cypro-Archaic period. As more, and more varied, data have accumulated, there have been calls for a more theoretically informed approach to considering the social changes involved, and even for prehistorians to extend their work into the Cypriot Iron Age. As a response to this, the present study considers a broad range of material and documentary evidence, attempts to reconstruct the political economy, and offers an interpretative framework based on social understandings of Complex Adaptive Systems theory. Using this approach, the authors conclude that, while the enduring realities of Cyprus—its geography, copper resources and long tradition of agropastoralism—continued to shape Cypriot culture, the Iron Age is not simply a continuation of its Bronze Age sociopolitical forms. We argue instead that the earliest Iron Age involved social actors negotiating new politico-economic agendas in response to changing conditions in the Iron Age eastern Mediterranean.

Manuscript waste in reconstructing book collections of medieval Elbląg

Medieval manuscript collections on the territory of Teutonic Prussia have been particularly affected by numerous unfortunate events in modern history, such as Polish-Swedish wars and the turmoil after World War II. Still, the attempts to reconstruct the local collections may shed new light on the intellectual history of this historical region. To this date this kind of research was based mostly on the preserved manuscripts with Prussian origin or provenance, that is to say produced or used on the territory of Prussia, currently held in Polish or foreign libraries and on the evidence on the lost volumes derived from archival inventories. The article, taking as an example the history of collections of the city of Elbląg, discusses the potential of systematic studies of parchment waste used in bindings of manuscripts and printed books for reconstructing the intellectual landscape of the territory in question. It systematizes different types of provenance evidence that links the parchment waste to the territory of Teutonic Prussia by an analysis of content, script, musical notation, bindings and other material evidence.

In Conversation with Vicki Kirby: Deconstruction, Critique, and Human Exceptionalism in the Anthropocene

In this interview Marc Higgins invites Vicki Kirby to dilate on the themes that have exercised her attention over the last thirty years. His questions address the received assumptions that shape political and ethical debate and the suggestion that their terms of reference require a radical shake-up. Kirby’s counter-intuitive treatment of familiar and accepted ways of thinking pays special attention to the nature/culture division and its myriad reconfigurations (body versus mind; primitive, or first, versus complex, or second; illiteracy versus literacy). She interrogates the routine and almost automatic logic that segregates what is deemed abstract and ideational from the pragmatic gravitas and political urgency that we tend to secure in empirical, “on the ground” evidence. For Kirby, this notion of material evidence and the weight of its truth claims, together with the corollary belief that the ideational and abstract are entirely other to physical and material reality, promote an insidious political agenda that sustains misogyny, racism, and ecological degradation as inevitable. By underlining the implicated ecologies of life whose dynamic cross-overs and impurities are also manifest in our thought structures, we are challenged to work with/in a sense of corruption that is irreducible and not simply negative.

ROMAN PORTS IN THE LOWER TIBER VALLEY: COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO REASSESS ROME'S PORT SYSTEM

This paper presents an innovative study of the port system of Rome in Imperial times through the application of an integrated approach to both archaeological analysis and material evidence. Specifically, it seeks to provide a more complete contextualization and understanding of the port system of Rome by focusing on the exploration of the physical geography of the river Tiber and its transformations in connection with the organization of the port system between the late first century BC and early third century AD. Methodologically, this study is based on the compilation, re-evaluation and analysis of published archaeological and geoarchaeological data and on the application of modelling and simulations techniques within a GIS environment. These foundations and means allow us to reconstruct the development of the river Tiber's historical course in antiquity and its impact on specific organizational aspects of Rome's port system. In this sense, this study provides new insights and avenues of research (applicable to other geographical areas and periods of time) to evaluate the system's changing capacity for transport and the potential existence of a signalling system, in contrast to previous hypotheses on the organization of river traffic along the Tiber.

The Rare Books of the Galway Poor Clares

The Poor Clares of Galway are the oldest surviving convent in Ireland, maintaining a small but important collection of rare books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This essay offers a bibliographical analysis of these rare books in order to sketch the role of reading within the convent from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. By analysing material evidence of reading and circulation practices—signatures, readers’ marks, marginalia, and bookmarks—broader patterns of book usage among the Galway Poor Clares are reconstructed for the first four centuries of existence. The essay concludes with a short bibliographical catalogue of the convent’s special collections.