Conceptual History of the Near East

Conceptual history holds tremendous potential to address a central issue in Near Eastern Studies, namely the formation of modernity in the Near East, provisionally located between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The encounter with European powers, primarily Britain and France, was a decisive historical factor in this formation; and European hegemony is, in fact, inscribed into the very concept of “modernity,” which we take as an historical, rather than analytical, concept. The conceptual formation of modernity in Arabic and Turkish was, however, a multilayered process; involving both ruptures and continuities, intersecting various temporalities, and incorporating concepts from several languages. To interrogate this multilayered process, we suggest the metaphor of the Sattelzeit (Saddle Period) as a heuristic tool, precisely because of its being tied to modernity. Finally, the article will show what conceptual history of the Near East has to offer to conceptual history more broadly.

СФЕРОКОНИЧЕСКИЕ СОСУДЫ ЦАРЕВСКОГО ГОРОДИЩА

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Ancient Iran

One major challenge of the study of ancient Iran is that it does not exist in Western academia as a discrete field of study. Prehistory, for example, which ends in the 3rd millennium in Elam but persists into the 1st millennium bce elsewhere on the Iranian plateau, has been studied primarily by anthropologists, the Iron Age by Assyriologists, the Parthians by classical archaeologists, and the Sasanians by scholars of Iranian studies. As a result, ancient Iran does not belong to any individual academic discipline, and in the context of Near Eastern studies, perhaps its most obvious home, it has been treated largely as an ancillary field. Thus Iran has seen less archaeological fieldwork, including excavation, regional survey, and study of standing architectural remains, than other parts of the Near East. This problem has been further compounded by the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which effectively barred foreign archaeologists from the country and severed contacts between them and their Iranian colleagues. This situation has improved in recent decades, but there are nevertheless relatively few scholars working on ancient Iran and comparatively little scholarship on its architecture, especially compared to Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Egypt, or the Mediterranean. To study Iranian architecture, therefore, it is necessary to extract relevant examples from archaeological reports, both preliminary and final. This is especially true for prehistoric periods before the advent of stone masonry, but even for the Sasanian period most architectural scholarship documents individual sites or buildings. The titles listed here thus provide only the raw material for studying ancient Iranian architecture. This bibliography is dedicated to the memory of David Stronach (b. 1931–d. 2020), a prolific and consummate archaeologist and scholar whose contributions to the study of Iranian architecture have been enormous.

The USSR and Cold War Legacy: Implications for the Current International Agenda

Interview with Michael A. Reynolds, Director of the Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies of Princeton University, USAMichael A. Reynolds is an American historian and political analyst. His teaching and research range over the geography of the Middle East and Eurasia and covers the themes of empire, international relations, nationalism, geopolitics, ethnic confl ict, and religion and culture. He is the author of Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), co-winner of the 2011 American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize, a Financial Times book of the summer, and a Choice outstanding academic title. He is the editor of Constellations of the Caucasus: Empires, Peoples, and Faiths (Markus Weiner, 2016). Reynolds also writes on contemporary issues related to Turkey, Russia, the Caucasus region and U.S. foreign policy. His writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The National Interest, and War on the Rocks, among other venues. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton and an MA in Political Science from Columbia.

Farewell to Tradition: Rationalism of the Biblical Studies in the Later Russian Empire

The article considers the increase in rationalization in the research of Biblical history and its conclusions in the historical works of pre-revolutionary Russia. A. P. Lopukhin wrote his work at the end of the 19th century and his main goal was the Biblical apologetics based on new Near Eastern studies. The works of N. M. Nikolsky, who used materialistic methodology and suppose that the significant part of Biblical stories contains a little historical truth had a great contrast with the views of Lopukhin. The reasons for this evolution connected with two factors: the big successes of foreign Biblical studies and the abolition of censorship restrictions after 1905.

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

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.