Archaeology of Early Chinese Settlement in Southeast Asia

Little historical information is available about early Chinese settlement in Southeast Asia. By the 15th century several Chinese settlements of significant size had formed, but they vanished by the time the Portuguese reached the region. This article surveys the historical literature on these early overseas Chinese settlements, and summarizes the contributions which archaeology can make to clarifying the timing and nature of the process.

On the Concept of an Anatolian-Greek Language Area

This paper aims at presenting some thoughts on the hypothesis of an Anatolian-Greek language area in the second millennium bc comparing different approaches both in the theoretical frames and in the analysis of the linguistic facts. For this purpose, it is necessary to introduce some terminological premises, followed by a selection of methodological issues, which will help explore the putative features that characterize the Anatolian-Greek area (morphological traits such as actionality markers, particles, verbal prefixes as well as special morphological forms; morphosyntactic traits, such as modal particles, sentence particles, absolute participial constructions; lexical units and phonetic features).

Toponyms as a Gateway to Society

Abui is a Papuan language spoken in Alor Island, South-East Indonesia. Although there are rich studies on the Abui language and its structure, research on Abui toponymy, which aids the understanding of language, culture, and society, deserves greater attention. This paper analyzes features of Abui society through Abui toponyms collected using Field Linguistics and Language Documentation methods. It finds that, because place names communicate valuable information on peoples and territories, Abui toponyms reflect the agrarian lifestyle of Abui speakers and, more broadly, the close relationship that the people have with their landscape. Furthermore, Abui toponyms express positive traits in the Abui culture like kinship ties and bravery. Notwithstanding, like other pre-literate and indigenous societies, oral stories are commonly used to explain how places are named. This paper augments the existing Abui toponymic studies on the connection between names and the places they name and provides a deeper understanding of the Abui language, culture, and society.

Magical Amulets, Magical Thinking, and Semiotics in Early Byzantium

The term ‘magic’ is problematic. Magic studies have rapidly developed in recent decades and have suggested various ways of understanding the term, especially regarding objects from the medieval Roman Empire, Byzantium. Two early Byzantine amulets (as case studies) display conventional semiotic structures, which include persuasive analogy, speech-acts, and show-acts. Persuasive analogy, speech-acts, and show-acts – and how they organize information – operate also in religious, medical, and philosophical examples. Accordingly, art, archaeology, and texts of ritual power exemplify intersecting communities of thought and various types of social practices. Magic studies is interdisciplinary, and it encourages critique of modern assumptions regarding authority and of our intellectual colonization of times past. This essay is broad with several object examples across media, written as a conference presentation. Another approach to these semiotic structures on magical amulets – with examination of fewer objects and wider attention to the historiography of magic studies – will appear in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Byzantine Art and Architecture, ed. Ellen Schwartz.

Evaluating Syntactic Annotation of Ancient Languages

In this paper we introduce an extended version of the Vedic Treebank (vtb, Hellwig et al. 2020) which comes along with revisited and extended annotation guidelines. In order to assess the quality of our annotations as well as the usability and limits of the guidelines we performed an inter-annotator agreement test. The results show that agreement between annotators is hampered by various factors, most prominently by insufficient understanding of the content because of the cultural and temporal gap and incomplete knowledge of Vedic grammar. An in-depth discussion of disagreeing annotations demonstrates that the setup of the workflow, too, has a major influence on inter-annotator agreement. We suggest some measures that can help increase the transparency and annotation consistency according to current knowledge of the language when annotating Vedic Sanskrit, or ancient language varieties in general.

Classification of the Parts of Speech in Arabic

In the Arabic linguistic tradition, the classification of the parts of speech (ism ‘noun’, fiʿl ‘verb’, ḥarf ‘particle’) is first introduced by Sībawayhi, who presents the three key elements in his Kitāb (I:1). The section at issue includes the presentation of the elements but does not provide much in terms of grammatical explanation. Nouns are in fact not introduced with their grammatical characteristics, but rather with examples: fa-l-ism: raǧul, wa-faras, wa-ḥāʾiṭ (“and the noun is ‘man’, and ‘horse’, and ‘wall’”) (Kitāb I:1). In addition to nouns, verbs and particles, Arabic grammar further recognized a number of other categories that are not considered as parts of speech but rather fall into the main three. This contribution aims to present relevant classifications of the parts of speech in the Greek and Arabic traditions, with the aim to account for possible external influences on the Arabic formulations, and foster further discussion on the development of the Arabic grammatical disciplines.

Between the Nile and the Red Sea

The Medjay were a group of desert nomads inhabiting the region between the Nile and the Red Sea contemporaneous to the Bronze Age of Ancient Egypt (c. 3100-1050 bce). Well-known from textual sources from Pharaonic Egypt and Kushite Nubia, it has proven difficult to produce basic societal descriptions of the Medjay and their political status, especially in their desert heartland. Most studies dedicated to the Medjay evaluate their presence as a nomadic diaspora and emigres on the Nile or focus on their interaction with the Ancient Egyptian state. These approaches place little emphasis on their indigenous geography and nomadic heritage in the Red Sea Hills. This study takes a very different tact and attempts to reconstruct some basic information on their political geography in their indigenous homeland. Although the sources, both textual and archaeological, are currently scarce regarding a Second Millennium bce desert occupation, they do demonstrate complex arrangements between Medjay political actors and nearby states. Particularly notable was the ability of individual tribes to enact varying policies of entente, détente, and aggression towards their Nile neighbours as well as exercise de facto sovereignty over a wealthy desert consistently threatened by Egyptian and Kushite imperialism.