Biden Priorities and Possible Strategy for Palestinian-Israeli Conflict Settlement

Israeli-U.S. relations are an important factor in U.S. policy in the Middle East. USA maintain Israel as a strategic ally and Israel was granted American “major non-NATO ally” status. United States actively influenced the Israeli regional policy. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict settlement was always America’ the most priority area. Israelis and Americans share the view that the United States has a predominant role and responsibility in the Palestinians - Israeli dispute peace-making. The two-state outcome and critical issue over Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem was a topic of American concerns for a long time relied on bipartisanship support of Democrats and Republicans. During Osama’s presidency D. Biden held post of deputy president and supported no new ideas for restarting negotiations between the sides of the conflict but its policies have failed, from Israel’s refusal to freeze settlement. The next Trump administration however was the “most pro-Israel ever”. Trump’s White House led a radical departure from the U.S.’s traditional role as the honest broker between Israelis and Palestinians. Biden’s victory in 2021 signals restructure Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, rehabilitating a durable two-state formula that establishes political, territorial, and demographic separation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). But uunlike the Obama and Trump administrations, the Biden administration doesn't see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a foreign policy priority. The question is: what really a Biden presidency might mean for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?

About One Detail of the Funeral Rite of Ancient Qabala

This article is devoted to the consideration and interpretation of a peculiar detail of the funeral rite observed at the cemeteries of ancient period in the historical region of Qabala - the capital of Caucasian Albania. Attention is focused on ceramic vessels with intentionally made holes, which were revealed in the burials among the grave goods. The vessels with holes were found in the ground burials of Uzuntala and Gushlar cemeteries of the 1st century BCE – 1st century CE, along with skeletons in a contracted position on their sides; as well as in the catacomb burial of Salbir, dating to the I-III centuries CE. In burials nos. 3–7 of Uzuntala, vessels of this type had holes in the center of their bases, and were placed upside down in the grave. In the catacomb burial of Salbir, 1st – 3rd centuries CE, two vases of the same type had large holes on the side of the body. The specific detail of the funeral rite, which is of a particular nature, has been episodically traced in the territory of Azerbaijan since the Bronze Age and continued to exist until the Late Antique period. It allows us to talk of the existence of a ritual that was carried out during the funeral ceremony and reflected some religious ideas associated with the funeral ideology. The authors of the paper suppose that these vessels should, according to prevailing beliefs, symbolize the “exodus of the soul” of the deceased and have no connection with the custom of damage to the inventory.

Types of Hellenistic Military Settlements in Royal Letters

The article is devoted to the analysis of information on Hellenistic military settlements, which can be found in the extant letters of Seleucid and Attalid kings. We mean the letter of Antiochus III preserved by Flavius Josephus in his Judean Antiquities, and three letters extant as inscriptions on stone: ‘Ikadion’s inscription’ from the island of Failaka in the Arabian Gulf (Kuwait, middle of the 3rd – early 2nd centuries BC), Antiochus V’s letter from Jamnia-on-the-Sea (Palestine, 163 BC) and Eumenes II’s letter from Kardakon Kome (Lycia, 181 BC). The material of the letters allows to conclude, that there were at least two different types of aforementioned settlements: 1) military settlements in proper sense, inhabited by warriors, whose duty was permanent military service, and members of their families; 2) specific settlements where people generally lived peaceful lives being engaged mostly in agriculture, cults of local sanctuaries etc., but also in some military activities like defense of fortresses. Both types could be protected by the kings in the form of partial or full tax exemption, land grants etc., although the second type got less royal attention of that kind than the first one. The existence of the second type can be explained by the fact that the oldest type of army, quite actual in the ancient world, was militia of a community. Thence the second type of settlements can be nothing else than communities, whose militias were used by the Hellenistic kings in their military activities alongside the professional army.

Review of pre-mongol arab-persian sources on the history of qara khitai state: features of the structure and content

This study is devoted to the analysis of pre-Mongol Arab-Persian sources containing information on the history of the Qara Khitai state. This power, formed in 1125 within the borders of East Turkestan, not only quickly becomes a regional leader, finally undermining the power of the Karakhanid rulers, but also interferes in the political processes that took place within neighboring regions. In particular, the Qara Khitai attempt to assert their power in the lands of Transoxiana leads to their clash with the Seljuk ruler, Sultan Sanjar, whose defeat in the battle of the Katavan plain in 1141, of course, to the destruction of his power after 1153, the growth of the power of regional leaders, as well as the strengthening of the Qara Khitai state itself. Up to the beginning of the XIII cent. this political entity will be the most important rival of Khorezm and the Ghurid Sultan in the struggle for dominance not only in Transoxiana, but also in the lands of Khorasan. Among the Arab-Persian sources, when describing this state and its rulers, researchers mainly rely on the monuments of the Mongol era, but in this article we would like to draw attention to the information potential of earlier works on this issue. We will present an overview of the Arab-Persian sources of the pre-Mongol period, containing information on the history of the Qara Khitai state, and highlight the features of their structure and content. We will try to highlight the possible historiographical continuity in relation to the description of the history of the Qara Khitai.

«Cimmero-Scythian» antiquities from Central Anatolia

Central Anatolia is one of the regions of Western Asia, where the most significant concentration of archaeological materials connected with the Eurasian nomads of the early Scythian time is recorded. The flat plains of Central Anatolia had good pastures and served as a space where different cultures communicated with each other since ancient times. In the 7th–6th centuries BC this territory was located between Western Anatolia with Lydia and the eastern Greek centers and Eastern Anatolia, which was the zone of interest of the Urartu and Assyria. Small local "principalities" were localized here. These principalities were probably controlled by well-armed and mobile nomads, who used this territory as a base for raids on neighboring as well as more distant regions. An important and most numerous category of nomad inventory coming from the region is constituted by bronze socketed arrowheads found in burials in the province of Amasya, Imirler, Gordion and on the local settlements (Boğazköy, Kaman-Kalehöyük, Kerkenez Dağ). The article introduces their typology and provides analogies coming from the Eurasian monuments of the 7th–6th centuries BC. The study of early nomadic complexes from Anatolia shows theirsyncretic nature, which is influenced by artifacts of the Cimmerian, Scythian, and Сentral Asian origin as well as the local Near Eastern items. It highlights the complex ethnic composition of the nomadic groups located here in the 7th–6th centuries BC that does not allow attributing all these materials to a single group, for example, the Cimmerians.