Marginalia and Ownership Notes

In this comprehensive study, Gat looks at British policy in the period leading up to the Six-Day War. Although Britain holds center stage in this account, the study discusses in some detail American policy and its effect on the Arab-Israeli conflict. It also focuses on the Middle East water dispute, its impact on future events, and eventually the outbreak of war in 1967. This is a fascinating look at the process by which the Middle East became yet another Cold War playground. To date, most scholars on the Arab-Israeli conflict have focused on the events of the Six-Day War, rather than on the tumultuous years prior to the war. Gat is the first to examine this turbulent yet decisive chapter in the history of the Middle East within the context of the Cold War, while making extensive use of British, American, and Israeli archives.

After the Golden Age - which is usually dated back to early Abbasid period - things began to change in the Middle East. Population decreased, ancient cities declined or were even deserted, and barbaric nomadism spread at the expense of civilised agriculture. In a parallel process intellectual creativity was stifled and artistic originality dried up. Thus even before the capitalist world economy made its influence felt, the once dynamic civilisations of the Middle East were turning into stagnate proto-developing countries: impoverished, disease-ridden and technologically backward. The present study asks a few simple questions about this notion of decline: how extensive and how general was the contraction of agriculture and de-urbanisation and what kinds of explanations can we offer.

Who Are the Jews? A Book Review Who Are The Jews? Volume I-Soul of the Israelites Volume II-A Nation of Philosophers Seymour W. Itzkqff Paideia Publishers, Box 343, Ashfield, MA 01330, 2004/2005 The above two volumes by Seymour W. Itzkoff, Emeritus Professor, Smith College, are part of a three-volume series on the religious, ethnic, and historical meaning of Judaism and its carriers, the Jewish people. The third volume is expected in two or three years, but in view of the challenging synthesis he has achieved in his first two volumes, and the wealth of documented information they contain, it seems appropriate to review these without waiting for the third. Soul of the Israelites spans the time from c. 1250 BCE to 582 BCE. A short introductory chapter outlines the post-Pleistocene Ice-Age migratory patterns of humans in the Middle East, and most notably the Anatolians, Hamites and Semites. The volume concludes with an analysis of the impact of the destruction of the Jewish First Temple, the Babylonian/Chaldean capture of Jerusalem and the transport of thejudean elite to Mesopotamia. A Nation of Philosophers considers the transformation of Judaism by the need for reinterpretation of the by-then (c.539 BCE) ancient writings, and by the attraction of and the struggle with Hellenism, and then with Rome. The concluding chapters concentrate on the transition from the Pharisaic contention to the creation of Talmudic Judaism under the Rabbis, the ultimate political alienation of the Jews, and finally the desperate and intense cultivation of cultural and ethnic endogamy by the Diaspora Jews as aliens in the countries in which they now lived. Itzkoff traces this hidden yet dynamic period to c.1200 CE. Much of both volumes is devoted to the explanation, through recent biblical and historical scholarship, of the tangible shifts and turns of emphasis within Judaism. But there is also an important ethnic component to Itzkoff s presentation of Judaism's origins and evolution that is not so widely known to readers who have not studied the anthropological origins of the ancient Jewish community. The ethnic and historical relationship of the Jews to the events of their origin adds much that is relevant to how that world of yesterday has shaped our understanding of the presentday world. The dilemmas of ethnic controversy are not unknown to us. Clarifying the historical evolution of the Jewish peoples helps us understand more clearly the nature of ethnicity and the history of the Middle East and even of Europe. Because these two volumes deal with the early origins of the Jewish nation, the author does not here become involved in more recent questions, such as the disparate demographic and cultural histories of the Sephardic and Ashkenazi branches. We will have to await the third and final volume to find out what Itzkoff has to say about Jewish history over the past eight centuries. Soul of the Israelites Itzkoff believes that the Hamites and Semites were a Caucasoid people whose common ancestors had acquired their distinctive racial characteristics during the Paleolithic, probably in more northern parts of Western Eurasia, but who in the course of time had expanded southwards, where they would have found life easier, especially at the edge of benign river valleys. This is also the sense of Genesis, as wanderers eternally seeking a new land of milk and honey, the people of Abraham eventually moved into the region of Ur, the ancient Sumerian city, then into Haran, a Hurrian/Mitanni city in northern Mesopotamia, before finally seizing the land of Canaan. Who were the Hurrians? Itzkoff regards them as IndoEuropean, and often speaks of the Hurrians, Hittites, and Mitanni as Indo-Europeans, but in this he may be questioned. Most scholars believe that the majority population of these states were a pre-Indo-European people of Anatolian origin, who were dominated by a small Indo-European ruling class. …

One of the most intriguing minority groups in the Middle East is now a thousand years old. It emerged in the city of Cairo, spread to what is today Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, and subsequently became known by outsiders as Druze (in Arabic, Durooz, meaning Druzes). Druzes have played a major role in the history of the Middle East and often been misunderstood by neighbors and outsiders because of their esoteric religious doctrine, the secretive nature that such a doctrine has instilled in them, and the variety of perspectives or divisions prevalent among members of the community. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Druzes covers their history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Druzes.

The Iran-Iraq War is one of the largest, yet least documented conflicts in the history of the Middle East. Drawing from an extensive cache of captured Iraqi government records, this book is the first comprehensive military and strategic account of the war through the lens of the Iraqi regime and its senior military commanders. It explores the rationale and decision-making processes that drove the Iraqis as they grappled with challenges that, at times, threatened their existence. Beginning with the bizarre lack of planning by the Iraqis in their invasion of Iran, the authors reveal Saddam's desperate attempts to improve the competence of an officer corps that he had purged to safeguard its loyalty to his tyranny, and then to weather the storm of suicidal attacks by Iranian religious revolutionaries. This is a unique and important contribution to our understanding of the history of war and the contemporary Middle East.

SummaryThe Middle East region is important to understand human evolution and migrations but is underrepresented in genomic studies. Here, we generated 137 high-coverage physically phased genome sequences from eight Middle Eastern populations using linked-read sequencing. We found no genetic traces of early expansions out-of-Africa in present-day populations but found Arabians have elevated Basal Eurasian ancestry that dilutes their Neanderthal ancestry. Population sizes within the region started diverging 15–20 kya, when Levantines expanded while Arabians maintained smaller populations that derived ancestry from local hunter-gatherers. Arabians suffered a population bottleneck around the aridification of Arabia 6 kya, while Levantines had a distinct bottleneck overlapping the 4.2 kya aridification event. We found an association between movement and admixture of populations in the region and the spread of Semitic languages. Finally, we identify variants that show evidence of selection, including polygenic selection. Our results provide detailed insights into the genomic and selective histories of the Middle East.

This article investigates the challenge for international society in understanding ISIS’s continuing presence in Iraq and which aspects of international law may be applied so as to allow ISIS to be better held responsible for its actions. Particular emphasis is placed on the nature of an internal conflict and the rules of international law that apply to such conflicts. There is also a wider analysis of the difficulty in contextualizing ISIS within the prevailing Westphalian framework of an international society predicated on independent sovereign states. As such, the article explores aspects of international relations and the history of the Middle East, as well as international law.

Are Georgian-Sasanian Coins an Indicator of a Georgian Strive for Independence within the Sasanian Empire

Even if such influential developments in the history of the Middle East as madrasas, Sunnism, and the use of Persian for official purposes did not originate in the Seljuq period, it was then that they grew and spread. Yet to what extent the Seljuq dynasty itself deserves credit for them is debatable, and one could argue that in many ways the sultans were but bystanders to historical processes over which they had little control. The institution of the atabegate, the guardians for royal princes, was perhaps a more genuinely Seljuq contribution, although its origins are so obscure that even this is questionable. More durable, and more certainly Seljuq, was the political legacy of the dynastic name itself, by linking themselves to which later rulers sought to add lustre to stories of their own origins. Throughout history, rulers have grappled with the question of how to justify their existence, and for new dynasties needing to explain the processes by which they have acquired the right to rule, this problem is always particularly acute. For centuries after the demise of the last Seljuq rulers of Anatolia, the Ottomans promoted their own legitimacy by claiming that they had inherited sovereignty from their predecessors, while their opponents tried to establish that they themselves were the Seljuqs' true heirs. In this chapter, we shall explore how the Seljuqs came to have such a lasting political influence on subsequent generations. In addition, nostalgia for the dynasty as well as political necessity gave rise to an important literature, with the composition of numerous Saljūqnāma s or ‘Books of the Seljuqs’ commemorating the dynasty's deeds, some of which are major historical sources.

In the present situation of the Middle East, aggrandizement of ethnicity and ethnographic issues and conflicts is a kind of ignorance of the process of history. This only happened in developing countries under the forces of exterior powers. This kind of approach is considered as “Social Dementia” in social sciences, “Social Dementia” encourages a nation to live in the past and ignore the present (Yordshahian, Ethnic genealogy & national survival. Farzan Publishers, Tehran, 2001) A blind approach to such a point of view will cause disintegration; what exactly happened throughout the history of the Middle East. People of every country gain their identity under the flag of integration of ethnic groups, and it is a preface to reach a global identity as a nation. The present discussion focused on study of ethnicity and ethnic groups of Iran, based on their cultural values and social approach. How we treat a multi-cultural nation is what should be described in detail. During the field work related to the present study, many interviews with local inhabitants all over the country have been done.

This concluding chapter argues that late Roman Syria was a place where linguistic frontiers did not translate into cultural boundaries. The Arab conquests of the seventh century did not change this; instead, the prestige their new scripture enjoyed added a third literary language, Arabic, to the mix of a region with an already rich history of intercultural exchange. Moreover, religious dynamics continued as they had for centuries—viewed against the background of post-Chalcedonian Christian–Christian interaction, the scope and nature of Christian–Muslim interaction looks very familiar. Ultimately, in trying to place the existence of the Middle East's population of simple Christians not just into this story, but at its center, this book has attempted to capture some of the excitement and interest of this process in a way that does justice to all of the people living there, not just a small subset of them.

If 1955 was a turning point in the history of the Middle East, 1954 set the stage for this drama. At the periphery, Turkey and Pakistan concluded a defense treaty that aimed at bridging the North Atlantic Trea y Organization (NATO) and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), a move inspired by Great Power politics and as yet of no direct interest to the Arab world. But in August 1954, Nuri al-Said resumed power at Baghdad and at once set out to engineer Iraq’s inclusion in the treaty, and in doing so turned the alliance into a lever to achieve Iraq’s dominance in the Arab world.

"PETER CHRISTENSEN, The Decline of Iranshahr: Irrigation and Environments in the History of the Middle East, 500 B.C. to A.D. 1500. Museum Tusculanum Press: University of Copenhagen, 1993. $58.00." published on 01 Jan 1996 by Brill.

Between Europe, Turan, and Orient. Spacial Concepts in Modern Azerbaijani Historiography and History Politics The Spatial Turn remains an important topic within the European and particularly German-speaking community of historians. These theoretical debates are not broadly used by historians in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. However, national historiography, which emerged at the turn of the 19th / 20th century, articulated its own special thought by creating the imagined spaces of Turan, Europe, and Orient. Azerbaijan itself was traditionally seen by the national historians as an area, where the Azerbaijani language and culture were widespread: e.g. the northern part of Iran was called “Southern Azerbaijan”. As result of their socialization, education and personal experience in Baku, some Azerbaijani historians depicted “Great Azerbaijan” within the Turkish-speaking historical area (concept of Turan). Other groups of historians and linguists involved in post-Soviet history-writing integrated Azerbaijani history into the history of the Middle East, emphasizing its close ties with the Muslim East (Sərq). Other groups of historians see Azerbaijan as a part of Eurasia by declaring the Caucasus an integral part of Europe, which also has strong bonds with Asia and Russia.

CONCLUSION: Dark Matter and the History of the Middle East