This is to note that I have received a research grant from the Qatar Foundation for a study of indigenous knowledge of the seasons and time-telling in the Gulf. I have created a separate webpage to indicate progress through updates on the progress. This page is at https://tabsir.net/?page_id=2903
Economy and Material Culture in the Early Islamic Empire
Bi-Weekly, Wednesday, 4-6 pm CEST Starting April 6, 2016
Islamic Material Culture
The Universität Bonn (Bethany Walker), the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (Andreas Kaplony), The Bard Graduate Center in New York (Abigail Balbale), and Universität Hamburg (Stefan Heidemann) are co-operating in setting up a series of webinars in Archaeology of the Middle East, Arabic Papyrology, Islamic Arts and material Culture, and Numismatics of the Middle East.
Why Agriculture?
Why agriculture and the Early Islamic Empire in material culture? Not least Bulliet’s book about the cotton boom (2009) in the Early Empire has stimulated discourse about agriculture and elite culture of the Early Islamic Empire. The webinar tutorial explores different aspects of this agriculture boom in case studies from Central Asia to the Iberian Peninsula. We see a continuation and improvement in efficiency of established forms of irrigation from Late Antiquity to the Early Islamic Empire. The new Muslim elites turned into a landholding class establishing estates and luxurious mansions. The new imperial metropolises created an unprecedented demand in foodstuffs, which was answered by bringnig more land under cultivation and introducing more efficient ways of production. Food had to be transported, and maritime and river routes were established. While some of these developments can be explored through text, material culture and archaeology allows new ways to see this boom in detail. Guest lecturers will include Corisande Fenwick (University College London), Abigale Balbale (The Bard Graduate Center, New York), Sören Stark, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World), and Kristoffer Damgaard (Carsten Niebuhr Institute, Copenhagen), and Bethany Walker (Universität Bonn).
The webinar is part of the ‘Webinar Initiative in Islamic Material Culture’ jointly organized by the Bard Graduate Center, New York, Universität Bonn, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, and Universität Hamburg.
Prerequisites for participation
Spoken and written proficiency in English language. The course is open to all advanced students in B.A., M.A., and PhD programs of Islamic studies, historians, art historians, and archaeologists of the Middle East. All students need a computer, a reliable internet connection, and a headset. In a personal online short skype interview in early April 2016, we will check whether all technical assets are working. Students from Hamburg have to sign up in the campus system ‘Stine’ and to contact Stefan Heidemann as early as possible to register and get the necessary introduction to the technology. Students from universities other than Universität Hamburg are welcome and have to apply with a short CV and a motivation letter in English until March, 15, 2016. These will be emailed to Prof. Stefan Heidemann at: stefan.heidemann@uni-hamburg.de. Preference is given to students from universities within the network of the webinar initiative “Islamic Material Culture”.
http://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/voror/Personal/agricultural-empire-sommer-2016.html
You can download fifty years of publications by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for free. Yes, for free. There are books on the art of Islamic Spain, Egypt, the Near East, etc. Check it out here.
Andreas Kaplony, H-Mideast-Medieval, Saturday, January 2, 2016
The Arabic Papyrology Database (APD) team wishes you a happy New Year. Our present: new, handy features implemented in the APD and many, many more documents . Please, check www.naher-osten.lmu.de/apd under
(a) “Documents”. For 2,571 published documents, we provide the full text of the document and information on the document, while for another 6,281 published and unpublished documents, we give information on the document only. We are proud to offer not only records from Egypt and the Middle East, but also a quite comprehensive list of Arabic documents from Sicily and Spain: click on “Origin” and choose Sicily or Spain. Weekly updates! – For full bibliographical details, check at www.naher-osten.uni-muenchen.de/apb.
(b) “Text”: This is our full text search tool. Many features, including search restricted by time, provenance, document type, etc.
(c) “Lexicon”: This site is completely new and allows you to access the lexicon of all implemented texts in several ways: Looking for a lemma, you will have an overview on all actual realizations, with hyperlinks giving you direct access. You might look for a root, a verbal stem, or a shape/morpheme type (e.g. fÄÊ¿il or faÊ¿Ê¿Äl). Or try Word categories (functional categories) and Domains (semantic categories), independently or in combined searches.
We would be happy to have your feedback on the new features.
Best regards, Eva Youssef-Grob (evamira.youssef@uzh.ch), for the Arabic Papyrology Database team
MENALib is a major resource for find e-texts, manuscripts, etc.
The Digital Islamic Humanities Project at Brown University is pleased to announce its third annual conference, titled “Distant Reading and the Islamic Archive,†which will be held on Friday, October 16, 2015.
Paper abstracts and the full event program may be found on the conference website (http://islamichumanities.org/conference-2015/).
Please note that event will be live-streamed over the web. You may access the webcast beginning tomorrow morning (Friday) at 9:00 am EST.
Speakers and paper titles:
David Vishanoff, “A Customizable Exaptive “Xap†for Charting Currents of Islamic Discourse across Multiple Bibliographic and Full Text Datasetsâ€
Peter Verkinderen, José Antonio Haro Peralta, and Hannah-Lena Hagemann, “Which Muḥammad? Computer-Based Tools for the Identification of Moving Elites in the Early Islamic Empireâ€
Alexander Magidow & Yonatan Belinkov, “Digital Philology and the History of Written Arabicâ€
Elias Muhanna, “Modeling Mannerism in Classical Arabic Poetryâ€
Maxim Romanov, “al-Ḏahabī’s Monster: Dissecting a 50-Volume Arabic Chronicle-cum-Biographical Collection From the 14th Century CEâ€
Seyed Mohammad Bagher Sajadi & Mohammad Sadegh Rasooli, “Automatic Proper Names Extraction from Old Islamic Literatureâ€
Karen Pinto, “MIME and Other Digital Experimentations with Medieval Islamic Mapsâ€
Nir Shafir, “Distant Reading the Material and Bibliographic Record of the Early Modern Islamic Archiveâ€
Eric van Lit, “A Digital Approach for Production and Transmission of Knowledge in Islamic Intellectual Historyâ€
Taimoor Shahid, “Mobile Ethics: Travel and Cosmopolitanism in the Islamic Archiveâ€
Yale University Announces Gift to Establish Center for Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School
Yale University President Peter Salovey and Yale Law School Dean Robert C. Post announced today a $10 million gift to create the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School.
This generous gift is from Abdallah S. Kamel, chief executive of the Dallah Albaraka Group, LLC, a banking and real estate enterprise based in Saudi Arabia.
“Mr. Kamel’s extraordinary generosity will open up exciting new opportunities for Yale Law School and for the entire university,†said President Salovey. “The Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization will enhance research opportunities for our students and other scholars and enable us to disseminate knowledge and insights for the benefit of scholars and leaders all over the world.â€
The center will bring prominent scholars of Islam to the Yale campus for public lectures, seminar discussions, visiting fellowships, and visiting professorships, attracting students from the Law School and other schools at the university to its lectures and other opportunities for collaboration.
Continue reading Center for Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School
This Mountains of Central Asia Digital Dataset (MCADD) consists of a collection of books, journals and maps related broadly to the Himalayas and its outlying attached ranges including the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams, the Pamirs, the Tian Shan and the Kuen Lun as well as the Tibetan highlands and the Tarim basin. These materials are housed in this site, and are freely available for personal non-commercial use and downloading.
Some of this material was originally downloaded from the Google Books website, but often this material from Google has been augmented by the addition of maps and other oversize materials that were excluded when the original Google scans were done and/or the addition of missing pages. For example, the Google scans of the 50 volumes of the Royal Geographical Society Journal, published between 1830 and 1880 do not include any of the oversize maps—these maps have all now been scanned and some 450 maps added in their proper location to each of the journal volume pdf files on the PAHAR website.
Various aids to searching specific topics, such as indexes of articles related to the MCADD geographic area (Himalaya, Tibet and Central Asia) have also been prepared for the more prolific journals, such as those of the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Central Asian Society, and the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Continue reading Mountains of Central Asia Digital Dataset