Near East

In this paper, we discuss about when the first occupation of Europe took place. According to the present-day data, the South of Europe was occupied before the northern latitudes. The first evidences have an age of around 1.3–1.4 Ma. The lithic technology utilized by these humans is simple, and can be classified as Mode 1. This technology does not have handaxes, cleavers, and neither complex strategies of production. Probably the access to Europe during the Lower Pleistocene was accomplished through the Near East. An ...

Until 1993 there were conducted first excavations in what promised to be the site of one of the most important buildings of Petra, the stunning capital of the Nabataean kingdom. Its construction, whose initiation century BC, several changes, reconstructions and landslides along its more than five hundred years of operation. But despite this still unknown for certain functions for which it was designed and that, regardless of the construction elements, materials have been located just still less inscriptions that shed some light on a mystery that will try here exhibit various theories that enable closer to resolution.

Qualitative data were collected from interviews with 100 Bedouin-Arab husbands, wives, children, and some extended family members of polygynous families in the Negev of Israel. Respondents were selected on the basis of self-reported levels of family functioning. Distinct contrasts were found between familial relationships in high functioning families and low functioning families. Differences occurred between husbands of low and high functioning families regarding reasons for a second marriage, how the marriage was received, and relationships with wives and their children. Such constructs can help enrich anthropological theory and improve professional psychosocial intervention. (Bedouin-Arab, family functioning, Middle East, polygynous families)

After the death of Alexander III of Macedon, the Seleucid Empire emerged as one of the most powerful Hellenistic kingdoms of Asia. His huge territorial extension and the various peoples who came under their control necessitated the creation of a mighty army that would ensure their control and help protectit from its enemies.

Throughout history, the Seleucid military might demonstrated
many times its importance for the maintenance, expansion and defense of the Empire. Rarely the Seleucid army was defeated in a campaign and it happened in front of the almighty Rome. After the defeat at Thermopylae and Magnesia, and following the imminent withdrawal must conquer the Ptolemaic Empire, the new king Antiochus IV Epiphanes held a military parade as never been done before, its real purpose is unknown, but the Seleucids showed the world the power that still had the Empire. Through the stories of several classic sources, we can come closer to this event and what
it could entail.

The Assassins of Alamut are presented in popular media and academic studies as the 11th century forerunners of today's "suicide terrorists"---thus producing a genealogy of spectacular Middle Eastern suicide-homicides that stretches back some 900 years.

"Sex, Lies, and Paradise" analyzes accretions of stories about the Assassins: to see how the Assassins got their name, were believed to anticipate an Islamic paradise in the afterlife, and came to represent for the West a volatile nexus of sex and violence.

This effort of literary archeology considers both eastern and western fabulations, and examines in particular how two popular, widely-circulating European texts---Marco Polo's Travels, and Mandeville's Travels---were key in shaping western understanding.

The article begins and ends by reflecting on the stakes involved---today, and in the past.

The work has the objective to present the homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible through the passages of Levíticus 18:22, 20:13; Deuteronomy 22:5, 23:18-19; 1st King 14:24, 15:12, 22:46; and 2nd Kings 23:7; to analyse the relations of prostitution cultual masculine of terms found in Deuteronomy 23:18-19 (qadesh and keleb); region of the Near Easts terms made a list to ritual homosexual worships role (qaditu and assinu); ritual deities with the masculine rite (Asherah of 2 Kings 23:7 and Astarte of Kítion in Cyprus connected with keleb in Deuteronomy 23:18-19) what they are with the fertility rites; to work the historical context in which the ritual homosexuality was developed in Israel and Judá (1st Kings 14:24, 15:12, 22:46 and 2nd Kings 23:7); and the question of the abominations and injunctions so much of the homosexuality (Levíticus 18:22 and 20:13) how much of tranvestism (Deuteronomy 22:5). The research will be carried out through several academic's studies which wrote about the subject of homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible and on his lifted questions and conclusions.

For much of the past three decades, soccer constituted the only major battleground that rivalled Islam in the creation of alternative public space in a swath of land stretching from the Gulf to the Atlantic coast of Africa. Away from the glare of the international media, soccer provided a venue to release pent-up anger and frustration and struggle for political, gender, economic, social, ethnic and national rights. By the time the Arab revolt erupted in December 2010, soccer had emerged as a key non-religious, non-governmental institution capable of successfully confronting security force-dominated repressive regimes and militant Islamists.

Increasingly over the past two decades, soccer became a high-stakes game, a political cat-and-mouse contest between fans and autocrats for control of the pitch and a counterbalance to jihadi employment of soccer as a bonding and recruitment tool.  All participants in the game banked on the fact that only soccer could capture the deep-seated emotion, passion and commitment evoked by Islam among a majority of the population in the Middle East and North Africa.

As a result, professional soccer inevitably emerged as an early casualty when protests spilled into the streets. Suspending league matches is one of the first steps embattled Middle Eastern and North African leaders take when mass anti-government protests erupt. They understand the soccer pitch's potential as an opposition rallying point.

Syria's indefinite suspension of professional soccer in early 2011 in advance of the government's violent crackdown pushed anti-government protests back into the mosque. With soccer stadiums inaccessible to the public and serving as detention centres and staging points for security forces, protests more often than not start at a mosque, the only remaining place where people can gather in numbers.

The suspension of professional soccer when protests initially erupted in Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria meant that militant, highly politicised, violence-prone soccer fans shifted their protest from the stadium to the square. They often played a unique role in helping protesters seeking to rid themselves of the yoke of repressive rule, economic mismanagement and corruption to break through the barrier of fear erected by neo-patriarchal autocrats that had condemned them to silence and passivity until then.

Neo-patriarchy is what makes Arab authoritarianism different from dictatorships in other parts of the world. Dictatorial regimes are not simply superimposed on societies gasping for freedom. Arab autocracies may lack popular support and credibility but their repressive reflexes that create barriers of fear are internalized and reproduced at virtually every layer of society. As a result societal resistance to and fear of change contributed to their sustainability.

In a controversial book  published in 1992 that is still banned in many Arab countries, Palestinian-American historian Hisham Sharabi argued that Arab society was built around the “dominance of the father (patriarch), the centre around which the national as well as the natural family are organized. Thus between ruler and ruled, between father and child, there exist only vertical relations: in both settings the paternal will is absolute will, mediated in both the society and the family by a forced consensus based on ritual and coercion.” With other words, Arab regimes franchised repression so that society, the oppressed, participated in their repression and denial of rights.

The regime is in effect the father of all fathers at the top of the pyramid. In the words of Egyptian journalist Khaled Diab, Egypt’s problem was not simply an aging president with little to show for himself after almost thirty years in power, but the fact that “Egypt has a million (president Hosni) Mubaraks.”

As a result, the patriarchal values that dominate soccer in addition to its popularity made it the perfect game for neo-patriarchs. Their values were soccer’s values: assertion of male superiority in most aspects of life, control or harnessing of female lust and a belief in a masculine God.

In breaking through the neo-patriarchal barriers of fear, militant soccer fans extended the tradition of soccer’s close association with politics across the Middle East and North Africa that is evident until today in derbies in Amman, Tehran, Riyadh and Cairo, home to the world's most violent encounter on the pitch.

Their battle on the pitch is not just about the political and economic future of the region. It is also a battle that challenges gender prejudice in asserting women's rights to play the game against the odds of legal restriction, social pressure and religious dress codes. And it is a cornerstone in efforts by the stateless -- Palestinians and Kurds -- to obtain a state of their own or by minorities like the Berbers, Iranian Azeris and Israeli Palestinians to assert their identity.

In this essay, I discuss the role of the soccer pitch as a venue for resistance to autocratic regimes and a battlefield for greater political freedom and economic opportunity, statehood, identity politics, and gender rights as well as an arena of competition with militant jihadists. This positions soccer as a platform on which multiple political battles are fought in both autocratic Middle Eastern and North African societies as well as those that enjoy some degree of political openness.

The article highlights the creation of the Maison Bonfils photographic collection and its transformation into a museum archive by the Harvard Semitic Museum. On the one hand, it examines the archiving of reality through photographic practice and analyses the epistemological premises of documentary photography applied to the object "The Holy Land. " On the other hand, it describes the transformation of the Bonfils collection into a corpus and its reception by the scientific community of the Ancient Near East. In both cases, we observe the implementation of a literal conception: on the one hand, the geographical territory is interpreted as the perfect equivalent of the biblical text and, on the other hand, the photographs of this territory are used as an immediate and totally transparent document of the historical reality of the 19 th century.

Abstract: Even if rather poor compared to other areas of the Ancient world, the lychnological bibliography and hence knowledge on lamps produced or imported in the Near East and Egypt has witnessed a small ‘boom ’ in the last twenty years. Erasing too many approximations, we were forced to use before, lacking of data issued from in-depth studies made on large corpuses, provided either by large museum collections or from recent excavation stratigraphic contexts. Five books recently appeared, widening dramatically the number of published artefacts and allowing further new reflections. This study is devoted to underline and bring to the researchers ’ awareness the most recent and the most important lamp studies published about materials from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the Holy Land and Egypt for a better understanding of the frame in which these five volumes, analysed at the end of the paper, fit in.

This PhD research challenges current scholarly debate on religion and religious architecture during the Roman Empire by offering a new understanding on the role of rural sanctuaries and a new approach on the subject. It re-evaluates the socio-economic significance of rural sanctuaries, and of the society that they represent, to a regional level and in a wider context of the Near East. This research can be seen as innovative because scholarly work on Syrian sanctuaries from the Roman period has, up to the present day, mainly discussed their religious connotations, including their architecture and deities, with no reference to their potential socio-economic significance. Furthermore, these studies have mostly focused on sanctuaries in cities rather than rural centres, and a comprehensive analytical overview is still lacking. This thesis demonstrates that a comprehensive analysis of archaeological, iconographic and written evidence placed within a historical and socio-economic context ...

Résumé/Abstract During the years that Conrad Schick was a resident of Jerusalem, between 1846 and 1901, he was in close and constant contact with the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), helping British expedition members working in the field and also, importantly, ...

Kibadachi is a rather simple karate exercise performed during a several-day-long special training, in which the participants squat in a crouching position for an hour and a half without moving. Despite its simplicity, and because its main feature is the immediate and excruciating pain it induces, kibadachi stimulates a kind of permeability between the participants, and also causes changes in the relations between physical and mental parts of their lived body. Following Deleuze and Guattari, kibadachi, and its capacity to dissolve boundaries, is analysed here as a way of becoming a Body without Organs. The participants of kibadachi enter social and somatic dynamics which operate potentiality hidden in their lived bodies, alter boundaries, and reinforce connectedness.Kibadachi is a rather simple karate exercise performed during a several-day-long special training, in which the participants squat in a crouching position for an hour and a half without moving. Despite its simplicity, and because its main feature is the immediate and excruciating pain it induces, kibadachi stimulates a kind of permeability between the participants, and also causes changes in the relations between physical and mental parts of their lived body. Following Deleuze and Guattari, kibadachi, and its capacity to dissolve boundaries, is analysed here as a way of becoming a Body without Organs. The participants of kibadachi enter social and somatic dynamics which operate potentiality hidden in their lived bodies, alter boundaries, and reinforce connectedness.RésuméLe kibadachi est un exercice de karaté relativement simple, exécuté au cours d'un entraînement spécial de plusieurs jours, lors duquel les participants se tiennent accroupis pendant une heure et demie sans bouger. En dépit de sa simplicité, et parce que sa principale caractéristique est la douleur immédiate et cuisante qu'il provoque, le kibadachi suscite une sorte de perméabilité entre les participants et provoque aussi des changements dans les relations entre les parties physique et mentale de leur corps vécu. Dans l'esprit de Deleuze et Guattari, le kibadachi et sa capacité d'abolir les frontières sont analysés ici comme un moyen de devenir un Corps sans Organes. Les participants au kibadachi s'engagent dans des dynamiques sociales et somatiques qui opèrent sur les potentialités cachées dans leurs corps vécus, modifient les frontières, et renforcent les liens aux autres.Le kibadachi est un exercice de karaté relativement simple, exécuté au cours d'un entraînement spécial de plusieurs jours, lors duquel les participants se tiennent accroupis pendant une heure et demie sans bouger. En dépit de sa simplicité, et parce que sa principale caractéristique est la douleur immédiate et cuisante qu'il provoque, le kibadachi suscite une sorte de perméabilité entre les participants et provoque aussi des changements dans les relations entre les parties physique et mentale de leur corps vécu. Dans l'esprit de Deleuze et Guattari, le kibadachi et sa capacité d'abolir les frontières sont analysés ici comme un moyen de devenir un Corps sans Organes. Les participants au kibadachi s'engagent dans des dynamiques sociales et somatiques qui opèrent sur les potentialités cachées dans leurs corps vécus, modifient les frontières, et renforcent les liens aux autres.

This study addresses changes in health which were consequential to the Neolithic transition in the southern Levant, judged on the basis of the study of specific and nonspecific stress indicators, trauma, and degenerative joint disease in 200 Natufian (hunter-gatherer) skeletons (10,500–8300 BC) and 205 Neolithic (agricultural) skeletons (8300–5500 BC) from the southern Levant. The comparison of the health profiles of pre-Neolithic (Natufian) and Neolithic populations reveals a higher prevalence of lesions indicative of infectious diseases among the Neolithic population, and an overall reduction in the prevalence of skull trauma among males. No change over time was observed in the prevalence of degenerative joint disease. These results indicate that in the southern Levant the Neolithic transition did not simply lead to an overall deterioration in health but rather resulted in a complex health profile which was shaped by 1) an increase exposure to disease agents, 2) changes in diet, 3) population aggregation in larger and denser settlements, 4) changes in activity patterns and the division of labor, and possibly 5) a higher resistant immunological system and response capacity to environmental aggressions (mainly infections)

En partant d'une presentation critique du modele de la revolution des « productions secondaires » de Sherratt, les auteurs resument les recentes preuves biochimiques, isotopiques et paleogenetiques de l'exploitation neolithique du lait en Europe. Elles suggerent que l'exploitation laitiere s'est developpee bien avant la revolution des « productions secondaires ». Dans un second temps, ils concentrent leur propos sur les indices osteoarcheologiques au Proche-Orient et en Europe mediterraneenne. En s'appuyant sur les recentes ameliorations des techniques archeozoologiques de construction et d'interpretation des profils d'abattage qui traduisent les strategies de gestion des animaux, ils analysent 36 de ces profils pour les moutons ou chevres (caprines) et 17 pour les bovins. Ils mettent en evidence l'exploitation laitiere des caprines des les tout premiers stades du Neolithique dans les deux regions concernees, et suggerent fortement l'utilisation d...

Drawing on an inquiry into Israel's preparedness for biological threats, in this article I suggest a new analysis of biosecurity events. A complex and dynamic assemblage emerges to prepare for biological threats, one that I call a “pre-event configuration.” The assemblage is composed of three core elements—the scientific element, the security element, and the public health element—each of which diagnoses threats and suggests appropriate solutions. This configuration also determines what will be perceived as an event for which preparation is needed and what will remain a nonevent. I maintain that the constitution of an event takes place beyond the actual time of its occurrence and is determined by the pre-event configuration in the “time of event.” Therefore, a comprehensive analysis of events should combine an examination of actual events and their aftermath with an inquiry into their potentialities as determined by the pre-event configuration. [biosecurity, preparedness, events, disasters]