Middle Eastern history Books

Book SynopsisThe University Museum excavated at Beth Shan from 1921-1934, when stratigraphical methods were first being developed. For this study the two Late Bronze levels (VII and VIII) have been reevaluated by the careful analysis of field records, photographs, and drawings along with the restudy of all artifacts housed in The University Museum and a selection of objects in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem. The structures of these levels have parallels in New Kingdom Egypt and Late Bronze/Early Iron Age sites of southern Levant and the Sinai. Included are contributions by 13 specialists on specific classes of objects and technologies.University Museum Monograph, 85

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Book SynopsisFor decades, Israel and Palestine have been locked in ongoing conflict over land that each claims as its own. In 2011, the author lived in Ramallah in Palestine's occupied West Bank and taught in nearby Jerusalem. In this book, he offers a personal take on the conflict.

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Book SynopsisA general treatment of the major players and historical events of the Roman Empire during Jesus' life.

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Book SynopsisThe Middle East and its people have a long, complex historyâwhat better key to unlock their mysteries than BarCharts' newest 6 page study guide? Inside you'll find important facts and definitions, as well as up-to-date timelines covering every key event that has occurred within the region. Whether you're a student or a Middle East scholar, there's much to discover in this handy reference tool.

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Book SynopsisThe workshop “People on the Move: Framework, Means, and Impact of Mobility across the East Mediterranean Region in the 8th to 6th Century BC,” held at the University of Basel in Switzerland from 3-6 August 2015, which forms the basis of this volume, addressed the question of how the increased cross-regional mobility of people and commodities in the wake of the Kushite, Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and early Achaemenid expansions into the eastern Mediterranean affected travellers, the communities they left behind, and the communities that received them. As demonstrated by the papers published here, the diversity of the sources this period and place requires a large number of specializations, both within the various area studies and regarding cross-regional connectivity. Trade Review Table of ContentsINTN INTRODUCTION The Eastern Mediterranean Area of Connectivity in the 8th-6th Century BCE-Setting an Agenda Melanie Wasmuth ARTICLES ‘He Will Raise an Ensign to a Nation Afar, Whistle to One at the End of the Earth’: The Assyrian and Babylonian Armies as Described in Prophetic Texts and Mesopotamian Inscriptions Idan Breier Egypt and Assyria in Isaiah 11:11-16 Dan'el Khan Pharaonic Prelude-Being on the Move in Ancient Egypt from Predynastic Times to the End of the New Kingdom Heidi Köpp-Junk The Standard of Living of the Judean Military Colony at Elephantine in Persian Period Egypt Alexander Schütze Cultural and Religious Impacts of Long-Term Cross-Cultural Migration Between Egypt and the Levant Thomas Staubli Cross-Regional Mobility in ca. 700 BCE: The Case of Ass. 8642a/IstM A 1924 Melanie Wasmuth Synthesis: Summaries and Responses: The Editors & Authors

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Book Synopsis"Indispensable reading for anyone who wants a wider understanding of the Islamic world, of its history and its politics." -Financial TimesAatish Taseer's fractured upbringing left him with many questions about his own identity. Raised by his Sikh mother in Delhi, his father, a Pakistani Muslim, remained a distant figure. Stranger to History is the story of the journey he made to try to understand what it means to be Muslim in the twenty-firstcentury. Starting from Istanbul, Islam's once greatest city, he travels to Mecca, its most holy, and then home through Iran and Pakistan. Ending in Lahore, at his estranged father's home, on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed, it is also the story of Taseer's divided family over the past fifty years. Recent events have added a coda to Stranger to History, as his father was murdered by a political assassin. A new introduction by the author reflects on how this event changes the impact of the book, and why its message is more relevant than ever.

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Book SynopsisThis book continues the personal story of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1920–1994) that began with The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood. Jabra was one of the Middle East's leading novelists, poets, critics, painters, and translators (he was the first to translate The Sound and the Fury into Arabic), and is the writer who is given credit for modernizing the Arabic novel. This book not only helps us understand Jabra as a writer and human being but also his times in post–World War II Baghdad when Iraq was enjoying an unprecedented period of creativity in literature and the arts.As a bright and inquisitive young man he became friends with the archeologist Max Mallowan and his wife, who, he later learned, was Agatha Christie (she wrote The Mousetrap during this period, in a little mud brick room). Jabra's intellectual autobiography quickly developed as he traveled to Jerusalem, Oxford, and Harvard University, where he studied with I. A. Richards and Archibald MacLeish. A number of different teaching posts in Baghdad provided him opportunities to become friends with many leading poets, such as Buland al-Haydari and Tawfiq Sayigh; historians like George Antonius; and the renowned translators of Arabic literature Desmond Stewart and Denys Johnson-Davies.But this book is not only about matters of the mind, it is about matters of the heart as well. Jabra beautifully describes his lengthy love affair with a young Muslim woman, the beautiful Lamica, whom he first met near Princesses' Street and whom he eventually married. He recounts all of the difficulties they had to surmount, and the pleasures to be had.This is the last book that Jabra published during his lifetime. Not only is Jabra's life an outstanding example of the circumstances—and fate—of the Palestinian in the twentieth century, but it also provides countless interesting insights into the cultural life of the Middle East in general and its modes of interconnection with the West.Trade ReviewThe sheer variety of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's interests and talents means that this memoir provides a wealth of information and insight on the confrontation and blending of political, social, and cultural principles and ideals that were so much a part of the inter- and post-war period that are the primary focus of this work. There is much to enjoy and much to ponder." —Roger Allen, professor of Arabic and comparative literature, University of Pennsylvania, translator of many books by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Naguib Mahfouz

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Book SynopsisThe 2005 winner of the The Arkansas Arabic Traslation Award, sponsored by the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas and the University of Arkansas Press, though written in the nineteenth century, is a richly contextualized precursor of modern Muslim wrestlings with notions of democracy and constitutionalism. Translated by the distinguished Middle East historian L. Carl Brown, this important historical work is now available to English language readers for the first time.Toward the end of his long career as an official in the Tunisian government, Ahmad ibn Abi Diyaf (Bin Diyaf) took on the task of writing a history of his country. The result was a multivolume history, concentrating on the period that Bin Diyaf experienced first-hand from within the small circle of Tunisia's government, where he had served from the 1820s to the 1860s. It was as if a Harry Hopkins, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., or Henry Kissinger had served not just a Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Nixon, but all three presidents for an unbroken forty-year period. Not only the most penetrating and most perceptive study of nineteenth-century Tunisian political life, Bin Diyaf's history was illustrative of the activities and ideas in play throughout the larger Ottoman world.His work was a history with a thesis. Bin Diyaf sought to show the need for his country, and for that matter the larger Ottoman world, to adopt representative and responsive forms of government as existed in Europe.His purpose was most clearly set out in the Muqaddima or Introduction to his monumental work, which Brown has translated. The ideas produced in this text roughly a century and a half ago were not institutionalized, but they did catch hold as ideas and goals influencing later developments.Trade ReviewL. Carl Brown's skillfully crafted translation of the Muquaddima nicely conveys both the substance and flavor of this political treatise. . . . His ideas have remarkable resonance today, as Muslims and non-Muslims again struggle to comprehend each other's political ideals and systems." —Kenneth J. Perkins, author of Port Sudan and Historical Dictionary of Tunisia"This translation of the Muqaddima permits readers to encounter an individual operating within mainstream Sunni political tradition while justifying a reorientation of that very tradition. . . . Readers will be grateful to Brown for making Bin Diyaf's version available in English." —William L. Cleveland, author of A History of the Modern Middle East

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Book SynopsisDuring the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American Protestant missionaries attempted to export their religious beliefs and cultural ideals to the Ottoman Empire. Seeking to attract Orthodox Christians and even Muslims to their faith, they promoted the paradigm of the Christian home as the foundation of national progress. Yet the missionaries efforts not only failed to win many converts but also produced some unexpected results.Drawing on a broad range of sources Ottoman, Bulgarian, Russian, French, and English Barbara Reeves-Ellington tracks the transnational history of this little-known episode of American cultural expansion. She shows how issues of gender and race influenced the missionaries’ efforts as well as the complex responses of Ottoman subjects to American intrusions into their everyday lives. Women missionaries married and single employed the language of Christian domesticity and female moral authority to challenge the male-dominated hierarchy of missionary society and to forge bonds of feminist internationalism. At the same time, Orthodox Christians adapted the missionaries’ ideology to their own purposes in developing a new strain of nationalism that undermined Ottoman efforts to stem growing sectarianism within their empire. By the beginning of the twentieth century, as some missionaries began to promote international understanding rather than Protestantism, they also paved the way for future expansion of American political and commercial interests.

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Book SynopsisFINALIST -- The National Jewish Book AwardIn this deeply personal journey of discovery, Ami Ayalon seeks input and perspective from Palestinians and Israelis whose experiences differ from his own. As head of the Shin Bet security agency, he gained empathy for "the enemy" and learned that when Israel carries out anti-terrorist operations in a political context of hopelessness, the Palestinian public will support violence, because they have nothing to lose. Researching and writing Friendly Fire, he came to understand that his patriotic life had blinded him to the self-defeating nature of policies that have undermined Israel''s civil society while heaping humiliation upon its Palestinian neighbors. "If Israel becomes an Orwellian dystopia," Ayalon writes, "it won''t be thanks to a handful of theologians dragging us into the dark past. The secular majority will lead us there motivated by fear and propelled by silence." Ayalon is a realist, not an idealist, and many who consider themselves Zionists will regard as radical his conclusions about what Israel must do to achieve relative peace and security and to sustain itself as a Jewish homeland and a liberal democracy.

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Book SynopsisLisht, twenty miles south of Cairo, has been the site of excavations since its discovery in 1906, and since that time scholars at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art have published a series of volumes about this Middle Kingdom site. This new book in the series “Egyptian Expedition Publications of The Metropolitan Museum of Art” focuses on the architecture of the pyramid complex of King Amenemhat I, which was built on a foundation using Old Kingdom blocks. The publication brings together new information obtained from numerous expeditions and many years of research and analysis. It includes photographs from the original finding in the early 20th century as well as new, unpublished drawings of wall reliefs and inscriptions. Documenting an area of excavation in Egypt that has suffered recent damage and continues to be threatened, this book provides indispensable insight to students and scholars of Egyptian archaeology and architecture. This sumptuously produced large-format volume contains 99 plates, 41 of them in colour.

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Book SynopsisWar and Collapse is the third volume in a series that covers the last years of the Ottoman Empire. It stems from a three-day international conference at which scholars examined the causes and consequences of World War I, with a focus on how these events pertained to the Ottoman state and society. Fifty-three scholars—both new and established—contributed to this collection, explaining what happened within the Ottoman Empire before and during WWI and how ethnic and national groups constructed these events to enhance their identities and promote their interests.The chapters provide insight into the mindsets of Ottoman peoples, showing how earlier events and circumstances set in motion Ottoman responses to the war and how continued conflict had devastating, irreversible effects on Ottoman society. What emerges is a comprehensive picture of the events, encompassing a wide variety of perspectives.Trade Review“In a field of growing interest, this volume will be useful for those wishing to learn more. It is by far the most compendious assemblage of relevant material.” —Norman Stone, author of The Eastern Front 1914–1917 “This collection of new and old approaches reveals that there is still much to be said about World War I that requires an Ottoman angle. The field is richer because of this valuable addition to the scholarship.” —Isa Blumi, author of Reinstating the Ottoman Empire

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Book SynopsisPioneer to the Past tells the intensely human, often poignantly moving story of the brilliant career of James Henry Breasted, one of the greatest Egyptologists and archaeologists America has produced. Breasted's greatest achievement was the founding of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago in 1919, through the generous support of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The Oriental Institute embodies Breasted's vision of an inter-disciplinary research center that unites archaeology, textual studies and art history as three complementary methodologies to provide a holistic understanding of ancient Near Eastern civilizations, and the ways that they laid the foundations for what we think of today as "Western civilization." Breasted's legacy continues to flourish today. Reprint of the Scribner's Sons 1943 Edition, with New Foreword and Photographs. Now available in paperback

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