The Plague of Justinian began in 541 and quickly spread over the area of the late antique Mediterranean. There it continued in more than a dozen plague waves until the middle of the 8th century, causing much suffering and a great number of deaths. Academia traditionally debates it as the end of Antiquity. Isochronal, the effect of climate change…[Read more]

The purpose of this book is to analyse the role which the development of the German Altertumswissenschaft at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries had (in combination with the English-French intellectual base) on the birth of the Romantic reception of the ancient traditions in Poland.

Review of said book.

Review of said book.

Kingship has been a political mainstay in human history, even when peoples have lacked monarchic rulers. This essay examines the book of Samuel as a source for the cultural history of ancient Judah, focusing on the question of how Samuel’s representations of monarchy would function for its readers in the early Second Temple era. In this era, w…[Read more]

This chapter focuses on Ezekiel as a text, i.e., a collection of writings meant to be read again and again. As a text, it presents a range of ideas in dialogue with one another—and sometimes in tension—thus providing ample space for continual discussion and reinterpretation of its ideas among its original communities of readers in antiquity. Eze…[Read more]

Public talk for International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University (February 24, 2021) https://youtu.be/77oz4tb8r0Y How did Hindu devotees come to worship an Indian goddess in the ‘Chinese Way?’ What was allegedly Chinese about these rituals and how is this related to the goddess’s Buddhist origins? When did Hindus start to think of Ch…[Read more]

The modern names for the Hebrew vowels (qameṣ, pataḥ, segol, ṣere, ḥiriq/ḥireq, ḥolem, shuruq/shureq, qibbuṣ/qubbuṣ) are derived from a variety of medieval sources. The pair of qameṣ and pataḥ are the oldest, both having evolved in the earliest stages of Masoretic analysis of vocalisation. The remaining names are products of three different…[Read more]

“The narratives of the world are numberless”; yet, all stories may be seen as chapters of a single story, the story of universal evolution as uncovered by contemporary science, with processes of human emergence and cultural development as a prominent backdrop to the understanding of any narrative process. Evolutionary approaches to literary and…[Read more]

Community history projects across Britain have collected and created images, indexes and transcriptions of historical documents ranging from newspaper articles and photographs, to wills and biographical records. Based on analysis of community- and institutionally-led participatory history sites, and interviews with family and local historians,…[Read more]

Pakistan’s religious leaders, ulama, have been put under significant strain in relation to how to deal with questions about the political tensions and violence over the past decade flowing from the Taliban’s role in the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The effects of this fraught environment on religious authority can be seen through the way…[Read more]

This paper discusses the issue of the relationship between theology and religious studies, drawing on certain principles of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical theory. Leaving aside differences between Gadamer and his critics, it is argued that his rehabilitation of prejudice, authority, and tradition as well as his notions of the fusion of…[Read more]

Though the ritual of fasting is common to most of the known religious traditions, its practice and symbolic value may vary considerably. This paper aims at a comparative study into the meaning and significance of this ritual with special reference to the three Semitic religions namely Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Some interesting similarities…[Read more]

This paper deals with the Sufi shaykh Haji Imdad Allah Muhajir Makki’s (1817-1899) efforts for conciliation of different strands of Muslim religious thought in the late nineteenth century with particular reference to his main work on this theme-a short treatise titled Faisalah-i Haft Mas’alah (literally: A Resolution of the Seven Controversies).…[Read more]

Religion, language, and race have been among the most crucial factors behind the formation of various national and communal identities in modern South Asian history. Just like the political division of British India, the complex interplay of these factors also culminated in a bifurcation of linguistic boundaries along the religious lines according…[Read more]

Medieval Hebrew and Syriac scribes both indicated vowels by placing dots above or below their consonantal writing. These vowel points were created in the Late Antique and early Islamic periods to disambiguate the vocalization of important texts, especially the Bible. The earliest step in this process was the implementation of the Syriac ‘diacritic…[Read more]

Dawid bar Pawlos’ Letter on Dots is an eighth-century text that purportedly describes the introduction of some of the dots used in Syriac writing. It also sheds light on the life of a certain Rāmišoʿ of Beṯ Rabban, apparently the same man as the master of pointing named in MS BL Add. 12138. However, most studies of Syriac dots either neglec…[Read more]

Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts with complete vocalisation are rare, a problem which makes reconstructing the pronunciation of the medieval language challenging. This study presents an edition of a Judaeo-Arabic translation of Ecclesiastes from the Cairo Genizah with full Tiberian vocalisation. This manuscript exhibits noteworthy features of dialectal…[Read more]

This article presents new data on links between the various medieval vocalisation traditions of Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic. These include the identification of overlaps in the Aramaic terminology used by Jewish Masoretes and Syriac Christian grammarians and in the phonological theories that underlie them, as well as connections between Syriac and…[Read more]