Bethany Walker

University of Bonn | Uni Bonn · Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg, Islamic Studies

Significance: Our survey found that participants with hemianopia report more difficulties watching video in various formats, including television (TV), on computers, and in a movie theater, compared with participants with normal vision (NV). These reported difficulties were not as marked as those reported by people with central vision loss. Purpo...

During the 2013 and 2014 excavation seasons, a cache of complete ceramic vessels was recovered from a stone-outlined pit sealed by domestic building collapse at the site of Tall ?isban, a Mamluk-era rural site in central Jordan. Among the finds were two whole, handless stonepaste jars of the late 14th century-an extremely rare find in Bilad al-Sham...

Wie bei vielen geisteswissenschaftlichen Disziplinen sind die Wurzeln des modernen Fachgebiets Archäologie – besonders bezogen auf den Nahen Osten – eng mit der Geschichte des westlichen Kolonialismus verflochten. Die Archäologie, wie sie im Nahen Osten und im östlichen Mittelmeerraum betrieben wird, begann als ein koloniales Unterfangen, dessen er...

A program of petrographic analysis of Mamluk-period Hand-Made Geometrically Painted Ware (HMGP), supplemented by hand-made plain vessels and cooking pots, was undertaken as an offshoot of a wider study of the hand-made pottery industries of the 12th–16th centuries in Bilād al-Shām. The aims of the wider project were to establish a chronological fra...

The Silences of the Archives, the Reknown of the Story. The Martin Guerre affair has been told many times since Jean de Coras and Guillaume Lesueur published their stories in 1561. It is in many ways a perfect intrigue with uncanny resemblance, persuasive deception and a surprizing end when the two Martin stood face to face, memory to memory, befor...

ChristianMauder: Gelehrte Krieger: Die Mamluken als Träger arabischsprachiger Bildung nach al-Ṣafadī, al-Maqrīzī und weiteren Quellen. (Arabistische Texte und Studien.) xviii, 234 pp. Hildesheim, Zurich and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2012. ISBN 3 487 14852 6. - Volume 77 Issue 2 - Bethany J. Walker

The settlement decline of the late Mamluk period is one of the most important phenomena in the cultural history of southern Bilād al-Šām and particularly for the Transjordan, as there is a growing belief that the settlement and ecological patterns that developed then laid the foundations for many aspects of modern Jordanian society. It is an issue,...

European travel reports of the 19th century and excavations in Transjordan created the impression that population numbers were strongly reduced during the Islamic periods, leading to 'empty' lands which were only resettled during the early 20th century. This development was considered to be caused by bad (Muslim) governance, nomadic incursions, and...

Le déclin de l'occupation humaine survenu à la fin de la période mamelouke est l'un des phénomènes les plus importants de l'histoire culturelle du Sud du Bilād al-Šām, et plus particulièrement de la Transjordanie, dans la mesure où il est de plus en plus admis que le peuplement et les modèles écologiques qui se sont développés alors sont à l'origin...

The creation of private property from former Treasury lands in the late Mamluk period, and the legal mechanisms that developed to support it, mark important turning points in the history of both medieval Islamic finance and jurisprudence. The following essay explores popular responses in Syria to changes in the rural endowment system as expressed t...

Power politics between rulers and ruled need not always take the form of open conflict. Particularly in rural society, the exercise of and response to state power can express themselves in multiple, nuanced ways and through multiple channels, such as the administrative structure and management of agricultural lands. Power relations based on access...

The medieval and early modern periods (twelfth through nineteenth centuries) are popularly imagined as one of the "dark ages" of Cypriot history, when the island was occupied by foreign forces and its Orthodox Christian heritage suppressed.(1) Fortunately, the last twenty years have witnessed a growing appreciation of Cyprus' medieval and post-medi...

Considered one of the wonders of world by medieval geographers, the Umayyad mosque at Damascus, with its shimmering gilded glass mosaics, had a tremendous impact on medieval Islamic architectural decoration. The mosque was, and continues to be, one of the most celebrated and frequently visited holy places in the Islamic world. One of the largest co...

Transjordan witnessed significant social and economic changes in the last quarter of the 19th century. The introduction of direct rule in the region by the Ottoman government transformed traditional tribal life, resulting in the settlement of formerly nomadic groups, the transition to an agrarian way of life, and the opening up of markets formerly...

"Ayyubid," "Mamluk," and "Ottoman" are the often only vaguely familiar political designations of the Middle and Late Islamic periods of Palestine. Together spanning over seven centuries, their rule of the region began under the leadership of the politically and militarily gifted Salah al-Din (d. 1193), who established the Ayyubid Dynasty, unifying...