Suchergebnisse

Executive council Thirty-Fourth Ordinary Session 07 - 08 February 2019 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

"Qatar: Evidence of the Palaeolithic Earliest People Revealed, with full text in both English and Arabic, tells the story of the long and difficult search to discover the identity of the first people to inhabit the sovereign State of Qatar, which is situated on a peninsula, that extends into the Arabian Gulf. The book synthesises the results of extensive fieldwork by the PADMAC Unit with the many diverse historical records and reports of investigations, beginning with Holgar Kapel's, in the early 1950s. The archaeology of the State of Qatar is an important part of the cultural heritage of the world. The loss of archaeological sites to urban and industrial development since the 1950s has been inevitable but the loss of over 30 years of Palaeolithic research in Qatar, an area of prehistoric significance, as a result of academic dissension, is certainly regrettable. The work of the PADMAC Unit in Qatar now marks the end of this Palaeolithic research hiatus."

In the Islamic middle ages, urban histories were for the most part not the kind of chronicle that one might think, covering the political, economic, or cultural history of a particular city over a certain time. Instead, they were a kind of ʿwhoʾs whoʾ directory of names of a cityʾs prominent inhabitants, mostly from as far back as information would be available until the lifetime of the author. In the case of the city of Nishapur, which saw its greatest blossoming between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, there is al-Ḥākim al-Nīshāpūrīʾs (d. 405/1014) foundational Taʾrīkh Nīsābūr , an Arabic work—now lost—on which many later biographers relied. Al-Ḥākimʾs work was continued by ʿAbd al-Ghāfir al-Fārisī (d. 529/1134) in his al-Siyāq li-Taʾrīkh Nīsābūr . The text published here is described as a partial summary of al-Fārisīʾs work, although Frye in his The Histories of Nishapur (p. 10) still regarded it as a fragment of the Siyāq itself