A Spear’s article by Teresa Levonian Cole describes the history of Deir al-Surian, ‘Monastery of the Syrians,’ and its remarkable library:
The tower, built around AD 850, contained the monastery’s original library. It might have remained a library like any other, had it not been for a decision by the new vizier to tax the monasteries in Egypt. To plead exemption for Deir al-Surian, Abbot Mushe of Nisibis made his way to the Abbasid capital of Baghdad in 927, and, while awaiting the Caliph’s decision (it was favourable), embarked on a five-year spree that would yield a cache of 250 manuscripts from Syria and Mesopotamia.
This would form the core of his monastery’s collection which, over the years, increased to number Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic and Christian-Arab texts, dating from the 5th to the 18th centuries. They would include biblical, Patristic and liturgical writings, as well as early translations of philosophy, medicine and science, many of whose original Greek texts have been lost.
Of these treasures, the most ancient are the writings in Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Christ), which include the earliest dated Old and New Testament manuscripts ever found in any language: part of the Book of Isaiah, dated AD 459/60, and a Gospel of AD 510.
A great many of its treasures were ripped off — excuse me, I mean “acquired” — by various minions of imperialism like the Egregious — excuse me, I mean Honourable — Robert Curzon, but quite a few remain, and they’re now being well taken care of thanks to the unstinting efforts of the monastery’s new librarian, Elizabeth Sobczynski. The whole thing is well worth a read. (Thanks, Paul!)
Test comment. (I can’t recall having so few comments since around 2003; it’s a little spooky.)
OK, well the moment may have passed, but just to humor you . . . The comment I was going to make earlier is that it was unclear to me why the fashion in which many of the manuscripts apparently first came to the location in question back in the 10th century (from their distant places of origin, with who knows what sort of military/political/economic stresses on their prior custodians) was any more praiseworthy or less imperialistic than the fashion in which some of them subsequently left that location in the 19th century.
Oh, it’s not. History is a messy business.
On the one hand, I share your outrage over Kulturraub, especially as practiced by colonial officers. On the other hand, I have to think of the Séert (Siirt) library destroyed in 1915 during the Armenian genocide. Had Addai Scher, the archbishop of Sért (who himself fell victim to the Genocide), not brought 13 manuscripts to Paris, the whole library would have been lost.
Yup. Like I said, messy.
Curzon wasn’t a conventional “colonial officer” since none of the places he acquired manuscripts from were under British rule – they were under Ottoman rule, and Curzon first became interested in this sort of thing when he was a junior diplomat serving in the British Embassy to the Porte. Perhaps his hosts wanted to humor him and told their dhimmi subjects to cooperate; perhaps the monasteries had the fairly obvious motive of dhimmi subjects of the Caliph/Sultan in currying favor with seemingly well-connected representatives of the various outside Christian (if heterodox) powers who might have an episodic interest in whether the Ottomans’ were treating the Christians subject to their rule well or not. I wonder if by the early 19th C. there was anyone left at al-Surian who could read Syriac.
When Stamford Raffles as shipwrecked on his return to Britain, he lost all his possessions, including a large number of irreplacable Malay manuscripts. I have read that a substantial proportion of the existing corpus was lost, but cannot find a link to that effect.
Cultural looting is pretty integral to historical cultural traditions, though. Rome had plunder down to a routine. Sweden plundered Germany. Venice and Genoa were full of plundered art (in Genoa, some of it plundered from Venice). The horses of St. Mark in Venice came from Constantinople. The greatness of a state was in part the ability to strip lesser states of their treasures.
This I don’t understand. Sinaiticus is from the 4C and aren’t some of the Dead Sea copies of Isaiah &c dated to BCE?
Sili, I am not sure, but I think it means manuscripts containing an explicit date in some form, rather than a date inferred indirectly.
A passage on Kulturraub from Ferdinand Mount’s LRB review of Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East by Jonathan Parry:
I like the final paragraph of the review:
While the British ambassadors who saved these objects are not blameless, I put more of the blame on the Ottoman dictators and their agents who had authority over them and sold them. Just to expand on “by concentrating our fire…” and all that.
I’m expected to feel sorry for thoroughly unsympathetic people portrayed as victims of (presumably smarter?) Europeans from distant past.
And I just don’t give a shit about those people.
I understand that based on their concept of property, to discuss returning a piece of art they need to show that the process of acquisition was wrong.
But I still don’t give a shit about rulers of Egypt. Just don’t give a shit.
If I support transfer of something to Egypt, then because of modern people of Egypt.
Also I don’t believe in this concept of property.
Still, as a way of contrasting the blithe concerns of earlier British adventurism, it is a pretty suggestive passage.
Nobody’s asking you to give a shit about any rulers of Egypt; where did you get that idea?
When cultural treasures are stolen from Ukraine (to take a current example), they’re not being stolen from Zelensky (for heaven’s sake), they’re being stolen from the Ukrainian people.
I don’t think cultural treasures belong to a people either. If so, that people is free to decide to blow them up. They belong to humanity. They also belong in a certain location and cultural context.
This is easy to say, but in real life things get messy when the treasures can’t be left where they ought to be, or when there are competing claims.
Yes, everything you say is true, of course it’s messy, but if they “belong to humanity” they belong to no one; in practical terms, the best way to think of them as the group property of whatever group is relevant to their creation, which of course is very messy indeed, but nobody should have the right to just take them and walk off with them (let alone destroy them).
To restate a point I made nine years ago, the manuscript collection of Deir-al-Surian was from early on full of manuscripts where the “group … relevant to their creation” was not the group whose monastery/library it was. Unless you have a very high-level abstracted notion of relevant-group, like “all Christian groups subject at the time to Muslim rule.”
Right. I don’t have any answers!
I don’t think cultural treasures belong to a people either. If so, that people is free to decide to blow them up.
The Buddhas of Bamiyan come to mind.
the group property of whatever group is relevant to their creation
In the case of the Buddhas, the relevant group would be “Buddhists in Afghanistan”, who haven’t existed since the 14C. But we do hear that there were local (i.e. Muslim Afghani) objections to their destruction. In practice, no one was going to go to war to protect the statues, so that was that. Boom.
Yes, I should have said “whatever group is relevant to their current meaningful existence” or something of the sort. This stuff is hard.
Closer to home, how about the old Penn Station?
As is discussed in another thread , texts have a perceived message or import which in an important sense “trumps” the author’s (or patron’s) stated intentions. This applies to cultural artefacts, which, together with recited poems and songs, were the only texts in pre-literate times. The Ottoman rulers could have clamped down on the venality or iconoclastic zeal of some local representatives and protected artefacts from destruction or sale abroad. It may be that the rulers perceived a threat of rebellion by subject peoples, who would derive positive feelings from their identification with the civilisation that produced the artefacts. In the Afghan case, I would suppose smashing statues is more of a bonding or team-building exercise on the part of a tribal society that feels itself under existential outside threat, but is unable to cooperate effectively because of inter-tribal friction.
@Trond, then the worst catastrophe ever was the Aswan dam – something USSR is proud with (because of participation of Soviet engineers) and something others probably consider a great achievement of Egyptian people.
Yes, I more or less think the same but… My argument is that it is more beautiful when we don’t move monuments. But then other people may have a different concept of beauty.
Some will say: better tells remain tells. Just don’t dig anything… And indeed, modern practices are destructive, obviously 100 years later people would be able to extract more infromation from the [discarded] ground itself.
Perhaps very precise position of sherds will give some information, perhaps traces of wooden objects will be found. Who knows..
It may be that the rulers perceived a threat of rebellion by subject peoples, who would derive positive feelings from their identification with the civilisation that produced the artefacts.
Oh, come now. The combination of greed and indifference is quite sufficient to explain all such things without resorting to Machiavellian calculations.
The old Penn Station is a somewhat easier case. Buildings (not abandoned, not in ruins, not excavated from under a tell) typically have identifiable owners – in that case the old Pennsylvania Railroad, prior to the ill-fated Penn Central merger which rapidly led to bankruptcy. Owners can usually (subject to various legal restrictions) tear down their own buildings if they are no longer useful to them (or are too expensive to maintain in changed economic circumstances etc.) and build something else on the site, subject to zoning laws and blah blah blah. The extent to which “landmark” laws should override that is an interesting question at least under U.S. law, especially to the extent it treats a particular building as part of the “public’s” cultural patrimony yet still expects a private owner to shell out the $ to maintain it. Paintings (if not wall frescos) and manuscripts etc. are mobile in a way that buildings are not, so their owners are less likely to want to destroy them, especially if they can be sold for $. “Cultural patrimony” laws, that e.g. can restrict a private Italian owner of a centuries-old Italian painting from selling it to a non-Italian collector, are nationalistic bullshit. When it comes to archeological artifacts where the intuition that whatever local graverobber dug it up owns it fair and square is less compelling, things may be different.
it treats a particular building as part of the “public’s” cultural patrimony yet still expects a private owner to shell out the $ to maintain it.
Compare and contrast corporations that want to build a stadium for their own profit yet still expect the public to give them a tax break for it.
FWIW, I favor voting against politicians who give sweetheart subsidies to well-connected local businesses (sportsball-oriented or otherwise) on dubious grounds. Although sometimes the politics are more complicated (i.e. the pols are also beholden to the construction unions whose members would make a lot of money building a new government-subsidized white-elephant stadium).
In the case of the old Penn Station, there’s the further complication that the finances of the railroads by the early Sixties were a mess in substantial part because of bad government regulatory choices, primarily at the federal level, not to mention the radical diminution of the revenues from medium/long-distance passenger rail business at least in part because of massive federal subsidy of highway construction beginning in the Fifties.
Private ownership is essentially selfish. Laws are essentially parochial. The economic and practical compromises everyone from passers-by to landowners to national governments have to make are essentially short-sighted. But the fact that there’s even an international discussion of how and by who cultural treasures (whatever that would mean) should be kept is a great thing.
One of those compromises is between digging out or leaving in place. It’s not simple at all. Where I live there’s really no other type of excavation than the rescue excavation to save the information of a site from being lost to nature or development, and archaeologists are unseemly happy when they are forced to dig. And rightly so. You just can’t let everything be in the ground. There’s a present value and a future yield on knowledge too. The development that will let future archaeologists extract more information from a site is fed by the needs and ideas and ingenuity of archaeologists digging now.
And indeed, modern practices are destructive, obviously 100 years later people would be able to extract more infromation from the [discarded] ground itself.
I found out recently that the library of Ashurbanipal (which had famously shattered by having fallen down from the second floor during the fire) is so messy in its current state of preservation not as much because of the fall-caused shattering (though that didn’t help), as because the guy who excavated it (in the 19th century) put the tablet fragments in boxes without much regard for their original placement – and indeed in the same boxes as tablet fragments from the (smaller) library of Sennacherib across the street. Apparently there’s no way to tell now which fragments originally belonged to which library.
Sometimes I wonder how much more could have been known, and how much easier it would have been to reconnect the fragments, if the positions of the pieces were meticulously recorded. It would have made the excavation many orders of magnitude longer, though.
Where I live there’s really no other type of excavation than the rescue excavation to save the information of a site from being lost to nature or development
Novgorod’s excavations are about half that and half deliberate careful examination of pre-selected tiny spots. And yes, lots of interesting stuff ends up (usually by accident) found in the discarded ground piles.
@LH, well, I was tired and sleepy yesterday (or rather it is raining here and it is that sort of prolonged “raining” when everyone wants to sleep. So I’m sleepy now as well). Indeed no unsympathetic types are referenced.
Yet it does not change my emotional perception.
Would it be right to return a certain piece of art? If yes, give it back. “We won’t give it back, but people who took it once were wrong” is crazy. But may be to give it back you first need to show that people who took it were wrong.
And here my problems begin, because
(1) no people from 100 years ago who did not want to give it away, but were forced to are mentioned.
(2) no, I don’t feel hostile to those European explorers. They basically invented the modern concept of archaeology and were in the process of inventing modern value of antiquities.
Should they have foreseen the future when this concept is shared by peoples and states that would appear on the land in 20th century and they want the antiquities back? Was this their fault?
If I start collecting socks and buy my friend’s old socks, and 20 years later both market price of old socks goes up and (apart of market prices) my friend starts seeing her old socks as a critically important part of her heritage I… Guess what.
I give her old socks back. She’s my freind.*
Maybe people who acquired all those antiquities were indeed disrespectful to locals – locals, contemprorary to them, not modern locals whose views they should have foreseen. But then I want to hear this story, I want those locals to be nameda dn their then views described.
* PS well, it can be complicated. I may have a little daughter 20 years later who has grown emotionally attached to my friend’s old socks in my (and my daughter’s) collection.
But anyway, it won’t be : “I won’t give you those socks, but I was such an asshole 20 years ago, sucha n asshole I was! And now I am a good guy but will give you nothing.”
It will be “it is still your socks and have always been. You’re a friend, not a trading partner”.
And something like this has happened (see Trond): value of such things went beyond simple “property” (with an equivalent in money determined by market prices)
@LH, I think my sleepy brain reacted so (rulers as victims of cunning Europeans) at this line: “By concentrating our fire on Elgin, we fail to notice that British ambassadors stripped the Ottoman Empire of many of its ancient treasures.”
And before that
“the first high-profile British ambassador there, Lord Elgin lost little time in extracting a firman from the sultan, giving him some sort of permission to excavate, make plaster casts and remove damaged sculptures from the citadel at Athens (the details remain ambiguous and the firman survives only in English translation). While he was exploiting this dubious permit, his secretary,”
“Egypt” of course came form your original post, I suppose I was thinking about the khedive.
Yes, some of my friends (from formelrly Ottoman lands) love the Ottoman period in history (or rather architecture etc.) of their country. But I’m not going to think of Ottomans better than I think about Russians or Brits just because Brits and Russians won.
All empires are crocodiles. As a placeholder for “the victims” it is nothing more than indefinite placeholder. Yes, I can think that the empire stands for people here, but again!!! what exactly unnamed people though about this all? This is not mentioned or discussed.
It is easier for me to think of modern people and modern actors than to hate some lords from the past.
Me: Where I live there’s really no other type of excavation than the rescue excavation to save the information of a site from being lost to nature or development
J1M: Novgorod’s excavations are about half that and half deliberate careful examination of pre-selected tiny spots. And yes, lots of interesting stuff ends up (usually by accident) found in the discarded ground piles.
I wasn’t completely truthful. There are spot-excavations, and recently there’s been some interesting re-examinations of old sites, including of course the piles of discarded material. But spot-excavations are basically done to check if there’s a risk of loss, and re-examinations to save whatever’s left to learn after the old excavation.
Oh, come now. The combination of greed and indifference is quite sufficient to explain all such things without resorting to Machiavellian calculations.
Hardly. Greed would have preserved the Buddhas as a tourist attraction, as the remains of them are today. Indifference would not have expended the substantial ordnance required for their destruction. The cause was either religious fanaticism (iconoclasm) or resentment that money was being offered for repairs to mere stones but refused for humanitarian purposes.
“I won’t give you those socks, but I was such an asshole 20 years ago, such an asshole I was! And now I am a good guy but will give you nothing.”
How about this? My great-grandfather the pirate stole your treasures but later in life repented and gave them to a public museum, where they are today. You now sue the museum for their return and announce your intention of burning them. Should the museum resist? I think so.
I note that the national patrimony of the U.S. is primarily national parks (which are mostly not cultural) and national monuments (some cultural, some not). In particular, no artifact less than 250 years old (i.e. non-Native) counts as cultural patrimony, except for buildings of historic importance.
I was talking about the Ottomans and their like, not the fucking Taliban, who surely you will agree are an outlier in these matters. Hardly anyone has a goal of destroying art; almost everyone wants to take it and own it. I maintain my statement. “You now sue the museum for their return and announce your intention of burning them” is the strawiest of straw men.
I’d rather not confuse history and modern states. Massive destruction of art is common for history.
Today movable pieces that can be placed in a museum or sold are not usually destroyed.
Destruction of buildings etc. is rather a norm when
(a) an ideology competes with an ideology – compare systematic destruction of mosques and churches in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.
(b) when an ideology presents itself as championing anti-[something] cause in absence of this [something] as an actual competitor.
Massive destruction of art is common for history.
True, of course, and I should rephrase: Hardly anyone has a goal of destroying art as such. Lots of people have wanted to destroy objects that we now consider “art,” like religious buildings and the Buddha statues, or for that matter the icons that got destroyed by the iconoclasts. But only lunatics want to destroy an impressionist painting.
@LH, well, I suppose yes, though cf. again (1) prohibition of figurative art (2) music.
I just mean, Taliban is different in that its enemy is not ‘communism’ (Russian in early 90s, Ukraine) or ‘colonialism’ and not “Christianity”, but Buddhism that has not been around in Afghanistan for ages.
KSA is complicated, I don’t understand if they have developed aversion to historical buildings as such (and without understanding Saudi mindset I don’t understand if people who say that they targeted the Marib dam on purpose can be right).
“KSA” – on a language exchange site people referred to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia as KSA and to literary Arabic as MSA. The latter irritated me (it’s a language, languages have names…), but in the case of the kingdom, the kingdom itself irritates me.
MSA is particularly bad, in that it can mean ‘Modern Standard Arabic’ or ‘Modern South Arabian’, and these are in the same domain.
“Modern South Arabian” is a mess in its own right, because it’s not actually descended from Old South Arabian, and (apparently) there are other languages in the region that probably are.
Admittedly AFAIK at the time Modern South Arabian was named it was thought that Old South Arabian had gone extinct many centuries ago, and the (again, apparent) modern descendants were only discovered later.
J1M, yes.
It is not in the same relation to Old South Arabian as Modern English to Old English:-(
But I don’t know what one could call OSA.
Epigraphic South Arabian too sounds as an epigraphic variety of “SA”.
To make confusion worse confounded, the languages are called Old, but the scripts are called Ancient, for both North and South Arabian. At least they are consistent, and if you get it wrong no great harm is done.
Me: Private ownership is essentially selfish. Laws are essentially parochial. The economic and practical compromises everyone from passers-by to landowners to national governments have to make are essentially short-sighted. But the fact that there’s even an international discussion of how and by who cultural treasures (whatever that would mean) should be kept is a great thing.
One of those compromises is between digging out or leaving in place. It’s not simple at all. Where I live there’s really no other type of excavation than the rescue excavation to save the information of a site from being lost to nature or development, and archaeologists are unseemly happy when they are forced to dig.
Here‘s a fresh example of parochial laws and short-sighted compromises. (Sorry, no English version yet.)
For reasons that made sense in the newly independent Norway, legal protection was given to antiquities older than the Protestantic Reformation in 1537. This is still the law, and the result is that archaeological sites younger than this are usually not systematically excavated (unless necessary or excusable as part of a site that also contains older remains) and objects younger than this are simply discarded after the excavation is finished, since no institution is responsible for taking care of them.
At Sem west of Drammen, metal detectorists a few years ago found elite objects from different eras all since the bronze age, leading to the realization that the site of a 17th century royal manor (which was well known from historical sources) had a long and continuous tradition as a regional or center of power. Now the current owner of the farm wants to drain his fields, and rescue excavations are being performed. Exciting finds have been made, including what may be the largest longhouse ever found, with some structures preliminary interpreted as external supports (somewhat like in a Gothic cathedral, I suppose), allowing a roof span of 9 m and possibly an upper floor. The finds are not dated yet, and carbon dating is eagerly awaited. The late Viking Age is a good guess based on similar houses in Danish military encampments, but potsherds found in the postholes would seemingly make it a millennium older, which would be really sensational.
All this is well, and future excavations will yield more. But the remains of the 16th-17th century royal manor will just be plowed over without more archaeological work than could be done this year on the side. The lead archaeologist is quoted venting his frustration with the arbitrary legal cut-off.
That is sad and stupid.
But I don’t know what one could call OSA.
Ṣayhadic (coined by A. F. L. Beeston). The Ṣayhad is a mediaeval Arab geographer’s term for what is now called the Ramlat as-Sab’atayn, the deserts of northern Yemen and southwestern Saudi Arabia.
Me: Here‘s a fresh example of parochial laws and short-sighted compromises. (Sorry, no English version yet.)
English version.
John C.: Ṣayhadic (coined by A. F. L. Beeston).
I like Yemenic, but maybe we could use that for Modern South Arabian. That’s a bad name as well.
“that archaeological sites younger than this are usually not systematically excavated”
This seems to contradict to what you said earlier (I thought “systematical” excavations are not practiced).
“objects younger than this are simply discarded after the excavation is finished, since no institution is responsible for taking care of them.”
But are not archaeologists themselves responsible for this?
No contradiction intended. Rescue excavations are systematic, professional excavations within their limitations. I don’t mean to claim that Norwegian archaeology is different, just add to the discussion on the difficult balance between excavation and preservation.
I’m no archaeologist and don’t have particular knowledge on the practical organisation, so all caveats apply. Archaeologists are responsible for archaeology. That means excavating sites, describing and cataloguing finds, and writing a report of the excavation. The archaeologists are mostly employed by the regional museums, which are the institutions responsible for organizing excavations in their regions and also of taking care of the objects. Preserving objects is a cost, and a lot of objects will have to be discarded after some process of evaluation. I don’t think that’s unique for Norway. What’s special here is the cut-off. I don’t think the cut-off is practiced rigidly, but it makes the threshold higher for saving objects from after 1537.
external supports (somewhat like in a Gothic cathedral, I suppose)
That’d be a Flying buttress?
“late Viking age” would be early in Europe. They didn’t appear on cathedrals until late C12th. And that’s the first I’ve heard of them in early non-religious architecture.
That longhouse/structure needs preserving permanently! And its various layers of evolution. (The “millennium older” doesn’t apply for the flying buttresses?)
@Trond, yes, I also don’t think it is unique for Norway.
I noted that, because if we want to change the situation, then it is the archaeological community who is responsible for changing it. Preserving objects is a cost. But simply storing them, in the most primitive way is cheap given the usual budget of excavations.
“no contradiction” – aha, thank you for clarification.
@drasvi: Yes, storing is cheap, but there’s a lot of material, so objects are still discarded. I know that part of the job is also to go through old stored material and decide what to throw out and what to keep.
Well, by “responsible” I meant changing institutions themselves (and the way they are funded).
As for storing, I know too little. But it is difficult to believe that there is so much of material that even the most basic storage is too expensive.
I suspect that instead they store everything within the musem walls (where space is limited) on accurate shelves.
@AntC: I think I must clarify on a couple of points.
1. The longhouse will no doubt be documented in full. The archaeologist’s frustration was about the much younger royal manor from the same site.
2. I let “somewhat like” do a lot of work there. The article is short on details, and it’s also very preliminary, but the archaeologist suggests that the supports may have been formed as roofed arcades. A closer parallel may be the larger of the Medieval stave churches. I also doubt that this excavation will give a final answer. What the archaeologists usually find* are the outlines of the foundations (postholes and shallow trenches marking the walls) and indoor fireplaces. Materials from the postholes and the fireplaces are used for dating. The rest of the technical description of the building is inference and speculation — and cross-inference between sites. In this case the speculation is based on the combination of an unusually large roof span of 9 m and the also unusual postholes outside of the outer walls.
* In the acid Norwegian soil all timber that’s not permanently wet will usually have rotted. The famous preserved viking ships are exceptional in having been sealed by a thick layer of clay. Most ship graves are recognized by the rows of iron nails, or even rust-coloured spots after iron nails..
Thanks @Trond
I used to live in York/Jorvik at the time of the digs, so I’ve stared into those kind of waterlogged post-holes.
I remember seeing stave churches still standing in Norway. Might even have been Borgund as illustrated at wp — is that by the road from Oslo to Bergen?
Those viking ships are amazing — so well preserved I could imagine setting sail on them. I spent hours just wandering to compare one with the other.
Further clarifications:
3. I didn’t say so explicitly, so in case it wasn’t clear, longhouses were timber structures.
4, I don’t mean to suggest that the Sem longhouse was a stave structure. The brief description says postholes for the external supports rather than continuous foundations. But you get the idea of how an arcade can be used to support a high wall and a wide roof for a large hall.
Clarification #4 made things both clearer and less clear. I’ll go to bed.
I like Yemenic, but maybe we could use that for Modern South Arabian
Bad enough that Yemen{i,ite,ic} can mean Arabic or Hebrew or OSA; we don’t want to add MSA as a possible meaning too. In addition, MSA is spoken in Oman as well.
And then, Yemen ultimately means ‘south’ anyway. And Soqotra is occupied by the UAE.
Nothing really wrong with my #4, but I failed to explain that it’s mostly about a technicality. In a stave church proper, the staves — the vertical load-bearing elements in the walls — rest on horizontal sills that in turn rest on stone foundations. Similar structures with the sills resting on timber poles dug into the ground are called “post churches”. These are not preserved but are typically known from excavations under the floors of medieval churches. The technique may be centuries older than that, but I have no way to know whether it could have been used for arcades in the Sem longhouse,
“Soqotra is occupied by the UAE”
I did not know:-/
I recently realised that Russian kinzhal “dagger” is the same word as khanjar (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/خنجر#Persian).
But why it is khanjar in Oman and jambiya in Yemen? Are these preferred terms in the two countries?
Me neither, to my surprise.
Actually, when I scrolled (rather than read) the article Socotra in WP a few days ago, I noticed
‘Tourism to the island has increased over the years as many operators have started offering trips to the island, which Gulf Today claimed “will become a dream destination despite the country’s conflict”. In May 2021, the Ministry of Information stated that the UAE is violating the island and has been planning to control it for years. It is running illegal trips for foreign tourists without taking any permission from the Yemeni government.[88] UAE is operating a weekly direct flight from Abu Dhabi to Socotra Island every Tuesday via Air Arabia.‘
But I did not notice that there is more (like the subchapter “UAE and STC control” and a link to the article UAE takeover of Socotra).
___
[88] has the subtitle “Israeli tourists have been illegally flocking to the Yemeni island of Socotra” and the video adds “there have been reports of the UAE and Israel setting up intelligence bases on the island.“.
PS the Gulf Today link, just because it was mentioned.