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Pictograms or Pseudo-Script? Non-Textual Identity Marks in Practical Use in Ancient Egypt and Elsewhere edited by B.J.J. Haring and Olaf E. Kaper (Proceedings of a Conference in Leiden, 19-20 December 2006. UITGAVEN - EGYPTOLOGICAL PUBLICATIONS: Peeters Publishers) Marking systems such as masons marks, property marks, pot marks, quarry marks and team marks confront us with the large variation in the use of graphic signs. They are often similar to writing, yet they are not script in the strictest sense of the word. The practical purposes of marks include claims to property and responsibilities, both individual and collective, for which regular scripts are also used. he marking systems are seen to operate in combination with writing, but frequently also in isolation. In societies that use writing, the marks appear to be strongly influenced by it: their shapes are often identical and they may be similarly arranged in lines or columns. In this sense the marking systems may be called a pseudo script, for in spite of their resemblance to writing, the signs remain mere pictograms. This volume brings together for the first time the results of research on practical marking systems in ancient Egypt and other cultures, making it possible to define the common characteristics of their appearance and their uses. It is the result of a conference hosted by the Egyptology Department at Leiden University in 2006. The great geographical and chronological range covered by the volume, the sign corpora added to many of the contributions, and the indices also make it the first important reference work on this intriguing topic. More

One Hundred Thousand Moons: An Advanced Political History of Tibet  by Tsepon Wangchuk Deden Shakabpa and Derek F. Maher (Brill's Tibetan Studies Library: Brill Academic Publishers) DRAWING ON A VAST ARRAY OF HISTORICAL AND biographical sources, this volume elaborates Tibetan political history, arguing that Tibet has long been an independent nation, and that the 195o incursion by the Chinese was an invasion of a sovereign country. The author situates Tibet's relations with a series of Chinese, Manchurian, and Mongolian empires in terms of the preceptor-patron relationship, an essentially religious connection in which Tibetan religious figures offered spiritual instruction to the contemporaneous emperor or other militarily powerful figure in exchange for protection and religious patronage. Simultaneously, this volume serves as an introduction to many aspects of Tibetan culture, society, and especially religion. The book includes a compendium of biographies of the most significant figures in Tibet's past. More

Tradition and Modernity by Chen Lai, translated by Edmund Ryden (Brill's Humanities in China Library Volume 3: Brill Academic Publishers) The question for twentieth-century China has been the integration of tradition and modernity. In this collection of essays written over a period of twenty years (1987-2006), Chen Lai reflects on the question in an informative and original way. He reads behind the political slogans and engages with the thought both of Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, and western sociology, and representative Chinese thinkers, notably Feng Youlan and Liang Shuming. While the focus is on China, the book also appeals to anyone interested in this fascinating question of how to modernize whilst retaining the positive values of tradition. Chen Lai's unique and balanced grasp of society marks him out as the foremost thinker in China on this topic today. More

Beauty And Love by Seyh Galip and Victoria Rowe Holbrook (MLA Texts and Translations: Modern Language Association) Companion volume in Turkish: Husn u Ask by Seyh Galip and Victoria Rowe Holbrook (MLA Texts and Translations: Modern Language Association) Holbrook's brilliant translation of the greatest Turkish romance brings Galip's dramatic imagery alive while making ingenious use of Ottoman mete for the first time in English. Her introduction is the finest brief treatment of Islamic mysticism in existence. Her profound knowledge of Sufism clarifies the philosophical vocabulary of the tale, and her modernized spelling of the text breaks with transliteration tradition to to make her work accessible to all readers of Turkish—Orhan Pamuk
Likewise her translation may well aid in the revival of appreciation of Ottoman poetics and the mysticism of love. The girl Beauty and the boy Love are betrothed to each other as children. But Beauty violates the custom of the tribe by falling in love with him, and Love must undergo the trials of a journey to the Land of the Heart to prove himself worthy—a journey to realization of both his and Beauty's true nature. More

The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society by Walter G. Andrews, Mehmet Kalpakli (Duke University Press) (Hardcover) "The Age of Beloveds is a treasure and a masterpiece. With breathtakingly extensive original research, it is beautifully written, in a style both inviting and impressive. It is the fruit of a lifetime's project to add Ottoman literature to the canons of world literature." -Victoria Holbrook, author of The Unreadable Shores of Love: Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance.
The Age of Beloveds offers a rich introduction to early-modern Ottoman culture through a study of its beautiful lyric love poetry. At the same time, it suggests provocative cross-cultural parallels in the sociology and spirituality of love in Europe—from Istanbul to London—during the long sixteenth century. Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli provide a generous sampling of translations of Ottoman poems, many of which have never appeared in English, along with informative and inspired close readings. The authors explain that the flourishing of Ottoman power and culture during the "Turkish Renaissance" manifested itself, to some degree, as an "age of beloveds," in which young men became the focal points for the desire and attention of powerful officeholders and artists as well as the inspiration for a rich literature of love.
The authors show that the "age of beloveds" was not just an Ottoman, eastern European, or Islamic phenomenon. It extended into western Europe as well, pervading the cultures of Venice, Florence, Rome, and London during the same period. Andrews and Kalpakli contend that in an age dominated by absolute rulers and troubled by war, cultural change, and religious upheaval, the attachments of dependent courtiers and the longings of anxious commoners aroused an intense interest in love and the beloved. The Age of Beloveds reveals new commonalities in the cultural-history of two worlds long seen as radically different.  More

The Religions of Mongolia by Walther Heissig, former head of the Department of Central Asiatic Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany, has written a thorough historical survey of the folk origins of the religions of Central Asia. He focuses on the existence in Mongolia of religious forms that have more ancient roots even than Buddhism. The forms of Northern Buddhism in Mongolia correspond in the main to those Tibetan forms from which they originated. Heissig is mainly concerned in the present book with those beliefs and concepts which belong to the non-Buddhist folk religion of the Mongols. Scholars have in recent years discovered original Mongol texts and documents unknown till now, and professor Heissig´s own researches in European libraries have revealed more than seventy-eight manuscripts, containing prayers and invocations from the folk religion, all of which provide essential material on the non-Buddhist religious conceptions of the Mongols. His philological work on these Mongol texts is the basis for this account of the ancient religious ideas of the Mongols. He begins by describing the shamanism of the Mongols, then gives an account of the spread of Lamaism and the subsequent Lamaist suppression of Shamanism. The main part of the book is devoted to a study of the Mongolian folk religion and its pantheon, which includes heavenly beings, the ancestor god, the deity of fire, and equestrian deities. This is an important study providing a glimpse of major religious ideas. More

Brave Men of the Hills: Resistance and Rebellion in Burma, 1825-1932 by Parimal Ghosh (University of Hawaii Press) Chapter 1 covers the period from the beginning of colonial rule in Lower Burma after the First War, till up to the period after the Second War. We begin with a brief discussion of the structure of the pre-British Burmese state in order to understand the dynamics of the resistance as it unfolded. The state formation in pre-British Burma was broadly of a decentralised nature, with a substantial degree of political power located in the spheres of such local level officials as the Myothugyis and the Tbugyis. Under the over-arching authority of the royal court the locality was, in the main, politically autonomous and economically self-sufficient. The decentralised formation was rendered more complete through a similar structure in the Buddhist Sangha. The central control of the thathanabaing or the head of the Sangha came into view only in matters of serious dispute, and individual monasteries generally took care of routine affairs, besides looking after the spiritual needs of the local people. With every boy expected to spend some time in the monastery, there was a universal respect for the Sangha. In pre-colonial times, and also during resistance to British rule, this respect and moral authority often came to develop political overtones. After the defeat of the royal army, especially in the Second and Third Angle-Burmese Wars, these men, firmly rooted in the locality, began a prolonged phase of resistance that continued almost unabated into the late 1880s. More

Mayada, Daughter of Iraq: One Woman's Survival Under Saddam Hussein by Jean P. Sasson & Mayada Al-Askari (Dutton) Jean Sasson was assigned Mayada Al-Askari as a translator on a trip to Baghdad in 1998. One year later, Sasson, a writer and lecturer who has lived in Saudi Arabia and traveled extensively in the Middle East, author of four internationally bestselling books on the Middle East, learned that Mayada had been taken without the knowledge of her family from the tiny print shop that she owned, imprisoned and subject to torture in the notorious Baladiyat Prison – headquarters of Saddam Hussein's infamous secret police. More