A Handbook of Modern Arabic Historical Scholarship on the Ancient and Medieval Periods.

• Author: Varisco, Daniel Martin

A Handbook of Modern Arabic Historical Scholarship on the Ancient and Medieval Periods. Edited by AMAR S. BAADJ. Handbook of Oriental Studies, The Near and Middle East, vol. 155. Leiden: BRILL, 2021. Pp. xxix + 653. $209, [euro]175.

In the past, historical surveys of specific disciplines in Oriental Studies have focused almost exclusively on Western authors. As noted by Amar Baadj, the seminal bibliographic resource Index Islamicus only includes works in Western languages and academic studies published in Arabic are rarely reviewed in Western journals. This volume fills a major gap in the literature by drawing attention to a wide range of Arabic academic scholarship on both the ancient and medieval periods for the Middle East and North Africa, with an additional study of modern Arabic scholarship on medieval Europe. Of the sixteen articles, nine are in English, six in French, and one in German. The short preface is available in English and Arabic. Bibliographic references are provided both in the footnotes and at the end of each article.

The first six articles focus on the ancient Near East through the classical era. The article on the history of Assyriology, by Laith M. Hussein, is a minimally annotated bibliography of sources in Arabic after a brief Uberblick of the Archaeology Department at Baghdad University, the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, and several recent archaeological projects. The second article, on the founding generations of Egyptian Egyptology, is arranged by short biographies of the main Egyptian scholars, starting with Ahmad Kamal (d. 1923), especially known for his work on the Cairo Museum collections and for the creation of local museums. In all, about forty scholars are described. The authors, Faiza Haikal and Amr Omar, note that even today it is expected that Egyptian archaeologists publish in a Western language, preferably English, rather than Arabic (p. 84). The third article, by the archaeologist Mohammed Maraqten, addresses the contributions of Arab scholars to the history of ancient South Arabia. There were several early archaeological expeditions, including those of the Egyptian Ahmed Fakhry (d. 1973) in 1947, 1948, and 1959. Arab scholars, including Yemenis, copied and studied South Arabic inscriptions; and Maraqten himself has written a major work on South Arabian minuscule texts inscribed on wood (Altsudarabische Texte auf Holzstabchen: Epigraphische und kulturhistorische Untersuchungen, 2014)...