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Abstract
This paper engages with the organization of the leadership of the Syro-Egyptian sultanate in the long ninth/fifteenth century, focusing particularly on the case of the court position of ‘the Chief Head of the [sultan’s] Guards’ (raʾs nawbat al-nuwab). It explores narrative source reports to identify the sultanate’s sixty ‘Chief Heads’ and to reconsider what they did in this capacity. Through the analytical categories of the court, social infrastructures and military entrepreneurialism, this paper furthers understandings of how these military leaders were all constitutive participants in the era’s complex processes of resource accumulation, violence-wielding, courtly reconfiguration, and state formation.
Abstract
This article offers an overview of the 39 shorthand Bible manuscripts in the Cambridge and Oxford Genizah collections. It describes the various methods of abbreviation found in these manuscripts and discusses the likely functions of the various categories of manuscript.
Abstract
Between 1747 and 1834, Durrānī Afghan rulers built webs of alliance to political, economic, and religious elites in Peshawar. The village of Chamkanī serves as a useful case study of these networks. Chamkanī housed an influential Indian merchant family, Afghan landed nobility, and a powerful Sufi lineage. Reflecting the fundamental tension between the Durrānī ideal of universal sovereignty and the reality of diffuse power, these groups both cooperated and clashed with royal authority, and maintained ties between themselves. Ultimately, the most durable legacies of Durrānī rule were left by these local elites.
Abstract
The paper examines the akıncıs’ actions and hence the motivation for their raids as essential constituents within the process of Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the late Middle Ages. Focusing on the raiders and their plundering activities, it asserts that the akıncıs played a crucial key role in the early Ottoman slave economy, as slave hunting was arguably the main economic driving force behind the Ottoman conquest. It hence argues that an analysis of the akıncıs allows for new insights into the nature of the early Ottoman Empire, but also advances the idea that their actions fall within a particular phase of the conquest period. To that end, the authors re-periodize the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans into the akıncı phase, which spanned eight to thirteen decades, depending on the region, and was characterized by continuous slave hunting and destruction of economic infrastructure, and the phase of administrative integration into the Ottoman Empire, which latter process was pursued by other actors, namely imperial elites from the center, and is usually characterized by at least partial repopulation of demographically weakened areas.
Abstract
A distinct concentration of 150 gallery graves dating to the Late Neolithic (2400–1700 BC) occurs in Göteryd parish in the South Swedish Uplands. This study investigates why such a concentration of gallery graves exists in this region and why these were not exchanged by new monuments in the Bronze Age. In order to discuss these issues, the distribution of the monuments and the stray finds have been analysed and correlated to the results of local pollen analysis. The results support the impression of abandonment at the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. The processes of expansion and abandonment seem to reflect general population trends, as discussed in recent works on population dynamics. Göteryd parish is a highland region and marginal from an agricultural point of view, but it borders on fertile and plain coastal areas, which are easily accessible through river valleys. In periods of population growth, Göteryd parish would absorb people from the coastal plains, a process that probably was reversed when the population shrank. The geographical position of the Göteryd area created a particular dynamic and made it vulnerable to changes in population dynamics, social networks, and climate.