The year 2024 marks the opening of the new Middle Eastern Library of Leiden University, a purpose-built facility to serve the needs of all those who engage in the study of the Middle East and North Africa from the dawn of history to the present day. To celebrate the occasion, more than 40 authors from Leiden and beyond have contributed to this special volume on the library’s rich and multifaceted Oriental holdings.

Topics range from the Ancient Near East to the material and conservational ...

Between 1848 and 1914 around 5.800 Swiss Mercenaries enlisted in the Dutch Colonial Army (KNIL) to fight in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). Following the traces of these mercenaries beyond the confines of the Dutch Empire, this book elucidates the complexities of the nineteenth-century military labour markets and provides an intricate examination of the mercenaries’ socio-cultural backgrounds, their motives, and their engagement with local communities and authorities. In doin...

Abu ‘Abdollâh' Jafar ibn Mohammad Rudaki (c. 880 CE-941 CE) was a poet to the Samanid court which ruled much of Khorâsân (northeastern Persia) from its seat in Bukhara.

He is widely regarded as "the father of Persian poetry, for he was the first major poet to write in New Persian language, following the Arab conquest in the seventh and eighth centuries, which established Islam as the official religion, and made Arabic the predominant literary language in Persian-speaking lands for some two...

Dit volume in de ASLU-serie bestudeert Frankische kastelen met als doel het in kaart brengen van de relatie van de toenmalige bewoners met de geconstrueerde ruimte. Dit onderzoek biedt nieuwe inzichten in het functioneren van het fort, zowel in de functie als bescherming tegen vijandige machten, als de invloed van het gebouw op het gedrag van de bewoners binnen de muren van deze kastelen.

- Met een uitgeklede versie van dit werk won Eva Mol de Leidse Universitaire Scriptieprijs in het jaar 20...

Between 1966 and 1980, the War History Office of the National Defense College of Japan (now the Center for Military History of the National Institute for Defense Studies) published the 102-volume Senshi Sōsho (War History Series). These volumes give a detailed account of the operations of the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War. The present volume, The Operations of the Navy in the Dutch East Indies and the Bay of Bengal, volume 26 of the series, des...

This book examines the role of Persian literature in politics in the tumultuous period of Iranian history from 1950 to 2000, illustrating how intellectuals used poetry, plays, novels and short stories to comment on socio-political developments. The unique aspect of the book is its strong empirical perspective, as Karimi-Hakkak has participated in the events he is writing about. It analyses how Persian intellectuals dealt with censorship, suppression, imprisonment, exile and even execution for...

"Being a slave" brings together scholars and writers who try to come to terms with the histories and legacies of European slavery in the Indian Ocean. This volume discusses a variety of qualitative data on the experience of being a slave in order to recover ordinary lives and, crucially, to place this experience in its Asian local context. Building on the rich scholarship on the slave trade, this volume offers a unique perspective that embraces the origin and afterlife of enslavement as well ...

Spatial analysis on the basis of material culture has always been one of the mayor topics in archaeological research. Designating place analyses the urban space of Roman Ostia and Pompeii in different ways: geophysical analysis, spatial analysis, iconographic analysis and epigraphic analysis. This book is based on the work of Hanna Stöger, the Leiden scholar who died in 2018. Hanna’s work in Ostia was not finished and this book contains contributions from people who inspired her, people sh...

By examining photography through geography and philosophy, this book makes evident that place is not the content of a definite representation. To do this, it breaks down the participatory elements of photography into six tropes: the photographer, the camera, the photograph, the image, the spectator, and the genre. Afterwards, through a rigorous theoretical analysis of each of these themes vis-à-vis the notion of place, it shows how they manifest inactive, contingent, unlocalizable, liminal, ...

Military involvement in foreign policy decision-making, and its role as a driving force in that process, has long been anathema to both academic and practitioner circles. Without wanting to pursue the quest for principles or ultimate predictions this study looks specifically into the role of the military in foreign policy decision-making. It does so by carefully reconstructing and comparing the sequential series of decisions of a group of British and Dutch senior civil and military decision-m...