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...

This new and now unabridged English translation of Huizinga’s Autumntide of the Middle Ages (Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen) celebrates the centenary of a book that still ranks as one of the most perceptive and influential analyses of the late medieval period. Its wide-ranging discussion of fourteenth and fifteenth century France and the Low Countries makes it a classic study of life, culture, and thought in medieval society.

The translation of the original text captures the impact of Huizing...

In October 1740, a tragedy unfolded in Batavia, the Asian headquarters of the Dutch East India Company on the island of Java. Faced with a spontaneous Chinese peasant uprising, Batavia’s vengeful inhabitants carried out a bloody massacre of their fellow Chinese within the city walls. The murderers marched from house to house, looting and pillaging, not even sparing the hospitals and prisons.

How could such a slaughter take place in the prosperous Queen of the East? Drawing on a wealth of Du...

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...

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, ...