From 1869 to 1878 approximately fifty American military officers were invited to Egypt by Khedive Ismail for the purpose of modernizing the Egyptian army. During that time the American officers led by General Charles P. Stone designed a staff system for the Egyptian army and they established a series of technical schools not only for the staff officers but for the rank and file as well. In addition to the reorganization, the American officers led exploratory expeditions into central Africa, they refortified the Egyptian coastline and they built roads and lighthouses. In conjunction with their expeditions, the officers produced numerous territorial maps, hydrological maps, and assay reports.

Lucian, writing in the mid-second century AD, recorded his observations of an "exotic" local cult in the city of Hierapolis in what is today Northern Syria. The local goddess was known as Dea Syria to the Romans and Atargatis to the Greeks. Lucian's so-named De Dea Syria is an important record of life and religion in Roman Syria. De Dea Syria presents to us an Oriental cult of a fertility goddess as seen through the eyes of a Hellenized Syrian devotee and religious ethnographer. How accurate Lucian's portrayal of the cult is questionable, though his account provides for us some indication that traditional religious practices were still being observed in Hierapolis despite Greek and Roman colonization. The origins of Near Eastern fertility goddesses began in the Bronze Age with the Sumerian goddess Inanna who was later associated with the Semitic Akkadian deity Ishtar. The worship of Ishtar spread throughout the Near East as a result of both Babylonian and Assyrian conquests. In Syria some of the major sites of her worship were located in Ebla and Mari. The later Phoenician and Canaanite cultures also adopted the worship of Ishtar melding her into their religions under the names of Astarte and Asherah respectively. By the Greco-Roman era, the Nabataeans and Palmyrenes also worshipped a form of the Near Eastern fertility goddess, calling her by many names including Atargatis, Astarte, al-Uzza and Allat. The Greeks and Romans found parallels between this eastern goddess and their deities and added her to their pantheons. Through this process of adoption and adaptation, the worship of this goddess naturally changed. In her many guises, Atargatis was worshipped not only at Hierapolis in the Greco-Roman period, but also at Delos, Dura Europos, and Khirbet et-Tannur. At all of these centers of worship vestiges of traditional practices retained in the cult were apparent. It is necessary to look at the cult as a whole to understand more fully whether her cult retained its original Oriental character or was partially or fully Hellenized. Temple architecture is an important part of Atargatis' cult which is often overlooked in the analysis of her cult. This thesis examines whether Atargatis' cult remained Oriental or became Hellenized by tracing the historical development of the temple architecture, associated cult objects, and decoration from their traditional origins down to the introduction of Greco-Roman styles into the Near East.

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After the First World War, there was widespread support for U.S. intervention in the Near East to assist Christian minorities in the region, but the Wilson administration and the U.S. Senate took little action. The Armenian cause in particular was foremost in the minds of Americans. Many Americans felt the United States had a moral responsibility to help Near Eastern Christians. For many observers, American interest coupled with the opportunity for increased participation in Near Eastern affairs made it seem likely that the United States would emerge from the peace process as a major influence in the Area. However, this was not the case, and proposed initiatives that would increase American participation in the area were either ignored or rejected. There was broad interest in getting more involved in the Near East, but no consensus on how to do so. Some favored an American mandate over Armenia, while others wanted a larger American mandate over Armenia, Constantinople, and Anatolia, and others sought to avoid mandates altogether and instead preferred sending direct aid to Armenia and the Near East. By the time it seemed clear that American intervention in the Near East would only happen along the terms favored by those seeking to limit American costs and responsibility, the solidification of isolationist sentiment in the United States, antagonized by the long League of Nations debate, and changing circumstances in the Near East made a dramatic increase in U.S. influence in the region unlikely. The debate over American intervention in the Near East provides insight into larger discussions about American imperialism and its relationship to humanitarianism, American isolationism in the interwar years, and the partisan atmosphere of American postwar politics. / History

Yes / Theories of Continuing Bonds, and more recently, the Dual Process of Grieving, have provided new ways of understanding the bereavement process, and have influenced current practice for counsellors, end-oflife care practitioners and other professionals. This paper uses these theories in a new way, exploring their relevance to archaeological interpretation, with particular reference to the phenomenon of the plastering of skulls of the deceased in the Neolithic of Southwest Asia (the Middle East/Near East), suggesting that traditional archaeological interpretations, which focus on concepts of status and social organisation, may be missing a more basic reaction to grief and a desire to keep the dead close for longer.

This study attempts to compose an account of television history in Kuwait, one that focuses on its integration into society and is told from the audience's perspective and experience. This study represents a cultural alternative to the overwhelmingly national, institutional, and biographical focus that accompanies television history works in Kuwait and the Arab world. The narrative is gathered and generated through the individual oral stories of 25 Kuwaitis over the age of 50, who generally represent the six geographical districts of Kuwait. Through their oral stories, the narrators examine the different areas in which television has integrated itself into society from 1957 to 1990. These include television’s succession to cinema, television’s novelty, television’s familiarization into society, television’s domestication, television’s interaction with modernity, and television’s content. The oral stories of the narrators regarding each area reveal a wide range of microscopic topics about living in early Kuwait and television’s integration with it, including the people’s initial “miraculous” conception of the device, television’s relation with Kuwaiti urban growth, and the early economical gap of television ownership in Kuwait. Besides the general exploration, discussing the research areas indicates a somewhat linear narrative of television’s integration into culture, where television was preceded by the cinema technology that had semiotically paved the way for the device, before an abrupt novelty period in which television was settling in an ever-changing Kuwait, followed by a familiarity period in which the device had lost its gimmicky association, interrelated with all the other sociocultural factors of society, and spatially corresponded with both the extinct and the surviving components of the Kuwaiti house. Kuwaiti television had also corresponded with the social, economical, and urban alterations of Kuwaiti modernity, with its content nostalgically reflecting different stages of Kuwaiti cultural life. In the end, an overarching theme could be found in the “foreshortening” of television’s integration journey into Kuwaiti culture, with the narrators using television to express their yearning to the values of yesteryear. Future studies suggest more focus on contextuality, qualitative data, and interdisciplinarity in television history.

Si, comme nous le suggérons, le mot « frontière » désigne un lieu de contact et d’échanges entre deux espaces plutôt qu’une ligne de séparation bien tracée, de nombreuses frontières existent, politiques, sociales, culturelles, linguistiques dans un Proche-Orient ancien qu’on qualifie souvent de « monde sans frontières » parce qu’il partage la même culture cunéiforme. Du XIVe siècle av. J.-C. au début du XIIe, les États syriens sont dans la mouvance successive d’empires puissants, Mitanni, Égypte, Hatti, qui se les disputent et fixent leurs frontières politiques, tandis que les frontières juridiques (de qui est-on justiciable ?) ou économiques (qui édicte les obligations fiscales ?) se superposent. Dans une Syrie où les langues parlées sont diverses, il existe, et même il se crée, des « entre-deux » linguistiques. Les zones frontières sont traversées sans cesse, volontairement (nomades, marchands) ou sous la contrainte (captifs). Dire qui est « un étranger » n’est possible en Syrie que de façon relative. Cependant, ni tout à fait étranger, ni membre de la communauté, un étranger résident peut, parce qu’il bénéficie d’une certaine protection et peut s’intégrer, devenir un de ceux par lesquels les cultures se transmettent. / If, as we would define it, the word “border” indicates a place of contact and exchanges between two spaces rather than a well-drawn line of separation, numerous borders exist: political, social, cultural, linguistic in an Ancient Near East often characterized as “a world without borders” since it shares the same cuneiform culture. From the fourteenth century BC to the beginning of the twelfth, the Syrian States have belonged to successive spheres of influence of powerful empires, Mitanni, Egypt, Hatti, which dispute them between themselves and fix their political borders, whereas the legal borders (to which jurisdiction you are under?) or economic ones (which authority imposes the tax obligations?) overlap. In Syria where the spoken languages are diverse, linguistic interspaces exist, are even created. Fringe areas are crossed ceaselessly, voluntarily (nomads, traders) or under duress (captives). To determine who is “a foreigner” is only possible in Syria in a relative manner. However, neither a true foreigner, nor a member of the community, a “resident foreigner” (since he is partly protected and may become integrated) can be one of these through whom the cultures are passed on.

French rule over Syria and Lebanon was premised on a vision of a special French protectorate established by centuries of cultural activity; archaeological, educational and charitable. This vision translated into a meaning of the mandate as colonial protectorate, integrated into the French Empire. Initial French methods of organising and supervising cultural activity sought to embrace this vision and to implement it in the exploitation of antiquities, the management and promotion of cultural heritage, the organisation of education and control of the public opinion among literate classes. However, in-depth examination of the first five years of the League of Nations-assigned mandate reveals that French expectations of a protectorate were quickly dashed by consistent and widespread contestation of their mandatary methods within cultural institutions, not simply among Arabists but so too among minority groups initially expected to be loyal clients. The violence of imposing the mandate de facto, starting with a landing of French troops in the Lebanese and Syrian Mediterranean coast in 1919 and followed by extension to Syria “proper” in 1920 was followed by consistent violent revolt and rejection of the very idea of a mandate over local peoples. Examining the cultural institutions’ role reveals less violent yet similarly consistent contestation of French meanings ascribed to the mandate by challenging their methods of executing it. Tracing the mandate administrators’ and surveillance and diplomatic apparatus’ point of view, this analysis shows the significant pressure put on French expectations through contestation of such policies as the exportation of antiquities, the expansion of French instruction over Arabic learning, the censorship of the press. This did not quite unite the infamously tapestry-like stakeholders within and without Syria on a nationalist or even anti-imperialist framework. Yet there was a unity in contesting mandatary methods precieved to be transforming the meaning of a League of Nations mandate. The political and de jure discourses emerging after the tragedy of World War I fostered expectations of European tutelages that prepared local peoples for autonomy and independence. Yet, even among the most Francophile of stakeholders, the unfolding of the first years of mandate rule brought forth de facto, entirely different events and methods. In conjunction with the ongoing violent refusal to accept even the premise of a French mandate, this contestation, partly occurring through cultural institutions, contributed to a fundamental reduction of French expectations in the formative five years. An in-depth horizontal and synchronic analysis of the shifts in discourses, attitudes and activities unfolding in French and locally-organised cultural institutions such as schools, museums and newspapers thus signals the need for mandate studies to give greater consideration to shifts in international and local meanings, methods and capacities rather than treating it as a single unit of analysis.

As the number of Islamic institutions increases in America, the need for greater understanding of the Muslim community, and the challenges faced by this minority, increases as well. This project seeks to provide such knowledge by exploring one of these rapidly growing institutions founded and funded by Muslims, private Islamic schools. Absent from media and literature is an understanding of Islamic schools and the experiences of youth as their attendees. This project addresses this gap through an ethnographic focus on female students at one Islamic school. Data was collected via interviews, focus groups, observation, and participant observation. This student-centered approach provides qualitative insight on the perspectives of Muslim girls on identity, schooling, and community in order to foster greater understanding of the mission, social function, and practices of Islamic schools.