Railway expansion was the great industrial project of the late 19th century, and the Great Powers built railways at speed and reaped great commercial benefits. The greatest imperial dream of all was to connect the might of Europe to the potential riches of the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire. In 1903 Imperial Germany, under Kaiser Wilhelm II, began to construct a railway which would connect Berlin to the Ottoman city of Baghdad, and project German power all the way to the Persian Gulf. The Ottoman Emperor, Abdul Hamid II, meanwhile, saw the railway as a means to bolster crumbling Ottoman control of Arabia. Using new Ottoman Turkish sources, Murat Ozyuksel shows how the Berlin-Baghdad railway became a symbol of both rising European power and declining Ottoman fortunes. It marks a new and important contribution to our understanding of the geopolitics of the Middle East before World War I, and will be essential reading for students of empire, Industrial History and Ottoman Studies.

This monograph presents in great detail a large number of both unpublished and previously published Babylonian mathematical texts in the cuneiform script. It is a continuation of the work A Remarkable Collection of Babylonian Mathematical Texts (Springer 2007) written by Jöran Friberg, the leading expert on Babylonian mathematics. Focussing on the big picture, Friberg explores in this book several Late Babylonian arithmetical and metro-mathematical table texts from the sites of Babylon, Uruk and Sippar, collections of mathematical exercises from four Old Babylonian sites, as well as a new text from Early Dynastic/Early Sargonic Umma, which is the oldest known collection of mathematical exercises. A table of reciprocals from the end of the third millennium BC, differing radically from well-documented but younger tables of reciprocals from the Neo-Sumerian and Old-Babylonian periods, as well as a fragment of a Neo-Sumerian clay tablet showing a new type of a labyrinth are also discussed. The material is presented in the form of photos, hand copies, transliterations and translations, accompanied by exhaustive explanations. The previously unpublished mathematical cuneiform texts presented in this book were discovered by Farouk Al-Rawi, who also made numerous beautiful hand copies of most of the clay tablets. Historians of mathematics and the Mesopotamian civilization, linguists and those interested in ancient labyrinths will find New Mathematical Cuneiform Texts particularly valuable. The book contains many texts of previously unknown types and material that is not available elsewhere.

Note biographique : Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, Freie Universität Berlin; Joachim Marzahn, Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin;Margarete van Ess, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Orient-Abteilung, Berlin

The modern Middle East was forged in the crucible of the First World War, but few know the full story of how war actually came to the region. As Sean McMeekin reveals in this startling reinterpretation of the war, it was neither the British nor the French but rather a small clique of Germans and Turks who thrust the Islamic world into the conflict for their own political, economic, and military ends. The Berlin-Baghdad Express tells the fascinating story of how Germany exploited Ottoman pan-Islamism in order to destroy the British Empire, then the largest Islamic power in the world. Meanwhile the Young Turks harnessed themselves to German military might to avenge Turkey’s hereditary enemy, Russia. Told from the perspective of the key decision-makers on the Turco-German side, many of the most consequential events of World War I—Turkey’s entry into the war, Gallipoli, the Armenian massacres, the Arab revolt, and the Russian Revolution—are illuminated as never before. Drawing on a wealth of new sources, McMeekin forces us to re-examine Western interference in the Middle East and its lamentable results. It is an epic tragicomedy of unintended consequences, as Turkish nationalists give Russia the war it desperately wants, jihad begets an Islamic insurrection in Mecca, German sabotage plots upend the Tsar delivering Turkey from Russia’s yoke, and German Zionism midwifes the Balfour Declaration. All along, the story is interwoven with the drama surrounding German efforts to complete the Berlin to Baghdad railway, the weapon designed to win the war and assure German hegemony over the Middle East.

Much of our perception of Babylon in the West is filtered through the poignant echoes of loss and longing that resonate in the Hebrew Bible. The lamenting exiles of Judah craved a return to their lost homeland after the sack of Jerusalem in 587 BC and their forcible removal by Nebuchadnezzar to the alien floodlands of the Euphrates. But to see Babylon only as an adjunct to Old Testament history is misleading. A Short History of Babylon explores the ever-changing city that shaped world history for two millennia.