Reviewing the Turkish state’s engagement with Kurdish question since 2015, I argue that while state tackled mainly through ethnopolitics, it now tackles geopolitics. Documenting recent by means of such new instruments as non-temporary control over non-Turkish territories populated or neighboured Kurds, replacing functions states Syria and Iraq on their (and Arab) territories, utilizing space po...

The Czech botanist František Nábělek (1884-1965) explored the Middle East in 1909-1910, visiting what are now Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain, Iran and Turkey. He described four new genera, 78 species, 69 varieties and 38 forms of vascular plants, most of these in his work Iter Turcico-Persicum (1923-1929). The main herbarium collection of Iter Turcico-Persicum comprise...

A web of corruption involving the Assad family, the security apparatus, and their business cohorts has been a major factor behind the outbreak of the Syrian revolt that started in 2011. UN-facilitated talks between the regime and the opposition are set to convene in Geneva in January 2016, after the refugee crisis in Europe and Russia’s entry into the Syrian war prompted a renewed international...

In this work, automatic recognition of Arabic dialects is proposed. An acoustic survey of the proportion of vocalic intervals and the standard deviation of consonantal intervals in nine dialects (Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Golf’s Countries and Iraq) is performed using the platform Alize and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). The results show the complexity of the autom...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...