This paper aims to provide a urban morphological analysis of the transformation of Saudi Arabian cities from the late 18 century onwards through a cartographical urban inventory as its basis. The paper focuses on the cartographical information about the major cities in the Saudi Arabian Peninsula associated with the period between late 18 and early 20 centuries. This study was mainly conducted ...

When I was a medical student in 1993, my overseas elective was in Nazareth Hospital in The Galilee, then run by the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society (EMMS). It’s the oldest continually functioning hospital in Israel, and has come a long way since 1861. Malcolm Billings’ book tells the story of the Armenian tailor’s son from Ottoman Constantinople who trained in Medicine in Edinburgh and, af...

Animals and products derived from different organs of their bodies have constituted part of the inventory of medicinal substances used in various cultures since ancient times. The article reviews the history of healing with animals in the Levant (The Land of Israel and parts of present-day Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, defined by the Muslims in the Middle Ages as Bilad al-Sham) in the medieval an...

Following World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the political and population dynamics of the Middle East changed dramatically. New national borders, defined either by western mandates or by local sovereignties, included peoples and architectural legacies from a variety of religions and ethnicities. Under the unifying pressures of national ideologies, the diverse groups of the Midd...

In advanced economies interest rates generally vary inversely with the borrower’s socio-economic status, because status tends to depend inversely on default risk. Both of these relationships depend critically on the impartiality of the law. Specifically, they require a lender to be able to sue a recalcitrant borrower in a sufficiently impartial court. Where the law is markedly biased in favor o...

Climate change and water availability in the Middle East are important in understanding human adaptive capacities in the face of long-term environmental changes. The key role of water availability for sedentary and nomad populations in these arid to semiarid landscapes is understood, but the millennium-scale influence of hydrologic instability on vegetation dynamics, human occupation, and histo...

1. Some Extended Arabic characters are typographical variants of characters already adequately covered by the corresponding Basic Arabic Characters; 2. 0626 ARABIC LETTER YEH WITH HAMZA ABOVE is actually a representation form of two nominal characters: 06D5 ARABIC LETTER AE followed by 0621 ARABIC LETTER HAMZA; 3. The graphemes for the aspirated phonemes of Urdu should be added; 06BE ARABIC LET...