The 2017 Seminar

The 2017 Seminar for Arabian Studies

This year’s Seminar for Arabian Studies took place at the British Museum from Friday 4th August to Sunday 6th August 2017. See the programme . Scroll down for links to abstracts of papers presented at this year’s Seminar.

2017 Special Session

To celebrate the completion of Phase 2 of the Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia in March 2017, the Seminar for Arabian Studies included a Special Session on “Languages, scripts and their uses in ancient North Arabia“. Ancient Arabia had its own branch of the alphabet and almost certainly a greater proportion of its population could read and write than in any other part of the ancient world. This Special Session explored the many different uses the inhabitants of ancient Arabia made of their literacy, the development of the various scripts which they employed, and what we can reconstruct of the languages they spoke. The papers from this Special Sessions are being edited for publication in a Supplement to volume 48 of the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, which will be on sale at the 2018 Seminar.

Abstracts of papers presented in 2017

Abstracts of papers presented in the main sessions
Abstracts of papers presented in the Special Session
Poster abstracts

The 2017 MBI lecture

Professor Trevor Marchand: Yemen’s Architectural Heritage In Peril
 
Yemen possesses one of the world’s finest treasure-troves of architecture, displaying a wondrous array of vernacular styles. Three of its ancient cities – Shibam, Ṣan‘ā’ and Zabīd – are UNESCO World Heritage sites, and a number of other towns and building complexes around the country await inclusion on that list. Each urban setting possesses a distinct ‘sense of place’, resulting from a mixture of native ingenuity, available construction materials, social relations, religious practices and local histories. Conflict and resistance, too, have contributed significantly to the history of Yemeni building design, town planning and civil engineering. The current hydra-headed conflict, however, involving international adversaries divided along political and sectarian lines, poses a threat of unprecedented scale to the country’s architectural heritage. The lecture will take stock of the damage incurred as well as some of the current efforts to safeguard buildings and to sustain conservation programmes. It will also address factors – in addition to military conflict – that represent perhaps more enduring challenges to the survival of Yemen’s architecture and traditional building practices.
 

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