The Filāḥa Texts Project: The Arabic Books of Husbandry

The purpose of the Filāḥa Texts Project is to publish, translate and elucidate the written works collectively known as the Kutub al-Filāḥa or ‘Books of Husbandry’ compiled by Arab, especially Andalusi, agronomists mainly between the 10th and 14th centuries These systematic and detailed manuals of agriculture, horticulture and animal husbandry have been somewhat neglected and remain largely unknown in the Anglophone world - apart from some of the Yemeni works they have never been translated into English. They not only provide primary source material for the understanding of what has been called the ‘Islamic Green Revolution’ but constitute a rich body of knowledge concerning a traditional system of husbandry which is as valid today as it was a thousand years ago and has much relevance to future sustainable agriculture.


More in the website of the project here.

Hungarian Contributions and Arabic Contributions to international scholarship in Classics: A Diagnostic Contrast

I'm not trying here to give a detailed diagnostic contrast between the Hungarian contributions to the international scholarship in the field of classics. My aim is to give a link to an interesting article that I've recently found online, about the Hungarian contributions in this field. The article is Rttook, Zsigmund. (1997) "The contribution of Hungary to international classical scholarship" Hungarian Studies, 12. Archived here.

The Hungarian case is very informative in many ways; first its language, like the Arabic, is not a modern science language. Nevertheless the Hungarian contributions has been recognizing internationally, cf. e.g. and I quote p. 12 of this article "At the centre of Gyula Moravcsik's interests stood the relationship of Byzantium and the Turcic peoples. (Turcic in the broadest sense of the word, more or less as Byzantine historians used the word, so even Hungarians were included.) His  monumental Byzantino-turcica remains an indispensable instrument for all who  deal with Byzantine history and with Turcic languages because the first volume of the work gives a detailed survey with a full bibliography of all Byzantine histo­rians who mention some Turcic people. The second volume contains all refer­ences to Turcic peoples and records of their languages on the basis not only of  printed texts, but also on the examination of the manuscript tradition. It was he,  further, who produced the standard edition of Constantine Porphyrogennetus' work De administrando imperio."

This monumental work appeared first in Hungarian Budapest 1942 & 1943 then in Berlin 1958 as a second edition in German. This in my opinion is a true case in which the genuine work recieves recognition even if it was composed in a language not considered as a science language.  

Homer's Iliad into Arabic Prose by Ahmed Etman et alli

Homer's Iliad is translated into Arabic prose by Ahmed Etman and alii. The translation was published by the NTC in 2008.

The Egyptian stage performance of Phaedra ( Jean Racine ?)

I found this video recording of a play titled in Arabic (فيدرا) or Phaedra. I think this is the Arabic translation of the  French play Phèdre by Jean Racine.

PhD Thesis about Kerkesoucha in Fayum

Kerkesoucha : An Egyptian Village in Greco-Roman Egypt in The Light of Papyri. A PhD thesis in Arabic has been approved with  summa cum laude. Congratulations to our colleague Ahmed Mahrous.

Classical Papers' Index

An Index of  " Classical Papers" or "أوراق  كلاسيكية " the bulletin of Classics department in Cairo University is available also online. The bulletin contains contributions written in Arabic as well as other European languages like English and French. The index could be accessed here.

List of Arabic titles in Library of Classics department (Cairo University)

The department of Classics in Cairo University is putting online a list with contributions to the study of classics written by scholars in Arabic. The list could be accessed here.