ISAW is a center for advanced scholarly research and graduate education, intended to cultivate comparative and connective investigations of the ancient old world from the Mediterranean to East Asia. It was founded by Shelby White and the Leon Levy Foundation in 2006.
Robert G. Hoyland appointed Professor of Late Antique and Early Islamic Middle Eastern History at ISAW
Professor Hoyland comes to us from the University of Oxford where he was Professor of Islamic History and also earned his DPhil there in 1994. His scholarly interests lie with the history, languages, and literature of the late antique and early Islamic Middle East, more specifically the relations between Muslims, Jews, and Christians, the links between identity, religion, and ethnicity, and the transmission of knowledge from the Ancient world to the Islamic world. He is the author of numerous publications including Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A survey and analysis of the Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian writings on Islam (2001). Please join us in welcoming Prof. Hoyland to our community this fall. Learn more >>>
Upcoming Events
19 May 2012: Between Belief and Science: The Contribution of Writing and Law to Ancient Religious Thought
...10:00 AM
24 May 2012: Exhibition Lecture: From the Excavation of a Frozen Tomb to the Writing of History: The Berel' 11 Barrow Project (Kazakhstan, Altai, Third Century BCE)
Henri-Paul Francfort, Maison René Ginouvès, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique: ...6:00 PM
Latest News
New Book from VRS Alum Mathieu Ossendrijver
Mathieu Ossendrijver, one of ISAW's visiting research scholars in 2010-11, has published a new book entitled Babylonian Mathematical Astronomy: Procedure Texts, part of the Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences series from Springer. The book contains a new analysis of the procedure texts of Babylonian mathematical astronomy. These cuneiform tablets, excavated in Babylon and Uruk and dating from 350-50 BCE, contain computational instructions that represent the earliest known form of mathematical astronomy of the ancient world. The book includes new translations of all 108 available tablets accompanied by commentaries and color photographs of the tablets. The preceding chapters are devoted to documentary, lexical, semantic, mathematical and astronomical aspects of the procedure texts. Special attention is given to issues of mathematical representation, a topic that had previously been largely ignored. Mathematical concepts are presented in a didactic fashion, setting out from the most elementary ones (numbers and elementary operations) to more complex ones (algorithms and computational systems). Chapters devoted to the planets and the Moon contain updated and expanded reconstructions and astronomical interpretations of the algorithms.
'Influential Neighbors' in the Wall Street Journal
Melik Kaylan writes in the Wall Street Journal for 1 May 2012 concerning ISAW's Nomads and Networks exhibition, as follows:
Wu Hung Elected to American Philosophical Society
His research interests include relationships between visual forms (architecture, bronze vessels, pictorial carvings and murals, etc.) and ritual, social memory, and political discourses in early Chinese art. He also serves as Director for the Center for the Art of East Asia and Consulting Curator at the Smart Museum of Art.
