Terrace farming installations occupy vast desert areas in the Southern Levant. Their construction harsh environments raises critical questions focusing on natural, political, and economic circumstances promoting their operation. The present review, based new observations previously published materials, focused three different arid regions located across Levant, namely Eastern Marmarica of North...

This article presents the results of a study of the medicinal uses of natural substances in medieval and Ottoman al-Sham (the Levant). It involved a meticulous survey of a wide range of historical sources spanning approximately 1100 years and including medical and pharmacological literature, travelogues, geographical and agricultural literature, dictionaries, archives, the Genizah and other med...

Palaeoenvironmental research in the Southern Levant presents a series of challenges, partly due to the unequal distribution of palaeoenvironmental records and potential archives throughout the region. Our knowledge of climatic evolution, during the last approximately 25,000 years, is of crucial importance to understand cultural developments. More local, well-dated, multi-proxy studies are much ...

The beginning of metallurgy in the ancient Near East attracts much attention. The southern Levant, with the rich assemblage of copper artifacts from the Nahal Mishmar cave and the unique gold rings of the Nahal Qanah cave, is regarded as a main center of early metallurgy during the second half of the 5th millennium CalBC. However, a recently discovered copper awl from a Middle Chalcolithic buri...

This study traces the use of the Doctrine of Signatures among medieval and Ottoman physicians and its subsequent appearance in the pharmacological literature of the Levant. Close examination of the historical sources of the Levant seems to support the claim that although this theory did not originate in the region, it was certainly practised there. These sources have revealed 23 substances with...

Archaeobotanical and genetic analysis of modern plant materials are drawing a complex scenario for the origins cereal agriculture in Levant. This paper presents an improved method study early farming harvesting systems based on texture gloss observed sickle blades through confocal microscopy. Using this method, we identify different activities (unripe/semi-ripe/ripe reaping reed grass cutting) ...

• Rare dataset of medieval glass from Venice. Common technology based on use Levantine ash. Three sources, sand compositions. Possible origins in Italy, the Levant and Egypt. Assemblages Venice, leading glassmaking centre Europe, are rarely accessible for analysis. Here we present electron microprobe analyses sixty-one vessels dated to between 12th and15 th centuries island Murano, which late 1...

New discoveries of legumes in the lower Galilee at the prehistoric site of Ahihud in Israel shed light on early farming systems in the southern Levant. Radiocarbon dating of twelve legumes from pits and floors indicate that the farming of legumes was practiced in southern Levant as early as 10.240-10.200 (1σ) ago. The legumes were collected from pits and other domestic contexts dated to the Ear...

This paper discusses the experience of the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS) project in developing event data sets for monitoring conflict levels in five geographical areas: the Levant (Arab-Israeli conflict), Persian Gulf, former Yugoslavia, Central Asia (Afghanistan, Armenia-Azerbijan, former Soviet republics), and West Africa (Liberia, Sierra Leone). These data sets were coded from commercial ...