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This is an analytical study of a new Sabaic inscription probably coming from the town of Naššān in Wādī al‐Jawf in northern Yemen. The text of this inscription, which is of a construction/dedicatory and a legal nature at the same time, bans the violation of the properties of Yaqdumʾil son of Ṯawrān, by the people of Ḫawlān and their vassals who had attacked that man's properties by cutting his trees and scattering his crops. The inscription is dated by the name of the Sabaean king Yadaʿʾil Bayyin son of Yaṯaʿʾamar, who reigned about the end of the fifth and the beginning of the fourth century BC. What distinguishes the inscription is that it contains new historical and linguistic material. Along with other Sabaic inscriptions found in the region, the text refers to the extent of settlement of Sabaean families from Mārib, Ṣirwāḥ, and Ḫawlān in the cities of al‐Jawf, specifically in Naššān and Našq, to control the roads of incense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The story of the god Thoth and King Ammon in Plato's Phaedrus is perhaps the most familiar example of a script‐origin narrative, but such accounts also exist from ancient China (such as Xu Shen's postface to the Shuowen jiezi) and Mesopotamia (the poem "Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta"). There are also rich and provocative ancient discussions of what it means to "borrow" or "adapt" writing from an adjacent (often more powerful) civilization, including a set of related narratives in eighth‐century Japanese chronicles about Korean scribes importing Sinitic writing. Such premodern sources can be profitably juxtaposed with modern discussions of colonial and ethnological encounters with literacy, such as frequently quoted and requoted stories of "natives" taken aback at the power of writing, or Claude Lévi‐Strauss's famous "Writing Lesson" (from his 1955 book Tristes Tropiques). This article considers the persistent anachronism that marks such accounts. Whether premodern or modern, it seems they inevitably become parables or allegories of the powers of writing at the time of their composition, rather than plausible reconstructions of its earliest stages. What lies behind this difficulty in writing the history of writing? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how an idea about the past enters a visualization studio, and the processes by which it is transformed by the techniques of visual representation put in place to make possible the creation of inscriptions and sketches. It focuses on the formation of a fact around a series of inscriptions, as the idea is moved between a number of actants and in the process sheds all traces of uncertainty. The actions of the artists, as they interact with each other, the client and the archaeologists, are at center. As representations create ideas about the past and cement those ideas in society, one cannot separate popular visual representations from the world of science. The processes of their construction hidden from the recipient, they survive the theories that once brought them into being. As a method to describe the making of a visual representation, this article makes use of the actor-network theory concepts of enrollment, inscription, negotiation, and translation to follow an idea into image and make the layers of translation in which image production is wrapped somewhat less opaque. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Nabataean inscription was discovered during excavations at Khirbat az-Zūna by the Regional Survey of the Wādī ath-Thamad Project in Jordan. The inscription is one of several examples of spolia found reused in the construction of the Roman castellum, although their origin remains unidentified. The inscription's position left it nearly invisible in antiquity, and it was clearly not meant to be read in its secondary context. The text is incomplete and partly illegible, but includes five lines of text mentioning five individuals; two of these are named Baṭalū, a new name in the Nabataean onomasticon. Of equal interest is a wish for the safety of a qysr, although the identity of this unnamed Caesar remains unknown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linus Pauling's work was intrinsically linked to visualizations. While his use of three- and two-dimensional inscriptions has been the focus of much scholarly research, the production of visualizations remains a rather poorly studied subject. This article focuses on the cooperation between Pauling and Roger Hayward, an architect by profession who came to scientific illustration in the late 1920s. By concentrating on the papers of Pauling and Hayward I describe the workflow between scientist and illustrator. Although Hayward's visualizations were epistemically indispensable and economically profitable, they were never fully acknowledged as such. This was due to the ongoing conflicts caused by the economic strategies pursued by Pauling and his publisher, Hayward's personal style, and science's general disregard for images as epistemic instruments. I suggest that these contentious relationships between scientist, illustrator, and publisher are paradigmatic for the history of scientific visualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is the edition and commentary of an inscription discovered some time ago in the area of Eilat. It is written in a script that is transitional between Nabataean and Arabic, is presumably dated to the late fifth century AD and mentions an Arab king. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Threatened by voices by popular dissent, some South American governments used massive imprisonments, systematic torture of prisoners, executions, indictments, and forced exile to silence and intimidate thousands of men and women. This profoundly disturbed all aspects of 'normal' life from the co-existence of different groups of the population to the core of the family. The traumatic effect produced by these events, which are both repressive to, and sustained in children's personality development, and the family as a whole, cannot be ignored. This article will look at the way in which terror is imprinted upon the psyche of victims of violence, and the effects of the transmission of that imprint from one generation to the next if there is no treatment intervention. The word 'mark' is used to describe this imprint, its manifestations, and its effects on the psychic life of survivors and their children. The word 'inscription' is used to describe the way in which this mark is burned into the psyche, just as the tattoos of Auschwitz were burned into the skin. Four case examples will elucidate how these histories of violence disturb the individual capacity to examine reality. They will explore the ways in which the defense mechnisms, built to insure psychic survival, are strained by the struggle between keeping the secret of umentionable and irresolvable horrors and the need to restore psychic continuity. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Greek funerary inscription of thirteen lines is currently in a private collection in northern Jordan and is said to be from the an-Naqaʿ cemetery in Ghor es-Safi. The type of stone and its contents confirm its presumed origin. It is a Christian stele dated to the fifth century AD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work we analyse the so-called 'construction inscriptions' from domestic buildings. In particular we deal with the inscriptions from domestic buildings from Tamnaʿ, the ancient capital of the Qatabān Kingdom, dated between the fourth century BC and the first century AD, a building located in the site of Darb aṣ-Ṣābi, near Barāqish, dated around the second century BC and a private house in Qaniya dated around the third-second centuries BC. We offer explanations of the lexical differences in the nouns used to indicate parts of buildings, not in terms of chronology, dialect or linguistic variations and influences, but on the basis of the architectonic and structural data available. Starting from the architectonic features (typologies of domestic buildings, different construction techniques, different uses of materials, etc.) we try to explain the differences in terminology concerning the inscriptions found in buildings known to us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines some of the major challenges facing urban sociology at century's end given its traditions and lineages. These challenges arise out of the intersection of major macrosocial trends and their particular spatial patterns. The city and the metropolitan region emerge as one of the strategic sites where these macrosocial trends materialize and hence can be constituted as an object of study. Among these trends are globalization and the rise of the new information technologies, the intensifying of transnational and translocal dynamics, and the strengthening presence and voice of specific types of socio-cultural diversity. Each one of these trends has its own specific conditionalities, contents and consequences for cities, and for theory and research. Cities are also sites where each of these trends interacts with the others in distinct, often complex manners, in a way they do not in just about any other setting. The city emerges once again as a strategic lens for the study of major macrosocial transformations as it was in the origins of sociology. Can urban sociology address these challenges and in so doing once again produce some of the analytic tools for understanding the broader transformation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]