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During the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, more Europeans visited the Middle East than ever before, as tourists, archaeologists, pilgrims, settler-colonists and soldiers. These visitors engaged with the Arabic language to differing degrees. While some were serious scholars of Classical Arabic, in the Orientalist mould, many did not learn the language at all. Between these two extremes lies a neglected group of language learners who wanted to learn enough everyday colloquial Arabic to get by. The needs of these learners were met by popular language books, which boasted that they could provide an easy route to fluency in a difficult language. Arabic Dialogues explores the motivations of Arabic learners and effectiveness of instructional materials, principally in Egypt and Palestine, by analysing a corpus of Arabic phrasebooks published in nine languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian) and in the territory of twenty-five modern countries. Beginning with Napoleon’s Expédition d’Égypte (1798–1801), it moves through the periods of mass tourism and European colonialism in the Middle East, concluding with the Second World War. The book also considers how Arab intellectuals understood the project of teaching Arabic to foreigners, the remarkable history of Arabic-learning among Yiddish- and Hebrew-speaking immigrants in Palestine, and the networks of language learners, teachers and plagiarists who produced these phrasebooks.

Within the basic historical framework, there is much that is controversial: the date of Bactrian independence, the order and relationships of Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kings, and the processes by which their rule came to an end. The most controversial question of all in Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek studies has long been that of the cultural and ethnic affinities of these kingdoms and their inhabitants. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book sets the Greek kingdoms of Central Asia within their wider geopolitical context. It surveys the intellectual history of studies of the Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms. The book provides an in-depth regional overview of the Hellenistic-period archaeology of Central Asia. It treats the written sources on the Greek kingdoms in Bactria and India.

This chapters explores how three philological traditions Graeco-Roman, South Asian and Chinese have been and can be used to contribute to our understanding of Central Asia in the Hellenistic period. It outlines the current state of the written evidence in Greek and Latin – including both texts from excavated contexts and those from the manuscript tradition – to explore how this evidence has traditionally been used to interpret the history and culture of Hellenistic Central Asia, and to offer some prospective avenues for future research. The most convenient place to consult the Greek texts from Hellenistic Central Asia is in Rougemont’s volume in the series Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum. The presence of Greek inscriptions and administrative documents obviously cannot be taken as a proxy for the use of Greek as a spoken language of communication.