Monthly Archives: March 2012

Syrian ancient sites under threat

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As a popular uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria enters its second year, the Syrian Expatriates Organization has voiced concern that the nation’s archaeological treasures are under serious threat from attacks by the Syrian army.

A Facebook group, called Syrian Archaeological Ruins in Danger, released an internal letter that the Syrian Prime Minister Adel Safar supposedly sent to other ministers, warning that “professional international gangs” have smuggled into the country equipment for “stealing manuscripts and robbing museums, safes, and banks.” There are several museums in Syria spread across the country, housing artifacts from different eras. The deteriorating security and the chaos ensuring from the fighting might make it harder to protect these important sites. This echoes what happened in Egypt after the uprising that toppled long-time President Hosni Mubarak in January February 2011, when looting attempts, often successful, spread across the country as security waned.

Meanwhile, according to an AFP report, the Syrian army has taken up fortification in the historic Citadel of Ibn Maan, overlooking the ancient Romanian Desert Ruins of Palmyra, a UNESCO protected world heritage site. Tanks have been set up near the entrance to the Roman ruins and residents say soldiers fortified in the citadel have been shooting at anything that moves from within since they started sieging the city in early February 2012.

In Homs, one of the worst hit cities by the conflict, activists have released videos and images of destroyed historic mosques, souqs (markets) and ancient towns.

The Citadel of Ibn Maan is not the only ancient citadel endangered by the ongoing violent conflict. Al-Madiq citadel in Hama, another badly hit city, suffered serious damage. Activists in the city have released a video on YouTube showing shelling and smoke rising from within the citadel, which dates back to the time of the Crusades.

The Syrian Expatriates Organization has appealed to the UNESCO to issue a statement condemning the Syrian government’s use of these historic sites as military bases and endangering the Syrian people’s heritage in the  fighting, and to send an assessment mission to evaluate the damage and thefts that may have occurred as soon as the situation permits.

The video below, posted by activists from Hama, shows the damage that the Al-Madiq citadel has sustained so far due to the ongoing fighting.

Chimeras: bloodthirsty myth or genetic revolution?

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This blog post is cross-posted from the Spoonful of Medicine blog.

Rebecca Hersher

NEW YORK — Chimeras, part one species and part another, have a long and violent history in the world of art and religion. But the way society views the mythical creatures is changing, thanks in part to the advent of genetic engineering.

“If you look back at depictions of chimeras, it is clear that there have been changes in our relationship with the animal within us, whether we fear it or try to harness its power,” Robert Klitzman, a psychiatrist and bioethicist at Columbia University in New York, told Nature Medicine.

At a lecture here this week at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Klitzman argued that art reflects our changing attitudes toward the differences between humans and animals, a line which is increasingly being blurred by genetic technologies such as the creation of chimeric mice and monkeys for research.

Klitzman’s survey of artistic representations of chimeras began in ancient Egypt, when the duality of the gods was their most terrifying trait. For example, Anubis, god of the afterlife, had the head of a conniving jackal and the body of a man, and Sekhmet, the warrior goddess who carried out heavenly punishments on earth bore the head of a lion. By the time of the Greeks, the most famous chimera, the murderous sphinx, had evolved to have the haunches of a lion, the wings of an eagle, the tail of a serpent and the head of a woman.

You can continue reading the full post by clicking here.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

Database of Middle Age Arabic documents

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Researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Germany are working with their counterparts at the French research centre CNRS to create a database of historic legal Arabic documents from all over the Arabic-speaking world.

The project, Islamic Law Materialized, was officially launched in 2009 and is set to run into 2014. It is headed by Christian Muller from CNRS.

The documents, dating from the 8th to the 12th century AD, are legal documents issues by courts, includes contracts of purchase, estate inventories, debt acknowledgments, marriage certificates, and divorce decrees.

“By compiling these texts into a database, we’ll be able to collate them with one another so that we can understand them even better,” said Johannes Pahlitzsch,a Byzantine and Arabic Studies expert from JGU. These legal documents often have phrases that are repeated across several documents. By having them all in one database, these phrases can easily be identified, collected and compared to other documents.

Most of what we scholars know about legal practice in the Middle Age Arabic-speaking world has come from legal manuals and juridical treaties. Other documents were neglected because the handwriting and technical terms often made them hard to decipher and they were widespread over several states, making them hard to collect and analyse.

“But, thanks to the database, we will be able to analyze the exact provisions of the decrees and make comparisons between them,” adds Pahlitzsch. “This will give us a much better idea of actual practices.”

Most of the ancient documents that are going into the database are collected from Christian institutes, mainly churches and monasteries. The scholars are collecting both edited and as yet unedited documents.

The research group will compare three under-examined corpuses from al-Andalus, Egypt and Palestine from the 13th to the 15th century, and compare these to other edited documents from Central Asia, Iran, Syria, Egypt and Muslim Spain (8th-15th centuries).

Egyptians fear a foot-and-mouth disease epidemic

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© Nature Middle East

The quick spread of foot-and-mouth disease across most of Egypt’s governorates has spread fear among farmers and breeders who are losing more cattle everyday. They have complained the government has been dragging its feet in addressing the problem and worry there might be a widespread epidemic of the disease around the corner, similar to one that hit the country in 2006.

Foot-and-mouth is an infectious and often fatal viral disease that easily spreads between farm animals such as cattle, sheep and pigs through aerosols or contaminated farming equipment. The symptoms of the disease in animals includes a high fever, skin rashes and blisters in the mouth and udders of females. It causes a serious decrease in milk production so can have severe economic effects. The virus is rarely transmitted to humans, where it is characterized by a mild fever, headaches and milk mouth inflammations.

So far, official statements put the number of infected cattle at over 24,000 across Egypt, with 2013 having died due to the virus so far since it started to spread on 26 February.

Samy Taha, head of the veterinarians syndicate in Egypt, blamed the widespread infection on imported live cattle from abroad and leeway infection control.

Speaking to a committee from the Egyptian parliament, the agriculture minister blamed farmers and breeders who have not taken their animals in for vaccination regularly.

The currently available vaccines and treatments for the disease have been largely ineffective, which has prompted scientists to expect the virus may have mutated. Samples have been sent to the laboratories of the World Reference Laboratory for Foot and Mouth Disease in London to determine if this is a new strain of the virus.

France has offered to send emergency vaccines to Egypt to control the disease and the Egyptian minister of agriculture has announced that the government has pledged the money needed to either import or locally produced the needed vaccines to control the spread of the disease.

However, controlling the spread of foot-and-mouth disease is not easy and often requires strict monitoring and quarantines and elimination of many infected animals. Farmers and breeders across the rural areas of Egypt are frustrated that little has been done since in the 20 days since the disease began to spread widely, remembering the large economic loss they suffered when it widely spread last in 2006.

 

MENA region lags behind world in education equality

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While countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have scaled up education and enrollment rates in schools keep rising, education inequality between the poor and the rich has not been reduced in over a decade, according to a new study.

Presenting his results at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, a professor of economics at Virginia Tech and a research fellow at the Brookings Institute, examined education inequality in 16 Arab countries.

Salehi-Isfahani found there was equality in actual access to schools, however, there was obvious inequality in the quality of schooling available to children from rich families compared to those from poorer families. He quoted Ragui Assaad, professor of planning and public affairs at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota, on his research in Egypt where “[the] most privileged boy has a 97% probability of pursuing higher education compared to only a 9% probability for the most deprived boy.”

Over the past few years, private expensive schools have increased in many of Egypt’s affluent neighborhoods, which offer high quality premium education at prices unaffordable to most Egyptians. This creates a disparity, with children from richer families getting better work and life opportunities based on their higher quality education.

The quality of research in the MENA was also below the global averages. In studies such as TIMSS (Trends in International Math and Science Study), which  compare international students’ aptitude in math and science to that of students in the United States, the students scored below world averages.

Salehi-Isfahani argued that a large amount of the benefits of education remained incalculable. “A lot of it cannot be measured, such as making better citizens, making better parents.”

He added that governments needed to start improving education and giving all children – whether wealthy or impoverished – the quality education they deserve as citizens.

 

Egyptian student shortlisted in international science competition

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Zebra Spider
© Adam Opioła / Wikipedia

An 18-year-old high school Egyptian student was shortlisted as one of six regional competitors to join the final stage of the YouTube Science Lab competition, which challenged students to come up with science experiments that would benefit from being performed in a low-gravity setting.

Amr Mohamed, who is studying for his IGCSE certificate in Alexandria, Egypt, submitted a proposal to study how the zebra jumping spider, which jumps to capture their prey rather than trap them in spiderwebs, would hunt in a zero-gravity setting – where jumping is not really an option.

Mohamed wants to study how the spiders would evolve and adapt to this new setting in order to continue hunting effectively and not perish in space.

Mohamed is the only one shortlisted to the  final six in his age group (16-18) from the Europe/Middle-East/Africa region. The final stage will take place on 22 March and will see two winners, one from each age group, whose experiments will be performed 400 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, aboard the International Space Station. These experiments will then be live-streamed on YouTube and people anywhere will be able to watch them live.

The YouTube Science Lab competition is held in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

According to The Daily News Egypt, Mohamed would like to pursue a science research career and has already submitted applications to MIT, Stanford and Columbia in the United States because “there are no real scientific research programs in Egypt,” he explained.