Arabic
The Roman past in 7th/13th century Hama (Syria): A brass cast of a cameo with the portrait of Nero in the treasure of al-Malik al-Mansur II
This paper is devoted to a brass medal in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, as well as its original gem. Both these items merited renewed attention from a cultural, historical and archaeological point of view since they both deserve their own place in the history of collecting both in the East and in the West. Writing the cultural biography of the object(s) involved in this study was particular challenging since it represents a dual, interrelated history of which we had until recently only one part (the brass cast).
Unpublished exemplars of block-printed Arabic amulets from the Qubbat al-khazna
The paper present two Syrian block-printed amulets coming from the Qubbat al-khazna find, in the Great Mosque in Damascus, that are currently at the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum in Istanbul. The Arabic texts of amulets are edited and translated into English. The technique of block-printing is discussed and the two exemplar put in a wider cultural and social context.
La madre di tutte le battaglie: una polirematica esotica
The paper deals with a formula that had an enormous diffusion in the Italian journalistic language, especially during the Nineties of the last century, namely la madre di tutte le battaglie.The work aims at reconstructing the etymology of the expression that goes back to a famous Saddam Hussein’s phrase. Saddam employed it from the middle of 1990 onwards, immediately after the invasion of Kuwait. As a matter of fact, the Arabic phrase umm al-macārik (“the mother of battles”) means “the supreme battle” and occurred in most of the official speeches made by Saddam between 1991 and 2003.
5th Simone Assemani Symposium on Islamic Coinage (Rome 29-30 September 2017)
The Proceedings of the 5th Simone Assemani Symposium on Islamic coins collect the various contributions with the unifying subject proposed for the meeting: Islamic money in the archaeological contexts (Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Tajikistan, Poland, on the plains of western Russia and in Georgia, Sicily or Spain), problems, methods, documentary value for the economic history from the Umayyad period to the Mamluks. The numismatic documentation should be also the outcome of recent investigations in the archives, i.e. the project “Fontes Inediti Numismaticae Orientalis”, acronym FINO.
Palaeography Between East and West. Proceedings of the Seminar on Arabic Palaeography held at Sapienza, University of Rome
The seminars entitled Palaeography Between East & West, which I convened at Sapienza University, aimed at offering a forum, a place of sharing knowledge and debate, to scholars who deal with manuscript materials in
Introduction
The seminars entitled Palaeography Between East & West, which I convened at Sapienza University, aimed at offering a forum, a place of sharing knowledge and debate, to scholars who deal with manuscript materials in