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Incidents of bioterrorism and biowarfare are likely to recur, leading to increased public concern and government action. The deficiencies of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) are in urgent need of attention: the BTWC is the central international agreement to prevent the proliferation of biological warfare programmes. Uniquely, this book is written by diplomats involved in the decade-long effort (1991-2001) in which State Parties to the BTWC tried to agree a Protocol to the Convention with legally binding measures to strengthen its effectiveness, and academics concerned with the negotiations. Just before negotiations foundered, when the Chairman's proposed text was virtually ...
More than 150 documents in Bactrian, the chief administrative language of pre-Islamic Afghanistan, have come to light during the last twenty-five years. These documents include letters, legal contracts, economic documents and a few Buddhist texts; many of them bear dates in the so-called "Bactrian era", which is also known from a few inscriptions, such as the Tochi valley inscriptions in Pakistan, but whose starting-point is controversial. The Bactrian documents have the potential to transform our knowledge of the history of the region during the 4th to 8th centuries CE, a period for which we have few contemporary records, but before they can be fully exploited as historical sources it is ne...
The Silk Road is as iconic in world history as the Colossus of Rhodes or the Suez Canal. But what was it, exactly? It conjures up a hazy image of a caravan of camels laden with silk on a dusty desert track, reaching from China to Rome. The reality was different--and far more interesting--as revealed in this new history. In The Silk Road, Valerie Hansen describes the remarkable archeological finds that revolutionize our understanding of these trade routes. For centuries, key records remained hidden--sometimes deliberately buried by bureaucrats for safe keeping. But the sands of the Taklamakan Desert have revealed fascinating material, sometimes preserved by illiterate locals who recycled offi...
This volume is a collection of ten articles published between 2009 and 2016 by Mark Dickens on the Assyrian Church of the East in Central Asia, along with a new article on Mar Yahbalaha III, the only Turkic patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East. Most articles deal with the textual evidence for Syriac Christianity in Central Asia, including six on Christian manuscript fragments from Turfan (China) and two on gravestone inscriptions from Semirechye (Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan). As the volume title indicates, these articles remind us of the centuries-long presence of the Assyrian Church of the East at the centre of the Asian continent, now all but forgotten due to the general scarcity of sources from which this history can be reconstructed.
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Bathalzar is the world's greatest violin-playing polar bear. At least, he used to be the greatest. Now he's the only polar bear left in all the world's circuses. He misses his home and his friends, but above all he misses his Grandpa Balthazar, who gave him his first violin. One day, Balthazar is set free. He sets off on an epic journey home, and eventually, after travelling across mountains, oceans and deserts, he sees a familiar face... This visually stunning picture book about the world's greatest violin-playing polar bear and his epic journey home from the circus features beautiful illustrations kids will love and sensitively explores themes of displacement, polar bear habitats and being far from home.
Reconstructing Manichaeism from scraps of ancient texts and the ungenerous polemic of its enemies (such as the ex-Manichaean Augustine of Hippo), BeDuhn reveals for the first time the religion as it was actually practiced. He describes the Manichaeans' daily ritual meal, their stringent disciplinary codes (intended to prevent humans from harming plants and animals), and their secretive religious procedures designed to transform the cosmos and bring about the salvation of all living beings. Overturning long-held assumptions about Manichaean dualism, asceticism, spirituality, and the pursuit of salvation, The Manichaean Body changes completely how we look at this ancient religion and the environment in which Christianity arose. BeDuhn's conclusions revolutionize our understanding of the Manichaeans, clearly distinguishing them from Gnostics and other early Christian heretics and revealing them to be practitioners of a unique world religion.
Scripts (writing systems) usually belong to specific languages and have temporal, spatial and cultural characteristics. The evolution of scripts has been the subject of research for a long time. This is probably because the long-term development of human thinking is reflected in the surviving script relics, many of which are still undeciphered today. The book presents the study of the script evolution with the mathematical tools of systematics, phylogenetics and bioinformatics. In the research described, the script is the evolutionary taxonomic unit (taxon), which is analogous to the concept of biological species. Among the methods of phylogenetics, phenetics classifies the investigated taxa...
The evolution of the disarmament regime of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) is described from 1980, when the first BTWC Review Conference was held, until 1998. The author analyses the results of SIPRI's first four review Conferences.