This paper examines the criticism of Munīr Lāhorī (1610–44) regarding the early modern literary style of tāza-gū'ī (speaking anew) through his unedited commentaries on the qasidas of ʿUrfī Shīrāzī (1556–90). Munīr is critical of the Iranian poet's overly complex style, ungrounded in the literary tradition as he perceived it, and of developments in Mughal courts that began to favor Iranian literati over their Indian counterparts. His philological criticism of ʿUrfī's qasidas and the promulgation of tāza-gū'ī elucidates the methodologies of Safavid-Mughal literary criticism and illustrates how the prominence of Iranian figures in South Asian courts influenced the discourse on early modern Persian literary developments.

In 1926, Roberto Bartoccini excavated a late-antique tomb at Sirte, Libya. Fifty-three inscriptions in Latin, Greek and Latino-Punic have been recorded and used as evidence of a thriving Christian community. This article reassesses these inscriptions, paying particular attention to the Latino-Punic texts, and discusses the persistence of a Punic identity that can be placed in the context of the wider archaeological landscape.

This study analyzes Turkey’s political landscape by harnessing computational social science techniques to parse extensive data about public ideologies from the Politus database. Unlike existing theoretical frameworks that focus on the ideologies of political elites and cadres, this study examines public ideologies in a contentious political manner. Exploiting an artificial intelligence-based data generation pipeline on digital traces, it distills the eight most prevalent ideologies down to the city level and employs exploratory statistical analyses. Principal component analysis delineates two fundamental axes: the traditional left–right political spectrum and a separate spectrum of secular–religious inclination, encompassing both political and cultural dimensions. Then, cluster analysis reveals three distinct groups: left-leaning and religiously inclined; center-right-leaning and religiously inclined; and those with a center-right-leaning focus and a pronounced secular orientation. The outcomes provide valuable insights into the political and cultural axes within political society, offering a clearer understanding of the most recent ideological and political climate in Turkey.

In the region of Cyrenaica is located the rural sanctuary of Martuba, where two altars and a set of statues have been discovered that have traditionally been linked to the goddess Isis. However, through a comparison with other elements belonging both to the region and to Numidian and Phoenician-Punic areas, as well as Egypt, this paper defends their identification not with the Egyptian divinity, but with the one with which a process of hybridisation or religious bricolage took place at some point prior to Herodotus, the puissance divine called for convenience ‘Luna’ (Moon). This suggests the presence of two intertwined cultural traditions that have contributed to the formation of an innovative and distinct local reality. The resultant cultural artefact is characterised by a synthesis of influences from dominant cultures, such as Roman and Egyptian, while retaining distinctive elements that are unique to the Libyan-Phoenician tradition.