In the early twentieth century, the Iranian Reza Shah state (1925–1941), in conjunction with the emerging group of state-trained scholars, called the status of ulama as knowledge producers into question. Existing scholarship has primarily examined the impact of state modernization on the Muslim clergy and their responses to modernization but has paid lesser attention to the passive role of the ulama or their representation in modernist intellectual and literary discourses. I examine two major Persian sources of the period to argue that intellectual representation of the ulama, in both polemics and academic critique, aided the state in its attempt to push the ulama from the center of intellectual and social life to the margins of ritual purity. Among my primary sources is a previously unexamined academic thesis authored by Qasim Tuysirkani in 1938.

On October 7, 2023, Palestinian armed groups, chiefly Hamas's armed wing, breached the fence around the Gaza strip and launched attacks on Israeli territory. Over several hours, Palestinian fighters killed 1,269 people, mostly civilians, engaged in sexual violence and torture, and took 253 hostages. The same day, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “Israel is at war,” and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched air strikes and later a ground invasion of Gaza. In the eleven months since, Palestinian groups have continued to hold, mistreat, and kill hostages and launched rockets into Israel's population centers. Meanwhile, the IDF has killed an estimated forty-one thousand people in Gaza, mostly civilians, engaged in sexual violence and torture of Palestinian detainees, damaged or destroyed most of the food, water, and medical infrastructure, and restricted humanitarian access, with dire consequences. Civilian casualty experts argue the death toll (which excludes the likely greater number killed “indirectly” through disease and deprivation) far exceeds what we have come to expect from contemporary military campaigns. Both sides have committed violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), too many to list individually.

Le pratiche funerarie delle élites tardoantiche a Roma rivelano un intreccio complesso tra status sociale e privilegio esibito nella sepoltura. Mentre i pregiudizi storiografici tradizionali hanno appiattito la forte eterogeneità interna alla classe dirigente dell'Impero tardoantico, un'analisi focalizzata sulle tombe riferibili ad individui specifici svela un quadro sfaccettato e permette di negarne definitivamente qualsivoglia concezione monolitica. L'epigrafia fornisce indicatori affidabili nella delineazione dello status sociale dei defunti, con formule riservate ai membri degli ordini senatorio ed equestre sulle cui tombe si concentra l'analisi proposta. Il mausoleo del celebre Sextus Claudius Petronius Probus incarna la grandiosità associata alle sepolture d’élite, mostrando tutti i caratteri di monumentalità tipici del periodo. Allo stesso modo, il mausoleo di Viventius, ex prefetto di Roma, riflette gli stretti legami tra gli aristocratici e i nuovi poli di attrazione cristiani del suburbio romano, possibilmente facilitati dal patrocinio diretto della Chiesa. Nel contempo, le catacombe rivelano pratiche di sepoltura diverse, con alcuni individui appartenenti ai due ordini maggiori della società romana sepolti in ambienti modesti, insieme a comuni defunti. Questi esempi sottolineano l'intricata relazione tra gerarchia sociale, costumi funerari e affiliazioni religiose tipici di Roma tardoantica.

L'articolo si propone di presentare lo storico dell'arte paleocristiana e bizantina tedesco Wolfgang Fritz Volbach (1892–1988) come museologo, alla luce di alcune ricerche recenti, di nuove acquisizioni documentarie e di una più ampia rassegna della sua attività tra Magonza, Berlino e Roma. Il testo si concentra sul suo periodo romano (e in particolare vaticano), sia in qualità di precoce professore di museologia al Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana di Roma, sia come attivo collaboratore nella riorganizzazione del Museo Sacro della Biblioteca Vaticana. Si riflette poi anche sulle sue idee di museologo, attingendo ai suoi testi critici e ai musei in cui ha lavorato tra Berlino e Magonza.

This article charts a new course for the study of the Middle Persian documents from early Islamic Iran, which takes their early Islamic context into account more fully than has hitherto been done. This approach and its potential fruits for the study of early Islamic history are illustrated through an in-depth treatment of four seventh-century documents from the Qom region (previously edited and discussed by Dieter Weber), each of which contains a fiscal term that is apparently otherwise unattested in the documentary corpus. I show that the existing interpretations of these documents anachronistically project the fiscal terminology and structures of a later time into early Islamic Iran, and that these documents, considered in aggregate, suggest a certain course of development for the Islamic fiscal system in the post-Sasanian territories in the decades following the initial conquests: from broad and relatively unspecific impositions to more targeted exactions, based on increasingly detailed assessments.