Michael Alram Michael Alram is the Director of the Coin Collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna and Vice-President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on Ancient and Medieval numismatics and monetary history. He extensively worked on the coinage of the Roman Empire, the monetary history of Iran and Central Asia in pre-Islamic times, as well as on Austria ́s monetary history. His ability to reach an audience can be seen is his exhibitions at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and many international exhibition projects. The Coin Collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna and the Maria Theresa Thaler as International Currency Coin collections are among the world ́s oldest museum collections. One of…

Petra Sijpesteijn Dr Petra Sijpesteijn is professor of Arabic. Her research concentrates on recovering the experiences of Muslims and non-Muslims living under Islamic rule, using the vast stores of radically under-used documents surviving from the early Islamic world. Starting in 2017, she manages an international research project entitled “Embedding Conquest: Naturalising Muslim Rule in the Early Islamic Empire (600-1000)”, funded by the European Research Council. Since 2014, she has also been director of the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam (LUCIS). Did the Early Muslim Empire have a Language Policy? After the establishment of the Muslim Empire as a result of the great Arab conquests of the mid-seventh…

A lecture by Mr. Abdulaziz Saleh al-Shehhi entitled: “Palm Tree House in the past”. The palm tree in the Emirates and the Arabian Gulf has its architectural style, its sense, its beauty and its environment, which are in harmony with it to form a heritage painting that embodies the history of the human being of the Arabian Peninsula.  

Jérémie Schiettecatte Dr Jérémie Schiettecatte’s current interests lay in the analysis of the evolution of settlement patterns in the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa from the Bronze Age to the Late Antiquity. Since 2000, he has been working in Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia. He directed the Saudi-French Archaeological Project in al-Kharj (Saudi Arabia) from 2011 to 2016 and holds a PhD in Near-Eastern archaeology from the Sorbonne University (Paris). An Archaeological Account of the Settlement Process in Central Arabia (c. 3000 BCE – 1800 CE): Results of the Saudi- French archaeological mission in al-Kharj. As one of the few watered areas in the Najd, the region…

Rémy Crassard Dr. Rémy Crassard is an archaeologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He participated in more than 70 archaeological expeditions, in many countries of the Middle East. He is the director of the Globalkites Project, has been teaching at universities in France and abroad, and has extensively published in international scientific journals and books. In 2017, he was appointed to the French center for archaeology and social sciences (CEFAS) in Kuwait, as permanent researcher and CEFAS Head of Archaeology. The Archaeology of Mysterious Gigantic Structures: The “desert kites” From the 1920s, aviators regularly spotted enigmatic gigantic stone structures from the air. With the development of open-accessed…

Bernard O’Kane Dr Bernard O’Kane is Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at The American University in Cairo, where he has been teaching since 1980. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of several books including The Mosques of Egypt and Timurid Architecture in Khurasan. O’Kane is also an avid photographer and recently directed the creation of the The Monumental Inscriptions of Cairo database. Stars and Symmetry: The Prophet Muhammad’s name in architectural inscriptions As we would expect, the name of Muhammad is among the most celebrated in architectural inscriptions. The two part Muslim profession of…

Tamer el-Leithy Dr. Tamer el-Leithy is an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University. He studied Economics in Cairo and worked as an oil company economist. Then, upon reading a historical novel set in medieval Cairo, he discovered a passion for medieval history, which led him back to graduate school to read medieval history in Cairo, then at Cambridge University (MPhil., 1998), and Princeton (PhD, 2005). He joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Research Fellow (2003-06) and taught at NYU (2007-14). Converting Objects and Words: Egypt’s Arabization in five objects (11th – 14th c.) The move from Coptic to Arabic – as the everyday language of most Coptic Christians as well…

Ahmad Al-Jallad Dr Ahmad Al-Jallad, Sofia Chair of Arabic at Ohio State University,USA, is a philologist, epigraphist, and historian of language. His work focuses on the languages and writing systems of pre-Islamic Arabia and the ancient Near East. He has authored and edited four books and many articles on the early history of Arabic, language classification, North Arabian and Arabic epigraphy, Quranic Studies, and historical Semitic linguistics. He has worked at excavation sites in Saudi Arabia, and conducts yearly epigraphic surveys in Jordan. The Rise of Arabic: From an Epic Past to an Evidence-based History The origins of Arabic, both the language and its script, became the subject of great speculation and disagreement…

Trudy Kawami Dr Trudy Kawami is a noted scholar of ancient Near Eastern and Central Asian art. She retired as the director of research at the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation in 2015 and is currently working with the Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah on a book on Elamite objects in the collection. She was also the curator of the Bronze Age section of the Splendors of the Ancient East: Antiquities from The al-Sabah Collection exhibition and three related exhibitions of objects in the Arthur M. Sackler collection. New Light on the Merchants and Rulers of Dilmun We suspected that the far-sailing merchants of Dilmun were a diverse group with contacts from the…

R. Michael Feener Dr R. Michael Feener is the Sultan of Oman Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and an Islamic Centre lecturer in the History Faculty at the University of Oxford. He is also the head of the Maldives Heritage Survey. Feener was formerly associated with the Asia Research Institute and the National University of Singapore. He has published extensively in the fields of Islamic studies and Southeast Asian history, as well as on post-disaster reconstruction, religion and development. Muslim Cultures of a Maritime World: Art and architecture of the Indian Ocean Within the first century of Islamic history Muslims, already active in expanding networks of maritime…