Arts and Humanities

Abstract: The Middle East includes at least two major empires, namely Ottoman and Persian. In Part 1 of this review, we focus on the studies of the scientific developments of the Ottomans, and we discussed their contributions in different fields, such as astronomy, medicine, and earth sciences, etc. In terms of Ottoman astronomy, Ulugh Beg (1394-1449) compiled Zij-i Sultani (astronomical table and star catalogue). His student, Ali Qushji (1403-74), wrote the mathematical work entitled al-Muḥammadiyya fī al-ḥisāb (The Muḥammadiyya Treatise on Arithmetic) and the astronomical works entitled al-Fathiyya (The Treatise of Conquest). For medicine, Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu (1385-1468) published Cerrahiyyetü’l-Haniyye (Imperial surgery), and Şanizade Mehmed Ataullah Efendi (1771-1826) wrote Teşrih-ül Ebdan ve Tercümânı Kıbale-i Feylesûfan (the first illustrated anatomy textbook in Ottoman-Turkish medicine). For Ottoman earth sciences, Piri Reis (1470-1553) published his 1513 world map and his nautical atlas, the Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of the Sea). Kâtip Çelebi (1609-57) compiled a vast universal bibliographic encyclopaedia of books and sciences, the Kaşf az-Zunūn. This review should form another discourse of modern scientific advances, other than the European narrative.

Abstract: This paper examines the development of science, technology, and engineering in Persia from the Achaemenid period under Cyrus the Great to the modern era. It traces the evolution of Persian knowledge across astronomy, medicine, earth sciences, and civil engineering, emphasizing the close relationship between scientific inquiry, practical needs, and state development. The study highlights major figures including al-Khwarizmi, al-Razi (Rhazes), Avicenna (Ibn Sina), al-Biruni, al-Karaji, Omar Khayyam, and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, whose contributions to medicine, astronomy, hydrology, and natural philosophy profoundly influenced the wider Islamic world and, in some cases, medieval Europe. It also examines major technological achievements, including Achaemenid hydraulic systems, Sasanian dams and bridges, Persian qanats, Safavid urban and hydraulic engineering, and the modernization of engineering education and infrastructure under the Qajar and Pahlavi states. By bringing together the histories of science, medicine, engineering, and technological exchange, the paper argues that Persian scientific development should not be understood simply as the transmission of Greek or European knowledge. Rather, Persian scholars and technical specialists actively adapted, synthesized, and extended knowledge from Greek, Indian, Mesopotamian, Islamic, and European traditions, creating a distinctive and enduring intellectual and technological tradition.

Abstract: The paper examines the history of the forest owned by the Dukes of Sermoneta, the Caetani family, situated in the Pontine Marshes region south of Rome. Chronologically, the study covers the period from the early decades of the nineteenth century—when the Dukes of Sermoneta began intensive exploitation of the woodland to meet the growing demand for coal and firewood—to the early 1920s, when the descendants of Duke Onorato Caetani VII decided to sell off the land still covered by woodland in order to focus on agricultural development. Through our case study, we outline a long historical period characterised by a variety of economic and commercial activities, which can be reconstructed thanks to the existence of a wealth of first-hand archival material. The main consequence of the decisions taken by the Caetani family—a prime example of a large noble estate—was the reduction in the area of lowland woodland, thereby initiating the first phase of the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes. The Caetani family implemented an entrepreneurial strategy that marked a significant shift in the region’s environmental balance.

Abstract: The Industrial Revolution is commonly periodized through successive technological discontinuities associated with mechanization, steam, electricity, mass production, computing, digital networks, and artificial intelligence. This paper proposes an alternative variable of historical observation: the functional-delegability frontier, defined as the historically demonstrated set of functions whose execution by technical systems is technically feasible under identifiable operating conditions. A function is specified independently of its mechanism as a transformation from an admissible input domain to a required output condition under specified operating conditions, F = (I, O, C). The framework distinguishes extensive expansion, in which a previously non-demonstrated function enters technical executability, from intensive expansion, in which the domain or conditions of an already delegable function broaden. It further separates functional flexibility—the range of distinct functions executable through a common architecture—from recursive expansion, in which delegated functions materially participate in developing additional technical capabilities. Historical cases ranging from pre-industrial automatic regulation and textile machinery to machine tools, punched-card systems, automatic telephone switching, general-purpose computing, industrial robotics, and machine learning are used to test the distinctions. The paper advances, as a falsifiable historical hypothesis rather than a definition, that mechanization, electrification, computing, digital technologies, and artificial intelligence can be interpreted as major technological discontinuities within a single, still-unfolding Industrial Revolution. The claim rests not on simple technological continuity but primarily on two proposed continuities: repeated reallocation of executable functions between humans and technical systems, and cumulative dependence of later technological systems on capabilities generated in earlier industrial development. A further, separately testable proposition is that delegated functions increasingly participate in producing subsequent technical capabilities, particularly after programmable computing. The framework does not explain the causes of industrialization or predict the economic consequences of automation; it offers a complementary historical variable through which continuity can be examined across technological discontinuities.

Abstract: Beginning in the 1860s, both the Kingdom of Serbia (Yugoslavia) and Romania gained notoriety as important regional factors in the South-Eastern European struggle for power. The beginning of the 20th century marks the strategic emergence of common interests between the two states and significant growth of the trading volume between the two. In this context, the heightening presence of Belgrade on Romanian territory was noticed, both politically, highlighted by consular representation, and economic interest, defined through the Danubian navigation- commerce binomial relation. In the first three decades of the 20th century, The Yugoslav Kingdom represented an important factor in Danubian navigation and an active presence in Romanian ports. The main vector in promoting their economic interests in the region was the Serbian Navigation Company, which became the Serbian Navigation Service, and subsequently, the Yugoslav Navigation Service. This service operated in the majority of Romanian ports and competed successfully against a multitude of significant, long-standing companies. The dynamization of commercial trade on the Danube presupposed the operationalization of a consular network in Belgrade that included the port of Brăila and the capital city, Bucharest. Between 1906 and 1932 the presence of 15 official Serbian (Yugoslav) consuls was recorded in Romania, of which 6 were based in Brăila and 9 in Bucharest. In relation to the regional scale of the Serbian (Yugoslav) Kingdom in the aforementioned time period, Belgrade had a consistent politico-economic presence in Romania, the interstate relations reaching significant heights that have temporarily contributed to the consolidation of regional stability.

Abstract: Background: In 1983 Plaitakis and Duvoisin identified Homeric moly with Galanthus nivalis L., and read the Circe episode as the earliest recorded use of an anticholinesterase against antimuscarinic poisoning. The identification held for four decades. Recent multidisciplinary criticism has now put its philological and biogeographical foundations in doubt. Objective: To ask what survives of the pharmacological thesis once those foundations are removed — by reconstructing the clinical phenotype the poem describes, extracting the constraints the texts actually impose, and testing five candidate taxa against them. Methods: Critical review, integrating the Homeric and classical sources (Theophrastus, Dioscorides) with Amaryllidaceae phytochemistry and with the clinical toxicology of antimuscarinic delirium. Results: The phenotype as narrated, delirium with inner awareness preserved (noos empedos), corresponds closely to central antimuscarinic toxicity. Five constraints emerge from the texts: a dark-tunicated bulb, a white flower, arduous extraction, an inland habitat, and the pharmacodynamic capacity to reverse the syndrome. Against these, Galanthus nivalis performs well on morphology and pharmacology and badly on biogeography, being effectively absent from the Aegean lowlands. Peganum harmala does possess anticholinesterase activity, contrary to a claim often made in this debate, but its habit is wrong and so is its ecology. Allium nigrum belongs to the moly of the later botanists and offers no centrally acting mechanism; Mandragora belongs to the kykeon, not to the cure. Only Pancratium spp. satisfy all five, and they do so for a reason no other candidate can supply: contractile roots that bury the bulb, accounting for precisely the difficulty of extraction that Theophrastus singled out as diagnostic. Conclusions: The pharmacological reading of the episode stands. The single-species identification does not, and should give way to a clade-level hypothesis centred on the Mediterranean Amaryllidoideae, with Pancratium as the likeliest archetype — that is, to an ancient ethnobotanical complex in which empirical antidotal knowledge was carried by a group of plants rather than by one.

Abstract: Amid shifting urban renewal approaches and industrial restructuring in China, small and medium-sized cities face the challenge of conserving industrial heritage through adaptive reuse. Drawing on gazetteers, planning documents, and interviews, this paper examines the transformation of the Anqing Baiqitun Cement Plant into a cultural and creative park across environmental, social, economic, and governance dimensions. The case is significant as typical heavy industrial heritage in a smaller city, while the enterprise's restructuring and relocation have produced a rupture in collective memory and identity. The study finds that minimal intervention in the heavy industrial remains achieved carbon sequestration and emission reduction, succeeded in ecological restoration, and attained financial viability by leveraging local markets and intangible assets. However, the industrial past has been selectively reconstructed, creating a divide between the former industrial community and the present one, partly due to an over-reliance on Authorised Heritage Discourse logic and insufficient collaboration with the existing enterprise. Participatory governance, driven mainly by government coordination and market capital, proved efficient but lacked public engagement. The paper argues that regenerating industrial heritage in small and medium-sized cities requires not only physical upgrading but also social mechanisms that enable public participation in conservation.

Abstract: While humour requires closeness, it may also be understood at distance, in books or newspapers, where jokes play an important role both as attractive elements for reading and as political and social devices. One of the problems that shall be discussed is a particular case of 'Anglobalization': the reception and appropriation of British cultural and political influence via the translation of British authors or through the satire on the influence of British Army officers. Thereafter, along with the concept of the British presence in Portuguese reading materials, the question is to understand whether we may speak about British humour or about Portuguese humour on British characters. While the meanings of jokes change, being far from the cultural area where texts were born and understood, they may still function for different readers. Humour is a strong case in discussing cultural transfer and reading expansion, as readers deal with jokes meant to be heard or to be seen, and hardly to be read.

Abstract: Sunday Schools provided access to books that would otherwise have not been available to rural children and teenagers in Australia. These books were largely written in the late nineteenth century by lower middle-class women, the daughters of clerks and grocers in England. The books produced by these writers were hardly sedate or regimented but laced with techniques deriving from the sensation novel, with unreliable narrators and unreliable figures of authority. An examination of one young woman’s reading choices reveals a world characterized by insecurity in identity, danger and uncertainty.

Abstract: Why did Portuguese diplomacy survive in Benin and Warri while Christian conversion failed to produce lasting social transformation? What explains the survival of diplomatic exchange in the face of the fragility of missionary success? This paper explores the diplomatic and religious aspects of Portuguese relations with the kingdoms of Benin and Warri from the late fifteenth century to 1725. It argues that African political agency, rather than European initiative, was the decisive structural feature of early Afro-Portuguese relations in the Bight of Benin. Diplomacy endured because the Oba of Benin and the Olu of Warri found Portuguese engagement useful for trade, prestige, military advantage, and external legitimation. Christianity, however, failed to achieve lasting social transformation because it threatened the sacred foundations of kingship in Benin and, in Warri, remained largely a court religion rather than a socially translated and locally sustained faith. The divergence between diplomatic success and missionary failure was therefore not incidental: it reflected African rulers’ capacity to select, adapt, and refuse foreign influence according to local political priorities.

Abstract:

The thesis of this essay is this: the concept of “national sovereignty” is a “poisoned candy”. Their universalization prevents, among other things, the existence of “nations of nations”. Perhaps the clearest example is the “Spanish nation”, which includes territories that, for centuries, have been called “nations” without ceasing to be part of the “Spanish nation” or posing problems of sovereignty. Only the recovery of the original meaning of the Latin “natio” can eliminate this unavoidable lexical problem, which has become a conceptual obstacle. The author traces the history of the two words involved in the question, both from their Latin origin: “natio” and “soberanitas”. To explain their union, he then reviews the various forms and political theories with which the concept of “supreme authority” has been attempted to be expressed until he reaches that of “national sovereignty” with Sieyès. This forces him to review more than two millennia of history of political thought, from the fifth century B.C. to the end of the eighteenth century.

Abstract: This paper explores the intertwined history of Africa and Atlantic Europe between 1400 and 1800. Unlike other works that view Africa as only a passive subject of Europe's outward expansion, this paper demonstrates that African kings, traders, priests and intellectuals were key players in the construction of the Atlantic world. Using four overlapping themes: political diplomacy; commodity knowledge; religious translation; and cartographic imagination, the paper shows that the histories of Africa and Europe during this period cannot be accurately reconstructed through the lens of a single region in isolation.

Abstract: This study examined the social and economic structure of the village of Rumnos, which was located in the district of Devrek in the Province of Bolu of the Ottoman Empire (now located in the District of Devrek, in the Province of Zonguldak in Turkey), based on Temettuat Register number 3378, dated 1844–1845. According to this particular volume of the Temettuat Register, the primary sources of income in the village were agriculture and animal husbandry. The prevalence of occupations directly related to agriculture is remarkable, as it generates the majority of wealth. The types of taxes paid by the tax-liable heads of household, together with their incomes derived from their occupational activities, were identified, and their overall tax burdens were determined. An income distribution analysis using statistical methods was conducted for this study. A Lorenz curve was constructed, and the Gini coefficient was calculated as 0.33. The analysis determined that there was a moderate level of inequality in the income distribution among the households in the village of Rumnos.

Abstract: The Sinaia Lead Plates constitute a corpus of over one hundred inscribed and illustrated metal plates reportedly discovered in Romania in the late nineteenth century, of which forty-six are currently preserved. Frequently classified as modern forgeries, the assemblage has not previously been subjected to a systematic, corpus-level archaeological analysis. This study presents an integrated reassessment of the plates combining material examination, epigraphic classification, linguistic analysis, iconographic evaluation, and contextual review of historical references. Rather than presupposing either authenticity or fabrication, the article adopts a structural and methodological approach, examining internal coherence, technical parameters, and functional plausibility. The analysis identifies consistent correlations between writing systems, linguistic patterns, iconographic organization, and historical associations across the corpus. Arguments advanced in support of the forgery hypothesis are reassessed within a comparative methodological framework, highlighting both their contributions and their limitations. Although the question of authenticity cannot be resolved conclusively on the basis of currently available evidence, the structural integration and conceptual organization of the corpus challenge simplified explanatory models and underscore the need for sustained interdisciplinary investigation.

Abstract: This paper examines China's unprecedented economic transformation from 1978 to 2025, analyzing the strategic policies and pragmatic approaches that enabled the world's most populous nation to lift over 800 million people out of poverty. Drawing on recent scholarship and empirical data, this study identifies five critical factors that drove China's success: pragmatic economic reform prioritizing competence over ideology; strategic experimentation through Special Economic Zones; export-led industrialization; massive infrastructure development; and disciplined collective action. The analysis demonstrates how China's development model offers important lessons for developing nations while acknowledging its unique contextual factors. This research contributes to contemporary development economics by examining how systematic, evidence-based policy implementation can achieve rapid poverty reduction at scale.

Abstract: During the Little Ice Age (1490-1760), natural disasters were primarily caused by extreme weather conditions featuring significant drops in temperature, which caused damage to crops; the resulting decrease in agricultural production led to famines. Recurring famines, in turn, caused the outbreaks of pandemics, resulting in massive death worldwide. The Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty (朝鮮王朝實錄) recorded a wide range of unusual events during the Little Ice Age including significant drops in ground-level temperature, reduced crops, repeated famines, and the prevalence of infectious disease, along with abnormal changes in the sky. Additionally other disasters during the Little Ice Age included frequent crop damages from insects and the appearance of deformed animals. This paper focuses on the appearance of deformed animals. By analyzing the 271 cases of deformed animals identified in the Veritable Records. While investigating the main cause of the Little Ice Age, I noticed that what space science refers to as “cosmic dust” was brought into the earth’s atmosphere by a multitude of meteors or accumulated in the atmosphere due to atmospheric meteor explosions. The Veritable Records recorded unusual situations such as pressed dust or powder falling from the sky or thick fog blocking vision and causing darkness during the day. This paper thus regards such records of unusual situations as indications of the long-term accumulation of “space dust,” which this paper identifies as the cause of animal deformations. This paper also relies on thirty-eight cases of deformations in the German flugblatt published during the Little Ice Age. These resources were collected from the German National Museum in Nuremberg, Germany and other European institutes.

Abstract: Democratic systems rest on institutional counterbalances capable of limiting authority concentration. Historical transitions toward dictatorship often emerge not through abrupt institutional destruction, but progressive weakening of stabilizing mechanisms like parliamentary oversight, judicial autonomy, political pluralism, decentralized governance. Adolf Hitler’s power consolidation following the Weimar Republic’s collapse provides a historical example in which democratic counterbalances lost corrective capacity under economic crisis, institutional fragility, coordinated mass mobilization, etc. While the historical causes of authoritarian transitions have been extensively studied, the dynamics governing the failure of democratic stabilizing mechanisms is less characterized. We introduce a dynamical systems framework aimed at identifying early-warning signals associated with democratic destabilization and executive power concentration. We represented democratic governance as a multidimensional attractor stabilized by negative feedback mechanisms generated by institutional independence, distributed authority, informational plurality, constitutional constraints. Using historical data from Germany between 1928 and 1934, we built a composite systemic stress index integrating economic instability, war trauma, ideological vulnerability, institutional fragility, political polarization and Nazi mobilization. Simulations based on nonlinear response functions and state-space trajectories showed threshold-like transitions in which progressive stress accumulation was followed by accelerated concentration of political authority, once stabilizing feedbacks became insufficient. Democratic collapse could be interpreted as a loss of systemic resilience associated with attractor deformation and feedback amplification. Potential applications of nonlinear approaches include comparative analysis of institutional fragility, quantitative assessment of democratic resilience and development of early-warning frameworks for detecting conditions associated with excessive concentration of political power in contemporary political systems.

Abstract: This study examines the north-western access corridor to Žilina through the Kysuca valley (the Kysucká brána area) and the Budatín crossing during the revolutionary years 1848–1849. Using local archival excerpts, a regional chronicle manuscript and a cartographic reading of historical and present-day topography, we reconstruct the probable road alignment between Brodno, Budatín and the bridgehead towards Žilina and identify its recurrent military use by Imperial, Hungarian and Russian forces. The paper argues that the corridor’s strategic value stemmed from a combination of terrain constraints (narrow valley and floodplain), bridge dependence and the connectivity of the Jablunkov Pass trade route. We provide a chronology of troop movements in 1848–1849 and discuss source limitations, including internal inconsistencies in local narratives that require verification against primary military records. The article contributes a microhistorical case study to military geography of Upper Hungary and highlights the analytical potential of regional sources when integrated with critical source evaluation.

Abstract: To date, many studies on the Nazi Special Courts have focused on the individuals involved in passing judgement or in the prosecution process in general, as well as on their political significance. For our study, we undertake a re-evaluation and computational ‘upcycling’ of an archive catalogue from the 1970s containing around 10,000 legal cases from the Munich Special Court (1933–1945). Although this was not an entirely new phenomenon–they were originally introduced by the Weimar Republic–, the special courts were unique in that they brought together general criminal law and ‘crimes’ in the form of non-conformity with National Socialist ideology under a single jurisdiction.

Abstract: From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, both Great Britain and the United States implemented large-scale child-emigration schemes aimed at relocating so-called «surplus» children—impoverished but considered «of good stock»—from major urban centres to rural households overseas or in the American interior. These programmes emerged from a shared diagnosis: industrial and agricultural economies in metropolitan areas were allegedly unable to absorb growing populations of poor children, who were framed as both a social burden and a latent threat to urban order. Emigration was thus promoted as a form of social reform—an intervention that would simultaneously relieve urban poverty and overcrowding while promising the children a healthier, morally improving environment on the farm.Central to this policy logic was the belief that agricultural labour and rural domesticity would function as vehicles of knowledge acquisition, moral rehabilitation, and civic formation. By learning farm work and rural norms, the children were expected to develop the dispositions necessary for productive adulthood and responsible citizenship, thereby securing redemption from an otherwise bleak urban future. Yet the historical record complicates this narrative of benevolent rescue. Although some children undoubtedly escaped severe deprivation, many migrant youths struggled to adapt to rural life, faced abuse, exploitation or isolation, and carried the consequences of these ruptures into adulthood. Rather than straightforward instruments of uplift, these schemes often reproduced existing inequalities under the guise of paternalistic reform.