Graffiti is often associated with decay and vandalism. Modern scholars of the practice (.ho typically focus on graffiti in the modern West) have described it as a way a subaltern or “marginal” group might achieve a voice precisely because the practice can be both illegal and anonymous. Certainly, many restorers of architectural sites in the Muslim world have viewed pilgrimage graffiti in just this way. Utilizing examples from shrines in Turkey, Iran, and Tajikistan and contextualizing them into their proper religious and cultural milieu, I however argue that Muslim shrine graffiti is in many ways a very different phenomenon. I show that shrine graffiti in the Muslim world has typically been understood not as an act of vandalism, but as a normative pilgrimage practice across much of the Muslim world, accepted and even encouraged by custodians of shrines. In analyzing the text of these inscriptions, we can learn how the pilgrimage site has been understood by those who participated at the site. Moreover, Muslim shrine graffiti is quite often not anonymous: pilgrims often sign and date their graffito, meaning that these inscriptions can also serve to gauge the popularity of a site over a period of time. At the same time, Muslim shrine graffiti does share at least one thing in common with graffiti in the modern West: in both cases, it can provide a window onto segments of society not traditionally found in our standard source material. Shrine graffiti can therefore serve as a source for the study of history, religion, and society.

This paper argues that changes in the structure of the Ottoman government during the Tanzimat era created corresponding shifts in legislation and ideology that enabled the effective policing of antiquities smuggling. Furthermore, these shifts represented not only a tightening of trade regulations, but both precipitated and reflected changing ideas about Ottoman identity and history. I use the correspondence of U.S. Vice Consul Rudolf Hurner as a focal point for examining the smuggling of antiquities by U.S. archaeologists and attempts by Ottoman officials of the Imperial Museum to thwart this illicit trade. Rudolf Hurner was a businessmen that used the diplomatic office to promote his personal economic interests; he was the nexus for antiquity smuggling out of U.S. archaeological digs at Adab and Nippur. In one particularly bold case, Hurner and Edgar Banks, an archaeologist working for the University of Pennsylvania, staged a robbery in an attempt to smuggle a statue, known as the King of Adab, out of Ottoman Iraq. Due to increased regulations that began during the Tanzimat era of the 19th century, Ottoman officials at the Imperial Museum – in particularly Hamdi Bey and his deputy Heider Bey - were able to prevent the smuggling of this statue and other artifacts. I argue that the restructuring of the Ottoman State during the Tanzimat era led to the regulation of antiquities, beginning with official legislation in 1874 that granted antiquities oversight to the Ministry of Education, to the creation of an Ottoman school to train archaeologists in 1875, and finally culminating in 20th century legislative changes that gave the Ottoman state full control over the fate of excavated antiquities. Changing Tanzimat regulations reflected not only the political but also the cultural values of Western nationalism; thus artifacts, once associated with the pre-Islamic past, became part of a larger project to foster a unified Ottoman identity and national mythology. Artifacts had to be protected because they represented not only a loss in commodities, but a loss of cultural heritage that contributed to the national imaginary.

This paper examines the historical commentaries of Hormuzd Rassam, a nineteenth century Assyrian Christian archeologist and diplomat from Mosul in the context of current scholarly literature on the uses and sometimes abuses of archaeology in legitimating histories of communities, tribes and modern nation-states in the Middle East. While largely neglected by historians of the Modern Middle East, Rassam was arguably the first Middle Easterner whose engagement with Orientalism allowed for the construction of a “national” history for the Aramaic speaking Christians of Upper Mesopotamia. From 1846 to 1855 and 1877 to 1882 Rassam assisted with and later led a series of archaeological digs in the ancient city of Nineveh outside Mosul on behalf of the British Museum. Furthermore, Rassam provided diplomatic reports and recommendations to the British government regarding the condition of the minority Christian and non-Christian groups in Ottoman Iraq, and also maintained correspondences with Ottoman officials in Mosul and Istanbul regarding his work. The talks Rassam gave to the Victoria Institute in London, alongside his 1897 memoir/travelogue linked the Aramaic speaking Christian community in Upper Mesopotamia to the heritage of the ancient empires of the Assyrians and Chaldeans. Rassam’s writings also include a commentary on the condition and beliefs of religious minorities such as Assyrian and Armenian Christians, Kurds, Yezidis, who are still an integral part of the region's tapestry of ethno-religious communities. Rassam provides a unique case study of an individual bridging two worlds (Victorian England and Ottoman Mosul), and struggling to find acceptance in the face of xenophobic and suspicious attitudes from both sides. This paper draws on two of Rassam’s talks to the Victoria Institute in London, Recent Assyrian and Babylonian Research in 1880, and The Garden of Eden and Biblical Sages in 1881, alongside Rassam’s own memoir and travelogue Asshur and the Land of Nimrod published in the United States in 1897.

Salīm Sarkīs’ famous 1896 polemic against the *mektupçu* of Beirut implicitly forwarded a theory as to the origin of the usage of *al-ʿumūm* as “the general public”. His claim that *al-ʿumūm* replaced *al-jumhūr* due to prohibition of the latter term by the censor was evidently wrong. There is, nevertheless, substantial evidence that the modern Arabic usage of *al-ʿumūm* and *ʿumūmī* to designate all things public was heavily influenced by Ottoman semantic choices. The proposed paper argues that the period between 1875 and 1914 witnessed a shift from *ʿumūm al-ahālī*, or the “entirety of people”, to *al-ʿumūm*, “the public”. I will show how the meaning of *al-ʿumūm* as the public was introduced and gradually established through the translation of Ottoman laws into Arabic, the proliferation of Arabised Ottoman terminology through official bi-lingual gazettes, and the publication of official announcements to *li-l-ʿumūm*. I further argue, that the adjective *ʿumūmī* / *ʿumūmiyya*, in addition to its original meaning as “general”, “universal” or “common”, equally acquired the meaning of something being “public” in the sense of being either open to the use of the public (both *ʿumūm al-ahālī* and *al-ʿumūm*) or as being state-sponsored and state-run (as in *al-manāfiʿ al-ʿumūmiyya* or *al-maʿārif al-ʿumūmiyya*) through the adaptation of Ottoman parlance. The analysis is based on some 7.000 news reports from eight Beiruti and Damascene newspapers between 1875 and 1914, as well as a corpus of some 30 contemporaneous Arabic, Ottoman, Persian, French, and English dictionaries and multi-lingual collections of Ottoman legal texts. I propose that by specifically focusing on news reports instead of opinion pieces and editorials or other canonical works (“Höhenkammliteratur”), it is possible to grasp a broadly accepted everyday usage resonating with the contemporaneous reading audience as a matter-of-fact description. The focus here is the resilience of certain terms and the gradual shifts of semantics instead of the programmatic ruptures and utopian spaces of political ideologies. In order to scrutinise the historical *a priori* and the semantic field for possible attempts to speak about *a* or even *the* public in the late Ottoman *Bilād al-Shām* in both its onomasiologic and semasiologic dimension across such a large dataset, I turn to quantitative methods once the individual terms and concepts were inductively established.