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Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Ibn Waḥshiyya (Arabic: ابن وحشية), died c. 930, was a Nabataean (Aramaic-speaking, rural Iraqi) agriculturalist, toxicologist, and alchemist born in Qussīn, near Kufa in Iraq. He is the author of the Nabataean Agriculture (Kitāb al-Filāḥa al-Nabaṭiyya), an influential Arabic work on agriculture, astrology, and magic. Already by the end of the tenth century, various works were being falsely attributed to him. One of these spurious writings, the Kitāb Shawq al-mustahām fī maʿrifat rumūz al-aqlām ("The Book of the Desire of the Maddened Lover for the Knowledge of Secret Scripts", perhaps 1022–3 CE), is notable as an early proposal that some Egyptian hieroglyphs could be read phonetically, rather than only logographically.
The Nabataean Agriculture (Arabic: كتاب الفلاحة النبطية, romanized: Kitāb al-Filāḥa al-Nabaṭiyya, lit. 'Book of the Nabataean Agriculture'), also written The Nabatean Agriculture, is a 10th-century text on agronomy by Ibn Wahshiyya (born in Qussīn, present-day Iraq; died c. 930). It contains information on plants and agriculture, as well as on magic and astrology. It was frequently cited by later Arabic writers on these topics. The Nabataean Agriculture was the first book written in Arabic about agriculture, as well as the most influential. Ibn Wahshiyya claimed that he translated it from a 20,000-year-old Mesopotamian text. Though some doubts remain, modern scholars believe that the work may be translated from a Syriac original of the 5th or 6th century. In any case, the work is ultimately based on Greek and Latin agricultural writings, heavily supplemented with local material. The work consists of some 1500 manuscript pages, principally concerned with agriculture but also containing lengthy digressions on religion, philosophy, magic, astrology, and folklore. Some of the most valuable material on agriculture deals with vineyards, arboriculture, irrigation and soil science. This agricultural information became well known throughout the Arabic-Islamic world from Yemen to Spain. The non-agricultural material in The Nabataean Agriculture paints a vivid picture of rural life in 10th-century Iraq. It describes a pagan religion with connections to ancient Mesopotamian religion tempered by Hellenistic influences. Some of this non-agricultural material was cited by the Andalusian magician and alchemist Maslama al-Qurtubi (died 964) in his Ghayat al-Hakim ("The Goal of the Wise", Latin: Picatrix), while other parts were discussed by the Jewish philosopher Maimonides in his Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190). The French Orientalist Étienne Marc Quatremère introduced the work to the European scholarly community in 1835. Most 19th-century scholars dismissed it as a forgery, but from the 1960s onward several researchers have shown increased interest in its authenticity and impact.
The Sabians, sometimes also spelled Sabaeans or Sabeans, are a religious group mentioned three times in the Quran (as الصابئون al-Ṣābiʾūn, in later sources الصابئة al-Ṣābiʾa), where it is implied that they belonged to the 'People of the Book' (ahl al-kitāb). Their original identity, which seems to have been forgotten at an early date, has been called an "unsolved Quranic problem". Modern scholars have variously identified them as Mandaeans, Manichaeans, Sabaeans, Elchasaites, Archontics, ḥunafāʾ (either as a type of Gnostics or as "sectarians"), or as adherents of the astral religion of Harran. Some scholars believe that it is impossible to establish their original identity with any degree of certainty. At least from the ninth century on, the Quranic epithet 'Sabian' was claimed by various religious groups who sought recognition by the Muslim authorities as a People of the Book deserving of legal protection (dhimma). Among those are the Sabians of Harran, adherents of a poorly understood ancient Semitic religion centered in the upper Mesopotamian city of Harran, who were described by Syriac Christian heresiographers as star worshippers. These Harranian Sabians practiced an old Semitic form of polytheism, combined with a significant amount of Hellenistic elements. Most of the historical figures known in the ninth–eleventh centuries as al-Ṣābiʼ were probably either members of this Harranian religion or descendants of such members, most notably the Harranian astronomers and mathematicians Thabit ibn Qurra (died 901) and al-Battani (died 929). From the early tenth century on, the term 'Sabian' was applied to purported 'pagans' of all kinds, such as the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, or Buddhists. Ibn Wahshiyya (died c. 930) used the term for a type of Mesopotamian paganism that preserved elements of ancient Assyro-Babylonian religion. Today in Iraq and Iran, the name 'Sabian' is normally applied to the Mandaeans, a modern ethno-religious group that follows the teachings of their prophet John the Baptist (Yahya ibn Zakariya). These Mandaean Sabians, whose most important religious ceremony is baptism, are monotheistic, and their holy book is known as the Ginza Rabba. Mandaean Sabian prophets include Adam, Seth, Noah, Shem and John the Baptist with Adam being the founder of the religion and John being the greatest and final prophet.
The Nabataeans of Iraq or Nabatees of Iraq (Arabic: نبط العراق, romanized: Nabaṭ al-ʿIrāq) was a name used by medieval Islamicate scholars for the rural, Aramaic-speaking, native inhabitants of central and southern Iraq (the Sawād) during the early Islamic period (7th–10th centuries CE). They are not to be confused with the ancient Nabataeans, a northern Arab people who established a kingdom at Petra during the late Hellenistic period (c. 150 BCE – 106 CE), and whom the Islamic-era Arabs seem to have called 'Nabataeans of the Levant' (نبط الشام, Nabaṭ al-Shām). The Nabataeans of Iraq were strongly associated by their Muslim overlords with agriculture and with a sedentary way of living, as opposed to the nomadic lifestyle of the conquering Arabs. The Arabic term Nabaṭī (also Nabīṭ, plural Anbāṭ) was often used as a derogatory term, identifying anyone who did not speak Arabic and who maintained a rural lifestyle as lacking education and culture, or as being akin to farm animals. Thus conceived of as a kind of 'other' to the noble way of life maintained by the nomadic Arabs, the term also came to be used for the non-Arab rural inhabitants of other places, such as for example for 'Nabataean' Kurds (al-Nabaṭ al-Akrād) or 'Nabataean' Armenians (al-Nabaṭ al-Armāniyyūn). The term 'Nabataeans of Iraq' appears to have been an exonym applied by the Arabs, not used by the Iraqi population to refer to itself. However, it was not always derogatory in meaning. As a general term for pre-Islamic Mesopotamian people, it was also used in a more positive way by learned authors such as the historian al-Mas'udi (died 956), who identified the ancient Babylonian kings as 'Nabataeans', stating that "these are the Nabataeans and others [...] It is they who erected the buildings, founded the cities, established the administrative divisions, dug the canals, planted the trees, sank the wells, worked the land." Al-Mas'udi's knowledge of the history of Mesopotamia, being ultimately based on Greek sources, was quite impressive for his time. However, the fact that the Iraqi 'Nabataeans' whom he used as direct informants were speakers of Aramaic, a language best known in his time through its Syriac variant, led him to use the terms 'Nabataean' and 'Syrian' (Suryānī) interchangeably, applying them both to the various Aramaic-speaking Hellenistic kingdoms established in the Near East after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. Another name which al-Mas'udi sometimes used synonymously with both 'Nabataean' and 'Syrian' is 'Chaldaean' (Kaldānī), a similarly ambiguous term originally referring to the inhabitants of a small kingdom in southeastern Mesopotamia (Chaldea) but which came to designate Mesopotamia as a whole in the writings of Greek authors such as Aristotle (384–322 BCE), as well as in the Bible (both usages of which al-Mas'udi was aware). Since al-Mas'udi also believed the Parthians (whom he called Ardawān, perhaps after the several Parthian kings who carried this name) to have been 'Chaldeans', in his historical imagination the Syriac/Aramaic-speaking 'Nabataeans' or 'Chaldaeans' had ruled over Mesopotamia from the legendary times of Nimrod until the advent of the Sassanids in the 3rd century CE. The Iraqi Nabataeans themselves, who were mainly peasants, seem to have had little knowledge about their own past. In this regard their case was similar to the Persians and other people with a long history before the advent of Islam, but it was exacerbated by the fact that most Iraqi Nabataeans had long since converted to Christianity, which tended to focus their interest on Christian salvation history rather than on their own pagan heritage. However, among those who had remained pagan there was a greater motivation to vaunt their glorious past as long-time rulers of the land. For example, the Nabataean scholar Ibn Wahshiyya (died c. 930 CE) claimed to be a descendant of the Neo-Assyrian king Sennacherib (r. 704 – 681 BCE), who was also more widely revered by pagan Nabataeans at the time as their illustrious ancestor. It is also from the pagan peasantry that Ibn Wahshiyya got most of his local information when compiling his Nabataean Agriculture, an influential work containing a mix of folkloric and learned knowledge on agriculture, plants, magic, astrology, and various subjects related to religion and myth. Ibn Wahshiyya claimed to have translated this work from a c. 20,000 old original written in "ancient Syriac" (al-Suryānī al-qadīm), believing it to contain the first seeds of all human knowledge. Syriac, a language that originated in the 1st century CE, was commonly believed in Ibn Wahshiyya's time to have been the language spoken in Paradise and used at the time of creation. Thus, the whole of Mesopotamian history was imagined to have been a product of Aramaic (i.e., 'Syrian' or 'Nabataean') culture. In reality, the Nabataean Agriculture was likely translated from a Syriac work that was first composed on the basis of Greek and Latin agricultural writings and then gradually augmented with local material during the last few centuries before Ibn Wahshiyya's time. Together with al-Mas'udi's historical works, and like the latter written in the context of the Shu'ubiyya movement which sought to preserve and promote the heritage of non-Arab peoples, the Nabataean Agriculture is the product of a conscious attempt to write down what was known at the time about pre-Islamic Mesopotamian, 'Nabataean' culture, a subject for which it remains a valuable source today.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Joe Louis.