Provisional List of Speakers
Daniel Martin Varisco is an anthropologist and historian who conducted ethnographic research on water rights and traditional agriculture in a highland Yemeni valley in 1978-79. As a historian he has carried out research on the anwā’ in the Egyptian National Library, the Western Library of the Great Mosque in Sanaa and elsewhere. He has written articles about the anwā’, other aspects of Arabic folk astronomy, astrology, almanacs and calendars. In 1994 he published Medieval Agriculture and Islamic Science (U. Washington), an edition and translation of a late 13th century Yemeni agricultural almanac and he is currently writing a history of agriculture in the Rasulid era as well as a Handbook of Rasulid Yemen. His most recent book was Seasonal Knowledge and the Almanac Tradition in the Arab Gulf (Palgrave, 2022), based on research in Qatar. He taught at Hofstra University and Qatar University until 2017 after which he received fellowships in Vienna, Bonn and Princeton. He is now retired and lives in New York.
Christian Julian Robin,
Graduated from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (1964), the National School of Living Oriental Languages in Literary Arabic (1967), and the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (1978), he served as the director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research from 1970 to 2010.
With a Doctorate in Letters, he served as the director of the Institute for Research and Studies on the Arab and Muslim Worlds (1997), as well as the director of the Laboratory of Ancient Semitic Studies. Additionally, he was the French correspondent of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres from 1997 to 2005. In 2011, he was appointed as an exceptional senior research director at CNRS.
Throughout his career, he held various archaeological missions, including directing the French Archaeological Mission in the Arab Republic of Yemen (1978-1989), the Qataban Mission (1988-2010), the French Archaeological Mission in Tigray (1996), and was responsible for the French part of the Franco-Saudi epigraphic survey mission in the Najran region (since 2005).
As a member of the editorial committee for several academic journals, including Saba and Raydân, and co-editor of the “Inventory of South Arabian Inscriptions,” he was also the founding president of the Society of Archaeologists, Philologists, and Historians of Arabia. Furthermore, he has been a member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres since 2005, having replaced Jean Schneider, and served as its president for the year 2017.
The most relevant publication to the conference of professor Robin is the review article about the pre-Islamic calendars in Arabia titled: “Die Kalender der Araber vor dem Islam.” The article was published in 2016 as a chapter of the book “Denkraum Spätantike. Reflexionen von Antiken im Umfeld des Koran”
Mohammed Maraqten: Dr. Mohammed Marqaten is a Palestinian archaeologist and historian who currently lives and works in Germany. He is a specialized researcher in the languages and civilizations of the ancient Near East, particularly the languages and writings of the Arabian Peninsula before Islam and is currently employed at the University of Münster in Germany. He obtained his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Marburg in Germany in Semitic languages in 1987. He has worked in teaching and research at several German universities and at the University of Vienna. He has published dozens of studies on the civilizations and languages of the ancient Near East, particularly on Aramaic and ancient Yemeni inscriptions, in English, German, and Arabic. Among his publications are four books, including one on Yemeni ancient inscriptions written on the fronds of palm trees.
Sakaji, Ammar (Jordan), President of the Jordanian Astronomical Society JAS, Head of the Scientific Affairs at the Regional Center for Space Science and Technology Education for Western Asia, Theoretical & Astronomical Physicist, Center of Theoretical Physics & Astrophysics, Honorary Professor of Physics, Editor of the Electronic Journal of Theoretical Physics, former Deputy General Director of the Scientific Affairs at the Regional Center for Space Science and Technology Education for Western Asia,
Belmonte Avilés, Juan Antonio (Murcia, Spain, 1962) has a degree in Physics from the University of Barcelona (1985) and a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of La Laguna (1989), where he also studied Egyptian hieroglyphic language. He is a Research Professor at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), where he investigates exoplanetology and Archaeoastronomy. He has written or edited some twenty books and written more than two hundred articles on these subjects in both scientific and popular science journals. He is associated with the Astrophysics Department of the University of La Laguna, where he has taught Astrobiology, History of Astronomy and Archaeoastronomy and has supervised several doctoral theses. He has been director of the Science and Cosmos Museum of Tenerife (1995-2000), President of the European Society for Cultural Astronomy (SEAC, 2005-2011), President of the “International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture” (ISAAC, 2017-2020) and of the Time Allocation Committee (CAT) of the observatories of the Canary Islands (2003-2011). He has received in 2012 the “Carlos Jaschek” Award for cultural astronomy for his contribution to the discipline. Currently, he is an associate editor of the Journal for the History of Astronomy, a reference journal in cultural astronomy, and President of the IAU C4 Commission. Over the past three decades he has conducted large-scale research on the astronomical traditions of the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean and beyond.
Ahmad Al-Jallad (born 1985) is an American researcher. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University (2012). He worked as a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands (2013-2018) and recently moved to work at Ohio State University in the United States. He specializes in the early history of Arabic and the languages of northern Arabia. He has published a book on the grammar of Safaitic inscriptions (2015) and edited a volume titled “Arabic in Context” (2017). He has two forthcoming books on related topics. He has published dozens of scholarly articles in journals focused on Near Eastern studies, including a study on celestial constellations in Safaitic inscriptions and another on the earliest stages of Arabic and the question of its classification. His latest book reconstructs the religion and rituals of Arabia’s pre-Islamic tribespeople: “The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia A Reconstruction Based on the Safaitic Inscriptions” Brill 2022: https://brill.com/view/title/61413?language=en.
