The article examines the collection of manuscripts, documents, and early printed books that belonged to the Dagestani Arabist scholar and manuscript collector Magomed-Galib Mukhiddinovich Sadyki (1918–2000). In autumn 2025, the collection was transferred to the Center of Islamic Manuscripts of the Institute of Oriental Studies RAS. The collection has been catalogued, while detailed description and partial digitization are ongoing. The collection of M.-G.M. Sadyki brings together documents and manuscripts from dispersed private and mosque collections in Southern Dagestan. It includes both common Arabic works and texts related to regional history. It contains manuscripts and books in Turkic, characteristic of Southern Dagestan’s written culture. Materials concerning the work and biography of the Lezgin poet Etim Emin (1841–1880) occupy a special place and reflect the deliberate nature of Sadyki’s collecting activities. The article focuses primarily on a corpus of legal documents comprising more than seventy letters and texts, dating from the 1860s–1890s. A part is connected with the Yaltsug rural court and traces practices of adjudicating property, inheritance, and family disputes, as well as interactions between the rural court and district administration during the spread of the legal system in the region. These documents demonstrate the integration of imperial judicial norms into local legal practice and provide micro-cases for studying transformations in Muslim legal culture from below. The collection of M.-G.M. Sadyki is an important source for studying the everyday history of Southern Dagestan, legal practices, rural court record-keeping, regional intellectual traditions, and documentary heritage in the 19th century.
This article examines a crucial stage in the evolution of Russian-Japanese relations during the second half of the 19th century, a period marked by active colonial expansion by Western powers in the Pacific Ocean, primarily the policies of the USA and leading European empires seeking to penetrate the region. This dynamic contributed to a more assertive Japanese policy towards adjacent territories, particularly Sakhalin. Japan's growing interest in the island was driven by both strategic considerations and the desire to protect its northern frontiers from foreign encroachment. In response, Russia adapted its foreign policy strategy, opting to intensify its diplomatic efforts in the Far East. This was expressed not only in a strengthened military presence but also in increased bilateral contacts aimed at finding compromises. The study focuses on the delimitation of Russian and Japanese territories, where Sakhalin emerged as a major stumbling block. The Treaty of Shimoda (1855) stipulated that the border would run between the islands of Iturup and Urup, while deliberately leaving Sakhalin under joint possession without clear division. This deliberate ambiguity allowed both parties to avoid binding commitments. The academic value of this work is enhanced by its use of rare Japanese sources and new archival materials from the Russian State Naval Archive (RGAVMF). These documents enable a more detailed and comprehensive reconstruction of the negotiation processes, the hidden motives of the parties involved, and the influence of the international context, revealing how the Sakhalin question became inextricably linked to broader geopolitical rivalries in Northeast Asia.
The article explores the use of matronyms and matronymic family names in Babylonia in diachronic perspective. Researches into matronyms were undertaken separately for each period — the Old, Middle and Neo-Babylonian, but there was no attempt to study this phenomenon in its development. The inconsistent use of personal determinatives constitutes a challenge for the research goals. Matronyms, though rare, appear as early as the Old Babylonian period; masculine determinatives prefixed to female names reflected scribal convention rather than gender designation. In the Middle Babylonian period, matronyms could replace patronyms for servile personnel and be applied to members of female-headed extended families. Unsystematic application of determinatives and use of matromyms derived from the names of the heads of extended families, persisted into the Neo-Babylonian period. References to a mother’s status, such as the designations mār ḫarimti, “son of a whore” or mār zakīti, “son of a freed woman”, functioned not as family names but as indicators of reduced legal rights and social standing, as seen in disinheritance cases.Over time, indicating a mother’s status or profession often took precedence over her name. Matronyms could mark independent women or specify lineage through a maternal grandfather’s household, without implying low status or absence of a legal father. Overall matronyms and maternal designations served specific purposes: denoting social status, legal capacity, or familial structure. Their use was not simply a substitute for a missing father but responded to contextual needs, whether highlighting a woman’s independent role, her household affiliation, or her offspring’s legal rights.
The idea of “generosity” of the British finds a peculiar refraction in their attempt to “renounce” the authorship of a famous hypotheses belonging to a British egyptologist, according to which the ancient Egyptian civilization was founded by a foreign “Dynastic Race”. This diffusionist hypothesis was developed by W.M. Flinders Petrie, influenced by the eugenic doctrine of F. Galton, with whom Petrie collaborated, supplying his anthropometric laboratory in London with human bones from his excavations. Historians have noted the racist views of Petrie, a supporter of eugenics and social Darwinism. In one of his monographs, the British egyptologist Toby Wilkinson attributed the authorship of the “Dynastic Race” hypothesis to the German anthropologist Hans Winkler, who had only an indirect connection with it (he discovered petroglyphs of large boats in the Eastern Desert of Upper Egypt, which served as the basis for the version of the invasion of Petrie’s “civilizers” into the Nile Valley from the Red Sea coast along Wadi Hammamat). Wilkinson also accused Winkler of adherence to nazi ideology and the use of the concept of “master race”, although it never appears in Winkler’s publications. Moreover, in the 1920s, Winkler was a member of the German communist party, what led to his dismissal from the University of Tübingen by the nazis after they came to power. Behind “generosity” of the British in this absurd concession of national scientific priority, accompanied by distortion of facts and outright lies, one can discern a desire to distance themselves from their politically incorrect theories.
The article examines the mechanisms of knowledge production about precolonial Africa in German historiography of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. It demonstrates that German African studies emerged as an integral part of the colonial project, combining the pragmatic tasks of colonial administration and missionary work with the epistemological frameworks of European evolutionism, diffusionism, and racial theories. By reconstructing the map of research centers across various German federal states, the study reveals a direct dependence of the directions and methods of African research on regional economic and political interests. Key institutional structures are analyzed. These institutions not only collected empirical data but also shaped the public image of Africa as a “backward” continent in need of European governance. Special attention is paid to the dominant theoretical paradigms: Leo Frobenius’s theory of “culture circles,” Friedrich Ratzel’s anthropogeography, and Carl Meinhof’s comparative linguistics. Despite the empirical value of the gathered material, these paradigms constructed an image of Africa as a space devoid of autonomous historical subjectivity. The article also traces the evolution of interpretations of the precolonial past – from the outright denial of African authorship of complex cultural phenomena to “decline” theories that likewise served to justify colonial intervention. It is concluded that German African studies of this period constituted an institutional mechanism for the symbolic appropriation of Africa’s past. Its dual legacy poses a challenge for the decolonization of contemporary academic approaches, including the identification of hidden ideologemes, the restitution of cultural assets, and the amplification of African voices in historical scholarship.
