Adam Silverstein's book offers a fascinating account of the official methods of communication employed in the Near East from pre-Islamic times through the Mamluk period. Postal systems were set up by rulers in order to maintain control over vast tracts of land. These systems, invented centuries before steam-engines or cars, enabled the swift circulation of different commodities - from letters, people and horses to exotic fruits and ice. As the correspondence transported often included confidential reports from a ruler's provinces, such postal systems doubled as espionage-networks through...

Adam Silverstein's book offers a fascinating account of the official methods of communication employed in the Near East from pre-Islamic times through the Mamluk period. Postal systems were set up by rulers in order to maintain control over vast tracts of land. These systems, invented centuries before steam-engines or cars, enabled the swift circulation of different commodities - from letters, people and horses to exotic fruits and ice. As the correspondence transported often included confidential reports from a ruler's provinces, such postal systems doubled as espionage-networks through...

In the past four decades since the field of late antique studies began to gather real momentum, scholars have debated the place of early Islam within the late antique world, particularly in relation to the issue of where and when 'Late Antiquity' ends. Although the Sasanian empire (in what is now modern Iran) became equally powerful as the Byzantine empire, and the two often forged their characters and practices on the basis of their relations with each other, that has rarely translated into equal coverage for the eastern part of the late antique world in studies of the period. Late...

This Handbook offers a comprehensive discussion of Abrahamic Religions, providing comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.