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The following article considers the imperial as experienced through the daily lives of peasants in southern Syria during the early Ottoman period. Control of critical resources was a flashpoint in the relationship between the state and village communities; thus, it is through the lens of land use that peasant dependency and agency in the face of the Ottoman state can be best evaluated. Two archaeological sites in Jordan and Israel provide data for detailed investigation of patterns noted in the scholarly literature. After a critical assessment of the contributions of archaeology to the large field of (overwhelmingly text-dominated) Ottoman studies, I turn to three areas of peasants’ lives that reflected, to different degrees, encounters with the imperial: land tenure and land use, household consumption, and material culture.

Walker summarizes the results of some work in progress on the Mamluk period, which is based on both written and material sources, and aims to explain the anomalies of Mamluk administration in Transjordan. Many factors contributed to inconsistencies in Mamluk control of the region, including the frequent transfer of local administration from one center to another, the roles of the sugar industry and the waqf system in the uneven development of rural Transjordan, and the empowerment of Transjordanian tribesmen in the political rivalries of the period. Moreover, the results of the recent excavation at Tall Hisban, a rural administrative capital of the first half of the 8th/14th century, are presented.

The medieval and early modern periods (twelfth through nineteenth centuries) are popularly imagined as one of the \"dark ages\" ofCypriot history, when the island was occupied by foreign forces and its Orthodox Christian heritage suppressed.1 Fortunately, the last twenty years have witnessed a growing appreciation of Cyprus' medieval and post-medieval heritage and significant progress in ceramic analysis, building multi-disciplinary databases on the material culture and physical environment, and understanding, gradually, the complexities of cultural encounters between the Lusignans Venetians, and Ottomans, on the one hand, and local peopks, the Cypriot landscape, and regional political and economic networks, on the other. Contemporary Scholarship 1980s The Canadian Palaeopaphos Survey Project (CPSP), which was in the field from 1979 to 1991 under the direction of David Rupp and the institutional sponsorship of Brock University, was one of the earliest projects that systematically collected and published data on the later historical periods.\\n Cyprus-based scholars should attend Ottoman, Crusader, and medieval Islamic conferences in order to place local ceramic developments, trade, and political events and their impact on local society in a regional perspective.14 * The landscape paradigm in Cypriot surveys has facilitated investigation into environmental and agricultural history, areas of inquiry ideally suited to research on the more recent historical periods.15 Such work is also being done on these periods in neighboring regions of the Middle East and should be continued, with a systematic and expansive collection of paleofloral and paleofaunal data.

Considered one of the wonders of world by medieval geographers, the Umayyad mosque at Damascus, with its shimmering gilded glass mosaics, had a tremendous impact on medieval Islamic architectural decoration. The mosque was, and continues to be, one of the most celebrated and frequently visited holy places in the Islamic world. One of the largest congregational mosques of its day, it served as a gathering place for the citizens of Damascus. No wonder the fledgling Mamluk state chose to patronize it, in the process situating themselves in a long line of legitimate Muslim leaders. Its splendor, expansiveness and expensive contruction represented the prosperity and grandeur of the fourteenth century.

The settlement decline of the late Mamluk period is one of the most important phenomena in the cultural history of southern Bilād al-Šām and particularly for the Transjordan, as there is a growing belief that the settlement and ecological patterns that developed then laid the foundations for many aspects of modern Jordanian society. It is an issue, moreover, that has for the last twenty years dominated debates on the archaeology of late medieval Jordan. While settlement fluctuations in this period transformed Jordan in important ways, there has been little systematic study of the issue in order to determine to what degree population levels dropped from the 14th century, how many settlements “disappeared”, and what was the long-term legacy of this phenomenon.This essay revisits the problem of settlement decline through a reanalysis of archaeological data within the larger context of the challenges facing the Mamluk state in the post-plague era. Detailed study of documentary sources for the period suggests that restructuring of the empire’s economy, along with changes in local land tenure, contributed to the dispersal of populations from settlement centers.

\"Ayyubid,\" \"Mamluk,\" and \"Ottoman\" are the often only vaguely familiar political designations of the Middle and Late Islamic periods of Palestine. Together spanning over seven centuries, their rule of the region began under the leadership of the politically and militarily gifted Salah al-Din (d. 1193), who established the Ayyubid Dynasty, unifying the Muslim Levant and dealing with the Frankish states that had been founded by the Crusaders. Nearly a century later, a bloodless military coup brought the Mamluk Sultanate into being with its fascinating institution of importing slaves who were enculturated, educated, and trained in the military arts. The Sultanate was a novelty, representing the first time Mamluks succeeded in creating their own state. Incorporating Palestine into their Cairo-based empire, the Mamluk empire became what was then the longest living, autonomous Islamic state in Egypt, surpassed only by its successor, the Ottoman Sultanate. The Ottomans, who, like the Mamluks, were a military dynasty, swept through Palestine in 1516. In the first hundred years of their governance, some of Palestine's larger towns received Ottoman patronage. Suleiman the Magnificent stands out for the attention he showered on Jerusalem, beautifying the Dome of the Rock and repairing the town's walls and gates. Soon, however, the Ottomans lost interest in a region so distant from their capitol in Anatolia. Investment gave way to neglect, and for two centuries there was little governance emanating from the central administration. Tribal sheiks rose in the vacuum, and local autonomy characterized a fairly splintered region. Ottoman resurgence in the nineteenth century imposed a stronger, more involved government and ambitious projects with international scope: the Suez Canal (1869) and the Hijaz Railway (finished in 1908), whetting the interest of European powers. Britain terminated Ottoman rule at the conclusion of the first World War.

The creation of private property from former Treasury lands in the late Mamluk period, and the legal mechanisms that developed to support it, mark important turning points in the history of both medieval Islamic finance and jurisprudence. The following essay explores popular responses in Syria to changes in the rural endowment system as expressed through peasant action and the critiques of local intellectuals. Because of the early wave of sultanic endowments here in the mid-fourteenth century, Jordan becomes for us a barometer of the success and failure of these changes and a window on the ways in which they played out on the local level.

Walker reviews Land Tenure, Fiscal Policy, and Imperial Power in Medieval Syro-Egypt by Daisuke Igarashi.