Adopting the theoretical traditions and methodological approaches of Chinese religious studies, this paper systematically reviews the scholarly development, theoretical contributions, and methodological characteristics of research on Korean Christianity conducted by Chinese scholars. Through an in-depth analysis of the academic literature spanning the past five decades, the study unveils the developmental logic, theoretical innovations, and prospective research directions within this field. It finds that Chinese scholarship has progressed through distinct phases—from preliminary exploration to diversified inquiry—marked by an increasingly expansive academic vision. Core findings include: in-depth interpretations of mechanisms underlying the indigenization of foreign religions, nuanced examinations of the complex interplay between religion and socio-cultural dynamics, and the construction of theoretical models for cross-cultural religious transmission. The study also highlights current methodological limitations and proposes future research strategies such as interdisciplinary integration, empirical approaches, and theoretical innovation. These efforts aim to offer fresh perspectives for the study of religious history in East Asia.
Melanie Wasmuth, Tero Alstola , Rotem Avneri Meir
et al.
Empires and kingship are long-standing topics of research in ancient Near Eastern studies; the study of queenship has gradually received more attention over recent decades. However, discussions of the social implications of kingship and queenship, comparisons of the gender roles, and their study across several empires remain rare. The paper at hand takes the unprecedented step of such a comparative analysis by tracing a specific detail of royal ideology, namely the presentation of the king and queen to the public as builders, across seven major Near Eastern empires following and/or interacting with each other throughout the first millennium BCE: the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Teispid-Achaemenid, Seleucid, Ptolemaic, Parthian, and Roman empires. Drawing on the available textual, material, and visual sources from the ancient contemporary contexts of each empire and from Classical reception history, we showcase the potential of a longue-durée comparison for the social institutions of kingship and of queenship, giving full attention and space also to the lesser known empires and the queens’ roles. To achieve this, we present first a synopsis of the key findings per empire and role, followed by a diachronic study of three aspects of gender comparison: concerning the empire-internal portfolios of king and queen, the joint presentation as a couple, and the question of how far the roles of king and queen mirror or complement each other. We conclude with some pertinent (albeit tentative) results on the features shared by some or all of the empires as well as their outstanding idiosyncracies.
Abstract This special issue examines women and Australian business history. Contributions explore women's entrepreneurship in small urban businesses, side hustles, agriculture, and family companies. Articles highlight the importance of women's businesses, as a financial necessity for women, their families, and their communities. Authors examine the barriers for women in business, including legislation, licensing, societal expectations, and discrimination. Articles also explore women's intersections with other demographic characteristics, with access to enterprise mediated by class and the rural–urban divide. Finally, contributions examine the way traditional archives have obscured histories of businesswomen, and the opportunities offered by feminist historical methodologies for studying business history.
Amir Ghodsi Simakani, Ali Ghasemi, Saeid Mousavi Siany
AbstractThe Safavids ascended to power in Iran through the force of Qizilbash swords. However, as they aimed to establish a long-lasting rule, they introduced distinct cultural claims to legitimize their government. Historiographical texts served as crucial tools for producing and justifying political legitimacy in Iran, shaping the ideal image of the king and the state among the subjects. Habib al-Siyar by Khandmir, written during the precarious period of the Safavid state's foundation to secure its legitimacy, should be analyzed within this context. This study, using historical research methods and a descriptive-analytical approach, demonstrates that—contrary to some perspectives emphasizing the tripartite legitimacy of Shi'ism, Sufism, and Iranshahr ideology in Safavid-era historical texts—a reevaluation of Habib al-Siyar reveals that Khandmir, while acknowledging Shi'i and Sufi elements, placed particular emphasis on constructing an ideal Iranian king using the Iranshahr ideological model. The study substantiates this claim through several points: Khandmir’s pride in Shah Ismail’s noble lineage and the Safavid family, the portrayal of the founder as a charismatic ruler, and the comparison of Shah Ismail with Sasanian kings—highlighting qualities such as invincibility, the unity of religion and state, and messianic leadership. Notably, the dominance of Iranshahr themes in Khandmir’s thought does not imply the neglect of key Shi'i and Sufi elements; rather, these elements were integrated alongside Iranshahr concepts in the narrative framework of Habib al-Siyar.Keywords: Habib al-Siyar, Khandmir, Shah Ismail I, Ideal King, Iranshahr Ideology.IntroductionThe rise of the Safavid dynasty, the formalization of Shi‘ism as the state religion, the question of political legitimacy, the integration of religious scholars into the state structure, and the ideological conflicts with the Ottomans and Uzbeks were among the critical challenges that shaped the legitimacy of the Safavid rule. In response, contemporary historians employed various discursive tools from the Iranian cultural tradition to construct and justify the political legitimacy of the Safavid state.Khandmir was one of the most influential historians during this foundational period. Through his work Habib al-Siyar, he played a pivotal role in shaping the discursive order of the 10th century AH (16th century CE) and introducing new historiographical perspectives. Since Habib al-Siyar was commissioned by the Safavid rulers, it had to reflect their needs and aspirations. As a result, the portrayal of Shah Ismail I, the dynasty’s founder, became the focal point of this historical narrative.This study seeks to explore the key ideological foundations that Khandmir employed in crafting the image of Shah Ismail. The central research question examines the specific sources of legitimacy and political thought embedded in Khandmir’s depiction of the Safavid ruler. Contrary to the dominant view that emphasizes a tripartite legitimacy framework—Shi‘ism, Sufism, and Iranian political thought—this study argues that Khandmir, while acknowledging Shi‘i and Sufi elements, deliberately constructed Shah Ismail as an Ideal Iranian King by drawing upon the ancient Iranshahr model of kingship.Materials and MethodsThe concept of Iranian political thought finds its most pronounced expression in the Iranshahr ideology, which, after the advent of Islam, was revitalized through the transformation of the religious caliphate into a monarchical system. The political philosophy of ancient Iran rested on five foundational principles: the cosmic battle between good and evil, the divine order (asha), the utopian vision of an ideal state, the sacred connection between the ruler and the land, and the king as the executor of divine will and social harmony. The term Iranshahr tradition thus refers to the historical evolution of political thought in this context.At the heart of this tradition was the institution of kingship, with farr-e izadi (divine glory) serving as its most enduring element from pre-Islamic Iran to the Islamic era. The Ideal Iranian King possessed distinct attributes that set him apart from ordinary rulers. These included divine legitimacy, the embodiment of Iranshahr ideals—foremost among them justice and equity—the highest level of wisdom and virtue, the provision of security and prosperity, and noble lineage.To substantiate the claims of this study, the research methodology involves a systematic analysis of Habib al-Siyar, focusing on its Iranshahr elements in constructing Shah Ismail’s image as an Ideal Iranian King. Additionally, a comparative evaluation of Khandmir’s account with other contemporary Safavid sources, such as Futuhat-e Shahi and Jahangosha-ye Khakan, provides further insight into how the Iranshahr ideology dominated the historiographical representation of Shah Ismail.Research FindingsThe first mention of the Safavid lineage in Habib al-Siyar appears in the context of Shaykh Safi al-Din Ardabili, who is introduced among the scholars and spiritual figures of Sultan Abu Sa‘id’s Ilkhanid court, with an esteemed lineage tracing back to Imam Musa al-Kazim (AS). This historical framing reflects an overt sense of pride in the noble ancestry of the Safavid house—a crucial element in Iranshahr thought, where lineage played a fundamental role in establishing a ruler’s legitimacy.This emphasis on lineage in Habib al-Siyar presents a synthesis of two dimensions: the Safavid rulers as descendants of the Prophet (via their claimed Sayyid lineage) and as leaders of a mystical order (via their spiritual heritage). Furthermore, Habib al-Siyar, as a contemporary historical source, constructs an unmistakably charismatic image of Shah Ismail. Khandmir refers to him as Zill Allah (the Shadow of God), a title that underscores his divine mandate. Another essential aspect of this idealized image is Shah Ismail’s portrayal as an invincible warrior—both in hunting and on the battlefield.Much like the Zoroastrian deity Bahram, Shah Ismail is depicted as an undefeated champion. However, the devastating defeat at Chaldiran posed a significant challenge to this idealized image. Consequently, sources like Habib al-Siyar crafted a narrative that sought to minimize the impact of this military loss, ensuring that neither Shah Ismail’s personal charisma nor the legitimacy of Safavid rule suffered irreparable damage. In modern terms, this can be seen as a form of historiographical propaganda orchestrated by Khandmir.Additionally, Khandmir sought to reinforce the religious legitimacy of Shah Ismail as a Shi‘i ruler. By asserting that the rise of the Safavids was divinely ordained and that their rule strengthened the faith of the Prophet, Habib al-Siyar positions Shah Ismail within a sacred historical framework that intertwined religious destiny with political power.Discussion of Results and ConclusionsKhandmir’s primary objective was to construct a historical narrative that would solidify the legitimacy of the Safavid state. To achieve this, he crafted an image of Shah Ismail that closely resembled the archetypal Ideal King of Iranshahr political thought. Nevertheless, Khandmir did not disregard the Shi‘i and Sufi elements essential to Safavid identity; instead, he skillfully integrated them within the broader Iranshahr ideological framework.His approach ensured that anyone who viewed Shah Ismail through the lens of Habib al-Siyar would see a ruler embodying multiple layers of legitimacy—religious, mystical, and historical. A comparative analysis of Khandmir’s descriptions with the traditional Iranian political vision of kingship reveals that while the Safavid ruler is presented in a Shi‘i and Sufi context, the deeper structural elements of his portrayal align with the Ideal Iranian King model.This study does not claim that Khandmir consciously and deliberately sought to revive pre-Islamic Iranian political thought in the same way that Ferdowsi or the Shu‘ubi movement did in earlier centuries. However, it suggests that the continuity of Iranian political philosophy persisted within the intellectual and cultural subconscious of the Safavid era. This enduring tradition, seamlessly interwoven with Islamic and Shi‘i political thought, played a crucial role in shaping Iran’s national identity from the Safavid period onward.
History (General) and history of Europe, History of Asia
Mohammed Tayeeb Hasan, Nikolaos Tsantalis, Pouria Alikhanifard
Tracking statements in the commit history of a project is in many cases useful for supporting various software maintenance, comprehension, and evolution tasks. A high level of accuracy can facilitate the adoption of code tracking tools by developers and researchers. To this end, we propose CodeTracker, a refactoring-aware tool that can generate the commit change history for code blocks. To evaluate its accuracy, we created an oracle with the change history of 1,280 code blocks found within 200 methods from 20 popular open-source project repositories. Moreover, we created a baseline based on the current state-of-the-art Abstract Syntax Tree diff tool, namely GumTree 3.0, in order to compare the accuracy and execution time. Our experiments have shown that CodeTracker has a considerably higher precision/recall and faster execution time than the GumTree-based baseline, and can extract the complete change history of a code block with a precision and recall of 99.5% within 3.6 seconds on average.
Ekaterina V. Doronicheva, Liubov V. Golovanova, Vladimir B. Doronichev
et al.
Neanderthals were widespread during the Middle Palaeolithic (MP) across Europe and Asia, including the Caucasus Mountains. Occupying the border between eastern Europe and West Asia, the Caucasus is important region regarding the Neanderthal occupation of Eurasia. On current radiometric estimates, the MP is represented in the Caucasus between about 260–210 ka and about 40 ka. Archaeological record indicates that several culture diverse MP hominin populations inhabited the Caucasus, but the region complex population history during this period remains poorly understood. In this paper, we identify for the first time the archaeological evidence indicating contacts between two culture diverse MP Neanderthal populations in the North Caucasus and discuss the nature of these contacts. Basing on the lithic assemblages that we excavated at Mezmaiskaya cave in the north-western Caucasus (Kuban River basin) and Saradj-Chuko grotto in the north-central Caucasus (Terek River basin), dating from MIS 5 to MIS 3, and comparative data from other MP sites in the Caucasus, we identify two large cultural regions that existed during the late MP in the North Caucasus. The distinctive toolkits and stone knapping technologies indicate that the MP assemblages from Mezmaiskaya cave and other sites in the west of North Caucasus represent a Caucasian variant of the Eastern Micoquian industry that was wide spread in central and eastern Europe, while the assemblages from Saradj-Chuko Grotto and other sites in the east of North Caucasus closely resemble the Zagros Mousterian industry that was wide spread in the Armenian Highlands, Lesser Caucasus and Zagros Mountains. The archaeological evidence implies that two culture diverse populations of Neanderthals settled the North Caucasus during the Late Pleistocene from two various source regions: from the Armenian Highlands and Lesser Caucasus along the Caspian Sea coast, and from Russian plain along the Sea of Azov coast.
Thousands of users consult digital archives daily, but the information they can access is unrepresentative of the diversity of documentary history. The sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for optical character recognition (OCR) - which jointly learns a vision and language model - is poorly extensible to low-resource document collections, as learning a language-vision model requires extensive labeled sequences and compute. This study models OCR as a character level image retrieval problem, using a contrastively trained vision encoder. Because the model only learns characters' visual features, it is more sample efficient and extensible than existing architectures, enabling accurate OCR in settings where existing solutions fail. Crucially, the model opens new avenues for community engagement in making digital history more representative of documentary history.
We argue that observations of the reionization history can be used as a probe of primordial density fluctuations, particularly on small scales. Although the primordial curvature perturbations are well constrained from measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and large-scale structure, these observational data probe the curvature perturbations only on large scales, and hence its information on smaller scales will give us further insight on primordial fluctuations. Since the formation of early galaxies is sensitive to the amplitude of small-scale perturbations, and then, in turn, gives an impact on the reionization history, one can probe the primordial power spectrum on small scales through observations of reionization. In this work, we focus on the running spectral indices of the primordial power spectrum to characterize the small-scale perturbations, and investigate their impact on the reionization history using the numerical code \texttt{21cmFAST}, which adopts a simple but commonly used reionization model. We also derive the constraints on the running spectral indices from observations of the reionization history indicated by the luminosity function of the Lyman-$α$ emitters. We show that the reionization history, in combination with large-scale observations such as CMB, would be a useful tool to investigate primordial density fluctuations.
The article is devoted to the activity of the Japanese military intelligence against Russia during Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05 based on Japanese and Russian archival documents.
This article proposes some potential contributions of contemporary art to industrial and technological heritage discussions. The paper analyses the relations among art, industrial ruins, technological trash, heritage, and society from an archaeological perspective, although this standpoint is compared to and complemented with those of art and art history. First, the text presents how industrial sites and technological artefacts from the recent past are transformed for/by the artists. In doing so, it offers a preliminary basic typology of art-obsolescence relations illustrated with cases from Europe, Asia and the Americas. Four major kinds of interactions are introduced: the conversion of abandoned industrial buildings into art galleries and museums; the transformation of larger obsolete industrial/technological areas into creative hubs; the intervention of artists in industrial ruins; and the creative recycling of technological waste. Second, the text infers from the examples provided in the typology three possible functions of art regarding heritage: revelation/addition of value; mediation between the public and dark heritages; and recognition in technological and industrial history. In the end, the paper defends the role of art in the making of industrial and technological heritages, as well as in reconnecting them to society.
Personalized dialogue systems explore the problem of generating responses that are consistent with the user's personality, which has raised much attention in recent years. Existing personalized dialogue systems have tried to extract user profiles from dialogue history to guide personalized response generation. Since the dialogue history is usually long and noisy, most existing methods truncate the dialogue history to model the user's personality. Such methods can generate some personalized responses, but a large part of dialogue history is wasted, leading to sub-optimal performance of personalized response generation. In this work, we propose to refine the user dialogue history on a large scale, based on which we can handle more dialogue history and obtain more abundant and accurate persona information. Specifically, we design an MSP model which consists of three personal information refiners and a personalized response generator. With these multi-level refiners, we can sparsely extract the most valuable information (tokens) from the dialogue history and leverage other similar users' data to enhance personalization. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model in generating more informative and personalized responses.
Conversational question generation (CQG) serves as a vital task for machines to assist humans, such as interactive reading comprehension, through conversations. Compared to traditional single-turn question generation (SQG), CQG is more challenging in the sense that the generated question is required not only to be meaningful, but also to align with the occurred conversation history. While previous studies mainly focus on how to model the flow and alignment of the conversation, there has been no thorough study to date on which parts of the context and history are necessary for the model. We argue that shortening the context and history is crucial as it can help the model to optimise more on the conversational alignment property. To this end, we propose CoHS-CQG, a two-stage CQG framework, which adopts a CoHS module to shorten the context and history of the input. In particular, CoHS selects contiguous sentences and history turns according to their relevance scores by a top-p strategy. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performances on CoQA in both the answer-aware and answer-unaware settings.
Damian Clarke, Manuel Llorca Jaña, Daniel Pailañir
Quantile regression and quantile treatment effect methods are powerful econometric tools for considering economic impacts of events or variables of interest beyond the mean. The use of quantile methods allows for an examination of impacts of some independent variable over the entire distribution of continuous dependent variables. Measurement in many quantative settings in economic history have as a key input continuous outcome variables of interest. Among many other cases, human height and demographics, economic growth, earnings and wages, and crop production are generally recorded as continuous measures, and are collected and studied by economic historians. In this paper we describe and discuss the broad utility of quantile regression for use in research in economic history, review recent quantitive literature in the field, and provide an illustrative example of the use of these methods based on 20,000 records of human height measured across 50-plus years in the 19th and 20th centuries. We suggest that there is considerably more room in the literature on economic history to convincingly and productively apply quantile regression methods.
Jan Zapletal, Raphael Watschinger, Günther Of
et al.
The presented paper concentrates on the boundary element method (BEM) for the heat equation in three spatial dimensions. In particular, we deal with tensor product space-time meshes allowing for quadrature schemes analytic in time and numerical in space. The spatial integrals can be treated by standard BEM techniques known from three dimensional stationary problems. The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, we provide temporal antiderivatives of the heat kernel necessary for the assembly of BEM matrices and the evaluation of the representation formula. Secondly, the presented approach has been implemented in a publicly available library besthea allowing researchers to reuse the formulae and BEM routines straightaway. The results are validated by numerical experiments in an HPC environment.
This paper is a study of the history of the transplant of mathematical tools using negative feedback for macroeconomic stabilization policy from 1948 to 1975 and the subsequent break of the use of control for stabilization policy which occurred from 1975 to 1993. New-classical macroeconomists selected a subset of the tools of control that favored their support of rules against discretionary stabilization policy. The Lucas critique and Kydland and Prescott's time-inconsistency were over-statements that led to the "dark ages" of the prevalence of the stabilization-policy-ineffectiveness idea. These over-statements were later revised following the success of the Taylor rule.