The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited / Benny Morris -- Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004

Thirty years after the 1947-49 War in historic Palestine, the Israeli government began declassifying the archives of the Jewish Agency and the Israeli security forces.  This gave rise to a new understanding of the war.  The Israeli historians who made use of these archives became known as "the New Historians."  This review covers two books by two of them: The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited by Benny Morris and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe.  (The review is available on this blog under both titles.)   

In reviewing the work of the New Historians, one must first understand the original narrative of the 1947-49 War.  The narrative was virtually unchallenged in Israel and in Western countries until the late 1980s.  It remains widely accepted today, but due to the work of the New Historians, serious scholars no longer accept the narrative. 

Morris and Pappe address three elements of the original narrative:  (1) 1947 Israel was a modern David surrounded by Arab Goliaths, (2) the Arab countries launched the war on May 15 after rejecting the UN Partition Plan, and (3) Palestinians left their homes of their own free will at the behest of Arab leaders.

I. Benny Morris: The Palestinian Refugee Problem 

The first edition of Morris's book was published in 1988.  He began writing it as a history of Haganah, the Jewish militia which later became the Israeli Defense Force.  Morris was given special access to Haganah's archives, but authorities later denied him access when they understood where his work was leading.  At the same time, other Israeli archives from the war period were becoming declassified.  This allowed Morris to continue his work.  

Morris's conclusions are not completely inconsistent with the original narrative.  He accepts that the Israeli leadership at first was not entirely certain of their ability to prevail in a war with the Arabs and that many factors resulted in the depopulation of Arab communities.  Most significantly, he believes the Jewish Agency had no premeditate plans to "transfer" Arabs out of areas under Jewish control. 

According to Morris, the Israeli leadership's initial concern about security was alleviated as they saw near universal success of their military operations.  At first, they sought to secure communication lines between Jewish settlements, especially between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and to provide an adequate defense of the small number of isolated Jewish settlements.  This was accomplished relatively quickly.  In all, only two Jewish settlements were lost during the war.  It quickly became clear to the Jewish Agency that the Arab population in Palestine was no match for the Jewish forces.  

One should distinguish, however, what was known by the leadership from what was believed by the general Jewish population.  Many in the Jewish community had fled, or were descendants of those who had fled, from pogroms in Eastern Europe as well as Shoah survivors.  Living in what was for most of them a foreign land among a suspicious indigenous population, including overtly hostile elements, could not have fostered a sense of security; however, the population's perception of the danger was not in line with the actual relative military capabilities of Arab and Jewish security forces.

Immediately following the UN's adoption of the Partition Plan, a low intensity conflict between Arabs and Jews began.  Arab irregular forces engaged mostly in small skirmishes and sniper attacks on passing Jewish convoys.  Some volunteers from neighboring Arab states, known as the Army of Rescue, also participated in these attacks.  In quick response, Jewish militias (Haganah, Irgun, and the Stern Gang) attacked villages from which they believed the Arab attacks emerged.  Their responses frequently were disproportionate and not always directed against the responsible parties.  An escalating cycle of violence ensued.  This prompted a significant number of Arabs to flee their homes in fear of and in response to Jewish assaults and/or anticipated Jewish political control. 

Among the most significant observations made by the New Historians is the implementation of "Plan Dalet" or "Plan D," by Haganah.  Plan D was composed of 13 specific military operations designed to occupy and exert control over Arab populated regions, both inside and outside the UN boundaries of the prospective Jewish state.  The plan was finalized during the sectarian violence in early March 1948 and was implemented in the first week of April -- six weeks before the British Mandate would end on May 14.  

For the first time since the passage of the UN Partition Plan, significant military assets were mobilized in coordinated attacks against an enemy.  One might identify November 29, 1947 as the start of escalating sectarian violence and the first week of April as when Israel launched a coordinated war against the Palestinians.  May 15, which is considered the start of the war by the original historical narrative, would mark, instead, the date when neighboring Arab countries joined in the defense of the beleaguered Palestinian population. 

Morris's Revisited (2nd) edition was published in 2004.  It was prompted by the release of additional archival material and Morris's desire to respond to criticism that he had not adequately examined the pre-war discussion among the Jewish leadership of transferring the Arab population out of Palestine.  Morris devotes a new chapter on the discussion of transfer.  He concludes that while there was pre-war interest among the leadership in transferring the population, the connection between that interest and what actually happened is "more tenuous than Arab propagandists would allow. "  According to Morris, the flight of refugees was mainly the consequence of local decisions made by specific military commanders in their efforts to secure the territory they were occupying for the Jewish state.  Additionally, some Arab directives to flee and decisions by the Arab upper class to wait out the war abroad played a role in the departure of Palestinians.  In any case, Israel's leaders recognized that their military operations were sparking the unexpected flight of Arabs which would serve the interests of a secure Israeli state.  As in the first edition, Morris continues to argue that the depopulation of Arab communities was a complex event that involved many factors.  

Morris does accept that Israel's military operations were the primary motivating force. He estimates that 600,000-760,000 Palestinian Arabs "departed their homes" between November 1947 and October 1950.  He documents 392 Arab cities, towns, and villages that were "abandoned" by their populations and 186 Israeli settlements that were constructed in their place.  Jewish and Israeli forces variously assisted, encouraged, directed, and forcibly expelled Palestinians from their homes in the course of different military operations. Morris's detailed accounting of this massive demographic shift is perhaps what made his first edition so ground breaking.  

Morris acknowledges that numerous atrocities were committed by Haganah and especially by the dissident Jewish militias, Irgun and the Stern Gang.  These atrocities -- massacres of tens of villagers at a time and sometimes more -- had a significant impact on the decisions of Arabs to flee their homes.  In the context of the war, the Jewish leadership simply allowed the flight of Arabs to unfold as a fortuitous consequence of war.  No official "transfer" policy was needed.  Morris does, however, identify some instances in which the leadership gave explicit expulsion orders.  He also recognizes that the leadership routinely approved expulsions after the fact and directed the destruction of buildings.

According to Morris, the Israeli leadership was surprised to see the mass exodus of Arabs, but they were insistent that very few refugees be allowed to return to their villages, and they made great efforts to ensure "infiltrators" would not return to their homes.  Even reluctant members of the leadership -- members of the more dovish party, Mapam -- eventually came around to accept the "transfer" of the population and the prohibition of its return. 

With regard to the three elements of the original narrative under discussion, Morris (1) rejects the claim that Israel was a modern David surrounded by Goliaths, (2) makes no real claim about what should be considered the start of the war, and (3) ambiguously assesses the motives for the flight of the Palestinians.  His work is noteworthy in that it broke the taboo that prevented an honest examination of Israel's origins.  Morris remains a Zionist, however, and rests his moral conclusions on the legitimacy of the foundation of Israel and the consequent need to secure the state through force, even if this involved producing hundreds of thousands of refugees and inflicting tens of thousands of casualties.

II. Ilan Pappe: The Ethnic Cleansing

The primary sources used by Morris are almost exclusively drawn from the Israeli archives.  His secondary sources are overwhelmingly in Hebrew.  This has lead to criticisms that he overlooks some important perspectives on and information about what was taking place.  Morris argues that these other perspectives are based largely on interviews and oral histories conducted too long after the events to be reliable.  In contrast, Ilan Pappe's work, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine makes use of these additional sources, along with many of the same archival sources used by Morris.  Pappe even makes use of both editions of Morris's work. 

Pappe's conclusions about Israeli actions and intentions are much more critical.  In his first chapter, he discusses the history and definition of the term "ethnic cleansing."  The reminder of the book is essentially an effort to show that while the expulsion of the Palestinians is a textbook case of ethnic cleansing, it has been ignored in discussions of past ethnic cleansings.  He often quotes the use of the term "cleanse" and its derivatives in Jewish documents and diaries that describe the expulsion of Palestinians.  

Pappe writes of the compilation of the "Village Files" by Jewish Arabists in the 1930s.  The files were a comprehensive registry of all the Arab villages in Palestine with details about their geography, economy, populations, leadership, and their relations with their Jewish neighbors.  The Files' main proponent in the Jewish Agency thought the creation of the registry would "greatly help the redemption of the land." As Jewish forces moved against Arab villages, the Village Files were invaluable, giving them detailed intelligence about their targets and even allowing them to identify specific individuals for assassination.

Pappe directly implicates the head of the Jewish Agency and first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion as the primary directing force in planning and approving the expulsions.  A small group of advisors called the "Consultant Committee" or simply the "Consultancy" was formed in February 1947, months prior to the passage of the Partition Plan. It became Ben-Gurion's most important advisory group.  He and members of the Consultancy recognized the need to ensure a majority Jewish population of 70-80% inside the Jewish state.  Consequently, they would need to transfer Arabs out of Jewish controlled areas, including to neighboring states.  The tactics they adopted for expelling the population began with forceful "retaliation" against Arab violence, mainly against snipers shooting at Jewish convoys, but as early as in December 1947, this evolved into a more pro-active "engagement" or "violent reconnaissance" which did not require a pretext.  The aim was to intimidate the population and encourage flight.

Between the assembly and use of the Village Files and the proceedings and diaries of the Consultancy, Pappe's case for the premeditated expulsion of Palestinians is strong.  Certainly, Morris and Pappe agree that the Israeli leadership made a conscious decision to prevent displaced people from returning to their homes.  This confirms either the leadership's intentions to expel the population or its legitimation of expulsion after the fact.  In any case, Morris and Pappe together provide sufficient evidence that the flight of Palestinians from Israeli controlled areas was not mainly a function of Arab directives to leave.

By May 15, 1947, or soon after, most of the largest cities with Arab populations were occupied by Jewish forces and virtually emptied of their Arab inhabitants.  Haifa, Tiberias, Safad, and Baysan lay in regions designated for a Jewish state. Jaffa and Acre lay in regions designated for the Arabs.  West Jerusalem was to be governed by an international administration.  Pappe refers to the expulsion of inhabitants from these cities as "urbicide" to distinguish it from (on his accounting) the more than 500 Arab villages that Jewish and Israeli forces ultimately destroyed or converted into Jewish settlements.  

This demographic change began shortly after the UN adopted the Partition Plan.  The only significant disagreement between Morris and Pappe is whether the Jewish Agency consciously planned the expulsion or merely raised no meaningful objection to it and retroactively approved it.  From the point of view of the refugees, the distinction is unimportant.

Plans for the expulsion of the Arab population could be made confidently because of the known military and political weakness of the Arab population.  According to Pappe, Jewish Arabists were reporting to the Consultancy that there was virtually no interest in war among ordinary Palestinians.  Many Arab villages reached peace agreements with neighboring Jewish settlements to stay out of the impending conflict.  Furthermore, the British Mandatory Force effectively disarmed the Arab population in a crushing counter-insurgency campaign between 1936 and 1939.  The Arab leadership was exiled to the Seychelles for years after.  In any case, political authority among Palestinians historically did not extend far beyond the village leadership, making the coordination of defensive measures nearly impossible.  In general, the Arab population of Palestine was uninterested in war and extremely vulnerable.

Pappe argues that the armies of neighboring Arab states were not nearly as threating as the original narrative would have it.  The combined number of Arab forces were roughly similar to the number of the Jewish forces, but were less well-equipped and lacked an effective single command structure.  There was competition, suspicion, even animosity, between the Arab states, particularly between Egypt and Jordan and between Syria and Jordan.  

The Jordanian army was the most well-equipped and well-organized; however, Jordan's King Abdullah and David Ben-Gurion came to an agreement before May15th in which Jordan would control the West Bank (at least that part the Israelis would not conquer).  Abdullah publicly announced that his forces would not invade the region set aside for the Jewish state, but would only occupy the Arab region.  This alleviated Israel's greatest concern.  The disposition of Jerusalem, however, was not agreed upon by Abdullah and Ben-Gurion.  It was here that the most significant fighting took place between the Jordanians and the Israelis.

Egypt was potentially a significant force.  Yet according to Pappe, it mobilized only 10,000 soldiers, 5,000 of which were untrained members of the Muslim Brotherhood that were released from prison to fight in Palestine.  Initially, Egypt made progress by occupying territory populated almost exclusively by Arabs or that was virtually uninhabited.  For a time, they were able to isolate a small number of Jewish settlements in the Negev, but their advance into Palestine was halted after just one week.  Israeli forces then steadily drove them back to Egypt, leaving them to occupy only the Gaza Strip.

Syrian forces amounted to only a few thousand fighters.  They managed to capture a kibbutz just across the border, but did little more after that.  Syria's participation in the war was mostly token.  Lebanese forces operated by and large defensively in Western Galilee, a region that had been allocated for the Arab state.  By the end of the war, Israel had completely expelled Lebanese forces from historic Palestine.  Iraq provided a small number of fighters who were relatively effective in defending a number of villages in the northern region of the West Bank.

Pappe concludes -- and the outcome of the conflict confirms -- that Israel was not only well-equipped to defend itself from its Arab neighbors, its forces were simultaneously able to expel and prevent the return of the great majority of the Palestinian population from areas they captured.

With regard to the three elements of the original narrative, Pappe concludes that all of them are entirely false.  (1) Israel was not a modern David surrounded by Goliaths, (2) the war was launched by Israeli forces and was well-underway before the Arab armies joined the fight, and (3) not only were Arab directives not responsible for the flight of the Palestinians, but the Israeli leadership had a long, well-established plan to expel as many Arabs from the prospective Jewish state as they possibly could.  Israel executed that plan diligently.  

Pappe's penultimate chapter is titled, "The Memoricide of the Nakba."  "Nakba" is the Arabic word for catastrophe, which is how the Palestinians refer to the 1947-49 War.  He argues that the memory of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been consciously erased.  In years just after the 1967 War, Israel's Ministry of Information was especially active in creating the narrative that helped erase the memory of the Nakba.  In a speech in 1969 to students at the Technical University in Haifa, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan said, "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages.  You don't know the names of these villages,...because these geography books no longer exist....There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."  Pappe describes how the Naming Committee of the Jewish National Fund renamed places under Jewish control which explains why they are missing from the geography books.

And they are not just missing from the written record.  They are gone entirely, often covered over by new settlements or national forests planted by the Jewish National Fund.  The Fund has also been responsible for the creation of parks and resorts in place of destroyed Arab villages.  Many new Jewish developments have "green lungs," i.e., wooded areas that once were neighboring Arab villages.  The erasure of the evidence of a previous Arab population continues today.

One final point regarding the original narrative deserves attention.  The narrative also asserts that the Jewish Agency accepted the Partition Plan while the Arab leadership rejected it.  The latter is certainly true.  The Arab population had been struggling for self-determination as early as the mid-19th century.  They allied with the British in the First World War on the promise that Britain would support their independence after victory.  Much of the British controlled territory was granted independence (Iraq in 1932 and Jordan in 1946), but Palestine remained under British control.  

Through the 1920s and 1930s, Britain facilitated the colonization of Palestine by mostly European Jewish colonists.  By 1947, the Jewish population of Palestine reached roughly one third of the whole and they owned roughly only 7% of the land.  Nonetheless, the Partition Plan designated 55% of land and most of the best land to the Jewish state.  The Arabs had no formal role in ratifying the plan. In essence, the Partition Plan was the culmination of a decades-long colonial enterprise.  In this context, it's quite natural that the Arabs would not accept it.

The Jewish Agency's "acceptance" of the plan, however, was significantly qualified in that they did not accept the plan's borders.  Announcing the acceptance of the plan was a strategic decision that would provide the State of Israel international recognition.  At the same time, the Agency declared its intention to set its own borders.  Its early invasion of regions designated for the Arab state demonstrated that the Jewish Agency also rejected the plan's agreed upon borders.  Furthermore, a significant segment of the Jewish leadership of the time desired all of historic Palestine for the Jewish state, rejecting a two state solution entirely.  The 1967 War was in part motivated by this desire.  That war completed Israel's occupation of all of historic Palestine and produced hundreds of thousands of additional Palestinian refugees.  Nearly a quarter of a million people were force out of the West Bank, unable to return.  

Two years after the 1967 War, the Times of London reported Defense Minister Moshe Dayan as writing, "Our fathers had reached the frontiers which were recognized in the Partition Plan.  Our generation reached the frontiers of 1949.  Now the six-day generation has managed to reach Suez, Jordan and the Golan Heights.  That is not the end.  After the present cease-fire lines, there will be new ones.  They will extend beyond Jordan -- perhaps to Lebanon and perhaps to central Syria as well."  Whether there remains interest among the Israeli leadership of expanding Israel further is an open question.  There has always been talk of expanding north to the Litani River in Lebanon and the Jewish settlement of the West Bank appears to be leading to eventual annexation. 

What distinguishes Morris's and Pappe's views is their attitudes toward the goals of Zionism.  For Morris, they are fundamentally sound.  What is at issue is how those goals are to be accomplished and perhaps the final borders of Israel.  For Pappe, Zionism is a colonial-settler enterprise that has committed horrendous atrocities and denied Palestinians the fundament rights due any people.  But the facts of the stories they tell are largely the same.  It is these facts that the New Historians finally brought to light, regardless of how those facts are judged.  

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine / Ilan Pappe -- Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006.

Thirty years after the 1947-49 War in historic Palestine, the Israeli government began declassifying the archives of the Jewish Agency and the Israeli security forces.  This gave rise to a new understanding of the war.  The Israeli historians who made use of these archives became known as "the New Historians."  This review covers two books by two of them: The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited by Benny Morris and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe.  (The review is available on this blog under both titles.)   

In reviewing the work of the New Historians, one must first understand the original narrative of the 1947-49 War.  The narrative was virtually unchallenged in Israel and in Western countries until the late 1980s.  It remains widely accepted today, but due to the work of the New Historians, serious scholars no longer accept the narrative. 

Morris and Pappe address three elements of the original narrative:  (1) 1947 Israel was a modern David surrounded by Arab Goliaths, (2) the Arab countries launched the war on May 15 after rejecting the UN Partition Plan, and (3) Palestinians left their homes of their own free will at the behest of Arab leaders.

I. Benny Morris: The Palestinian Refugee Problem 

The first edition of Morris's book was published in 1988.  He began writing it as a history of Haganah, the Jewish militia which later became the Israeli Defense Force.  Morris was given special access to Haganah's archives, but authorities later denied him access when they understood where his work was leading.  At the same time, other Israeli archives from the war period were becoming declassified.  This allowed Morris to continue his work.  

Morris's conclusions are not completely inconsistent with the original narrative.  He accepts that the Israeli leadership at first was not entirely certain of their ability to prevail in a war with the Arabs and that many factors resulted in the depopulation of Arab communities.  Most significantly, he believes the Jewish Agency had no premeditate plans to "transfer" Arabs out of areas under Jewish control. 

According to Morris, the Israeli leadership's initial concern about security was alleviated as they saw near universal success of their military operations.  At first, they sought to secure communication lines between Jewish settlements, especially between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and to provide an adequate defense of the small number of isolated Jewish settlements.  This was accomplished relatively quickly.  In all, only two Jewish settlements were lost during the war.  It quickly became clear to the Jewish Agency that the Arab population in Palestine was no match for the Jewish forces.  

One should distinguish, however, what was known by the leadership from what was believed by the general Jewish population.  Many in the Jewish community had fled, or were descendants of those who had fled, from pogroms in Eastern Europe as well as Shoah survivors.  Living in what was for most of them a foreign land among a suspicious indigenous population, including overtly hostile elements, could not have fostered a sense of security; however, the population's perception of the danger was not in line with the actual relative military capabilities of Arab and Jewish security forces.

Immediately following the UN's adoption of the Partition Plan, a low intensity conflict between Arabs and Jews began.  Arab irregular forces engaged mostly in small skirmishes and sniper attacks on passing Jewish convoys.  Some volunteers from neighboring Arab states, known as the Army of Rescue, also participated in these attacks.  In quick response, Jewish militias (Haganah, Irgun, and the Stern Gang) attacked villages from which they believed the Arab attacks emerged.  Their responses frequently were disproportionate and not always directed against the responsible parties.  An escalating cycle of violence ensued.  This prompted a significant number of Arabs to flee their homes in fear of and in response to Jewish assaults and/or anticipated Jewish political control. 

Among the most significant observations made by the New Historians is the implementation of "Plan Dalet" or "Plan D," by Haganah.  Plan D was composed of 13 specific military operations designed to occupy and exert control over Arab populated regions, both inside and outside the UN boundaries of the prospective Jewish state.  The plan was finalized during the sectarian violence in early March 1948 and was implemented in the first week of April -- six weeks before the British Mandate would end on May 14.  

For the first time since the passage of the UN Partition Plan, significant military assets were mobilized in coordinated attacks against an enemy.  One might identify November 29, 1947 as the start of escalating sectarian violence and the first week of April as when Israel launched a coordinated war against the Palestinians.  May 15, which is considered the start of the war by the original historical narrative, would mark, instead, the date when neighboring Arab countries joined in the defense of the beleaguered Palestinian population. 

Morris's Revisited (2nd) edition was published in 2004.  It was prompted by the release of additional archival material and Morris's desire to respond to criticism that he had not adequately examined the pre-war discussion among the Jewish leadership of transferring the Arab population out of Palestine.  Morris devotes a new chapter on the discussion of transfer.  He concludes that while there was pre-war interest among the leadership in transferring the population, the connection between that interest and what actually happened is "more tenuous than Arab propagandists would allow. "  According to Morris, the flight of refugees was mainly the consequence of local decisions made by specific military commanders in their efforts to secure the territory they were occupying for the Jewish state.  Additionally, some Arab directives to flee and decisions by the Arab upper class to wait out the war abroad played a role in the departure of Palestinians.  In any case, Israel's leaders recognized that their military operations were sparking the unexpected flight of Arabs which would serve the interests of a secure Israeli state.  As in the first edition, Morris continues to argue that the depopulation of Arab communities was a complex event that involved many factors.  

Morris does accept that Israel's military operations were the primary motivating force. He estimates that 600,000-760,000 Palestinian Arabs "departed their homes" between November 1947 and October 1950.  He documents 392 Arab cities, towns, and villages that were "abandoned" by their populations and 186 Israeli settlements that were constructed in their place.  Jewish and Israeli forces variously assisted, encouraged, directed, and forcibly expelled Palestinians from their homes in the course of different military operations. Morris's detailed accounting of this massive demographic shift is perhaps what made his first edition so ground breaking.  

Morris acknowledges that numerous atrocities were committed by Haganah and especially by the dissident Jewish militias, Irgun and the Stern Gang.  These atrocities -- massacres of tens of villagers at a time and sometimes more -- had a significant impact on the decisions of Arabs to flee their homes.  In the context of the war, the Jewish leadership simply allowed the flight of Arabs to unfold as a fortuitous consequence of war.  No official "transfer" policy was needed.  Morris does, however, identify some instances in which the leadership gave explicit expulsion orders.  He also recognizes that the leadership routinely approved expulsions after the fact and directed the destruction of buildings.

According to Morris, the Israeli leadership was surprised to see the mass exodus of Arabs, but they were insistent that very few refugees be allowed to return to their villages, and they made great efforts to ensure "infiltrators" would not return to their homes.  Even reluctant members of the leadership -- members of the more dovish party, Mapam -- eventually came around to accept the "transfer" of the population and the prohibition of its return. 

With regard to the three elements of the original narrative under discussion, Morris (1) rejects the claim that Israel was a modern David surrounded by Goliaths, (2) makes no real claim about what should be considered the start of the war, and (3) ambiguously assesses the motives for the flight of the Palestinians.  His work is noteworthy in that it broke the taboo that prevented an honest examination of Israel's origins.  Morris remains a Zionist, however, and rests his moral conclusions on the legitimacy of the foundation of Israel and the consequent need to secure the state through force, even if this involved producing hundreds of thousands of refugees and inflicting tens of thousands of casualties.

II. Ilan Pappe: The Ethnic Cleansing

The primary sources used by Morris are almost exclusively drawn from the Israeli archives.  His secondary sources are overwhelmingly in Hebrew.  This has lead to criticisms that he overlooks some important perspectives on and information about what was taking place.  Morris argues that these other perspectives are based largely on interviews and oral histories conducted too long after the events to be reliable.  In contrast, Ilan Pappe's work, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine makes use of these additional sources, along with many of the same archival sources used by Morris.  Pappe even makes use of both editions of Morris's work. 

Pappe's conclusions about Israeli actions and intentions are much more critical.  In his first chapter, he discusses the history and definition of the term "ethnic cleansing."  The reminder of the book is essentially an effort to show that while the expulsion of the Palestinians is a textbook case of ethnic cleansing, it has been ignored in discussions of past ethnic cleansings.  He often quotes the use of the term "cleanse" and its derivatives in Jewish documents and diaries that describe the expulsion of Palestinians.  

Pappe writes of the compilation of the "Village Files" by Jewish Arabists in the 1930s.  The files were a comprehensive registry of all the Arab villages in Palestine with details about their geography, economy, populations, leadership, and their relations with their Jewish neighbors.  The Files' main proponent in the Jewish Agency thought the creation of the registry would "greatly help the redemption of the land." As Jewish forces moved against Arab villages, the Village Files were invaluable, giving them detailed intelligence about their targets and even allowing them to identify specific individuals for assassination.

Pappe directly implicates the head of the Jewish Agency and first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion as the primary directing force in planning and approving the expulsions.  A small group of advisors called the "Consultant Committee" or simply the "Consultancy" was formed in February 1947, months prior to the passage of the Partition Plan. It became Ben-Gurion's most important advisory group.  He and members of the Consultancy recognized the need to ensure a majority Jewish population of 70-80% inside the Jewish state.  Consequently, they would need to transfer Arabs out of Jewish controlled areas, including to neighboring states.  The tactics they adopted for expelling the population began with forceful "retaliation" against Arab violence, mainly against snipers shooting at Jewish convoys, but as early as in December 1947, this evolved into a more pro-active "engagement" or "violent reconnaissance" which did not require a pretext.  The aim was to intimidate the population and encourage flight.

Between the assembly and use of the Village Files and the proceedings and diaries of the Consultancy, Pappe's case for the premeditated expulsion of Palestinians is strong.  Certainly, Morris and Pappe agree that the Israeli leadership made a conscious decision to prevent displaced people from returning to their homes.  This confirms either the leadership's intentions to expel the population or its legitimation of expulsion after the fact.  In any case, Morris and Pappe together provide sufficient evidence that the flight of Palestinians from Israeli controlled areas was not mainly a function of Arab directives to leave.

By May 15, 1947, or soon after, most of the largest cities with Arab populations were occupied by Jewish forces and virtually emptied of their Arab inhabitants.  Haifa, Tiberias, Safad, and Baysan lay in regions designated for a Jewish state. Jaffa and Acre lay in regions designated for the Arabs.  West Jerusalem was to be governed by an international administration.  Pappe refers to the expulsion of inhabitants from these cities as "urbicide" to distinguish it from (on his accounting) the more than 500 Arab villages that Jewish and Israeli forces ultimately destroyed or converted into Jewish settlements.  

This demographic change began shortly after the UN adopted the Partition Plan.  The only significant disagreement between Morris and Pappe is whether the Jewish Agency consciously planned the expulsion or merely raised no meaningful objection to it and retroactively approved it.  From the point of view of the refugees, the distinction is unimportant.

Plans for the expulsion of the Arab population could be made confidently because of the known military and political weakness of the Arab population.  According to Pappe, Jewish Arabists were reporting to the Consultancy that there was virtually no interest in war among ordinary Palestinians.  Many Arab villages reached peace agreements with neighboring Jewish settlements to stay out of the impending conflict.  Furthermore, the British Mandatory Force effectively disarmed the Arab population in a crushing counter-insurgency campaign between 1936 and 1939.  The Arab leadership was exiled to the Seychelles for years after.  In any case, political authority among Palestinians historically did not extend far beyond the village leadership, making the coordination of defensive measures nearly impossible.  In general, the Arab population of Palestine was uninterested in war and extremely vulnerable.

Pappe argues that the armies of neighboring Arab states were not nearly as threating as the original narrative would have it.  The combined number of Arab forces were roughly similar to the number of the Jewish forces, but were less well-equipped and lacked an effective single command structure.  There was competition, suspicion, even animosity, between the Arab states, particularly between Egypt and Jordan and between Syria and Jordan.  

The Jordanian army was the most well-equipped and well-organized; however, Jordan's King Abdullah and David Ben-Gurion came to an agreement before May15th in which Jordan would control the West Bank (at least that part the Israelis would not conquer).  Abdullah publicly announced that his forces would not invade the region set aside for the Jewish state, but would only occupy the Arab region.  This alleviated Israel's greatest concern.  The disposition of Jerusalem, however, was not agreed upon by Abdullah and Ben-Gurion.  It was here that the most significant fighting took place between the Jordanians and the Israelis.

Egypt was potentially a significant force.  Yet according to Pappe, it mobilized only 10,000 soldiers, 5,000 of which were untrained members of the Muslim Brotherhood that were released from prison to fight in Palestine.  Initially, Egypt made progress by occupying territory populated almost exclusively by Arabs or that was virtually uninhabited.  For a time, they were able to isolate a small number of Jewish settlements in the Negev, but their advance into Palestine was halted after just one week.  Israeli forces then steadily drove them back to Egypt, leaving them to occupy only the Gaza Strip.

Syrian forces amounted to only a few thousand fighters.  They managed to capture a kibbutz just across the border, but did little more after that.  Syria's participation in the war was mostly token.  Lebanese forces operated by and large defensively in Western Galilee, a region that had been allocated for the Arab state.  By the end of the war, Israel had completely expelled Lebanese forces from historic Palestine.  Iraq provided a small number of fighters who were relatively effective in defending a number of villages in the northern region of the West Bank.

Pappe concludes -- and the outcome of the conflict confirms -- that Israel was not only well-equipped to defend itself from its Arab neighbors, its forces were simultaneously able to expel and prevent the return of the great majority of the Palestinian population from areas they captured.

With regard to the three elements of the original narrative, Pappe concludes that all of them are entirely false.  (1) Israel was not a modern David surrounded by Goliaths, (2) the war was launched by Israeli forces and was well-underway before the Arab armies joined the fight, and (3) not only were Arab directives not responsible for the flight of the Palestinians, but the Israeli leadership had a long, well-established plan to expel as many Arabs from the prospective Jewish state as they possibly could.  Israel executed that plan diligently.  

Pappe's penultimate chapter is titled, "The Memoricide of the Nakba."  "Nakba" is the Arabic word for catastrophe, which is how the Palestinians refer to the 1947-49 War.  He argues that the memory of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been consciously erased.  In years just after the 1967 War, Israel's Ministry of Information was especially active in creating the narrative that helped erase the memory of the Nakba.  In a speech in 1969 to students at the Technical University in Haifa, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan said, "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages.  You don't know the names of these villages,...because these geography books no longer exist....There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."  Pappe describes how the Naming Committee of the Jewish National Fund renamed places under Jewish control which explains why they are missing from the geography books.

And they are not just missing from the written record.  They are gone entirely, often covered over by new settlements or national forests planted by the Jewish National Fund.  The Fund has also been responsible for the creation of parks and resorts in place of destroyed Arab villages.  Many new Jewish developments have "green lungs," i.e., wooded areas that once were neighboring Arab villages.  The erasure of the evidence of a previous Arab population continues today.

One final point regarding the original narrative deserves attention.  The narrative also asserts that the Jewish Agency accepted the Partition Plan while the Arab leadership rejected it.  The latter is certainly true.  The Arab population had been struggling for self-determination as early as the mid-19th century.  They allied with the British in the First World War on the promise that Britain would support their independence after victory.  Much of the British controlled territory was granted independence (Iraq in 1932 and Jordan in 1946), but Palestine remained under British control.  

Through the 1920s and 1930s, Britain facilitated the colonization of Palestine by mostly European Jewish colonists.  By 1947, the Jewish population of Palestine reached roughly one third of the whole and they owned roughly only 7% of the land.  Nonetheless, the Partition Plan designated 55% of land and most of the best land to the Jewish state.  The Arabs had no formal role in ratifying the plan. In essence, the Partition Plan was the culmination of a decades-long colonial enterprise.  In this context, it's quite natural that the Arabs would not accept it.

The Jewish Agency's "acceptance" of the plan, however, was significantly qualified in that they did not accept the plan's borders.  Announcing the acceptance of the plan was a strategic decision that would provide the State of Israel international recognition.  At the same time, the Agency declared its intention to set its own borders.  Its early invasion of regions designated for the Arab state demonstrated that the Jewish Agency also rejected the plan's agreed upon borders.  Furthermore, a significant segment of the Jewish leadership of the time desired all of historic Palestine for the Jewish state, rejecting a two state solution entirely.  The 1967 War was in part motivated by this desire.  That war completed Israel's occupation of all of historic Palestine and produced hundreds of thousands of additional Palestinian refugees.  Nearly a quarter of a million people were force out of the West Bank, unable to return.  

Two years after the 1967 War, the Times of London reported Defense Minister Moshe Dayan as writing, "Our fathers had reached the frontiers which were recognized in the Partition Plan.  Our generation reached the frontiers of 1949.  Now the six-day generation has managed to reach Suez, Jordan and the Golan Heights.  That is not the end.  After the present cease-fire lines, there will be new ones.  They will extend beyond Jordan -- perhaps to Lebanon and perhaps to central Syria as well."  Whether there remains interest among the Israeli leadership of expanding Israel further is an open question.  There has always been talk of expanding north to the Litani River in Lebanon and the Jewish settlement of the West Bank appears to be leading to eventual annexation. 

What distinguishes Morris's and Pappe's views is their attitudes toward the goals of Zionism.  For Morris, they are fundamentally sound.  What is at issue is how those goals are to be accomplished and perhaps the final borders of Israel.  For Pappe, Zionism is a colonial-settler enterprise that has committed horrendous atrocities and denied Palestinians the fundament rights due any people.  But the facts of the stories they tell are largely the same.  It is these facts that the New Historians finally brought to light, regardless of how those facts are judged.  

Buddhist Symbolism in Tibetan Thangkas: The Story of Siddhartha and Other Buddhas Interpreted in Modern Nepalese Painting / Ben Meulenbeld -- Havelte/Holland: Binkey Kok Publications, 2004

Beyond its most basic tenets, Buddhism is not simple.  It contains complicated psychological and metaphysical theories that are difficult to understand, except after long study.  This posed a problem for monks bringing the religion to communities that had no previous experience with Buddhism's Indic background.  In Tibet, propagation of the religion relied, therefore, on stories of the Buddha and his past lives, a form of literature called the jataka.  Another method of propagating Buddhism was through art.  In the 10th century, when Buddhism was experiencing a renaissance in Tibet, the Indian tradition paintings, called thangkas, representing buddhas and bodhisattvas were used as a teaching aids to convey complicated ideas and to serve as objects upon which one could focus one's mind in meditation.  They were easily transported and could serve to set up a portable alter.

Ben Meulenbeld's Buddhist Symbolism in Tibetan Thangkas provides a fine introduction to the thangka and its common subjects.  Moreover, it is a beautiful book with 37 colorful plates reproducing thangkas of a large private collection of modern works painted in the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal.  The first chapter provides an introduction to the purpose and creation of thangkas, from their design through their painting and ultimately to their framing.  The second chapter provides a brief description of the religious background of thangkas, particularly a recounting of the life of Siddhartha Buddha.  It is illustrated with four thangkas.  The third chapter is an extremely brief account of Theravada Buddhism.  This is a Buddhist tradition that survives in Sri Lanka and in parts of Southeast Asia.  As Tibet is not heir to this tradition, the chapter is brief  and illustrated with only one thangka of the historical Buddha.  Instead, Buddhism was brought to Tibet by Mahayana Buddhists.  So the fourth chapter, on the Mahayana tradition is much longer and illustrated wigh 13 plates.  This tradition laid great emphasis on the bodhisattva, an enlightened figure who forswears liberation in nirvana to help all other sentient beings attain enlightenment.  Many of the thangkas in this chapter depict legendary buddhas and important bodhisattvas that make up a kind of pantheon of Buddhist personalities.  The fifth and longest chapter deals with the Vajrayana tradition.  It is illustrated with 18 thangkas. The Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism is now the dominant tradition in Tibet.  The thangkas here depicted actual figures in the history of Tibetan Buddhism along with several other miscellaneous subjects including, the Wheel of Life, a Yogini, a Gathering of Saints, Kalachakras, Herukas, the Mandala of Yama, and two Kalachakra mandalas.  The final chapter deals with paubas. These are like thangkas, but include with Hindu themes.  It is short and is illustrated with only one pauba.

Most all of the thangkas follow a very standard rather symmetric design with figures seemingly placed on a two dimensional surface, usually in a cross-legged position facing forward.  They hold or are accompanied by items that indicate their identity.  In the case of the historical figures in the fifth chapter, the image is much more naturalistic.  The figures do not face directly forward, but sit facing obliquely amid a naturalistic background.

The two greatest strengths of Meulenbeld's work are first, the explanations of the various legendary buddhas, bodhisattvas, and other beings in the Buddhist "pantheon."  One is given a good understanding of their primary features and the symbolic objects and hand gestures that are characteristic of the being.  Second, are the illustrations themselves.  They are simply exquisite.  Unfortunately, despite the folio format of the book, seeing the details of the illustrations requires strong lighting and a magnifying glass, and the reproductions are not as sharps as one would like.  However, rectifying this shortcoming would involve printing the work in an over sized format using much more expensive reproduction technology.  Consequently, having the work in a more manageable format is a compensating virtue.

The Buddhist Religion: A Historical Introduction / Richard H. Robinson -- Belmont, Cal.: Dickenson Publishing Co., 1970

Richard Robinson's short history The Buddhist Religion is a mixture of facts about the rise and fall of various schools of Buddhism and some of the main tenets of their faiths.  It is, unfortunately, not as detailed as one might like on the latter score.   Two short chapters -- one introductory and one concluding -- describe the current state and potential future of Buddhism, but the bulk of the book examines Buddhism from its origin with the Buddha to roughly the second millennium C.E.  Twenty-six pages are devoted to Buddhism during the life of the Buddha, forty-three are devoted to Buddhism in India, and thirty-five are devoted to Buddhism outside of India.  What we know of the life of the Buddha is, of course, colored by myth and legend.  Robinson is not shy to recount many of these.  Of the later two topics, much of the work describes various religious beliefs, including celestial bodhisattvas, celestial buddhas, and the magical beliefs, particularly of Tantric Buddhism.  Consequently, his title, The Buddhist Religion is appropriate. Anyone looking for a history of Buddhist philosophy should go elsewhere.

His treatment of the rise and fall of various schools is worthwhile, though.  The reader gets a fairly clear outline of Buddhism's genealogy, but again, there is scant  treatment (not to say no treatment) of the details of the doctrinal disagreements that led to various schisms.  His treatment of the ideas characteristic of Buddhism outside of India is especially weak.  One is presented instead with brief descriptions (in the style of biographical reference book entries) of important Buddhists in China and Japan.  More print is devoted to the political fortunes of these figures than their doctrines.  The treatment of Buddhism in Southeast Asia is even more cursory.

Robinson provides no bibliographic footnotes to his work, and only a few textual notes.  The reader must be content with a list of "selected readings."  No doubt, the selection is good and the list is not short, but anyone looking to confirm some bit of information or expand one's understanding of a topic is not well served by it.  Robinson does provide a clearly organized list of Buddhist scriptures for the Pali, Chinese, and Tibetan canons.

Buddhism: A Modern Perspective / Charles S. Prebish, ed. -- University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University, 1975

Buddhism, edited by Charles Prebish is a cross between a introductory survey and an brief, one volume encyclopedia of Buddhism.  It is composed of 45 chapters, averaging five and a half pages.  Each chapter explores a significant topic in the history and philosophy of Buddhism.  The First Part deals with "Indian Buddhism," beginning with a history of early Buddhism.  Chapter Six begins the treatment of the central ideas of Buddhism:  the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Three Marks of Existence, the Five Aggregates, Dependent Origination, and the Stages of Sanctification. The rest of Part One provides and account of the major schools, important literature, and advanced ideas.  Remarkably, the authors of each of chapter manage to convey the important concepts clearly and concisely, quickly presenting the essence of the topic at hand. 

Part Two deals with "Buddhism Outside of India."  Unfortunately, it is here where the work begins to falter.  There is simply too much information about the development of Buddhism in Ceylon, Southeast Asia, China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, and the West to pack into the brief chapters allotted to these regions, some of which have been home to Buddhism for nearly two millennia.  Nonetheless, even Part Two can serve as a worthwhile reference source for names of political and religious leaders and monastic communities.  They also provide a thumbnail sketch of the history of Buddhism in the region

A short bibliography of "suggested reading" follows each chapter.  The work also includes a brief directory of Buddhist communities in the United States and an extensive glossary, general bibliography, and index.

Buddhism: A Modern Perspective will be more valuable for the beginner, but more experienced scholars are bound to find an number of chapters quite useful.

Illustrated Atlas of the Himalaya / David Zurick and Julsun Pacheco -- Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2006

The Illustrated Atlas of the Himalaya is a beautiful introduction to the Himalaya. Geographically, it covers everything between the Indus River and the Karakorum Mountains in the west to the Brahmaputra River in the east and from Tibetan plateau in the north to the Terai lowland in the south. It is divided into five chapters: the regional setting, the natural environment, society, resources and conservation, and exploration and travel. It contains maps, tables and charts, photographs, and text.

The pages are ten inches by thirteen inches and oriented in a landscape format. This allows large panoramic images of mountain vistas and other subjects. While the photographs are the work's strongest feature, it is not simply a coffee table picture book. The other features are also of high quality.

The maps are detailed and usually precisely drawn, though often smaller than they could be. In several cases, details are lost in the small scale. At the same time, there is also a great deal of white space on the pages. While this makes reading the work a pleasure, the white space could have been used to include more detail or at very least to enlarge some of the graphics.

The text generally is well-written and informative, but the authors have an unfortunate habit of making reference to places not shown on any of their maps. This is curious, since much information appears on the maps that is not referenced in the text. It is almost as though the text and maps are for two separate works. The atlas does contain a place index, listing longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates; so it is possible to look up a place, find its coordinates, and then refer to one of more of the maps to locate the place. This usually is more work than is desirable. I found myself skipping the effort or seeking out other maps and atlases to supplement the work. Greater coordination between the maps and the text would have greatly improved the usefulness of the atlas.

The geology of the region is complicated, making the section on the natural environment difficult, but a careful reading is rewarding. The section on society provides much typical demographic information, along with information about the transportation and communication systems, development issues, and governance. It is, however, a somewhat elementary treatment of the society. Importantly, the section on governance is now quite obsolete with the success of the Maoist insurgency. The section on resources and conservation describes the flora, fauna, minerals, and water resources. Curiously, nothing is said about the effects of climate change in the region. One would think that a work published in 2006 would take this into account, since by that time it was well understood that the Himalaya will be profoundly affected by a warming climate. (Just recently, Appa Sherpa, the man who has made it to the top of Mt. Everest more often than anyone, asserted that climbing Everest would soon be too dangerous due to melting ice and snow.) The final section on exploration and travel is a concise history of the expeditions into the mountains by outsiders. It provides enough information for an interested reader to seek out more detail in other works.

Buddhism: Its Essence and Development / Edward Conze -- N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1975

Edward Conze's Buddhism: Its Essence and Development is among the most popular general introductions to Buddhism and for good reason. Conze is one of history's foremost European scholars of Buddhism. He translated numerous sutras and shastras and wrote works of his own on the history and philosophy of Buddhism.

The subtitle of Buddhism: Its Essence and Development aptly describes the character of the work. The early pages provide a brief listing, and account of the significance of the most important Buddhist documents and address some of the common questions and impressions about Buddhism that arose in Europe and the U.S., e.g., Is Buddhism atheistic and is it a pessimistic philosophy?

The core of the work describes the philosophical tenets of early Buddhism and those ideas that most all Buddhists accept, e.g., The Four Noble Truths. It also describes how different Buddhist schools of thought developed these ideas. In particular, the doctrines of the Theravadin, Sarvastivadin, and Mahasangikan schools are discussed and then later, he presents the doctrines of the Mahayana tradition (the Madhyamika and Yogacara schools). All of this might count as the "essence" of Buddhism.

Its "development" describes the full scope of historical Buddhism, including how it became transformed by the specific cultures that adopted it. Here the magical and mythological views that became attached to the core ideas are discussed. Conze also presents the views of Bhakti, Tantric, and Pure Land Buddhism. These seem to reside at the intersection between reasonable developments of Buddhist thought and the degeneration of its core ideas, brought on by the superstitions of the societies which produced these schools.

Perhaps the greatest (only?) weakness of the work is the brevity of the treatment that Conze gives to Ch'an and Zen Buddhism, making the work a bit too "Indo-centric" as a general treatment of Buddhism. At just over 200 pages, the work could have been much improved with an additional 30-50 pages on these schools of Buddhism.

Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy / Bryan W. Van Norden -- Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2011

In the preface to Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy Bryan Van Norden warns his more scholarly readers that he has "greatly simplified many aspects of both Chinese and Western history and culture." His reason for doing so is to avoid overwhelming the beginner with too many nuances and controversies. It is noteworthy that while his work is an introduction to Chinese philosophy, he makes frequent mention of Western philosophical ideas. His hope is to both inspire a more in depth study of Chinese philosophy, while also prompting readers to study Western philosophy. As such, his book will make an excellent text for any introductory Western philosophy course that hopes to take a multi-cultural perspective.

The time period that Norden explores runs from the sixth century B.C.E. to through the third century B.C.E., though a final chapter races through the remainder of the history of Chinese philosophy. Figures given the most attention are Kongzi (Confucius), Mengzi (Mencius), Mozi, Yang Zhu, Laozi (Lao Tzu), Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Han Feizi. The central ideas that are used to distinguish these figures are their theories about ethics, e.g., cultivating virtues, promoting beneficial consequences, or promoting one's own well being, the nature and value of rites, the foundations of a good society, and human nature.

The work also contains three appendices on how to read a text, particularly a philosophical text, an explanation of the Chinese language and writing, and three alternate readings of Kongzi's philosophy. Each are not without value, but with the exception of the third appendix, they add little to the work. The alternate readings of Kongzi comprise only six and a half pages and as such, might well have been easily incorporated into the main text.

More valuable appendices might have included annotated philosophical and political time lines and a glossary of terms. Norden appears to have consciously decided to avoid using Chinese terminology, probably in an effort to keep the text accessible for beginners, but introducing students to the terms and characters actually used by the philosophers in question would not only make the appendices more valuable, they would be a clear reminder to Westerners that, as much as possible, one needs to place one's preconceptions in abeyance when trying to understand Chinese philosophy. One can only begin to understand it after becoming familiar with a great deal of the history, culture, and intellectual heritage of China.

Early Zoroastrianism / James Hope Moulton -- London: Williams and Norgate, 1913

In 1912, James Hope Moulton presented a series of lectures in Oxford which were later published in the Hibbert Lectures (1913). His topic was "early" Zoroastrianism by which he means Zoroastrianism, its immediate predecessor beliefs, and its descendant beliefs up to the time of Alexander. The work is quite valuable, but uneven. Moulton's first two chapters, "The Sources" and "Before Zarathustra" are somewhat unclear and confusing. His frequent name dropping and brief allusions, indicates that he was addressing an audience that was well-informed about the prevailing issues in Zoroastrian scholarship. After almost 100 years, it's all a bit baffling to the casual reader.

In the first chapter, Moulton presents numerous arguments for various theories about when Zarathustra lived. His evidence does not provide a clear and simple conclusion, but in general it tends toward an earlier date than what is often suggested. The clearest evidence for Zoroastrianism is the Behistan bas relief and inscription depicting Darius around 500 B.C. It is often thought the Zarathustra must have lived about a century or two before this; however, the arguments Moulton relates could place Zarathustra three or four hundred years early at the start of the first millennium.

Moulton's third chapter, "The Prophet and the Reform" is clearer. Here, Moulton argues that Zarathustra flourished in Bactria and traces the development of his thought -- portrayed as a great reformation of early Aryan nature worship -- though its transmission west by the Magi. In the hands of the Magi, Zarathustra's religious insights were transformed and -- in many of their essentials -- lost. The course of this transformation is described in two chapters, "The Magi" and "The Magi (continued)." Moulton argues that many of the more popular (and sometimes disturbing) notions of Zoroastrianism are actually alien to Zarathustra's teaching and were grafted onto the religion by Magi who, having failed to maintain political power in the Achaemenian period, established themselves as religious leaders.

The rest of the work addresses more specific features of Zoroastrianism and happily is clearer and more direct. The polytheistic doctrine of the divine beings (amesha spenta) is presented as a departure from Zarathustra's monotheism. Similarly, the moral dualism setting the good god Ahura Mazda against the evil Angra Mainyu (or Ahriman) is presented as a Magian perversion. This has come to be known as the Zurvanian heresy and now widely accepted.

Zarathustra made, however, a number of very important theological contributions that are prominent in many religions today, including monotheism, the immortality of the individual soul, a future day of judgement when our moral conduct will determine our eternal fate, and the existence of fravashis, or guardian spirits associated with each person. This notion, however, was not so exclusively Zarathustra's, but it was an important component of his thinking and may have been the origin of contemporary Western angelology.

In the final chapter, "Zarathustra and Israel," Moulton takes up a question that occupied the scholars of his time: what was the relationship between the theology of Zarathustra and the theology of the Bible, which have a number of striking similarities. Moulton's chapter is an interesting, though brief argument that while there might have been some cross-fertilization, the two theologies arose independently. For a more thorough treatment of this question, I recommend Lawrence Mills's series of lectures Our Own Religion in Ancient Persia. Mills's lectures also were published in 1913, though their publication was based on work done in past years. It is likely that Moulton had access to at least some of these before writing his own lectures.

Mills outlines three possibilities: (1) Zoroastrianism and Yahwehism arose largely independently, (2) Yahwehism impressed upon Zoroastrianism its monotheistic tendencies when the Jews were held captive in Babylon, and (3) the converse: Zoroastrianism impressed upon Yahwehism its monotheism during the captivity. Mills, like Moulton, opts for the first possibility, but it seems as though both are motivated by a desire either to glorify monotheism by claiming that its truth was independently evident or by the desire to defend the independence of Yahwehism.

If Moulton is correct, that Zarathustra's monotheism along with his other theological insights arose around the tenth century B.C., and if recent archeology and scholarship is correct, placing the origins of the Bible at or around the time of the exile, then it would seem natural that Zoroastrianism was the progenitor of monotheistic Yahwehism. While not absolutely certain, it seems more likely that a relatively minor ethic group (the Jews) might, while in captivity, adopt the elements of the theology of their surrounding culture. This is particularly likely in that prior to the rise of monotheistic Yahwehism in the post-exilic period, the Jews were at most henotheistic and so open to a variety of theologies. Second, their Babylonian captors were far and away the most powerful state in the region. Finally, their Achaemenian liberators (again the most advanced state of the region) were unquestionably monotheistic. It would have been a very easy step to adopt the monotheism of Ahura Mazda under the old, familiar name "Yahweh."

Moulton's Early Zoroastrianism, while somewhat frustrating at the start, develops into an extremely interesting examination of major theological ideas, whose origins are not well known today. It is no wonder that it remains in print today.

The Life and Growth of Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science / William Dwight Whitney -- NY: D. Appleton and Co., 1896

In 1786, Sir William Jones published The Sanskrit Language in which he remarked on similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek and suggested that all three developed from a common extinct language now called "Proto-Indo-European." Jones's observations were an important landmark in the study of language. One century later, the field of philology was in its golden age. William Dwight Whitney was among the leading philologist of the era. He was professor of Sanskrit and editor of The Century Dictionary, an English language dictionary surpassed only by the Oxford English Dictionary.

Whitney published a general treatment of language and the principles of comparative philology in 1875 entitled The Life and Growth of Language: An Outline of Linguistic Science, which covered much of the same ground that appeared in his 1867 work, Language and the Study of Language. Life and the Growth of Language is an excellent exposition of the state of the art in philology during its heyday. It combines a clear explanation of basic linguistic concepts with hypotheses about how languages change over time. This is illustrated with analyses of specific word forms as they are transformed by the tendencies among speakers that alter language.

The great bulk of his book examines various Indo-European languages which he claims belong to the most well-developed language family. His examples show the genetic links between modern languages by examining three basic linguistic forms: inflective, agglutinative, and word order languages. All languages make use of each of these forms, though normally one is dominant. In Latin which is mainly inflective, case endings express the role that the word plays in the sentence; suffixes tell us, for example, whether the noun is the subject of the sentence or the object. In English, this information normally is revealed by the order of the words in the sentence. Agglutinative languages employ specific words to express cases and link them together in complex, compound words. Whitney's prime examples of agglutinative languages are Scythian and Chinese, in which words tend to be single syllables. These syllables are brought together to express numerous semantic relations, e.g., cases common in English, as well as passive, reflexive, causative, negative, and impossible action.

These linguistic properties are explained in the course of showing how language changes, sometimes to the extent of altering the dominant structure the language. For example, Modern English, a word order language, developed out of Old English, a inflected language; however, contrary to this trend, some Modern English inflections were formed from older agglutinative or word order features. Whitney's example of this is the past tense suffix "-ed." According to Whitney, it is the worn away expression of "did." "Did" is still used to indicate the past tense as in expressions like "he did love." The origin of the -ed ending came from a slightly different word order, "he love did." The existence of both "he did love" and "he loved" in Modern English indicates that early English was probably agglutinative where "did" served to indicate the past tense.

The Life and Growth of Language drives home the plasticity of language. Suffixes and prefixes are formed out of words worn away by lazy speakers. Conversely, word orders are standardize or specific words are employed to express what was expressed previously by now neglected inflections. Whitney describes other changes to the language related to the invention of new words and word borrowings. Both often take place as a result of significant cultural changes due to new technologies or modes of life or due to exposure to foreign cultures through trade, migration, or conquest. According to Whitney, many words originated in onomatopoeias.

In the later chapters, Whitney describes features of other language families, highlighting the amazing diversity of linguistic forms. For example, outside Indo-European languages, the distinction between verb and other parts of speech is not so stark. Single words are made to do the work of numerous parts of speech and are distinguished only by their inflections. Whitney observes that intonation is critical to distinguishing Chinese words, Native American languages make an important distinction between animate and inanimate objects rather like some languages distinguish genders, and Scythian employs fifteen to twenty separated cases.

Philologists of Whitney's time believed that the relationship between languages could be recognized by the similarity between certain core words, e.g., mother, father, brother, and others that were not likely to be replaced by new or borrowed words. Famously, Jones recognized the similarity of the Latin and Greek "pater" and "mater" and the Sanskrit "piter" and "matar," along with other similar words. Similarities between the grammatical structure of two languages provided an even stronger argument for their common ancestry. Such arguments, however, are not always convincing since accidental commonalities clearly appear between languages.

The difficulty of establishing strong connections between languages raises an important question about the "science" of philology. Whitney examines this in his last chapter. His sensitivity to the difficulties of drawing sound conclusions is, however, limited by the progress of the philosophy of science of the 19th century. While not yet widely and clearly articulated, verificationism and induction was the state of the art in the philosophy of science in Whitney's day. Falsificationism and the hypothetico-deductive method was still 50 to 75 years away from its seminal articulation in Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

Since philology was concerned chiefly with reconstructing dead language that had no written record, there was little to no possibility of testing an hypothesis. All that could be done was to formulate elegant, but untestable theories that linked existing languages. This short-coming may well have been the main reason that philology did not last far into the 20th century as a science. However, with recent advances in archaeology and genetics, a larger body of evidence has become available to support philological claims. Furthermore, more recent philosophers of science and epistemologists, e.g., W.V.O. Quine and Nelson Goodman have enhanced the significance of theory construction in the progress of science, potentially establishing greater respect for future philological activity.

Whitney's work is surprisingly advanced when compared to 20th century linguistics. It is evidence that the advances in 20th century linguistics were not radical departures from the ideas of the 19th century, but merely clearer expressions of nascent older ideas. Similarly, Whitney views Indo-European languages as somehow more developed than those of other families. This reflects his time, but he also exhibits a budding awareness that all human languages are essentially equally sophisticated and are a product of a common natural human capacity. There are many passages that make Whitney sound like a typical 19th century ethnocentric imperialist and other that seem to recognize that non-Indo-European languages, even "primitive" languages, are no less sophisticated than Indo-European languages. In these passages, the difference for Whitney is mostly in the size of the languages' vocabularies, and he recognizes that this is merely a reflection of a more complex industrial society.

All in all, Whitney's The Life and Growth of Language is a fascinating romp through Indo-European philology. Happily, it requires no special knowledge to enjoy the excursion.

The Bible Unearthed / Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman -- NY: Simon and Schuster, 2002

In the 19th century, archaeologists began a concerted effort to uncover the remains of biblical places and events, and in the course of about 100 years, evidence began mounting to corroborate the historical accuracy of the Bible. Modern archaeological techniques have, however, cast doubt on these conclusions. A leading figure challenging the historicity of the Bible is Israel Finkelstein. His book The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origins of Its Sacred Texts is a persuasive summary of his main arguments. With his co-author Neil Asher Silberman, Finkelstein effective separates fact from legend regarding the patriarchs, the Exodus, Joshua's conquest of Canaan, the golden age of David and Solomon, and the subsequent history of Israel and Judah.

The argument against believing that the biblical stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob refer to historical individuals is based on numerous anachronisms. It was commonly thought that the patriarchs lived in the early second millennium B.C.E. However, camels -- a common pack animal in the stories -- were not domesticated until later in that millennium and were not commonly used in caravans until the first millennium B.C.E. Gum, balm, and myrrh were the common items of trade with the Arab world in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E. Isaac's encounter with the Philistines is particularly problematic in that the Philistines did not arrive in Canaan until after 1200 B.C.E., and the stories suggest that the Philistine city of Gerar was of some significance, but it did not become eminent until the late eighth century B.C.E. A conservative reading of the evidence would indicate that the patriarchs might have existed, but that the stories about them were not finalized until the seventh century and that much of what is said about them cannot be true. More likely, they were legendary figures in the mold of the Greek heroes of the Iliad.

Finkelstein points out that there is no evidence that the Hebrews ever lived in Egypt. Given the huge amount of historical evidence from the period of the Exodus, it is easy to accept that the lack of reference to the Hebrews means that the stories of in Exodus are purely legendary.

Some of the best analyses in The Bible Unearthed refute the invasion of Canaan by Joshua. Early evidence suggested a number of cities that might have been destroyed by Joshua, but Finkelstein demonstrates that the destruction layers could not be of the time purported to Joshua. Furthermore, settlement patterns and material remains indicate that the Israeli population in the highlands of Judea and Samaria were a natural development from a mixed population of farmers and herders that regularly moved between the lowlands valleys and the hills.

Finkelstien does not, however, understand the monarchies of David and Solomon as purely legendary, but the archaeological evidence that Finkelstein presents makes them out to be minor chieftains of a marginal hill people. Evidence would suggest that the first great Israelite Kingdom began with the Omri dynasty, which flourished not in Judea, but in the north during the 9th century.

Examining the archaeological remains and comparing it with the Bible would indicate that the Pentatuch and the Deuteronomistic histories (Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) were largely composed (or at least substantially completed) in the seventh century during the reign of Josiah in Judah. Josiah's reign followed the collapse of Samarian Israel and was strengthened by a large influx of Israeli refugees. The strict "Yahweh-Alone" movement that characterized Josiah's time would have greatly benefited from a sweeping national epic that delegitimized all political and religious tendency that were not faithful to Yahweh and centered on the temple in Jerusalem.

The strength of The Bible Unearthed lies in its methodology. Instead of starting with the biblical texts and seeking archaeological support those texts, Finkelstien begins with the facts on (or in) the ground and compares the biblical text to these. What does not conform to the facts then must be reinterpreted. As iconoclastic as the arguments seem to be, they have come to be the orthodoxy among biblical archaeologists and provide a fascinating new story of the history that has been central to the Middle Eastern and European world views for millennia.

Ugarit and the Old Testament / Peter C. Craigie -- Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman's Publishing, 1983

A full understanding the Old Testament requires not only knowledge of the text itself, but also of the culture out of which it came; however, if we are limited to the Old Testament to understand its culture, then a full understanding of the Old Testament is not possible. We need, instead, additional sources of information to provide the context. Numerous archaeological and historical resources are available for this, but perhaps the most interesting are the ancient artifacts uncovered at Ras Shamra in Syria on the Mediterranean coast.

Beginning in 1929, archaeological digs at Ras Shamra have produced a wealth of cuneiform tablets from what has been determined to be the ancient city of Ugarit. These tablets, along with the ruins of buildings and other artifacts, shed a clear light on the culture of the Old Testament as life in Ugarit appears to have been similar to life among the Hebrews. This can be concluded from the temporal and spacial proximity of the two cultures, the similarity of their physical environment, and the similarity between ancient Hebrew and the language of the Ugarit cuneiform tablets.

Ugarit was destroy approximately in 1200 B.C., just centuries prior to the settlement of the Hebrews in Canaan, and while this might seem like a long time from a modern perspective, the pace of cultural change in the ancient world was very much slower than the pace of change in modern times. Linguistically, Ugaritic is nearer to Hebrew than any other middle eastern language. Consequently, we can conclude that the cultures are likely to be more closely tied to one another than the culture of the Hebrews is to any other known contemporary or near-contemporary culture.

Like the Hebrew's Hebron, Ugarit was a small city state that expanded to become a small buffer state between two ancient superpowers. Both maintained this status for several centuries. Ugarit appears to have been more cosmopolitan than Israel, probably due to its role as a regional trading center.

The Ugarit tablets provide a wide variety of information about life in Ugarit, including its religion. Three deities are prominent in the texts: El, Baal, and Dagon. It is noteworthy that the world "el" is used in biblical texts to refer to God, as in for example, "Elohim" and "Bethel" (house of God). Furthermore, the character of Baal appears strikingly similar to Yahweh. Both are, for example, sky gods who made their earthly homes in sacred temples within a city or cities; however, the Hebrews made a transition possiblty from polytheism through henotheism and finally to monotheism. All three gods mentioned in the Ugarit tablets are mentioned in the Old Testament, indicating a direct connection between the writers of the Old Testament and the writers of the Ugarit tablets.

Beyond making these sorts of connections, Peter Craigie's Ugarit and the Old Testament gives close analyses of some of the Ugaritic texts, showing their similarity to certain biblical passages, particularly Psalm 29, Psalm 104, Amos 7:14-15, Deuteronomy 14:21, Exodus 23:19. Craigie also suggests that the Hebrews were not unique in understanding themselves as having a "covenant" with their god, but that this relationship was common in Canaan's religious milieu. Craigie also provides an interesting glimpse into Ugarit in its own right, describing its most prominent buildings, libraries, languages, populations, and commercial relations with the Egyptian and Hittite empires. Furthermore, Ugarit's access to the Mediterranean made it an important commercial gateway between Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilizations.

Ugarit and the Old Testament provides a very interesting -- though brief -- tour of the discoveries of Ras Shamra and their significance. It leaves the reader hungry from more.

The Codes of Hammurabi and Moses with Copious Comments, Index, and Bible References / W.W. Davies -- Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham, 1905

More recent translations of The Code of Hammurabi are probably more reliable than Davies's 1905 translation, but the "copious comments, index, and Bible references" in this translation make it well worth perusing. Davies writes in his introduction that Hammurabi flourished about 2250 BC. More recent historians place him 500 years later (see Gerda Lerner's The Creation of Patriarchy and The Ancient Near East, Vol 1, edited by James B. Pritchard); but even this later date places his Code well before Mosaic Law, and so it is interesting to see what in Mosaic Law is prefigured in Hammurabi's Code. Davies's volume goes beyond annotating Hammurabi with Biblical citations. It often includes the full Biblical text for comparison and is valuably augmented by his commentary.

The strong similarities between the two legal systems probably does not indicate a direct borrowing of one from the other, but instead is evidence of the continuity between the Old Babylonian society and Judea of the first millennium BC. The Code is a remarkable compendium of contract law, family law, and criminal law. There are even regulations for sentencing and clues to judicial procedure. Careful study can reveal the relative legal standing of different elements of the society and broad principles of justice, most generally: lex talionis.

Punishments ranged from fines -- usually a multiple of the value of what was illegally lost, stolen, or destroyed -- to whipping, mutilation, and death. Executions generally were accomplished by drowning or burning the felon, possibly burning him or her alive.

The parallels with Mosaic Law and even with contemporary legal principles are sometimes striking, leading one to wonder how deeply seated is our sense of justice.

Perhaps most interesting, though, is the inventory of social positions and occupations that can be generated from the Code, giving the careful reader a vivid picture of life in Old Babylon where grains, fruit, cattle, oxen, sheep, asses, and goats provided sustenance. The Code regulates farmers, herders, orchard growers, tenants, landlords, sailors, traveling salesmen, teamsters, business agents, money lenders, doctors, artisans, brick makers, tailors, stone cutters, carpenters, builders, tavern keepers, kings, priests, sacred prostitutes, slaves, masters, indentured servants, husbands, wives, concubines, fathers, step-fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, neighbors, and aliens. The mores and behavior of these people are revealed by the laws that Hammurabi found necessary to promulgate. Infractions were few enough to be regulated, but frequent enough to need regulation.

Buddhist Sutras: Origin, Development, Transmission / Kogen Mizuno -- Tokyo: Kosei Publishing, 1982.

Buddha, like Socrates, left no writings of his own, but shortly after his death, his followers gathered to recite his sermons. The goal was to agree upon precisely what he said to preserve his teaching in an oral tradition. The language spoken by the monks of this First Buddhist Council was probably Old Magadhi. As the popularity of Buddhism grew, the desire to evangelize to speakers of other languages also grew. Consequently, the sermons of the Buddha were written down and translated into various languages of ancient India. These sermons are known as sutras. Along with the sutras, early Buddhists compiled monastic rules known as vinayas. Later, commentaries on the sutras developed, known as abhidharma. Collectively, these writings are known as the Tripitaka or the three baskets and are the canon of early Buddhism.

In centuries following the establishment of this canon, other important works were written in an effort to express the insights of Buddhism in various languages, importantly Chinese. With the addition of a number of original Chinese texts to the canon the "Pali canon" or the original canon written in Pali, was expanded into what is known as the Chinese canon. In Buddhist Sutras Kogen Mizuno recounts the origin, development, and transmission of the Pali canon through the Chinese canon. Along the way, he describes the transmission of Buddhist sutras into various other Asian languages, especially Japanese.

Mizuno's work is loaded with information about the texts, languages, and translators of the sutras and includes valuable explanation of some of the sectarian movements in the history of Buddhism and important cultural contexts. He notes that doctrinal divergences within Buddhism can often be traced to different interpretations of the teachings generated by translations into different languages. Unfortunately, the work is not well organized. While it follows a rough chronological sequence, there are many leaps forward and backward in time. Furthermore, it overlays this sequence with topical treatments of his subject that do not have a clear pattern of presentation. The effect is a rambling narrative. However, it is filled with illuminating facts and details in the history of the Buddhist canon.

Among its most valuable features is an appendix which alphabetically lists the titles of scriptures and catalogs of scriptures in Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, and other languages. Each work appears in the list using each language into which it has been translated. For example, The Heart Wisdom Sutra is also listed as the Prajnaparamita-hridaya-sutra (Sanskrit) and as Pan-jo po-lo-mi-to hsin-ching (Chinese). English details about the work are given in under the title listed in the original language.

From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East / William Dalrymple -- N.Y.: Holt,1997.

William Dalrymple’s From The Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East combines two of my favorite book genres: history and travel. The book records Dalrymple’s 1994 attempt to follow Byzantine traveler-monk John Moschos and his pupil, Sophronius the Sophist, on their extraordinary late 6th century journey across the Eastern Byzantine world. Moschos’ goal was to gather and record the wisdom of the Christian desert fathers of the Byzantine East before that world disappeared. His book The Spiritual Meadow is a collection of the stories, sayings, and anecdotes that he collected during those wanderings among the monasteries and hermitages of the Levant. Dalrymple weaves Moscos’ anecdotes with his own in a poignant witness to the fate of the successors of those 6th century Christians.

Like Dalrymple, Moschos and Sophronius traveled at a pivotal and dangerous time in the history of the Middle East. The declining Byzantine Empire was being attacked from the west by Slavs, Goths, Lombards and Avars, while in the east Sassanian Persia and raids from desert nomads were disrupting life. Moschos records monasteries burned and populations slaughtered or sold into slavery. Many of the great cities of the East, cities such as Antioch and Tyre, had decayed to mere backwaters. More significantly perhaps, Moschos was an almost exact contemporary to Mohammed. In fact, his young companion on the journey, Sophronius the Sophist was eventually appointed Patriarch of Jerusalem and defended the city against the first army of Islam as it emerged from Arabia to defeat all before it.

The conflict between modern day Islamic states and Israel dominates our current understanding of the Middle East. The fate of practitioners of third major religion to arise in the Middle East, Christianity, seldom occurs to us. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share a common heritage. They have many common prophets, holy spaces, and even practices; all are mid-eastern religions. Dalrymple goes so far as to state the Islam actually preserves very ancient Christian ritual; he observes that John Moschos would feel more “at home” with Suni Islamic ritual practices than with those practiced in many of the modern Christian churches. Yet Christians, be they Armenian, Palestianian, Syriac, Coptic, or Maronite are being driven from their historic homelands.

Dalrymple witnesses to their suffering and dispossession. In Turkey and Palestine, at current emigration rates, it is probable that neither Christian community will exist by 2020. In Lebanon and Egypt, the larger size of the Christian population predicts that they will exist longer, but they are experiencing decreasing influence. Only in Syria did he see a “confident” Christian population, but they fear a severe backlash whenever Asad’s repressive regime collapses. Dalrymple points out Moschos’ significance as observer and recorder of the”beginning of the end” for Christians in the historic home of Christianity. He sees his own journey as witness to the end of that fourteen hundred year Christian exodus.

Dalrymple weaves a fascinating blend of history, politics, travel, and spirituality. He successfully evokes the clouds of incense and mystery of Orthodox worship, the dry and cruel landscapes preferred by 6th century ascetics, and the terror of traveling where wandering bands of insurgents shoot foreigners. The stories from The Spiritual Meadow greatly enhanced the story of Dalrymple’s own journey. This is a terrific book (one that I’ve actually read twice). What is missing in this book is a map. Travel books must have maps.

The Queen's Empire, or Ind and Her Pearl / Joseph Moore -- Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1886.

Travel logs can be quite entertaining, but when they were written long ago, one not only gets a glimpse of the visited world, but one gets a glimpse of the traveler's world. This is certainly true of The Queen's Empire by Joseph Moore. Moore opens his narrative by telling us how he indignantly protested the lack of adequate food service on a slow train trip in Colorado. The vignette sets the stage for reading the account of a haughty American traveler, making his way from London to Ceylon (present day Sri Lanka.) Along the way we see his racism, classism, and ethnocentrism, along with a healthy dose of anglophilia. It's a stark reminder of the attitudes current in the privileged classes in late 19th century America.

Nonetheless, Moore gives a fascinating account of his travels in Italy, Egypt, India, and Ceylon, especially the latter two countries. His travels in India take him from Bombay to Dehli, and across the country to Calcutta. He gives lucid accounts of the people and sights along the way, including the Taj Mahal, temples, and a British fort. From Calcutta, he travels north to Darjeeling and the Himalayas where he spends a week at the foot of Kanchinjanga, the world's second highest mountain. Finally, he travels by steamer down the eastern coast of India, stopping at Madras and continuing to Ceylon.

Throughout the account, Moore gives special attention to the religious views, rites, and customs he encounters, particularly those of Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Perhaps his most vivid writing comes at the very end of the book, where he describes the capture of wild elephants in Ceylon. The captors (with the cooperation of tame elephants) patiently herd the elephants to an encloser where two ropes are tied around their back legs. In time, they are chained to a tame elephant and taken away for sale.

In the process, Moore describes the death of one man and two elephants. The man, of course, is crushed by an angry elephant. Of the elephants, one received a mortal wound from a rifle. Here is Moore's description of the death of the other: the elephant "writhed, screamed, tore at the foliage, pawed the earth, tossed clouds of dust over her back, flung her trunk about fiercely, and planted her head upon the ground for leverage to rend asunder the bonds. At length she fell, in exhaustion, anguish, and despair, and lay motionless and resigned. The natives well knew that these symptoms forebode the loss of their prize. She panted for an hour or more, sighed deeply, and died--of 'broken heart.'"

Moore's engaging prose is accompanied by drawings and photographs on 52 plates and a fine foldout map of India and Ceylon.

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind / Michael Axworthy -- NY: Basic Books, 2008.

Overall, Axworthy's History of Iran provides decent accounts of the military, diplomatic, and political history of Iran. He even includes material on Iranian poets. However, the coverages of various centuries is quite uneven. The earliest centuries are given very short attention. As the history reaches recent times, the treatment is more detailed. Iran has seen human settlement for 7,000 years, but Axworthy devotes fully half of the book to the most recent 300 years, and 40% of the book to the last century. This may be plus for anyone interested in gaining a quick background on contemporary Iranian politics, but for the student of Iran, the most interesting material is undeveloped. There is virtually nothing on such matters as the life, customs, social structures, economic conditions of early Iranians. Instead, we are informed of the doings of various rulers and the fates of various dynasties.

Axworthy's more recent history will be at times quite informative for anyone whose knowledge of Iran is from accounts of journalists and pundits, but as a rule, it is not especially revealing and at times the perspective of the author seems to over determine his analysis. This is even true (and especially so) in his treatment of the Iranian religious leader Mani. Axworthy dubs Mani "the Dark Prophet" and his treatment of Mani is so hostile that Axworthy feels the need to write, "It would be foolish to attribute all evils of religion to Mani, but he does seem to have done a remarkably good job of infecting a range of belief systems with the most damaging and depressing ideas..."

Our Own Religion in Ancient Persia: Being Lectures ... Presenting the Zend Avesta As Collated With Pre-Christian Exilic Pharisaism / Lawrence Mills

Mills's Our Own religion in Ancient Persia is a collection of Lectures on several facets of Zoroastrianism. His primary thesis is one which I believe is now well accepted -- that many of the central theological views in post-exilic Judaism and Christianity find their historical roots in the Zoroastrianism of Babylon. The ideas include, monotheism, the immortality of the soul, and the relationship between God and evil. The style of the work ranges from academic to poetic to memoir. Like many works on Zoroastrianism, this one fails to give a systematic treatment of the subject, but it is nonetheless entertaining.