Thesaurus d’Épigraphie Islamique Updates

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The Thesaurus d’Épigraphie Islamique was recently updated and now includes

Issue No. 10: Inscriptions from South-East Asia (Burma, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam)

It is now that much easier to find something like the Arabic stela excavated at Phnom Bakeng, probably carved by a local craftsman unfamiliar with the Arabic alphabet!

Arabic Stela - Phnom Bakheng

Access to the searchable database is free once you’ve created an account. The new material completes content already in the database:

No. 1: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya
No. 2: Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain)
No. 3: Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan)
Nos. 4 and 5: Egypt
No. 6: Indian world (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives)
Nos. 7-9: Sub-Saharan Africa, Iraq, Western Europe (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Malta, France)

A Converted Temple in Cappadocia?

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Alexander Brey

One of the more interesting and less well-understood sites that we visited was a Byzantine church complex that appears to have been a renovation to an earlier, polytheistic temple. As I understand it, the bases of the four piers in the church are uncharacteristic of the Byzantine cave churches.

The upper part of the complex has eroded and collapsed, leaving much of it exposed. There are still several adjoining cave-rooms, but the exposed portion makes for a beautiful photosynth.