India's foreign policy establishment is said to be divided on the issue of Iraq. Some believe that with Bush set on ousting President Saddam Hussein through military strikes and in determining the nature of a post-Saddam dispensation, it would be in India's interest to just go along with the US now and gain a share in the spoils (reconstruction projects) as it has in Afghanistan. However, others believe that India does not stand to gain from an Iraqi invasion. The political upheaval and economic uncertainty it will engender across the Middle East will severely affect India. It could mean the return to India of millions of Indians working in the Middle East who are currently remitting around US$6 billion annually. Furthermore, the impact on the Indian economy will be severe given the fact that Arab oil accounts for almost two-thirds of India's crude imports. Indian officials are worried that Washington's current preoccupation with Iraq has distracted its attention away from the military operations against al-Qaeda.

If you have any kind of questions pertaining to where and the best ways to use Eskort Diyarbakir, you could contact us at our web site. For Sterrett, the expedition of 1907-08 was only the first step in an ambitious long-term plan for archaeological research in the Eastern Mediterranean. To launch his plan, Sterrett selected three recent Cornell alums. Their leader, Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead, already projects a serious, scholarly air in his yearbook photo of 1902, whose caption jokingly alludes to his freshman ambition "of teaching Armenian history to Professor Schmidt." In 1907, just before crossing to Europe, Olmstead received his Ph.D. Cornell with a dissertation on Assyrian history. Olmstead's two younger companions, Benson Charles and Jesse Wrench, were both members of the class of 1906. They had spent 1904-05 traveling in Syria and Palestine, where they rowed the Dead Sea and practiced making the "squeezes," replicas of inscriptions made by pounding wet paper onto the stone surface and letting it dry, that would form one the expedition's primary occupations. Olmstead, Wrench, and Charles made their separate ways to Athens, whence they sailed together for Istanbul.

Much of their time in the Ottoman capital was spent purchasing provisions and hiring porters. The trip's employees would do much more than carry the baggage. Solomon, an Armenian from Ankara, had a knack for quizzing villagers regarding the location of remote monuments. While preparing for the journey, the group made smaller trips in western Anatolia. At Binbirkilise, a Byzantine site on the Konya plain, they visited the veteran English researchers Gertrude Bell and William Ramsay. Like Bell, whose Byzantine interests set her at the vanguard of European scholarship, the Cornell researchers were less interested in ancient Greece and Rome than in what came before and after. Their particular focus was on the Hittites and the other peoples who ruled central Anatolia long before the rise of the Hellenistic kingdoms. When the expedition set off in mid-July, their starting point was not one of the classical cities of the coast, but a remote village in the heartland of the Phrygian kings.

The inscription was widely believed to be too worn to be read, but the expedition "recovered fully one half. "Their dedication is all the more remarkable as the script in which it is written, now known as "hieroglyphic Luwian," was not deciphered until over half a century later. We now know that Nişantaş celebrates the deeds of Shupiluliuma II, last of the Great Kings of Hattusha. As the expedition pushed eastwards, and the fall turned to winter, the Cornellians began to worry that the snows would prevent them from crossing the Taurus mountains, trapping them on the interior plateau. While Wrench and Olmstead pushed ahead with the carriages along the postal route, Charles led a small off-road party to document the monuments of the little-known region between Kayseri and Malatya. A grainy photograph taken at Arslan Taş, "the lion's stone," shows two figures bundled against the cold, doggedly waiting for a squeeze to dry. The backstory is recorded in the expedition's journal.

An American invasion of Iraq would lead to a more serious dilution of the operations, Delhi fears. India has an enormous interest in seeing al-Qaeda rooted out. M H Ansari, a former Indian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told the weekly news magazine Outlook that "India should be happy with the status quo where there's no strategic hostility to New Delhi in the Arab world and there's $10 billion trade with the Gulf countries." While India's support will not influence US decisions on Iraq, New Delhi's position on the evolving situation is of some significance. India not joining an anti-Iraq coalition in the event of an attack on that country will underscore the fact that democracies do not go to war easily. For long, the US, while willing to overlook India's trade ties with Iraq, has been peeved with its reluctance to vote with Washington in the UN on key global issues.

But their courageous story has been lost to Cornell history - until now. Blizzards, bad roads, an "unsettled" country: the challenges facing the three Cornellians who sailed from New York for the eastern Mediterranean in 1907 were legion. But their fourteen months' campaign in the Ottoman Empire nevertheless resulted in photographs, pottery, and copies of numerous Hittite inscriptions, many newly discovered or previously thought to be illegible. It took three years before their study of those inscriptions appeared, and while its title page conveyed its academic interest, it tells us nothing of the passion and commitment that made it possible. The story of the men behind the study and their adventures abroad has been lost to Cornell history-until now. The organizer, John Robert Sitlington Sterrett, spent the late 1800s traveling from one end of Anatolia to the other, where he established a reputation as an expert on Greek inscriptions. In 1901 he became Professor of Greek at Cornell, where he instilled his own love of travel in his most promising students.