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.

As the expedition moved out of the Hittite heartlands, we begin to see in Wrench's fieldbooks the beginnings of a new interest in the medieval architecture of the Syriac-speaking Christian communities. The first drawing to appear in his notes is a hastily-sketched plan of the early medieval Deyrulzafaran, "the saffron monastery," located outside of Mardin. Underneath he has copied the Syriac inscription that he found above the door. A few days later and a few pages further, we find a drawing of the late antique church of Mar Yakub in Nusaybin. When, in the following year, Wrench made his way back to Istanbul, he took a long detour through the Tur Abdin, the heartland of Syriac monasticism. The expedition frequently visited American missionaries along their route, celebrating Christmas in Mardin with the local mission of the American Board in Turkey. But as they pressed on across the steppes that today form the far northeastern corner of Syria, the strains of six months' steady travel began to show.

UN-approved multilateral action would reduce some of those risks, Mr Goff said. Because it had a substantial proportion of its combat forces in East Timor, and had also committed Army, Air Force and Navy forces to Afghanistan in the war against terrorism, it was unlikely New Zealand Should you have virtually any inquiries regarding where and the way to make use of escort diyarbakır, you can email us in our own webpage. could make a further commitment of combat forces. If the UN did approve action against Iraq, New Zealand would consider humanitarian, medical or logistic support. National's foreign affairs spokesman, Wayne Mapp, said the Government had already made a major commitment to the Gulf in the form of a frigate and an Air Force Orion. He was confident they would be involved in any action against Iraq. INDIA NOT YET PREPARED TO DITCH IRAQ by Sudha Ramachandran Asia Times, 23rd November BANGALORE - As the crisis over Iraq enters a new phase with the return of the weapons inspectors to that country, India has sent out a clear anti-war signal, distancing itself from the United States' position.

When asked about Delhi's position on the various proposals, officials of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs refrained from commenting; the reason for the silence being that India had no part to play in hammering out the resolution since the matter concerned the Security Council alone. From a position of merely supporting the UN role in defusing the crisis, India has now shifted to opposing US goals and proposed strategy in Iraq. India's disagreement with the Bush administration's approach on Iraq does not come as a surprise. Delhi has consistently expressed its opposition to international interference in the internal affairs of a country. It has also supported the pursuit of a diplomatic approach to ensure Iraq's full compliance with UN resolutions with respect to inspection of its suspected chemical and biological weapons facilities. It has opposed the use of force against Iraq to ensure compliance. In 1998, for instance, when the US and Britain launched air strikes on Iraq, India called for an immediate halt to the military operations.

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.