NATO enlargement and Russian annexation of Crimea marked crucial turning points. According to one narrative, the Russian occupation was part of a plan to re-establish dominion over Eastern Europe. According to a rival view, it was an attempt to counter a U.S. plan to subjugate Russia. I scrutinize the logical requirements of those narratives in a multi-stage game of incomplete information that produces equilibrium play such that first NATO is enlarged and then Russia attacks Ukraine. The two competing narratives correspond to two different separating equilibria. Conditions for their existence inform about the consistency and plausibility of the associated narratives.

This paper explores how Civilization VI: Babylon Pack perpetuates colonial and Orientalist narratives originally rooted in nineteenth-century Western archaeology of West Asia. It argues that early excavations, such as those conducted by Austen Henry Layard at Nineveh, produced archaeological finds as well as visual and textual frame-works of hierarchy and ‘civilising’ missions. These frameworks continue to shape popular representations of ancient West Asia. Through a detailed examination of Civilization VI and its Babylon expansion, the paper illustrates how the game’s visual design, its portrayal of Hammurabi, and its core mechanics, such as ‘colonialism’ and ‘natural history’, perpetuate these ideological legacies. The immersive and interactive nature of video games intensifies their cultural impact, embedding inherited stereotypes in contemporary perceptions of the past. However, their popular-ity also provides opportunities for critical engagement. By recognising the colonial genealogies of archaeological imagery, scholars can gain a better understanding of, and challenge, how digital media continues to ‘play’ with the power structures of the past.

In this article, Épidemaïs, the Phoenician merchant in the comic series Asterix the Gaul, and other characters representative of ancient West Asian cultures, namely the Sumerians, Akkadians, Hittites, Assyrians and Medes, are analysed with regard to their historically accurate or stereotyped representation. Even if it has already been made clear several times that the characters and their narratives in the comic series should not be understood as historically accurate, such accuracy is repeatedly attributed to them. First, it will be demonstrated on the basis of some well-known case studies why this is the case. In a subsequent step the results will be applied to an analysis of the West Asian characters. It will be discussed whether the historical reference dominates or whether they rather represent stereotypical characteristics that associate them with the time of their creation in the 20th century, and how to deal with these results.

The article examines the links between archaeology, nationalism, and (crypto-)colonialism using the example of Iran. The starting point is that archaeology has not only been a scientific enterprise but also a deeply political endeavour since its emergence. The central question is how archaeological knowledge has been instrumentalised in colonial and post-colonial contexts to construct national identities – often marginalising or ignoring cultural plurality. Particular attention is paid to the concept of crypto-colonialism, which describes the paradoxical power relations in formally independent but de facto partially subjugated states such as Iran. In the area of conflict between adaptation to Western standards and self-assertion through recourse to an idealised pre-Islamic past, an archaeological practice developed that actively supported state power. Case studies are used to analyse the role of archaeology as an instrument of knowledge and power. The aim is to show the entanglements of researchers and to provide impulses for a critical-reflexive, decolonising archaeology.

Looting and trafficking of archaeological objects is a worldwide problem, which often becomes more severe during armed conflicts – two examples being the looting of Iraqi museums and archaeological sites after 2003, and the plunder of Syrian heritage during the civil war. Shocking images of archaeological destruction have attracted significant media attention in so-called ‘Western’ countries. In some situations, the reporting of European news media on the obliteration of what is perceived as ‘world heritage’ can even inspire public outrage. Between 2014 and 2015, the shock value of cultural destruction wrought by the terror group IS was used to draw attention to conflict-related antiquities trafficking, portraying the illicit antiquities market as a main income source for the terrorists. This sensationalist reporting has roused public concern and arguably even led to a moral panic. The antiquities market has reacted defensively to this portrayal, and used the overblown figures and tenuous allegations of terror financing seen in the media to discredit research into and regulation of the antiquities trade. In this paper, I discuss the consequences of this discourse and the continuing lack of voices from Western Asia therein.

The availability of geocoordinates offers valuable insights into spatial patterns of economic, demographic and health outcomes. However, disclosing the exact geolocation of statistical units to secondary analysts contravenes the responsible use of data. To protect privacy, anonymisation methods are used. A commonly applied anonymisation method is the one used by Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). The DHS anonymisation scheme works by first aggregating data at small spatial units followed by random (donut) displacement of the geocoordinates. It is reasonable for secondary analysts to be concerned about the impact of anonymisation on the analyses. In this paper, the DHS anonymisation scheme is used as a basis for studying how anonymisation impacts on kernel density estimation. We propose methodology to account for the impact of the anonymisation process on density estimation. The proposed methodology is based on deriving the distribution of the true coordinates given the observed (anonymised) coordinates. Density estimation is then implemented by using the theoretical distribution and an iterative algorithm that accounts for both aggregation and displacement. The aim is to approximate the original population density using generated pseudo-coordinates under the assumption that the anonymisation process is known. The proposed method is illustrated by using DHS data from the Rajshahi Division in Bangladesh to estimate the density of households below the poverty line. The results show that accounting for measurement error due to anonymisation leads to a more accurate picture of the spatial distribution of poverty.

Over the last decade, Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe has developed the concept of necropolitics as a biting critique of the Eurocentricism of Foucault’s biopolitical discourse. Building on Mbembe, the art historian Dan Hicks has advanced the concept of necrography as a productive paradigm by which the looted objects in museum collections might be analyzed as legacies of colonial despoliation. He suggests that a necrography of looted objects provides the desperately needed context that has been stripped away from them in the service of Western European and American colonial efforts. Using Hicks’s work as a blueprint, this paper provides a preliminary necrography for the “Captive Being Flayed,” or the so-called Wellesley Eunuch [Wellesley Davis Museum; 1883.1]. In so doing, I attempt to answer the funda-mental questions: What is our responsibility to the objects in our care? And, more importantly: How the curation of these objects extends the orientalist impulses out of which they were procured, allowing them to metastasize into new lieux de memoire as satellites of decaying empires?

Both volumes of Austen Henry Layard’s Nineveh and Its Remains (1849a) include a frontispiece dramatizing the removal and transport of a winged bull from Nimrud. The illustrations inspired a series of sequels propagated in Layard’s subsequent publications, popular news media, and cloth prints. These drawings have received significant attention because of their striking resemblance to reliefs found in Court VI of Sennacherib’s Southwest Palace at Nineveh (seventh century BCE). The similarities are generally assumed to be a coincidence. Based on an analysis of archival material, I will argue that Layard was inspired by Assyrian reliefs in crafting the illustrations. In fact, most illustrations showing the modern transit of colossi were produced after Layard and Hormuzd Rassam had excavated Court VI of the Southwest Palace at Nineveh, with its reliefs depicting the ancient transport of a winged bull. I show that many of the striking parallels between the ancient reliefs and modern images are manufactured by twin interpretive processes: (1) the reading of Layard’s techniques back into Sennacherib’s reliefs and (2) the active appropriation of Assyrian compositional elements into updated versions of Layard’s frontispieces.

Vocabularies of space define the world. Yet, despite their apparent conceptual authority (Harley 1989), the lineages of cartographic entities are often blurred, accidental, and produced from etymologies only imperfectly understood by their users. Drawing on a recent study on past and present meanings of the term ‘Mesopotamia’ (Rattenborg2018), this paper reviews the inadvertent, if now firmly embedded separation of past and present spaces of the state of Iraq in Western – and global – discourse. Though widely conceived of as a textbook example of colonialist discursive dispossession of a nation’s heritage (Bahrani 1998), the argument advanced here is that ‘Mesopotamia’ – in the sense that we understand it today – is an unintended by-product of British military nomenclature defined during the First World War. Its widespread application as a cultural-historical shorthand, utilized with great enthusiasm by generations of archaeologists, epigraphers, and historians, came about comparatively late, fusing the trappings of an age-old signifier with the versatility of a physical space shaped by very modern events. As such, ‘Mesopotamia’is itself a freak accident of history, the vestige of a haphazard etymology far removed from the simple biographies attributed to it by contemporary commentators. This rather ironic state of affairs is reviewed through a discussion of its continued reaffirmation and widespread use in spatial discourses of archaeological and historical scholarship, arts trade and antiquities trafficking, and in popular media worldwide.

The rare access to exact official geocoordinates opens new methodological possibilities for analyzing highly sensitive tax data. We explore their visualization potential and systematically evaluate aggregation as an anonymization strategy, with particular attention to its methodological and analytical implications. For an analysis of high-income taxpayers in Berlin, Germany, the focus is on the presentation of regional shares. In addition to frequency maps, smoothed representations using kernel density estimation are analyzed in particular, and their cartographic characteristics are discussed. Due to the high sensitivity of individual-level data, such data are generally not published, which is why anonymization is required in official statistics. This applies in particular to the group of high-income taxpayers. Using exact data as a gold standard makes it possible to systematically analyze the distortions caused by aggregation, one of the most commonly used anonymization methods in official statistics. In order to correct these distortions, a measurement error model is employed that explicitly accounts for the aggregation process and produces smoothed kernel density estimates for interpretable cartographic representations. In addition, the measurement error model is linked with census information to demonstrate a realistic application scenario. Local and global error measures are intended to empirically substantiate the improvement achieved through the use of the measurement error model.

In light of the numerous current crises and wars, one may question whether it would even be useful to discussthe history of archaeology, particularly that of the colonial past and present of West Asia. As editors of this themeissue, we believe it is, since it continues to have a significant effect on the contemporary world. The macro-regionof West Asia remains at the center of global and regional politics, which can be traced to historical developmentsthat occurred at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Our conviction is that a greater understandingand critique of the history of our discipline and the inherent colonial practices will foster a more comprehensiveunderstanding of the current state of the massive conflicts shaping regional politics on West Asia.

We analyze how value added taxes (VATs) affect labor market outcomes (firms’ employee costs, wages, hours worked, employment). While VATs are designed to tax consumption, they are levied at the firm level, which creates potential spillovers to labor markets. We hypothesize that VATs affect wages and employment through two channels: an inflation adjustment effect, where employees demand higher wages to compensate for VAT-induced price increases; and a profitability effect, where incomplete pass-through reduces firms’ net sales and profits, putting downward pressure on wages and employment. We exploit variation in VAT rates, measuring labor market outcomes at the firm and country level. We find economically significant negative effects of VAT rates at the firm level on employee costs and at the country level on wages and employment. At the firm level, a one percentage point increase in the standard VAT rate corresponds to a 3.886% reduction in employee costs. At the country level, the same increase is associated with a 2.802% decline in average nominal wages. We find a 1.444% decline in employment at the country level following a one percentage point increase in the VAT rate. For working hours, the evidence is inconclusive and at most suggests a reduction. Heterogeneity analyses suggest that small firms and firms with high profit margins react stronger; among the employees, the age group 15-24 years is hit hardest. Our study provides the first systematic cross-country evidence on the labor market consequences of VATs.

Synopsis:

In this book, feminisation – the marking of female sex on personal nouns – in Dutch and German is investigated contrastively, diachronically, and corpus-linguistically. The corpus-based approach entails a theoretical and methodological shift from a structuralist and essentialist approach to the interplay of language and sex to a poststructuralist, usage-based and holistic perspective, which has long been lacking from the scientific domain of Gender Linguistics.

Starting from the observation that feminising morphology seems less frequently used in Dutch than in German in the same contexts, the goal is to examine how intra- and extralinguistic factors influence the choice for or against the use of these morphological patterns. These (only partly consciously made) choices are called differentiation and neutralisation, respectively. On the intralinguistic level, the link between the use of feminising morphology and properties of the grammatical gender system is investigated contrastively and diachronically, as well as more generally various semantic and pragmatic factors (semantics of the personal noun, animacy, referentiality) that may contribute to a more or less stable feminisation system. On the extralinguistic level, the effect of diverging views on gender-fair language use in both language areas, and within the respective areas (North vs. South for Dutch, East vs. West for German), stands out.

Drawing on diachronic corpus data, the effects of these factors are investigated empirically in three case studies by focusing on the form (Case Study I) and function (Case Study II: feminisation in human reference and Case Study III: feminisation in nonhuman reference) of feminising morphology. Both formally and functionally, Dutch feminisation is a complex system, whereas the German one is more uniform and straightforward. The use of feminising morphology in Dutch has been restricted since at least the second half of the 20th century, but less so in Northern than in Southern (Belgian) Dutch. By contrast, the tendency in German goes toward the consolidation of the feminisation system in all semantically female contexts, with the exception of language use in former East-German newspapers. Furthermore, as opposed to the Dutch feminisation system, the German system has taken on inflectional properties known as inherent inflection, the marking of which is semantically motivated. Examples of the use of feminising morphology in nonhuman reference fit in this analysis as well (e.g., die Partei als Gewinnerin ‘the party as the winner.fem’).

Significant impacting factors in the reduction of a feminisation system are indeed the gender system (feminisation is connected with a preserved masculine/feminine gender distinction, present in German but not in Dutch), referentiality (feminisation is an important referent-tracking instrument and therefore more likely found in referential contexts), semantics (in the case of reduction of feminisation, remnants of the system are observed in semantic contexts which foreground social gender), the newness of a personal noun in a language (neutralisation of new nouns is more common than neutralisation of long-established nouns), and the influence of language policy: the Dutch feminisation system, as well as the use of feminising morphology in the former GDR, has been subject to a significant effect of conscious neutralisation strategies as a means of gender-fair language use.