The first Linear B tablets were found by Evans in Knossos, many more by Blegen in Pylos in 1939 and progressively in all Mycenaean centres. Crete had three writing types Hieroglyphic, Linear A being more widespread, still undeciphered, and Linear B which descends from Linear A and appeared in mainland Greece around 1400 BC. After many endeavours, it has been deciphered in 1952 revealing a syllabic script for an early stage of Greek language. The debate of concordance between the Knossos and the Pylos tablets followed and is still alive. The inscribed clay tablets, simply dried, were baked by the fires that destroyed the palaces and thus preserved. They are administrative documents mostly inventory or tax statements teaching us a lot about Mycenaean life, palatial system, social hierarchy but no literature or history.

Homer lived in Ionia, which he probably never left, around 700 BC. His birthplace and patronymic are unknown; he is associated with many legends. There were probably more than one poet and poems. Homer would have been the one who gave to the epics their final form. The Greeks of the historical period knew next to nothing about the Mycenaean era. Homer is the one who gave a ‘memory’ to their past. He described a country that did not exist, an idealized, heroic and aristocratic society with kings and walled palaces. When the poems were written down in the 6th century BC, all Greek cities wanted to be connected with a hero and acquire noble roots. The historicity of the poems is much debated. Homer is a precious source for Mycenaean studies, but he is a poet and oscillates between the poetic and the historical world and two eras, the prehistoric and the historical. The fact is that epic poems existed in Mycenaean times; they were transmitted orally; the core of Homeric epic could have been created around them.

Shortly after the middle of the 13th century catastrophes occurred in Mycenaean centres; but the palaces were repaired, the fortifications reinforced, underground fountains built to ensure water supply. Yet by the end of the century – the beginning of the 12th – the whole Mediterranean was engulfed in a turmoil of raids, like those of the Sea Peoples, natural disasters, population movements and social unrest. The rich Near-Eastern cities and their network collapsed, the Hittite state dissolved, Cyprus and Troy were destroyed and Egypt entered a period of decline. In Greece the palaces were destroyed, the Mycenaean organization disappeared along with the writing, people fled to secure places. Internal factors and the dysfunction of the palace system are mainly the causes of the disasters. A short renaissance followed with small flourishing communities but new destructions brought complete disruption and final decay. The 1st millennium BC would herald the Iron Age based on new political circumstances and the use of the metal-iron-that changed peoples’ life. In many ways though the Mycenaean legacy was preserved.

This chapter attempts to reconstruct the early history of the ala Apriana, a cavalry unit present in Egypt from the Julio-Claudian period, and of early auxiliary units of the Roman army in Egypt, on the basis of Latin and Greek documentary papyri. It then looks at Claudius’ reorganisation of permanent alae with standardised names, and investigates the identity and role of Aper, the first eponymous commander of the ala Apriana, suggesting an identification with the Gaulish orator Marcus Aper, Tacitus’ teacher and a speaker in the Dialogus de oratoribus.

Since the late 2000s, the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region has seen an acceleration of growth in technology-based entrepreneurship, particularly in the e-commerce, fintech, logistics and transportation sectors. However, in a region with a combined population of more than 450 million and a GDP of US$3.5 trillion, coupled with unlimited prospects across a diverse portfolio of economic sectors, having only ten unicorns means they remain rare. This chapter shares the historical evolution and profiles of these unicorns and soon-to-be unicorns (soonicorns) in the region as of 2023. The existing supporting ecosystem is analysed in terms of talent, investments, markets, regulations and enablers as well as what needs to change to scale and maximise their impact. The key findings indicate that while the current unicorns are based in only three MENA markets: Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, their scope of operations and reach is regional; unicorns support and build on regional integration and complementarities between markets, talent and investments. Regionalisation is the key enabler for expanding the number of technology-based unicorns in MENA.

Despite the Arab world’s growing development needs, its third sector remains constrained by outdated regulatory frameworks that limit its potential. This chapter explores how effective policy reforms can unlock catalytic capital, empower civil society organizations (CSOs), and drive systemic change across the region.

Through the case study of Bab Amal in Egypt, an evidence-based poverty alleviation initiative, this chapter illustrates how regulatory inefficiencies increase costs, delay impact, and hinder large-scale social transformation. It highlights five key policy areas – streamlining registration, financial sustainability, data access, multi-sector collaboration, and evidence-based policymaking – offering a pathway for unlocking billions in untapped development capital.

Chapter 5 returns to Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s biography to examine his attempts to embody, apply, and disseminate his legal philosophy among diverse classes: scholars, students of the law, and a non-specialist public in Damascus and later in Cairo, where he retired. I demonstrate that Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s public activism and frequent embroilment in political controversy are best understood as manifestations of these efforts. I outline the connections between his legal philosophy and the socioreligious goals he pursued, highlighting the continuity between his theoretical scholarship and his embodied activism.

This concluding chapter synthesizes the key findings of the study and extends the theoretical framework by testing its predictions in four additional authoritarian regimes — Bahrain, Egypt, pre-apartheid South Africa, and Mexico under the PRI. It argues that the most important factor in sustaining labor militancy is autonomy from political elites and strong connections with the rank-and-file. The chapter reinforces the book’s central claim that labor militancy emerges from authoritarian exclusion and the absence of partisan coalitions to represent labor interests. It concludes by discussing the broader implications of these findings for theories of labor politics, authoritarianism, and institutional change.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, young and mostly urban Egyptian men and boys started writing in new ways. Inspired by the recent emergence of mass-circulated print fiction in both books and periodicals, they became infatuated with writing fiction. Their writerly endeavours often clashed with the textual preferences of their fathers, and represented a major shift in the understanding of what written texts are for, and who can write them.

This chapter summarizes the main findings, arguments, and contributions of the book. It reviews the theoretical arguments and discusses promising avenues for further research on revolution and counterrevolution. Then it explains how the book’s findings speak to a number of scholarly and public debates. First, for scholars of violence and nonviolence, who have argued that unarmed civil resistance is more effective at toppling autocrats than armed conflict, the book raises questions about the tenacity of the regimes established through these nonviolent movements. Second, it speaks to scholarship on democratization, highlighting the important differences between transitions effected through elite pacts versus those brought about through revolutionary mobilization. Third, it offers lessons about how foreign powers can help or hinder the consolidation of new democracies. Next, the chapter discusses implications for Egypt and the broader Middle East, including the possibility that future revolutions might avoid the disappointing fates of the 2011 revolutions. The chapter ends by reflecting on what the book has to say about our current historical moment, when rising rates of counterrevolution appear to be only one manifestation of a broader resurgence of authoritarian populism and reactionary politics worldwide.

This chapter analyzes the popular dimensions of Egypt’s 2013 counterrevolution, using an original dataset of protests during the post-revolutionary transition. It shows that Egypt’s revolutionaries were unable to consolidate the social support of the revolution, and that this failure allowed counterrevolutionaries to channel broad disaffections with revolutionary rule into a popular movement for restoration. The dataset covers the final eighteen months of the transition and includes approximately 7,500 contentious events sourced from the major Arabic-language newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm. These data reveal, first, the extent to which social mobilization persisted after the end of the eighteen-day uprising. The transition period was awash with discontent and unrest, much of it over nonpolitical issues like the deterioration of the economy, infrastructure problems, and unmet labor demands. Second, statistical analyses show that this discontent came to be directed against Mohamed Morsi’s government. The earliest and most persistent anti-Morsi protests emerged in places where the population had long been highly mobilized over socio-economic grievances. Later, they also began to emerge in places with large numbers of old regime supporters. Ultimately, these two groups – discontented Egyptians and committed counterrevolutionaries – came together to provide the social base for the movement that swept the military back to power.

This chapter analyzes Egypt’s 2011 revolution and 2013 coup, one of the most prominent counterrevolutions of the 21st century. Drawing on approximately 100 original interviews with Egyptian politicians and activists, it argues that Egypt’s counterrevolution only became possible when revolutionaries squandered their initial capacity to hold the old regime’s military in check and presented them with an opportunity to rebuild their popular support. Specifically, the chapter makes the following claims: (1) revolutionary forces began the transition with considerable leverage over the former regime, grounded in their ability to threaten a return to mass mobilization and their backing from the United States; (2) after Mohamed Morsi was elected president, his administration’s poor management of the post-revolutionary governance trilemma, particularly its decision to prioritize the concerns of old regime elements over those of his secularist allies, caused the revolutionary coalition to fracture and Washington to begin questioning its support; and (3) these developments created opportunities for the military to bolster its domestic and foreign support and sapped revolutionaries’ capacity to resist a counterrevolutionary coup. Ultimately, the chapter concludes that, though the task facing Egypt’s revolutionary leaders was not easy, a counterrevolutionary end to the transition was far from a foregone conclusion.

Chapter 1 introduces the main arguments, findings, and contributions of the book. Counterrevolution is a subject that has often been overlooked by scholars, even as counterrevolutions have been responsible for establishing some of history’s most brutal regimes, for cutting short experiments in democracy and radical change, and for perpetuating vicious cycles of conflict and instability. The chapter reveals some of the most important statistics from the book’s original dataset of counterrevolution worldwide. These statistics raise a number of puzzling questions, which motivate the theoretical argument about counterrevolutionary emergence and success. After previewing this argument, the chapter discusses the main contributions of the book, including to theories of revolution, democratization, and nonviolence; to ongoing debates about Egypt’s revolution and the failures of the 2011 Arab Spring; and to our understanding of the present-day resurgence of authoritarianism worldwide. It finishes by laying out the multi-method research strategy and providing an overview of the chapters to come.

To understand the integration of Palmyra in the wider system of the Roman Empire and Mediterranean societies, this study will follow the paths of individuals between their place of origin and different Mediterranean locations. Palmyrenes in the Mediterranean were traders, soldiers or craftsmen, and their itineraries have to be integrated in a more complex picture. The personal names and the use of Palmyrene Aramaic generally testify to individuals of Palmyrene origin. If the routes are beyond our evidence, it is often possible to understand the relationships of those individuals with the populations around them and their local integration.

This chapter juxtaposes Palmyrene funerary portraiture with the portraiture of Egypt and Pannonia in the first three centuries AD to discern stylistic connections between the provincial centres as well as to the portraiture produced in Rome. Due to its inherently subjective (and hence, flawed) nature, the notion of style as an interpretative framework has fallen by the wayside in archaeology and art history. This chapter will return to the concept of style and evaluate its helpfulness in determining the significance of Palmyrene funerary portraiture in the context of Roman provincial portraiture. Is it appropriate to describe Palmyrene portraiture as ‘Roman’ in style, or perhaps, ‘eastern Mediterranean’, and at what point does it become ‘Palmyrene’? A better understanding of the place of this portraiture in terms of style, not only in antiquity but also in contemporary analyses of funerary portraiture in the Roman world, enhances our ability to interpret its significance at the local level.

‘Mayors’ and village chiefs figure prominently in the iconographic and administrative record of ancient Egypt as key representatives of the pharaonic authority. Moreover, there also existed other local actors (wealthy peasants, ‘great ones’, etc.) whose occasional appearance in the written and archaeological record points to the existence of paths of accumulation of wealth and power that crystallised in the emergence of potential local leaders who owed little (or nothing) to the state in order to enhance their social role. The aim of this contribution is to explore how mayors and informal leaders ‘built’ their prominent local position in ancient Egypt, how it changed over time (especially in periods of political turmoil) and how they mobilised their contacts, family networks, wealth and official duties in order to consolidate and transmit their privileged position to the next generations. Inscriptions from Elkab, Akhmim and elsewhere, references in administrative texts and archaeological evidence (houses, etc.) related to a ‘middle class’ provide crucial clues about these themes.