Category: News In English

By Youssef and Majd Kanjou and Michael Seifert Everyone knows that the official language in Syria is Arabic. Historians, however, speak of ancient sources in Syriac. What is it about this mysterious Syriac language, spoken by only a few, for which there is a word of its own in Arabic (Siriani) which, unlike in German, is different from the name of the nationality (Syria)? tünews INTERNATIONAL spoke about this with the Syrian expert on Aramaic history and linguistics Jabagh Kablou. He was a professor at the University of Damascus until 2016 and now works as a scholarship holder at the… Read More

By Mona Hähnle There are cases where coins combine very well with literary sources and complement them visually. This is also the case with the coin presented here. It is a bronze coin with a weight of 17.23 g and a diameter of 3 cm. The portrait of the Roman Emperor Philip II is depicted on the obverse. He wears a laurel wreath, armour and a cape draped on his back. The inscription names the emperor in ancient Greek. On the reverse of the coin is the goddess Atargatis. She is seated frontally on a lion striding to the right.… Read More

By Michael Seifert “A house that someone covered with a sheet like a treasure chest. … One entered closed-eyed, one came out open-eyed. The solution to the riddle: the school.” A famous Babylonian riddle, almost 4000 years old, shows that schools already existed at that time in Mesopotamia, the Mesopotamia of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in what is now Iraq. These were the oldest schools about which anything is known through written tradition. Among others, Konrad Volk, Professor Emeritus of Ancient Oriental Philology at the University of Tübingen, who was interviewed by tünews INTERNATIONAL, is researching these schools. Writing… Read More

By Ute Kaiser Elias (name changed) is not an isolated case. Time and again, Turkey deports refugees from Afghanistan to the country in the Hindu Kush. The 20-year-old experienced this a few weeks ago. A plane transported Elias and others from Istanbul to Kabul. There, the father picked up his son and took him on a journey of several hours to the hometown of the dissident family in northern Afghanistan. Elias felt bad at first afterwards. “He got depressed,” reports a cousin of the 20-year-old who lives in Tübingen. One reason: Elias considered Turkey only as a transit country during… Read More

By Sameer Ibrahim and Michael Seifert Hot days in Germany? Not for Sameer Ibrahim, who came to Germany from Iraq seven years ago: “When I went to work this morning, I had to put on a jacket, it was so cold. And in the afternoon 35 degrees in the shade, that’s perfect weather for me. It only gets bad above 40 degrees.” Southern Iraq and the capital Baghdad, his old home, are currently experiencing highs of 45 to 48 degrees, with maximum temperatures of 51 degrees expected again, as in recent years. Sameer’s sister said on the phone: “We are… Read More