Inscriptions from Tombs at Bir esh-Shaghala

Excavations during the past decade by the Supreme Council of Antiquities have uncovered a number of cemeteries belonging to the ancient city of Mut (Mothis in Greek), which was the capital of the Dakhleh Oasis in the Roman period as it is today. At one of these, Bir esh-Shaghala, about 3 km northwest of the town of Mut, these excavations have found several large mud-brick tombs which originally had pyramidal superstructures, now largely eroded, and subterranean burial chambers, many of which are well preserved. Maher Bashendi, the director of the Dakhleh Oasis inspectorate of the SCA and the excavator of this cemetery, will publish the tombs from this site with collaborators. He has kindly allowed us to publish here, in advance of that full report on the site, the Greek and demotic texts found on and in two of the tombs, Tombs 5 and 6

The Swampland: Introduction and Review

The Swampland program aims to distinguish effective theories which can be completed into quantum gravity in the ultraviolet from those which cannot. This article forms an introduction to the field, assuming only a knowledge of quantum field theory and general relativity. It also forms a comprehensive review, covering the range of ideas that are part of the field, from the Weak Gravity Conjecture, through compactifications of String Theory, to the de Sitter conjecture.Comment: 198 Pages, 40 figures. Invited review for Fortschritte der Physik. Partially based on lectures delivered at BUSSTEPP 2018 (Oxford), and lectures to be delivered at SIFTS 2019 (Madrid) and BUSSTEPP 2019 (Glasgow). v2: Fixed typos, added comments and references. v3. More references added and typos fixe

Temple building on the Egyptian margins: the geopolitical issues behind Seti II and Ramesses IX’s activity at Amheida

Middle Eastern Studie

Quantum Mechanics on a Helix and Chirality-Induced Spin Selectivity

Electrons that are transported through chiral structures favor a certain alignment of spin and momentum. After its discovery over a decade ago, this chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect has become its own field of research and now refers to a collection of experimental observations that exhibit a relation between chirality of a molecule and spin polarization. Being observed at room temperature, the effect is of great interest to the field of quantum biology where chiral molecules are ubiquitous. While a variety of attempts to capture the effect on theoretical models have been brought forward, no consensus exists regarding its origin. In this thesis, we choose a transient wave packet approach which complements steady-states models that are commonly used in existing work. The number of transient CISS phenomena observed in experiments is growing and our methods may help closing the gap between experimental observation and theoretical description. After establishing an equivalence to the wide-spread Green’s function method in case of a simple model for dsDNA, we investigate two novel models for chirality-induced spin selectivity. The first of these demonstrates that spin-polarization can be induced in a non-chiral object via an extended interface to a helix. Spin polarization can be traced back to a momentum conservation condition at the interface and understood in terms of dispersion curves of analytical eigenstates. The last model includes helix vibrations and allows to study temperature dependence. Spin polarization is governed by an energy-momentum conservation relation that serves as resonance condition for vibration-exciting transitions. Including coupling to a thermal environment confirms robustness of the effect to noise

Personal Names: Structures and Patterns

The diversity and complexity of ancient Egyptian personal names points to a range of availablepatterns and options for name-giving. Alongside personal names that make direct reference tothe name-bearer and his or her family, there are numerous names that refer to a god, the ruling(or an earlier) king, or some venerated individual, with or without simultaneous reference to thename-bearer or his family. An individual could be designated, for example, as one beloved,given, or protected by a god or king, but a name could equally contain an objective statementabout god or king

Kursivhieratische Texte aus sprachlicher und onomastischer Sicht

Anhand einer Auswahl von lexikalischen, grammatischen und teils onomastischen Besonderheiten werden die besonderen Schwierigkeiten kursivhieratischer Texte demonstriert. Diese schwer lesbaren und oft vernachlässigten Texte sind besonders bedeutsam für die Erforschung der ägyptischen Sprachgeschichte, da aus der Zeit der kursivhieratischen Texte - also grob zwischen 750 und 550 v.Chr. - nur wenig Material in derselben Sprachstufe, aber anderen Schriftformen (hieroglyphisch, „normalhieratisch“ und demotisch), erhalten ist