Postdoctoral assignment - Ancient and Modern Cultures and Languages of Africa and Western Cental Asia

This project proposes an exploration of the conceptions of the water cycle and the environment preserved in Arabic sources composed from the twelfth century onwards, during the period commonly defined as post-classical. Although hydraulic engineering in the Arab-Islamic context has been the subject of numerous studies, a history of hydrological thought remains to be written for the centuries following the twelfth. Here, hydrological thought is understood both as systemic reflection on water within the global environment (hydrological cycle, water balance) and as the study of specific phenomena related to it, such as precipitation and its relationship with orography, groundwater and karst phenomena, river regimes, salinity, and water quality. On these topics, moreover, much of what we know for the period preceding the one addressed in this proposal is owed to research conducted at Ca’ Foscari. [...]