Much of their time in the Ottoman capital was spent purchasing provisions and hiring porters. The travellers were a day's march behind the imperial troops who had been sent in to quell the rebellion, and who frequently left the roadside inns in a deplorable state. The expedition frequently visited American missionaries along their route, celebrating Christmas in Mardin with the local mission of the American Board in Turkey. As the expedition moved out of the Hittite heartlands, we begin to see in Wrench's fieldbooks the beginnings of a new interest in the medieval architecture of the Syriac-speaking Christian communities. The expedition beat the worst of the snows and was in the lowlands of northern Mesopotamia by December. Much of their time in the Ottoman capital was spent purchasing provisions and hiring porters. The trip's employees would do much more than carry the baggage. At Binbirkilise, a Byzantine site on the Konya plain, they visited the veteran English researchers Gertrude Bell and William Ramsay. Their first major achievement came at the Hattusha, site of the Hittite capital, where they set to work on a hieroglyphic inscription of six feet in height and over twenty feet in length, known in Turkish as "Nişantaş" (the marked stone). We now know that Nişantaş celebrates the deeds of Shupiluliuma II, last of the Great Kings of Hattusha. As they made their way to the regional center, Diyarbakır, they heard that the city was in revolt: Here is more information in regards to eskort diyarbakır look at our web page. the local worthies had occupied the telegraph office to protest the depredations enacted by a local chieftain. But as they pressed on across the steppes that today form the far northeastern corner of Syria, the strains of six months' steady travel began to show

Still, the travelers reserved their greatest enthusiasm for the much older inscriptions of the Hittite kingdoms. It took three years before their study of those inscriptions appeared, and while its title page conveyed its academic interest, it tells us nothing of the passion and commitment that made it possible. As the expedition pushed eastwards, and the fall turned to winter, the Cornellians began to worry that the snows would prevent them from crossing the Taurus mountains, trapping them on the interior plateau. Blizzards, bad roads, an "unsettled" country: the challenges facing the three Cornellians who sailed from New York for the eastern Mediterranean in 1907 were legion. Their particular focus was on the Hittites and the other peoples who ruled central Anatolia long before the rise of the Hellenistic kingdoms. Burr's advice was both honest and sanguine. Olmstead's two younger companions, Benson Charles and Jesse Wrench, were both members of the class of 1906. They had spent 1904-05 traveling in Syria and Palestine, where they rowed the Dead Sea and practiced making the "squeezes," replicas of inscriptions made by pounding wet paper onto the stone surface and letting it dry, that would form one the expedition's primary occupations

nBut their courageous story has been lost to Cornell history - until now. Baghdad in the early twentieth century was a lively international city, and as the company recuperated they took advantage of its entertainments. The inscription was widely believed to be too worn to be read, but the expedition "recovered fully one half. "Their dedication is all the more remarkable as the script in which it is written, now known as "hieroglyphic Luwian," was not deciphered until over half a century later. But their courageous story has been lost to Cornell history - until now. Cornell with a dissertation on Assyrian history. Wrench supplemented his notes on the "first Babylonian dynasty" with a clutch of pressed flowers. Funding has been provided by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Classics, and the Department of the History of Art. In the Jesse Wrench of 1929, on the other hand, we see a very different person from the yearbook photo of 1906. Wrench took Burr's long-distance advice to heart, and pursued a decades-long career as a beloved teacher of history at the University of Missouri

Azeri violence against Armenians has been ongoing in the South Caucasus region for decades. Dismissing any criticism as "Armenian propaganda" has been commonplace in Azerbaijan since war gripped South Caucasus in the early 1990s. By the time a fragile Armenian-Azerbaijani ceasefire was signed in 1994, this conflict - the Nagorno-Karabakh war - had scarred the wider region. • On February 18, Azerbaijani armed forces violated the ceasefire and opened fire at the residential houses of the village of Taghavard in the Martuni region. The February 1988 Sumgait pogroms that Azeris committed against Armenians were followed by a wave of anti-Armenian violence spreading to Kirovabad in November 1988 and to Baku in January 1990. These pogroms resulted in the killings or expulsions of hundreds of thousands of Armenians from what is now known as Azerbaijan. His home was searched on February 22, 2010 when the police executed detention and search and seizure warrants issued by a judge as part of the investigation into Mullah Muhammed’s group. The Bakirköy 3rd High Criminal Court acquitted all suspects including Mullah Muhammed of al-Qaeda charges on December 15, 2015. In a contradiction of past reports about Tahşiyeciler, the Security General Directorate (Emniyet) also issued a new report whitewashing the activities of the group. A Turkish al-Qaeda cell operating in Azerbaijan was led by the head of a Turkish-Azeri business association and founder of controversial charity group the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH), which has links to Turkish intelligence agency MIT, a Nordic Monitor investigation has found. The secret document found in leaked emails tells the story of how the owner of a bankrupt shipping and container company asked for compensation from the Turkish government for damage his ship sustained while transporting arms between Libyan ports at the order of Turkish authorities in 2011. The document revealed all the details of a Turkish government-approved arms shipment to rebels in a ship contracted by the IHH