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2 Writers Win Yousef Bakkar Award for Oriental Studies

A general view of the skyline as seen from Jordan's first "Air Taxi", in Amman, Jordan, January 4, 2019. REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed
A general view of the skyline as seen from Jordan's first "Air Taxi", in Amman, Jordan, January 4, 2019. REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed
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2 Writers Win Yousef Bakkar Award for Oriental Studies

A general view of the skyline as seen from Jordan's first "Air Taxi", in Amman, Jordan, January 4, 2019. REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed
A general view of the skyline as seen from Jordan's first "Air Taxi", in Amman, Jordan, January 4, 2019. REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed

Two writers from Jordan and Iran have won the "Yousef Bakkar Award for Oriental Studies," which is organized by the Jordanian Writers Association, with the support of Dr. Youssef Bakkar, Petra News Agency reported.

The $3,000 award was announced Saturday by the General Secretariat of the "Yousef Bakkar Prize for Oriental Studies.”

According to an Association statement, the award was jointly won by: Dr. Abbas Abdel Halim Abbas, from Jordan, for his book "Abdul Wahhab Azzam, A Civilizational Project, a Study of His Literary Efforts and Comparative Eastern Cultures", and Dr. Yadallah Malayri, from Iran, for his book "The Neighbors in the Eastern Mediterranean, the political novel between Persian and Arabic, Ahmed Mahmoud and Abd al-Rahman Munif as a model.”

The "Yousef Bakkar Award for Oriental Studies,” the first of its kind on the Arab and Islamic levels, constitutes a quantum leap in supporting and encouraging specialists in oriental studies, and aims to contribute positively in serving Islamic civilization by reviving literary and cultural relations between oriental languages, especially Arabic, Persian and Turkish, Petra said.

The President of the Jordanian Writers Association, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Award and its Secretary General, lawyer and poet Akram Al-Zoubi, said that the association will soon hold a special ceremony to honor the award winners, expressing appreciation for the support of the Award’s Board of Trustees and its arbitrators.

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Thousands Greet the Winter Solstice at the Ancient Stonehenge Monument

A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
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Thousands Greet the Winter Solstice at the Ancient Stonehenge Monument

A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)
A person holds up a smart phone as they wait for sunrise during the winter Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, England, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Anthony Upton)

Thousands of tourists, pagans, druids and people simply yearning for the promise of spring marked the dawn of the shortest day of the year at the ancient Stonehenge monument on Saturday.

Revelers cheered and beat drums as the sun rose at 8:09 a.m. (0809 GMT) over the giant standing stones on the winter solstice — the shortest day and the longest night in the Northern Hemisphere. No one could see the sun through the low winter cloud, but that did not deter a flurry of drumming, chanting and singing as dawn broke.

There will be less than eight hours of daylight in England on Saturday — but after that, the days get longer until the summer solstice in June.

The solstices are the only occasions when visitors can go right up to the stones at Stonehenge, and thousands are willing to rise before dawn to soak up the atmosphere.

The stone circle, whose giant pillars each took 1,000 people to move, was erected starting about 5,000 years ago by a sun-worshiping Neolithic culture, according to The AP. Its full purpose is still debated: Was it a temple, a solar calculator, a cemetery, or some combination of all three?

In a paper published in the journal Archaeology International, researchers from University College London and Aberystwyth University said the site on Salisbury Plain, about 128 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of London, may have had political as well as spiritual significance.

That follows from the recent discovery that one of Stonehenge’s stones — the unique stone lying flat at the center of the monument, dubbed the “altar stone” — originated in Scotland, hundreds of miles north of the site. Some of the other stones were brought from the Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, nearly 240 kilometers (150 miles) to the west,

Lead author Mike Parker Pearson from UCL’s Institute of Archaeology said the geographical diversity suggests Stonehenge may have served as a “monument of unification for the peoples of Britain, celebrating their eternal links with their ancestors and the cosmos.”