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Literature Commission Highlights Saudi Arabia’s Role in Teaching Arabic in South Korea

The Saudi Literature, Publishing, and Translation Commission organized a seminar titled "The Role of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Teaching Arabic in Korea" at the Seoul International Book Fair 2024. (SPA)
The Saudi Literature, Publishing, and Translation Commission organized a seminar titled "The Role of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Teaching Arabic in Korea" at the Seoul International Book Fair 2024. (SPA)
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Literature Commission Highlights Saudi Arabia’s Role in Teaching Arabic in South Korea

The Saudi Literature, Publishing, and Translation Commission organized a seminar titled "The Role of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Teaching Arabic in Korea" at the Seoul International Book Fair 2024. (SPA)
The Saudi Literature, Publishing, and Translation Commission organized a seminar titled "The Role of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Teaching Arabic in Korea" at the Seoul International Book Fair 2024. (SPA)

The Saudi Literature, Publishing, and Translation Commission organized a seminar titled "The Role of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Teaching Arabic in Korea" at the Seoul International Book Fair 2024, where the Kingdom was the guest of honor.

Cultural attaché at the Saudi embassy, Dr. Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al-Dayel attended the event.

Al-Dayel highlighted the history of the Arabic language and the great attention the Kingdom pays to serving this language.

He noted that Arabic is one of the Semitic languages and was divided into several languages until the Holy Quran was revealed in classical Arabic. This language was spoken by the tribes of Quraysh, Tamim, Hawazin, and Azd, thus ending linguistic differences in the Arabian Peninsula.

Saudi Arabia has shown immense interest in the Arabic language, as evidenced by Article 1 of the Basic Law of Governance, which identifies the Kingdom as an Arab Islamic state, he continued.

He stressed that the Kingdom had played a prominent and significant role in recognizing Arabic as a global language at the UN, making it one of the six official languages globally. This led to celebrating the UN Arabic Language Day, held annually on December 18.

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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.”