The Seminar for Arabian Studies is the only international academic forum which meets annually for the presentation of research in the humanities on the Arabian Peninsula. It focuses on the fields of archaeology, architecture, art, epigraphy, ethnography, history, language, linguistics, literature, and numismatics from the earliest times to the present day. A wide range of original and stimulating papers presented at the Seminar are published in the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies and reflect the dynamism and scope of the interdisciplinary event. The main foci of the Seminar in 2014, in chronological order were the Palaeolithic and Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages, Early Historical and Classical periods, Heritage Management, Islamic Archaeology and History. In addition there were sessions on Ethnography, on Language, and with a session dedicated to the Archaeology and History of ancient Yemen. In addition, on the evening of Saturday, 26 July 2014, Professor Lloyd Weeks, Head of the School of Humanities, the University of University of New England, New South Wales, Australia, a long supporter of the Seminar and Foundation, presented the MBI Lecture entitled 'The Quest for the Copper of Magan: how early metallurgy shaped Arabia and set the horizons of the Bronze Age world' and as always provided an informative, interesting and lucid lecture. This volume also includes notes in memoriam on Nigel Groom (1924-2014), 'Arabist, historian, spy-catcher, and writer on perfume'; and on Professor Tony Wilkinson (1948-2014), Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh (2005-2006) and Professor of Archaeology at Durham University (2006-2014) who specialised in landscape archaeology.

The Seminar for Arabian Studies is the only international academic forum that meets annually for the presentation of research in the humanities on the Arabian Peninsula. It focuses on the fields of archaeology, architecture, art, epigraphy, ethnography, history, language, linguistics, literature, and numismatics from the earliest times to the present day. A wide range of original and stimulating papers presented at the Seminar is published in the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies and reflects the dynamism and scope of the interdisciplinary event. The Proceedings present the cutting edge of new research on Arabia and include reports of new discoveries in the Peninsula. They are published each spring in time for the subsequent Seminar, which is held in July. The main foci of the Seminar in 2015, in descending order of the number of papers presented in each session were North Arabia, South Arabia and Aksum, Archaeological Survey and Field Methods, Bronze and Iron Ages in Eastern Arabia, Islamic Archaeology, and Neolithic Archaeology. In addition, there were sessions on Recent Cultural History in Arabia, and Heritage Management in Arabia, as well as a special session on the Nabataean world titled 'Beyond the "rose-red" city: the hinterland of Petra and Nabatean rural sites', which featured a total of six papers. This volume also includes notes in memoriam on Professor Andrzej Zaborski (1942-2014), Professor Ordinarius at the Jagellonian University of Cracow, who specialized in Afro-Asiatic linguistics, Semitic and Cushitic in particular.

This volume deals with One Thousand and One Nights in yet another and novel way as it brings old and new together by exploring parallels and possible origins of its tales, as well as the wealth of modern and contemporary material that it has originated and continues to inspire. The papers included in this volume address the theory and practice of the adaptation and appropriation of One Thousand and One Nights into any type of literary text and media, while approaching a definition of our contemporary knowledge and understanding of the Nights. Through this, it will be possible to underline the dynamic nature and autonomous life that the tale collection acquired and how it originated works like Jorge Luis Borges's essays, Naguib Mahfouz's works, Miguel Gomes's trilogy, a Turkish soap opera that became popular around the world and made it to Netflix, or Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's well-known symphonic suite.

The special session in 2013, Languages of Southern Arabia, was the fifth in the Seminar for Arabian Studies special session series. This was the first special session with an explicit linguistic focus to be held at the Seminar, and aimed to bring together experts on the extinct and extant languages of southern Arabia to pave the way for identifying cultural, lexical, morphological, syntactic, phonological, and phonetic links between the language families, and to discuss advances in the field and future avenues of research. With papers dealing with Ancient South Arabian, the Modern South Arabian languages, and the Arabic dialects of the southern part of the Peninsula, this session examined and re-examined links within and between the language groups and further afield.