At the first meeting of his class in Northwest Semitic Epigraphy at Harvard, Frank Cross would inform students that one of the things each of them needed was an “eye for form.” By this, he meant the ability to recognize typological or evolutionary change in letters and scripts. Frank, like his teacher William Foxwell Albright, was a master of typological method. In fact, typology was the dominant feature of his epigraphic work, from the origins of the alphabet to the development of the scripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Indeed, he has written about the importance of typology itself. Because Frank Cross has so dominated the study of the ancient Near East in the last 60 years, Aufrecht once asked him what he considered his primary field of study to be. Without hesitation, he said, “Epigraphy.” It seems, therefore, that the field that he loved and to which he contributed so much is an appropriate subject for this Festschrift in his honor, which is being presented by his colleagues, friends, and former students. Included are an appreciation by Peter Machinist and a contribution by the late Pierre Bordreuil.

New applications, research, and fundamental theories in nonlinear analysis are presented in this book. Each chapter provides a unique insight into a large domain of research focusing on functional equations, stability theory, approximation theory, inequalities, nonlinear functional analysis, and calculus of variations with applications to optimization theory. Topics include: Fixed point theory Fixed-circle theory Coupled fixed points Nonlinear duality in Banach spaces Jensen's integral inequality and applications Nonlinear differential equations Nonlinear integro-differential equations Quasiconvexity, Stability of a Cauchy-Jensen additive mapping Generalizations of metric spaces Hilbert-type integral inequality, Solitons Quadratic functional equations in fuzzy Banach spaces Asymptotic orbits in Hill’sproblem Time-domain electromagnetics Inertial Mann algorithms Mathematical modelling Robotics Graduate students and researchers will find this book helpful in comprehending current applications and developments in mathematical analysis. Research scientists and engineers studying essential modern methods and techniques to solve a variety of problems will find this book a valuable source filled with examples that illustrate concepts.

Archaeologists have had an abiding interest in the rise and fall of state-level societies. Now they are turning their attention to the British Empire.

This volume examines the unique characteristics of akshara orthography and how they may affect literacy development and problems along with the implications for assessment and instruction. Even though akshara orthography is used by more than a billion people, there is an urgent need for a systematic attempt to bring the features, research findings, and future directions of akshara together in a coherent volume. We hope that this volume will bridge that gap. Akshara is used in several Indic languages, each calling it by a slightly different name, for example 'aksharamu', in Telugu, 'akshara' in Kannada, and 'akshar' in Hindi. It is the Bhrami-derived orthography used across much of the Indian subcontinent. There is a growing body of research on the psycholinguistic underpinnings of learning to read akshara, and the emerging perspective is that akshara, even though classified as alphasyllabaries, abugida, and semi-syllabic writing systems, is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Rather, akshara orthography is unique and deserves to be a separate classification and needs further investigation relating to literacy acquisition in akshara. The chapters in this volume, written by leading authors in the field, will inform the reader of the current research on akshara in a coherent and systematic way.