 Before I go on, I'll be speaking a little while later, but I would first like to introduce to you the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the American University at Sharjah. Dr. Mahmood, kind of tell me, you know, before I start, I was standing outside and the Geltner News reporter approached me and asked me a very technical question about the topics and I could not answer the question. I'm very much interested in what you do. So I referred him to David, but on behalf of the College of Arts and Sciences and at the moment of our began translation, I will come into AUS and to the first UAE conference on storytelling, travel, writing, scenery and from course, culture and perspective. This is a very interesting topic. When Richard and Mahmood first approached me about the conference, we started the discussion about the minutes of the title. So this is something very interesting and it is related to the United Arab Emirates and especially Sharjah and being the crossroads of that modern world and it is really aligned with what we do here at AUS. So I want to come into AUS and I want also to take this opportunity to thank you so much for the support for this conference and for coming to AUS and to participate in this very exciting conference. It is a great pleasure to see the Sharjah Museum Authority and the Arab German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Department of Arabic and Translation at the College of Arts and Sciences to come together to organize this wonderful conference. This is really a great effort and it is something that we always seek to do at AUS. I'm also very impressed by the breadth and the depth of the issues that will be presented and discussed in this conference such as travel and imaginary journeys, seafaring and travel, travel and many other topics. This conference, you know, comes as I said at the time of who he is becoming again the crossroads of the modern world and organizing such a high-category international conference with the quality of speakers and participants is one of many examples that show that we are committed to the fulfillment of his highly successful plans in Latin Britain about the role of education and academic research in the advancement of our society and in shaping of the lives of our children for AUS also to become a center of research and eminent devoted to the making of history and academic excellence. And when you are here at AUS, I invite you to tour AUS and to visit our departments and our colleges and visit our wonderful facilities and see what we do. That will give you maybe a very good idea or maybe will provide you with information about what we do here at AUS. We have a mission and as I said, this is in line with the vision of his Highness to become an eating institute in our own world. And right now we are in a very important period of here at AUS of becoming a comprehensive research institute and his Highness has provided us with all the resources to become a comprehensive research institute. This is a very exciting time for AUS and we are always looking for collaboration. So please talk to the faculty at AUS, talk to the head of department and explore ways of collaboration for new projects and also new programs. I want to thank the conference chair Dr. Mohan and also Dr. David Winsom and the charge of authority, Gaia and members of the organizing committee for their hard work and dedication. And I want to thank all the participants who contributed to the success of the conference and I wish you a very pleasant stay at AUS and in Georgia and a very productive and successful meeting. Thank you. Okay, if you'll permit me to expand a bit and in fact what I want to start is exactly what the dean left off. First of all, I'll introduce myself for those of you who haven't met me yet although many of us are in correspondence. I'm David Winsom, I'm the head of Arabic and translation studies at the American University in Georgia and I think it's fitting that we should be holding a conference of this type in the UAE in general, specifically in Georgia. Georgia is, as you probably all know by now, the cultural capital of the United Arab Emirates. It's due in part to its very active commitment to the building of and presenting of museums but many other things as well. It turns out that it is also, its history is specific to the people of the Emirates because it happens to be the location of the first seaport and the first airport in the Emirates which were, at the time, not even called the Emirates, they were called the Trucial States. So the name I don't particularly enjoy but that's what they were called. But as far as we can determine, the civilizations of this part of the Arabian Gulf have been engaged in seafaring and engaged in living from the sea since prehistory. There's archeological evidence that gives the proof of human settlement in this, directly in this part of the world dating back 8,000 years before the president. And recent paleoclimatological studies have indicated that climate was not really conducive to human habitation, but highly attractive. And the same studies also indicate that the climate of this part of the world in fact the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf undergo cyclical changes where sometimes it's cool and wet and other times it's warmer and dry. So this particular period that we're living through now these lovely fall weather that we'll be experiencing for the next few days is simply a temporary condition. Things might get wetter again in the future. Whatever the case may be, it seems that people have come to the area perhaps attracted by the climate and have remained in and throughout the weather and dry. Or as we'd like to say in Arabic, the Ocdowliens that not only remain but that flourish, UAV is the locale of several important archaeological sites giving evidence for rich trading centers along the coast and the inland. And the Emirate of Sharjah itself boasts one of the more important of these but not very far from here. There's a few hour drives away from the inland site called Malihah nowadays. It's still the site of modern habitation but it has been the site of human habitation for maybe 8,000 years. Maybe longer, we don't know. The evidence also points to it having been an important and affluent locust of overland and sea trade. The trade, excepting as far north as Mesopotamia and as far east as China and certainly as far west as Yemen perhaps further. Where Malihah especially begins to attract my own interest is that not only is it an interesting archaeological site with evidence of an affluent civilization that grew up there, we've also been finding inscriptions written in the South Arabian script that's called musnatic in Arabic. Some of that we can't quite tell what the languages are. Others of them are written in Aramaic which was the bingo franca of the entire Middle East 4,000 years before Islam. And it so happens that one of the papers of this conference will address something about the Aramaic culture in the Arabian Gulf in the previous language here. Go on and link about the languages of the area if you ask me because that happens to be my area of interest. But I won't because except to observe that language and writing of course means history and then the light of history, the historical light of the Gulf becomes brighter with the coming of the Islamic era. And we know that Islam and the people who were carrying Islam with them reached here very early in the Islamic era. You can only guess at the involvement of earlier inhabitants of our region in syrupy and seafaring but we know indisputably the people of the region have been gaining their light from the sea since the beginning of the Islamic era. Both as a source of food and as an avenue of trade. Several of the papers of this conference will address such matters specifically. So I'm looking at activity in an account of trade and seafaring in the Gulf itself and some others will be looking at the wider contexts especially maritime activities and accounts thereof in the wider context of the Indian War. And this brings us to the second theme of the conference which is travel writing. Travel writing in writing of any kind of course is history. There I witness as accounts of the southern Arabian peninsula from writers of late antiquity that mentioned the culture and civilization of the Arabian Gulf and it so happens that we'll be fortunate that some of the papers of our conference while not extending as far back as prehistory of the Arabian Gulf do extend as far back as late antiquity and accounts of this part of the world in late antiquity by which I mean Hellenistic and Roman eras. Once history begins, of course, travel writing never ceases and we will hear in the next few days accounts of sea voyages from late antiquity to modern era. As for storytelling, that of course is an activity of which people have been engaging and which people have found engaging since well before any physical record of human language ever existed. And it has probably been engaged in by human beings since it was interested. So we are then about to embark upon a journey of our home to a sea of discovery about the mingling of cultures that travel and trade for great civilization. And we will discover, or rather we will rediscover the centrality of the Arabian Gulf and our own place in it to the telling of tales about travel and seafaring and the meeting of cultures. And as I said before, given the opportunity, I might go on and on and on and on about the subjects involved in our conference, especially where they interact with questions of the languages of the region. But I must stop now so as to take some of my allotted time to engage in another extraordinarily implicit duty which is to acknowledge and to thank all of those who have worked together to bring us to this moment. And throughout the planning of this conference there's always been sort of an implicit discussion about whose name you would put first when we talk about the sponsors and the people involved. And it's not a question that I can solve. But I will solve it for a moment by starting at home and thanking the people that the American University of Georgia will be involved with this. First by extending a sincere word of thanks to our Dean, Dean Mahmood, and I'm telling you who is the Dean again as I tell you of the College of Arts and Sciences, first towards immediately agreeing to the idea of the conference. And we first presented it to him. But also to this continued, for his continued support of the project as it developed and came to fruition. And I'd like to mention a personal word for myself. Dean, I'm going to tell you he's an inspiring and dedicated leader of the College and it has been a pleasure for me to work with him here. And it's also, of course, a pleasure to work with the colleagues in the Department of Arabic and Translation Studies. And to them, especially those colleagues on the conference organizing committee, I also extend my grateful thanks for their tireless and it has been tireless and unceasing work in organizing this event. Particularly and foremost, I am my greatest thanks to our colleague, Naha Shahar, who has truly been working tirelessly for the organization of this conference while at the same time working on other projects of her own one of which had to be completed last night. It has nothing to do with the conference. It has to do with the books she's writing. So while she's organizing the conference, she's been writing the books as well. I'd also like to sing a lot to Ahmed and Siri, who has been working behind the scenes especially in the facilitation of the visas and the security preferences. And to my assistant and to our assistant, Mamya Hanani who also has worked diligently and with an utmost professionalism in keeping track of the tiniest details of the organization of this conference. From there, we can move to the Arab Airmen, German, Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities which we all now affectionately as AgCAD and first to Chris-Jan Fraun, who will be with us in a few minutes. And to Beate Ulrichi Masala who were along with Mahayani involved in the selection committee, we received more than 60 abstracts for this conference of which we chose 25 or so. I don't know exactly what the number is now. We're guessing it was more than it was about 20. It's been a pleasure to work with them as briefly as we have and it's all been until today by way of Skype and the wonders of modern technology. But we did find while we were selecting the committee, the abstracts that all of us think alike when it comes to choosing the papers for this conference. There were no disagreements whatsoever which I think is an unusual thing that speaks to the goodwill and the professional scholarship of people involved at this. And I'd also like to thank Nicola Bisoner from AgCAD, the AgCAD Berlin office whom I've heard so much about but did not meet until yesterday. And we thank her very much for her support and also since we're talking about that we must thank the German Federal Ministry of Education Research who provides this funding for AgCAD. And finally I owe the greatest debt of thanks to the Scharcher Museum Authority and a few people, all the people involved with it, whom I only met a few, but the consummate professionalism about that organization shows through our interaction with all of these people. And first I would like to extend my thanks to Aya Sa'aiki who is the manager of Education Interpretation Department of the Scharcher Museum Authority. She has been our main point of contract the contact since with the Authority since we began planning this conference and in fact even before we began planning this conference we were dealing with her with other educational things and just by dealing with her the professionalism of the Authority comes through. And in fact through all of our meetings we've now in fact become friends as well as colleagues in this enterprise. And of course I would like to thank Manal Ataya and I started this session of thanks with the talk of starting at home and in a sense welcoming her back home. She is the Director General of the Scharcher Museum Authority and I'm already inviting her to come and speak in just a minute but ultimately we also need to thank Sheikh Dr. Mohamed bin Mohamed Al-Qasimi by saying Sultan Sheikh Dr. Sultan Mohamed bin Al-Qasimi who created the vision for this oasis of learning in the beautiful Emirati Desert. In his family of Qasimiya our Colossum have been intricately associated with Scharcher and the Northern Emirates and I must admit personally that although I've known about Scharcher's since I first began to study American more than 30 years ago what I know about the modern state of Scharcher and the pre-modern state of Scharcher is almost entirely for reading his own writings and we I should end then by saying that we also have a paper that will build upon his PhD dissertation in writing about the early history of the crucial states of history of the crucial states before they became the Emirates and I think that is extremely exciting and he himself has done all scholars hope to do which is to produce a study on which a whole body of scholarship can be built and it looks like that will be beginning of this conference so now here we go let me close and invite Manala Ataya to the stage for remarks from the Scharcher Museums Authority Good morning good morning I'm with everyone it's a pleasure and an honor to be here today I will keep my remarks relatively short because I know we're probably very excited to get going with this unbelievable conference as mentioned earlier by Dr. David I was the same when I saw the title for this conference I was to be ready to sign my name up and have our authority get involved so pertinent to the work that Scharcher does and the history of Scharcher which Dr. David very eloquently described and made a lot of detail so I'd like to again thank you for coaching us to be part of this important conference which brings together passionately researchers and professors and professionals together a successful and important collaboration between us and the University just reaffirms for us the strong bond that we have between our two institutions so it really is a privilege for me to be here today in the University City of Scharcher where he's my best chef Dr. Sophan Ahmed in Placime Scharcher envisioned a city of culture and knowledge establishing more than 18 museums offering students and researchers and the general public an opportunity to engage with and learn from a diverse collection which includes collections of maritime heritage Islamic art and history contemporary art modern art or archaeology heritage it goes on and on Scharcher's commitment to culture and education is on parallel this will be evident to our respected audience sitting here with us today when you visit more of our historic institutions and our museums tomorrow I believe we'll be going to the Scharcher Museum of Islamic Civilization and also ending your time with us at the Scharcher Maritime Museum and our guides and curators will present stories dating back to Abdulmanik Ibn Alman during the many dynasty and ending with stories from the sea which played a key role in development of the coastal cities over 6, 8,000 years ago our dedicated researchers led by my colleague Fahram Hedi who is here with us today dedicated tremendous amount of time and effort in collecting world history from the senior citizens and residents of the UAE which we in turn use to enrich our displays for our visitors at all ages for me really at the end of the day are all storytellers we all live in a network of stories and there isn't a stronger connection between people than storytellers recent projects inaugurated by His Highness this year included the reopening of Bates and Namguda which is one of Scharcher's largest and oldest houses that date back to 1825 this historic house was built with you know sorry, indigenous let's say materials corals stolen freely and it's a unique example of the Grand Coast level and then we expanded that house to more where you will see how the sea has played such an important role in bringing different cultures together because the original owner of that house was a pearl trader himself and with his wealth of course was able to build that house but also with his travels to India and other countries Iran etc he was able to bring so much knowledge information interaction with different people and those stories you will see in some of the states of the museum but I also want to emphasize that within any museum you know that you are only seeing about 5 or 10% of the information that's actually collected obviously we don't put everything on display because most people don't bring that much in a museum space but for me I think what I want to say which is so important is that at least we are collecting information the data is there in our archives or use in the future or in other ways whether it is publications or conferences in the future and perhaps even new museum institutions where that information would be relevant I wanted to before I end just use a quote that I saw the other day and I thought was really wonderful my roof it says to be good storyteller one must be gloriously alive it is not possible to kindle fresh fires from burnt out embers I have noticed that the best of the traditional storyteller who I have heard have been those who live close to the heart of things to the earth, the sea, wind and weather they have been those who know solitude and silence they have been given unbroken time to feel deeply to know the power of the spoken word finally charging museums authority is proud to be committed to supporting academic institutions and researchers we strive to have our collections available to support students in all majors as well as strengthening our partnership in practice I have to say that he did a great he helped me here with thinking a lot of people personally by name so I won't have to do that so I would just like to say in general to thank all the people who have used the arts of Aikia and of course the Charjoumenu Minority and I do also want to particularly thank Ayodhria Hema and Zabi she has been instrumental in helping us put this together and has been personally a very wonderful for me because it's great to be involved in something where you don't have to worry about anything you feel everything is going to be done perfectly and we just need the updates and it was smooth sailing all the time throughout this process and that was really wonderful for me and I can't thank her enough for that and I'm excited to see what the day holds so thank you again so much for having us today and we're honored to be partnering with you at this board conference and we look forward to the rest of the day in the next few days that you're here. Thank you and have a great day and thank you and I'll keep your arms to my spirits and while I was involved a lot of planning for this I think it would be a long semester suddenly became very busy and a long semester and at that point I just let other people do whatever they're doing an organization from all sides to be tremendously good and I had to sit and watch and I kept people working and sometimes sign something, that was that our last speaker today And the other, the third partner from the conference organizers that has Dr. Christian from, who will be speaking on behalf of us? Dear Ian, I am a colleague, I am the director of Excellency at Dijk, the professor of labor at Lindenburg, Brunson, dear colleagues, and I would like to address you in these last opening remarks in the two roles that I have to fulfill right now. First is one of the organizers. Second is one of the members and representatives of the Arab-German Young Academy, who already worked in more than once, Agia. And yet, these roles are not that different at all. The idea for this conference started in October 2017 meeting among your job and during the meeting of the Agia Working Group coming heritage and coming challenges at the January 17th. The idea was to have a closer look at these on the one hand rather different, but on the other hand, at the same time closely intertwined literary drama genres of travel writing and storytelling from multiple perspectives in an interdisciplinary chronological and cross-cultural approach. It is one of the great benefits of being a member of Agia that you can make these ideas become reality relatively easy. There were different tasks ahead of us before we could finally invite you to this conference. The first task was to find the right location. And Charger was in perfect spots for several reasons. First of all, it is Dr. Rima Isahas resident and workplace and so she could immediately get you to contact with the American University of Charger and the Charger Museums Authority. Both institutions were eager to help write from the start and immediately gave their first support for this conference and in the end made this event possible. Thank you very, very much for this. With this sector's support numerous and countless other helping hands, which I have met by now because I have been very much looking forward to it, managed to organize a tool program on our second day as well as the events on our fourth day which perfectly fits to the topic of the conference itself. Moreover, there are many culinary relights ahead of us with much lower food as promised. We are very much looking forward to this as well. So, Justin mentioned the food. This is a specific of Agia as well. So, if you want to get to know how different the food in the Arabian world is, come to Agia, you need to know everything. So, you get the specifics as well. Last but not least, Charger itself is an excellent setting for the conference since the Persian or Arabian north has played a vital role in the cross-cultural and pro-eventing part throughout history up until today. Providing us with some inspiring geographical context to talk about travel writing and storytelling. Therefore, we, the organizers, are very thankful to the friendly, force-powering representatives of the American University of Charter, the Charter of the Youth Authority and to the United Arab Emirates for having us here. Actively contributing to the program and giving us the opportunity to talk about an interesting and multi-faceted topic. The second task was to find some participants from different fields of research willing and interested to join our conference. Therefore, we are very thankful for all these different applications that arrived us from which unfortunately due to financial and temporary reasons not all could be invited. In this lecture, the selection process itself, Professor William Williams, for instance, made a very active part, and we are again very thankful for the help and the time granted. Now we are proud, proud and thankful that's got us from, in part of the appearance, Tunisia, India, Spain, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Charter itself, England, Italy, the United States, Egypt, Germany, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, followed our call for participation, made this conference quite an interesting topic on mobility and cross-culture, inter-H.I. itself. The third and last task was funding, organizing the flights, hotel rooms, etc. Therefore, we are very grateful to the archaeologists in Berlin for organizing the further organization of flights, the accommodation, the layout of the program, and so much more. Moreover, we are very thankful again to the American University of Charter and the Charter Museum Authority for the financial support and the organization of the medicine, the application. Finally, we are grateful to the Federal Ministry of Research and Interpretation in Germany, which, in its close collaboration with Appia granted the necessary funding to make this conference itself become reality. It is the declared goal of the Arab-German Young Academy to bring scholars from different countries and different fields of research together to speak about the common topic from different angles of perspective. And with a view on the program ahead of us, I am very much looking forward for this goal to be realized in the upcoming days. Thank you very much for your attention. Yes, the conference organizer, or at least the head of the department of organizing the conference, talked a little bit about logistics. I won't talk about it again, and those will be made clear throughout the days of the conference, but first order of business must be to talk about some cancellations. There's always that kind of conference business, and some of them, most of them came to us after the conference program was printed so it could be removed again. Next to, that was another nice deal, with the panel, the panel to both of those conferences, both of those papers cannot be delivered because the people who were delivered were not able to attend. So what I'm going to do is also take my prerogative at the conference organizer to announce that instead of starting at 9.30, which we can't do now, we'll have a short coffee break and we'll try to start at 9.10, and then we'll have a fairly long lunch break in which you can go around and look at the campus if you like, or I think sometimes a great tour of the library if you'd like that, and we'll meet you back in the hall across from here, which is lecture hall, and it's directly across from us, right now we're on a coffee meeting room at 1,400, which is 2 o'clock afterwards. So at this point we'll have coffee and we'll try to start with our first panel around 10.30 at the moment. And thank you all for your attendance and for your attention. Thank you.