Herodotus, Xerxes en de Babylonische opstanden van 484 v. Chr.

Horizon 2020(H2020)682241Middle Eastern Studie

De wilde jeugd der assyriologie

Oratie uitgesproken door Prof.dr. C. Waerzeggers bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar in de Assyriologie aan de Universiteit Leiden op vrijdag 1 december 2017Middle Eastern Studie

Babylonian entrepreneurs

Horizon 2020(H2020)682241Middle Eastern Studie

Digital prosopography of Babylonia: new horizons

Horizon 2020(H2020)682241Middle Eastern Studie

The day before Cyrus entered Babylon

Horizon 2020(H2020)682241Middle Eastern Studie

An unfinished duplicate of a marriage contract from the reign of Darius I

Horizon 2020(H2020)682241Middle Eastern Studie

Collations of CUSAS 28

Horizon 2020(H2020)682241Middle Eastern Studie

Peripheral Nerve Ultrasound for the Differentiation between ALS, Inflammatory, and Hereditary Polyneuropathies

Background and Objectives: Ultrasound (US) is a non-invasive tool for the in vivo detection of peripheral nerve alterations. Materials and Methods: In this study, we applied nerve US to assist the discrimination between the spectrum of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, n = 11), chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP, n = 5), and genetically confirmed Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease (CMT, n = 5). All participants and n = 15 controls without neurological diseases underwent high-resolution US of the bilateral tibial nerve. The nerve cross-sectional area (CSA) and nerve microvascular blood flow were compared between the groups and related to cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) measures, clinical symptoms, and nerve conduction studies. The analyses are part of a larger multimodal study on the comparison between US and 7 Tesla (7T) magnetic resonance neurography (MRN). Results: The patients and controls were matched with respect to their demographical data. CMT had the longest disease duration, followed by CIDP and ALS. CSA was related to age, weight, and disease duration. CSA was larger in CMT and CIDP compared to ALS and controls. The blood flow was greatest in CIDP, and higher than in CMT, ALS, and controls. In ALS, greater CSA was correlated with greater CSF total protein and higher albumin quotient. The US measures did not correlate with clinical scores or nerve conduction studies in any of the subgroups. Conclusion: Our results point towards the feasibility of CSA and blood flow to discriminate between ALS, CIDP, and CMT, even in groups of small sample size. In ALS, larger CSA could indicate an inflammatory disease subtype characterized by reduced blood–nerve barrier integrity. Our upcoming analysis will focus on the additive value of 7T MRN in combination with US to disentangle the spectrum between more inflammatory or more degenerative disease variants among the disease groups

Super-resolution track-density imaging studies of mouse brain: Comparison to histology

The recently proposed track-density imaging (TDI) technique was introduced as a means to achieve superresolution using diffusion MRI. This technique is able to increase the spatial resolution of the reconstructed images beyond the acquired MRI resolution by incorporating information from whole-brain fibre-tracking results. It not only achieves super-resolution, but also provides very high anatomical contrast with a new MRI contrast mechanism. However, the anatomical information-content of this novel contrast mechanism has not yet been assessed. In this work, we perform such a study using diffusion MRI of ex vivo mouse brains acquired at 16.4T, to compare the results of the super-resolution TDI technique with histological staining (myelin and Nissl stains) in the same brains. Furthermore, a modified version of the directionally-encoded colour TDI map using short-tracks is introduced, which reduces the TDI intensity dynamic range, and therefore enhances the directionality colour-contrast. Good agreement was observed between structures visualised in the superresolution TDI maps and in the histological sections, supporting the anatomical information-content of the images generated using the TDI technique. The results therefore show that the TDI methodology does provide meaningful and rich anatomical contrast, in addition to achieving super-resolution. Furthermore, this study is the first to show the application of TDI to mouse brain imaging: the high-resolution, high-quality images demonstrate the useful complementary information that can be achieved using super-resolution TDI

Secrets in the Library: Protected Scholarship and Professional Identity in Late Babylonian Uruk

Injunctions to secrecy in the colophons of scholarly cuneiform tablets offer potential insights into the classification and protection of knowledge in Mesopotamia. However, most models of a body of “secret knowledge” defined by the so-called “Geheimwissen colophons” have found it difficult to account for a seemingly disparate corpus of protected texts. This study argues first for an expanded definition of intellectual protection, which leads to a larger corpus of protected texts. Through a case study of Late Babylonian colophons from Uruk, it is suggested that there is a strong correlation between texts related to the professional specialism of the tablet owner, and the occurrence of protective formulae in the colophon. This implies that it is fruitful to consider “secret knowledge” less as an abstracted corpus of esoteric texts and more as a mutable categorisation strongly linked to professional and individual intellectual identity