Battle of Ain Dara
The Battle of Ain Dara took place in the town of Ain Dara in 1711 between the Qaysi and Yamani tribo-political factions. The Qays were led by Emir Haydar of the Shihab dynasty and consisted of the Druze clans of Jumblatt, Talhuq, Imad and Abd al-Malik and the Maronite clan of Khazen. The Yamani faction was led by Mahmoud Abi Harmush and consisted of the Druze Alam ad-Din, Arslan and al-Sawaf clans. The Yamani faction also had backing from the Ottoman provincial authorities of Sidon and Damascus. The battle ended in a rout for the Yamani faction and resulted in the consolidation of Qaysi political and fiscal domination over Mount Lebanon. The battle's outcome also precipitated a mass migration of pro-Yamani Druze nobility and peasants from Mount Lebanon to the eastern Hauran, in a mountainous area today known as Jabal al-Druze.
Background
In 17th-century Mount Lebanon, the Druze were the major demographic group of the region. The Druze had been divided into political factions based on the pre-Islamic Arab tribal divisions of the Qays and Yaman. The Ma'ans, whose emirs (princes) consistently held the tax farms of Mount Lebanon's districts (Chouf, Matn, Keserwan, Gharb and Jurd), represented the Qaysi faction, along with their allies, the Druze clans of Jumblatt, Imad, Talhuq and Abu'l Lama, the Maronite Khazen clan of Keserwan, and the Sunni Muslim Shihab clan of Wadi al-Taym. Leading the Yamani faction was the Alam ad-Din clan, whose members occasionally gained the tax farms of Mount Lebanon during times of conflict between the Ma'ans and the Ottoman authorities. Other families belonging to the Yamani faction were the Druze clans of Arslan and al-Sawaf.
Ain Dara
Ain Dara may refer to:
See also
Ain Dara (archaeological site)
The Ain Dara temple, located near the village of Ain Dara, northwest of Aleppo, Syria, is an Iron Age Syro-Hittite temple noted for its similarities to Solomon's Temple as described in the Hebrew Bible. According to the excavator Ali Abu Assaf, it was in existence from 1300 BC until 740 BC and remained "basically the same" during the period of the Solomonic Temple's construction (1000 - 900 BC) as it had been before, so that it predates the Solomonic Temple. The temples of Emar, Munbaqa, and Ebla are also comparable. The surviving sculptures depict lions and sphinxes (comparable to the cherubim of the First Temple).
Massive footprints are carved into the floor; whether of gods or humans or animals is debatable. Also left to speculation is to whom the temple is dedicated. Ain Dara may have been devoted to Ishtar, goddess of fertility; or dedicated to the female goddess Astarte, or the deity Ba'al Hadad.
Geography
Ain Dara temple is located in north Syria, 67 kilometres (42 mi) northwest of Aleppo near the Syro-Turkish border. It was built on a terrace known as the "acropolis of the tell", a precipitous-faced tell that overlooks the Afrin Valley. The area is divided in two parts, the main tell that is 25 m (82 ft) above the surrounding plain, and the lower acropolis which covers an area of 25 ha (60 acres).
Ain
Ain (French pronunciation: [ɛ̃]; Arpitan: En) is a department named after the Ain River on the eastern edge of France. Being part of the region Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and bordered by the rivers Saône and Rhône, the department of Ain enjoys a privileged geographic situation. It has an excellent transport network (TGV, highways) and benefits from the proximity to the international airports of Lyon and Geneva.
Ain is composed of four geographically different areas (Bresse, Dombes, Bugey and Pays de Gex) which – each with its own characteristics – contribute to the diversity and the dynamic economic development of the department. In the Bresse agriculture and agro-industry are dominated by the cultivation of cereals, cattle breeding, milk and cheese production as well as poultry farming. In the Dombes, pisciculture assumes greater importance as does wine making in the Bugey. The high diversification of the department's industry is accompanied by a strong presence of the plastics sector in and around Oyonnax (so-called "Plastics Valley").
Ayin
Ayin or Ayn is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʿAyin 
, Hebrew ʿAyin ע, Aramaic ʿĒ 
, Syriac ʿĒ ܥ, and Arabic ʿAyn ع (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only). ﻉ comes twenty‐first in the New Persian alphabet and eighteenth in Arabic hijaʾi order.
The ʿayin glyph in these various languages represents, or has represented, a voiced pharyngeal fricative (/ʕ/), or a similarly articulated consonant, which has no equivalent or approximate substitute in the sound‐system of English. There are many possible transliterations.
Origins
The letter name is derived from Proto-Semitic *ʿayn- "eye", and the Phoenician letter had an eye-shape, ultimately derived from the ı͗r hieroglyph
To this day, ʿayin in Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, and Maltese means "eye" and "spring" (ʿayno in Neo-Aramaic).
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Ο, Latin O, and Cyrillic О, all representing vowels.
The sound represented by ayin is common to much of the Afrasiatic language family, such as the Egyptian, Cushitic, and Semitic languages. Some scholars believe that the sound in Proto-Indo-European transcribed h3 was similar, though this is debatable. (See Laryngeal theory.)
Ain (spring)
An ain is a spring in North Africa, which reaches the surface as a result of an artesian basin and is of particular importance in arid regions. It can produce a flow of water directly or result in evaporitic saline crusts. Known examples are found in the oases of the Tunisian region of Bled el Djerid and in the entire area around the depressions of Chott el Djerid and Chott el Gharsa. Here, there are water-bearing strata, usually of sand or sandstone, that act as aquifers in their function.
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