Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Ismail (Arabic: أبو عبد الله محمد الرابع), known as Muhammad IV, (14 April 1315 – 25 August 1333) was the ruler of the Emirate of Granada on the Iberian Peninsula from 1325 to 1333. He was the sixth sultan of the Nasrid dynasty, succeeding to the throne at ten years old when his father, Ismail I (r. 1314–1325), was assassinated.

The initial years of his reign were marked by conflict among his ministers, who vied for control of the young sultan's government. This escalated into a civil war between the party of the vizier Muhammad ibn al-Mahruq and that of the powerful commander of the Volunteers of the Faith, Uthman ibn Abi al-Ula. Uthman declared Muhammad's uncle, Muhammad ibn Faraj, as a rival sultan and secured support from Alfonso XI of Castile (r. 1312–1350), Granada's Christian neighbour to the north. Muhammad IV requested help from Abu Said Uthman II (r. 1310–1331) of the Marinid Sultanate in Morocco and gave him territories in the Iberian Peninsula, including Ronda, Marbella, and Algeciras, probably in exchange for Marinid troops. The civil war ended in 1328 when Muhammad, who despite his youth had begun taking a more active role in government, reconciled with Uthman ibn Abi al-Ula, and ordered Ibn al-Mahruq assassinated; the pretender Muhammad ibn Faraj was sent to North Africa. In 1329 he appointed his childhood tutor Abu Nuaym Ridwan as the hajib (chamberlain), outranking his other ministers; this was the first time the title appeared in the Emirate of Granada. (Full article...)

Eric Alfred Havelock (/ˈhævlɒk/; 3 June 1903 – 4 April 1988) was a British classicist who spent most of his life in Canada and the United States. He was a professor at the University of Toronto and was active in the Canadian socialist movement during the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, he served as chair of the classics departments at both Harvard and Yale. Although he was trained in the turn-of-the-20th-century Oxbridge tradition of classical studies, which saw Greek intellectual history as an unbroken chain of related ideas, Havelock broke radically with his own teachers and proposed an entirely new model for understanding the classical world, based on a sharp division between literature of the 6th and 5th centuries BC on the one hand, and that of the 4th on the other.

Much of Havelock's work was devoted to addressing a single thesis: that all of Western thought is informed by a profound shift in the kinds of ideas available to the human mind at the point that Greek philosophy converted from an oral to a literate form. The idea has been controversial in classical studies, and has been rejected outright both by many of Havelock's contemporaries and modern classicists. Havelock and his ideas have nonetheless had far-reaching influence, both in classical studies and other academic areas. He and Walter J. Ong (who was himself strongly influenced by Havelock) essentially founded the field that studies transitions from orality to literacy, and Havelock has been one of the most frequently cited theorists in that field; as an account of communication, his work profoundly affected the media theories of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Havelock's influence has spread beyond the study of the classical world to that of analogous transitions in other times and places. (Full article...)