Cow dung
Cow dung known as cow pats, cow pies or cow manure, is the waste product of bovine animal species. These species include domestic cattle, bison and water buffalo. Cow dung is the undigested residue of plant matter; the resultant faecal matter is rich in minerals. Color ranges from greenish to blackish darkening soon after exposure to air. Cow dung, a dark brown color is used as manure. If not recycled into the soil by species such as earthworms and dung beetles, cow dung can dry out and remain on the pasture, creating an area of grazing land, unpalatable to livestock. In many parts of the developing world, in the past in mountain regions of Europe and dried cow dung is used as fuel. Dung may be collected and used to produce biogas to generate electricity and heat; the gas is rich in methane and is used in rural areas of India and Pakistan and elsewhere to provide a renewable and stable source of electricity. In central Africa, Maasai villages have burned cow dung inside to repel mosquitos. In cold places, cow dung is used to line the walls of rustic houses as a cheap thermal insulator.
Most of villagers in India spray fresh cow dung mixed with water in front of the houses to repel insects. It is dried into cake like shapes and used as replacement for firewood. Cow dung is an optional ingredient in the manufacture of adobe mud brick housing depending on the availability of materials at hand. A deposit of cow dung is referred to in American English as a "cow chip," or less "cow pie," and in British English as a "cowpat"; when dry, it is used in the practice of "cow chip throwing" popularized in Beaver, Oklahoma in 1970. On April 21, 2001 Robert Deevers of Elgin, set the record for cow chip throwing with a distance of 185 feet 5 inches. Cow dung is used in Hindu religious fire yajna as an important ingredient.. Cow dung is used in the making of panchgavya, for use in Hindu rituals, it is used as a medicine in India. Cow dung provides food for a wide range of animal and fungus species, which break it down and recycle it into the food chain and into the soil. In areas where cattle are not native, there are also no native species which can break down their dung, this can lead to infestations of pests such as flies and parasitic worms.
In Australia, dung beetles from elsewhere have been introduced to help recycle the cattle dung back into the soil.. Cattle have a natural aversion to feeding around their own dung; this can lead to the formation of taller ungrazed patches of fertilized sward. These habitat patches, termed "islets", can be beneficial for many grassland arthropods, including spiders and bugs, they have an important function in maintaining biodiversity in utilized pastures. A buffalo chip called a meadow muffin, is the name for a large, dried piece of dung deposited by the American bison. Well dried buffalo chips were among the few things that could be collected and burned on the prairie and were used by the Plains Indians and pioneers, homesteaders as a source of cooking heat and warmth. Bison dung is sometimes referred to by the name nik-nik; this word is a borrowing from the Sioux language. In modern Sioux, nik-nik can refer to the feces including domestic cattle, it has come to be used in Lakota, to refer to lies or broken promises, analogously to the vulgar English term "bullshit" as a figure of speech.
Biomass briquettes Chicken manure Coprophilous fungi Dry animal dung fuel Imigongo Shit Museum Sigri stove fueled with dried cow dung
Nemean lion
The Nemean lion was a vicious monster in Greek mythology that lived at Nemea. It was killed by Heracles, it could not be killed with mortals' weapons. Its claws could cut through any armor. Today, lions are not part of the Greek fauna; the Asiatic lion subspecies ranged in southeastern Europe. According to Herodotus, lion populations were extant in Ancient Greece, until around 100 BC when they became extinct; the lion is considered to have been the offspring of Typhon and Echidna. The Nemean lion was sent to Nemea in the Peloponnesus to terrorize the city; the first of Heracles' twelve labours, set by King Eurystheus, was to slay the Nemean lion. Heracles wandered the area. There he met a boy who said that if Heracles slew the Nemean lion and returned alive within 30 days, the town would sacrifice a lion to Zeus. Another version claims that he met Molorchos, a shepherd who had lost his son to the lion, saying that if he came back within 30 days, a ram would be sacrificed to Zeus. If he did not return within 30 days, it would be sacrificed to the dead Heracles as a mourning offering.
While searching for the lion, Heracles fetched some arrows to use against it, not knowing that its golden fur was impenetrable. After some time, Heracles made the lion return to his cave; the cave had two entrances. In those dark and close quarters, Heracles stunned the beast with his club. During the fight the lion bit off one of his fingers, he killed the lion by strangling it with his bare hands. After slaying the lion, he failed, he tried sharpening the knife with a stone and tried with the stone itself. Athena, noticing the hero's plight, told Heracles to use one of the lion's own claws to skin the pelt; when he returned on the thirtieth day carrying the carcass of the lion on his shoulders, King Eurystheus was amazed and terrified. Eurystheus forbade him again to enter the city. Eurystheus warned him that the tasks set for him would become difficult, he sent Heracles off to complete his next quest, to destroy the Lernaean hydra. Heracles wore the Nemean lion's coat after killing it, as it was impervious to the elements and all but the most powerful weapons.
Others say. According to some authors, Heracles was helped in this labour by an Earth-born serpent, which followed him to Thebes and settled down in Aulis, it was identified as the water snake which devoured the sparrows and was turned into stone in the prophecy about the Trojan War. Smith, William. "Heracles or Hercules" Media related to Nemean Lion at Wikimedia Commons
Pineios (Peloponnese)
The Pineiós is a river in Peloponnese, Greece. It is not named after the god Peneus, it is 70 km long. Its source is near the village Kryovrysi, it empties into a bay of southwest of Gastouni. For a part of its upper course, it forms the border between Achaea; the river flows through the plain of Elis. The river passes through the following villages: Kryovrysi Agia Triada Kalfas Kentro Kalyvia Ilidos Agia Mavra Kavasila Vartholomio In ancient times, the river passed east of what is now Stafidokampos, the Andravida Air Base and the former wetlands, now drained for agricultural purposes, near Agios Panteleimonas. In the 1960s, the government began building an earth-shaped dam named the Peneus Dam to supply water for the north and much of Elis; the dam is considered the highest dam in Elis. In Greek mythology, the Peneus and Alpheus were two rivers re-routed by Heracles in his fifth labour in order to clean the filth from the Augean Stables in a single day, a task, presumed to be impossible
Labours of Hercules
The Twelve Labours of Heracles or Hercules are a series of episodes concerning a penance carried out by Heracles, the greatest of the Greek heroes, whose name was romanised as Hercules. They were accomplished over 12 years at the service of King Eurystheus; the episodes were connected by a continuous narrative. The establishment of a fixed cycle of twelve labours was attributed by the Greeks to an epic poem, now lost, written by Peisander, dated about 600 BC. After Hercules killed his wife and children, he went to the oracle at Delphi, he prayed to the god Apollo for guidance. Hercules was told to serve the king of Mycenae, for 12 years. During these 12 years, Hercules is sent to perform twelve difficult feats, called labours. Driven mad by Hera, Hercules slew his son and wife Megara. After recovering his sanity, Hercules regretted his actions. Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, advised him to go to Tiryns and serve his cousin King Eurystheus for twelve years, performing whatever labors Eurystheus might set him.
Hercules despaired at this, loathing to serve a man whom he knew to be far inferior to himself, yet fearing to oppose his father Zeus. He placed himself at Eurystheus's disposal. Eurystheus ordered Hercules to perform ten labours. Hercules accomplished these tasks, but Eurystheus refused to recognize two: the slaying of the Lernaean Hydra, as Hercules' nephew and charioteer Iolaus had helped him. Eurystheus set two more tasks, which Hercules performed, bringing the total number of tasks to twelve; as they survive, the labours of Hercules are not recounted in any single place, but must be reassembled from many sources. Ruck and Staples assert that there is no one way to interpret the labours, but that six were located in the Peloponnese, culminating with the rededication of Olympia. Six others took the hero farther afield, to places that were, per Ruck, "all strongholds of Hera or the'Goddess' and were Entrances to the Netherworld". In each case, the pattern was the same: Hercules was sent to kill or subdue, or to fetch back for Eurystheus a magical animal or plant.
A famous depiction of the labours in Greek sculpture is found on the metopes of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, which date to the 450s BC. In his labours, Hercules was sometimes accompanied by a male companion, according to Licymnius and others, such as Iolaus, his nephew. Although he was supposed to perform only ten labours, this assistance led to two labours being disqualified: Eurystheus refused to recognize slaying the Hydra, because Iolaus helped him, the cleansing of the Augean stables, because Hercules was paid for his services and because the rivers did the work. Several of the labours involved the offspring of Typhon and his mate Echidna, all overcome by Hercules. A traditional order of the labours found in the Bibliotheca is: Slay the Nemean lion. Slay the nine-headed Lernaean Hydra. Capture the Ceryneian Hind. Capture the Erymanthian Boar. Clean the Augean stables in a single day. Slay the Stymphalian birds. Capture the Cretan Bull. Steal the Mares of Diomedes. Obtain the girdle of Hippolyta.
Obtain the cattle of the monster Geryon. Steal the apples of the Hesperides. Capture and bring back Cerberus; the first labour was to slay the Nemean lion. According to one version of the myth, the Nemean lion took women as hostages to its lair in a cave near Nemea, luring warriors from nearby towns to save the damsel in distress. After entering the cave, the warrior would rush to her side. Once he was close, the woman would turn into a lion and kill the warrior, devouring his remains and giving the bones to Hades. Hercules wandered the area. There he met a boy who said that if Hercules slew the Nemean lion and returned alive within thirty days, the town would sacrifice a lion to Zeus, but if he did not return within thirty days or he died, the boy would sacrifice himself to Zeus. Another version claims that he met Molorchos, a shepherd who had lost his son to the lion, saying that if he came back within thirty days, a ram would be sacrificed to Zeus. If he did not return within thirty days, it would be sacrificed to the dead Hercules as a mourning offering.
While searching for the lion, Hercules fletched some arrows to use against it, not knowing that its golden fur was impenetrable. When he found and shot the lion, firing at it with his bow, he discovered the fur's protective property as the arrow bounced harmlessly off the creature's thigh. After some time, Hercules made the lion return to his cave; the cave had two entrances. In those dark and close quarters, Hercules stunned the beast with his club and, using his immense strength, strangled it to death. During the fight the lion bit off one of his fingers. Others say that he shot arrows at it shooting it in the unarmored mouth. After slaying the lion, he failed, he tried sharpening the knife with a stone and tried with the stone itself. Athena, noticing the hero's plight, told Hercules to use one of the lion's own claws to skin the pelt. Others say; when he returned on the thirtieth day carrying the carcass of the lion on his shoulders, King Eurystheus was amazed and terri
Eurystheus
In Greek mythology, Eurystheus was king of Tiryns, one of three Mycenaean strongholds in the Argolid, although other authors including Homer and Euripides cast him as ruler of Argos. Eurystheus was the son of Sthenelus and Nicippe, he was a grandson of the hero Perseus, as was his opponent Heracles, he was married to daughter of Amphidamas. In the contest of wills between Hera and Zeus over whose candidate would be hero, fated to defeat the remaining creatures representing an old order and bring about the reign of the Twelve Olympians, Eurystheus was Hera's candidate and Heracles – though his name implies that at one archaic stage of myth-making he had carried "Hera's fame" – was the candidate of Zeus; the arena for the actions that would bring about this deep change are the Twelve Labors imposed on Heracles by Eurystheus. The immediate necessity for the Labours of Heracles is as penance for Heracles' murder of his own family, in a fit of madness, sent by Hera. Details of the individual episodes may be found in the article on the Labours of Heracles, but Hera was connected with all of the opponents Heracles had to overcome.
Heracles' human stepfather Amphitryon was a grandson of Perseus, since Amphitryon's father was older than Eurystheus' father, he might have received the kingdom, but Sthenelus had banished Amphitryon for accidentally killing the eldest son in the family. When, shortly before his son Heracles was born, Zeus proclaimed the next-born descendant of Perseus should get the kingdom, Hera thwarted his ambitions by delaying Alcmene's labour and having her candidate Eurystheus born prematurely. Heracles' first task was to slay the Nemean Lion and bring back its skin, which Heracles decided to wear. Eurystheus was so scared by Heracles' fearsome guise that he hid in a subterranean bronze winejar, from that moment forth all labors were communicated to Heracles through a herald, Copreus. For his second labour, to slay the Lernaean Hydra, Heracles took with him his nephew, Iolaus, as a charioteer; when Eurystheus found out that Heracles' nephew had helped him he declared that the labour had not been completed alone and as a result did not count towards the ten labours set for him.
Eurystheus' third task did not involve killing a beast, but capturing one alive - the Ceryneian Hind, a golden-horned stag sacred to Artemis. Heracles knew that he had to return the hind, as he had promised, to Artemis, so he agreed to hand it over on the condition that Eurystheus himself come out and take it from him. Eurystheus did come out, but the moment Heracles let the hind go, she sprinted back to her mistress, Heracles departed, saying that Eurystheus had not been quick enough; when Heracles returned with the Erymanthian Boar, Eurystheus was again frightened and hid in his jar, begging Heracles to get rid of the beast. The fifth labour proposed by Eurystheus was to clear out the numerous stables of Augeias. Striking a deal with Augeias, Heracles proposed a payment of a tenth of Augeias' cattle if the labour was completed successfully. Not believing the task feasible, Augeias agreed. Heracles rerouted two nearby rivers through the stable; when Augeias learned of Heracles' bargain for the task, he refused payment.
Heracles brought the case to court, Phyleus testified against his father. Enraged, Augeias banished both Phyleus and Heracles from the land before the court had cast their vote. However, Eurystheus refused to credit the labour to Heracles. So Heracles drove Augeias out of the kingdom and installed Phyleus as king. Heracles took his tenth of the cattle and left them to graze in a field by his home. For his sixth labour, Heracles had to drive the Stymphalian Birds off the marshes, he did so, shooting down several birds with his Hydra-poisoned arrows and bringing them back to Eurystheus as proof. For his seventh labour, Heracles captured the Cretan Bull, he rode it back to his cousin. Eurystheus offered to sacrifice the bull to Hera his patron, she refused the sacrifice. The bull was wandered to Marathon, becoming known as the Marathonian Bull; when Heracles brought back the man-eating Mares of Diomedes Eurystheus dedicated the horses to Hera and allowed them to roam in the Argolid. Bucephalus, Alexander the Great's horse, was said to be descended from these mares.
To acquire the belt of Hippolyte, queen of the Amazons was Heracles ninth task. This task was at the request of Admete. For the tenth labour, he stole the cattle of the giant Geryon, which Eurystheus had sacrificed to Hera. To extend what may have once been ten Labours to the canonical dozen, it was said that Eurystheus didn't count the Hydra, as he was assisted, nor the Augean stables, as Heracles received payment for his work. For the eleventh labour Heracles had to obtain the Apples of the Hesperides. For his final labour, he was to capture Cerberus, the three-headed hound that guarded the entrance to Hades; when he managed to bring the struggling animal back, the terrified Eurystheus hid in his jar one more time, begging Heracles to leave for good and take the dog with him. After Heracles died, Eurystheus remained bitter over the ind
Lernaean Hydra
The Lernaean Hydra or Hydra of Lerna, more known as the Hydra, is a serpentine water monster in Greek and Roman mythology. Its lair was the lake of Lerna in the Argolid, the site of the myth of the Danaïdes. Lerna was reputed to be an entrance to the Underworld, archaeology has established it as a sacred site older than Mycenaean Argos. In the canonical Hydra myth, the monster is killed by Heracles as the second of his Twelve Labors. According to Hesiod, the Hydra was the offspring of Echidna, it had poisonous breath and blood so virulent that its scent was deadly. The Hydra possessed the exact number of which varies according to the source. Versions of the Hydra story add a regeneration feature to the monster: for every head chopped off, the Hydra would regrow two heads. Heracles required the assistance of his cousin Iolaus to cut off all of the monster's heads and burn the neck using sword and fire; the oldest extant Hydra narrative appears in Hesiod's Theogony, while the oldest images of the monster are found on a pair of bronze fibulae dating to c. 700 BCE.
In both these sources, the main motifs of the Hydra myth are present: a multi-headed serpent, slain by Heracles and Iolaus. While these fibulae portray a six-headed Hydra, its number of heads was first fixed in writing by Alcaeus, who gave it nine heads. Simonides, writing a century increased the number to fifty, while Euripides and others did not give an exact figure. Heraclitus the paradoxographer rationalized the myth by suggesting that the Hydra would have been a single-headed snake accompanied by its offspring. Like the initial number of heads, the monster's capacity to regenerate lost heads varies with time and author; the first mention of this ability of the Hydra occurs with Euripides, where the monster grew back a pair of heads for each one severed by Heracles. In the Euthydemus of Plato, Socrates likens Euthydemus and his brother Dionysidorus to a Hydra of a sophistical nature who grows two arguments for every one refuted. Palaephatus and Diodorus Siculus concur with Euripides, while Servius has the Hydra grow back three heads each time.
Depictions of the monster dating to c. 500 BCE show it with a double tail as well as multiple heads, suggesting the same regenerative ability at work, but no literary accounts have this feature. The Hydra had many parallels in ancient Near Eastern religions. In particular, Sumerian and Assyrian mythology celebrated the deeds of the war and hunting god Ninurta, whom the Angim credited with slaying 11 monsters on an expedition to the mountains, including a seven-headed serpent and Bashmu, whose constellation was associated by the Greeks with the Hydra; the constellation is sometimes associated in Babylonian contexts with Marduk's dragon, the Mushhushshu. Eurystheus sent Heracles to slay the Hydra. Upon reaching the swamp near Lake Lerna, where the Hydra dwelt, Heracles covered his mouth and nose with a cloth to protect himself from the poisonous fumes, he shot flaming arrows into the Hydra's lair, the spring of Amymone, a deep cave from which it emerged only to terrorize neighboring villages. He confronted the Hydra, wielding either a harvesting sickle, a sword, or his famed club.
The chthonic creature's reaction to this decapitation was botanical: two grew back, an expression of the hopelessness of such a struggle for any but the hero. The weakness of the Hydra was; the details of the struggle are explicit in the Bibliotheca: realizing that he could not defeat the Hydra in this way, Heracles called on his nephew Iolaus for help. His nephew came upon the idea of using a firebrand to scorch the neck stumps after each decapitation. Heracles cut off each head and Iolaus cauterized the open stumps. Seeing that Heracles was winning the struggle, Hera sent a giant crab to distract him, he crushed it under his mighty foot. The Hydra's one immortal head was cut off with a golden sword given to Heracles by Athena. Heracles placed the head—still alive and writhing—under a great rock on the sacred way between Lerna and Elaius, dipped his arrows in the Hydra's poisonous blood, thus his second task was complete. The alternate version of this myth is that after cutting off one head he dipped his sword in its neck and used its venom to burn each head so it could not grow back.
Hera, upset that Heracles had slain the beast she raised to kill him, placed it in the dark blue vault of the sky as the constellation Hydra. She turned the crab into the constellation Cancer. Heracles would use arrows dipped in the Hydra's poisonous blood to kill other foes during his remaining labors, such as Stymphalian Birds and the giant Geryon, he used one to kill the centaur Nessus. Both Strabo and Pausanias report that the stench of the river Anigrus in Elis, making all the fish of the river inedible, was reputed to be due to the Hydra's poison, washed from the arrows Heracles used on the centaur; when Eurystheus, the agent of Hera, assigning The Twelve Labors to Heracles, found out that it was Heracles' nephew Iolaus who had handed Heracles the firebrand, he declared that the labor had not been completed alone and as a result did not count towards the 10 labors set for him. The mythic element is an equivocating attempt to resolve the submerged conflict between an ancient ten labors and a more recent twelve.
Greek
Pausanias (geographer)
Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the second-century AD, who lived in the time of Roman emperors Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius. He is famous for his Description of Greece, a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from his first-hand observations; this work provides crucial information for making links between classical literature and modern archaeology. Andrew Stewart assesses him as: A careful, pedestrian writer...interested not only in the grandiose or the exquisite but in unusual sights and obscure ritual. He is careless or makes unwarranted inferences, his guides or his own notes sometimes mislead him, yet his honesty is unquestionable, his value without par. Pausanias was born in 110 AD into a Greek family and was a native of Lydia. Before visiting Greece, he had been to Antioch and Jerusalem, to the banks of the River Jordan. In Egypt, he had seen the pyramids. While at the temple of Ammon, he had been shown the hymn once sent to that shrine by Pindar. In Macedonia, he appears to have seen.
Crossing over to Italy, he had seen something of the wonders of Rome. He was one of the first known to write of seeing the ruins of Troy, Alexandria Troas, Mycenae. Pausanias' Description of Greece is in each dedicated to some portion of Greece, he begins his tour in Attica, where the city of its demes dominate the discussion. Subsequent books describe Corinthia, Messenia, Achaea, Boetia and Ozolian Locris; the project is more than topographical. Pausanias digresses from the description of architectural and artistic objects to review the mythological and historical underpinnings of the society that produced them; as a Greek writing under the auspices of the Roman empire, he was in an awkward cultural space, between the glories of the Greek past he was so keen to describe and the realities of a Greece beholden to Rome as a dominating imperial force. His work bears the marks of his attempt to navigate that space and establish an identity for Roman Greece, he is not a naturalist by any means, although from time to time, he does comment on the physical realities of the Greek landscape.
He notices the pine trees on the sandy coast of Elis, the deer and the wild boars in the oak woods of Phelloe, the crows amid the giant oak trees of Alalcomenae. It is in the last section that Pausanias touches on the products of nature, such as the wild strawberries of Helicon, the date palms of Aulis, the olive oil of Tithorea, as well as the tortoises of Arcadia and the "white blackbirds" of Cyllene. Pausanias is most of Delphi, yet in the most secluded regions of Greece, he is fascinated by all kinds of depictions of deities, holy relics, many other sacred and mysterious objects. At Thebes he views the shields of those who died at the Battle of Leuctra, the ruins of the house of Pindar, the statues of Hesiod, Arion and Orpheus in the grove of the Muses on Helicon, as well as the portraits of Corinna at Tanagra and of Polybius in the cities of Arcadia. Pausanias has the instincts of an antiquary; as his modern editor, Christian Habicht, has said, In general, he prefers the old to the new, the sacred to the profane.
Some magnificent and dominating structures, such as the Stoa of King Attalus in the Athenian Agora or the Exedra of Herodes Atticus at Olympia are not mentioned. Unlike a Baedeker guide, in Periegesis Pausanias stops for a brief excursus on a point of ancient ritual or to tell an apposite myth, in a genre that would not become popular again until the early nineteenth century. In the topographical part of his work, Pausanias is fond of digressions on the wonders of nature, the signs that herald the approach of an earthquake, the phenomena of the tides, the ice-bound seas of the north, the noonday sun that at the summer solstice, casts no shadow at Syene. While he never doubts the existence of the deities and heroes, he sometimes criticizes the myths and legends relating to them, his descriptions of monuments of art are unadorned. They bear the impression of reality, their accuracy is confirmed by the extant remains, he is frank in his confessions of ignorance. When he quotes a book at second hand he takes pains to say so.
The work left faint traces in the known Greek corpus. "It was not read", Habicht relates. The only manuscripts of Pausanias are three fifteenth-century copies, full of errors and lacunae, which all appear to depend on a single manuscript that survived to be copied. Niccolò Niccoli had this archetype in Florence in 1418. At his death in 1437, it went to the library of San Marco, Florence it disappeared after 1500; until twentieth-century archaeologists concluded that Pausanias was a reliable guide to the sites they were excavating, Pausanias was la
_05.jpg)