1.
Codex Gigas
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The Codex Gigas is the largest extant medieval manuscript in the world. It is also known as the Devils Bible because of an illustration of the devil on the inside. It is thought to have created in the early 12th century in the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice in Bohemia. It contains the Vulgate Bible as well as historical documents all written in Latin. The codex is bound in a folder covered with leather. At 92 cm tall,50 cm wide and 22 cm thick, weighing 74.8 kg, Codex Gigas is composed of 310 leaves of vellum allegedly made from the skins of 160 donkeys or perhaps calfskin. It initially contained 320 sheets, though some of these were subsequently removed and it is unknown who removed the pages or for what purpose but it seems likely that they contained the monastic rules of the Benedictines. Legend has it, that it was written by one scribe, according to legend, the Codex was created by Herman the Recluse in the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice near Chrudim in the Czech Republic. The monastery was destroyed sometime in the 15th century during the Hussite Revolution, records in the codex end in the year 1229. The codex was later pledged to the Cistercians Sedlec Monastery and then bought by the Benedictine monastery in Břevnov. From 1477 to 1593, it was kept in the library of a monastery in Broumov until it was taken to Prague in 1594 to form a part of the collections of the Emperor Rudolf II. At the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, the collection was taken as war booty by the Swedish army. From 1649 to 2007, the manuscript was kept in the Swedish Royal Library in Stockholm, the site of its creation is marked by a maquette in the town museum of Chrast. On Friday,7 May 1697, a fire broke out at the royal castle in Stockholm. The codex was rescued from the flames by being out of a window. This damaged the binding and knocked loose some pages which are missing today. According to the vicar Johann Erichsons, the codex landed on, in September 2007, after 359 years, the Codex Gigas returned to Prague on loan from Sweden until January 2008, and was on display at the Czech National Library. A National Geographic documentary included interviews with experts who argued that certain evidence indicates the manuscript was indeed the work of just one scribe
2.
Latin
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Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet is derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, Latin was originally spoken in Latium, in the Italian Peninsula. Through the power of the Roman Republic, it became the dominant language, Vulgar Latin developed into the Romance languages, such as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Romanian. Latin, Italian and French have contributed many words to the English language, Latin and Ancient Greek roots are used in theology, biology, and medicine. By the late Roman Republic, Old Latin had been standardised into Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin was the colloquial form spoken during the same time and attested in inscriptions and the works of comic playwrights like Plautus and Terence. Late Latin is the language from the 3rd century. Later, Early Modern Latin and Modern Latin evolved, Latin was used as the language of international communication, scholarship, and science until well into the 18th century, when it began to be supplanted by vernaculars. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Today, many students, scholars and members of the Catholic clergy speak Latin fluently and it is taught in primary, secondary and postsecondary educational institutions around the world. The language has been passed down through various forms, some inscriptions have been published in an internationally agreed, monumental, multivolume series, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Authors and publishers vary, but the format is about the same, volumes detailing inscriptions with a critical apparatus stating the provenance, the reading and interpretation of these inscriptions is the subject matter of the field of epigraphy. The works of several hundred ancient authors who wrote in Latin have survived in whole or in part and they are in part the subject matter of the field of classics. The Cat in the Hat, and a book of fairy tales, additional resources include phrasebooks and resources for rendering everyday phrases and concepts into Latin, such as Meissners Latin Phrasebook. The Latin influence in English has been significant at all stages of its insular development. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, English writers cobbled together huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek words, dubbed inkhorn terms, as if they had spilled from a pot of ink. Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, many of the most common polysyllabic English words are of Latin origin through the medium of Old French. Romance words make respectively 59%, 20% and 14% of English, German and those figures can rise dramatically when only non-compound and non-derived words are included. Accordingly, Romance words make roughly 35% of the vocabulary of Dutch, Roman engineering had the same effect on scientific terminology as a whole
3.
Book
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A book is a set of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of paper, parchment, or other materials, fastened together to hinge at one side, with text and/or images printed in ink. A single sheet within a book is a leaf, and each side of a leaf is a page, a set of text-filled or illustrated pages produced in electronic format for reading on a computer screen, smartphone or e-reader device is known as an electronic book, or e-book. The term books may refer the body of works of literature. In library and information science, a book is called a monograph, to distinguish it from serial periodicals such as magazines, journals, in novels and sometimes other types of books, a book may be divided into several large sections, also called books. An avid reader or collector of books or a lover is a bibliophile or colloquially. A shop where books are bought and sold is a bookshop or bookstore, Books are also sold in some department stores, drugstores and newspaper vendors. Books can also be borrowed from libraries, google has estimated that as of 2010, approximately 130,000,000 distinct titles had been published. In some wealthier nations, printed books are giving way to the usage of electronic or e-books, the word book comes from Old English bōc, which in turn comes from the Germanic root *bōk-, cognate to beech. Similarly, in Slavic languages буква is cognate with beech, in Russian and in Serbian and Macedonian, the word букварь or буквар refers specifically to a primary school textbook that helps young children master the techniques of reading and writing. It is thus conjectured that the earliest Indo-European writings may have been carved on beech wood, similarly, the Latin word codex, meaning a book in the modern sense, originally meant block of wood. When writing systems were created in ancient civilizations, a variety of objects, such as stone, clay, tree bark, metal sheets, the study of such inscriptions forms a major part of history. The study of inscriptions is known as epigraphy, the Ancient Egyptians would often write on papyrus, a plant grown along the Nile River. At first the words were not separated from other and there was no punctuation. Texts were written right to left, left to right. The technical term for that last type of writing is boustrophedon, a tablet might be defined as a physically robust writing medium, suitable for casual transport and writing. See also stylus, the instrument used to write on a tablet, clay tablets were flattened and mostly dry pieces of clay that could be easily carried, and impressed with a stylus. They were used as a medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age. Tablets were used by traders to record sales of such as bushels of grain
4.
Paper
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Paper is a thin material produced by pressing together moist fibres of cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets. It is a material with many uses, including writing, printing, packaging, cleaning. The modern pulp and paper industry is global, with China leading its production, the oldest known archaeological fragments of the immediate precursor to modern paper, date to the 2nd century BC in China. The pulp papermaking process is ascribed to Cai Lun, a 2nd-century AD Han court eunuch, with paper as an effective substitute for silk in many applications, China could export silk in greater quantity, contributing to a Golden Age. Because of papers introduction to the West through the city of Baghdad, in the 19th century, industrial manufacture greatly lowered its cost, enabling mass exchange of information and contributing to significant cultural shifts. In 1844, the Canadian inventor Charles Fenerty and the German F. G. Keller independently developed processes for pulping wood fibres, before the industrialisation of the paper production the most common fibre source was recycled fibres from used textiles, called rags. The rags were from hemp, linen and cotton, a process for removing printing inks from recycled paper was invented by German jurist Justus Claproth in 1774. Today this method is called deinking and it was not until the introduction of wood pulp in 1843 that paper production was not dependent on recycled materials from ragpickers. The word paper is etymologically derived from Latin papyrus, which comes from the Greek πάπυρος, although the word paper is etymologically derived from papyrus, the two are produced very differently and the development of the first is distinct from the development of the second. Papyrus is a lamination of natural plant fibres, while paper is manufactured from fibres whose properties have changed by maceration. To make pulp from wood, a chemical pulping process separates lignin from cellulose fibres and this is accomplished by dissolving lignin in a cooking liquor, so that it may be washed from the cellulose, this preserves the length of the cellulose fibres. Paper made from chemical pulps are also known as wood-free papers–not to be confused with paper, this is because they do not contain lignin. The pulp can also be bleached to produce paper, but this consumes 5% of the fibres, chemical pulping processes are not used to make paper made from cotton. There are three main chemical pulping processes, the process dates back to the 1840s and it was the dominant method extent before the second world war. Most pulping operations using the process are net contributors to the electricity grid or use the electricity to run an adjacent paper mill. Another advantage is that this process recovers and reuses all inorganic chemical reagents, soda pulping is another specialty process used to pulp straws, bagasse and hardwoods with high silicate content. There are two major mechanical pulps, thermomechanical pulp and groundwood pulp, in the TMP process, wood is chipped and then fed into steam heated refiners, where the chips are squeezed and converted to fibres between two steel discs. In the groundwood process, debarked logs are fed into grinders where they are pressed against rotating stones to be made into fibres
5.
Vellum
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Vellum is prepared animal skin or membrane used as a material for writing on. Vellum is prepared for writing or printing on, to produce single pages, scrolls, vellum is generally smooth and durable, although there are great variations depending on preparation and the quality of the skin. The manufacture involves the cleaning, bleaching, stretching on a frame, to create tension, scraping is alternated with wetting and drying. A final finish may be achieved by abrading the surface with pumice, modern paper vellum is a quite different synthetic material, used for a variety of purposes, including plans, technical drawings, and blueprints. In Europe, from Roman times, the vellum was used for the best quality of prepared skin, regardless of the animal from which the hide was obtained, calf, sheep. Although the term derives from the French for calf, animal vellum can include hide from virtually any other mammal. The best quality, uterine vellum, was said to be made from the skins of stillborn or unborn animals, there has long been, however, much blurring of the boundaries between these terms. In 1519, William Horman could write in his Vulgaria, That stouffe that we wrytte upon, modern scholars and custodians increasingly use only the safe if confusing term membrane. In the usage of modern practitioners of the crafts of writing, illuminating, lettering. Vellum is a translucent material produced from the skin, often split, the skin is washed with water and lime, but not together. It is then soaked in lime for several days to soften, once clear, the two sides of the skin are distinct, the side facing inside the animal and the hair side. The inside body side of the skin is usually the lighter, the hair follicles may be visible on the outer side, together with any scarring, made while the animal was alive. The membrane can also show the pattern of the animals vein network called the veining of the sheet, any remaining hair is removed and the skin is dried by attaching it to a frame. The skin is attached at points around the circumference with cords, to prevent tearing, the maker then uses a crescent shaped knife, to clean off any remaining hairs. Once the skin is dry, it is thoroughly cleaned and processed into sheets. The number of extracted from the piece of skin depends on the size of the skin. For example, the average calfskin can provide three and half sheets of writing material. This can be doubled when it is folded into two conjoint leaves, also known as a bifolium, historians have found evidence of manuscripts where the scribe wrote down the medieval instructions now followed by modern membrane makers
6.
Papyrus
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The word papyrus /pəˈpaɪrəs/ refers to a thick precursor to modern paper made from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus. Papyrus can also refer to a document written on sheets of papyrus joined together side by side and rolled up into a scroll, the plural for such documents is papyri. Papyrus is first known to have used in ancient Egypt. It was also used throughout the Mediterranean region and in Kingdom of Kush, the Ancient Egyptians used papyrus as a writing material, as well as employing it commonly in the construction of other artifacts such as reed boats, mats, rope, sandals, and baskets. Papyrus was first manufactured in Egypt as far back as the fourth millennium BCE, the earliest archaeological evidence of papyrus was excavated in 2012 and 2013 at Wadi al-Jarf, an ancient Egyptian harbor located on the Red Sea coast. The papyrus rolls describe the last years of building the Great Pyramid of Giza, in the first centuries BCE and CE, papyrus scrolls gained a rival as a writing surface in the form of parchment, which was prepared from animal skins. Sheets of parchment were folded to form quires from which book-form codices were fashioned, early Christian writers soon adopted the codex form, and in the Græco-Roman world, it became common to cut sheets from papyrus rolls to form codices. Codices were an improvement on the scroll, as the papyrus was not pliable enough to fold without cracking. Papyrus had the advantage of being cheap and easy to produce. Unless the papyrus was of quality, the writing surface was irregular. Its last appearance in the Merovingian chancery is with a document of 692, the latest certain dates for the use of papyrus are 1057 for a papal decree, under Pope Victor II, and 1087 for an Arabic document. Its use in Egypt continued until it was replaced by more inexpensive paper introduced by Arabs who originally learned of it from the Chinese, by the 12th century, parchment and paper were in use in the Byzantine Empire, but papyrus was still an option. Papyrus was made in several qualities and prices, pliny the Elder and Isidore of Seville described six variations of papyrus which were sold in the Roman market of the day. These were graded by quality based on how fine, firm, white, grades ranged from the superfine Augustan, which was produced in sheets of 13 digits wide, to the least expensive and most coarse, measuring six digits wide. Materials deemed unusable for writing or less than six digits were considered commercial quality and were pasted edge to edge to be used only for wrapping, until the middle of the 19th century, only some isolated documents written on papyrus were known. They did not contain literary works, the first modern discovery of papyri rolls was made at Herculaneum in 1752. Until then, the papyri known had been a few surviving from medieval times. The English word papyrus derives, via Latin, from Greek πάπυρος, Greek has a second word for it, βύβλος
7.
Manuscript
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A manuscript is any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to being mechanically printed or reproduced in some automated way. More recently, it is understood to be a written, typed, or word-processed copy of a work. Before the arrival of printing, all documents and books were manuscripts, manuscripts are not defined by their contents, which may combine writing with mathematical calculations, maps, explanatory figures or illustrations. Manuscripts may be in form, scrolls or in codex format. Illuminated manuscripts are enriched with pictures, border decorations, elaborately embossed initial letters or full-page illustrations. The traditional abbreviations are MS for manuscript and MSS for manuscripts, while the forms MS. ms or ms. for singular, and MSS. mss or mss. for plural are also accepted. The second s is not simply the plural, by an old convention, it doubles the last letter of the abbreviation to express the plural, just as pp. means pages. Before the invention of printing in China or by moveable type in a printing press in Europe. Historically, manuscripts were produced in form of scrolls or books, manuscripts were produced on vellum and other parchment, on papyrus, and on paper. In Russia birch bark documents as old as from the 11th century have survived, in India, the palm leaf manuscript, with a distinctive long rectangular shape, was used from ancient times until the 19th century. Paper spread from China via the Islamic world to Europe by the 14th century, when Greek or Latin works were published, numerous professional copies were made simultaneously by scribes in a scriptorium, each making a single copy from an original that was declaimed aloud. Manuscripts in Tocharian languages, written on leaves, survived in desert burials in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia. Volcanic ash preserved some of the Roman library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, ironically, the manuscripts that were being most carefully preserved in the libraries of antiquity are virtually all lost. Originally, all books were in manuscript form, in China, and later other parts of East Asia, woodblock printing was used for books from about the 7th century. The earliest dated example is the Diamond Sutra of 868, in the Islamic world and the West, all books were in manuscript until the introduction of movable type printing in about 1450. Manuscript copying of books continued for a least a century, as printing remained expensive, private or government documents remained hand-written until the invention of the typewriter in the late 19th century. In the Philippines, for example, as early as 900AD, specimen documents were not inscribed by stylus and this type of document was rare compared to the usual leaves and bamboo staves that were inscribed. However, neither the leaves nor paper were as durable as the document in the hot
8.
Concertina
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A concertina is a free-reed musical instrument, like the various accordions and the harmonica. It has a bellows, and buttons typically on both ends of it, when pressed, the buttons travel in the same direction as the bellows, unlike accordion buttons, which travel perpendicularly to the bellows. The concertina was developed in England and Germany, most likely independently, the English version was invented in 1829 by Sir Charles Wheatstone, while Carl Friedrich Uhlig announced the German version five years later, in 1834. Various forms of concertina are used for music, for the traditional musics of Ireland, England, and South Africa. Because the concertina was developed nearly contemporaneously in England and Germany, systems can be divided into English, Anglo-German. To a player proficient in one of these systems, a concertina of a different system may be quite unfamiliar, the English concertina and the Duet concertina bear similarities in history and construction. Both systems generally play a scale, and are unisonoric. Both these English-developed instruments are smaller than German concertinas, and tend to be hexagonal, though occasionally having 8,10, the English system alternates the notes of the scale between two hands, enabling rapid melodies. The Duet system places the low notes on the hand and high on the right. The English concertina is credited to Sir Charles Wheatstone, who first patented such a design in 1829 in Great Britain, Wheatstone was also the first to patent a Duet concertina, in 1844. The German concertinas, developed within Germany itself for its market and diaspora. They are generally bisonoric, use a different style of long plate reeds, unlike the English and Anglo, they sometimes have more than one reed per note, creating a vibrato effect. Various German concertina systems share common features and core button layout. In the United States, particularly in the Midwest where there are many German and Central European descendants, a related variant is the Carlsfelder concertina of C. F. Zimmerman, unveiled in 1849. and at the 1851 London Industrial Exposition. The bandoneon is a German concertina system with an original bisonoric layout devised by Heinrich Band, though the typical bandoneon is bisonoric, the 1920s saw the development of unisonoric variants such as the Ernst Kusserow and Charles Peguri systems, both introduced around 1925. Bandoneons typically have more than one reed per button, dry-tuned with the reeds an octave apart, Ástor Piazzolla was one of the most famous exponents of this instrument. The Anglo or Anglo-German concertina is, historically, a hybrid between the English and German concertinas, the button layouts are generally the same as the original 20-button German concertinas designed by Uhlig in 1834, and in a bisonoric system. Within a few years of its invention, the German concertina was an import in England, Ireland
9.
Scroll
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A scroll, also known as a roll, is a roll of papyrus, parchment, or paper containing writing. The scroll is usually unrolled so that one page is exposed at a time, for writing or reading, with the remaining pages rolled up to the left and right of the visible page. It is unrolled side to side, and the text is written in lines from the top to the bottom of the page. Depending on the language, the letters may be left to right, right to left. Some scrolls are simply rolled up pages, others may have wooden rollers on each end, scrolls were the first form of editable record keeping texts, used in Eastern Mediterranean ancient Egyptian civilizations. Parchment scroll used by Israelites after Sinai was the first use of scrolls in the recording of literature before the codex or bound book with pages was invented by the Latins in the 1st century AD. Scrolls were more highly regarded than codices until well into Roman times where they were written in single latitudinal column. The ink used in writing scrolls had to adhere to a surface that was rolled and unrolled, even so, ink would slowly flake off of scrolls. Shorter pieces of parchment or paper are called rolls or rotuli, historians of the classical period tend to use roll instead of scroll. A distinction that sometimes applies is that the lines of writing in rotuli run across the width of the rather than along the length. Rolls may be wider than most scrolls, up to perhaps 60 cm or two feet wide, Rolls were often stored together in a special cupboard on shelves. A special Chinese form of book, called the whirlwind book, consists of several pieces of paper bound at the top with bamboo. In Scotland, the term scrow was used from about the 13th to the 17th centuries for scroll, writing, there existed an office of Clerk of the Scrow meaning the Clerk of the Rolls or Clerk of the Register. The scroll was replaced by the codex, a process which started almost as soon as the codex was invented. Unfortunately, scrolls were usually discarded after their contents were transferred to a codex, most scrolls uncovered by archaeologists are found in trash middens and burial sites. The oldest complete Torah scroll was discovered in May 2013 by Professor Mauro Perani. It was stored in a library in Bolonia, Italy. It had been mislabeled in 1889 as dating from the 17th century, carbon testing dates the prayer book to the year 840, which is 300 to 400 years earlier than the previously oldest known Torah scrolls from the 12th and 13th centuries
10.
Maya codices
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This sort of paper was generally known by the word āmatl in Nahuatl, and by the word huun in Mayan. The folding books are the products of professional scribes working under the patronage of such as the Tonsured Maize God. The Maya developed their huun-paper around the 5th century, which is roughly the time that the codex became predominant over the scroll in the Roman world. However, Maya paper was more durable and a writing surface than papyrus. The codices have been named for the cities where they eventually settled, the Dresden codex is generally considered the most important of the few that survive. There were many books in existence at the time of the Spanish conquest of Yucatán in the 16th century, however most were destroyed by the Conquistadors, in particular, many in Yucatán were ordered destroyed by Bishop Diego de Landa in July 1562. Such codices were the primary records of Maya civilization, together with the many inscriptions on stone monuments. However, their range of subject matter in all likelihood embraced more topics than those recorded in stone and buildings, however, not all were unaware of the books value, Fr. The last codices destroyed were those of Nojpetén, Guatemala in 1697, with their destruction, access to the history of the Maya and opportunity for insight into some key areas of Maya life was greatly diminished. There are only four codices whose authenticity is beyond doubt and these are, The Dresden Codex also known as the Codex Dresdensis, The Madrid Codex, also known as the Tro-Cortesianus Codex, The Paris Codex, also known as the Peresianus Codex. The Grolier Codex, also known as the Sáenz Codex, the Dresden Codex is held in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek, the state library in Dresden, Germany. It is the most elaborate of the codices, and also an important specimen of Maya art. Many sections are ritualistic, others are of an astrological nature, the codex is written on a long sheet of paper that is screen-folded to make a book of 39 leaves, written on both sides. It was probably written just before the Spanish conquest, somehow it made its way to Europe and was bought by the royal library of the court of Saxony in Dresden in 1739. The only exact replica, including the huun, made by a German artist is displayed at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología in Guatemala City, since October,2007. Between 1880 and 1900, Dresden librarian Ernst Förstemann succeeded in deciphering the Maya numerals, subsequent studies have decoded these astronomical almanacs, which include records of the cycles of the Sun and Moon, including eclipse tables, and all of the naked-eye planets. The Serpent Series, pp. 61–69, is an ephemeris of these phenomena that uses a base date of 1.18.1.8.0.16 in the prior era. The Codex was discovered in Spain in the 1860s, it was divided into two parts of differing sizes that were found in different locations, the Codex receives its alternate name of the Tro-Cortesianus Codex after the two parts that were separately discovered
11.
Ancient Rome
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In its many centuries of existence, the Roman state evolved from a monarchy to a classical republic and then to an increasingly autocratic empire. Through conquest and assimilation, it came to dominate the Mediterranean region and then Western Europe, Asia Minor, North Africa and it is often grouped into classical antiquity together with ancient Greece, and their similar cultures and societies are known as the Greco-Roman world. Ancient Roman civilisation has contributed to modern government, law, politics, engineering, art, literature, architecture, technology, warfare, religion, language and society. Rome professionalised and expanded its military and created a system of government called res publica, the inspiration for modern republics such as the United States and France. By the end of the Republic, Rome had conquered the lands around the Mediterranean and beyond, its domain extended from the Atlantic to Arabia, the Roman Empire emerged with the end of the Republic and the dictatorship of Augustus Caesar. 721 years of Roman-Persian Wars started in 92 BC with their first war against Parthia and it would become the longest conflict in human history, and have major lasting effects and consequences for both empires. Under Trajan, the Empire reached its territorial peak, Republican mores and traditions started to decline during the imperial period, with civil wars becoming a prelude common to the rise of a new emperor. Splinter states, such as the Palmyrene Empire, would divide the Empire during the crisis of the 3rd century. Plagued by internal instability and attacked by various migrating peoples, the part of the empire broke up into independent kingdoms in the 5th century. This splintering is a landmark historians use to divide the ancient period of history from the pre-medieval Dark Ages of Europe. King Numitor was deposed from his throne by his brother, Amulius, while Numitors daughter, Rhea Silvia, because Rhea Silvia was raped and impregnated by Mars, the Roman god of war, the twins were considered half-divine. The new king, Amulius, feared Romulus and Remus would take back the throne, a she-wolf saved and raised them, and when they were old enough, they returned the throne of Alba Longa to Numitor. Romulus became the source of the citys name, in order to attract people to the city, Rome became a sanctuary for the indigent, exiled, and unwanted. This caused a problem for Rome, which had a large workforce but was bereft of women, Romulus traveled to the neighboring towns and tribes and attempted to secure marriage rights, but as Rome was so full of undesirables they all refused. Legend says that the Latins invited the Sabines to a festival and stole their unmarried maidens, leading to the integration of the Latins, after a long time in rough seas, they landed at the banks of the Tiber River. Not long after they landed, the men wanted to take to the sea again, one woman, named Roma, suggested that the women burn the ships out at sea to prevent them from leaving. At first, the men were angry with Roma, but they realized that they were in the ideal place to settle. They named the settlement after the woman who torched their ships, the Roman poet Virgil recounted this legend in his classical epic poem the Aeneid
12.
Wax tablet
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A wax tablet is a tablet made of wood and covered with a layer of wax, often linked loosely to a cover tablet, as a double-leaved diptych. It was used as a reusable and portable writing surface in Antiquity, ciceros letters make passing reference to the use of cerae, and some examples of wax-tablets have been preserved in waterlogged deposits in the Roman fort at Vindolanda on Hadrians Wall. Medieval wax tablet books are on display in several European museums, writing on the wax surface was performed with a pointed instrument, a stylus. Therefore, the stylus could not be applied with the degree of dexterity as a pen. A straight-edged, spatula-like implement would be used in a fashion to serve as an eraser. The entire tablet could be erased for reuse by warming it to about 50 °C, the modern expression of a clean slate equates to the Latin expression tabula rasa. Wax tablets were used for a variety of purposes, from taking down students or secretaries notes to recording business accounts, early forms of shorthand were used too. The earliest surviving exemplar of a writing tablet with an ivory hinge was among the finds recovered from the 14th-century BCE Uluburun Shipwreck near Kaş in modern Turkey in 1986. This find further confirmed that the reference to writing tablets in Homer was far from anachronistic, an archaeological discovery in 1979 in Durrës, Albania found two wax tablets made of ivory in a grave believed to belong to a money lender from the 2nd century CE. The Greeks probably started using the pair of wax tablets. An alternative theory holds that it has retained its Semitic designation, daltu, in Hebrew the term evolved into daleth. In the first millennium BCE writing tablets were in use in Mesopotamia as well as Syria, writing tablets of ivory were found in the ruins of Sargons palace in Nimrud. Hériman of Tournai, a monk at the abbey of St Martin of Tournai, a remarkable example of a wax tablet book are the servitude records which the hospital of Austrias oldest city, Enns, established in 1500. Ten wooden plates, sized 375 x 207 mm and arranged in a 90 mm stack, are divided into two halves along their long axis. The annual payables due are written on parchment or paper glued to the left sides, payables received were recorded for deduction on the respective right sides, which are covered with brownish-black writing wax. The material is based on beeswax, and contains 5-10% plant oils and this volume is the continuation of an earlier one, which was begun in 1447. Wax tablets were used for high-volume business records of transient importance until the 19th century, for instance, the salt mining authority at Schwäbisch Hall employed wax records until 1812. The fish market in Rouen used them even until the 1860s, tafel, Buch und Blatt in Near Eastern Studies in Honour of W. F
13.
Classical antiquity
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It is the period in which Greek and Roman society flourished and wielded great influence throughout Europe, North Africa and Southwestern Asia. Conventionally, it is taken to begin with the earliest-recorded Epic Greek poetry of Homer, and continues through the emergence of Christianity and it ends with the dissolution of classical culture at the close of Late Antiquity, blending into the Early Middle Ages. Such a wide sampling of history and territory covers many disparate cultures, Classical antiquity may refer also to an idealised vision among later people of what was, in Edgar Allan Poes words, the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome. The culture of the ancient Greeks, together with influences from the ancient Near East, was the basis of art, philosophy, society. The earliest period of classical antiquity takes place before the background of gradual re-appearance of historical sources following the Bronze Age collapse, the 8th and 7th centuries BC are still largely proto-historical, with the earliest Greek alphabetic inscriptions appearing in the first half of the 8th century. Homer is usually assumed to have lived in the 8th or 7th century BC, in the same period falls the traditional date for the establishment of the Ancient Olympic Games, in 776 BC. The Phoenicians originally expanded from Canaan ports, by the 8th century dominating trade in the Mediterranean, carthage was founded in 814 BC, and the Carthaginians by 700 BC had firmly established strongholds in Sicily, Italy and Sardinia, which created conflicts of interest with Etruria. The Etruscans had established control in the region by the late 7th century BC, forming the aristocratic. According to legend, Rome was founded on April 21,753 BC by twin descendants of the Trojan prince Aeneas, Romulus and Remus. As the city was bereft of women, legend says that the Latins invited the Sabines to a festival and stole their unmarried maidens, leading to the integration of the Latins and the Sabines. Archaeological evidence indeed shows first traces of settlement at the Roman Forum in the mid-8th century BC, the seventh and final king of Rome was Tarquinius Superbus. As the son of Tarquinius Priscus and the son-in-law of Servius Tullius, Superbus was of Etruscan birth and it was during his reign that the Etruscans reached their apex of power. Superbus removed and destroyed all the Sabine shrines and altars from the Tarpeian Rock, the people came to object to his rule when he failed to recognize the rape of Lucretia, a patrician Roman, at the hands of his own son. Lucretias kinsman, Lucius Junius Brutus, summoned the Senate and had Superbus, after Superbus expulsion, the Senate voted to never again allow the rule of a king and reformed Rome into a republican government in 509 BC. In fact the Latin word Rex meaning King became a dirty and hated throughout the Republic. In 510, Spartan troops helped the Athenians overthrow the tyrant Hippias, cleomenes I, king of Sparta, put in place a pro-Spartan oligarchy conducted by Isagoras. Greece entered the 4th century under Spartan hegemony, but by 395 BC the Spartan rulers removed Lysander from office, and Sparta lost her naval supremacy. Athens, Argos, Thebes and Corinth, the two of which were formerly Spartan allies, challenged Spartan dominance in the Corinthian War, which ended inconclusively in 387 BC
14.
Printing press
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A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium, thereby transferring the ink. The printing press was invented in the Holy Roman Empire by the German Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, the printing press spread within several decades to over two hundred cities in a dozen European countries. By 1500, printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million volumes, in the 16th century, with presses spreading further afield, their output rose tenfold to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies. The operation of a press became so synonymous with the enterprise of printing that it lent its name to a new branch of media. The sharp rise of learning and literacy amongst the middle class led to an increased demand for books which the time-consuming hand-copying method fell far short of accommodating. Technologies preceding the press led to the presss invention included, manufacturing of paper, development of ink, woodblock printing. At the same time, a number of products and technological processes had reached a level of maturity which allowed their potential use for printing purposes. The device was used from very early on in urban contexts as a cloth press for printing patterns. Gutenberg may have also inspired by the paper presses which had spread through the German lands since the late 14th century. Gutenberg adopted the design, thereby mechanizing the printing process. Printing, however, put a demand on the quite different from pressing. Gutenberg adapted the construction so that the power exerted by the platen on the paper was now applied both evenly and with the required sudden elasticity. To speed up the process, he introduced a movable undertable with a plane surface on which the sheets could be swiftly changed. The known examples range from Germany to England to Italy, however, the various techniques employed did not have the refinement and efficiency needed to become widely accepted. Gutenberg greatly improved the process by treating typesetting and printing as two separate work steps, a goldsmith by profession, he created his type pieces from a lead-based alloy which suited printing purposes so well that it is still used today. The mass production of metal letters was achieved by his key invention of a hand mould. Another factor conducive to printing arose from the existing in the format of the codex. Considered the most important advance in the history of the prior to printing itself
15.
Electronic paper
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Electronic paper and e-paper are display devices that mimic the appearance of ordinary ink on paper. Unlike conventional backlit flat panel displays that light, electronic paper displays reflect light like paper. This may make them comfortable to read, and provide a wider viewing angle than most light-emitting displays. The contrast ratio in electronic displays available as of 2008 approaches newspaper, an ideal e-paper display can be read in direct sunlight without the image appearing to fade. Many electronic paper technologies hold static text and images indefinitely without electricity, flexible electronic paper uses plastic substrates and plastic electronics for the display backplane. There is ongoing competition among manufacturers to provide full-color ability, Electronic paper was first developed in the 1970s by Nick Sheridon at Xeroxs Palo Alto Research Center. The first electronic paper, called Gyricon, consisted of polyethylene spheres between 75 and 106 micrometers across, each sphere is a janus particle composed of negatively charged black plastic on one side and positively charged white plastic on the other. The spheres are embedded in a transparent silicone sheet, with each sphere suspended in a bubble of oil so that they can rotate freely. The polarity of the applied to each pair of electrodes then determines whether the white or black side is face-up. At the FPD2008 exhibition, Japanese company Soken demonstrated a wall with electronic wall-paper using this technology, in the simplest implementation of an electrophoretic display, titanium dioxide particles approximately one micrometer in diameter are dispersed in a hydrocarbon oil. A dark-colored dye is added to the oil, along with surfactants. This mixture is placed between two parallel, conductive plates separated by a gap of 10 to 100 micrometres, when a voltage is applied across the two plates, the particles migrate electrophoretically to the plate that bears the opposite charge from that on the particles. When the particles are located at the front side of the display, it appears white, when the particles are located at the rear side of the display, it appears dark, because the incident light is absorbed by the colored dye. Electrophoretic displays are considered examples of the electronic paper category, because of their paper-like appearance. These displays are constructed from an electrophoretic imaging film manufactured by E Ink Corporation, a mobile phone that used the technology is the Motorola Fone. Electrophoretic Display technology has also developed by Sipix and Bridgestone/Delta. SiPix is now part of E Ink, the Sipix design uses a flexible 0. 15mm Microcup architecture, instead of E Inks 0. 04mm diameter microcapsules. Bridgestone Corp. s Advanced Materials Division cooperated with Delta Optoelectronics Inc. in developing the Quick Response Liquid Powder Display technology, an electrophoretic display forms images by rearranging charged pigment particles with an applied electric field
16.
Christianity
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Christianity is a Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, who serves as the focal point for the religion. It is the worlds largest religion, with over 2.4 billion followers, or 33% of the global population, Christians believe that Jesus is the Son of God and the savior of humanity whose coming as the Messiah was prophesied in the Old Testament. Christian theology is summarized in creeds such as the Apostles Creed and his incarnation, earthly ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection are often referred to as the gospel, meaning good news. The term gospel also refers to accounts of Jesuss life and teaching, four of which—Matthew, Mark, Luke. Christianity is an Abrahamic religion that began as a Second Temple Judaic sect in the mid-1st century, following the Age of Discovery, Christianity spread to the Americas, Australasia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the rest of the world through missionary work and colonization. Christianity has played a prominent role in the shaping of Western civilization, throughout its history, Christianity has weathered schisms and theological disputes that have resulted in many distinct churches and denominations. Worldwide, the three largest branches of Christianity are the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the denominations of Protestantism. There are many important differences of interpretation and opinion of the Bible, concise doctrinal statements or confessions of religious beliefs are known as creeds. They began as baptismal formulae and were expanded during the Christological controversies of the 4th and 5th centuries to become statements of faith. Many evangelical Protestants reject creeds as definitive statements of faith, even agreeing with some or all of the substance of the creeds. The Baptists have been non-creedal in that they have not sought to establish binding authoritative confessions of faith on one another. Also rejecting creeds are groups with roots in the Restoration Movement, such as the Christian Church, the Evangelical Christian Church in Canada, the Apostles Creed is the most widely accepted statement of the articles of Christian faith. It is also used by Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists and this particular creed was developed between the 2nd and 9th centuries. Its central doctrines are those of the Trinity and God the Creator, each of the doctrines found in this creed can be traced to statements current in the apostolic period. The creed was used as a summary of Christian doctrine for baptismal candidates in the churches of Rome. Most Christians accept the use of creeds, and subscribe to at least one of the mentioned above. The central tenet of Christianity is the belief in Jesus as the Son of God, Christians believe that Jesus, as the Messiah, was anointed by God as savior of humanity, and hold that Jesus coming was the fulfillment of messianic prophecies of the Old Testament. The Christian concept of the Messiah differs significantly from the contemporary Jewish concept, Jesus, having become fully human, suffered the pains and temptations of a mortal man, but did not sin
17.
Bible
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The Bible is a collection of sacred texts or scriptures that Jews and Christians consider to be a product of divine inspiration and a record of the relationship between God and humans. Many different authors contributed to the Bible, what is regarded as canonical text differs depending on traditions and groups, a number of Bible canons have evolved, with overlapping and diverging contents. The Christian Old Testament overlaps with the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Septuagint, the New Testament is a collection of writings by early Christians, believed to be mostly Jewish disciples of Christ, written in first-century Koine Greek. These early Christian Greek writings consist of narratives, letters, among Christian denominations there is some disagreement about the contents of the canon, primarily the Apocrypha, a list of works that are regarded with varying levels of respect. Attitudes towards the Bible also differ amongst Christian groups and this concept arose during the Protestant Reformation, and many denominations today support the use of the Bible as the only source of Christian teaching. With estimated total sales of over 5 billion copies, the Bible is widely considered to be the book of all time. It has estimated sales of 100 million copies, and has been a major influence on literature and history, especially in the West. The English word Bible is from the Latin biblia, from the word in Medieval Latin and Late Latin. Medieval Latin biblia is short for biblia sacra holy book, while biblia in Greek and it gradually came to be regarded as a feminine singular noun in medieval Latin, and so the word was loaned as a singular into the vernaculars of Western Europe. Latin biblia sacra holy books translates Greek τὰ βιβλία τὰ ἅγια ta biblia ta hagia, the word βιβλίον itself had the literal meaning of paper or scroll and came to be used as the ordinary word for book. It is the diminutive of βύβλος byblos, Egyptian papyrus, possibly so called from the name of the Phoenician sea port Byblos from whence Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece, the Greek ta biblia was an expression Hellenistic Jews used to describe their sacred books. Christian use of the term can be traced to c.223 CE, bruce notes that Chrysostom appears to be the first writer to use the Greek phrase ta biblia to describe both the Old and New Testaments together. The division of the Hebrew Bible into verses is based on the sof passuk cantillation mark used by the 10th-century Masoretes to record the verse divisions used in oral traditions. The oldest extant copy of a complete Bible is an early 4th-century parchment book preserved in the Vatican Library, the oldest copy of the Tanakh in Hebrew and Aramaic dates from the 10th century CE. The oldest copy of a complete Latin Bible is the Codex Amiatinus and he states that it is not a magical book, nor was it literally written by God and passed to mankind. In Christian Bibles, the New Testament Gospels were derived from traditions in the second half of the first century CE. Riches says that, Scholars have attempted to reconstruct something of the history of the oral traditions behind the Gospels, the period of transmission is short, less than 40 years passed between the death of Jesus and the writing of Marks Gospel. This means that there was time for oral traditions to assume fixed form
18.
Martial
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In these short, witty poems he cheerfully satirises city life and the scandalous activities of his acquaintances, and romanticises his provincial upbringing. He wrote a total of 1,561, of which 1,235 are in elegiac couplets, Martial has been called the greatest Latin epigrammatist, and is considered the creator of the modern epigram. Knowledge of his origins and early life are derived almost entirely from his works, which can be more or less dated according to the well-known events to which they refer. In Book X of his Epigrams, composed between 95 and 98, he mentions celebrating his birthday, hence he was born during March 38,39,40 or 41 AD. His place of birth was Augusta Bilbilis in Hispania Tarraconensis and his parents, Fronto and Flaccilla, appear to have died in his youth. Martial professes to be of the school of Catullus, Pedo, the epigram bears to this day the form impressed upon it by his unrivalled skill in wordsmithing. The success of his countrymen may have been what motivated Martial to move to Rome, from Hispania, once he had completed his education. This move occurred in AD64, in which Seneca the Younger and Lucan may have served as his first patrons, not much is known of the details of his life for the first twenty years or so after he came to Rome. He published some poems of which he thought very little in his later years. Martial had neither youthful passion nor youthful enthusiasm to precociously mold him a poet and he made many influential friends and patrons and secured the favor of both Titus and Domitian. From them he obtained various privileges, among others the semestris tribunatus, the earliest of his extant works, known as Liber spectaculorum, was first published at the opening of the Colosseum in the reign of Titus. It relates to the performances given by him, but the book as it now stands was presented to the world in or about the first year of Domitian, i. e. about the year 81. The two books, numbered by editors xiii. and xiv. and known by the names of Xenia, in 86 he bore for the world the first two of the twelve books on which his pendulous and sterling reputation rests. From that time till his return to Hispania in 98 he published a volume almost every year. The first nine books and the first edition of Book X. appeared in the reign of Domitian, Book XI. appeared at the end of 96, shortly after the accession of Nerva. A revised edition of book X. that which we now possess extant, appeared in 98, the last book was written after three years absence in Hispania, shortly before his lamentable death, which happened about the year 102 or 103. These twelve books bring Martials ordinary mode of life between the age of forty-five and sixty very fully before us for leisurely consideration of a Sunday afternoon and his regular home for thirty-five years was the bustle of metropolitan Rome. He lived at first up three flights of stairs, and his garret overlooked the laurels in front of the portico of Agrippa
19.
Greco-Roman world
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Certainly, all men of note and accomplishment, whatever their ethnic extractions, spoke and wrote in Greek and/or Latin. The historian Josephus Flavius was Jewish but he wrote and spoke in Greek and was a Roman citizen. Occupying the periphery of this world were Roman Germany, Illyria and Pannonia, also included was Dacia, Nubia, Mauretania, Arabia Petraea, the Tauric Chersonesus. The above seems to ignore the major rivalry between the Greco-Romans, during their period of ascendancy, and the empire to the east. In the schools of art, philosophy and rhetoric, the foundations of education were transmitted throughout the lands of Greek, within its educated class spanning all of the Greco-Roman era, the testimony of literary borrowings and influences is overwhelming proof of a mantle of mutual knowledge. For example, several hundred papyrus volumes found in a Roman villa at Herculaneum are in Greek, from the lives of Cicero and Julius Caesar, it is known that Romans frequented the schools in Greece. The installation, both in Greek and Latin, of Augustuss monumental eulogy, the Res Gestae, is a proof of recognition for the dual vehicles of the common culture. Most educated Romans were likely bilingual in Greek and Latin, Greco-Roman architecture is architecture of the Roman world that followed the principles and style established in ancient Greece. The most representative building of that era was the temple, other prominent structures that represented the style included government buildings, like the Roman Senate, and cultural structures, like the Colosseum. The three primary styles of column design used in temples in classical Greece were Doric, Ionic, examples of Doric architecture are the Parthenon and the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, while the Erechtheum, which is located right next to the Parthenon is Ionic. Ionic Greco-Roman architecture tend to be more decorative than the formal Doric styles, by AD211, with Caracallas edict known as the Constitutio Antoniniana, all free inhabitants of the Empire became citizens. As a result, even after the Fall of Rome, the people of the empire that remained continued to call themselves Romans even though Greek became the language of the Empire. Rhomaioi is what they continued to call themselves through the Ottoman era, Classical Antiquity Classical mythology Legacy of the Roman Empire Greco-Roman mysteries Hellenistic Greece Magic in the Greco-Roman world List of Greco-Roman geographers Sir William Smith. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography
20.
Recto and verso
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The terms recto and verso refer to the text written on the front and back sides of a leaf of paper in a bound item such as a codex, book, broadsheet, or pamphlet. The terms are shortened from Latin rectō foliō and versō foliō, translating to on the side of the page and on the turned side of the page. The page faces themselves are called folium rectum and folium versum in Latin, in codicology, each physical sheet of a manuscript is numbered and the sides are referred to as rectum and folium versum, abbreviated as r and v respectively. Editions of manuscripts will thus mark the position of text in the manuscript in the form fol. 1r, sometimes with the r and v in superscript, as in 1r, or with a superscript o indicating the ablative recto, verso and this terminology has been standard since the beginnings of modern codicology in the 17th century. The use of the recto and verso are also used in the codicology of manuscripts written in right-to-left scripts, like Syriac, Arabic. However, as these scripts are written in the direction to the scripts witnessed in European codices. The reading order of each folio remains first recto, then verso regardless of writing direction, the distinction between recto and verso can be convenient in the annotation of scholarly books, particularly in bilingual edition translations. The recto and verso terms can also be employed for the front and back of a one-sheet artwork, a recto-verso drawing is a sheet with drawings on both sides, for example in a sketchbook—although usually in these cases there is no obvious primary side. Some works are planned to exploit being on two sides of the piece of paper, but usually the works are not intended to be considered together. Paper was relatively expensive in the past, indeed good drawing paper still is more expensive than normal paper. In some early printed books, it is the rather than the pages. Thus each folium carries a number on its recto side. This was also common in e. g. internal company reports in the 20th century. Book design Obverse and reverse in coins Page spread
21.
Random access
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It is typically contrasted to sequential access. For example, data might be stored notionally in a sequence like a row. However, given all the coordinates, a program can access each record about as quickly and easily as any other, at first the term random access was used because the process had to be capable of finding records no matter in which sequence they were required. However, soon the term direct access gained favour because one could directly retrieve a record, the operative attribute however is that the device can access any required record immediately on demand. The opposite is sequential access, where a remote element takes longer time to access, a typical illustration of this distinction is to compare an ancient scroll and the book. A more modern example is a tape and a CD. In data structures, direct access implies the ability to access any entry in a list in constant time, very few data structures can guarantee this, other than arrays. Direct access is required, or at least valuable, in many such as binary search. Other data structures, such as linked lists, sacrifice direct access to permit efficient inserts, deletes, data stream Random-access machine Locality of reference
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Sequential access
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In computer science, sequential access means that a group of elements is accessed in a predetermined, ordered sequence. Sequential access is sometimes the way of accessing the data. It may also be the method of choice, for example if all that is wanted is to process a sequence of data elements in order. However, there is no consistent definition of access or sequentiality. In fact, different sequentiality definitions can lead to different sequentiality quantification results, in spatial dimension, request size, strided distance, backward accesses, re-accesses can affect sequentiality. For temporal sequentiality, characteristics such as multi-stream and inter-arrival time threshold has impact on the definition of sequentiality, in data structures, a data structure is said to have sequential access if one can only visit the values it contains in one particular order. The canonical example is the linked list, indexing into a list that has sequential access requires O time, where n is the index. On the other hand, some algorithms, typically those that do not have index, require only sequential access, such as mergesort, direct access storage device Queued sequential access method
23.
Parchment
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Parchment is a writing material made from specially prepared untanned skins of animals—primarily sheep, calves, and goats. It has been used as a medium for over two millennia. Vellum is a finer quality parchment made from the skins of kids, lambs and it may be called animal membrane by libraries and museums that wish to avoid distinguishing between parchment and the more restricted term vellum. Today the term parchment is often used in non-technical contexts to refer to any animal skin, particularly goat, sheep or cow, that has been scraped or dried under tension. Vellum in theory refers exclusively to calfskin, and is used to denote a quality of material. The term parchment originally referred only to the skin of sheep and, occasionally, the word parchment evolved from the name of the city of Pergamon which was a thriving center of parchment production during the Hellenistic period. This account, originated in the writings of Pliny the Elder, is dubious because parchment had been in use in Anatolia, in the 2nd century BC a great library was set up in Pergamon that rivaled the famous Library of Alexandria. Writing on prepared animal skins had a history, however. H. Ibscher, and preserved in the Cairo Museum, a roll of the Twelfth Dynasty now in Berlin, the text now in the British Museum. Though the Assyrians and the Babylonians impressed their cuneiform on clay tablets, early Islamic texts are also found on parchment. In the later Middle Ages, especially the 15th century, parchment was largely replaced by paper for most uses except luxury manuscripts, new techniques in paper milling allowed it to be much cheaper than parchment, it was still made of textile rags and of very high quality. With the advent of printing in the fifteenth century, the demands of printers far exceeded the supply of animal skins for parchment. Although most copies of the Gutenberg Bible are on paper, some were printed on parchment,12 of the 48 surviving copies, in 1490, Johannes Trithemius preferred the older methods, because handwriting placed on parchment will be able to endure a thousand years. But how long will printing last, which is dependent on paper and it lasts for two hundred years that is a long time. In fact high quality paper from this period has survived 500 years or more very well, the heyday of parchment use was during the medieval period, but there has been a growing revival of its use among artists since the late 20th century. Although parchment never stopped being used it had ceased to be a choice for artists supports by the end of 15th century Renaissance. This was partly due to its expense and partly due to its working properties. When the water in paint media touches parchments surface, the collagen melts slightly, forming a bed for the paint
24.
Egypt
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Egypt, officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia by a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt is a Mediterranean country bordered by the Gaza Strip and Israel to the northeast, the Gulf of Aqaba to the east, the Red Sea to the east and south, Sudan to the south, and Libya to the west. Across the Gulf of Aqaba lies Jordan, and across from the Sinai Peninsula lies Saudi Arabia, although Jordan and it is the worlds only contiguous Afrasian nation. Egypt has among the longest histories of any country, emerging as one of the worlds first nation states in the tenth millennium BC. Considered a cradle of civilisation, Ancient Egypt experienced some of the earliest developments of writing, agriculture, urbanisation, organised religion and central government. One of the earliest centres of Christianity, Egypt was Islamised in the century and remains a predominantly Muslim country. With over 92 million inhabitants, Egypt is the most populous country in North Africa and the Arab world, the third-most populous in Africa, and the fifteenth-most populous in the world. The great majority of its people live near the banks of the Nile River, an area of about 40,000 square kilometres, the large regions of the Sahara desert, which constitute most of Egypts territory, are sparsely inhabited. About half of Egypts residents live in areas, with most spread across the densely populated centres of greater Cairo, Alexandria. Modern Egypt is considered to be a regional and middle power, with significant cultural, political, and military influence in North Africa, the Middle East and the Muslim world. Egypts economy is one of the largest and most diversified in the Middle East, Egypt is a member of the United Nations, Non-Aligned Movement, Arab League, African Union, and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Miṣr is the Classical Quranic Arabic and modern name of Egypt. The name is of Semitic origin, directly cognate with other Semitic words for Egypt such as the Hebrew מִצְרַיִם, the oldest attestation of this name for Egypt is the Akkadian
25.
Paperback
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A paperback is a type of book characterized by a thick paper or paperboard cover, and often held together with glue rather than stitches or staples. In contrast, hardcover or hardback books are bound with cardboard covered with cloth, inexpensive books bound in paper have existed since at least the 19th century in such forms as pamphlets, yellowbacks, dime novels, and airport novels. Modern paperbacks can be differentiated by size, in the US there are mass-market paperbacks and larger, more durable trade paperbacks. In the UK, there are A-format, B-format, and the largest C-format sizes, Paperback editions of books are issued when a publisher decides to release a book in a low-cost format. Cheaper, lower quality paper, glued bindings, and the lack of a cover may contribute to the lower cost of paperbacks. Paperbacks can be the medium when a book is not expected to be a major seller or where the publisher wishes to release a book without putting forth a large investment. Examples include many novels, and newer editions or reprintings of older books, first editions of many modern books, especially genre fiction, are issued in paperback. Best-selling books, on the hand, may maintain sales in hardcover for an extended period in order to reap the greater profits that the hardcovers provide. These paper bound volumes were offered for sale at a fraction of the historic cost of a book, the Routledges Railway Library series of paperbacks remained in print until 1898, and offered the traveling public 1,277 unique titles. The German-language market also supported examples of cheap books, Bernhard Tauchnitz started the Collection of British. These inexpensive, paperbound editions, a precursor to mass-market paperbacks. Reclam published Shakespeare in this format from October 1857 and went on to pioneer the mass-market paper-bound Universal-Bibliothek series from 10 November 1867, the German publisher Albatross Books revised the 20th-century mass-market paperback format in 1931, but the approach of World War II cut the experiment short. The first released book on Penguins 1935 list was André Maurois Ariel, Lane intended to produce inexpensive books. He purchased paperback rights from publishers, ordered large print runs to keep prices low. Booksellers were initially reluctant to buy his books, but when Woolworths placed a large order, after that initial success, booksellers showed more willingness to stock paperbacks, and the name Penguin became closely associated with the word paperback. In 1939, Robert de Graaf issued a similar line in the United States, the term pocket book became synonymous with paperback in English-speaking North America. In French, the term livre de poche was used and is still in use today, de Graaf, like Lane, negotiated paperback rights from other publishers, and produced many runs. His practices contrasted with those of Lane by his adoption of illustrated covers aimed at the North American market, in order to reach an even broader market than Lane, he used distribution networks of newspapers and magazines, which had a lengthy history of being aimed at mass audiences
26.
Late antiquity
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Late antiquity is a periodization used by historians to describe the time of transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages in mainland Europe, the Mediterranean world, and the Near East. The development of the periodization has generally been accredited to historian Peter Brown, precise boundaries for the period are a continuing matter of debate, but Brown proposes a period between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Generally, it can be thought of as from the end of the Roman Empires Crisis of the Third Century to, in the East, the early Islamic period, following the Muslim conquests in the mid–7th century. In the West the end was earlier, with the start of the Early Medieval period typically placed in the 6th century, beginning with Constantine the Great, Christianity was made legal in the Empire, and a new capital was founded at Constantinople. The resultant cultural fusion of Greco-Roman, Germanic and Christian traditions formed the foundations of the subsequent culture of Europe, the term Spätantike, literally late antiquity, has been used by German-speaking historians since its popularization by Alois Riegl in the early 20th century. Concurrently, some migrating Germanic tribes such as the Ostrogoths and Visigoths saw themselves as perpetuating the Roman tradition, Constantine confirmed the legalization of the religion through the so-called Edict of Milan in 313, jointly issued with his rival in the East, Licinius. Monasticism was not the only new Christian movement to appear in Late Antiquity, notable in this regard is the topic of the Fifty Bibles of Constantine. Within the recently legitimized Christian community of the 4th century, a division could be distinctly seen between the laity and an increasingly celibate male leadership. Celibate and detached, the clergy became an elite equal in prestige to urban notables. The Late Antique period also saw a transformation of the political and social basis of life in. The later Roman Empire was in a sense a network of cities, archaeology now supplements literary sources to document the transformation followed by collapse of cities in the Mediterranean basin. Burials within the urban precincts mark another stage in dissolution of traditional urbanistic discipline, overpowered by the attraction of saintly shrines, in Roman Britain, the typical 4th- and 5th-century layer of black earth within cities seems to be a result of increased gardening in formerly urban spaces. A similar though less marked decline in population occurred later in Constantinople. In Europe there was also a decline in urban populations. As a whole, the period of antiquity was accompanied by an overall population decline in almost all Europe. Long-distance markets disappeared, and there was a reversion to a degree of local production and consumption, rather than webs of commerce. The degree and extent of discontinuity in the cities of the Greek East is a moot subject among historians. In the western Mediterranean, the new cities known to be founded in Europe between the 5th and 8th centuries were the four or five Visigothic victory cities
27.
Middle Ages
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In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or Medieval Period lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance, the Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history, classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is subdivided into the Early, High. Population decline, counterurbanisation, invasion, and movement of peoples, the large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the seventh century, North Africa and the Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with classical antiquity was not complete. The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire survived in the east and remained a major power, the empires law code, the Corpus Juris Civilis or Code of Justinian, was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became widely admired later in the Middle Ages. In the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions, monasteries were founded as campaigns to Christianise pagan Europe continued. The Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, briefly established the Carolingian Empire during the later 8th, the Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralised nation states, reducing crime and violence, intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, and by the founding of universities. Controversy, heresy, and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the conflict, civil strife. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages, the Middle Ages is one of the three major periods in the most enduring scheme for analysing European history, classical civilisation, or Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern Period. Medieval writers divided history into periods such as the Six Ages or the Four Empires, when referring to their own times, they spoke of them as being modern. In the 1330s, the humanist and poet Petrarch referred to pre-Christian times as antiqua, leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodisation in his History of the Florentine People. Bruni and later argued that Italy had recovered since Petrarchs time. The Middle Ages first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas or middle season, in early usage, there were many variants, including medium aevum, or middle age, first recorded in 1604, and media saecula, or middle ages, first recorded in 1625. The alternative term medieval derives from medium aevum, tripartite periodisation became standard after the German 17th-century historian Christoph Cellarius divided history into three periods, Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. The most commonly given starting point for the Middle Ages is 476, for Europe as a whole,1500 is often considered to be the end of the Middle Ages, but there is no universally agreed upon end date. English historians often use the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to mark the end of the period
28.
Bookbinding
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Bookbinding is the process of physically assembling a book from an ordered stack of paper sheets that are folded together into sections or sometimes left as a stack of individual sheets. The stack is then bound together along one edge by either sewing with thread through the folds or by a layer of flexible adhesive, for protection, the bound stack is either wrapped in a flexible cover or attached to stiff boards. Finally, a cover is adhered to the boards and a label with identifying information is attached to the covers along with additional decoration. Bookbinding is a trade that relies on basic operations of measuring, cutting. A finished book depends on a minimum of two dozen operations to complete but sometimes more than double that according to the specific style. All operations have an order and each one relies on accurate completion of the previous step with little room for back tracking. An extremely durable binding can be achieved by using the best hand techniques, Bookbinding combines skills from other trades such as paper and fabric crafts, leather work, model making, and graphic arts. It requires knowledge about numerous varieties of book structures along with all the internal and external details of assembly, a working knowledge of the materials involved is required. Bookbinding is a craft of great antiquity, and at the same time. The division between craft and industry is not so wide as might at first be imagined and it is interesting to observe that the main problems faced by the mass-production bookbinder are the same as those that confronted the medieval craftsman or the modern hand binder. Before the computer age, the bookbinding trade involved two divisions, second was Letterpress binding which deals with making new books intended to be read from and includes fine binding, library binding, edition binding, and publishers bindings. A result of the new bindings is a third division dealing with the repair, restoration, with the digital age, personal computers have replaced the pen and paper based accounting that used to drive most of the work in the stationery binding industry. There is a grey area between the two divisions. There are cases where the printing and binding jobs are combined in one shop, a step up to the next level of mechanization is determined by economics of scale until you reach production runs of ten thousand copies or more in a factory employing a dozen or more workers. The craft of bookbinding probably originated in India, where religious sutras were copied on to palm leaves with a metal stylus, the leaf was then dried and rubbed with ink, which would form a stain in the wound. The finished leaves were given numbers, and two long twines were threaded through each end through wooden boards, making a palm-leaf book, when the book was closed, the excess twine would be wrapped around the boards to protect the manuscript leaves. Buddhist monks took the idea through Afghanistan to China in the first century BC, similar techniques can also be found in ancient Egypt where priestly texts were compiled on scrolls and books of papyrus. Another version of bookmaking can be seen through the ancient Mayan codex, writers in the Hellenistic-Roman culture wrote longer texts as scrolls, these were stored in boxes or shelving with small cubbyholes, similar to a modern winerack
29.
Codicology
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Codicology is the study of codices or manuscript books written on parchment as physical objects. It is often referred to as the archaeology of the book, concerning itself with the materials, there are no clear-cut definitions, some codicologists say that their field encompasses palaeography, the study of handwriting, while some palaeographers say that their field encompasses codicology. Palaeographers and codicologists may also study the history of libraries, manuscript-collecting, there exist some very good online databases with research functions for medieval manuscripts. Codices Electronici Ecclesiae Coloniensis, Universität Köln, about 500 manuscripts, marburger Repertorium of German manuscripts in the 13th and 14th century, Philipps-Universität Marburg. The Digital Walters, The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, over 900 illuminated manuscripts and 1250 incunables. Codices Electronici Sangallenses have registered manuscript of St. Gallen, catalogue for Austria with illuminated manuscripts of the 8th to 13th centuries. British Library, several collections, e. g. Harlean Collection. The known Anglo-Saxon works like Beowulf or Lindisfarne Gospel, bodleian Library, Oxford, catalogue, collections similar to the British Library, easy to use. Works all in good quality online, Library of Congress, Washington D. C. huge catalogue of manuscript collections. Hill Museum & Manuscript Library in Collegeville, Minnesota,90,000 manuscripts from Austria, textual scholarship Fragmentology Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, 12th–17th centuries, Center for Digital Initiatives, University of Vermont Libraries
30.
Palaeography
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Palaeography or paleography is the study of ancient and historical handwriting. The discipline is important for understanding, authenticating, and dating ancient texts, however, it cannot in general be used to pinpoint dates with high precision. Palaeography can be a skill for historians and philologists, as it tackles two main difficulties. First, since the style of an alphabet in each given language has evolved constantly. Second, scribes often used many abbreviations, usually so as to more quickly and sometimes to save space. Knowledge of individual letter-forms, ligatures, punctuation, and abbreviations enables the palaeographer to read, the palaeographer must know, first, the language of the text, and second, the historical usages of various styles of handwriting, common writing customs, and scribal or notarial abbreviations. Philological knowledge of the language, vocabulary, and grammar generally used at a time or place can help palaeographers identify ancient or more recent forgeries versus authentic documents. Knowledge of writing materials is essential to the study of handwriting. Palaeography can be used to provide information about the date at which a document was written, scholars also tend to oversimplify diachronic development, assuming models of simplicity rather than complexity. It spread from the Mediterranean coast to the borders of India, becoming popular and being adopted by many people. The Aramaic script was written in a form with a direction from right to left. One innovation in Aramaic is the matres lectionis system to indicate certain vowels, Early Phoenician-derived scripts did not have letters for vowels, and so most texts recorded just consonants. Most likely as a consequence of changes in North Semitic languages. The letter aleph was employed to write /ā/, he for /ō/, yod for /ī/, Aramaic writing and language supplanted Babylonian cuneiform and Akkadian language, even in their homeland in Mesopotamia. The wide diffusion of Aramaic letters led to its writing being used not only in monumental inscriptions, Aramaic papyri have been found in large numbers in Egypt, especially at Elephantine – among them are official and private documents of the Jewish military settlement in 5 BC. In the Aramaic papyri and potsherds, words are separated usually by a small gap, at the turn of the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC, the heretofore uniform Aramaic letters developed new forms, as a result of dialectal and political fragmentation in several subgroups. The most important of these is the so-called square Hebrew block script, followed by Palmyrene, Nabataean, Aramaic is usually divided into three main parts, Old Aramaic Middle Aramaic, and Modern Aramaic of the present day. Old Aramaic appeared in the 11th century BC as the language of the first Aramaean states
31.
Polyptych
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A polyptych is a painting which is divided into sections, or panels. Polyptychs typically display one central or main panel that is usually the largest of the attachments, while the panels are called side panels. Sometimes, as evident in the Ghent and Isenheim works, the panels can be varied in arrangement to show different views or openings in the piece. Polyptychs were most commonly created by early Renaissance painters, the majority of which designed their works to be altarpieces in churches, the polyptych form of art was also quite popular among ukiyo-e printmakers of Edo period Japan. Some medieval manuscripts are polyptychs, particularly Carolingian works, in which the columns on the page are framed with borders that resemble polyptych paintings, altar displays may also form polyptychs. Dominic Polyptych by Lorenzo Lotto Media related to polyptychs at Wikimedia Commons
32.
Herculaneum
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Located in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, Herculaneum was an ancient Roman town destroyed by volcanic pyroclastic flows in 79 AD. Its ruins are located in the commune of Ercolano, Campania and it had been thought until then that the town had been evacuated by the inhabitants. Herculaneum was a town than Pompeii, possessing an extraordinary density of fine houses with, for example. Ancient tradition connected Herculaneum with the name of the Greek hero Herakles, in fact, it seems that some forefathers of the Samnite tribes of the Italian mainland founded the first civilization on the site of Herculaneum at the end of the 6th century BC. Soon after, the town came under Greek control and was used as a trading post because of its proximity to the Gulf of Naples, the Greeks named the city Ἡράκλειον, Heraklion. In the 4th century BC, Herculaneum again came under the domination of the Samnites. The city remained under Samnite control until it became a Roman municipium in 89 BC, when, having participated in the Social War, it was defeated by Titus Didius, a legate of Sulla. After the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, the town of Herculaneum was buried under approximately 20 metres of ash, excavations continued sporadically up to the present and today many streets and buildings are visible, although over 75% of the town remains buried. Today, the Italian towns of Ercolano and Portici lie on the site of Herculaneum. Until 1969 the town of Ercolano was called Resina and it changed its name to Ercolano, the Italian modernization of the ancient name in honour of the old city. The inhabitants worshipped above all Hercules, who was believed to be the founder of both the town and Mount Vesuvius, Other important deities worshipped include Venus and Apollo. The catastrophic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius occurred on the afternoon of 24 August 79 AD, because Vesuvius had been dormant for approximately 800 years, it was no longer even recognized as a volcano. Based on archaeological excavations and on two letters of Pliny the Younger to the Roman historian Tacitus, the course of the eruption can be reconstructed, at around 1pm on 24 August, Vesuvius began spewing volcanic ash and stone thousands of meters into the sky. When it reached the tropopause, the top of the cloud flattened, the prevailing winds at the time blew toward the southeast, causing the volcanic material to fall primarily on the city of Pompeii and the surrounding area. Since Herculaneum lay to the west of Vesuvius, it was only affected by the first phase of the eruption. While roofs in Pompeii collapsed under the weight of falling debris, only a few centimetres of ash fell on Herculaneum, causing little damage, during the following night, the eruptive column which had risen into the stratosphere collapsed onto Vesuvius and its flanks. The first pyroclastic surge, formed by a mixture of ash and hot gases, a succession of six flows and surges buried the citys buildings, causing little damage in some areas and preserving structures, objects and victims almost intact. In 1709 the digging of a deep well revealed some exceptional statues at the lowest levels which was found to be the site of the theatre
33.
Julius Caesar
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Gaius Julius Caesar, known as Julius Caesar, was a Roman politician, general, and notable author of Latin prose. He played a role in the events that led to the demise of the Roman Republic. In 60 BC, Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey formed an alliance that dominated Roman politics for several years. Their attempts to power as Populares were opposed by the Optimates within the Roman Senate. Caesars victories in the Gallic Wars, completed by 51 BC, extended Romes territory to the English Channel, Caesar became the first Roman general to cross both the Channel and the Rhine, when he built a bridge across the Rhine and crossed the Channel to invade Britain. These achievements granted him unmatched military power and threatened to eclipse the standing of Pompey, with the Gallic Wars concluded, the Senate ordered Caesar to step down from his military command and return to Rome. Caesar refused the order, and instead marked his defiance in 49 BC by crossing the Rubicon with the 13th Legion, leaving his province, Civil war resulted, and Caesars victory in the war put him in an unrivalled position of power and influence. After assuming control of government, Caesar began a programme of social and governmental reforms and he centralised the bureaucracy of the Republic and was eventually proclaimed dictator in perpetuity, giving him additional authority. But the underlying political conflicts had not been resolved, and on the Ides of March 44 BC, a new series of civil wars broke out, and the constitutional government of the Republic was never fully restored. Caesars adopted heir Octavian, later known as Augustus, rose to power after defeating his opponents in the civil war. Octavian set about solidifying his power, and the era of the Roman Empire began, much of Caesars life is known from his own accounts of his military campaigns, and from other contemporary sources, mainly the letters and speeches of Cicero and the historical writings of Sallust. The later biographies of Caesar by Suetonius and Plutarch are also major sources, Caesar is considered by many historians to be one of the greatest military commanders in history. Caesar was born into a family, the gens Julia. The cognomen Caesar originated, according to Pliny the Elder, with an ancestor who was born by Caesarean section. The Historia Augusta suggests three alternative explanations, that the first Caesar had a head of hair, that he had bright grey eyes. Caesar issued coins featuring images of elephants, suggesting that he favored this interpretation of his name, despite their ancient pedigree, the Julii Caesares were not especially politically influential, although they had enjoyed some revival of their political fortunes in the early 1st century BC. Caesars father, also called Gaius Julius Caesar, governed the province of Asia and his mother, Aurelia Cotta, came from an influential family. Little is recorded of Caesars childhood, in 85 BC, Caesars father died suddenly, so Caesar was the head of the family at 16
34.
Roman Empire
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Civil wars and executions continued, culminating in the victory of Octavian, Caesars adopted son, over Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC and the annexation of Egypt. Octavians power was then unassailable and in 27 BC the Roman Senate formally granted him overarching power, the imperial period of Rome lasted approximately 1,500 years compared to the 500 years of the Republican era. The first two centuries of the empires existence were a period of unprecedented political stability and prosperity known as the Pax Romana, following Octavians victory, the size of the empire was dramatically increased. After the assassination of Caligula in 41, the senate briefly considered restoring the republic, under Claudius, the empire invaded Britannia, its first major expansion since Augustus. Vespasian emerged triumphant in 69, establishing the Flavian dynasty, before being succeeded by his son Titus and his short reign was followed by the long reign of his brother Domitian, who was eventually assassinated. The senate then appointed the first of the Five Good Emperors, the empire reached its greatest extent under Trajan, the second in this line. A period of increasing trouble and decline began with the reign of Commodus, Commodus assassination in 192 triggered the Year of the Five Emperors, of which Septimius Severus emerged victorious. The assassination of Alexander Severus in 235 led to the Crisis of the Third Century in which 26 men were declared emperor by the Roman Senate over a time span. It was not until the reign of Diocletian that the empire was fully stabilized with the introduction of the Tetrarchy, which saw four emperors rule the empire at once. This arrangement was unsuccessful, leading to a civil war that was finally ended by Constantine I. Constantine subsequently shifted the capital to Byzantium, which was renamed Constantinople in his honour and it remained the capital of the east until its demise. Constantine also adopted Christianity which later became the state religion of the empire. However, Augustulus was never recognized by his Eastern colleague, and separate rule in the Western part of the empire ceased to exist upon the death of Julius Nepos. The Eastern Roman Empire endured for another millennium, eventually falling to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Roman Empire was among the most powerful economic, cultural, political and military forces in the world of its time. It was one of the largest empires in world history, at its height under Trajan, it covered 5 million square kilometres. It held sway over an estimated 70 million people, at that time 21% of the entire population. Throughout the European medieval period, attempts were made to establish successors to the Roman Empire, including the Empire of Romania, a Crusader state. Rome had begun expanding shortly after the founding of the republic in the 6th century BC, then, it was an empire long before it had an emperor
35.
Classical Latin
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Classical Latin is the modern term used to describe the form of the Latin language recognized as standard by writers of the late Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. In some later periods, it was regarded as good Latin, the word Latin is now taken by default as meaning Classical Latin, so that, for example, modern Latin textbooks describe classical Latin. Latinitas was spoken as well as written, moreover, it was the language taught by the schools. Prescriptive rules therefore applied to it, and where a subject was concerned, such as poetry or rhetoric. No authors are noted for the type of rigidity evidenced by stylized art, except possibly the repetitious abbreviations, good Latin in philology is classical Latin literature. The term classicus was devised by the Romans themselves to translate Greek ἐγκριθέντες, select, before then, classis, in addition to being a naval fleet, was a social class in one of the diachronic divisions of Roman society according to property ownership by the Roman constitution. The word is a transliteration of Greek κλῆσις calling, used to rank army draftees by property from first to fifth class, classicus is anything primae classis, first class, such as the authors of the polished works of Latinitas, or sermo urbanus. It had nuances of the certified and the authentic, testis classicus and it was in this sense that Marcus Cornelius Fronto in the 2nd century AD used scriptores classici, first-class or reliable authors whose works could be relied upon as model of good Latin. This is the first known reference, possibly innovated at this time, aulus Gellius includes many authors, such as Plautus, who are currently considered writers of Old Latin and not strictly in the period of classical Latin. The classical Romans distinguished Old Latin as prisca Latinitas and not sermo vulgaris, each author in the Roman lists was considered equivalent to one in the Greek, for example Ennius was the Latin Homer, the Aeneid was a new Iliad, and so on. The lists of authors were as far as the Roman grammarians went in developing a philology. The Renaissance brought a revival of interest in restoring as much of Roman culture as could be restored and with it the return of the concept of classic, the best. Thomas Sébillet in 1548 referred to les bons et classiques poètes françois, meaning Jean de Meun and Alain Chartier, according to Merriam Websters Collegiate Dictionary, the term classical, from classicus, entered modern English in 1599, some 50 years after its re-introduction on the continent. In 1715 Laurence Echards Classical Geographical Dictionary was published, in 1736 Robert Ainsworths Thesaurus Linguae Latinae Compendarius turned English words and expressions into proper and classical Latin. In 1768 David Ruhnken recast the mold of the view of the classical by applying the word canon to the pinakes of orators, Ruhnken had a kind of secular catechism in mind. The practice and Teuffels classification, with modifications, are still in use and his work was translated into English as soon as published in German by Wilhelm Wagner, who corresponded with Teuffel. Wagner published the English translation in 1873, Teuffel divides the chronology of classical Latin authors into several periods according to political events, rather than by style. Regarding the style of the literary Latin of those periods he had, Teuffel was to go on with other editions of his history, but meanwhile it had come out in English almost as soon as it did in German and found immediate favorable reception
36.
Saturnalia
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Saturnalia was an ancient Roman festival in honour of deity Saturn, held on 17 December of the Julian calendar and later expanded with festivities through to 23 December. The poet Catullus called it the best of days, the revelries of Saturnalia were supposed to reflect the conditions of the lost mythical age, not all of them desirable. The Greek equivalent was the Kronia, although probably the best-known Roman holiday, Saturnalia as a whole is not described from beginning to end in any single ancient source. Modern understanding of the festival is pieced together from several accounts dealing with various aspects, the Saturnalia was the dramatic setting of the multivolume work of that name by Macrobius, a Latin writer from late antiquity who is the major source for information about the holiday. The renewal of light and the coming of the new year was celebrated in the later Roman Empire at the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun, on 23 December. The statue of Saturn at his main temple normally had its feet bound in wool, the official rituals were carried out according to Greek rite. The sacrifice was officiated by a priest, whose head was uncovered, in Roman rite, priests sacrificed capite velato, the day was supposed to be a holiday from all forms of work. Schools were closed, and exercise regimens were suspended, courts were not in session, so no justice was administered, and no declaration of war could be made. After the public rituals, observances continued at home, on 18 and 19 December, which were also holidays from public business, families conducted domestic rituals. They bathed early, and those with means sacrificed a suckling pig, the phrase io Saturnalia was the characteristic shout or salutation of the festival, originally commencing after the public banquet on the single day of 17 December. The interjection io is pronounced either with two syllables or as a single syllable and it was a strongly emotive ritual exclamation or invocation, used for instance in announcing triumph or celebrating Bacchus, but also to punctuate a joke. Saturnalia is the best-known of several festivals in the Greco-Roman world characterized by role reversals, slaves were treated to a banquet of the kind usually enjoyed by their masters. Ancient sources differ on the circumstances, some suggest that master and slave dined together, while others indicate that the slaves feasted first, the practice might have varied over time, and in any case slaves would still have prepared the meal. Saturnalian license also permitted slaves to disrespect their masters without the threat of a punishment and it was a time for free speech, the Augustan poet Horace calls it December liberty. In two satires set during the Saturnalia, Horace has a slave offer sharp criticism to his master, everyone knew, however, that the leveling of the social hierarchy was temporary and had limits, no social norms were ultimately threatened, because the holiday would end. The toga, the garment of the male Roman citizen, was set aside in favor of the Greek synthesis. Romans of citizen status normally went about bare-headed, but for the Saturnalia donned the pilleus, slaves, who ordinarily were not entitled to wear the pilleus, wore it as well, so that everyone was pilleated without distinction. Female entertainers were certainly present at some otherwise all-male gatherings, role-playing was implicit in the Saturnalias status reversals, and there are hints of mask-wearing or guising
37.
Oxyrhynchus
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Oxyrhynchus is a city in Middle Egypt, located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo, in the governorate of Al Minya. It is also a site, considered one of the most important ever discovered. Among the texts discovered at Oxyrhynchus are plays of Menander, fragments from the Gospel of Thomas, Oxyrhynchus lies west of the main course of the Nile, on the Bahr Yussef, a branch of the Nile that terminates in Lake Moeris and the Fayum oasis. It was the capital of the 19th Upper Egyptian Nome, after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, the city was reestablished as a Greek town, called Oxyrrhynkhoupolis. In Hellenistic times, Oxyrhynchus was a regional capital, the third-largest city in Egypt. After Egypt was Christianized, it became famous for its churches and monasteries. Oxyrhynchus remained a prominent, though declining, town in the Roman. After the Arab invasion of Egypt around 641, the system on which the town depended fell into disrepair. Today the town of El Bahnasa occupies part of the ancient site, for more than 1,000 years, the inhabitants of Oxyrhynchus dumped garbage at a series of sites out in the desert sands beyond the town limits. When the canals dried up, the water fell and never rose again. The area west of the Nile has virtually no rain, so the garbage dumps of Oxyrhynchus were gradually covered with sand and were forgotten for another 1,000 years, private citizens added their own piles of unwanted papyri. Because papyrus was expensive, papyri were often reused, a document might have farm accounts on one side, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, therefore, contained a complete record of the life of the town, and of the civilizations and empires of which the town was a part. It is also likely that there were military buildings, such as barracks, since the city supported a military garrison on several occasions during the Roman, during the Greek and Roman periods, Oxyrhynchus had temples to Serapis, Zeus-Amun, Hera-Isis, Atargatis-Bethnnis and Osiris. There were also Greek temples to Demeter, Dionysus, Hermes, in the Christian era, Oxyrhynchus was the seat of a bishopric, and the modern town still has several ancient Coptic Christian churches. When Flinders Petrie visited Oxyrhynchus in 1922, he remains of the colonnades. Now only part of a single column remains, everything else has been scavenged for building material for modern housing, in 1882, Egypt, while still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, came under effective British rule, and British archaeologists began the systematic exploration of the country. My first impressions on examining the site were not very favourable, the rubbish mounds were nothing but rubbish mounds. However, they soon realized what they had found
38.
Palimpsest
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A palimpsest is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused for another document. Pergamene was made of lamb or kid skin was expensive and not readily available, so. The word palimpsest derives from the Latin palimpsestus, which derives from the Ancient Greek παλίμψηστος, where papyrus was in common use, reuse of writing media was less common because papyrus was cheaper and more expendable than costly parchment. Some papyrus palimpsests do survive, and Romans referred to this custom of washing papyrus, the writing was washed from parchment or vellum using milk and oat bran. With the passing of time, the faint remains of the writing would reappear enough so that scholars can discern the text. Medieval codices are constructed in gathers which are folded, then stacked together like a newspaper, faint legible remains were read by eye before 20th-century techniques helped make lost texts readable. To read palimpsests, scholars of the 19th century used chemical means that were very destructive, using tincture of gall or, later. Modern methods of reading palimpsests using ultraviolet light and photography are less damaging, innovative digitized images aid scholars in deciphering unreadable palimpsests. For example, multispectral imaging undertaken by researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology, at the Walters Art Museum where the palimpsest is now conserved, the project has focused on experimental techniques to retrieve the remaining text, some of which was obscured by overpainted icons. One of the most successful techniques for reading through the paint proved to be X-ray fluorescence imaging, a number of ancient works have survived only as palimpsests. Vellum manuscripts were over-written on purpose due to the dearth or cost of the material. Such a decree put added pressure on retrieving the vellum on which secular manuscripts were written, the decline of the vellum trade with the introduction of paper exacerbated the scarcity, increasing pressure to reuse material. Cultural considerations also motivated the creation of palimpsests, or the pagan texts may have merely appeared irrelevant. Texts most susceptible to being overwritten included obsolete legal and liturgical ones, sometimes of intense interest to the historian, Early Latin translations of Scripture were rendered obsolete by Jeromes Vulgate. Texts might be in foreign languages or written in scripts that had become illegible over time. The codices themselves might be damaged or incomplete. The most valuable Latin palimpsests are found in the codices which were remade from the early large folios in the 7th to the 9th centuries. It has been noticed that no work is generally found in any instance in the original text of a palimpsest
39.
Villa of the Papyri
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The Villa of the Papyri, is named after its unique library of papyri, but is also one of the most luxurious houses in all of Herculaneum and in the Roman world. It is located in the current commune of Ercolano, southern Italy and it was situated on the ancient coastline below the volcano Vesuvius with nothing to obstruct the view of the sea. It was perhaps owned by Julius Caesars father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, in AD79, the eruption of Vesuvius covered all of Herculaneum with some 30 m of volcanic ash. Herculaneum was first excavated in the years between 1750 and 1765 by Karl Weber by means of underground tunnels, the villas name derives from the discovery of its library, the only surviving library from the Graeco-Roman world that exists in its entirety. It contained over 1,800 papyrus scrolls, now carbonised by the heat of the eruption, most of the villa is still underground, but parts have been cleared of volcanic deposits. Many of the finds are displayed in the Naples National Archaeological Museum, the Getty Villa is a reproduction of the Villa of the Papyri. Sited a few hundred metres from the nearest house in Herculaneum and it was surrounded by a garden closed off by porticoes, but with an ample stretch of gardens, vineyards and woods down to a small harbour. The villas layout is faithful to, but enlarges upon, the scheme of suburban villas in the country around Pompeii. The atrium functioned as a hall and a means of communication with the various parts of the house. The entrance opened with a portico on the sea side. The first peristyle had 10 columns on each side and a pool in the centre. In this enclosure were found the bronze herma of Doryphorus, a replica of Polykleitos athlete, the large second peristyle could be reached by passing through a large tablinum in which, under a propylaeum, was the archaic statue of Athena Promachos. A collection of bronze busts were in the interior of the tablinum and these included the head of Scipio Africanus. The living and reception quarters were grouped around the porticoes and terraces, giving occupants ample sunlight, the grounds included a large area of covered and uncovered gardens for walks in the shade or in the warmth of the sun. The gardens included a gallery of busts, hermae and small marble and these were laid out between columns amid the open part of the garden and on the edges of the large swimming bath. The luxury of the villa is evidenced not only by the works of art. The villa housed a collection of at least 80 sculptures of magnificent quality, among them is the bronze Seated Hermes, found at the villa in 1758. Around the bowl of the atrium impluvium were 11 bronze fountain statues depicting Satyrs pouring water from a pitcher, other statues and busts were found in the corners around the atrium walls
40.
Herculaneum papyri
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The Herculaneum papyri are more than 1,800 papyri found in Herculaneum in the 18th century, carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79. The papyri, containing a number of Greek philosophical texts, come from the only surviving library from antiquity that exists in its entirety, most of the works discovered are associated with the Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemus of Gadara. In 1752, workmen of the Bourbon royal family accidentally discovered what is now known as the Villa of the Papyri, there may still be a lower section of the Villas collection that remains buried. In the 18th century, the first digs began, the excavation appeared closer to mining projects, as mineshafts were dug, and horizontal subterranean galleries were installed. Workers would place objects in baskets and send them back up, with the backing of Charles III of Spain, Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre headed the systematic excavation of Herculaneum with Karl Jakob Weber. Due to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD, bundles of scrolls were carbonized by the heat of the pyroclastic flows. This intense parching took place over a short period of time, in a room deprived of oxygen, resulting in the scrolls carbonisation into compact. They were then preserved by the layers of cement-like rock and it is uncertain how many papyri were originally found as many of the scrolls were destroyed by workmen or when scholars extracted them from the volcanic tuff. The official list amounts to 1,814 rolls and fragments, the inventory now comprises 1826 papyri More than 340 are almost complete, about 970 are partly decayed and partly decipherable, and more than 500 are merely charred fragments. In 1802, King Ferdinand IV of Naples offered six rolls to Napoleon Bonaparte in a diplomatic move, in 1803, along with other treasures, the scrolls were transported by Francesco Carelli. Upon receiving the gift, Bonaparte then gave the scrolls to Institut de France under charge of Gaspard Monge, in 1810, eighteen unrolled papyri were given to George IV, four of which he presented to the Bodleian Library, the rest are now mainly in the British Library. In 1802, King Ferdinand IV of Naples appointed Rev. John Hayter to assist the process, from 1802 to 1806, Hayter unrolled and partly deciphered some 200 papyri. These copies are held in Bodleian Library, where they are known as the Oxford Facsimiles of the Herculaneum Papyri, in January 1816, Pierre-Claude Molard and Raoul Rochette led an attempt to unroll one papyrus with a replica of Abbot Piaggios machine. However, the scroll was destroyed without any information being obtained. In 1877, a papyrus was brought to a laboratory in the Louvre, an attempt to unravel it was made with a small mill, but it was unsuccessful and was partially destroyed - leaving a quarter intact. By the middle of the 20th century, only 585 rolls or fragments had been completely unrolled, of the unrolled papyri, about 200 had been deciphered and published, and about 150 only deciphered. The bulk of the manuscripts are housed in the Naples National Archaeological Museum. In 1969, Marcello Gigante founded the creation of the International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri, using the Oslo method, the CISPE team separated individual layers of the papyri
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Nag Hammadi library
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The Nag Hammadi library is a collection of Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. Twelve leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a jar were found by a local farmer named Muhammed al-Samman. D. The discovery of these texts significantly influenced modern scholarship into early Christianity, the contents of the codices were written in the Coptic language. The best-known of these works is probably the Gospel of Thomas, subsequently, a 1st or 2nd century date of composition circa 80 AD or earlier has been proposed for the lost Greek originals of the Gospel of Thomas. The buried manuscripts date from the 3rd and 4th centuries, the Nag Hammadi codices are currently housed in the Coptic Museum in Cairo, Egypt. The story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945 has been described as as exciting as the contents of the find itself, neither originally reported the find, as they sought to make money from the manuscripts by selling them individually at intervals. The brothers mother burned several of the manuscripts, worried, apparently, as a result, what came to be known as the Nag Hammadi library appeared only gradually, and its significance went unacknowledged until some time after its initial discovery. In 1946, the brothers became involved in a feud, and his brother-in-law in October that year sold a codex to the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo. The resident Coptologist and religious historian Jean Doresse, realizing the significance of the artifact, after the revolution in 1952, these texts were handed to the Coptic Museum in Cairo, and declared national property. Pahor Labib, the director of the Coptic Museum at that time, was keen to keep manuscripts in their country of origin. Meanwhile, a single codex had been sold in Cairo to a Belgian antique dealer. After an attempt was made to sell the codex in both New York City and Paris, it was acquired by the Carl Gustav Jung Institute in Zurich in 1951, through the mediation of Gilles Quispel. It was intended as a present to the famous psychologist, for this reason. The papyri were finally together in Cairo, of the 1945 find, eleven complete books. The first edition of a text found at Nag Hammadi was from the Jung Codex, a translation of which appeared in Cairo in 1956. Due to the political circumstances in Egypt, individual tracts followed from the Cairo. This state of affairs did not change until 1966, with the holding of the Messina Congress in Italy, at this conference, intended to allow scholars to arrive at a group consensus concerning the definition of gnosticism, James M. A facsimile edition in twelve volumes was published between 1972 and 1977, with subsequent additions in 1979 and 1984 from the publisher E. J, brill in Leiden, entitled, The Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices
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Demosthenes
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Demosthenes was a Greek statesman and orator of ancient Athens. His orations constitute a significant expression of contemporary Athenian intellectual prowess and provide an insight into the politics, Demosthenes learned rhetoric by studying the speeches of previous great orators. He delivered his first judicial speeches at the age of 20, for a time, Demosthenes made his living as a professional speech-writer and a lawyer, writing speeches for use in private legal suits. Demosthenes grew interested in politics during his time as a logographer and he went on to devote his most productive years to opposing Macedons expansion. He idealized his city and strove throughout his life to restore Athens supremacy, after Philips death, Demosthenes played a leading part in his citys uprising against the new king of Macedonia, Alexander the Great. However, his efforts failed and the revolt was met with a harsh Macedonian reaction, to prevent a similar revolt against his own rule, Alexanders successor in this region, Antipater, sent his men to track Demosthenes down. Demosthenes took his own life, in order to avoid being arrested by Archias, the Alexandrian Canon compiled by Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace recognised Demosthenes as one of the ten greatest Attic orators and logographers. Longinus likened Demosthenes to a thunderbolt, and argued that he perfected to the utmost the tone of lofty speech, living passions, copiousness, readiness. Quintilian extolled him as lex orandi, and Cicero said about him that inter omnis unus excellat, Demosthenes was born in 384 BC, during the last year of the 98th Olympiad or the first year of the 99th Olympiad. His father—also named Demosthenes—who belonged to the tribe, Pandionis. Aeschines, Demosthenes greatest political rival, maintained that his mother Kleoboule was a Scythian by blood—an allegation disputed by modern scholars. Demosthenes was orphaned at the age of seven, although his father provided well for him, his legal guardians, Aphobus, Demophon and Therippides, mishandled his inheritance. As soon as Demosthenes came of age in 366 BC, he demanded they render an account of their management, according to Demosthenes, the account revealed the misappropriation of his property. Although his father left an estate of nearly fourteen talents, Demosthenes asserted his guardians had left nothing except the house, and fourteen slaves and thirty silver minae. At the age of 20 Demosthenes sued his trustees in order to recover his patrimony and delivered five orations, the courts fixed Demosthenes damages at ten talents. When all the trials came to an end, he succeeded in retrieving a portion of his inheritance. According to Pseudo-Plutarch, Demosthenes was married once, the only information about his wife, whose name is unknown, is that she was the daughter of Heliodorus, a prominent citizen. Demosthenes also had a daughter, the one who ever called him father
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Oxyrhynchus Papyri
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The manuscripts date from the 1st to as late as the 7th century AD. They include thousands of Greek and Latin documents, letters and literary works and they also include a few vellum manuscripts, and more recent Arabic manuscripts on paper. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are currently housed in many institutions all over the world, a substantial number are housed in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. Although the initial hope of finding many of the lost literary works of antiquity at Oxyrhynchus was not realized and these include poems of Pindar, fragments of Sappho and Alcaeus, along with larger pieces of Alcman, Ibycus, and Corinna. There were also remains of the Hypsipyle of Euripides, fragments of the comedies of Menander. Also found were the oldest and most complete diagrams from Euclids Elements, another important find was the historical work known as the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, whose author is unknown but may be Ephorus or, as many currently think, Cratippus. A life of Euripides by Satyrus the Peripatetic was also unearthed, Menanders plays found in fragments at Oxyrhynchus include Misoumenos, Dis Exapaton, Epitrepontes, Karchedonios, Dyskolos and Kolax. The works found at Oxyrhynchus have greatly raised Menanders status among classicists, there is an on-line table of contents briefly listing the type of contents of each papyrus or fragment. Among the Christian texts found at Oxyrhynchus, were fragments of early non-canonical Gospels, Oxyrhynchus 840, there are many parts of other canonical books as well as many early Christian hymns, prayers, and letters also found among them. All manuscripts classified as theological in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri are listed below, a few manuscripts that belong to multiple genres, or genres that are inconsistently treated in the volumes of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, are also included. In each volume that contains theological manuscripts, they are listed first, the original Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC. This translation is called the Septuagint, because there is a tradition that seventy Jewish scribes compiled it in Alexandria and it was quoted in the New Testament and is found bound together with the New Testament in the 4th and 5th century Greek uncial codices Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus and Vaticanus. The Septuagint included books, called the Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical by Christians, portions of Old Testament books of undisputed authority found among the Oxyrhynchus Papyri are listed in this section. The first number is the volume of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri in which the manuscript is published, the second number is the overall publication sequence number in Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Standard abbreviated citation of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri is, P. Oxy, <volume in Roman numerals> <publication sequence number>. Context will always make clear whether volume 70 of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri or the Septuagint is intended, VIII1073 is an Old Latin version of Genesis, other manuscripts are probably copies of the Septuagint. Dates are estimated to the nearest 50 year increment, content is given to the nearest verse where known. This name designates several, unique writings or different versions of pre-existing writings found in the canon of the Jewish scriptures
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Jews
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The Jews, also known as the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group originating from the Israelites, or Hebrews, of the Ancient Near East. Jews originated as a national and religious group in the Middle East during the second millennium BCE, the Merneptah Stele appears to confirm the existence of a people of Israel, associated with the god El, somewhere in Canaan as far back as the 13th century BCE. The Israelites, as an outgrowth of the Canaanite population, consolidated their hold with the emergence of the Kingdom of Israel, some consider that these Canaanite sedentary Israelites melded with incoming nomadic groups known as Hebrews. The worldwide Jewish population reached a peak of 16.7 million prior to World War II, but approximately 6 million Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust. Since then the population has risen again, and as of 2015 was estimated at 14.3 million by the Berman Jewish DataBank. According to the report, about 43% of all Jews reside in Israel and these numbers include all those who self-identified as Jews in a socio-demographic study or were identified as such by a respondent in the same household. The exact world Jewish population, however, is difficult to measure, Israel is the only country where Jews form a majority of the population. The modern State of Israel was established as a Jewish state and defines itself as such in its Declaration of Independence and its Law of Return grants the right of citizenship to any Jew who requests it. The English word Jew continues Middle English Gyw, Iewe, according to the Hebrew Bible, the name of both the tribe and kingdom derive from Judah, the fourth son of Jacob. The Hebrew word for Jew, יְהוּדִי ISO 259-3 Yhudi, is pronounced, with the stress on the syllable, in Israeli Hebrew. The Ladino name is ג׳ודיו, Djudio, ג׳ודיוס, Djudios, Yiddish, ייִד Yid, ייִדן, Yidn. The etymological equivalent is in use in languages, e. g. but derivations of the word Hebrew are also in use to describe a Jew, e. g. in Italian. The German word Jude is pronounced, the corresponding adjective jüdisch is the origin of the word Yiddish, in such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility. Some people, however, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a factual reconstruction for the origin of the Jews is a difficult and complex endeavor. It requires examining at least 3,000 years of ancient human history using documents in vast quantities, as archaeological discovery relies upon researchers and scholars from diverse disciplines, the goal is to interpret all of the factual data, focusing on the most consistent theory. In this case, it is complicated by long standing politics and religious, Jacob and his family migrated to Ancient Egypt after being invited to live with Jacobs son Joseph by the Pharaoh himself. The patriarchs descendants were later enslaved until the Exodus led by Moses, traditionally dated to the 13th century BCE, Modern archaeology has largely discarded the historicity of the Patriarchs and of the Exodus story, with it being reframed as constituting the Israelites inspiring national myth narrative. The growth of Yahweh-centric belief, along with a number of practices, gradually gave rise to a distinct Israelite ethnic group
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Rylands Library Papyrus P52
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The front contains parts of seven lines from the Gospel of John 18, 31–33, in Greek, and the back contains parts of seven lines from verses 37–38. Since 2007, the papyrus has been on permanent display in the librarys Deansgate building, although Rylands P52 is generally accepted as the earliest extant record of a canonical New Testament text, the dating of the papyrus is by no means the subject of consensus among scholars. The fragment of papyrus was among a group acquired on the Egyptian market in 1920 by Bernard Grenfell, the original transcription and translation of the fragment of text was not done until 1934, by Colin H. Roberts. Roberts found comparator hands in dated papyrus documents between the late 1st and mid 2nd centuries, with the largest concentration of Hadrianic date. Since this gospel text would be unlikely to have reached Egypt before c.100 CE he proposed a date in the first half of the 2nd century. The recto consequently preserves the top corner of a right-hand page. The characters in style are the ones that can be seen in Papyrus P52. The Jews, For us it is not permitted to killanyone, so that the word of Jesus might be fulfilled, entered therefore again into the Praeto-rium Pilate and summoned Jesusand said to him, Thou art king of theJews. For this I have been born and I have come into the world so that I would test- ify to the truth, everyone who is of the truth hears of me my voice. Said to him Pilate, What is truth, and this having said, again he went out unto the Jews and said to them, I find not one fault in him. There appears insufficient room for the phrase in the second line of the verso. The writing is generously scaled – letter forms vary between 0.3 and 0.4 cm in height, lines are spaced approximately 0.5 cm apart, and there is a margin of 2 cm at the top. To judge from the spacing and the size of the text, taken together with the over-scaled writing, this suggests that the manuscript may have been intended for congregational reading. Roberts describes the handwriting as heavy, rounded and rather elaborate, but nevertheless not the work of a practised scribe. In total,114 legible letters are visible on the two sides of the fragment, representing 18 out of the 24 letters of the Greek Alphabet, beta, zeta, xi, phi, chi, and psi being missing. Roberts noted that the writing is painstaking and rather laboured, with instances of individual letters formed using several strokes with a rather clumsy effect, several letters are inclined to stray away from the notional upper and lower writing lines. Roberts noted that in addition to alpha and upsilon, other letters also tend to be given decorative hooks, especially iota Ι and he also drew attention to the forms of epsilon Ε, delta Δ and mu Μ. Nongbri confirms Roberts observations, and also notes distinctive forms of rho Ρ, pi Π, aside from their sometimes clumsy construction, the sigma and eta are also distinctive in form, the sigma facing fully to the right, and the eta having a distinctive high cross stroke
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Codex Amiatinus
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It is missing the Book of Baruch. It was produced in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria as a gift for the Pope, the Codex is also a fine specimen of medieval calligraphy, and is now kept at Florence in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. It is named after the location in which it was found in modern times, Mount Amiata in Tuscany, the symbol for it is written am or A. It contains Epistula Hieronymi ad Damasum, Prolegomena to the four Gospels and it contains 1040 leaves of strong, smooth vellum, fresh-looking today despite their great antiquity, arranged in quires of four sheets, or quaternions. It is written in characters, large, clear, regular. A little space is left between words, but the writing is in general continuous. The text is divided into sections, which in the Gospels correspond closely to the Ammonian Sections, from this manner of writing the script is believed to have been modeled upon the Codex Grandior of Cassiodorus, but it may go back, perhaps, even to St. Jerome. Originally three copies of the Bible were commissioned by Ceolfrid in 692 and this date has been established as the double monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow secured a grant of additional land to raise the 2000 head of cattle needed to produce the vellum. Bede was most likely involved in the compilation, Ceolfrid accompanied one copy intended as a gift to Pope Gregory II, but he died en route to Rome. The book later appears in the 9th century in Abbey of the Saviour, Monte Amiata in Tuscany, where it remained until 1786 when it passed to the Laurentian Library in Florence. The dedication page had been altered and the librarian Angelo Maria Bandini suggested that the author was Servandus, a follower of St. Benedict, and was produced at Monte Cassino around the 540s. This claim was accepted for the hundred years, establishing it as the oldest copy of the Vulgate. In 1888 Giovanni Battista de Rossi established that the Codex was related to the Bibles mentioned by Bede and this also established that Amiatinus was related to the Greenleaf Bible fragment in the British Library. Although de Rossis attribution removed 150 years from the age of the Codex, as the primary source of the Vulgate, the manuscript was of particular importance to the Catholics during the Counter-Reformation. In 1587 Pope Sixtus V demanded the book be sent to Rome where it was used as the source for a new papal edition of the Bible. List of New Testament Latin manuscripts Celt – a famous mistake in most Vulgates, not found in this copy Chapman, notes on the early history of the Vulgate Gospels. Ceolfrids gift to St Peter, the first quire of the Codex Amiatinus, christ and the vision of God, the Biblical diagrams of the Codex Amiatinus. In Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Anne-Marie Bouché, the minds eye, art and theological argument in the Middle Ages
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Western culture
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The term also applies beyond Europe, to countries and cultures whose histories are strongly connected to Europe by immigration, colonization, or influence. For example, Western Culture includes countries in the Americas and Australasia, whose language, before the Cold War era, the traditional Western viewpoint identified Western Civilization with the Western Christian countries and culture. Ancient Greece is considered the birthplace of Western culture, with the worlds first democratic system of government and major advances in philosophy, science, Greece was followed by Rome, which made key contributions in law, government, engineering and political organization. European culture developed with a range of philosophy, medieval scholasticism, and mysticism. Rational thinking developed through an age of change and formation, with the experiments of the Enlightenment. More often an ideology is what will be used to categorize it as a Western society. There is some disagreement about what nations should or should not be included in the category, many parts of the Eastern Roman Empire are considered Western today but were Eastern in the past. Since the context is highly biased and context-dependent, there is no agreed definition what the West is and it is difficult to determine which individuals fit into which category and the East–West contrast is sometimes criticized as relativistic and arbitrary. Globalism has spread Western ideas so widely that almost all cultures are, to some extent. Stereotyped views of the West have been labeled Occidentalism, paralleling Orientalism—the term for the 19th-century stereotyped views of the East, as Europe discovered the wider world, old concepts adapted. The area that had formerly considered the Orient became the Near East, as the interests of the European powers interfered with Meiji Japan and Qing China for the first time. Thus, the Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895 occurred in the Far East, the Greeks contrasted themselves to their Eastern neighbors, such as the Trojans in Iliad, setting an example for later contrasts between east and west. In the Middle Ages, the Near East provided a contrast to the West, concepts of what is the West arose out of legacies of the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. Later, ideas of the west were formed by the concepts of Latin Christendom, Western culture is neither homogeneous nor unchanging. As with all cultures, it has evolved and gradually changed over time. Nevertheless, it is possible to follow the evolution and history of the West, and appreciate its similarities and differences, its borrowings from, and contributions to, other cultures of humanity. Nevertheless, the Greeks felt they were the most civilized and saw themselves as something between the wild barbarians of most of Europe and the soft, slavish Middle-Easterners. In the meantime, however, Greece, under Alexander, had become a capital of the East, the Celts also created some significant literature in the ancient world whenever they were given the opportunity
