First Punic War
The First Punic War was the first of three wars fought between Ancient Carthage and the Roman Republic, the two great powers of the Western Mediterranean. For 23 years, in the longest continuous conflict and greatest naval war of antiquity, the two powers struggled for supremacy on the Mediterranean island of Sicily and its surrounding waters, in North Africa; the war began in 264 BC with the Roman conquest of the Carthaginian-controlled city of Messina in Sicily, granting Rome a military foothold on the island. The Romans built up a navy to challenge Carthage, the greatest naval power in the Mediterranean, for control over the waters around Sicily. In naval battles and storms, 700 Roman and 500 Carthaginian quinqueremes were lost, along with hundreds of thousands of lives. Command of the sea was lost by both sides repeatedly. A Roman invasion of Carthaginian Africa was destroyed in battle at the Bagradas and the Roman consul Marcus Atilius Regulus was captured by the Carthaginians in 255. In 23 years, the Romans conquered Sicily and drove the Carthaginians to the west end of the island.
After both sides had been brought to a state of near exhaustion, the Romans mobilized their citizenry's private wealth and created a new fleet under consul Gaius Lutatius Catulus. The Carthaginian fleet was destroyed at the Aegates Islands in 241, forcing the cut-off Carthaginian troops on Sicily to give up. A peace treaty was signed in which Carthage was made to pay a heavy indemnity and Rome ejected Carthage from Sicily, annexing the island as a Roman province; the war was followed by a failed revolt against the Carthaginian Empire. The Romans exploited Carthage's weakness to seize the Carthaginian possessions of Sardinia and Corsica in violation of the peace treaty; the unresolved strategic competition between Rome and Carthage would lead to the eruption of the Second Punic War in 218 BC. The series of wars between Rome and Carthage took the name "Punic" from the Latin adjective for Carthaginian, Punicus; this refers to the Carthaginian heritage as Phoenician colonists. A Carthaginian name for the conflicts does not survive in any records.
Rome had emerged as the leading city-state in the Italian Peninsula, a wealthy, expansionist republic with a successful citizen army. Over the past one hundred years, Rome had come into conflict, defeated rivals on the Italian peninsula incorporated them into the Roman political world. First, the Latin League was forcibly dissolved during the Latin War the power of the Samnites was broken during the three prolonged Samnite wars, the Greek cities of Magna Graecia submitted to Roman power at the conclusion of the Pyrrhic War. By the beginning of the First Punic War, the Romans had secured the whole of the Italian peninsula, except Gallia Cisalpina in the Po Valley. Carthage was a republic that dominated the political and economic affairs of the western Mediterranean Sea on the North African coasts and islands, above all, due to its navy, it originated as a Phoenician colony near modern Tunis. Carthage had become a wealthy centre for trade networks extending from Gadir along the coasts of southern Iberia and North Africa, across the Balearic Islands, Corsica and the western half of Sicily, to the ports of the eastern Mediterranean, including Tyre, its mother city, on the shores of the Levant.
At the height of power, just before the First Punic War, Carthage was hostile to foreign ships in the western Mediterranean. North African peoples, such as the Berbers, in the area around Carthage were loosely associated with Carthage. In the midst of the First Punic War, some tribes rebelled against Carthage, opening a second front while the Carthaginians battled the Romans in Sicily. Greek colonists were a major presence in the western Mediterranean, following centuries of colonial settlement and conflicts with Rome over Magna Graecia and with Carthage over places such as Sicily; the rich, strategically influential, well-fortified Greek colony of Syracuse was politically independent of Rome and Carthage. Hostilities of the First Punic War began with developments involving the Romans and Greek colonists in Sicily and southern Italy. In 288 BC, the Mamertines, a group of Italian mercenaries hired by Agathocles of Syracuse, occupied the city of Messana in the north-eastern tip of Sicily, killing all the men and taking the women as their wives.
At the same time, a group of Roman troops made up of Campanian "citizens without the vote" revolted and seized control of Rhegium, lying across the Straits of Messina on the mainland of Italy. In 270 BC, the Romans regained control of Rhegium and punished the survivors of the revolt. In Sicily, the Mamertines ravaged the countryside and collided with the expanding regional empire of the independent city of Syracuse. Hiero II, tyrant of Syracuse, defeated the Mamertines near Mylae on the Longanus River. Following their defeat, the Mamertines appealed to both Carthage for assistance; the Carthaginians acted first, approached Hiero to take no further action and convinced the Mamertines to accept a Carthaginian garrison in Messana. Either unhappy with the prospect of a Carthaginian garrison or convinced that the recent alliance between Rome and Carthage against Pyrrhus reflected cordial relations between the two, the Mamertines, hoping for more reliable protection, petitioned Rome for an alliance.
However, the rivalry between Rome and Carthage had grown since the war with Pyrrhus and that alliance was no longer feasible. According to the historian Polybius, considerable debate took place in Rome on the questio
Elymians
The Elymians were an ancient people who inhabited the western part of Sicily during the Bronze Age and Classical antiquity. Apart from mythological tales, there is little known about the culture of the Elymians, they are indistinguishable from their Sicani neighbours in the archaeological record of the early Iron Age. Thereafter they appear to have adopted many aspects of the culture of the Greek colonists of Sicily, erecting the remarkable temple at Segesta and using the Greek alphabet to write their own language; as yet, no one has succeeded in deciphering the Elymian language. The Elymians maintained friendly relations with Carthage but came into frequent conflict with the expansionist Greek colonies of western Sicily Selinus. Boundary disputes with Selinus broke out into open warfare on several occasions after 580 BC, they sought to ally first with Athens against Selinus, provoking the disastrous Sicilian expedition of 415–413 BC. Following this failure they encouraged the Carthaginians to attack Selinus in 409 BC and succeeded in obtaining the destruction of their rivals.
However, they allied with Rome instead. The Elymians were exempted from taxes; this was said to have been in recognition of the Elymians' claim of Trojan ancestry, seen as making them cousins of the Roman people, who claimed to have been descended from the Trojans. The Elymians appear to have disappeared from view under Roman rule becoming assimilated into the general Sicilian population; the Elymi shared western Sicily with the Sicani, the Phoenicians, the Greeks. Their three most important cities were Segesta, the political centre. Other cities were Elima, Iaitas and Drepanon. Ancient peoples of Italy Prehistoric Italy Monte Polizzo Sicilian Peoples: The Elymians by Vincenzo Salerno Giulia Falco: Elymoi. In: Der Neue Pauly vol. 3, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-476-01473-8, Sp. 1003. Simona Marchesini: "The Elymian language"' in Olga Tribulato: Language and Linguistic Contact in Ancient Sicily. Cambridge University Press, 2012:95–114
Astrophysics
Astrophysics is the branch of astronomy that employs the principles of physics and chemistry "to ascertain the nature of the astronomical objects, rather than their positions or motions in space". Among the objects studied are the Sun, other stars, extrasolar planets, the interstellar medium and the cosmic microwave background. Emissions from these objects are examined across all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, the properties examined include luminosity, density and chemical composition; because astrophysics is a broad subject, astrophysicists apply concepts and methods from many disciplines of physics, including mechanics, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, relativity and particle physics, atomic and molecular physics. In practice, modern astronomical research involves a substantial amount of work in the realms of theoretical and observational physics; some areas of study for astrophysicists include their attempts to determine the properties of dark matter, dark energy, black holes.
Topics studied by theoretical astrophysicists include Solar System formation and evolution. Astronomy is an ancient science, long separated from the study of terrestrial physics. In the Aristotelian worldview, bodies in the sky appeared to be unchanging spheres whose only motion was uniform motion in a circle, while the earthly world was the realm which underwent growth and decay and in which natural motion was in a straight line and ended when the moving object reached its goal, it was held that the celestial region was made of a fundamentally different kind of matter from that found in the terrestrial sphere. During the 17th century, natural philosophers such as Galileo and Newton began to maintain that the celestial and terrestrial regions were made of similar kinds of material and were subject to the same natural laws, their challenge was. For much of the nineteenth century, astronomical research was focused on the routine work of measuring the positions and computing the motions of astronomical objects.
A new astronomy, soon to be called astrophysics, began to emerge when William Hyde Wollaston and Joseph von Fraunhofer independently discovered that, when decomposing the light from the Sun, a multitude of dark lines were observed in the spectrum. By 1860 the physicist, Gustav Kirchhoff, the chemist, Robert Bunsen, had demonstrated that the dark lines in the solar spectrum corresponded to bright lines in the spectra of known gases, specific lines corresponding to unique chemical elements. Kirchhoff deduced that the dark lines in the solar spectrum are caused by absorption by chemical elements in the Solar atmosphere. In this way it was proved that the chemical elements found in the Sun and stars were found on Earth. Among those who extended the study of solar and stellar spectra was Norman Lockyer, who in 1868 detected bright, as well as dark, lines in solar spectra. Working with the chemist, Edward Frankland, to investigate the spectra of elements at various temperatures and pressures, he could not associate a yellow line in the solar spectrum with any known elements.
He thus claimed the line represented a new element, called helium, after the Greek Helios, the Sun personified. In 1885, Edward C. Pickering undertook an ambitious program of stellar spectral classification at Harvard College Observatory, in which a team of woman computers, notably Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Annie Jump Cannon, classified the spectra recorded on photographic plates. By 1890, a catalog of over 10,000 stars had been prepared that grouped them into thirteen spectral types. Following Pickering's vision, by 1924 Cannon expanded the catalog to nine volumes and over a quarter of a million stars, developing the Harvard Classification Scheme, accepted for worldwide use in 1922. In 1895, George Ellery Hale and James E. Keeler, along with a group of ten associate editors from Europe and the United States, established The Astrophysical Journal: An International Review of Spectroscopy and Astronomical Physics, it was intended that the journal would fill the gap between journals in astronomy and physics, providing a venue for publication of articles on astronomical applications of the spectroscope.
Around 1920, following the discovery of the Hertsprung-Russell diagram still used as the basis for classifying stars and their evolution, Arthur Eddington anticipated the discovery and mechanism of nuclear fusion processes in stars, in his paper The Internal Constitution of the Stars. At that time, the source of stellar energy was a complete mystery; this was a remarkable development since at that time fusion and thermonuclear energy, that stars are composed of hydrogen, had not yet been discovered. In 1
Province of Trapani
Trapani is a province in the autonomous island region of Sicily, southern Italy. Following the suppression of the Sicilian provinces, it was replaced in 2015 by the Free municipal consortium of Trapani, its capital is the city of Trapani. It has an area of 2,469.62 square kilometres and a total population of 433,826. There are 24 comunes in the province. Besides the capital Trapani, other cities and places of interest in the province include Segesta, Erice, Alcamo, Mazara del Vallo, Castellammare del Golfo, Mozia; the nearby island of Pantelleria, noted for its wine production, the Aegadian Islands are administratively a part of Trapani province. The Province of Trapani is a major centre for viticulture; the area now covered by the province was occupied successively by the Carthaginians and latterly by the Romans. The port of Trapani, first known as Drepana Drepanon, was inhabited by the Sicani and the Elymi becoming a prosperous Phoenician trading centre by the 8th century BC, it was taken by the Carthaginians in 260 BC and by the Romans in 240 BC, becoming a civitas romana until 440 AD when it was sacked by the Vandals by the Byzantines and by the Muslims in 830.
In the 16th century, it received privileges under Emperor Charles V of Spain who strengthened the town walls. Trapani became the provincial capital in 1817; the province of Trapani borders the Tyrrhenian Sea to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Strait of Sicily to the west. It is bordered to the east with only the provinces of Agrigento; the territory has few flat areas, although with the exception of the mountains of Sparagio and Inici, most land is under 1000 metres. The northwestern part is rugged in comparison to the south; the province includes the archipelago of the Egadi Islands belonging to the comune of Favignana, the island of Pantelleria, the largest of Sicily, in the comune of the same name, the Stagnone Islands, which belong to the comune of Marsala. The Egadi Islands consist of three main islands, Favignana and Marettimo and two islets and Maraone; the province of Trapani has a number of rivers but most are not of notable size or importance, except for the Belice River on the border of the province, the Birgi River, with a length of about 40 km.
Other rivers include the torrential Modione, the Fiume, the Salemi and the Sossius, the latter of which flows into the Mediterranean Sea at the resort of Berbaro. Natural lakes include the Gorghi Tondi and Preola, in the comune of Mazara del Vallo, the Lago di Venere in Pantelleria. There are three man-made lakes, Lago Rubino, created by a dam across the Cuddia River, part of the catchment area of the Birgi, at Lago Trinità in Castelvetrano, the lake of the same name at the resort of Paceco. However, there is a coastal lagoon, the Stagnone Lagoon, within a 2000 hectare reserve on the stretch of coast between Punta Alga and Cape San Teodoro, near Marsala, in an area, once an important naval base and commercial for the Phoenicians; the waters are shallow and salty, with marshland. The lagoon consists of four islands: San Pantaleo and Schola. Official website Pictures, tourism, books, local products, local surnames, transportation in the province of Trapani
Erice
Erice is a historic town and comune in the province of Trapani in Sicily, southern Italy. The main town of Erice is located on top of Mount Erice, at around 750 metres above sea level, overlooking the city of Trapani, the low western coast towards Marsala, the dramatic Punta del Saraceno and Capo San Vito to the north-east, the Aegadian Islands on Sicily's north-western coast. Casa Santa forms part of Erice at the base of Mount Erice adjacent to Trapani. A cable car joins lower parts of Erice; the bordering municipalities are Buseto Palizzolo, Trapani and Custonaci. The hamlets are Ballata, Casa Santa, Napola, Rigaletta, San Cusumano and Torretta; the ancient Greek name of Erice was Eryx, its foundation was associated with the eponymous Greek hero Eryx. It was not a Greek colony, as the Phoenicians founded it, but was Hellenized, it was destroyed in the First Punic War by the Carthaginians, from on declined in importance. Eryx was renamed as Cebel Hamid, it was ruled by the Arabs until the Norman conquest.
In 1167 the Normans renamed it Monte San Giuliano, a name maintained until 1934. In the northeastern portion of the city there are the remains of ancient Elymian and Phoenician walls indicating different stages of settlement and occupation in antiquity. There are two castles that remain in the city: Pepoli Castle, which dates from Saracen times, the Venus Castle, dating from the Norman period, built on top of the ancient Temple of Venus, where Venus Ericina was worshipped. According to legend, the temple was founded by Aeneas, it was well known throughout the Mediterranean area in the ancient age, an important cult was celebrated in it. In his book On the Nature of Animals, Aelian writes that animals chosen for sacrifice would voluntarily walk up to the altar to be killed. A cable car ran from 2005 to 2017, when it was closed due to a forest fire, from the outskirts of Trapani to the town of Erice; the cablecar was rebuilt and reopened in June 2018. Erice hosts scientific meetings at the Ettore Majorana center, organised by the controversial astrophysicist Antonino Zichichi.
There is an annual workshop on Molecular Gastronomy. Panoramic view from Erice castle Erice Photo Essay
Alcamo
Alcamo is the fourth-largest town in the province of Trapani in Sicily, with a population of 45,374 inhabitants. It is on the borderline with the Metropolitan City of Palermo at a distance of about 50 kilometres from Palermo and Trapani. Nowadays the town territory includes an area of 130.79 square kilometres and is the second municipality as for population density in the province of Trapani, after Erice. Alcamo is bounded by the Tyrrhenian Sea on the north and Partinico on the east, Camporeale on the south and Calatafimi-Segesta and Castellammare del Golfo on the west, its most important hamlet is Alcamo Marina at about 6 kilometres from the town centre. Together with other municipalities it takes part in the Associazione Città del Vino, the movement Patto dei Sindaci, Progetto Città dei Bambini, Rete dei Comuni Solidali and Patto Territoriale Golfo di Castellammare. Alcamo is situated in the middle of the Gulf of Castellammare, at 258 metres above the sea level and at the foot of Mount Bonifato, a calcareous complex 825 metres high.
At the altitude of 500 metres there is the Nature Reserve of Monte Bonifato. The territory of Alcamo includes Alcamo Marina used as a summer resort; the climate is mild, with higher rainfall during winter than summer. The average annual temperature is 16.9 °C, with higher temperatures in August and lower temperatures in February. The average annual rainfall is 558 mm. Rainfall is scarcer in July and more abundant in December. Seismic classification: zone 2, Ordinance PCM 3274 Climatic classification: zone B, 1140 degree day Köppen climatic classification: CSa Atmospheric diffusivity: low, Ibimet CNR 2002 There are discordances about the etymology of the toponym "Alcamo": one of the hypothesis connects the present name to the Arab word al-qama, which would mean "muddy earth" or "rich soil", another supposition is that it had been derived from the name of the Muslim leader who founded the town in 828 AD and whose name was al-Qāmūq. According to some people this hypothesis was invented by Leo Africanus who had told this story without consulting any document on the subject.
Besides, according to some scholars, the name Alcamo would derive from caccamu, a dialectal word referring to the plant Citrullus colocynthis. Though there is little information about it, there are evidences that territory of Alcamo was inhabited in prehistoric times. One of the most important finds is an axe from the Neolithic, kept at the Museo archeologico regionale Paolo Orsi of Syracuse. From the quotations by Lycophron we know that in old times there was an inhabited centre called "Longuro" on Mount Bonifato. According to an old story, this settlement was founded by a Greek colony which had escaped from the destruction of the town of Troy. During the Roman period the inhabitants of Longuro moved to the foot of the mountain so they could practice agriculture in the surrounding lands; the town was called Longaricum. According to a supposition the two hillocks appearing on the gonfalon of Alcamo would represent both the towns of Longaricum and Longuro. Alcamo was founded in 828 by the Muslim commander al-Kamuk, though other sources date its origin to about 972.
The first document mentioning Alcamo is dating back to 1154, in a paper written by the Berber geographer Idrisi, given this task by Roger II of Sicily in order to get a collection of geographic maps. From a distance longer than an Arab mile, the writer describes the position of Alcamo viewed from the Castle of Calatubo and defines it as a "manzil", a hamlet or a group of houses with rich soil and a flourishing market; this hamlet was called "Alqamah" by Arabs. In a diary of 1185 the Andalusian pilgrim Ibn Jubayr confirms the Arab origin of the town. In the Middle Ages Alcamo was inhabited by Muslim people, whose numbers declined after the Norman conquest of Sicily, begun in 1060. Alcamo was divided into four hamlets named San Vito, San Leonardo, Sant'Ippolito and San Nicolò del Vauso, but a series of Arab revolts between 1221 and 1243 led King Frederick II to move most of the Arab population to a colony at Lucera, while Christians from Bonifato came to inhabit the town. In this period the famous poet Ciullo or Cielo d'Alcamo was born.
In 1340 Raimondo Peralta acquired the barony of Alcamo from Peter II of Aragon. The barony passed to his son Guglielmo Peralta Sclafani, called "Guglielmone". and afterwards to the Ventimiglia family, Giaimo de Prades, the Cabrera family, the Speciale family, Pietro Balsamo prince of Roccafiorita and to Giuseppe Alvarez. In the 14th century Alcamo had several thousands of inhabitants and hundreds of them had immigrated from different parts of Sicily and Italy, some from Spain. During this period, Antonello da Messina moved to Alcamo for three years in order to learn the
Cult
In modern English, the term cult has come to refer to a social group defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, or its common interest in a particular personality, object or goal. This sense of the term is controversial and it has divergent definitions in both popular culture and academia and it has been an ongoing source of contention among scholars across several fields of study, it is considered pejorative. In the sociological classifications of religious movements, a cult is a social group with deviant or novel beliefs and practices, although this is unclear. Other researchers present a less-organized picture of cults, saying that they arise spontaneously around novel beliefs and practices. Groups said to be cults range in size from local groups with a few members to international organizations with millions. An older sense of the word cult—covered in a different article—is a set of religious devotional practices that are conventional within their culture and related to a particular figure, associated with a particular place.
References to the "cult" of, for example, a particular Catholic saint, or the imperial cult of ancient Rome, use this sense of the word. Beginning in the 1930s, cults became the object of sociological study in the context of the study of religious behavior. From the 1940s the Christian countercult movement has opposed some sects and new religious movements, it labelled them as cults for their "un-Christian" unorthodox beliefs; the secular anti-cult movement began in the 1970s and it opposed certain groups charging them with mind control and motivated in reaction to acts of violence committed by some of their members. Some of the claims and actions of the anti-cult movement have been disputed by scholars and by the news media, leading to further public controversy; the term "new religious movement" refers to religions. Many, but not all of them, have been considered to be cults. Sub-categories of cults include: Doomsday cults, personality cults, political cults, destructive cults, racist cults, polygamist cults, terrorist cults.
Various national governments have reacted to cult-related issues in different ways, this has sometimes led to controversy. English-speakers used the word "cult" not to describe a group of religionists, but to refer to the act of worship or to a religious ceremony; the English term originated in the early 17th century, borrowed via the French culte, from the Latin noun cultus. The word derived from the Latin adjective cultus, based on the verb colere. While the literal original sense of the word in English remains in use, a derived sense of "excessive devotion" arose in the 19th century; the terms cult and cultist came into use in medical literature in the United States in the 1930s for what would now be termed "faith healing" as practised in the US Holiness movement. This usage experienced a surge of popularity at the time, extended to other forms of alternative medicine as well. In the English-speaking world the word "cult" carries derogatory connotations, it has always been controversial because it is considered a subjective term, used as an ad hominem attack against groups with differing doctrines or practices.
In the 1970s, with the rise of secular anti-cult movements, scholars began abandoning the term "cult". According to The Oxford Handbook of Religious Movements, "by the end of the decade, the term'new religions' would replace'cult' to describe all of those leftover groups that did not fit under the label of church or sect."Sociologist Amy Ryan has argued for the need to differentiate those groups that may be dangerous from groups that are more benign. Ryan notes the sharp differences between definition from cult opponents, who tend to focus on negative characteristics, those of sociologists, who aim to create definitions that are value-free; the movements themselves may have different definitions of religion as well. George Chryssides cites a need to develop better definitions to allow for common ground in the debate. In Defining Religion in American Law, Bruce J. Casino presents the issue as crucial to international human rights laws. Limiting the definition of religion may interfere with freedom of religion, while too broad a definition may give some dangerous or abusive groups "a limitless excuse for avoiding all unwanted legal obligations".
Religion scholar Megan Goodwin defined the term cult when used by laymen as being a shorthand that means a "religion I don't like". A new religious movement is a religious community or spiritual group of modern origins, which has a peripheral place within its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin or part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. In 1999 Eileen Barker estimated that NRMs, of which some but not all have been labelled as cults, number in the tens of thousands worldwide, most of which originated in Asia or Africa. In 2007 the religious scholar Elijah Siegler commented that, although no NRM had become the dominant faith in any country, many of the concepts which they had first introduced have become part of worldwide mainstream culture. Sociologist Max Weber found that cults based on charismatic leadership follow the routinization of charisma; the concept of a "cult" as a sociological classification was introduced in 1932 by American sociologist Howard P. Becker as a
