Egypt
Egypt the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a 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 and the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south, Libya to the west. Across the Gulf of Aqaba lies Jordan, across the Red Sea lies Saudi Arabia, across the Mediterranean lie Greece and Cyprus, although none share a land border with Egypt. Egypt has one of the longest histories of any country, tracing its heritage back to the 6th–4th millennia BCE. Considered a cradle of civilisation, Ancient Egypt saw some of the earliest developments of writing, urbanisation, organised religion and central government. Iconic monuments such as the Giza Necropolis and its Great Sphinx, as well the ruins of Memphis, Thebes and the Valley of the Kings, reflect this legacy and remain a significant focus of scientific and popular interest. Egypt's long and rich cultural heritage is an integral part of its national identity, which has endured, assimilated, various foreign influences, including Greek, Roman, Ottoman Turkish, Nubian.
Egypt was an early and important centre of Christianity, but was Islamised in the seventh century and remains a predominantly Muslim country, albeit with a significant Christian minority. From the 16th to the beginning of the 20th century, Egypt was ruled by foreign imperial powers: The Ottoman Empire and the British Empire. Modern Egypt dates back to 1922, when it gained nominal independence from the British Empire as a monarchy. However, British military occupation of Egypt continued, many Egyptians believed that the monarchy was an instrument of British colonialism. Following the 1952 revolution, Egypt expelled British soldiers and bureaucrats and ended British occupation, nationalized the British-held Suez Canal, exiled King Farouk and his family, declared itself a republic. In 1958 it merged with Syria to form the United Arab Republic, which dissolved in 1961. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Egypt endured social and religious strife and political instability, fighting several armed conflicts with Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, occupying the Gaza Strip intermittently until 1967.
In 1978, Egypt signed the Camp David Accords withdrawing from the Gaza Strip and recognising Israel. The country continues to face challenges, from political unrest, including the recent 2011 revolution and its aftermath, to terrorism and economic underdevelopment. Egypt's current government is a presidential republic headed by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, described by a number of watchdogs as authoritarian. Islam is the official religion of Egypt and Arabic is its official language. With over 95 million inhabitants, Egypt is the most populous country in North Africa, the Middle East, the Arab world, the third-most populous in Africa, 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, where the only arable land is found. The large regions of the Sahara desert, which constitute most of Egypt's territory, are sparsely inhabited. About half of Egypt's residents live in urban areas, with most spread across the densely populated centres of greater Cairo and other major cities in the Nile Delta.
The sovereign state of Egypt is a transcontinental country considered to be a regional power in North Africa, the Middle East and the Muslim world, a middle power worldwide. Egypt's economy is one of the largest and most diversified in the Middle East, is projected to become one of the largest in the world in the 21st century. In 2016, Egypt became Africa's second largest economy. Egypt is a founding member of the United Nations, Non-Aligned Movement, Arab League, African Union, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. "Miṣr" is the Classical Quranic Arabic and modern official name of Egypt, while "Maṣr" is the local pronunciation in Egyptian Arabic. 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 "mi-iṣ-ru" related to miṣru/miṣirru/miṣaru, meaning "border" or "frontier". There is evidence of rock carvings in desert oases. In the 10th millennium BCE, a culture of hunter-gatherers and fishers was replaced by a grain-grinding culture.
Climate changes or overgrazing around 8000 BCE began to desiccate the pastoral lands of Egypt, forming the Sahara. Early tribal peoples migrated to the Nile River where they developed a settled agricultural economy and more centralised society. By about 6000 BCE, a Neolithic culture rooted in the Nile Valley. During the Neolithic era, several predynastic cultures developed independently in Upper and Lower Egypt; the Badarian culture and the successor Naqada series are regarded as precursors to dynastic Egypt. The earliest known Lower Egyptian site, predates the Badarian by about seven hundred years. Contemporaneous Lower Egyptian communities coexisted with their southern counterparts for more than two thousand years, remaining culturally distinct, but maintaining frequent contact through trade; the earliest known evidence of Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions appeared during the predynastic period on Naqada III pottery vessels, dated to about 3200 BCE. A unified kingdom was founded c. 3150 BCE
Blacksmith
A blacksmith is a metalsmith who creates objects from wrought iron or steel by forging the metal, using tools to hammer and cut. Blacksmiths produce objects such as gates, railings, light fixtures, sculpture, agricultural implements and religious items, cooking utensils and weapons. While there are many people who work with metal such as farriers and armorers, the blacksmith had a general knowledge of how to make and repair many things, from the most complex of weapons and armor to simple things like nails or lengths of chain; the "black" in "blacksmith" refers to the black firescale, a layer of oxides that forms on the surface of the metal during heating. The origin of "smith" is debated, it may come from the old English word "smythe" meaning "to strike" or it may have originated from the Proto-German "smithaz" meaning "skilled worker." Blacksmiths work by heating pieces of wrought iron or steel until the metal becomes soft enough for shaping with hand tools, such as a hammer and chisel. Heating takes place in a forge fueled by propane, natural gas, charcoal, coke or oil.
Some modern blacksmiths may employ an oxyacetylene or similar blowtorch for more localized heating. Induction heating methods are gaining popularity among modern blacksmiths. Color is important for indicating the workability of the metal; as iron heats to higher temperatures, it first glows red orange and white. The ideal heat for most forging is the bright yellow-orange color; because they must be able to see the glowing color of the metal, some blacksmiths work in dim, low-light conditions, but most work in well-lit conditions. The key is to have consistent lighting, but not too bright. Direct sunlight obscures the colors; the techniques of smithing can be divided into forging, heat-treating, finishing. Forging—the process smiths use to shape metal by hammering—differs from machining in that forging does not remove material. Instead, the smith hammers the iron into shape. Punching and cutting operations by smiths re-arrange metal around the hole, rather than drilling it out as swarf. Forging uses seven basic operations or techniques: Drawing down Shrinking Bending Upsetting Swaging Punching Forge weldingThese operations require at least a hammer and anvil, but smiths use other tools and techniques to accommodate odd-sized or repetitive jobs.
Drawing lengthens the metal by reducing one or both of the other two dimensions. As the depth is reduced, or the width narrowed, the piece is lengthened or "drawn out." As an example of drawing, a smith making a chisel might flatten a square bar of steel, lengthening the metal, reducing its depth but keeping its width consistent. Drawing does not have to be uniform. A taper can result as in making a woodworking chisel blade. If tapered in two dimensions, a point results. Drawing can be accomplished with a variety of methods. Two typical methods using only hammer and anvil would be hammering on the anvil horn, hammering on the anvil face using the cross peen of a hammer. Another method for drawing is to use a tool called a fuller, or the peen of the hammer, to hasten the drawing out of a thick piece of metal. Fullering consists of hammering a series of indentations with corresponding ridges, perpendicular to the long section of the piece being drawn; the resulting effect looks somewhat like waves along the top of the piece.
The smith turns the hammer over to use the flat face to hammer the tops of the ridges down level with the bottoms of the indentations. This forces the metal to grow in length much faster than just hammering with the flat face of the hammer. Heating iron to a "forging heat" allows bending as if it were a soft, ductile metal, like copper or silver. Bending can be done with the hammer over the horn or edge of the anvil or by inserting a bending fork into the hardy hole, placing the work piece between the tines of the fork, bending the material to the desired angle. Bends can be dressed and tightened, or widened, by hammering them over the appropriately shaped part of the anvil; some metals are "hot short". They become like Plasticine: although they may still be manipulated by squeezing, an attempt to stretch them by bending or twisting, is to have them crack and break apart; this is a problem for some blade-making steels, which must be worked to avoid developing hidden cracks that would cause failure in the future.
Though hand-worked, titanium is notably hot short. Such common smithing processes as decoratively twisting a bar are impossible with it. Upsetting is the process of making metal thicker in one dimension through shortening in the other. One form is to heat the end of a rod and hammer on it as one would drive a nail: the rod gets shorter, the hot part widens. An alternative to hammering on the hot end is to place the hot end on the anvil and hammer on the cold end. Punching may be done to make a hole. For example, in preparation for making a hammerhead, a smith would punch a hole in a heavy bar or rod for the hammer handle. Punching is not limited to holes, it includes cutting and drifting—all done with a chisel. The five basic forging processes are combined to produce and refine the shapes necessary for finished products. For example, to fashion a cross-peen hammer head, a smith would start with a bar the diameter of the ham
Air hammer (fabrication)
An air hammer known as an air chisel, is a pneumatic hand tool used to carve in stone, to break or cut metal objects apart. It is designed to accept different tools depending on the required function; the following are various tools that can be used in the air hammer: Universal joint and tie-rod tool Used to separate universal joints and tie-rod ends. Ball joint separator Used to separate ball joints. Shock absorber chisel Used to break loose shock absorber nuts. Exhaust pipe cutter Used to cut through exhaust pipe for disassembly. Tapered punch A general tool that can be used to free frozen nuts, insert pins, align holes. Rubber bushing splitter Used to remove rubber bushings. Free-standing air hammers are an adaptation of the hand-held version. An air hammer can stretch or shrink a variety of metals, from thin aircraft aluminums, all the way down to 10-gauge steel, they are used for smoothing metal, roughed, shaped or formed. In the 1920s, two pneumatic devices were invented that would permanently change the way metal and stone were hammered.
The pneumatic rivet gun was developed to set hot rivets on girder bridges and high steel buildings. This tool was scaled down for sheet metal, as the 1930s saw the advent of monocoque aluminum aircraft; the other new device, hitting at twice or three times the speed of the rivet gun, was the stone carver's hammer – a great blessing for smooth and rapid dressing of granite and marble. In 1930 F. J. Hauschild adapted the original stone carver's hammer into a portable hand-held steel tube frame for the purpose of straightening auto bodies. For the next 25 years his "Ram's Head Body and Fender Machine" improved and increased production for auto body work men all over the U. S. Copying Hauschild’s patented design, a pneumatic tool company in Chicago marketed a number of "destined-to-be-classic" pneumatic planishing hammers, both hand-held for auto body work, free-standing ones, with a variety of throat depths for industry and manufacturing. By World War II, rivet guns were used in U. S. aircraft factories both for riveting aluminum sheets, for flow forming, the process of working aluminum sheet into and over wooden forms by the application of the pneumatic rivet gun.
Post-war industry brought many new applications for the "air hammer" technology. Among these were: sand rammers and tampers for sand casting metal plating rack scalers weld chippers destruction guns for cleaning up concrete needle scalers pavement breakers metal chisels; each of these tools has a different purpose despite nearly identical appearance in many cases. Air Power Hammer shrinking 14-gauge steel demonstrated
St Paul's Cathedral
St Paul's Cathedral, London, is an Anglican cathedral, the seat of the Bishop of London and the mother church of the Diocese of London. It is a Grade I listed building, its dedication to Paul the Apostle dates back to the original church on this site, founded in AD 604. The present cathedral, dating from the late 17th century, was designed in the English Baroque style by Sir Christopher Wren, its construction, completed in Wren's lifetime, was part of a major rebuilding programme in the City after the Great Fire of London. The cathedral building destroyed in the Great Fire, now referred to as Old St Paul's Cathedral, was a central focus for medieval and early modern London, including Paul's walk and St. Paul's Churchyard being the site of St. Paul's Cross; the cathedral is one of the most recognisable sights of London. Its dome, framed by the spires of Wren's City churches, has dominated the skyline for over 300 years. At 365 feet high, it was the tallest building in London from 1710 to 1967; the dome is among the highest in the world.
St Paul's is the second-largest church building in area in the United Kingdom after Liverpool Cathedral. Services held at St Paul's have included the funerals of Admiral Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Winston Churchill and Baroness Thatcher. St Paul's Cathedral is the central subject of much promotional material, as well as of images of the dome surrounded by the smoke and fire of the Blitz; the cathedral is a working church with daily services. The tourist entry fee at the door is £ 20 for adults. A list of the 16 "archbishops" of London was recorded by Jocelyn of Furness in the 12th century, claiming London's Christian community was founded in the 2nd century under the legendary King Lucius and his missionary saints Fagan, Deruvian and Medwin. None of, considered credible by modern historians but, although the surviving text is problematic, either Bishop Restitutus or Adelphius at the 314 Council of Arles seems to have come from Londinium; the location of Londinium's original cathedral is unknown.
Bede records that in AD 604 Augustine of Canterbury consecrated Mellitus as the first bishop to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the East Saxons and their king, Sæberht. Sæberht's uncle and overlord, Æthelberht, king of Kent, built a church dedicated to St Paul in London, as the seat of the new bishop, it is assumed, although not proved, that this first Anglo-Saxon cathedral stood on the same site as the medieval and the present cathedrals. On the death of Sæberht in about 616, his pagan sons expelled Mellitus from London, the East Saxons reverted to paganism; the fate of the first cathedral building is unknown. Christianity was restored among the East Saxons in the late 7th century and it is presumed that either the Anglo-Saxon cathedral was restored or a new building erected as the seat of bishops such as Cedd and Earconwald, the last of whom was buried in the cathedral in 693; this building, or a successor, was rebuilt in the same year. King Æthelred the Unready was buried in the cathedral on his death in 1016.
The cathedral was burnt, with much of the city, in a fire in 1087, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The present structure of St Peter upon Cornhill was designed by Christopher Wren following the Great Fire of London in 1666, it stands upon the highest point in the area of old Londinium, medieval legends tie it to the city's earliest Christian community. In 1995, however, a large and ornate 5th-century building on Tower Hill was excavated, which might have been the city's cathedral; the Elizabethan antiquarian William Camden argued that a temple to the goddess Diana had stood during Roman times on the site occupied by the medieval St Paul's Cathedral. Wren reported that he had found no trace of any such temple during the works to build the new cathedral after the Great Fire, Camden's hypothesis is no longer accepted by modern archaeologists; the fourth St Paul's referred to as Old St Paul's, was begun by the Normans after the 1087 fire. A further fire in 1136 disrupted the work, the new cathedral was not consecrated until 1240.
During the period of construction, the style of architecture had changed from Romanesque to Gothic and this was reflected in the pointed arches and larger windows of the upper parts and East End of the building. The Gothic ribbed vault was constructed, like that of York Minster, of wood rather than stone, which affected the ultimate fate of the building. An enlargement programme commenced in 1256. This'New Work' was consecrated in 1300 but not complete until 1314. During the Medieval period St Paul's was exceeded in length only by the Abbey Church of Cluny and in the height of its spire only by Lincoln Cathedral and St. Mary's Church, Stralsund. Excavations by Francis Penrose in 1878 showed that it was 100 feet wide; the spire was about 489 feet in height. By the 16th century the building was starting to decay. After the Protestant Reformation under Henry VIII and Edward VI, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Chantries Acts led to the destruction of interior ornamentation and the cloisters, crypts, shrines and other buildings in St Paul's Churchyard.
Many of these former Catholic
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is Russia's second-largest city after Moscow, with 5 million inhabitants in 2012, part of the Saint Petersburg agglomeration with a population of 6.2 million. An important Russian port on the Baltic Sea, it has a status of a federal subject. Situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, it was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on 27 May 1703. During the periods 1713–1728 and 1732–1918, Saint Petersburg was the capital of Imperial Russia. In 1918, the central government bodies moved to Moscow, about 625 km to the south-east. Saint Petersburg is one of the most modern cities of Russia, as well as its cultural capital; the Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Saint Petersburg is home to the Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world. Many foreign consulates, international corporations and businesses have offices in Saint Petersburg. An admirer of everything German, Peter the Great named the city, Sankt-Peterburg.
On 1 September 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, the Imperial government renamed the city Petrograd, meaning "Peter's city", in order to expunge the German name Sankt and Burg. On 26 January 1924, shortly after the death of Vladimir Lenin, it was renamed to Leningrad, meaning "Lenin's City". On 6 September 1991, Sankt-Peterburg, was returned. Today, in English the city is known as "Saint Petersburg". Local residents refer to the city by its shortened nickname, Piter; the city's traditional nicknames among Russians are the Window to Europe. Swedish colonists built Nyenskans, a fortress at the mouth of the Neva River in 1611, in what was called Ingermanland, inhabited by Finnic tribe of Ingrians; the small town of Nyen grew up around it. At the end of the 17th century, Peter the Great, interested in seafaring and maritime affairs, wanted Russia to gain a seaport in order to trade with the rest of Europe, he needed a better seaport than the country's main one at the time, on the White Sea in the far north and closed to shipping during the winter.
On 12 May 1703, during the Great Northern War, Peter the Great captured Nyenskans and soon replaced the fortress. On 27 May 1703, closer to the estuary 5 km inland from the gulf), on Zayachy Island, he laid down the Peter and Paul Fortress, which became the first brick and stone building of the new city; the city was built by conscripted peasants from all over Russia. Tens of thousands of serfs died building the city; the city became the centre of the Saint Petersburg Governorate. Peter moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg in 1712, 9 years before the Treaty of Nystad of 1721 ended the war. During its first few years, the city developed around Trinity Square on the right bank of the Neva, near the Peter and Paul Fortress. However, Saint Petersburg soon started to be built out according to a plan. By 1716 the Swiss Italian Domenico Trezzini had elaborated a project whereby the city centre would be located on Vasilyevsky Island and shaped by a rectangular grid of canals; the project is evident in the layout of the streets.
In 1716, Peter the Great appointed Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond as the chief architect of Saint Petersburg. The style of Petrine Baroque, developed by Trezzini and other architects and exemplified by such buildings as the Menshikov Palace, Kunstkamera and Paul Cathedral, Twelve Collegia, became prominent in the city architecture of the early 18th century. In 1724 the Academy of Sciences and Academic Gymnasium were established in Saint Petersburg by Peter the Great. In 1725, Peter died at the age of fifty-two, his endeavours to modernize Russia had met with opposition from the Russian nobility—resulting in several attempts on his life and a treason case involving his son. In 1728, Peter II of Russia moved his seat back to Moscow, but four years in 1732, under Empress Anna of Russia, Saint Petersburg was again designated as the capital of the Russian Empire. It remained the seat of the Romanov dynasty and the Imperial Court of the Russian Tsars, as well as the seat of the Russian government, for another 186 years until the communist revolution of 1917.
In 1736–1737 the city suffered from catastrophic fires. To rebuild the damaged boroughs, a committee under Burkhard Christoph von Münnich commissioned a new plan in 1737; the city was divided into five boroughs, the city centre was moved to the Admiralty borough, situated on the east bank between the Neva and Fontanka. It developed along three radial streets, which meet at the Admiralty building and are now one street known as Nevsky Prospekt, Gorokhovaya Street and Voznesensky Prospekt. Baroque architecture became dominant in the city during the first sixty years, culminating in the Elizabethan Baroque, represented most notably by Italian Bartolomeo Rastrelli with such buildings as the Winter Palace. In the 1760s, Baroque architecture was succeeded by neoclassical architecture. Established in 1762, the Commission of Stone Buildings of Moscow and Saint Petersburg ruled that no structure in the
Canterbury Cathedral
Canterbury Cathedral in Canterbury, Kent, is one of the oldest and most famous Christian structures in England. It forms part of a World Heritage Site, it is the cathedral of the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, leader of the Church of England and symbolic leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion. Its formal title is the Metropolitical Church of Christ at Canterbury. Founded in 597, the cathedral was rebuilt between 1070 and 1077; the east end was enlarged at the beginning of the 12th century, rebuilt in the Gothic style following a fire in 1174, with significant eastward extensions to accommodate the flow of pilgrims visiting the shrine of Thomas Becket, the archbishop, murdered in the cathedral in 1170. The Norman nave and transepts survived until the late 14th century, when they were demolished to make way for the present structures. Before the English Reformation the cathedral was part of a Benedictine monastic community known as Christ Church, Canterbury, as well as being the seat of the archbishop.
Christianity had started to become powerful in the Roman Empire around the 3rd century. Following the conversion of Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century, the influence of Christianity grew steadily; the cathedral's first bishop was Augustine of Canterbury abbot of St Andrew's Benedictine Abbey in Rome. He was sent by Pope Saint Gregory the Great in 596 as a missionary to the Anglo-Saxons. Augustine dedicated it to Jesus Christ, the Holy Saviour. Augustine founded the Abbey of St Peter and Paul outside the city walls; this was rededicated to St Augustine himself and was for many centuries the burial place of the successive archbishops. The abbey is part of the World Heritage Site of Canterbury, along with the cathedral and the ancient Church of St Martin. Bede recorded; the oldest remains found during excavations beneath the present nave in 1993 were, parts of the foundations of an Anglo-Saxon building, constructed across a Roman road. They indicate that the original church consisted of a nave with a narthex, side-chapels to the north and south.
A smaller subsidiary building was found to the south-west of these foundations. During the 9th or 10th century this church was replaced by a larger structure with a squared west end, it appears to have had a square central tower. The 11th-century chronicler Eadmer, who had known the Saxon cathedral as a boy, wrote that, in its arrangement, it resembled St Peter's in Rome, indicating that it was of basilican form, with an eastern apse. During the reforms of Dunstan, archbishop from 960 until his death in 988, a Benedictine abbey named Christ Church Priory was added to the cathedral, but the formal establishment as a monastery seems to date only to c. 997 and the community only became monastic from Lanfranc's time onwards. Dunstan was buried on the south side of the high altar; the cathedral was badly damaged during Danish raids on Canterbury in 1011. The Archbishop, Ælfheah, was taken hostage by the raiders and killed at Greenwich on 19 April 1012, the first of Canterbury's five martyred archbishops.
After this a western apse was added as an oratory of Saint Mary during the archbishopric of Lyfing or Aethelnoth. The 1993 excavations revealed that the new western apse was polygonal, flanked by hexagonal towers, forming a westwork, it housed the archbishop's throne, with the altar of St Mary just to the east. At about the same time that the westwork was built, the arcade walls were strengthened and towers added to the eastern corners of the church; the cathedral was destroyed by fire in 1067, a year after the Norman Conquest. Rebuilding began in 1070 under Lanfranc, he cleared the ruins and reconstructed the cathedral to a design based on that of the Abbey of Saint-Étienne in Caen, where he had been abbot, using stone brought from France. The new church, its central axis about 5m south of that of its predecessor, was a cruciform building, with an aisled nave of nine bays, a pair of towers at the west end, aiseless transepts with apsidal chapels, a low crossing tower, a short choir ending in three apses.
It was dedicated in 1077. Under Lanfranc's successor Anselm, twice exiled from England, the responsibility for the rebuilding or improvement of the cathedral's fabric was left in the hands of the priors. Following the election of Prior Ernulf in 1096, Lanfranc's inadequate east end was demolished, replaced with an eastern arm 198 feet long, doubling the length of the cathedral, it was raised above a elaborately decorated crypt. Ernulf was succeeded in 1107 by Conrad, who completed the work by 1126; the new choir took the form of a complete church with its own transepts. A free standing campanile was built on a mound in the cathedral precinct in about 1160; as with many Gothic church buildings, the interior of the choir was richly embellished. William of Malmesbury wrote: "Nothing like it could be seen in England either for the light of its glass windows, the gleaming of its marble pavements, or the many-coloured paintings which led the eyes to the panelled ceiling above."Though named after the 6th-century founding archbishop, the Chair of St Augustine, the ceremonial enthronement chair of the Archbishop of Canterbury, may date from the Norman period.
Its first recorded use is in 1205. A pivotal moment in the history of the cathedral was the mu
Scroll (art)
The scroll in art is an element of ornament and graphic design featuring spirals and rolling incomplete circle motifs, some of which resemble the edge-on view of a book or document in scroll form, though many types are plant-scrolls, which loosely represent plant forms such as vines, with leaves or flowers attached. Scrollwork is a term for some forms of decoration dominated by spiralling scrolls, today used in popular language for two-dimensional decorative flourishes and arabesques of all kinds those with circular or spiralling shapes. Scroll decoration has been used for the decoration of a vast range of objects, in all Eurasian cultures, most beyond. A lengthy evolution over the last two millennia has taken forms of plant-based scroll decoration from Greco-Roman architecture to Chinese pottery, back across Eurasia to Europe, they are widespread in architectural decoration, painted ceramics and illuminated manuscripts. In the usual artistic convention, scrolls "apparently do not succumb to gravitational forces, as garlands and festoons do, or oppose them, in the manner of vertically growing trees.
This gives scrolls a relentless power. If attached to walls, they are more embedded in the architectural order, which are fictitiously hanging on them." In true scrolls the main "stem" lines do not cross over each other, or not significantly. When crossing stems become a dominant feature in the design, terms such as interlace or arabesque are used instead. Many scrolls run along a narrow band, such as a frieze panel or the border of a carpet or piece of textile or ceramics, so are called "running scrolls", while others spread to cover wide areas, are infinitely expandible. Similar motifs made up of straight lines and right angles, such as the "Greek key", are more called meanders. In art history, a "floriated" or "flower scroll" has flowers in the centre of the volutes, a "foliated" or "leaf scroll" shows leaves in varying degrees of profusion along the stems; the Ara Pacis scrolls are foliated and sparingly floriated, whilst those in the Dome of the Rock mosaics are profusely foliated with thick leaves forming segments of the stems.
As in arabesques, the "leaf" forms spring directly from the stem without a leaf stalk in ways that few if any real plants do. Although forms are based on real plants the acanthus, vine and paeony, faithful representation is the point of the design, as of these four only the vine is the sort of climbing plant with many stems and tendrils that scrolls represent. Islamic and Chinese scroll decoration included more flowers than European designs, whether classical or medieval. Scroll-forms containing animals or human figures are said to be "inhabited". In speading designs, an upright element imitating the main stem or flower-stalk of the plant appears as a central element protruding vertically from the base, again as in the Ara Pacis panel; this is not a necessary element. The standard was depicted as a fanciful candelabra in grotesque designs, in which it is an important element, central to the composition. Scrollwork in its strict meaning is rather different, it develops from strapwork, as the ends of otherwise flat elements, loosely imitating leather, metal sheets, or broad leaves rather than plant tendrils.
Rather than the "profile" view displaying the spiral, the forms are shown front on with the width of the strip seen. It begins in the Renaissance, becomes popular in Mannerist and Baroque ornament. Continuous scroll decoration has a long history, such patterns were an essential element of classical and medieval decoration; the use of scrolls in ornament goes back to at least the Bronze Age. Geometrical scroll patterns like the Vitruvian scroll are found widely in many cultures, often developed independently. Plant-based scrolls were widely used in Greek and Roman architectural decoration, spreading from them to other types of objects, they may have first evolved in Greek painted pottery, where their development can traced in the large surviving corpus. In Europe Greco-Roman decoration especially as seen in jewellery and floor mosaics, was adapted by the "barbarian" peoples of the Migration Period into interlace styles replacing the plant forms of the main scrolling stem with stretched and stylized animal forms.
In Anglo-Saxon art the interlace designs of the early pagan Anglo-Saxons were replaced by vine scrolls after Christianization, medieval European decoration in general evolved styles that combined the two. Another expansion was to the East: "The practice of decorating facades in Chinese Buddhist caves with figures combined with leaf scrolls was derived in its entirety from provincial forms of Hellenistic architecture employed in Central Asia"; the lotus flower was a symbol of Buddhism, so often included in these r
