Gog and Magog
Gog and Magog appear in the Hebrew Bible as individuals, peoples, or lands. In Ezekiel 38, Gog is an individual and Magog is his land. A legend was attached to Gog and Magog by the time of the Roman period, that the Gates of Alexander were erected by Alexander the Great to repel the tribe. Romanized Jewish historian Josephus knew them as the nation descended from Magog the Japhetite, as in Genesis, explained them to be the Scythians. In the hands of Early Christian writers they became apocalyptic hordes, throughout the Medieval period variously identified as the Huns, Mongols, Turanians or other nomads, or the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel; the legend of Gog and Magog and the gates was interpolated into the Alexander romances. In one version, "Goth and Magoth" are kings of the Unclean Nations, driven beyond a mountain pass by Alexander, blocked from returning by his new wall. Gog and Magog are derived literature, they have been depicted on Medieval cosmological maps, or mappae mundi, sometimes alongside Alexander's wall.
The conflation of Gog and Magog with the legend of Alexander and the Iron Gates was disseminated throughout the Near East in the early centuries of the Christian era. They appear in the Quran as Yajuj and Majuj, adversaries of Dhul-Qarnayn, mentioned in the Qu'ran as a great righteous ruler and is most considered to be Alexander the Great. Muslim geographers identified them at first with Turkic tribes from Central Asia and with the Mongols. In modern times they remain associated with apocalyptic thinking in the United States and the Muslim world; the names are mentioned together in Ezekiel chapter 38, where Gog is an individual and Magog is his land. The meaning of the name Gog remains uncertain, in any case the author of the Ezekiel prophecy seems to attach no particular importance to it. Efforts have been made to identify him with various individuals, notably Gyges, a king of Lydia in the early 7th century BCE, but many scholars do not believe he is related to any historical person. In Genesis 10 Magog is a person, son of Japheth son of Noah.
The name Magog is obscure, but may come from the Assyrian mat-Gugu, "Land of Gyges", i.e. Lydia. Alternatively, Gog may be derived from Magog rather than the other way round, "Magog" may be code for Babylon; the form "Gog and Magog" may have emerged as shorthand for "Gog and/of the land of Magog", based on their usage in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. An example of this combined form in Hebrew has been found, but its context is unclear, being preserved only in a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In Revelation and Magog together are the hostile nations of the world. Gog or Goug the Reubenite occurs in 1 Chronicles 5:4, but he appears to have no connection with the Gog of Ezekiel or Magog of Genesis; the Biblical "Gog and Magog" gave derivation of the name Gogmagog, a legendary British giant. A corrupted folk rendition in print altered the tradition around Gogmagog and Corineus with two giants Gog and Magog, with whom the Guildhall statues came to be identified; the Book of Ezekiel records a series of visions received by the prophet Ezekiel, a priest of Solomon's Temple, among the captive during the Babylonian exile.
The exile, he tells his fellow captives, is God's punishment on Israel for turning away, but God will restore his people to Jerusalem when they return to him. After this message of reassurance, chapters 38–39, the Gog oracle, tell how Gog of Magog and his hordes will threaten the restored Israel but will be destroyed, after which God will establish a new Temple and dwell with his people for a period of lasting peace. "Son of man, direct your face against Gog, of the land of Magog, the prince, leader of Meshech and Tubal, prophesy concerning him. Say: Thus said the Lord: Behold, I am against you, the prince, leader of Meshech and Tubal... Persia and Put will be with you... Gomer with all its troops, Beth Togarmah from the far north with all its troops—the many nations with you." Internal evidence indicates that the Gog oracle was composed later than the chapters around it. Of Gog's allies and Tubal were 7th-century kingdoms in central Anatolia north of Israel, Persia towards east and Put to the south.
The confederation thus represents a multinational alliance surrounding Israel. "Why the prophet's gaze should have focused on these particular nations is unclear," comments Biblical scholar Daniel I. Block, but their remoteness and reputation for violence and mystery "made Gog and his confederates perfect symbols of the archetypal enemy, rising against God and his people". One explanation is that the Gog alliance, a blend of the "Table of Nations" in Genesis 10 and Tyre's trading partners in Ezekiel 27, with Persia added, was cast in the role of end-time enemies of Israel by means of Isaiah 66:19, another text of eschatological foretelling. Although the prophecy refers to Gog as an enemy in some future, it is not clear if the confrontation is meant to occur in a final "end of days" since the Hebrew term aḥarit ha-yamim may mean "latter days", is open to interpretation. Twentieth-century scholars have used the
Ancient Libya
The Latin name Libya referred to the region west of the Nile corresponding to the Atlantic Mountains according to Diodorus. Its people were ancestors of the modern Libyan, they occupied the area for thousands of years before the beginning of human records in ancient Egypt. Climate changes affected the locations of the settlements. More narrowly, Libya could refer to the country west of Egypt, viz Marmarica and Cyrenaica; the Libyan Sea or Mare Libycum was the part of the Mediterranean Sea south of Crete, between Cyrene and Alexandria. In the Hellenistic period, the Berbers were known as Libyans, a Greek term for the inhabitants of the Maghreb, their lands were called "Libya" and extended from modern Morocco to the western borders of ancient Egypt. Modern Egypt contains the Siwa Oasis, part of ancient Libya; the Siwi language, a Berber language, is still spoken in the area. The Greek name is based on the ethnonym Libu; the name Libya was the Latin designation for the region of the Maghreb, from the Ancient Greek.
In Classical Greece, the term had a broader meaning, encompassing the continent that became known as Africa, which, in antiquity, was assumed to constitute one third of the world's land mass, compared to Europe and Asia combined. The Libu are attested since the Late Bronze Age as inhabiting the region; the oldest known references to the Libu date to Ramesses II and his successor Merneptah, pharaohs of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt, during the 13th century BC. LBW appears as an ethnic name on the Merneptah Stele. Menelaus had travelled there on his way home from Troy. Homer names Libya, in Odyssey. Homer used the name in a geographic sense, while he called its inhabitants "Lotus-eaters". After Homer, Aeschylus and other ancient Greek writers use the name. Herodotus used Λιβύη Libúē to indicate the African continent; when the Greeks settled in the real Libya in the 630s, the old name taken from the Egyptians was applied by the Greeks of Cyrenaica, who may have coexisted with the Libu. The name appeared in the Hebrew language, written in the Bible as Lehabim and Lubim, indicating the ethnic population and the geographic territory as well.
In the neo-Punic inscriptions, it was written as Lby for the masculine noun, Lbt for the feminine noun of Libyan. Latin absorbed the name from the Punic languages; the Romans would have known them before their colonization of North Africa because of the Libyan role in the Punic Wars against the Romans. The Romans used the name Líbues, but only when referring to the Libyan Desert of Egypt; the other Libyan territories were called "Africa". Classical Arabic literature called Libya Lubya. Modern Arabic uses Libya; the Lwatae, the tribe of Ibn Battuta, as the Arabs called it, was a Berber tribe, situated in Cyrenaica. This tribe may have ranged from the Atlantic Ocean to modern Libya and was referred to by Corippius as Laguatan. Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah states Luwa was an ancestor of this tribe, he writes. Subsequently, it became Lwat. Conversely, the Arabs adopted the name as a singular form, adding an "h" for the plural form in Arabic. Ibn Khaldun disagrees with Ibn Hazam, who claimed on the basis of Berber sources, that the Lwatah, in addition to the Sadrata and the Mzata, were from the Qibts.
According to Ibn Khaldun, this claim is incorrect because Ibn Hazam had not read the books of the Berber scholars. Oric Bates, a historian, considers that the name Libu or LBW would be derived from the name Luwatah whilst the name Liwata is a derivation of the name Libu. Compared with the history of Egypt, historians know little about the history of Libya, as there are few surviving written records. Information on ancient Libya comes from archaeological evidence and historic sources written by Egyptians neighbors, the ancient Greeks and Byzantines, from Arabs of Medieval times. Since Neolithic times, the climate of North Africa has become drier. A reminder of the desertification of the area is provided by megalithic remains, which occur in great variety of form and in vast numbers in presently arid and uninhabitable wastelands: dolmens and circles like Stonehenge, underground cells excavated in rock, barrows topped with huge slabs, step-pyramid-like mounds. Most remarkable are the trilithons, some still standing, some fallen, which occur isolated or in rows, consist of two squared uprights standing on a common pedestal that supports a huge transverse beam.
In the Terrgurt valley, Cowper says, "There had been no less than eighteen or twenty megalithic trilithons, in a line, each with its massive altar placed before it." In ancient times, the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the Persian Achaemenid Empire, the armies of Alexander the Great and his Ptolemaic successors from Egypt Romans and local representatives of the Byzantine Empire ruled all or parts of Libya
Germans
Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe, who share a common German ancestry and history. German is the shared mother tongue of a substantial majority of ethnic Germans; the English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages. Since the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation within the Holy Roman Empire, German society has been characterized by a Catholic-Protestant divide. Of 100 million native speakers of German in the world 80 million consider themselves Germans. There are an additional 80 million people of German ancestry in the United States, Argentina, South Africa, the post-Soviet states, France, each accounting for at least 1 million. Thus, the total number of Germans lies somewhere between 100 and more than 150 million, depending on the criteria applied. Today, people from countries with German-speaking majorities most subscribe to their own national identities and may or may not self-identify as ethnically German.
The German term Deutsche originates from the Old High German word diutisc, referring to the Germanic "language of the people". It is not clear how if at all, the word was used as an ethnonym in Old High German. Used as a noun, ein diutscher in the sense of "a German" emerges in Middle High German, attested from the second half of the 12th century; the Old French term alemans is taken from the name of the Alamanni. It was loaned into Middle English as almains in the early 14th century; the word Dutch is attested in English from the 14th century, denoting continental West Germanic dialects and their speakers. While in most Romance languages the Germans have been named from the Alamanni, the Old Norse and Estonian names for the Germans were taken from that of the Saxons. In Slavic languages, the Germans were given the name of němьci with a meaning "foreigner, one who does not speak "; the English term Germans is only attested from the mid-16th century, based on the classical Latin term Germani used by Julius Caesar and Tacitus.
It replaced Dutch and Almains, the latter becoming obsolete by the early 18th century. The Germans are a Germanic people. Part of the Holy Roman Empire, around 300 independent German states emerged during its decline after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ending the Thirty Years War; these states formed into modern Germany in the 19th century. The concept of a German ethnicity is linked to Germanic tribes of antiquity in central Europe; the early Germans originated on the North German Plain as well as southern Scandinavia. By the 2nd century BC, the number of Germans was increasing and they began expanding into eastern Europe and southward into Celtic territory. During antiquity these Germanic tribes remained separate from each other and did not have writing systems at that time. In the European Iron Age the area, now Germany was divided into the La Tène horizon in Southern Germany and the Jastorf culture in Northern Germany. By 55 BC, the Germans had reached the Danube river and had either assimilated or otherwise driven out the Celts who had lived there, had spread west into what is now Belgium and France.
Conflict between the Germanic tribes and the forces of Rome under Julius Caesar forced major Germanic tribes to retreat to the east bank of the Rhine. Roman emperor Augustus in 12 BC ordered the conquest of the Germans, but the catastrophic Roman defeat at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest resulted in the Roman Empire abandoning its plans to conquer Germania. Germanic peoples in Roman territory were culturally Romanized, although much of Germania remained free of direct Roman rule, Rome influenced the development of German society the adoption of Christianity by the Germans who obtained it from the Romans. In Roman-held territories with Germanic populations, the Germanic and Roman peoples intermarried, Roman and Christian traditions intermingled; the adoption of Christianity would become a major influence in the development of a common German identity. The first major public figure to speak of a German people in general, was the Roman figure Tacitus in his work Germania around 100 AD; however an actual united German identity and ethnicity did not exist and it would take centuries of development of German culture until the concept of a German ethnicity began to become a popular identity.
The Germanic peoples during the Migrations Period came into contact with other peoples. The Limes Germanicus was breached in AD 260. Migrating Germanic tribes commingled with the local Gallo-Roman populations in what is now Swabia and Bavaria; the arrival of the Huns in Europe resulted in Hun conquest of large parts of Eastern Europe, the Huns were allies of the Roman Empire who fought against Germanic tribes, but the Huns cooperated with the Germanic tribe of the Ostrogoths, large numbers of Germans lived within the lands of the Hunnic Empire of
Ham (son of Noah)
Ham, according to the Table of Nations in the Book of Genesis, was a son of Noah and the father of Cush, Mizraim and Canaan. Ham's descendants are interpreted by Flavius Josephus and others as having populated Africa and adjoining parts of Asia; the Bible refers to Egypt as "the land of Ham" in Psalm 78:51. Since the 17th century a number of suggestions have been made that relate the name Ham to a Hebrew word for "burnt", "black" or "hot", to the Egyptian word ḥm for "servant" or the word ḥm for "majesty" or the Egyptian word Kmt for "Egypt". A 2004 review of David Goldenberg's The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism and Islam states that Goldenberg "argues persuasively that the biblical name Ham bears no relationship at all to the notion of blackness and as of now is of unknown etymology." Genesis 5:32 indicates that Noah became the father of Shem and Japheth from the age of 500 years old, but does not list in detail their specific years. An incident involving Ham is related in Genesis 9:20-27.
And Noah began to be an husbandman, planted a vineyard: and he drank of the wine, was drunken. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, told his two brethren without, and Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it upon both their shoulders, went backward, covered the nakedness of their father. And Noah awoke from his wine, knew what his youngest son had done unto him, and he said. And he said, Blessed be the God of Shem. God enlarge Japheth; the Talmud deduces two possible explanations, one attributed to Rab and one to Rabbi Samuel, for what Ham did to Noah to warrant the curse. According to Rab, Ham castrated Noah on the basis that, since Noah cursed Ham by his fourth son Canaan, Ham must have injured Noah with respect to a fourth son. Emasculating him thus deprived Noah of the possibility of a fourth son. According to Samuel, Ham sodomized Noah, a judgment that he based on analogy with another biblical incident in which the phrase "and he saw" is used: With regard to Ham and Noah, Genesis 9 reads, " And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, told his two brethren without.
And Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it upon both their shoulders, went backward, covered the nakedness of their father. In Genesis 34:2 it reads, "And when Shechem the son of Hamor saw her, he took her and lay with her and defiled her." According to this argument, similar abuse must have happened each time that the Bible uses the same language. The Talmud concludes that, in fact, "both indignities were perpetrated." Although the story can be taken in more recent times, some scholars have suggested that Ham may have had intercourse with his father's wife. Under this interpretation, Canaan is cursed as the "product of Ham's illicit union." The chronological scheme of the Book of Jubilees has Ham born in the year 1209 A. M. — two years after Shem, three before Japheth, 99 before the flood. It gives the name of his wife who survived the flood as Na'eltama'uk. After his youngest son Canaan was cursed in 1321 A. M. he left Mount Ararat and built a city named for his wife on the south side of the mountain.
In 1569 A. M. he received a third division of the earth along with his two brothers for his inheritance: everything west of the Nile River, to the south of Gadir. In 1639 A. M. when the nations were scattered following the failure of the Tower of Babel and his children journeyed to their allotment, with the exception of Canaan, who settled in Shem's territory, thus receiving another curse. According to Jubilees 10:29–34, this second curse is attributed to Canaan's steadfast refusal to join his elder brothers in Ham's allotment beyond the Nile, instead "squatting" within the inheritance of Shem, on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, the region promised to Abraham: And Canaan saw the land of Lebanon to the river of Egypt, that it was good, he went not into the land of his inheritance to the west the sea, he dwelt in the land of Lebanon and westward from the border of Jordan and from the border of the sea, and Ham, his father, Cush and Mizraim his brothers said unto him:'Thou hast settled in a land, not thine, which did not fall to us by lot: do not do so.
Dwell not in the dwelling of Shem. Cursed art thou, cursed shalt thou be beyond all the sons of Noah, by the curse by which we bound ourselves by an oath in the presence of the holy judge, in the presence of Noah our father.' But he did not hearken unto them, dwelt in the land of Lebanon from Hamath to the entering of Egypt, he and his sons until this day. And for this reason that land is named Canaan. – Jubilees 10:29–34. In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints book of Abraham, when it relates the conditions of the Egyptian government, it says in verse 27 of Chapter 1: "Now, Pharaoh being of th
Phrygia
In classical antiquity, Phrygia was a kingdom in the west central part of Anatolia, in what is now Asian Turkey, centered on the Sangarios River. After its conquest, it became a region of the great empires of the time. Stories of the heroic age of Greek mythology tell of several legendary Phrygian kings: Gordias, whose Gordian Knot would be cut by Alexander the Great Midas, who turned whatever he touched to gold Mygdon, who warred with the AmazonsAccording to Homer's Iliad, the Phrygians participated in the Trojan War as close allies of the Trojans, fighting against the Achaeans. Phrygian power reached its peak in the late 8th century BC under another, king: Midas, who dominated most of western and central Anatolia and rivaled Assyria and Urartu for power in eastern Anatolia; this Midas was, however the last independent king of Phrygia before Cimmerians sacked the Phrygian capital, around 695 BC. Phrygia became subject to Lydia, successively to Persia and his Hellenistic successors, Pergamon and Byzantium.
Phrygians became assimilated into other cultures by the early medieval era. Phrygia describes an area on the western end of the high Anatolian plateau, an arid region quite unlike the forested lands to the north and west. Phrygia begins in the northwest where an area of dry steppe is watered by the Sakarya and Porsuk river system and is home to the settlements of Dorylaeum near modern Eskisehir, the Phrygian capital Gordion; the climate is harsh with cold winters. South of Dorylaeum, there is another important Phrygian settlement, Midas City, situated in an area of hills and columns of volcanic tuff. To the south again, central Phrygia includes the cities of Afyonkarahisar with its marble quarries at nearby Docimium, the town of Synnada. At the western end of Phrygia stood the towns of Aizanoi and Acmonia. From here to the southwest lies the hilly area of Phrygia that contrasts to the bare plains of the region's heartland. Southwestern Phrygia is watered by the Maeander and its tributary the Lycus, contains the towns of Laodicea on the Lycus and Hierapolis.
Inscriptions found at Gordium make clear that Phrygians spoke an Indo-European language with at least some vocabulary similar to Greek, not belonging to the family of Anatolian languages spoken by most of Phrygia's neighbors. One of the so-called Homeric Hymns describes the Phrygian language as not mutually intelligible with that of Troy. According to ancient tradition among Greek historians, the Phrygians anciently migrated to Anatolia from the Balkans. Herodotus says, he and other Greek writers recorded legends about King Midas that associated him with or put his origin in Macedonia. Some classical writers connected the Phrygians with the Mygdones, the name of two groups of people, one of which lived in northern Macedonia and another in Mysia; the Phrygians have been identified with the Bebryces, a people said to have warred with Mysia before the Trojan War and who had a king named Mygdon at the same time as the Phrygians were said to have had a king named Mygdon. The classical historian Strabo groups Phrygians, Mysians and Bithynians together as peoples that migrated to Anatolia from the Balkans.
This image of Phrygians as part of a related group of northwest Anatolian cultures seems the most explanation for the confusion over whether Phrygians and Anatolian Mygdones were or were not the same people. The apparent similarity of the Phrygian language to Greek and its dissimilarity with the Anatolian languages spoken by most of their neighbors is taken as support for a European origin of the Phrygians. Phrygian continued to be spoken until the 6th century AD, though its distinctive alphabet was lost earlier than those of most Anatolian cultures; some scholars have theorized that such a migration could have occurred more than classical sources suggest, have sought to fit the Phrygian arrival into a narrative explaining the downfall of the Hittite Empire and the end of the high Bronze Age in Anatolia. According to this "recent migration" theory, the Phrygians invaded just before or after the collapse of the Hittite Empire at the beginning of the 12th century BC, filling the political vacuum in central-western Anatolia, may have been counted among the "Sea Peoples" that Egyptian records credit with bringing about the Hittite collapse.
The so-called Handmade Knobbed Ware found in Western Anatolia during this period has been tentatively identified as an import connected to this invasion. However, most scholars reject such a recent Phrygian migration and accept as factual the Iliad's account that the Phrygians were established on the Sakarya River before the Trojan War, thus must have been there during the stages of the Hittite Empire, earlier; these scholars seek instead to trace the Phrygians' origins among the many nations of western Anatolia who were subject to the Hittites. This interpretation gets support from Greek legends about the founding of Phrygia's main city Gordium by Gordias and of Ancyra by Midas, which suggest that Gordium and Ancyra were believed to date from the distant past before the Trojan War; some scholars dismiss the claim of a Phrygian migration
Europe
Europe is a continent located in the Northern Hemisphere and in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the Mediterranean Sea to the south, it comprises the westernmost part of Eurasia. Since around 1850, Europe is most considered to be separated from Asia by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas and the waterways of the Turkish Straits. Although the term "continent" implies physical geography, the land border is somewhat arbitrary and has been redefined several times since its first conception in classical antiquity; the division of Eurasia into two continents reflects East-West cultural and ethnic differences which vary on a spectrum rather than with a sharp dividing line. The geographic border does not follow political boundaries, with Turkey and Kazakhstan being transcontinental countries. A strict application of the Caucasus Mountains boundary places two comparatively small countries and Georgia, in both continents.
Europe covers 2 % of the Earth's surface. Politically, Europe is divided into about fifty sovereign states of which the Russian Federation is the largest and most populous, spanning 39% of the continent and comprising 15% of its population. Europe had a total population of about 741 million as of 2016; the European climate is affected by warm Atlantic currents that temper winters and summers on much of the continent at latitudes along which the climate in Asia and North America is severe. Further from the sea, seasonal differences are more noticeable than close to the coast. Europe, in particular ancient Greece, was the birthplace of Western civilization; the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD and the subsequent Migration Period marked the end of ancient history and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Renaissance humanism, exploration and science led to the modern era. Since the Age of Discovery started by Portugal and Spain, Europe played a predominant role in global affairs. Between the 16th and 20th centuries, European powers controlled at various times the Americas all of Africa and Oceania and the majority of Asia.
The Age of Enlightenment, the subsequent French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars shaped the continent culturally and economically from the end of the 17th century until the first half of the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century, gave rise to radical economic and social change in Western Europe and the wider world. Both world wars took place for the most part in Europe, contributing to a decline in Western European dominance in world affairs by the mid-20th century as the Soviet Union and the United States took prominence. During the Cold War, Europe was divided along the Iron Curtain between NATO in the West and the Warsaw Pact in the East, until the revolutions of 1989 and fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1949 the Council of Europe was founded, following a speech by Sir Winston Churchill, with the idea of unifying Europe to achieve common goals, it includes all European states except for Belarus and Vatican City. Further European integration by some states led to the formation of the European Union, a separate political entity that lies between a confederation and a federation.
The EU originated in Western Europe but has been expanding eastward since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The currency of most countries of the European Union, the euro, is the most used among Europeans. In classical Greek mythology, Europa was a Phoenician princess; the word Europe is derived from her name. The name contains the elements εὐρύς, "wide, broad" and ὤψ "eye, countenance", hence their composite Eurṓpē would mean "wide-gazing" or "broad of aspect". Broad has been an epithet of Earth herself in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion and the poetry devoted to it. There have been attempts to connect Eurṓpē to a Semitic term for "west", this being either Akkadian erebu meaning "to go down, set" or Phoenician'ereb "evening, west", at the origin of Arabic Maghreb and Hebrew ma'arav. Michael A. Barry, professor in Princeton University's Near Eastern Studies Department, finds the mention of the word Ereb on an Assyrian stele with the meaning of "night, sunset", in opposition to Asu " sunrise", i.e. Asia.
The same naming motive according to "cartographic convention" appears in Greek Ἀνατολή. Martin Litchfield West stated that "phonologically, the match between Europa's name and any form of the Semitic word is poor." Next to these hypotheses there is a Proto-Indo-European root *h1regʷos, meaning "darkness", which produced Greek Erebus. Most major world languages use words derived from Europa to refer to the continent. Chinese, for example, uses the word Ōuzhōu. In some Turkic languages the Persian name Frangistan is used casually in referring to much of Europe, besides official names such as Avrupa or Evropa; the prevalent definition of Europe as a geographical term has been in use since the mid-19th century. Europe is taken to be bounded by large bodies of water
Biological anthropology
Biological anthropology known as physical anthropology, is a scientific discipline concerned with the biological and behavioral aspects of human beings, their extinct hominin ancestors, related non-human primates from an evolutionary perspective. It is a subfield of anthropology that provides a biological perspective to the systematic study of human beings; as a subfield of anthropology, biological anthropology itself is further divided into several branches. All branches are united in their common orientation and/or application of evolutionary theory to understanding human biology and behavior. Paleoanthropology is the study of fossil evidence for human evolution using remains from extinct hominin and other primate species to determine the morphological and behavioral changes in the human lineage, as well as the environment in which human evolution occurred. Human biology is an interdisciplinary field of biology, biological anthropology and medicine, which concerns international, population-level perspectives on health, anatomy, molecular biology and genetics.
Primatology is the study of non-human primate behavior and genetics. Primatologists use phylogenetic methods to infer which traits humans share with other primates and which are human-specific adaptations. Human behavioral ecology is the study of behavioral adaptations from the evolutionary and ecologic perspectives, it focuses on human adaptive responses to environmental stresses. Bioarchaeology is the study of past human cultures through examination of human remains recovered in an archaeological context; the examined human remains are limited to bones but may include preserved soft tissue. Researchers in bioarchaeology combine the skill sets of human osteology and archaeology, consider the cultural and mortuary context of the remains. Paleopathology is the study of disease in antiquity; this study focuses not only on pathogenic conditions observable in bones or mummified soft tissue, but on nutritional disorders, variation in stature or morphology of bones over time, evidence of physical trauma, or evidence of occupationally derived biomechanic stress.
Evolutionary psychology is the study of psychological structures from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations – that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection in human evolution. Evolutionary biology is the study of the evolutionary processes that produced the diversity of life on Earth, starting from a single common ancestor; these processes include natural selection, common descent, speciation. Biological Anthropology looks different today than it did twenty years ago; the name is relatively new, having been'physical anthropology' for over a century, with some practitioners still applying that term. Biological anthropologists look back to the work of Charles Darwin as a major foundation for what they do today. However, if one traces the intellectual genealogy and the culture back to physical anthropology's beginnings--going further back than the existence of much of what we know now as the hominin fossil record--then history focuses in on the field's interest in human biological variation.
Some editors, see below, have rooted the field deeper than formal science. Attempts to study and classify human beings as living organisms date back to ancient Greece; the Greek philosopher Plato placed humans on the scala naturae, which included all things, from inanimate objects at the bottom to deities at the top. This became the main system through which scholars thought about nature for the next 2,000 years. Plato's student Aristotle observed in his History of Animals that human beings are the only animals to walk upright and argued, in line with his teleological view of nature, that humans have buttocks and no tails in order to give them a cushy place to sit when they are tired of standing, he explained regional variations in human features as the result of different climates. He wrote about physiognomy, an idea derived from writings in the Hippocratic Corpus. Scientific physical anthropology began in the 17th to 18th centuries with the study of racial classification; the first prominent physical anthropologist, the German physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, amassed a large collection of human skulls, from which he argued for the division of humankind into five major races.
In the 19th century, French physical anthropologists, led by Paul Broca, focused on craniometry while the German tradition, led by Rudolf Virchow, emphasized the influence of environment and disease upon the human body. In the 1830s and 1840s, physical anthropology was prominent in the debate about slavery, with the scientific, monogenist works of the British abolitionist James Cowles Prichard opposing those of the American polygenist Samuel George Morton. In the late 19th century, German-American anthropologist Franz Boas impacted biological anthropology by emphasizing the influence of culture and experience on the human form, his research showed that head shape was malleable to environmental and nutritional factors rather than a stable "racial" trait. However, scientific racism still persisted in biological anthropology, with prominent figures such as Earnest Hooton and Aleš Hrdlička promoting theories of racial superiority and a European o
