Legend
Legend is a genre of folklore that consists of a narrative featuring human actions perceived or believed both by teller and listeners to have taken place within human history. Narratives in this genre may demonstrate human values, possess certain qualities that give the tale verisimilitude. Legend, for its active and passive participants, includes no happenings that are outside the realm of "possibility," but may include miracles. Legends may be transformed over time, in order to keep them fresh and realistic. Many legends operate within the realm of uncertainty, never being believed by the participants, but never being resolutely doubted; the Brothers Grimm defined legend as folktale grounded. A modern folklorist's professional definition of legend was proposed by Timothy R. Tangherlini in 1990: Legend is a short episodic, traditional ecotypified historicized narrative performed in a conversational mode, reflecting on a psychological level a symbolic representation of folk belief and collective experiences and serving as a reaffirmation of held values of the group to whose tradition it belongs.
Legend is a loanword from Old French that entered English usage circa 1340. The Old French noun legende derives from the Medieval Latin legenda. In its early English-language usage, the word indicated a narrative of an event; the word legendary was a noun meaning a collection or corpus of legends. This word changed to legendry, legendary became the adjectival form. By 1613, English-speaking Protestants began to use the word when they wished to imply that an event was fictitious. Thus, legend gained its modern connotations of "undocumented" and "spurious", which distinguish it from the meaning of chronicle. In 1866, Jacob Grimm described the fairy tale as "poetic, legend historic." Early scholars such as Karl Wehrhan Friedrich Ranke and Will Erich Peuckert followed Grimm's example in focussing on the literary narrative, an approach, enriched after the 1960s, by addressing questions of performance and the anthropological and psychological insights provided in considering legends' social context.
Questions of categorising legends, in hopes of compiling a content-based series of categories on the line of the Aarne–Thompson folktale index, provoked a search for a broader new synthesis. In an early attempt at defining some basic questions operative in examining folk tales, Friedrich Ranke in 1925 characterised the folk legend as "a popular narrative with an objectively untrue imaginary content" a dismissive position, subsequently abandoned. Compared to the structured folktale, legend is comparatively amorphous, Helmut de Boor noted in 1928; the narrative content of legend is in realistic mode, rather than the wry irony of folktale. In Einleitung in der Geschichtswissenschaft, Ernst Bernheim asserted that a legend is a longstanding rumour. Gordon Allport credited the staying-power of some rumours to the persistent cultural state-of-mind that they embody and capsulise; when Willian Jansen suggested that legends that disappear were "short-term legends" and the persistent ones be termed "long-term legends", the distinction between legend and rumour was obliterated, Tangherlini concluded.
In the narrow Christian sense, legenda were hagiographical accounts collected in a legendary. Because saints' lives are included in many miracle stories, legend, in a wider sense, came to refer to any story, set in a historical context but that contains supernatural, divine or fantastic elements. Hippolyte Delehaye distinguished legend from myth: "The legend, on the other hand, has, of necessity, some historical or topographical connection, it refers imaginary events to some real personage, or it localizes romantic stories in some definite spot."From the moment a legend is retold as fiction, its authentic legendary qualities begin to fade and recede: in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving transformed a local Hudson River Valley legend into a literary anecdote with "Gothic" overtones, which tended to diminish its character as genuine legend. Stories that exceed the boundaries of "realism" are called "fables". For example, the talking animal formula of Aesop identifies his brief stories as fables, not legends.
The parable of the Prodigal Son would be a legend if it were told as having happened to a specific son of a historical father. If it included a donkey that gave sage advice to the Prodigal Son it would be a fable. Legend may be transmitted orally, passed on person-to-person, or, in the original sense, through written text. Jacob de Voragine's Legenda Aurea or "The Golden Legend" comprises a series of vitae or instructive biographical narratives, tied to the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church, they are presented as lives of the saints, but the profusion of miraculous happenings and above all their uncritical context are characteristics of hagiography. The Legenda was intended to inspire extemporized homilies and sermons appropriate to the saint of the day; the vanishing hitchhiker is the best-known urban legend in America, traceable as far back as 1870, but it is found around the world including in Korea and Russia. In the legend, a young girl in a white dress picked up alongside of the road by a passerby.
The unknown girl in white remains silent for the duration of her ride, thanks the driver, gets
Fucine Lake
The Fucine Lake was a large endorheic lake in western Abruzzo, central Italy, stretching from Avezzano in the northwest to Ortucchio in the southeast, touching Trasacco in the southwest. Once the third largest lake in Italy, it was drained in 1878; the former lake is mentioned by Virgil in the Aeneid in book 7, in that it weeps for Umbro, the healer priest killed tragically in battle.. The Romans founded settlements on its banks, including Marruvium, it was the site of the Battle of Fucine Lake in 89 BC. However, while the lake provided fertile soil and a large quantity of fish, it was believed to harbour malaria, having no natural outflow flooded the surrounding arable land; the Emperor Claudius attempted to control the lake's maximum level by digging a 5.6 km drainage tunnel through Monte Salviano, requiring 30,000 workers and eleven years, but with uncertain success. Of the collapse of one of the tunnels Cassius Dio observed "When the Fucine Lake caved in, the prominent freedman Tiberius Claudius Narcissus was blamed for it.
For he had been in charge of the undertaking, it was thought that after spending a good deal less than he had received he had purposely contrived the collapse, in order that his wrong-doing might not be detected." The original lake had a fluctuating area of about 140 km2 which the Claudian initiative may have reduced to about 90 km2. A 4.5 km collecting canal was extended and deepened by Hadrian which reduced the area of the lake to about 57 km2. The larger 19th century tunnel, along the same route as the Roman tunnel, destroyed most of the archaeology of the Roman tunnel, why the success of the earlier Claudian scheme is so uncertain; the deeper Hadrianic canal destroyed the archaeology of the Claudian canal. The final Roman canal has left clear archaeology, showing that 1 km from the lake, the tunnel was 7.5 m deep, 19.5 m wide at the top, 4.5 m wide at the base. It sloped to the tunnel at 0.05%. A detailed account of the Roman scheme is found in the Brisse & Retrou reference below; as the Empire fell, there was a failure to maintain the Roman drainage scheme.
Sediment and vegetation blocked the collecting canal. An earthquake on a fault crossing the collecting canal dropped the land on the lake side 30–35 cm relative to the tunnel entrance. Investigations where the fault crosses the canal show that large amounts of sediment had accumulated in the canal before the earthquake. On the assumption that this earthquake would damage Rome it seems likely that the earthquake occurred shortly before 508 AD when the earthquake damage to the Colosseum was repaired; the lake appears to have returned to its uncontrolled pre-Claudian area by the end of the 5th century and by the end of the 6th century. Some suggestion, or attempt, to restore the Roman drainage scheme appears in both the 13th and 15th centuries but neither succeeded. In the 19th century, the Swiss engineer Jean François Mayor de Montricher was commissioned by the prince Alessandro Torlonia to drain the lake. A 6.3 km-long and 21 m-wide canal was begun in 1862 and after more than 13 years, the lake was drained.
The resulting plain is one of Italy's most fertile regions. Antiquities from the Roman occupation of the land, after the first drainage scheme, became part of the Torlonia collection. List of drying lakes A. Campanelli 2001 Il Tesoro del lago, L'archeologia del Fucino e la collezione Torlonia Sandro D'Amati 1960 Il prosciugamento del Fucino, Avezzano October 1996 Paleoseismology related to deformed archaeological remains in the Fucino plain Implications for subrecent seismicity in Central Italy Annali di Geofisica Cesare Letta 1972 I Marsi e il Fucino nell’antichità, Milan. Brisse & Rotrou 1876 Desséchement du Lac Fucino éxécuté par le Prince Alexandre Torlonia; the draining of Lake Fucino accomplished by Prince Alexander Torlonia. ] Rome Chisholm, Hugh, ed.. "Fucino, Lago di". Encyclopædia Britannica. 11. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 273–274. Google Earth view
Mirror writing
Mirror writing is formed by writing in the direction, the reverse of the natural way for a given language, such that the result is the mirror image of normal writing: it appears normal when it is reflected in a mirror. It is sometimes used as an primitive form of cipher. A common modern usage of mirror writing can be found on the front of ambulances, where the word "AMBULANCE" is written in large mirrored text, so that drivers see the word the right way around in their rear-view mirror; some people are able to produce handwritten mirrored text. Notably, Leonardo da Vinci wrote most of his personal notes in this way. Mirror writing calligraphy was popular in the Ottoman Empire, where it carried mystical associations. Research suggests that the ability to produce handwritten mirror writing is inherited and caused by atypical language organization in the brain, it is not known how many people in the population inherit the ability to write mirrored text, but an informal Australian newspaper experiment identified 10 true mirror-writers in a readership of 65,000.
Half of the children of people with the ability inherit it. A higher proportion of left-handed people are better mirror writers than right-handed people because it is more natural for a left-hander to write backwards. 15% of left-handed people have the language centres in both halves of their brain. The cerebral cortex and motor homunculus are affected by this, causing the person to be able to read and write backwards quite naturally. In an experiment conducted by the Department of Neurosurgery at Hokkaido University School of Medicine in Sapporo, Scientists proposed that the origin of mirror writing comes from damage caused through accidental brain damage or neurological diseases, such as an essential tremor, Parkinson’s disease, or spino-cerebellar degeneration; this hypothesis was proposed because these conditions affect a "neural mechanism that controls the higher cerebral function of writing via the thalamus." Another study by the same university discovered. The scientists observed that normal children exhibited signs of mirror writing while learning to write, thus concluding that there is no exact method for finding the true origin of mirror writing.
As with left-handedness, mirror writing is sometimes "corrected" in children. Leonardo da Vinci wrote most of his personal notes in mirror, only using standard writing if he intended his texts to be read by others; the purpose of this practice by Leonardo remains unknown, though several possible reasons have been suggested. For example, writing left handed from left to right would have been messy because the ink just put down would smear as his hand moved across it. Writing in reverse would prevent such smudging. An alternative theory is that the process of rotating the linguistic object in memory before setting it to paper, rotating it before reading it back, is a method of reinforcement learning. From this theory, it follows the use of boustrophedonic writing in public codes, may be to render better recall of the text in the reader. Matteo Zaccolini may have written his original four volume treatise on optics and perspective in the early 17th century in mirror script. Mirror writing calligraphy was popular in the Ottoman Empire during the 18th and 19th centuries among the Bektashi order, where it carried mystical associations.
The origins of this mirror writing tradition may date to the pre-Islamic period in rock inscriptions of the western Arabian peninsula. Peep show images shown in a zograscope have headers in Mirror writing. Boustrophedon Ambigram Media related to Mirror writings at Wikimedia Commons Mirror Writing a genetic trait Jay A. Gottfried, kruba sundar, Feyza Sancar, Anjan chatterjee. "Acquired mirror writing and reading: evidence for reflected graphemic representations". Archived from the original on 14 June 2010. CS1 maint: Multiple names: authors list Mirror writing: neurological reflections on an unusual phenomenon
Coinage of the Social War (91–88 BC)
The family of Social War coinage include all the coins issued by the Italic allies of the Marsic confederation, Peligni, Vestini, Frentani and Lucani, during the Social War against Rome. Inspired by the Roman denarius, their circulation continued after the conflict ended and promiscuously with their republican models. Coins issued during the Social War consist chiefly of silver coins of the weight of the contemporary Roman denarius, they are thought to have been issued from the mints of Corfinium and Aesernia; this coinage belongs to the crucial years of the revolt against Rome. Similar coins of the same family may have been struck although there is no firm evidence of this, they circulated in parallel and with the Roman denarii of the same weight. Furthermore, some isolated exemplar come from stratigraphic contexts much more recent than the insurrection against Rome. One coin that circulated during the Social Wars was a silver denarius coin that on the front side depicted Bacchus with a wreath and on the back depicted the Italian bull goring the Roman wolf.
There is an inscription in Oscan on both sides. Another example of a silver denarius personifies Italia on one side, on the other shows eight warriors swearing an oath. There is in the Paris Collection a well-preserved single gold stater of Attic weight of 8.47 gr. and its first appearance dates back to 1827, although Julius Friedländer reported 1830: Obverse: head of young Dionysos right, crowned with ivy wreath. Reverse: Cista mystica adorned with three wreaths and with a wolf skin on the top; the authenticity of this coin is disputed. The genuineness of the piece was supported by Julius Friedländer in his fundamental work about Oscan coinage with an argument based on the perfect accuracy of the legend when compared with the poor knowledge of the Oscan alphabet and language at the time the coin first appeared before the pioneering works of Klenze and Lepsius; the coin, in particular, shows a perfect distinction between i and stressed í, a distinction that none were aware of before the work of Klenze.
Arguments against the coin's authenticity come from Secondina Lorenza Cesano and Alberto Campana, who closely follows Cesano reasoning. Some of the iconographic themes were original; when borrowed, the themes acquired new resonances. For example, the heads on the obverse was a personification of Italia depicted as a goddess with a helmet, which replaced the head of Rome, accompanied by a legend reproducing his name, ITALIA, in the Latin alphabet or VITELIU in Oscan alphabet; the inscriptions were in Oscan and in Latin characters. The pieces were struck by a central mint with two different and simultaneous issues, one for the Oscan-speaking and one for the Latin-speaking citizens. Legends record the names of the chief leaders of the Revolt: Quintus Poppaedius Silo, Gaius Papius Mutilus, with his title Imperator, an unknown Numerius Lucius, others. Social War Roman Republican currency Ancient Greek coinage Alberto Campana, La monetazione degli insorti italici durante la Guerra Sociale, Apparuti edizioni, Soliera, 1987 Secondina Lorenza Cesano, Di Uranio Antonino e di altre falsificazioni, in Rivista Italiana di Numismatica e Scienze Affini, pp. 35–69 Julius Friedländer, Die oskischen Münzen, Lipsia, 1850 Theodor Mommsen, Louis de Blacas, Histoire de la monnaie romaine, Paris, 1865–1875 This article incorporates text from: Barclay Vincent Head, Historia Numorum, a Manual of Greek Numismatics, Oxford: 1887.
Phobos (moon)
Phobos is the innermost and larger of the two natural satellites of Mars, the other being Deimos. Both moons were discovered in 1877 by American astronomer Asaph Hall. Phobos is a small, irregularly shaped object with a mean radius of 11 km and is seven times as massive as the outer moon, Deimos. Phobos is named after the Greek god Phobos, a son of Ares and Aphrodite and the personification of fear. Phobos orbits 6,000 km from the Martian surface, closer to its primary body than any other known planetary moon, it is so close that it orbits Mars much faster than Mars rotates, completes an orbit in just 7 hours and 39 minutes. As a result, from the surface of Mars it appears to rise in the west, move across the sky in 4 hours and 15 minutes or less, set in the east, twice each Martian day. Phobos is one of the least reflective bodies in the Solar System, with an albedo of just 0.071. Surface temperatures range from about −4 °C on the sunlit side to −112 °C on the shadowed side; the defining surface feature is the large impact crater, which takes up a substantial proportion of the moon's surface.
In November 2018, astronomers concluded that the many grooves on Phobos were caused by boulders ejected from the asteroid impact that created Stickney crater that rolled around on the surface of the moon. Images and models indicate that Phobos may be a rubble pile held together by a thin crust, that it is being torn apart by tidal interactions. Phobos gets closer to Mars by about 2 meters every one hundred years, it is predicted that within 30 to 50 million years it will either collide with the planet, or break up into a planetary ring. Phobos was discovered by astronomer Asaph Hall on 18 August 1877, at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D. C. at about 09:14 Greenwich Mean Time. Hall had discovered Deimos, Mars's other moon, a few days earlier on 12 August 1877 at about 07:48 UTC; the names spelled Phobus and Deimus were suggested by Henry Madan, Science Master of Eton, based on Greek mythology, in which Phobos is a companion to the god Ares. Phobos has dimensions of 27 km × 22 km × 18 km, retains too little mass to be rounded under its own gravity.
Phobos does not have an atmosphere due to low gravity. It is one of the least reflective bodies in the Solar System, with an albedo of about 0.071. Infrared spectra show. Instead, its composition shows similarities to that of Mars’ surface. Phobos's density is too low to be solid rock, it is known to have significant porosity; these results led to the suggestion. Spectral observations indicate that the surface regolith layer lacks hydration, but ice below the regolith is not ruled out. Phobos is cratered; the most prominent of these is the crater, Stickney, a large impact crater some 9 km in diameter, taking up a substantial proportion of the moon's surface area. As with Mimas's crater Herschel, the impact that created Stickney must have nearly shattered Phobos. Many grooves and streaks cover the oddly shaped surface; the grooves are less than 30 meters deep, 100 to 200 meters wide, up to 20 kilometers in length, were assumed to have been the result of the same impact that created Stickney. Analysis of results from the Mars Express spacecraft, revealed that the grooves are not in fact radial to Stickney, but are centered on the leading apex of Phobos in its orbit.
Researchers suspect that they have been excavated by material ejected into space by impacts on the surface of Mars. The grooves thus formed as crater chains, all of them fade away as the trailing apex of Phobos is approached, they have been grouped into 12 or more families of varying age representing at least 12 Martian impact events. Nonetheless, in November 2018, astronomers concluded that the many grooves on Phobos were caused by boulders, ejected from the asteroid impact that created Stickney crater, that rolled around on the surface of the moon. Faint dust rings produced by Phobos and Deimos have long been predicted but attempts to observe these rings have, to date, failed. Recent images from Mars Global Surveyor indicate that Phobos is covered with a layer of fine-grained regolith at least 100 meters thick; the unique Kaidun meteorite that fell on a Soviet military base in Yemen in 1980 has been hypothesized to be a piece of Phobos, but this has been difficult to verify because little is known about the exact composition of Phobos.
A person who weighs 68 kg on Earth would weigh about 60 g standing on the surface of Phobos. Geological features on Phobos are named after astronomers who studied Phobos and people and places from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. A number of craters have been named, are listed in the following table. There is one named regio, Laputa Regio, one named planitia, Lagado Planitia; the only named ridge on Phobos is Kepler Dorsum, named after the astronomer Johannes Kepler. The orbital motion of Pho
Vestini
Vestini were an Italic tribe who occupied the area of the modern Abruzzo included between the Gran Sasso and the northern bank of the Aterno river. Their main centres were Pitinum, Peltuinum and Aternum. Writing at about 100 years after the end of the Social War, a failed last attempt of the italic tribes to form a union, that would compete with Rome in power and influence, the Roman geographer, placed the location of the Vestini as he knew it to be as follows; the southern border was the Aternus River. Aternum on the southern bank of the mouth of the river, was on the Marrucinian side. Both the Peligni upstream on the southern bank and the Marrucini downstream shared the port with the Vestini. Strabo has little else to say about the country of the Vestini. Ptolemy has only to add that the towns of the Vestini were Pinna, Avia and Angulus. Pliny the Elder mentions Peltuina, he lists the Vestini in Augustus' Regio IV. A Vestini sculpture, the Warrior of Capestrano, dating from the 6th century BC, was found in Capestrano, province of L'Aquila.
The tribe entered into the Roman alliance, retaining its own independence, in 302 BC, issuing coins of its own in the following century. A northerly section round Amiternum near the passes into Sabine country received the Caerite franchise soon after. In spite of this, of the influence of Hadria, modern Atri, a Latin colony founded about 290 BC, the local dialect, which belongs to the north Oscan group, survived to the middle of the 2nd century BC and until the Social War; the oldest Latin inscriptions of the district are C. I. L. Ix. 3521, from Furfo with Sullan alphabet, 3574, "litteris antiquissimis," but with couraverunt, a form which, as intermediate between coir- or coer- and cur-, cannot be earlier than 100 BC. The latter inscription contains the forms magisterles and ueci, which show that the Latin first spoken by the Vestini was not that of Rome, but that of their neighbours the Marsi and Aequi; the inscription of Scoppito shows that at the time at which it was written the upper Aternus valley must be counted Vestine, not Sabine in point of dialect.
Vestinian language Attribution: This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Conway, Robert Seymour. "Vestini". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. 27. Cambridge University Press. P. 1056. Endnotes: See further Paeligni and Sabini, for the inscriptions and further details, R. S. Conway, The Italic Dialects, pp. 258 ff. on which this article is based
Trasacco
Trasacco is a comune and town in the province of L'Aquila in the Abruzzo region of central-eastern Italy
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Conway, Robert Seymour (1911). "Marsi". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 17 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. Endnote:
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the 
