1.
John William Waterhouse
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John William Waterhouse RA was an English painter known for working in the Pre-Raphaelite style. He worked several decades after the breakup of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, born in Italy to English parents who were both painters, he later moved to London, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art. He soon began exhibiting at their annual exhibitions, focusing on the creation of large canvas works depicting scenes from the daily life. Later on in his career he came to embrace the Pre-Raphaelite style of painting despite the fact that it had out of fashion in the British art scene several decades before. The exact date of his birth is unknown, though he was baptised on 6 April, and his early life in Italy has been cited as one of the reasons why many of his later paintings were set in ancient Rome or based upon scenes taken from Roman mythology. In 1854, the Waterhouses returned to England and moved to a newly built house in South Kensington, London, in 1871 he entered the Royal Academy of Art school, initially to study sculpture, before moving on to painting. Waterhouses early works were not Pre-Raphaelite in nature, but were of classical themes in the spirit of Alma-Tadema, the painting was a success and Waterhouse would exhibit at the annual exhibition every year until 1916, with the exception of 1890 and 1915. He then went from strength to strength in the London art scene, perhaps due to his success, his paintings typically became larger and larger in size. In 1883 he married Esther Kenworthy, the daughter of an art schoolmaster from Ealing who had exhibited her own flower-paintings at the Royal Academy and they had two children, but both died in early childhood. In 1895 Waterhouse was elected to the status of full Academician and he taught at the St. Johns Wood Art School, joined the St Johns Wood Arts Club, and served on the Royal Academy Council. One of Waterhouses most famous paintings is The Lady of Shalott, a study of Elaine of Astolat and he actually painted three different versions of this character, in 1888,1894, and 1916. Like The Lady of Shalott and other Waterhouse paintings, it deals with a woman dying in or near water and he also may have been inspired by paintings of Ophelia by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. He submitted his Ophelia painting of 1888 in order to receive his diploma from the Royal Academy, after this, the painting was lost until the 20th century, and is now displayed in the collection of Lord Lloyd-Webber. Waterhouse would paint Ophelia again in 1894 and 1909 or 1910, Waterhouse could not finish the series of Ophelia paintings because he was gravely ill with cancer by 1915. He died two years later, and his grave can be found at Kensal Green Cemetery in London, in total he produced 118 paintings. List of paintings by John William Waterhouse Moyle, Franny, Pre-Raphaelite art, simpson, Eileen, Pre-Raphaelites for a new generation, Letters,17 June, Pre-Raphaelite revival, The Daily Telegraph. Dorment, Richard, Waterhouse, The modern Pre-Raphaelite, at the Royal Academy – review, The Daily Telegraph
2.
Merman
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A merboy is a young merman. In contrast to mermaids, mermen were traditionally depicted as unattractive, however, some modern depictions show them as handsome. In Greek mythology, mermen were often illustrated to have green hair, a beard. In Irish mythology, mermen are described as extremely ugly creatures with green hair, teeth and skin, narrow eyes, in Medieval Europe, mermen were sometimes held responsible for causing violent storms and sinking ships. In Finnish mythology, a vetehinen, a type of Neck, is portrayed as a magical, powerful. He can cure illnesses, lift curses and brew potions, chinese mermen were believed to only surface during storms or, in some cases, were believed to have the ability to cause storms. The actions and behavior of mermen can vary depending on the source. They have been said to sink ships by summoning great storms, mermen, just like mermaids, can lure and attract humans with their enchantingly beautiful, soft melodic and seductive siren-like singing voices and tones. The most well-known merman was probably Triton, son of Poseidon, although Amphitrite gave birth to a merman, neither Poseidon nor Amphitrite were merfolk, although both were able to live under water as easily as on land. Triton was also known as the Trumpeter of the Sea for his usage of a conch shell, other noteworthy mermen were the Babylonian Oannes and Ea, and the Sumerian Enki. Another notable merman from Greek mythology was Glaucus and he was born a human and lived his early life as a fisherman. One day, while fishing, he saw that the fish he caught would jump from the grass and he ate some of the grass, believing it to have magical properties, and felt an overwhelming desire to be in the sea. He jumped in the ocean and refused to go back on land, the sea gods nearby heard his prayers and transformed him into a sea god. Ovid describes the transformation of Glaucus in the Metamorphoses, describing him as a man with a fishy member where his legs had been. Norse mythology, in particular Icelandic folklore, has known as Marbendlar. In Dogon mythology, ancestral spirits called Nommo had humanoid upper torsos, legs and feet, the Russian medieval epic Sadko contains a Sea Tsar who is a merman. A merman was supposedly found in Banff, Alberta and it has a display at the Indian Trading Post. List of piscine and amphibian humanoids List of hybrid creatures in mythology Vodyanoy Fish-man of Cantabria, Spain
3.
Siren (mythology)
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In Greek mythology, the Sirens were dangerous creatures, who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island. Roman poets placed them on small islands called Sirenum scopuli. All such locations were surrounded by cliffs and rocks, although a Sophocles fragment makes Phorcys their father, when Sirens are named, they are usually as daughters of the river god Achelous, with Terpsichore, Melpomene, Sterope, or Chthon. In Euripides play, Helen, Helen in her anguish calls upon Winged maidens, although they lured mariners, the Greeks portrayed the Sirens in their meadow starred with flowers and not as sea deities. Roman writers linked the Sirens more closely to the sea, as daughters of Phorcys, Sirens are found in many Greek stories, notably in Homers Odyssey. Their number is reported as from two to five. In the Odyssey, Homer says nothing of their origin or names, according to Ovid, the Sirens were the companions of young Persephone. They were given wings by Demeter to search for Persephone when she was abducted, however, the Fabulae of Hyginus has Demeter cursing the Sirens for failing to intervene in the abduction of Persephone. Their song is continually calling on Persephone, the term siren song refers to an appeal that is hard to resist but that, if heeded, will lead to a bad conclusion. As Jane Ellen Harrison notes of The Ker as siren, It is strange and beautiful that Homer should make the Sirens appeal to the spirit, not to the flesh. The siren song is a promise to Odysseus of mantic truths, with a promise that he will live to tell them, they sing, Once he hears to his hearts content, sails on. We know all the pains that the Greeks and Trojans once endured on the plain of Troy when the gods willed it so— all that comes to pass on the fertile earth. They are mantic creatures like the Sphinx with whom they have much in common and their song takes effect at midday, in a windless calm. The end of song is death. That the sailors flesh is rotting away, suggests it has not been eaten and it has been suggested that, with their feathers stolen, their divine nature kept them alive, but unable to provide food for their visitors, who starved to death by refusing to leave. According to Hyginus, sirens were fated to live only until the mortals who heard their songs were able to pass by them, Sirens were believed to combine women and birds in various ways. In early Greek art, Sirens were represented as birds with womens heads, bird feathers. Later, they were represented as female figures with the legs of birds, with or without wings, playing a variety of musical instruments, especially harps
4.
Undine
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Undines /ˈʌnˌdiːn, ˌʌnˈdiːn/ are a category of elemental beings associated with water, first named in the alchemical writings of Paracelsus. Similar creatures are found in literature, particularly Ovids Metamorphoses. Later writers developed the undine into a nymph in its own right. Undines are almost invariably depicted as being female, and are found in forest pools and waterfalls. The group contains many species, including nereides, limnads, naiades, although resembling humans in form they lack a human soul, so to achieve immortality they must acquire one by marrying a human. Such a union is not without risk for the man, because if he is unfaithful he is fated to die, Undine is a term that appears in the alchemical writings of Paracelsus, a Renaissance alchemist and physician. Ondine is a spelling, and has become a female given name. He describes these elementals as the invisible, spiritual counterparts of visible Nature, many resembling human beings in shape, and inhabiting worlds of their own, unknown to man because his undeveloped senses were incapable of functioning beyond the limitations of the grosser elements. Undines are almost invariably depicted as being female, which is consistent with the ancient idea that water is a female element and they are usually found in forest pools and waterfalls, and their beautiful singing voices are sometimes heard over the sound of water. The group contains many species, including oreades, nereides, limnads, naiades, mermaids, what undines lack, compared to humans, is a soul. Marriage with a human shortens their lives on Earth, but earns them a human soul. The offspring of a union between an undine and a man are human with a soul, but also some kind of aquatic characteristic. Moses Binswanger, the protagonist in Hansjörg Schneiders Das Wasserzeichen, has a cleft in his throat, for instance, the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles was the first to propose that the four classical elements were sufficient to explain everything present in the world. The philosophy of nature spirits was also familiar to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, celtic languages scholar Henry Jenner has argued that the elementals grew out of the folklore that preceded them, The subdivisions and elaborations. Resembles the theory of these mystics in its outlines, and was probably what suggested it to them. Later writers embellished Paracelsus undine classification by developing it into a nymph in its own right. Ondine was the title of one of the poems in Aloysius Bertrands collection Gaspard de la Nuit of 1842 and this poem inspired the first movement of Maurice Ravels 1908 piano suite Gaspard de la nuit. The myth of the undine was one of the inspirations behind the French play Pelléas et Mélisande written by Maurice Maeterlinck, the composer Claude Debussy was in the audience, and he used the plays text as the libretto for his opera of the same name
5.
Folklore
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Folklore is the body of expressive culture shared by a particular group of people, it encompasses the traditions common to that culture, subculture or group. These include oral traditions such as tales, proverbs and jokes and they include material culture, ranging from traditional building styles to handmade toys common to the group. Folklore also includes customary lore, the forms and rituals of celebrations like Christmas and weddings, folk dances, each one of these, either singly or in combination, is considered a folklore artifact. Just as essential as the form, folklore also encompasses the transmission of these artifacts from one region to another or from one generation to the next, for folklore is not taught in a formal school curriculum or studied in the fine arts. Instead these traditions are passed along informally from one individual to another either through verbal instruction or demonstration, the academic study of folklore is called folkloristics. To fully understand folklore, it is helpful to clarify its component parts and it is well-documented that the term was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms. He fabricated it to replace the contemporary terminology of popular antiquities or popular literature, the second half of the compound word, lore, proves easier to define as its meaning has stayed relatively stable over the last two centuries. Coming from Old English lār instruction, and with German and Dutch cognates, it is the knowledge and traditions of a particular group, the concept of folk proves somewhat more elusive. When Thoms first created this term, folk applied only to rural, frequently poor, a more modern definition of folk is a social group which includes two or more persons with common traits, who express their shared identity through distinctive traditions. Folk is a concept which can refer to a nation as in American folklore or to a single family. This expanded social definition of folk supports a view of the material, i. e. the lore. These now include all things people make with words, things they make with their hands, Folklore is no longer circumscribed as being chronologically old or obsolete. The folklorist studies the traditional artifacts of a group and how they are transmitted. Transmission is a part of the folklore process. Without communicating these beliefs and customs within the group over space and time, for folklore is also a verb. These folk artifacts continue to be passed along informally, as a rule anonymously, the folk group is not individualistic, it is community-based and nurtures its lore in community. As new groups emerge, new folklore is created… surfers, motorcyclists, in direct contrast to high culture, where any single work of a named artist is protected by copyright law, folklore is a function of shared identity within the social group. Having identified folk artifacts, the professional folklorist strives to understand the significance of these beliefs, customs, for these cultural units would not be passed along unless they had some continued relevance within the group
6.
Human
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Modern humans are the only extant members of Hominina tribe, a branch of the tribe Hominini belonging to the family of great apes. Several of these hominins used fire, occupied much of Eurasia and they began to exhibit evidence of behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago. In several waves of migration, anatomically modern humans ventured out of Africa, the spread of humans and their large and increasing population has had a profound impact on large areas of the environment and millions of native species worldwide. Humans are uniquely adept at utilizing systems of communication for self-expression and the exchange of ideas. Humans create complex structures composed of many cooperating and competing groups, from families. Social interactions between humans have established a wide variety of values, social norms, and rituals. These human societies subsequently expanded in size, establishing various forms of government, religion, today the global human population is estimated by the United Nations to be near 7.5 billion. In common usage, the word generally refers to the only extant species of the genus Homo—anatomically and behaviorally modern Homo sapiens. In scientific terms, the meanings of hominid and hominin have changed during the recent decades with advances in the discovery, there is also a distinction between anatomically modern humans and Archaic Homo sapiens, the earliest fossil members of the species. The English adjective human is a Middle English loanword from Old French humain, ultimately from Latin hūmānus, the words use as a noun dates to the 16th century. The native English term man can refer to the species generally, the species binomial Homo sapiens was coined by Carl Linnaeus in his 18th century work Systema Naturae. The generic name Homo is a learned 18th century derivation from Latin homō man, the species-name sapiens means wise or sapient. Note that the Latin word homo refers to humans of either gender, the genus Homo evolved and diverged from other hominins in Africa, after the human clade split from the chimpanzee lineage of the hominids branch of the primates. The closest living relatives of humans are chimpanzees and gorillas, with the sequencing of both the human and chimpanzee genome, current estimates of similarity between human and chimpanzee DNA sequences range between 95% and 99%. The gibbons and orangutans were the first groups to split from the leading to the humans. The splitting date between human and chimpanzee lineages is placed around 4–8 million years ago during the late Miocene epoch, during this split, chromosome 2 was formed from two other chromosomes, leaving humans with only 23 pairs of chromosomes, compared to 24 for the other apes. There is little evidence for the divergence of the gorilla, chimpanzee. Each of these species has been argued to be an ancestor of later hominins
7.
Fish
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A fish is any member of a group of animals that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals that lack limbs with digits. They form a group to the tunicates, together forming the olfactores. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous, tetrapods emerged within lobe-finned fishes, so cladistically they are fish as well. However, traditionally fish are rendered obsolete or paraphyletic by excluding the tetrapods, because in this manner the term fish is defined negatively as a paraphyletic group, it is not considered a formal taxonomic grouping in systematic biology. The traditional term pisces is considered a typological, but not a phylogenetic classification, the earliest organisms that can be classified as fish were soft-bodied chordates that first appeared during the Cambrian period. Although they lacked a true spine, they possessed notochords which allowed them to be more agile than their invertebrate counterparts, fish would continue to evolve through the Paleozoic era, diversifying into a wide variety of forms. Many fish of the Paleozoic developed external armor that protected them from predators, the first fish with jaws appeared in the Silurian period, after which many became formidable marine predators rather than just the prey of arthropods. Fish are abundant in most bodies of water and they can be found in nearly all aquatic environments, from high mountain streams to the abyssal and even hadal depths of the deepest oceans. With 33,100 described species, fish exhibit greater species diversity than any group of vertebrates. Fish are an important resource for humans worldwide, especially as food, commercial and subsistence fishers hunt fish in wild fisheries or farm them in ponds or in cages in the ocean. They are also caught by fishers, kept as pets, raised by fishkeepers. Fish have had a role in culture through the ages, serving as deities, religious symbols, fish do not represent a monophyletic group, and therefore the evolution of fish is not studied as a single event. Early fish from the record are represented by a group of small, jawless. Jawless fish lineages are mostly extinct, an extant clade, the lampreys may approximate ancient pre-jawed fish. The first jaws are found in Placodermi fossils, the diversity of jawed vertebrates may indicate the evolutionary advantage of a jawed mouth. It is unclear if the advantage of a hinged jaw is greater biting force, improved respiration, fish may have evolved from a creature similar to a coral-like sea squirt, whose larvae resemble primitive fish in important ways. The first ancestors of fish may have kept the form into adulthood. Fish are a group, that is, any clade containing all fish also contains the tetrapods
8.
Assyria
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Assyria was a major Mesopotamian East Semitic-speaking kingdom and empire of the ancient Near East and the Levant. Centered on the Tigris in Upper Mesopotamia, the Assyrians came to rule powerful empires at several times. Assyria is named after its capital, the ancient city of Aššur. In the 25th and 24th centuries BC, Assyrian kings were pastoral leaders, Assyria can also refer to the geographic region or heartland where Assyria, its empires and the Assyrian people were centered. The indigenous modern Eastern Aramaic-speaking Assyrian Christian ethnic minority in northern Iraq, north east Syria, southeast Turkey, in prehistoric times, the region that was to become known as Assyria was home to a Neanderthal culture such as has been found at the Shanidar Cave. The earliest Neolithic sites in Assyria were the Jarmo culture c.7100 BC and Tell Hassuna, during the 3rd millennium BC, a very intimate cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians and the Akkadians throughout Mesopotamia, which included widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian, and vice versa, is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a scale, to syntactic, morphological. This has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the third millennium BC as a sprachbund and it is highly likely that the city was named in honour of its patron Assyrian god with the same name. The city of Aššur, together with a number of other Assyrian cities, however it is likely that they were initially Sumerian-dominated administrative centres. In the late 26th century BC, Eannatum of Lagash, then the dominant Sumerian ruler in Mesopotamia, similarly, in c. the early 25th century BC, Lugal-Anne-Mundu the king of the Sumerian state of Adab lists Subartu as paying tribute to him. Of the early history of the kingdom of Assyria, little is known, in the Assyrian King List, the earliest king recorded was Tudiya. According to Georges Roux he would have lived in the mid 25th century BC, Tudiya was succeeded on the list by Adamu, the first known reference to the Semitic name Adam and then a further thirteen rulers. The earliest kings, such as Tudiya, who are recorded as kings who lived in tents, were independent semi-nomadic pastoralist rulers and these kings at some point became fully urbanised and founded the city state of Ashur in the mid 21st century BC. During the Akkadian Empire, the Assyrians, like all the Mesopotamian Semites, became subject to the dynasty of the city state of Akkad, the Akkadian Empire founded by Sargon the Great claimed to encompass the surrounding four quarters. Assyrian rulers were subject to Sargon and his successors, and the city of Ashur became an administrative center of the Empire. On those tablets, Assyrian traders in Burushanda implored the help of their ruler, Sargon the Great, the name Hatti itself even appears in later accounts of his grandson, Naram-Sin, campaigning in Anatolia. Assyrian and Akkadian traders spread the use of writing in the form of the Mesopotamian cuneiform script to Asia Minor, the Akkadian Empire was destroyed by economic decline and internal civil war, followed by attacks from barbarian Gutian people in 2154 BC. The rulers of Assyria during the period between c.2154 BC and 2112 BC once again fully independent, as the Gutians are only known to have administered southern Mesopotamia
9.
Atargatis
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Atargatis /əˈtɑːrɡətᵻs/ or Ataratheh was the chief goddess of northern Syria in Classical Antiquity. Ctesias also used the name Derceto for her, and the Romans called her Dea Syriae, primarily she was a goddess of fertility, but, as the baalat of her city and people, she was also responsible for their protection and well-being. Her chief sanctuary was at Hierapolis, modern Manbij, northeast of Aleppo and she is sometimes described as a mermaid-goddess, due to identification of her with a fish-bodied goddess at Ascalon. However, there is no evidence that Atargatis was worshipped at Ascalon, michael Rostovtzeff called her the great mistress of the North Syrian lands. As Ataratheh, doves and fish were considered sacred to her, doves as an emblem of the Love-Goddess, according to a third-century Syriac source, In Syria and in Urhâi the men used to castrate themselves in honor of Taratha. But when King Abgar became a believer, he commanded that anyone who emasculated himself should have a cut off. And from that day to the present no one in Urhâi emasculates himself anymore, the name Atargatis derives from the Aramaic form ‘Atar‘atheh, which comes in several variants. ‘Atar‘atheh is seen as a continuation of Bronze Age goddesses, the name ‘Atar‘atheh is widely held to derive from a compound of the Aramaic form ‘Attar, which is a cognate of ‘Ațtart minus its feminine suffix -t, and ‘Attah or ‘Atā, a cognate of Anat. Alternatively, the second half may be a Palmyrene divine name ‘Athe and it has also been proposed that the element -gatis may relate to the Greek gados fish. So Atar-Gatis may simply mean the fish-goddess Atar, as a consequence of the first half of the name, Atargatis has frequently, though wrongly, been identified as ‘Ashtart. The two deities were probably of common origin and have features in common, but their cults are historically distinct. There is reference in 2 Maccabees 12, at Palmyra she appears on the coinage with a lion, or her presence is signalled with a lion and the crescent moon, an inscription mentions her. Two well preserved temples in Niha, Lebanon are dedicated to her and her wavy hair, suggesting water to Glueck, was parted in the middle. At Petra the goddess from the north was syncretised with a North Arabian goddess from the south al-Uzzah, at Dura-Europus among the attributes of Atargatis are the spindle and the sceptre or fish-spear. At her temples at Ascalon, Hierapolis Bambyce, and Edessa, Glueck noted in 1936 that to this day there is a sacred fish-pond swarming with untouchable fish at Qubbet el-Baeddwī, a dervish monastery three kilometres east of Tripolis, Lebanon. From Syria her worship extended to Greece and to the furthest West, Lucian and Apuleius give descriptions of the beggar-priests who went round the great cities with an image of the goddess on an ass and collected money. Again we find the cult in Sicily, introduced, no doubt, by slaves and mercenary troops, the leader of the rebel slaves in the First Servile War, a Syrian named Eunus, claimed to receive visions of Atargatis, whom he identified with the Demeter of Enna. In many cases Atargatis, ‘Ashtart, and other goddesses who once had independent cults and this fusion is exemplified by the Carnion temple, which is probably identical with the famous temple of ‘Ashtart at Ashtaroth-Karnaim
10.
Greek mythology
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It was a part of the religion in ancient Greece. Greek mythology is explicitly embodied in a collection of narratives. Greek myth attempts to explain the origins of the world, and details the lives and adventures of a variety of gods, goddesses, heroes, heroines. These accounts initially were disseminated in a tradition, today the Greek myths are known primarily from ancient Greek literature. The oldest known Greek literary sources, Homers epic poems Iliad and Odyssey, focus on the Trojan War, archaeological findings provide a principal source of detail about Greek mythology, with gods and heroes featured prominently in the decoration of many artifacts. Geometric designs on pottery of the eighth century BC depict scenes from the Trojan cycle as well as the adventures of Heracles, in the succeeding Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods, Homeric and various other mythological scenes appear, supplementing the existing literary evidence. Greek mythology has had an influence on the culture, arts. Poets and artists from ancient times to the present have derived inspiration from Greek mythology and have discovered contemporary significance and relevance in the themes, Greek mythology is known today primarily from Greek literature and representations on visual media dating from the Geometric period from c. Mythical narration plays an important role in every genre of Greek literature. Nevertheless, the only general mythographical handbook to survive from Greek antiquity was the Library of Pseudo-Apollodorus and this work attempts to reconcile the contradictory tales of the poets and provides a grand summary of traditional Greek mythology and heroic legends. Apollodorus of Athens lived from c, 180–125 BC and wrote on many of these topics. His writings may have formed the basis for the collection, however the Library discusses events that occurred long after his death, among the earliest literary sources are Homers two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Other poets completed the cycle, but these later and lesser poems now are lost almost entirely. Despite their traditional name, the Homeric Hymns have no connection with Homer. They are choral hymns from the part of the so-called Lyric age. Hesiods Works and Days, a poem about farming life, also includes the myths of Prometheus, Pandora. The poet gives advice on the best way to succeed in a dangerous world, lyrical poets often took their subjects from myth, but their treatment became gradually less narrative and more allusive. Greek lyric poets, including Pindar, Bacchylides and Simonides, and bucolic poets such as Theocritus and Bion, additionally, myth was central to classical Athenian drama
11.
Christopher Columbus
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Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer, navigator, colonizer, and citizen of the Republic of Genoa. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean and those voyages and his efforts to establish permanent settlements on the island of Hispaniola initiated the European colonization of the New World. Western imperialism and economic competition were emerging among European kingdoms through the establishment of routes and colonies. During his first voyage in 1492, he reached the New World instead of arriving at Japan as he had intended, landing on an island in the Bahamas archipelago that he named San Salvador. Over the course of three voyages, he visited the Greater and Lesser Antilles, as well as the Caribbean coast of Venezuela and Central America. These voyages had, therefore, an impact in the historical development of the modern Western world. He spearheaded the transatlantic trade and has been accused by several historians of initiating the genocide of the Hispaniola natives. Columbus himself saw his accomplishments primarily in the light of spreading the Christian religion, Columbus never admitted that he had reached a continent previously unknown to Europeans, rather than the East Indies for which he had set course. He called the inhabitants of the lands that he visited indios, the name Christopher Columbus is the Anglicisation of the Latin Christophorus Columbus. His name in Italian is Cristoforo Colombo and, in Spanish and he was born before 31 October 1451 in the territory of the Republic of Genoa, though the exact location remains disputed. His father was Domenico Colombo, a wool weaver who worked both in Genoa and Savona and who also owned a cheese stand at which young Christopher worked as a helper. Bartolomeo, Giovanni Pellegrino, and Giacomo were his brothers, Bartolomeo worked in a cartography workshop in Lisbon for at least part of his adulthood. He also had a sister named Bianchinetta, Columbus never wrote in his native language, which is presumed to have been a Genoese variety of Ligurian. In one of his writings, he says he went to sea at the age of 10, in 1470, the Columbus family moved to Savona, where Domenico took over a tavern. In the same year, Christopher was on a Genoese ship hired in the service of René of Anjou to support his attempt to conquer the Kingdom of Naples. Some modern historians have argued that he was not from Genoa but, instead and these competing hypotheses have generally been discounted by mainstream scholars. In 1473, Columbus began his apprenticeship as business agent for the important Centurione, Di Negro, later, he allegedly made a trip to Chios, an Aegean island then ruled by Genoa. In May 1476, he took part in a convoy sent by Genoa to carry valuable cargo to northern Europe
12.
Manatee
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Manatees are large, fully aquatic, mostly herbivorous marine mammals sometimes known as sea cows. They measure up to 4.0 metres long, weigh as much as 590 kilograms, the name manatí comes from the Spanish manatí, derived from the Caribbean word sometimes cited as manattouï. The etymology is dubious, with connections having been made to Latin manus, and to a used by the Taíno. Manatees are occasionally called sea cows, as they are slow plant-eaters, peaceful and they often graze on water plants in tropical seas. Manatees comprise three of the four living species in the order Sirenia, the fourth is the Eastern Hemispheres dugong. The Sirenia are thought to have evolved from four-legged land mammals over 60 million years ago, the Amazonians hair color is brownish gray, and they have thick wrinkled skin often with coarse hair, or whiskers. Photos are rare, although little is known about this species. Manatees have a mass of 400 to 550 kilograms, and mean length of 2.8 to 3.0 metres, when born, baby manatees have an average mass of 30 kilograms. They have a large, flexible, prehensile upper lip and they use the lip to gather food and eat, as well as using it for social interactions and communications. Manatees have shorter snouts than their fellow sirenians, the dugongs and their small, widely spaced eyes have eyelids that close in a circular manner. The adults have no incisor or canine teeth, just a set of cheek teeth and these teeth are continuously replaced throughout life, with new teeth growing at the rear as older teeth fall out from farther forward in the mouth. This process is known as polyphyodonty and amongst the mammals, only occurs in the kangaroo. At any given time, a manatee typically has no more than six teeth in each jaw of its mouth. Its tail is paddle-shaped, and is the clearest visible difference between manatees and dugongs, a tail is fluked, similar in shape to a that of a whale. Females have two teats, one under each flipper, a characteristic that was used to make links between the manatee and elephants. Manatees are unusual amongst mammals in possessing just six cervical vertebrae, all other mammals have seven cervical vertebrae, other than the two-toed and three-toed sloths. Like horses, they have a stomach, but a large cecum. In general, their intestines have a length of about 45 meters
13.
Sea in culture
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The role of the sea in human culture has been important for centuries, as people experience the sea in contradictory ways, as powerful but serene, beautiful but dangerous. Human responses to the sea can be found in artforms including literature, art, poetry, film, theatre, the earliest art representing boats is 40,000 years old. Since then, artists in different countries and cultures have depicted the sea, symbolically, the sea has been perceived as a hostile environment populated by fantastic creatures, the Leviathan of the Bible, Isonade in Japanese mythology, and the kraken of late Norse mythology. In the works of the psychiatrist Carl Jung, the sea symbolises the personal, the sea and ships have been depicted in art ranging from simple drawings on the walls of huts in Lamu to seascapes by Joseph Turner and Dutch Golden Age painting. The Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai created colour prints of the moods of the sea, the sea has appeared in literature since Homers Odyssey. The sea is a theme in the Haiku poems of the Japanese Edo period poet Matsuo Bashō. In the Middle Ages, the sea appears in such as the Tristan legend, with motifs such as mythical islands. Pilgrimage is a theme in stories and poems such as The Book of Margery Kempe. Burial at sea has been practised in various ways by countries around the world since the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Human reactions to the sea are found in, for example, literature, art, poetry, film, theatre, and classical music, as well as in mythology, trade and exchange of ideas with neighbouring nations is one of the means by which civilizations advance and evolve. This happened widely among the ancient peoples living in lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea, as well as in India, China, petroglyphs depicting boats made of papyrus are among rock art dating back 40,000 years on the shores of the Caspian Sea. The Egyptians placed figures of birds on the prow while the Phoenicians used horses representing speed. The Ancient Greeks used boars heads to symbolise acute vision and ferocity while Roman boats often mounted a carving of a centurion representing valour in battle. In northern Europe, serpents, bulls, dolphins and dragons were used to decorate ships prows and by the thirteenth century. The Greek mythology of the sea includes a pantheon of gods. The god of the sea, Poseidon, is accompanied by his wife, Amphitrite, the Tritons, sons of Poseidon, who were variously represented with the tails of fish or seahorses, formed Poseidons retinue along with the Nereids. The mythic sea was further peopled by dangerous sea monsters such as Scylla, Poseidon himself had something of the shifting character of the sea, presiding not only over the sea, but also earthquakes, storms and horses. Neptune occupied a position in Roman mythology
14.
Hans Christian Andersen
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Hans Christian Andersen (/ˈhɑːnz ˈkrɪstʃən ˈændərsən/, Danish, often referred to in Scandinavia as H. C. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersens popularity is not limited to children, his stories, called eventyr in Danish, express themes that transcend age and nationality. Some of his most famous fairy tales include The Emperors New Clothes, The Little Mermaid, The Nightingale, The Snow Queen, The Ugly Duckling, Thumbelina and his stories have inspired ballets, animated and live-action films and plays. Hans Christian Andersen was born in the town of Odense, Denmark, Andersens father, also Hans, considered himself related to nobility. His paternal grandmother had told his father that their family had in the past belonged to a social class. A persistent theory suggests that Andersen was a son of King Christian VIII. Andersens father, who had received an education, introduced Andersen to literature. Andersens mother, Anne Marie Andersdatter, was uneducated and worked as a washerwoman following his fathers death in 1816, she remarried in 1818. Andersen was sent to a school for poor children where he received a basic education and was forced to support himself, working as an apprentice for a weaver and, later. At 14, he moved to Copenhagen to seek employment as an actor, having an excellent soprano voice, he was accepted into the Royal Danish Theatre, but his voice soon changed. A colleague at the theatre told him that he considered Andersen a poet, taking the suggestion seriously, Andersen began to focus on writing. Jonas Collin, director of the Royal Danish Theatre, felt a great affection for Andersen and sent him to a school in Slagelse. Andersen had already published his first story, The Ghost at Palnatokes Grave, though not a keen pupil, he also attended school at Elsinore until 1827. He later said his years in school were the darkest and most bitter of his life, at one school, he lived at his schoolmasters home. There he was abused and was told that it was to improve his character and he later said the faculty had discouraged him from writing in general, causing him to enter a state of depression. A very early fairy tale by Andersen, called The Tallow Candle, was discovered in a Danish archive in October 2012, the story, written in the 1820s, was about a candle who did not feel appreciated. It was written while Andersen was still in school and dedicated to a benefactor, in 1829, Andersen enjoyed considerable success with the short story A Journey on Foot from Holmens Canal to the East Point of Amager. Its protagonist meets characters ranging from Saint Peter to a talking cat, Andersen followed this success with a theatrical piece, Love on St. Nicholas Church Tower, and a short volume of poems
15.
The Little Mermaid
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The tale was first published in 1837 and has been adapted to various media, including an animated film by Disney and a musical theatre production. The Little Mermaid dwells in a kingdom with her widowed father, her dowager grandmother. As each returns, the Little Mermaid listens longingly to their various descriptions of the inhabited by human beings. When the Little Mermaids turn comes, she rises up to the surface, watches a birthday celebration being held on a ship in honor of a handsome prince, a violent storm hits, sinking the boat, and the Little Mermaid saves the prince from drowning. She delivers him unconscious to the shore near a temple, here, she waits until a young woman from the temple and her ladies in waiting find him. To her dismay, the prince never sees the Little Mermaid or even realizes that it was she who had saved his life. The Little Mermaid becomes melancholy and asks her grandmother if humans can live forever, the Little Mermaid, longing for the prince and an eternal soul, visits the Sea Witch in a dangerous part of the ocean. However, she will feel as if she is walking on sharp knives. In addition, she will obtain a soul if she wins the love of the prince and marries him. Otherwise, at dawn on the first day after he marries someone else, after she agrees to the arrangement, the Little Mermaid swims to the surface near the princes palace and drinks the potion. She is found by the prince, who is mesmerized by her beauty and grace, even though she is considered dumb, most of all, he likes to see her dance, and she dances for him despite suffering excruciating pain with every step. Soon, the Little Mermaid becomes the favorite companion and accompanies him on many of his outings. When the princes parents encourage their son to marry the princess in an arranged marriage. He goes on to say he can love the young woman from the temple. It turns out that the princess from the kingdom is the temple girl. The prince declares his love for her, and the wedding is announced at once. The prince and princess celebrate their new marriage on a ship. She thinks of all that she has sacrificed and of all the pain she has endured for the prince
16.
Frederic Leighton
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Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton PRA, known as Sir Frederic Leighton between 1878 and 1896, was an English painter and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter, Leighton was bearer of the shortest-lived peerage in history, after only one day his hereditary peerage ended with his death. Leighton was born in Scarborough to a family in the import and export business and he was educated at University College School, London. He then received his training on the European continent, first from Eduard von Steinle. When he was 24 he was in Florence, he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, from 1855 to 1859 he lived in Paris, where he met Ingres, Delacroix, Corot and Millet. In 1860, he moved to London, where he associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and he designed Elizabeth Barrett Brownings tomb for Robert Browning in the English Cemetery, Florence in 1861. In 1864 he became an associate of the Royal Academy and in 1878 he became its President and his 1877 sculpture, Athlete Wrestling with a Python, was considered at its time to inaugurate a renaissance in contemporary British sculpture, referred to as the New Sculpture. American art critic Earl Shinn claimed at the time that Except Leighton and his paintings represented Britain at the great 1900 Paris Exhibition. Leighton was knighted at Windsor in 1878, and was created a baronet, of Holland Park Road in the Parish of St Mary Abbots, Kensington, in the County of Middlesex, eight years later. He was the first painter to be given a peerage, in the New Year Honours List of 1896, the patent creating him Baron Leighton, of Stretton in the County of Shropshire, was issued on 24 January 1896, Leighton died the next day of angina pectoris. Leighton remained a bachelor and rumours of his having a child with one of his models in addition to the supposition that Leighton may have been homosexual continue to be debated today. He certainly enjoyed an intense and romantically tinged relationship with the poet Henry William Greville whom he met in Florence in 1856, the older man showered Leighton in letters, but the romantic affection seems not to have been reciprocated. Enquiry is furthermore hindered by the fact that Leighton left no diaries, after his death his Barony was extinguished after existing for only a day, this is a record in the Peerage. His house in Holland Park, London has been turned into a museum, the house also features many of Leightons inspirations, including his collection of Iznik tiles. Its centrepiece is the magnificent Arab Hall, the Hall is featured in issue ten of Cornucopia. A blue plaque commemorates Leighton at Leighton House Museum, Leighton was an enthusiastic volunteer soldier, enrolling with the first group to join the 38th Middlesex Rifle volunteers on 5 October 1860. His qualities of leadership were identified, and he was promoted to command A Company within a few months. On 6 January 1869 Captain Leighton was elected to command The Artists Rifles by a meeting of the corps
17.
Old English
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Old English or Anglo-Saxon is the earliest historical form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers probably in the mid 5th century, Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic dialects originally spoken by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. As the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain, Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, Old English had four main dialects, associated with particular Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish and West Saxon. It was West Saxon that formed the basis for the standard of the later Old English period, although the dominant forms of Middle. The speech of eastern and northern parts of England was subject to strong Old Norse influence due to Scandinavian rule, Old English is one of the West Germanic languages, and its closest relatives are Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Like other old Germanic languages, it is different from Modern English. Old English grammar is similar to that of modern German, nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs have many inflectional endings and forms. The oldest Old English inscriptions were using a runic system. Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 5th century to the late 11th century, some time after the Norman invasion. While indicating that the establishment of dates is a process, Albert Baugh dates Old English from 450 to 1150, a period of full inflections. Perhaps around 85 per cent of Old English words are no longer in use, Old English is a West Germanic language, developing out of Ingvaeonic dialects from the 5th century. It came to be spoken over most of the territory of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms which became the Kingdom of England and this included most of present-day England, as well as part of what is now southeastern Scotland, which for several centuries belonged to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Other parts of the island – Wales and most of Scotland – continued to use Celtic languages, Norse was also widely spoken in the parts of England which fell under Danish law. Anglo-Saxon literacy developed after Christianisation in the late 7th century, the oldest surviving text of Old English literature is Cædmons Hymn, composed between 658 and 680. There is a corpus of runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries. The Old English Latin alphabet was introduced around the 9th century, with the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms by Alfred the Great in the later 9th century, the language of government and literature became standardised around the West Saxon dialect. In Old English, typical of the development of literature, poetry arose before prose, a later literary standard, dating from the later 10th century, arose under the influence of Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester, and was followed by such writers as the prolific Ælfric of Eynsham. This form of the language is known as the Winchester standard and it is considered to represent the classical form of Old English
18.
Odyssey
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The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the Odyssey is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second-oldest extant work of Western literature, the Iliad is the oldest. Scholars believe the Odyssey was composed near the end of the 8th century BC, somewhere in Ionia, the poem mainly focuses on the Greek hero Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his journey home after the fall of Troy. It takes Odysseus ten years to reach Ithaca after the ten-year Trojan War. In his absence, it is assumed Odysseus has died, and his wife Penelope and son Telemachus must deal with a group of suitors, the Mnesteres or Proci. The Odyssey continues to be read in the Homeric Greek and translated into languages around the world. Many scholars believe the poem was composed in an oral tradition by an aoidos, perhaps a rhapsode. The details of the ancient oral performance and the conversion to a written work inspire continual debate among scholars. The Odyssey was written in a dialect of Greek—a literary amalgam of Aeolic Greek, Ionic Greek. Among the most noteworthy elements of the text are its non-linear plot, in the English language as well as many others, the word odyssey has come to refer to an epic voyage. The Odyssey has a lost sequel, the Telegony, which was not written by Homer and it was usually attributed in antiquity to Cinaethon of Sparta. In one source, the Telegony was said to have stolen from Musaeus by either Eugamon or Eugammon of Cyrene. The Odyssey begins ten years after the end of the ten-year Trojan War, and Odysseus has still not returned home from the war. Odysseus protectress, the goddess Athena, requests to Zeus, king of the gods, to finally allow Odysseus to return home when Odysseus enemy, then, disguised as a Taphian chieftain named Mentes, she visits Telemachus to urge him to search for news of his father. He offers her hospitality, they observe the suitors dining rowdily while the bard Phemius performs a poem for them. Penelope objects to Phemius theme, the Return from Troy, because it reminds her of her missing husband and that night Athena, disguised as Telemachus, finds a ship and crew for the true prince. The next morning, Telemachus calls an assembly of citizens of Ithaca to discuss what should be done with the suitors. Accompanied by Athena, he departs for the Greek mainland and the household of Nestor, most venerable of the Greek warriors at Troy, now at home in Pylos
19.
Femmes fatales
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A femme fatale is a stock character of a mysterious and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetype of literature and art, in American early 20th century film, femme fatale characters were referred to as vamps, an allusion to their role as sexual vampires. The phrase is French for fatal woman, a femme fatale tries to achieve her hidden purpose by using feminine wiles such as beauty, charm, and sexual allure. In some situations, she uses lies or coercion rather than charm and she may also make use of some subduing weapon such as sleeping gas, a modern analog of magical powers in older tales. She may also be a victim, caught in a situation from which she cannot escape, a younger version of a femme fatale is called a fille fatale, or fatal girl. Femmes fatale are typically villainous, or at least morally ambiguous, and always associated with a sense of mystification, the femme fatale archetype exists in the culture, folklore and myth of many cultures. Ancient mythical or legendary examples include Mohini, Lilith, the Sirens, historical examples from Classical times include Cleopatra and Messalina, as well as the Biblical figures Delilah, Jezebel and Salome. An example from Chinese literature and traditional history is Daji, the femme fatale was a common figure in the European Middle Ages, often portraying the dangers of unbridled female sexuality. The pre-medieval inherited Biblical figure of Eve offers an example, as does the wicked, along with them, there rose the gothic novel, The Monk featuring Matilda, a very powerful femme fatale. This led to her appearing in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, pre-Raphaelite painters frequently used the classic personifications of the femme fatale as a subject. Later, Salome was the subject of an opera by Strauss, and was popularized on stage, screen, another enduring icon of glamour, seduction, and moral turpitude is Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, 1876–1917. While working as a dancer, she took the stage name Mata Hari. Although she may have been innocent, she was accused of German espionage and was put to death by a French firing squad, after her death she became the subject of many sensational films and books. Other considerably famous femmes fatales are Isabella of France, Hedda Gabler of Kristiania, Marie Antoinette of Austria, one traditional view portrays the femme fatale as a sexual vampire, her charms leech the virility and independence of lovers, leaving them shells of themselves. Rudyard Kipling took inspiration from a vampire painted by Philip Burne-Jones, the poem inspired the 1913 eponymous film The Vampire by Robert Vignola, sometimes cited as the first vamp movie. Like much of Kiplings verse it became popular, and its refrain. Describing a seduced man, became the title of the popular 1915 film A Fool There Was that made Theda Bara a star, the poem was used in the publicity for the film. On this account, in the American slang of the era the femme fatale was called a vamp, from the American film-audience perspective, the femme fatale often appeared foreign, usually either of indeterminate Eastern European or Asian ancestry
20.
Sirenia
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The Sirenia, commonly referred to as sea cows or sirenians, are an order of fully aquatic, herbivorous mammals that inhabit swamps, rivers, estuaries, marine wetlands, and coastal marine waters. The Sirenia comprise the families Dugongidae, Trichechidae, †Protosirenidae, currently, four species of sirenians exist. Sirenians are classified in the clade Paenungulata, alongside the elephants and the hyraxes, the Dugongidae diverged from the Trichechidae in the late Eocene or early Oligocene. Sirenians grow to between 2.5 and 4 m in length and 1,500 kg in weight, the now extinct Stellers sea cow was the largest sirenian to have lived, and could reach lengths of 8 m and weights of 8 to 10 t. Sirenians have a large, fusiform body to prevent drag through the water and they have heavy bones that act as ballasts to counteract the buoyancy of their blubber. They have a layer of blubber and consequently are sensitive to temperature fluctuations. Sirenians are slow-moving, typically coasting at 8 km/h, but they can reach 24 km/h in short bursts and they use their strong lips to pull out seagrasses, consuming 10–15% of their body weight per day. While breathing, they hold just their nostrils above the surface, sirenians typically inhabit warm, shallow, coastal waters or rivers. They are mainly herbivorous, but have been known to consume animals such as birds, males typically mate with more than one female, and may participate in lek mating. Sirenians are K-selectors, and display parental care, the meat, oil, bones, and skins are valuable items sold in markets. Mortality is often caused by hunting by humans or other human-induced causes, such as habitat destruction, entanglement in fishing gear. Stellers sea cow went extinct due to overhunting in 1768, Sirenia, commonly sirenians, are also referred to by the common name sirens, deriving from the sirens of Greek mythology. This comes from a legend about their discovery, involving lonely sailors mistaking them for mermaids, seekoei is also the name for a hippopotamus in Afrikaans. In some Germanic languages, see can mean either a body of fresh or salt water, sirenians are classified within the cohort Afrotheria in the clade Paenungulata, alongside the Proboscidea, Hyracoidea, and two extinct orders, the Embrithopoda and Desmostylia. This clade was first established by George Gaylord Simpson in 1945 based on evidence, such as testicondy. The Paenungulata, along with the Afrotheria, are one of the most well-supported mammalian clades in molecular phylogeny, the first appearance of sirenians in the fossil record was during the early Eocene, and by the late Eocene, sirenians had significantly diversified. Inhabitants of rivers, estuaries, and nearshore waters, they were able to spread rapidly. The most primitive sirenian known to date, Prorastomus, was found in Jamaica, the first known quadrupedal sirenian was Pezosiren from the early Eocene
21.
Mammal
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Mammals are any vertebrates within the class Mammalia, a clade of endothermic amniotes distinguished from reptiles by the possession of a neocortex, hair, three middle ear bones and mammary glands. All female mammals nurse their young with milk, secreted from the mammary glands, Mammals include the largest animals on the planet, the great whales. The basic body type is a quadruped, but some mammals are adapted for life at sea, in the air, in trees. The largest group of mammals, the placentals, have a placenta, Mammals range in size from the 30–40 mm bumblebee bat to the 30-meter blue whale. With the exception of the five species of monotreme, all modern mammals give birth to live young, most mammals, including the six most species-rich orders, belong to the placental group. The largest orders are the rodents, bats and Soricomorpha, the next three biggest orders, depending on the biological classification scheme used, are the Primates, the Cetartiodactyla, and the Carnivora. Living mammals are divided into the Yinotheria and Theriiformes There are around 5450 species of mammal, in some classifications, extant mammals are divided into two subclasses, the Prototheria, that is, the order Monotremata, and the Theria, or the infraclasses Metatheria and Eutheria. The marsupials constitute the group of the Metatheria, and include all living metatherians as well as many extinct ones. Much of the changes reflect the advances of cladistic analysis and molecular genetics, findings from molecular genetics, for example, have prompted adopting new groups, such as the Afrotheria, and abandoning traditional groups, such as the Insectivora. The mammals represent the only living Synapsida, which together with the Sauropsida form the Amniota clade, the early synapsid mammalian ancestors were sphenacodont pelycosaurs, a group that produced the non-mammalian Dimetrodon. At the end of the Carboniferous period, this group diverged from the line that led to todays reptiles. Some mammals are intelligent, with some possessing large brains, self-awareness, Mammals can communicate and vocalize in several different ways, including the production of ultrasound, scent-marking, alarm signals, singing, and echolocation. Mammals can organize themselves into fission-fusion societies, harems, and hierarchies, most mammals are polygynous, but some can be monogamous or polyandrous. They provided, and continue to provide, power for transport and agriculture, as well as commodities such as meat, dairy products, wool. Mammals are hunted or raced for sport, and are used as model organisms in science, Mammals have been depicted in art since Palaeolithic times, and appear in literature, film, mythology, and religion. Defaunation of mammals is primarily driven by anthropogenic factors, such as poaching and habitat destruction, Mammal classification has been through several iterations since Carl Linnaeus initially defined the class. No classification system is accepted, McKenna & Bell and Wilson & Reader provide useful recent compendiums. Though field work gradually made Simpsons classification outdated, it remains the closest thing to a classification of mammals
22.
Dugong
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The dugong is a medium-sized marine mammal. It is one of four living species of the order Sirenia and it is the only living representative of the once-diverse family Dugongidae, its closest modern relative, Stellers sea cow, was hunted to extinction in the 18th century. The dugong is the strictly marine herbivorous mammal. The dugong is the only sirenian in its range, which spans the waters of some 40 countries and territories throughout the Indo-West Pacific, the northern waters of Australia between Shark Bay and Moreton Bay are believed to be the dugongs contemporary stronghold. Like all modern sirenians, the dugong has a body with no dorsal fin or hind limbs. The forelimbs or flippers are paddle-like, the dugong is easily distinguished from the manatees by its fluked, dolphin-like tail, but also possesses a unique skull and teeth. Its snout is sharply downturned, an adaptation for feeding in benthic seagrass communities, the molar teeth are simple and peg-like unlike the more elaborate molar dentition of manatees. The dugong has been hunted for thousands of years for its meat, traditional hunting still has great cultural significance in several countries in its modern range, particularly northern Australia and the Pacific Islands. The dugongs current distribution is fragmented, and many populations are believed to be close to extinction, the IUCN lists the dugong as a species vulnerable to extinction, while the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species limits or bans the trade of derived products. Despite being legally protected in many countries, the causes of population decline remain anthropogenic and include fishing-related fatalities, habitat degradation. With its long lifespan of 70 years or more, and slow rate of reproduction, the word dugong derives from the Tagalog term dugong which was in turn adopted from the Malay duyung, both meaning lady of the sea. Other common local names include sea cow, sea pig and sea camel, Dugong dugon is the only extant species of the family Dugongidae, and one of only four extant species of the Sirenia order, the others forming the manatee family. It was first classified by Müller in 1776 as Trichechus dugon and it was later assigned as the type species of Dugong by Lacépède and further classified within its own family by Gray and subfamily by Simpson. Dugongs and other sirenians are not closely related to marine mammals. Dugongs and elephants share a group with hyraxes and the aardvark. The fossil record shows sirenians appearing in the Eocene, where they most likely lived in the Tethys Ocean, the Stellers sea cow became extinct in the 18th century. No fossils exist of other members of the Dugongidae, molecular studies have been made on dugong populations using mitochondrial DNA. The results have suggested that the population of Southeast Asia is distinct from the others, Australia has two distinct maternal lineages, one of which also contains the dugongs from Africa and Arabia
23.
Disease
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A disease is a particular abnormal condition, a disorder of a structure or function, that affects part or all of an organism. The study of disease is called pathology which includes the study of cause, Disease is often construed as a medical condition associated with specific symptoms and signs. When caused by pathogens, even in the literature, the term disease is often misleadingly used in the place of its causal agent. This language habitat can cause confusion in the communication of the principle in epidemiology. Diseases can affect not only physically, but also emotionally. Death due to disease is called death by natural causes, there are four main types of disease, infectious diseases, deficiency diseases, genetic diseases, and physiological diseases. Diseases can also be classified as communicable and non-communicable, the deadliest diseases in humans are coronary artery disease, followed by cerebrovascular disease and lower respiratory infections. In many cases, terms such as disease, disorder, morbidity, there are situations, however, when specific terms are considered preferable. Disease The term disease broadly refers to any condition that impairs the normal functioning of the body, for this reason, diseases are associated with dysfunctioning of the bodys normal homeostatic processes. The term disease has both a count sense and a noncount sense, by contrast, an infection that is asymptomatic during its incubation period, but expected to produce symptoms later, is usually considered a disease. Non-infectious diseases are all other diseases, including most forms of cancer, heart disease, acquired disease disease that began at some point during ones lifetime, as opposed to disease that was already present at birth, which is congenital disease. Acquired sounds like it could mean caught via contagion, but it simply means acquired sometime after birth and it also sounds like it could imply secondary disease, but acquired disease can be primary disease. It is often, genetic and can be inherited and it can also be the result of a vertically transmitted infection from the mother such as HIV/AIDS. Genetic disease disease that is caused by genetic mutation and it is often inherited, but some mutations are random and de novo. Hereditary or inherited disease a type of disease caused by mutation that is hereditary Iatrogenic disease A disease condition caused by medical intervention. Idiopathic disease disease whose cause is unknown, as medical science has advanced, many diseases whose causes were formerly complete mysteries have been somewhat explained or even extensively explained. Bacterial infections can be primary or secondary to a viral infection or burn. Terminal disease disease with death as an inevitable result Illness Illness is generally used as a synonym for disease, however, this term is occasionally used to refer specifically to the patients personal experience of his or her disease
24.
Mesopotamia
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In the Iron Age, it was controlled by the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires. The Sumerians and Akkadians dominated Mesopotamia from the beginning of history to the fall of Babylon in 539 BC. It fell to Alexander the Great in 332 BC, and after his death, around 150 BC, Mesopotamia was under the control of the Parthian Empire. Mesopotamia became a battleground between the Romans and Parthians, with parts of Mesopotamia coming under ephemeral Roman control. In AD226, eastern part of it fell to the Sassanid Persians, division of Mesopotamia between Roman and Sassanid Empires lasted until the 7th century Muslim conquest of Persia of the Sasanian Empire and Muslim conquest of the Levant from Byzantines. A number of primarily neo-Assyrian and Christian native Mesopotamian states existed between the 1st century BC and 3rd century AD, including Adiabene, Osroene, and Hatra, Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BC. The regional toponym Mesopotamia comes from the ancient Greek root words μέσος middle and ποταμός river and it is used throughout the Greek Septuagint to translate the Hebrew equivalent Naharaim. In the Anabasis, Mesopotamia was used to designate the land east of the Euphrates in north Syria, the Aramaic term biritum/birit narim corresponded to a similar geographical concept. The neighbouring steppes to the west of the Euphrates and the part of the Zagros Mountains are also often included under the wider term Mesopotamia. A further distinction is made between Northern or Upper Mesopotamia and Southern or Lower Mesopotamia. Upper Mesopotamia, also known as the Jazira, is the area between the Euphrates and the Tigris from their sources down to Baghdad, Lower Mesopotamia is the area from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf and includes Kuwait and parts of western Iran. In modern academic usage, the term Mesopotamia often also has a chronological connotation and it is usually used to designate the area until the Muslim conquests, with names like Syria, Jazirah, and Iraq being used to describe the region after that date. It has been argued that these later euphemisms are Eurocentric terms attributed to the region in the midst of various 19th-century Western encroachments, Mesopotamia encompasses the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, both of which have their headwaters in the Armenian Highlands. Both rivers are fed by tributaries, and the entire river system drains a vast mountainous region. Overland routes in Mesopotamia usually follow the Euphrates because the banks of the Tigris are frequently steep and difficult. The climate of the region is semi-arid with a vast desert expanse in the north which gives way to a 15,000 square kilometres region of marshes, lagoons, mud flats, in the extreme south, the Euphrates and the Tigris unite and empty into the Persian Gulf. In the marshlands to the south of the area, a complex water-borne fishing culture has existed since prehistoric times, periodic breakdowns in the cultural system have occurred for a number of reasons. Alternatively, military vulnerability to invasion from marginal hill tribes or nomadic pastoralists has led to periods of trade collapse and these trends have continued to the present day in Iraq
25.
First Babylonian Dynasty
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The chronology of the first dynasty of Babylonia is debated as there is a Babylonian King List A and a Babylonian King List B. In this chronology, the years of List A are used due to their wide usage. The reigns in List B are longer, in general, thus any evidence must come from surrounding regions and written records. Not much is known about the kings from Sumuabum through Sin-muballit other than the fact they were Amorites rather than indigenous Akkadians, what is known, however, is that they accumulated little land. When Hammurabi ascended the throne of Babylon, the empire consisted of a few towns in the surrounding area, Dilbat, Sippar, Kish. Once Hammurabi was king, his military victories gained land for the empire, however, Babylon remained but one of several important areas in Mesopotamia, along with Assyria, then ruled by Shamshi-Adad I, and Larsa, then ruled by Rim-Sin I. In Hammurabis thirtieth year as king, he began to establish Babylon as the center of what would be a great empire. In that year, he conquered Larsa from Rim-Sin I, thus gaining control over the urban centers of Nippur, Ur, Uruk. In essence, Hammurabi gained control over all of south Mesopotamia, the other formidable political power in the region in the 2nd millennium was Eshnunna, which Hammurabi succeeded in capturing in c. Babylon exploited Eshnunnas well-established commercial trade routes and the stability that came with them. It was not long before Hammurabis army took Assyria and parts of the Zagros Mountains, Hammurabis other name was Hammurapi-ilu, meaning Hammurapi the god or perhaps Hammurapi is god. He could have been Amraphel king of Shinar or Sinear in the Jewish records and the Bible, Abraham lived from 1871 to 1784, according to modern interpretations of the Old Testaments figures that have been usually reckoned in modern half years before the Exodus, from equinox to equinox. The Venus tablets of Ammisaduqa are famous, and several books had been published about them, several dates have been offered but the old dates of many sourcebooks seems to be outdated and incorrect. A few sources, some printed almost a century ago, claim that the text mentions an occultation of the Venus by the moon. However, this may be a misinterpretation, calculations support 1659 for the fall of Babylon, based on the statistical probability of dating based on the planets observations. The presently accepted middle chronology is too low from the point of view. A text about the fall of Babylon by the Hittites of Mursilis I at the end of Samsuditanas reign which tells about an eclipse is crucial for a correct Babylonian chronology. The pair of lunar and solar eclipses occurred in the month Shimanu, the lunar eclipse took place on February 9,1659 BC
26.
Neo-Assyrian Empire
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The Neo-Assyrian Empire was an Iron Age Mesopotamian empire, in existence between 911 and 612 BC. The Assyrians perfected early techniques of imperial rule, many of which became standard in later empires, the Neo-Assyrian Empire succeeded the Old Assyrian Empire, and the Middle Assyrian Empire of the Late Bronze Age. During this period, Aramaic was also made a language of the empire. Upon the death of Ashurbanipal in 627 BC, the empire began to due to a brutal. In 616 BC, Cyaxares king of the Medes and Persians made alliances with Nabopolassar ruler of the Babylonians and Chaldeans, Assyria was originally an Akkadian kingdom which evolved in the 25th to 24th centuries BC. The urbanised Akkadian speaking nation of Assyria emerged in the mid 21st century BC, during the 20th century BC, it established colonies in Asia Minor, and under the 20th century BC King Ilushuma, Assyria conducted many successful raids against the states of the south. Ashur-uballit extended Assyrian control over the farming lands of Nineveh. Tiglath-Pileser controlled the caravan routes that crossed the fertile crescent from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Much campaigning by Tiglath-Pileser and succeeding kings was directed against Aramaean pastoralist groups in Syria, by the end of the 2nd millennium BC, the Aramaean expansion had resulted in the loss of much Assyrian territory in Upper Mesopotamia. After the death of Tiglath-Pileser I in 1076 BC, Assyria was in decline for the next 150 years. The period from 1200 BC to 900 BC was an age for the entire Near East, North Africa, Caucasus, Mediterranean and Balkan regions, with great upheavals. Adad-nirari II and his successors campaigned on a basis for part of every year with an exceptionally well-organized army. He subjugated the areas previously under only nominal Assyrian vassalage, conquering and deporting Aramean and Hurrian populations in the north to far-off places. Adadinirari II then twice attacked and defeated Shamash-mudammiq of Babylonia, annexing an area of land north of the Diyala river. He made further gains over Babylonia under Nabu-shuma-ukin I later in his reign and he was succeeded by Tukulti-Ninurta II in 891 BC, who further consolidated Assyrias position and expanded northwards into Asia Minor and the Zagros Mountains during his short reign. The next king, Ashurnasirpal II, embarked on a vast program of expansion, during his rule, Assyria recovered much of the territory that it had lost around 1100 BC at the end of the Middle Assyrian period. Ashurnasirpal II also campaigned in the Zagros Mountains in modern Iran, repressing a revolt against Assyrian rule by the Lullubi, the Assyrians began boasting in their ruthlessness around this time. Ashurnasirpal II also moved his capital to the city of Kalhu, the palaces, temples and other buildings raised by him bear witness to a considerable development of wealth and art
27.
Semiramis
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Semiramis was the legendary wife of King Nimrod, and Ninus later on, succeeding him to the throne of Assyria. The indigenous Assyrians of Iraq, northeast Syria, southeast Turkey, the name of Semiramis came to be applied to various monuments in Western Asia and Asia Minor, the origin of which was forgotten or unknown. Nearly every stupendous work of antiquity by the Euphrates or in Iran seems to have ultimately been ascribed to her, herodotus ascribes to her the artificial banks that confined the Euphrates and knows her name as borne by a gate of Babylon. After her husbands death, she served as regent from 811–806 BC for her son, according to the legend as related by Diodorus, Semiramis was of noble parents, the daughter of the fish-goddess Derketo of Ascalon in Assyria and a mortal. Derketo abandoned her at birth and drowned herself, doves fed the child until Simmas, the royal shepherd, found and raised her. Semiramis then married Onnes or Menones, one of Ninus generals, when Onnes refused to exchange his wife for the kings daughter, Ninus threatened to put out his eyes unless he at once acceded to his commands. Onnes, out of fear of the king, and out of doomed passion for his wife, fell into a kind of frenzy and madness, Semiramis and Ninus had a son named Ninyas. After King Ninus conquered Asia, including the Bactrians, he was wounded by an arrow. Semiramis then masqueraded as her son and tricked her late husbands army into following her instructions because they thought these came from their new ruler, after Ninuss death she reigned as queen regnant for 42 years, conquering much of Asia. Semiramis restored ancient Babylon and protected it with a brick wall that completely surrounded the city. Then she built several palaces in Persia, including Ecbatana, Diodorus also attributes the Behistun inscription to her, now known to have been done under Darius I of Persia. She not only reigned Asia effectively but also added Libya and Aethiopia to the empire and she then went to war with king Stabrobates of India, having her artisans create an army of false elephants to deceive the Indians into thinking she had acquired real elephants. This succeeded at first, but then she was wounded in the counterattack and she is also credited with inventing the chastity belt. Armenian tradition portrays her as a homewrecker and a harlot, one of the most popular legends in Armenian tradition involves Semiramis and an Armenian king, Ara the Beautiful. In the 20th century, the poet Nairi Zarian retold the story of Ara the Beautiful and Shamiram, according to the legend, Semiramis had heard about the fame of the handsome Armenian king Ara, and she lusted after his image. Semiramis was enamored with Aras vigorous physical power and so sought to consummate with him and she asked Ara to marry her, but he refused, upon hearing this, she gathered the armies of Assyria and marched against Armenia. During the battle Ara was slain by Semiramis, to avoid continuous warfare with the Armenians, Semiramis, reputed to be a sorceress, took his body and prayed to the gods to raise Ara from the dead. When the Armenians advanced to avenge their leader, she disguised one of her lovers as Ara and spread the rumor that the gods had brought Ara back to life, although many different versions of the legend exist, they agree that Ara never came back to life
28.
Babylonia
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Babylonia was an ancient Akkadian-speaking state and cultural area based in central-southern Mesopotamia. A small Amorite-ruled state emerged in 1894 BC, which contained at this time the city of Babylon. Babylon greatly expanded during the reign of Hammurabi in the first half of the 18th century BC, during the reign of Hammurabi and afterwards, Babylonia was called Māt Akkadī the country of Akkad in the Akkadian language. It was often involved in rivalry with its older fellow Akkadian-speaking state of Assyria in northern Mesopotamia and it retained the Sumerian language for religious use, but by the time Babylon was founded, this was no longer a spoken language, having been wholly subsumed by Akkadian. The earliest mention of the city of Babylon can be found in a tablet from the reign of Sargon of Akkad. During the 3rd millennium BC, a cultural symbiosis occurred between Sumerian and Akkadian-speakers, which included widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian and vice versa is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a scale, to syntactic, morphological. This has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the millennium as a sprachbund. Traditionally, the religious center of all Mesopotamia was the city of Nippur. The empire eventually disintegrated due to decline, climate change and civil war. Sumer rose up again with the Third Dynasty of Ur in the late 22nd century BC and they also seem to have gained ascendancy over most of the territory of the Akkadian kings of Assyria in northern Mesopotamia for a time. The states of the south were unable to stem the Amorite advance, King Ilu-shuma of the Old Assyrian Empire in a known inscription describes his exploits to the south as follows, The freedom of the Akkadians and their children I established. I established their freedom from the border of the marshes and Ur and Nippur, Awal, past scholars originally extrapolated from this text that it means he defeated the invading Amorites to the south, but there is no explicit record of that. More recently, the text has been taken to mean that Asshur supplied the south with copper from Anatolia and these policies were continued by his successors Erishum I and Ikunum. During the first centuries of what is called the Amorite period and his reign was concerned with establishing statehood amongst a sea of other minor city states and kingdoms in the region. However Sumuabum appears never to have bothered to give himself the title of King of Babylon, suggesting that Babylon itself was only a minor town or city. He was followed by Sumu-la-El, Sabium, Apil-Sin, each of whom ruled in the same manner as Sumuabum. Sin-Muballit was the first of these Amorite rulers to be regarded officially as a king of Babylon, the Elamites occupied huge swathes of southern Mesopotamia, and the early Amorite rulers were largely held in vassalage to Elam
29.
Enki
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Enki is a god in Sumerian mythology, later known as Ea in Akkadian and Babylonian mythology. He was originally god of the city of Eridu, but later the influence of his cult spread throughout Mesopotamia and to the Canaanites, Hittites. He was the deity of crafts, mischief, water, seawater, lakewater, intelligence and he was associated with the southern band of constellations called stars of Ea, but also with the constellation AŠ-IKU, the Field. Beginning around the second millennium BCE, he was referred to in writing by the numeric ideogram for 40. The planet Mercury, associated with Babylonian Nabu was in Sumerian times, a large number of myths about Enki have been collected from many sites, stretching from Southern Iraq to the Levantine coast. He figures in the earliest extant cuneiform inscriptions throughout the region and was prominent from the third millennium down to Hellenistic times, the exact meaning of his name is uncertain, the common translation is Lord of the Earth. The Sumerian En is translated as an equivalent to lord and was originally a title given to the High Priest. Ki means earth, but there are theories that ki in this name has another origin, possibly kig of unknown meaning, in Sumerian E-A means the house of water, and it has been suggested that this was originally the name for the shrine to the god at Eridu. It has also suggested that the original non-anthropomorphic divinity at Eridu was not Enki. The main temple to Enki was called E-abzu, meaning abzu temple and it was the first temple known to have been built in Southern Iraq. Four separate excavations at the site of Eridu have demonstrated the existence of a shrine dating back to the earliest Ubaid period, over the following 4,500 years, the temple was expanded 18 times, until it was abandoned during the Persian period. On this basis Thorkild Jacobsen has hypothesized that the deity of the temple was Abzu. P. Steinkeller believes that, during the earliest period, Enki had a position to a goddess, taking the role of divine consort or high priest. The Enki temple had at its entrance a pool of fresh water, carp are shown in the twin water flows running into the later God Enki, suggesting continuity of these features over a very long period. These features were found at all subsequent Sumerian temples, suggesting that this established the pattern for all subsequent Sumerian temples. All rules laid down at Eridu were faithfully observed, Enki was the keeper of the divine powers called Me, the gifts of civilization. His image was a snake, or the Caduceus, sometimes confused with the Rod of Asclepius used to symbolize medicine. He is often shown with the crown of divinity dressed in the skin of a carp
30.
Milesian school
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The Milesian school was a school of thought founded in the 6th century BC. The ideas associated with it are exemplified by three philosophers from the Ionian town of Miletus, on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. They introduced new opinions contrary to the belief of how the world was organized. The Milesians conceived of nature in terms of methodologically observable entities and these philosophers defined all things by their quintessential substance of which the world was formed and which was the source of everything. Thales thought it to be water, but as it was impossible to explain some things as being composed of this element, Anaximander chose an unobserved, undefined element, which he called apeiron. Consequently, there must be another entity from which the others originate, the notion of temporal infinity was familiar to the Greek mind in the religious conception of immortality and Anaximanders description was in terms appropriate to this conception. This arche is called eternal and ageless, critics disliked the unspecified nature of the apeiron, which caused Anaximenes to define it as being air, which is a more concrete, yet still subtle, element. Anaximenes held that by its evaporation and condensation, air can change into other elements or substances such as fire, wind, clouds, water, however, our modern concept of energy is much more similar to Anaximanders apeiron. The differences between the three philosophers was not limited to the nature of matter, each of them conceived of the universe differently. Thales held that the world was floating in water, for Anaximenes, the sun and the moon were flat disks traveling around a heavenly canopy, on which the stars were fixed. Ionian School Pre-Socratic philosophy Ionian Enlightenment Lahaye, Robert, lÉcole de Milet, Cèdre, Paris,1966
31.
Anaximander
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Anaximander was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in Miletus, a city of Ionia. He belonged to the Milesian school and learned the teachings of his master Thales and he succeeded Thales and became the second master of that school where he counted Anaximenes and, arguably, Pythagoras amongst his pupils. Little of his life and work is known today, according to available historical documents, he is the first philosopher known to have written down his studies, although only one fragment of his work remains. Fragmentary testimonies found in documents after his death provide a portrait of the man, like many thinkers of his time, Anaximanders philosophy included contributions to many disciplines. In astronomy, he attempted to describe the mechanics of celestial bodies in relation to the Earth, in physics, his postulation that the indefinite was the source of all things led Greek philosophy to a new level of conceptual abstraction. His knowledge of geometry allowed him to introduce the gnomon in Greece and he created a map of the world that contributed greatly to the advancement of geography. He was also involved in the politics of Miletus and was sent as a leader to one of its colonies, Anaximander, son of Praxiades, was born in the third year of the 42nd Olympiad. According to Apollodorus of Athens, Greek grammarian of the 2nd century BC, he was years old during the second year of the 58th Olympiad. Establishing a timeline of his work is now impossible, since no document provides chronological references, Themistius, a 4th-century Byzantine rhetorician, mentions that he was the first of the known Greeks to publish a written document on nature. Therefore, his texts would be amongst the earliest written in prose, by the time of Plato, his philosophy was almost forgotten, and Aristotle, his successor Theophrastus and a few doxographers provide us with the little information that remains. However, we know from Aristotle that Thales, also from Miletus and it is debatable whether Thales actually was the teacher of Anaximander, but there is no doubt that Anaximander was influenced by Thales theory that everything is derived from water. 3rd-century Roman rhetorician Aelian depicts him as leader of the Milesian colony to Apollonia on the Black Sea coast, indeed, Various History explains that philosophers sometimes also dealt with political matters. It is very likely that leaders of Miletus sent him there as a legislator to create a constitution or simply to maintain the colony’s allegiance. Anaximanders theories were influenced by the Greek mythical tradition, and by some ideas of Thales – the father of philosophy – as well as by observations made by older civilizations in the East. This was a practice for the Greek philosophers in a society which saw gods everywhere, therefore they could fit their ideas into a tolerably elastic system. Some scholars see a gap between the mythical and the new rational way of thought which is the main characteristic of the archaic period in the Greek city states. This has given rise to the phrase Greek miracle, but if we follow carefully the course of Anaximanders ideas, we will notice that there was not such an abrupt break as initially appears. The basic elements of nature which the first Greek philosophers believed that constituted the universe represent in fact the primordial forces of previous thought and their collision produced what the mythical tradition had called cosmic harmony
32.
Infancy
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An infant is the more formal or specialised synonym for baby, the very young offspring of a human or other animal. A newborn is, in use, an infant who is only hours, days. In medical contexts, newborn or neonate refers to an infant in the first 28 days after birth, the term applies to premature, full term, and postmature infants, before birth, the term fetus is used. The term infant is typically applied to children under one year of age, however, definitions may vary. When a human child learns to walk, the toddler may be used instead. In British English, infant is a term that can be applied to children aged between four and seven. As a legal term, infancy continues from birth until age 18, a newborns shoulders and hips are wide, the abdomen protrudes slightly, and the arms and legs are relatively long with respect to the rest of their body. In first world nations, the total body length of newborns are 35. 6–50.8 cm. The Apgar score is a measure of a transition from the uterus during the first minutes after birth. In developed countries, the birth weight of a full-term newborn is approximately 3.4 kg. After the first week, healthy term neonates should gain 10–20 grams/day, a newborns head is very large in proportion to the body, and the cranium is enormous relative to his or her face. While the adult human skull is one seventh of the total body length. Normal head circumference for an infant is 33–36 cm at birth. At birth, many regions of the skull have not yet been converted to bone. The two largest are the anterior fontanel, located at the top front portion of the head, and the smaller triangular-shaped posterior fontanel. Later in the life, these bones will fuse together in a natural process. A protein called noggin is responsible for the delay in an infants skull fusion, during labour and birth, the infants skull changes shape to fit through the birth canal, sometimes causing the child to be born with a misshapen or elongated head. It will usually return to normal on its own within a few days or weeks, special exercises sometimes advised by physicians may assist the process
33.
Alexander the Great
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Alexander III of Macedon, commonly known as Alexander the Great, was a king of the Ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon and a member of the Argead dynasty. He was born in Pella in 356 BC and succeeded his father Philip II to the throne at the age of twenty and he was undefeated in battle and is widely considered one of historys most successful military commanders. During his youth, Alexander was tutored by Aristotle until the age of 16, after Philips assassination in 336 BC, he succeeded his father to the throne and inherited a strong kingdom and an experienced army. Alexander was awarded the generalship of Greece and used this authority to launch his fathers Panhellenic project to lead the Greeks in the conquest of Persia, in 334 BC, he invaded the Achaemenid Empire and began a series of campaigns that lasted ten years. Following the conquest of Anatolia, Alexander broke the power of Persia in a series of battles, most notably the battles of Issus. He subsequently overthrew Persian King Darius III and conquered the Achaemenid Empire in its entirety, at that point, his empire stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River. He sought to reach the ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea and invaded India in 326 BC and he eventually turned back at the demand of his homesick troops. Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BC, the city that he planned to establish as his capital, without executing a series of planned campaigns that would have begun with an invasion of Arabia. In the years following his death, a series of civil wars tore his empire apart, resulting in the establishment of several states ruled by the Diadochi, Alexanders surviving generals, Alexanders legacy includes the cultural diffusion which his conquests engendered, such as Greco-Buddhism. He founded some twenty cities that bore his name, most notably Alexandria in Egypt, Alexander became legendary as a classical hero in the mold of Achilles, and he features prominently in the history and mythic traditions of both Greek and non-Greek cultures. He became the measure against which military leaders compared themselves, and he is often ranked among the most influential people in human history. He was the son of the king of Macedon, Philip II, and his wife, Olympias. Although Philip had seven or eight wives, Olympias was his wife for some time. Several legends surround Alexanders birth and childhood, sometime after the wedding, Philip is said to have seen himself, in a dream, securing his wifes womb with a seal engraved with a lions image. Plutarch offered a variety of interpretations of dreams, that Olympias was pregnant before her marriage, indicated by the sealing of her womb. On the day Alexander was born, Philip was preparing a siege on the city of Potidea on the peninsula of Chalcidice. That same day, Philip received news that his general Parmenion had defeated the combined Illyrian and Paeonian armies, and it was also said that on this day, the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, burnt down. This led Hegesias of Magnesia to say that it had burnt down because Artemis was away, such legends may have emerged when Alexander was king, and possibly at his own instigation, to show that he was superhuman and destined for greatness from conception
34.
Aegean Sea
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The Aegean Sea is an elongated embayment of the Mediterranean Sea located between the Greek and Anatolian peninsulas, i. e. between the mainlands of Greece and Turkey. In the north, it is connected to the Marmara Sea and Black Sea by the Dardanelles, the Aegean Islands are within the sea and some bound it on its southern periphery, including Crete and Rhodes. The sea was known as Archipelago, but in English this words meaning has changed to refer to the Aegean Islands and, generally. In ancient times, there were various explanations for the name Aegean, a possible etymology is a derivation from the Greek word αἶγες – aiges = waves, hence wavy sea, cf. also αἰγιαλός, hence meaning sea-shore. The Venetians, who ruled many Greek islands in the High and Late Middle Ages, popularized the name Archipelago, in some South Slavic languages the Aegean is often called White Sea. The Aegean Sea covers about 214,000 square kilometres in area, the seas maximum depth is 3,543 metres, east of Crete. The Aegean Islands are found within its waters, with the following islands delimiting the sea on the south, Kythera, Antikythera, Crete, Kasos, Karpathos, many of the Aegean Islands, or chains of islands, are actually extensions of the mountains on the mainland. One chain extends across the sea to Chios, another extends across Euboea to Samos, the International Hydrographic Organization defines the limits of the Aegean Sea as follows, On the South. In the Dardanelles. A line joining Kum Kale and Cape Helles, the dense Mediterranean water sinks below the Black Sea inflow to a depth of 23–30 metres, then flows through the Dardanelles Strait and into the Sea of Marmara at velocities of 5–15 cm/s. The Black Sea outflow moves westward along the northern Aegean Sea, Aegean Sea Intermediate Water – Aegean Sea Intermediate Water extends from 40–50 m to 200–300 metres with temperatures ranging from 11–18 °C. Aegean Sea Bottom Water – occurring at depths below 500–1000 m with a uniform temperature. The current coastline dates back to about 4000 BC, before that time, at the peak of the last ice age sea levels everywhere were 130 metres lower, and there were large well-watered coastal plains instead of much of the northern Aegean. When they were first occupied, the islands including Milos with its important obsidian production were probably still connected to the mainland. The present coastal arrangement appeared c.7000 BC, with post-ice age sea levels continuing to rise for another 3,000 years after that, the subsequent Bronze Age civilizations of Greece and the Aegean Sea have given rise to the general term Aegean civilization. In ancient times, the sea was the birthplace of two ancient civilizations – the Minoans of Crete and the Mycenean Civilization of the Peloponnese, later arose the city-states of Athens and Sparta among many others that constituted the Athenian Empire and Hellenic Civilization. Plato described the Greeks living round the Aegean like frogs around a pond, the Aegean Sea was later invaded by the Persians and the Romans, and inhabited by the Byzantine Empire, the Bulgarians, the Venetians, the Genoese, the Seljuq Turks, and the Ottoman Empire. The Aegean was the site of the democracies, and its seaways were the means of contact among several diverse civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean. Many of the islands in the Aegean have safe harbours and bays, in ancient times, navigation through the sea was easier than travelling across the rough terrain of the Greek mainland
35.
Greek language
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Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any living language, spanning 34 centuries of written records and its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history, other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic and many other writing systems. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, during antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and many places beyond. It would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire, the language is spoken by at least 13.2 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. Greek roots are used to coin new words for other languages, Greek. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, the earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the worlds oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages, the Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods, Proto-Greek, the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Mycenaean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards, Ancient Greek, in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire, after the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek, the continuation of Koine Greek in Byzantine Greece, up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Much of the written Greek that was used as the language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine. Modern Greek, Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period and it is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it. In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia, the historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language is often emphasised. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language and it is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English, Greek is spoken by about 13 million people, mainly in Greece, Albania and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. Greek is the language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population
36.
Lucian
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Lucian of Samosata was a rhetorician and satirist who wrote in the Greek language during the Second Sophistic. He is noted for his witty and scoffing nature, Lucian wrote exclusively in ancient Greek. He wrote mainly in the Attic dialect, but On the Syrian Goddess, few details of Lucians life can be verified with any degree of accuracy, though clues can be found in writings attributed to him. In several works he claims to have born in Samosata, in the former kingdom of Commagene. His depictions of the processes involved in the diverse and dynamic cult have many significant parallels to Syrias material culture. On the Syrian Goddess parodies the Greek view of foreigners as barbarous, while the narrator concludes that the Syrians, throughout the account, the narrator often conflates the terms Assyrian and Syrian. In The Syrian Goddess, the claims to be an Assyrian himself. In the final paragraph of the work, the describes a ritual in which initiates would dedicate a lock of their hair to Hippolytus as part of a pre-marital coming-of-age ritual. The narrator comments, as rendered in Strong and Garstangs 1913 translation, I performed this act myself when a youth, Lucians claim in Double Indictment to be a native speaker of a barbarian tongue has been suggested to refer Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic. A more likely interpretation is that he is referring to speaking a variety of Greek. It has been suggested that in referring to himself as a barbarian, he was from the Semitic and his name added lustre to any entertaining and sarcastic essay, more than 150 surviving manuscripts attest to his continued popularity. The first printed edition of a selection of his works was issued at Florence in 1499 and his best known works are A True Story, and Dialogues of the Gods and Dialogues of the Dead. Lucian was trained as a rhetorician, a vocation whose practitioners pleaded in court, composed pleas for others, Lucians practice was to travel about, giving amusing discourses and witty lectures improvised on the spot, somewhat as a rhapsode had done in declaiming poetry at an earlier period. In this way Lucian travelled through Ionia and mainland Greece, to Italy and even to Gaul, there are 80 surviving works attributed to Lucian. He wrote in a variety of styles which included comic dialogues, rhetorical essays, Lucian was also one of the earliest novelists in Western civilization. In A True Story, a narrative work written in prose, he parodies some of the fantastic tales told by Homer in the Odyssey. He anticipated modern fictional themes like voyages to the moon and Venus, extraterrestrial life and his novel is widely regarded as an early, if not the earliest science fiction work. Lucians On Dance is important for the history of dance as it is one of very few literary discussions of dance - specifically pantomime - that treats Roman dance in detail
37.
Ionic Greek
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Ionic Greek was a subdialect of the Attic–Ionic or Eastern dialect group of Ancient Greek. The Ionic dialect appears to have spread from the Greek mainland across the Aegean at the time of the Dorian invasions. By the end of the Greek Dark Ages in the 5th-century BC, the Ionic dialect was also spoken on islands across the central Aegean and on the large island of Euboea north of Athens. The dialect was spread by Ionian colonization to areas in the northern Aegean, the Black Sea. The Ionic dialect is divided into two major time periods, Old Ionic and New Ionic. The transition between the two is not clearly defined, but 600 BC is a good approximation, the poet Archilochus wrote in late Old Ionic. The most famous New Ionic authors are Anacreon, Theognis, Herodotus, Hippocrates, and, in Roman times, Aretaeus, Arrian, and Lucian. This was further enhanced by the writing reform implemented in Athens in 403 BC, whereby the old Attic alphabet was replaced by the Ionic alphabet and this alphabet eventually became the standard Greek alphabet, its use becoming uniform during the Koine era. It was also the used in the Christian Gospels and the book of Acts. Proto-Greek ā > Ionic ē, in Doric, Aeolic, ā remains, in Attic, ā after e, i, r, in Attic, e, o is not lengthened. Proto-Greek *kórwā > Attic κόρη, Ionic κούρη girl *órwos > ὄρος, οὔρος mountain *ksénwos > ξένος, ξεῖνος guest, Proto-Greek *hāwélios > Attic hēlios, Homeric ēélios sun Ionic contracts less often than Attic. Ionic γένεα, Attic γένη family Proto-Greek *kʷ before a, o > Ionic k, Attic p. Proto-Greek *okʷō > Ionic ὄκως, Attic ὅπως in whatever way, in which way Proto-Greek *ťť > Ionic ss and this Ionic feature made it into Koine Greek. Proto-Greek *táťťō > Ionic τάσσω, Attic τάττω I arrange Ionic had a very analytical word-order, perhaps the most analytical one within ancient Greek dialects
38.
Asia
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Asia covers an area of 44,579,000 square kilometres, about 30% of Earths total land area and 8. 7% of the Earths total surface area. The continent, which has long been home to the majority of the population, was the site of many of the first civilizations. Asia is notable for not only its large size and population. In general terms, Asia is bounded on the east by the Pacific Ocean, on the south by the Indian Ocean, the western boundary with Europe is a historical and cultural construct, as there is no clear physical and geographical separation between them. The most commonly accepted boundaries place Asia to the east of the Suez Canal, the Ural River, and the Ural Mountains, and south of the Caucasus Mountains, China and India alternated in being the largest economies in the world from 1 to 1800 A. D. The accidental discovery of America by Columbus in search for India demonstrates this deep fascination, the Silk Road became the main East-West trading route in the Asian hitherland while the Straits of Malacca stood as a major sea route. Asia has exhibited economic dynamism as well as robust population growth during the 20th century, given its size and diversity, the concept of Asia—a name dating back to classical antiquity—may actually have more to do with human geography than physical geography. Asia varies greatly across and within its regions with regard to ethnic groups, cultures, environments, economics, historical ties, the boundary between Asia and Africa is the Red Sea, the Gulf of Suez, and the Suez Canal. This makes Egypt a transcontinental country, with the Sinai peninsula in Asia, the border between Asia and Europe was historically defined by European academics. In Sweden, five years after Peters death, in 1730 Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published a new atlas proposing the Urals as the border of Asia, the Russians were enthusiastic about the concept, which allowed them to keep their European identity in geography. Tatishchev announced that he had proposed the idea to von Strahlenberg, the latter had suggested the Emba River as the lower boundary. Over the next century various proposals were made until the Ural River prevailed in the mid-19th century, the border had been moved perforce from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea into which the Ural River projects. The border between the Black Sea and the Caspian is usually placed along the crest of the Caucasus Mountains, the border between Asia and the loosely defined region of Oceania is usually placed somewhere in the Malay Archipelago. The terms Southeast Asia and Oceania, devised in the 19th century, have had several different geographic meanings since their inception. The chief factor in determining which islands of the Malay Archipelago are Asian has been the location of the possessions of the various empires there. Lewis and Wigen assert, The narrowing of Southeast Asia to its present boundaries was thus a gradual process, Asia is larger and more culturally diverse than Europe. It does not exactly correspond to the borders of its various types of constituents. From the time of Herodotus a minority of geographers have rejected the three-continent system on the grounds there is no or is no substantial physical separation between them
39.
Hera
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Hera is the goddess of women and marriage in Greek mythology and religion. She is the daughter of the Titans Cronus and Rhea, Hera is married to her brother Zeus and is titled as the Queen of Heaven. One of her characteristics is her jealous and vengeful nature against Zeuss other lovers and offspring, Hera is commonly seen with the animals she considers sacred including the cow, lion and the peacock. Scholar of Greek mythology Walter Burkert writes in Greek Religion, Nevertheless, there are memories of an aniconic representation, as a pillar in Argos. Her counterpart in the religion of ancient Rome was Juno, According to Plutarch, Hera was an allegorical name and an anagram of aēr. So begins the section on Hera in Walter Burkerts Greek Religion, in a note, he records other scholars arguments for the meaning Mistress as a feminine to Heros, Master. John Chadwick, a decipherer of Linear B, remarks her name may be connected with hērōs, ἥρως, hero, a. J. van Windekens, offers young cow, heifer, which is consonant with Heras common epithet βοῶπις. R. S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin and her name is attested in Mycenaean Greek written in the Linear B syllabic script as
40.
Phoenicia
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The enterprising, sea-based Phoenician civilization spread across the Mediterranean between 1500 BC and 300 BC. Their civilization was organized in city-states, similar to those of Ancient Greece, perhaps the most notable of which were Tyre, Sidon, Arvad, Berytus and Carthage. Each city-state was an independent unit, and it is uncertain to what extent the Phoenicians viewed themselves as a single nationality. In terms of archaeology, language, lifestyle, and religion there was little to set the Phoenicians apart as markedly different from other Semitic Canaanites. The Phoenicians were the first state-level society to make use of alphabets. By their maritime trade, the Phoenicians spread the use of the alphabet to Anatolia, North Africa, and Europe, where it was adopted by the Greeks, the name Phoenicians, like Latin Poenī, comes from Greek Φοίνικες. The word φοῖνιξ phoînix meant variably Phoenician person, Tyrian purple, the word may be derived from φοινός phoinós blood red, itself possibly related to φόνος phónos murder. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin of the ethnonym, the oldest attested form of the word in Greek may be the Mycenaean po-ni-ki-jo, po-ni-ki, possibly borrowed from Ancient Egyptian fnḫw Asiatics, Semites, although this derivation is disputed. The folk-etymological association of Φοινίκη with φοῖνιξ mirrors that in Akkadian which tied kinaḫni, the land was natively known as knʿn and its people as the knʿny. In the Amarna tablets of the 14th century BC, people from the region called themselves Kenaani or Kinaani, the ethnonym survived in North Africa until the 4th century AD. Herodotus account refers to the myths of Io and Europa, according to the Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians began the quarrel. The Greek historian Strabo believed that the Phoenicians originated from Bahrain, Herodotus also believed that the homeland of the Phoenicians was Bahrain. The people of Tyre in South Lebanon in particular have long maintained Persian Gulf origins, however, there is little evidence of occupation at all in Bahrain during the time when such migration had supposedly taken place. Canaanite culture apparently developed in situ from the earlier Ghassulian chalcolithic culture, Byblos is attested as an archaeological site from the Early Bronze Age. The Late Bronze Age state of Ugarit is considered quintessentially Canaanite archaeologically, fernand Braudel remarked in The Perspective of the World that Phoenicia was an early example of a world-economy surrounded by empires. The high point of Phoenician culture and sea power is usually placed c, archaeological evidence consistent with this understanding has been difficult to identify. A unique concentration in Phoenicia of silver hoards dated between 1200 and 800 BC, however, contains hacksilver with lead isotope ratios matching ores in Sardinia and Spain. This metallic evidence agrees with the memory of a western Mediterranean Tarshish that supplied Solomon with silver via Phoenicia
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