Pushkin Museum
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts is the largest museum of European art in Moscow, located in Volkhonka street, just opposite the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The International musical festival Sviatoslav Richter's December nights has been held in the Pushkin museum since 1981; the museum's current name is somewhat misleading, in that it has no direct associations with the famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, other than as a posthumous commemoration of his name and fame. The facility was founded by professor Ivan Tsvetaev. Tsvetaev persuaded the millionaire and philanthropist Yuriy Nechaev-Maltsov and the fashionable architect Roman Klein of the urgent need to give Moscow a fine arts museum. After going through a number of name-changes in the transition to the Soviet-era and the return of the Russian capital to Moscow, the museum was renamed to honour the memory of Pushkin in 1937, the 100th anniversary of his death; the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts' building was designed by Vladimir Shukhov.
Construction lasted from 1898 until early 1912, with Ivan Rerberg heading structural engineering effort on the museum site for the first 12 years. In 2008, President Dmitri A. Medvedev announced plans for a $177 million restoration. A Rbn22 billion expansion, developed by Norman Foster in collaboration with local architectural firm Mosproject-5, was confirmed in 2009, but became mired in disputes with officials and preservationists and concern grew that it would not be completed on schedule for 2018. After Moscow’s chief architect Sergei Kuznetsov issued an ultimatum, demanding that Foster take a more active role in the project and prove his commitment by coming to the Russian capital within a month, Norman Foster’s firm resigned from the project in 2013. In 2014, Russian architect Yuri Grigoryan, his firm Project Meganom, were chosen to take over the project. Grigoryan’s design provides new modern buildings and, following the protest of heritage groups who campaigned to save the pre-revolutionary architecture, preserves the historic 1930s gas station near the Pushkin’s main building inside a glass structure.
The holdings of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts include around 700,000 paintings, drawings, applied works and archaeological and animalistic objects. The Department of Manuscripts houses documents on the Museum’s history; the Museum owns studios for a Scientific Library. The earliest monuments from the Museum collection are pieces of Byzantine art: icons; the early stage of development of Western European painting is represented by a small, but impressive, collection of Italian Primitives. The hall of early Italian art was opened on October 10, 1924, but the first original paintings were presented to the Alexander III Fine Arts Museum in 1910 by Mikhail Schekin, the Russian consul in Trieste, include unique Old Master works such as painting by Giambattista Pittoni. After 1924, many paintings from Moscow and St. Petersburg state-owned and private collections were provided to the Museum; these were artworks by Western European painters from the Rumyantsev Museum, as well as the private collections of Sergei Tretyakov, the Yusupovs, the Shuvalovs, Henri Brocard, Dmitry Schukin, other Russian collectors.
Pieces provided by the State Hermitage were of particular importance. However, the gallery was completed only in 1948, when artworks by French painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were transferred from the State Museum of New Western Art; the Department of Prints and Drawings was founded in 1924, when the Museum received the holdings of the Printing Cabinet of the Moscow Public and Rumyantsev Museum. In 1861, Alexander II made a valuable gift to the Printing Cabinet: the Moscow Public and Rumyantsev Museum received more than 20,000 prints from the Hermitage; the Department received a number of private collections from Dmitry Rovinsky, Nikolay Mosolov, Sergey Kitaev. During the Soviet period, the Department’s holdings were increased by means of gifts and transfers from other museums. Today, the Department of Prints and Drawings is a solid collection of graphic art pieces that includes around 400,000 prints, books with prints, pieces of applied graphics, bookplates; these were created by masters of Western Europe, America and Eastern countries from the 15th century to modern day.
The collection includes works by famous artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Rubens, Picasso, Karl Bryullov, Favorsky, Utamaro and Hiroshige. The collection of Western European sculptures includes more than 600 pieces; the Museum has expanded its holdings over the years and owns artworks from the 6th-21st centuries. The first artifacts presented to the Museum of Fine Arts were sculptures from Mikhail Schekin’s collections. After the revolution, the Museum received many sculptures from nationalized collections. In 1924, a few painting halls were opened in the Museum; the first original pieces found their places there. Gradual acquisition of original sculptur
Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt
The Twelfth Dynasty of ancient Egypt, is combined with the Eleventh and Fourteenth Dynasties under the group title Middle Kingdom. Known rulers of the Twelfth Dynasty are as follows: The chronology of the 12th dynasty is the most stable of any period before the New Kingdom; the Ramses Papyrus canon in Turin gives 213 years. Manetho stated that it was based in Thebes, but from contemporary records it is clear that the first king moved its capital to a new city named "Amenemhat-itj-tawy", more called Itjtawy; the location of Itjtawy has not been found, but is thought to be near the Fayyum near the royal graveyards at el-Lisht. Egyptologists consider this dynasty to be the apex of the Middle Kingdom; the order of its rulers is well known from several sources — two lists recorded at temples in Abydos and one at Saqqara, as well as Manetho's work. A recorded date during the reign of Senusret III can be correlated to the Sothic cycle many events during this dynasty can be assigned to a specific year.
This dynasty was founded by Amenemhat I, who may have been vizier to the last pharaoh of Dynasty XI, Mentuhotep IV. His armies campaigned south as far into southern Canaan, he reestablished diplomatic relations with the Canaanite state of Byblos and Hellenic rulers in the Aegean Sea. His son Senusret I followed his father's triumphs with an expedition south to the Third Cataract, but the next rulers were content to live in peace until the reign of Senusret III. Finding Nubia had grown restive under the previous rulers, Senusret sent punitive expeditions into that land; these military campaigns gave birth to a legend of a mighty warrior named Sesostris, a story retold by Manetho and Diodorus Siculus. Manetho claimed the mythical Sesostris not only subdued the lands as had Senusret I, but conquered parts of Canaan and had crossed over into Europe to annex Thrace. However, there are no records of the time, either in Egyptian or other contemporary writings that support these claims. Senusret's successor Amenemhat III reaffirmed his predecessor's foreign policy.
However, after Amenemhat, the energies of this dynasty were spent, the growing troubles of government were left to the dynasty's last ruler, Queen Sobekneferu, to resolve. Amenemhat was remembered for the mortuary temple at Hawara that he built, known to Herodotus and Strabo as the "Labyrinth". Additionally, under his reign, the marshy Fayyum was first exploited, it was during the twelfth dynasty. The best known work from this period is The Story of Sinuhe, of which several hundred papyrus copies have been recovered. Written during this dynasty were a number of Didactic works, such as the Instructions of Amenemhat and The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant. Pharaohs of Dynasties XII through XVIII are credited with preserving for us some of the most remarkable Egyptian papyri: 1900 BC – Prisse Papyrus 1800 BC – Berlin Papyrus 1800 BC – Moscow Mathematical Papyrus 1650 BC – Rhind Mathematical Papyrus 1600 BC – Edwin Smith papyrus 1550 BC – Ebers papyrus History of Ancient Egypt Twelfth dynasty of Egypt Family Tree Execration Texts
Volume
Volume is the quantity of three-dimensional space enclosed by a closed surface, for example, the space that a substance or shape occupies or contains. Volume is quantified numerically using the SI derived unit, the cubic metre; the volume of a container is understood to be the capacity of the container. Three dimensional mathematical shapes are assigned volumes. Volumes of some simple shapes, such as regular, straight-edged, circular shapes can be calculated using arithmetic formulas. Volumes of complicated shapes can be calculated with integral calculus if a formula exists for the shape's boundary. One-dimensional figures and two-dimensional shapes are assigned zero volume in the three-dimensional space; the volume of a solid can be determined by fluid displacement. Displacement of liquid can be used to determine the volume of a gas; the combined volume of two substances is greater than the volume of just one of the substances. However, sometimes one substance dissolves in the other and in such cases the combined volume is not additive.
In differential geometry, volume is expressed by means of the volume form, is an important global Riemannian invariant. In thermodynamics, volume is a fundamental parameter, is a conjugate variable to pressure. Any unit of length gives a corresponding unit of volume: the volume of a cube whose sides have the given length. For example, a cubic centimetre is the volume of a cube. In the International System of Units, the standard unit of volume is the cubic metre; the metric system includes the litre as a unit of volume, where one litre is the volume of a 10-centimetre cube. Thus 1 litre = 3 = 1000 cubic centimetres = 0.001 cubic metres. Small amounts of liquid are measured in millilitres, where 1 millilitre = 0.001 litres = 1 cubic centimetre. In the same way, large amounts can be measured in megalitres, where 1 million litres = 1000 cubic metres = 1 megalitre. Various other traditional units of volume are in use, including the cubic inch, the cubic foot, the cubic yard, the cubic mile, the teaspoon, the tablespoon, the fluid ounce, the fluid dram, the gill, the pint, the quart, the gallon, the minim, the barrel, the cord, the peck, the bushel, the hogshead, the acre-foot and the board foot.
Capacity is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "the measure applied to the content of a vessel, to liquids, grain, or the like, which take the shape of that which holds them". Capacity is not identical in meaning to volume, though related. Units of capacity are the SI litre and its derived units, Imperial units such as gill, pint and others. Units of volume are the cubes of units of length. In SI the units of volume and capacity are related: one litre is 1 cubic decimetre, the capacity of a cube with a 10 cm side. In other systems the conversion is not trivial; the density of an object is defined as the ratio of the mass to the volume. The inverse of density is specific volume, defined as volume divided by mass. Specific volume is a concept important in thermodynamics where the volume of a working fluid is an important parameter of a system being studied; the volumetric flow rate in fluid dynamics is the volume of fluid which passes through a given surface per unit time. In calculus, a branch of mathematics, the volume of a region D in R3 is given by a triple integral of the constant function f = 1 and is written as: ∭ D 1 d x d y d z.
The volume integral in cylindrical coordinates is ∭ D r d r d θ d z, the volume integral in spherical coordinates has the form ∭ D ρ 2 sin ϕ d ρ d θ d ϕ. The above formulas can be used to show that the volumes of a cone and cylinder of the same radius and height are in the ratio 1: 2: 3, as follows. Let the radius be r and the height be h the volume of cone is 1 3 π r 2 h = 1 3 π r 2 = × 1, the volume of the sphere
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. Nominally a union of multiple national Soviet republics, its government and economy were centralized; the country was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Other major urban centres were Leningrad, Minsk, Alma-Ata, Novosibirsk, it spanned over 10,000 kilometres east to west across 11 time zones, over 7,200 kilometres north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, steppes and mountains; the Soviet Union had its roots in the 1917 October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian Provisional Government which had replaced Tsar Nicholas II during World War I. In 1922, the Soviet Union was formed by a treaty which legalized the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian and Byelorussian republics that had occurred from 1918. Following Lenin's death in 1924 and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s.
Stalin committed the state's ideology to Marxism–Leninism and constructed a command economy which led to a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization. During his rule, political paranoia fermented and the Great Purge removed Stalin's opponents within and outside of the party via arbitrary arrests and persecutions of many people, resulting in at least 600,000 deaths. In 1933, a major famine struck the country. Before the start of World War II in 1939, the Soviets signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, after which the USSR invaded Poland on 17 September 1939. In June 1941, Germany broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theatre of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at intense battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk; the territories overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Soviet Union.
The post-war division of Europe into capitalist and communist halves would lead to increased tensions with the United States-led Western Bloc, known as the Cold War. Stalin died in 1953 and was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1956 denounced Stalin and began the de-Stalinization; the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred during Khrushchev's rule, among the many factors that led to his downfall in 1964. In the early 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, but tensions resumed with the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. In 1985, the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost and perestroika, which caused political instability. In 1989, Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist governments; as part of an attempt to prevent the country's dissolution due to rising nationalist and separatist movements, a referendum was held in March 1991, boycotted by some republics, that resulted in a majority of participating citizens voting in favor of preserving the union as a renewed federation.
Gorbachev's power was diminished after Russian President Boris Yeltsin's high-profile role in facing down a coup d'état attempted by Communist Party hardliners. In late 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union met and formally dissolved the Soviet Union; the remaining 12 constituent republics emerged as independent post-Soviet states, with the Russian Federation—formerly the Russian SFSR—assuming the Soviet Union's rights and obligations and being recognized as the successor state. The Soviet Union was a powerhouse of many significant technological achievements and innovations of the 20th century, including the world's first human-made satellite, the first humans in space and the first probe to land on another planet, Venus; the country had the largest standing military in the world. The Soviet Union was recognized as one of the five nuclear weapons states and possessed the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, it was a founding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as well as a member of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the World Federation of Trade Unions and the leading member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact.
The word "Soviet" is derived from a Russian word сове́т meaning council, advice, harmony and all deriving from the proto-Slavic verbal stem of vět-iti, related to Slavic věst, English "wise", the root in "ad-vis-or", or the Dutch weten. The word sovietnik means "councillor". A number of organizations in Russian history were called "council". For example, in the Russian Empire the State Council, which functioned from 1810 to 1917, was referred to as a Council of Ministers after the revolt of 1905. During the Georgian Affair, Vladimir Lenin envisioned an expression of Great Russian ethnic chauvinism by Joseph Stalin and his supporters, calling for these nation-states to join Russia as semi-independent parts of a greater union, which he named as the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. Stalin resisted the proposal, but accepted it, although with Lenin's agreement changed the name of the newly proposed sta
Boris Turayev
Boris Alexandrovich Turayev was a Russian scholar who studied the Ancient Near East. He was admitted into the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1918. After graduating from the University of St Petersburg Turayev studied under Gaston Maspero and Adolf Erman and worked in museums of Berlin and London. Since 1896, he delivered, he was an ordinary professor of this university since 1911. After the establishment of the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts, Turayev persuaded Vladimir Golenishchev to sell his collection of ancient Egyptian statuary and curiosities to the museum. For a time he lived in the museum building, his own collection of Egyptian antiquities went to the State Hermitage. Boris Turayev's magnum opus, History of Ancient East, quite unprecedented in its scope, brought him recognition throughout Europe, it was the first comprehensive study that analyzed the whole history and culture of the Ancient Middle East. He wrote books about Egyptian literature and mythology. Complete Bibliography of Boris Turayev Turaev's History of the Ancient East online
Palaeography
Palaeography or paleography is the study of ancient and historical handwriting. Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering and dating historical manuscripts, the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, the history of scriptoria; the discipline is important for understanding and dating ancient texts. However, it cannot in general be used to pinpoint dates with high precision. Palaeography can be an essential skill for historians and philologists, as it tackles two main difficulties. First, since the style of a single alphabet in each given language has evolved it is necessary to know how to decipher its individual characters as they existed in various eras. Second, scribes used many abbreviations so as to write more and sometimes to save space, so the specialist-palaeographer must know how to interpret them. Knowledge of individual letter-forms, ligatures and abbreviations enables the palaeographer to read and understand the text.
The palaeographer must know, the language of the text. Philological knowledge of the language and grammar used at a given time or place can help palaeographers identify ancient or more recent forgeries versus authentic documents. Knowledge of writing materials is essential to the study of handwriting and to the identification of the periods in which a document or manuscript may have been produced. An important goal may be to assign the text a date and a place of origin: this is why the palaeographer must take into account the style and formation of the manuscript and the handwriting used in it. Palaeography can be used to provide information about the date. However, "paleography is a last resort for dating" and, "for book hands, a period of 50 years is the least acceptable spread of time" with it being suggested that "the'rule of thumb' should be to avoid dating a hand more than a range of at least seventy or eighty years". In a 2005 e-mail addendum to his 1996 "The Paleographical Dating of P-46" paper Bruce W. Griffin stated "Until more rigorous methodologies are developed, it is difficult to construct a 95% confidence interval for NT manuscripts without allowing a century for an assigned date."
William M Schniedewind went further in the abstract to his 2005 paper "Problems of Paleographic Dating of Inscriptions" and stated that "The so-called science of paleography relies on circular reasoning because there is insufficient data to draw precise conclusion about dating. Scholars tend to oversimplify diachronic development, assuming models of simplicity rather than complexity". Anatolian hieroglyphs Cuneiform script Hittite cuneiform Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic script South Arabian alphabet The Aramaic language was the international trade language of the Ancient Middle East, originating in what is modern-day Syria, between 1000 and 600 BC, it spread from the Mediterranean coast to the borders of India, becoming popular and being adopted by many people, both with or without any previous writing system. The Aramaic script was written in a consonantal form with a direction from right to left; the Aramaic alphabet, a modified form of Phoenician, was the ancestor of the modern Arabic and Hebrew scripts, as well as the Brāhmī script, the parent writing system of most modern abugidas in India, Southeast Asia and Mongolia.
The Aramaic script did not differ from the Phoenician, but the Aramaeans simplified some of the letters and rounded their lines: a specific feature of its letters is the distinction between d and r. One innovation in Aramaic is the matres lectionis system to indicate certain vowels. Early Phoenician-derived scripts did not have letters for vowels, so most texts recorded just consonants. Most as a consequence of phonetic changes in North Semitic languages, the Aramaeans reused certain letters in the alphabet to represent long vowels; the letter aleph was employed to write /ā/, he for /ō/, yod for /ī/, vav for /ū/. Aramaic writing and language supplanted Babylonian cuneiform and Akkadian language in their homeland in Mesopotamia; the wide diffusion of Aramaic letters led to its writing being used not only in monumental inscriptions, but on papyrus and potsherds. Aramaic papyri have been found in large numbers in Egypt at Elephantine—among them are official and private documents of the Jewish military settlement in 5 BC.
In the Aramaic papyri and potsherds, words are separated by a small gap, as in modern writing. At the turn of the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC, the heretofore uniform Aramaic letters developed new forms, as a result of dialectal and political fragmentation in several subgroups; the most important of these is the so-called square Hebrew block script, followed by Palmyrene and the much Syriac script. Aramaic is divided into three main parts: Old Aramaic Middle Aramaic, Modern Aramaic of the present day; the term Middle Aramaic refers to the form of Aramaic which appears in pointed texts and is reached in the 3rd century AD with the loss of short unstressed vowels in open syllables, continues until the triumph of Arabic. Old Aramaic appeared in the 11th century BC as the official language of t
Second Intermediate Period of Egypt
The Second Intermediate Period marks a period when Ancient Egypt fell into disarray for a second time, between the end of the Middle Kingdom and the start of the New Kingdom. It is best known as the period when the Hyksos people of West Asia made their appearance in Egypt and whose reign comprised the 15th dynasty founded by Salitis; the 12th Dynasty of Egypt came to an end at the end of the 19th century BC with the death of Queen Sobekneferu. She had no heirs, causing the 12th dynasty to come to a sudden end, with it, the Golden Age of the Middle Kingdom. Retaining the seat of the 12th dynasty, the 13th dynasty ruled from Itjtawy near Memphis and Lisht, just south of the apex of the Nile Delta; the 13th dynasty is notable for the accession of the first formally recognised Semitic-speaking king, Khendjer. The 13th Dynasty proved unable to hold on to the entire territory of Egypt however, a provincial ruling family of Western Asian descent in Avaris, located in the marshes of the eastern Nile Delta, broke away from the central authority to form the 14th Dynasty.
The 15th Dynasty dates from 1650 to 1550 BC. Known rulers of the Fifteenth Dynasty are as follows: Salitis Sakir-Har Khyan Apophis, c. 1590? BC–1550 BC Khamudi, c. 1550–1540 BCThe 15th Dynasty of Egypt was the first Hyksos dynasty. It did not control the entire land; the Hyksos preferred to stay in northern Egypt. The names and order of their kings is uncertain; the Turin King list indicates that there were six Hyksos kings, with an obscure Khamudi listed as the final king of the 15th Dynasty. The surviving traces on the X figure appears to give the figure 8 which suggests that the summation should be read as 6 kings ruling 108 years; some scholars argue there were two Apophis kings named Apepi I and Apepi II, but this is due to the fact there are two known prenomens for this king: Awoserre and Aqenenre. However, the Danish Egyptologist Kim Ryholt maintains in his study of the Second Intermediate Period that these prenomens all refer to one man, who ruled Egypt for 40 or more years; this is supported by the fact that this king employed a third prenomen during his reign: Nebkhepeshre.
Apepi employed several different prenomens throughout various periods of his reign. This scenario is not unprecedented, as kings, including the famous Ramesses II and Seti II, are known to have used two different prenomens in their own reigns; the 16th Dynasty ruled the Theban region in Upper Egypt for 70 years. Of the two chief versions of Manetho's Aegyptiaca, Dynasty XVI is described by the more reliable Africanus as "shepherd kings", but by Eusebius as Theban. Ryholt, followed by Bourriau, in reconstructing the Turin canon, interpreted a list of Thebes-based kings to constitute Manetho's Dynasty XVI, although this is one of Ryholt's "most debatable and far-reaching" conclusions. For this reason other scholars do not follow Ryholt and see only insufficient evidence for the interpretation of the 16th Dynasty as Theban; the continuing war against Dynasty XV dominated the short-lived 16th dynasty. The armies of the 15th dynasty, winning town after town from their southern enemies, continually encroached on the 16th dynasty territory threatening and conquering Thebes itself.
In his study of the second intermediate period, the egyptologist Kim Ryholt has suggested that Dedumose I sued for a truce in the latter years of the dynasty, but one of his predecessors, Nebiryraw I, may have been more successful and seems to have enjoyed a period of peace in his reign. Famine, which had plagued Upper Egypt during the late 13th dynasty and the 14th dynasty blighted the 16th dynasty, most evidently during and after the reign of Neferhotep III. From Ryholt's reconstruction of the Turin canon, 15 kings of the dynasty can now be named, five of whom appear in contemporary sources. While they were most rulers based in Thebes itself, some may have been local rulers from other important Upper Egyptian towns, including Abydos, El Kab and Edfu. By the reign of Nebiriau I, the realm controlled by the 16th dynasty extended at least as far north as Hu and south to Edfu. Not listed in the Turin canon is Wepwawetemsaf, who left a stele at Abydos and was a local kinglet of the Abydos Dynasty.
Ryholt gives the list of kings of the 16th dynasty. Others, such as Helck, Bennett combine some of these rulers with the Seventeenth dynasty of Egypt; the estimated dates come from Bennett's publication. The Abydos Dynasty may have been a short-lived local dynasty ruling over part of Upper Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period in Ancient Egypt and was contemporary with the 15th and 16th Dynasties from 1650 to 1600 BC; the existence of an Abydos Dynasty was first proposed by Detlef Franke and elaborated on by Egyptologist Kim Ryholt in 1997. The existence of the dynasty may have been vindicated in January 2014, when the tomb of the unknown pharaoh Seneb Kay was discovered in Abydos; the dynasty tentatively includes four rulers: Wepwawetemsaf, Pantjeny and Seneb Kay. The royal necropolis of the Abydos Dynasty was found in the southern part of Abydos, in an area called Anubis Mountain in ancient times; the rulers of the Abydos Dynasty placed their burial ground adjacent to the tombs of the Middle Kingdom rulers.
Around the time Memphis and Itj-tawy fell to the Hyksos, the native Egyptian ruling house in Thebes declared its independence from Itj-tawy, becoming the 17th
