Arabic
Arabic is a Central Semitic language that first emerged in Iron Age northwestern Arabia and is now the lingua franca of the Arab world. It is named after the Arabs, a term used to describe peoples living in the area bounded by Mesopotamia in the east and the Anti-Lebanon mountains in the west, in northwestern Arabia, in the Sinai Peninsula. Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage comprising 30 modern varieties, including its standard form, Modern Standard Arabic, derived from Classical Arabic; as the modern written language, Modern Standard Arabic is taught in schools and universities, is used to varying degrees in workplaces and the media. The two formal varieties are grouped together as Literary Arabic, the official language of 26 states, the liturgical language of the religion of Islam, since the Quran and Hadith were written in Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic follows the grammatical standards of Classical Arabic, uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpart in the spoken varieties, has adopted certain new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties.
Much of the new vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the post-classical era in modern times. Due to its grounding in Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic is removed over a millennium from everyday speech, construed as a multitude of dialects of this language; these dialects and Modern Standard Arabic are described by some scholars as not mutually comprehensible. The former are acquired in families, while the latter is taught in formal education settings. However, there have been studies reporting some degree of comprehension of stories told in the standard variety among preschool-aged children; the relation between Modern Standard Arabic and these dialects is sometimes compared to that of Latin and vernaculars in medieval and early modern Europe. This view though does not take into account the widespread use of Modern Standard Arabic as a medium of audiovisual communication in today's mass media—a function Latin has never performed. During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabic was a major vehicle of culture in Europe in science and philosophy.
As a result, many European languages have borrowed many words from it. Arabic influence in vocabulary, is seen in European languages Spanish and to a lesser extent Portuguese, Catalan, owing to both the proximity of Christian European and Muslim Arab civilizations and 800 years of Arabic culture and language in the Iberian Peninsula, referred to in Arabic as al-Andalus. Sicilian has about 500 Arabic words as result of Sicily being progressively conquered by Arabs from North Africa, from the mid-9th to mid-10th centuries. Many of these words relate to related activities; the Balkan languages, including Greek and Bulgarian, have acquired a significant number of Arabic words through contact with Ottoman Turkish. Arabic has influenced many languages around the globe throughout its history; some of the most influenced languages are Persian, Spanish, Kashmiri, Bosnian, Bengali, Malay, Indonesian, Punjabi, Assamese, Sindhi and Hausa, some languages in parts of Africa. Conversely, Arabic has borrowed words from other languages, including Greek and Persian in medieval times, contemporary European languages such as English and French in modern times.
Classical Arabic is the liturgical language of 1.8 billion Muslims, Modern Standard Arabic is one of six official languages of the United Nations. All varieties of Arabic combined are spoken by as many as 422 million speakers in the Arab world, making it the fifth most spoken language in the world. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, an abjad script and is written from right to left, although the spoken varieties are sometimes written in ASCII Latin from left to right with no standardized orthography. Arabic is a Central Semitic language related to the Northwest Semitic languages, the Ancient South Arabian languages, various other Semitic languages of Arabia such as Dadanitic; the Semitic languages changed a great deal between Proto-Semitic and the establishment of the Central Semitic languages in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include: The conversion of the suffix-conjugated stative formation into a past tense; the conversion of the prefix-conjugated preterite-tense formation into a present tense.
The elimination of other prefix-conjugated mood/aspect forms in favor of new moods formed by endings attached to the prefix-conjugation forms. The development of an internal passive. There are several features which Classical Arabic, the modern Arabic varieties, as well as the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions share which are unattested in any other Central Semitic language variety, including the Dadanitic and Taymanitic languages of the northern Hejaz; these features are evidence of common descent from Proto-Arabic. The following features can be reconstructed with confidence for Proto-Arabic: negative particles m *mā.
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and completely enclosed by land: on the north by Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa and on the east by the Levant. Although the sea is sometimes considered a part of the Atlantic Ocean, it is identified as a separate body of water. Geological evidence indicates that around 5.9 million years ago, the Mediterranean was cut off from the Atlantic and was or desiccated over a period of some 600,000 years, the Messinian salinity crisis, before being refilled by the Zanclean flood about 5.3 million years ago. It covers an approximate area of 2.5 million km2, representing 0.7 % of the global ocean surface, but its connection to the Atlantic via the Strait of Gibraltar-the narrow strait that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea and separates Spain in Europe from Morocco in Africa- is only 14 km wide. In oceanography, it is sometimes called the Eurafrican Mediterranean Sea or the European Mediterranean Sea to distinguish it from mediterranean seas elsewhere.
The Mediterranean Sea has an average depth of 1,500 m and the deepest recorded point is 5,267 m in the Calypso Deep in the Ionian Sea. The sea is bordered on the north by Europe, the east by Asia, in the south by Africa, it is located between latitudes 30° and 46° N and longitudes 6° W and 36° E. Its west-east length, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Gulf of Iskenderun, on the southwestern coast of Turkey, is 4,000 km; the sea's average north-south length, from Croatia's southern shore to Libya, is 800 km. The sea was an important route for merchants and travellers of ancient times that allowed for trade and cultural exchange between emergent peoples of the region; the history of the Mediterranean region is crucial to understanding the origins and development of many modern societies. The countries surrounding the Mediterranean in clockwise order are Spain, Monaco, Slovenia, Croatia and Herzegovina, Albania, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco. In addition, the Gaza Strip and the British Overseas Territories of Gibraltar and Akrotiri and Dhekelia have coastlines on the sea.
The Ancient Greeks called the Mediterranean ἡ θάλασσα or sometimes ἡ μεγάλη θάλασσα, ἡ ἡμέτερα θάλασσα, or ἡ θάλασσα ἡ καθ'ἡμᾶς. The Romans called it Mare Mare Internum and, starting with the Roman Empire, Mare Nostrum; the term Mare Mediterrāneum appears later: Solinus used it in the 3rd century, but the earliest extant witness to it is in the 6th century, in Isidore of Seville. It means'in the middle of land, inland' in Latin, a compound of medius, -āneus; the Latin word is a calque of Greek μεσόγειος, from μέσος and γήινος, from γῆ. The original meaning may have been'the sea in the middle of the earth', rather than'the sea enclosed by land'; the Carthaginians called it the "Syrian Sea". In ancient Syrian texts, Phoenician epics and in the Hebrew Bible, it was known as the "Great Sea" or as "The Sea". Another name was the "Sea of the Philistines", from the people inhabiting a large portion of its shores near the Israelites. In Modern Hebrew, it is called HaYam HaTikhon'the Middle Sea'. In Modern Arabic, it is known as al-Baḥr al-Mutawassiṭ'the Middle Sea'.
In Islamic and older Arabic literature, it was Baḥr al-Rūm'the Sea of the Romans' or'the Roman Sea'. At first, that name referred to only the Eastern Mediterranean, but it was extended to the whole Mediterranean. Other Arabic names were Baḥr al-šām'the Sea of Syria' and Baḥr al-Maghrib'the Sea of the West'. In Turkish, it is the Akdeniz'the White Sea'; the origin of the name is not clear, as it is not known in earlier Greek, Byzantine or Islamic sources. It may be to contrast with the Black Sea. In Persian, the name was translated as Baḥr-i Safīd, used in Ottoman Turkish, it is the origin of the colloquial Greek phrase Άσπρη Θάλασσα. Johann Knobloch claims that in Classical Antiquity, cultures in the Levant used colours to refer to the cardinal points: black referred to the north, yellow or blue to east, red to south, white to west; this would explain both the Turkish Akdeniz and the Arab nomenclature described above. Several ancient civilizations were located around the Mediterranean shores and were influenced by their proximity to the sea.
It provided routes for trade and war, as well as food for numerous communities throughout the ages. Due to the shared climate and access to the sea, c
Geological formation
A formation or geological formation is the fundamental unit of lithostratigraphy. A formation consists of a certain amount of rock strata that have a comparable lithology, facies or other similar properties. Formations are not defined by the thickness of their rock strata; the concept of formally defined layers or strata is central to the geologic discipline of stratigraphy. Groups of strata are divided into formations; the definition and recognition of formations allow geologists to correlate geologic strata across wide distances between outcrops and exposures of rock strata. Formations were at first described as the essential geologic time markers, based on their relative ages and the law of superposition; the divisions of the geological time scale were described and put in chronological order by the geologists and stratigraphers of the 18th and 19th centuries. The lithology of a rock is a description of its visible physical characteristics. Modern geology prefers to use lithology, that it an examination of the visible features of the component rocks, to identify discrete formations.
Geologic formations are divided into the broad categories of: sedimentary rock layers. Intrusive igneous rocks are not considered to be formations; the contrast in lithology between formations required to justify their establishment varies with the complexity of the geology of a region. Formations must be able to be delineated at the scale of geologic mapping practiced in the region. Geologic formations are named after the geographic area in which they were first described. Formations cannot be defined by any criteria other than primary lithology, it is useful to define biostratigraphic units on paleontological criteria, chronostratigraphic units on the age of the rocks, chemostratigraphic units on geochemical criteria. The term "formation" is used informally to refer to a specific grouping of rocks, such as those encountered within a certain depth range in an oil well "Formation" is used informally to describe the odd shapes that rocks acquire through erosional or depositional processes; such a formation is abandoned.
Some well-known cave formations include stalagmites. Geochronology – Science of determining the age of rocks and fossils List of rock formations – Links to Wikipedia articles about notable rock outcrops List of Chinese geological formations List of fossil sites – A table of worldwide localities notable for the presence of fossils
Gharyan
Gharyan is a city in northwestern Libya, in Jabal al Gharbi District. Prior to 2007 it was the administrative seat of Gharyan District. Gharyan is one of the largest towns in the Western Mountains. Gharyan was on the trade routes both south to Fezzan and over the Nafusa Mountains. By 1884 the Ottomans had established a town council in Gharyan, it was considered the center of Libyan resistance against the Italian invasion in the early 20th century. In early 2011, the city became involved in the nationwide anti-Gaddafi uprising. Successful, on 2 March, government forces retook it. In April, rebels succeeded in occupying several nearby towns and establishing a second territory on the focal town and the first town demonstrate their will against regime on the 16 Feb. ZENTAIN Libya besides Misrata, no longer under the control of the Gaddafi forces, but as of late June the rebels had still failed to take Gharyan. On 13 August 2011, the rebel forces in Libya initiated a new battle for control of the city and were in control within two days.
On April 4, 2019, the city fell to forces loyal to Tobruk-based General Khalifa Haftar as part of a wider Libyan National Army offensive in western Libya. Just west of Gharyan, there is a primitive road to the right, which provides a bumpy trip to a derelict former Italian barracks, a relic of World War II. There is a crumbling building at the camp. Painted on the bricks of one of the walls inside the building is an enormous representation of a naked woman, lying on her side, American pin-up style; the upper torso of the woman is shaped as an inaccurate representation of the North Africa coast, the salient points of her anatomy are marked with names of North African towns. The "Lady of Garian" was drawn by Clifford Saber, a volunteer American ambulance driver with the British 8th Army. Saber created the mural to help boost the morale of his fellow servicemen, finishing on 2 March 1943, while his unit was housed for a few days at the barracks in Gharyan. Gharyan experiences a hot semi-arid climate, with blazing cool winters.
Due to its winter months being 5º degrees colder than Tripoli, the locality sees a cooler variation of said climate, though its higher elevation meant that the town gets a dozen millimetres more precipitation Libya's capital city. In the 1920s the Italians built a 90 kilometres long railway between Tripoli and a village near Gharyan, destroyed by the British during World War II. Thanks to its mountainous climate, figs are grown for local consumption, with olives and saffron for both local use and export. Gharyan is well known for its ceramics industry. List of cities in Libya Railway stations in Libya Media related to Gharyan at Wikimedia Commons
Nalut
Nalut is the capital of the Nalut District in Libya. Nalut lies halfway between Tripoli and Ghadames, at the western end of the Nafusa Mountains coastal range, in the Tripolitania region; the town is a long-time Berber community and a cultural centre for them, with a festival held in Spring to revive and promote the local culture, traditions and art of the Amazigh people. The name Nalut and its alternate Lalut may derive from the pagan Berber goddess of Tala; as Nalut is only 60 km from the Tunisian border and lies close to some oases it played an important part in the caravan trade. Nalut is home to the Ksar Nalut ⵣⴰⵙⵔⵓ ⵏ ⵏⴰⵍⵓⵜ, a granary fortified by a ksour; the facility is a tourist destination. The fortress was a communal building where the local families could store their grain in times of conflict; the Alal'a Mosque –, Nalut's oldest mosque – was rebuilt in 1312 CE. A monument to Muammar Gaddafi's Green Book in the town square was demolished during the Libyan Civil War. In late April 2011, "Radio Free Nalut" began broadcasting in the city.
It was one of several rebel-controlled radio stations established during the civil war and conducted broadcasts in Berber. A national reconciliation conference for the factions in the Libyan Civil War was held in Nalut in September 2016. Nalut contains the Nalut Dinosaur Museum, which exhibits fossil trees and dinosaurs which have been discovered in the vicinity of the town since the first find in 1998. List of cities in Libya 2011 Nafusa Mountains Campaign Nalut Dinosaur Museum
Nalut District
Nalut is one of the districts of Libya. Its capital is the city of Nalut; the second most notable city is Ghadames. To the north and west, Nalut district borders Algeria. Domestically, it borders Nuqat al Khams - northeast, Jabal al Gharbi in the east and Wadi al Shatii in south. In 2007, Nalut District was enlarged to include the Ghadames District, while the eastern part of former Nalut was moved to Jabal al Gharbi. Per the census of 2012, the total population in the region was 157,747 and the average size of the household in the country was 6.9. There were 22,713 households in the district, with 20,907 Libyan ones; the population density of the district was 1.86 persons per sq. km. Nalut District is located in the north eastern part of Libya, called Tripolitania. Most of the country has a flat undulating plain and occasional plateau, with an average elevation of around 423 m. Around 91 per cent of the land is covered by desert, with only 8.8 per cent agricultural land and 0.1 per cent of forests.
The major resources are petroleum and natural gas. Along the coastal regions, the climate is Mediterranean in coastal areas, while it is desert climate in all other parts. Dust storms lasting four to eight days is pretty common during Spring. Triplotania is the northwest region, while it is Fezzen in southwest. Triplotania runs from north to south and has set of coastal oases and limestone plateaus having an elevation of 2,000 ft to 3,000 ft; the region receives an annual rainfall of 16 in. There are no perennial rivers in the region. Per the census of 2012, the total population in the region was 157,747 with 150,353 Libyans; the average size of the household in the country was 6.9, while the average household size of non-Libyans being 3.7. There were 22,713 households in the district, with 20,907 Libyan ones; the population density of the district was 1.86 persons per sq. km. Per 2006 census, there were 35,830 economically active people in the district. There were 21,584 government employees, 4,153 employers, 10,565 first level workers and 000 second level workers.
There were 8,788 workers in state administration, 4,345 in agriculture, animal husbandry and forestry, 4,576 in agriculture & hunting, 10,240 in education, 2,429 in private enterprises, 2,121 in health & social work, 2,795 in production, 9,494 in technical work and 203 service workers. The total enrollment in schools was 30,033 and the number of people above secondary stage and less than graduation was 1,884; as per the report from World Health Organization, there were two communicable disease centres, two dental clinics, two general clinics, no in-patient clinics, twi out-patient clinics, 20 pharmacies, 43 PHC centres, three rural clinics and zero specialized clinics. In 2007, Nalut District was enlarged to include what had been the Ghadames District, while the eastern part of former Nalut was moved to Jabal al Gharbi. Libya became independent in 1951 from the colonial empire and known for its oil rich resources; as a part of decentralization in 2012, the country is administratively split into 13 regions from the original 25 municipalities, which were further divided in 1,500 communes.
Local governmental institutions manage the administration of education and communities
Tripolitania
Tripolitania is a historic region and former province of Libya. Tripolitania was a separate Italian colony from 1927 to 1934. From 1934 to 1963, Tripolitania was one of three administrative divisions within Italian Libya and the Kingdom of Libya, alongside Cyrenaica to the east and Fezzan to the south; the region had been settled since antiquity, first coming to prominence as part of the Carthaginian empire. Following the defeat of Carthage in the Punic Wars, Rome organized the region, into a province known as Africa, placed it under the administration of a proconsul. During the Diocletian reforms of the late 3rd century, all of North Africa was placed into the newly created Diocese of Africa, of which Tripolitania was a constituent province. After the Fall of Rome in the 5th century, Tripolitania changed hands between the Vandals and the Byzantine Empire, until it was taken during the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb in the 8th century, it was part of the region known to the Islamic world as Ifriqiya, whose boundaries mirrored those of the old Roman province of Africa Proconsularis.
Though nominally under the suzerainty of the Abbasid Caliphate, local dynasties such as the Aghlabids and the Fatimids were independent. Native Berber people, who had inhabited the area locally for centuries before the arrival of the Arabic peoples, established their own native Hafsid dynasty over Ifriqiya in the 13th century, would control the region until it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, who established Ottoman Tripolitania as a distinct province. In the old system, Tripolitania included Tripoli, the capital city of Libya and a vast northwestern portion of the country; because the city and the sha'biyah are nowadays coextensive, the term "Tripolitania" has more historical than contemporary value. In Arabic the same word is used for both the city and the region, that word, used alone, would be understood to mean only the city; the system of administrative divisions that included Tripolitania was abolished in the early 1970s in favor of a system of smaller-size municipalities or baladiyat.
The baladiyat system was subsequently changed many times and has become the "Sha'biyat" system. The region, Tripolitania is now composed of several smaller baladiyat or sha'biyat — see administrative divisions in Libya; the city of Oea, on the site of modern Tripoli, was founded by the Phoenicians in the 7th century BC. It was conquered by the Greek rulers of Cyrenaica; the Greek name Τρίπολις "three cities" referred to Oea and Leptis Magna. The Roman Republic captured Tripolitania in 146 BC, the area prospered during the Roman Empire period; the Latin name Regio Tripolitania dates to the 3rd century. The Vandals took over in 435, were in turn supplanted by the counter offensive of the Eastern Roman Empire in the 530s. In the 7th century, Tripolitania was conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate, was inherited by its descendants the Umayyads and the Abbasids; the Fatimids, established a Caliphate from Tunisia to Syria. In the 1140s, the Normans of Sicily invaded Tripoli, but were ousted by the Almohad Caliphate in 1158.
Emir Abu Zakariya, an Almohad vassal, established an independent state in Tunisia in 1229 and took control of Tripolitania shortly after. The Hafsids would control the region until the Ottoman conquest of 1553. Ottoman Tripolitania extended beyond the region of Tripolitania proper including Cyrenaica. Tripolitania became independent under the rulers of the Karamanli dynasty from 1711 until Ottoman control was re-imposed by Mahmud II in 1835. Ottoman rule persisted until 1911 -- 12. Italy granted autonomy after the war, but occupied the region. After World War I, an Arab Republic, Al-Jumhuriya al-Trabulsiya, or "Tripolitanian Republic", declared the independence of Tripolitania from Italian Libya; the proclamation of the Tripolitanian Republic in autumn 1918 was followed by a formal declaration of independence at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. This was the first formally declared republican form of government in the Arab world, but it gained little support from international powers, disintegrated by 1923.
Italy under Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini managed to reestablish full control over Libya by 1930. Administered as part of a single colony, Italian Tripolitania was a separate colony from 26 June 1927 to 3 December 1934, when it was merged into Libya; the Italian fascists constructed the Marble Arch as a form of an imperial triumphal arch at the border between Tripolitani and Cyrenaica near the coast. Tripolitania experienced a huge development in the late 1930s, when was created the Italian 4th shore with the Province of Tripoli and with Tripoli as a modern "westernized" city; the Tripoli Province was established in 1937, with the official name: Commissariato Generale Provinciale di Tripoli. It was considered a province of the Kingdom of Italy and lasted until 1943. During World War II, several see-saw back and forth campaigns with mobile armour vehicles ebbed and flowed across the North African coastal deserts between first Italian Fascists and the British, soon joined by the Nazi Ge
Mountains of Libya
