Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan the Republic of Kazakhstan, is the world's largest landlocked country, the ninth largest in the world, with an area of 2,724,900 square kilometres. It is a transcontinental country located in Asia. Kazakhstan is the dominant nation of Central Asia economically, generating 60% of the region's GDP through its oil and gas industry, it has vast mineral resources. Kazakhstan is a democratic, unitary, constitutional republic with a diverse cultural heritage. Kazakhstan shares borders with Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, adjoins a large part of the Caspian Sea; the terrain of Kazakhstan includes flatlands, taiga, rock canyons, deltas, snow-capped mountains, deserts. Kazakhstan has an estimated 18.3 million people as of 2018. Given its large land area, its population density is among the lowest, at less than 6 people per square kilometre; the capital is Astana, where it was moved in 1997 from the country's largest city. The territory of Kazakhstan has been inhabited by groups included the nomadic groups and empires.
In antiquity, the nomadic Scythians have inhabited the land and the Persian Achaemenid Empire expanded towards the southern territory of the modern country. Turkic nomads who trace their ancestry to many Turkic states such as Turkic Khaganate etc have inhabited the country throughout the country's history. In the 13th century, the territory joined the Mongolian Empire under Genghis Khan. By the 16th century, the Kazakh emerged as a distinct group, divided into three jüz; the Russians began advancing into the Kazakh steppe in the 18th century, by the mid-19th century, they nominally ruled all of Kazakhstan as part of the Russian Empire. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, subsequent civil war, the territory of Kazakhstan was reorganised several times. In 1936, it was made part of the Soviet Union. Kazakhstan was the last of the Soviet republics to declare independence during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Nursultan Nazarbayev, the first President of Kazakhstan, was characterized as an authoritarian, his government was accused of numerous human rights violations, including suppression of dissent and censorship of the media.
Nazarbayev resigned in March 2019, with Senate Chairman Kassym-Jomart Tokayev taking office as Interim President. Kazakhstan has worked to develop its economy its dominant hydrocarbon industry. Human Rights Watch says that "Kazakhstan restricts freedom of assembly and religion", other human rights organisations describe Kazakhstan's human rights situation as poor. Kazakhstan's 131 ethnicities include Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Germans and Uyghurs. Islam is the religion of about 70% of the population, with Christianity practised by 26%. Kazakhstan allows freedom of religion, but religious leaders who oppose the government are suppressed; the Kazakh language is the state language, Russian has equal official status for all levels of administrative and institutional purposes. Kazakhstan is a member of the United Nations, WTO, CIS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Eurasian Economic Union, CSTO, OSCE, OIC, TURKSOY; the name "Kazakh" comes from the ancient Turkic word qaz, "to wander", reflecting the Kazakhs' nomadic culture.
The name "Cossack" is of the same origin. The Persian suffix -stan means "land" or "place of", so Kazakhstan can be translated as "land of the wanderers". Though traditionally referring only to ethnic Kazakhs, including those living in China, Turkey and other neighbouring countries, the term "Kazakh" is being used to refer to any inhabitant of Kazakhstan, including non-Kazakhs. Kazakhstan has been inhabited since the Paleolithic. Pastoralism developed during the Neolithic as the region's climate and terrain are best suited for a nomadic lifestyle; the Kazakh territory was a key constituent of the Eurasian Steppe route, the ancestor of the terrestrial Silk Roads. Archaeologists believe. During recent prehistoric times Central Asia was inhabited by groups like the Proto-Indo-European Afanasievo culture early Indo-Iranians cultures such as Andronovo, Indo-Iranians such as the Saka and Massagetae. Other groups included the nomadic Scythians and the Persian Achaemenid Empire in the southern territory of the modern country.
In 329 BC, Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army fought in the Battle of Jaxartes against the Scythians along the Jaxartes River, now known as the Syr Darya along the southern border of modern Kazakhstan. The Cuman entered the steppes of modern-day Kazakhstan around the early 11th century, where they joined with the Kipchak and established the vast Cuman-Kipchak confederation. While ancient cities Taraz and Hazrat-e Turkestan had long served as important way-stations along the Silk Road connecting Asia and Europe, true political consolidation began only with the Mongol rule of the early 13th century. Under the Mongol Empire, the largest in world history, administrative districts were established; these came under the rule of the emergent Kazakh Khanate. Throughout this period, traditional nomadic life and a livestock-
Central Asia
Central Asia stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to China in the east and from Afghanistan in the south to Russia in the north. The region consists of the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, it is colloquially referred to as "the stans" as the countries considered to be within the region all have names ending with the Persian suffix "-stan", meaning "land of". Central Asia has a population of about 72 million, consisting of five republics: Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Afghanistan, a part of South Asia, is sometimes included in Central Asia. Central Asia has been tied to its nomadic peoples and the Silk Road, it has acted as a crossroads for the movement of people and ideas between Europe, Western Asia, South Asia, East Asia. The Silk Road connected Muslim lands with the people of Europe and China; this crossroads position has intensified the conflict between tribalism and traditionalism and modernization. In pre-Islamic and early Islamic times, Central Asia was predominantly Iranian, populated by Eastern Iranian-speaking Bactrians, Sogdians and the semi-nomadic Scythians and Dahae.
After expansion by Turkic peoples, Central Asia became the homeland for the Kazakhs, Tatars, Turkmen and Uyghurs. From the mid-19th century until the end of the 20th century, most of Central Asia was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, both Slavic-majority countries, the five former Soviet "-stans" are still home to about 7 million ethnic Russians and 500,000 Ukrainians; the idea of Central Asia as a distinct region of the world was introduced in 1843 by the geographer Alexander von Humboldt. The borders of Central Asia are subject to multiple definitions. Built political geography and geoculture are two significant parameters used in the scholarly literature about the definitions of the Central Asia; the most limited definition was the official one of the Soviet Union, which defined Middle Asia as consisting of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, hence omitting Kazakhstan. This definition was often used outside the USSR during this period. However, the Russian culture has two distinct terms: Средняя Азия and Центральная Азия.
Soon after independence, the leaders of the four former Soviet Central Asian Republics met in Tashkent and declared that the definition of Central Asia should include Kazakhstan as well as the original four included by the Soviets. Since this has become the most common definition of Central Asia; the UNESCO History of the Civilizations of Central Asia, published in 1992, defines the region as "Afghanistan, northeastern Iran and central Pakistan, northern India, western China and the former Soviet Central Asian republics."An alternative method is to define the region based on ethnicity, in particular, areas populated by Eastern Turkic, Eastern Iranian, or Mongolian peoples. These areas include Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the Turkic regions of southern Siberia, the five republics, Afghan Turkestan. Afghanistan as a whole, the northern and western areas of Pakistan and the Kashmir Valley of India may be included; the Tibetans and Ladakhi are included. Insofar, most of the mentioned peoples are considered the "indigenous" peoples of the vast region.
Central Asia is sometimes referred to as Turkestan. There are several places that claim to be the geographic center of Asia, for example Kyzyl, the capital of Tuva in the Russian Federation, a village 200 miles north of Ürümqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region of China. Central Asia is an large region of varied geography, including high passes and mountains, vast deserts, treeless, grassy steppes; the vast steppe areas of Central Asia are considered together with the steppes of Eastern Europe as a homogeneous geographical zone known as the Eurasian Steppe. Much of the land of Central Asia is too rugged for farming; the Gobi desert extends from the foot of the Pamirs, 77° E, to the Great Khingan Mountains, 116°–118° E. Central Asia has the following geographic extremes: The world's northernmost desert, at Buurug Deliin Els, Mongolia, 50°18' N; the Northern Hemisphere's southernmost permafrost, at Erdenetsogt sum, Mongolia, 46°17' N. The world's shortest distance between non-frozen desert and permafrost: 770 km.
The Eurasian pole of inaccessibility. A majority of the people earn a living by herding livestock. Industrial activity centers in the region's cities. Major rivers of the region include the Amu Darya, the Syr Darya, the Hari River and the Murghab River. Major bodies of water include the Aral Sea and Lake Balkhash, both of which are part of the huge west-central Asian endorheic basin that includes the Caspian Sea. Both of these bodies of water have shrunk in recent decades due to diversion of water from rivers that feed them for irrigation and industrial purposes. Water is an valuable resource in arid Central Asia and can lead to rather significant international disputes. Central Asia is bounded on the north by the forests of Siberia; the northern half of Cent
Herbivore
A herbivore is an animal anatomically and physiologically adapted to eating plant material, for example foliage or marine algae, for the main component of its diet. As a result of their plant diet, herbivorous animals have mouthparts adapted to rasping or grinding. Horses and other herbivores have wide flat teeth that are adapted to grinding grass, tree bark, other tough plant material. A large percentage of herbivores have mutualistic gut flora that help them digest plant matter, more difficult to digest than animal prey; this flora is made up of cellulose-digesting bacteria. Herbivore is the anglicized form of a modern Latin coinage, cited in Charles Lyell's 1830 Principles of Geology. Richard Owen employed the anglicized term in an 1854 work on fossil skeletons. Herbivora is derived from the Latin herba meaning a small plant or herb, vora, from vorare, to eat or devour. Herbivory is a form of consumption in which an organism principally eats autotrophs such as plants and photosynthesizing bacteria.
More organisms that feed on autotrophs in general are known as primary consumers. Herbivory is limited to animals that eat plants. Fungi and protists that feed on living plants are termed plant pathogens, while fungi and microbes that feed on dead plants are described as saprotrophs. Flowering plants that obtain nutrition from other living plants are termed parasitic plants. There is, however, no single exclusive and definitive ecological classification of consumption patterns. In zoology, an herbivore is an animal, adapted to eat plant matter. Our understanding of herbivory in geological time comes from three sources: fossilized plants, which may preserve evidence of defence, or herbivory-related damage. Although herbivory was long thought to be a Mesozoic phenomenon, fossils have shown that within less than 20 million years after the first land plants evolved, plants were being consumed by arthropods. Insects fed on the spores of early Devonian plants, the Rhynie chert provides evidence that organisms fed on plants using a "pierce and suck" technique.
During the next 75 million years, plants evolved a range of more complex organs, such as roots and seeds. There is no evidence of any organism being fed upon until the middle-late Mississippian, 330.9 million years ago. There was a gap of 50 to 100 million years between the time each organ evolved and the time organisms evolved to feed upon them. Further than their arthropod status, the identity of these early herbivores is uncertain. Hole feeding and skeletonisation are recorded in the early Permian, with surface fluid feeding evolving by the end of that period. Herbivory among four-limbed terrestrial vertebrates, the tetrapods developed in the Late Carboniferous. Early tetrapods were large amphibious piscivores. While amphibians continued to feed on fish and insects, some reptiles began exploring two new food types and plants; the entire dinosaur order ornithischia was composed with herbivores dinosaurs. Carnivory was a natural transition from insectivory for medium and large tetrapods, requiring minimal adaptation.
In contrast, a complex set of adaptations was necessary for feeding on fibrous plant materials. Arthropods evolved herbivory in four phases, changing their approach to it in response to changing plant communities. Tetrapod herbivores made their first appearance in the fossil record of their jaws near the Permio-Carboniferous boundary 300 million years ago; the earliest evidence of their herbivory has been attributed to dental occlusion, the process in which teeth from the upper jaw come in contact with teeth in the lower jaw is present. The evolution of dental occlusion led to a drastic increase in plant food processing and provides evidence about feeding strategies based on tooth wear patterns. Examination of phylogenetic frameworks of tooth and jaw morphologes has revealed that dental occlusion developed independently in several lineages tetrapod herbivores; this suggests that evolution and spread occurred within various lineages. Herbivores form an important link in the food chain because they consume plants in order to digest the carbohydrates photosynthetically produced by a plant.
Carnivores in turn consume herbivores for the same reason, while omnivores can obtain their nutrients from either plants or animals. Due to a herbivore's ability to survive on tough and fibrous plant matter, they are termed the primary consumers in the food cycle. Herbivory and omnivory can be regarded as special cases of Consumer-Resource Systems. Herbivores come in all sizes in the animal kingdom, they include aquatic and non-aquatic vertebrates. They can be large, like an elephant. Many herbivores found living in close proximity to humans, such as rodents, cows and camels. Two herbivore feeding strategies are browsing. For a terrestrial mammal to be called a grazer, at least 90% of the forage has to be grass, for a browser at least 90% tree leaves and/or twigs. An intermediate feeding strategy is called "mixed-feeding". In their daily need to take up energy from forage, herbivores of different body mass may be selective in choosing their food. "Selective" means that herbivores may choose their forage source depending on, e.g. season or food avail
Knotted-pile carpet
A knotted-pile carpet is a carpet containing raised surfaces, or piles, from the cut off ends of knots woven between the warp and woof. The Ghiordes/Turkish knot and the Senneh/Persian knot, typical of Turkish carpets and Persian carpets, are the two primary knots. A flat or tapestry woven carpet, without pile, is a kilim. A pile carpet is influenced by width and number of warp and weft, pile height, knots used, knot density. "The structural weft threads alternate with supplementary weft that rises from the surface of the weave at a perpendicular angle. This supplementary weft is attached to the warp by one of three knots...to form the pile or nap of the carpet." Knots are tied in rows, one to each pair of warp threads, which may be pushed down to make the rug more solid: "the interwoven warp and weft threads form the carpet's foundation, the design comes from the rows of knots." "In the knotted-pile...the arrangement of rows of weft is the dominant consideration."Diagonal, or offset, knotting has knots in successive rows occupy alternate pairs of warps.
This feature allows for changes from one half knot to the next, creates diagonal pattern lines at different angles. It is sometimes found in Kurdish or Turkmen rugs in Yomuds, it is tied symmetrically. The Ghiordes knot or Turkish knot is one of the two most-used knots employed in knotted-pile carpets. In the Ghiordes knot, the colored weft yarn passes over the two warp yarns, is pulled through between them and cut to form the pile; the Turkish knot has a symmetrical structure. The Ghiordes knot is the knot used in the oldest surviving pile carpets, the fragments found in Pazyryk kurgan burial mounds, in the Altai of Central Asia; the symmetrical knot is used in Turkeywork textiles of the Early Modern period. To tie a symmetric knot, the yarn is passed between two adjacent warps, brought back under one, wrapped around both forming a collar pulled through the center so that both ends emerge between the warps; the Turkish knot uses two warps. Persian carpets are woven with two different knots: The symmetrical Turkish or "Giordes" knot used in Turkey, the Caucasus, East Turkmenistan, some Turkish and Kurdish areas of Iran, the asymmetrical Persian, or Senneh knot used in India, Pakistan and Egypt.
The term "Senneh knot" is somewhat misleading, as rugs are woven with symmetric knots in the town of Senneh. The asymmetric knot is tied by wrapping the yarn around only one warp the thread is passed behind the adjacent warp so that it divides the two ends of the yarn; the Persian knot may open on the right. The Persian knot may be considered as using only warp; the asymmetric knot allows the artist to produce more fluent curvilinear designs, while more bold, rectilinear designs may use the symmetric knot. As exemplified by Senneh rugs with their elaborate designs woven with asymmetric knots, the quality of the design depends more on the weaver's skills, than on the type of knot, used. Another knot used in Persian carpets is the Jufti knot, tied around four warps instead of two. A serviceable carpet can be made with jufti knots, jufti knots are sometimes used in large single-colour areas of a rug, for example in the field, to save on material. However, as carpets woven wholly or with the jufti knot need only half the amount of pile yarn compared to traditionally woven carpets, their pile is less resistant to wear, these rugs do not last as long.
Another variant of knot is known from early Spanish rugs. The Spanish knot or single-warp knot, is tied around one single warp; some of the rug fragments excavated by A. Stein in Turfan seem to be woven with a single knot. Single knot weavings are known from Egyptian Coptic pile rugs. Pile weave "Rug Knots" and "Making Pile Carpets", MathForum.org. Accessed: December 14, 2016
Permafrost
In geology, permafrost is ground, including rock or soil, at or below the freezing point of water 0 °C for two or more years. Most permafrost is located in high latitudes, but at lower latitudes alpine permafrost occurs at higher elevations. Ground ice is not always present, as may be in the case of non-porous bedrock, but it occurs and it may be in amounts exceeding the potential hydraulic saturation of the ground material. Permafrost accounts for 0.022% of total water on Earth and the permafrost region covers 24% of exposed land in the Northern Hemisphere. It occurs subsea on the continental shelves of the continents surrounding the Arctic Ocean, portions of which were exposed during the last glacial period; the thawing of permafrost has implications for the global climate. A global temperature rise of 1.5 °C above current levels would be enough to start the thawing of permafrost in Siberia, according to one group of scientists. "In contrast to the relative dearth of reports on frozen ground in north America prior to World War II, a vast literature on the engineering aspects of permafrost was available in Russian.
Beginning in 1942, Siemon William Muller delved into the relevant Russian literature held by the Library of Congress and the U. S. Geological Survey Library so that he was able to furnish the government an engineering field guide and a technical report about permafrost by 1943", year in which he coined the term as a contraction of permamently frozen ground. Although classified, in 1947 a revised report was released publicly, regarded as the first North American treatise on the subject. Permafrost is soil, rock or sediment, frozen for more than two consecutive years. In areas not overlain by ice, it exists beneath a layer of soil, rock or sediment, which freezes and thaws annually and is called the "active layer". In practice, this means that permafrost occurs at an mean annual temperature of − 2 colder. Active layer thickness is 0.3 to 4 meters thick. The extent of permafrost varies with the climate: in the Northern Hemisphere today, 24% of the ice-free land area, equivalent to 19 million square kilometers, is more or less influenced by permafrost.
Of this area more than half is underlain by continuous permafrost, around 20 percent by discontinuous permafrost, a little less than 30 percent by sporadic permafrost. Most of this area is found in Siberia, northern Canada and Greenland. Beneath the active layer annual temperature swings of permafrost become smaller with depth; the deepest depth of permafrost occurs. Above that bottom limit there may be permafrost, whose temperature doesn't change annually—"isothermal permafrost". Permafrost forms in any climate where the mean annual air temperature is less than the freezing point of water. Exceptions are found in moist-wintered forest climates, such as in Northern Scandinavia and the North-Eastern part of European Russia west of the Urals, where snow acts as an insulating blanket. Glaciated areas may be exceptions. Since all glaciers are warmed at their base by geothermal heat, temperate glaciers, which are near the pressure-melting point throughout, may have liquid water at the interface with the ground and are therefore free of underlying permafrost.
"Fossil" cold anomalies in the Geothermal gradient in areas where deep permafrost developed during the Pleistocene persist down to several hundred metres. This is evident from temperature measurements in boreholes in North Europe; the below-ground temperature varies less from season to season than the air temperature, with mean annual temperatures tending to increase with depth as a result of the geothermal crustal gradient. Thus, if the mean annual air temperature is only below 0 °C, permafrost will form only in spots that are sheltered—usually with a northerly aspect—creating discontinuous permafrost. Permafrost will remain discontinuous in a climate where the mean annual soil surface temperature is between −5 and 0 °C. In the moist-wintered areas mentioned before, there may not be discontinuous permafrost down to −2 °C. Discontinuous permafrost is further divided into extensive discontinuous permafrost, where permafrost covers between 50 and 90 percent of the landscape and is found in areas with mean annual temperatures between −2 and −4 °C, sporadic permafrost, where permafrost cover is less than 50 percent of the landscape and occurs at mean annual temperatures between 0 and −2 °C.
In soil science, the sporadic permafrost zone is abbreviated SPZ and the extensive discontinuous permafrost zone DPZ. Exceptions occur in un-glaciated Siberia and Alaska where the present depth of permafrost is a relic of climatic conditions during glacial ages where winters were up to 11 °C colder than those of today. At mean annual soil surface temperatures below −5 °C the influence of aspect can never be sufficient to thaw permafrost and a zone of continuous permafrost forms. A line of continuous permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere represents the most southerly border where land is covered by continuous permafrost or glacial ice; the line of continuous permafrost varies around the world northward or southward due to regional climatic changes. In the southern hemisphere, most of the equivalent line would fall within the Southern Ocean if there were land there. Most of the Antarctic continent is overl
Iron Age
The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three-age division of the prehistory and protohistory of humankind. It was preceded by the Bronze Age; the concept has been applied to Europe and the Ancient Near East, and, by analogy to other parts of the Old World. The duration of the Iron Age varies depending on the region under consideration, it is defined by archaeological convention, the mere presence of some cast or wrought iron is not sufficient to represent an Iron Age culture. For example, Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger comes from the Bronze Age. In the Ancient Near East, this transition takes place in the wake of the so-called Bronze Age collapse, in the 12th century BC; the technology soon spread to South Asia. Its further spread to Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Central Europe is somewhat delayed, Northern Europe is reached still by about 500 BC; the Iron Age is taken to end by convention, with the beginning of the historiographical record. This does not represent a clear break in the archaeological record.
The Germanic Iron Age of Scandinavia is taken to end c. AD 800, with the beginning of the Viking Age. In South Asia, the Iron Age is taken to begin with the ironworking Painted Gray Ware culture and to end with the reign of Ashoka; the use of the term "Iron Age" in the archaeology of South and Southeast Asia is more recent, less common, than for western Eurasia. The Sahel and Sub-Saharan Africa are outside of the three-age system, there being no Bronze Age, but the term "Iron Age" is sometimes used in reference to early cultures practicing ironworking such as the Nok culture of Nigeria; the three-age system was introduced in the first half of the 19th century for the archaeology of Europe in particular, by the 19th century expanded to the archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Its name harks back to the mythological "Ages of Man" of Hesiod; as an archaeological era it was first introduced for Scandinavia by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen in the 1830s. By the 1860s, it was embraced as a useful division of the "earliest history of mankind" in general and began to be applied in Assyriology.
The development of the now-conventional periodization in the archaeology of the Ancient Near East was developed in the 1920s to 1930s. As its name suggests, Iron Age technology is characterized by the production of tools and weaponry by ferrous metallurgy, more from carbon steel; the Iron Age in Europe is being seen as a part of the Bronze Age collapse in the ancient Near East, in ancient India, ancient Iran, ancient Greece. In other regions of Europe the Iron Age began in the 8th century BC in Central Europe and the 6th century BC in Northern Europe; the Near Eastern Iron Age is divided into two subsections, Iron I and Iron II. Iron I illustrates both discontinuity with the previous Late Bronze Age. There is no definitive cultural break between the 13th and 12th centuries BC throughout the entire region, although certain new features in the hill country and coastal region may suggest the appearance of the Aramaean and Sea People groups. There is evidence, however, of strong continuity with Bronze Age culture, although as one moves into Iron I the culture begins to diverge more from that of the late 2nd millennium.
The Iron Age as an archaeological period is defined as that part of the prehistory of a culture or region during which ferrous metallurgy was the dominant technology of metalworking. The periodization is not tied to the presence of ferrous metallurgy and is to some extent a matter of convention; the characteristic of an Iron Age culture is mass production of tools and weapons made from steel alloys with a carbon content between 0.30% and 1.2% by weight. Only with the capability of the production of carbon steel does ferrous metallurgy result in tools or weapons that are equal or superior to bronze. To this day bronze and brass have not been replaced in many applications, with the spread of steel being based as much on economics as on metallurgical advancements. A range of techniques have been used to produce steel from smelted iron, including techniques such as case-hardening and forge welding that were used to make cutting edges stronger. By convention, the Iron Age in the Ancient Near East is taken to last from c. 1200 BC to c. 550 BC, taken as the beginning of historiography or the end of the proto-historical period.
In Central and Western Europe, the Iron Age is taken to last from c. 800 BC to c. 1 BC, in Northern Europe from c. 500 BC to 800 AD. In China, there is no recognizable prehistoric period characterized by ironworking, as Bronze Age China transitions directly into the Qin dynasty of imperial China; the following gives an overview over the
