Pharmacology
Pharmacology is the branch of biology concerned with the study of drug action, where a drug can be broadly defined as any man-made, natural, or endogenous molecule which exerts a biochemical or physiological effect on the cell, organ, or organism. More it is the study of the interactions that occur between a living organism and chemicals that affect normal or abnormal biochemical function. If substances have medicinal properties, they are considered pharmaceuticals; the field encompasses drug composition and properties and drug design and cellular mechanisms, organ/systems mechanisms, signal transduction/cellular communication, molecular diagnostics, toxicology, chemical biology and medical applications and antipathogenic capabilities. The two main areas of pharmacology are pharmacokinetics. Pharmacodynamics studies the effects of a drug on biological systems, Pharmacokinetics studies the effects of biological systems on a drug. In broad terms, pharmacodynamics discusses the chemicals with biological receptors, pharmacokinetics discusses the absorption, distribution and excretion of chemicals from the biological systems.
Pharmacology is not synonymous with pharmacy and the two terms are confused. Pharmacology, a biomedical science, deals with the research and characterization of chemicals which show biological effects and the elucidation of cellular and organismal function in relation to these chemicals. In contrast, pharmacy, a health services profession, is concerned with application of the principles learned from pharmacology in its clinical settings. In either field, the primary contrast between the two are their distinctions between direct-patient care, for pharmacy practice, the science-oriented research field, driven by pharmacology; the origins of clinical pharmacology date back to the Middle Ages in Avicenna's The Canon of Medicine, Peter of Spain's Commentary on Isaac, John of St Amand's Commentary on the Antedotary of Nicholas. Clinical pharmacology owes much of its foundation to the work of William Withering. Pharmacology as a scientific discipline did not further advance until the mid-19th century amid the great biomedical resurgence of that period.
Before the second half of the nineteenth century, the remarkable potency and specificity of the actions of drugs such as morphine and digitalis were explained vaguely and with reference to extraordinary chemical powers and affinities to certain organs or tissues. The first pharmacology department was set up by Rudolf Buchheim in 1847, in recognition of the need to understand how therapeutic drugs and poisons produced their effects. Early pharmacologists focused on natural substances plant extracts. Pharmacology developed in the 19th century as a biomedical science that applied the principles of scientific experimentation to therapeutic contexts. Today pharmacologists use genetics, molecular biology and other advanced tools to transform information about molecular mechanisms and targets into therapies directed against disease, defects or pathogens, create methods for preventative care and personalized medicine; the word "pharmacology" is derived from Greek φάρμακον, pharmakon, "drug, spell" and -λογία, -logia "study of", "knowledge of".
The discipline of pharmacology can be divided into many sub disciplines each with a specific focus. Clinical pharmacology is the basic science of pharmacology with an added focus on the application of pharmacological principles and methods in the medical clinic and towards patient care and outcomes. Neuropharmacology is the study of the effects of medication on central and peripheral nervous system functioning. Psychopharmacology known as behavioral pharmacology, is the study of the effects of medication on the psyche, observing changed behaviors of the body and mind, how molecular events are manifest in a measurable behavioral form. Psychopharmacology is an interdisciplinary field which studies behavioral effects of psychoactive drugs, it incorporates approaches and techniques from neuropharmacology, animal behavior and behavioral neuroscience, is interested in the behavioral and neurobiological mechanisms of action of psychoactive drugs. Another goal of behavioral pharmacology is to develop animal behavioral models to screen chemical compounds with therapeutic potentials.
People in this field use small animals to study psychotherapeutic drugs such as antipsychotics and anxiolytics, drugs of abuse such as nicotine and methamphetamine. Ethopharmacology is a term, in use since the 1960s and derives from the Greek word ἦθος ethos meaning character and "pharmacology" the study of drug actions and mechanism. Cardiovascular pharmacology is the study of the effects of drugs on the entire cardiovascular system, including the heart and blood vessels. Pharmacogenetics is clinical testing of genetic variation that gives rise to differing response to drugs. Pharmacogenomics is the application of genomic technologies to drug discovery and further characterization of older drugs. Pharmacoepidemiology is the study of the effects of drugs in large numbers of people. Safety pharmacology specialises in detecting and investigating potential undesirable pharmacodynamic effects of new chemical entities on physiological functions in relation to exposure in the therapeutic range and above.
Systems pharmacology is
Yam (vegetable)
Yam is the common name for some plant species in the genus Dioscorea that form edible tubers. Yams are perennial herbaceous vines cultivated for the consumption of their starchy tubers in many temperate and tropical world regions; the tubers themselves are called "yams", having numerous cultivars and related species. In parts of the United States and Canada, "yam" is sometimes used to refer to varieties of the unrelated sweet potato; the name, appears to derive from Portuguese inhame or Canarian ñame, which derived from West African languages during trade. The main derivations borrow from verbs meaning "to eat". In various places other unrelated root vegetables are sometimes referred to as "yams", including: In the United States, the sweet potato those with orange flesh, are referred to as "yams" In Okinawa, purple sweet potatoes may be called "yams" In New Zealand, the oca is referred to as "yam" In Japan, konjac corms are colloquially referred to as "yams" In Malaysia and Singapore the taro is referred to as a "yam"Yam has various common names across multiple world regions.
A monocot related to lilies and grasses, yams are vigorous herbaceous vines, providing an edible tuber. They are native to Africa and the Americas; some yams are invasive plants considered a "noxious weed", outside cultivated areas. Yam tubers vary in size from that of a small potato to over 60 g; some 870 species of yams are known, 95% of these crops are grown in Africa. Yam tubers can grow up to 15 m in length and 7.6 to 15.2 cm high. The tuber may grow into the soil up to 1.5 metres deep. The plant disperses by seed; the edible tuber softens after heating. The skins vary in color from dark brown to light pink; the majority of the vegetable is composed of a much softer substance known as the "meat". This substance ranges in color from pink in mature yams. Yam crop begins when whole seed tubers or tuber portions are planted into mounds or ridges, at the beginning of the rainy season; the crop yield depends on how and where the sets are planted, sizes of mounds, interplant spacing, provision of stakes for the resultant plants, yam species, tuber sizes desired at harvest.
Small-scale farmers in West and Central Africa intercrop yams with cereals and vegetables. The seed yams are bulky to transport. Farmers who do not buy new seed yams set aside up to 30% of their harvest for planting the next year. Yam crops face pressure from a range of insect pests and fungal and viral diseases, as well as nematode, their growth and dormant phases correspond to the wet season and the dry season. For maximum yield, the yams require a humid tropical environment, with an annual rainfall over 1500 mm distributed uniformly throughout the growing season. White and water yams produce a single large tuber per year weighing 5 to 10 kg. Despite the high labor requirements and production costs, consumer demand for yam is high in certain subregions of Africa, making yam cultivation quite profitable to certain farmers. Many cultivars of yams are found throughout the humid tropics; the most economically important are discussed below. Dioscorea rotundata, the white yam, D. cayenensis, the yellow yam, are native to Africa.
They are the most important cultivated yams. In the past, they were considered as two separate species, but most taxonomists now regard them as the same species. Over 200 varieties between them are cultivated. White yam tuber is cylindrical in shape, the skin is smooth and brown, the flesh is white and firm. Yellow yam has yellow flesh, caused by the presence of carotenoids, it looks similar to the white yam in outer appearance. The yellow yam has a shorter dormancy than white yam. The'Kokoro' variety is important in making dried yam chips, they are large plants. The tubers most weigh about 2.5 to 5 kg each, but can weigh as much as 25 kg. After 7 to 12 months' growth, the tubers are harvested. In Africa, most are pounded into a paste to make the traditional dish of "pounded yam," known as Iyan. D. alata, called "white yam", winged yam, water yam, purple yam, was first cultivated in Southeast Asia. Although not grown in the same quantities as the African yams, it has the largest distribution worldwide of any cultivated yam, being grown in Asia, the Pacific islands and the West Indies.
In Africa, the popularity of water yam is second only to white yam. The tuber shape is cylindrical, but can vary. Tuber flesh is watery in texture. Uhi was brought to Hawaii by the early Polynesian settlers and became a major crop in the 19th century when the tubers were sold to visiting ships as an stored food supply for their voyages. D. polystachya, Chinese yam, is native to China. The Chinese yam plant is somewhat smaller with the vines about 3 m long, it can be grown in much cooler conditions than other yams. It is grown in Korea and Japan, it was introduced to Europe in the 19th century, when the potato crop there was falling victim to disease, is still grown in France for the Asian food market. The tubers are harvested after about 6 months of growth; some are eaten right after harvesting and some are used as ingredients for other dishes, including noodles, for traditional medicines. D. bulbifera, the air
Tarsus, Mersin
Tarsus is a historic city in south-central Turkey, 20 km inland from the Mediterranean. It is part of the Adana-Mersin metropolitan area, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in Turkey with a population of 3 million people. Tarsus forms an administrative district in the eastern part of the Mersin Province and lies in the core of Çukurova region. With a history going back over 6,000 years, Tarsus has long been an important stop for traders and a focal point of many civilizations. During the Roman Empire, Tarsus was the capital of the province of Cilicia, it was the scene of the first meeting between Mark Antony and Cleopatra, the birthplace of Paul the Apostle. Located on the mouth of the Berdan River, which empties into the Mediterranean, Tarsus is a junction point of land and sea routes connecting the Cilician plain, central Anatolia and the Mediterranean sea; the climate is typical of the Mediterranean region, with hot summers and chilly, damp winters. Tarsus has a long history of commerce, is still a commercial centre today, trading in the produce of the fertile Çukurova plain.
Industries include agricultural machinery, spare parts, fruit-processing, brick-making and ceramics. Agriculture is an important source of income: half the land area in the district is farmland and most of the remainder is forest and orchard; the farmland is well-irrigated and managed with up-to-date equipment. The ancient name is Tarsos, derived from Tarsa, the original name of the city in the Hittite language, derived from a pagan god, Tarku, as Hittites were one of the first settlers of the region. First mentioned in historical record in Akkadian texts of the Neo-Assyrian era as Tarsisi. During the Hellenistic era it was known as Antiochia on the Cydnus, to distinguish it from Syrian Antioch, it was known as Darson in Western Armenian and Tarson in Eastern Armenian. Excavation of the mound of Gözlükule reveals that the prehistorical development of Tarsus reaches back to the Neolithic Period and continues unbroken through Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages; the settlement was located at the crossing of several important trade routes, linking Anatolia to Syria and beyond.
Because the ruins are covered by the modern city, archaeology has touched the ancient city. The city may have been of Semitic origin. A Greek legend connects it with the memory of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus, still preserved in the Dunuk-Tach, called'tomb of Sardanapalus', a monument of unknown origin. Stephanus of Byzantium quotes Athenodorus of Tarsus as relating another legend: Anchiale, daughter of Iapetus, founded Anchiale: her son was Cydnus, who gave his name to the river at Tarsus: the son of Cydnus was Parthenius, from whom the city was called Parthenia: afterwards the name was changed to Tarsus. Much of this legend of the foundation of Tarsus, appeared in the Roman era, none of it is reliable; the geographer Strabo states that Tarsus was founded by people from Argos who were exploring this coast. Another legend states that Bellerophon fell off his winged horse Pegasus and landed here, hurting his foot, thus the city was named tar-sos. Other candidates for legendary founder of the city include the hero Perseus and Triptolemus, son of the earth-goddess Demeter, doubtless because the countryside around Tarsus is excellent farmland.
The coinage of Tarsus bore the image of Hercules, due to yet another tale in which the hero was held prisoner here by the local god Sandon. Tarsus has been suggested as a possible identification of the biblical Tarshish, where the prophet Jonah wanted to flee, but Tartessos in Spain is a more identification for this. In historical times, the city was first ruled by the Hittites, followed by Assyria, the Persian Empire. Tarsus, as the principal town of Cilicia, was the seat of a Persian satrapy from 400 BC onward. Indeed, Xenophon records that in 401 BC, when Cyrus the Younger marched against Babylon, the city was governed by King Syennesis in the name of the Persian monarch. At this period the patron god of the city was Sandon, of whom a large monument existed at Tarsus at least until the 3rd century AD. Coins showed Sandon standing on a winged and horned lion, it is now thought that the Lion of Saint Mark on the pillar in the Piazza San Marco in Venice was in origin a winged lion-griffin from such a monument at Tarsus.
Alexander the Great passed through with his armies in 333 BC and nearly met his death here after a bath in the Cydnus. By this time Tarsus was largely influenced by Greek language and culture, as part of the Seleucid Empire it became more and more hellenized. Strabo praises the cultural level of Tarsus in this period with its philosophers and linguists; the schools of Tarsus rivaled those of Alexandria. 2 Maccabees records its revolt in about 171 BC against Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who had renamed the town Antiochia on the Cydnus. The name did not last, due to the confusion of so many cities named Antioch. At this time the library of Tarsus held 200,000 books, including a huge collection of scientific works. In 67 BC, after crushing the Cilician pirates, subjected Tarsus to Rome, it beca
De Materia Medica
De Materia Medica is a pharmacopoeia of medicinal plants and the medicines that can be obtained from them. The five-volume work was written between 50 and 70 CE by Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek physician in the Roman army, it was read for more than 1,500 years until supplanted by revised herbals in the Renaissance, making it one of the longest-lasting of all natural history books. The work describes many drugs known to be effective, including aconite, colocynth, henbane and squill. In all, about 600 plants are covered, along with some animals and mineral substances, around 1000 medicines made from them. De Materia Medica was circulated as illustrated manuscripts, copied by hand, in Greek and Arabic throughout the mediaeval period. From the sixteenth century on, Dioscorides' text was translated into Italian, German and French, in 1655 into English, it formed the basis for herbals in these languages by men such as Leonhart Fuchs, Valerius Cordus, Rembert Dodoens, Carolus Clusius, John Gerard and William Turner.
These herbals included more and more direct observations and supplanting the classical text. Several manuscripts and early printed versions of De Materia Medica survive, including the illustrated Vienna Dioscurides manuscript written in the original Greek in sixth-century Constantinople. Sir Arthur Hill saw a monk on Mount Athos still using a copy of Dioscorides to identify plants in 1934. Between 50 and 70 AD, a Greek physician in the Roman army, wrote a five-volume book in his native Greek, Περὶ ὕλης ἰατρικῆς, known more in Western Europe by its Latin title De Materia Medica, he had studied pharmacology at Tarsus in Roman Anatolia. The book became the principal reference work on pharmacology across Europe and the Middle East for over 1500 years, was thus the precursor of all modern pharmacopoeias. In contrast to many classical authors, De Materia Medica was not "rediscovered" in the Renaissance, because it never left circulation. In the medieval period, De Materia Medica was circulated in Latin and Arabic.
In the Renaissance from 1478 onwards, it was printed in Italian, German and French as well. In 1655, John Goodyer made an English translation from a printed version not corrected from the Greek. While being reproduced in manuscript form through the centuries, the text was supplemented with commentary and minor additions from Arabic and Indian sources. Several illustrated manuscripts of De Materia Medica survive; the most famous is the lavishly illustrated Vienna Dioscurides, written in the original Greek in Byzantine Constantinople in 512/513 AD. The Naples Dioscurides and Morgan Dioscurides are somewhat Byzantine manuscripts in Greek, while other Greek manuscripts survive today in the monasteries of Mount Athos. Densely illustrated Arabic copies survive from the 13th centuries; the result is a complex set of relationships between manuscripts, involving translation, copying errors, additions of text and illustrations, reworkings, a combination of copying from one manuscript and correction from another.
De Materia Medica is the prime historical source of information about the medicines used by the Greeks and other cultures of antiquity. The work records the Dacian names for some plants, which otherwise would have been lost; the work presents about 600 medicinal plants in all, along with some animals and mineral substances, around 1000 medicines made from these sources. Botanists have not always found Dioscorides' plants easy to identify from his short descriptions because he had described plants and animals from southeastern Europe, whereas by the sixteenth century his book was in use all over Europe and across the Islamic world; this meant that people attempted to force a match between the plants they knew and those described by Dioscorides, leading to what could be catastrophic results. Each entry gives a substantial amount of detail on the plant or substance in question, concentrating on medicinal uses but giving such mention of other uses and help with recognition as considered necessary.
For example, on the "Mekon Agrios and Mekon Emeros", the opium poppy and related species, Dioscorides states that the seed of one is made into bread: it has "a somewhat long little head and white seed", while another "has a head bending down" and a third is "more wild, more medicinal and longer than these, with a head somewhat long — and they are all cooling." After this brief description, he moves at once into pharmacology. The account thus combines recognition, pharmacological effect, guidance on drug preparation, its effects are summarized, accompanied by a caution: A little of it is a pain-easer, a sleep-causer, a digester, helping coughs and abdominal cavity afflictions. Taken as a drink too it hurts and it kills, it is helpful for aches, sprinkled on with rosaceum. For
Anazarbus
Anazarbus was an ancient Cilician city. Under the late Roman Empire, it was the capital of Cilicia Secunda, it was destroyed in 1374. It was situated in Anatolia in modern Turkey, in the present Çukurova about 15 km west of the main stream of the present Ceyhan River and near its tributary the Sempas Su. A lofty isolated ridge formed its acropolis. Though some of the masonry in the ruins is pre-Roman, the Suda's identification of it with Cyinda, famous as a treasure city in the wars of Eumenes of Cardia, cannot be accepted in the face of Strabo's express location of Cyinda in western Cilicia, it was founded by Assyrians. Under the early Roman Empire the place was known as Caesarea, was the Metropolis of Late Roman province Cilicia Secunda, it was the home of the poet Oppian. Rebuilt by the Eastern Roman emperor Justin I after an earthquake in the 6th century, it became Justinopolis, its great natural strength and situation, not far from the mouth of the Sis pass, near the great road which debouched from the Cilician Gates, made Anazarbus play a considerable part in the struggles between the Eastern Roman Empire and the early Muslim invaders.
It had been rebuilt by Harun al-Rashid in 796, refortified at great expense by the Hamdanid Sayf al-Dawla and again destroyed in 962 by Nikephoros II Phokas. In late 1097 or early 1098 it was captured by the armies of the First Crusade and was incorporated into Bohemond's Principality of Antioch; the Crusaders are responsible for the construction of an impressive donjon atop the center of the outcrop. Most of the remaining fortifications, including the curtain walls, massive horse-shaped towers, undercrofts and free-standing structures date from the Armenian periods of occupation, which began with the arrival of the Rubenid Baron T‛oros I, c. 1111. The site exchanged hands between the Greeks and Armenians, until it was formally part of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia. Within the fortress are two Armenian chapels and the magnificent three-aisle church built by T‛oros I to celebrate his conquests; the church was once surrounded by a well-executed dedicatory inscription in Armenian. The Mamluk Empire of Egypt destroyed the city in 1374.
The present wall of the lower city is of late construction. It encloses a mass of ruins conspicuous in which are a fine triumphal arch, the colonnades of two streets, a gymnasium, etc. A stadium and a theatre lie outside the walls to the south; the remains of the acropolis fortifications are interesting, including roads and ditches hewn in the rock. There are no notable structures in the upper town. For picturesqueness the site is not equaled in Cilicia, it is worthwhile to trace the three fine aqueducts to their sources. A necropolis on the escarpment to the south of the curtain wall can be seen complete with signs of illegal modern excavations. A visit in December 2002 showed that the three aqueducts mentioned above have been nearly destroyed. Only small, isolated sections are left standing with the largest portion lying in a pile of rubble that stretches the length of where the aqueducts once stood. A powerful earthquake that struck the area in 1945 is thought to be responsible for the destruction.
A modest Turkish farming village lies to the southwest of the ancient city. A small outdoor museum with some of the artifacts collected in the area can be viewed for a small fee. Nearby are some beautiful mosaics discovered in a farmers field. Inquire at the museum for a viewing. Anazarbus/Anavarsa was one of a chain of Armenian fortifications stretching through Cilicia; the castle of Sis lies to the north while Tumlu Castle and Yilankale are to the south, the fortresses of Amouda and Sarvandikar are to the east. In 2013, excavations uncovered the first known colonnaded double-lane road of the ancient world, 34 meters wide and 2700 meters long uncovered the ruins of a church and a bathhouse. In 2017, archaeologists discovered a limestone statue of the god Eros; the statue is thought to date to the third or fourth century B. C. Anazarbus was the capital and so from 553 the metropolitan see of the Late Roman province of Cilicia Secunda. In the 4th century, one of the bishops of Anazarbus was Athanasius, a "consistent expounder of the theology of Arius."
His theological opponent, Athanasius of Alexandria, in De Synodis 17, 1 refers to Anazarbus as Ναζαρβῶν. A 6th century Notitia Episcopatuum indicates that it had as suffragan sees Epiphania, Alexandria Minor, Flavias and Aegeae. Rhosus was subject to Anazarbus, but after the 6th century was made exempt, Mopsuestia was raised to the rank of autcephalous metropolitan see, though without suffragans; the titular archbishopric was revived in the 18th century as a see of the Latin Catholic church, Anazarbus. It is vacant, having had the following incumbents of the highest rank, with an episcopal exception: Titular Archbishop Giuseppe Maria Saporiti Titular Bishop Isidro Alfonso Cavanillas Titular Archbishop Gerolamo Formagliari Titular Archbishop Romain-Frédéric Gallard Titular Archbishop, as Coadjutor Archeparch of Istanbul of the Armenians (1842.06.0
British Museum
The British Museum, in the Bloomsbury area of London, United Kingdom, is a public institution dedicated to human history and culture. Its permanent collection of some eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence, having been sourced during the era of the British Empire, it documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. It was the first public national museum in the world; the British Museum was established in 1753 based on the collections of the Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. It first opened in Montagu House, on the site of the current building, its expansion over the following 250 years was a result of expanding British colonisation and has resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, the first being the Natural History Museum in 1881. In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the British Museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as the museum until 1997.
The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture and Sport, as with all national museums in the UK it charges no admission fee, except for loan exhibitions. Its ownership of some of its most famous objects originating in other countries is disputed and remains the subject of international controversy, most notably in the case of the Parthenon Marbles. Although today principally a museum of cultural art objects and antiquities, the British Museum was founded as a "universal museum", its foundations lie in the will of the Irish physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane, a London-based doctor and scientist from Ulster. During the course of his lifetime, after he married the widow of a wealthy Jamaican planter, Sloane gathered a large collection of curiosities and, not wishing to see his collection broken up after death, he bequeathed it to King George II, for the nation, for a sum of £20,000. At that time, Sloane's collection consisted of around 71,000 objects of all kinds including some 40,000 printed books, 7,000 manuscripts, extensive natural history specimens including 337 volumes of dried plants and drawings including those by Albrecht Dürer and antiquities from Sudan, Greece, the Ancient Near and Far East and the Americas.
On 7 June 1753, King George II gave his Royal Assent to the Act of Parliament which established the British Museum. The British Museum Act 1753 added two other libraries to the Sloane collection, namely the Cottonian Library, assembled by Sir Robert Cotton, dating back to Elizabethan times, the Harleian Library, the collection of the Earls of Oxford, they were joined in 1757 by the "Old Royal Library", now the Royal manuscripts, assembled by various British monarchs. Together these four "foundation collections" included many of the most treasured books now in the British Library including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf; the British Museum was the first of a new kind of museum – national, belonging to neither church nor king open to the public and aiming to collect everything. Sloane's collection, while including a vast miscellany of objects, tended to reflect his scientific interests; the addition of the Cotton and Harley manuscripts introduced a literary and antiquarian element and meant that the British Museum now became both National Museum and library.
The body of trustees decided on a converted 17th-century mansion, Montagu House, as a location for the museum, which it bought from the Montagu family for £20,000. The trustees rejected Buckingham House, on the site now occupied by Buckingham Palace, on the grounds of cost and the unsuitability of its location. With the acquisition of Montagu House, the first exhibition galleries and reading room for scholars opened on 15 January 1759. At this time, the largest parts of collection were the library, which took up the majority of the rooms on the ground floor of Montagu House and the natural history objects, which took up an entire wing on the second state storey of the building. In 1763, the trustees of the British Museum, under the influence of Peter Collinson and William Watson, employed the former student of Carl Linnaeus, Daniel Solander to reclassify the natural history collection according to the Linnaean system, thereby making the Museum a public centre of learning accessible to the full range of European natural historians.
In 1823, King George IV gave the King's Library assembled by George III, Parliament gave the right to a copy of every book published in the country, thereby ensuring that the museum's library would expand indefinitely. During the few years after its foundation the British Museum received several further gifts, including the Thomason Collection of Civil War Tracts and David Garrick's library of 1,000 printed plays; the predominance of natural history and manuscripts began to lessen when in 1772 the museum acquired for £8,410 its first significant antiquities in Sir William Hamilton's "first" collection of Greek vases. From 1778, a display of objects from the South Seas brought back from the round-the-world voyages of Captain James Cook and the travels of other explorers fascinated visitors with a glimpse of unknown lands; the bequest of a collection of books, engraved gems, coins and drawings by Clayton Mordaunt Cracherode in 1800 did much to raise the museum's reputation. The museum's first notable addition towards its collection of antiquities, since its foundation, was by Sir William Hamilton, British Ambassador to Naples, who sold his collection of Greek and Roman artefacts to
Ancient Greek
The Ancient Greek language includes the forms of Greek used in Ancient Greece and the ancient world from around the 9th century BCE to the 6th century CE. It is roughly divided into the Archaic period, Classical period, Hellenistic period, it is succeeded by medieval Greek. Koine is regarded as a separate historical stage of its own, although in its earliest form it resembled Attic Greek and in its latest form it approaches Medieval Greek. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects. Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians and philosophers, it has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language. Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, divided into many dialects; the main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic and Doric, many of them with several subdivisions.
Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms used in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek used in the epic poems, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey", in poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects; the origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period, they differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek, but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not than 1120 BCE, at the time of the Dorian invasion—and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BCE.
The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians. The invasion is known to have displaced population to the Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians; the Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people—Dorians and Ionians, each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for the dialects is: West vs. non-west Greek is the strongest marked and earliest division, with non-west in subsets of Ionic-Attic and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Non-west is called East Greek. Arcadocypriot descended more from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age.
Boeotian had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect. Thessalian had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek, spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric, Southern Peloponnesus Doric, Northern Peloponnesus Doric; the Lesbian dialect was Aeolic Greek. All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, these colonies developed local characteristics under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects; the dialects outside the Ionic group are known from inscriptions, notable exceptions being: fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos, in Aeolian, the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar and other lyric poets in Doric.
After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BCE, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed based on Attic Greek, but with influence from other dialects. This dialect replaced most of the older dialects, although Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language, spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek. By about the 6th century CE, the Koine had metamorphosized into Medieval Greek. Ancient Macedonian was an Indo-European language at least related to Greek, but its exact relationship is unclear because of insufficient data: a dialect of Greek; the Macedonian dialect (or l
