Genesis flood narrative
The Genesis flood narrative is a flood myth found in the Tanakh. The story tells of God's decision to return the Earth to its pre-creation state of watery chaos and remake it in a reversal of creation; the narrative has strong similarities to parts of the Epic of Gilgamesh which predates the Book of Genesis. A global flood as described in this myth is inconsistent with the physical findings of geology and paleontology. A branch of creationism known as flood geology is a pseudoscientific attempt to argue that such a global flood occurred; the flood is part of what scholars call the first 11 chapters of Genesis. These chapters, fable-like and legendary, form a preface to the patriarchal narratives which follow, but show little relationship to them. For example, the names of its characters and its geography—Adam and Eve, the Land of Nod, so on—are symbolic rather than real, much of the narratives consist of lists of "firsts": the first murder, the first wine, the first empire-builder. Few of the people and events depicted in the book are mentioned elsewhere in the Bible.
This has led scholars to suppose that the primeval history forms a late composition attached to Genesis to serve as an introduction. At one extreme are those who see it as a product of the Hellenistic period, in which case it cannot be earlier than the first decades of the 4th century BCE; the flood narrative is made up of two stories woven together. As a result many details are contradictory, such as how long the flood lasted, how many animals were to be taken aboard the ark, whether Noah released a raven which "went to and fro until the waters were dried up" or a dove which on the third occasion "did not return to him again," or both. Despite this disagreement on details the story forms a unified whole, many efforts have been made to explain this unity, including attempts to identify which of the two sources was earlier and therefore influenced the other; the flood myth originated in Mesopotamia. The Mesopotamian story has three distinct versions, the Sumerian Epic of Ziusudra, as episodes in two Babylonian epics, those of Atrahasis and Gilgamesh.
Noah walked with God. Seeing that the earth was corrupt and filled with violence, God instructed Noah to build an ark in which he, his sons, their wives, together with male and female of all living creatures, would be saved from the waters. Noah entered the ark in his six hundredth year, on the 17th day of the second month of that year "the fountains of the Great Deep burst apart and the floodgates of heaven broke open" and rain fell for forty days and forty nights until the highest mountains were covered 15 cubits, all earth-based life perished except Noah and those with him in the ark. In Jewish legend, the kind of water, pouring to the earth for forty days is not the common, but God bade each drop pass through Hell of Gehenna before it fell to earth, the'hot rain' scalded the skin of the sinners; the punishment that overtook them was befitting their crime. As their sensual desires had made them hot, inflamed them to immoral excesses, so they were chastised by means of heated water. After 150 days "God remembered Noah... and the waters subsided" until the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat.
On the 27th day of the second month of Noah's six hundred and first year the earth was dry. Noah built an altar and made a sacrifice, God made a covenant with Noah that man would be allowed to eat every living thing but not its blood, that God would never again destroy all life by a flood; the flood is a renewal of God's creation of the world. In Genesis 1 God separates the "waters above the earth" from those below so that dry land can appear as a home for living things, but in the flood story the "windows of heaven" and "fountains of the deep" are opened so that the world is returned to the watery chaos of the time before creation; the sequence of flood events mimics that of creation, the flood first covering the earth to the highest mountains destroying, in order, cattle, beasts, "swarming creatures", mankind.. The ark itself is a microcosm of Solomon's Temple. Intertextuality is the way biblical stories reflect one another; such echoes are coincidental—for instance, the word used for ark is the same used for the basket in which Moses is saved, implying a symmetry between the stories of two divinely chosen saviours in a world threatened by water and chaos.
The most significant such echo is a reversal of the Genesis creation narrative. The Genesis flood narrative is included in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Jesus and the apostles additionally taught on the Genesis flood narrative in New Test
Filipa Moniz Perestrelo
Filipa Moniz Perestrelo was a Portuguese noblewoman from Porto Santo Island, in Madeira, Portugal. She was the wife of Christopher Columbus, married in 1479 in Vila Baleira on the island. Filipa Moniz was the daughter of Bartolomeu Perestrelo. Prior to marrying she was one of the twelve elite Comendadoras of the Monastery of All Saints in Lisbon of the Military Order of St. James, which means she had a comendary, her step son Ferdinand Columbus and her brother - in -law Bartholomew Columbus, described her as a "noble Comendadora" residing in the Monastery of All Saints. Discussing the question how Christopher Columbus, the son of a Genoese wool weaver, could marry the daughter of a Portuguese Knight of Santiago, member of the household of Prince John, Lord of Reguengos de Monsaraz and of Prince Henry the Navigator's household, Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that this is "no great mystery." Filipa was "already about 25 years old," her mother was a widow "with slender means," and "her mother was glad enough to have no more convent bills to pay, a son-in-law who asked for no dowry."
Another view is presented by Portuguese professor Joel Silva Ferreira Mata, who researched All-Saints and its residents, showed that as "member" of the Order of Santiago, in order for Filipa to marry the future Admiral Columbus, like all members, required authorization from Santiago's Master, like all other religious and military orders, the Order of Santiago had its established rules and protocols by which it was governed. The Master of Santiago from 1470 to 1492, thus governing at the time of Filipa's marriage, was King John II of Portugal. From this marriage was born Diego Columbus in 1479 or 1480 who went on to become 2nd Admiral of the Indies, 2nd Viceroy of the Indies and 3rd Governor of the Indies and who married King Fernando's cousin, María de Toledo y Rojas, thus Filipa Moniz was wife of a Viceroy and mother of another Viceroy. Columbus had a second son, from Beatriz Enriquez de Arana, after Filipa died, in 1488. Filipa's fate is unknown and it is uncertain whether she was dead before Columbus left Portugal, nor is her cause of death known.
Current scholarship places her death sometime between 1478 and 1484. She was buried in the Capela da Piedade, the first chapel to the right of the main chapel in the Carmo Convent along with her sister, Izeu Perestrelo and her brother-in-law, Pedro Correia da Cunha. People from Madeira Rafael Perestrello, a cousin of Filipa Perestrelo, among the first Europeans to land in China during the Chinese Ming Dynasty
Pliocene
The Pliocene Epoch is the epoch in the geologic timescale that extends from 5.333 million to 2.58 million years BP. It is the youngest epoch of the Neogene Period in the Cenozoic Era; the Pliocene is followed by the Pleistocene Epoch. Prior to the 2009 revision of the geologic time scale, which placed the four most recent major glaciations within the Pleistocene, the Pliocene included the Gelasian stage, which lasted from 2.588 to 1.806 million years ago, is now included in the Pleistocene. As with other older geologic periods, the geological strata that define the start and end are well identified but the exact dates of the start and end of the epoch are uncertain; the boundaries defining the Pliocene are not set at an identified worldwide event but rather at regional boundaries between the warmer Miocene and the cooler Pliocene. The upper boundary was set at the start of the Pleistocene glaciations. Charles Lyell gave the Pliocene its name in Principles of Geology; the word pliocene comes from the Greek words πλεῖον and καινός and means "continuation of the recent", referring to the modern marine mollusc fauna.
H. W. Fowler called the term Pliocene a "regrettable barbarism" and an indication that "a good classical scholar" such as Lyell should have requested a philologist's help when coining words. To summarize the usage of these "regrettable barbarisms" in the labelling of the Cenozoic era: with the understanding that these are all new relative to the Mesozoic and Paleozoic eras. In the official timescale of the ICS, the Pliocene is subdivided into two stages. From youngest to oldest they are: Piacenzian Zanclean The Piacenzian is sometimes referred to as the Late Pliocene, whereas the Zanclean is referred to as the Early Pliocene. In the system of North American Land Mammal Ages include Hemphillian, Blancan; the Blancan extends forward into the Pleistocene. South American Land Mammal Ages include Montehermosan and Uquian. In the Paratethys area the Pliocene contains the Romanian stages; as usual in stratigraphy, there are many other local subdivisions in use. In Britain the Pliocene is divided into the following stages: Gedgravian, Pre-Ludhamian, Thurnian, Bramertonian or Antian, Pre-Pastonian or Baventian and Beestonian.
In the Netherlands the Pliocene is divided into these stages: Brunssumian C, Reuverian A, Reuverian B, Reuverian C, Tiglian A, Tiglian B, Tiglian C1-4b, Tiglian C4c, Tiglian C5, Tiglian C6 and Eburonian. The exact correlations between these local stages and the ICS stages is still a matter of detail; the global average temperature in the mid-Pliocene was 2–3 °C higher than today, carbon dioxide levels were the same as today, global sea level was 25 m higher. The northern hemisphere ice sheet was ephemeral before the onset of extensive glaciation over Greenland that occurred in the late Pliocene around 3 Ma; the formation of an Arctic ice cap is signaled by an abrupt shift in oxygen isotope ratios and ice-rafted cobbles in the North Atlantic and North Pacific ocean beds. Mid-latitude glaciation was underway before the end of the epoch; the global cooling that occurred during the Pliocene may have spurred on the disappearance of forests and the spread of grasslands and savannas. Continents continued to drift, moving from positions as far as 250 km from their present locations to positions only 70 km from their current locations.
South America became linked to North America through the Isthmus of Panama during the Pliocene, making possible the Great American Interchange and bringing a nearly complete end to South America's distinctive large marsupial predator and native ungulate faunas. The formation of the Isthmus had major consequences on global temperatures, since warm equatorial ocean currents were cut off and an Atlantic cooling cycle began, with cold Arctic and Antarctic waters dropping temperatures in the now-isolated Atlantic Ocean. Africa's collision with Europe formed the Mediterranean Sea, cutting off the remnants of the Tethys Ocean; the border between the Miocene and the Pliocene is the time of the Messinian salinity crisis. Sea level changes exposed the land bridge between Asia. Pliocene marine rocks are well exposed in the Mediterranean and China. Elsewhere, they are exposed near shores. During the Pliocene parts of southern Norway and southern Sweden, near sea level rose. In Norway this rise elevated the Hardangervidda plateau to 1200 m in the Early Pliocene.
In Southern Sweden similar movements elevated the South Swedish highlands leading to a deflection of the ancient Eridanos river from its original path across south-central Sweden into a course south of Sweden. The change to a cooler, seasonal climate had considerable impacts on Pliocene vegetation, reducing tropical species worldwide. Deciduous forests proliferated, coniferous forests and tundra covered much of the north, grasslands spread on all continents. Tropical forests were limited to a tight band around the equator, in addition to dry savannahs, deserts appeared in Asia and Africa. Both marine and co
New World
The New World is one of the names used for the majority of Earth's Western Hemisphere the Americas, Oceania. The term originated in the early 16th century after Europeans made landfall in what would be called the Americas in the age of discovery, expanding the geographical horizon of classical geographers, who had thought of the world as consisting of Africa and Asia, collectively now referred to as the Old World; the phrase gained prominence after the publication of a pamphlet titled Mundus Novus attributed to Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. The Americas were referred to as the "fourth part of the world"; the terms "Old World" vs. "New World" are meaningful in historical context and for the purpose of distinguishing the world's major ecozones, to classify plant and animal species that originated therein. One can speak of the "New World" in a historical context, e.g. when discussing the voyages of Christopher Columbus, the Spanish conquest of Yucatán and other events of the colonial period.
For lack of alternatives, the term is still useful to those discussing issues that concern the Americas and the nearby oceanic islands, such as Bermuda and Clipperton Island, collectively. The term "New World" is used in a biological context, when one speaks of Old World and New World species. Biological taxonomists attach the "New World" label to groups of species that are found in the Americas, to distinguish them from their counterparts in the "Old World", e.g. New World monkeys, New World vultures, New World warblers; the label is often used in agriculture. Asia and Europe share a common agricultural history stemming from the Neolithic Revolution, the same domesticated plants and animals spread through these three continents thousands of years ago, making them indistinct and useful to classify together as "Old World". Common Old World crops, domesticated animals did not exist in the Americas until they were introduced by post-Columbian contact in the 1490s. Conversely, many common crops were domesticated in the Americas before they spread worldwide after Columbian contact, are still referred to as "New World crops".
Other famous New World crops include the cashew, rubber, sunflower and vanilla, fruits like the guava and pineapple. There are rare instances of overlap, e.g. the calabash and yam, the dog, are believed to have been domesticated separately in both the Old and New World, their early forms brought along by Paleo-Indians from Asia during the last glacial period. In wine terminology, "New World" has a different definition. "New World wines" include not only North American and South American wines, but those from South Africa, New Zealand, all other locations outside the traditional wine-growing regions of Europe, North Africa and the Near East. The term "New World" was first coined by the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci, in a letter written to his friend and former patron Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de' Medici in the Spring of 1503, published in 1503–04 under the title Mundus Novus. Vespucci's letter contains arguably the first explicit articulation in print of the hypothesis that the lands discovered by European navigators to the west were not the edges of Asia, as asserted by Christopher Columbus, but rather an different continent, a "New World".
Vespucci first approached this realization in June 1502, during a famous chance meeting between two different expeditions at the watering stop of "Bezeguiche" – his own outgoing expedition, on its way to chart the coast of newly discovered Brazil, the vanguard ships of the Second Portuguese India armada of Pedro Álvares Cabral, returning home from India. Having visited the Americas in prior years, Vespucci found it difficult to reconcile what he had seen in the West Indies, with what the returning sailors told him of the East Indies. Vespucci wrote a preliminary letter to Lorenzo, while anchored at Bezeguiche, which he sent back with the Portuguese fleet – at this point only expressing a certain puzzlement about his conversations. Vespucci was convinced when he proceeded on his mapping expedition through 1501–02, covering the huge stretch of coast of eastern Brazil. After returning from Brazil, in the Spring of 1503, Amerigo Vespucci composed the Mundus Novus letter in Lisbon to Lorenzo in Florence, with its famous opening paragraph: In passed days I wrote fully to you of my return from new countries, which have been found and explored with the ships, at the cost and by the command of this Most Serene King of Portugal.
For the opinion of the ancients was, that the greater part of the world beyond the equinoctial line to the south was not land, but only sea, which they have called the Atlantic.
Island
An island or isle is any piece of sub-continental land, surrounded by water. Small islands such as emergent land features on atolls can be called islets, cays or keys. An island in a river or a lake island may be called an eyot or ait, a small island off the coast may be called a holm. A grouping of geographically or geologically related islands is called an archipelago, such as the Philippines. An island may be described despite the presence of an artificial land bridge; some places may retain "island" in their names for historical reasons after being connected to a larger landmass by a land bridge or landfill, such as Coney Island and Coronado Island, though these are speaking, tied islands. Conversely, when a piece of land is separated from the mainland by a man-made canal, for example the Peloponnese by the Corinth Canal or Marble Hill in northern Manhattan during the time between the building of the United States Ship Canal and the filling-in of the Harlem River which surrounded the area, it is not considered an island.
There are two main types of islands in the sea: oceanic. There are artificial islands; the word island derives from Middle English iland, from Old English igland. However, the spelling of the word was modified in the 15th century because of a false etymology caused by an incorrect association with the etymologically unrelated Old French loanword isle, which itself comes from the Latin word insula. Old English ieg is a cognate of Swedish ö and German Aue, related to Latin aqua. Greenland is the world's largest island, with an area of over 2.1 million km2, while Australia, the world's smallest continent, has an area of 7.6 million km2, but there is no standard of size that distinguishes islands from continents, or from islets. There is a difference between continents in terms of geology. Continents are the largest landmass of a particular continental plate. By contrast, islands are either extensions of the oceanic crust, or belong to a continental plate containing a larger landmass. Continental islands are bodies of land.
Examples are Borneo, Sumatra, Sakhalin and Hainan off Asia. A special type of continental island is the microcontinental island, created when a continent is rifted. Examples are Madagascar and Socotra off Africa, New Caledonia, New Zealand, some of the Seychelles. Another subtype is an island or bar formed by deposition of tiny rocks where water current loses some of its carrying capacity; this includes: barrier islands, which are accumulations of sand deposited by sea currents on the continental shelves fluvial or alluvial islands formed in river deltas or midstream within large rivers. While some are transitory and may disappear if the volume or speed of the current changes, others are stable and long-lived. Islets are small islands. Oceanic islands are islands; the vast majority are volcanic in origin, such as Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean. The few oceanic islands that are not volcanic are tectonic in origin and arise where plate movements have lifted up the ocean floor above the surface.
Examples are Saint Paul Rocks in the Atlantic Ocean and Macquarie Island in the Pacific. One type of volcanic oceanic island is found in a volcanic island arc; these islands arise from volcanoes. Examples are the Aleutian Islands, the Mariana Islands, most of Tonga in the Pacific Ocean; the only examples in the Atlantic Ocean are some of the Lesser Antilles and the South Sandwich Islands. Another type of volcanic oceanic island occurs. There are two examples: Iceland, the world's second largest volcanic island, Jan Mayen. Both are in the Atlantic. A third type of volcanic oceanic island is formed over volcanic hotspots. A hotspot is more or less stationary relative to the moving tectonic plate above it, so a chain of islands results as the plate drifts. Over long periods of time, this type of island is "drowned" by isostatic adjustment and eroded, becoming a seamount. Plate movement across a hot-spot produces a line of islands oriented in the direction of the plate movement. An example is the Hawaiian Islands, from Hawaii to Kure, which continue beneath the sea surface in a more northerly direction as the Emperor Seamounts.
Another chain with similar orientation is the Tuamotu Archipelago. The southernmost chain is the Austral Islands, with its northerly trending part the atolls in the nation of Tuvalu. Tristan da Cunha is an example of a hotspot volcano in the Atlantic Ocean. Another hotspot in the Atlantic is the island of Surtsey, formed in 1963. An atoll is an island formed from a coral reef that has grown on an eroded and submerged volcanic island; the reef forms a new island. Atolls are ring-shaped with a central lagoon. Examples are the Line Islands
Madeira Island
Madeira is a Portuguese island, is the largest and most populous of the Madeira Archipelago. It has an area including Ilhéu de Agostinho, Ilhéu de São Lourenço, Ilhéu Mole; as of 2011, Madeira had a total population of 262,456. It is at the top of a massive shield volcano that rises about 6 km from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, on the Tore underwater mountain range; the volcano formed atop an east-west rift in the oceanic crust along the African Plate, beginning during the Miocene epoch over 5 million years ago, continuing into the Pleistocene until about 700,000 years ago. This was followed by extensive erosion, producing two large amphitheatres open to south in the central part of the island. Volcanic activity resumed, producing scoria cones and lava flows atop the older eroded shield; the most recent volcanic eruptions were on the west-central part of the island only 6,500 years ago, creating more cinder cones and lava flows. It is the largest island of the group with an area of 741 km2, a length of 57 km, while 22 km at its widest point, with a coastline of 150 km.
It has a mountain ridge that extends along the centre of the island, reaching 1,862 metres at its highest point, while much lower along its eastern extent. The primitive volcanic foci responsible for the central mountainous area, consisted of the peaks: Ruivo, Arieiro, Cidrão, Casado, Ferreiro. At the end of this eruptive phase, an island circled by reefs was formed, its marine vestiges are evident in a calcareous layer in the area of Lameiros, in São Vicente. Sea cliffs, such as Cabo Girão, valleys and ravines extend from this central spine, making the interior inaccessible. Daily life is concentrated in the many villages at the mouths of the ravines, through which the heavy rains of autumn and winter travel to the sea. Madeira, the archipelago and Autonomous Region named after Madeira Island
Barbary Coast
The term Barbary Coast was used by Europeans from the 16th century to the early 19th to refer to the coastal regions of North Africa inhabited by Berber people. Today this land is part of the modern nations of Morocco, Algeria and Libya; the English term "Barbary" could refer to all the Berber lands whether coastal or not, as seen in European geographical and political maps published during the 17th–20th centuries. The name derives from the Berber people of North Africa, from Greek Bàrbaroi and the Arabic Barbar, meaning "barbaric". In the West, the name evoked the Barbary pirates and Barbary slave traders based on that coast—who attacked ships and coastal settlements in the Mediterranean Sea and eastern North Atlantic Ocean, captured and traded slaves or goods from Europe and sub-Saharan Africa; these actions provoked the Barbary Wars of the early 19th century. Barbary was not always a unified political entity. From the 16th century onwards, it was divided into the political entities of the Regency of Algiers and Tripolitania.
Major rulers petty monarchs during the times of the Barbary states' plundering parties included the Pasha or Dey of Algiers, the Bey of Tunis and the Bey of Tripoli. Before the territory was divided between Ifriqiya, a west-central Algerian state centered on Tlemcen or Tiaret. Powerful Berber dynasties such as the Almohads and thereafter the Hafsids unified it for short periods. From a European perspective, Tripoli in modern-day Libya, was considered its capital or chief city—though Marrakesh in Morocco was the largest and most important Berber city at the time; some saw Tangiers in Morocco as the capital. The first United States military land action overseas, executed by the U. S. Marines and Navy, was the Battle of Derna, Tripoli in April 1805, it formed part of an effort to destroy all of the Barbary pirates, to free American slaves in captivity, to put an end to piracy acts between these warring tribes on the part of the Barbary states, which were themselves member states of the Ottoman Empire.
The opening line of the Marines' Hymn refers to this action: "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli..." This was the first time the United States Marine Corps took part in offensive actions outside of the United States. The modern word razzia is, via Italian and French, from Algerian Arabic ghaziya referring to slave raids conducted by Barbary pirates. Ottoman Algeria Ottoman Tripolitania Ottoman Tunisia Turkish Abductions Republic of Salé Langue de Barbarie Barbary duck "When Europeans Were Slaves: Research Suggests White Slavery Was Much More Common Than Previously Believed", Ohio State University
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listen)) is a Portuguese island 43 kilometres (27 mi) northeast of Madeira Island in the North Atlantic Ocean; it is the northernmost and easternmost island of the archipelago of Madeira, located in the Atlantic Ocean west of Europe and Africa.
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