1.
Ecbatana
Ecbatana was an ancient city in Media in western Iran. It is believed that Ecbatana is in Tell Hagmatana, near Hamedan, but the history of the city is controversial. Excavations at Kaboutar Ahang have revealed stone age tools and pottery from 1400 to 1200 BC, according to Herodotus, Ecbatana was chosen as the Medes capital in the late 8th century BC by Deioces. Under the Persian kings, situated at the foot of Mount Alvand, later, it became the capital of the Parthian kings, at which time it became their main mint, producing drachm and assorted bronze denominations. It is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible under the name Achmetha, in 330 BC, Ecbatana was the site of the murder of the Macedonian general Parmenion by order of Alexander the Great. Ecbatana was first excavated in 1913 by Charles Fossey, another excavation was conducted in 1977. The Greeks thought Ecbatana to be the capital of Medes empire and it is alleged that he surrounded his palace in Ecbatana with seven concentric walls of different colours.
In the 5th century BC, Herodotus wrote of Ecbatana, The Medes built the city now called Ecbatana, the plan of the place is, that each of the walls should out-top the one beyond it by the battlements. The nature of the ground, which is a hill, favors this arrangements in some degree. The number of the circles is seven, the royal palace, the circuit of the outer wall is very nearly the same with that of Athens. On this wall the battlements are white, of the black, of the third scarlet, of the fourth blue. The last two have their battlements coated respectively with silver and gold, all these fortifications Deioces had caused to be raised for himself and his own palace. There is currently no evidence of Median existence in Hagmatana hill prior to the Parthian era afterwards, Assyrian sources never mention Hagmatana/Ecbatana. The Sagbita mentioned by Assyrian sources was located in the proximity of the cities Kishesim, sir Henry Rawlinson attempted to prove that there was a second and older Ecbatana in Media Atropatene on the site of the modern Takht-i-Suleiman.
However, the cuneiform texts imply that there was one city of the name. Ecbatana is the capital of Astyages, which was taken by the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great in the sixth year of Nabonidus. Inscribed Column Bases from Hamadan, vol,39, pp. 99–117,2001 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, Hugh, ed. article name needed
2.
Anatolia
Anatolia, in geography known as Asia Minor, Asian Turkey, Anatolian peninsula, or Anatolian plateau, is the westernmost protrusion of Asia, which makes up the majority of modern-day Turkey. The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Sea of Marmara forms a connection between the Black and Aegean Seas through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits and separates Anatolia from Thrace on the European mainland. Traditionally, Anatolia is considered to extend in the east to a line between the Gulf of Alexandretta and the Black Sea to the Armenian Highlands, traditionally Anatolia is the territory that comprises approximately the western two-thirds of the Asian part of Turkey. The Turkification of Anatolia began under the Seljuk Empire in the late 11th century, various non-Turkic languages continue to be spoken by minorities in Anatolia today, including Kurdish, Armenian, Laz and Greek. Traditionally, Anatolia is considered to extend in the east to a line running from the Gulf of Alexandretta to the Black Sea.
This traditional geographical definition is used, for example, in the latest edition of Merriam-Websters Geographical Dictionary, under this definition, Anatolia is bounded to the east by the Armenian Highlands, and the Euphrates before that river bends to the southeast to enter Mesopotamia. To the southeast, it is bounded by the ranges that separate it from the Orontes valley in Syria, the first name the Greeks used for the Anatolian peninsula was Ἀσία, presumably after the name of the Assuwa league in western Anatolia. As the name of Asia came to be extended to areas east of the Mediterranean. The name Anatolia derives from the Greek ἀνατολή meaning “the East” or more literally “sunrise”, the precise reference of this term has varied over time, perhaps originally referring to the Aeolian and Dorian colonies on the west coast of Asia Minor. In the Byzantine Empire, the Anatolic Theme was a theme covering the western, the modern Turkish form of Anatolia is Anadolu, which again derives from the Greek name Aνατολή.
The Russian male name Anatoly and the French Anatole share the same linguistic origin, in English the name of Turkey for ancient Anatolia first appeared c. It is derived from the Medieval Latin Turchia, which was used by the Europeans to define the Seljuk controlled parts of Anatolia after the Battle of Manzikert. Human habitation in Anatolia dates back to the Paleolithic, neolithic Anatolia has been proposed as the homeland of the Indo-European language family, although linguists tend to favour a origin in the steppes north of the Black Sea. However, it is clear that the Anatolian languages, the oldest branch of Indo-European, have spoken in Anatolia since at least the 19th century BC. The earliest historical records of Anatolia stem from the southeast of the region and are from the Mesopotamian-based Akkadian Empire during the reign of Sargon of Akkad in the 24th century BC, scholars generally believe the earliest indigenous populations of Anatolia were the Hattians and Hurrians. The region was famous for exporting raw materials, and areas of Hattian-, one of the numerous cuneiform records dated circa 20th century BC, found in Anatolia at the Assyrian colony of Kanesh, uses an advanced system of trading computations and credit lines.
They were speakers of an Indo-European language, the Hittite language, originating from Nesa, they conquered Hattusa in the 18th century BC, imposing themselves over Hattian- and Hurrian-speaking populations. According to the most widely accepted Kurgan theory on the Proto-Indo-European homeland, the Hittites adopted the cuneiform script, invented in Mesopotamia
3.
Michael Ventris
A student of languages, Ventris had pursued the decipherment as a vocation since his adolescence. After creating a new field of study, Ventris died in an accident a few weeks before the publication of his definitive work. Ventris was born into an army family. His father, Edward Francis Vereker Ventris, reached the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Indian Army, his career was brought to an end, as he contracted tuberculosis. His grandfather, Francis Ventris, was a major-general who ended his career as Commander of British Forces in China, during his time in England, Edward Ventris met and married Anna Dorothea Janasz, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish immigrant landholder from Poland. Michael Ventris was their only child, health became an issue early on in Ventriss life, as he developed at a young age chronic bronchial asthma. The family moved to Switzerland for eight years, seeking a clean, a number of health clinics and spas catered to the physical well-being of Ventris, constantly observing his well-being.
Ventris started school in Gstaad, where classes were taught in French and he soon was fluent in both languages and showing proficiency for Swiss German. He was capable of learning a language within a matter of weeks and his mother, of Polish descent, often spoke to him in her own tongue, in which he was fluent by the age of eight. At this time, he was reading Adolf Ermans Die Hieroglyphen in German, in 1931, the Ventris family returned home. Michaels fathers physical condition was worsening as he got older, from 1931 to 1935 Ventris was sent to Bickley Hill School in Stowe. His parents, unable to continue living together, divorced in 1935, at this time, he secured a scholarship to Stowe School for Boys Stowe School, quartered in an 18th-century stately home. At Stowe he learned some Latin and classical Greek, when he was not away at school, Ventris lived with his mother, before 1935 in coastal hotels, after 1935 in the avant garde Berthold Lubetkins Highpoint modernist apartments in Highgate.
His mothers acquaintances, who frequented the house, included many sculptors, the money for her sophisticated lifestyle came from the Polish estates. Ventriss father died in 1938 when Ventris was 16 years old, dora became administrator of the estate. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939 the family holdings in that country were gone, Ventris lost his mother to clinical depression and an overdose of barbiturates. He never spoke of her, assuming instead an ebullient and energetic manner in whatever he decided to do, at the same time they noted that he had a dark and mysterious side as well, associated with feelings that he was a fraud, and not a true genius. A friend of the family, Russian sculptor Naum Gabo, took Ventris under his wing, Ventris said that Gabo was the most family he had ever had
4.
Red hair
Red hair occurs naturally in 1–2% of the human population. It occurs more frequently in people of northern or western European ancestry, Red hair appears most commonly in people with two copies of a recessive allele on chromosome 16 which produces an altered version of the MC1R protein. Red hair varies in hues from a deep burgundy or bright copper through to burnt orange or red-orange and it is characterized by high levels of the reddish pigment pheomelanin and relatively low levels of the dark pigment eumelanin. It is associated with skin color, lighter eye colors, freckles. Cultural reactions have varied from ridicule to admiration, many stereotypes exist regarding redheads. The term redhead has been in use since at least 1510, several accounts by Greek writers mention redheaded people. A fragment by the poet Xenophanes describes the Thracians as blue-eyed and red-haired, in Asia, red hair has been found among the ancient Tocharians, who occupied the Tarim Basin in what is now the northwesternmost province of China.
Caucasian Tarim mummies have been found with red hair dating to the 2nd millennium BC, reddish-brown hair is found amongst some Polynesians, and is especially common in some tribes and family groups. In Polynesian culture reddish hair has traditionally seen as a sign of descent from high-ranking ancestors. Red hair is most commonly found at the northern and western fringes of Europe, redheads today are commonly associated with the Celtic Nations and to a far lesser extent the Germanic peoples. Over the years there have been a number of studies measuring the percentage of redheads within the UK, exact figures, and methods, but they all are in agreement that the highest percentages in the world are within these isles. England has a red hair prevalence of around 4%, with 28. 5% of population having the allele, in Ireland, the percentage of population with red hair is estimated to be at around 10%. According to Britains DNA,34. 7% of the Irish population carry the allele for red hair, Scotland has a very high percentage with around 6% of the population having red hair.
Previously it was estimated that red hair occurrence in Scotland was around 13%, the largest ever study of hair colour in Scotland, which analysed over 500,000 people in 1907, found the percentage of Scots with red hair to be 5. 3%. 38% of Welsh people carry the red-haired allele, a 1956 study of hair colour among British army recruits found higher levels of red hair in Wales and the English Border counties. Carleton Coons 1939 book The Races of Europe stated that rufosity often occurred in Montenegrins, in Italy, red hair is found at a frequency of 0. 57% of the total population, without variation in frequency across the different regions of the country. In Sardinia, red hair is found at a frequency of 0. 24% of the population, the Berber populations of Morocco and northern Algeria have occasional redheads. Red hair frequency is especially significant among the Riffians from Morocco and Kabyles from Algeria, the Queen of Morocco, Lalla Salma wife of king Mohammed VI, has red hair
5.
Blond
Blond, blonde, or fair hair, is a hair color characterized by low levels of the dark pigment eumelanin. The resultant visible hue depends on various factors, but always has some sort of yellowish color, the color can be from the very pale blond to reddish strawberry blond or golden-brownish blond colors. On the Fischer–Saller scale, blond color ranges from A to O, the word blond is first documented in English in 1481 and derives from Old French blund, blont meaning a colour midway between golden and light chestnut. It gradually eclipsed the native term fair, of meaning, from Old English fæġer. This earlier use of fair survives in the proper name Fairfax, the French word blond has two possible origins. Also, Old English beblonden meant dyed as ancient Germanic warriors were noted for dyeing their hair, linguists who favor a Latin origin for the word say that Medieval Latin blundus was a vulgar pronunciation of Latin flavus, meaning yellow. Most authorities, especially French, attest the Frankish origin, the word was reintroduced into English in the 17th century from French, and was for some time considered French, in French, blonde is a feminine adjective, it describes a woman with blonde hair.
Blond, with its continued gender-varied usage, is one of few adjectives in written English to retain separate masculine and feminine grammatical genders, each of the two forms, however, is pronounced identically. The Oxford English Dictionary records that the phrase big blond beast was used in the 20th century to refer specifically to men of the Nordic type. The OED records that blond as an adjective is used with reference to women, in which case it is likely to be spelt blonde. By the early 1990s, blonde moment or being a dumb blonde had come into common parlance to mean an instance of a person, another hair color word of French origin, functions in the same way in orthodox English. Brunette can be used, like blonde, to describe a mixed-gender populace, the OED quotes Grant Allen, The nation which resulted. Blond and blonde are used to refer to objects that have a color reminiscent of fair hair. Various subcategories of blond hair have been defined to describe the different shades and sources of the color more accurately.
Common examples include the following, ash-blond, ashen or grayish blond, bleached blond, bottle blond, or peroxide blond terms used to refer to artificially colored blond hair. Blond/flaxen, when distinguished from other varieties, blond by itself refers to a light but not whitish blond, with no traces of red, gold, or brown, dirty blond or dishwater blond, dark blond with flecks of golden blond and brown. Golden blond, a darker to rich, golden-yellow blond, honey blond or caramel blond, dark iridescent blond. Platinum blond or towheaded, whitish-blond, almost all platinum blonds are children, platinum blond is often used to describe bleached hair, while towheaded generally refers to natural hair color
6.
Athenaeus
Athenaeus of Naucratis was a Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourishing about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD. The Suda says only that he lived in the times of Marcus Aurelius, but the contempt with which he speaks of Commodus and he was a contemporary of Adrantus. Several of his publications are lost, but the fifteen-volume Deipnosophistae mostly survives, Athenaeus himself states that he was the author of a treatise on the thratta, a kind of fish mentioned by Archippus and other comic poets, and of a history of the Syrian kings. The Deipnosophistae, which means dinner-table philosophers, survives in fifteen books, the first two books, and parts of the third and fifteenth, are extant only in epitome, but otherwise the work seems to be entire. It is an immense store-house of information, chiefly on matters connected with dining, but containing remarks on music, dances, games and luxury. Nearly 800 writers and 2500 separate works are referred to by Athenaeus, were it not for Athenaeus, much valuable information about the ancient world would be missing, and many ancient Greek authors such as Archestratus would be almost entirely unknown.
Book XIII, for example, is an important source for the study of sexuality in classical and Hellenistic Greece, and it is thus a dialogue within a dialogue, after the manner of Plato, but the conversation extends to enormous length. The topics for discussion generally arise from the course of the dinner itself, the guests supposedly quote from memory. The actual sources of the preserved in the Deipnosophistae remain obscure. The twenty-four named guests include individuals called Galen and Ulpian, but they are all probably fictitious personages, the complete version of the text, with the gaps noted above, is preserved in only one manuscript, conventionally referred to as A. The epitomized version of the text is preserved in two manuscripts, conventionally known as C and E, the standard edition of the text is Kaibels Teubner. The standard numbering is drawn largely from Casaubon, one of Athenaeus friends, wrote about the untimely death of Athenaeus in the Athenaeum. It describes the tale of angry peasants who believed that Athenaeus writings directly contradicted their beliefs of the Mithras cult.
One night in 191 A. D. they kidnapped him, when they discovered that he continued writing the Deipnosophistae, twenty-three men stormed into his home and strangled him to death. It is unclear whether Athenaeus finished his work on his own or Timocrates finished it for him, Athenaeus described what may be considered the first patents. He mentions that in 500 BC, in the Greek city of Sybaris, the victor was given the exclusive right to prepare his dish for one year. Swallow song of Rhodes David Braund and John Wilkins and his world, reading Greek culture in the Roman Empire, christian Jacob, The Web of Athenaeus, Washington, DC, Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University,2013. D. Yonge, at The Literature Collection The Deipnosophists, long excerpts in searchable HTML format, at attalus
7.
Linear B
Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of Greek. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries, the oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1450 BC. It is descended from the older Linear A, an earlier script used for writing the Minoan language, as is the Cypriot syllabary. Linear B, found mainly in the archives at Knossos, Pylos and Mycenae. The succeeding period, known as the Greek Dark Ages, provides no evidence of the use of writing and it is the only one of the prehistoric Aegean scripts to have been deciphered, by English architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris. Linear B consists of around 87 syllabic signs and over 100 ideographic signs and these ideograms or signifying signs symbolize objects or commodities. They have no value and are never used as word signs in writing a sentence. The application of Linear B appears to have been confined to administrative contexts, in all the thousands of clay tablets, a relatively small number of different hands have been detected,45 in Pylos and 66 in Knossos.
It is possible that the script was used only by a guild of professional scribes who served the central palaces, once the palaces were destroyed, the script disappeared. Linear B has roughly 200 signs, divided into syllabic signs with phonetic values, the representations and naming of these signs have been standardized by a series of international colloquia starting with the first in Paris in 1956. Colloquia continue, the 13th occurred in 2010 in Paris, many of the signs are identical or similar to those in Linear A, Linear A encodes an as-yet unknown language, and it is uncertain whether similar signs had the same phonetic values. The grid developed during decipherment by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick of phonetic values for syllabic signs is shown below, initial consonants are in the leftmost column, vowels are in the top row beneath the title. The transcription of the syllable is listed next to the sign along with Bennetts identifying number for the sign preceded by an asterisk, in cases where the transcription of the sign remains in doubt, Bennetts number serves to identify the sign.
The signs on the tablets and sealings often show considerable variation from each other, discovery of the reasons for the variation and possible semantic differences is a topic of ongoing debate in Mycenaean studies. Many of these were identified by the edition and are shown in the special values below. The second edition relates, It may be taken as axiomatic that there are no true homophones, the unconfirmed identifications of *34 and *35 as ai2 and ai3 were removed. Other values remain unknown, mainly because of scarcity of evidence concerning them, note that *34 and *35 are mirror images of each other but whether this graphic relationship indicates a phonetic one remains unconfirmed. In recent times, CIPEM inherited the authority of Bennett
8.
Aristophanes
Aristophanes, son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion, was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete and these, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and are used to define it. Also known as the Father of Comedy and the Prince of Ancient Comedy and his second play, The Babylonians, was denounced by the demagogue Cleon as a slander against the Athenian polis. In my opinion, he says through the Chorus in that play, less is known about Aristophanes than about his plays. In fact, his plays are the source of information about him. It was conventional in Old Comedy for the Chorus to speak on behalf of the author during a called the parabasis. However, these facts relate almost entirely to his career as a dramatist, Aristophanes claimed to be writing for a clever and discerning audience, yet he declared that other times would judge the audience according to its reception of his plays.
He sometimes boasts of his originality as a dramatist yet his plays consistently espouse opposition to new influences in Athenian society. He caricatured leading figures in the arts, in politics, such caricatures seem to imply that Aristophanes was an old-fashioned conservative, yet that view of him leads to contradictions. It has been argued that Aristophanes produced plays mainly to entertain the audience, an elaborate series of lotteries, designed to prevent prejudice and corruption, reduced the voting judges at the City Dionysia to just five in number. These judges probably reflected the mood of the audiences yet there is uncertainty about the composition of those audiences. The theatres were certainly huge, with seating for at least 10000 at the Theatre of Dionysus, the conservative views expressed in the plays might therefore reflect the attitudes of the dominant group in an unrepresentative audience. The production process might have influenced the views expressed in the plays, throughout most of Aristophanes career, the Chorus was essential to a plays success and it was recruited and funded by a choregus, a wealthy citizen appointed to the task by one of the archons.
Thus the political conservatism of the plays may reflect the views of the wealthiest section of Athenian society, when Aristophanes first play The Banqueters was produced, Athens was an ambitious, imperial power and the Peloponnesian War was only in its fourth year. His plays often express pride in the achievement of the older generation yet they are not jingoistic, the plays are particularly scathing in criticism of war profiteers, among whom populists such as Cleon figure prominently. However it is whether he led or merely responded to changes in audience expectations. Aristophanes won second prize at the City Dionysia in 427 BC with his first play The Banqueters and he won first prize there with his next play, The Babylonians. Some influential citizens, notably Cleon, reviled the play as slander against the polis, Cleon seems to have had no real power to limit or control Aristophanes, the caricatures of him continued up to and even beyond his death
9.
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a historical period characterized by the use of bronze, proto-writing, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the principal period of the three-age Stone-Bronze-Iron system, as proposed in modern times by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen. An ancient civilization is defined to be in the Bronze Age either by smelting its own copper and alloying with tin, arsenic, or other metals, or by trading for bronze from production areas elsewhere. Copper-tin ores are rare, as reflected in the fact there were no tin bronzes in Western Asia before trading in bronze began in the third millennium BC. Worldwide, the Bronze Age generally followed the Neolithic period, with the Chalcolithic serving as a transition, although the Iron Age generally followed the Bronze Age, in some areas, the Iron Age intruded directly on the Neolithic. Bronze Age cultures differed in their development of the first writing, according to archaeological evidence, cultures in Mesopotamia and Egypt developed the earliest viable writing systems.
The overall period is characterized by use of bronze, though the place and time of the introduction. Human-made tin bronze technology requires set production techniques, tin must be mined and smelted separately, added to molten copper to make bronze alloy. The Bronze Age was a time of use of metals. The dating of the foil has been disputed, the Bronze Age in the ancient Near East began with the rise of Sumer in the 4th millennium BC. Societies in the region laid the foundations for astronomy and mathematics, the usual tripartite division into an Early and Late Bronze Age is not used. Instead, a division based on art-historical and historical characteristics is more common. The cities of the Ancient Near East housed several tens of thousands of people, ur in the Middle Bronze Age and Babylon in the Late Bronze Age similarly had large populations. The earliest mention of Babylonia appears on a tablet from the reign of Sargon of Akkad in the 23rd century BC, the Amorite dynasty established the city-state of Babylon in the 19th century BC.
Over 100 years later, it took over the other city-states. Babylonia adopted the written Semitic Akkadian language for official use, by that time, the Sumerian language was no longer spoken, but was still in religious use. Elam was an ancient civilization located to the east of Mesopotamia, in the Old Elamite period, Elam consisted of kingdoms on the Iranian plateau, centered in Anshan, and from the mid-2nd millennium BC, it was centered in Susa in the Khuzestan lowlands. Its culture played a role in the Gutian Empire and especially during the Achaemenid dynasty that succeeded it
10.
Drinking horn
A drinking horn is the horn of a bovid used as a drinking vessel. Drinking horns remain an important accessory in the culture of ritual toasting in Georgia in particular, Drinking vessels made from glass, ceramics or metal styled in the shape of drinking horns are known from antiquity. The ancient Greek term for a horn was simply keras. To be distinguished from the drinking-horn proper is the rhyton, a made in the shape of a horn with an outlet at the pointed end. Both in the Greek and the Scythian sphere, vessels of clay or metal shaped like horns were used alongside actual horns from an early time, a Late Archaic Attic red-figure vase shows Dionysus and a satyr each holding a drinking horn. During Classical Antiquity, the Thracians and Scythians in particular were known for their custom of drinking from horns, xenophons account of his dealings with the Thracian leader Seuthes suggests that drinking horns were integral part of the drinking kata ton Thrakion nomon. The Scythian elite used horn-shaped rhyta made entirely from precious metal, a notable example is the 5th century BC gold-and-silver rhython in the shape of a Pegasus which was found in 1982 in Ulyap, now at the Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow.
This typology became standard in Soviet-era archaeology, there are a few artistic representation of Scythans actually drinking from horns from the rim. After these early specimens, there is a gap with only sparse evidence of Scythian drinking horns during the 6th century, Drinking horns re-appear in the context of Pontic burials in the 5th century BC, these are the specimens classified as Scythian drinking horns by Maksimova. The 5th-century BC practice of depositing drinking horns with precious metal fittings as grave goods for deceased warriors appears to originate in the Kuban region, in the 4th century BC, the practice spreads throughout the Pontic Steppe. Rhyta, mostly of Achaemenid or Thracian import, continue to be found in Scythian burials, around the midpoint of the 4th century BC, a new type of solid silver drinking horn with strong curvature appears. While the slightly curving horn type is found throughout the Pontic Steppe, the custom of depositing drinking horns as grave goods begins to subside towards the end of the 4th century BC.
In the Crimean peninsula, such depictions appear somewhat later, from the 5th century BC, Scythian drinking horns have been found almost exclusively in warrior burials. This has been taken as suggesting an association of the drinking horn with the Scythian cult of kingship. In the influential interpretation due to M. I, the Scythian ruler received the drinking horn from a deity as a symbol of his investiture. This interpretation is based on a number of depictions of a Scythian warrior drinking from a standing or kneeling next to a seated woman. Rolle interpreted the woman not as a goddess but as a high-ranking Scythian woman performing a ritual office, the Scythian drinking horns are clearly associated with the consumption of wine. The drinking horn reached Central Europe with the Iron Age, in the context of Thraco-Cimmerian cultural transmission
11.
Sofia
Sofia is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria. The city has a population of 1.26 million, while 1.68 million people live in its metropolitan area, the city is located at the foot of Vitosha Mountain in the western part of the country, within less than 50 kilometres drive from the Serbian border. Its location in the centre of the Balkan peninsula means that it is the midway between the Black Sea and the Adriatic Sea, whereas the Aegean Sea is the closest to it, Sofia has been an area of human habitation since at least 7000 BC. Being Bulgarias primate city, Sofia is a hometown of many of the local universities, cultural institutions. Sofia is one of the top 10 best places for business in the world. Sofia is Europes most affordable capital to visit as of 2013, for the longest time the city possessed a Thracian name, derived from the tribe Serdi, who were either of Thracian, Celtic, or mixed Thracian-Celtic origin. It seems that the first written mention of Serdica was made during his reign, during the Romans civitas Serdenisium was mentioned the brightest city of the Serdi in official inscriptions.
The city was major throughout the past ever since Antiquity, when Roman emperor Constantine the Great referred to it as my Rome, other names given to Sofia, such as Serdonpolis and Triaditza, were mentioned by Byzantine Greek sources or coins. The Slavic name Sredets, which is related to middle and to the citys earliest name, the city was called Atralissa by the Arab traveller Idrisi and Strelisa, Stralitsa or Stralitsion by the Crusaders. The name Sofia comes from the Saint Sofia Church, as opposed to the prevailing Slavic etymology among Bulgarian cities and towns. It is ultimately derived from the Egyptian Kemetic word sbÅ, meaning star, door and wisdom and this was a tradition of collection of wise literature, shared between Mediterranean cultures, which was called sophia in Greek. In these documents the city is called Sofia, but at the time the region and the citys inhabitants are still called Sredecheski. The city became popular to the Ottomans by the name Sofya. In 1879 there was a dispute about what the name of the new Bulgarian capital should be, the citys name is pronounced by Bulgarians with a stress on the o, in contrast with the tendency of foreigners to place the stress on i.
The female given name Sofia is pronounced by Bulgarians with a stress on the i, Sofia has an area of 492 km2, while Sofia City Province has an area of 1344 km2. Sofias development as a significant settlement owes much to its position in the Balkans. It is situated in western Bulgaria, at the foot of the Vitosha mountain, in the Sofia Valley that is surrounded by the Balkan mountains to the north. The valley has an altitude of 550 metres
12.
Minoan civilization
The Minoan civilization was an Aegean Bronze Age civilization on the island of Crete and other Aegean islands which flourished from about 2600 to 1100 BC. It preceded the Mycenaean civilization of Ancient Greece, the civilization was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century through the work of British archaeologist Arthur Evans. It has been described as the earliest of its kind in Europe, the term Minoan, which refers to the mythical King Minos, originally described the pottery of the period. Minos was associated in Greek mythology with the labyrinth and the Minotaur, according to Homer, Crete once had 90 cities. The Minoan period saw trade between Crete and Aegean and Mediterranean settlements, particularly the Near East and artists, the Minoan cultural influence reached beyond Crete to the Cyclades, Egypts Old Kingdom, copper-bearing Cyprus and the Levantine coast, and Anatolia. Some of its best art is preserved in the city of Akrotiri on the island of Santorini, although the Minoan language and writing systems remain undecipherable and are subjects of academic dispute, they apparently conveyed a language entirely different from the Greek.
The reason for the end of the Minoan period is unclear, theories include Mycenaean invasions from mainland Greece, the term Minoan refers to the mythical King Minos of Knossos. Its origin is debated, but it is attributed to archeologist Arthur Evans. Minos was associated in Greek mythology with the labyrinth, which Evans identified with the site at Knossos. However, Karl Hoeck had already used the title Das Minoische Kreta in 1825 for volume two of his Kreta, this appears to be the first known use of the word Minoan to mean ancient Cretan, Evans said that applied it, not invented it. Hoeck, with no idea that the archaeological Crete had existed, had in mind the Crete of mythology, although Evans 1931 claim that the term was unminted before he used it was called a brazen suggestion by Karadimas and Momigliano, he coined its archaeological meaning. Instead of dating the Minoan period, archaeologists use two systems of relative chronology, the first, created by Evans and modified by archaeologists, is based on pottery styles and imported Egyptian artifacts.
Evans system divides the Minoan period into three eras, early and late. These eras are subdivided—for example, Early Minoan I, II and III, another dating system, proposed by Greek archaeologist Nicolas Platon, is based on the development of architectural complexes known as palaces at Knossos, Phaistos and Kato Zakros. Platon divides the Minoan period into pre-, proto-, neo-, the relationship between the systems in the table includes approximate calendar dates from Warren and Hankey. The Thera eruption occurred during a phase of the LM IA period. Efforts to establish the volcanic eruptions date have been controversial, the eruption is identified as a natural event catastrophic for the culture, leading to its rapid collapse. Although stone-tool evidence exists that hominins may have reached Crete as early as 130,000 years ago, evidence for the first anatomically-modern human presence dates to 10, the oldest evidence of modern human habitation on Crete are pre-ceramic Neolithic farming-community remains which date to about 7000 BC
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