England
England is a country, part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to Scotland to the north-northwest; the Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south; the country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight. The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, but takes its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe deriving its name from the Anglia peninsula, who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in the 10th century, since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world; the English language, the Anglican Church, English law – the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world – developed in England, the country's parliamentary system of government has been adopted by other nations.
The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England's terrain is chiefly low hills and plains in central and southern England. However, there is upland and mountainous terrain in the west; the capital is London, which has the largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. England's population of over 55 million comprises 84% of the population of the United Kingdom concentrated around London, the South East, conurbations in the Midlands, the North West, the North East, Yorkshire, which each developed as major industrial regions during the 19th century; the Kingdom of England – which after 1535 included Wales – ceased being a separate sovereign state on 1 May 1707, when the Acts of Union put into effect the terms agreed in the Treaty of Union the previous year, resulting in a political union with the Kingdom of Scotland to create the Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The name "England" is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means "land of the Angles"; the Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages. The Angles came from the Anglia peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area of the Baltic Sea; the earliest recorded use of the term, as "Engla londe", is in the late-ninth-century translation into Old English of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The term was used in a different sense to the modern one, meaning "the land inhabited by the English", it included English people in what is now south-east Scotland but was part of the English kingdom of Northumbria; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that the Domesday Book of 1086 covered the whole of England, meaning the English kingdom, but a few years the Chronicle stated that King Malcolm III went "out of Scotlande into Lothian in Englaland", thus using it in the more ancient sense.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its modern spelling was first used in 1538. The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, in which the Latin word Anglii is used; the etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars. How and why a term derived from the name of a tribe, less significant than others, such as the Saxons, came to be used for the entire country and its people is not known, but it seems this is related to the custom of calling the Germanic people in Britain Angli Saxones or English Saxons to distinguish them from continental Saxons of Old Saxony between the Weser and Eider rivers in Northern Germany. In Scottish Gaelic, another language which developed on the island of Great Britain, the Saxon tribe gave their name to the word for England. An alternative name for England is Albion; the name Albion referred to the entire island of Great Britain. The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus the 4th-century BC De Mundo: "Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the ocean that flows round the earth.
In it are two large islands called Britannia. But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, i.e. it was written in the Graeco-Roman period or afterwards. The word Albion or insula Albionum has two possible origins, it either derives from a cognate of the Latin albus meaning white, a reference to the white cliffs of Dover or from the phrase the "island of the Albiones" in the now lost Massaliote Periplus, attested through Avienus' Ora Maritima to which the former served as a source. Albion is now applied to England in a more poetic capacity. Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England and made popular by its use in Arthurian legend; the earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximate
Rose
A rose is a woody perennial flowering plant of the genus Rosa, in the family Rosaceae, or the flower it bears. There are over thousands of cultivars, they form a group of plants that can be erect shrubs, climbing, or trailing, with stems that are armed with sharp prickles. Flowers vary in size and shape and are large and showy, in colours ranging from white through yellows and reds. Most species are native to Asia, with smaller numbers native to Europe, North America, northwestern Africa. Species and hybrids are all grown for their beauty and are fragrant. Roses have acquired cultural significance in many societies. Rose plants range in size from compact, miniature roses, to climbers that can reach seven meters in height. Different species hybridize and this has been used in the development of the wide range of garden roses; the name rose comes from French, itself from Latin rosa, borrowed from Oscan, from Greek ρόδον rhódon, itself borrowed from Old Persian wrd-, related to Avestan varəδa, Sogdian ward, Parthian wâr.
The leaves are borne alternately on the stem. In most species they are 5 to 15 centimetres long, with 5–9 leaflets and basal stipules. Most roses are deciduous but a few are evergreen or nearly so; the flowers of most species have five petals, with the exception of Rosa sericea, which has only four. Each petal is divided into two distinct lobes and is white or pink, though in a few species yellow or red. Beneath the petals are five sepals; these may be long enough to be visible when viewed from above and appear as green points alternating with the rounded petals. There are multiple superior ovaries. Roses are insect-pollinated in nature; the aggregate fruit of the rose is a berry-like structure. Many of the domestic cultivars do not produce hips, as the flowers are so petalled that they do not provide access for pollination; the hips of most species are red. Each hip comprises an outer fleshy layer, the hypanthium, which contains 5–160 "seeds" embedded in a matrix of fine, but stiff, hairs. Rose hips of some species the dog rose and rugosa rose, are rich in vitamin C, among the richest sources of any plant.
The hips are eaten by fruit-eating birds such as thrushes and waxwings, which disperse the seeds in their droppings. Some birds finches eat the seeds; the sharp growths along a rose stem, though called "thorns", are technically prickles, outgrowths of the epidermis, unlike true thorns, which are modified stems. Rose prickles are sickle-shaped hooks, which aid the rose in hanging onto other vegetation when growing over it; some species such as Rosa rugosa and Rosa pimpinellifolia have densely packed straight prickles an adaptation to reduce browsing by animals, but possibly an adaptation to trap wind-blown sand and so reduce erosion and protect their roots. Despite the presence of prickles, roses are browsed by deer. A few species of roses have only vestigial prickles; the genus Rosa is subdivided into four subgenera: Hulthemia containing two species from southwest Asia, Rosa persica and Rosa berberifolia, which are the only roses without compound leaves or stipules. Hesperrhodos contains Rosa stellata, from North America.
Platyrhodon with one species from east Asia, Rosa roxburghii. Rosa containing all the other roses; this subgenus is subdivided into 11 sections. Banksianae – white and yellow flowered roses from China. Bracteatae – three species, two from China and one from India. Caninae – pink and white flowered species from Asia and North Africa. Carolinae – white and bright pink flowered species all from North America. Chinensis – white, yellow and mixed-color roses from China and Burma. Gallicanae – pink to crimson and striped flowered roses from western Asia and Europe. Gymnocarpae – one species in western North America, others in east Asia. Laevigatae – a single white flowered species from China. Pimpinellifoliae – white, bright yellow and striped roses from Asia and Europe. Rosa – white, lilac and red roses from everywhere but North Africa. Synstylae – white and crimson flowered roses from all areas. Roses are best known as ornamental plants grown for their flowers in the garden and sometimes indoors, they have been used for commercial perfumery and commercial cut flower crops.
Some are used as landscape plants, for hedging and for other utilitarian purposes such as game cover and slope stabilization. The majority of ornamental roses are hybrids. A few species roses are grown for attractive or scented foliage, ornamental thorns or for their showy fruit. Ornamental roses have been cultivated for millennia, with the earliest known cultivation known to date from at least 500 BC in Mediterranean countries, P
Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages lasted from the 5th to the 15th century. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and merged into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery; the Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early and Late Middle Ages. Population decline, counterurbanisation, collapse of centralized authority and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in Late Antiquity, continued in the Early Middle Ages; the large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire—came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, an Islamic empire, after conquest by Muhammad's successors. Although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break with classical antiquity was not complete.
The still-sizeable Byzantine Empire, Rome's direct continuation, survived in the Eastern Mediterranean and remained a major power. The empire's law code, the Corpus Juris Civilis or "Code of Justinian", was rediscovered in Northern Italy in 1070 and became admired in the Middle Ages. In the West, most kingdoms incorporated the few extant Roman institutions. Monasteries were founded; the Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty established the Carolingian Empire during the 8th and early 9th century. It covered much of Western Europe but succumbed to the pressures of internal civil wars combined with external invasions: Vikings from the north, Magyars from the east, Saracens from the south. During the High Middle Ages, which began after 1000, the population of Europe increased as technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to flourish and the Medieval Warm Period climate change allowed crop yields to increase. Manorialism, the organisation of peasants into villages that owed rent and labour services to the nobles, feudalism, the political structure whereby knights and lower-status nobles owed military service to their overlords in return for the right to rent from lands and manors, were two of the ways society was organised in the High Middle Ages.
The Crusades, first preached in 1095, were military attempts by Western European Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralised nation-states, reducing crime and violence but making the ideal of a unified Christendom more distant. Intellectual life was marked by scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasised joining faith to reason, by the founding of universities; the theology of Thomas Aquinas, the paintings of Giotto, the poetry of Dante and Chaucer, the travels of Marco Polo, the Gothic architecture of cathedrals such as Chartres are among the outstanding achievements toward the end of this period and into the Late Middle Ages. The Late Middle Ages was marked by difficulties and calamities including famine and war, which diminished the population of Europe. Controversy and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the interstate conflict, civil strife, peasant revolts that occurred in the kingdoms. Cultural and technological developments transformed European society, concluding the Late Middle Ages and beginning the early modern period.
The Middle Ages is one of the three major periods in the most enduring scheme for analysing European history: classical civilisation, or Antiquity. The "Middle Ages" first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas or "middle season". In early usage, there were many variants, including medium aevum, or "middle age", first recorded in 1604, media saecula, or "middle ages", first recorded in 1625; the alternative term "medieval" derives from medium aevum. Medieval writers divided history into periods such as the "Six Ages" or the "Four Empires", considered their time to be the last before the end of the world; when referring to their own times, they spoke of them as being "modern". In the 1330s, the humanist and poet Petrarch referred to pre-Christian times as antiqua and to the Christian period as nova. Leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodisation in his History of the Florentine People, with a middle period "between the fall of the Roman Empire and the revival of city life sometime in late eleventh and twelfth centuries".
Tripartite periodisation became standard after the 17th-century German historian Christoph Cellarius divided history into three periods: ancient and modern. The most given starting point for the Middle Ages is around 500, with the date of 476 first used by Bruni. Starting dates are sometimes used in the outer parts of Europe. For Europe as a whole, 1500 is considered to be the end of the Middle Ages, but there is no universally agreed upon end date. Depending on the context, events such as the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the Americas in 1492, or the Protestant Reformation in 1517 are sometimes used. English historians use the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to mark the end of the period. For Spain, dates used are the death of King Ferdinand II in 1516, the death of Queen Isabella I of Castile in 1504, or the conquest of Granada in 1492. Historians from Romance-speaking countries tend to divide the Middle Ages into two parts: an earlier "High" and late
Petal
Petals are modified leaves that surround the reproductive parts of flowers. They are brightly colored or unusually shaped to attract pollinators. Together, all of the petals of a flower are called a corolla. Petals are accompanied by another set of special leaves called sepals, that collectively form the calyx and lie just beneath the corolla; the calyx and the corolla together make up the perianth. When the petals and sepals of a flower are difficult to distinguish, they are collectively called tepals. Examples of plants in which the term tepal is appropriate include genera such as Tulipa. Conversely, genera such as Rosa and Phaseolus have well-distinguished petals; when the undifferentiated tepals resemble petals, they are referred to as "petaloid", as in petaloid monocots, orders of monocots with brightly coloured tepals. Since they include Liliales, an alternative name is lilioid monocots. Although petals are the most conspicuous parts of animal-pollinated flowers, wind-pollinated species, such as the grasses, either have small petals or lack them entirely.
The role of the corolla in plant evolution has been studied extensively since Charles Darwin postulated a theory of the origin of elongated corollae and corolla tubes. A corolla of separate tepals is apopetalous. If the petals are free from one another in the corolla, the plant is choripetalous. In the case of fused tepals, the term is syntepalous; the corolla in some plants forms a tube. Petals can differ in different species; the number of petals in a flower may hold clues to a plant's classification. For example, flowers on eudicots most have four or five petals while flowers on monocots have three or six petals, although there are many exceptions to this rule; the petal whorl or corolla may be bilaterally symmetrical. If all of the petals are identical in size and shape, the flower is said to be regular or actinomorphic. Many flowers are termed irregular or zygomorphic. In irregular flowers, other floral parts may be modified from the regular form, but the petals show the greatest deviation from radial symmetry.
Examples of zygomorphic flowers may be seen in members of the pea family. In many plants of the aster family such as the sunflower, Helianthus annuus, the circumference of the flower head is composed of ray florets; each ray floret is anatomically an individual flower with a single large petal. Florets in the centre of the disc have no or reduced petals. In some plants such as Narcissus the lower part of the petals or tepals are fused to form a floral cup above the ovary, from which the petals proper extend. Petal consists of two parts: the upper, broad part, similar to leaf blade called the blade and the lower part, similar to leaf petiole, called the claw, separated from each other at the limb. Claws are developed in petals of some flowers such as Erysimum cheiri; the inception and further development of petals shows a great variety of patterns. Petals of different species of plants vary in colour or colour pattern, both in visible light and in ultraviolet; such patterns function as guides to pollinators, are variously known as nectar guides, pollen guides, floral guides.
The genetics behind the formation of petals, in accordance with the ABC model of flower development, are that sepals, petals and carpels are modified versions of each other. It appears that the mechanisms to form petals evolved few times, rather than evolving from stamens. Pollination is an important step in the sexual reproduction of higher plants. Pollen is produced by the male organs of hermaphroditic flowers. Pollen does not move on its own and thus requires wind or animal pollinators to disperse the pollen to the stigma of the same or nearby flowers. However, pollinators are rather selective in determining the flowers; this develops competition between flowers and as a result flowers must provide incentives to appeal to pollinators. Petals play a major role in competing to attract pollinators. Henceforth pollination dispersal could occur and the survival of many species of flowers could prolong. Petals have various purposes depending on the type of plant. In general, petals operate to protect some parts of the flower and attract/repel specific pollinators.
This is where the positioning of the flower petals are located on the flower is the corolla e.g. the buttercup having shiny yellow flower petals which contain guidelines amongst the petals in aiding the pollinator towards the nectar. Pollinators have the ability to determine specific flowers. Using incentives flowers draw pollinators and set up a mutual relation between each other in which case the pollinators will remember to always guard and pollinate these flowers; the petals could produce different scents to allure desirable pollinators or repel undesirable pollinators. Some flowers will mimic the scents produced by materials such as decaying meat, to attract pollinators to them. Various colour traits are used by different petals that could attract pollinators that have poor smelling abilities, or that only come out at certain parts of the day; some flowers are able to change the colour
Yogurt
Yogurt spelled yoghurt, yogourt or yoghourt, is a food produced by bacterial fermentation of milk. The bacteria used to make yogurt are known as yogurt cultures; the fermentation of lactose by these bacteria produces lactic acid, which acts on milk protein to give yogurt its texture and characteristic tart flavor. Cow's milk is available worldwide and, as such, is the milk most used to make yogurt. Milk from water buffalo, ewes, mares and yaks is used to produce yogurt where available locally; the milk used may be homogenized or not pasteurized or raw. Each type of milk produces different results. Yogurt is produced using a culture of Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. Bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus bacteria. In addition, other lactobacilli and bifidobacteria are sometimes added during or after culturing yogurt; some countries require yogurt to contain a certain amount of colony-forming units of bacteria. To produce yogurt, milk is first heated to about 85 °C, to denature the milk proteins so that they do not form curds.
After heating, the milk is allowed to cool to about 45 °C. The bacterial culture is mixed in, that temperature of 45 °C is maintained for 4 to 12 hours to allow fermentation to occur; the word is derived from Turkish: yoğurt, is related to the verb yoğurmak, "to knead", or "to be curdled or coagulated. It may be related to yoğun, meaning dense; the sound ğ was traditionally rendered as "gh" in transliterations of Turkish from around 1615–1625. In modern Turkish the letter ğ marks a diaeresis between two vowels, without being pronounced itself, reflected in some languages' versions of the word. In English, the several variations of the spelling of the word include yogurt, to a lesser extent yoghourt or yogourt. Analysis of the L. delbrueckii subsp. Bulgaricus genome indicates. Milk may have become spontaneously and unintentionally exposed to it through contact with plants, or bacteria may have been transferred from the udder of domestic milk-producing animals; the origins of yogurt are unknown, but it is thought to have been invented in Mesopotamia around 5000 BC.
In ancient Indian records, the combination of yogurt and honey is called "the food of the gods". Persian traditions hold that "Abraham owed his fecundity and longevity to the regular ingestion of yogurt"; the cuisine of ancient Greece included a dairy product known as oxygala, believed to have been a form of yogurt. Galen mentioned that oxygala was consumed with honey, similar to the way thickened Greek yogurt is eaten today; the oldest writings mentioning yogurt are attributed to Pliny the Elder, who remarked that certain "barbarous nations" knew how "to thicken the milk into a substance with an agreeable acidity". The use of yogurt by medieval Turks is recorded in the books Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk by Mahmud Kashgari and Kutadgu Bilig by Yusuf Has Hajib written in the 11th century. Both texts describe its use by nomadic Turks; the earliest yogurts were spontaneously fermented by wild bacteria in goat skin bags. Some accounts suggest that Mughal Indian emperor Akbar's cooks would flavor yogurt with mustard seeds and cinnamon.
Another early account of a European encounter with yogurt occurs in French clinical history: Francis I suffered from a severe diarrhea which no French doctor could cure. His ally Suleiman the Magnificent sent a doctor, who cured the patient with yogurt. Being grateful, the French king spread around the information about the food; until the 1900s, yogurt was a staple in diets of people in the Russian Empire, Western Asia, South Eastern Europe/Balkans, Central Europe, the Indian subcontinent. Stamen Grigorov, a Bulgarian student of medicine in Geneva, first examined the microflora of the Bulgarian yogurt. In 1905, he described it as consisting of a rod-like lactic acid-producing bacteria. In 1907, the rod-like bacterium was called Bacillus bulgaricus; the Russian Nobel laureate and biologist Ilya Mechnikov, from the Institut Pasteur in Paris, was influenced by Grigorov's work and hypothesized that regular consumption of yogurt was responsible for the unusually long lifespans of Bulgarian peasants.
Believing Lactobacillus to be essential for good health, Mechnikov worked to popularize yogurt as a foodstuff throughout Europe. Isaac Carasso industrialized the production of yogurt. In 1919, from Ottoman Salonika, started a small yogurt business in Barcelona and named the business Danone after his son; the brand expanded to the United States under an Americanized version of the name: Dannon. Yogurt with added fruit jam was patented in 1933 by the Radlická Mlékárna dairy in Prague. Yogurt was introduced to the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century, influenced by Élie Metchnikoff's The Prolongation of Life, it was popularized by John Harvey Kellogg at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where it was used both orally and in enemas, by Armenian immigrants Sarkis and Rose Colombosian, who started "Colombo and Sons Creamery" in Andover, Massachusetts in 1929. Colombo Yogurt was delivered around New England in a horse
Arab cuisine
Arab cuisine is the cuisine of the Arabs, defined as the various regional cuisines spanning the [ and the Arabian Peninsula. The cuisines are centuries old and reflect the culture of great trading in spices and foods; the three main regions known as the Maghreb, the Fertile Crescent, the Arabian Peninsula have many similarities, but many unique traditions. These kitchens have been influenced by the climate, cultivating possibilities, as well as trading possibilities; the kitchens of the Maghreb and Levant are young kitchens that were developed over the past centuries. The kitchen from the Khaleej region is a old kitchen; the kitchens can be divided into rural kitchens. The Arab cuisine uses specific and sometimes unique spices; some of those foods are: Meat: chicken are the most used, with beef, goat. Other poultry is used in some regions, fish is used in coastal areas including the Mediterranean sea, Atlantic Ocean or the Red sea. Pork is prohibited for Muslim Arabs, being both a cultural and religious taboo and prohibited under Islamic law.
Dairy products: dairy products are used yogurt and white cheese. Butter and cream are used extensively. Herbs and spices: The amounts and types used varies from region to region; some of the included herbs and spices are sesame, Black pepper, turmeric, cumin, Parsley and sumac. Spice mixtures include Ras el hanout, Za'atar, Harissa. Beverages: hot beverages are served more than cold, coffee being at the top of the list in the Middle-eastern countries and tea at top of the Maghreb countries. In Jordan, Egypt, some parts of Syria and Algeria, tea is much more important as a beverage. Other Arabic drinks include Andalucian Maghrebi avocado smoothie. Grains: rice is the staple and is used for most dishes. Bulgur and semolina are used extensively. Legumes: lentils are used in all colours, as well as fava beans, scarlet runner beans, green peas, lupini beans, white beans, brown beans. Vegetables: Arab cuisine favors vegetables such as carrots, zucchini, okra and Olives. Potatoes are eaten as vegetables in Arab culture.
Fruits: Arab cuisine favors fruits such as Pomegranate, Figs, citruses, Cantaloupe, Honeydew melon, grapes and nectarines. Nuts: Almonds, pine nuts and walnuts are included in dishes or eaten as snacks. Greens: Parsley and mint are popular as seasonings in many dishes, while spinach and mulukhiyah are used in cooked dishes. Dressings and sauces: The most popular dressings include various combinations of olive oil, lemon juice, parsley, or garlic, as well as tahini. Labaneh is seasoned with mint, onion, or garlic, served as a sauce with various dishes; the Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula, Middle-East and North-Africa relied on a diet of dates, dried fruit, wheat, barley and meat. The meat comes from large animals such as cows and lambs, they eat dairy products: milk, cheese and buttermilk. The bedouins would use many different dried beans including white beans and chickpeas. Vegetables that were used a lot among the bedouins are variants that could be dried, such as pumpkins, but vegetables that are more heat-resistant, such as aubergines.
They would drink a lot of Arabic tea, Maghrebi mint tea, or Arabic coffee. A daily break to freshen up with drinks is a much loved tradition; the bread, eaten a lot is called Khobz as well as Khaleej, in the Maghreb regions. Dishes such as Marqa, Tajines were prepared traditionally among the bedouins. Breakfast existed of baked beans, nuts, dried fruits, milk and cheese with tea or coffee. Snacks dried fruits. Essential to any cooking in the Arab world is the concept of generosity. Meals are large family affairs, with much sharing and a great deal of warmth over the dinner table. Formal dinners and celebrations involve large quantities of lamb, every occasion entails large quantities of Arabic coffee or Arabic tea. Coffee ceremony: In the Khaleej region, a visitor is greeted by a great table of dried fruits, fresh fruits and cakes with syrup. Dried fruits include figs, dates and plums. Fresh fruits include citruses and pomegranate. Arabic Coffee is served the most, but Arabic tea is a great refresher.
Spices are added in the coffee or other drinks. Dinner guests: In the khaleej region, a visitor might expect a dinner consisting of a large platter, shared with a vast amount of spiced rice, incorporating cooked spicy lamb or chicken, or both, as separate dishes, with various stewed vegetables spiced, sometimes with a tomato-based sauce. Different types of bread are served with different toppings specific to the region. Tea would accompany the meal, as it is constantly consumed. Coffee would be included in the same manner. Tea/coffee ceremony: In the Maghrebi region, a visitor might expect a table full of bread-like snacks, including Msemen and other stuffed breads; these are served with rosewater or olive oil. There are many different cookies and cakes included accompanied by plates with different kinds of nuts. Arabic coffee and Mint tea is served with it in a traditional Maghrebian teapot. Dinner guests: In the Maghrebi region, a visitor m
Iran
Iran called Persia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is a country in Western Asia. With over 81 million inhabitants, Iran is the world's 18th most populous country. Comprising a land area of 1,648,195 km2, it is the second largest country in the Middle East and the 17th largest in the world. Iran is bordered to the northwest by Armenia and the Republic of Azerbaijan, to the north by the Caspian Sea, to the northeast by Turkmenistan, to the east by Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the south by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, to the west by Turkey and Iraq; the country's central location in Eurasia and Western Asia, its proximity to the Strait of Hormuz, give it geostrategic importance. Tehran is the country's capital and largest city, as well as its leading economic and cultural center. Iran is home to one of the world's oldest civilizations, beginning with the formation of the Elamite kingdoms in the fourth millennium BCE, it was first unified by the Iranian Medes in the seventh century BCE, reaching its greatest territorial size in the sixth century BCE, when Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid Empire, which stretched from Eastern Europe to the Indus Valley, becoming one of the largest empires in history.
The Iranian realm fell to Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE and was divided into several Hellenistic states. An Iranian rebellion culminated in the establishment of the Parthian Empire, succeeded in the third century CE by the Sasanian Empire, a leading world power for the next four centuries. Arab Muslims conquered the empire in the seventh century CE; the Islamization of Iran led to the decline of Zoroastrianism, by the country's dominant religion, Iran's major contributions to art and science spread within the Muslim rule during the Islamic Golden Age. After two centuries, a period of various native Muslim dynasties began, which were conquered by the Seljuq Turks and the Ilkhanate Mongols; the rise of the Safavids in the 15th century led to the reestablishment of a unified Iranian state and national identity, with the country's conversion to Shia Islam marking a turning point in Iranian and Muslim history. Under Nader Shah, Iran was one of the most powerful states in the 18th century, though by the 19th century, a series of conflicts with the Russian Empire led to significant territorial losses.
The Iranian Constitutional Revolution in the early 20th century led to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy and the country's first legislature. A 1953 coup instigated by the United Kingdom and the United States resulted in greater autocracy and growing Western political influence. Subsequent widespread dissatisfaction and unrest against the monarchy led to the 1979 Revolution and the establishment of an Islamic republic, a political system that includes elements of a parliamentary democracy vetted and supervised by a theocracy governed by an autocratic "Supreme Leader". During the 1980s, the country was engaged in a war with Iraq, which lasted for eight years and resulted in a high number of casualties and economic losses for both sides; the sovereign state of Iran is a founding member of the UN, ECO, NAM, OIC, OPEC. It is a major regional and middle power, its large reserves of fossil fuels – which include the world's largest natural gas supply and the fourth largest proven oil reserves – exert considerable influence in international energy security and the world economy.
The country's rich cultural legacy is reflected in part by its 22 UNESCO World Heritage sites, the third largest number in Asia and 11th largest in the world. Iran is a multicultural country comprising numerous ethnic and linguistic groups, the largest being Persians, Azeris and Lurs. Organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have criticized Iran's women's rights record; the term Iran derives directly from Middle Persian Ērān, first attested in a third-century inscription at Rustam Relief, with the accompanying Parthian inscription using the term Aryān, in reference to the Iranians. The Middle Iranian ērān and aryān are oblique plural forms of gentilic nouns ēr- and ary-, both deriving from Proto-Iranian *arya-, recognized as a derivative of Proto-Indo-European *ar-yo-, meaning "one who assembles". In the Iranian languages, the gentilic is attested as a self-identifier, included in ancient inscriptions and the literature of the Avesta, remains in other Iranian ethnic names Alan and Iron.
Iran has been referred to as Persia by the West, due to the writings of Greek historians who referred to all of Iran as Persís, meaning "land of the Persians", while Persis itself was one of the provinces of ancient Iran, today defined as Fars. As the most extensive interaction the Ancient Greeks had with any outsider was with the Persians, the term persisted long after the Greco-Persian Wars. In 1935, Reza Shah requested the international community to refer to the country by its native name, effective March 22 that year; as The New York Times explained at the time, "At the suggestion of the Persian Legation in Berlin, the Tehran government, on the Persian New Year, March 21, 1935, substituted Iran for Persia as the official name of the country." Opposition to the name change led to the reversal of the decision, Professor Ehsan Yarshater, editor of Encyclopædia Iranica, propagated a move to use Persia and Iran interchangeably. Today, both Iran and Persia are used in cultural contexts, while Iran remains irreplaceab
.jpg)
