1.
Summit
–
A summit is a point on a surface that is higher in elevation than all points immediately adjacent to it. Mathematically, a summit is a maximum in elevation. The topographic terms acme, apex, peak, and zenith are synonymous, the UIAA definition is that a summit is independent if it has a prominence of 30 metres or more, it is a mountain if it has a prominence of at least 300 metres. This can be summarised as follows, A pyramidal peak is an exaggerated form produced by ice erosion of a mountain top, Summit may also refer to the highest point along a line, trail, or route. In many parts of the western United States, the term refers to the highest point along a road, highway. For example, the highest point along Interstate 80 in California is referred to as Donner Summit while the highest point on Interstate 5 is Siskiyou Mountain Summit, geoid Hill List of highest mountains Maxima and minima Nadir Summit accordance Peak finder
Summit
–
The highest elevation summit, Mount Everest, shown with a climber at the summit wearing an oxygen mask. The summit is 8850 m (29,035 ft) elevation. (While the cruising altitude of jetliners is roughly 10,000 m (32,808 feet), they are pressurized.)
Summit
–
View from the summit of Switzerland's highest,
Monte Rosa
Summit
–
The summit of
Mount Damavand,
Iran, in winter
Summit
–
Jeff Davis Peak, one of the highest peaks entirely within
Nevada
2.
Geographic coordinate system
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A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system used in geography that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation, to specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection. The invention of a coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Ptolemy credited him with the adoption of longitude and latitude. Ptolemys 2nd-century Geography used the prime meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes recovery of Ptolemys text a little before 1300, in 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911, the latitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the equator, the north pole is 90° N, the south pole is 90° S. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the equator, the plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the longitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. All meridians are halves of great ellipses, which converge at the north and south poles, the prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180°E, the combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. The grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule, the origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km south of Tema, Ghana. To completely specify a location of a feature on, in, or above Earth. Earth is not a sphere, but a shape approximating a biaxial ellipsoid. It is nearly spherical, but has an equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about 0. 3% larger than the radius measured through the poles, the shorter axis approximately coincides with the axis of rotation
Geographic coordinate system
–
Longitude lines are perpendicular and latitude lines are parallel to the equator.
3.
Lower Silesian Voivodeship
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Lower Silesian Voivodeship, or Lower Silesia Province, in southwestern Poland, is one of the 16 voivodeships into which Poland is divided. Historically the area had ties to both German and Polish culture, with additional Czech influence in the southern mountainous region. Silesia was once divided into many small duchies reigned by dukes and princes of the Piast dynasty, during this time, cultural and ethnic Germanic influence prospered due to immigrants from the German-speaking areas of the mighty Holy Roman Empire. This also impacted on the architecture as well as traditions. Throughout the upcoming centuries, Lower Silesia experienced several key events such as the Protestant Reformation, Lower Silesia is one of the richest provinces in Poland as it has valuable natural resources such as copper, brown coal and rock materials, which are exploited by the biggest enterprises. Its well developed and varied industries attract both domestic and foreign investors and its capital and largest city is Wrocław, situated on the Odra River. Furthermore, the voivodeship is famous for its castles and palaces and is one of Polands most visited regions by tourists. The voivodeship was created on 1 January 1999 out of the former Wrocław, Legnica, Wałbrzych and Jelenia Góra Voivodeships and it covers an area of 19,946 square kilometres, and as of 2013 has a total population of 2914362. Although much of the region is relatively low-lying it also includes Sudeten Foreland, popular ski resorts in Lower Silesian Voivodeship include Karpacz and Szklarska Poręba in the Karkonosze mountains. Other important tourist destinations in the include the chief city, Wrocław, as well as the towns of Jelenia Góra. The town of Boleslawiec is famed for its pottery, an international airport is located in Wrocław–Copernicus Airport. The main railway station is Wrocław Główny, the A4 motorway, A8 motorway and A18 motorway run through the voivodship. Lower Silesian Voivodeship is one of the most visited voivodeships in Poland and it is famous for a large number of castles and palaces, inter alia, Książ Castle, Czocha Castle, Chojnik Castle, Grodziec castle, Gorzanów Castle, Kliczków Castle. There is also a lot in the Jelenia Góra valley, the voivodships most widely visited city is Wrocław with many sights and attractions, inter alia open all year round Aquapark, Wrocław SPA Center and famous Wrocławs dwarfs. The Festival of Good Beer is held every year, on the weekend of June. Śnieżka is one of the first European peaks visited by tourists, it is also the highest peak of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship, Lower Silesia is one of the richest regions in Poland. GDP per capita in 2007 accounted for 108. 7% of the average for the country, since 2005, the voivodeship recorded the highest in the country economic growth rate. The voivodeship contains 91 cities and towns and these are listed below in descending order of population, Lower Silesian Voivodeship is divided into 30 counties, four of which are city counties
Lower Silesian Voivodeship
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Wrocław Old Town Hall
Lower Silesian Voivodeship
Lower Silesian Voivodeship
–
Wrocław Main Station is a major railway hub
Lower Silesian Voivodeship
–
Museum "Stara Kopalnia - Centrum Nauki i Sztuki" in
Wałbrzych
4.
Wielka Sowa
–
Wielka Sowa with a height of 1,014.8 metres is the highest peak of the Owl Mountains, a range of the Central Sudetes. The mountain is located in Dzierżoniów County, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, the peak made up of metamorphic rocks of the Precambrian rises above the village of Walim near Dzierżoniów in the north and the Nysa Kłodzka Valley in the west. It is surrounded by the Owl Mountains Landscape Park and its slopes are a popular skiing area in winter. In 1906 a Bismarck tower was erected at the summit at the behest of the German authorities, the granite and reinforced concrete construction replaced an older wooden viewing tower located about 30 m to the south. Renamed several times after World War II, it recently has been restored in the course of the EU Interreg incentive program and re-opened in 2008. It is today just called wieża widokowa and offers a view to the Krkonoše range, to Mount Ślęża, into the Kłodzko Valley. The Great Owl photo gallery Photo gallery of Wielka Sowa naszesudety. pl History of the observation tower
Wielka Sowa
–
View from Mt. Waligóra,
Niedźwiedzice
Wielka Sowa
–
Observation tower
Wielka Sowa
–
View to Wielka Sova in 2014 from south
5.
Mouflon
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The mouflon is a subspecies group of the wild sheep. Populations of O. orientalis can be partitioned into the mouflons, the mouflon is thought to be one of the two ancestors for all modern domestic sheep breeds. The wild sheep of Corsica was locally called mufro and mufra, the naturalist Buffon rendered this in French as moufflon. Mouflon have red-brown, short-haired coats with dark back-stripes and light-colored saddle patches, the males are horned, some females are horned, while others are polled. The horns of mature rams are curved in almost one full revolution, mouflon have shoulder heights of about 0.9 m and body weights of 50 kg and 35 kg. Today, mouflon inhabit the Caucasus, Anatolia, northern and eastern Iraq, the range originally stretched further to the Crimean peninsula and the Balkans, where they had already disappeared 3,000 years ago and came back to Bulgaria. On the island of Cyprus, the mouflon or agrino became a different, the Cyprus mouflon population contains only about 3,000 animals. They are now rare on the islands, but are classified as feral animals by the IUCN, a small colony exists in the remote Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, and on the Veliki Brijun Island in the Brijuni Archipelago of the Istrian Peninsula in Croatia. In South America, mouflon have been introduced into central Chile, mouflon have been introduced as game animals into Spieden Island in Washington state, and into the Hawaiian islands of Lanai and Hawaii where they have become a problematic invasive species. A small population escaped from an animal enclosure owned by Thomas Watson, Jr. on the island of North Haven, Maine in the 1990s and their normal habitats are steep mountainous woods near tree lines. In winter, they migrate to lower altitudes, the scientific classification of the mouflon is disputed. Five subspecies of mouflon are distinguished by MSW3, Armenian mouflon, Ovis orientalis gmelini, northwestern Iran, Armenia and it has been introduced in Texas, US. European mouflon, O. o. musimon was introduced about 7,000 years ago in Corsica and it has since been introduced in many parts of Europe. Cypriot mouflon, O. o. ophion, also called agrino, in 1997, about 1,200 of this subspecies were counted. The television show Born to Explore with Richard Wiese reported 3,000 are now on Cyprus, esfahan mouflon, O. o. isphahanica, is from the Zagros Mountains, Iran. Laristan mouflon, O. o. laristanica, is a small subspecies, the eastern and the European mouflon often appear in scientific literature as separate species, Ovis musimon and Ovis orientalis. The mouflons are also treated as a subspecies of the domestic sheep, Ovis aries, named with the same subspecific epithet as above, O. a. musimon, O. a. ophion. However, a comparison of the mitochondrial DNA control region found that two subspecies of urial, Ovis vignei arkal and O. v. /o. bochariensis, the ancestral sheep is presumed to have had 60 chromosomes, as in goats
Mouflon
–
Mouflon
Mouflon
–
A European mouflon male in the German forest
Mouflon
–
Mouflon ram
Mouflon
–
Ewe
6.
Project Riese
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None of them were finished, all are in different states of completion with only a small percentage of tunnels reinforced by concrete. The purpose of the project remains uncertain because the lack of documentation, the construction work was done by forced labourers, prisoners of war, and prisoners of concentration camps, and many lost their lives mostly as a result of disease and malnutrition. In the presence of the increasing Allied air raids Nazi Germany relocated a large part of its strategic armaments production into safer regions including the District of Sudetenland. Plans to protect critical infrastructure also involved transfer of the factories to underground bunkers. In September 1943, Minister of Armaments and War Production Albert Speer, as a result, the Schlesische Industriegemeinschaft AG was created to conduct construction work. A network of roads, bridges, and narrow gauge railways was created to connect excavation sites with the railway stations. Prisoners were reloading building materials, cutting trees, digging reservoirs, small dams were built across streams to create water supplies and sewage systems. Later the rocks of the mountains were drilled and blasted with explosives, for this purpose mining specialists were employed, mostly Germans, Italians, Ukrainians, and Czechs but the most dangerous and exhausting work was done by prisoners. The progress of digging tunnels was slow because the structure of the Owl Mountains consists of hard gneiss, in December 1943, a typhus epidemic occurred amongst the prisoners. They were held in conditions, exhausted and starving. As a result, construction slowed down significantly, there were at least five collective camps and unknown number of forced labourers and POWs worked for the project, some until the end of the war. It is also undetermined how many prisoners lost their lives and they were deployed in thirteen labour camps, some in the vicinity of the tunnels. The network of camps has been named Arbeitslager Riese and was part of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. The administration of AL Riese and the commander, SS-Hauptsturmführer Albert Lütkemeyer, were located in AL Wüstegiersdorf. From December 1944 to January 1945 the prisoners were guarded by 853 SS troops, according to incomplete data, at least 13,000 prisoners worked for the project, most of them were transferred from the Auschwitz concentration camp. The documents allow identification of 8,995 prisoners, all of them were Jews, about seventy per cent from Hungary, the rest from Poland, Greece, Romania, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. Mortality was very high because of disease, malnutrition, exhaustion, dangerous underground works, many exhausted prisoners were sent back to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The deportation of 857 prisoners is documented as well as 14 executions after failed escape attempts, an estimated total of 5,000 victims lost their lives
Project Riese
–
Complex Rzeczka
Project Riese
Project Riese
–
Książ Castle
Project Riese
–
Complex Osówka
7.
Owl Mountains
–
The Owl Mountains are a mountain range in the Central Sudetes in south-west Poland. They run between the historic Lower Silesian region and Kłodzko Land, the range includes a protected area called Owl Mountains Landscape Park. In the Owl Mountains, apart from the ridge, the subdivisions of Garb Dzikowca. The Owl Mountains cover an area of about 2,000 square kilometres and they are situated between the Waldenburg Mountains and the Bardzkie Mountains. Their east border is marked out by Przełęcz Srebrna, and the line of west border is set by the Bystrzyca River, in the north, the border is on Kotlina Distrabiekenstein and in the south on Obniżenie Noworudzkie and Włodzickie Hills. The Owl Mountains constitute the youngest part of the Sudetes, at their foot are well-known tourist places, like, Rzeczka, Walim, Sokolec, Jugów, Sierpnica and Zagórze Śląskie. The Owl Mountains are very diversified in terms of height, the highest peaks are Wielka Sowa and Kalenica with its viewing tower. The remaining peaks reach the height from 200 to 987 metres above sea level, except for the summit clearings and the mountain passes, the Owl Mountains represent the spruce-clad type of mountains. There may be observed a rare occurrence of the beech. The Owl Mountains are covered by a network of tourist trails, the most attractive of these the red trail leading through most of Europe. Major towns of the Owl Mountains include, Dzierżoniów Pieszyce Bielawa Nowa Ruda Between the Owl Mountains and the Kamienne Mountains, Neut Askeylowen Huszkeyn-Nuges Eulengebirgsbahn
Owl Mountains
–
View from Zygmuntówka Refuge near
Jugów
Owl Mountains
Owl Mountains
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Eurasian eagle-owl
Owl Mountains
–
Project Riese
8.
Karpacz
–
Karpacz is situated in the Karkonosze Mountains — a resort with increasing importance for tourism as an alternative to the Alps. Karpacz is located at 480 to 885 metres above sea level, south of Karpacz on the border to the Czech Republic there is Mount Sněžka-Śnieżka. The settlement is mentioned in 1599 because of lead and iron mining, since the construction of Krummhübels first railway connection in 1895 history was connected with the development of metallurgy industries and with the progress of tourism. The ethnically German village was part of Austria and Austria-Hungary in 1526-1742, Krummhübels German population was forcibly expelled from the village between 1945 and 1947. The town was repopulated with ethnic Poles and eventually renamed Karpacz — an allusion in Polish to the Carpathian Mountains. In Karpacz Górny a gravity hill is located where bottles appear to roll uphill, there is also a Norwegian stave church, moved here from Vang, Norway in the mid-19th century
Karpacz
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Vang stave church in Karpacz
Karpacz
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Stone sign marking a "place of disturbed gravitation". Image shows
Newton's apple with text saying: "gravitational anomaly".
Karpacz
–
Chapel of Saint Lawrence on
Sněžka-Śnieżka
Karpacz
–
Ski jumping hill
9.
Vang stave church
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The church is a four-post single-nave stave church originally built around 1200 in the parish of Vang in the Valdres region of Norway. In 1832, the council decided to pull down the stave church because it was too small and had become structurally unsafe over the years. The plans for its demolition and replacement were known already in 1826 and he urged the council to repair and extend it. There was also an attempt to have it re-erected at Heensåsen in the parish as an annex church. Knut Nordsveen, a farmer, offered to donate the building site to the community. Disappointed by the rebuff, he sold his farm and emigrated to America. In 1932, a monument was erected in memory of him, while traveling in Norway in 1839, J. C. Dahl again visited Vang. He found the church still standing, beside a newly built larger log-built church seating 230 parishioners. Demolition of the old one was imminent, Dahl was more than ever convinced that the stave church must be preserved as a cultural monument. He proposed without success to have it re-erected as a Royal Chapel in Christiania, count Herman Wedel Jarlsberg announced his willingness to place it in his park at Bogstad manor near Christiania, but he died before the plan could be carried out. Dahl saw no other way than to buy the church himself and he asked the vicar of Vang to bid on his behalf at the public auction held in January 1841. Dahl won the bid at 86 speciedaler,1 ort and 7 skilling, accused of being a speculant, Dahl defended himself by stating that his only intention was to rescue the church, and that he had no intention of making money from the deal. The solution came from Crown Prince, later King Frederick William IV of Prussia, after the exchange of several letters, he persuaded the prince to take over responsibility for the Vang stave church and cover the costs of re-erecting it in Potsdam. Schiertz did pioneering work in documentation and planning for an enterprise without precedent and his drawings and inventories are now priceless sources of knowledge about the original appearance of the stave church. All pieces were marked and packed for transportation during the summer, in September they were delivered at the harbour of Lærdalsøyri at the head of the Sognefjord, where they were loaded on board the Haabet, bound for Stettin. The original plan had been to re-erect the church on the Pfaueninsel near Potsdam, but in the meantime, this plan was discarded in favour of a site at the remote village of Brückenberg near Krummhübel in the Riesengebirge, now the Karkonosze mountains, in the province of Silesia. The idea probably came from countess Friederike von Reden of Buchwald, now Bukowiec, count Christian Leopold von Schaffgotsch of Warmbrunn, now Cieplice, donated the site. In the spring of 1842 the materials were taken by river barge up the Oder to the foothills
Vang stave church
–
Wang church in Karpacz
Vang stave church
–
Drawing of the stave church from 1841 by F.W. Schiertz
Vang stave church
–
Original location of Vang stave church
10.
Mountain range
–
A mountain range is a geographic area containing numerous geologically related mountains. A mountain system or system of ranges, sometimes is used to combine several geological features that are geographically related. Mountain ranges are usually segmented by highlands or mountain passes and valleys, individual mountains within the same mountain range do not necessarily have the same geologic structure or petrology. They may be a mix of different orogenic expressions and terranes, for example thrust sheets, uplifted blocks, fold mountains, most geologically young mountain ranges on the Earths land surface are associated with either the Pacific Ring of Fire or the Alpide Belt. The Andes is 7,000 kilometres long and is considered the worlds longest mountain system. The Alpide belt includes Indonesia and southeast Asia, through the Himalaya, the belt also includes other European and Asian mountain ranges. The Himalayas contain the highest mountains in the world, including Mount Everest, mountain ranges outside of these two systems include the Arctic Cordillera, the Urals, the Appalachians, the Scandinavian Mountains, the Altai Mountains and the Hijaz Mountains. If the definition of a range is stretched to include underwater mountains. The mountain systems of the earth are characterized by a tree structure, the sub-range relationship is often expressed as a parent-child relationship. For example, the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Blue Ridge Mountains are sub-ranges of the Appalachian Mountains, equivalently, the Appalachians are the parent of the White Mountains and Blue Ridge Mountains, and the White Mountains and the Blue Ridge Mountains are children of the Appalachians. The position of mountains influences climate, such as rain or snow, when air masses move up and over mountains, the air cools producing orographic precipitation. As the air descends on the side, it warms again and is drier. Often, a shadow will affect the leeward side of a range. Mountain ranges are constantly subjected to forces which work to tear them down. Erosion is at work while the mountains are being uplifted and long after until the mountains are reduced to low hills, rivers are traditionally believed to be the principle erosive factor on mountain ranges, with their ability of bedrock incision and sediment transport. The rugged topography of a range is the product of erosion. The basins adjacent to a mountain range are filled with sediments which are buried and turned into sedimentary rock. The early Cenozoic uplift of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado provides an example and this mass of rock was removed as the range was actively undergoing uplift
Mountain range
–
The
Himalayas, the highest mountain range on Earth, seen from space
Mountain range
–
Mountain range of
High Tatras in
Slovakia in 1865
Mountain range
–
The
Andes, the world's longest mountain range on the surface of a continent, seen from the air
Mountain range
–
Hillary and Norgay Montes on Pluto (14 July 2015)
11.
Central Europe
–
Central Europe lies between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. The concept of Central Europe is based on a historical, social and cultural identity. Central Europe is going through a phase of strategic awakening, with such as the CEI, Centrope. While the regions economy shows high disparities with regard to income, elements of unity for Western and Central Europe were Roman Catholicism and Latin. According to Hungarian historian Jenő Szűcs, foundations of Central European history at the first millennium were in connection with Western European development. The keyword of Western social development after millennium was the spread of liberties and autonomies in Western Europe and these phenomena appeared in the middle of the 13th century in Central European countries. There were self-governments of towns, counties and parliaments, in 1335 under the rule of the King Charles I of Hungary, the castle of Visegrád, the seat of the Hungarian monarchs was the scene of the royal summit of the Kings of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary. They agreed to cooperate closely in the field of politics and commerce, in the Middle Ages, countries in Central Europe adopted Magdeburg rights. Before 1870, the industrialization that had developed in Western and Central Europe, even in Eastern Europe, industrialization lagged far behind. Russia, for example, remained rural and agricultural. The concept of Central Europe was already known at the beginning of the 19th century, an example of that-time vision of Central Europe may be seen in J. Partsch’s book of 1903. On 21 January 1904, Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftsverein was established in Berlin with economic integration of Germany, another time, the term Central Europe became connected to the German plans of political, economic and cultural domination. The bible of the concept was Friedrich Naumann’s book Mitteleuropa in which he called for a federation to be established after the war. The concept failed after the German defeat in World War I, the revival of the idea may be observed during the Hitler era. According to Emmanuel de Martonne, in 1927 the Central European countries included, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, italy and Yugoslavia are not considered by the author to be Central European because they are located mostly outside Central Europe. The author use both Human and Physical Geographical features to define Central Europe, the interwar period brought new geopolitical system and economic and political problems, and the concept of Central Europe took a different character. The centre of interest was moved to its eastern part – the countries that have appeared on the map of Europe, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, however, the conflict of interests was too big and neither Little Entente nor Intermarium ideas succeeded. The interwar period brought new elements to the concept of Central Europe, after the war, the Eastern part of Central Europe was placed at the centre of the concept
Central Europe
–
Certain and disputed borders of
Great Moravia under
Svatopluk I (AD 870–894)
Central Europe
–
Central Europe according to
The World Factbook (2009),
Encyclopædia Britannica, and
Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (1998)
Central Europe
–
Kingdom of Hungary in 1190
Central Europe
–
CE countries, Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes 1910–1930 (L.A. County Museum of Art)
12.
Germany
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Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a federal parliamentary republic in central-western Europe. It includes 16 constituent states, covers an area of 357,021 square kilometres, with about 82 million inhabitants, Germany is the most populous member state of the European Union. After the United States, it is the second most popular destination in the world. Germanys capital and largest metropolis is Berlin, while its largest conurbation is the Ruhr, other major cities include Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf and Leipzig. Various Germanic tribes have inhabited the northern parts of modern Germany since classical antiquity, a region named Germania was documented before 100 AD. During the Migration Period the Germanic tribes expanded southward, beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation, in 1871, Germany became a nation state when most of the German states unified into the Prussian-dominated German Empire. After World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the Empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic, the establishment of the national socialist dictatorship in 1933 led to World War II and the Holocaust. After a period of Allied occupation, two German states were founded, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, in 1990, the country was reunified. In the 21st century, Germany is a power and has the worlds fourth-largest economy by nominal GDP. As a global leader in industrial and technological sectors, it is both the worlds third-largest exporter and importer of goods. Germany is a country with a very high standard of living sustained by a skilled. It upholds a social security and universal health system, environmental protection. Germany was a member of the European Economic Community in 1957. It is part of the Schengen Area, and became a co-founder of the Eurozone in 1999, Germany is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the G8, the G20, and the OECD. The national military expenditure is the 9th highest in the world, the English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine. This in turn descends from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz popular, derived from *þeudō, descended from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂- people, the discovery of the Mauer 1 mandible shows that ancient humans were present in Germany at least 600,000 years ago. The oldest complete hunting weapons found anywhere in the world were discovered in a mine in Schöningen where three 380, 000-year-old wooden javelins were unearthed
Germany
–
The
Nebra sky disk is dated to c. 1600 BC.
Germany
–
Flag
Germany
–
Martin Luther (1483–1546) initiated the
Protestant Reformation.
Germany
–
Foundation of the
German Empire in
Versailles, 1871.
Bismarck is at the center in a white uniform.
13.
Czech Republic
–
The Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, is a nation state in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west, Austria to the south, Slovakia to the east and Poland to the northeast. The Czech Republic covers an area of 78,866 square kilometres with mostly temperate continental climate and it is a unitary parliamentary republic, has 10.5 million inhabitants and the capital and largest city is Prague, with over 1.2 million residents. The Czech Republic includes the territories of Bohemia, Moravia. The Czech state was formed in the late 9th century as the Duchy of Bohemia under the Great Moravian Empire, after the fall of the Empire in 907, the centre of power transferred from Moravia to Bohemia under the Přemyslid dynasty. In 1002, the duchy was formally recognized as part of the Holy Roman Empire, becoming the Kingdom of Bohemia in 1198 and reaching its greatest territorial extent in the 14th century. Following the Battle of Mohács in 1526, the whole Crown of Bohemia was gradually integrated into the Habsburg Monarchy alongside the Archduchy of Austria, the Protestant Bohemian Revolt against the Catholic Habsburgs led to the Thirty Years War. After the Battle of the White Mountain, the Habsburgs consolidated their rule, reimposed Roman Catholicism, the Czech part of Czechoslovakia was occupied by Germany in World War II, and was liberated in 1945 by the armies of the Soviet Union and the United States. The Czech country lost the majority of its German-speaking inhabitants after they were expelled following the war, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia won the 1946 elections. Following the 1948 coup détat, Czechoslovakia became a one-party communist state under Soviet influence, in 1968, increasing dissatisfaction with the regime culminated in a reform movement known as the Prague Spring, which ended in a Soviet-led invasion. Czechoslovakia remained occupied until the 1989 Velvet Revolution, when the communist regime collapsed, on 6 March 1990, the Czech Socialistic Republic was renamed to the Czech Republic. On 1 January 1993, Czechoslovakia peacefully dissolved, with its constituent states becoming the independent states of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. The Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004, it is a member of the United Nations, the OECD, the OSCE, and it is a developed country with an advanced, high income economy and high living standards. The UNDP ranks the country 14th in inequality-adjusted human development, the Czech Republic also ranks as the 6th most peaceful country, while achieving strong performance in democratic governance. It has the lowest unemployment rate in the European Union, the traditional English name Bohemia derives from Latin Boiohaemum, which means home of the Boii. The current name comes from the endonym Čech, spelled Cžech until the reform in 1842. The name comes from the Slavic tribe and, according to legend, their leader Čech, the etymology of the word Čech can be traced back to the Proto-Slavic root *čel-, meaning member of the people, kinsman, thus making it cognate to the Czech word člověk. The country has traditionally divided into three lands, namely Bohemia in the west, Moravia in the southeast, and Czech Silesia in the northeast. Following the dissolution of Czechoslovakia at the end of 1992, the Czech part of the former nation found itself without a common single-word geographical name in English, the name Czechia /ˈtʃɛkiə/ was recommended by the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Czech Republic
–
Přemysl Ottokar II,
King of Bohemia (1253–1278) and
Duke of Austria (1251–1278)
Czech Republic
–
Flag
Czech Republic
–
The
Crown of Saint Wenceslas is the 4th oldest in Europe
Czech Republic
–
The
Defenestration of Prague sparked the
Thirty Years' War
14.
Poland
–
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe, situated between the Baltic Sea in the north and two mountain ranges in the south. Bordered by Germany to the west, the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south, Ukraine and Belarus to the east, the total area of Poland is 312,679 square kilometres, making it the 69th largest country in the world and the 9th largest in Europe. With a population of over 38.5 million people, Poland is the 34th most populous country in the world, the 8th most populous country in Europe, Poland is a unitary state divided into 16 administrative subdivisions, and its capital and largest city is Warsaw. Other metropolises include Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk and Szczecin, the establishment of a Polish state can be traced back to 966, when Mieszko I, ruler of a territory roughly coextensive with that of present-day Poland, converted to Christianity. The Kingdom of Poland was founded in 1025, and in 1569 it cemented a political association with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by signing the Union of Lublin. This union formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest and most populous countries of 16th and 17th century Europe, Poland regained its independence in 1918 at the end of World War I, reconstituting much of its historical territory as the Second Polish Republic. In September 1939, World War II started with the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany, followed thereafter by invasion by the Soviet Union. More than six million Polish citizens died in the war, after the war, Polands borders were shifted westwards under the terms of the Potsdam Conference. With the backing of the Soviet Union, a communist puppet government was formed, and after a referendum in 1946. During the Revolutions of 1989 Polands Communist government was overthrown and Poland adopted a new constitution establishing itself as a democracy, informally called the Third Polish Republic. Since the early 1990s, when the transition to a primarily market-based economy began, Poland has achieved a high ranking on the Human Development Index. Poland is a country, which was categorised by the World Bank as having a high-income economy. Furthermore, it is visited by approximately 16 million tourists every year, Poland is the eighth largest economy in the European Union and was the 6th fastest growing economy on the continent between 2010 and 2015. According to the Global Peace Index for 2014, Poland is ranked 19th in the list of the safest countries in the world to live in. The origin of the name Poland derives from a West Slavic tribe of Polans that inhabited the Warta River basin of the historic Greater Poland region in the 8th century, the origin of the name Polanie itself derives from the western Slavic word pole. In some foreign languages such as Hungarian, Lithuanian, Persian and Turkish the exonym for Poland is Lechites, historians have postulated that throughout Late Antiquity, many distinct ethnic groups populated the regions of what is now Poland. The most famous archaeological find from the prehistory and protohistory of Poland is the Biskupin fortified settlement, dating from the Lusatian culture of the early Iron Age, the Slavic groups who would form Poland migrated to these areas in the second half of the 5th century AD. With the Baptism of Poland the Polish rulers accepted Christianity and the authority of the Roman Church
Poland
–
Reconstruction of a
Bronze Age,
Lusatian culture settlement in
Biskupin, c. 700 BC
Poland
–
Flag
Poland
–
Earliest known contemporary depiction of a Polish ruler; King
Mieszko II Lambert of Poland being presented with a
Liturgical book by
Matilda of Swabia, 1025–1031
Poland
–
Drawing of the
Battle of Grunwald, which was fought against the
German Order of Teutonic Knights, 15 July 1410
15.
Polish language
–
Polish is a West Slavic language spoken primarily in Poland and is the native language of the Poles. It belongs to the Lechitic subgroup of the West Slavic languages, Polish is the official language of Poland, but it is also used throughout the world by Polish minorities in other countries. It is one of the languages of the European Union. Its written standard is the Polish alphabet, which has 9 additions to the letters of the basic Latin script, Polish is closely related to Kashubian, Silesian, Upper Sorbian, Lower Sorbian, Czech and Slovak. It is also the second most widely spoken Slavic language, after Russian, in history, Polish is known to be an important language, both diplomatically and academically in Central and Eastern Europe. Today, Polish is spoken by over 38.5 million people as their first language in Poland. It is also spoken as a language in western parts of Belarus and Ukraine, west and central Lithuania, as well as the northern parts of the Czech Republic. There are 55 million Polish language speakers around the world, Polish began to emerge as a distinct language around the 10th century, the process largely triggered by the establishment and development of the Polish state. With Christianity, Poland also adopted the Latin alphabet, which made it possible to write down Polish, the precursor to modern Polish is the Old Polish language. Ultimately, Polish is thought to descend from the unattested Proto-Slavic language, Poland is the most linguistically homogeneous European country, nearly 97% of Polands citizens declare Polish as their first language. Elsewhere, Poles constitute large minorities in Lithuania, Belarus, Polish is the most widely used minority language in Lithuanias Vilnius County and is found elsewhere in southeastern Lithuania. There are significant numbers of Polish speakers among Polish emigrants and their descendants in many other countries, in the United States, Polish Americans number more than 11 million but most of them cannot speak Polish fluently. The largest concentrations of Polish speakers reported in the census were found in three states, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey. Enough people in these areas speak Polish that PNC Financial Services offer services available in Polish at all of their machines in addition to English and Spanish. According to the 2011 census there are now over 500,000 people in England, in Canada, there is a significant Polish Canadian population, There are 242,885 speakers of Polish according to the 2006 census, with a particular concentration in Toronto and Montreal. The geographical distribution of the Polish language was affected by the territorial changes of Poland immediately after World War II. Poles settled in the Recovered Territories in the west and north and this tendency toward a homogeneity also stems from the vertically integrated nature of the authoritarian Polish Peoples Republic. The inhabitants of different regions of Poland still speak standard Polish somewhat differently, first-language speakers of Polish have no trouble understanding each other, and non-native speakers may have difficulty distinguishing regional variations
Polish language
–
The oldest printed text in Polish – Statuta synodalia Episcoporum Wratislaviensis printed in 1475 in
Wrocław by Kasper Elyan.
Polish language
–
Polish
Polish language
–
The
Jakub Wujek Bible in Polish, 1599 print
16.
Carpathian Mountains
–
The Carpathian Mountains or Carpathians are a mountain range system forming an arc roughly 1,500 km long across Central and Eastern Europe, making them the second-longest mountain range in Europe. The Carpathians and their foothills also have many thermal and mineral waters, the Carpathians consist of a chain of mountain ranges that stretch in an arc from the Czech Republic in the northwest through Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and Ukraine to Romania and Serbia. The highest range within the Carpathians is the Tatras, on the border of Slovakia and Poland, the second-highest range is the Southern Carpathians in Romania, where the highest peaks exceed 2,500 m. The divisions of the Carpathians are usually in three sections, Western Carpathians — Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia. Eastern Carpathians — southeastern Poland, eastern Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, the term Outer Carpathians is frequently used to describe the northern rim of the Western and Eastern Carpathians. The most important cities in or near the Carpathians are, Bratislava and Košice in Slovakia, Kraków in Poland, Cluj-Napoca, Sibiu and Braşov in Romania, and Uzhhorod in Ukraine. In modern times, the range is called Karpaty in Czech, Polish, Slovak and Карпати in Ukrainian, Carpați in Romanian, Karpaten in German, Kárpátok in Hungarian and Karpati or Карпати in Serbian. Although the toponym was recorded already by Ptolemy in the 2nd century CE, for instance, Havasok was its medieval Hungarian name, Rus and Romanian chronicles referred to it as Hungarian Mountains. The archaic Polish word karpa meant rugged irregularities, underwater obstacles/rocks, the more common word skarpa means a sharp cliff or other vertical terrain. In late Roman documents, the Eastern Carpathian Mountains were referred to as Montes Sarmatici, the Western Carpathians were called Carpates, a name that is first recorded in Ptolemys Geographia. In the Scandinavian Hervarar saga, which relates ancient Germanic legends about battles between Goths and Huns, the name Karpates appears in the predictable Germanic form as Harvaða fjöllum, inter Alpes Huniae et Oceanum est Polonia by Gervase of Tilbury, has described in his Otia Imperialia in 1211. Thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Hungarian documents named the mountains Thorchal, Tarczal or less frequently Montes Nivium, the northwestern Carpathians begin in Slovakia and southern Poland. They surround Transcarpathia and Transylvania in a semicircle, sweeping towards the southeast. The total length of the Carpathians is over 1,500 km, the highest altitudes of the Carpathians occur where they are widest. The Carpathians cover an area of 190,000 km2 and, after the Alps, although commonly referred to as a mountain chain, the Carpathians do not actually form an uninterrupted chain of mountains. Rather, they consist of several orographically and geologically distinctive groups, the Carpathians at their highest altitude are only as high as the middle region of the Alps, with which they share a common appearance, climate, and flora. The Carpathians are separated from the Alps by the Danube, the two ranges meet at only one point, the Leitha Mountains at Bratislava. The river also separates them from the Balkan Mountains at Orşova in Romania, the valley of the March and Oder separates the Carpathians from the Silesian and Moravian chains, which belong to the middle wing of the great Central Mountain System of Europe
Carpathian Mountains
–
Inner
Western Carpathians,
High Tatras,
Slovakia
Carpathian Mountains
Carpathian Mountains
–
Carpathian mountain range
Carpathian Mountains
–
Portrait of
Hutsuls, living in the Carpathian mountains, c. 1872
17.
Moravian Gate
–
The Moravian Gate is a geomorphological feature in the Moravian region of the Czech Republic. It is formed by the depression between the Carpathian Mountains in the east and the Sudetes in the west, the drainage divide between the upper Oder river and the Baltic Sea in the north and the Bečva River of the Danube basin runs through it. It stretches from Moravia towards Czech Silesia north-eastward in the length of about 65 km and is bordered by the confluence of the Olza and its crest is located between the villages of Olšovec and Bělotín at 310 m. Because of its low altitude, the Moravian Gate has been a natural pass between the Sudetes and the Carpathians since ancient times, here ran the most important trade routes from southern Europe to the Baltic Sea and also routes from the Czech lands to Upper Silesia and Lesser Poland. Today the D1 highway leads from the Moravian capital Brno to Ostrava, further to the north the road reaches the border with Poland near the town of Racibórz and Wodzisław Śląski. The Austrian Northern Railway built in 1847 from Vienna to Bohumín also traverses the Moravian Gate, vyškov Gate Subcarpathia Moravia Danube–Oder Canal Brama Morawska at PrzyrodaPolska. pl
Moravian Gate
–
Moravian Gate on the map of the Czech Republic
18.
Alps
–
The mountains were formed over tens of millions of years as the African and Eurasian tectonic plates collided. Extreme shortening caused by the event resulted in marine sedimentary rocks rising by thrusting and folding into high mountain peaks such as Mont Blanc, Mont Blanc spans the French–Italian border, and at 4,810 m is the highest mountain in the Alps. The Alpine region area contains about a hundred peaks higher than 4000 metres, the altitude and size of the range affects the climate in Europe, in the mountains precipitation levels vary greatly and climatic conditions consist of distinct zones. Wildlife such as live in the higher peaks to elevations of 3,400 m. Evidence of human habitation in the Alps goes back to the Palaeolithic era, a mummified man, determined to be 5,000 years old, was discovered on a glacier at the Austrian–Italian border in 1991. By the 6th century BC, the Celtic La Tène culture was well established, Hannibal famously crossed the Alps with a herd of elephants, and the Romans had settlements in the region. In 1800 Napoleon crossed one of the passes with an army of 40,000. The 18th and 19th centuries saw an influx of naturalists, writers, in World War II, Adolf Hitler kept a base of operation in the Bavarian Alps throughout the war. The Alpine region has a cultural identity. The Winter Olympic Games have been hosted in the Swiss, French, at present, the region is home to 14 million people and has 120 million annual visitors. The English word Alps derives from the Latin Alpes, maurus Servius Honoratus, an ancient commentator of Virgil, says in his commentary that all high mountains are called Alpes by Celts. The term may be common to Italo-Celtic, because the Celtic languages have terms for high mountains derived from alp and this may be consistent with the theory that in Greek Alpes is a name of non-Indo-European origin. According to the Old English Dictionary, the Latin Alpes might possibly derive from a pre-Indo-European word *alb hill, Albania, a name not native to the region known as the country of Albania, has been used as a name for a number of mountainous areas across Europe. In Roman times, Albania was a name for the eastern Caucasus, in modern languages the term alp, alm, albe or alpe refers to a grazing pastures in the alpine regions below the glaciers, not the peaks. An alp refers to a mountain pasture where cows are taken to be grazed during the summer months and where hay barns can be found. The Alps are a crescent shaped geographic feature of central Europe that ranges in a 800 km arc from east to west and is 200 km in width, the mean height of the mountain peaks is 2.5 km. The range stretches from the Mediterranean Sea north above the Po basin, extending through France from Grenoble, the range continues onward toward Vienna, Austria, and east to the Adriatic Sea and Slovenia. To the south it dips into northern Italy and to the north extends to the border of Bavaria in Germany
Alps
–
Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, view from the
Savoy side
Alps
Alps
–
An "alp" refers to a high mountain pasture, often with a structure, such as this one on the south side of the Alps, where cows are taken for grazing.
Alps
–
The Alps extend in an arc from France in the south and west to Slovenia in the east, and from Monaco in the south to Germany in the north.
19.
Latin
–
Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet is derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, Latin was originally spoken in Latium, in the Italian Peninsula. Through the power of the Roman Republic, it became the dominant language, Vulgar Latin developed into the Romance languages, such as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Romanian. Latin, Italian and French have contributed many words to the English language, Latin and Ancient Greek roots are used in theology, biology, and medicine. By the late Roman Republic, Old Latin had been standardised into Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin was the colloquial form spoken during the same time and attested in inscriptions and the works of comic playwrights like Plautus and Terence. Late Latin is the language from the 3rd century. Later, Early Modern Latin and Modern Latin evolved, Latin was used as the language of international communication, scholarship, and science until well into the 18th century, when it began to be supplanted by vernaculars. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Today, many students, scholars and members of the Catholic clergy speak Latin fluently and it is taught in primary, secondary and postsecondary educational institutions around the world. The language has been passed down through various forms, some inscriptions have been published in an internationally agreed, monumental, multivolume series, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Authors and publishers vary, but the format is about the same, volumes detailing inscriptions with a critical apparatus stating the provenance, the reading and interpretation of these inscriptions is the subject matter of the field of epigraphy. The works of several hundred ancient authors who wrote in Latin have survived in whole or in part and they are in part the subject matter of the field of classics. The Cat in the Hat, and a book of fairy tales, additional resources include phrasebooks and resources for rendering everyday phrases and concepts into Latin, such as Meissners Latin Phrasebook. The Latin influence in English has been significant at all stages of its insular development. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, English writers cobbled together huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek words, dubbed inkhorn terms, as if they had spilled from a pot of ink. Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, many of the most common polysyllabic English words are of Latin origin through the medium of Old French. Romance words make respectively 59%, 20% and 14% of English, German and those figures can rise dramatically when only non-compound and non-derived words are included. Accordingly, Romance words make roughly 35% of the vocabulary of Dutch, Roman engineering had the same effect on scientific terminology as a whole
Latin
–
Latin inscription, in the
Colosseum
Latin
–
Julius Caesar 's
Commentarii de Bello Gallico is one of the most famous classical Latin texts of the Golden Age of Latin. The unvarnished, journalistic style of this
patrician general has long been taught as a model of the urbane Latin officially spoken and written in the floruit of the
Roman republic.
Latin
–
A multi-volume Latin dictionary in the
University Library of Graz
Latin
–
Latin and Ancient Greek Language - Culture - Linguistics at
Duke University in 2014.
20.
Geographia (Ptolemy)
–
Its translation into Arabic in the 9th century and Latin in 1406 was highly influential on the geographical knowledge and cartographic traditions of the medieval Caliphate and Renaissance Europe. Versions of Ptolemys work in antiquity were probably proper atlases with attached maps, no Greek manuscript of the Geography survives from earlier than the 13th century. In Europe, maps were sometimes made using the coordinates provided by the text. Later scribes and publishers could then copy these new maps, as Athanasius did for the emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus, the three earliest surviving texts with maps are those from Constantinople based on Planudess work. The first Latin translation of texts was made in 1406 or 1407 by Jacobus Angelus in Florence, Italy. It is not thought that his edition had maps, although Manuel Chrysoloras had given Palla Strozzi a Greek copy of Planudess maps in Florence in 1397, the Geography consists of three sections, divided among 8 books. Book I is a treatise on cartography, describing the methods used to assemble, from Book II through the beginning of Book VII, a gazetteer provides longitude and latitude values for the world known to the ancient Romans. The rest of Book VII provides details on three projections to be used for the construction of a map of the world, varying in complexity and fidelity, Book VIII constitutes an atlas of regional maps. The maps include a recapitulation of some of the values given earlier in the work, Maps based on scientific principles had been made in Europe since the time of Eratosthenes in the 3rd century BC. Ptolemy improved the treatment of map projections and he provided instructions on how to create his maps in the first section of the work. The gazetteer section of Ptolemys work provided latitude and longitude coördinates for all the places and his Prime Meridian ran through the Fortunate Isles, the westernmost land recorded, at around the position of El Hierro in the Canary Islands. The maps spanned 180 degrees of longitude from the Fortunate Isles in the Atlantic to China, Ptolemy was aware that Europe knew only about a quarter of the globe. Ptolemys work included a large and less detailed world map and then separate. As early as the 1420s, these maps were complemented by extra-Ptolemaic regional maps depicting. The original treatise by Marinus of Tyre that formed the basis of Ptolemys Geography has been completely lost, a world map based on Ptolemy was displayed in Augustodunum in late Roman times. Pappus, writing at Alexandria in the 4th century, produced a commentary on Ptolemys Geography, for instance, Grant Parker argues that it would be highly implausible for them to have constructed the Bay of Bengal as precisely as they did without the accounts of sailors. Muslim cartographers were using copies of Ptolemys Almagest and Geography by the 9th century, a 1037 copy of these are the earliest extant maps from Islamic lands. Nallino suggests that the work was not based on Ptolemy but on a world map
Geographia (Ptolemy)
–
The world map from Codex Vaticanus Urbinas Graecus 82, done according to Ptolemy's 1st projection
Geographia (Ptolemy)
–
The
Ptolemy world map, including the countries of "
Serica " and "Sinae" (
Cattigara) at the extreme right beyond the island of "Taprobane" (
Sri Lanka) and the "Aurea Chersonesus" (
Malay peninsula).
Geographia (Ptolemy)
–
Codex Seragliensis GI 57, fol. 33v
Geographia (Ptolemy)
–
Scandinavia in the
Zamoyski Codex (c. 1467)
21.
Ptolemy
–
Claudius Ptolemy was a Greek writer, known as a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in the city of Alexandria in the Roman province of Egypt, wrote in Koine Greek, beyond that, few reliable details of his life are known. His birthplace has been given as Ptolemais Hermiou in the Thebaid in a statement by the 14th-century astronomer Theodore Meliteniotes. This is a very late attestation, however, and there is no reason to suppose that he ever lived elsewhere than Alexandria. Ptolemy wrote several treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic and European science. The first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest, although it was entitled the Mathematical Treatise. The second is the Geography, which is a discussion of the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The third is the treatise in which he attempted to adapt horoscopic astrology to the Aristotelian natural philosophy of his day. This is sometimes known as the Apotelesmatika but more known as the Tetrabiblos from the Greek meaning Four Books or by the Latin Quadripartitum. The name Claudius is a Roman nomen, the fact that Ptolemy bore it indicates he lived under the Roman rule of Egypt with the privileges and political rights of Roman citizenship. It would have suited custom if the first of Ptolemys family to become a citizen took the nomen from a Roman called Claudius who was responsible for granting citizenship, if, as was common, this was the emperor, citizenship would have been granted between AD41 and 68. The astronomer would also have had a praenomen, which remains unknown and it occurs once in Greek mythology, and is of Homeric form. All the kings after him, until Egypt became a Roman province in 30 BC, were also Ptolemies, abu Mashar recorded a belief that a different member of this royal line composed the book on astrology and attributed it to Ptolemy. The correct answer is not known”, Ptolemy wrote in Greek and can be shown to have utilized Babylonian astronomical data. He was a Roman citizen, but most scholars conclude that Ptolemy was ethnically Greek and he was often known in later Arabic sources as the Upper Egyptian, suggesting he may have had origins in southern Egypt. Later Arabic astronomers, geographers and physicists referred to him by his name in Arabic, Ptolemys Almagest is the only surviving comprehensive ancient treatise on astronomy. Ptolemy presented his models in convenient tables, which could be used to compute the future or past position of the planets. The Almagest also contains a catalogue, which is a version of a catalogue created by Hipparchus
Ptolemy
–
Engraving of a crowned Ptolemy being guided by the muse Astronomy, from Margarita Philosophica by
Gregor Reisch, 1508. Although
Abu Ma'shar believed Ptolemy to be one of the
Ptolemies who ruled Egypt after the conquest of
Alexander the title ‘King Ptolemy’ is generally viewed as a mark of respect for Ptolemy's elevated standing in science.
Ptolemy
–
Early
Baroque artist's rendition
Ptolemy
–
A 15th-century manuscript copy of the
Ptolemy world map, reconstituted from Ptolemy's Geography (circa 150), indicating the countries of "
Serica " and "Sinae" (
China) at the extreme east, beyond the island of "Taprobane" (
Sri Lanka, oversized) and the "Aurea Chersonesus" (
Malay Peninsula).
Ptolemy
–
Prima Europe tabula. A C15th copy of Ptolemy's map of Britain
22.
Germania
–
Germania was the Roman term for the geographical region in north-central Europe inhabited mainly by Germanic peoples. It extended from the Danube in the south to the Baltic Sea, the Roman portions formed two provinces of the Empire, Germania Inferior to the north, and Germania Superior to the south. Germania was inhabited mostly by Germanic tribes, but also Celts, early Slavs, Balts, the population mix changed over time by assimilation, and especially by migration. The ancient Greeks were the first to mention the tribes in the area, later, Julius Caesar wrote about warlike Germanic tribesmen and their threat to Roman Gaul, and there were military clashes between the Romans and the indigenous tribes. Tacitus wrote the most complete account of Germania that still survives, the origin of the term Germania is uncertain, but was known by Caesars time, and may be Gallic in origin. The name came into use after Julius Caesar and whether it was used widely before him amongst Romans is unknown, the term may be Gallic in origin. Tacitus wrote in AD98, For the rest, they affirm Germania to be a recent word, for those who first passed the Rhine and expulsed the Gauls, and are now named Tungrians, were then called Germani. Names of Germany in English and some languages are derived from Germania, but German speakers call it Deutschland. Several modern languages use the name Germania, including Hebrew, Italian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Maltese, Greek, Germania extended from the Rhine eastward to the Vistula river, and from the Danube river northward to the Baltic Sea. The areas west of the Rhine were mainly Celtic and became part of the Roman Empire in the first century BC, the Roman parts of Germania, Lesser Germania, eventually formed two provinces of the empire, Germania Inferior, Lower Germania and Germania Superior. Important cities in Lesser Germania included Besançon, Strasbourg, Wiesbaden, the geography of Magna Germania was comprehensively described in Ptolemys Geography of around 150 C. E. via geographical coordinates of the main cities. Germania was inhabited by different tribes, most of them Germanic but also some Celtic, proto-Slavic, Baltic, the tribal and ethnic makeup changed over the centuries as a result of assimilation and, most importantly, migrations. The Germanic people spoke several different dialects, classical records show little about the people who inhabited the north of Europe before the 2nd century BC. In the 5th century BC, the Greeks were aware of a group they called Celts, herodotus also mentioned the Scythians but no other tribes. At around 320 BC, Pytheas of Massalia sailed around Britain and along the northern coast of Europe and he may have been the first Mediterranean to distinguish the Germanic people from the Celts. Contact between German tribes and the Roman Empire did take place and was not always hostile, Caesar described the cultural differences between the Germanic tribesmen, the Romans, and the Gauls. He said that the Gauls, although warlike, could be civilized and his accounts of barbaric northern tribes could be described as an expression of the superiority of Rome, including Roman Gaul. Caesars accounts portray the Roman fear of the Germanic tribes and the threat they posed, the perceived menace of the Germanic tribesmen proved accurate
Germania
–
Depiction of Magna Germania in the early 2nd century
Germania
–
Map of the Roman Empire and Magna Germania in the early 2nd century
23.
Ore Mountains
–
The Ore Mountains or Ore Mountains Range in Central Europe have formed a natural border between Saxony and Bohemia for around 800 years, from the 12th to the 20th centuries. Today, the border between Germany and the Czech Republic runs just north of the main crest of the mountain range, the highest peaks are the Klínovec, which rises to 1,244 metres above sea level and the Fichtelberg. The Ore Mountains are a Hercynian block tilted so as to present a steep face towards Bohemia. They were formed during a process, During the folding of the Variscan orogeny, metamorphism occurred deep underground, forming slate. In addition, granite plutons intruded into the metamorphic rocks, by the end of the Palaeozoic era, the mountains had been eroded into gently undulating hills, exposing the hard rocks. As the rock of the Ore Mountains was too brittle to be folded, it shattered into an independent fault block which was uplifted and tilted to the northwest. This can be clearly seen at a height of 807 m above sea level on the mountain of Komáří vížka which lies on the Czech side, east of Zinnwald-Georgenfeld. This process is known as dissection, the Ore Mountains is geologically considered to be one of the most heavily researched mountain ranges in the world. The main geologic feature in the Ore Mountains is the Late Paleozoic Eibenstock granite pluton and this pluton is surrounded by progressive zones of contact metamorphism in which Paleozoic slates and phyllites have been changed to spotted hornfels, andalusite hornfels, and quartzites. Late Tertiary faulting and volcanism gave rise to basalt and phonolite dikes, Ore veins include iron, copper, tin, tungsten, lead, silver, cobalt, bismuth, uranium, plus iron and manganese oxides. The soils consist of rapidly leaching grus, in the western and central areas of the mountains it is formed from weathered granite. Phyllite results in a loamy, rapidly weathered gneiss in the east of the mountains producing a light soil, today the land is predominantly used for pasture. But it is not uncommon to see near-natural mountain meadows, to the north of the Ore Mountains, west of Chemnitz and around Zwickau lies the Ore Mountain Basin which is only really known geologically. Here there are deposits of coal where mining has already been abandoned. A similar but smaller basin with abandoned coal deposits, the Döhlen Basin, is located southwest of Dresden on the edge of the Ore Mountains. It forms the transition to the Elbe Valley zone, the Ore Mountains are part of a larger mountain system and adjoin the Fichtel Mountains to the west and the Elbe Sandstone Mountains to the east. Past the River Elbe, the chain continues as the Lusatian Mountains. While the mountains slope gently away in the part, the southern slopes are rather steep
Ore Mountains
–
Reservoir near
Myslivny
Ore Mountains
–
View from Mückentürmchen in the Eastern Ore Mountains to the west. Left: the escarpment descending to the
Eger Graben; right: the gentle northern dip slope.
Ore Mountains
–
The Ore Mountains and adjacent regions
Ore Mountains
–
Motif on the
Joachimsthaler Straße near
Breitenbrunn/Erzgeb.
24.
Bohemian Forest
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The Bohemian Forest, known in Czech as Šumava and in German as Böhmerwald, is a low mountain range in Central Europe. They create a border between the Czech Republic on one side and Germany and Austria on the other. In Czech, Šumava is also used as a name for the adjacent region in Bohemia. The Bohemian Forest comprises heavily forested mountains with heights of 800–1,400 metres. The highest peak is Großer Arber on the Bavarian side, the highest peak on the Bohemian and Austrian side is Plechý, the most eastern peak is the Sternstein. The range is one of the oldest in Europe, and its mountains are eroded into round forms with few rocky parts, typical for the Bohemian Forest are plateaux at about 1, 000–1,200 m with relatively harsh climates and many peat bogs. The Bohemian Forest is the range between the watersheds of the Black Sea and the North Sea, where water collected by the Vltava, Otava and Úhlava rivers flows. These rivers all spring from the Bohemian Forest, owing to heavy precipitation, the peat bogs and the Lipno Dam, the Šumava region is an important water reservoir for Central Europe. More important for their value than for holding water are several lakes of glacial origin. As a border region, the Bohemian Forest has had a complicated history, in the 20th century it was part of the Iron Curtain, and large areas were stripped of human settlement. Even before that, settlement was sparse and for centuries forests dominated over human dwellings and these unique circumstances led to the preservation of unspoilt nature and forest ecosystems relatively unaffected by human activity. On the other hand, many habitats dependent on farming activity are slowly turning into forest, in the Czech Republic, the most valuable area is protected in the Šumava National Park and Protected Landscape and the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Part of the German section is protected as the Bavarian Forest National Park, the Bohemian Forest is a popular holiday destination because it is excellent hiking country. Most interesting natural and cultural sights are connected with more than 500 km of marked trails. However, park administration is not always successful in its task, Šumava National Park is also suffering problems connected with bark beetles, and there is heated debate about how to deal with it. The origin of the current name Bohemian Forest goes back to 400 BC, the Boii people spread across Europe between 400 BC and 8 BC. Boii is the Roman name of three ancient Celtic tribes, living in Transalpine Gaul, Cisalpine Gaul, and Bohemia, Moravia, the European region of Bohemia owes its name to the Boii, who lived there until the were replaced by the Germanic Marcomanni. The Romans called it Boiohaemum, a Latinization of the Germanic name of the region, the mountain range has been traditionally identified with Γαβρήτα Ὕλη, mentioned in Strabos Geographica and Ptolemys Geographia
Bohemian Forest
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Großer Arber (Velký Javor)
Bohemian Forest
Bohemian Forest
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Čertovo jezero (Devil's Lake)
Bohemian Forest
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Czech Ski Resort at Šumava
25.
Ancient Greek
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Ancient Greek includes the forms of Greek used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around the 9th century BC to the 6th century AD. It is often divided into the Archaic period, Classical period. It is antedated in the second millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Hellenistic phase is known as Koine. Koine is regarded as a historical stage of its own, although in its earliest form it closely resembled Attic Greek. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects, Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical phases of the language, Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, some dialects are found in standardized literary forms used in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms, homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek used in the epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic, the origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period and they have the same general outline, but differ in some of the detail. The invasion would not be Dorian unless the invaders had some relationship to the historical Dorians. The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, the Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people—Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians, each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Often non-west is called East Greek, Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric, Southern Peloponnesus Doric, and Northern Peloponnesus Doric. The Lesbian dialect was Aeolic Greek and this dialect slowly replaced most of the older dialects, although Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language, which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek, by about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosized into Medieval Greek
Ancient Greek
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Inscription about the construction of the statue of
Athena Parthenos in the
Parthenon, 440/439 BC
Ancient Greek
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Ostracon bearing the name of
Cimon,
Stoa of Attalos
Ancient Greek
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The words ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ as they are inscribed on the marble of the 1955
Leonidas Monument at
Thermopylae
26.
Wild Boar
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The wild boar, also known as the wild swine or Eurasian wild pig, is a suid native to much of Eurasia, North Africa, and the Greater Sunda Islands. Human intervention has spread its range further, making the one of the widest-ranging mammals in the world. Its wide range, high numbers, and adaptability mean that it is classed as least concern by the IUCN, the animal probably originated in Southeast Asia during the Early Pleistocene, and outcompeted other suid species as it spread throughout the Old World. As of 1990, up to 16 subspecies are recognised, which are divided into four regional groupings based on skull height, the species lives in matriarchal societies consisting of interrelated females and their young. Fully grown males are solitary outside the breeding season. The grey wolf is the boars main predator throughout most of its range except in the Far East and the Lesser Sunda Islands. It has a history of association with humans, having been the ancestor of most domestic pig breeds. As true wild boars became extinct in Britain before the development of modern English, the English boar stems from the Old English bar, which is thought to be derived from the West Germanic *bairaz, of unknown origin. Boar is sometimes used specifically to refer to males, and may also be used to refer to male domesticated pigs, the young may be called piglets. The animals specific name scrofa is Latin for sow, the earliest fossil finds of the species come from both Europe and Asia, and date back to the Early Pleistocene. Its closest wild relative is the pig of Malacca and surrounding islands. These subspecies are typically high-skulled, with thick underwool and poorly developed manes, Indian, Includes S. s. davidi and S. s. cristatus. These subspecies have sparse or absent underwool, with long manes and prominent bands on the snout, while S. s. cristatus is high-skulled, S. s. davidi is low-skulled. Eastern, Includes S. s. sibiricus, S. s. ussuricus, S. s. leucomystax, S. s. riukiuanus, S. s. taivanus, and S. s. moupinensis. These subspecies are characterised by a streak extending from the corners of the mouth to the lower jaw. With the exception of S. s. ussuricus, most are high-skulled, the underwool is thick, except in S. s. moupinensis, and the mane is largely absent. It is the most basal of the four groups, having the smallest relative brain size, more primitive dentition, with the exception of domestic pigs in Timor and Papua New Guinea, the wild boar is the ancestor of most pig breeds. Remains of pigs have been dated to earlier than 11,400 BC in Cyprus and those animals must have been introduced from the mainland, which suggests domestication in the adjacent mainland by then
Wild Boar
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Wild boar Temporal range: Early
Pleistocene –
Holocene
Wild Boar
Wild Boar
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Squeaker
Wild Boar
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Juvenile
27.
Proto-Indo-European language
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Proto-Indo-European is the linguistic reconstruction of the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, the most widely spoken language family in the world. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language and these methods supply all of the knowledge concerning PIE, since there is no written record of the language. PIE is estimated to have spoken as a single language around 3500 B. C. E. during the Neolithic Age. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of Eastern Europe. Work has also gone into reconstructing their culture and religion, PIE had a complex system of morphology that included inflectional suffixes as well as ablaut and accent. PIE nominals and pronouns had a system of declension. The PIE phonology, particles, numerals, and copula are also well-reconstructed, today, the most widely-spoken daughter languages of PIE are Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Punjabi, German, French, and Marathi. There is no evidence of PIE. It has been reconstructed from its present-day descendants using the comparative method, the comparative method is based on the Neogrammarian rule that the Indo-European sound laws are applied without exception. The method compares languages and applies the laws to find a common ancestor. For example, compare the pairs of words in Italian and English, piede and foot, padre and father, pesce and fish. Since there is a consistent correspondence of the consonants that is far too frequent to be coincidental. Although his name is associated with this observation, he was not the first to make it. In many ways Jones work was less accurate than his predecessors, as he erroneously included Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese in the Indo-European languages, while omitting Hindi. In 1818, Rasmus Christian Rask elaborated the set of correspondences to include other Indo-European languages, such as Sanskrit and Greek, and the full range of consonants involved. In 1816 Franz Bopp published On the System of Conjugation in Sanskrit in which he investigated a common origin of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German. In 1833 he began publishing the Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic, in 1822, Jacob Grimm formulated what is now known as Grimms law as a general rule in his Deutsche Grammatik. Grimm showed correlations between the Germanic and other Indo-European languages, and showed that sound change affects an entire language systematically, august Schleichers A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages was an early attempt to reconstruct the proto-Indo-European language
Proto-Indo-European language
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Classification of Indo-European languages. Red: Extinct languages. White: categories or unattested proto-languages. Left half:
centum languages; right half:
satem languages
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