1.
Georgia (country)
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Georgia is a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. The capital and largest city is Tbilisi, Georgia covers a territory of 69,700 square kilometres, and its 2016 population is about 3.72 million. Georgia is a unitary, semi-presidential republic, with the government elected through a representative democracy, during the classical era, several independent kingdoms became established in what is now Georgia. The kingdoms of Colchis and Iberia adopted Christianity in the early 4th century, a unified Kingdom of Georgia reached the peak of its political and economic strength during the reign of King David IV and Queen Tamar in the 12th and early 13th centuries. Thereafter the kingdom declined and eventually disintegrated under hegemony of various powers, including the Mongols, the Ottoman Empire. Russian rule over Georgia was eventually acknowledged in various treaties with Iran. Since the establishment of the modern Georgian republic in April 1991, post-communist Georgia suffered from civil, the countrys Western orientation soon led to the worsening of relations with Russia, culminating in the brief Russo-Georgian War in August 2008. Georgia is a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and it contains two de facto independent regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which gained limited international recognition after the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. Georgia and a part of the international community consider the regions to be part of Georgias sovereign territory under Russian military occupation. Georgia probably stems from the Persian designation of the Georgians – gurğān, in the 11th and 12th centuries adapted via Syriac gurz-ān/gurz-iyān, starting with the Persian word gurğ/gurğān, the word was later adopted in numerous other languages, including Slavic and West European languages. This term itself might have established through the ancient Iranian appellation of the near-Caspian region. The self-designation used by ethnic Georgians is Kartvelebi, the medieval Georgian Chronicles present an eponymous ancestor of the Kartvelians, Kartlos, a great-grandson of Japheth. However, scholars agree that the word is derived from the Karts, the name Sakartvelo consists of two parts. Its root, kartvel-i, specifies an inhabitant of the core central-eastern Georgian region of Kartli, ancient Greeks and Romans referred to early western Georgians as Colchians and eastern Georgians as Iberians. Today the full, official name of the country is Georgia, before the 1995 constitution came into force the countrys name was the Republic of Georgia. The territory of modern-day Georgia was inhabited by Homo erectus since the Paleolithic Era, the proto-Georgian tribes first appear in written history in the 12th century BC. The earliest evidence of wine to date has found in Georgia. In fact, early metallurgy started in Georgia during the 6th millennium BC, the classical period saw the rise of a number of early Georgian states, the principal of which was Colchis in the west and Iberia in the east
2.
Abkhazia
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Abkhazia is a partially recognised state on the eastern coast of the Black Sea and the south-western flank of the Caucasus Mountains, south of Russia and northwest of Georgia proper. It covers 8,660 square kilometres and has a population of around 240,000, the separatist Abkhazian polity, formally the Republic of Abkhazia or Apsny, is recognised only by Russia and a small number of other countries. The status of Abkhazia is an issue of the Georgian–Abkhazian conflict. The region enjoyed autonomy within Soviet Georgia at the time when the Soviet Union began to disintegrate in the late 1980s, despite the 1994 ceasefire agreement and years of negotiations, the dispute remained unresolved. The long-term presence of a United Nations Observer Mission and a Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States peacekeeping force failed to prevent the flare-up of violence on several occasions. On 28 August 2008, the Parliament of Georgia declared Abkhazia a Russian-occupied territory, the Abkhazians call their homeland Аҧсны, popularly etymologised as a land/country of the soul, yet literally meaning a country of mortals. It possibly first appeared in the century in an Armenian text as Psin. The state is designated as the Republic of Abkhazia or Apsny. The Russian Абхазия is adapted from the Georgian აფხაზეთი, in Mingrelian, Abkhazia is known as აბჟუა or სააფხაზო. Between the 9th and 6th centuries BC, the territory of modern Abkhazia was part of the ancient Georgian kingdom of Colchis and this kingdom was subsequently absorbed in 63 BC into the Kingdom of Egrisi, known to Byzantine Roman sources as Lazica. Classical authors described various peoples living in the region and the multitude of languages they spoke. Arrian, Pliny and Strabo have given accounts of the Abasgoi and Moschoi peoples somewhere in modern Abkhazia on the shore of the Black Sea. Around the mid 6th century AD, the Byzantines and the neighbouring Sassanid Persia fought for supremacy over Abkhazia for 20 years, Abkhazia, or Abasgia in classic sources, formerly part of Colchis and later of Egrisi until the late 690s, was a princedom under Byzantine authority. The country was mostly Christian, with the seat in Pityus. An Arab incursion into Abkhazia led by Marwan II, was repelled by Leon I jointly with his Egrisian and Kartlian allies in 736, after acquiring Egrisi via a dynastic union in the 780s the Kingdom of Abkhazia was established and became a dominant power in western Caucasus. During this period the Georgian language replaced Greek as the language of literacy, the western Georgian kingdom flourished between 850 and 950 when it annexed significant parts of central Georgia. In the 16th century, after the break-up of the Georgian Kingdom into small kingdoms and principalities, since the 1570s, when the Ottoman navy occupied the fort of Tskhumi, Abkhazia came under the influence of the Ottoman Empire and Islam. Under Ottoman rule, the majority of Abkhaz elite converted to Islam, the principality retained a degree of autonomy
3.
Moscow Time
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Moscow Time is the time zone for the city of Moscow, Russia, Belarus, and most of western Russia, including Saint Petersburg. It is the second-westernmost of the time zones of Russia. It has been set to UTC+3 permanently on 26 October 2014, Moscow Time is used to schedule trains, ships, etc. throughout Russia, while airplane travel is scheduled using local time. Times in Russia are often announced throughout the country on radio stations as Moscow Time, descriptions of time zones in Russia are often based on Moscow Time rather than UTC. For example, Yakutsk is said to be MSK+6 within Russia, on 27 March 2011, Muscovites set their clocks forward for a final time, effectively observing MSD, or UTC+4, permanently. On 1 July 2014, the State Duma passed a bill repealing the 2011 change, most of the European Russia uses Moscow Time. In Kaliningrad Oblast, Kaliningrad time is used, Samara Oblast and Udmurtia use Samara time and Perm Krai, Bashkortostan and Orenburg Oblast use Yekaterinburg time. Prior to 27 March 2011, Moscow Time was UTC+3, daylight saving time was used in the summer, advancing it to UTC+4. UTC+3 was also used in European parts of what was then the USSR, Belarus, in 1930–1991. Estonia, in 1940–1989 Latvia, in 1940–1989 Lithuania, in 1940–1989 Moldova, in 1940–1991 Ukraine, in 1930–1990 Kaliningrad Oblast, in 1946–1991 Samara Oblast, in 1989–1991, and again from 2010–2011. Moscow Summer Time, was first applied in 1981 and was used, until 1988 in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania until 1989 in Belarus, Moldova, between 1989 and 1990 and in 2010 in Samara Oblast. In 1922–1930 and 1991–1992, Moscow observed EET, daylight saving time was observed in the summer of 1991, and the city and region reverted to UTC+3 by the summer of 1992. The time in Moscow has been as follows, Time in Russia East Africa Time, also in UTC+03,00 Current time in Moscow Moscow time
4.
Vehicle registration plate
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A vehicle registration plate, also known as a number plate or a license plate, is metal or plastic plate attached to a motor vehicle or trailer for official identification purposes. The registration identifier is a numeric or alphanumeric ID that uniquely identifies the owner within the issuing regions database. The first two letters indicate the state to which the vehicle is registered, the next two digit numbers are the sequential number of a district. Due to heavy volume of vehicle registration, the numbers were given to the RTO offices of registration as well, the third part indicates the year of registration of the vehicle and is a 4 digit number unique to each plate. In some countries, the identifier is unique within the entire country, whether the identifier is associated with a vehicle or a person also varies by issuing agency. In the vast majority of jurisdictions, the government holds a monopoly on the manufacturing of vehicle registration plates for that jurisdiction. Thus, it is illegal for private citizens to make and affix their own plates. Alternately, the government will merely assign plate numbers, and it is the owners responsibility to find an approved private supplier to make a plate with that number. In some jurisdictions, plates will be assigned to that particular vehicle for its lifetime. If the vehicle is destroyed or exported to a different country. Other jurisdictions follow a policy, meaning that when a vehicle is sold the seller removes the current plate from the vehicle. Buyers must either obtain new plates or attach plates they already hold, as well as register their vehicles under the buyers name, a person who sells a car and then purchases a new one can apply to have the old plates put onto the new car. One who sells a car and does not buy a new one may, depending on the laws involved, have to turn the old plates in or destroy them. Some jurisdictions permit the registration of the vehicle with personal plates, in some jurisdictions, plates require periodic replacement, often associated with a design change of the plate itself. Vehicle owners may or may not have the option to keep their original plate number, alternately, or additionally, vehicle owners have to replace a small decal on the plate or use a decal on the windshield to indicate the expiration date of the vehicle registration. Plates are usually fixed directly to a vehicle or to a frame that is fixed to the vehicle. Sometimes, the plate frames contain advertisements inserted by the service centre or the dealership from which the vehicle was purchased. Vehicle owners can also purchase customized frames to replace the original frames, in some jurisdictions licence plate frames are illegal
5.
Abkhaz language
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Abkhaz /æpˈhɑːz/ is a Northwest Caucasian language most closely related to Abaza. It is spoken mostly by the Abkhaz people and it is the official language of Abkhazia where around 100,000 people speak it. Furthermore, it is spoken by thousands of members of the Abkhazian diaspora in Turkey, Georgias other autonomous republic of Adjara, Syria, Jordan, the Russian census of 2010 reported 6,786 speakers of Abkhaz in Russia. Abkhaz is a Northwest Caucasian language and is related to Adyghe. Grammatically, the two are similar, however, the differences in phonology are substantial and are the main reason for many other linguists preferring to keep the two separate. Most linguists believe that Ubykh is the closest relative to the Abkhaz–Abaza dialect continuum, Abkhaz is spoken primarily in Abkhazia. However, the number of Abkhaz speakers in these countries remains unknown due to a lack of official records. Bzyb or Bzyp, spoken in the Caucasus and in Turkey, Sadz, nowadays spoken only in Turkey, formerly also spoken between the rivers Bzyp and Khosta. The literary Abkhaz language is based on the Abzhywa dialect, Abkhaz has a very large number of consonants, with three-way voiced/voiceless/ejective and palatalized/labialized/plain distinctions. By contrast, the language has only two phonemically distinct vowels—which, however, have several allophones depending on the palatal and/or labial quality of adjacent consonants. Phonemes in green are found in the Bzyp and Sadz dialects of Abkhaz, Abkhaz is typologically classified as an agglutinative language. Like all other Northwest Caucasian languages, Abkhaz has a complex verbal system coupled with a very simple noun system. Viacheslav Chirikba has characterized Abkhaz as a language, as the verb occupies the central place in Abkhaz morphology. Abkhaz is a language that distinguishes just two cases, the nominative and the adverbial. Abkhaz uses the Cyrillic script since 1862, the first alphabet was a 37–character Cyrillic alphabet invented by Baron Peter von Uslar. In 1909 a 55-letter Cyrillic alphabet was used, a 75-letter Latin script devised by a Russian/Georgian linguist Nikolai Marr lasted for 2 years 1926–1928. The earliest extant written records of the Abkhaz language are in the Arabic script, Abkhaz has been used as a literary language for only about 100 years. Both Georgian and Abkhaz law enshrines an official status of the Abkhaz language in Abkhazia, the 1992 law of Georgia, reiterated in the 1995 Constitution, grants Abkhaz the status of second official language in the territory of Abkhazia, along with Georgian
6.
Georgian language
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Georgian is a Kartvelian language spoken by Georgians. It is the language of Georgia. Georgian is written in its own writing system, the Georgian script, Georgian is the literary language for all regional subgroups of Georgians, including those who speak other Kartvelian languages, Svans, Mingrelians and the Laz. Georgian is the most pervasive of the Kartvelian languages, a family that also includes Svan and Megrelian and Laz. Dialects of Georgian are from Imereti, Racha-Lechkhumi, Guria, Adjara, Imerkhevi, Kartli, Kakheti, Saingilo, Tusheti, Khevsureti, Khevi, Pshavi, Fereydan, Mtiuleti and Meskheti. Georgian as separate from the other Kartvelian languages would have emerged in the 1st millennium BC in the area known later as the Kingdom of Iberia, the evolution of Georgian into a written language was a consequence of the conversion of the Georgian elite to Christianity in the mid-4th century. The first Georgian texts are inscriptions and palimpsests dating to the 5th century, Georgian has a rich literary tradition. The oldest surviving work in Georgian is the 5th century Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik by Iakob Tsurtaveli. In the 11th century, Old Georgian gives rise to Middle Georgian, the Georgian national epic, Shota Rustavelis The Knight in the Panthers Skin, dates from the 12th century. This marked the beginning of the modern Georgian language, symbols on the left are those of the IPA and those on the right are of the modern Georgian alphabet. Opinions also differ on the aspiration of /t͡sʰ, t͡ʃʰ/, as it is non-contrastive, a former distinction between /x/ and /qʰ/ has been lost. Prosody in Georgian involves stress, intonation, and rhythm, stress is very weak, and linguists disagree as to where stress occurs in words. Jun, Vicenik, and Lofstedt have proposed that Georgian stress and intonation are the result of pitch accents on the first syllable of a word, the rhythm of Georgian speech is syllable-timed. Georgian contains many harmonic clusters involving two consonants of a type which are pronounced with only a single release, e. g. ბგერა bgera, ცხოვრება tskhovreba. There are also frequent consonant clusters, sometimes involving more than six consonants in a row, as may be seen in words like გვფრცქვნი gvprtskvni and მწვრთნელი mtsvrtneli. Vicenik has observed that Georgian vowels following ejective stops have creaky voice, Georgian has been written in a variety of scripts over its history. Currently the Mkhedruli or Military script is almost completely dominant, the others are used mostly in religious documents, Mkhedruli has 33 letters in common use, a half dozen more are obsolete in Georgian, though still used in other alphabets, like Mingrelian, Laz, and Svan. The letters of Mkhedruli correspond closely to the phonemes of the Georgian language, however, the first examples of a Georgian script date from the 5th century AD
7.
Russian language
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Russian is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and beyond. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and it is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second most widespread language on the Internet after English, Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found between pairs of almost all consonants and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language, another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family and it is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus. From the point of view of the language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. In the 19th century, the language was often called Great Russian to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called White Russian and Ukrainian, however, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language and it is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a hard target language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in American world policy. The standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language, mikhail Lomonosov first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755, in 1783 the Russian Academys first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared. By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features are observed in colloquial speech. Thus, the Russian language is the 6th largest in the world by number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a choice for both Russian as a second language and native speakers in Russia as well as many of the former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics, samuel P. Huntington wrote in the Clash of Civilizations, During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Russian was the lingua franca from Prague to Hanoi
8.
Black Sea
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The Black Sea is a body of water between Eastern Europe and Western Asia, bounded by Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine. It is supplied by a number of rivers, such as the Danube, Dnieper, Rioni, Southern Bug. The Black Sea has an area of 436,400 km2, a depth of 2,212 m. It is constrained by the Pontic Mountains to the south and by the Caucasus Mountains to the east, the longest east-west extent is about 1,175 km. The Black Sea has a water balance, that is, a net outflow of water 300 km3 per year through the Bosphorus. Mediterranean water flows into the Black Sea as part of a two-way hydrological exchange, the Black Sea drains into the Mediterranean Sea and then the Atlantic Ocean, via the Aegean Sea and various straits. The Bosphorus Strait connects it to the Sea of Marmara, and these waters separate Eastern Europe and Western Asia. The Black Sea is also connected to the Sea of Azov by the Strait of Kerch, the water level has varied significantly. Due to these variations in the level in the basin. At certain critical water levels it is possible for connections with surrounding water bodies to become established and it is through the most active of these connective routes, the Turkish Straits, that the Black Sea joins the world ocean. When this hydrological link is not present, the Black Sea is a basin, operating independently of the global ocean system. Currently the Black Sea water level is high, thus water is being exchanged with the Mediterranean. The Turkish Straits connect the Black Sea with the Aegean Sea, and comprise the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, the International Hydrographic Organization defines the limits of the Black Sea as follows, On the Southwest. The Northeastern limit of the Sea of Marmara, a line joining Cape Takil and Cape Panaghia. Strabos Geographica reports that in antiquity, the Black Sea was often just called the Sea, for the most part, Graeco-Roman tradition refers to the Black Sea as the Hospitable sea, Εὔξεινος Πόντος Eúxeinos Póntos. This is a euphemism replacing an earlier Inhospitable Sea, Πόντος Ἄξεινος Póntos Áxeinos, strabo thinks that the Black Sea was called inhospitable before Greek colonization because it was difficult to navigate, and because its shores were inhabited by savage tribes. The name was changed to hospitable after the Milesians had colonized the southern shoreline and it is also possible that the epithet Áxeinos arose by popular etymology from a Scythian word axšaina- unlit, dark, the designation Black Sea may thus date from antiquity. A map of Asia dating to 1570, entitled Asiae Nova Descriptio, from Abraham Orteliuss Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, english-language writers of the 18th century often used the name Euxine Sea to refer to the Black Sea
9.
Kingdom of Abkhazia
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Writing the kingdoms primary history was dominated by Georgian and Byzantine sources supported by modern epigraphic and archaeological records. This can be explained by the scarcity of primary sources on these issues. Most Abkhaz historians claim the kingdom was formed as a result of the consolidation of the early Abkhaz tribes that enabled them to extend their dominance over the neighboring areas. This is objected to on the side of the Georgian historians, Abkhazia, or Abasgia of classic sources, was a princedom under Byzantine authority. It had Anacopia as the capital, Abkhazia was ruled by a hereditary archon who effectively functioned as a Byzantine viceroy. The country was chiefly Christian and the city of Pityus was a seat of an archbishop directly subordinated to the Patriarch of Constantinople, another Abasgian episcopal see was that of Soteropolis. The Arabs, pursuing the retreating Georgian princes – brothers Mir of Egrisi, dysentery and floods, combined with a stubborn resistance offered by the archon Leon I and his Kartlian and Egrisian allies, made the invaders retreat. Leon I then married Mir’s daughter, and a successor, Leon II exploited this dynastic union to acquire Egrisi in the 770s, presumably considered as a successor state of Lazica, this new polity continued to be referred to as Egrisi in some contemporary Georgian and Armenian chronicles. The successful defense against the Arabs, and new territorial gains, towards circa 786, Leon won his full independence with the help of the Khazars, he assumed the title of King of the Abkhazians and transferred his capital to the western Georgian city of Kutatisi. According to Georgian annals, Leon subdivided his kingdom into eight duchies, Abkhazia proper, Tskhumi, Bedia, Guria, Racha and Takveri, Svaneti, Argveti, the most prosperous period of the Abkhazian kingdom was between 850 and 950. The increasingly expansionist tendencies of the led to the enlargement of its realm to the east. Beginning with George I, the Abkhazian kings controlled also Kartli, in about 908 King Constantine III had finally annexed a significant portion of Kartli, bringing his kingdom up to the neighborhood of Arab-controlled Tfilisi. Under his son, George II, the Abkhazian Kingdom reached a climax of power, for a brief period of time, Kakheti in eastern Georgia and Hereti in the Georgian-Albanian marches also recognized the Abkhazian suzerainty. As a temporary ally of the Byzantines, George II patronized the missionary activities of Nicholas Mystikos in Alania, george’s successors, however, were unable to retain the kingdom’s strength and integrity. During the reign of Leon III, Kakheti and Hereti emancipated themselves from the Abkhazian rule, a bitter civil war and feudal revolts which began under Demetrius III led the kingdom into complete anarchy under the unfortunate king Theodosius III the Blind. By that time the hegemony in Transcaucasia had finally passed to the Georgian Bagratids of Tao-Klarjeti, in 978, the Bagratid prince Bagrat, nephew of the sonless Theodosius, occupied the Abkhazian throne with the help of his adoptive father David III of Tao. In 1008, Bagrat succeeded on the death of his natural father Gurgen as the King of Kings of the Georgians, thus, these two kingdoms unified through dynastic succession, in practice laying the foundation for the unified Georgian monarchy, officially styled then as the Kingdom of Georgians. Only Abkhazia and the areas of Svanetia, Racha and Khevi-Khevsureti did not acknowledge Seljuk suzerainty
10.
Ottoman Empire
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After 1354, the Ottomans crossed into Europe, and with the conquest of the Balkans the Ottoman Beylik was transformed into a transcontinental empire. The Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire with the 1453 conquest of Constantinople by Mehmed the Conqueror, at the beginning of the 17th century the empire contained 32 provinces and numerous vassal states. Some of these were later absorbed into the Ottoman Empire, while others were granted various types of autonomy during the course of centuries. With Constantinople as its capital and control of lands around the Mediterranean basin, while the empire was once thought to have entered a period of decline following the death of Suleiman the Magnificent, this view is no longer supported by the majority of academic historians. The empire continued to maintain a flexible and strong economy, society, however, during a long period of peace from 1740 to 1768, the Ottoman military system fell behind that of their European rivals, the Habsburg and Russian Empires. While the Empire was able to hold its own during the conflict, it was struggling with internal dissent. Starting before World War I, but growing increasingly common and violent during it, major atrocities were committed by the Ottoman government against the Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks. The word Ottoman is an anglicisation of the name of Osman I. Osmans name in turn was the Turkish form of the Arabic name ʿUthmān, in Ottoman Turkish, the empire was referred to as Devlet-i ʿAlīye-yi ʿOsmānīye, or alternatively ʿOsmānlı Devleti. In Modern Turkish, it is known as Osmanlı İmparatorluğu or Osmanlı Devleti, the Turkish word for Ottoman originally referred to the tribal followers of Osman in the fourteenth century, and subsequently came to be used to refer to the empires military-administrative elite. In contrast, the term Turk was used to refer to the Anatolian peasant and tribal population, the term Rūmī was also used to refer to Turkish-speakers by the other Muslim peoples of the empire and beyond. In Western Europe, the two names Ottoman Empire and Turkey were often used interchangeably, with Turkey being increasingly favored both in formal and informal situations and this dichotomy was officially ended in 1920–23, when the newly established Ankara-based Turkish government chose Turkey as the sole official name. Most scholarly historians avoid the terms Turkey, Turks, and Turkish when referring to the Ottomans, as the power of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum declined in the 13th century, Anatolia was divided into a patchwork of independent Turkish principalities known as the Anatolian Beyliks. One of these beyliks, in the region of Bithynia on the frontier of the Byzantine Empire, was led by the Turkish tribal leader Osman, osmans early followers consisted both of Turkish tribal groups and Byzantine renegades, many but not all converts to Islam. Osman extended the control of his principality by conquering Byzantine towns along the Sakarya River and it is not well understood how the early Ottomans came to dominate their neighbours, due to the scarcity of the sources which survive from this period. One school of thought which was popular during the twentieth century argued that the Ottomans achieved success by rallying religious warriors to fight for them in the name of Islam, in the century after the death of Osman I, Ottoman rule began to extend over Anatolia and the Balkans. Osmans son, Orhan, captured the northwestern Anatolian city of Bursa in 1326 and this conquest meant the loss of Byzantine control over northwestern Anatolia. The important city of Thessaloniki was captured from the Venetians in 1387, the Ottoman victory at Kosovo in 1389 effectively marked the end of Serbian power in the region, paving the way for Ottoman expansion into Europe
11.
Russian Empire
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The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until it was overthrown by the short-lived February Revolution in 1917. One of the largest empires in history, stretching over three continents, the Russian Empire was surpassed in landmass only by the British and Mongol empires. The rise of the Russian Empire happened in association with the decline of neighboring powers, the Swedish Empire, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Persia. It played a role in 1812–14 in defeating Napoleons ambitions to control Europe. The House of Romanov ruled the Russian Empire from 1721 until 1762, and its German-descended cadet branch, with 125.6 million subjects registered by the 1897 census, it had the third-largest population in the world at the time, after Qing China and India. Like all empires, it included a large disparity in terms of economics, ethnicity, there were numerous dissident elements, who launched numerous rebellions and assassination attempts, they were closely watched by the secret police, with thousands exiled to Siberia. Economically, the empire had an agricultural base, with low productivity on large estates worked by serfs. The economy slowly industrialized with the help of foreign investments in railways, the land was ruled by a nobility from the 10th through the 17th centuries, and subsequently by an emperor. Tsar Ivan III laid the groundwork for the empire that later emerged and he tripled the territory of his state, ended the dominance of the Golden Horde, renovated the Moscow Kremlin, and laid the foundations of the Russian state. Tsar Peter the Great fought numerous wars and expanded an already huge empire into a major European power, Catherine the Great presided over a golden age. She expanded the state by conquest, colonization and diplomacy, continuing Peter the Greats policy of modernisation along West European lines, Tsar Alexander II promoted numerous reforms, most dramatically the emancipation of all 23 million serfs in 1861. His policy in Eastern Europe involved protecting the Orthodox Christians under the rule of the Ottoman Empire and that connection by 1914 led to Russias entry into the First World War on the side of France, Britain, and Serbia, against the German, Austrian and Ottoman empires. The Russian Empire functioned as a monarchy until the Revolution of 1905. The empire collapsed during the February Revolution of 1917, largely as a result of failures in its participation in the First World War. Perhaps the latter was done to make Europe recognize Russia as more of a European country, Poland was divided in the 1790-1815 era, with much of the land and population going to Russia. Most of the 19th century growth came from adding territory in Asia, Peter I the Great introduced autocracy in Russia and played a major role in introducing his country to the European state system. However, this vast land had a population of 14 million, grain yields trailed behind those of agriculture in the West, compelling nearly the entire population to farm. Only a small percentage lived in towns, the class of kholops, close to the one of slavery, remained a major institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter I converted household kholops into house serfs, thus including them in poll taxation
12.
Russian Civil War
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The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war in the former Russian Empire immediately after the Russian Revolutions of 1917, as many factions vied to determine Russias political future. In addition, rival militant socialists and nonideological Green armies fought against both the Bolsheviks and the Whites, eight foreign nations intervened against the Red Army, notably the Allied Forces and the pro-German armies. The Red Army defeated the White Armed Forces of South Russia in Ukraine, the remains of the White forces commanded by Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel were beaten in Crimea and evacuated in late 1920. Lesser battles of the war continued on the periphery for two years, and minor skirmishes with the remnants of the White forces in the Far East continued well into 1923. Armed national resistance in Central Asia was not completely crushed until 1934, there were an estimated 7,000, 000–12,000,000 casualties during the war, mostly civilians. The Russian Civil War has been described by some as the greatest national catastrophe that Europe had yet seen, many pro-independence movements emerged after the break-up of the Russian Empire and fought in the war. Several parts of the former Russian Empire—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the rest of the former Russian Empire was consolidated into the Soviet Union shortly afterwards. After the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the Russian Provisional Government was established during the February Revolution of 1917, Political commissars were appointed to each unit of the army to maintain morale and ensure loyalty. In June 1918, when it became apparent that an army composed solely of workers would be far too small. Former Tsarist officers were utilized as military specialists, sometimes their families were taken hostage in order to ensure their loyalty, at the start of the war three-quarters of the Red Army officer corps was composed of former Tsarist officers. By its end, 83% of all Red Army divisional and corps commanders were ex-Tsarist soldiers, a Ukrainian nationalist movement was active in Ukraine during the war. More significant was the emergence of an anarchist political and military movement known as the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine or the Anarchist Black Army led by Nestor Makhno, some of the military forces were set up on the basis of clandestine officers organizations in the cities. The Czechoslovak Legions had been part of the Russian army and numbered around 30,000 troops by October 1917 and they had an agreement with the new Bolshevik government to be evacuated from the Eastern Front via the port of Vladivostok to France. The transport from the Eastern Front to Vladivostok slowed down in the chaos, under pressure from the Central Powers, Trotsky ordered the disarming and arrest of the legionaries, which created tensions with the Bolsheviks. The Western Allies armed and supported opponents of the Bolsheviks, hence, many of these countries expressed their support for the Whites, including the provision of troops and supplies. Winston Churchill declared that Bolshevism must be strangled in its cradle, the British and French had supported Russia during World War I on a massive scale with war materials. After the treaty, it looked like much of material would fall into the hands of the Germans. Under this pretext began allied intervention in the Russian Civil War with the United Kingdom, there were violent clashes with troops loyal to the Bolsheviks
13.
Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states
14.
Megrelian language
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Mingrelian or Megrelian is a Kartvelian language spoken in Western Georgia, primarily by Mingrelians. The language was also called Iverian in the early 20th century, no reliable figures exist for the number of Mingrelian native speakers, but it is estimated to be between 500,000 and 800,000. Most speakers live in the Samegrelo region of Georgia, that comprises the Odishi Hills and the Kolkheti Lowlands, from the Black Sea coast to the Svan Mountains and the Tskhenistskali River. Smaller enclaves existed in Abkhazia, but the civil unrest there has displaced many Mingrelian speakers to other regions of Georgia. Their geographical distribution is relatively compact, which has helped to promote the transmission of the language between generations, Mingrelian is generally written with the Georgian alphabet, but has no written standard or official status. Almost all speakers are bilingual, they use Mingrelian mainly for familiar and informal conversation, in the summer of 1999, books of the Georgian poet Murman Lebanidze were burned in the Mingrelian capital, Zugdidi, after he made disparaging remarks about the Mingrelian language. Mingrelian is one of the Kartvelian languages and it is closely related to Laz, from which it has differentiated mostly in the last 500 years, after the northern and southern communities were separated by Turkic invasions. It is somewhat closely related to Georgian and even more distantly related to Svan. Mingrelian is not mutually intelligible with any of other languages. Some linguists refer to Mingrelian and Laz as grouped within the Zan languages, Zan had already split into Mingrelian and Laz variants by early modern times, however, and it is not customary to speak of a unified Zan language today. The oldest surviving texts in Mingrelian date from the 19th century, the earliest linguistic studies of Mingrelian include a phonetic analysis by Aleksandre Tsagareli, and grammars by Ioseb Kipshidze and Shalva Beridze. From 1930 to 1938 several newspapers were published in Mingrelian, such as Kazakhishi Gazeti, Komuna, Samargalosh Chai, Narazenish Chai, Mingrelian has five primary vowels a, e, i, o, u. The Zugdidi-Samurzaqano dialect has a sixth, ə, which is the result of reduction of i and u. Consonant inventory of Mingrelian is almost identical to Laz, Georgian, and Svan. Certain pairs of vowels reduce to single vowels, ae and ai → ee → e ao, oa, in word-initial prevocalic and intervocalic positions, q → ʔ. Before the consonant v, q → ʔ/ḳ, the common types are, voicing/devoicing of voiceless/voiced consonants before voiced/voiceless ones. Glottalization of consonants before the ones and the glottal stop. If the stem contains r then the suffixes -ar and -ur transform to -al and -ul, before the stops and affricates, an inorganic augmentation n may appear. Megrelian is written in the Mkhedruli script, Aleksandre Tsagareli, Megrelskie Etiudi, Analiz Fonetiki Megrelskogo Yazika
15.
Castor and Pollux
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In Greek and Roman mythology, Castor and Pollux, or Kastor and Polydeuces, were twin brothers, together known as the Dioscuri or Dioskouroi. Their mother was Leda, but they had different fathers, Castor was the son of Tyndareus, the king of Sparta, while Pollux was the divine son of Zeus. Though accounts of their birth are varied, they are said to have been born from an egg, along with their twin sisters or half-sisters Helen of Troy. In Latin the twins are known as the Gemini or Castores. When Castor was killed, Pollux asked Zeus to let him share his own immortality with his twin to keep them together, the pair were regarded as the patrons of sailors, to whom they appeared as St. Elmos fire, and were also associated with horsemanship. They are sometimes called the Tyndaridae or Tyndarids, later seen as a reference to their father and stepfather Tyndareus, the best-known story of the twins birth is that Zeus disguised himself as a swan and seduced Leda. Thus Ledas children are said to have hatched from two eggs that she then produced. The Dioscuri can be recognized in vase-paintings by the skull-cap they wear, the pilos, whether the children are thus mortal or half-immortal is not consistent among accounts, nor is whether the twins hatched together from one egg. In some accounts, only Pollux was fathered by Zeus, while Leda and this explains why they were granted an alternate immortality. It is a belief that one would live among the gods. Castor and Pollux are sometimes both mortal, sometimes both divine, one consistent point is that if only one of them is immortal, it is Pollux. In Homers Iliad, Helen looks down from the walls of Troy, the narrator remarks that they are both already dead and buried back in their homeland of Lacedaemon, thus suggesting that at least in some early traditions, both were mortal. Their death and shared immortality offered by Zeus was material of the lost Cypria in the Epic cycle, the Dioscuri were regarded as helpers of humankind and held to be patrons of travellers and of sailors in particular, who invoked them to seek favourable winds. Their role as horsemen and boxers also led to them being regarded as the patrons of athletes and they characteristically intervened at the moment of crisis, aiding those who honoured or trusted them. Ancient Greek authors tell a number of versions of the story of Castor, homer portrays them initially as ordinary mortals, treating them as dead in the Iliad, but in the Odyssey they are treated as alive even though the corn-bearing earth holds them. The author describes them as having honour equal to gods, living on alternate days due to the intervention of Zeus, in both the Odyssey and in Hesiod, they are described as the sons of Tyndareus and Leda. In Pindar, Pollux is the son of Zeus while Castor is the son of the mortal Tyndareus, the theme of ambiguous parentage is not unique to Castor and Pollux, similar characterisations appear in the stories of Hercules and Theseus. The Dioscuri are also invoked in Alcaeus Fragment 34a, though whether this poem antedates the Homeric Hymn to the twins is unknown and they appear together in two plays by Euripides, Helen and Elektra
16.
Zeus
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Zeus /ˈzjuːs/ is the sky and thunder god in ancient Greek religion, who ruled as king of the gods of Mount Olympus. His name is cognate with the first element of his Roman equivalent Jupiter and his mythologies and powers are similar, though not identical, to those of the Indo-European deities such as Indra, Jupiter, Perun, Thor, and Odin. Zeus is the child of Cronus and Rhea, the youngest of his siblings to be born, in most traditions, he is married to Hera, by whom he is usually said to have fathered Ares, Hebe, and Hephaestus. At the oracle of Dodona, his consort was said to be Dione, Zeus was also infamous for his erotic escapades. These resulted in many godly and heroic offspring, including Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, Persephone, Dionysus, Perseus, Heracles, Helen of Troy, Minos, and the Muses. He was equated with many foreign weather gods, permitting Pausanias to observe That Zeus is king in heaven is a common to all men. His symbols are the thunderbolt, eagle, bull, and oak, in addition to his Indo-European inheritance, the classical cloud-gatherer also derives certain iconographic traits from the cultures of the Ancient Near East, such as the scepter. Zeus is frequently depicted by Greek artists in one of two poses, standing, striding forward with a thunderbolt leveled in his right hand. The gods name in the nominative is Ζεύς Zeús and it is inflected as follows, vocative, Ζεῦ Zeû, accusative, Δία Día, genitive, Διός Diós, dative, Διί Dií. Diogenes Laertius quotes Pherecydes of Syros as spelling the name, Ζάς, Zeus is the Greek continuation of *Di̯ēus, the name of the Proto-Indo-European god of the daytime sky, also called *Dyeus ph2tēr. The god is known under this name in the Rigveda, Latin, Zeus is the only deity in the Olympic pantheon whose name has such a transparent Indo-European etymology. The earliest attested forms of the name are the Mycenaean Greek
17.
Argonauts
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The Argonauts were a band of heroes in Greek mythology, who in the years before the Trojan War, around 1300 BC, accompanied Jason to Colchis in his quest to find the Golden Fleece. Their name comes from their ship, Argo, named after its builder and they were sometimes called Minyans, after a prehistoric tribe in the area. After the death of King Cretheus, the Aeolian Pelias usurped the Iolcan throne from his half-brother Aeson, because of this unlawful act, an oracle warned him that a descendant of Aeolus would seek revenge. Pelias put to death every prominent descendant of Aeolus he could, instead, Pelias kept Aeson prisoner and forced him to renounce his inheritance. Aeson married Alcimede, who bore him a son named Jason, Pelias intended to kill the baby at once, but Alcimede summoned her kinswomen to weep over him as if he were stillborn. She faked a burial and smuggled the baby to Mount Pelion and he was raised by the centaur Chiron, the trainer of heroes. When Jason was 20 years old, an oracle ordered him to dress as a Magnesian, while traveling Jason lost his sandal crossing the muddy Anavros river while helping an old woman. The goddess was angry with King Pelias for killing his stepmother Sidero after she had sought refuge in Heras temple, another oracle warned Pelias to be on his guard against a man with one shoe. Pelias was presiding over a sacrifice to Poseidon with several neighboring kings in attendance, among the crowd stood a tall youth in leopard skin with only one sandal. Pelias recognized that Jason was his nephew and he could not kill him because prominent kings of the Aeolian family were present. Instead, he asked Jason, What would you do if an oracle announced that one of your fellow-citizens were destined to kill you, Jason replied that he would send him to go and fetch the Golden Fleece, not knowing that Hera had put those words in his mouth. Jason learned later that Pelias was being haunted by the ghost of Phrixus, Phrixus had fled from Orchomenus riding on a divine ram to avoid being sacrificed and took refuge in Colchis where he was later denied proper burial. According to an oracle, Iolcus would never prosper unless his ghost was taken back in a ship and this fleece now hung from a tree in the grove of the Colchian Ares, guarded night and day by a dragon that never slept. Pelias swore before Zeus that he would give up the throne at Jasons return while expecting that Jasons attempt to steal the Golden Fleece would be a fatal enterprise, however, Hera acted in Jasons favour during the perilous journey. There is no definite list of the Argonauts, H. J. Rose explains this was because an Argonautic ancestor was an addition to even the proudest of pedigrees. The following list is collated from several lists given in ancient sources, several more names are discoverable from other sources. Amyrus, eponym of a Thessalian city, is given by Stephanus of Byzantium as one of the Argonauts, he is said to have been a son of Poseidon. Azorus was the helmsman of Argo according to Hesychius of Alexandria, atalanta is included on the list by Pseudo-Apollodorus, but Apollonius claims that Jason forbade her because she was a woman and could cause strife in the otherwise all-male crew
18.
Svan language
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The Svan language is a Kartvelian language spoken in the western Georgian region of Svaneti primarily by the Svan people. With its speakers variously estimated to be between 30,000 and 80,000, the UNESCO designates Svan as a endangered language. It is of particular interest because it has retained many features that have been lost in the other Kartvelian languages. Like all languages of the Kartvelian family, Svan has a number of consonants. It has agreement between subject and object, and a split-ergative morphosyntactic system, verbs are marked for aspect, evidentiality and version. Svan retains the voiceless aspirated uvular plosive, /qʰ/, and the glides /w/ and its morphology is less regular than that of the other three sister languages, and there are notable differences in verbal inflections. Svan is the language of fewer than 30,000 Svans, living in the mountains of Svaneti, i. e. in the districts of Mestia and Lentekhi of Georgia, along the Enguri, Tskhenistskali. Some Svan speakers live in the Kodori Valley of the de facto independent republic of Abkhazia, although conditions there make it difficult to reliably establish their numbers, there are only an estimated 2,500 Svan individuals living there. The language is used in familiar and casual social communication and it has no written standard or official status. Most speakers also speak Georgian, the official language, and use it as their literary. There is no instruction in Svan, and the number of speakers is declining due to the dispersal of the Svan population in the face of increasing economic hardship. The language is regarded as being endangered, as proficiency in it among people is limited. Svan is the most differentiated member of the four Kartvelian languages and is believed to have split off in the 2nd millennium BC or earlier, about one thousand years before Georgian did. The Svan language is divided into the dialects and subdialects, Upper Svan Upper Bal, Ushguli, Kala, Ipar, Mulakh, Mestia, Lenzer. Lower Bal, Becho, Tskhumar, Etser, Par, Chubekh, lentekhian, Lentekhi, Kheled, Khopur, Rtskhmelur, Cholur Freely varies between and Apart from the odd /eː/, only Upper Bal and Lashkh dialects have long vowels. Only Upper Bal has /æ, æː/, Lashkh does not have the front rounded vowels /œ, œː, y, yː/. The digraphs ჳი /y/ ჳე /œ/ are used in the Lower Bal and Lentekh dialects, and occasionally in Upper Bal, Svan at TITUS database ECLING - Svan. Svan alphabet and language at Omniglot Svan Youth literature in Svan language
19.
Hornbeam
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Hornbeams are hardwood trees in the flowering plant genus Carpinus in the birch family Betulaceae. The 30–40 species occur across much of the regions of the northern hemisphere. The common English name hornbeam derives from the hardness of the woods and the Old English beam, the botanic name for the genus, Carpinus, is the original Latin name for the European species. Though some botanists grouped them with the hazels and hop-hornbeams in a family, Corylaceae. Hornbeams are small to medium-sized trees, Carpinus betulus reaching a height of 32 m, the leaves are deciduous, alternate, and simple with a serrated margin, and typically vary from 3–10 cm in length. The flowers are wind-pollinated pendulous catkins, produced in spring, the male and female flowers are on separate catkins, but on the same tree. The fruit is a nut about 3–6 mm long, held in a leafy bract, the bract may be either trilobed or simple oval. The asymmetry of the seedwing makes it spin as it falls, the shape of the wing is important in the identification of different hornbeam species. Typically, 10–30 seeds are on each seed catkin, the 30–40 species occur across much of the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, with the greatest number of species in east Asia, particularly China. Only two species occur in Europe, only one in eastern North America, and one in Mesoamerica, Carpinus betulus can be found in Europe, Turkey and Ukraine. Hornbeams yield a hard timber, giving rise to the name ironwood. Dried heartwood billets are nearly white and are suitable for decorative use, for general carpentry, hornbeam is rarely used, partly due to the difficulty of working it. The wood is used to construct carving boards, tool handles, handplane soles, coach wheels, piano actions, shoe lasts, the wood can also be used as gear pegs in simple machines, including traditional windmills. It is sometimes coppiced to provide hardwood poles and it is also used in parquet flooring and for making chess pieces. — European hornbeam - widespread across much of Europe, Turkey, Iran, Caucasus, - Nepal, Himalayas of northern India Carpinus fangiana Hu - Sichuan, Guangxi Carpinus hebestroma Yamam. - Tibet, Yunnan Carpinus omeiensis Hu & W. P. Fang - Sichuan, — Oriental hornbeam - Hungary, Balkans, Italy, Crimea, Turkey, Iran, Caucasus Carpinus paohsingensis W. Y. Hsia - China Carpinus polyneura Franch. — Chonowskis hornbeam - China, Korea, Japan Carpinus turczaninowii Hance — Korean hornbeam, - China, Korea, - China, Korea, Himalayas, northern Indochina Acer carpinifolium, hornbeam maple Eichhorn, Markus. Brady Haran for the University of Nottingham
20.
MSN Encarta
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Microsoft Encarta was a digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation from 1993 to 2009. Microsoft published similar encyclopedias under the Encarta trademark in various languages, including German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, localized versions contained contents licensed from national sources and more or less content than the full English version. For example, the Dutch version had content from the Dutch Winkler Prins encyclopedia, in March 2009, Microsoft announced it was discontinuing both the Encarta disc and online versions. The MSN Encarta site was closed on October 31,2009 in all countries except Japan, Microsoft continued to operate the Encarta online dictionary at dictionary. msn. com until 2011. In the late 1990s, Microsoft added content from Colliers Encyclopedia, thus the final Microsoft Encarta can be considered the successor of the Funk and Wagnalls, Collier, and New Merit Scholar encyclopedias. None of these formerly successful encyclopedias remained in print for long after being merged into Encarta, Microsoft introduced several regional versions of Encarta translated into languages other than English. For example, the Brazilian Portuguese version was introduced in 1999, the Spanish version was somewhat smaller than the English one, at 42,000 articles. In 2000, the full Encarta content became available on the World Wide Web to subscribers, in July 2006, Websters Multimedia, a Bellevue, Washington subsidiary of London-based Websters International Publishers, took over maintenance of Encarta from Microsoft. The last version was Encarta Premium 2009, released in August 2008, updates for Encarta were offered until October 2009. Additionally, MSN Encarta web sites were discontinued around October 31,2009, existing MSN Encarta Premium subscribers were refunded. Encartas standard edition included approximately 50,000 articles, with images, videos. Its articles were integrated with multimedia content and could include links to selected by its editors. Encartas articles in general were less lengthy and more summarized than the version of Encyclopædia Britannica or the online Wikipedia. Like most multimedia encyclopedias, Encartas articles tended to provide an overview of the rather than an exhaustive coverage. A sidebar could display alternative views, essays, journals or original materials relevant to the topic, for example, when reading about computers, it featured annals since 1967 of the computer industry. Encarta also supported closed captioning for the hearing impaired, a separate program, called Encarta Research Organizer was included in early versions for gathering and organizing information and constructing a Word document-based report. Later versions included Encarta Researcher which was a plugin to organize information from Encarta articles. Content copied from Encarta was appended with a boilerplate message after the selection
21.
Esri
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Esri is an international supplier of geographic information system software, web GIS and geodatabase management applications. The company is headquartered in Redlands, California, the company was founded as Environmental Systems Research Institute in 1969 as a land-use consulting firm. Esri products have 40. 7% of the market share. In 2014, Esri had approximately a 43 percent share of the GIS software market worldwide, the company has 10 regional offices in the U. S. and a network of 80+ international distributors, with about a million users in 200 countries. The firm has 3,200 employees in the U. S. and is privately held by the founders. In 2006, revenues were about $660 million, in a 2009 Investors Business Daily article, Esris annual revenues were indicated to be $1.2 billion, from 300,000 customers. The company hosts an annual International Users Conference, which was first held on the Redlands campus in 1981 with 16 attendees, the Users Conference has been held in San Diego at the San Diego Convention Center since 1997. An estimated 15,000 users from 131 countries attended in 2012, jack and Laura Dangermond founded Esri in 1969. Jack Dangermond is the current president, according to the company, Esri is pronounced as a word, ez-ree. Some distributors outside of the USA such as Esri Canada and Esri Australia market themselves with the ess-ree pronunciation followed by the country name, Esri uses the name ArcGIS to refer to its suite of GIS software products, which operate on desktop, server, and mobile platforms. ArcGIS also includes products and web services. In a general sense, the term GIS describes any information system that integrates, stores, edits, analyzes, shares, gIS-centric certification criteria have been specifically defined by NAGCS, the National Association of GIS-Centric Solutions. As of December 2014, the companys desktop GIS suite is ArcGIS for Desktop version 10.3, the suites components, ArcMap, ArcCatalog and ArcToolbox, allow users to author, analyze, map, manage, share, and publish geographic information. The product suite is available in three levels of licensing, Basic, Standard and Advanced, Basic provides a basic set of GIS capabilities suitable for many GIS applications. Standard, at added cost, allows more extensive data editing and manipulation, Advanced, at the high end, provides full, advanced analysis and data management capabilities, including geostatistical and topological analysis tools. ArcGIS Explorer, ArcReader, and ArcExplorer are basic freeware applications for viewing GIS data, ArcGIS for Desktop Extensions are available, including Spatial Analyst for raster analysis, and 3D Analyst for terrain mapping and analysis. Other more specialized extensions are available from Esri and third parties, Esris original product, ARC/INFO, was a command line GIS product available initially on minicomputers, then on UNIX workstations. In 1992, a GUI GIS, ArcView GIS, was introduced, over time, both products were offered in Windows versions, and ArcView also as a Macintosh product
22.
Google Maps
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Google Maps is a web mapping service developed by Google. It offers satellite imagery, street maps, 360° panoramic views of streets, real-time traffic conditions, Google maps began as a C++ desktop program designed by Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen at Where 2 Technologies. In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google, which converted it into a web application, after additional acquisitions of a geospatial data visualization company and a realtime traffic analyzer, Google Maps was launched in February 2005. The services front end utilizes JavaScript, XML, and Ajax, Google Maps offers an API that allows maps to be embedded on third-party websites, and offers a locator for urban businesses and other organizations in numerous countries around the world. Google Map Maker allows users to expand and update the services mapping worldwide. Much of the satellite imagery is no more than three years old and is updated on a regular basis. Google Maps uses a variant of the Mercator projection. The current redesigned version of the application was made available in 2013. Google Maps for mobile was released in September 2008 and features GPS turn-by-turn navigation, in August 2013, it was determined to be the worlds most popular app for smartphones, with over 54% of global smartphone owners using it at least once. In 2012, Google reported having over 7,100 employees, Google Maps provides a route planner under Get Directions. Up to four modes of transportation are available depending on the area, driving, public transit, walking, in combination with Google Street View, issues such as parking, turning lanes, and one-way streets can be viewed before traveling. China mainland, Hong Kong, Macau, Jordan, Lebanon, only public transit directions are provided for South Korea. All countries of mainland North and Central America are covered contiguously, all countries of mainland South America are covered. All countries including Trinidad and Tobago* are treated contiguously, all inhabited countries and territories in the Caribbean are covered, though in general there are no connections between islands. Like many other Google web applications, Google Maps uses JavaScript extensively, as the user drags the map, the grid squares are downloaded from the server and inserted into the page. When a user searches for a business, the results are downloaded in the background for insertion into the panel and map. Locations are drawn dynamically by positioning a red pin on top of the map images, a hidden IFrame with form submission is used because it preserves browser history. The site also uses JSON for data rather than XML
23.
Sukhumi Dranda Airport
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Sukhumi Babushara Airport, previously known as Sukhumi Dranda Airport, is the main airport of Abkhazia. It is located in the village of Babushara next to the village of Dranda and some 20 kilometres from Sukhumi. The airport was built in the mid-1960s, when the region was part of the Soviet Union, in the Soviet era, it was used only for domestic flights, primarily to transport people from across the Soviet Union to the sunny beaches of Abkhazia. The airport was damaged during the civil war in the early 1990s. Land mines and other remnants of war have been cleared from the airport since by the HALO Trust. The airport is only used for flights to the mountain village of Pskhu. There is another airport in Abkhazia near Gudauta, which serves Russian military troops located there
24.
Sukhumi botanical garden
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Sukhumi Botanical Garden is one of the oldest botanical gardens in the Caucasus. It was founded in 1840 as Sukhum-Kale Military-Botanical Garden by the head of the Russian Black Sea fortification line N. N. Rayevsky with the purpose of the introduction of new plants in the region. It was ravaged by Turkish forces in 1853-55 and 1877-78 in the course of the Russo-Turkish wars, the garden was transferred to civil authorities in 1889 and the restoration of the plantings was begun in 1894. Sukhumi botanical garden continued to develop during the Soviet rule and it was transformed into the research institute of botany of the Academy of Sciences. More than 4,500 species were collected in the garden, the garden suffered greatly during the Georgian-Abkhazian War. Большая Советская Энциклопедия, Сухумский ботанический сад
25.
Abkhazian State University
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The Abkhazian State University is the only university in Abkhazia. It was founded in 1979 on the basis of the Sukhumi Pedagogical Institute and its first rector was Zurab Anchabadze. The university consists the departments of physics and mathematics, biology and geography, history, philology, economics, law, pedagogical, the first college in Abkhazia, Sukhumi Agro-pedagogical Institute was founded in 1932 and transformed into Maxim Gorky Pedagogical Institute the following year. Following the rallies and street demonstrations in 1978 it was transformed into Abkhazian State University with Abkhaz, in 1989 Georgian students demanded that the Georgian sector be transformed into a branch of the Tbilisi State University. This was opposed by the Abkhaz and eventually led to the clashes in the city, official information on the Abkhazian State University
26.
Colchis
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Colchis was an ancient kingdom and region on the coast of the Black Sea, centered in present-day western Georgia. Internationally, Colchis is perhaps best known for its role in Greek mythology, most notably as the destination of the Argonauts, as well as the home to Medea and the Golden fleece. Colchis was populated by Colchians, an early Kartvelian-speaking tribe, ancestral to the contemporary Western Georgians, namely Svans and Mingrelians, the kingdom of Colchis, Kolkhis or Qulha which existed from the c. According to the scholar of Caucasian studies Cyril Toumanoff, Colchis appears as the first Caucasian State to have achieved the coalescence of the newcomer. Colchis can be regarded as not a proto-Georgian, but a Georgian kingdom. It would seem natural to seek the beginnings of Georgian social history in Colchis. A second South Caucasian tribal union emerged in the 13th century BC on the Black Sea coast. There is some difference in authors as to the extent of the country westward, thus Strabo makes Colchis begin at Trabzon, while Ptolemy, on the other hand. The name of Colchis first appears in Aeschylus and Pindar, the earlier writers only speak about it under the name of Aea, the residence of the mythical king Aeëtes, Kolchian Aia lies at the furthest limits of sea and earth, wrote Apollonius of Rhodes. Scylax mentions also Mala or Male, which he, in contradiction to other writers, the central part of the region is Colchis Plain, stretching between Sokhumi and Kobuleti, most of that lies on the elevation below 20 m above sea level. Marginal parts of the region are mountains of the Great and the Lesser Caucasus, the climate is mild humid, near Batumi, annual rainfall level reaches 4,000 mm, which is the absolute maximum for the continental western Eurasia. The dominating natural landscapes of Colchis are temperate rainforests, yet degraded in the part of the region, wetlands. In at least some parts of Colchis, the process of urbanization seems to have been advanced by the end of the 2nd millennium BC. The Colchian Late Bronze Age saw the development of significant skill in the smelting and casting of metals, sophisticated farming implements were made, and fertile, well-watered lowlands and a mild climate promoted the growth of progressive agricultural techniques. Colchis was inhabited by a number of related but distinct tribes whose settlements lay along the shore of the Black Sea and these Colchian tribes differed so completely in language and appearance from the surrounding Indo-European nations that the ancients provided various wild theories to account for the phenomenon. Herodotus regarded the Colchians as Ancient Egyptian race, Apollonius of Rhodes states that the Egyptians of Colchis preserved as heirlooms a number of wooden tablets, which show, with considerable accuracy, seas and highways. Detlev Fehling regards the link between Colchis and Egypt as a clear example of the way Herodotus used spurious sources to back up stories he had made up himself. In the 13th century BC, the Kingdom of Colchis was formed as a result of the consolidation of the tribes inhabiting the region. This power, celebrated in Greek mythology as the destination of the Argonauts, the home of Medea, the kingdom of Tabal was conquered by the Assyrian emperor Shalmaneser III in the 830s BC
27.
Pileus (hat)
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The pileus was a brimless, felt cap worn in Ancient Greece and surrounding regions, later also introduced in Ancient Rome. The Greek πιλίδιον and Latin pilleolus were smaller versions, similar to a skullcap, the pileus was especially associated with the manumission of slaves, who wore it upon their liberation. It became emblematic of liberty and freedom from bondage, the pileus, is very common in Albania and Kosovo even today. The pilos was a common conical travelling hat in Illyria and Ancient Greece, the pilos is the brimless version of the petasos. It could be made of felt or leather, pilos caps often identify the mythical twins, or Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, as represented in sculptures, bas-reliefs and on ancient ceramics. Their caps were supposedly the remnants of the egg from which they hatched, the pilos appears on votive figurines of boys at the sanctuary of the Cabeiri at Thebes, the Cabeirion. In warfare, the pilos helmet was often worn by the peltast light infantry, in conjunction with the exomis. The pilos helmet was made of bronze in the shape as the pilos which was presumably sometimes worn under the helmet for comfort. The first widespread adoption of the pilos helmet occurred in Sparta towards the end of the 5th century BC, in Ancient Rome, a slave was freed in a ceremony in which a praetor touched the slave with a rod called a vindicta and pronounced him to be free. The slaves head was shaved and a pileus was placed upon it, both the vindicta and the cap were considered symbols of Libertas, the goddess representing liberty. This was a form of extra-legal manumission considered less legally sound than manumission in a court of law, one 19th century dictionary of classical antiquity states that, Among the Romans the cap of felt was the emblem of liberty. When a slave obtained his freedom he had his head shaved, hence the phrase servos ad pileum vocare is a summons to liberty, by which slaves were frequently called upon to take up arms with a promise of liberty. The figure of Liberty on some of the coins of Antoninus Pius, struck A. D.145, holds this cap in the right hand. ISBN 1-85532-867-4 Institute of France – Greek Costume Antiquitas – Casque corinthien et pilos A Brief History of Greek Helmets by Jesse Obert – AncientPlanet Online Journal Vol.2,48 –59
28.
Thyrsos
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A thyrsus or thyrsos was a wand or staff of giant fennel covered with ivy vines and leaves, sometimes wound with taeniae and always topped with a pine cone. The thyrsus, associated with Dionysus and his followers, the Satyrs and Maenads, is a symbol of prosperity, fertility, hedonism, and pleasure/enjoyment in general. It has been suggested that this was specifically a fertility phallus, with the representing the shaft of the penis. The thyrsus was tossed in the Bacchic dance, Pentheus, The thyrsus— in my hand shall I hold it. Or thus am I more like a Bacchanal, Dionysus, In thy right hand, and with thy right foot raise it. Sometimes the thyrsus was displayed in conjunction with a wine cup, another symbol of Dionysus, forming a male-and-female combination like that of the royal scepter. In Greek religion, the staff was carried by the votaries of Dionysus, euripides wrote that honey dripped from the thyrsos staves that the Bacchic maenads carried. The thyrsus was an instrument at religious rituals and fêtes. The fabulous history of Bacchus relates that he converted the thyrsi carried by himself and his followers into dangerous weapons, hence his thyrsus is called a spear enveloped in vine-leaves, and its point was thought to incite to madness. Euripides also writes, Theres a brute wildness in the fennel-wands—Reverence it well, for many, as they say in the mysteries, are the thyrsus bearers, but few are the mystics, --meaning, as I interpret the words, the true philosophers. The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me, /Those Pans and nymphs ye wot of, Thrysus at Encyclopædia Britannica Online Thrysus at The Ancient Library Thyrsus at Perseus Project
29.
Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii
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Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky was a Russian chemist and photographer. He is best known for his work in color photography of early 20th-century Russia. Prokudin-Gorsky was born in the estate of Funikova Gora, in what is now Kirzhachsky District. His parents were of the Russian nobility, and the family had a military history. They moved to Saint Petersburg, where Prokudin-Gorsky enrolled in Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology to study chemistry under Dmitri Mendeleev and he also studied music and painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts. In 1890, Prokudin-Gorsky married Anna Aleksandrovna Lavrova, and later the couple had two sons, Mikhail and Dmitri, and a daughter, Ekaterina, Anna was the daughter of the Russian industrialist Aleksandr Stepanovich Lavrov, an active member in the Imperial Russian Technical Society. Prokudin-Gorsky subsequently became the director of the board of Lavrovs metal works near Saint Petersburg. He also joined Russias oldest photographic society, the section of the IRTS, presenting papers. In 1901, he established a studio and laboratory in Saint Petersburg. Perhaps Prokudin-Gorskys best-known work during his lifetime was his portrait of Leo Tolstoy, which was reproduced in various publications, on postcards. The Tsar enjoyed the demonstration, and, with his blessing, Prokudin-Gorsky got the permission, in the course of ten years, he was to make a collection of 10,000 photos. Prokudin-Gorsky considered the project his lifes work and continued his journeys through Russia until after the October Revolution. He was appointed to a new professorship under the new regime, in 1920, Prokudin-Gorsky remarried and had a daughter with his assistant Maria Fedorovna née Schedrimo. The family finally settled in Paris in 1922, reuniting with his first wife, Prokudin-Gorsky set up a photo studio there together with his three adult children, naming it after his fourth child, Elka. He died in Paris on September 27,1944, a month after the Liberation of Paris and he is buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery. Only the viewers and ready-made triple photographs for use in them sold in any significant quantity, still life arrangements, unpopulated landscapes and oil paintings were the typical subject matter, but a few examples of color portraiture from life were also offered. Several Kromskop color views of the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, another very notable practitioner was Adolf Miethe, with whom Prokudin-Gorsky studied in Germany in 1902. Miethe was a photochemist who greatly improved the characteristics of the black-and-white photographic materials suitable for use with this method of color photography
30.
Miletus
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Miletus was an ancient Greek city on the western coast of Anatolia, near the mouth of the Maeander River in ancient Caria. Its ruins are located near the village of Balat in Aydın Province. Before the Persian invasion in the middle of the 6th century BC, Miletus greatest wealth and splendor was reached during the Hellenistic era and later Roman times. Evidence of first settlement at the site has been inaccessible by the rise of sea level. The first available evidence is of the Neolithic, in the early and middle Bronze age the settlement came under Minoan influence. Legend has it that an influx of Cretans occurred displacing the indigenous Leleges, the site was renamed Miletus after a place in Crete. The Late Bronze Age, 13th century BC, saw the arrival of Luwian language speakers from south central Anatolia calling themselves the Carians, later in that century other Greeks arrived. The city at that time rebelled against the Hittite Empire, after the fall of that empire the city was destroyed in the 12th century BC and starting about 1000 BC was resettled extensively by the Ionian Greeks. Legend offers an Ionian foundation event sponsored by a founder named Neleus from the Peloponnesus, the Greek Dark Ages were a time of Ionian settlement and consolidation in an alliance called the Ionian League. The Archaic Period of Greece began with a sudden and brilliant flash of art, Miletus is the birthplace of the Hagia Sophias architect Isidore of Miletus and Thales, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher in c.624 BC. The ruins appear on maps at 37°31. 8N 27°16. 7E, about 3 km north of Balat and 3 km east of Batıköy in Aydın Province. In antiquity the city possessed a harbour at the entry of a large bay. The harbour of Miletus was additionally protected by the small island of Lade. Over the centuries the gulf silted up with alluvium carried by the Meander River, there is a Great Harbour Monument where, according to the New Testament account, the apostle Paul stopped on his way back to Jerusalem by boat. He met the Ephesian Elders and then headed out to the beach to bid farewell, recorded in the book of Acts 20. During the Pleistocene epoch the Miletus region was submerged in the Aegean Sea and it subsequently emerged slowly, the sea reaching a low level of about 130 meters below present level at about 18,000 BP. The site of Miletus was part of the mainland, a gradual rise brought a level of about 1.75 meters below present at about 5500 BP, creating several karst block islands of limestone, the location of the first settlements at Miletus. At about 1500 BC the karst shifted due to small crustal movements, since then the sea has risen 1.75 m but the peninsula has been surrounded by sediment from the Maeander river and is now land-locked
31.
Greek colony
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Colonies in antiquity were city-states founded from a mother-city, not from a territory-at-large. Bonds between a colony and its metropolis remained often close, and took specific forms, however, unlike in the period of European colonialism during the early and late modern era, ancient colonies were usually sovereign and self-governing from their inception. An Egyptian colony that was stationed in southern Canaan dates to slightly before the First Dynasty, narmer had Egyptian pottery produced in Canaan and exported back to Egypt, from regions such as Arad, En Besor, Rafiah, and Tel ʿErani. Shipbuilding was known to the ancient Egyptians as early as 3000 BC, the Archaeological Institute of America reports that the earliest dated ship—75 feet long, dating to 3000 BC – may have possibly belonged to Pharaoh Aha. Egypt at its height controlled Crete across the Mediterranean Sea, the Phoenicians were the major trading power in the Mediterranean in the early part of the first millennium BC. They had trading contacts in Egypt and Greece, and established colonies as far west as modern Spain, from Gadir the Phoenicians controlled access to the Atlantic Ocean and the trade routes to Britain. The most famous and successful of Phoenician colonies was founded by settlers from Tyre in 814–813 BC and called Kart-Hadasht (Qart-ḥadašt, the Carthaginians later founded their own colony in the southeast of Spain, Carthago Nova, which was eventually conquered by their enemy, Rome. But in most cases the motivation was to establish and facilitate relations of trade with foreign countries, colonies were established in Ionia and Thrace as early as the 8th century BC. There were two types of colony, one known as an ἀποικία - apoikia and the other as an ἐμπορίov - emporion. The first type of colony was a city-state on its own, through this Greek expansion the use of coins flourished throughout the Mediterranean Basin. The Greeks also colonised modern-day Crimea on the Black Sea, among the settlements they established there was the city of Chersonesos, at the site of modern-day Sevastopol. Another area with significant Greek colonies was the coast of ancient Illyria on the Adriatic Sea, the extensive Greek colonization is remarked upon by Cicero when noting that It were as though a Greek fringe has been woven about the shores of the barbarians. Several formulae were generally adhered to on the solemn and sacred occasions when a new colony set forth, if a Greek city was sending out a colony, an oracle, especially one such as the Oracle of Delphi, was almost invariably consulted beforehand. A person of distinction was selected to guide the emigrants and make the necessary arrangements and it was usual to honor these founders of colonies, after their death, as heroes. Some of the fire was taken from the public hearth in the Prytaneum. After the conquests of the Macedonian Kingdom and Alexander the Great, the relation between colony and mother-city, known literally as the metropolis, was viewed as one of mutual affection. Any differences that arose were resolved by peaceful means whenever possible and it is worth noting that the Peloponnesian War was in part a result of a dispute between Corinth and her colony of Corcyra. The charter of foundation contained general provisions for the arrangement of the affairs of the colony, the constitution of the mother-city was usually adopted by the colony, but the new city remained politically independent
32.
Greek language
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Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any living language, spanning 34 centuries of written records and its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history, other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic and many other writing systems. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, during antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and many places beyond. It would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire, the language is spoken by at least 13.2 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. Greek roots are used to coin new words for other languages, Greek. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, the earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the worlds oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages, the Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods, Proto-Greek, the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Mycenaean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards, Ancient Greek, in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire, after the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek, the continuation of Koine Greek in Byzantine Greece, up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Much of the written Greek that was used as the language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine. Modern Greek, Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period and it is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it. In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia, the historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language is often emphasised. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language and it is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English, Greek is spoken by about 13 million people, mainly in Greece, Albania and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. Greek is the language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population
33.
Dioscuri
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In Greek and Roman mythology, Castor and Pollux, or Kastor and Polydeuces, were twin brothers, together known as the Dioscuri or Dioskouroi. Their mother was Leda, but they had different fathers, Castor was the son of Tyndareus, the king of Sparta, while Pollux was the divine son of Zeus. Though accounts of their birth are varied, they are said to have been born from an egg, along with their twin sisters or half-sisters Helen of Troy. In Latin the twins are known as the Gemini or Castores. When Castor was killed, Pollux asked Zeus to let him share his own immortality with his twin to keep them together, the pair were regarded as the patrons of sailors, to whom they appeared as St. Elmos fire, and were also associated with horsemanship. They are sometimes called the Tyndaridae or Tyndarids, later seen as a reference to their father and stepfather Tyndareus, the best-known story of the twins birth is that Zeus disguised himself as a swan and seduced Leda. Thus Ledas children are said to have hatched from two eggs that she then produced. The Dioscuri can be recognized in vase-paintings by the skull-cap they wear, the pilos, whether the children are thus mortal or half-immortal is not consistent among accounts, nor is whether the twins hatched together from one egg. In some accounts, only Pollux was fathered by Zeus, while Leda and this explains why they were granted an alternate immortality. It is a belief that one would live among the gods. Castor and Pollux are sometimes both mortal, sometimes both divine, one consistent point is that if only one of them is immortal, it is Pollux. In Homers Iliad, Helen looks down from the walls of Troy, the narrator remarks that they are both already dead and buried back in their homeland of Lacedaemon, thus suggesting that at least in some early traditions, both were mortal. Their death and shared immortality offered by Zeus was material of the lost Cypria in the Epic cycle, the Dioscuri were regarded as helpers of humankind and held to be patrons of travellers and of sailors in particular, who invoked them to seek favourable winds. Their role as horsemen and boxers also led to them being regarded as the patrons of athletes and they characteristically intervened at the moment of crisis, aiding those who honoured or trusted them. Ancient Greek authors tell a number of versions of the story of Castor, homer portrays them initially as ordinary mortals, treating them as dead in the Iliad, but in the Odyssey they are treated as alive even though the corn-bearing earth holds them. The author describes them as having honour equal to gods, living on alternate days due to the intervention of Zeus, in both the Odyssey and in Hesiod, they are described as the sons of Tyndareus and Leda. In Pindar, Pollux is the son of Zeus while Castor is the son of the mortal Tyndareus, the theme of ambiguous parentage is not unique to Castor and Pollux, similar characterisations appear in the stories of Hercules and Theseus. The Dioscuri are also invoked in Alcaeus Fragment 34a, though whether this poem antedates the Homeric Hymn to the twins is unknown and they appear together in two plays by Euripides, Helen and Elektra
34.
Classical mythology
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Classical mythology or Greco-Roman mythology is both the body of and the study of myths from the ancient Greeks and Romans as they are used or transformed by cultural reception. Along with philosophy and political thought, mythology represents one of the major survivals of classical antiquity throughout later Western culture, the Greek word mythos refers to the spoken word or speech, but it also denotes a tale, story or narrative. Classical myths are also alluded to in scientific naming, particularly in astronomy, chemistry, and biology, and in the theory of Freud. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, when Latin remained the dominant language in Europe for international educated discourse, mythological names almost always appeared in Latinized form. With the Greek revival of the 19th century, however, Greek names began to be used more often, classical mythology is a term often used to designate the myths belonging to the Greek and Roman traditions. A classical myth as it appears in later Western culture is usually a syncretism of various versions from both Greek and Latin sources. Greek myths were narratives related to ancient Greek religion, often concerned with the actions of gods and other supernatural beings, major sources for Greek myths include the Homeric epics, that is, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Known versions are preserved in sophisticated literary works shaped by the artistry of individuals and by the conventions of genre, or in vase painting. In these forms, mythological narratives often serve purposes that are not primarily religious, such as entertainment and even comedy, Roman myths have a dynamic relation to Roman historiography, as in the early books of Livys Ab urbe condita. The literary collection of Greco-Roman myths with the greatest influence on later Western culture was the Metamorphoses of the Augustan poet Ovid. The myths as they appear in popular culture of the 20th and 21st centuries often have only a tangential relation to the stories as told in ancient Greek and Latin literature
35.
Caucasus
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The Caucasus /ˈkɔːkəsəs/ or Caucasia /kɔːˈkeɪʒə/ is a region at the border of Europe and Asia, situated between the Black and the Caspian seas. It is home to the Caucasus Mountains, which contain Europes highest mountain, politically, the Caucasus region is separated between northern and southern parts. The southern parts consist of independent sovereign states, and the parts are under the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation. The region is known for its diversity, aside from Indo-European and Turkic languages, the Kartvelian, Northwest Caucasian. Pliny the Elders Natural History derives the name of the Caucasus from Scythian kroy-khasis, German linguist Paul Kretschmer notes that the Latvian word Kruvesis also means ice. According to German philologists Otto Schrader and Alfons A. Nehring, the South Caucasus region and southern Dagestan were the furthest points of Persian expansions, with areas to the north of Caucasus Mountains practically impregnable. The mythological mountain of Qaf, the worlds highest mountain that ancient lore shrouded in mystery, was said to be situated in this region, therefore, the Caucasus might be associated with the legendary mountain. The Ciscaucasus contains the majority of the Greater Caucasus Mountain range. It includes Southwestern Russia and northern parts of Georgia and Azerbaijan, the Transcaucasus is bordered on the north by Russia, on the west by the Black Sea and Turkey, on the east by the Caspian Sea, and on the south by Iran. It includes the Caucasus Mountains and surrounding lowlands, all of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia are in South Caucasus. The main Greater Caucasus range is generally perceived to be the line between Asia and Europe. The highest peak in the Caucasus is Mount Elbrus in the western Ciscaucasus in Russia, the Caucasus is one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse regions on Earth. The nation states that comprise the Caucasus today are the post-Soviet states Georgia, Armenia, three territories in the region claim independence but are recognized as such by only a handful or by no independent states, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Abkhazia and South Ossetia are recognised by the majority of independent states as part of Georgia, the Russian divisions include Krasnodar Krai, Stavropol Krai, and the autonomous republics of Adygea, Karachay–Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan. The region has many different languages and language families, there are more than 50 ethnic groups living in the region. Russian is used as a common language, today the peoples of the Northern and Southern Caucasus tend to be either Eastern Orthodox Christians, Oriental Orthodox Christians, or Sunni Muslims. Shia Islam has had many adherents historically in Azerbaijan, located in the part of the region. Located on the peripheries of Turkey, Iran, and Russia, the region has been an arena for political, military, religious, throughout its history, the Caucasus was usually incorporated into the Iranian world
36.
Linen
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Linen /ˈlɪnᵻn/ is a textile made from the fibers of the flax plant. Linen is laborious to manufacture, but the fiber is very absorbent, many products are made of linen, aprons, bags, towels, napkins, bed linens, tablecloths, runners, chair covers, and mens and womens wear. The word linen is of West Germanic origin and cognate to the Latin name for the plant, linum. This word history has given rise to a number of terms in English, most notably line. Textiles in a linen weave texture, even made of cotton, hemp. Such fabrics generally also have their own names, for example fine cotton yarn in a linen-style weave is called Madapolam. The collective term linens is still used generically to describe a class of woven or knitted bed, bath, table. The inner layer of fine composite cloth garments was traditionally made of linen, Linen textiles appear to be some of the oldest in the world, their history goes back many thousands of years. Fragments of straw, seeds, fibers, yarns, and various types of dating to about 8000 BC have been found in Swiss lake dwellings. Dyed flax fibers found in a cave in Georgia suggest the use of woven linen fabrics from wild flax may date back even earlier to 36,000 BP. Linen was sometimes used as currency in ancient Egypt, egyptian mummies were wrapped in linen as a symbol of light and purity, and as a display of wealth. Some of these fabrics, woven from hand-spun yarns, were fine for their day. In 1923 the German city Bielefeld issued banknotes printed on linen, today, linen is usually an expensive textile produced in relatively small quantities. It has a long staple relative to cotton and other natural fibers, the word linen is derived from the Latin for the flax plant, which is linum, and the earlier Greek λίνον. The discovery of dyed flax fibers in a cave in Georgia dated to thirty-six thousand years ago suggests that ancient people used wild flax fibers to create linen-like fabrics from an early date, in ancient Mesopotamia, flax was domesticated and linen was first produced. It was used mainly by the class of the society. The Sumerian poem of the courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi, translated by Samuel Noah Kramer and Diane Wolkstein and published in 1983, mentions flax and linen. It opens with briefly listing the steps of preparing linen from flax, in a form of questions, in ancient Egypt, linen was used for mummification and for burial shrouds
37.
Hemp
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A nuclear electromagnetic pulse is a characteristic burst of electromagnetic radiation created by nuclear explosions. The resulting rapidly changing electric and magnetic fields may couple with electrical and electronic systems to produce damaging current, the specific characteristics of any particular nuclear EMP event vary according to a number of factors, the most important of which is the altitude of the detonation. The term electromagnetic pulse generally excludes optical and ionizing ranges, in military terminology, a nuclear warhead detonated hundreds of kilometers above the Earths surface is known as a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse device. The fact that a pulse is produced by a nuclear explosion was known in the earliest days of nuclear weapons testing. The magnitude of the EMP and the significance of its effects, during the first United States nuclear test on 16 July 1945, electronic equipment was shielded because Enrico Fermi expected the electromagnetic pulse. The official technical history for that first nuclear test states, All signal lines were completely shielded, in spite of this many records were lost because of spurious pickup at the time of the explosion that paralyzed the recording equipment. During British nuclear testing in 1952–1953 instrumentation failures were attributed to radioflash, the first openly reported observation of the unique aspects of high-altitude nuclear EMP occurred during the helium balloon lofted Yucca nuclear test of the Hardtack I series on 28 April 1958. In that test, the field measurements from the 1.7 kiloton weapon went off the scale of the test instruments and was estimated to be about 5 times the oscilloscope limits. The Yucca EMP was initially positive-going whereas low-altitude bursts were negative pulses, also, the polarization of the Yucca EMP signal was horizontal, whereas low-altitude nuclear EMP was vertically polarized. In spite of many differences, the unique EMP results were dismissed as a possible wave propagation anomaly. The larger scientific community aware of the significance of the EMP problem after a three-article series on nuclear EMP was published in 1981 by William J. Broad in Science. In July 1962, the US carried out the Starfish Prime test and this demonstrated that the effects of a high-altitude nuclear explosion were much larger than had been previously calculated. Starfish Prime was the first success in the series of United States high-altitude nuclear tests in 1962 known as Operation Fishbowl, subsequent tests gathered more data on the high-altitude EMP phenomenon. The EMP damage of the Starfish Prime test was quickly repaired because of the ruggedness of Hawaiis electrical and these calculations, combined with the accelerating reliance on EMP-sensitive microelectronics, heightened awareness that EMP could be a significant problem. In 1962, the Soviet Union also performed three EMP-producing nuclear tests in space over Kazakhstan, the last in the Soviet Project K nuclear tests. The geomagnetic storm–like E3 pulse from Test 184 induced a current surge in an underground power line that caused a fire in the power plant in the city of Karaganda. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the level of damage was communicated informally to U. S. scientists. After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a period of a few years of cooperation between United States and Russian scientists on the HEMP phenomenon
38.
Slave trade
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The history of slavery spans nearly every culture, nationality, and religion from ancient times to the present day. However the social, economic, and legal positions of slaves were vastly different in different systems of slavery in different times and places, Slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations, as it is developed as a system of social stratification. Slavery was known in the very oldest civilizations such as Sumer in Mesopotamia which dates back as far as 3500 BC, the Byzantine–Ottoman wars and the Ottoman wars in Europe resulted in the taking of large numbers of Christian slaves. Slavery became common within much of Europe and the British Isles during the Dark Ages, the Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, Arabs and a number of West African kingdoms played a prominent role in the Atlantic slave trade, especially after 1600. During the 1983–2005 Second Sudanese Civil War people were taken into slavery, evidence emerged in the late 1990s of systematic slavery in cacao plantations in West Africa, see the chocolate and slavery article. Evidence of slavery predates written records, and has existed in many cultures, however, slavery is rare among hunter-gatherer populations. Mass slavery requires economic surpluses and a population density to be viable. Due to these factors, the practice of slavery would have only proliferated after the invention of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution, about 11,000 years ago. Such institutions were a mixture of debt-slavery, punishment for crime, the enslavement of prisoners of war, child abandonment, French historian Fernand Braudel noted that slavery was endemic in Africa and part of the structure of everyday life. During the 16th century, Europe began to outpace the Arab world in the export traffic, the Dutch imported slaves from Asia into their colony in South Africa. In 1807 Britain, which extensive, although mainly coastal, colonial territories on the African continent, made the international slave trade illegal. In Senegambia, between 1300 and 1900, close to one-third of the population was enslaved, in early Islamic states of the Western Sudan, including Ghana, Mali, Segou, and Songhai, about a third of the population was enslaved. In Sierra Leone in the 19th century about half of the population consisted of slaves. In the 19th century at least half the population was enslaved among the Duala of the Cameroon, the Igbo and other peoples of the lower Niger, the Kongo, among the Ashanti and Yoruba a third of the population consisted of slaves. The population of the Kanem was about a third slave and it was perhaps 40% in Bornu. Between 1750 and 1900 from one- to two-thirds of the population of the Fulani jihad states consisted of slaves. The population of the Sokoto caliphate formed by Hausas in northern Nigeria and it is estimated that up to 90% of the population of Arab-Swahili Zanzibar was enslaved. Roughly half the population of Madagascar was enslaved, the Anti-Slavery Society estimated that there were 2,000,000 slaves in the early 1930s Ethiopia, out of an estimated population of between 8 and 16 million
39.
Mithridates VI Eupator
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He is often considered the greatest ruler of the Kingdom of Pontus. Mithridates VI was a prince of Persian and Greek ancestry, Mithridates was born in the Pontic city of Sinope, and was raised in the Kingdom of Pontus. He was the first son among the children born to Laodice VI and his father, Mithridates V, was a prince and the son of the former Pontic monarchs Pharnaces I of Pontus and his wife-cousin Nysa. His mother, Laodice VI, was a Seleucid princess and the daughter of the Seleucid monarchs Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Mithridates V was assassinated in about 120 BC in Sinope, poisoned by unknown persons at a lavish banquet which he held. He left the kingdom to the joint rule of Mithridates mother, Laodice VI, Mithridates, neither Mithridates nor his younger brother were of age, and their mother retained all power as regent for the time being. Laodice VI’s regency over Pontus was from 120 BC to 116 BC, during his mother’s regency, he escaped from his mothers plots against him, and went into hiding. Mithridates emerged from hiding, returning to Pontus between 116 BC and 113 BC and was hailed as king and he removed his mother and brother from the throne, imprisoning both, becoming the sole ruler of Pontus. Laodice VI died in prison, ostensibly of natural causes, Mithridates Chrestus may have died in prison also, or may have been tried for treason and executed. Mithridates first married his younger sister Laodice, aged 16 and his goal was to preserve the purity of their bloodline, solidify his claim to the throne, to co-rule over Pontus, and to ensure the succession to his legitimate children. Mithridates entertained ambitions of making his state the dominant power in the Black Sea and he first subjugated Colchis, a region east of the Black Sea, and prior to 164 BC, an independent kingdom. He then clashed for supremacy on the Pontic steppe with the Scythian King Palacus, the young king then turned his attention to Anatolia, where Roman power was on the rise. He contrived to partition Paphlagonia and Galatia with King Nicomedes III of Bithynia and it soon became clear to Mithridates that Nicomedes was steering his country into an anti-Pontic alliance with the expanding Roman Republic. When Mithridates fell out with Nicomedes over control of Cappadocia, and defeated him in a series of battles, the next ruler of Bithynia, Nicomedes IV of Bithynia, was a figurehead manipulated by the Romans. Mithridates plotted to overthrow him, but his attempts failed and Nicomedes IV, instigated by his Roman advisors, Rome itself was involved in the Social War, a civil war with its Italian allies. Thus, in all of Roman Asia Province there were two legions present in Macedonia. These legions combined with Nicomedes IVs army to invade Mithridates kingdom of Pontus in 89 BC, Mithridates, however, won a decisive victory, scattering the Roman-led forces. His victorious forces were welcomed throughout Anatolia, the following year,88 BC, Mithridates orchestrated a massacre of Roman and Italian settlers remaining in several Anatolian cities, essentially wiping out the Roman presence in the region. This episode is known as the Asiatic Vespers, the Kingdom of Pontus comprised a mixed population in its Ionian Greek and Anatolian cities
40.
Kingdom of Pontus
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The Kingdom of Pontus or Pontic Empire was a state founded by the Persian Mithridatic dynasty, which may have been directly related to Darius the Great and the Achaemenid dynasty. The kingdom was proclaimed by Mithridates I in 281 BCE and lasted until its conquest by the Roman Republic in 63 BCE, culturally, the kingdom was Hellenized, with Greek the official language. The Kingdom of Pontus was divided into two areas, the coastal region and the Pontic interior. The coastal region bordering the Black Sea was separated from the inland area by the Pontic Alps. The river valleys of Pontus also ran parallel to the coast and were quite fertile, supporting cattle herds, millet, the coastal region was dominated by Greek cities such as Amastris and Sinope, which became the Pontic capital after its capture. The coast was rich in timber, fishing, and olives, Pontus was also rich in iron and silver, which were mined near the coast south of Pharnacia, steel from the Chalybian mountains became quite famous in Greece. There were also copper, lead, zinc and arsenic, the Pontic interior also had fertile river valleys such as the river Lycus and Iris. The major city of the interior was Amasia, the early Pontic capital, besides Amasia and a few other cities, the interior was dominated mainly by small villages. The kingdom of Pontus was divided into districts named Eparchies, the division between coast and interior was also cultural. The coast was mainly Greek and focused on sea trade, the interior was occupied by the Anatolian Cappadocians and Paphlagonians ruled by an Iranian aristocracy that went back to the Persian empire. The interior also had powerful temples with large estates, the gods of the Kingdom were mostly syncretic, with features of local gods along with Persian and Greek deities. Major gods included the Persian Ahuramazda, who was termed Zeus Stratios, sun gods were particularly popular, with the royal house being identified with the Persian god Ahuramazda of the Achaemenid dynasty, both Apollo and Mithras were worshipped by the Kings. Indeed, the used by the majority of the Pontic kings was Mithridates. Pontic culture represented a synthesis between Iranian, Anatolian and Greek elements, with the two mostly associated with the interior parts, and the latter moreso with the coastal region. By the time of Mithridates VI Eupator, Greek was the language of the Kingdom though Anatolian languages continued to be spoken in the interior. Although the Pontic kings claimed descent from the Persian royal house, they acted as Hellenistic kings and portrayed themselves as such in their coins. The region of Pontus was originally part of the Persian satrapy of Cappadocia, the Persian dynasty which was to found this kingdom had, during the 4th century BCE, ruled the Greek city of Cius in Mysia, with its first known member being Mithridates of Cius. His son Ariobarzanes II became satrap of Phrygia and he became a strong ally of Athens and revolted against Artaxerxes, but was betrayed by his son Mithridates II of Cius
41.
Roman emperor
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The Roman emperor was the ruler of the Roman Empire during the imperial period. The emperors used a variety of different titles throughout history, often when a given Roman is described as becoming emperor in English, it reflects his taking of the title Augustus or Caesar. Another title often used was imperator, originally a military honorific, early Emperors also used the title princeps. Emperors frequently amassed republican titles, notably Princeps Senatus, Consul, the first emperors reigned alone, later emperors would sometimes rule with co-Emperors and divide administration of the Empire between them. The Romans considered the office of emperor to be distinct from that of a king, the first emperor, Augustus, resolutely refused recognition as a monarch. Although Augustus could claim that his power was authentically republican, his successor, Tiberius, nonetheless, for the first three hundred years of Roman Emperors, from Augustus until Diocletian, a great effort was made to emphasize that the Emperors were the leaders of a Republic. Elements of the Republican institutional framework were preserved until the end of the Western Empire. The Eastern emperors ultimately adopted the title of Basileus, which had meant king in Greek, but became a title reserved solely for the Roman emperor, other kings were then referred to as rēgas. In addition to their office, some emperors were given divine status after death. The Western Roman Empire collapsed in the late 5th century, Romulus Augustulus is often considered to be the last emperor of the west after his forced abdication in 476, although Julius Nepos maintained a claim to the title until his death in 480. Constantine XI was the last Byzantine Roman emperor in Constantinople, dying in the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, a Byzantine group of claimant Roman Emperors existed in the Empire of Trebizond until its conquest by the Ottomans in 1461. In western Europe the title of Roman Emperor was revived by Germanic rulers, the Holy Roman Emperors, in 800, at the end of the Roman Republic no new, and certainly no single, title indicated the individual who held supreme power. Insofar as emperor could be seen as the English translation of imperator, then Julius Caesar had been an emperor, however, Julius Caesar, unlike those after him, did so without the Senates vote and approval. Julius Caesar held the Republican offices of four times and dictator five times, was appointed dictator in perpetuity in 45 BC and had been pontifex maximus for a long period. He gained these positions by senatorial consent, by the time of his assassination, he was the most powerful man in the Roman world. In his will, Caesar appointed his adopted son Octavian as his heir, a decade after Caesars death, Octavians victory over his erstwhile ally Mark Antony at Actium put an end to any effective opposition and confirmed Octavians supremacy. His restoration of powers to the Senate and the people of Rome was a demonstration of his auctoritas, some later historians such as Tacitus would say that even at Augustus death, the true restoration of the Republic might have been possible. Instead, Augustus actively prepared his adopted son Tiberius to be his successor, the Senate disputed the issue but eventually confirmed Tiberius as princeps
42.
Augustus
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Augustus was the founder of the Roman Principate and considered the first Roman emperor, controlling the Roman Empire from 27 BC until his death in AD14. He was born Gaius Octavius into an old and wealthy equestrian branch of the plebeian gens Octavia and his maternal great-uncle Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, and Octavius was named in Caesars will as his adopted son and heir, then known as Octavianus. He, Mark Antony, and Marcus Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate to defeat the assassins of Caesar, following their victory at the Battle of Philippi, the Triumvirate divided the Roman Republic among themselves and ruled as military dictators. The Triumvate was eventually torn apart by the ambitions of its members. Lepidus was driven into exile and stripped of his position, in reality, however, he retained his autocratic power over the Republic as a military dictator. By law, Augustus held a collection of powers granted to him for life by the Senate, including supreme military command, and it took several years for Augustus to develop the framework within which a formally republican state could be led under his sole rule. He rejected monarchical titles, and instead called himself Princeps Civitatis, the resulting constitutional framework became known as the Principate, the first phase of the Roman Empire. The reign of Augustus initiated an era of peace known as the Pax Romana. Augustus dramatically enlarged the Empire, annexing Egypt, Dalmatia, Pannonia, Noricum, and Raetia, expanding possessions in Africa, expanding into Germania, beyond the frontiers, he secured the Empire with a buffer region of client states and made peace with the Parthian Empire through diplomacy. Augustus died in AD14 at the age of 75 and he probably died from natural causes, although there were unconfirmed rumors that his wife Livia poisoned him. He was succeeded as Emperor by his adopted son Tiberius, Augustus was known by many names throughout his life, At birth, he was named Gaius Octavius after his biological father. Historians typically refer to him simply as Octavius between his birth in 63 until his adoption by Julius Caesar in 44 BC, upon his adoption, he took Caesars name and became Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus in accordance with Roman adoption naming standards. He quickly dropped Octavianus from his name, and his contemporaries referred to him as Caesar during this period, historians. In 27 BC, following his defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra and it is the events of 27 BC from which he obtained his traditional name of Augustus, which historians use in reference to him from 27 BC until his death in AD14. While his paternal family was from the town of Velletri, approximately 40 kilometres from Rome and he was born at Ox Head, a small property on the Palatine Hill, very close to the Roman Forum. He was given the name Gaius Octavius Thurinus, his cognomen possibly commemorating his fathers victory at Thurii over a band of slaves. Due to the nature of Rome at the time, Octavius was taken to his fathers home village at Velletri to be raised. Octavius only mentions his fathers equestrian family briefly in his memoirs and his paternal great-grandfather Gaius Octavius was a military tribune in Sicily during the Second Punic War
43.
Pliny the Elder
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In the latter number will be my uncle, by virtue of his own and of your compositions. Pliny is referring to the fact that Tacitus relied on his uncles now missing work on the History of the German Wars. The wind caused by the sixth and largest pyroclastic surge of the eruption would not allow his ship to leave the shore, and Pliny probably died during this event. Plinys dates are pinned to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 and a statement of his nephew that he died in his 56th year, Pliny was the son of an equestrian, Gaius Plinius Celer, and his wife, Marcella. Neither the younger nor the elder Pliny mention the names and their ultimate source is a fragmentary inscription found in a field in Verona and recorded by the 16th century Augustinian monk Onofrio Panvinio at Verona. The reading of the inscription depends on the reconstruction, but in all cases the names come through, whether he was an augur and whether she was named Grania Marcella are less certain. Jean Hardouin presents a statement from a source that he claims was ancient, that Pliny was from Verona. Hardouin also cites the conterraneity of Catullus, additional efforts to connect Celer and Marcella with other gentes are highly speculative. Hardouin is the scholar to use his unknown source. He kept statues of his ancestors there, a statue of Pliny on the facade of the Duomo of Como celebrates him as a native son. He had a sister, Plinia, who married into the Caecilii and was the mother of his nephew, Pliny the Younger, whose letters describe his work and study regimen in detail. In one of his letters to Tacitus, Pliny the Younger details how his uncles breakfasts would be light and simple following the customs of our forefathers. This shows that Pliny the Younger wanted it to be conveyed that Pliny the Elder was a good Roman and this statement would have pleased Tacitus. Two inscriptions identifying the hometown of Pliny the Younger as Como take precedence over the Verona theory, one commemorates the youngers career as imperial magistrate and details his considerable charitable and municipal expenses on behalf of the people of Como. Another identifies his father Lucius village as Fecchio near Como and it is likely therefore that Plinia was a local girl and Pliny the Elder, her brother, was from Como. Gaius was a member of the Plinii gens and he did not take his fathers cognomen, Celer, but assumed his own, Secundus. As his adopted son took the same cognomen, Pliny founded a branch, no earlier instances of the Plinii are known. In 59 BC, only about 82 years before Plinys birth, Julius Caesar founded Novum Comum as a colonia to secure the region against the Alpine tribes, whom he had been unable to defeat
44.
Sassanid dynasty
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The Sasanian Empire was founded by Ardashir I, after the fall of the Parthian Empire and the defeat of the last Arsacid king, Artabanus V. According to a legend, the vexilloid of the Sasanian Empire was the Derafsh Kaviani, in many ways, the Sasanian period witnessed the peak of ancient Iranian civilization. Persia influenced Roman culture considerably during the Sasanian period, the Sasanians cultural influence extended far beyond the empires territorial borders, reaching as far as Western Europe, Africa, China and India. It played a prominent role in the formation of both European and Asian medieval art, much of what later became known as Islamic culture in art, architecture, music and other subject matter was transferred from the Sasanians throughout the Muslim world. Conflicting accounts shroud the details of the fall of the Parthian Empire, the Sassanid Empire was established in Estakhr by Ardashir I. Papak was originally the ruler of a region called Khir, however, by the year 200, he managed to overthrow Gochihr, and appoint himself as the new ruler of the Bazrangids. His mother, Rodhagh, was the daughter of the governor of Pars. Papak and his eldest son Shapur managed to expand their power all of Pars. The subsequent events are unclear, due to the nature of the sources. It is certain, however, that following the death of Papak, Ardashir, sources reveal that Shapur, leaving for a meeting with his brother, was killed when the roof of a building collapsed on him. By the year 208, over the protests of his brothers who were put to death. Once Ardashir was appointed shahanshah, he moved his capital further to the south of Pars, the city, well supported by high mountains and easily defendable through narrow passes, became the center of Ardashirs efforts to gain more power. The city was surrounded by a high, circular wall, probably copied from that of Darabgird, in a second attempt to destroy Ardashir, Artabanus V himself met Ardashir in battle at Hormozgan, where Artabanus V met his death. Following the death of the Parthian ruler, Ardashir I went on to invade the provinces of the now defunct Parthian Empire. Ardashir was aided by the geography of the province of Fars, in the next few years, local rebellions would form around the empire. Nonetheless, Ardashir I further expanded his new empire to the east and northwest, conquering the provinces of Sistan, Gorgan, Khorasan, Margiana, Balkh and he also added Bahrain and Mosul to Sassanids possessions. In the west, assaults against Hatra, Armenia and Adiabene met with less success, in 230, he raided deep into Roman territory, and a Roman counter-offensive two years later ended inconclusively, although the Roman emperor, Alexander Severus, celebrated a triumph in Rome. Ardashir Is son Shapur I continued the expansion of the empire, conquering Bactria, invading Roman Mesopotamia, Shapur I captured Carrhae and Nisibis, but in 243 the Roman general Timesitheus defeated the Persians at Rhesaina and regained the lost territories
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Ufa, Russia[citation needed]
Tiraspol, Transnistria[citation needed]
Stepanakert, Nagorno-Karabakh Republic[citation needed]
Sant'Antioco, Italy[47][48]
Side, Turkey[49]
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