United States
The United States of America known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U. S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D. C. and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico; the State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean; the U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The diverse geography and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century; the United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776; the war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties; the United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848. During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.
By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power; the United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U. S. Moon landing; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower. The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation, it is a representative democracy.
The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, other international organizations. The United States is a developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for a quarter of global GDP; the U. S. economy is post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U. S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, worker productivity.
The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, is a leading political and scientific force internationally. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci; the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan, Esq. to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort; the first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776. The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the'United States of America'".
The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence; this draft of the document did not surface unti
KV47
Tomb KV47, located in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, was used for the burial of Pharaoh Siptah of the Nineteenth Dynasty, though Siptah's mummy was found in KV35. KV47 was discovered on December 1905 by Edward R. Ayrton. Theodore M. Davis, Ayrton's sponsor, published an account of the site's discovery and excavation in 1908. Ayrton stopped his excavation in 1907 due to safety fears, Harry Burton returned in 1912 to dig further; the cutting of Chamber J1 was halted after the workmen cut into Side Chamber Ja of the tomb of Tia'a, KV32. The workmen were forced to abandon the chamber and create a second burial chamber, Chamber J2 Davis, Theodore M; the Tomb of Siphtah: With the Tomb of Queen Tîyi. London: Duckworth Publishing, 2001. ISBN 0-7156-3073-3 Theban Mapping Project: KV47 - Includes detailed maps of most of the tombs
Edward R. Ayrton
Edward Russell Ayrton was an English Egyptologist and archaeologist. He was the son of William Scrope Ayrton, 1849-1904 and his wife Ellen Louisa McClatchie, was born in Wuhu, China, on 17 December 1882, he was educated in London. He began his career in Egyptology at the age of 20, assisting the pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology William Matthew Flinders Petrie, he joined Petrie on the Egypt Exploration Fund excavations at Abydos from 1902 to 1904. Ayrton's first independent work was the excavation of the Second Dynasty site of Shunet ez Zebib, he worked near Ghurab with William Leonard Stevenson Loat. In 1904-05 he excavated and recorded graves of several ancient princesses found in the funerary temple complex of king Mentuhotep II at Deir al-Bahari, as part of the expedition led by Édouard Naville and Henry Hall. Working for Theodore M. Davis in Egypt's Valley of the Kings from 1905 to 1908, he discovered the following tombs: KV47 KV55 KV56 and KV57, he led or participated in the excavation of the following tombs: KV2, KV10, KV46, KV47, KV48, KV49, KV50, KV51, KV52, KV53, KV54, KV56, KV57, KV59, KV60.
Again working with Loat, in 1908-09 he excavated amongst the Sixth Dynasty tombs at Abydos and the Predynastic cemetery at El Mahasna. In 1911 he accepted a position with the Archaeological Survey of Ceylon. On the 18 May 1914 he drowned while on a shooting expedition, in an accident on the Tissa Tank lake, Tissamaharama, in southern Ceylon; the Times Newspaper printed his obituary on the 23 May 1914. The Estate of £ 457 18s 1d is left to Florence Margaret Ayrton. E. R. Ayrton, "Discovery of the tomb of Si-ptah in the Bibân el Molûk, Thebes", PSBA, 28, 1906. Edward R. Ayrton and W. L. S. Loat, "Pre-dynastic cemetery at El Mahasna", 1911, London. Edward R. Ayrton, "The Date of Buddhadasa of Ceylon from a Chinese Source". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1911. Edward R. Ayrton, "The Excavation of the Tomb of Queen Tîyi", The Tomb of Queen Tîyi, ed. Nicholas Reeves, San Francisco, KMT Communications, 1990. Obituary in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 2, No.
1, pp. 20-23
KV60
Tomb KV60 in Egypt's Valley of the Kings is one of the more perplexing tombs of the Theban Necropolis, due to the uncertainty over the identity of one female mummy found there, thought by some, such as the noted Egyptologist Elizabeth Thomas, to be that of the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh Hatshepsut. This identification has been advocated by Egyptologist Zahi Hawass; when the tomb was discovered by Howard Carter in 1903, it was found to have been ransacked and desecrated in antiquity, but still held two mummies, along with some badly damaged grave goods. In 1906 Edward R. Ayrton reopened it, removed one mummy, KV60B, together with the coffin it was in, to the Egyptian Museum; the coffin was inscribed with the title royal nurse, In. This personage has been identified with Sit-Ra, called In, the royal nurse of Hatshepsut. Since neither Carter nor Ayrton drew plans or maps indicating the location of the tomb, the whereabouts of the tomb became forgotten. Elizabeth Thomas speculated that the second mummy was that of Hatshepsut, relocated there by Thutmose III, as part of his campaign of official hostility towards her.
In 1990 the tomb was rediscovered and properly excavated by a team led by Donald P. Ryan and Mark Papworth; this produced evidence both in favour of, casting doubt on, Thomas' theory. On the supporting side, the mummy proved to be that of a elderly lady, with her left arm flexed in the pose thought to mark a royal mummy. On the other hand, none of the pottery fragments recovered during the excavation could be dated to the 18th Dynasty. A wooden face-piece from a coffin destined for a male was found – but the tomb contained only females, Hatshepsut is known to have used the false beard; the mummy was placed in a new wooden coffin, left in the tomb, resealed. In early 2007, the tomb was reopened and the second mummy, KV60A, removed for testing. On 27 June 2007, Supreme Council of Antiquities director Zahi Hawass offered what he considered to be definitive proof that this "corpulent, elderly" body was indeed Hatshepsut; the mummy was found by CT scan to have one root of a missing molar. An unopened canopic box bearing the royal name of Hapshetsut was found by CT scan to contain a molar with one root missing.
The size and shape of the root remaining in the mummy is claimed to fit the molar in the canopic box. Doubts have been cast by, for example, Egyptology writer Dylan Bickerstaffe, he wrote about the molar, soon after the attribution was made, that "it is important that the join with the root in the mouth of the mummy is physically corroborated. DNA tests should also be able to confirm that the tooth and KV60A are one and the same person." In a 2013 book, science journalist Jo Marchant reported:Most Egyptologists I’ve spoken to are skeptical that this mummy has anything to do with Hatshepsut, say they would like to study the team’s evidence. Neither the CT scans nor the DNA results have yet been published in a scientific journal. Notes Further reading Nicholas Reeves and Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Valley of the Kings pp. 186–187. Donald P. Ryan, "Who is buried in KV60", KMT 1:1, 1990. Siliotti, A. Guide to the Valley of the Kings and to the Theban Necropolises and Temples, 1996, A. A. Gaddis, Cairo.
Theban Mapping Project: KV60 – Plans of the tomb and other details. Donald Ryan's site – Contains photos of the mummy he found in KV60. Unidentified Mummies – More pictures and information on the mummies
William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan was an American orator and politician from Nebraska. Beginning in 1896, he emerged as a dominant force in the Democratic Party, standing three times as the party's nominee for President of the United States, he served in the United States House of Representatives and as the United States Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. Just before his death he gained national attention for attacking the teaching of evolution in the Scopes Trial; because of his faith in the wisdom of the common people, he was called "The Great Commoner". Born and raised in Illinois, Bryan moved to Nebraska in the 1880s, he won election to the House of Representatives in the 1890 elections, serving two terms before making an unsuccessful run for the Senate in 1894. At the 1896 Democratic National Convention, Bryan delivered his "Cross of Gold speech" which attacked the gold standard and the eastern moneyed interests and crusaded for inflationary policies built around the expanded coinage of silver coins.
In a repudiation of incumbent President Grover Cleveland and his conservative Bourbon Democrats, the Democratic convention nominated Bryan for president, making Bryan the youngest major party presidential nominee in U. S. history. Subsequently, Bryan was nominated for president by the left-wing Populist Party, many Populists would follow Bryan into the Democratic Party. In the intensely fought 1896 presidential election, Republican nominee William McKinley emerged triumphant. Bryan gained fame as an orator as he invented the national stumping tour when he reached an audience of 5 million people in 27 states in 1896. Bryan retained control of the Democratic Party and won the presidential nomination again in 1900. In the aftermath of the Spanish–American War, Bryan became a fierce opponent of American imperialism, much of the campaign centered on that issue. In the election, McKinley again defeated Bryan, winning several Western states that Bryan had won in 1896. Bryan's influence in the party weakened after the 1900 election, the Democrats nominated the conservative Alton B. Parker in the 1904 presidential election.
Bryan regained his stature in the party after Parker's resounding defeat by Theodore Roosevelt, voters from both parties embraced the progressive reforms that had long been championed by Bryan. Bryan won his party's nomination in the 1908 presidential election, but he was defeated by Roosevelt's chosen successor, William Howard Taft. Along with Henry Clay, Bryan is one of the two individuals who never won a presidential election despite receiving electoral votes in three separate presidential elections held after the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment. After the Democrats won the presidency in the 1912 election, Woodrow Wilson rewarded Bryan's support with the important cabinet position of Secretary of State. Bryan helped Wilson pass several progressive reforms through Congress, but he and Wilson clashed over U. S. neutrality in World War I. Bryan resigned from his post in 1915 after Wilson sent Germany a note of protest in response to the sinking of Lusitania by a German U-boat. After leaving office, Bryan retained some of his influence within the Democratic Party, but he devoted himself to religious matters and anti-evolution activism.
He opposed Darwinism on humanitarian grounds, most famously in the 1925 Scopes Trial. Since his death in 1925, Bryan has elicited mixed reactions from various commentators, but he is considered to have been one of the most influential figures of the Progressive Era. William Jennings Bryan was born in Salem, Illinois, on March 19, 1860, to Silas Lillard Bryan and Mariah Elizabeth Bryan. Silas Bryan had been born in 1822, had established a legal practice in Salem in 1851, he married Mariah, a former student of his at McKendree College, in 1852. Of Scots-Irish and English ancestry, Silas Bryan was an avid Jacksonian Democrat, he won election as a state circuit judge, in 1866 moved his family to a 520-acre farm north of Salem, living in a ten-room house, the envy of Marion County. Silas served in various local positions and sought election to Congress in 1872, but was narrowly defeated by the Republican candidate. An admirer of Andrew Jackson and Stephen A. Douglas, Silas passed on his Democratic affiliation to his son, who would remain a life-long Democrat.
Bryan was the fourth child of Silas and Mariah, but all three of his older siblings died during infancy. Bryan had five younger siblings, four of whom lived to adulthood. Bryan was home-schooled by his mother until the age of ten. Demonstrating a precocious talent for oratory, Byran gave public speeches as early as the age of four. Silas was a Baptist and Mariah was a Methodist, but Bryan's parents allowed him to choose his own church. At age fourteen, Bryan had a conversion experience at a revival, he said. At age fifteen, Bryan was sent to attend Whipple Academy, a private school in Jacksonville, Illinois. After graduating from Whipple Academy, Bryan entered Illinois College, located in Jacksonville. During his time at Illinois College, Bryan served as chaplain of the Sigma Pi literary society, he continued to hone his public speaking skills, taking part in numerous debates and oratorical contests. In 1879, while still in college, Bryan met Mary Elizabeth Baird, the daughter of an owner of a nearby general store, began courting her.
Bryan and Mary Elizabeth married on October 1, 1884. Mary Elizabeth would emerge as an important part of Bryan's career, managing his correspondence and helping him prepare speeches and articles. After graduating from college at the top of his class, Bryan studied law at Union Law College (which became Northwestern University
KV46
Tomb KV46 in the Valley of the Kings is the tomb of Yuya and his wife Tjuyu, the parents of Queen Tiye, the wife of Amenhotep III, King Ay. It was discovered in February 1905 by James E. Quibell. Quibell was sponsored by Theodore M. Davis, who published an account of the excavation in 1907. KV 46 consists of a staircase leading down to a further descending corridor and a unique burial chamber; the walls of the tomb are not decorated and were never meant to be: the walls are unplastered and were not smoothed. Until the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, this was the richest and best preserved tomb found in the valley, the first to be found with major items in situ apart from the Tomb of Kha or TT8, rather the tomb of an Egyptian nobleman. Located in a small branch of the main valley between two Ramesside tombs, KV46 contained the intact sarcophagi of Yuya and Tjuyu. Differences in the embalming techniques used for Yuya and Tjuyu indicates that they died at different times and were placed in the tomb accordingly.
KV46 was robbed in antiquity, most three times: a first time shortly after the closure of the tomb, twice during the construction of the adjacent tombs KV3 and KV4. During the first looting, only perishable products such as oil were removed; the second and third times however the looters took most of the jewellery but were not able to remove Yuya and Tjuyu's funerary masks. Davis, Theodore M; the Tomb of Iouiya and Touiyou. London: Duckworth Press, 2000. ISBN 0-7156-2963-8 Theban Mapping Project: KV46 - Includes detailed map of the tomb
Upper Egypt
Upper Egypt is the strip of land on both sides of the Nile that extends between Nubia and downriver to Lower Egypt. Upper Egypt is between the Cataracts of the Nile above modern-day Aswan, downriver to the area of El-Ayait, which places modern-day Cairo in Lower Egypt; the northern part of Upper Egypt, between Sohag and El-Ayait, is known as Middle Egypt. In Arabic, inhabitants of Upper Egypt are known as Sa'idis and they speak Sai'idi Egyptian Arabic. In ancient Egypt, Upper Egypt was known as tꜣ šmꜣw "the Land of Reeds" or "the Sedgeland" It was divided into twenty-two districts called nomes; the first nome was where modern-day Aswan is and the twenty-second was at modern Atfih just to the south of Cairo. The main city of prehistoric Upper Egypt was Nekhen, whose patron deity was the vulture goddess Nekhbet. By about 3600 BC, Neolithic Egyptian societies along the Nile had based their culture on the raising of crops and the domestication of animals. Shortly after 3600 BC, Egyptian society began to increase in complexity.
A new and distinctive pottery, related to the Levantine ceramics, appeared during this time. Extensive use of copper became common during this time; the Mesopotamian process of sun-drying adobe and architectural principles—including the use of the arch and recessed walls for decorative effect—became popular during this time. Concurrent with these cultural advances, a process of unification of the societies and towns of the upper Nile River, or Upper Egypt, occurred. At the same time the societies of the Nile Delta, or Lower Egypt underwent a unification process. Warfare between Upper and Lower Egypt occurred often. During his reign in Upper Egypt, King Narmer defeated his enemies on the Delta and merged both the Kingdom of Upper and Lower Egypt under his single rule. For most of pharaonic Egypt's history, Thebes was the administrative center of Upper Egypt. After its devastation by the Assyrians, its importance declined. Under the Ptolemies, Ptolemais Hermiou took over the role of Upper Egypt's capital city.
Upper Egypt was represented by the tall White Crown Hedjet, its symbols were the flowering lotus and the sedge. In the 11th century, large numbers of pastoralists, known as Hilalians, fled Upper Egypt and moved westward into Libya and as far as Tunis, it is believed that degraded grazing conditions in Upper Egypt, associated with the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period, were the root cause of the migration. In the 20th-century Egypt, the title Prince of the Sa'id was used by the heir apparent to the Egyptian throne. Although the Kingdom of Egypt was abolished after the Egyptian revolution of 1952, the title continues to be used by Muhammad Ali, Prince of the Sa'id; the following list may not be complete: Sa'idi people Upper and Lower Egypt Geography of Egypt Edel, Elmar Zu den Inschriften auf den Jahreszeitenreliefs der "Weltkammer" aus dem Sonnenheiligtum des Niuserre Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, OCLC 309958651, in German. Media related to Upper Egypt at Wikimedia Commons
