Iberia

2020 ◽  
pp. 50-94
Author(s):  
David M. Carballo

A deep history of Iberia examines the waves of conquest and cultural developments on the Iberian peninsula. Agriculture was imported to Iberia from the Fertile Crescent region of Southwest Asia and included animal husbandry and the use of pack animals. Autonomous cultural developments of native Iberians were stimulated by maritime powers that sailed west along the Mediterranean: the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, and Romans, each growing in their imperial reach and providing a base for later political and economic developments. Iberians also took advantage of their geographical setting on a peninsular hinge between the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, which connected two major maritime spheres of interaction and saw the development of hybrid ships increasingly suited to open ocean crossing. Following the collapse of imperial Rome, Iberia fluctuated between Christian and Islamic rule, with the former emerging victorious after a centuries-long program of national unification known as the Reconquista, or “reconquest.” Crops introduced by Muslims and administrative strategies implemented by Christian kingdoms in frontier regions were direct predecessors of the plantation-like economies eventually imposed on the Americas.

1835 ◽  
Vol 125 ◽  
pp. 355-358 ◽  

The Fourth Memoir, published in my Zoological Researches and Illustrations, No. III. page 69, &c., having first made known the real nature of the Cirripedes , the key of which remained concealed in their metamorphosis, it might have been expected that some naturalist favourably situated to investigate the oceanic tribe of these animals, would have been the first to make the same discovery in regard to these, and thereby complete their natural history. It was scarcely to be expected that the honour of this discovery also should be reserved for the author, fixed to one spot, where none of them naturally exist, and are but casually thrown upon our shores by the waves of the Atlantic, attached to pieces of wreck, or brought into port fixed to the bottoms of ships returning from distant voyages. Fortunately, however, two ships of this description came into this harbour (Cork), one from the Mediterranean, the other from North America, which, not being sheathed with copper, had their bot­toms literally covered with Barnacles of the three genera of Lepas , Cineras , and Otion ; and having persons employed expressly for the purpose, numbers of these were brought alive in sea water, amongst which were many with the ova in various stages of their progress, and some ready to hatch, which they eventually did in prodigious numbers, so as to enable him to add the proof of their being, like the Balani, natatory Crusta­cea in their first stage , but of a totally different facies and structure; a circumstance which determines the propriety of the separation of the Cirripedes into two tribes, and evinces the sagacity of Mr. MacLeay in being the first to indicate that these two tribes, the Balani and Lepades , were not so closely related as generally supposed. The larvæ of the Balani , described in Memoir IV. under the external appearance of the bivalve Monoculi ( Astracoda ), have a pair of pedunculated eyes, more numerous and more completely developed members, approximating to those of Cyclops , and of the perfect Triton ; while, in the present type, or Lepades , the larva resembles some­what that of the Cyclops , which Müller, mistaking for a perfect animal, named Amymone , and which can be shown to he common to a great many of the Entomostraca ; or the resemblance is still more striking to that of the Argulus Armiger of Latreille, which, in fact, is but an Amymone furnished with a tricuspidate shield at the back.


1911 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 665-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Willing Balch

Modern international law is generally regarded as beginning with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. But it is necessary to go much further back in the history of the world for the beginnings of the law governing the intercourse of nations. The Greek states had a rudimentary inter-state law that regulated their relations. Thus they practiced arbitration in a way among themselves: they recognized the sanctity of the person of heralds, and they followed other recognized customs in their dealings one with another. When Rome and Carthage and other nations were struggling for the mastery of the world, the beginnings of a law of nations were recognized and practiced between them. Upon, however, practically all the known world coming under the sway of imperial Rome, all possibility as well as need of a law of nations was wanting, and as a result the faltering beginnings of an international law as recognized among the Greek states and then by the Powers surrounding the Mediterranean, were extinguished by the extension of the Pax Romana to all the known world.


Author(s):  
Graeme Barker

Africa, the cradle of humankind several million years ago, was also where anatomically modern humans first developed over 150,000 years ago. Yet our understanding of how these people eventually became farmers is still very limited. A generation ago Thurston Shaw commented that, in comparison with other parts of the world, ‘Africa lags behind. . . in relation to archaeological research and in knowledge about the beginnings of food production’ (Shaw, 1977: 108). Ann Stahl’s review of the topic a few years later made the same observation: ‘research into the origins of African agriculture lags ten to fifteen years behind studies of early agriculture elsewhere’ (Stahl, 1984: 19). In many regions, archaeologists in the 1970s and 1980s were still attempting to establish the most basic chronological framework of artefactual sequences, let alone recover the biological remains that could show when agricultural activities began (Hall, 1996). Many parts of the continent have endured decades of political unrest and military conflict, making archaeological fieldwork impossible for long periods. The equatorial forests are particularly under-researched because of the combination of political unrest, the difficulties of conducting fieldwork in forest, and poor preservation conditions of organic remains. Our understanding of the archaeological history of human settlement in these vast regions is still extremely rudimentary. For countries grappling with tremendous problems of underdevelopment, funding archaeologists in museums and universities can inevitably be a low priority. The number of professional archaeologists engaged in fieldwork on the African continent, indigenous Africans especially, is still extremely small. Distribution maps of archaeological sites are often primarily an indication of where archaeologists have been able to work. Despite these considerable challenges, however, recent studies have started to transformlong-standing ideas about when, how, and why people in Africa started to practise plant and animal husbandry (Fig. 8.1). The northern margins of the continent are Mediterranean in climate and environment, and the beginnings of farming there are best understood as part of the wider settlement history of the Mediterranean basin discussed in the next chapter. The Saharan desert in places reaches right to the coast, for example at Libya’s Gulf of Sirte, but elsewhere the Mediterranean zone can be up to 200 kilometres deep, notably in the mountainous region known as the Maghreb that embraces much of Morocco, northern Algeria, and northern Tunisia.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-219
Author(s):  
Aminta Arrington

The Lisu are a largely Christian minority group in south-west China who, as an oral culture, express their faith more through a set of Christian practices done as a group and less through bible reading as individuals. Even so, the Lisu practice of Christianity specifically, and Lisu culture more generally, was profoundly impacted by the written scriptures. During the initial evangelisation of the Lisu by the China Inland Mission, missionaries created a written script for the Lisu language. Churches were constructed and organised, which led to the creation of bible schools and the work of bible translation. In the waves of government persecution after 1949, Lisu New Testaments were hidden away up in the mountains by Lisu Christians. After 1980, the Lisu reclaimed their faith by listening to the village elders tell the Old Story around the fires and reopening the churches that had been closed for twenty-two years. And they reclaimed their bible by retrieving the scriptures from the hills and copying them in the evening by the light of a torch. The Lisu bible has its own narrative history, consisting of script creating, translating, migrating, and copying by hand. At times it was largely influenced by the mission narrative, but at other times, the Lisu bible itself was the lead character in the story. Ultimately, the story of the Lisu bible reflects the Lisu Christian story of moving from missionary beginnings to local leadership and, ultimately, to local theological inquiry.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-58
Author(s):  
Mohamed Chamekh

This article explores illegal migration through Tunisian rap. It considers this music an aspect of resistance and protest against the socio-economic and political conditions obliging thousands of Tunisians to cross the Mediterranean in makeshift boats in search of better prospects and challenging the increasing security and legislative measures crippling mobility imposed by the EU and Tunisian authorities. This article contends that harga songs document the history of the working class in Tunisia and carve the identity of harraga as people who have been marginalised for generations. It concludes that EU-Tunisia security talks and dialogues remain ineffective as long as the root causes of illegal migration have not been addressed. Keywords: illegal migration, Tunisian rap, resistance, marginalization, security, immobility, identity


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Weizhao Yang ◽  
Nathalie Feiner ◽  
Catarina Pinho ◽  
Geoffrey M. While ◽  
Antigoni Kaliontzopoulou ◽  
...  

AbstractThe Mediterranean basin is a hotspot of biodiversity, fuelled by climatic oscillation and geological change over the past 20 million years. Wall lizards of the genus Podarcis are among the most abundant, diverse, and conspicuous Mediterranean fauna. Here, we unravel the remarkably entangled evolutionary history of wall lizards by sequencing genomes of 34 major lineages covering 26 species. We demonstrate an early (>11 MYA) separation into two clades centred on the Iberian and Balkan Peninsulas, and two clades of Mediterranean island endemics. Diversification within these clades was pronounced between 6.5–4.0 MYA, a period spanning the Messinian Salinity Crisis, during which the Mediterranean Sea nearly dried up before rapidly refilling. However, genetic exchange between lineages has been a pervasive feature throughout the entire history of wall lizards. This has resulted in a highly reticulated pattern of evolution across the group, characterised by mosaic genomes with major contributions from two or more parental taxa. These hybrid lineages gave rise to several of the extant species that are endemic to Mediterranean islands. The mosaic genomes of island endemics may have promoted their extraordinary adaptability and striking diversity in body size, shape and colouration, which have puzzled biologists for centuries.


1973 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 201-265
Author(s):  
Paul R. Magocsi

It is customary among western scholars who have written about the Carpatho-Rusyns to consider them “the most forgotten among the forgotten.”2 Little is known in the West about the political, economic, and cultural developments of Subcarpathian Rus', especially before 1918. Yet such an enormous amount of material has been written in eastern European languages about this territory that as early as 1931 the noted Slavic linguist Roman Jakobson could write: “In the whole east Slavic world, there is hardly any other marginal area whose past has been examined with such affectionate meticulousness and scholarliness as Carpatho-Russia.”3The present study is intended as an introductory guide to the voluminous historiography of Subcarpathian Rus'. The material has been arranged according to the following topical and chronological subdivisions: bibliographical aids; general historical studies; early history to 1514; 1514 to 1711; 1711 to 1848; 1848 to 1918; 1918 to 1938; October, 1938, to March, 1939; 1939 to 1944; 1945 to the present; cultural developments; Rusyns in Hungary; Rusyns in Jugoslavia; and Rusyns in the United States. Works will be discussed under the heading which most nearly describes the period dealt with in the text regardless of the date of publication. The time periods were not designated arbitrarily but are based on certain historical events the significance of which will be clarified in the appropriate subsection. Most studies treated in this article deal exclusively or primarily with Subcarpathian Rus' only a few are concerned with problems of a more general nature. Many studies dealing with the recent history of the area are not necessarily included because they represent sound historical research but because they are valuable, highly selective accounts of crucial events, many of them written by the participants themselves.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document