Ancient water robotics and Abou-l Iz Al-Jazari

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 699-709 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zekâi Şen
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Southeastern Part ◽  
Water Power ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Although water resources have been developed throughout the centuries for the service of different civilizations, at different scales and in different regions, their use in automation has been conceived only recently. Research into the history of water from an automation point of view has led to some unknown or hidden facts. Starting from the ancient Greek period before the prophet Christ and after about the 12th century, many researchers tried to make use of water power for working some simple but effective devices for the service of mankind. Among these are the haulage of water from a lower level to a higher elevation by water wheels in order to irrigate agricultural land. Hero during the Hellenistic period and Vitruvius of the Roman Empire were among the first who tried to make use of water power for use in different human activities, such as water haulage, watermills, water clocks, etc. The highlights of these works were achieved by a 12th century Muslim researcher, Abou-l Iz Al-Jazari, who lived in the southeastern part of modern day Turkey. He reviewed all the previous work from different civilizations and then suggested his own designs and devices for the use of water power in automation of excellent types. He even combined animals and water power through early designs of valves, pistons, cylinders and crank mills, as will be explained in this paper. His works were revealed by German historians and engineers in the first quarter of the 19th century. Later, an English engineer translated his book from Arabic into English, revealing the guidelines for modern automation and robotic designs originating from the 12th century. This paper gives a brief summary of the early workers' devices and Abou-l Iz Al-Jazari's much more developed designs with his original hand-drawn pictures.

scholarly journals Teaching Modern Greek to Classicists

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-139
Author(s):  
Jerneja Kavčič ◽  
Brian Daniel Joseph ◽  
Christopher Brown
Keyword(s):  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
History Of ◽  
Carry Over ◽  
The 19Th Century

The ideology of decline is a part of the history of the study and characterization of the Greek language from the Hellenistic period and the Roman Atticist movement right up to the emergence of katharevousa in the 19th century and the resulting modern diglossia. It is also clear, however, that there is an overwhelming presence of Ancient Greek vocabulary and forms in the modern language. Our position is that the recognition of such phenomena can provide a tool for introducing classicists to the modern language, a view that has various intellectual predecessors (e.g., Albert Thumb, Nicholas Bachtin, George Thomson, and Robert Browning). We thus propose a model for the teaching of Modern Greek to classicists that starts with words that we refer to as carry-overs. These are words that can be used in the modern language without requiring any explanation of pronunciation rules concerning Modern Greek spelling or of differences in meaning in comparison to their ancient predecessors (e.g., κακός ‘bad’, μικρός ‘small’, νέος ‘new’, μέλι ‘honey’, πίνετε ‘you drink’). Our data show that a beginners’ textbook of Ancient Greek may contain as many as a few hundred carry-over words, their exact number depending on the variety of the Erasmian pronunciation that is adopted in the teaching practice. However, the teaching of Modern Greek to classicists should also take into account lexical phenomena such as Ancient-Modern Greek false friends, as well as Modern Greek words that correspond to their ancient Greek predecessors only in terms of their written forms and meanings.

Sources of auxiliation in the perfects of Europe

2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Drinka
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Peripheral Areas ◽  
Explanatory Mechanism ◽  
Scribal Tradition

This paper explores the complex role of language contact in the development of be and have auxiliation in the periphrastic perfects of Europe. Beginning with the influence of Ancient Greek on Latin, it traces the spread of the category across western Europe and identifies the Carolingian scribal tradition as largely responsible for extending the use of the be perfect alongside the have perfect across Charlemagne’s realm. Outside that territory, by contrast, in “peripheral” areas like Iberia, Southern Italy, and England, have came to be used as the only perfect auxiliary. Within the innovating core area, a further innovation began in Paris in the 12th century and spread to contiguous areas in France, Southern Germany, and northern Italy: the semantic shift in the perfects from anterior to preterital meaning. What can be concluded from these three successive instances of diffusion in the history of the perfect is that contact should be regarded as one of the essential “multiple sources” of innovation, and as a fundamental explanatory mechanism for language change.

Ancient Greek Terracotta Sculpture

2022 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Southern Italy ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Greek Life ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Monumental Sculpture ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Terracotta Figurines ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Greek World ◽  
Material Form

The phrase “terracotta sculpture” refers to all figurative representations in fired clay produced in Greece and in the Greek world during the first millennium bce, (from the Geometric period to the end of the Hellenistic period), whatever their size (figurine, statuette, or statue), whatever their manufacturing technique (modeling, molding, mixed), whatever their material form (in-the-round, relief, etc.), whatever their representation (anthropomorphic, zoomorphic [real or imaginary], diverse objects), and whatever the limits of their representation: full figure (figurines, statuettes, groups), truncated or abbreviated representations, including protomai, masks, busts, half figures, and anatomical representations, among others. All these objects, with the possible exception of large statues, were the products of artisans who were referred to in ancient texts as “coroplasts,” or modelers of images in clay. Because of this, the term “coroplasty,” or “coroplathy,” has been used to refer to this craft, but also increasingly to all of its products, large and small, while research on this material falls under the rubric of coroplastic studies. Greek terracottas were known to antiquarians from the mid-17th century onward from archaeological explorations in both sanctuary and funerary sites, especially in southern Italy and Sicily. Yet serious scholarly interest in these important representatives of Greek sculpture developed only in the last quarter of the 19th century, when terracotta figurines of the Hellenistic period were unearthed from the cemeteries of Tanagra in Boeotia in the 1870s and Myrina in Asia Minor in the 1880s. These immediately entered the antiquities markets, where their cosmopolitan, secular imagery had a great appeal for collectors and fueled scholarly interest and debate. At the same time, sanctuary deposits containing terracottas also began to be explored, but scholarly attention privileged funerary terracottas because of their better state of preservation. For most of the 20th century, the study of figurative terracottas basically was an art-historical exercise based in iconography and style that remained in the shadow of monumental sculpture. It is only in the last four decades or so that coroplastic studies has developed into an autonomous field of research, with approaches specific to the discipline that consider modalities of production, as well as the religious, social, political, and economic roles that terracottas played in ancient Greek life by means of broad sociological and anthropological approaches. Consequently, this bibliography mainly comprises publications of the last forty years, although old titles that are still essential for research are also included.

Leibniz’s Theme, Babbage’s Dream

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Subrata Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz ◽  
Steam Engine ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Steam Power ◽  
Water Power ◽  
History Of ◽  
Automate Calculation ◽  
James Watt

The German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is perhaps best remembered in science as the co-inventor (with Newton) of the differential calculus. In our story, however, he has a presence not so much because, like his great French contemporary the philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), he built a calculating machine—in Pascal’s case, the machine could add and subtract, whereas Leibniz’s machine also performed multiplication and division—but for something he wrote vis-à-vis calculating machines. He wished that astronomers could devote their time strictly to astronomical matters and leave the drudgery of computation to machines, if such machines were available. Let us call this Leibniz’s theme, and the story I will tell here is a history of human creativity built around this theme. The goal of computer science, long before it came to be called by this name, was to delegate the mental labor of computation to the machine. Leibniz died well before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, circa 1760s, when the cult and cultivation of the machine would transform societies, economies, and mentalities. The pivot of this remarkable historical event was steam power. Although the use of steam to move machines automatically began with the English ironmonger and artisan Thomas Newcomen (1663–1727) and his invention of the atmospheric steam engine in 1712, just 4 years before Leibniz’s passing, the steam engine as an efficient source of mechanical power, as an efficient means of automating machinery, as a substitute for human, animal, and water power properly came into being with the invention of the separate condenser in 1765 by Scottish instrument maker, engineer, and entrepreneur James Watt (1738–1819)—a mechanism that greatly improved the efficiency of Newcomen’s engine. The steam engine became, so to speak, the alpha and omega of machine power. It was the prime mover of ancient Greek thought materialized. And Leibniz’s theme conjoined with the steam engine gave rise, in the minds of some 19th-century thinkers, to a desire to automate calculation or computation and to free humans of this mentally tedious labor.

Greek Prehistory Through the Bronze Age

Classics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan Burke
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
History Of ◽  
Epic Poems ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Bronze Age ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Of Greece

The history of archaeology of Greece as we know it today begins with prehistoric investigations that took place in the 19th century. Early excavations by Heinrich Schliemann, Arthur Evans, and Wilhelm Dörpfeld, along with Greek colleagues like Christos Tsountas, Panagiotis Stamatakis, Valerios Stais, and Antonios Keramopoulos laid the foundation for systematic, stratigraphic excavations. Research was heavily directed by ancient Greek texts, primarily the epic poems of Homer. Efforts to find archaeological truth to the legendary tales of the ancient heroes continue to be problematic, but, to a degree, early excavations revealed a rich and fascinating period of Greece’s development. Although the archaeological discoveries of Greek prehistory date to an age centuries older than Homer, the discoveries shed light on a vast, rich archaeological history, one upon which the Homeric tales were, at least partially, based. Early discoveries of prehistoric texts, especially on Crete with scripts in Hieroglyphic Minoan, Linear A (non-Greek), and Linear B (Greek), along with the enigmatic Phaistos disc, have expanded our understanding of the history of the Greek language and Greek people.

Climatic changes during the past two millennia along the Ancient Silk Road

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 605-623
Author(s):  
Zhixin Hao ◽  
Jingyun Zheng ◽  
Yingzhuo Yu ◽  
Danyang Xiong ◽  
Yang Liu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
Silk Road ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
North Central ◽  
Social Events ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Silk Road

The Ancient Silk Road has a history of more than 2000 years and gave birth to the diversities of culture between East and West. Climate change may have played a crucial role in this process and in the flourishing and decline of civilizations. In this work, high-resolution temperature reconstructions covering more than 1000 years along the Ancient Silk Road are reviewed, and the main characteristics of temperature and hydroclimatic changes are summarized. Four warm stages occurred that included the 1st–3rd centuries, the late 7th century to the early 11th century, the mid-12th century to the mid-13th century, and since the 20th century, and three cold stages, including the 4th century to the early 7th century, the middle of the 11th century to the early 12th century, and the end of the 13th century to the mid-19th century, occurred. Within these various stages, regional differences existed in amplitudes and starting–ending years of the cold/warm phases. Wetness and dryness variabilities during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) were greater than during the Little Ice Age in Northwestern China. The climate was dry during the MCA in Central Asia, South Scandinavia, and North-central Europe. In addition, the climate backgrounds of several famous kingdoms flowering and social events that flourished during these times, such as the Roman Empire, the Loulan Kingdom, the Tibetan Kingdom, and the three unprecedented Mongol westward conquests, are discussed.

Two ‘Virtues’ of Tiberius: A Numismatic Contribution to the History of his Reign

1939 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. H. V. Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

Mr. M. P. Charlesworth's Raleigh Lecture, ‘The Virtues of a Roman Emperor: Propaganda and the Creation of Belief,’ serves admirably to illuminate a new aspect of the history of the Roman Empire, in which the debt of pure history to numismatics (and notably to the work of Mr. Mattingly in the British Museum Catalogues) will be plain. From the numismatic point of view there is, indeed, one curious omission in Mr. Charlesworth's argument; and attempts to make good the omission have opened up a series of speculations which are here discussed.

scholarly journals Filozoficzno-historyczne zaplecze etyki biznesu

2018 ◽  
pp. 151-179
Author(s):  
Paweł Więckowski
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
European Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture ◽  
The 19Th Century

The text describes different philosophical concepts and historically important cultural phenomena that should be considered while rethinking ethical side of business. Broad range of both philosophical (such as the search for the foundations of morality, social contract) and social subjects (such as history of centralized state, individualism) is presented to help the reflections. The background for analysis is the history of culture, especially of primary collective society; contrasted with it is individualism of classical Athens with corresponding reaction of philosophers; development of state and Christianity in Roman Empire; organismic medieval state; Renaissance, reformation and the birth of capitalism; the Enlightenment breakthrough and English capitalism; liberalism and Darwinism of the 19th century; the catastrophe of European culture and success of America of the 20th century.

scholarly journals Archaeological Excursion into Proximal Colony

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 669 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Palavestra
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Theoretical Context ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina by the end of the 19th century, presided by Benjamin Kallay, the Empire’s Minister of Finance and governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, strived to gain wider international justification for its years’ long project of “civilizing” Bosnia and Herzegovina, or particular “historizing” of this proximal colony. In the summer of 1894 the Austro-Hungarian government in Bosnia and Herzegovina organized the Congress of Archaeologists and Anthropologists in the Landesmuseum in Sarajevo. The aim of the Congress was to inform archaeologists and anthropologists about the results of archaeological investigations in the country, and to seek their advice in directing further work. The wider ideological, political, as well as theoretical context of this congress, however, was much more complex and layered, with the aim to present the constructed image of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a country of tamed and civilized European Orient of rich past and luxurious folklore. The participants of the Congress discussed the archaeological and anthropological data presented to them by the hosts, including the specially organized excavations at Butmir and Glasinac. It is interesting to analyze, from the point of view of the history of archaeological ideas, the endeavours of the participants to adapt the archaeological finds before them to the wishes of the hosts, and, on the other hand, to their favoured archaeological paradigms dominant at the time.

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