scholarly journals THE MYSTERY OF «OLEH TOMB»: KYIV OR LADOGA?

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-293
Author(s):  
V. M. Rychka

Described in Primary Chronicle under 912 the story of the unusual circumstances of the death of Kyiv pagan prince Oleh the Prophetic is connected to Kyiv topographic realities, contemporary for chronist, in particular, to the toponym «Oleh Tomb», also known from other sources. According to this chronicle Oleh Tomb was placed on the hill Shchekovytsya but the exact localization of the latter is not provided. In the middle of the 19th century Kyiv people called Shchekovytsya the high hill rising over the Podil on the west side. In the works of the later Kyiv scholars this hill was unequivocally identified with Chronicle Shchekovytsya where they localized the grave of Oleh. This view was challenged by P. G. Lebedyntsev who suggested localizate the Oleh Tomb not on Shchekovytsya / Skavitsya but on the western slope of the Starokyivsky Plateau, on Kudryavka, opposite the Lybid’ River, near the Zhidovsky (Lviv) Gate of Medieval Kyiv. Basing on the analysis of Kyiv Chronicle information the scientist concluded that the toponym «Oleh Tomb» is separated from Shchekovytsya in the annals. The explanation of this contradiction in the chronicle was proposed by one of the best experts in the historical topography of Old Kyiv — M. I. Petrov. He suggested that under the name of Shchekovytsya one should consider not only the Podil hill but also all surrounding ravines and highlands. The Shchekovytsya ridge of mountains and hills stretched from the east to the southwest from the present Shchekovitsa hill to the edge of the present Lviv Square. The common for whole this territory name Shchekovytsya became gradually decay due to the large scale construction of the city in the 18th century and the appearance of proper names of new urban areas. The version of the death and burial of Oleh in Ladoga where one of the central and largest hills got the name «Oleh Tomb» is still popular in historiography, especially Russian. This mound was explored by archaeologists. The cremation burial was discovered under the barrow. It was dated to earlier (9th century) time than the date of Oleh death. Because of the impossibility of this «grave» to be burial place of the Prince of Kyiv, G. S. Lebedev has proposed to consider it the «Oleh Hill» — a «ritual seat» which had some public and religious functions. Despite the hypothetical nature of such interpretation the ghost of Oleh finds the visible features in Ladoga. At the end of the last century in Old Ladoga the stone was erected on that mound with a memorial plaque proclaiming this site of the 9th—10th centuries «The tomb of Prince Oleh the Prophetic». The story of the death of Kyiv pagan prince Oleh the Prophetic «due to horse» contained in the Primary Chronicle under 912 was compilled, apparently, on the base of some archaic mythological song or historical anecdote. It wins over not its factual authenticity but psychological one. However, there is no reason to doubt that Oleh died in Kyiv. The death of the prince, who was crowned with warrior glory, prompted his followers to muse about the choice of a place for the building of the great barrow over his grave. The slopes of the Lysa Gora (Yurkovytsia), where the pagan necropolis had already been laid near Oleh courtyard, probably seemed them to be cramped. This may have been the reason for choosing among the highlands, which rise above the Podil, the beautiful terrain of Kudryavka in the upper reaches of the Hlybochytsa river. The barrow built in the 10th century was probably quite large which explains the relatively long life of «Oleh Tomb» in the Kyiv toponimic.

Author(s):  
Néhémie Strupler

When: Karum Period: First centuries of the 2nd millennium B.C. when Assyrian and Anatolian merchants took part in large-scale commercial exchanges between Aššur and central Anatolia. Most of the epigraphic finds come  from the 19th century BC, and the 18th century is less known. We don’t know how the commercial exchanges came to an end. Until the establishment of the administration at the Hittite capital Hattuša/Boğazköy (1650), there is a hiatus in the epigraphical records for more than a century. Who: Anitta, son of Pithana, an ambitious ruler who created one of the first Kingdom in Central Anatolian (modern Turkey) in the mid 18th century.Where: Boğazköy (modern name, in Central Anatolia) was a city called Ḫattuš and was an exchange place in the Anatolian Network of the Karum period. The site was selected as the capital of the Hittites around 1650 by Ḫattušili I, the first well attested Hittite King.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloé Duffaut ◽  
Nathalie Frascaria-Lacoste ◽  
Pierre-Antoine Versini

<p>Hydro-meteorological risks are increasing and this could be due to global changes. These risks are particularly important in the urban context where most human beings live. Indeed, the impervious surfaces present in cities increase the risk of flooding, for example. Nature-Based Solutions can help to reduce these risks by creating permeable soils or storing water while promoting biodiversity. In this context, it is essential to understand what hinders the development and sustainability of these Nature-based Solutions in the city and what could help to deploy them on a large scale. For this purpose, various professionals working on Nature-Based Solutions in the city in France, were interviewed between 2020 and 2021, both in the academic and operational sectors, or even at the interface between the two: researchers in ecology or hydrology, IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) project manager, project managers at the Regional Biodiversity Agency, director and natural environment manager of a watershed union, agro-economists engineer among others. They were asked what are the barriers and potential opportunities for Nature-Based Solutions implementation and sustainability in city. By analysing their answers, it emerges that the obstacles are more often cultural, political or financial than technical. The potential levers often mentioned are education and awareness-raising at all levels, especially for elected officials and the general public. Regulations such as the PLU (Local Urban Plan) and new funding for more natural spaces in the city also seem to be means of promoting Nature-based Solutions in urban areas. These interviews with diverse professionals directly involved in Nature-Based Solutions in cities allow to give real courses of action to be taken to democratize these Solutions throughout the French territory, or even internationally, and therefore ultimately reduce the risks of hydro-meteorology. This is one of the objectives of the French ANR project EVNATURB (Assessment of ecosystem performance of a renaturation of the urban environment), in which this study has been carried out.</p>


2011 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 267-274
Author(s):  
Stanislav Popelka ◽  
Alžběta Brychtová

Olomouc, nowadays a city with 100,000 inhabitants, has always been considered as one of the most prominent Czech cities. It is a social and economical centre, which history started just about the 11th century. The present appearance of the city has its roots in the 18th century, when the city was almost razed to the ground after the Thirty years’ war and a great fire in 1709. After that, the city was rebuilt to a baroque military fortress against Prussia army. At the beginning of the 20th century the majority of the fortress was demolished. Character of the town is dominated by the large number of churches, burgher’s houses and other architecturally significant buildings, like a Holy Trinity Column, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Aim of this project was to state the most suitable methods of visualization of spatial-temporal change in historical build-up area from the tourist’s point of view, and to design and evaluate possibilities of spatial data acquisition. There are many methods of 2D and 3D visualization which are suitable for depiction of historical and contemporary situation. In the article four approaches are discussed comparison of historical and recent pictures or photos, overlaying historical maps over the orthophoto, enhanced visualization of historical map in large scale using the third dimension and photorealistic 3D models of the same area in different ages. All mentioned methods were geolocalizated using the Google Earth environment and multimedia features were added to enhance the impression of perception. Possibilities of visualization, which were outlined above, were realized on a case study of the Olomouc city. As a source of historical data were used rapport plans of the bastion fortress from the 17th century. The accuracy of historical maps was confirmed by cartometric methods with use of the MapAnalyst software. Registration of the spatial-temporal changes information has a great potential in urban planning or realization of reconstruction and particularly in the propagation of the region and increasing the knowledge of citizens about the history of Olomouc.


Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 810 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Barragán-Escandón ◽  
Esteban Zalamea-León ◽  
Julio Terrados-Cepeda

Previous research has assessed the potential of solar energy against possible demand; however, the sustainability issues associated with the use of large-scale photovoltaic deployment in urban areas have not been jointly established. In this paper, the impact of photovoltaic energy in the total urban energy mix is estimated using a series of indicators that consider the economic, environmental and social dimensions. These indicators have been previously applied at the country level; the main contribution of this research is applying them at the urban level to the city of Cuenca, Ecuador. Cuenca is close to the equatorial line and at a high altitude, enabling this area to reach the maximum self-supply index because of the high irradiation levels and reduced demand. The solar potential was estimated using a simple methodology that applies several indexes that were proven reliable in a local context considering this particular sun path. The results demonstrate that the solar potential can meet the electric power demand of this city, and only the indicator related to employment is positive and substantially affected. The indicators related to the price of energy, emissions and fossil fuel dependency do not change significantly, unless a fuel-to-electricity transport system conversions take place.


Author(s):  
David Morton

Maputo (Lourenço Marques until 1976) is the capital of Mozambique and one of the busiest port cities on the east coast of Africa. The Bay of Lourenço Marques had already been a source of ivory for the Indian Ocean world and Europe for centuries when, in the late 18th century, Portugal established a permanent garrison there, among the Mpfumo and other Xi-ronga-speaking clans. From 1898 until independence in 1975, the fort-turned-city was the administrative headquarters of Portugal’s territory of Mozambique, a home to many Portuguese settlers, and a stark example of racialized exploitation and urban segregation under colonial rule. It was also the principal transit hub for hundreds of thousands of southern Mozambican men recruited to labor in neighboring South Africa. Following independence, the city became a laboratory of revolutionary socialist experimentation as well as an overcrowded safe haven for refugees of Mozambique’s long and terrible civil war. Despite closer historical ties to South Africa than to most of Mozambique, Maputo is the country’s economic center and its gateway for foreign investment. According to 2017 census figures, the metropolitan population exceeded 2.5 million, making it one of the larger urban areas in southern Africa.


Author(s):  
Mark V. Barrow

The prospect of extinction, the complete loss of a species or other group of organisms, has long provoked strong responses. Until the turn of the 18th century, deeply held and widely shared beliefs about the order of nature led to a firm rejection of the possibility that species could entirely vanish. During the 19th century, however, resistance to the idea of extinction gave way to widespread acceptance following the discovery of the fossil remains of numerous previously unknown forms and direct experience with contemporary human-driven decline and the destruction of several species. In an effort to stem continued loss, at the turn of the 19th century, naturalists, conservationists, and sportsmen developed arguments for preventing extinction, created wildlife conservation organizations, lobbied for early protective laws and treaties, pushed for the first government-sponsored parks and refuges, and experimented with captive breeding. In the first half of the 20th century, scientists began systematically gathering more data about the problem through global inventories of endangered species and the first life-history and ecological studies of those species. The second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries have been characterized both by accelerating threats to the world’s biota and greater attention to the problem of extinction. Powerful new laws, like the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973, have been enacted and numerous international agreements negotiated in an attempt to address the issue. Despite considerable effort, scientists remain fearful that the current rate of species loss is similar to that experienced during the five great mass extinction events identified in the fossil record, leading to declarations that the world is facing a biodiversity crisis. Responding to this crisis, often referred to as the sixth extinction, scientists have launched a new interdisciplinary, mission-oriented discipline, conservation biology, that seeks not just to understand but also to reverse biota loss. Scientists and conservationists have also developed controversial new approaches to the growing problem of extinction: rewilding, which involves establishing expansive core reserves that are connected with migratory corridors and that include populations of apex predators, and de-extinction, which uses genetic engineering techniques in a bid to resurrect lost species. Even with the development of new knowledge and new tools that seek to reverse large-scale species decline, a new and particularly imposing danger, climate change, looms on the horizon, threatening to undermine those efforts.


There is money to be made in the financial industry. Academics, under pressure to exhibit relevance, are happy to point to their consultancies in the City as evidence of their value in the market, and the industry has shown a notable ability to recruit the brightest and best from our Universities. These observations should not obscure the profound scientific challenges posed by the area of finance. The area has both stimulated and benefited from advances in a range of mathematical sciences, most obviously probability, differential equations, optimization, statistics and numerical analysis. One thinks, for example, of Bernoulli’s resolution, in the 18th century, of the St Petersburg Problem through his introduction of a logarithmic utility, of Bachelier’s description, at the turn of this century, of the stochastic process we now call brownian motion, of Kendall’s investigation, forty years ago, of the statistical unpredictability of stock prices, and of the current enormously fertile interaction between economics and mathematics centred around martingale representations. Looking to the future, some of the mathematical ideas originally motivated by statistical mechanics, and since used to model the large-scale telecommunication networks upon which the financial industry relies, may also provide insight into the very difficult problems that arise in economics concerning interacting systems of rational agents.


Author(s):  
Jong-Soo Choi ◽  
Dong-Su Kim ◽  
Yu-Lim Choi ◽  
Lakshmi Prasanna Lingamdinne ◽  
Janardhan Reddy Koduru ◽  
...  

Soil dust emitted from large-scale construction sites in urban areas impacts air quality and creates a severe health threat to residents. Water spraying is commonly practiced to lower dust emission in construction sites, but its long-term effectiveness is questionable. In this study the utility of starch, polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), and a blend of starch and PVA in various proportions was investigated for the suppression of soil dust emissions at construction sites in Seoul. The efficiency of each dust suppressant was tested with test soil samples in a laboratory-scale wind tunnel box under different concentrations of suppressants and soil textures. Starch and PVA showed superior ability to suppress soil dust emissions compared to moistening bare soil, resulting in PM10 lower than the daily limit values of 30 μg/m3. PVA showed higher soil dust suppression capability for all conditions over starch. Test soils sprayed with dust suppressants significantly improved aggregate stability compared to untreated soils.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 1470 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nan Xia ◽  
Liang Cheng ◽  
ManChun Li

Urban areas are essential to daily human life; however, the urbanization process also brings about problems, especially in China. Urban mapping at large scales relies heavily on remote sensing (RS) data, which cannot capture socioeconomic features well. Geolocation datasets contain patterns of human movement, which are closely related to the extent of urbanization. However, the integration of RS and geolocation data for urban mapping is performed mostly at the city level or finer scales due to the limitations of geolocation datasets. Tencent provides a large-scale location request density (LRD) dataset with a finer temporal resolution, and makes large-scale urban mapping possible. The objective of this study is to combine multi-source features from RS and geolocation datasets to extract information on urban areas at large scales, including night-time lights, vegetation cover, land surface temperature, population density, LRD, accessibility, and road networks. The random forest (RF) classifier is introduced to deal with these high-dimension features on a 0.01 degree grid. High spatial resolution land cover (LC) products and the normalized difference built-up index from Landsat are used to label all of the samples. The RF prediction results are evaluated using validation samples and compared with LC products for four typical cities. The results show that night-time lights and LRD features contributed the most to the urban prediction results. A total of 176,266 km2 of urban areas in China were extracted using the RF classifier, with an overall accuracy of 90.79% and a kappa coefficient of 0.790. Compared with existing LC products, our results are more consistent with the manually interpreted urban boundaries in the four selected cities. Our results reveal the potential of Tencent LRD data for the extraction of large-scale urban areas, and the reliability of the RF classifier based on a combination of RS and geolocation data.


Antiquity ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 88 (340) ◽  
pp. 578-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Lindsay ◽  
Jeffrey Leon ◽  
Adam T. Smith ◽  
Conner Wiktorowicz

Geophysical techniques now available to archaeology have the potential to provide large-scale survey data that can map the buried structures of extensive and complex sites. Recent work at two Late Bronze Age hilltop fortresses in the mountainous volcanic terrain of Armenia provides an excellent illustration of their potential. Magnetometry revealed an unknown residential complex at Tsaghkahovit. Across the plain at Gegharot, where magnetometry was less successful, ground-penetrating radar identified terracing extending down the western slope of the hill below the fortress, greatly increasing the size of the occupied area. Combined with targeted excavations, these geophysical approaches are providing novel insights into the unusual political relations between fortress-based sovereigns and mobile subjects in central Armenia.


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