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82ae9a8838fb1938e6d4429487dc470a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/argot | Argot | Argot
…States, is more often called argot. The term dialect refers to language characteristic of a certain geographic area or social class.
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fec1c3b72de7eb0c299d9f5d75d981c7 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arguments-for-Socialism | Arguments for Socialism | Arguments for Socialism
…ideas in a book called Arguments for Socialism (1979). Benn believed that Britain’s consensus-based, Keynesian, managed welfare state economy had collapsed. The “democratic socialism” that he advocated would involve a large measure of public investment, public expenditure, and public ownership combined with self-management in the workplace, along with open (as…
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508e81e60c51d819c1264c6e8f7fd267 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam | Argumentum ad ignorantiam | Argumentum ad ignorantiam
…respect, ( e) the argument ad ignorantiam (an appeal “to ignorance”), which argues that something (e.g., extrasensory perception) is so since no one has shown that it is not so, and (f) the argument ad baculum (an appeal “to force”), which rests on a threatened or implied use of force…
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94e1a4ed612aba7651ad1b2341726236 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/argumentum-ad-misericordiam | Argumentum ad misericordiam | Argumentum ad misericordiam
…injustice, ( c) the argument ad misericordiam (an appeal “to pity”), as when a trial lawyer, rather than arguing for his client’s innocence, tries to move the jury to sympathy for him, (d) the argument ad verecundiam (an appeal “to awe”), which seeks to secure acceptance of the conclusion on…
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0d19cf831c7ded7c67b81a76f4680389 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/argumentum-ad-populum | Argumentum ad populum | Argumentum ad populum
…false, ( b) the argument ad populum (an appeal “to the people”), which, instead of offering logical reasons, appeals to such popular attitudes as the dislike of injustice, ( c) the argument ad misericordiam (an appeal “to pity”), as when a trial lawyer, rather than arguing for his client’s innocence,…
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084b2009792c2ffa1f25ec837e5dbddd | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Argus-Corp | Argus Corp. | Argus Corp.
…1978 Black assumed control of Argus Corp., an investment holding corporation in which his father was a major shareholder. At the time, Argus held controlling interests in several Canadian corporations, including Hollinger Mines, Dominion Stores (a grocery chain), Standard Broadcasting, and Massey Ferguson (a farm equipment company). Wishing to reposition…
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885fc47260ccea9000b7a309370cc839 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Argus-ship | Argus | Argus
Argus, the first true aircraft carrier. Construction of the Argus began in 1914, and initially it was an Italian liner; it was purchased in 1916 by the British Royal Navy and converted, work being completed in September 1918. The Argus had an unobstructed flight deck about 560 feet (170.7 metres) long and a hangar that could accommodate 20 aircraft. It was armed with six four-inch guns and could reach a speed of 20.2 knots. In addition to serving as an operational carrier, the Argus was used for trials and training.
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313138e4452adec3b0cb6aedad894529 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arhanniti | Arhanniti | Arhanniti
…King Kumarapala and wrote the Arhanniti, a work on politics from a Jain perspective. A prodigious writer, he produced Sanskrit and Prakrit grammars, textbooks on science and practically every branch of Indian philosophy, and several poems, including the Trishashtishalakapurusha-charita (“Deeds of the 63 Illustrious Men”), a Sanskrit epic of the
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6e25664bc5b1abbef961538de3c44f11 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arhuaco | Arhuaco | Arhuaco
…terracing, by the Antillean Arawak, Arhuaco, Chibcha, Jirajara, Páez, and Timote, all of whom showed evidence of other cultural elaborations as well. In contrast with such highly developed groups, a few cultures in the area were based more on hunting or fishing than on even simple farming; among those were…
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c9a0f01a94b3bd6cbced94d19c6c95eb | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arhus-Convention | Århus Convention | Århus Convention
…Rio Declaration and the 1998 Århus Convention, which committed the 40 European signatory states to increase the environmental information available to the public and to enhance the public’s ability to participate in government decisions that affect the environment. During the 1990s the Internet became a primary vehicle for disseminating environmental…
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20b56c825249a11d505eb19a5106243d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ari | Ari | Ari
…from the influence of the Ari, a Mahāyāna Tantric Buddhist sect that was at that time predominant in central Myanmar. Primarily through his efforts, Theravāda Buddhism became the dominant religion of Myanmar and the inspiration for its culture and civilization. He maintained diplomatic relations with King Vijayabāhu of Ceylon, who…
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4e5dfa41f8d646cce92f96ee6010a642 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ari-nohem | Ari nohem | Ari nohem
Leone’s major work was Ari nohem (1840; “The Lion Roars”), in which he attempted to demonstrate, with much erudition, that the Zohar, the major text of Kabbala, is not the work of antiquity that its proponents claimed.
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a64663a26bdf62b39e0b63964e6175bb | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ariadne-and-Bluebeard | Ariadne and Bluebeard | Ariadne and Bluebeard
…scoring; and, in his opera Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1907), on the play of Maurice Maeterlinck, the atmosphere and musical texture make up for the lack of dramatic impact.
…Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1907; Ariadne and Bluebeard)—like Pelléas, an almost verbatim setting of a Maeterlinck play.
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540fb7a12f2b3f84dfb47f7f92ee166a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ariadne-auf-Naxos-by-Gerstenberg | Ariadne auf Naxos | Ariadne auf Naxos
…the text of a cantata, Ariadne auf Naxos (1767), that was set to music by Johann Adolph Scheibe and Johann Christian Bach and later adapted for a well-known duodrama by Jiří Antonín Benda.
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f7b44ad271c32516c5249000830b6f4e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ariadne-auf-Naxos-opera-by-Strauss | Ariadne auf Naxos | Ariadne auf Naxos
Their subsequent operas together were Ariadne auf Naxos (1912; Ariadne on Naxos), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919; The Woman Without a Shadow), and Die ägyptische Helena (1928; The Egyptian Helen). But in 1929 Hofmannsthal died while working on the opera Arabella, leaving Strauss bereft.
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31bd0b8380e8f592c3abd20f2466df92 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ariadne-Greek-mythology | Ariadne | Ariadne
Ariadne, in Greek mythology, daughter of Pasiphae and the Cretan king Minos. She fell in love with the Athenian hero Theseus and, with a thread or glittering jewels, helped him escape the Labyrinth after he slew the Minotaur, a beast half bull and half man that Minos kept in the Labyrinth. Here the legends diverge: she was abandoned by Theseus and hanged herself; or, Theseus carried her to Naxos and left her there to die, and she was rescued by and married the god Dionysus.
Ancient Greek poets and artists liked to portray Ariadne asleep on the shore of Naxos while Dionysus gazes at her with love and admiration. Ariadne’s story was later taken up by European artists, writers, and composers, including Richard Strauss in his opera Ariadne auf Naxos (1912; Ariadne on Naxos). In ancient art Ariadne frequently appears as the consort of Dionysus, sometimes with their children.
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0cc96deb5c73a64d9760805ce19dc7d6 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arian-controversy | Arian controversy | Arian controversy
The lingering disagreements about which Christological model was to be considered normative burst into the open in the early 4th century in what became known as the Arian controversy, possibly the most-intense and most-consequential theological dispute in early Christianity. The two protagonists,…
…conflicts was the so-called Arian controversy in the early 4th century. In his interpretation of the idea of God, Arius sought to maintain a formal understanding of the oneness of God. In defense of that oneness, he was obliged to dispute the sameness of essence of the Son and the…
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f4080f577c12ad7401920a455f8c3e65 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arianespace-Corporation | Arianespace Corporation | Arianespace Corporation
…was Europe, which formed the Arianespace Corporation to market Ariane launches to commercial customers. Arianespace was a mixed public-private corporation with close ties to the French government; the French space agency was a major shareholder.
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939ba4319d866a7e0b48a6418546fa86 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ariel-2 | Ariel 2 | Ariel 2
-British Ariel 2, launched in 1964, which studied long-wavelength radio noise from Earth’s ionosphere and the Milky Way Galaxy. Ariel 2 was followed by two more satellites in the Ariel series and by the U.S. satellites Radio Astronomy Explorers 1 and 2, launched in 1968 and…
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d13557b81403aed6e9b8e6b312e53052 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ariel-astronomy | Ariel | Ariel
Ariel, second nearest of the five major moons of Uranus. It was discovered in 1851 by William Lassell, an English astronomer, and bears the name of characters in Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape of the Lock and William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.
Ariel revolves around Uranus at a mean distance of 190,900 km (118,620 miles) from the centre of the planet, taking 2.52 days to complete one orbit. Like the other large Uranian moons, Ariel rotates synchronously with its orbital period, keeping the same face toward the planet and the same face forward in its orbit. The moon’s mean diameter is about 1,160 km (720 miles). Its density of about 1.59 grams per cubic cm is consistent with a composition of roughly equal parts water ice and rock, perhaps intermixed with a small amount of frozen methane.
Photographs taken by the U.S. Voyager 2 spacecraft during its flyby of the Uranian system in 1986 show that Ariel’s surface is crisscrossed with scarps and long valleylike formations. Some of the latter are partially filled with materials that may have upwelled from the moon’s interior as a result of tectonic activity in the past. In a few cases, ice appears to have spread out from the valleys across broad plains, much like glacier flows on Earth. These features and the paucity of large impact craters suggest that Ariel has the youngest surface of all of Uranus’s major moons.
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1f97e1f8535ec60f609db67e7d79aea1 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arien | Arien | Arien
His Arien (1638–50), published in eight volumes, are generally strophic settings for one or more voices and continuo, with texts by his friend Simon Dach, himself, and other contemporary poets. The songs are also important for the study of basso continuo performance practice, for some of…
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bb4f9de605fd412b5566436b17e17bf3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/arika | Arika | Arika
The ariki, or alii, the nobility of Polynesia, have more mana than commoners, and both their land and the insignia associated with them have mana. Besides areas and symbolic elements that are associated with the ariki, many objects and animals having special relationships with chiefs, warriors,…
…a chief or chiefs (ariki). Traditionally, at the day-to-day level, the most important social groups were the hapuu (subtribe), which was the primary landholding group and the one within which marriage was preferred, and the whaanau, or extended family.
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642ec77abc2a9876bd3b8dbb385948df | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arild-Asnes-1970 | Arild Asnes, 1970 | Arild Asnes, 1970
…political turn with the novel Arild Asnes, 1970 (1971), which traced the development of a young man to the point at which he perceived that political revolution was necessary and must be brought about by conflict. In 25 September Plassen (1974; “September 25th Square”) he showed the growing political awareness…
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9e3476e2be381d8e31e37ef06abddb34 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/arimanni | Arimanni | Arimanni
…people in arms—the exercitales, or arimanni, who formed the basis of the Lombard army. This concept did not leave much room for Romans, who indeed largely disappear from the evidence, even when documents increase again in the 8th century; it is likely that any Romans who wished to remain politically…
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ac26a994977aec1b198522a7e7a5e171 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arin-language | Arin language | Arin language
…also called Assan or Asan), Arin, and Pumpokol, now extinct members of this group, were spoken chiefly to the south of the present-day locus of Ket and Yug.
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394ace0781bee6f2ec0d2fe5a7932af0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aristotelianism/Aristotelianism-from-the-19th-century | Aristotelianism from the 19th century | Aristotelianism from the 19th century
The anti-Aristotelian movement was countered mainly by historical and philological scholarship. As Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, a German philosopher, saw it, Aristotle’s personality and works must be known as exactly as possible because he provides the indispensable historical basis of any serious philosophy. Such a type of study had declined after the great achievements of the 16th century. After the work done between the first new learned edition of the collected Greek texts of Aristotle by J.G. Buhle (1791–93) and a vast collection of all documentary material in the Aristoteles-Archiv at Berlin (which began in 1965), there is little, if anything, that remains to be discovered concerning the original and deteriorated forms of Aristotle’s traditional corpus. A monumental edition sponsored by the Prussian Academy from 1831 to 1870 became the basis for almost innumerable critical editions of individual works. A rich crop of fragments, which were identified and edited in the last centuries, brought to light previously almost unknown aspects of Aristotle’s early activity. And in 1890 a papyrus was discovered in Egypt that contained most of the otherwise lost Constitution of Athens. European and American academies have sponsored the editing of ancient and medieval commentaries and translations in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew. Historical, philological, and philosophical exegesis has explored in great detail the contents and background of most of Aristotle’s writings. Translations of all the works into English, German, and French and of many of them into most of the other European languages as well as into Hebrew, Arabic, and Japanese have made Aristotle widely accessible. Historians of ideas have investigated Aristotle’s relationship to Plato and to the Greece of his day, his influence in following ages, and his own philosophical development.
Philosophical Aristotelianism has been mainly confined to the German schools established by Trendelenburg and Franz Brentano. Trendelenburg was concerned to effect a revaluation of Aristotle’s metaphysics in the face of German idealism; he had a measure of influence in the United States on such thinkers as Felix Adler, George Sylvester Morris, and John Dewey. Aristotle’s theories of being and knowledge formed the point of departure for Brentano’s “descriptive psychology” and his doctrine of human experience, and they also contributed to the phenomenologies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Outside Germany, J.-G.-F.-L. Ravaisson-Mollien, a spiritualist philosopher, and Sir David Ross, editor and translator of Aristotle’s works, acknowledged a debt to Aristotle, respectively, for their metaphysics and ethics; and the reestablishment of Aquinas, by Pope Leo XIII in 1879, as the great doctor of the church increased the interest in Aristotle and in his influence on the history of Christian thought. Contemporary philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon world is often associated with a keen interest in Aristotle (nor is he entirely neglected in other philosophical traditions), and the name of the Aristotelian Society (London) reflects the view that good philosophy must be practiced in the spirit of Aristotle.
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89e1d07417d3c32a61e73a1700e91948 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aristotelianism/The-later-Latin-tradition | The later Latin tradition | The later Latin tradition
Before 1115 only the very short Categories and De Interpretatione (On Interpretation) were known in Latin, and these two works circulated, from about 800, in a version by Boethius. By 1278 practically the whole of the Aristotelian corpus existed in translations from the Greek, and much of it had a wide circulation. Apart from three other works of logic in translations done by Boethius, which reappeared about 1115, this wholesale discovery was the result of cultural contacts with Constantinople and a few other Greek centres and the personal initiative of a few scholars. Most notable and first of these was James of Venice, who was in Constantinople and translated the Posterior Analytics, Physics, De Anima (On the Soul), Metaphysics, and several minor texts before or about 1150; other scholars translated anew or for the first time works on ethics, natural philosophy, and logic before 1200. With higher standards of linguistic scholarship, Robert Grosseteste, about 1240, revised and completed the translation of the Nicomachean Ethics and translated On the Heavens for the first time from the Greek.
The Flemish translator William of Moerbeke, active between about 1255 and 1278, completed the Latin Aristotelian corpus; he was the first to translate the Politics and Poetics and to give a full and reliable translation of the books on animals; he also translated anew some books of natural philosophy, and he revised several of the older translations. About half of the works were also translated from the Arabic, mainly in Toledo by Gerard of Cremona and Michael Scot, between 1165 and 1230. With two or three exceptions, these translations came after those from the Greek; all had a much more limited circulation and influence. A considerable contribution to the knowledge of Aristotle came from the translations of the ancient commentaries; nearly all of these were made from the Greek.
The view that Aristotle came to be known in Latin by way of the Arabic scholars must be understood as true only in the sense that a number of Aristotelian doctrines—partly transformed in the process—spread in Latin circles from the works of such figures as al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Albumazar before the texts of Aristotle were accessible or had been properly interpreted. Further, there is little truth in a view that in the Latin world in the Middle Ages Aristotle was seen in a Neoplatonic light because Plotinian and Proclan texts translated from the Arabic—namely the Theologia Aristotelis (“Theology of Aristotle”) and the Liber de causis (“Book of Causes”)—were ascribed to him.
The study of Porphyry’s Isagoge, of Aristotle’s Categories and De Interpretatione, and of theological texts containing Aristotelian elements formed the basis, from the 9th century onward, of logical methodology (dialectic) in a wide number of fields. When applied to problems concerning the Trinity or the Eucharist, or in general to problems concerning individuality and universality of concepts and things, dialectic was perceived as a powerful instrument for clarifying faith or—on the opposite side—for endangering it. For Peter Abelard, the first great Aristotelian of the Middle Ages, dialectic was an essential method for analysis and the discovery of truth. As part of his study, he produced an illuminating account of the linguistic, mental, and objective aspects of universals on the basis of Aristotelian doctrines. Soon thereafter, new developments of Aristotle’s theory of language and logic took place, partly as a result of the recently acquired knowledge of his Sophistical Refutations.
At the same time, in the later 12th century and during the beginning of the 13th century, Aristotle’s physics, cosmology, and metaphysics began to attract attention through the Latin texts both of Arabic works on science and philosophy and of Aristotle’s own works, and did so mainly among scientists of the famous medical school at Salerno and among the English philosophers. About 1190 Alfred of Sareshel used the new texts in his treatise De motu cordis (“On the Movement of the Heart”). Between 1210 and 1235 Robert Grosseteste commented on Aristotle’s Physics and drew on various aspects of Aristotle’s natural philosophy for his own scientific and philosophical treatises, and around 1245 Roger Bacon commented on the Physics and on part of the Metaphysics. It would be wrong, however, to try to find in this scholarship the origin of modern experimental science, which is rather to be found in the study of ancient and more recent mechanics, medicine, and technology or in original inventiveness.
The introduction of the new Aristotle met with difficulties at the University of Paris. The impact of non-Christian Aristotelian and Arabic philosophy engendered fears, doubts, and suspicions. Although the masters at Paris were free to teach Aristotle’s logic, which was value free, and although no obstacle was put in the way of lecturing on any of Aristotle’s works at the universities of Oxford and Toulouse, in the first part of the 13th century the ecclesiastical authorities at Paris imposed a ban on lectures relating to the physics, the metaphysics, and the psychology of Aristotle and his commentators. While this ban succeeded in slowing down some activities it also quickened reactions and aroused strong curiosity; the very demand for some kind of censorship of the works led to more intimate study of them. Certainly by the 1240s the prohibition against teaching Aristotle had become a dead letter at Paris, as can be seen from the fact that Roger Bacon was then commenting on the “dangerous” Physics and Metaphysics. Shortly thereafter, before 1255, all of Aristotle’s philosophical treatises then known had become a required part of the Parisian Master of Arts curriculum, and, around the same time, Albertus Magnus—committed though he was, as a Dominican friar, to safeguarding the purity of faith and dogma—made Aristotle’s works an indissoluble part of philosophical and scientific literature in the Latin world. Albertus Magnus announced it as his intention to make all of Aristotle’s natural philosophy “intelligible to the Latins.” His vast encyclopaedia of secular knowledge and wisdom consisted of an analytical exposition of Aristotle’s thought combined with all the information and interpretations that Albertus had gathered from other, mainly Arabic, sources or that he had gained as the product of his own extensive research and speculation. Faced with the danger of being accused of following Aristotle against church dogma, he asserted: “I expound, I do not endorse, Aristotle.”
The approach of Albertus’s pupil, Thomas Aquinas, to Aristotle was that of a scholar. He wrote numerous detailed commentaries on a variety of Aristotle’s works, including the Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics; he analyzed the structure of every section of most works; he tried to discover their organization and to follow the arguments; and he was careful to obtain the best texts and to get from them the genuine meaning. Above all, Aquinas drew heavily on Aristotle’s thought in composing his own masterwork, the Summa theologiae. He respected Aristotle’s authoritativeness and credited him with reasonableness, even when that was not explicitly justified. Sometimes he drew inferences that went beyond Aristotle’s own conclusions, and he allowed himself considerable freedom whenever Aristotle had left loose ends in his attempts to solve difficulties. At these points he often went his own way, without ascribing the new steps to Aristotle but without feeling that he was going against him. Compromises followed; for example, he stepped beyond Aristotle when he argued that the individual soul, although remaining essentially and indissolubly the form of the individual body, is separable from it and immortal. Aristotle’s account was stretched almost to the breaking point but it was not transformed. Beyond that point Thomas Aquinas was not a Christian Aristotle but a man of faith and dogma; he divorced himself from Aristotle when necessary and approached closer to Augustine of Hippo, to the Neoplatonists, or to Avicenna.
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23609b1961a816e09f0de2d2e212cc33 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aristotle-Contemplating-the-Bust-of-Homer | Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer | Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer
…three years later, when Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer was purchased by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for \$2.3 million.
…of these paintings, the famous Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, without knowing its subject, it must surely have been mainly Rembrandt’s fame that attracted him. Van Hoogstraten in his book on painting refers to “name-buyers,” a phenomenon that apparently grew parallel to the emergence of the art lover. Once…
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c7a14fd71d76ccd22b38d025be91e59c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/arithmomancy | Arithmomancy | Arithmomancy
Arithmomancy, also called arithmancy, from the Greek arithmos (“number”) and manteia (“divination”), was practiced by the ancient Greeks, Chaldeans, and Hebrews; its successor is numerology. In these forms of number mysticism the letters of an alphabet are assigned numbers by some rule, typically A…
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86372df17c10ade76b4b7a928e7c889e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/ariyah | ʿārīyah | ʿārīyah
ʿārīyah, (Arabic: “gratuitous loan”), in Islāmic law, the gratuitous loan of some object—e.g., a utensil, a tool, or a work animal—to another person for a specific period of time, after which the object is returned to the lender. The recipient is required under law to restore the object after use. ʿĀrīyah never involves the loan of money or of objects that will be consumed in their use. Under an ʿārīyah contract, a Muslim may pay a debt by allowing his debtor to use, for example, his house or his land for a certain period of time while maintaining full ownership of the premises. ʿĀrīyah also enables an individual to lend possessions to another at a time when he would not be able to take care of them himself. The borrower is not, in principle, responsible for damage to the object arising from his authorized use of it, though the various schools of Islāmic law differ from each other in their doctrines on this point.
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e408bbca2d20232ffc647624d5ed0637 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arizona-Cardinals | Arizona Cardinals | Arizona Cardinals
Arizona Cardinals, American professional gridiron football team based in Phoenix. The Cardinals are the oldest team in the National Football League (NFL), but they are also one of the least successful franchises in league history, having won just two NFL championships (1925 and 1947) since the team’s founding in 1898.
The Cardinals started out as the Morgan Athletic Club, a neighbourhood team based in the South Side of Chicago. The team acquired its nickname in 1901 when its founder, Chris O’Brien, received a shipment of faded jerseys from the University of Chicago Maroons football team that were cardinal red in colour. Now known as the Racine Cardinals—after the name of the Chicago street on which the team’s playing field was located—the team played in a loosely organized “league” composed of Chicago-area amateur clubs. The Cardinals’ continued success and popularity gave the team the opportunity to join the American Professional Football League (the forerunner of the NFL) when it was founded in 1920. The team was renamed the Chicago Cardinals in 1922 when a franchise from Racine, Wisconsin, joined the NFL. Three years later the Cardinals were credited with their first NFL championship after compiling a record of 11 wins, two losses, and one tie over the course of the 1925 season.
After 1925 the team entered into a long stretch of noncompetitive and sometimes dismal years, which included consecutive 0–10 seasons in 1943 and 1944. Having already coached the team from 1940 to 1942, Jimmy Conzelman was rehired in 1946, and he oversaw a Cardinals victory in the 1947 NFL championship game behind the play of the team’s famed “Million-Dollar Backfield.” This feat was followed by a franchise-best 11–1 record and another trip to the title game in 1948, where the Cardinals fell to the Philadelphia Eagles, 7–0. Conzelman left the team the next year, and the Cardinals embarked on another extended period of poor play. This led to a decline in revenue, and in 1960 the franchise relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, where the team was invariably referred to as the St. Louis “football” Cardinals, in deference to the city’s beloved Major League Baseball team of the same name.
The Cardinals began posting winning records more frequently in St. Louis, but the postseason evaded them until 1974, when a team featuring quarterback Jim Hart, running back Terry Metcalf, and a pair of future Hall of Famers, offensive lineman Dan Dierdorf and tight end Jackie Smith, won 10 games and made the first of two consecutive trips to the play-offs, where they lost each time. The Cardinals returned to the play-offs again during the strike-shortened 1982 season, but a general lack of fan support—combined with the ownership’s desire for a profitable home stadium—induced the team to move to Phoenix in 1988.
The Cardinals’ mediocre play continued until 1998, when quarterback Jake Plummer led the team to a nine-win season and its first play-off victory in 51 years. The team’s momentum did not continue into the next year, and yet another long play-off drought ensued. In 2008 the Cardinals had their most successful season since their relocation to Arizona: veteran quarterback Kurt Warner, heading a powerful offense highlighted by Pro Bowl wide receivers Larry Fitzgerald and Anquan Boldin, guided the team to a division title and the franchise’s first Super Bowl appearance the following February, where they lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers. After leading Arizona to another play-off appearance in 2009, Warner and Boldin both left the team at season’s end, and the Cardinals quickly returned to their losing ways.
In 2013 the Cardinals won 10 games for the second time since the franchise relocated to Arizona, but the team did not qualify for the postseason. The team won 11 games in 2014 to earn a play-off spot, but the injury-plagued Cardinals—who were starting a third-string quarterback by the postseason—lost their opening play-off contest. The following season saw Arizona win 13 games (the highest total in the team’s 96 years of existence up to that point) and a division title. The Cardinals won their opening play-off contest over the Green Bay Packers in dramatic fashion by rallying from a last-second hail-mary touchdown that had tied the game to win the game just three plays into overtime. The Cardinals were then eliminated by the Carolina Panthers in the NFC championship game. In 2016 the team surprisingly struggled to a 7–8–1 record, and the Cardinals were unable to break their paltry franchise-record streak of consecutive play-off qualifications at two. Arizona’s play worsened over subsequent seasons, reaching a low point in 2018 when the team posted an NFL-worst 3–13 record.
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87683f4f8cbe9f3f101dc6a692f7bdbf | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arizona-State-University | Arizona State University | Arizona State University
Arizona State University, public, coeducational institution of higher learning with its main campus in Tempe, Arizona, U.S. The university offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees in areas including agriculture, engineering, business, education, and the arts and sciences. It also includes Colleges of Architecture and Environmental Design, Fine Arts, Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Law. Students can study abroad at locations throughout Europe, and in Mexico, Asia, and the Middle East. Branch campuses are ASU West (1984), located in northwestern Phoenix, and ASU East (1996) in nearby Mesa. The university also has an extended campus in downtown Phoenix designed to accommodate working adults. Total enrollment at the school exceeds 47,000.
Arizona State University was created as a normal school by the territorial legislature in 1885. Instruction began in 1886. The university’s Camp Tontozona, located in the Mogollon Rim area, allows for instruction and research in mountain terrain. The university also has a centre for meteorite study and a solar energy research laboratory. An important arts centre for Phoenix and its suburbs, Arizona State is home to the Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1964, and the Sundome Center for the Performing Arts, the largest single-level theatre in the United States. Alumni of the university include the researcher and industrial designer Temple Grandin.
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23725b4689db329a36a9331389c3e734 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arkansas-River-Navigation-System | Arkansas River Navigation System | Arkansas River Navigation System
Arkansas River Navigation System, official name Mcclellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation Systems, improved portion of the Verdigris and Arkansas rivers, extending southeastward for 439 mi (767 km) from Catoosa (near Tulsa) in northeastern Oklahoma, U.S., through Arkansas to the Mississippi River 25 mi north of Arkansas City, Ark. Approved by the U.S. Congress in 1946 and completed in January 1971, the project controls the Arkansas River’s regular flooding and provides a navigable waterway for year-round shipment of the river basin’s resources—agricultural products, lumber, petroleum, and coal. Seventeen dams and locks along the waterway, which is 250 ft (75 m) wide and 9 ft deep, create a large supply of hydroelectric power.
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a46365f0cbcb09118f0c9381c37bb93b | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Armada-Spanish-naval-fleet | Spanish Armada | Spanish Armada
Spanish Armada, also called Armada or Invincible Armada, Spanish Armada Española or Armada Invencible, the great fleet sent by King Philip II of Spain in 1588 to invade England in conjunction with a Spanish army from Flanders. England’s attempts to repel this fleet involved the first naval battles to be fought entirely with heavy guns, and the failure of Spain’s enterprise saved England and the Netherlands from possible absorption into the Spanish empire.
Philip had long been contemplating an attempt to restore the Roman Catholic faith in England, and English piracies against Spanish trade and possessions offered him further provocation. The Treaty of Nonsuch (1585) by which England undertook to support the Dutch rebels against Spanish rule, along with damaging raids by Sir Francis Drake against Spanish commerce in the Caribbean in 1585–86, finally convinced Philip that a direct invasion of England was necessary. He decided to use 30,000 troops belonging to the veteran army of the Spanish regent of the Netherlands, the duke of Parma, as the main invasion force and to send from Spain sufficient naval strength to defeat or deter the English fleet and clear the Strait of Dover for Parma’s army to cross from Flanders over to southeastern England.
After nearly two years’ preparation and prolonged delays, the Armada sailed from Lisbon in May 1588 under the command of the duke of Medina-Sidonia, a replacement for Spain’s most distinguished admiral, the marquess de Santa Cruz, who had died in February. Medina-Sidonia was an experienced administrator who proved to be resolute and capable in action, but he had relatively little sea experience. The Spanish fleet consisted of about 130 ships with about 8,000 seamen and possibly as many as 19,000 soldiers. About 40 of these ships were line-of-battle ships, the rest being mostly transports and light craft. The Spaniards were conscious that even their best ships were slower than those of the English and less well armed with heavy guns, but they counted on being able to force boarding actions if the English offered battle, after which the superiority of the Spanish infantry would prove decisive.
The English fleet was under the command of Charles Howard, 2nd Baron Howard of Effingham; he was no more experienced an admiral than Medina-Sidonia but was a more effective leader. His second in command was Sir Francis Drake. The English fleet at one time or another included nearly 200 ships, but during most of the subsequent fighting in the English Channel it numbered less than 100 ships, and at its largest it was about the same size as the Spanish fleet. No more than 40 or so were warships of the first rank, but the English ships were unencumbered by transports, and even their smallest vessels were fast and well armed for their size. The English placed great reliance on artillery; their ships carried few soldiers but had many more and heavier guns than the Spanish ships. With these guns, mounted in faster and handier ships, they planned to stand off and bombard the Spanish ships at long range.
Gales forced the Armada back to the port of A Coruña (in northern Spain) for refitting, and it finally got under way again in July. The Armada was first sighted by the English off Lizard Point, in Cornwall, on July 29 (July 19, Old Style). The larger part of the English fleet was then at Plymouth, dead to leeward, but by a neat maneuver was able to get to the windward, or upwind, side of the enemy (i.e., west of the Armada, given the prevailing west winds) and hence gain the tactical initiative. In three encounters (off Plymouth, July 31 [July 21]; off Portland Bill, August 2 [July 23]; and off the Isle of Wight, August 4 [July 25]), the English harassed the Spanish fleet at long range and easily avoided all attempts to bring them to close action but were unable to inflict serious damage on the Spanish formation.
The Armada reached the Strait of Dover on August 6 (July 27) and anchored in an exposed position off Calais, France. The English also anchored, still to windward (west of the Armada), and were reinforced by a squadron that had been guarding the narrow seas. The first certain news of the Armada’s advance reached Parma in Flanders the same day, and he at once began embarking his troops in their invasion craft, but the process required six days, and the Armada had no safe port in which to wait for him nor any means of escorting his small craft across the coastal shallows where Dutch and English warships cruised to intercept them. This defect in Spanish strategy was to prove disastrous.
At midnight on August 7–8 (July 28–29), the English launched eight fire ships before the wind and tide into the Spanish fleet, forcing the Spanish ships to cut or slip their cables (thus losing their anchors) and stand out to sea to avoid catching fire. The Spanish ships’ formation was thus completely broken. At dawn on the 8th the English attacked the disorganized Spanish ships off Gravelines, and a decisive battle ensued. The English ships now closed to effective range and were answered largely with small arms. The Spanish ships’ heavy guns were not mounted, nor were Spanish gunners trained to reload in action. They sustained serious damage and casualties without being able to reply effectively. Three Spanish ships were sunk or driven ashore, and others were badly battered. At the same time, the English were obliged by shortage of ammunition to break off the action and follow at a distance. By the morning of August 9 (July 30), the prevailing westerly winds were driving the Spaniards toward the shoals of the Zeeland banks. At the last minute, however, the wind shifted and allowed them to shape a safe course to the northward. Both the west wind and the English fleet now prevented the Armada from rejoining Parma, and it was forced to make the passage back to Spain around the northern tip of Scotland. The English fleet turned back in search of supplies when the Armada passed the Firth of Forth and there was no further fighting, but the long voyage home through the autumn gales of the North Atlantic proved fatal to many of the Spanish ships. Whether through battle damage, bad weather, shortage of food and water, or navigational error, some ships foundered in the open sea while others were driven onto the west coast of Ireland and wrecked. Only 60 ships are known to have reached Spain, many of them too badly damaged to be repaired, and perhaps 15,000 men perished. The English lost several hundred, perhaps several thousand, men to disease but sustained negligible damage and casualties in action.
The defeat of the Armada saved England from invasion and the Dutch Republic from extinction, while dealing a heavy blow to the prestige of the greatest European power of the age. Tactically, the Armada action has enduring historical significance as the first major naval gun battle under sail and as the moment from which, for over two and a half centuries, the gun-armed sailing warship dominated the seas.
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083e7ba104a508c2b88446fbe7060753 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/armature-modeling | Armature | Armature
Armature, in sculpture, a skeleton or framework used by an artist to support a figure being modeled in soft plastic material. An armature can be made from any material that is damp-resistant and rigid enough to hold such plastic materials as moist clay and plaster, which are applied to and shaped around it. Pieces of thick wire, a few blocks of wood nailed together, or a galvanized iron pipe secured to a baseboard can serve as the armature for a life-sized head or a small standing figure. Larger pieces of sculpture are supported by more complicated armatures constructed of lead pipe, iron rods, or pipes and wood. A combination of these materials is used in the huge armatures required for monumental sculpture. Armatures for large models were used as early as the Renaissance.
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0349ef34d966f54fe68f3ca104ef2bcb | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Armed-Forces-Day-Egyptian-holiday | Armed Forces Day | Armed Forces Day
Armed Forces Day, public holiday observed in Egypt on October 6, celebrating the day in 1973 when combined Egyptian and Syrian military forces launched a surprise attack on Israel and crossed into the Sinai Peninsula, which marked the beginning of the October (Yom Kippur) War.
Egyptian Pres. Anwar Sadat planned the attack in an attempt to bolster Egyptian and Arab morale and to regain control of the Sinai territory that had been lost to Israel during the June (Six-Day) War in 1967. The plan met with initial success when more than 80,000 Egyptian soldiers crossed the Bar Lev line—massive fortifications built by the Israelis to withstand such attacks. The Egyptian forces held the territory for two days before being forced to pull back after an Israeli counterattack entirely surrounded the Egyptian Third Army. Although the assault by Egypt and Syria was ultimately unsuccessful, the initial regaining of the Sinai territory was a source of pride, representing the first Arab military victory over Israel since the Six-Day War. It eventually led Egypt and Israel to negotiate the 1977 Camp David Accords, brokered by U.S. Pres. Jimmy Carter. As a result of the accords, the Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egyptian control.
Celebrations on Armed Forces Day typically include parades and other events staged by the military, as well as patriotic television shows, songs, and fireworks displays. The holiday took on additional meaning after the 1981 assassination of President Sadat during an Armed Forces Day parade in Cairo.
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73e463b3affe97e54c985cd629bab4cc | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Armed-Forces-Revolutionary-Council | Armed Forces Revolutionary Council | Armed Forces Revolutionary Council
…for the coup, formed the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), which included members of the RUF, to rule the country; President Kabbah was sent into exile. The AFRC met with increasing resistance on all fronts: domestically, its troops were engaged in battle with militia forces loyal to Kabbah’s government; internationally,…
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55dfd0b58d68637d5664a79644bea6b3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Armenian-language | Armenian language | Armenian language
Armenian language, Armenian Hayeren, also spelled Haieren, language that forms a separate branch of the Indo-European language family; it was once erroneously considered a dialect of Iranian. In the early 21st century the Armenian language is spoken by some 6.7 million individuals. The majority (about 3.4 million) of these live in Armenia, and most of the remainder live in Georgia and Russia. More than 100,000 Armenian speakers live in Iran. Until the early 20th century, an Armenian population had lived in Turkey in the area around Lake Van since ancient times; a small minority of Armenians lives in Turkey today. Armenians also live in Lebanon, Egypt, Azerbaijan, Iraq, France, Bulgaria, the United States, and elsewhere.
Several distinct varieties of the Armenian language can be distinguished: Old Armenian (Grabar), Middle Armenian (Miǰin hayerên), and Modern Armenian, or Ašxarhabar (Ashkharhabar). Modern Armenian embraces two written varieties—Western Armenian (Arewmtahayerên) and Eastern Armenian (Arewelahayerên)—and many dialects are spoken. About 50 dialects were known before 1915, when the Armenian population of Turkey was drastically reduced by means of massacre and forced exodus; some of these dialects were mutually unintelligible.
Armenian belongs to the satem (satəm) group of Indo-European languages; this group includes those languages in which the palatal stops became palatal or alveolar fricatives, such as Slavic (with Baltic) and Indo-Iranian. Armenian also shows at least one characteristic of the centum group—comprising Celtic, Germanic, Italic, and Greek—in that it preserves occasional palatal stops as k-like sounds.
Precisely how and when the first Armenians arrived in eastern Anatolia and the areas surrounding Lakes Van, Sevan, and Urmia is not known. It is possible that they reached that territory as early as the second half of the 2nd millennium bc. Their presence as the successors to the local Urartians can be dated to approximately 520 bc, when the names Armina and Armaniya first appear in the Old Persian cuneiform inscription of Darius I (the Great) at Behistun (present-day Bisitun, Iran). A variation of that early designation, Armenian, is the name by which the people who call themselves Hay are known worldwide.
The invention of the Armenian alphabet is traditionally credited to the monk St. Mesrop Mashtots, who in ad 405 created an alphabet consisting of 36 signs (two were added later) based partly on Greek letters; the direction of writing (left to right) also followed the Greek model. This new alphabet was first used to translate the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament.
Grabar, as the language of the first translation was known, became the standard for all subsequent literature, and its use produced what has come to be considered the golden age of Armenian literature. It concealed the noticeable dialectal variations of the spoken language and was used for literary, historical, theological, scientific, and even practical everyday texts. The first Armenian periodical, Azdarar (1794), was also printed in Grabar, although by the end of the 18th century the spoken language had so diverged from the written that the language of the periodical was not widely understood.
This divergence had been evident from roughly the 7th century, and, beginning in the 11th century, a variation of the spoken language (now called Middle Armenian) was also written. One of the territorial varieties of Middle Armenian became the official language of Lesser Armenia, the kingdom of Cilicia ruled by the Rubenid and Hethumid dynasties from the 11th to the 14th century.
By the 19th century the discrepancy between Grabar (which had continued to prevail as the written language) and the spoken language (which had by then splintered into numerous dialects) had grown so vast that a movement arose to elaborate a modern standard language that would be comprehensible to all and fit for use in schools. This movement eventually yielded two diglossic varieties of Ašxarhabar (Ashkharhabar), the modern standard language; Grabar remained the language of formal high style during the 19th century.
Western Armenian (formerly known as “Armenian of Turkey”) was based on the dialect of the Armenian community of Istanbul, and Eastern Armenian (formerly known as “Armenian of Russia”) was based on the dialects of Yerevan (Armenia) and Tbilisi (Georgia). Both Eastern and Western Armenian were purged of “Muslim” words (Arabic, Persian, and Turkish loanwords), which were replaced by words taken from Grabar. Loanwords in Grabar (from Greek, Syriac, and, most numerous of all, ancient Iranian), however, were considered part of the native traditional vocabulary and were fully absorbed.
Western Armenian is used by Armenians living in Turkey and some Arab countries as well as in emigrant communities in Europe and the United States. Eastern Armenian is prevalent in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Iran. Although they share almost the same vocabulary, the important divergences in pronunciation and the grammatical differences between the two varieties are so significant that they may be considered two different languages.
Old Armenian had seven vowel phonemes: /a/, /e/, /ê/ (from *ey; an asterisk indicates a reconstructed rather than an attested form), /ə/, /i/, /o/, and /u/ (written o + w). In the modern language there is only one /e/. The vowel /ə/ is reduced and cannot be stressed. Semivowels were /y/ and /w/, consonantal variants of /i/ and /u/ that in certain positions in Modern Armenian have developed into the fricatives /h/ and /v/ or have merged with adjacent vowels. Sonants included the trilled r /ṛ/ and single-flap r, a velarized l /ł/ (which developed into the velar fricative gh /γ / in all dialects), l /l/, and the nasals m /m/ and n /n/.
Old Armenian and modern fricatives are v /v/ (perhaps a positional variant of w), s /s/ (originating partly from Proto-Indo-European palatal k’, as in other satem languages), š /sh/, z /z/, ž /zh/, x /χ/ (= kh, uvular), and h /h/. The modern language also has an f /f/.
The most characteristic of the Armenian consonants are plosives (i.e., stops and affricates). In Old Armenian they formed a system of 15 phonemes with three types of articulation—voiced, voiceless, and voiceless aspirated—in every point of articulation: b-p-p‘; d-t-t‘; g-k-k‘; j-c-c‘ ( /= dz/-/= ts/- /= ts‘/); ǰ-č-č‘ (/ = English j/-/= English ch/-/= ch‘/). According to some linguists, Old Armenian b, d, g, j, and ǰ were voiced aspirated and p, t, k, c, and č glottalized.
That system had developed from Proto-Indo-European plain consonants and some clusters as a result of palatalization processes as well as the so-called consonant shift, a process including the devoicing of Proto-Indo-European voiced consonants. The consonant shift in Proto-Armenian had some similarities to the Proto-Germanic shift (see Grimm’s law), although these processes were independent of one another. It should be mentioned that this explanation of the origin of Armenian plosives is a traditional one. Some glottalist linguists claim that the Old Armenian system had not undergone any important changes from the Proto-Indo-European system, which they interpret in a manner quite different from the traditional view. Namely, they argue that Proto-Indo-European stops traditionally reconstructed as voiced *b, d, g, j, and ǰ were in fact glottalized voiceless *p’, t’, k’, c’, and č’.
Modern dialects as well as the two modern literary languages have retained many aspects of the Old Armenian system. In modern forms of Armenian the stress falls on the last syllable of a word. In the initial position, Eastern Armenian has voiced or, in some dialects, voiced aspirated consonants corresponding to Old Armenian b, d, g, j, and ǰ; intensive voiceless slightly glottalized plosives in place of Old Armenian p, t, k, c, and č; and voiceless slightly aspirated plosives in place of Old Armenian p‘, t‘, k‘, c‘, and č ‘. In medial and final position the correspondences are different.
In Western Armenian, Old Armenian b, d, g, j, and ǰ are pronounced as voiceless and, in some dialects, voiceless aspirated, having merged with Old Armenian p‘, t‘, k‘, c‘, and č ‘, whereas Old Armenian p, t, k, c, and č are pronounced as /b/, /d/, /g/, /j/, and /ǰ/ in all Western dialects. An example of the difference between the two varieties of Modern Armenian can be seen in two common personal names of Greek origin that are pronounced /Petros/ and /Grigor/ in Eastern Armenian, without any change as regards the voicing, but /Bedros/ and /Krikor/ in Western Armenian. This reveals consonant shifts in Armenian dialects that, all told, represent as many as seven types of development of the Old Armenian plosive system. The highly variegated picture of Modern Armenian consonants seems to corroborate the idea that Armenian has been a “shift” language from its very beginning.
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902cb217f0644deaa2ee1afc03dff213 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Armenian-language/Morphology-and-syntax | Morphology and syntax | Morphology and syntax
Old Armenian had preserved to some degree the general morphological character of older Indo-European languages based on the inflexion of nouns and verbs. It was close typologically to Greek, though the shapes of words were very, even surprisingly, different. The nominal and pronominal declension had seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, instrumental, and locative. However, many of these forms overlapped so that usually only three or four different forms existed; e.g., žam ‘time’ was both nominative and accusative, žamê was ablative, and žamu was genitive, dative, instrumental, and locative. A special form of locative was very rare. There was no gender category. The case endings varied for various types of stems.
By means of distinctive endings, the verb distinguished three persons in singular and plural. The tenses were based on the present stem (present, imperfect, subjunctive present, and prohibitive) and the aorist past stem (aorist, subjunctive aorist, and imperative).
The Modern Armenian noun has maintained and even developed this plan, especially in Eastern Armenian, which has the special locative ending -um in its declension. But, in comparison with Old Armenian (where case endings were different in singular and plural), Modern Armenian declension resembles rather the Turkish or the Georgian type of agglutination. This resemblance is especially visible in Eastern Armenian, where plural forms usually have the same endings as the singular—for example, -i for genitive and dative, the only difference residing in the plural infixation -ner- inserted between the stem and the ending for multisyllabic nouns—e.g., ašakert ‘pupil,’ ašakert-i ‘of pupil, to pupil,’ ašakert-ner-i ‘of pupils, to pupils.’
There are significant differences between Eastern and Western Armenian in case endings and in the use of the definite article, expressed as -ə (after consonants) and -n (after vowels). For instance, in Eastern Armenian the definite article may not be used after the genitive: pat(-ə) ‘(the) wall,’ pat-i ‘of (the) wall,’ pat-er(-ə) ‘(the) walls,’ pat-er-i both ‘of walls’ and ‘of the walls.’ In contrast, Western Armenian usage is, respectively, bad(-ə) ‘(the) wall,’ bad-i ‘of wall,’ bad-i-n ‘of the wall,’ bad-er(-ə) ‘(the) walls,’ bad-er-u ‘of walls,’ and bad-er-u-n ‘of the walls.’ Western Armenian has retained the Old Armenian ablative ending -ê, whereas Eastern Armenian has -ic‘; for instance, ‘from Armenia’ is rendered as Hayastan-ê-n (with -n being the definite article) in Western Armenian and as Hayastan-ic‘ in Eastern Armenian.
There are essential differences in the verb structures of the two varieties of Modern Armenian as well. Western Armenian, which is more conservative in this respect, forms the present tense by prefixing gə, a particle of unknown origin, to old forms, made up of the stem and personal endings. Eastern Armenian uses periphrastic forms: participle ending in -um (probably of locative origin) plus the copula em, es... ‘am, are…’. Thus, Old Armenian sir-em ‘I love’ is Western Armenian gə sir-em and Eastern Armenian sir-um em. The Old Armenian present tense has in both modern languages the value of a subjunctive. In Modern Armenian the passive is formed by means of the infixation -v-, as with sir-v-um em ‘I am loved’ (Eastern form).
In Old Armenian a declined adjective could be placed before or after a noun; in the modern language it may only precede a noun and has no case endings, as in Turkish and Georgian. Similarly, in Modern Armenian the genitive always precedes a noun. Postpositions are preferred to prepositions in Modern Armenian, unlike in Old Armenian. In other respects, Armenian word order is relatively free.
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3ac64cb62818f5fb8538f0472f7883c4 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Armenian-Secret-Army-for-the-Liberation-of-Armenia | Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia | Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia
Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), terrorist group formed in 1975 to force Turkey to admit its guilt for the Armenian Genocide of 1915–16. At its founding, the group’s stated goals were to force the Turkish government to acknowledge the genocide, pay reparations, and support the creation of an Armenian state.
The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) was founded in 1975 by Hagop Hagopian, a Lebanese-born Armenian who had become involved with Palestinian resistance groups in the early 1970s. Some sources claim that Hagopian was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and that the PFLP helped fund the Armenian group. Like the PFLP, ASALA was Marxist in ideology.
ASALA started with 6 or 7 members, and at the height of its support, in the early 1980s, it may have had about 100 active members and sympathizers. ASALA’s first attack was the bombing of the World Council of Churches office in Beirut, Lebanon, in January 1975; no one was hurt in the attack. The group’s next attack—the assassination of Oktay Cirit, the first secretary of the Turkish embassy in Beirut, in 1976—established assassination as a primary tactic. Throughout the late 1970s and early ’80s, ASALA perpetrated a series of attacks on Turkish diplomats around the world; more than 30 diplomats and members of their families were assassinated between 1975 and 1984. (Another Armenian terrorist group, the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide [JCAG], which later became the Armenian Revolutionary Army [ARA], also carried out assassinations during that period.)
The assassination campaign attracted international attention, and by 1980 ASALA had begun to receive considerable clandestine support from the Armenian community in the United States and Europe. Unlike JCAG/ARA, ASALA carried out dozens of bombings. Between 1980 and 1982, ASALA initiated several bombing campaigns in Switzerland and France with the aim of freeing comrades imprisoned in those countries; the bombings injured dozens of people, and several terrorists were released from prison in response.
More often, however, ASALA targeted Turkish institutions. Its most-devastating attacks were made at the Ankara Esenboga Airport in Ankara, Turkey, on August 7, 1982, and at the Turkish Airlines counter at France’s Orly Airport on July 15, 1983. Eighteen people were killed and more than 120 injured in those two attacks.
When Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, ASALA was forced to flee its Beirut headquarters. That shake-up exacerbated tensions within the group, and following the Orly attack, ASALA split in two. One faction, which felt that the group’s attacks on civilians were hurting its cause, labeled itself the ASALA Revolutionary Movement (ASALA-RM) and vowed to pursue a more openly political path. The second faction, led by Hagopian, remained committed to terrorist tactics and associated itself with the Abu Nidal Organization. The split weakened both groups considerably, and the number of their attacks declined drastically. In 1988 Hagopian was killed in Athens, Greece. He is believed to have been assassinated by Turkish agents. ASALA’s steady decline only accelerated after his death, and, despite 1991 and 1994 attacks claimed by the group, most observers believed that by the early 21st century the group no longer posed a threat.
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7f7013d75ea90b8f0e13260b9c63ab14 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Armida | Armida | Armida
Armida, a grand opera requiring a trio of tenors and a dramatic soprano (Colbran), appeared in 1817. Rossini was now finding interpreters that suited his music. Colbran, the tenor Manuel del Popolo García, the bass Filippo Galli (“the most beautiful voice in Italy”), and the…
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b503ecd32b77becead923aa68cd664ed | https://www.britannica.com/topic/armorial-ensign | Armorial ensign | Armorial ensign
Armorial ensign, heraldic symbol carried on a flag or shield. The term is much misunderstood because of the popular use of ensign as a generic term for flag. A grant of arms or a matriculation (registration of armorial bearings) may in its text use the term ensigns armorial to mean the heraldic design of the bearer’s arms. See heraldry.
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1099686b9bba1ba4275079edae38739a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/armour-protective-clothing/Modern-armour | Modern armour | Modern armour
Modern warfare subjects soldiers to a variety of lethal projectiles. Bullets fired from rifles, pistols, and machine guns can penetrate flesh and often create terrible wounds by “tumbling” when they hit a hard substance such as bone. Shell fragments—jagged pieces of metal formed by the explosion of a grenade or artillery projectile—can inflict substantial damage to the human body. Mines, booby traps, and improvised explosive devices target soldiers at close range and kill or wound through the force of explosion or the effects of fragmentation. Shaped charges are designed to penetrate vehicle armour with streams of molten metal. Soldiers in the path of those metallic streams often suffer death, serious injury, or amputation of limbs.
As a result of such developments, soldiers in modern war suffer far more wounds from projectiles and fragmentation than from slicing or stabbing, as was the case before the advent of gunpowder and high explosives. All unprotected portions of the body are vulnerable to modern weaponry, but protection of the head and torso is especially necessary to prevent serious injury or death. To protect the critical areas of the body, modern armed forces have developed combat helmets and body armour for use by members of the armed forces on the battlefield, in combat aircraft, and in naval vessels.
Gunpowder weapons eventually made the heavy and expensive armoured suits of the medieval period obsolete, so that from the Renaissance onward armies increasingly opted not to outfit their soldiers with body armour in order to improve their stamina and ability to engage in long marches. However, the introduction of trench warfare during World War I and the devastating effects of artillery barrages caused armies once again to outfit their soldiers with metal combat helmets to protect against fragmentation wounds to the head. The German army even outfitted some soldiers in exposed positions—machine gunners, snipers, and sentries—with steel breastplates. Steel helmets were standard-issue for foot soldiers during World War II as well. In addition, bomber crews in that conflict wore heavy “flak jackets” designed to protect against fragmentation from air-defense guns.
In the latter stages of the Korean War, the U.S. Army introduced the M-1952 armoured vest. The M-1952 weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg), and its 12 layers of flexible laminated nylon provided a measure of ballistic protection against shell fragments. U.S. soldiers and marines continued to wear the vest into the Vietnam War as well, until the army replaced it with the fragmentation protective body armour, M-1969, which incorporated some minor improvements over the M-1952 but retained essentially the same protective characteristics as the older vest.
In the decades since the Vietnam War, the development of new materials such as Kevlar and advanced ceramics gave engineers the ability to create lightweight body armour that is effective against both fragmentation and bullets. Advanced fibres absorb the impact of bullets or fragments and disperse their energy across a large area as the projectiles move through successive layers of material. The bullets or fragments deform, or “mushroom,” rather than penetrate the material. Likewise, a bullet’s energy dissipates as it passes through a ceramic plate. A soft vest of tightly woven or laminated fibres thus provides basic protection against handgun rounds, small-calibre rifle rounds, and grenade fragments, and the addition of ceramic plates into pockets in the soft vest enables protection against high-velocity rifle rounds. Ballistic vests are generally rated using a system devised by the National Institute of Justice, the research and standards division of the U.S. Department of Justice. It classifies the degree of protection offered, from Type IIA (proof against 9-mm or .40-calibre bullets) to Type IV (proof against .30-calibre [7.62 mm] armour-piercing rifle bullets).
Soldiers in Western-style armies routinely enter into combat outfitted with a helmet (now often made of lightweight Kevlar rather than steel) to protect the head and with body armour (incorporating both Kevlar and ceramic) to protect the torso. Law-enforcement personnel routinely wear lightweight vests protective against handguns, and bomb-disposal experts wear even heavier suits designed to give them extensive full-body protection against explosions at close range.
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bab6e45fc742d96cc8f45483a92c9e12 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Armoured-Train-14-69 | Armoured Train 14–69 | Armoured Train 14–69
In 1927 he reworked Armoured Train 14–69— which had been severely criticized for neglecting the role of the Communist Party in the partisan movement—into a play, correcting this flaw. The drama enjoyed immediate success and has become one of the classics of the Soviet repertory. In his works composed…
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bc686040d67cc37c8234edb6723d8af9 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Armoury-Museum | Armoury Museum | Armoury Museum
Armoury Museum, Russian Oruzheinaya Palata, in Moscow, oldest museum in Russia. It is housed in a building between the Great Kremlin Palace and the Kremlin wall, was designed by Konstantin A. Thon, and was built between 1844 and 1851. The museum was originally founded to house the treasures accumulated over the centuries by Russia and is Russo-Byzantine in style. The treasures of the Kremlin cathedrals and the Synodal Treasury were added to the museum after the Revolution.
Arms and armour include the armour of Boris Godunov and the jewel-encrusted helmet of Tsar Michael. Among the examples of enamel work, icons, and jewelry are some famous works of the Russian goldsmith Peter Fabergé. There are also vestments and fabrics and European gold and silver, including one of the finest collections of 16th- and 17th-century English silver in the world and French porcelain from the Sèvres factory. The thrones include one of inlaid ivory that belonged to Ivan the Terrible and a gold throne presented to Boris Godunov in 1604 by the shah of Persia. The Russian state regalia, including crowns and other precious objects, is housed in the museum.
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4ab4a302d9c9e92924dd2de420103a31 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Armstrong-Flight-Research-Center | Armstrong Flight Research Center | Armstrong Flight Research Center
…of positions, mainly at the Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, until his retirement in 2008.
…then became director of the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base. He left the space program in 1977 to enter private business in Los Angeles. In 2004 he wrote a book, Two Sides of the Moon: Our Story of the Cold War Space Race, with Soviet cosmonaut…
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a8bdb05c49ecd32a0a1e21273d44b42d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Army-of-Tennessee | Army of Tennessee | Army of Tennessee
Army of Tennessee, primary Confederate army of the Western Theatre during the American Civil War (1861–65). Although the army fought in numerous engagements, it won few victories. In addition to facing some of the Union’s most capable generals, the army was plagued by problems of command, supply, and logistics for the duration of the war. Historians have identified the string of defeats suffered by the Army of Tennessee as a primary cause of Confederate defeat in the war.
The Army of Tennessee, the primary Confederate army of the Western front during the American Civil War, was formed in 1861 as the Provisional Army of Tennessee, which was the core of a force known variously as the Army of the West and the Army of the Mississippi before being ultimately renamed in November 1862.
Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the Army of Tennessee to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman at Durham, North Carolina, on April 26, 1865.
The Army of Tennessee was commanded by several different generals during the war, including Albert Sidney Johnston, P.G.T. Beauregard, Braxton Bragg, and John B. Hood.
Historians have identified the string of defeats suffered by the Army of Tennessee as a primary cause of the Confederate defeat in the American Civil War. The army’s only major victory came at the Battle of Chickamauga Creek in 1863, which proved to have little influence on the war’s outcome.
Although the Army of Tennessee would not receive its permanent title until November 1862, for all intents and purposes its origin can be found with the formation of the Provisional Army of Tennessee, organized by Gov. Isham G. Harris in the spring and early summer of 1861. By July, however, that state force had been turned over to the Confederate government. Over the next several months the army would serve as the nucleus of a larger force that fought under a number of titles, including the Army of the West and the Army of Mississippi.
In the war’s early months the army, commanded by Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, was tasked with shielding the young Confederacy from invasion along the Tennessee-Kentucky border. However, after Union forces captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, the army was forced to abandon this line of defense and retreat before consolidating with other Confederate forces at Corinth, Mississippi.
Johnston, hoping to stave off further disaster in the Western Theatre, decided that he would launch a surprise attack against Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Federal army encamped at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee. This attack ushered in the Battle of Shiloh (April 6–7, 1862), which initially went well for the Confederates. However, Johnston was killed in action a few hours into the battle, and his successor, Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, soon ordered his forces to halt. Overnight, Grant was reinforced by another Union army commanded by Gen. Don Carlos Buell and quickly turned the tide on the Confederates the following day.
After the defeat at Shiloh, Beauregard ordered his army to retreat back to Corinth; however, his tenure as commander would be short-lived. Owing to conflicts with Confederate Pres. Jefferson Davis, Beauregard was replaced by Gen. Braxton Bragg. In the fall of 1862 Bragg’s army joined that of Gen. E. Kirby-Smith in the invasion of Kentucky. Although the advance was initially designed as a combined mission, conflicts between the two commanders resulted in the two forces’ operating independently of each another.
Bragg’s wing of the campaign culminated in the Battle of Perryville (October 8, 1862) against Union Gen. Don Carlos Buell. Bragg attacked an isolated wing of the Union army and forced it to retreat. However, Bragg was unable or unwilling to maintain the initiative, and as the Federal force began to receive reinforcements he ordered his army to retreat back into Tennessee, above the protests of some of his lieutenants. Following this retreat the army was reorganized and joined by other Confederate forces in the region and renamed the Army of Tennessee.
Bragg ordered the army to take up a defensive position at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where it awaited the arrival of the Union Army of the Cumberland, commanded by Gen. William Rosecrans. The Battle of Stones River (December 31, 1862–January 2, 1863) began when Bragg struck at the approaching Federals, forcing their right flank to fall back. As at Perryville, Murfreesboro first appeared promising for the Confederates. Bragg hoped that this attack would culminate in breaking the Union’s supply line, forcing Rosecrans to retreat. The Confederate momentum could not be sustained, however, and by nightfall the two armies were eyeing each other from their trenches. Given the relative success of the battle’s first day, Bragg expected Rosecrans to retreat. Nevertheless, as the new year dawned, the Union lines remained. On January 2 Bragg tried to regain the initiative, this time by attacking the Federals’ left flank, but it was to no avail, and Bragg again ordered his army to retreat—this time to Tullahoma, Tennessee, where it remained until summer.
Soon, however, the Army of Tennessee’s retreat would continue, and, in a near-bloodless campaign, Rosecrans managed to maneuver his army into positions that forced Bragg to retreat into north Georgia, while the Union occupied Chattanooga, Tennessee—an important supply and transportation centre. Having successfully captured the city, Rosecrans was determined to crush Bragg’s army, and their forces collided at the Battle of Chickamauga Creek (September 19–20, 1863).
Bragg, intent on retaking Chattanooga and hoping to crush the Union army, welcomed this battle. At Chickamauga, Bragg received many reinforcements—including two divisions from Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army under Gen. James Longstreet. On the battle’s second day those troops exploited a gap in Rosecrans’s lines, driving a large portion of his army from the field. At Chickamauga the Army of Tennessee won its only major victory of the war. Nonetheless, determined resistance by Union troops under Gen. George Thomas allowed the rest of the northern army to safely retreat back to Chattanooga.
While some of Bragg’s lieutenants urged him to immediately pursue the federals, he opted to let them escape before placing Chattanooga under siege. The siege, however, was a failure, and the Union army was able to open an effective supply line and soon received reinforcements. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant—recently appointed commander of all Federal forces in the West—took command at Chattanooga. Making matters even worse for the Confederates, northern forces in the city were reinforced by another army under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. The combined might of these forces was too much for the Army of Tennessee, and as a result of the Battle of Chattanooga (November 23–25, 1863), it was forced once again to retreat into north Georgia.
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0353363e2fee9d92d515d8b0adce50cd | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Army-of-the-Andes | Army of the Andes | Army of the Andes
Army of the Andes, military force of 3,500 soldiers organized by the South American independence leader José de San Martín. In 1817 San Martín led the soldiers from Argentina across the Andes Mountains to liberate Chile from Spanish colonial rule. San Martín’s challenge was to coordinate the difficult passage across the Andes. The soldiers were divided into four columns: two major ones, the first under generals Miguel Estanislao Soler and Bernardo O’Higgins, and the second under Juan Las Heras; and two smaller wing divisions. All four concentrations of forces had to execute the monthlong march by different routes and appear in Chilean territory between February 6 and 8, 1817.
On February 12 the rebels met a Spanish army under Gen. Raphael Maroto at Chacabuco (see Battle of Chacabuco). San Martín separated his forces into two wings under Soler and O’Higgins, respectively. O’Higgins attacked prematurely, narrowly averting defeat. When Soler appeared, O’Higgins was able to regroup and mount a two-battalion bayonet charge that left the Spaniards surrounded. The victorious San Martín entered Santiago, Chile, on February 14. The success of this operation established San Martín’s reputation as a great general.
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04442633473f8ca80edf36dbec699bf2 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Around-the-World-in-Eighty-Days-by-Verne | Around the World in Eighty Days | Around the World in Eighty Days
Around the World in Eighty Days, French Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, travel adventure novel by French author Jules Verne, published serially in 1872 in Le Temps and in book form in 1873. The work tells the story of the unflappable Phileas Fogg’s trip around the world, accompanied by his emotional valet, Passepartout, to win a bet. It was the most popular of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires series of novels.
Phileas Fogg, a London gentleman of meticulous and unchanging habits, hires as his valet Jean Passepartout, a Frenchman who has had a variety of jobs, including circus performer, but now seeks a tranquil life. After reading in The Daily Telegraph that a new railroad in India has made it theoretically possible to travel around the world in 80 days, Fogg bets his fellow members at the Reform Club that he will make that journey in 80 days or less; the wager is for the princely sum of £20,000 (half his fortune). Leaving that night, Fogg and a nonplussed Passepartout board a train bound for Dover and Calais to begin their journey.
Shortly before Fogg’s departure, someone resembling him had robbed a bank, and Fogg’s sudden exit leads Scotland Yard to believe that he was the bank robber. Accordingly, a detective, Mr. Fix, is sent to Suez, in British-ruled Egypt, to await the steamer Mongolia, on which Fogg and Passepartout are traveling. Fix befriends Passpartout, and, after learning that they will take the steamer to Bombay, he buys a ticket and joins them. The Mongolia reaches Bombay before the arrival of an arrest warrant, however. During the few hours before their planned departure for Calcutta on the Great India Peninsula Railway, Passepartout visits a Hindu temple on Malabar Hill, unaware that Christians are forbidden to enter and that shoes are not to be worn inside. He is beaten by enraged priests and barely makes it to the train station on time.
The train travels through India until stopping at the village of Kholby, where Fogg learns that, contrary to what was reported in the British press, the railroad is 50 miles (81 km) short of completion, and passengers are required to find their own way to Allahabad to resume the train trip. Fogg purchases an elephant and hires a Parsi man as elephant driver and guide. The elephant-borne party later encounters a group of people preparing for an act of suttee—the immolation of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. Fogg decides that they must rescue the young widow. Passepartout disguises himself as the body of the late rajah, and, as soon as the pyre is lit, he springs up and seizes the widow. The party then flees before the ruse is discovered. They reach the railroad station in Allahabad and continue on their journey.
In Calcutta, however, Fogg and Passepartout are arrested and sentenced to prison because of Passepartout’s incursion into the Malabar Hill temple in Bombay. An unperturbed Fogg pays bail for them, and, accompanied by the widow, Aouda, they board a steamer bound for Hong Kong. Fix, who had hoped the sentences would keep them in Calcutta long enough for the warrant to arrive, joins them.
In Hong Kong Passepartout attempts to secure cabins on a boat to Yokohama and learns that its departure has been rescheduled for that evening. Desperate to keep Fogg in Hong Kong until the warrant arrives, Fix tells Passepartout why he is following Fogg and offers to pay him to help delay Fogg’s departure. When Passepartout refuses, Fix drugs him with opium, preventing him from returning to Fogg. As a result, Fogg misses the steamer. However, he finds another ship that will take them to Shanghai, and he, Aouda, and Fix set sail. In the meantime, Passepartout manages to stagger onto the ship for Yokohama.
Passepartout arrives in Yokohama with no money and no idea where Fogg is. He joins a traveling circus, where Fogg, having caught a Yokohama-bound steamer from Shanghai, encounters him just in time for them all (including Fix) to board the steamer that will take them to San Francisco. As Britain has no jurisdiction in the United States, Fix is now as eager as the rest of them to get Fogg back to England quickly. The group boards a train bound for New York City.
The train trip continues more or less uneventfully until it reaches Medicine Bow, Wyoming Territory, where a signalman tells them that the suspension bridge is too dilapidated to bear the weight of a train. However, the engineer believes that it might be possible to safely cross the bridge by going at top speed, and the plan works, with the bridge collapsing as soon as the train reaches the other side. In Nebraska the train is attacked by a band of Sioux, who are on the point of winning the battle when Passepartout succeeds in uncoupling the train from its engine outside Fort Kearny, and the soldiers garrisoned there frighten the Sioux into leaving. However, the Sioux capture Passepartout and two other passengers. Fogg rides to their rescue with a group of soldiers, but the recoupled train departs without them.
Using a sail-powered sledge, Fogg and the others travel over snow to Omaha, Nebraska, arriving just in time to board a train to Chicago. From there they catch a train to New York City, where they arrive 45 minutes after departure of the ship to England. Fogg finds an empty trading ship whose captain is willing to carry the group of four to Bordeaux, France. After bribing the crew and imprisoning the captain, Fogg assumes control and sets course for Liverpool, England. When a storm prevents the use of sails, the coal supply runs low. Fogg buys the ship from the captain and begins burning its wooden parts. As soon as they arrive in Liverpool, Fix arrests Fogg. Several hours later, though, Fix learns that another man was responsible for the bank robbery, and he releases Fogg, who orders a special train. However, he arrives in London five minutes too late to win his wager.
The following evening Fogg apologizes to Aouda for being unable to provide for her comfort as a result of losing the bet. She in turn proposes marriage to him, and he joyfully agrees. Passepartout is sent to engage a clergyman, and he learns that their journey through the time zones had gained them a day and that they are not too late after all. He rushes back to notify Fogg, who arrives at the Reform Club with only moments to spare.
The richness and poetry of Around the World in Eighty Days, together with the lively narrative, won Verne worldwide renown and was a fantastic success for the times, setting new sales records, with translations in English, Russian, Italian, and Spanish appearing soon after it was published in book form. An 1874 stage version, written by Verne and French playwright Adolphe d’Ennery, was also wildly successful and ran for several decades. The novel inspired numerous attempts to travel around the world in 80 days or less, most notably by American journalist Nellie Bly in 1889–90. The best-known film version, Around the World in 80 Days (1956), starred David Niven, Cantinflas, and Shirley MacLaine and won the Academy Award for best picture.
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b0c5e41886e3caa28507c49687570915 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arrighi | Arrighi | Arrighi
Italics included Arrighi, a version of the letter used by the 16th-century papal writing master and printer (see above). Among the modern faces whose design Morison supervised were Eric Gill’s Sans Serif, which enjoyed a wide vogue in advertising and avant-garde book typography; Gill’s Perpetua, based upon…
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3186d9a54821fcdbb29a48c6ae143738 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arringatore | Arringatore | Arringatore
…orator popularly called the “Arringatore” at Florence and a terra-cotta married pair on the lid of a cinerary chest (for ashes of the dead) in the Museo Etrusco Guarnacci, at Volterra, is earlier than c. 100 bce; works of that type may be reckoned as provincial interpretations of the…
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090bf14366e8ed0df4d33b6554fc37e7 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/arrondissement | Arrondissement | Arrondissement
It comprises 20 arrondissements (municipal districts), each of which has its own mayor, town hall, and particular features. The numbering begins in the heart of Paris and continues in the spiraling shape of a snail shell, ending to the far east. Parisians refer to the arrondissements by number…
…subdivisions of the départements, termed arrondissements, each headed by a sous-préfet. The préfets and sous-préfets were appointed by the government in Paris to serve as agents of the central government and also as the executives of the divisional governments, the conseils généraux, which were composed of elected officials. The system…
…are in turn subdivided into arrondissements. Each région is administered by a governor, who coordinates the activities of the cercles and implements economic policy. The cercles provide nuclei for the major government services; their various headquarters provide focal points for health services, the army, the police, local courts, and other…
…city is divided into 16 arrondissements, but for the purposes of local government these are grouped into eight secteurs, which elect mayors. In addition to the eight city halls, one for each secteur, there are two “mini city halls” in each arrondissement. The city mayor is assisted by a local…
…its commissioner, is subdivided into arrondissements, each of which is under the administration of a subprefect. Arrondissements are again subdivided into cantons and these into communes, which are somewhat equivalent to the English parish.
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39ebba12a0848e7c5e992296c0676cd5 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arrow-British-ship | Arrow | Arrow
…officials boarded the British-registered ship Arrow while it was docked in Canton, arrested several Chinese crew members (who were later released), and allegedly lowered the British flag. Later that month a British warship sailed up the Pearl River estuary and began bombarding Canton, and there were skirmishes between British and…
Guangzhou police seized the Arrow, a Chinese-owned but British-registered ship flying a British flag, and charged its Chinese crew with piracy and smuggling. The British consul Harry Parkes sent a fleet to fight its way up to Guangzhou. French forces joined the venture on the plea that a French…
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95a91f4c783bc3128c7e25f83dfff9f3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arrow-of-God | Arrow of God | Arrow of God
In Arrow of God (1964), set in the 1920s in a village under British administration, the principal character, the chief priest of the village, whose son becomes a zealous Christian, turns his resentment at the position he is placed in by the white man against his…
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2e60c722ee1652692f272d564355e8b1 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arrowsmith-novel-by-Lewis | Arrowsmith | Arrowsmith
Arrowsmith, novel by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1925. The author declined to accept a Pulitzer Prize for the work because he had not been awarded the prize for his Main Street in 1921.
The narrative concerns the personal and professional travails of Martin Arrowsmith, a Midwestern physician. Disheartened successively by rural practice, the state of public health care, and the elitism of an urban clinic, Martin accepts a research position at an institute in New York that leads him, along with his wife, Leora, a nurse, to an epidemic-ravaged island. Leora dies there, and Martin abandons his scientific principles in order to make an experimental serum more widely available. Returning to the institute, he marries a wealthy widow and finds her social demands a distraction. In a final move—and in realization of his ambitions—he leaves institutional medicine, as well as his wife, and sets up his own laboratory on a New England farm.
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34952267706a05f6c5ee9f096bfd4441 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ars-amatoria | Ars amatoria | Ars amatoria
Ars amatoria, (Latin: “Art of Love”) poem by Ovid, published about 1 bce. Ars amatoria comprises three books of mock-didactic elegiacs on the art of seduction and intrigue. One of the author’s best-known works, it contributed to his downfall in 8 ce on allegations of immorality. The work, which presents a fascinating portrait of the sophisticated and hedonistic Roman aristocracy, attained wide popularity in its day. The message of this brilliant treatise was essentially subversive to the official program of moral reforms then being promoted by Augustus, and it cannot have been well received by those who were seriously committed to the goals and aspirations of Augustanism.
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8cc84a634ffffb31e0c6bd4c7c4d43d4 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ars-cantus-mensurabilis | Ars cantus mensurabilis | Ars cantus mensurabilis
…mid-13th century), a theorist, whose Ars cantus mensurabilis (“The Art of Measured Song”) served to organize and codify the newly formed mensural system (a more precise system of rhythmic notation, the direct ancestor of modern notation); and Pierre de la Croix (flourished last half of 13th century), whose works anticipate…
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f968fff47ec5f47a5d0086846354756c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ars-Conjectandi | Ars Conjectandi | Ars Conjectandi
Jakob Bernoulli’s pioneering work Ars Conjectandi (published posthumously, 1713; “The Art of Conjecturing”) contained many of his finest concepts: his theory of permutations and combinations; the so-called Bernoulli numbers, by which he derived the exponential series; his treatment of mathematical and moral predictability; and the subject of probability—containing what…
…1713 from a manuscript, the Ars conjectandi, left behind at his death in 1705. There he showed that the observed proportion of, say, tosses of heads or of male births will converge as the number of trials increases to the true probability p, supposing that it is uniform. His theorem…
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030fd8d7cb4789468513da8e3d12a14d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ars-maior | Ars maior | Ars maior
…and a small school grammar, Ars maior and Ars minor. The latter was written for young students and gives, by question and answer, elementary instruction in the eight parts of speech. It remained in use throughout the European Middle Ages, and its author’s name in the forms donat and donet…
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72ed88dc5e0c27b90f7f763f7a175035 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ars-Nova-by-Vitry | Ars Nova | Ars Nova
…and authoritative treatise of music Ars nova (c. 1320; “New Art”), which dealt with the theoretical aspects of French music in the first half of the 14th century. It included an explanation of new theories of mensural notation, a detailed account of the various uses and meanings of the coloured…
When the influential treatise Ars Nova (“New Art”) by the composer Philippe de Vitry appeared early in the 14th century, the preceding epoch acquired its designation of Ars Antiqua (“Old Art”), for it was only in retrospect that the rapid developments of the century and a half from circa…
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6266bccf6717deaac818de367a1f0fba | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ars-novae-musicae | Ars novae musicae | Ars novae musicae
In his treatise Ars novae musicae (1319; “The Art of the New Music”) he enthusiastically supported the great changes in musical style and notation occurring in the 14th century and associated with the composer and theorist Philippe de Vitry, whose book, Ars Nova (1320; “The New Art”), gave…
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9b9e9d0bc6e3a7e62ea2008554e30125 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arsenal-film-by-Dovzhenko | Arsenal | Arsenal
…different stages of Ukrainian history; Arsenal (1929), an epic film poem about the effects of revolution and civil war upon the Ukraine; and Zemlya (Earth, 1930), which is considered to be his masterpiece. Earth tells the story of the conflict between a family of wealthy landowning peasants (kulaks) and the…
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f1d70a3dc55e8f3aa8ff8b4ab1385a0b | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arsene-Lupin | Arsène Lupin | Arsène Lupin
Arsène Lupin, fictional character in stories and novels by Maurice Leblanc. The debonair Lupin is a reformed thief, a criminal genius who has turned detective. The police are not convinced of his change of heart and often suspect him when a daring robbery occurs.
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3ed5a446dd94777f0de3e8884220c683 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/arson | Arson | Arson
Arson, crime commonly defined by statute as the willful or malicious damage or destruction of property by means of fire or explosion. In English common law, arson referred to the burning of another person’s dwellings under circumstances that endangered human life. Modern statutes have expanded this definition so that arson now includes the wrongful burning of any public or private property.
Most jurisdictions have divided arson statutes into two or more degrees, reserving the heavier punishments for burnings that pose a danger to human life. Such acts generally include the burning of vehicles, bridges, and forests as well as habitable dwellings (e.g., houses, stores, office buildings, and factories). In nearly all countries, an arsonist may be prosecuted for murder if someone dies as a result of the act, even if the intention to kill is absent. Some jurisdictions (e.g., Germany and some U.S. states) also impose a higher penalty for arson committed for the purpose of concealing or destroying evidence of another crime.
It can be arson to burn personal property as well as real estate. Statutes also have forbidden burnings caused by incendiary devices. By contrast, a fire caused by accident or ordinary carelessness is not arson, because criminal intent is lacking. Nonetheless, reckless activity—or burning without regard to consequences—can result in an arson conviction.
An arsonist may act from a variety of different motives, including rage, jealousy, profit (e.g., burnings undertaken to commit insurance fraud), and the desire to conceal or destroy evidence. Persons suffering from pyromania have a pathological and uncontrollable urge to set fires.
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9d811e34a7a5431a4967d7b1b5023a57 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Art-Institute-of-Chicago | Art Institute of Chicago | Art Institute of Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago, museum in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., featuring European, American, and Asian sculpture, paintings, prints and drawings, decorative arts, photography, textiles, and arms and armour, as well as African, pre-Columbian American, and ancient art. The museum contains more than 300,000 works of art. It is especially noted for its extensive collections of 19th-century French painting (Impressionist works in particular) and 20th-century painting and sculpture.
The Art Institute was established in 1866 as the Chicago Academy of Design. It was reestablished as the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts in 1879, and it took its current name in 1882. In 1893 it moved to its present building, which covers an entire city block bounded by Columbus Drive and Michigan Avenue between Jackson and Monroe streets. The building was designed by the architectural firm of Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge for the World’s Columbian Exposition. Greeting visitors to the museum are two bronze lions designed by sculptor Edward Kemeys; their “names” are, unofficially, “on the prowl” (north lion) and “stands in an attitude of defiance” (south lion). The museum also has sculpture gardens (begun after a donation by Mrs. Stanley McCormick in the 1960s) and an interior courtyard restaurant. Educational spaces, including the Morton Auditorium, provide facilities for expanding public knowledge about the arts.
During the 1920s and ’30s the museum expanded its collection with generous bequests from such art patrons as Bertha Honoré Palmer, Helen Birch Bartlett, and Martin A. Ryerson. In the 1960s the B.F. Ferguson Memorial Building and the Morton Wing were constructed to house the museum’s expanding collections, and in 1968 the main building was renamed after Robert Allerton, a museum trustee. The Daniel L. and Ada F. Rice Building was completed in 1988. Japanese architect Andō Tadao designed the museum’s gallery for the display of Japanese screens in the 1990s. At the end of that decade, construction began on a new Modern Wing to house 20th- and 21st-century art, as well as the Ryan Education Center. The 264,000-square-foot (24,526-square-metre) addition to the north side of the building was designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano. It featured an outdoor terrace and a path to nearby Millennium Park and was completed in May 2009.
The School of the Art Institute offers both undergraduate and graduate programs and has approximately 3,000 students. The Ryerson Library (built in 1901 to house the museum’s collection of art books) and the Burnham Library (founded in 1912 to house the museum’s architecture holdings) were merged in 1957.
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cc4f8191249569fed0fe4a3e6bacced3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Art-Museums-and-Their-Digital-Future-2119647 | Art Museums and Their Digital Future | Art Museums and Their Digital Future
With the dramatic growth of museums around the world—over 2,000 built in China alone since the advent of the 21st century and new ones springing up on a regular basis throughout Europe and North America, the Middle East, and Latin America—this is a good moment to reflect on these institutions and their future. Can they sustain this level of growth indefinitely? Will available resources support this many museums? Can museums at the end of the 21st century be as popular as they are today? Will new forms of engagement with the arts replace the unique experiences provided by museums?
The list of questions could go on for pages, but here are two issues that I think merit particular attention from the point of view of today’s concerns about technology and utility: Can museums use new technologies to transform themselves from “analog” institutions into “digital” ones, and can they reallocate their resources in order to fully activate their collections?
The rapid evolution of digital technologies has enabled museums to develop an array of platforms—from websites to social media—that have extended their programming and reach within and beyond their walls. But they still think in analog ways. The challenge for museums is to use these technologies to learn to think digitally and thus to imagine new ways of working with each other as well as engaging the public, to move beyond a hierarchical order of organization and thinking to a networked set of relationships and possibilities. In other words, could partnership among museums replace competition? Could sharing replace ownership? Could conversation replace authority?
[When Martin Scorsese learned that 80 percent of American silent films had been lost, he took urgent action. Learn what he did.]
In short, could art museums develop new conceptual models that build upon digital thinking to transform themselves into 21st-century institutions where collections are developed jointly by several museums? Where audiences are regularly invited to share their ideas about art with the museums and each other and even encouraged to participate in the making of art and the shaping of the intellectual life of the institutions? Where museums work together on joint educational and community-centered programs about art, on site and online?
An equally pressing concern for art museums is whether they can find the right balance between collecting and programming. Most museums have extensive collections, often only a fraction of which are actually displayed but which consume substantial physical, financial, and human resources. At the same time, museums struggle to find adequate funding to support the kind of robust programming essential to expanding and sustaining audiences, especially new audiences who have grown up in a digital world and expect a rich and deeply engaging experience from museums. Moreover, with the rise of hyper-successful commercial galleries like Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and White Cube, among others, which have access to far greater financial resources than museums and look like museums, with their bookstores, restaurants, and well-curated exhibitions, this issue is acute. Unless museums can rebalance the relationship between the growth of their collections (for which there are often endowed funds compelling them to continue purchasing art, which only compounds the problem) and the use of their collections (for which there are rarely endowed funds), they may find themselves unable to generate the breadth and richness of programming required by audiences in the future.
[Removing statues is a useful expression of changing values. But we cannot forget what we’re erasing, argues Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer.]
Art museums, as we know them, have been around since the late 18th century and have proven themselves to be surprisingly resilient, inventing and reinventing themselves in response to changing audiences, interests, and opportunities. Although there is every reason to believe they will continue to do so, there remain serious challenges to be dealt with today and in the future for museums to ensure success and fidelity to their mission.
This essay was originally published in 2018 in Encyclopædia Britannica Anniversary Edition: 250 Years of Excellence (1768–2018).
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938575c2f73b760297eb7706d20e02fc | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Art-poetique | Art poétique | Art poétique
In 1882 his famous “Art poétique” (probably composed in prison eight years earlier) was enthusiastically adopted by the young Symbolists. He later disavowed the Symbolists, however, chiefly because they went further than he in abandoning traditional forms: rhyme, for example, seemed to him an unavoidable necessity in French verse.
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834bcdbbe23b16d916b4d1c9a13ca985 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Art-Through-the-Ages | Art Through the Ages | Art Through the Ages
…one herself, and the resulting Art Through the Ages (1926) far surpassed other available works in readability, breadth of coverage, and wealth of illustration. It remained a widely used text for decades. In 1932 she published Understanding the Arts, aimed at a wide general audience. A second edition of Art…
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6feb0ee7a0ba35144bf80e6b2c7114ae | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Art-Worlds | Art Worlds | Art Worlds
In Art Worlds (1982), a book that greatly influenced the sociology of art, Becker examined the cultural contexts (the “art worlds”) in which artists produce their work.
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e1285874109b2764c23cfd38bd6d6f6e | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Artamenes-or-The-Grand-Cyrus | Artamènes; or, The Grand Cyrus | Artamènes; or, The Grand Cyrus
…ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age:…
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4c06f57b68e9a24c11437948bea0ee07 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Artemis-Greek-goddess | Artemis | Artemis
Artemis, in Greek religion, the goddess of wild animals, the hunt, and vegetation and of chastity and childbirth; she was identified by the Romans with Diana. Artemis was the daughter of Zeus and Leto and the twin sister of Apollo. Among the rural populace, Artemis was the favourite goddess. Her character and function varied greatly from place to place, but, apparently, behind all forms lay the goddess of wild nature, who danced, usually accompanied by nymphs, in mountains, forests, and marshes. Artemis embodied the sportsman’s ideal, so besides killing game she also protected it, especially the young; this was the Homeric significance of the title Mistress of Animals.
The worship of Artemis probably flourished in Crete or on the Greek mainland in pre-Hellenic times. Many of Artemis’s local cults, however, preserved traces of other deities, often with Greek names, suggesting that, upon adopting her, the Greeks identified Artemis with nature divinities of their own. The virginal sister of Apollo is very different from the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, for example.
Dances of maidens representing tree nymphs (dryads) were especially common in Artemis’s worship as goddess of the tree cult, a role especially popular in the Peloponnese. Throughout the Peloponnese, bearing such epithets as Limnaea and Limnatis (Lady of the Lake), Artemis supervised waters and lush wild growth, attended by nymphs of wells and springs (naiads). In parts of the peninsula her dances were wild and lascivious.
Outside the Peloponnese, Artemis’s most familiar form was as Mistress of Animals. Poets and artists usually pictured her with the stag or hunting dog, but the cults showed considerable variety. For instance, the Tauropolia festival at Halae Araphenides in Attica honoured Artemis Tauropolos (Bull Goddess), who received a few drops of blood drawn by sword from a man’s neck.
The frequent stories of the love affairs of Artemis’s nymphs are supposed by some to have originally been told of the goddess herself. The poets after Homer, however, stressed Artemis’s chastity and her delight in the hunt, dancing and music, shadowy groves, and the cities of just men. The wrath of Artemis was proverbial, for to it myth attributed wild nature’s hostility to humans. Yet Greek sculpture avoided Artemis’s unpitying anger as a motif. In fact, the goddess herself did not become popular as a subject in the great sculptural schools until the relatively gentle 4th-century-bce spirit prevailed.
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35b5eeb8b24b3f3f6e4d81e55b3bf79c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Artha-shastra | Artha-shastra | Artha-shastra
Artha-shastra, (Sanskrit: “The Science of Material Gain”) also spelled Artha-śāstra, singularly important Indian manual on the art of politics, attributed to Kautilya (also known as Chanakya), who reportedly was chief minister to the emperor Chandragupta (c. 300 bce), the founder of the Mauryan dynasty. Although it is unlikely that all of the text dates to such an early period, several parts have been traced back to the Mauryas.
The author of the Artha-shastra is concerned with the ruler’s central control of a realm of fairly limited size. Kautilya wrote about the way the state’s economy is organized, how ministers should be chosen, how war should be conducted, and how taxation should be arranged and distributed. Emphasis is placed on the importance of a network of runners, informers, and spies, which, in the absence of a ministry of public information and a police force, functioned as a surveillance corps for the ruler, focusing particularly on any external threats and internal dissidence.
Entirely practical in purpose, the Artha-shastra presents no overt philosophy. But implicit in its writings is a complete skepticism, if not cynicism, concerning human nature, its corruptibility, and the ways in which the ruler—and his trusted servant—can take advantage of such human weakness.
Unstated but apparent is the paradox that a ruler has to have complete confidence in the minister who is ruling his state. This paradox was dramatized by the playwright Vishakhadatta (c. 5th century ce) in his play Mudrarakshasa (“Minister Rakshasa and His Signet Ring”).
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a3bb98258e7d047b1c392bb8d2aa2855 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arthur-Bell-and-Sons-PLC | Arthur Bell & Sons PLC | Arthur Bell & Sons PLC
In 1985 the firm acquired Arthur Bell & Sons PLC, a distiller of Scotch whisky, and in 1986 it bought The Distillers Co. PLC, which was the largest Scotch distiller in the world. Guinness’s use of clandestine and apparently illegal stock transactions in acquiring Distillers created a major corporate scandal…
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d97dfa616c9106c0c5aaf6c6cb28deb6 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arthurian-legend | Arthurian legend | Arthurian legend
Arthurian legend, the body of stories and medieval romances, known as the matter of Britain, centring on the legendary king Arthur. Medieval writers, especially the French, variously treated stories of Arthur’s birth, the adventures of his knights, and the adulterous love between his knight Sir Lancelot and his queen, Guinevere. This last situation and the quest for the Holy Grail (the vessel used by Christ at the Last Supper and given to Joseph of Arimathea) brought about the dissolution of the knightly fellowship, the death of Arthur, and the destruction of his kingdom.
Stories about Arthur and his court had been popular in Wales before the 11th century; European fame came through Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38), celebrating a glorious and triumphant king who defeated a Roman army in eastern France but was mortally wounded in battle during a rebellion at home led by his nephew Mordred. Some features of Geoffrey’s story were marvelous fabrications, and certain features of the Celtic stories were adapted to suit feudal times. The concept of Arthur as a world conqueror was clearly inspired by legends surrounding great leaders such as Alexander the Great and Charlemagne. Later writers, notably Wace of Jersey and Lawamon, filled out certain details, especially in connection with Arthur’s knightly fellowship (the Knights of the Round Table).
Using Celtic sources, Chrétien de Troyes in the late 12th century made Arthur the ruler of a realm of marvels in five romances of adventure. He also introduced the themes of the Grail and the love of Lancelot and Guinevere into Arthurian legend. Prose romances of the 13th century explored these major themes further. An early prose romance centring on Lancelot seems to have become the kernel of a cyclic work known as the Prose Lancelot, or Vulgate cycle (c. 1225).
The Lancelot theme was connected with the Grail story through Lancelot’s son, the pure knight Sir Galahad, who achieved the vision of God through the Grail as fully as is possible in this life, whereas Sir Lancelot was impeded in his progress along the mystic way because of his adultery with Guinevere. Another branch of the Vulgate cycle was based on a very early 13th-century verse romance, the Merlin, by Robert de Boron, that had told of Arthur’s birth and childhood and his winning of the crown by drawing a magic sword (see Excalibur) from a stone. The writer of the Vulgate cycle turned this into prose, adding a pseudo-historical narrative dealing with Arthur’s military exploits. A final branch of the Vulgate cycle contained an account of Arthur’s Roman campaign and war with Mordred, to which was added a story of Lancelot’s renewed adultery with Guinevere and the disastrous war between Lancelot and Sir Gawain that ensued. A later prose romance, known as the post-Vulgate Grail romance (c. 1240), combined Arthurian legend with material from the Tristan romance.
The legend told in the Vulgate cycle and post-Vulgate romance was transmitted to English-speaking readers in Thomas Malory’s late 15th-century prose Le Morte Darthur. At the same time, there was renewed interest in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, and the fictitious kings of Britain became more or less incorporated with official national mythology. The legend remained alive during the 17th century, though interest in it was by then confined to England. Of merely antiquarian interest during the 18th century, it again figured in literature during Victorian times, notably in Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. In the 20th century an American poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson, wrote an Arthurian trilogy, and the American novelist Thomas Berger wrote Arthur Rex (1978). In England T.H. White retold the stories in a series of novels collected as The Once and Future King (1958). His work was the basis for Camelot (1960), a musical by Alan Lerner and Frederick Loewe; a film, also called Camelot (1967), was derived from the musical. Numerous other films have been based on the Arthurian legend, notably John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) and the satirical Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).
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c8495dd08512b434039f2fd011e3ca30 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Artis-Analyticae-Praxis-ad-Aequationes-Algebraicas-Resolvendas | Artis Analyticae Praxis ad Aequationes Algebraicas Resolvendas | Artis Analyticae Praxis ad Aequationes Algebraicas Resolvendas
…however, was the posthumously published Artis Analyticae Praxis ad Aequationes Algebraicas Resolvendas (1631; “Application of Analytical Art to Solving Algebraic Equations”). (The editor of this work introduced the signs ∙ for multiplication, > for greater than, and < for less than.) Although Harriot published little and kept some of his…
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a846e3f5c44bbbdd78f39c358e7a4e5a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Artisans-Dwellings-Act | Artisans’ Dwellings Act | Artisans’ Dwellings Act
… authority in every area; the Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act of the same year enabled local authorities to embark upon schemes of slum clearance; a factory act of 1878 fixed a 56-hour workweek; while further legislation dealt with friendly societies (private societies for mutual-health and old-age insurance), the protection…
…authorization in Great Britain, the Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act (generally known as the first Cross Act) of 1875.
The Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act made effective slum clearance possible. The Public Health Act of 1875 codified the complicated law on that subject. Equally important were an enlightened series of factory acts (1874, 1878) preventing the exploitation of labour and two trades union acts…
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454d9d32d1364ac843a0a9cc23b899a8 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/artistic-regimes | Artistic regimes | Artistic regimes
…broadest of which Rancière calls artistic “regimes”—determine distributions of the sensible in the artistic domain and lend insight into the distributions that characterize larger society.
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8c50edfb6df3a16c7efedb464150e93d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Artistry-of-the-Mentally-Ill | Artistry of the Mentally Ill | Artistry of the Mentally Ill
…and art historian Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922), which became something of a touchstone for the Surrealists, especially Max Ernst, as well as for Dubuffet and subsequently many others.
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0037406c1fdf0aca91c4fb446ea5b4eb | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arts-and-Letters | Arts and Letters | Arts and Letters
…establishment placed him second to Arts and Letters. Despite a field of only eight horses, the race hinged on which of the two favoured horses would come out on top from their blistering drive down the stretch. Majestic Prince did so by a neck. It was the fifth Derby victory…
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d52a804ec326b07fc8e7b4a362b71542 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arts-Council-of-Great-Britain | Arts Council of Great Britain | Arts Council of Great Britain
The independent Arts Council of Great Britain, which was founded in 1946, supported many kinds of contemporary creative and performing arts until 1994, when it devolved into the Arts Council of England (which became Arts Council England in 2003 after joining with the Regional Arts Boards), the…
From this, the Arts Council of Great Britain was created in 1946 to provide “State support for the arts, without State control.” It soon became instrumental in developing vital arts communities in London and throughout Great Britain, in fostering generations of new dramatists, and in supporting fringe, touring,…
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8548aa7e91d2f0282e5cdf9bd3525c4f | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arts-in-Society | Arts in Society | Arts in Society
…political and economic problems; and Arts in Society (founded 1958), a forum for the discussion of the role of art, which also publishes poetry and reviews. Of general political journals, the oldest still in publication in the 1990s was The Nation, founded in 1865 by E.L. Godkin and edited in…
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47a9135c4ea10ca04441f47b3f4ec662 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Artuqid-dynasty | Artuqid Dynasty | Artuqid Dynasty
Artuqid Dynasty, Turkmen dynasty that ruled the province of Diyarbakır in northern Iraq (now in southeastern Turkey) through two branches: at Ḥiṣn Kayfā and Āmid (1098–1232) and at Mardin and Mayyāfāriqīn (1104–1408).
Artuq ibn Ekseb, founder of the dynasty, was rewarded for his services to the Seljuq sultan with the grant of Palestine in 1086. Forced out of Palestine by the Fāṭimids of Egypt, Artuq’s descendant Muʿīn ad-Dīn Sökmen returned to Diyarbakır, where he took Ḥiṣn Kayfā (1102), Mardin, and several other northern districts. His brother Najm ad-Dīn Ilghāzī, meanwhile, returned to Seljuq service and was made governor of Iraq by the Seljuq sultan Muḥammad. Sent to Diyarbakır in about 1107, Ilghāzī displaced one of Sökmen’s sons at Mardin (1108); he then made it the capital of his line, leaving Ḥiṣn Kayfā to his brother’s descendants.
The Artuqids’ relations with the Seljuqs thenceforth steadily worsened. Ilghāzī organized a Turkmen coalition against the Seljuq governor of Mosul and was able to win control of all Diyarbakır by 1118. The next year he defeated European crusaders who were threatening Aleppo. From 1113 the Artuqids also expanded into the northeast, along the eastern Euphrates.
The rise of the Zangids in Mosul and later in Aleppo during the reigns of Dāʾūd (c. 1109–44) and his successor, Kara Arslan (1144–67), ended Artuqid expansion. The Artuqids were instead drawn into wars against the crusaders and the Byzantines by the Zangid Nureddin and, at his death in 1174, found themselves Zangid vassals. Their position in Diyarbakır weakened further as Saladin, ruler of Egypt, gradually began to reconquer Nureddin’s old kingdom, and by 1186 the Artuqids had submitted to Saladin.
The Artuqids survived in Diyarbakır for two more centuries as vassals of the Seljuqs of Rūm and the Khwārezm-Shāhs. In 1232 the Artuqid line in Ḥiṣn Kayfā was destroyed by the Seljuqs; but the Mardin branch continued under the Mongols until 1408, when it was finally displaced by the Turkmen federation of the Kara Koyunlu.
The artistic traditions of the Artuqid age had a strong Seljuq flavour. Contact with the West occasionally brought some Byzantine elements into the iconography. Several examples of Artuqid metalwork have survived, and Artuqid textiles include delicate silks and heavier brocades. Little Artuqid architecture has survived. From recent excavations and historical descriptions, however, it is known that the palace at Diyarbakır was splendid.
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bb18d8b5c65f70abbce2cf2c5cb7ce37 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arturos-Island | Arturo’s Island | Arturo’s Island
…novel, L’isola di Arturo (1957; Arturo’s Island), examines a boy’s growth from childhood dreams to the painful disillusions of adulthood. This novel, for which she won the Strega Prize, is notable for its delicate lyricism and its mingling of realistic detail with an air of unreality; it is often compared…
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62974bfeee4964e00acd82c8d66a895c | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arukh | ʿArukh | ʿArukh
…Talmudic Aramaic and Hebrew, the ʿArukh, which is still used.
…chose to revise the classic ʿArukh (“Lexicon”), a Hebrew and Aramaic dictionary compiled by Nathan ben Yehiel, a medieval Italian Hebrew lexicographer. Kohut worked on his magnum opus for some 25 years. During this period, he emigrated to the United States (1885), where he became rabbi of a congregation in…
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7994205457624f187c0872438dfd2728 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arukh-ha-shalem | ʿArukh ha-shalem | ʿArukh ha-shalem
…the last volume of his ʿArukh ha-shalem was published (the first volume had appeared in 1878), and the work brought him honours from learned Jewish bodies throughout the world.
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c65d0a0ca4ac0f3391915cc808734532 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/arupa-loka | Arūpa-loka | Arūpa-loka
Arūpa-loka, (Sanskrit and Pāli: “world of immaterial form”), in Buddhist thought, the highest of the three spheres of existence in which rebirth takes place. The other two are rūpa-loka, “the world of form,” and kāma-loka, “the world of feeling” (the three are also referred to as arūpa-dhātu, rūpa-dhātu, and kāma-dhātu, the “realms” of formlessness, form, and feeling).
In arūpa-loka, existence depends on the stage of concentration attained, and there are four levels: the infinity of space, the infinity of thought, the infinity of nonbeing, and the infinity of neither consciousness nor nonconsciousness. The rūpa-loka, which is free from sensuous desire but is still conditioned by form, is inhabited by gods. It is also further subdivided into the spheres inhabited by Brahmā, by the luminous deities, by the blissful gods, and by the deities of great fruits. Kāma-loka includes the six heavens of the lesser gods and the five lower worlds (the worlds of men, demons, ghosts, animals, and purgatory).
As superior as is rebirth in the higher worlds, such an existence is nonetheless temporary, subject to change, and involves the fundamental conflicts of existence within the limits of transmigration. This can be broken only by further spiritual insight, resulting in Nirvāṇa and release from the cycle of rebirths.
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1d86c21a03f586929267e9248d7c2c5d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arusha-Declaration | Arusha Declaration | Arusha Declaration
…planning, as outlined in the Arusha Declaration of 1967. The declaration also resulted in the nationalization of a number of industries and public services. In the long term, however, the centrally planned economy contributed to a marked economic decline.
…the philosophical basis for the Arusha Declaration (1967). When Tanganyika became a republic in 1962, he was elected president, and in 1964 he became president of the United Republic of Tanzania (Tanganyika and Zanzibar).
…views were formulated in the Arusha Declaration of February 5, 1967, which put forth the policy of ujamaa (familyhood) and called for socialism and self-reliance. The resources of the country, Nyerere said, were owned by the whole people and were held in trust for their descendants. The leaders had to…
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61cafc3abfaca08e0d466e176ea903f7 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aryabhatiya | Aryabhatiya | Aryabhatiya
In his commentary on the Aryabhatiya, Bhaskara explains in detail Aryabhata’s method of solving linear equations and provides a number of illustrative astronomical examples. Bhaskara particularly stressed the importance of proving mathematical rules rather than just relying on tradition or expediency. In supporting Aryabhata’s approximation to π, Bhaskara criticized the…
…composed at least two works, Aryabhatiya (c. 499) and the now lost Aryabhatasiddhanta.
…two major astronomical schools: the Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata (c. 500 ce) and the Brahma-sphuta-siddhanta (628; “Correctly Established Doctrine of Brahma”) of Brahmagupta. Little is known of these authors. Aryabhata lived in Kusumapura (near modern Patna), and Brahmagupta is said to have been
…sines is found in the Aryabhatiya. Its author, Aryabhata I (c. 475–550), used the word ardha-jya for half-chord, which he sometimes turned around to jya-ardha (“chord-half”); in due time he shortened it to jya or jiva. Later, when Muslim scholars translated this work into Arabic, they retained the word jiva…
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628824af85a00232d7aa95c34946a874 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aryan | Aryan | Aryan
Aryan, name originally given to a people who were said to speak an archaic Indo-European language and who were thought to have settled in prehistoric times in ancient Iran and the northern Indian subcontinent. The theory of an “Aryan race” appeared in the mid-19th century and remained prevalent until the mid-20th century. According to the hypothesis, those probably light-skinned Aryans were the group who invaded and conquered ancient India from the north and whose literature, religion, and modes of social organization subsequently shaped the course of Indian culture, particularly the Vedic religion that informed and was eventually superseded by Hinduism.
However, since the late 20th century, a growing number of scholars have rejected both the Aryan invasion hypothesis and the use of the term Aryan as a racial designation, suggesting that the Sanskrit term arya (“noble” or “distinguished”), the linguistic root of the word, was actually a social rather than an ethnic epithet. Rather, the term is used strictly in a linguistic sense, in recognition of the influence that the language of the ancient northern migrants had on the development of the Indo-European languages of South Asia. In the 19th century “Aryan” was used as a synonym for “Indo-European” and also, more restrictively, to refer to the Indo-Iranian languages. It is now used in linguistics only in the sense of the term Indo-Aryan languages, a branch of the larger Indo-European language family.
In Europe the notion of white racial superiority emerged in the 1850s, propagated most assiduously by the comte de Gobineau and later by his disciple Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who first used the term “Aryan” to mean the “white race.” Members of that so-called race spoke Indo-European languages, were credited with all the progress that benefited humanity, and were purported to be superior to “Semites,” “yellows,” and “blacks.” Believers in Aryanism came to regard the Nordic and Germanic peoples as the purest members of the “race.” That notion, which had been repudiated by anthropologists by the second quarter of the 20th century, was seized upon by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and was made the basis of the German government policy of exterminating Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and other “non-Aryans.”
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, many white supremacist groups used the word Aryan in their name as an identifier of their racist ideology. Those groups include the Aryan Circle (a large group that had its roots in the Texas prison system), the Aryan Nations (a Christian Identity-based hate group prominent in the late 20th century), and the Aryan Brotherhood (a group originating in San Quentin [California] prison). That association with racism, crime, hate crimes, and Nazism has given the word a powerful new negative sense.
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a9a96964e4d41307b23557ad7b562ef6 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Arzamas-society | Arzamas society | Arzamas society
Arzamas society, Russian literary circle that flourished in 1815–18 and was formed for the semiserious purpose of ridiculing the conservative “Lovers of the Russian Word,” a group dominated by the philologist Aleksandr S. Shishkov, who wished to keep the modern Russian language firmly tied to Old Church Slavonic. The Arzamas circle included the poets Vasily A. Zhukovsky, Konstantin Batyushkov, and the youthful Aleksandr Pushkin, who were all advocates of recent Westernized language reforms. Though the activities of the club members were limited to composing burlesques of the archaic Slavonic style, their adoption of the new style in their subsequent works had a permanent effect on the formation of the modern Russian literary language.
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a047443a7ebf760756ab89554abfbff3 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/As-Farpas | As Farpas | As Farpas
…Queirós, started the satirical review As Farpas (“The Darts”) in 1871, and, after the departure overseas of Queirós late in 1872, Ortigão produced the review alone until 1888. In his hands, As Farpas gradually became less satirical and more didactic and descriptive, a vehicle for disseminating and popularizing such current…
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3f319ca24efdfdff1dbfe04826a33431 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/As-Lagrimas-e-o-Vento | As Lagrimas e o Vento | As Lagrimas e o Vento
…de Janeiro, and his second, As Lagrimas e o Vento (1975; “Tears and Wind”), in Lisbon. The latter work is a fictional account of the war of liberation that resulted in independence. Lima also published a volume of poems, Kissange (1961), and a play, A Pele do Diabo (1977; “The…
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a08aaba3abf34082378c5875fc9c33ab | https://www.britannica.com/topic/asabiyyah | ʿaṣabīyyah | ʿaṣabīyyah
…by his central concept of ʿaṣabiyyah, or “social cohesion.” It is this cohesion, which arises spontaneously in tribes and other small kinship groups, but which can be intensified and enlarged by a religious ideology, that provides the motive force that carries ruling groups to power. Its inevitable weakening, due to…
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8d50be5504a87ff6c491693edb4e8d4d | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Asamando | Asamando | Asamando
Asamando, in Akan religion, the land of the spirits and the dwelling place of the Nsamanfo, or ancestors.
For the Akan, physical death (owuo) does not mark the end of life but represents the transition from earthly life to spiritual life, a transition that each individual must make to reach Asamando and join the community of the Nsamanfo.
The Akan believe that each individual consists of certain material and spiritual components. The body (honam) and blood (mogya) represent the material or physical components, whereas the life force or soul (kra), divine breath (honhom), and spirit (sunsum) represent the spiritual or nonphysical components. Nyame, the creator, bestows the material and spiritual elements upon people at conception and birth. However, upon physical death, the individual’s honam and mogya join Asase Yaa (Mother Earth) while the kra, honhom, and sunsum return to Nyame. The Akan believe that the universe and all things, both animate and inanimate, are endowed with varying degrees of sunsum, which is also the basis of the individual’s character and personality. Upon owuo, it is the sunsum that makes the transition to Asamando and awaits nomination to the status of Nsamanfo.
The Akan calendar operates on a 40- to 42-day cycle, and the Akan believe that it takes at least one cycle for the sunsum to finally depart the world of the living and enter Asamando. Akan funeral rites (ayie) are taken quite seriously, because it is the responsibility of the deceased’s family members to perform proper and timely customary rites to ensure that the sunsum can enter Asamando. If the rites are defective, the sunsum might be transformed into an unsettled and malevolent spirit that returns to harm the family.
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ae4e5e38af63a0e1fab1d007813822b0 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Asben | Asben | Asben
…region in the west, the Asben (Kel Aïr) in the Aïr region, and the Itesen (Kel Geres) to the south and east of Aïr. The Tuareg people are also found in Algeria and in Mali. The Kanuri, who live to the east of Zinder, are divided into a number of…
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a8850fab77f48e71b12f2637f95624e1 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/ASBO-British-law | ASBO | ASBO
The ill-fated ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order), restricting the movement of offenders, was celebrated by some as an appropriately strong response to troublemaking neighbours and gangs but was condemned by others as an attack on civil liberties.
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8fd9034e0151144a2325f3772ee1216a | https://www.britannica.com/topic/asceticism | Asceticism | Asceticism
Asceticism, (from Greek askeō: “to exercise,” or “to train”), the practice of the denial of physical or psychological desires in order to attain a spiritual ideal or goal. Hardly any religion has been without at least traces or some features of asceticism.
The origins of asceticism lie in man’s attempts to achieve various ultimate goals or ideals: development of the “whole” person, human creativity, ideas, the “self,” or skills demanding technical proficiency. Athletic askēsis (“training”), involving the ideal of bodily fitness and excellence, was developed to ensure the highest possible degree of physical fitness in an athlete. Among the ancient Greeks, athletes preparing for physical contests (e.g., the Olympic Games) disciplined their bodies by abstaining from various normal pleasures and by enduring difficult physical tests. In order to achieve a high proficiency in the skills of warfare, warriors also adopted various ascetical practices. The ancient Israelites, for example, abstained from sexual intercourse before going into battle.
As values other than those concerned with physical proficiency were developed, the concept expressed by askēsis and its cognates was applied to other ideals—e.g., mental facility, moral vitality, and spiritual ability. The ideal of training for a physical goal was converted to that of attaining wisdom or mental prowess by developing and training intellectual faculties. Among the Greeks such training of the intellect led to the pedagogical system of the Sophists—itinerant teachers, writers, and lecturers of the 5th and 4th centuries bc who instructed in return for fees. Another change in the concept of askēsis occurred in ancient Greece when the notion of such training was applied to the realm of ethics in the ideal of the sage who is able to act freely to choose or refuse a desired object or an act of physical pleasure. This kind of askēsis, involving training the will against a life of sensual pleasure, was exemplified by the Stoics (ancient Greek philosophers who advocated the control of the emotions by reason).
The view that one ought to deny one’s lower desires—understood as sensuous, or bodily—in contrast with one’s spiritual desires and virtuous aspirations, became a central principle in ethical thought. Plato believed that it is necessary to suppress bodily desires so that the soul can be free to search for knowledge. This view was also propounded by Plotinus, a Greek philosopher of the 3rd century ad and one of the founders of Neoplatonism, a philosophy concerned with hierarchical levels of reality. The Stoics, among whom asceticism was primarily a discipline to achieve control over the promptings of the emotions, upheld the dignity of human nature and the wise man’s necessary imperturbability, which they believed would become possible through the suppression of the affective, or appetitive, part of man.
In a similar manner, the value of asceticism in strengthening an individual’s will and his deeper spiritual powers has been a part of many religions and philosophies throughout history. The 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, for example, advocated a type of asceticism that annihilates the will to live; his fellow countryman and earlier contemporary, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, held to a moral asceticism for the cultivation of virtue according to the maxims of the Stoics. Many factors were operative in the rise and cultivation of religious asceticism: the fear of hostile influences from the demons; the view that one must be in a state of ritual purity as a necessary condition for entering into communion with the supernatural; the desire to invite the attention of divine or sacred beings to the self-denial being practiced by their suppliants; the idea of earning pity, compassion, and salvation by merit because of self-inflicted acts of ascetical practices; the sense of guilt and sin that prompts the need for atonement; the view that asceticism is a means to gain access to supernatural powers; and the power of dualistic concepts that have been at the source of efforts to free the spiritual part of man from the defilement of the body and physically oriented living.
Among the higher religions (e.g., Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity), still other factors became significant in the rise and cultivation of asceticism. These include the realization of the transitory nature of earthly life, which prompts a desire to anchor one’s hope in otherworldliness, and the reaction against secularization that is often coupled with a belief that spirituality can best be preserved by simplifying one’s mode of life.
In all strictly ascetic movements, celibacy (q.v.) has been regarded as the first commandment. Virgins and celibates emerged among the earliest Christian communities and came to occupy a prominent status. Among the earliest Mesopotamian Christian communities, only the celibates were accepted as full members of the church, and in some religions only celibates have been permitted to be priests (e.g., Aztec religion and Roman Catholicism). Abdication of worldly goods is another fundamental principle. In monastic communities there has been a strong trend toward this ideal. In Christian monasticism this ideal was enacted in its most radical form by Alexander Akoimetos, a founder of monasteries in Mesopotamia (died c. 430). Centuries before the activities of the medieval Western Christian monk St. Francis of Assisi, Alexander betrothed himself to poverty, and through his disciples he expanded his influence in Eastern Christian monasteries. These monks lived from the alms they begged but did not allow the gifts to accumulate and create a housekeeping problem, as occurred among some Western monastic orders, such as the Franciscans. In the East, wandering Hindu ascetics and Buddhist monks also live according to regulations that prescribe a denial of worldly goods.
Abstinence and fasting are by far the most common of all ascetic practices. Among the primitive peoples, it originated, in part, because of a belief that taking food is dangerous, for demonic forces may enter the body while one is eating. Further, some foods regarded as especially dangerous were to be avoided. Fasting connected with religious festivals has very ancient roots. In ancient Greek religion, rejection of meat appeared particularly among the Orphics, a mystical, vegetarian cult; in the cult of Dionysus, the orgiastic god of wine; and among the Pythagoreans, a mystical, numerological cult. Among a number of churches the most important period of fasting in the liturgical year is the 40 days before Easter (Lent), and among Muslims the most important period of fasting is the month of Ramaḍān. The ordinary fasting cycles, however, did not satisfy the needs of ascetics, who therefore created their own traditions. Among Jewish-Christian circles and Gnostic movements, various regulations regarding the use of vegetarian food were established, and Manichaean monks won general admiration for the intensity of their fasting achievements. Christian authors write of their ruthless and unrelenting fasting, and, between their own monks and the Manichaeans, only the Syrian ascetical virtuosos could offer competition in the practice of asceticism. Everything that could reduce sleep and make the resultant short period of rest as troublesome as possible was tried by Syrian ascetics. In their monasteries Syrian monks tied ropes around their abdomens and were then hung in an awkward position, and some were tied to standing posts.
Personal hygiene also fell under condemnation among ascetics. In the dust of the deserts—where many ascetics made their abodes—and in the blaze of the Oriental sunshine, the abdication of washing was equated with a form of asceticism that was painful to the body. With respect to the prohibition against washing, the Persian prophet Mani seems to have been influenced by those ascetic figures who had been seen since ancient times in India, walking around with their long hair hanging in wild abandonment and dressed in filthy rags, never cutting their fingernails and allowing dirt and dust to accumulate on their bodies. Another ascetic practice, the reduction of movement, was especially popular among the Syrian monks, who were fond of complete seclusion in a cell. The practice of restriction in regard to contact with human beings culminated in solitary confinement in wildernesses, cliffs, frontier areas of the desert, and mountains. In general, any settled dwelling place has been unacceptable to the ascetic mentality, as noted in ascetical movements in many religions.
Psychological forms of asceticism have also been developed. A technique of pain-causing introspection was used by Buddhist ascetics in connection with their practices for meditation. The Syrian Christian theologian St. Ephraem Syrus counselled the monks that meditation on guilt, sin, death, and punishment—i.e., the pre-enactment of the moment before the Eternal Judge—must be carried out with such ardour that the inner life becomes a burning lava that produces an upheaval of the soul and torment of the heart. Syrian monks striving for higher goals created a psychological atmosphere in which continued fear and dread, methodically cultivated, were expected to produce continual tears. Nothing less than extreme self-mortification satisfied the ascetic virtuosos.
Pain-producing asceticism has appeared in many forms. A popular custom was to undergo certain physically exhausting or painful exercises. The phenomena of cold and heat provided opportunities for such experiences. The Hindu fakirs (ascetics) of India provide most remarkable examples of those seeking painful forms of asceticism. In the earliest examples of such radical forms of self-mortification that appeared in India, the ascetic stared at the sun until he went blind or held up his arms above the head until they withered. Syrian Christian monasticism was also inventive in regard to forms of self-torture. A highly regarded custom involved the use of iron devices, such as girdles or chains, placed around the loins, neck, hands, and feet and often hidden under garments. Pain-producing forms of asceticism include self-laceration, particularly castration, and flagellation (whipping), which emerged as a mass movement in Italy and Germany during the Middle Ages and is still practiced in parts of Mexico and the southwestern United States.
Variations of asceticism in world religions. In the primitive religions, asceticism in the form of seclusion, physical discipline, and the quality and quantity of food prescribed has played an important role in connection with the puberty rites and rituals of admission to the tribal community. Isolation for shorter or longer periods of time and other acts of asceticism have been imposed on medicine men, since severe self-discipline is regarded as the chief way leading to the control of occult powers. Isolation was and is practiced by young men about to achieve the status of manhood in the Blackfoot and other Indian tribes of the northwestern United States. In connection with important occasions, such as funerals and war, taboos (negative restrictive injunctions) involving abstinence from certain food and cohabitation were imposed. For the priests and chiefs these were much stricter. In Hellenistic culture (c. 300 bc–c. ad 300), asceticism in the form of fasting and refraining from sexual intercourse was practiced by communities of a religiomystical character, including the Orphics and Pythagoreans. A new impetus and fresh approach to ascetic practices (including emasculation) came with the expansion of the Oriental mystery religions (such as the cult of the Great Mother) in the Mediterranean area.
In India, in the late Vedic period (c. 1500 bc–c. 200 bc), the ascetic use of tapas (“heat,” or austerity) became associated with meditation and yoga, inspired by the idea that tapas kills sin. These practices were embedded in the Brahmanic (ritualistic Hindu) religion in the Upaniṣads (philosophical treatises), and this view of tapas gained in importance among the Yogas and the Jainas, adherents of a religion of austerity that broke away from Brahmanic Hinduism. According to Jainism, liberation becomes possible only when all passions have been exterminated. Under the influences of such ascetic views and practices in India, Siddhārtha Gautama himself underwent the experiences of bodily self-mortification in order to obtain spiritual benefits; but since his expectations were not fulfilled, he abandoned them. But his basic tenet, which held that suffering lies in causal relation with desires, promoted asceticism in Buddhism. The portrait of the Buddhist monk as depicted in the Vinaya (a collection of monastic regulations) is of one who avoids extreme asceticism in his self-discipline. The kind of monasticism that developed in Hinduism during the medieval period also was moderate. Asceticism generally has no significant place in the indigenous religions of China (Confucianism and Taoism). Only the priests in Confucianism practiced discipline and abstinence from certain foods during certain periods, and some movements within Taoism observed similar marginally ascetic practices.
Judaism, because of its view that God created the world and that the world (including man) is good, is nonascetic in character and includes only certain ascetic features, such as fasting for strengthening the efficacy of prayer and for gaining merit. Though some saw a proof of the holiness of life in some ascetic practices, a fully developed ascetical system of life has remained foreign to Jewish thought, and ascetic trends could, therefore, appear only on the periphery of Judaism. Such undercurrents rose to surface among the Essenes, a monastic sect associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, who represented a kind of religious order practicing celibacy, poverty, and obedience. The archaeological discovery (1940s) of their community at Qumrān (near the Dead Sea in an area that was a part of Jordan) has thrown new light on such movements in Judaism.
In Zoroastrianism (founded by the Persian prophet Zoroaster, 7th century bc), there is officially no place for asceticism. In the Avesta, the sacred scriptures of Zoroastrianism, fasting and mortification are forbidden, but ascetics were not entirely absent even in Persia.
In Christianity all of the types of asceticism have found realization. In the Gospels asceticism is never mentioned, but the theme of following the historical Christ gave asceticism a point of departure. An ascetic view of the Christian life is found in the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians in his use of the image of the spiritual athlete who must constantly discipline and train himself in order to win the race. Abstinence, fasts, and vigils in general characterized the lives of the early Christians, but some ramifications of developing Christianity became radically ascetic. Some of these movements, such as the Encratites (an early ascetic sect), a primitive form of Syrian Christianity, and the followers of Marcion, played important roles in the history of early Christianity. During the first centuries ascetics stayed in their communities, assumed their role in the life of the church, and centred their views of asceticism on martyrdom and celibacy. Toward the end of the 3rd century, monasticism originated in Mesopotamia and Egypt and secured its permanent form in cenobitism (communal monasticism). After the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire (after ad 313), monasticism was given a new impetus and spread all over the Western world. In Roman Catholicism new orders were founded on a large scale. Though asceticism was rejected by the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, certain forms of asceticism did emerge in Calvinism, Puritanism, Pietism, early Methodism, and the Oxford Movement (an Anglican movement of the 19th century espousing earlier ecclesiastical ideals). Related to asceticism is the Protestant work ethic, which consists of a radical requirement of accomplishment symbolized in achievement in one’s profession and, at the same time, demanding strict renunciation of the enjoyment of material gains acquired legitimately.
The adherents of Islām in its beginnings knew only fasting, which was obligatory in the month of Ramaḍān. Monasticism is rejected in the Qurʾān (the Islāmic sacred scripture). Yet ascetic forces among Christians in Syria and Mesopotamia, vigorous and conspicuous, were able to exercise their influence and were assimilated by Islām in the ascetic movement known as zuhd (self-denial) and later in that of Ṣūfism, a mystical movement that arose in the 8th century and incorporated ascetic ideals and methods.
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5c7b8cd8095326cf8ce72a7a721e4e35 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/ASCII | ASCII | ASCII
ASCII, abbreviation of American Standard Code For Information Interchange, a standard data-transmission code that is used by smaller and less-powerful computers to represent both textual data (letters, numbers, and punctuation marks) and noninput-device commands (control characters). Like other coding systems, it converts information into standardized digital formats that allow computers to communicate with each other and to efficiently process and store data.
The ASCII code was originally developed for teletypewriters but eventually found wide application in personal computers. The standard ASCII code uses seven-digit binary numbers; i.e., numbers consisting of various sequences of 0’s and 1’s. The code can represent 128 different characters, since there are 128 different possible combinations of seven 0’s and 1’s. The binary sequence 1010000, for example, represents an uppercase “P,” while the sequence 1110000 represents a lowercase “p.”
Digital computers use a binary code that is arranged in groups of eight rather than of seven digits, or bits. Each such eight-digit group is called a byte. Because digital computers use eight-bit bytes, the ASCII code is commonly embedded in an eight-bit field consisting of the seven information bits and a parity bit that is used for error-checking purposes or to represent special symbols. The use of an eight-bit system increased the number of characters the code could represent to 256. The eight-bit system, which is known as the extended ASCII code, was introduced in 1981 by the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) for use with its first model of personal computer. This extended ASCII code soon became the industry-wide standard for personal computers. In it, 32 code combinations are used for machine and control commands, such as “start of text,” “carriage return,” and “form feed.” The next group of 32 combinations is used for numbers and various punctuation symbols. Another group of 32 combinations is used for uppercase letters and a few other punctuation marks, and the last 32 are used for lowercase letters.
A different coding system, the EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code), is used in mainframe computers and minicomputers.
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b7d038d4b22e2e3326db855e1c6db928 | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ashes-and-Diamonds-by-Andrzejewski | Ashes and Diamonds | Ashes and Diamonds
…in Popiół i diament (1948; Ashes and Diamonds), translated into 27 languages and generally considered his finest novel. It presents a dramatic conflict between young Polish patriots and the communist regime during the last days of World War II. In 1958 Andrzej Wajda, the leading director of the Polish cinema,…
…novel Popiół i diament (1948; Ashes and Diamonds) examined the moral controversies that accompanied the political and social changes of the postwar period, especially the tragic situation of young conspirators involved in the struggle against the new communist regime.
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d3a69420848c762917123d7f57abafeb | https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ashes-by-Deledda | Ashes | Ashes
…his brother’s bride; Cenere (1904; Ashes; film, 1916, starring Eleonora Duse), in which an illegitimate son causes his mother’s suicide; and La madre (1920; The Woman and the Priest; U.S. title, The Mother), the tragedy of a mother who realizes her dream of her son’s becoming a priest only to…
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