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Astrolabe
An astrolabe ( grc, ἀστρολάβος ; ar, ٱلأَسْطُرلاب ; persian, ستاره‌یاب ) is an ancient astronomical instrument that was a handheld model of the universe. Its various functions also make it an elaborate inclinometer and an analog calculation device capable of working out several kinds of problems in astronomy. In its simplest form it is a metal disc with a pattern of wires, cutouts, and perforations that allows a user to calculate astronomical positions precisely. Historically used by astronomers, it is able to measure the altitude above the horizon of a celestial body, day or night; it can be used to identify stars or planets, to determine local latitude given local time (and vice versa), to survey, or to triangulate. It was used in classical antiquity, the Islamic Golden Age, the European Middle Ages and the Age of Discovery for all these purposes. The astrolabe's importance comes not only from the early developments into the study of astron ...
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Islamic Astronomy
Islamic astronomy comprises the Astronomy, astronomical developments made in the Islamic world, particularly during the Islamic Golden Age (9th–13th centuries), and mostly written in the Arabic language. These developments mostly took place in the Middle East, Central Asia, Al-Andalus, and North Africa, and later in the Far East and History of India, India. It closely parallels the genesis of other Islamic sciences in its assimilation of foreign material and the amalgamation of the disparate elements of that material to create a science with Islamic characteristics. These included Greek astronomy, Greek, Sassanid Empire, Sassanid, and Indian astronomy, Indian works in particular, which were translated and built upon. Islamic astronomy played a significant role in the revival of Byzantine science, Byzantine and Science in Medieval Western Europe, EuropeanSaliba (1999). astronomy following the Dark Ages (historiography), loss of knowledge during the early medieval period, notably ...
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Mariner's Astrolabe
The mariner's astrolabe, also called sea astrolabe, was an inclinometer used to determine the latitude of a ship at sea by measuring the sun's noon altitude (declination) or the meridian altitude of a star of known declination. Not an astrolabe proper, the mariner's astrolabe was rather a graduated circle with an alidade used to measure vertical angles. They were designed to allow for their use on boats in rough water and/or in heavy winds, which astrolabes are ill-equipped to handle. It was invented by the Portuguese people, a nation known for its maritime prowess and dominated the sea for multiple centuries. In the sixteenth century, the instrument was also called a ring. History Many dates can be found for the appearance of the first Mariner's astrolabes. The earliest date, 1295, is offered by the Majorcan astronomer Ramon Llull.''The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea'', Peter Kemp ed., 1976 Later dates center around the late 15th century, with Samuel Purchas claimin ...
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Canterbury Astrolabe Quadrant
The Canterbury Astrolabe Quadrant is a medieval astrolabe believed to date from 1388, and which was found in an archaeological dig at the House of Agnes, a bed and breakfast hotel in Canterbury, Kent, England in 2005. The Canterbury Astrolabe Quadrant is the only one of its kind known to definitely have been made in England. Astrolabes are calculation instruments that enable their users to tell the time and determine their geographical latitude using the position of the sun and stars. An extremely rare instrument, the Canterbury Astrolabe Quadrant probably belonged to a travelling scholar who may have lost it in Canterbury while on pilgrimage to that city. It is also the first astrolabe to have been found during an archaeological dig. Scientific instruments such as this are usually handed down from generation to generation or found among family possessions, but are rarely discovered in the ground. The British Museum was originally outbid in an auction in 2007 for the brass astrola ...
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Islamic Golden Age
The Islamic Golden Age was a period of cultural, economic, and scientific flourishing in the history of Islam, traditionally dated from the 8th century to the 14th century. This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786 to 809) with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the world's largest city by then, where Muslim scholars and polymaths from various parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds were mandated to gather and translate all of the known world's classical knowledge into Aramaic and Arabic. The period is traditionally said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate due to Mongol invasions and the Siege of Baghdad in 1258. A few scholars date the end of the golden age around 1350 linking with the Timurid Renaissance, while several modern historians and scholars place the end of the Islamic Golden Age as late as the end of 15th to 16th centuries meeting with the I ...
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Medieval Islam
The Islamic Golden Age was a period of cultural, economic, and scientific flourishing in the history of Islam, traditionally dated from the 8th century to the 14th century. This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786 to 809) with the inauguration of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the world's largest city by then, where Muslim scholars and polymaths from various parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds were mandated to gather and translate all of the known world's classical knowledge into Aramaic and Arabic. The period is traditionally said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate due to Mongol invasions and the Siege of Baghdad in 1258. A few scholars date the end of the golden age around 1350 linking with the Timurid Renaissance, while several modern historians and scholars place the end of the Islamic Golden Age as late as the end of 15th to 16th centuries meeting with the Isl ...
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Al-Biruni
Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni (973 – after 1050) commonly known as al-Biruni, was a Khwarazmian Iranian in scholar and polymath during the Islamic Golden Age. He has been called variously the "founder of Indology", "Father of Comparative Religion", "Father of modern geodesy", and the first anthropologist. Al-Biruni was well versed in physics, mathematics, astronomy, and natural sciences, and also distinguished himself as a historian, chronologist, and linguist. He studied almost all the sciences of his day and was rewarded abundantly for his tireless research in many fields of knowledge. Royalty and other powerful elements in society funded Al-Biruni's research and sought him out with specific projects in mind. Influential in his own right, Al-Biruni was himself influenced by the scholars of other nations, such as the Greeks, from whom he took inspiration when he turned to the study of philosophy. A gifted linguist, he was conversant in Khwarezmian, Persian, Ar ...
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Inclinometer
An inclinometer or clinometer is an measuring instrument, instrument used for measuring angles of slope, elevation, or depression (geology), depression of an object with respect to gravity's direction. It is also known as a ''tilt indicator'', ''tilt sensor'', tiltmeter, ''tilt meter'', ''slope alert'', ''slope gauge'', ''gradient meter'', ''gradiometer'', ''level gauge'', ''level meter'', ''declinometer'', and ''pitch & roll indicator''. Clinometers measure both inclines and declines using three different units of measure: degree (angle), degrees, percentage points, and topos. The Astrolabes, astrolabe is an example of an inclinometer that was used for celestial navigation and location of astronomical objects from ancient history, ancient times to the Renaissance. A ''tilt sensor'' can measure the wikt:tilt, tilting in often two axes of a reference plane in two axes. In contrast, a full motion would use at least three axes and often additional sensors. One way to measure tilt a ...
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Hamza Al-Isfahani
Hamza ibn al-Hasan bnal-Mu'addib al-Isfahani ( ar, حمزه الاصفهانی; – after 961), commonly known as Hamza al-Isfahani (or Hamza Isfahani; ) was a Persian philologist and historian, who wrote in Arabic during the Buyid era. A Persian nationalist with strong prejudices against Arabs, he spent most of his life in his native town, Isfahan, and visited Baghdad three times during his lifetime. He had contact with many important scholars and historians, among them al-Tabari and Ibn Durayd. He wrote a history of Isfahan, a famous Chronology of pre-Islamic and Islamic dynasties known as ''Taʾrīk̲h̲ sinī mulūk al-arḍ wa ’l-anbiyāʾ'' (), and some other works on lexicography and poetry. Biography Like many other medieval Iranian scholars, details regarding the life of Hamza are obscure. He was born in the city of Isfahan in , where he spent most of his life. The city had served as an important center in western Iran under the Achaemenid, Parthian and Sasanian Empi ...
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Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston, 2011. Having emerged in the 1st century, it is named after the Arabs, Arab people; the term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula, as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece. Since the 7th century, Arabic has been characterized by diglossia, with an opposition between a standard Prestige (sociolinguistics), prestige language—i.e., Literary Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Classical Arabic—and diverse vernacular varieties, which serve as First language, mother tongues. Colloquial dialects vary significantly from MSA, impeding mutual intelligibility. MSA is only acquired through formal education and is not spoken natively. It is ...
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Oxford Dictionaries (website)
Lexico was a dictionary website that provided a collection of English and Spanish dictionaries produced by Oxford University Press (OUP), the publishing house of the University of Oxford. While the dictionary content on Lexico came from OUP, this website was operated by Dictionary.com, whose eponymous website hosts dictionaries by other publishers such as Random House. The website was closed and redirected to Dictionary.com on 26 August 2022. Before the Lexico site was launched, the '' Oxford Dictionary of English'' and ''New Oxford American Dictionary'' were hosted by OUP's own website Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO), later known as Oxford Living Dictionaries. The dictionaries' definitions have also appeared in Google definition search and the Dictionary application on macOS, among others, licensed through the Oxford Dictionaries API. History In the 2000s, OUP allowed access to content of the ''Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English'' on a website called AskOxf ...
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YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the List of most visited websites, second most visited website, after Google Search. YouTube has more than 2.5 billion monthly users who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos each day. , videos were being uploaded at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute. In October 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion. Google's ownership of YouTube expanded the site's business model, expanding from generating revenue from advertisements alone, to offering paid content such as movies and exclusive content produced by YouTube. It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subscription option for watching content without ads. YouTube also approved creators to participate in Google's Google AdSens ...
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Greek Language
Greek ( el, label=Modern Greek, Ελληνικά, Elliniká, ; grc, Ἑλληνική, Hellēnikḗ) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Italy (Calabria and Salento), southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics of Homer, ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting impo ...
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