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Bobrinski Bucket
The Bobrinski Bucket, also called a kettle or cauldron, is a 12th-century bronze bucket originally manufactured for a merchant in Herat in 1163 out of bronze with copper and silver inlay, inlaid decorations. It provides one of the earliest examples of Persian Empire, Persian Islamic calligraphy, anthropomorphic calligraphy. It is named after a former owner, Count Bobrinsky, and is now in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. Inscription and Decoration The decoration of the bucket is done with copper and silver inlay. In this process patterns are created by embedding a different material onto the surface of the object. The bucket features alternating bands of calligraphy and pictorial scenes. The inscriptions, written in Arabic, are of general well wishes. In the pictorial scenes there is no visual hierarchy. The figures within each band are of the same size and detail. The first register is an inscription in anthropomorphic Naskh (script), Naskh script with the tops of the le ...
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Bobrinsky Bronzekessel
The Counts Bobrinsky or Bobrinskoy (''Бобринские'') are a Russian nobility, Russian noble family descending from Count Aleksey Grigorievich Bobrinsky (1762–1813), who was Catherine the Great's natural son by Count Grigory Orlov. The first Count Bobrinsky Empress Catherine II gave birth to her only official illegitimate son on April 11, 1762, several months before her ascension to the throne. Catherine had to conceal the pregnancy. When the due date came, to distract her husband, Emperor Peter III of Russia, Peter III, her trusted servant Vasily Shkurin was ordered to burn his own house, knowing that the Emperor had a passion to watch the fires. The child was named Aleksey after his uncle and godfather, Count Alexei Grigoryevich Orlov, Aleksey Orlov. He was brought up in Bobriki, a village in the Tula Oblast, Tula guberniya. On April 2, 1781, Catherine sent him a letter, in which she openly avowed her maternity. She named him Bobrinsky, a surname derived from the est ...
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Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), is the second-largest city in Russia. It is situated on the Neva River, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, with a population of roughly 5.4 million residents. Saint Petersburg is the fourth-most populous city in Europe after Istanbul, Moscow and London, the most populous city on the Baltic Sea, and the world's northernmost city of more than 1 million residents. As Russia's Imperial capital, and a historically strategic port, it is governed as a federal city. The city was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on 27 May 1703 on the site of a captured Swedish fortress, and was named after apostle Saint Peter. In Russia, Saint Petersburg is historically and culturally associated with t ...
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Archaeological Collections Of The Hermitage Museum
Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes. Archaeology can be considered both a social science and a branch of the humanities. It is usually considered an independent academic discipline, but may also be classified as part of anthropology (in North America – the four-field approach), history or geography. Archaeologists study human prehistory and history, from the development of the first stone tools at Lomekwi in East Africa 3.3 million years ago up until recent decades. Archaeology is distinct from palaeontology, which is the study of fossil remains. Archaeology is particularly important for learning about prehistoric societies, for which, by definition, there are no written records. Prehistory includes over 99% of the human past, from the Paleolithic until the adve ...
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JSTOR
JSTOR (; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library founded in 1995 in New York City. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals in the humanities and social sciences. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. , more than 8,000 institutions in more than 160 countries had access to JSTOR. Most access is by subscription but some of the site is public domain, and open access content is available free of charge. JSTOR's revenue was $86 million in 2015. History William G. Bowen, president of Princeton University from 1972 to 1988, founded JSTOR in 1994. JSTOR was originally conceived as a solution to one of the problems faced by libraries, especially research and university libraries, due to the increasing number of academic journals in existence. Most libraries found it prohibitively expensive in terms of cost and space to maintain a comprehen ...
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Situla (vessel)
Situla (plural ''situlae''), from the Latin word for bucket or pail, is the term in archaeology and art history for a variety of elaborate bucket-shaped vessels from the Iron Age to the Middle Ages, usually with a handle at the top. All types may be highly decorated, most characteristically with reliefs in bands or friezes running round the vessel. Decorated Iron Age situlae in bronze are a distinctive feature of Etruscan art in burials from the northern part of the Etruscan regions, from which the style spread north to some cultures in Northern Italy, Slovenia, and adjacent areas, where terms such as situla culture and situla art may be used. Situla is also the term for types of bucket-shaped Ancient Greek vases, some very finely painted. More utilitarian pottery situlae are also found, and some in silver or other materials, such as two glass ones from late antiquity in St Mark's, Venice. Ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern shapes tend to have a pointed bottom, so that they must ...
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Polo
Polo is a ball game played on horseback, a traditional field sport and one of the world's oldest known team sports. The game is played by two opposing teams with the objective of scoring using a long-handled wooden mallet to hit a small hard ball through the opposing team's goal. Each team has four mounted riders, and the game usually lasts one to two hours, divided into periods called ''chukkas'' or "''chukkers''". Polo has been called "the sport of kings", and has become a spectator sport for equestrians and high society, often supported by sponsorship. The progenitor of the game and its variants existed from the to the as equestrian games played by nomadic Iranian and Turkic peoples. In Persia, where the sport evolved and developed, it was at first a training game for cavalry units, usually the royal guard or other elite troops. A notable example is Saladin, who was known for being a skilled polo player which contributed to his cavalry training. It is now popular around ...
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Kufic
Kufic script () is a style of Arabic script that gained prominence early on as a preferred script for Quran transcription and architectural decoration, and it has since become a reference and an archetype for a number of other Arabic scripts. It developed from the Arabic alphabet in the city of Kufa, from which its name is derived. Kufic script is characterized by angular, rectilinear letterforms and its horizontal orientation. There are many different versions of Kufic script, such as square Kufic, floriated Kufic, knotted Kufic, and others. History Origin of the Kufic script Calligraphers in the early Islamic period used a variety of methods to transcribe Qur’an manuscripts. Arabic calligraphy became one of the most important branches of Islamic Art. Calligraphers came out with the new style of writing called Kufic. Kufic is the oldest calligraphic form of the various Arabic scripts. The name of the script derives from Kufa, a city in southern Iraq which was considere ...
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Naskh (script)
Naskh ( ar, , qalam an-naskh, from the verb , , 'to copy', from n-s-kh root (ن-س-خ)) is a smaller, round script of Islamic calligraphy. Naskh is one of the first scripts of Islamic calligraphy to develop, commonly used in writing administrative documents and for transcribing books, including the Qur’an, because of its easy legibility. In his 1617 ''Grammatica Arabica'', Thomas van Erpe defined naskhī characters as the "noblest and true writing style". Origin Naskh style of writing can be found as early as within the first century of the Islamic calendar. Round scripts became the most popular in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, due to their use by scribes. Ibn Muqla is credited with standardizing the "Six Pens" of Islamic calligraphy, also including , , , , and . These are known as "the proportioned scripts" () or "the six scripts" (). Kufic is commonly believed to predate naskh, but historians have traced the two scripts as coexisting long before their ...
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Visual Hierarchy
Visual hierarchy, according to Gestalt psychology, is a pattern in the visual field wherein some elements tend to "stand out," or attract attention, more strongly than other elements, suggesting a hierarchy of importance. While it may occur naturally in any visual field, the term is most commonly used in design (especially graphic design and cartography), where elements are intentionally designed to make some look more important than others. This order is created by the visual contrast between forms in a field of perception. Objects with highest contrast to their surroundings are recognized first by the human mind. Evidence There is some scientific evidence for visual hierarchy using eye tracking. For example, one study found that when people agree that a graphic design is good, they exhibit more similar eye movements; measured by the Fréchet distance. Theory The concept of visual hierarchy is based in Gestalt psychological theory, an early 20th-century German theory that propo ...
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Count Bobrinsky
The Counts Bobrinsky or Bobrinskoy (''Бобринские'') are a Russian noble family descending from Count Aleksey Grigorievich Bobrinsky (1762–1813), who was Catherine the Great's natural son by Count Grigory Orlov. The first Count Bobrinsky Empress Catherine II gave birth to her only official illegitimate son on April 11, 1762, several months before her ascension to the throne. Catherine had to conceal the pregnancy. When the due date came, to distract her husband, Emperor Peter III, her trusted servant Vasily Shkurin was ordered to burn his own house, knowing that the Emperor had a passion to watch the fires. The child was named Aleksey after his uncle and godfather, Count Aleksey Orlov. He was brought up in Bobriki, a village in the Tula guberniya. On April 2, 1781, Catherine sent him a letter, in which she openly avowed her maternity. She named him Bobrinsky, a surname derived from the estate he lived in. On the 5th day of his reign, Emperor Paul made his half-br ...
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Bronze
Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals, such as phosphorus, or metalloids such as arsenic or silicon. These additions produce a range of alloys that may be harder than copper alone, or have other useful properties, such as ultimate tensile strength, strength, ductility, or machinability. The three-age system, archaeological period in which bronze was the hardest metal in widespread use is known as the Bronze Age. The beginning of the Bronze Age in western Eurasia and India is conventionally dated to the mid-4th millennium BCE (~3500 BCE), and to the early 2nd millennium BCE in China; elsewhere it gradually spread across regions. The Bronze Age was followed by the Iron Age starting from about 1300 BCE and reaching most of Eurasia by about 500 BCE, although bronze continued to be much more widely used than it is in mod ...
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