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Scythian Archers
The Scythian archers were a hypothesized police force of 5th- and early 4th-century BC Athens that is recorded in some Greek artworks and literature. The force is said to have consisted of 300 armed Scythians (a nomadic Iranic people living in the Eurasian Steppe) who were public slaves in Athens. They acted on behalf of a group of eleven elected Athenian magistrates "who were responsible for arrests and executions and for some aspects of public order" in the city. Despite being called "archers", the Scythian police probably did not use bows and arrows. One of Aristophanes's comedies has a Scythian archer as a character, and he speaks broken Greek with an accent. Name The Scythian archers were called ''toxotai'' (, literally " hearchers"), ''Skythai'' (, literally " heScythians"), and ''Speusinioi'' (), which was named after a certain Speusinos, the alleged founder of the force. Rhodes, Peter J. (Durham), “Scythians”, in: Brill's New Pauly, Antiquity volumes edited by: Hubert ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Red-figure Pottery
Red-figure pottery () is a style of Pottery of ancient Greece, ancient Greek pottery in which the background of the pottery is painted black while the figures and details are left in the natural red or orange color of the clay. It developed in Athens around 520 BC and remained in use until the late 3rd century AD. It replaced the previously dominant style of black-figure pottery within a few decades. Its modern name is based on the figural depictions in red color on a black background, in contrast to the preceding black-figure style with black figures on a red background. The most important areas of production, apart from Attica, were in Magna Graecia, Southern Italy. The style was also adopted in other parts of Greece. Etruria became an important center of production outside the Ancient Greece, Greek World. Attic red-figure vases were exported throughout Greece and beyond. For a long time, they dominated the market for fine ceramics. Few centers of pottery production could compe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Balbina Bäbler
Balbina Bäbler (, also known as Balbina Bäbler-Nesselrath; Glarus, 7 May 1967) is a Swiss archaeologist and historian, and is a specialist on the Northern Black Sea coastal area. Biography Balbina Bäbler studied at the universities of Bern and Munich. She graduated the course in 1997 with a thesis on "Diligent Thracians and strong Scythians: non-Greek population of Athens of the classical period and their archaeological heritage" (Fleissige Thrakerinnen und wehrhafte Skythen Nichtgriechen im klassischen Athen und ihre archaologische Hinterlassenschaft.). Bäbler is an expert on the archaeological chronology and burial cultures, and was an Honorary Fellow at the University of Exeter from 2002 until 2004. Bäbler worked at the University of Hamburg, Leibniz University Hannover, as well as in the University of Göttingen. She was a research fellow at the Winckelmann-Ausgabe of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz from 2010 to 2015. She has co-edited severa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mamluk
Mamluk or Mamaluk (; (singular), , ''mamālīk'' (plural); translated as "one who is owned", meaning "slave") were non-Arab, ethnically diverse (mostly Turkic, Caucasian, Eastern and Southeastern European) enslaved mercenaries, slave-soldiers, and freed slaves who were assigned high-ranking military and administrative duties, serving the ruling Arab and Ottoman dynasties in the Muslim world. The most enduring Mamluk realm was the knightly military class in medieval Egypt, which developed from the ranks of slave-soldiers. Originally the Mamluks were slaves of Turkic origins from the Eurasian Steppe, but the institution of military slavery spread to include Circassians, Abkhazians, Georgians, Armenians, Russians, and Hungarians, as well as peoples from the Balkans such as Albanians, Greeks, and South Slavs (''see'' Saqaliba). They also recruited from the Egyptians. The "Mamluk/Ghulam Phenomenon", as David Ayalon dubbed the creation of the specific warrior class, was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Composite Bow
A composite bow is a traditional bow made from horn, wood, and sinew laminated together, a form of laminated bow. The horn is on the belly, facing the archer, and sinew on the outer side of a wooden core. When the bow is drawn, the sinew (stretched on the outside) and horn (compressed on the inside) store more energy than wood for the same length of bow. The strength can be made similar to that of all-wood "self" bows, with similar draw-length and therefore a similar amount of energy delivered to the arrow from a much shorter bow. However, making a composite bow requires more varieties of material than a self bow, its construction takes much more time, and the finished bow is more sensitive to moisture. Archaeological finds and art indicate composite bows have existed since the second millennium BCE, but their history is not well recorded, being developed by cultures without a written tradition. They originated among Asiatic pastoralists who used them as daily necessities, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scythian Languages
The Scythian languages are a group of Eastern Iranic languages of the classical and late antique period (the Middle Iranic period), spoken in a vast region of Eurasia by the populations belonging to the Scythian cultures and their descendants. The dominant ethnic groups among the Scythian-speakers were nomadic pastoralists of Central Asia and the Pontic–Caspian steppe. Fragments of their speech known from inscriptions and words quoted in ancient authors as well as analysis of their names indicate that it was an Indo-European language, more specifically from the Iranic group of Indo-Iranic languages. Most of the Scythian languages eventually became extinct, except for modern Ossetian (which descends from the Alanic dialect of Scytho-Sarmatian), Wakhi (which descends from the Khotanese and Tumshuqese forms of Scytho-Khotanese), and Yaghnobi (which descends from Sogdian). Alexander Lubotsky summarizes the known linguistic landscape as follows: Classification ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John William Donaldson
John William Donaldson (7 June 1811 – 10 February 1861) was an English academic and writer in Greek classics, a philologist and a biblical critic. He was born in London, and was educated at University College, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he subsequently became a fellow. In 1841 he was elected headmaster of King Edward's School, Bury St Edmunds, but, "spectacularly unsuccessful", in 1855 he resigned his post and returned to Cambridge, where his time was divided between literary work and private tuition. He is remembered as a pioneer of philology in the UK, though much of his work is now obsolete. The ''New Cratylus'' (1839), the book on which his fame mainly rests, was an attempt to apply to Greek the principles of comparative philology. The same year he was ordained deacon and in 1849 was graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge as a Doctor of Divinity. It was founded mainly on the comparative grammar of Franz Bopp, but a large part of it was original, Bo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sigma
Sigma ( ; uppercase Σ, lowercase σ, lowercase in word-final position ς; ) is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 200. In general mathematics, uppercase Σ is used as an operator (mathematics), operator for summation. When used at the end of a Letter case, letter-case word (one that does not use all caps), the final form (ς) is used. In ' (Odysseus), for example, the two lowercase sigmas (σ) in the center of the name are distinct from the word-final sigma (ς) at the end. The Latin alphabet, Latin letter S derives from sigma while the Cyrillic script, Cyrillic letter Es (Cyrillic), Es derives from a #Lunate sigma, lunate form of this letter. History The shape (Σς) and alphabetic position of sigma is derived from the Phoenician alphabet, Phoenician letter (Shin (letter), ''shin''). Sigma's original name may have been ''san'', but due to the complicated early history of the Greek Archaic Greek alphabets, epich ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Xi (letter)
Xi ( or ; uppercase Ξ, lowercase ξ; ) is the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiceless consonant cluster . Its name is pronounced in Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 60. Xi was derived from the Phoenician letter samekh . Xi is distinct from the letter chi, which gave its form to the Latin letter X. Greek Both in classical Ancient Greek and in Modern Greek, the letter Ξ represents the consonant cluster /ks/. In some archaic local variants of the Greek alphabet, this letter was missing. Instead, especially in the dialects of most of the Greek mainland and Euboea, the cluster /ks/ was represented by Χ (which in classical Greek is chi, used for ). Because this variant of the Greek alphabet was used in Magna Graecia (the Greek colonies in Sicily and the southern part of the Italian peninsula), the Latin alphabet borrowed Χ rather than Ξ as the Latin letter that represented the /ks/ cluster that was also ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aspirated Consonant
In phonetics, aspiration is a strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive. Transcription In the International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ... (IPA), aspirated consonants are written using the symbols for voiceless consonants followed by the aspiration modifier letter , a superscript form of the symbol for the voiceless glottal fricative . For instance, represents the voiceless bilabial stop, and represents the aspirat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fortis And Lenis
In linguistics, ''fortis'' ( ; Latin for 'strong') and ''lenis'' (, ; Latin for 'weak'), sometimes identified with 'tense' and 'lax', are pronunciations of consonants with relatively greater and lesser energy, respectively. English has fortis consonants, such as the ''p'' in ''pat'', with a corresponding lenis consonant, such as the ''b'' in ''bat''. Fortis and lenis consonants may be distinguished by tenseness or other characteristics, such as voicing, aspiration, glottalization, velarization, length, and length of nearby vowels. ''Fortis'' and ''lenis'' were coined for languages where the contrast between sounds such as 'p' and 'b' does not involve voicing (vibration of the vocal cords). History Originally, the terms were used to refer to an impressionistic sense of strength differences, though more sophisticated instruments eventually gave the opportunity to search for the acoustic and articulatory signs. For example, tested whether articulatory strength could be det ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nu (letter)
Nu, or ny (; uppercase Ν, lowercase ν; ''ni'' ), is the thirteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiced alveolar nasal . In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 50. It is derived from the Phoenician nun . Its Latin equivalent is N, though the lowercase (\nu) resembles the Roman lowercase v. The name of the letter is written in Ancient Greek and traditional Modern Greek polytonic orthography, while in Modern Greek it is written . Letters that arose from nu include Roman N and Cyrillic script En. Symbology The lower-case letter is used as a symbol in many academic fields. Uppercase nu is not used, because it appears identical to Latin N. * Mathematics: ** Degrees of freedom in statistics. ** The greatest fixed point of a function, as commonly used in the μ-calculus. ** Free names of a process, as used in the π-calculus. ** One of the Greeks in mathematical finance, known as "vega". ** The reciprocal of 1 plus the interest rate in fi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Final Sigma
Sigma ( ; uppercase Σ, lowercase σ, lowercase in word-final position ς; ) is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 200. In general mathematics, uppercase Σ is used as an operator for summation. When used at the end of a letter-case word (one that does not use all caps), the final form (ς) is used. In ' (Odysseus), for example, the two lowercase sigmas (σ) in the center of the name are distinct from the word-final sigma (ς) at the end. The Latin letter S derives from sigma while the Cyrillic letter Es derives from a lunate form of this letter. History The shape (Σς) and alphabetic position of sigma is derived from the Phoenician letter ( ''shin''). Sigma's original name may have been ''san'', but due to the complicated early history of the Greek epichoric alphabets, ''san'' came to be identified as a separate letter in the Greek alphabet, represented as Ϻ. Herodotus reports that "san" was the name gi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
