title: Timber framing

text: During World War II, the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the Canadian Military Engineers undertook to construct airplane hangars using this timber construction system in order to conserve steel. Wood hangars were constructed throughout North America and employed various technologies including bowstring, Warren, and Pratt trusses, glued laminated arches, and lamella roof systems. Unique to this building type is the interlocking of the timber members of the roof trusses and supporting columns and their connection points. The timber members are held apart by "fillers" (blocks of timber). This leaves air spaces between the timber members which improves air circulation and drying around the members which improves resistance to moisture born decay.


title: Timber framing

text: Timber members in this type of framing system were connected with ferrous timber connectors of various types. Loads between timber members were transmitted using split-rings (larger loads), toothed rings (lighter loads), or spiked grid connectors. Split-ring connectors were metal rings sandwiched between adjacent timber members to connect them together. The rings were fit into circular grooves on in both timber members then the assembly was held together with through-bolts. The through-bolts only held the assembly together but were not load-carrying. Shear plate connectors were used to transfer loads between timber members and metal. Shear plate connectors resembled large washers, deformed on the side facing the timber in order to grip it, and were through-fastened with long bolts or lengths of threaded rod. A leading manufacturer of these types of timber connectors was the Timber Engineering Company, or TECO, of Washington, DC. The proprietary name of their split-ring connectors was the "TECO Wedge-Fit."


title: Timber framing

text: In the United States and Canada, timber-frame construction has been revived since the 1970s, and is now experiencing a thriving renaissance of the ancient skills. This is largely due to such practitioners as Steve Chappell, Jack Sobon, and Tedd Benson, who studied old plans and techniques and revived a long-neglected technique. Once a handcrafted skill passed down, timber-frame construction has now been modernized with the help of modern industrial tools such as CNC machines. These machines and mass-production techniques have assisted growth and made for more affordable frames and shorter lead-times for projects.


title: Timber framing

text: Timber-framed structures differ from conventional wood-framed buildings in several ways. Timber framing uses fewer, larger wooden members, commonly timbers in the range of 15 to 30 cm (6 to 12 in), while common wood framing uses many more timbers with dimensions usually in the 5- to 25-cm (2- to 10-in) range. The methods of fastening the frame members also differ. In conventional framing, the members are joined using nails or other mechanical fasteners, whereas timber framing uses the traditional mortise and tenon or more complex joints that are usually fastened using only wooden pegs. Modern complex structures and timber trusses often incorporate steel joinery such as gusset plates, for both structural and architectural purposes.


title: Timber framing

text: Recently, it has become common practice to enclose the timber structure entirely in manufactured panels such as structural insulated panels (SIPs). Although the timbers can only be seen from inside the building when so enclosed, construction is less complex and insulation is greater than in traditional timber building. SIPs are "an insulating foam core sandwiched between two structural facings, typically oriented strand board" according to the Structural Insulated Panel Association. SIPs reduce dependency on bracing and auxiliary members, because the panels span considerable distances and add rigidity to the basic timber frame.


title: Timber framing

text: An alternate construction method is with concrete flooring with extensive use of glass. This allows a very solid construction combined with open architecture. Some firms have specialized in industrial prefabrication of such residential and light commercial structures such as Huf Haus as low-energy houses or – dependent on location – zero-energy buildings.


title: Timber framing

text: Straw-bale construction is another alternative where straw bales are stacked for nonload-bearing infill with various finishes applied to the interior and exterior such as stucco and plaster. This appeals to the traditionalist and the environmentalist as this is using "found" materials to build.


title: Timber framing

text: Mudbricks also called adobe are sometimes used to fill in timber-frame structures. They can be made on site and offer exceptional fire resistance. Such buildings must be designed to accommodate the poor thermal insulating properties of mudbrick, however, and usually have deep eaves or a veranda on four sides for weather protection.


title: Timber framing

text: Timber design or wood design is a subcategory of structural engineering that focuses on the engineering of wood structures. Timber is classified by tree species (e.g., southern pine, douglas fir, etc.) and its strength is graded using numerous coefficients that correspond to the number of knots, the moisture content, the temperature, the grain direction, the number of holes, and other factors. There are design specifications for sawn lumber, glulam members, prefabricated I-joists, composite lumber, and various connection types. In the United States, structural frames are then designed according to the Allowable Stress Design method or the Load Reduced Factor Design method (the latter being preferred).


title: Timber framing

text: The techniques used in timber framing date back to Neolithic times, and have been used in many parts of the world during various periods such as ancient Japan, continental Europe, and Neolithic Denmark, England, France, Germany, Spain, parts of the Roman Empire, and Scotland. The timber-framing technique has historically been popular in climate zones which favour deciduous hardwood trees, such as oak. Its most northernmost areas are Baltic countries and southern Sweden. Timber framing is rare in Russia, Finland, northern Sweden, and Norway, where tall and straight lumber, such as pine and spruce, is readily available and log houses were favored, instead.


title: Timber framing

text: Half-timbered construction in the Northern European vernacular building style is characteristic of medieval and early modern Denmark, England, Germany, and parts of France and Switzerland, where timber was in good supply yet stone and associated skills to dress the stonework were in short supply. In half-timbered construction, timbers that were riven (split) in half provided the complete skeletal framing of the building.


title: Timber framing

text: Europe is full of timber-framed structures dating back hundreds of years, including manors, castles, homes, and inns, whose architecture and techniques of construction have evolved over the centuries. In Asia, timber-framed structures are found, many of them temples.


title: Timber framing

text: Some Roman carpentry preserved in anoxic layers of clay at Romano-British villa sites demonstrate that sophisticated Roman carpentry had all the necessary techniques for this construction. The earliest surviving (French) half-timbered buildings date from the 12th century.


title: Timber framing

text: Important resources for the study and appreciation of historic building methods are open-air museums.


title: Timber framing

text: The topping out ceremony is a builders' rite, an ancient tradition thought to have originated in Scandinavia by 700 AD. In the U.S., a bough or small tree is attached to the peak of the timber frame after the frame is complete as a celebration. Historically, it was common for the master carpenter to give a speech, make a toast, and then break the glass. In Northern Europe, a wreath made for the occasion is more commonly used rather than a bough. In Japan, the "ridge raising" is a religious ceremony called the "jotoshiki". In Germany, it is called the "".


title: Timber framing

text: Many historic hand tools used by timber framers for thousands of years have similarities, but vary in shape. Electrically powered tools first became available in the 1920s in the U.S. and continue to evolve. See the list of timber framing tools for basic descriptions and images of unusual tools (The list is incomplete at this time).


title: Timber framing

text: Some of the earliest known timber houses in Europe have been found in Great Britain, dating to Neolithic times; Balbridie and Fengate are some of the rare examples of these constructions.


title: Timber framing

text: Molded plaster ornamentation, pargetting further enriched some English Tudor architecture houses. Half-timbering is characteristic of English vernacular architecture in East Anglia, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Cheshire, where one of the most elaborate surviving English examples of half-timbered construction is Little Moreton Hall.


title: Timber framing

text: In South Yorkshire, the oldest timber house in Sheffield, the "Bishops' House" (c. 1500), shows traditional half-timbered construction.


title: Timber framing

text: In the Weald of Kent and Sussex, the half-timbered structure of the Wealden hall house, consisted of an open hall with bays on either side and often jettied upper floors.


title: Timber framing

text: Half-timbered construction traveled with British colonists to North America in the early 17th century but was soon abandoned in New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies for clapboard facings (an East Anglia tradition). The original English colonial settlements, such as Plymouth, Massachusetts and Jamestown, Virginia had timber-framed buildings, rather than the log cabins often associated with the American frontier. Living history programs demonstrating the building technique are available at both these locations.


title: Timber framing

text: One of the surviving streets lined with almost-touching houses is known as The Shambles, York, and is a very popular tourist attraction.


title: Timber framing

text: Historic timber-frame construction in England (and the rest of the United Kingdom) showed regional variation which has been divided into the "eastern school", the "western school", and the "northern school", although the characteristic types of framing in these schools can be found in the other regions (except the northern school). A characteristic of the eastern school is close studding which is a half-timbering style of many studs spaced about the width of the studs apart (for example six-inch studs spaced six inches apart) until the middle of the 16th century and sometimes wider spacing after that time. Close studding was an elite style found mostly on expensive buildings. A principal style of the western school is the use of square panels of roughly equal size and decorative framing utilizing many shapes such as lozenges, stars, crosses, quatrefoils, cusps, and many other shapes. The northern school sometimes used posts which landed on the foundation rather than on a sill beam, the sill joining to the sides of the posts and called an interrupted sill. Another northern style was to use close studding but in a herring-bone or chevron pattern.


title: Timber framing

text: As houses were modified to cope with changing demands there sometimes were a combination of styles within a single timber-frame construction. The major types of historic framing in England are 'cruck frame', box frame, and aisled construction. From the box frame, more complex framed buildings such as the Wealden House and Jettied house developed.


title: Timber framing

text: The cruck frame design is among the earliest, and was in use by the early 13th century, with its use continuing to the present day, although rarely after the 18th century. Since the 18th century however, many existing cruck structures have been modified, with the original cruck framework becoming hidden. Aisled barns are of two or three aisled types, the oldest surviving aisled barn being the barley barn at Cressing Temple dated to 1205–35.


title: Timber framing

text: Generally speaking, the size of timbers used in construction, and the quality of the workmanship reflect the wealth and status of their owners. Small cottages often used quite small cross-section timbers which would have been deemed unsuitable by others. Some of these small cottages also have a very 'home-made' – even temporary – appearance. Many such example can be found in the English shires. Equally, some relatively small buildings can be seen to incorporate substantial timbers and excellent craftsmanship, reflecting the relative wealth and status of their original owners. Important resources for the study of historic building methods in the UK are open-air museums.


title: Timber framing

text: It is often claimed that timber-framed buildings in Britain contain reused ships' timbers. This belief is dismissed by experts, who point out that curved timbers are rarely suitable, that salt is destructive to cellulose in the wood, and that ships' timbers are generally slight compared to cruck trusses.


title: Timber framing

text: Elaborately half-timbered houses of the 13th through 18th centuries still remain in Bourges, Tours, Troyes, Rouen, Thiers, Dinan, Rennes, and many other cities, except in Provence and Corsica. Timber framing in French is known colloquially as "pan de bois" and half-timbering as "colombage". Alsace is the region with the most timbered houses in France.


title: Timber framing

text: The "Normandy tradition" features two techniques: frameworks were built of four evenly spaced regularly hewn timbers set into the ground ("poteau en terre") or into a continuous wooden sill ("poteau de sole") and mortised at the top into the plate. The openings were filled with many materials including mud and straw, wattle and daub, or horsehair and gypsum.


title: Timber framing

text: Germany has several styles of timber framing, but probably the greatest number of half-timbered buildings in the world are to be found in Germany and in Alsace (France). There are many small towns which escaped both war damage and modernisation and consist mainly, or even entirely, of half-timbered houses.


title: Timber framing

text: The German Timber-Frame Road ("Deutsche Fachwerkstraße") is a tourist route that connects towns with remarkable "fachwerk". It is more than long, crossing Germany through the states of Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Hesse, Thuringia, Bavaria, and Baden-Württemberg.


title: Timber framing

text: Some of the more prominent towns (among many) include: Quedlinburg, a UNESCO-listed town, which has over 1200 half-timbered houses spanning five centuries; Goslar, another UNESCO-listed town; Hanau-Steinheim (home of the Brothers Grimm); Bad Urach; Eppingen ("Romance city" with a half-timbered church dating from 1320); Mosbach; Vaihingen an der Enz and nearby UNESCO-listed Maulbronn Abbey; Schorndorf (birthplace of Gottlieb Daimler); Calw; Celle; and Biberach an der Riß with both the largest medieval complex, the "Holy Spirit Hospital" and one of Southern Germany's oldest buildings, now the Braith-Mali-Museum, dated to 1318.


title: Timber framing

text: German "fachwerk" building styles are extremely varied with a huge number of carpentry techniques which are highly regionalized. German planning laws for the preservation of buildings and regional architecture preservation dictate that a half-timbered house must be authentic to regional or even city-specific designs before being accepted.


title: Timber framing

text: In general the northern states have "fachwerk" very similar to that of the nearby Netherlands and England while the more southerly states (most notably Bavaria and Switzerland) have more decoration using timber because of greater forest reserves in those areas. During the 19th century, a form of decorative timber-framing called "bundwerk" became popular in Bavaria, Austria and South Tyrol.


title: Timber framing

text: The German "fachwerkhaus" usually has a foundation of stone, or sometimes brick, perhaps up to several feet (a couple of metres) high, which the timber framework is mortised into or, more rarely, supports an irregular wooden sill.


title: Timber framing

text: The most characteristic feature is the spacing between the posts and the high placement of windows. Panels are enclosed by a sill, posts, and a plate, and are crossed by two rails between which the windows are placed—like "two eyes peering out".


title: Timber framing

text: In addition there is a myriad of regional scrollwork and fretwork designs of the non-loadbearing large timbers (braces) peculiar to particularly wealthy towns or cities.


title: Timber framing

text: A unique type of timber-frame house can be found in the region where the borders of Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland meet – it is called the Upper Lusatian house (Umgebindehaus, translates as "round-framed house"). This type has a timber frame surrounding a log structure on part of the ground floor.


title: Timber framing

text: Several half-timbered houses can be found in Northern Italy, especially in Piedmont, Lombardy, in the city of Bologna, in Sardinia in the Barbagia region and in the Iglesiente mining region.


title: Timber framing

text: Historically, the majority of Polish cities as well as their central marketplaces possessed timber-framed dwellings and housing. Throughout the Middle Ages it was customary in Poland to use either bare brick or wattle and daub (Polish: "szachulec") as filling in-between the timber frame. However, the half-timbered houses which can be observed nowadays have been built in regions that were historically German or had significant German cultural influence. As these regions were at some point parts of German Prussia, half-timbered walls are often called "mur pruski" (lit. Prussian wall) in Polish. A distinctive type of house associated with mostly Mennonite immigrant groups from Frisia and the Netherlands, known as the Olędrzy, is called an "arcade house" ("dom podcieniowy"). The biggest timber-framed religious buildings in Europe are the Churches of Peace in southwestern Poland. There are also numerous examples of timber-framed secular structures such as the granaries in Bydgoszcz.


title: Timber framing

text: The Umgebindehaus rural housing tradition of south Saxony (Germany) is also found in the neighboring areas of Poland, particularly in the Silesian region.


title: Timber framing

text: Another world-class type of wooden building Poland shares with some neighboring countries are its wooden church buildings.


title: Timber framing

text: The Spanish generally follow the Mediterranean forms of architecture with stone walls and shallow roof pitch. Timber framing is often of the post and lintel style. Castile and León, par example La Alberca, and the Basque Country have the most representative examples of the use of timber framing in the Iberian Peninsula.


title: Timber framing

text: Most traditional Basque buildings with half-timbering elements are detached farm houses (in Basque: baserriak). Their upper floors were built with jettied box frames in close studding. In the oldest farmsteads and, if existing, in the third floor the walls were sometimes covered with vertical weatherboards. Big holes were left in the gable of the main façade for ventilation. The wooden beams were painted over, mostly in dark red. The vacancies were filled in with wattle and daub or rubble laid in a clay mortar and then plastered over with white chalk or nogged with bricks. Although the entire supporting structure is made of wood, the timbering is only visible on the main façade, which is generally oriented to the southeast.


title: Timber framing

text: Although the typical Basque house is now mostly associated with half-timbering, the outer walls and the fire-walls were built in masonry (rubble stone, bricks or, ideally, ashlars) whenever it could be afforded. Timber was a sign of poverty. Oak-wood was cheaper than masonry: that is why, when the money was running out, the upper floor walls were mostly built timbered. Extant baserriak with half-timbered upper-floor façades were built from the 15th to 19th centuries and are found in all Basque regions with oceanic climate, except in Zuberoa (Soule), but are concentrated in Lapurdi (Labourd).


title: Timber framing

text: To a lesser extent timbered houses are also found in villages and towns as row houses, as the photo from the Uztaritz village shows.


title: Timber framing

text: Currently, it has again become popular to build houses resembling old Basque farmsteads, with more or less respect for the principles of traditional half-timbered building.


title: Timber framing

text: Nowadays, timber framing is primarily found in the provinces of Limburg, Liège, and Luxembourg. In urban areas, the ground floor was formerly built in stone and the upper floors in timber framing. Also, as timber framing was seen as a cheaper way of building, often the visible structures of noble houses were in stone and bricks, and the invisible or lateral walls in timber framing. The open-air museums of Bokrijk and Saint-Hubert (Fourneau Saint-Michel) show many examples of Belgian timber framing. Many post-and-beam houses can be found in cities and villages, but, unlike France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, there are few fully timber framed cityscapes.


title: Timber framing

text: Timber frame ("bindingsværk", literally "binding work") is the traditional building style in almost all of Denmark, making it the only Nordic country where this style is prevalent in all regions. Along the west coast of Jutland, houses built entirely of bricks were traditionally more common due to lack of suitable wood. In the 19th and especially in the 20th century, bricks have been the preferred building material in all of Denmark, but traditional timber-frame houses remain common both in the towns and in the countryside. Different regions have different traditions as to whether the timber frame should be tarred and thus clearly visible or be limewashed or painted in the same colour as the infills.


title: Timber framing

text: The Swedish mostly built log houses but they do have traditions of several types of timber framing: Some of the following links are written in Swedish. Most of the half-timbered houses in Sweden were built during the Danish time and are located in what until 1658 used to be Danish territory in southern Sweden, primarily in the province Skåne and secondarily in Blekinge and Halland. In Swedish half-timber is known as "korsvirke".


title: Timber framing

text: Norway has at least two significant types of timber-framed structures: the stave church and . The term "stave" (a post or pole) indicates that a "stave church" essentially means a framed church, a distinction made in a region where log building is common. All but one surviving stave churches are in Norway, one in Sweden. Replicas of stave churches and other Norwegian building types have been reproduced elsewhere, e.g. at the Scandinavian Heritage Park in North Dakota, United States.


title: Timber framing

text: "Grindverk" translates as "trestle" construction, consisting of a series of transversal frames of two posts and a connecting beam, supporting two parallel wall plates bearing the rafters. Unlike other types of timber framing in Europe, the trestle frame construction uses no mortise and tenon joints. Archaeological excavations have uncovered similar wooden joints from more than 3,000 years ago, suggesting that this type of framing is an ancient unbroken tradition. Grindverk buildings are only found on part of the western coast of Norway, and most of them are boathouses and barns.


title: Timber framing

text: Log building was the common construction used for housing humans and livestock in Norway from the middle ages until the 18th century. Timber framing of the type used in large parts of Europe appeared occasionally in late medieval towns, but never became common, except for the capital Christiania. After a fire in 1624 in Oslo, King Christian IV ordered the town to be relocated to a new site. He outlawed log building to prevent future conflagrations and required wealthy burghers to use brickwork and the less affluent to use timber framing in the Danish manner. During the next two centuries, 50 per cent of the houses were timber framed.


title: Timber framing

text: All of these buildings disappeared as a consequence of this small provincial town of Christiania becoming the capital of independent Norway in 1814. This caused a rapid growth, with the population rising from 10 000 to 250 000 by 1900. Increasing prices caused a massive urban renewal, which resulted in all wooden structures being replaced with office blocks.


title: Timber framing

text: The Netherlands is often overlooked for its timbered houses, yet many exist, including windmills. It was in North Holland where the import of cheaper timber, combined with the Dutch innovation of windmill-powered sawmills, allowed economically viable widespread use of protective wood covering over framework. In the late 17th century the Dutch introduced vertical cladding also known in Eastern England as clasp board and in western England as weatherboard, then as more wood was available more cheaply, horizontal cladding in the 17th century. Perhaps owing to economic considerations, vertical cladding returned to fashion. Dutch wall framing is virtually always built in bents and the three basic types of roof framing are the rafter roof, purlin roof, and ridge-post roof.


title: Timber framing

text: Half-timbered houses can be found in Romania mostly in areas once inhabited by Transylvanian Saxons, in cities, towns and villages with Germanic influence such as Bistrița, Brașov, Mediaș, Sibiu and Sighișoara. However the number of half-timbered houses is very small. In Wallachia there are few examples of this type of architecture, most of those buildings being located in Sinaia, such as the Peleș Castle.


title: Timber framing

text: As the result of centuries of German settlement and cultural influence, towns in the Baltic states such as Klaipėda and Riga also preserve German-style Fachwerkhäuser.


title: Timber framing

text: Most "haft-timbered" houses existing in Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Texas were built by German settlers. Old Salem North Carolina has fine examples of German fachwerk buildings. Many are still present in Colonia Tovar (Venezuela), Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), where Germans settled. Later, they chose more suitable building materials for local conditions (most likely because of the great problem of tropical termites.)


title: Timber framing

text: In the historical region of North America known as New France, colombage pierroté, also called "maçonnerie entre poteaux", half-timbered construction with the infill between the posts and studs of stone rubble and lime plaster or bousillage and simply called "colombage" in France. Colombage was used from the earliest settlement until the 18th century but was known as "bousillage entre poteaus sur solle" in Lower Louisiana. The style had its origins in Normandy, and was brought to Canada by very early Norman settlers. The Men's House at Lower Fort Garry is a good example. The exterior walls of such buildings were often covered over with clapboards to protect the infill from erosion. Naturally, this required frequent maintenance, and the style was abandoned as a building method in the 18th century in Québec. For the same reasons, half-timbering in New England, which was originally employed by the English settlers, fell out of favour soon after the colonies had become established.


title: Timber framing

text: Other variations of half-timbering are "colombage à teurques" (torchis), straw coated with mud and hung over horizontal staves (or otherwise held in place), colombage an eclisses, and colombage a lattes.


title: Timber framing

text: Poteaux-en-terre (posts in ground) is a type of timber framing with the many vertical posts or studs buried in the ground called post in ground or "earthfast" construction. The tops of the posts are joined to a beam and the spaces between are filled in with natural materials called bousillage or pierrotage.


title: Timber framing

text: Poteaux-sur-sol (posts on a sill) is a general term for any kind of framing on a sill. However, sometimes it specifically refers to "vertical log construction" like poteaux-en-terre placed on sills with the spaces between the timbers infilled.


title: Timber framing

text: Piece-sur-piece also known as Post-and-plank style or "corner post construction" (and many other names) in which wood is used both for the frame and horizontal infill; for this reason it may be incorrect to call it "half-timbering". It is sometimes a blend of framing and log building with two styles: the horizontal pieces fit into groves in the posts and can slide up and down or the horizontal pieces fit into individual mortises in the posts and are pegged and the gaps between the pieces chinked (filled in with stones or chips of wood covered with mud or moss briefly discussed in Log cabin.)


title: Timber framing

text: This technique of a timber frame walls filled in with horizontal planks or logs proved better suited to the harsh climates of Québec and Acadia, which at the same time had abundant wood. It became very popular throughout New France, as far afield as southern Louisiana. The Hudson's Bay Company used this technique for many of its trading posts, and this style of framing becoming known as Hudson Bay style or Hudson Bay corners. Also used by the Red River Colony this style also became known as "Red River Framing". "The support of horizontal timbers by corner posts is an old form of construction in Europe. It was apparently carried across much of the continent from Silesia by the Lausitz urnfield culture in the late Bronze Age." Similar building techniques are apparently not found in France but exist in Germany and Switzerland known as Bohlenstanderbau when planks are used or blockstanderbau when beams are used as the infill. In Sweden known as sleppvegg or skiftesverk and in Denmark as bulhus.


title: Timber framing

text: A particularly interesting example in the U.S. is the Golden Plough Tavern (c. 1741), York, York County, PA, which has the ground level of corner-post construction with the second floor of fachwerk (half timbered) and was built for a German with other Germanic features.


title: Timber framing

text: Characteristics of traditional timber framing in the parts of the U.S. formerly known as New Netherland are H-framing also known as dropped-tie framing in the U.S. and the similar anchor beam framing as found in the New World Dutch barn.


title: Timber framing

text: Some time periods/regions within New England contain certain framing elements such as common purlin roofs, five sided ridge beams, plank-frame construction and plank-wall construction. The English barn always contains an "English tying joint" and the later New England style barn were built using bents.


title: Timber framing

text: Japanese timber framing is believed to be descended from Chinese framing (see Ancient Chinese wooden architecture). Asian framing is significantly different from western framing, with its predominant use of post and lintel framing and an almost complete lack of diagonal bracing.


title: Timber framing

text: When half-timbering regained popularity in Britain after 1860 in the various revival styles, such as the Queen Anne style houses by Richard Norman Shaw and others, it was often used to evoke a "Tudor" atmosphere ("see Tudorbethan"), though in Tudor times half-timbering had begun to look rustic and was increasingly limited to village houses ("illustration, above left").


title: Timber framing

text: In 1912, Allen W. Jackson published "The Half-Timber House: Its Origin, Design, Modern Plan, and Construction," and rambling half-timbered beach houses appeared on dune-front properties in Rhode Island or under palm-lined drives of Beverly Hills. During the 1920s increasingly minimal gestures towards some half-timbering in commercial speculative housebuilding saw the fashion diminish.


title: Timber framing

text: In the revival styles, such as Tudorbethan (Mock Tudor), the half-timbered appearance is superimposed on the brickwork or other material as an outside decorative façade rather than forming the main frame that supports the structure.


title: Timber framing

text: The style was used in many of the homes built in Lake Mohawk, New Jersey, as well as all of the clubhouse, shops, and marina.


title: Timber framing

text: For information about "roundwood framing" see the book Roundwood Timber Framing:Building Naturally Using Local Resources by Ben Law (East Meon, Hampshire: Permanent Publications; 2010. )


title: Timber framing

text: The use of timber framing in buildings offers various aesthetic and structural benefits, as the timber frame lends itself to open plan designs and allows for complete enclosure in effective insulation for energy efficiency. In modern construction, a timber-frame structure offers many benefits:


title: Timber framing

text: In North America, heavy timber construction is classified Building Code Type IV: a special class reserved for timber framing which recognizes the inherent fire resistance of large timber and its ability to retain structural capacity in fire situations. In many cases this classification can eliminate the need and expense of fire sprinklers in public buildings.


title: Timber framing

text: In terms of the traditional half-timber or "fachwerkhaus" there are maybe more disadvantages than advantages today. Such houses are notoriously expensive to maintain let alone renovate and restore, most commonly owing to local regulations that do not allow divergence from the original, modification or incorporation of modern materials.


title: Timber framing

text: Additionally, in such nations as Germany, where energy efficiency is highly regulated, the renovated building may be required to meet modern energy efficiencies, if it is to be used as a residential or commercial structure (museums and significant historic buildings have no semi-permanent habitade exempt). Many framework houses of significance are treated merely to preserve, rather than render inhabitable – most especially as the required heavy insecticidal fumigation is highly poisonous.


title: Timber framing

text: In some cases, it is more economical to build anew using authentic techniques and correct period materials than restore. One major problem with older structures is the phenomenon known as "mechano-sorptive creep" or slanting: where wood beams absorb moisture whilst under compression or tension strains and deform, shift position or both. This is a major structural issue as the house may deviate several degrees from perpendicular to its foundations (in the x-axis, y-axis, and even z-axis) and thus be unsafe and unstable or so out of square it is extremely costly to remedy.


title: Timber framing

text: A summary of problems with "Fachwerkhäuser" or half-timbered houses includes the following, though many can be avoided by thoughtful design and application of suitable paints and surface treatments and routine maintenance. Often, though when dealing with a structure of a century or more old, it is too late.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Murray Bookchin (January 14, 1921 – July 30, 2006) was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher. A pioneer in the environmental movement, Bookchin formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. Among the most important were "Our Synthetic Environment" (1962), "Post-Scarcity Anarchism" (1971), "The Ecology of Freedom" (1982) and "Urbanization Without Cities" (1987). In the late 1990s, he became disenchanted with what he saw as an increasingly apolitical "lifestylism" of the contemporary anarchist movement, stopped referring to himself as an anarchist, and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called "communalism", which seeks to reconcile and expand Marxist, syndicalist, and anarchist thought.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Bookchin was a prominent anti-capitalist and advocate of social decentralization along ecological and democratic lines. His ideas have influenced social movements since the 1960s, including the New Left, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, and more recently, the democratic confederalism of Rojava. He was a central figure in the American green movement and the Burlington Greens.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Bookchin was born in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrants Nathan Bookchin and Rose (Kaluskaya) Bookchin. He grew up in the Bronx, where his grandmother, Zeitel, a Socialist Revolutionary, imbued him with Russian populist ideas. After her death in 1930, he joined the Young Pioneers, the Communist youth organization (for children 9 to 14) and the Young Communist League (for youths) in 1935. He attended the Workers School near Union Square, where he studied Marxism. In the late 1930s he broke with Stalinism and gravitated toward Trotskyism, joining the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In the early 1940s, he worked in a foundry in Bayonne, New Jersey, where he was a trade union organizer and shop steward for the United Electrical Workers as well as a recruiter for the SWP. Within the SWP, he adhered to the Goldman-Morrow faction, which broke away after the war ended. He was an auto worker and UAW member at the time of the great General Motors strike of 1945–46. In 1949, while speaking to a Zionist youth organization at City College, Bookchin met a mathematics student, Beatrice Appelstein, whom he married in 1951. They were married for 12 years and lived together for 35, remaining close friends and political allies for the rest of his life. They had two children, Debbie and Joseph. On religious views, Bookchin was an atheist, but was considered to be tolerant of religious views.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: From 1947, Bookchin collaborated with a fellow lapsed Trotskyist, the German expatriate Josef Weber, in New York in the Movement for a Democracy of Content, a group of 20 or so post-Trotskyists who collectively edited the periodical "Contemporary Issues – A Magazine for a Democracy of Content". "Contemporary Issues" embraced utopianism. The periodical provided a forum for the belief that previous attempts to create utopia had foundered on the necessity of toil and drudgery; but now modern technology had obviated the need for human toil, a liberatory development. To achieve this "post-scarcity" society, Bookchin developed a theory of ecological decentralism. The magazine published Bookchin's first articles, including the pathbreaking "The Problem of Chemicals in Food" (1952). In 1958, Bookchin defined himself as an anarchist, seeing parallels between anarchism and environmentalism. His first book, "Our Synthetic Environment," was published under the pseudonym Lewis Herber, in 1962, a few months before Rachel Carson's famous "Silent Spring". The book described a broad range of environmental ills, but received little attention because of its political radicalism.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: In 1964, Bookchin joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and protested racism at the 1964 World's Fair. During 1964–67, while living on Manhattan's Lower East Side, he cofounded and was the principal figure in the New York Federation of Anarchists. His groundbreaking essay "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" introduced environmentalism and, more specifically, ecology as a concept in radical politics. In 1968, he founded another group that published the influential "Anarchos" magazine, which published that and other innovative essays on post-scarcity and on sustainable technologies such as solar and wind energy, and on decentralization and miniaturization. Lecturing throughout the United States, he helped popularize the concept of ecology to the counterculture. His widely republished 1969 essay "Listen, Marxist!" warned Students for a Democratic Society (in vain) against an impending takeover by a Marxist group. "Once again the dead are walking in our midst," he wrote, "ironically, draped in the name of Marx, the man who tried to bury the dead of the nineteenth century. So the revolution of our own day can do nothing better than parody, in turn, the October Revolution of 1917 and the civil war of 1918–1920, with its 'class line,' its Bolshevik Party, its 'proletarian dictatorship,' its puritanical morality, and even its slogan, 'Soviet power'". These and other influential 1960s essays are anthologized in "Post-Scarcity Anarchism" (1971).


title: Murray Bookchin

text: In 1969–1970, he taught at the Alternate U, a counter-cultural radical school based on 14th Street in Manhattan. In 1971, he moved to Burlington, Vermont, with a group of friends, to put into practice his ideas of decentralization. In the fall of 1973, he was hired by Goddard College to lecture on technology; his lectures led to a teaching position and to the creation of the Social Ecology Studies program in 1974 and the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE) soon thereafter, of which he became the director. In 1974, he was hired by Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey, where he quickly became a full professor. The ISE was a hub for experimentation and study of appropriate technology in the 1970s. In 1977–78 he was a member of the Spruce Mountain Affinity Group of the Clamshell Alliance. Also in 1977, he published "The Spanish Anarchists", a history of the Spanish anarchist movement up to the revolution of 1936. During this period, Bookchin briefly forged some ties with the nascent libertarian movement, speaking at a Libertarian Party convention and contributing to a newsletter edited by Karl Hess. Nevertheless, Bookchin rejected the types of libertarianism that advocated unconstrained individualism.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: In "From Urbanization to Cities" (published in 1987 as "The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship"), Bookchin traced the democratic traditions that influenced his political philosophy and defined the implementation of the libertarian municipalism concept. A few years later, "The Politics of Social Ecology", written by his partner of 19 years, Janet Biehl, briefly summarized these ideas.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: In 1988, Bookchin and Howie Hawkins founded the Left Green Network "as a radical alternative to U.S. Green liberals", based around the principles of social ecology and libertarian municipalism.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: In 1995, Bookchin lamented the decline of American anarchism into primitivism, anti-technologism, neo-situationism, individual self-expression, and "ad hoc adventurism," at the expense of forming a social movement. Arthur Verslius said, "Bookchin ... describes himself as a 'social anarchist' because he looks forward to a (gentle) societal revolution. ... Bookchin has lit out after those whom he terms 'lifestyle anarchists.'" The publication of "Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism" in 1995, criticizing this tendency, was startling to anarchists. Thereafter Bookchin concluded that American anarchism was essentially individualistic and broke with anarchism publicly in 1999. He placed his ideas into Communalism, a political ideology and form of libertarian socialism that retains his ideas about assembly democracy and the necessity of decentralization of settlement, power/money/influence, agriculture, manufacturing, etc. His last major published work was "The Third Revolution", a four-volume history of the libertarian movements in European and American revolutions.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: He continued to teach at the ISE until 2004. Bookchin died of congestive heart failure on July 30, 2006, at his home in Burlington, at the age of 85.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: In addition to his political writings, Bookchin wrote extensively on philosophy, calling his ideas dialectical naturalism. The dialectical writings of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, which articulate a developmental philosophy of change and growth, seemed to him to lend themselves to an organic, environmentalist approach. Although Hegel "exercised a considerable influence" on Bookchin, he was not, in any sense, a Hegelian. His philosophical writings emphasize humanism, rationality, and the ideals of the Enlightenment.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Bookchin was critical of class-centered analysis of Marxism and simplistic anti-state forms of libertarianism and liberalism and wished to present what he saw as a more complex view of societies. In "The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy," he says that:


title: Murray Bookchin

text: My use of the word hierarchy in the subtitle of this work is meant to be provocative. There is a strong theoretical need to contrast hierarchy with the more widespread use of the words class and State; careless use of these terms can produce a dangerous simplification of social reality. To use the words hierarchy, class, and State interchangeably, as many social theorists do, is insidious and obscurantist. This practice, in the name of a "classless" or "libertarian" society, could easily conceal the existence of hierarchical relationships and a hierarchical sensibility, both of whicheven in the absence of economic exploitation or political coercion-would serve to perpetuate unfreedom.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Bookchin also points to an accumulation of hierarchical systems throughout history that has occurred up to contemporary societies which tends to determine the human collective and individual psyche:


title: Murray Bookchin

text: The objective history of the social structure becomes internalized as a subjective history of the psychic structure. Heinous as my view may be to modern Freudians, it is not the discipline of work but the discipline of rule that demands the repression of internal nature. This repression then extends outward to external nature as a mere object of rule and later of exploitation. This mentality permeates our individual psyches in a cumulative form up to the present day-not merely as capitalism but as the vast history of hierarchical society from its inception.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Murray Bookchin's book about humanity's collision course with the natural world, "Our Synthetic Environment", was published six months before Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring."


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Bookchin rejected Barry Commoner's belief that the environmental crisis could be traced to technological choices, Paul Ehrlich's views that it could be traced to overpopulation, or the even more pessimistic view that traces this crisis to human nature. Rather, Bookchin felt that our environmental predicament is the result of the cancerous logic of capitalism, a system aimed at maximizing profit instead of enriching human lives: "By the very logic of its grow-or-die imperative, capitalism may well be producing ecological crises that gravely imperil the integrity of life on this planet."


title: Murray Bookchin

text: The solution to this crisis, he said, is not a return to hunter-gatherer societies, which Bookchin characterized as xenophobic and warlike. Bookchin likewise opposed "a politics of mere protest, lacking programmatic content, a proposed alternative, and a movement to give people direction and continuity." He claims we needa constant awareness that a given society's irrationality is deep-seated, that its serious pathologies are not isolated problems that can be cured piecemeal but must be solved by sweeping changes in the often hidden sources of crisis and suffering—that awareness alone is what can hold a movement together, give it continuity, preserve its message and organization beyond a given generation, and expand its ability to deal with new issues and developments.The answer then lies in Communalism, a system encompassing a directly democratic political organization anchored in loosely confederated popular assemblies, decentralization of power, absence of domination of any kind, and replacing capitalism with human-centered forms of production.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: In the history of environmentalism, social ecology is not a movement but a theory primarily associated with Bookchin and elaborated over his body of work. He presents a utopian philosophy of human evolution that combines the nature of biology and society into a third "thinking nature" beyond biochemistry and physiology, which he argues is a more complete, conscious, ethical, and rational nature. Humanity, by this line of thought, is the latest development from the long history of organic development on Earth. Bookchin's social ecology proposes ethical principles for replacing a society's propensity for hierarchy and domination with that of democracy and freedom.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Bookchin wrote about the effects of urbanization on human life in the early 1960s during his participation in the civil rights and related social movements. Bookchin then began to pursue the connection between ecological and social issues, culminating with his best-known book, "The Ecology of Freedom", which he had developed over a decade. His argument, that human domination and destruction of nature follows from social domination between humans, was a breakthrough position in the growing field of ecology. Life develops from self-organization and evolutionary cooperation (symbiosis). Bookchin writes of preliterate societies organized around mutual need but ultimately overrun by institutions of hierarchy and domination, such as city-states and capitalist economies, which he attributes uniquely to societies of humans and not communities of animals. He proposes confederation between communities of humans run through democracy rather than through administrative logistics.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Bookchin's vision of an ecological society is based on highly participatory, grassroots politics, in which municipal communities democratically plan and manage their affairs through popular assembly, a program he called Communalism. This democratic deliberation purposefully promotes autonomy and self-reliance, as opposed to centralized state politics. While this program retains elements of anarchism, it emphasizes a higher degree of organization (community planning, voting, and institutions) than general anarchism. In Bookchin's Communalism, these autonomous, municipal communities connect with each other via confederations.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Starting in the 1970s, Bookchin argued that the arena for libertarian social change should be the municipal level. In 1980 Bookchin used the term "libertarian municipalism" to describe a system in which libertarian institutions of directly democratic assemblies would oppose and replace the state with a confederation of free municipalities. In "The Next Revolution", Bookchin stresses the link that libertarian municipalism has with his earlier philosophy of social ecology. He writes:


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Bookchin proposes that these institutional forms must take place within differently scaled local areas. In a 2001 interview he summarized his views this way:


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Libertarian municipalism intends to create a situation in which the two powers—the municipal confederations and the nation state cannot coexist. In other words, it strives to expose the inherent power imbalance and tension that exists between the nation state and the municipality, in order to challenge and overcome state power. Its supporters—Communalists—believe it to be the means to achieve a rational society, and its structure becomes the organization of society.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Though Bookchin, by his own recognition, failed to win over a substantial body of supporters during his own lifetime, his ideas have nonetheless influenced movements and thinkers across the globe.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Among these are the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) and closely aligned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in Turkey, which have fought the Turkish state since the 1980s to try to secure greater political and cultural rights for the country's Kurds. The PKK is designated as a terrorist organization by the Turkish and United States governments, while the YPG has been considered an ally of the US against ISIS. Though founded on a rigid Marxist–Leninist ideology, the PKK has seen a shift in its thought and aims since the capture and imprisonment of its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, in 1999. Öcalan began reading a variety of post-Marxist political theory while in prison, and found particular interest in Bookchin's works.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: Öcalan attempted in early 2004 to arrange a meeting with Bookchin through his lawyers, describing himself as Bookchin's "student" eager to adapt his thought to Middle Eastern society. Bookchin was too ill to accept the request. In May 2004 Bookchin conveyed this message "My hope is that the Kurdish people will one day be able to establish a free, rational society that will allow their brilliance once again to flourish. They are fortunate indeed to have a leader of Mr. Öcalan's talents to guide them". When Bookchin died in 2006, the PKK hailed the American thinker as "one of the greatest social scientists of the 20th century", and vowed to put his theory into practice.


title: Murray Bookchin

text: "Democratic confederalism", the variation on Communalism developed by Öcalan in his writings and adopted by the PKK, does not outwardly seek Kurdish rights within the context of the formation of an independent state separate from Turkey. The PKK claims that this project is not envisioned as being only for Kurds, but rather for all peoples of the region, regardless of their ethnic, national, or religious background. Rather, it promulgates the formation of assemblies and organizations beginning at the grassroots level to enact its ideals in a non-state framework beginning at the local level. It also places a particular emphasis on securing and promoting women's rights. The PKK has had some success in implementing its programme, through organizations such as the Democratic Society Congress (DTK), which coordinates political and social activities within Turkey, and the Koma Civakên Kurdistan (KCK), which does so across all countries where Kurds live.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The deserts of Australia or the Australian deserts cover about , or 18% of the Australian mainland, but about 35% of the Australian continent receives so little rain, it is practically desert. Collectively known as the Great Australian desert, they are primarily distributed throughout the Western Plateau and interior lowlands of the country, covering areas from South West Queensland, Far West region of New South Wales, Sunraysia in Victoria and Spencer Gulf in South Australia to the Barkly Tableland in Northern Territory and the Kimberley region in Western Australia.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: By international standards, the Great Australian desert receives relatively high rates of rainfall or around on average, but due to the high evapotranspiration it would be correspondingly arid. No weather station situated in an arid region records less than of average annual rainfall. The deserts in the interior and south lack any significant summer rains. The desert in western Australia is well explained by the little evaporation of the cold sea current of the West Australian Current, of polar origin, which prevents significant rainfall in the interior of the continent. About 40% of Australia is covered by dunes. Australia is the driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: In addition to being mostly uninhabited, the Great Australian Desert is diverse, where it consists of semi-desert grassy or mountainous landscapes, xeric shrubs, salt pans, gibber (stony) deserts, red sand dunes, sandstone mesas, rocky plains, open tree savannahs and bushland with a few rivers and salt lakes, which are mostly seasonally dry and often have no outflow in the east. The 3 million km² desert is among the least modified in the world. The Australian desert has the largest population of feral camels in the world.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The area's geology spans a geological time period of over 3.8 billion years, therefore featuring some of the oldest rocks on earth. There are three main cratonic shields of recognised Archaean age within the Australian landmass: The Yilgarn, the Pilbara and the Gawler cratons. Several other Archaean-Proterozoic orogenic belts exist, usually sandwiched around the edges of these major cratonic shields. The history of the Archaean cratons is extremely complex and protracted. The cratons appear to have been accumulated to form the greater Australian landmass in the late Archaean to meso-Proterozoic, (~2400 Ma to 1,600 Ma).


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Chiefly the Capricorn Orogeny is partly responsible for the assembly of the West Australian landmass by connecting the Yilgarn and Pilbara cratons. The Capricorn Orogeny is exposed in the rocks of the Bangemall Basin, Gascoyne Complex granite-gneisses and the Glengarry, Yerrida and Padbury basins. Unknown Proterozoic orogenic belts, possibly similar to the Albany Complex in southern Western Australia and the Musgrave Block, represent the Proterozoic link between the Yilgarn and Gawler cratons, covered by the Proterozoic-Palaeozoic Officer and Amadeus basins.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Indigenous Australians have lived in the desert for at least 50,000 years and occupied all Outback regions, including the driest deserts, when Europeans first entered central Australia in the 1800s. Many Indigenous Australians retain strong physical and cultural links to their traditional country and are legally recognised as the Traditional Owners of large parts of the Outback under Commonwealth Native Title legislation.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Aboriginal tribes and clans have been nomadic in the desert areas for thousands of years. They subsisted on the local flora and fauna, now known as bush food, and made sure that their sources of drinking water remained intact. The nomads moved in clearly demarcated tribal areas. For example, important tribes living in the desert areas include the Arrernte, Luritja and Pitjantjatjara. The latter tribe's sphere of influence extended from Uluṟu to the Nullarbor Plains. The Dieri tribe lives in a large area of the Simpson, Strzelecki and Tirari deserts.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The rock art and archaeological site at Karnatukul was, until recently, estimated to have been inhabited for up to 25,000 years, and known as the site of the oldest continuous recorded occupation in the Western Desert cultural region. Karnakatul shows one of the earliest uses of firewood, and habitation continued through times of extreme climate change, when the desertification occurred as the polar ice sheets expanded. The oldest examples of rock art, in Western Australia's Pilbara region and the Olary district of South Australia, are estimated to be up to around 40,000 years old. The oldest firmly dated evidence of rock art painting in Australia is a charcoal drawing on a small rock fragment found during the excavation of the Narwala Gabarnmang rock shelter in south-western Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The isolated desert areas remained undeveloped for a long time. For example, the Spinifex People first had contact with whites in the 1950s, when they were expelled from their tribal lands because of nuclear weapons testing (1950–1963) by the British and Australian governments. The Pintupi Nine, a group of nine Aboriginal people of the Pintupi tribe, lived in the Stone Age area of the Gibson Desert until October 1984, when they first encountered whites as they left the desert. Both discoveries were sensations at the time.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Large parts of the Australian desert areas are part of the Desert Cultural Area. For the Aborigines, the Uluṟu in the desert area and the Kata Tjuṯa with their Dreamtime stories have great cultural significance. The Aborigines of the desert produced many important artists, one of the first and most famous being Albert Namatjira, who was born in Hermannsburg in the Great Sandy Desert. About a third of Australia's deserts are now Aboriginal lands. A very large part of it is managed by them as a nature reserve. A number of tribes have land use rights for almost all other desert regions. Today, numerous Aborigines live in settlements in the deserts.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The Strzelecki Desert was named in 1845 by explorer Charles Sturt after Polish explorer Paul Edmund Strzelecki.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The first European to cross the Great Sandy Desert was Peter Egerton Warburton. He arrived on the Western Australian coast badly exhausted and blind in one eye. He owed his survival to Charley, an Aboriginal tracker. The British explorer Ernest Giles, who crossed the desert in 1875, gave it the name Great Victoria Desert. It is dedicated to Queen Victoria. From 1858 onwards, the so-called "Afghan" cameleers and their beasts played an instrumental role in opening up the Outback and helping to build infrastructure.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The Sturt Stony Desert was named by Charles Sturt in 1844, while he was trying to find the inland sea which he believed lay at the centre of Australia. In 1866 Peter Egerton Warburton's expedition reached the Tirari desert from the west. The Overland Telegraph line was constructed in the 1870s along the route identified by Stuart. In 1865 the surveyor George Goyder, using changes in vegetation patterns, mapped a line in South Australia, north of which he considered rainfall to be too unreliable to support agriculture. British explorer Ernest Giles named the Gibson Desert in memory of Alfred Gibson, who went missing during an 1873–74 expedition.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The Tanami Desert was named by explorer and prospector Allan Davidson. He only assigned the name on his second expedition to this desert region, which ended in 1900. "Tanami" was the original Aboriginal name for two rock caves with clear drinking water.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The Simpson Desert got its name from Allen Simpson, a geographer who ventured into this desert in 1845. The name was suggested by explorer and geologist Cecil Madigan. In 1936, Edmund Colson became the first white man to cross the Simpson Desert. Before that, the great Australian explorers Charles Sturt and David Lindsay had failed. While the early explorers used horses to cross the Outback, the first woman to make the journey riding a horse was Anna Hingley, who rode from Broome to Cairns in 2006.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The nuclear weapons trials carried out by the United Kingdom at Maralinga and Emu Field in the 1950s and early 1960s have left areas contaminated with plutonium-239 and other radioactive material.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: A large contiguous desert area is formed by the Tanami, Greater Sands, Lesser Sands, Gibson and Greater Victoria Sands in western Australia and a smaller one by the Simpson, Sturt, Strzelecki and Tirari Deserts in the east. Spatially isolated between Great Victoria Sand and Simpson lies the small Pedirka Desert, which spreads out over the geological Pedirka Sedimentary Basin. The Small Sandy Desert connects to the Great Sandy Desert and is similar in terms of landscape and vegetation. The Western Desert, which describes a cultural region of Australia's indigenous people, includes the Gibson, Great Victoria, Great Sand and Small Sand deserts in the states of Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Most of the inhabitants of the area are Indigenous Australians. There are other areas in Australia designated as desert that are not related to the Australian deserts mentioned above. On Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia is an area of two square kilometers called the Little Sahara, a formation of several sand dunes on its south coast. In Victoria, about 375 km west of Melbourne, there is still the Little Desert National Park. The Painted Desert is 121 kilometers northwest of Coober Pedy in South Australia.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The almost treeless Nullarbor Plains in southern Australia, made of limestone, are also known as the Nullarbor Desert.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Australian deserts generally meet the first three criteria, although some coastal desert areas exist in Western Australia. The great ocean circulation in the south of the continent and the cold sea currents in the southern zone play the fourth crucial role, indirectly at the origin of the long periods of continental drought by imposing high atmospheric pressures. As for the fifth hypothesis of cold or frozen deserts, as absurd as this assertion may appear in present-day Australia, they existed several million years ago. Geomorphologists thus explain a number of spectacular rock formations, from the Mount Olga or Uluru to the over-deepened wave of the wind rocks, by involving a thaw of (peri)glacial formations followed by wind action over a long period. The sand ridges have a trend of SSE-NNW and continue parallel for great distances.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Areas of the formerly desert outback, deserts such as the Simpson Desert from west to east or mountainous regions such as the Arckaringa Hills are characterized by ocean landscapes of charred rocks, called gibberss. As noted by early Australian explorers such as Ernest Giles large portions of the desert are characterized by gravel-covered terrains covered in thin desert grasses and it also contains extensive areas of undulating red sand plains and dunefields, low rocky/gravelly ridges and substantial upland portions with a high degree of laterite formation. The sandy soil of the lateritic "buckshot" plains is rich in iron in the Gibson Desert. Several isolated salt-water lakes occur in the centre of the region and to the southwest a system of small lakes follow paleo-drainage features. The desert proper is uninhabitable and the environment remains unmarred, while the greener fringe is used for sheep grazing.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Two types of semi-desert, referred to as "grassland" in Australia, occur in the Australian deserts: Tussock – or Mitchell grasslands are found in the desert areas of the Northern Territory, South Australia and western Queensland. The annual precipitation that falls on these marl and alluvial soils covered with grasses of the Astrebla genus ranges from 150 to 500 mm. Trees cannot take root on the heavy clay soils, and they are riddled with bushfires. Spinifex or hummock semi-desert grows spiny- headed grasses (Spinifex) in clumps, next to free areas as green Triodia pungens and blue-grey Triodia basedowii. Zygochloa dominates on the sand dunes of the Simpson, Strzelecki and Tirari deserts. In large areas of desert, semi-desert grasslands with mulga bushes (Acacia aneura) predominate.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Semi-desert savannas with low-growing acacia species cover large areas in the south of the arid zone, where 200 to 500 mm of precipitation falls in winter and summer. The acacia species, called mulga, grow on the plains, mountain slopes and hills of the deserts. In connection with the bushfires, which are mainly ignited by the spinifex grasses, the non-resistant mula bushes burn, which then no longer grow back. There is evidence that Aborigines did not start bushfires in mulga landscapes. The desert areas covered by mulga are also threatened by deforestation, extensive livestock farming and fuel wood production. At the eastern end of the arid zone is the so-called Witchetty Bush. This area is home to the endemic species of acacia, Acacia kempeana, which feeds the wood borer larva, the witchetty maggot, up to three inches in size. It is high in protein and was an important part of the Aboriginal diet.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Eucalyptus woodland thrives along the dry riverbeds. Grasses grow on the soil under the eucalypts. Chenopodiaceae shrubs, which usually do not exceed 1.5 meters in height, are found in the southern desert areas. They are salt plants that grow on both dry and saline soils. In the deserts there are permanent or percolating patches of freshwater formed in rocky areas or in sandstone canyons. Bluebush and saltbush species grow in heavier soils. Between the sand ridges, the areas of wooded steppe consist of "Eucalyptus gongylocarpa", "Eucalyptus youngiana", and "Acacia aneura" (mulga) shrubs scattered over areas of resilient spinifex grasses, particularly "Triodia basedowii". Most of the area is covered by hummock grasslands (Triodia spp.), with a few eucalypts, acacias, grevilleas, and bloodwoods ("Corymbia chippendalei" and "Corymbia opaca") are found on sand hills. The vegetation of the dunefields of the Tirari Desert is dominated by either Sandhill Wattle ("Acacia ligulata") or Sandhill Cane-grass ("Zygochloa paradoxa") which occur on the crests and slopes of dunes. Tall, open shrubland also occurs on the slopes.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: In drier areas, species including Old Man Saltbush ("Atriplex nummularia"), Cottonbush ("Maireana aphylla") and Queensland Bluebush ("Chenopodium auricomum") form a sparse, open shrubland, whereas swamps and depressions are frequently associated with Swamp Cane-grass ("Eragrostis australasica") and Lignum ("Muehlenbeckia florulenta"). The intermittent watercourses and permanent waterholes associated with tributaries of Cooper Creek support woodland dominated by River Red Gum ("Eucalyptus camaldulensis") and Coolibah ("Eucalyptus coolabah"). Numerous salt lakes form after heavy rainfall and at times fill the underlying salt flats. The salt lakes occupy relatively small areas in the desert areas. For example, a major salt lake is Lake Eyre, which spans areas of the Gibson and Tirari deserts and fills up completely and then dries up about once every 25 years. Seventeen headwaters have formed in the deserts as a result of the subsurface Great Artesian Basin, one of the largest freshwater basins in the world. The water coming out of the springs is rich in minerals. The springs partially form the habitat of endemic fish and the spring area is overgrown with rare plants. Numerous springs have dried up due to extensive agricultural use in the last 100 years. Threats to biodiversity include wildfires, feral animals, weeds, and uncontrolled grazing.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Significantly fewer animals live in the Australian deserts than in the Australian coastal regions. The most common creatures in Australia's arid regions are insects, such as termites and ants, which are of great importance to the ecology. Animals in the desert include feral camels, dingoes, goannas (including the large perentie) and numerous species of lizards and birds. Mammals include bilbies, woma python, mulgara, malleefowl, common brushtail possum, rufous hare-wallaby, burrowing bettong, the black-flanked rock-wallaby, marsupial moles, rufous hare-wallabies, yellow-footed rock wallaby, western grey kangaroos, and red kangaroos. Some of the bird-life found within the desert include the rare Alexandra's parrot, wedge-tailed eagles, Australian bustard, the mulga parrot, the scarlet-chested parrot and the chestnut-breasted whiteface ("Aphelocephala pectoralis") found on the eastern edge of the Great Victoria Desert and the malleefowl of Mamungari Conservation Park.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: About 95 species of mammals lived there at the time of European colonization, of which 17 are extinct, such as the desert bandicoot (Perameles eremiana), the numbat (Myrmecobius fasciatus) and the long-tailed bouncy mouse (Notomys longicaudatus). The main survivors are small rodents, insectivorous bats, marsupials, kangaroos and wallabies. A major threat to vegetation are the free-roaming camels in the desert. Over 200 species of birds live in the desert areas, including emus, ratites, parrots, cockatoos, owls and raptors. The desert includes many types of lizards, including the vulnerable great desert skink ("Egernia kintorei"), the Central Ranges taipan (discovered in 2007), and a number of small marsupials, including the endangered sandhill dunnart "(Sminthopsis psammophila)" and the crest-tailed mulgara "(Dasycercus cristicauda)". One way to survive here is to burrow into the sands, as a number of the desert's animals, including the southern marsupial mole "(Notoryctes typhlops)", and the water-holding frog do.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Reptiles live in large numbers in the deserts, for example the thorny devils, bearded dragons, monitor lizards, frilled dragon and geckos. Frog species that have adapted to drought, such as the Desert Trilling Frog (Neobatrachus centralis) and the Desert Tree Frog (Litoria rubella), can also occur. The most numerous species of lizards in the world can be found in the Australian desert, there are over 40 species of them there. In addition to fish, the few permanent freshwater holes are also home to mussels, crustaceans and insects. 34 species of fish occur in Lake Eyre and others at the artesian springs (e.g. at Dalhousie Springs in South Australia). Over 40 species of frogs have been observed after heavy rains.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The Dingo Fence was built to restrict movements of dingoes and wild dogs into agricultural areas towards the south east of the continent. Predators of the desert include the dingo (as the desert is north of the Dingo Fence) and two large monitor lizards, the perentie "(Varanus giganteus)" and the sand goanna "(Varanus gouldii)". Many introduced species have affected the fauna and flora of Australia's desert regions. The Australian feral camel affects native vegetation, partly because Australian desert vegetation evolved without any major herbivores present. Uncontrolled access to more sensitive areas by four-wheel-drive vehicles is also an issue. Feral cats have reduced the populations of bilbies and mulgara.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Australia's climate is mostly determined by the hot, sinking air of the subtropical high-pressure belt (i.e. Australian High). Dry conditions are associated with an El Niño–Southern Oscillation in Australia. Vegetation in arid areas is primarily dependent upon soil type.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The average annual rainfall in the Australian desert is low, ranging from 81 to as much as 250 mm (3 to 10 in), which would make it a semi-arid climate. But a massive evaporation rate makes up for the higher than normal desert rainfall. Central Australia is very arid, with the driest areas averaging of rainfall each year. Thunderstorms are relatively common in the region, with an annual average of 15 to 20 thunderstorms. Summer daytime temperatures range from 32 to 40 °C (90 to 104 °F); winter maximum temperatures average between 18 to 23 °C (64 to 73 °F), though will be more warmer in the north.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Extensive areas are covered by longitudinal dunes. The northwestern region of the desert is one which gives rise to the heat lows which help drive the NW monsoon. There, almost all rain comes from monsoon thunderstorms or the occasional tropical cyclone rain depression. Frost does not occur in most of the area in the far north. The regions bordering the Gibson Desert in the far southeast may record a light frost or two every year, with frost being more prevalent in the Tanami region. Away from the coast winter nights can still be chilly in comparison to the warm days. Minimum winter temperatures dip to in most parts of the desert.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Tourism is a major industry across the Great Australian desert, and commonwealth and state tourism agencies explicitly target Outback Australia as a sought after destination for domestic and international travelers. Tourism Australia explicitly markets nature-based and Indigenous-led experiences to tourists. In the 2015–2016 financial year, 815,000 visitors spent $988 million while on holidays in the Northern Territory alone. At Katjarra, there are two camping spots, with shed tanks and long-drop toilets, and Indigenous rangers are available to show tourists the part of the range that is open to the public.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Riversleigh, in Queensland, is one of Australia's most renowned fossil sites and was recorded as a World Heritage site in 1994. The 100 km (39 sq mi) area contains fossil remains of ancient mammals, birds and reptiles of Oligocene and Miocene age.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Other than agriculture and tourism, the primary economic activity in the vast and sparsely settled desert is mining. Owing to the almost complete absence of mountain building and glaciation since the Permian (in many areas since the Cambrian) ages, the outback is extremely rich in iron, aluminum, manganese and uranium ores, and also contains major deposits of gold, nickel, copper, lead and zinc ores. Because of its size, the value of grazing and mining is considerable. Major mines and mining areas in the Outback include opals at Coober Pedy, Lightning Ridge and White Cliffs, metals at Broken Hill, Tennant Creek, Olympic Dam and the remote Challenger Mine. Oil and gas are extracted in the Cooper Basin around Moomba. The Tanami Desert features The Granites gold mine and Coyote Gold Mine.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: In Western Australia the Argyle diamond mine in the Kimberley is the world's biggest producer of natural diamonds and contributes approximately one-third of the world's natural supply. The Pilbara region's economy is dominated by mining and petroleum industries. Most of Australia's iron ore is also mined in the Pilbara and it also has one of the world's major manganese mines.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The outback is reticulated by historic tracks with excellent bitumen surface and well-maintained dirt roads. The Stuart Highway runs from north to south through the centre of the continent, roughly paralleled by the Adelaide–Darwin railway. There is a proposal to develop some of the roads running from the south-west to the north-east to create an all-weather road named the Outback Highway, crossing the continent diagonally from Laverton, Western Australia (north of Kalgoorlie), through the Northern Territory to Winton, in Queensland. Air transport is relied on for mail delivery in some areas, owing to sparse settlement and wet-season road closures. Most outback mines have an airstrip and many have a fly-in fly-out workforce.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Although the desert covers about three-quarters of the continent, it only supports around 800,000 residents – less than 5% of the Australian population. In addition, there are approximately 1,200 small Indigenous communities, of which almost half have a population of fewer than 100 people. The Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) started service in 1928 and helps people who live in the outback of Australia. In former times, serious injuries or illnesses often meant death due to the lack of proper medical facilities and trained personnel. Young Indigenous adults from the Gibson Desert region work in the Wilurarra Creative programs to maintain and develop their culture. Indigenous Australians in the desert regions include the Kogara, the Mirning and the Pitjantjatjara. Aboriginal populations have been increasing in this region.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Inhabited areas within the Great Australian desert include many towns and as well as some cities, such as:


title: Deserts of Australia

text: The Aboriginal languages with the most speakers today in the desert include Upper Arrernte, Walmajarri, Warlpiri, and the Western Desert languages within the Western Desert cultural bloc, such as the Wati languages, the Panyjima language, Wangkatha, Noongar language, the Yankunytjatjara dialect and the Pitjantjatjara dialect. There is also the Adnyamathanha language in South Australia. Other (extant) language clusters include the Kalkatungic languages, Ngarna languages Arandic languages, Ngumpin–Yapa languages, Warumungu languages, Ngayarda languages, Kanyara-Mantharta languages and Thura-Yura languages. Most of these languages belong in the Pama–Nyungan language family.


title: Deserts of Australia

text: Ethnic groups include the Kartudjara, Warumungu people, Pitjantjatjara, Panyjima people, Kuyani, Yankunytjatjara, Kunapa, Manjiljarra, Ayerrereng, Yuruwinga, Yulparija and the Maduwongga.


title: 2005–06 NBA season

text: The 2005–06 NBA season was the 60th season of the National Basketball Association. The Miami Heat defeated the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA Finals, four games to two to win their first NBA championship.


title: 2005–06 NBA season

text: Teams in bold advanced to the next round. The numbers to the left of each team indicate the team's seeding in its conference, and the numbers to the right indicate the number of games the team won in that round. The division champions are marked by an asterisk. Home court advantage does not necessarily belong to the higher-seeded team, but instead the team with the better regular season record; teams enjoying the home advantage are shown in italics.


title: Obersturmbannführer

text: Obersturmbannführer (Senior Assault-unit Leader; ; short: Ostubaf) was a paramilitary rank in the German Nazi Party (NSDAP) which was used by the SA ("Sturmabteilung") and the SS ("Schutzstaffel"). The rank of "Obersturmbannführer" was junior to the rank of "Standartenführer", and was equivalent to the military rank of "Oberstleutnant" (lieutenant colonel) in the German Army.


title: Obersturmbannführer

text: As the SA expanded, the rank of "Ostubaf" was created in May 1933 to provide a rank above "Sturmbannführer"; likewise, the "Ostubaf" was an SS rank. The "Obersturmbannführer" rank insignia was composed of four silver pips and a black stripe on a silver background, all elements are centered in the left wing of the collar of the tunic of an SS or of an SA uniform. The rank also was worn on the shoulder boards of an "Oberstleutnant" and was the highest rank in the SS and the SA to display SS unit insignia on the collar wing opposite the rank insignia.


title: Obersturmbannführer

text: Various Waffen-SS units composed of foreign recruits were considered distinct from the German SS, and thus they were not permitted to wear SS runes on their collar tabs but had their divisional insignia instead. Their ranks was also prepended with "Waffen" instead of "SS", as in, Waffen-Obersturmbannführer.


title: Obersturmbannführer

text: In 1940, Adolf Eichmann was promoted to "Obersturmbannführer", and was listed as such in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference held in January 1942. In 1961, during the Eichmann trial for Lt. Col. Eichmann's crimes against humanity, the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, drew attention to the executive significance and command responsibility of the rank of "Obersturmbannführer", in response to Eichmann's claim that he was merely a clerk obeying orders; Hausner asked, "Were you an "Obersturmbannführer" or an office girl?"


title: Obersturmbannführer

text: In the book "Eichmann in Jerusalem" (1963) the political theoretician Hannah Arendt said that "Obersturmbannführer" was not a rank of significance, because Eichmann whiled away the war time awaiting promotion to the rank of "Standartenführer". That "people like Eichmann, who had risen from the ranks, were never permitted to advance beyond a lieutenant colonel [i.e. "Obersturmbannführer"] except at the front", in combat with the enemy.


title: Royal Danish Army

text: The Royal Danish Army (, , ) is the land-based branch of the Danish Defence, together with the Danish Home Guard. For the last decade, the Royal Danish Army has undergone a massive transformation of structures, equipment and training methods, abandoning its traditional role of anti-invasion defence, and instead focusing on out of area operations by, among other initiatives, reducing the size of the conscripted and reserve components and increasing the active (standing army) component, changing from 60% support structure and 40% operational capability, to 60% combat operational capability and 40% support structure. When fully implemented, the Danish army will be capable of deploying 1,500 troops permanently on three different continents continuously, or 5,000 troops for a shorter period of time, in international operations without any need for extraordinary measures such as parliamentary approval of a war funding bill.


title: Royal Danish Army

text: Founded in 1614, in the wake of the Kalmar War, the Royal Danish Army was originally designed to prevent conflicts and war, maintain Denmark's sovereignty and protect her interest. With time, these goals have developed into also encompassing the need to protect freedom and peaceful development in the world with respect for human rights.


title: Royal Danish Army

text: The Danish King remained commander in chief throughout the Early Modern period, in the Thirty Years' War, the Dano-Swedish War (1657–58) and the Scanian War (1675–1679), the Great Northern War (1700–1721), the Theatre War of 1789/9 and the Napoleonic Wars.


title: Royal Danish Army

text: In 1815, however, as a result of continued evolution and division of command, four general commands were created with the King as the supreme authority: Zealand and adjacent islands, Funen Langeland, Jutland and the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. At the same time, the need for maintenance of the army in peacetime became pertinent, and the Army Operational Command was established.


title: Royal Danish Army

text: The Royal Danish Army has historically been an integral part of the defence of Denmark and thus involved in warfare, skirmishes and battles continuously to protect her interests. Most notably various territorial wars with Sweden, Russia and Prussia, the Napoleonic Wars on the side of France, and the Second World War, controversially and famously against the wishes of the Danish government, which had ordered immediate surrender to Germany. In modern times the Royal Danish Army has also become the backbone of Danish international missions, such as those in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.


title: Royal Danish Army

text: The Royal Danish Army has been committed to a number of United Nations and NATO peacekeeping and unconventional warfare operations since becoming involved in the Yugoslav Wars under UN mandate in 1994, most notably in the famous Operation Bøllebank. The Royal Danish Army was also engaged in the Kosovo War and continues to this day to maintain peacekeeping operations in Kosovo as part of the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK), together with the Danish Home Guard. In addition, the Royal Danish Army was involved in the War in Iraq from 2003 to 2007 with a significant contingent of soldiers responsible for creating and maintaining peace in the province of Basra, together with the British.


title: Royal Danish Army

text: Denmark lost its first soldier in Iraq on 17 August 2003 when Preben Pedersen, a 34-year-old Lance Corporal with the Jutland Dragoon Regiment, became the first coalition soldier not from the United States or Britain to die in the Iraq War. Starting in 2001, the Royal Danish Army was also involved in the War in Afghanistan and the Royal Danish Army and the British Army have been involved in heavy clashes with the Taliban in the Helmand Province, where about 760 Danish soldiers controlled a large battlegroup. The Danish army withdrew its combat forces from Afghanistan in May 2014. After the Afghan National Army took responsibility for the security in Afghanistan in 2015, the Danish army has provided training, advisory and security support as part of Resolute Support Mission.


title: Royal Danish Army

text: In an effort to relieve police officers in Copenhagen and at the border control, Danish soldiers replaced police officers in 2017 at different locations, marking the first time in 86 years soldiers were used to keep order in cities.


title: Royal Danish Army

text: The structure of the Danish army changed in 2015, leaving Danish Division without brigades or support troops directly under its command. The two brigades had only command over combat battalions, as combat support and logistic support units were grouped under various support centres. 1st Brigade consisted of four combat battalions and was tasked with providing troops for international deployments. 2nd Brigade consisted of five battalions and was tasked with the defence of the Danish territory. Support centres contained the army's combat support, combat logistic and general support units. This structure was changed in


title: Royal Danish Army

text: The Danish Army Aviation Troops ("Hærens Flyvertropper") were established in 1923 following the rapid development of military aircraft technology. The Aviation Troops flew two squadrons of Fokker C.V reconnaissance aircraft from 1923 to 1932, when 17 Gloster Gauntlet fighters were purchased to form two new squadrons.


title: Royal Danish Army

text: In 1937, ten Fokker D.XXI fighters were built on licence in the Royal Army Aircraft Factory at Værløse.


title: Royal Danish Army

text: As a result of the establishment of the Royal Danish Air Force in 1950, the Army Aviation Troops were disbanded and activities transferred to the new service. During the Cold War the Army created the Royal Danish Army Air Corps("Hærens Flyvetjeneste") in 1971 with 12 Hughes OH-6 Cayuseas Light observation helicopter. in 1974 additional 4 Hughes OH-6 Cayuse was added . In 1990 the army bought 12 Eurocopter Fennec as anti-tank helicopter. But with the end of the Cold War and the reduction of forces, the 12 Eurocopter Fennec AS 550 and 10 Hughes OH-6 Cayuse(both as utility helicopters) were transferred to the Squadron 724 of the Air Force in 2003 and the Army Air Service disbanded.


title: Royal Danish Army

text: Each regiment and corps has distinctive insignia, such as a cap badge, berets, Formation patchs or stable belt.


title: Royal Danish Army

text: The Army has throughout its long history had many different regiments that have either changed names, been disbanded or been amalgamated or merged. Since the end of the Cold War has seen a lot of cuts to army expenditure, many regiments have been downsized and merged. Likewise further development of military tactics, have led to a streamlining of the regiments.


title: Vizier

text: A vizier (; ; ), or wazir, is a high-ranking political advisor or minister in the near east. The Abbasid caliphs gave the title "wazir" to a minister formerly called "katib" (secretary), who was at first merely a helper but afterwards became the representative and successor of the "dapir" (official scribe or secretary) of the Sassanian kings.


title: Vizier

text: In modern usage, the term has been used for government ministers in much of the Middle East and beyond.


title: Vizier

text: Vizier is suggested to be an Iranian word, from the Pahlavi root of "vičir", which originally had the meaning of a "decree", "mandate", and "command", but later as its use in Dinkard also suggests, came to mean "judge" or "magistrate". Arthur Jeffery considers the word to be a "good Iranian" word, as has a well-established root in Avestan language. The Pahlavi "vičir", is in fact from the Avestan "vīčira", which means "deciding". This Avestan root is behind the Modern Persian form of the word which is "večer" which means "judge".


title: Vizier

text: Another possibility is that the etymology of the word is derived from the Arabic "wazara" ("to bear a burden"), from the Semitic root "W-Z-R". The word is mentioned in the Quran, where Aaron is described as the "wazir" (helper) of Moses, as well as the word "wizr" (burden) which is also derived from the same root. It was later adopted as a title, in the form of "wazīr āl Muḥammad" ("Helper of the Family of Muhammad") by the proto-Shi'a leaders al-Mukhtar and Abu Salama. Under the Abbasid caliphs, the term acquired the meaning of "representative" or "deputy".


title: Vizier

text: The vizier stood between sovereign and subjects, representing the former in all matters touching the latter. The 11th-century legal theorist al-Mawardi defined two types of viziers: "wazīr al-tanfīdh" ("vizier of execution"), who had limited powers and served to implement the caliph's policies, and the far more powerful "wazīr al-tafwīd" ("vizier with delegated powers"), with authority over civil and military affairs, and enjoyed the same powers as the caliph, except in the matter of the succession or the appointment of officials. Al-Mawardi stressed that the latter, as an effective viceroy, had to be a Muslim well versed in the "Shari'a", whereas the former could also be a non-Muslim or even a slave, although women continued to be expressly barred from the office.


title: Vizier

text: Historically, the term has been used to describe two very different ways: either for a unique position, the prime minister at the head of the monarch's government (the term Grand Vizier always refers to such a post), or as a shared 'cabinet rank', rather like a British secretary of state. If one such vizier is the prime minister, he may hold the title of Grand Vizier or another title.


title: Vizier

text: "Wazīr" is the standard Arabic word for a government minister. Prime ministers are usually termed as "Ra'īs al-Wuzara" (literally, president of the ministers) or "al-Wazīr al-'Awwal" (prime minister). The latter term is generally found in the Maghreb, while the former is typical of usage in the Mashriq (broadly defined, including Egypt, Sudan, Levant, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula). Thus, for example, the Prime Minister of Egypt is in Arabic a "wazīr".


title: Vizier

text: In Iran the ministers of government are called "Vazir" in Persian (e.g. foreign/health "Vazir"), and prime minister of state before the removal of the post, was called as "Nokhost Vazir".


title: Vizier

text: In Pakistan, the prime minister (de facto ruling politician, formally under the president) is called "Vazīr-e Azam" (Persian for Grand vizier), other Ministers are styled "vazir"s.


title: Vizier

text: In India, "Vazīr" is the official translation of minister in the Urdu language, and is used in ministerial oath taking ceremonies conducted in Urdu.


title: Vizier

text: In East Africa – Kenya and Tanzania, ministers are referred to as Waziri in Swahili and prime ministers as Waziri Mkuu.


title: Vizier

text: In the rare case of the Indian princely state of Jafarabad (Jafrabad, founded c. 1650), ruled by "Thanadar"s, in 1702 a state called Janjira was founded, with rulers (six incumbents) styled "wazir"; when, in 1762, Jafarabad and Janjira states entered into personal union, both titles were maintained until (after 1825) the higher style of Nawab was assumed.


title: Vizier

text: In contemporary literature and pantomime, the "Grand Vizier" is a character stereotype and is usually portrayed as a scheming backroom plotter and the clear power behind the throne of a usually bumbling or incompetent monarch. A well-known example of this is the sinister character of Jafar in the Disney animated film "Aladdin", who plots and uses magic to take over the entire Kingdom of Agrabah under the nose of the nation's naïve sultan, just as Jaffar in the 1940 movie "The Thief of Bagdad" dethroned his master, caliph Ahmad. Others include Zigzag from "The Thief and the Cobbler" (the original inspiration for the character of Jafar in Disney's "Aladdin"), the comic book character Iznogoud, Prince Sinbad's advisor Yusuf in the DC Vertigo series "Fables", and the villains of the video games "Prince of Persia" and "".


title: Vizier

text: Perhaps the origin of this character archetype is the biblical account of Esther. The book details the rise of a Jewish woman to Queen of Persia, and her role in stopping the plot of Haman, chief advisor to the Persian king, to wipe out all Jews living in Persia.


title: Vizier

text: Throughout history the notion of the sinister Grand Vizier has often been invoked when a political leader appears to be developing a cozy relationship with a spiritual advisor of questionable scruples or talents. This stereotype is frequently mentioned in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, as for example in both Sourcery and Interesting Times. Another instance of a sinister Grand Vizier in entertainment can be found in the science fiction series Lexx, the primary antagonist in the second season being Mantrid, the self-proclaimed "greatest Bio-Vizier of all time."


title: Vizier

text: In Shatranj, from which modern chess developed, the piece corresponding to the modern chess "queen" (though far weaker) was often called "Wazīr".


title: Vizier

text: Up to the present, the word for the queen piece in chess is still called by variants of the word "vazīr" in Middle Eastern languages, as well as in Hungarian ("vezér", meaning "leader") and Russian ("ferz' (ферзь)").


title: Baraka (film)

text: Baraka is a 1992 American non-narrative documentary film directed by Ron Fricke. The film is often compared to "Koyaanisqatsi", the first of the "Qatsi" films by Godfrey Reggio for which Fricke served as cinematographer. It was photographed in the 70 mm Todd-AO format, and is the first film ever to be restored and scanned at 8K resolution.


title: Baraka (film)

text: "Baraka" is a documentary film with no narrative or voice-over. It explores themes via a compilation of natural events, life, human activities and technological phenomena shot in 24 countries on six continents over a 14-month period.


title: Baraka (film)

text: The film is Ron Fricke's follow-up to Godfrey Reggio's similar non-verbal documentary film "Koyaanisqatsi". Fricke was cinematographer and collaborator on Reggio's film, and for "Baraka" he struck out on his own to polish and expand the photographic techniques used on "Koyaanisqatsi". Shot in 70 mm, it includes a mixture of photographic styles including slow motion and time-lapse. Two camera systems were used to achieve this. A Todd-AO system was used to shoot conventional frame rates, but to execute the film's time-lapse sequences Fricke had a special camera built that combined time-lapse photography with perfectly controlled movements.