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1404 | AV | AV, Av or A.V. may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
The abbreviation of audiovisual, possessing both a sound and a visual component
A.V. (film), a 2005 Hong Kong film directed by Pang Ho-Cheung
Adult video, an alternative name/synonym of a pornographic film
AV The Hunt, a 2020 Turkish thriller film directed by Emre Akay
Businesses and organizations
America Votes, an American 501(c)4 organization that promotes progressive causes
Ambulance Victoria, an ambulance service operated in the Australian state of Victoria
Anonymous for the Voiceless, a grassroots animal rights organization specializing in street activism
Aston Villa F.C., an English professional football club
AV Akademikerverlag GmbH & Co. KG an imprint of the German group VDM Publishing (now OmniScriptum)
Avaya, a technology company formerly listed on the New York Stock Exchange with symbol "AV"
Avianca (IATA airline code AV)
Aviva, British insurance company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange and London Stock Exchange as "AV"
AeroVironment, manufacturer of unmanned military aircraft and systems
Amusement Vision, the former name of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio
People
Av or Avrum Gross (1936–2018), American lawyer and Attorney General of Alaska
Av or Avrom Isaacs (1926–2016), Canadian art dealer
Av Westin (1929–2022), American television producer
Arun Vijay (born 1977), Indian actor
Places
Anguilla (FIPS country code and obsolete NATO diagram AV)
Antelope Valley, a valley in Southern California
Province of Avellino, a province of Italy
Science and technology
Anatomy and medicine
Aerobic vaginitis, vaginal infection associated with overgrowth of aerobic bacteria
Arteriovenous (disambiguation)
Atrioventricular (disambiguation)
Electronics and computing
Access violation, a computer software error
Age verification, system for checking a user's age
Antivirus software, used to prevent, detect and remove malicious software
Audio and video connector, a cable between two devices
Analog video
AV Linux, a Linux-based operating system
Fluid dynamics
Annular velocity, speed of the drilling fluid's movement in a column called an annulus in oil wells
Apparent viscosity, shear stress divided by shear rate
Vehicles
AV (cyclecar), a British cyclecar manufactured between 1919 and 1924
Bavarian A V, an 1853 steam locomotive model
A US Navy hull classification symbol: Seaplane tender (AV)
Autonomous vehicles
Other uses in science and technology
A-type main-sequence star, in astronomy, abbreviated A V
Aperture value mode, setting on photo cameras that allows to choose a specific aperture value
Other uses
Alternative vote, an electoral system used to elect a single winner from a field of more than two candidates
Approval voting, a non-ranking vote system
Authorised Version of the Bible (also known as King James Version)
Av (month), a month in the Hebrew calendar
av, the Avar language's ISO 639-1 code
Av. or Ave, an abbreviation for Avenue (landscape)
or AV from Latin aurum (avrvm), a numismatic abbreviation for "gold"
A.V., the putative mark of ébéniste Adam Weisweiler
Aviation, abbreviated Av in military use
Andhra Vidyalaya College, aka A. V. College, a school in Hyderabad, India
See also
2023 AV, an asteroid that passed closed to the Earth in 2023
A5 (disambiguation)
α5 (disambiguation)
AV idol, a type of Japanese porn star
Category:Masculine given names
Category:Hypocorisms | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.230584 |
1408 | Alcuin | | caption = A Carolingian manuscript, . Rabanus Maurus (left), with Alcuin (middle), dedicating his work to Archbishop Otgar of Mainz (right)
| era =
| main_interests =
| birth_date =
| death_date = 19 May 804 (aged around 69)
| influences = Ecgbert of York
}}
Alcuin of York (;<!-- Editorial note: Lexico uses /a/ for the sound more accurately transcribed in IPA as /æ/ --> ; 735 – 19 May 804) – also called Ealhwine, Alhwin, or Alchoin – was a scholar, clergyman, poet, and teacher from York, Northumbria. He was born around 735 and became the student of Archbishop Ecgbert at York. At the invitation of Charlemagne, he became a leading scholar and teacher at the Carolingian court, where he remained a figure in the 780s and 790s. Before that, he was also a court chancellor in Aachen. "The most learned man anywhere to be found", according to Einhard's Life of Charlemagne (–833), he is considered among the most important intellectual architects of the Carolingian Renaissance. Among his pupils were many of the dominant intellectuals of the Carolingian era.
Alcuin wrote many theological and dogmatic treatises, as well as a few grammatical works and a number of poems. In 796, he was made abbot of Marmoutier Abbey, in Tours, where he worked on perfecting the Carolingian minuscule script. He remained there until his death.
Biography
Background
Alcuin was born in Northumbria, presumably sometime in the 730s. Virtually nothing is known of his parents, family background, or origin. In common hagiographical fashion, the Vita Alcuini asserts that Alcuin was of "noble English stock", and this statement has usually been accepted by scholars. Alcuin's own work only mentions such collateral kinsmen as Wilgils of Ripon, father of the missionary saint Willibrord; and Beornrad (also spelled Beornred), abbot of Echternach and bishop of Sens. Willibrord, Alcuin and Beornrad were all related by blood.
In his Life of St Willibrord, Alcuin writes that Wilgils called a Pater familias, had founded an oratory and church at the mouth of the Humber, which had fallen into Alcuin's possession by inheritance. Because in early Anglo-Latin writing paterfamilias ("head of a family, householder") usually referred to a ("churl"), Donald A. Bullough suggests that Alcuin's family was of ("churlish") status: i.e., free but subordinate to a noble lord, and that Alcuin and other members of his family rose to prominence through beneficial connections with the aristocracy. If so, Alcuin's origins may lie in the southern part of what was formerly known as Deira.
York
The young Alcuin came to the cathedral church of York during the golden age of Archbishop Ecgbert and his brother, the Northumbrian King Eadberht. Ecgbert had been a disciple of the Venerable Bede, who urged him to raise York to an archbishopric. King Eadberht and Archbishop Ecgbert oversaw the re-energising and reorganisation of the English church, with an emphasis on reforming the clergy and on the tradition of learning that Bede had begun. Ecgbert was devoted to Alcuin, who thrived under his tutelage.
The York school was renowned as a centre of learning in the liberal arts, literature, and science, as well as in religious matters. From here, Alcuin drew inspiration for the school he would lead at the Frankish court. He revived the school with the trivium and quadrivium disciplines, writing a codex on the trivium, while his student Hrabanus wrote one on the quadrivium.
Alcuin graduated to become a teacher during the 750s. His ascendancy to the headship of the York school, the ancestor of St Peter's School, began after Æthelbert of York became Archbishop of York in 767. Around the same time, Alcuin became a deacon in the church. He was never ordained a priest. Though no real evidence shows that he took monastic vows, he lived as if he had.
In 781, King Ælfwald I of Northumbria sent Alcuin to Rome to petition the Pope for official confirmation of York's status as an archbishopric and to confirm the election of the new archbishop, Eanbald I. On his way home, he met Charlemagne (whom he had met once before), this time in the Italian city of Parma. asserts Charlemagne met Alcuin – for the second time – at Parma in 781. reports that Alcuin had previously been sent to Charlemagne by Ethelbert.}}
Charlemagne
Alcuin's intellectual curiosity allowed him to be reluctantly persuaded to join Charlemagne's court. He joined an illustrious group of scholars whom Charlemagne had gathered around him, the mainsprings of the Carolingian Renaissance: Peter of Pisa, Paulinus II of Aquileia, Rado, and Abbot Saint Fulrad. Alcuin would later write, "the Lord was calling me to the service of King Charles".
Alcuin became master of the Palace School of Charlemagne in Aachen () in 782. It had been founded by the king's ancestors as a place for the education of the royal children (mostly in manners and the ways of the court). However, Charlemagne wanted to include the liberal arts, and most importantly, the study of religion. From 782 to 790, Alcuin taught Charlemagne himself, his sons Pepin and Louis, as well as young men sent to be educated at court, and the young clerics attached to the palace chapel. Bringing with him from York his assistants Pyttel, Sigewulf, and Joseph, Alcuin revolutionised the educational standards of the Palace School, introducing Charlemagne to the liberal arts and creating a personalised atmosphere of scholarship and learning, to the extent that the institution came to be known as the "school of Master Albinus".
In this role as adviser, he took issue with the emperor's policy of forcing pagans to be baptised on pain of death, arguing, "Faith is a free act of the will, not a forced act. We must appeal to the conscience, not compel it by violence. You can force people to be baptised, but you cannot force them to believe". His arguments seem to have prevailed – Charlemagne abolished the death penalty for paganism in 797.
Charlemagne gathered the best men of every land in his court and became far more than just the king at the centre. It seems that he made many of these men his closest friends and counsellors. They referred to him as "David", a reference to the Biblical king David. Alcuin soon found himself on intimate terms with Charlemagne and the other men at court, where pupils and masters were known by affectionate and jesting nicknames. Alcuin himself was known as 'Albinus' or 'Flaccus'. While at Aachen, Alcuin bestowed pet names upon his pupils – derived mainly from Virgil's Eclogues. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "He loved Charlemagne and enjoyed the king's esteem, but his letters reveal that his fear of him was as great as his love." Return to Northumbria and back to Francia
In 790, Alcuin returned from the court of Charlemagne to England, to which he had remained attached. He dwelt there for some time, but Charlemagne then invited him back to help in the fight against the Adoptionist heresy, which was at that time making great progress in Toledo, the old capital of the Visigoths and still a major city for the Christians under Islamic rule in Spain. He is believed to have had contacts with Beatus of Liébana, from the Kingdom of Asturias, who fought against Adoptionism. At the Council of Frankfurt in 794, Alcuin upheld the orthodox doctrine against the views expressed by Felix of Urgel, an heresiarch according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. Having failed during his stay in Northumbria to influence King Æthelred I in the conduct of his reign, Alcuin never returned home.
He was back at Charlemagne's court by at least mid-792, writing a series of letters to Æthelred, to Hygbald, Bishop of Lindisfarne, and to Æthelhard, Archbishop of Canterbury in the succeeding months, dealing with the Viking attack on Lindisfarne in July 793. These letters and Alcuin's poem on the subject, , provide the only significant contemporary account of these events. In his description of the Viking attack, he wrote: "Never before has such terror appeared in Britain. Behold the church of St Cuthbert, splattered with the blood of God's priests, robbed of its ornaments." Tours and death In 796, Alcuin was in his 60s. He hoped to be free from court duties and upon the death of Abbot Itherius of Saint Martin at Tours, Charlemagne put Marmoutier Abbey into Alcuin's care, with the understanding that he should be available if the king ever needed his counsel. There, he encouraged the work of the monks on the beautiful Carolingian minuscule script, ancestor of modern Roman typefaces using a mixture of upper- and lower-case letters. Latin paleography in the 8th century leaves little room for a single origin of the script, and sources contradict his importance as no proof has been found of his direct involvement in the creation of the script. Carolingian minuscule was already in use before Alcuin arrived in Francia. Most likely he was responsible for copying and preserving the script while at the same time restoring the purity of the form.
Alcuin died on 19 May 804, some 10 years before the emperor, and was buried at St. Martin's Church under an epitaph that partly read:
The majority of details on Alcuin's life come from his letters and poems. Also, autobiographical sections are in Alcuin's poem on York and in the Vita Alcuini, a hagiography written for him at Ferrières in the 820s, possibly based in part on the memories of Sigwulf, one of Alcuin's pupils.
Carolingian Renaissance figure and legacy
Mathematician
The collection of mathematical and logical word problems entitled Propositiones ad acuendos juvenes ("Problems to Sharpen Youths") is sometimes attributed to Alcuin. In a 799 letter to Charlemagne, the scholar claimed to have sent "certain figures of arithmetic for the joy of cleverness", which some scholars have identified with the Propositiones. }}
The text contains about 53 mathematical word problems (with solutions), in no particular pedagogical order. Among the most famous of these problems are: four that involve river crossings, including the problem of three anxious brothers, each of whom has an unmarried sister whom he cannot leave alone with either of the other men lest she be defiled (Problem 17); the problem of the wolf, goat, and cabbage (Problem 18); and the problem of "the two adults and two children where the children weigh half as much as the adults" (Problem 19). Alcuin's sequence is the solution to one of the problems of that book. Literary influence
Alcuin made the abbey school into a model of excellence and many students flocked to it. He had many manuscripts copied using outstandingly beautiful calligraphy, the Carolingian minuscule based on round and legible uncial letters. He wrote many letters to his English friends, to Arno, bishop of Salzburg and above all to Charlemagne. These letters (of which 311 are extant) are filled mainly with pious meditations, but they form an important source of information as to the literary and social conditions of the time and are the most reliable authority for the history of humanism during the Carolingian age. Alcuin trained the numerous monks of the abbey in piety, and in the midst of these pursuits, he died.
Alcuin is the most prominent figure of the Carolingian Renaissance, in which three main periods have been distinguished: in the first of these, up to the arrival of Alcuin at the court, the Italians occupy a central place; in the second, Alcuin and the English are dominant; in the third (from 804), the influence of Theodulf of Orléans is preponderant.
Alcuin also developed manuals used in his educational work – a grammar and works on rhetoric and dialectics. These are written in the form of a dialogue, and in two of them the interlocutors are Charlemagne and Alcuin. He wrote several theological treatises: a De fide Trinitatis, and commentaries on the Bible. Alcuin is credited with inventing the first known question mark, though it did not resemble the modern symbol.
Alcuin transmitted to the Franks the knowledge of Latin culture, which had existed in Anglo-Saxon England. A number of his works still exist. Besides some graceful epistles in the style of Venantius Fortunatus, he wrote some long poems, and notably he is the author of a history (in verse) of the church at York, Versus de patribus, regibus et sanctis Eboracensis ecclesiae. At the same time, he is noted for making one of the only explicit comments on Old English poetry surviving from the early Middle Ages, in a letter to one Speratus, the bishop of an unnamed English see (possibly Unwona of Leicester): ("Let God's words be read at the episcopal dinner-table. It is right that a reader should be heard, not a harpist, patristic discourse, not pagan song. What has Ingeld to do with Christ?").
Legacy
Alcuin is honoured in the Church of England and in the Episcopal Church on 20 May the first available day after the day of his death (as Dunstan is celebrated on 19 May).
Alcuin is also venerated as a Saint by Eastern Orthodox Christians in the British Isles and Ireland. The Orthodox Fellowship of John the Baptist publishes a liturgical calendar that is widely used in that region, and this calendar includes a feast for St Alcuin.
Alcuin College, one of the colleges of the University of York, is named after him. In January 2020, Alcuin was the subject of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time. In December 2024, Alcuin was prominently featured in a Part 2 of a 3-part podcast series on Charlemagne in The Rest Is History (podcast).
Selected works
For a complete census of Alcuin's works, see Marie-Hélène Jullien and Françoise Perelman, eds., Clavis scriptorum latinorum medii aevi: Auctores Galliae 735–987, Tomus II – Alcuinus, Turnhout, Brepols, 1999.
Poetry
* Carmina, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Poetae Latini aevi Carolini I, Berlin, Weidmann, 1881, 160–351.
** Godman, Peter, trad., Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1985, 118–149.
** Stella, Francesco, trad., comm., La poesia carolingia, Firenze: Le Lettere, 1995, pp. 94–96, 152–161, 266–267, 302–307, 364–371, 399–404, 455–457, 474–477, 503–507.
** Isbell, Harold, trad.; The Last Poets of Imperial Rome, Baltimore, Penguin, 1971.
* Poem on York, Versus de patribus, regibus et sanctis Euboricensis ecclesiae, ed. and trad. Peter Godman, The Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982.
* De clade Lindisfarnensis monasterii, "On the destruction of the monastery of Lindisfarne" (Carmen 9, ed. Dümmler, pp. 229–235).
Letters
Of Alcuin's letters, over 310 have survived:
* Epistolae, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH, Epistolae, IV.2, Berlin, Weidmann, 1895, 1–493;
* Jaffé, Philipp, Ernst Dümmler, and W. Wattenbach, eds. Monumenta Alcuiniana, Berlin, Weidmann, 1873, 132–897;
* Chase, Colin, ed. Two Alcuin Letter-books, Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1975;
* Allott, Stephen, trad. Alcuin of York, c. AD 732 to 804 – His life and letters, York, William Sessions, 1974;
* Sturgeon, Thomas G., trad. The Letters of Alcuin – Part One, the Aachen Period (762–796). Harvard University PhD thesis, 1953.
Didactic works
* Ars grammatica. PL 101, 854–902;
* De orthographia, ed. H. Keil, Grammatici Latini VII, 1880, 295–312; ed. Sandra Bruni, Alcuino de orthographia, Florence, SISMEL, 1997;
* De dialectica, PL 101, 950–976;
* Disputatio regalis et nobilissimi juvenis Pippini cum Albino scholastico, "Dialogue of Pepin, the Most Noble and Royal Youth, with the Teacher Albinus", ed. L. W. Daly and W. Suchier, Altercatio Hadriani Augusti et Epicteti Philosophi, Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press, 1939, 134–146; ed. Wilhelm Wilmanns, "Disputatio regalis et nobilissimi juvenis Pippini cum Albino scholastic", Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum, 14 (1869), 530–555, 562.
* Disputatio de rhetorica et de virtutibus sapientissimi regis Carli et Albini magistri, ed. and trad. Wilbur Samuel Howell, The Rhetoric of Alcuin and Charlemagne, New York, Russell and Russell, 1965 (1941); ed. C. Halm, Rhetorici Latini Minores, Leipzig, Teubner, 1863, 523–550;
* De virtutibus et vitiis (moral treatise dedicated to Count Wido of Brittany, 799–800), PL 101, 613–638 ([http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/04z/z_0735-0804__Alcuinus__De_Virtutibus_Et_Vitiis_Liber_Ad_Widonem_Comitem__MLT.pdf.html transcript available online]). A new critical edition is being prepared for the Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis;
* De animae ratione (ad Eulaliam virginem) (written for Gundrada, Charlemagne's cousin), PL 101, 639–650;
* De Cursu et Saltu Lunae ac Bissexto, astronomical treatise, PL 101, 979–1002;
* (?) Propositiones ad acuendos iuvenes, ed. Menso Folkerts, "Die alteste mathematische Aufgabensammlung in lateinischer Sprache, Die Alkuin zugeschriebenen Propositiones ad acuendos iuvenes; Überlieferung, Inhalt, Kritische Edition", in idem, Essays on Early Medieval Mathematics: The Latin Tradition, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003.
Theology
* Compendium in Canticum Canticorum: Alcuino, Commento al Cantico dei cantici – con i commenti anonimi Vox ecclesie e Vox antique ecclesie, ed. Rossana Guglielmetti, Firenze, SISMEL 2004;
* Quaestiones in Genesim, PL 100, 515–566;
* De Fide Sanctae Trinitatis et de Incarnatione Christi; Quaestiones de Sancta Trinitate, ed. E. Knibbs and E. Ann Matter (Corpus Christianorum – Continuatio Mediaevalis 249, Brepols, 2012).
Hagiography
* Vita II Vedastis episcopi Atrebatensis, Revision of the earlier Vita Vedastis by Jonas of Bobbio, Patrologia Latina, 101, 663–682;
* Vita Richarii confessoris Centulensis, Revision of an earlier anonymous life, MGH Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, 4, 381–401;
* Vita Willibrordi archiepiscopi Traiectensis, ed. W. Levison, Passiones vitaeque sanctorum aevi Merovingici, MGH Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum, 7, 81–141.
Notes and references
Notes
References
See also
* Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes
* Carolingian art
* Carolingian Empire
* Category: Carolingian period
* Correctory
* Codex Vindobonensis 795
Bibliography
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* Allott, Stephen; Alcuin of York, his life and letters
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* Dales, Douglas J.; "Accessing Alcuin – A Master Bibliography", The Lutterworth Press, Cambridge, 2013
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* Diem, Albrecht; "The Emergence of Monastic Schools – The Role of Alcuin", in: Luuk A. J. R. Houwen and Alasdair A. McDonald (eds.), Alcuin of York – Scholar at the Carolingian Court, Groningen 1998 (Germania Latina, vol. 3), pp. 27–44.
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* Duckett, Eleanor Shipley; Carolingian Portraits, (1962)
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* Ganshof, F.L.; The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy
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* Godman, Peter; Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance
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* Lorenz, Frederick; [https://archive.org/details/lifeofalcuin00lorerich The life of Alcuin], (Thomas Hurst, 1837).
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* McGuire, Brian P.; Friendship and Community – The Monastic Experience
* Murphy, Richard E.; Alcuin of York – De Virtutibus et Vitiis, Virtues and Vices
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* Stehling, Thomas; Medieval Latin Love Poems of Male Love and Friendship.
* Stella, Francesco; "Alkuins Dichtung" in Alkuin von York und die geistige Grundlegung Europas , Sankt Gallen, Verlag am Klosterhof, 2010, pp. 107–128.
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* Throop, Priscilla; trans. Alcuin – His Life; On Virtues and Vices; Dialogue with Pepin (Charlotte, VT: MedievalMS, 2011)
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* Andrew Fleming West [https://archive.org/details/alcuinriseofchri00westiala Alcuin and the Rise of the Christian Schools] (C. Scribner's Sons, 1912)
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External links
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* [http://logica.ugent.be/albrecht/alcuin.pdf Alcuin's book, Problems for the Quickening of the Minds of the Young]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20081205163439/http://www.bu.edu/english/levine/alcend.htm Introduction to Alcuin's writings by Robert Levine and Whitney Bolton]
* [http://www.alcuinsociety.com/ The Alcuin Society]
* [http://www.historyofyork.org.uk/timeline/anglo-saxon Anglo-Saxon York on History of York site]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20081118194921/http://www.corpuschristianorum.org/series/cccm_preparation.html Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis – new critical editions in preparation]
* [https://archive.today/20121204163129/http://kaali.linguist.jussieu.fr/CGL/index.jsp Corpus Grammaticorum Latinorum – complete texts and full bibliography]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20130502224321/http://cristoraul.com/ENGLISH/readinghall/GalleryofHistory/ALCUIN/Alcuin-Door.html The Life of Alcuin by Frederick Lorenz]
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Category:730s births
Category:Year of birth unknown
Category:804 deaths
Category:8th-century astronomers
Category:8th-century Christian theologians
Category:8th-century English writers
Category:8th-century Frankish writers
Category:8th-century writers in Latin
Category:8th-century mathematicians
Category:8th-century philosophers
Category:8th-century poets
Category:9th-century Christian abbots
Category:9th-century Christian theologians
Category:9th-century English writers
Category:9th-century English clergy
Category:9th-century philosophers
Category:People educated at St Peter's School, York
Category:Anglo-Saxon poets
Category:Anglo-Saxon saints
Category:Anglo-Saxon writers
Category:Carolingian poets
Category:Christian hagiographers
Category:Deacons
Category:English monks
Category:Grammarians of Latin
Category:Texts of Anglo-Saxon England in Latin
Category:Medieval chancellors (government)
Category:Medieval English mathematicians
Category:Medieval English theologians
Category:Medieval Latin-language poets
Category:8th-century linguists
Category:People from York
Category:Saints from the Carolingian Empire
Category:Scholastic philosophers
Category:Sources on Germanic paganism
Category:Writers from the Carolingian Empire
Category:Anglican saints
Category:Yorkshire saints | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcuin | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.257066 |
1409 | Angilbert | |birth_place|death_date18 February 814
|death_place=Centule, Austrasia, Francia
|feast_day=18 February
|venerated_in=Catholic Church<br>Eastern Orthodox Church
|image|imagesize
|caption|titlesAbbot of the Monastery of St Richarius<br/>Count of Ponthieu
|beatified_date=Pre-Congregation
|beatified_place|beatified_by
|canonized_date=1100
|canonized_place|canonized_byPope Urban II
|attributes|patronage
|major_shrine|suppressed_date
|issues|prayer
|prayer_attrib=
}}
Angilbert, Count of Ponthieu ( – 18 February 814)<!-- sometimes known as Saint Angilbert or Angilberk or Engelbert,--> was a noble Frankish poet who was educated under Alcuin and served Charlemagne as a secretary, diplomat, and son-in-law. He is venerated as a pre-Congregation saint and is still honored on the day of his death, 18 February.Life, copied between 795 and 800, and probably given by Charlemagne to Angilbert when the king visited Saint-Riquier for Easter 800]]
Angilbert seems to have been brought up at the court of Charlemagne at the palace school in Aquae Granni (Aachen). He was educated there as the pupil and then-friend of the great English scholar Alcuin. When Charlemagne sent his young son Pepin to Italy as King of the Lombards, Angilbert went along as primicerius palatii, a high administrator of the satellite court. As the friend and adviser of Pepin, he assisted for a while in the government of Italy. Angilbert delivered the document on Iconoclasm from the Frankish Synod of Frankfurt to Pope Adrian I, and was later sent on three important embassies to the pope, in 792, 794, and 796. At one time, he served an officer of the maritime provinces. He accompanied Charlemagne to Rome in 800 and was one of the witnesses to his will in 811.
There are various traditions concerning Angilbert's relationship with Bertha, daughter of Charlemagne. One holds that they were married, another that they were not. They had, however, at least one daughter and two sons, one of whom, Nithard, became a notable figure in the mid-9th century, while their daughter Bertha went on to marry Helgaud II, Count of Ponthieu. Control of marriage and the meanings of legitimacy were hotly contested in the Middle Ages. Bertha and Angilbert are an example of how resistance to the idea of a sacramental marriage could coincide with holding church offices. On the other hand, some historians have speculated that Charlemagne opposed formal marriages for his daughters out of concern for political rivalries from their potential husbands; none of Charlemagne's daughters were married, despite political offers of arranged marriages.
In 790, Angilbert retired to the abbey of Centulum, the "Monastery of St Richarius" () at present-day Saint-Riquier in Picardy. Elected abbot in 794, he rebuilt the monastery and endowed it with a library of 200 volumes. It was not uncommon for the Merovingian, Carolingian, or later kings to make laymen abbots of monasteries; the layman would often use the income of the monastery as his own and leave the monks a bare minimum for the necessary expenses of the foundation. Angilbert, in contrast, spent a great deal rebuilding Saint-Riquier; when he completed it, Charlemagne spent Easter of the year 800 there. In keeping with Carolingian policies, Angilbert established a school at Saint-Riquier to educate the local boys.
Poetry
Angilbert's Latin poems reveal the culture and tastes of a man of the world, enjoying the closest intimacy with the imperial family. Charlemagne and the other men at court were known by affectionate and jesting nicknames. Charlemagne was referred to as "David", a reference to the Biblical king David. Angilbert was nicknamed "Homer" because he wrote poetry, and was the probable author of an epic, of which the fragment which has been preserved describes the life at the palace and the meeting between Charlemagne and Leo III. It is a mosaic from Virgil, Ovid, Lucan and Venantius Fortunatus, composed in the manner of Einhard's use of Suetonius. Of the shorter poems, besides the greeting to Pippin on his return from the campaign against the Avars (796), an epistle to David (i.e., Charlemagne) incidentally reveals a delightful picture of the poet living with his children in a house surrounded by pleasant gardens near the emperor's palace. The reference to Bertha, however, is distant and respectful, her name occurring merely on the list of princesses to whom he sends his salutation.
The poem De conversione Saxonum has been attributed to Angilbert.
Angilbert's poems were published by Ernst Dümmler in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. For criticisms of this edition, see Ludwig Traube in Max Roediger's Schriften für germanische Philologie (1888).
Notes
References
* |url-statusdead |archiveurlhttps://web.archive.org/web/20150611021417/http://christdesert.org/public_texts/martyrology/ |archivedate11 June 2015 }}.
* |page=29 }}
* |page=32 }}
*
* }}.
* Attribution* |page9 }}
Further reading
* A. Molinier, ''Les Sources de l'histoire de France''.
Category:8th-century births
Category:Year of birth unknown
Category:814 deaths
Category:Medieval Latin-language poets
Category:Saints from the Carolingian Empire
Category:8th-century writers in Latin
Category:8th-century Frankish writers | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angilbert | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.263479 |
1412 | Amine | Amin|Anime}}
In chemistry, amines (, ) are compounds and functional groups that contain a basic nitrogen atom with a lone pair. Formally, amines are derivatives of ammonia ((in which the bond angle between the nitrogen and hydrogen is 107°), wherein one or more hydrogen atoms have been replaced by a substituent such as an alkyl or aryl group (these may respectively be called alkylamines and arylamines; amines in which both types of substituent are attached to one nitrogen atom may be called alkylarylamines). Important amines include amino acids, biogenic amines, trimethylamine, and aniline. Inorganic derivatives of ammonia are also called amines, such as monochloramine ().
The chemical notation for amines contains the letter "R", where "R" is not an element, but an "R-group", which in amines could be a single hydrogen or carbon atom, or could be a hydrocarbon chain.
Compounds with a nitrogen atom attached to a carbonyl group, thus having the structure , are called amides and have different chemical properties from amines.
Classification of amines
Amines can be classified according to the nature and number of substituents on nitrogen. Aliphatic amines contain only H and alkyl substituents. Aromatic amines have the nitrogen atom connected to an aromatic ring.
<!-- primary amine redirects to this section -->
{| class"wikitable" style"margin:auto 1em auto 1em; float:right; text-align:center;"
|- id="amino_group_connectivity_table"
! Primary (1°) amine !! Secondary (2°) amine !! Tertiary (3°) amine
|-
|
|
|
|}Amines, alkyl and aryl alike, are organized into three subcategories <small>(see table)</small> based on the number of carbon atoms adjacent to the nitrogen (how many hydrogen atoms of the ammonia molecule are replaced by hydrocarbon groups):
*Primary (1°) amines—Primary amines arise when one of three hydrogen atoms in ammonia is replaced by an alkyl or aromatic group. Important primary alkyl amines include methylamine, most amino acids, and the buffering agent tris, while primary aromatic amines include aniline.
*Secondary (2°) amines—Secondary amines have two organic substituents (alkyl, aryl or both) bound to the nitrogen together with one hydrogen. Important representatives include dimethylamine, while an example of an aromatic amine would be diphenylamine.
*Tertiary (3°) amines—In tertiary amines, nitrogen has three organic substituents. Examples include trimethylamine, which has a distinctively fishy smell, and EDTA.
A fourth subcategory is determined by the connectivity of the substituents attached to the nitrogen:
*Cyclic amines—Cyclic amines are either secondary or tertiary amines. Examples of cyclic amines include the 3-membered ring aziridine and the six-membered ring piperidine. N-methylpiperidine and N-phenylpiperidine are examples of cyclic tertiary amines.
It is also possible to have four organic substituents on the nitrogen. These species are not amines but are quaternary ammonium cations and have a charged nitrogen center. Quaternary ammonium salts exist with many kinds of anions.
Naming conventions
Amines are named in several ways. Typically, the compound is given the prefix "amino-" or the suffix "-amine". The prefix "N-" shows substitution on the nitrogen atom. An organic compound with multiple amino groups is called a diamine, triamine, tetraamine and so forth.
Lower amines are named with the suffix -amine.
]]
Higher amines have the prefix amino as a functional group. IUPAC however does not recommend this convention, but prefers the alkanamine form, e.g. butan-2-amine.
(or butan-2-amine)]]
Physical properties
Hydrogen bonding significantly influences the properties of primary and secondary amines. For example, methyl and ethyl amines are gases under standard conditions, whereas the corresponding methyl and ethyl alcohols are liquids. Amines possess a characteristic ammonia smell, liquid amines have a distinctive "fishy" and foul smell.
The nitrogen atom features a lone electron pair that can bind H<sup>+</sup> to form an ammonium ion R<sub>3</sub>NH<sup>+</sup>. The lone electron pair is represented in this article by two dots above or next to the N. The water solubility of simple amines is enhanced by hydrogen bonding involving these lone electron pairs. Typically salts of ammonium compounds exhibit the following order of solubility in water: primary ammonium () > secondary ammonium () > tertiary ammonium (R<sub>3</sub>NH<sup>+</sup>). Small aliphatic amines display significant solubility in many solvents, whereas those with large substituents are lipophilic. Aromatic amines, such as aniline, have their lone pair electrons conjugated into the benzene ring, thus their tendency to engage in hydrogen bonding is diminished. Their boiling points are high and their solubility in water is low.
Spectroscopic identification
Typically the presence of an amine functional group is deduced by a combination of techniques, including mass spectrometry as well as NMR and IR spectroscopies. <sup>1</sup>H NMR signals for amines disappear upon treatment of the sample with D<sub>2</sub>O. In their infrared spectrum primary amines exhibit two N-H bands, whereas secondary amines exhibit only one.StructureAlkyl amines
on the nitrogen atom.]]
Alkyl amines characteristically feature tetrahedral nitrogen centers. C-N-C and C-N-H angles approach the idealized angle of 109°. C-N distances are slightly shorter than C-C distances. The energy barrier for the nitrogen inversion of the stereocenter is about 7 kcal/mol for a trialkylamine. The interconversion has been compared to the inversion of an open umbrella into a strong wind.
Amines of the type NHRR' and NRR′R″ are chiral: the nitrogen center bears four substituents counting the lone pair. Because of the low barrier to inversion, amines of the type NHRR' cannot be obtained in optical purity. For chiral tertiary amines, NRR′R″ can only be resolved when the R, R', and R″ groups are constrained in cyclic structures such as N-substituted aziridines (quaternary ammonium salts are resolvable).
Aromatic amines
In aromatic amines ("anilines"), nitrogen is often nearly planar owing to conjugation of the lone pair with the aryl substituent. The C-N distance is correspondingly shorter. In aniline, the C-N distance is the same as the C-C distances.
Basicity
Like ammonia, amines are bases. Compared to alkali metal hydroxides, amines are weaker.
{| class"wikitable" style"float:center; margin:0 1em;"
|-
!Alkylamine or aniline
! pK<sub>a</sub> of <br />protonated amine
! K<sub>b</sub>
|-
| Methylamine (MeNH<sub>2</sub>)
| 10.62
|
|-
| Dimethylamine (Me<sub>2</sub>NH)
| 10.64
|
|-
| Trimethylamine (Me<sub>3</sub>N)
| 9.76
|
|-
| Ethylamine (EtNH<sub>2</sub>)
| 10.63
|
|-
| Aniline (PhNH<sub>2</sub>)
| 4.62
|
|-
| 4-Methoxyaniline (4-MeOC<sub>6</sub>H<sub>4</sub>NH<sub>2</sub>)
| 5.36
|
|-
| N,N-Dimethylaniline (PhNMe<sub>2</sub>)
| 5.07
|
|-
| 3-Nitroaniline (3-NO<sub>2</sub>-C<sub>6</sub>H<sub>4</sub>NH<sub>2</sub>)
| 2.46
|
|-
| 4-Nitroaniline (4-NO<sub>2</sub>-C<sub>6</sub>H<sub>4</sub>NH<sub>2</sub>)
| 1.00
|
|-
| 4-Trifluoromethylaniline (CF<sub>3</sub>C<sub>6</sub>H<sub>4</sub>NH<sub>2</sub>)
| 2.75
|
|}
The basicity of amines depends on:
# The electronic properties of the substituents (alkyl groups enhance the basicity, aryl groups diminish it).
# The degree of solvation of the protonated amine, which includes steric hindrance by the groups on nitrogen.
Electronic effects
Owing to inductive effects, the basicity of an amine might be expected to increase with the number of alkyl groups on the amine. Correlations are complicated owing to the effects of solvation which are opposite the trends for inductive effects. Solvation effects also dominate the basicity of aromatic amines (anilines). For anilines, the lone pair of electrons on nitrogen delocalizes into the ring, resulting in decreased basicity. Substituents on the aromatic ring, and their positions relative to the amino group, also affect basicity as seen in the table.
Solvation effects
Solvation significantly affects the basicity of amines. N-H groups strongly interact with water, especially in ammonium ions. Consequently, the basicity of ammonia is enhanced by 10<sup>11</sup> by solvation. The intrinsic basicity of amines, i.e. the situation where solvation is unimportant, has been evaluated in the gas phase. In the gas phase, amines exhibit the basicities predicted from the electron-releasing effects of the organic substituents. Thus tertiary amines are more basic than secondary amines, which are more basic than primary amines, and finally ammonia is least basic. The order of pK<sub>b</sub>'s (basicities in water) does not follow this order. Similarly aniline is more basic than ammonia in the gas phase, but ten thousand times less so in aqueous solution.
In aprotic polar solvents such as DMSO, DMF, and acetonitrile the energy of solvation is not as high as in protic polar solvents like water and methanol. For this reason, the basicity of amines in these aprotic solvents is almost solely governed by the electronic effects.
Synthesis
<!-- This section is linked from Organic reaction -->
From alcohols
Industrially significant alkyl amines are prepared from ammonia by alkylation with alcohols:
Selectivity can be improved via the Delépine reaction, although this is rarely employed on an industrial scale. Selectivity is also assured in the Gabriel synthesis, which involves organohalide reacting with potassium phthalimide.
Aryl halides are much less reactive toward amines and for that reason are more controllable. A popular way to prepare aryl amines is the Buchwald-Hartwig reaction.
From alkenes
Disubstituted alkenes react with HCN in the presence of strong acids to give formamides, which can be decarbonylated. This method, the Ritter reaction, is used industrially to produce tertiary amines such as tert-octylamine.
|-
|valign=top| Hofmann degradation
|valign=top|Amide
| This reaction is valid for preparation of primary amines only. Gives good yields of primary amines uncontaminated with other amines.
|-
|valign=top| Hofmann elimination
|valign=top| Quaternary ammonium salt
|Upon treatment with strong base
|-
|valign=top| Leuckart reaction
|valign=top| Ketones and aldehydes
| Reductive amination with formic acid and ammonia via an imine intermediate
|-
|valign=top| Hofmann–Löffler reaction
|valign=top| Haloamine
|
|-
|valign=top| Eschweiler–Clarke reaction
|valign=top| Amine
| Reductive amination with formic acid and formaldehyde via an imine intermediate
|}
Reactions
Alkylation, acylation, and sulfonation, etc.
Aside from their basicity, the dominant reactivity of amines is their nucleophilicity. Most primary amines are good ligands for metal ions to give coordination complexes. Amines are alkylated by alkyl halides. Acyl chlorides and acid anhydrides react with primary and secondary amines to form amides (the "Schotten–Baumann reaction").
Similarly, with sulfonyl chlorides, one obtains sulfonamides. This transformation, known as the Hinsberg reaction, is a chemical test for the presence of amines.
Because amines are basic, they neutralize acids to form the corresponding ammonium salts . When formed from carboxylic acids and primary and secondary amines, these salts thermally dehydrate to form the corresponding amides.
:<math chem"" title"Amine reaction with carboxylic acids">
{
\underbrace\ce{H-\!\!\overset{\displaystyle R1 \atop |}{\underset{| \atop \displaystyle R2}N}\!\!\!\!:}_\text{amine} +
\underbrace\ce{R3-\overset{\displaystyle O \atop \|}C-OH}_\text{carboxylic acid} ->
}\
\underbrace\ce{{H-\overset{\displaystyle R1 \atop |}{\underset{| \atop \displaystyle R2}{N+}}-H} + R3-COO^-}
_{\text{substituted-ammonium} \atop \text{carboxylate salt}}
\ce{->[\text{heat}][\text{dehydration}]}{
\underbrace\ce{\overset{\displaystyle R1 \atop |}{\underset{| \atop \displaystyle R2}N}\!\!-\overset{\displaystyle O \atop \|}C-R3}_\text{amide} +
\underbrace\ce{H2O}_\text{water}
}</math>
Amines undergo sulfamation upon treatment with sulfur trioxide or sources thereof:
:<chem>R2NH + SO3 -> R2NSO3H</chem>
Diazotization
Amines reacts with nitrous acid to give diazonium salts. The alkyl diazonium salts are of little importance because they are too unstable. The most important members are derivatives of aromatic amines such as aniline ("phenylamine") (A = aryl or naphthyl):
:<chem>ANH2 + HNO2 + HX -> AN2+ + X- + 2 H2O</chem>
Anilines and naphthylamines form more stable diazonium salts, which can be isolated in the crystalline form. Diazonium salts undergo a variety of useful transformations involving replacement of the group with anions. For example, cuprous cyanide gives the corresponding nitriles:
:<chem>AN2+ + Y- -> AY + N2</chem>
Aryldiazoniums couple with electron-rich aromatic compounds such as a phenol to form azo compounds. Such reactions are widely applied to the production of dyes.Conversion to iminesImine formation is an important reaction. Primary amines react with ketones and aldehydes to form imines. In the case of formaldehyde (R' H), these products typically exist as cyclic trimers: <chem displayblock>RNH2 + R'_2CO -> R'_2CNR + H2O</chem> Reduction of these imines gives secondary amines: <chem displayblock>R'_2C=NR + H2 -> R'_2CH-NHR</chem>
Similarly, secondary amines react with ketones and aldehydes to form enamines: <chem displayblock> R2NH + R'(RCH2)CO -> RCH=C(NR2)R' + H2O</chem>
Mercuric ions reversibly oxidize tertiary amines with an α hydrogen to iminium ions: <chem displayblock>Hg^2+ + R2NCH2R' <> Hg + [R2NCHR']+ + H+</chem>Overview
An overview of the reactions of amines is given below:
{| class"wikitable sortable" style"background:white; float:center; margin:0 1em;"
|-
! style"width:200px;"|Reaction name !! Reaction product !! class"unsortable" | Comment
|-
|valign=top | Amine alkylation
|valign=top|Amines
| Degree of substitution increases
|-
|valign=top | Schotten–Baumann reaction
|valign=top|Amide
| Reagents: acyl chlorides, acid anhydrides
|-
|valign=top | Hinsberg reaction
|valign=top|Sulfonamides
| Reagents: sulfonyl chlorides
|-
|valign=top | Amine–carbonyl condensation
|valign=top|Imines
|-
|valign=top | Organic oxidation
|valign=top|Nitroso compounds
| Reagent: peroxymonosulfuric acid
|-
|valign=top | Organic oxidation
|valign=top| Diazonium salt
| Reagent: nitrous acid
|-
|valign=top| Zincke reaction
|Zincke aldehyde
| Reagent: pyridinium salts, with primary and secondary amines
|-
|valign=top| Emde degradation
|valign=top|Tertiary amine
| Reduction of quaternary ammonium cations
|-
|valign=top| Hofmann–Martius rearrangement
|valign=top|Aryl-substituted anilines
|-
|valign=top| von Braun reaction
|valign=top| Organic cyanamide
|By cleavage (tertiary amines only) with cyanogen bromide
|-
|valign=top| Hofmann elimination
|valign=top| Alkene
|Proceeds by β-elimination of less hindered carbon
|-
|valign=top| Cope reaction
|valign=top| Alkene
|Similar to Hofmann elimination
|-
|valign=top| Carbylamine reaction
|valign=top| Isonitrile
|Primary amines only
|-
|valign=top| Hofmann's mustard oil test
|valign=top| Isothiocyanate
|Carbon disulfide and mercury(II) chloride are used. Thiocyanate smells like mustard.
|}
Biological activity
Amines are ubiquitous in biology. The breakdown of amino acids releases amines, famously in the case of decaying fish which smell of trimethylamine. Many neurotransmitters are amines, including epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, and histamine. Protonated amino groups () are the most common positively charged moieties in proteins, specifically in the amino acid lysine. The anionic polymer DNA is typically bound to various amine-rich proteins. Additionally, the terminal charged primary ammonium on lysine forms salt bridges with carboxylate groups of other amino acids in polypeptides, which is one of the primary influences on the three-dimensional structures of proteins.
Amine hormones
Hormones derived from the modification of amino acids are referred to as amine hormones. Typically, the original structure of the amino acid is modified such that a –COOH, or carboxyl, group is removed, whereas the , or amine, group remains. Amine hormones are synthesized from the amino acids tryptophan or tyrosine.Application of aminesDyes
Primary aromatic amines are used as a starting material for the manufacture of azo dyes. It reacts with nitrous acid to form diazonium salt, which can undergo coupling reaction to form an azo compound. As azo-compounds are highly coloured, they are widely used in dyeing industries, such as:
* Methyl orange
* Direct brown 138
* Sunset yellow FCF
* Ponceau
Drugs
Most drugs and drug candidates contain amine functional groups:
* Chlorpheniramine is an antihistamine that helps to relieve allergic disorders due to cold, hay fever, itchy skin, insect bites and stings.
* Chlorpromazine is a tranquilizer that sedates without inducing sleep. It is used to relieve anxiety, excitement, restlessness or even mental disorder.
* Ephedrine and phenylephrine, as amine hydrochlorides, are used as decongestants.
* Amphetamine, methamphetamine, and methcathinone are psychostimulant amines that are listed as controlled substances by the US DEA.
* Thioridazine, an antipsychotic drug, is an amine which is believed to exhibit its antipsychotic effects, in part, due to its effects on other amines.
* Amitriptyline, imipramine, lofepramine and clomipramine are tricyclic antidepressants and tertiary amines.
* Nortriptyline, desipramine, and amoxapine are tricyclic antidepressants and secondary amines. (The tricyclics are grouped by the nature of the final amino group on the side chain.)
* Substituted tryptamines and phenethylamines are key basic structures for a large variety of psychedelic drugs.
* Opiate analgesics such as morphine, codeine, and heroin are tertiary amines.
Gas treatment
Aqueous monoethanolamine (MEA), diglycolamine (DGA), diethanolamine (DEA), diisopropanolamine (DIPA) and methyldiethanolamine (MDEA) are widely used industrially for removing carbon dioxide (CO<sub>2</sub>) and hydrogen sulfide (H<sub>2</sub>S) from natural gas and refinery process streams. They may also be used to remove CO<sub>2</sub> from combustion gases and flue gases and may have potential for abatement of greenhouse gases. Related processes are known as sweetening.Epoxy resin curing agentsAmines are often used as epoxy resin curing agents. These include dimethylethylamine, cyclohexylamine, and a variety of diamines such as 4,4-diaminodicyclohexylmethane. The reaction proceeds by the lone pair of electrons on the amine nitrogen attacking the outermost carbon on the oxirane ring of the epoxy resin. This relieves ring strain on the epoxide and is the driving force of the reaction. Molecules with tertiary amine functionality are often used to accelerate the epoxy-amine curing reaction and include substances such as 2,4,6-Tris(dimethylaminomethyl)phenol. It has been stated that this is the most widely used room temperature accelerator for two-component epoxy resin systems.SafetyLow molecular weight simple amines, such as ethylamine, are toxic with between 100 and 1000 mg/kg. They are skin irritants, especially as some are easily absorbed through the skin.<ref nameUllmann/> Amines are a broad class of compounds, and more complex members of the class can be extremely bioactive, for example strychnine.
See also
* Acid–base extraction
* Amine value
* Amine gas treating
* Ammine
* Biogenic amine
* Ligand isomerism
* Official naming rules for amines as determined by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC)
References
Further reading
* Introduction to Chemistry|urlhttps://courses.lumenlearning.com/introchem/chapter/amines/#:~:textThe%20amine%20functional%20group%20contains,by%20a%20carbon-containing%20substituent.&textAmine%20groups%20bonded%20to%20an,are%20known%20as%20aromatic%20amines.|access-date2021-07-22|websitecourses.lumenlearning.com}}
* External links
* [https://www.organic-chemistry.org/synthesis/C1N/amines/primaryamines.shtm Synthesis of amines]
* [http://www.millhousemedical.co.nz/files/docs/factsheet_7_amines_in_foods.pdf Factsheet, amines in food]
Category:Functional groups | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amine | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.295382 |
1416 | April 29 | Events
Pre-1600
* 801 – An earthquake in the Central Apennines hits Rome and Spoleto, damaging the basilica of San Paolo Fuori le Mura.
*1091 – Battle of Levounion: The Pechenegs are defeated by Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos.
*1429 – Joan of Arc arrives to relieve the Siege of Orléans.
*1483 – Gran Canaria, the main island of the Canary Islands, is conquered by the Kingdom of Castile.
*1521 – Swedish War of Liberation: Swedish troops defeat a Danish force in the Battle of Västerås.1601–1900*1760 – French forces commence the siege of Quebec which is held by the British.
*1770 – James Cook arrives in Australia at Botany Bay, which he names.
*1781 – American Revolutionary War: British and French ships clash in the Battle of Fort Royal off the coast of Martinique.
*1826 – The galaxy Centaurus A or NGC 5128 is discovered by James Dunlop.
*1861 – Maryland in the American Civil War: Maryland's House of Delegates votes not to secede from the Union.
*1862 – American Civil War: The Capture of New Orleans by Union forces under David Farragut.
*1864 – Theta Xi fraternity is founded at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the only fraternity to be founded during the American Civil War.1901–present*1903 – A landslide kills 70 people in Frank, in the District of Alberta, Canada.
*1910 – The Parliament of the United Kingdom passes the People's Budget, the first budget in British history with the expressed intent of redistributing wealth among the British public.
*1911 – Tsinghua University, one of mainland China's leading universities, is founded.
*1916 – World War I: The UK's 6th Indian Division surrenders to Ottoman Forces at the Siege of Kut in one of the largest surrenders of British forces up to that point.
* 1916 – Easter Rising: After six days of fighting, Irish rebel leaders surrender to British forces in Dublin, bringing the Easter Rising to an end.
*1945 – World War II: The Surrender of Caserta is signed by the commander of German forces in Italy.
* 1945 – World War II: Airdrops of food begin over German-occupied regions of the Netherlands.
* 1945 – World War II: Adolf Hitler marries his longtime partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker and designates Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor.
* 1945 – Dachau concentration camp is liberated by United States troops.
*1946 – The International Military Tribunal for the Far East convenes and indicts former Prime Minister of Japan Hideki Tojo and 28 former Japanese leaders for war crimes.
*1952 – Pan Am Flight 202 crashes into the Amazon basin near Carolina, Maranhão, Brazil, killing 50 people.
*1953 – The first U.S. experimental 3D television broadcast shows an episode of Space Patrol on Los Angeles ABC affiliate KECA-TV.
*1967 – After refusing induction into the United States Army the previous day, Muhammad Ali is stripped of his boxing title.
*1970 – Vietnam War: United States and South Vietnamese forces invade Cambodia to hunt Viet Cong.
*1974 – Watergate scandal: United States President Richard Nixon announces the release of edited transcripts of White House tape recordings relating to the scandal.
*1975 – Vietnam War: Operation Frequent Wind: The U.S. begins to evacuate U.S. citizens from Saigon before an expected North Vietnamese takeover. U.S. involvement in the war comes to an end.
* 1975 – Vietnam War: The North Vietnamese army completes its capture of all parts of South Vietnam-held Trường Sa Islands.
*1986 – A fire at the Central library of the Los Angeles Public Library damages or destroys 400,000 books and other items.
*1986 – The United States Navy aircraft carrier becomes the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to transit the Suez Canal, navigating from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea to relieve the .
*1986 – An assembly of Sikhs, known as a Sarbat Khalsa, officially declared independence for a state of Khalistan.
*1991 – A cyclone strikes the Chittagong district of southeastern Bangladesh with winds of around , killing at least 138,000 people and leaving as many as ten million homeless.
* 1991 – The 7.0 Racha earthquake affects Georgia with a maximum MSK intensity of IX (Destructive), killing 270 people.
*1992 – Riots in Los Angeles begin, following the acquittal of police officers charged with excessive force in the beating of Rodney King. Over the next three days 63 people are killed and hundreds of buildings are destroyed.
*1997 – The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 enters into force, outlawing the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons by its signatories.
*2004 – The final Oldsmobile is built in Lansing, Michigan, ending 107 years of vehicle production.
*2011 – The Wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton takes place at Westminster Abbey in London.
*2013 – A powerful explosion occurs in an office building in Prague, believed to have been caused by natural gas, and injures 43 people.
* 2013 – National Airlines Flight 102, a Boeing 747-400 freighter aircraft, crashes during takeoff from Bagram Airfield in Parwan Province, Afghanistan, killing all seven people on board.
*2015 – A baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox sets the all-time low attendance mark for Major League Baseball. Zero fans were in attendance for the game, as the stadium was officially closed to the public due to the 2015 Baltimore protests.
<!-- PLEASE do not add video game release dates. They will be removed on sight -->
Births
<!-- Please do not add yourself or anyone else without a biography in Wikipedia to this list. -->
Pre-1600
*1469 – William II, Landgrave of Hesse (d. 1509)
*1587 – Sophie of Saxony, Duchess of Pomerania (d. 1635)
1601–1900
*1636 – Esaias Reusner, German lute player and composer (d. 1679)
*1665 – James Butler, 2nd Duke of Ormonde, Irish general and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (d. 1745)
*1667 – John Arbuthnot, Scottish-English physician and polymath (d. 1735)
*1727 – Jean-Georges Noverre, French actor and dancer (d. 1810)
*1745 – Oliver Ellsworth, American lawyer and politician, 3rd Chief Justice of the United States (d. 1807)
*1758 – Georg Carl von Döbeln, Swedish general (d. 1820)
*1762 – Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, French general and politician, French Minister of Foreign Affairs (d. 1833)
*1780 – Charles Nodier, French librarian and author (d. 1844)
*1783 – David Cox, English landscape painter (d. 1859)
*1784 – Samuel Turell Armstrong, American publisher and politician, 14th Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts (d. 1850)
*1810 – Thomas Adolphus Trollope, English journalist and author (d. 1892)
*1818 – Alexander II of Russia (d. 1881)
*1837 – Georges Ernest Boulanger, French general and politician, French Minister of War (d. 1891)
*1842 – Carl Millöcker, Austrian composer and conductor (d. 1899)
*1847 – Joachim Andersen, Danish flautist, composer and conductor (d. 1907)
*1848 – Raja Ravi Varma, Indian painter and academic (d. 1906)
*1854 – Henri Poincaré, French mathematician, physicist and engineer (d. 1912)
*1863 – Constantine P. Cavafy, Egyptian-Greek journalist and poet (d. 1933)
* 1863 – William Randolph Hearst, American publisher and politician, founded the Hearst Corporation (d. 1951)
* 1863 – Maria Teresia Ledóchowska, Austrian nun and missionary (d. 1922)
*1872 – Harry Payne Whitney, American businessman and lawyer (d. 1930)
* 1872 – Forest Ray Moulton, American astronomer and academic (d. 1952)
*1875 – Rafael Sabatini, Italian-English novelist and short story writer (d. 1950)
*1879 – Thomas Beecham, English conductor (d. 1961)
*1880 – Adolf Chybiński, Polish historian, musicologist and academic (d. 1952)
*1882 – Auguste Herbin, French painter (d. 1960)
* 1882 – Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman, Dutch printer, typographer, and Nazi resister (d. 1945)
*1885 – Egon Erwin Kisch, Czech journalist and author (d. 1948)
*1887 – Robert Cushman Murphy, American ornithologist (d. 1973)
*1888 – Michael Heidelberger, American immunologist (d. 1991)
*1891 – Edward Wilfred Taylor, British businessman (d. 1980)
*1893 – Harold Urey, American chemist and astronomer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1981)
*1894 – Marietta Blau, Austrian physicist and academic (d. 1970)
*1895 – Vladimir Propp, Russian scholar and critic (d. 1970)
* 1895 – Malcolm Sargent, English organist, composer and conductor (d. 1967)
*1898 – E. J. Bowen, British physical chemist (d. 1980)
*1899 – Duke Ellington, American pianist, composer and bandleader (d. 1974)
* 1899 – Mary Petty, American illustrator (d. 1976)
*1900 – Amelia Best, Australian politician (d. 1979)1901–present*1901 – Hirohito, Japanese emperor (d. 1989)
*1907 – Fred Zinnemann, Austrian-American director and producer (d. 1997)
*1908 – Jack Williamson, American author and academic (d. 2006)
*1909 – Tom Ewell, American actor (d. 1994)
*1912 – Richard Carlson, American actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 1977)
*1915 – Henry H. Barschall, German-American physicist and academic (d. 1997)
*1917 – Maya Deren, Ukrainian-American director, poet, and photographer (d. 1961)
* 1917 – Celeste Holm, American actress and singer (d. 2012)
*1918 – George Allen, American football player and coach (d. 1990)
*1919 – Gérard Oury, French actor, director and screenwriter (d. 2006)
*1920 – Edward Blishen, English author and radio host (d. 1996)
* 1920 – Harold Shapero, American composer (d. 2013)
*1922 – Parren Mitchell, American politician (d. 2007)
* 1922 – Toots Thielemans, Belgian guitarist and harmonica player (d. 2016)
*1923 – Irvin Kershner, American actor, director and producer (d. 2010)
*1924 – Zizi Jeanmaire, French ballerina and actress (d. 2020)
*1925 – John Compton, Saint Lucian lawyer and politician, 1st Prime Minister of Saint Lucia (d. 2007)
* 1925 – Iwao Takamoto, American animator, director, and producer (d. 2007)
*1926 – Elmer Kelton, American journalist and author (d. 2009)
*1927 – Dorothy Manley, English sprinter (d. 2021)
* 1927 – Bill Slater, English footballer (d. 2018)
*1928 – Carl Gardner, American singer (d. 2011)
* 1928 – Heinz Wolff, German-English physiologist, engineer, and academic (d. 2017)
*1929 – Walter Kempowski, German author and academic (d. 2007)
* 1929 – Peter Sculthorpe, Australian composer and conductor (d. 2014)
* 1929 – April Stevens, American singer (d. 2023)
* 1929 – Maurice Strong, Canadian businessman and diplomat (d. 2015)
* 1929 – Jeremy Thorpe, English lawyer and politician (d. 2014)
*1930 – Jean Rochefort, French actor and director (d. 2017)
*1931 – Frank Auerbach, German-British painter (d. 2024)
* 1931 – Lonnie Donegan, Scottish-English singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2002)
* 1931 – Chris Pearson, Canadian politician, 1st Premier of Yukon (d. 2014)
*1932 – David Tindle, English painter and educator
* 1932 – Dmitry Zaikin, Soviet pilot and cosmonaut instructor (d. 2013)
*1933 – Ed Charles, American baseball player and coach (d. 2018)
* 1933 – Rod McKuen, American singer-songwriter and poet (d. 2015)
* 1933 – Willie Nelson, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer and actor
*1934 – Luis Aparicio, Venezuelan-American baseball player
* 1934 – Pedro Pires, Cape Verdean politician, 3rd President of Cape Verde
*1935 – Otis Rush, American blues singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2018)
*1936 – Zubin Mehta, Indian conductor
* 1936 – Adolfo Nicolás, Spanish priest, 13th Superior General of the Society of Jesus (d. 2020)
* 1936 – Alejandra Pizarnik, Argentine poet (d. 1972)
* 1936 – Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, English banker and philanthropist (d. 2024)
*1937 – Jill Paton Walsh, English author (d. 2020)
*1938 – Steven Bach, American writer, businessman and educator (d. 2009)
* 1938 – Bernie Madoff, American businessman, financier and convicted felon (d. 2021)
*1939 – Klaus Rinke, German contemporary artist
*1940 – George Adams, American musician (d. 1992)
* 1940 – Peter Diamond, American economist
*1941 – Hanne Darboven, German painter (d. 2009)
*1942 – Dick Chrysler, American politician
* 1942 – Rennie Fritchie, Baroness Fritchie, English civil servant and academic
*1943 – Duane Allen, American country singer
* 1943 – Brenda Dean, Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde, English union leader and politician (d. 2018)
* 1943 – Ruth Deech, Baroness Deech, English lawyer and academic
*1944 – Francis Lee, English footballer and businessman (d. 2023)
*1945 – Hugh Hopper, English bass guitarist (d. 2009)
* 1945 – Catherine Lara, French singer-songwriter and violinist
* 1945 – Tammi Terrell, American soul singer-songwriter (d. 1970)
*1946 – Rodney Frelinghuysen, American politician and lobbyist
*1947 – Tommy James, American singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer
* 1947 – Johnny Miller, American golfer and sportscaster
* 1947 – Jim Ryun, American runner and politician
*1948 – Edith Brown Clement, American judge
*1950 – Paul Holmes, New Zealand journalist (d. 2013)
* 1950 – Phillip Noyce, Australian director and producer
* 1950 – Debbie Stabenow, American social worker and politician
*1951 – Dale Earnhardt, American race car driver (d. 2001)
* 1951 – Jon Stanhope, Australian politician
*1952 – Geraldine Doogue, Australian journalist and television host
* 1952 – Nora Dunn, American actress and comedian
* 1952 – Bob McClure, American baseball player and coach
* 1952 – Dave Valentin, American flautist (d. 2017)
* 1953 – Bill Drummond, British musician
*1954 – Mo Brooks, American attorney and politician
* 1954 – Jerry Seinfeld, American comedian, actor and producer
*1955 – Leslie Jordan, American actor, comedian, writer and singer (d. 2022)
* 1955 – Kate Mulgrew, American actress
*1957 – Daniel Day-Lewis, British actor
* 1957 – Fiamē Naomi Mataʻafa, Samoan politician, 7th Prime Minister of Samoa
* 1957 – Joseph Morelle, American politician
*1958 – Kevin Moore, English footballer (d. 2013)
* 1958 – Michelle Pfeiffer, American actress
* 1958 – Eve Plumb, American actress
*1960 – Robert J. Sawyer, Canadian author and academic
*1962 – Polly Samson, English novelist, lyricist and journalist
*1963 – Mike Babcock, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
*1964 – Federico Castelluccio, Italian-American actor, director, producer and screenwriter
* 1964 – Lúðvík Bergvinsson, Icelandic politician
*1965 – Michel Bussi, French geographer, author, and academic
* 1965 – Amy Krouse Rosenthal, American author (d. 2017)
*1966 – Christian Tetzlaff, German violinist
*1968 – Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, Croatian politician and diplomat, 4th President of Croatia
*1969 – Paul Adelstein, American actor and writer
*1970 – Andre Agassi, American tennis player
* 1970 – Uma Thurman, American actress
*1975 – Garrison Starr, American singer-songwriter and producer
* 1975 – April Telek, Canadian actress
*1976 – Micol Ostow, American author, editor and educator
* 1976 – God Shammgod, American basketball player and coach
*1977 – Zuzana Hejdová, Czech tennis player
* 1977 – Claus Jensen, Danish international footballer and manager
* 1977 – David Sullivan, American film and television actor
*1978 – Bob Bryan, American tennis player
* 1978 – Mike Bryan, American tennis player
* 1978 – Tyler Labine, Canadian actor and comedian
*1979 – Lee Dong-gook, South Korean footballer
*1980 – Mathieu Biron, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1980 – Bre Blair, Canadian actress
*1981 – George McCartney, Northern Irish footballer
*1983 – Megan Boone, American actress
* 1983 – Jay Cutler, American football player
* 1983 – Sam Jones III, American actor
*1984 – Kirby Cote, Canadian swimmer
* 1984 – Lina Krasnoroutskaya, Russian tennis player
*1986 – Byun Yo-han, South Korean actor
* 1986 – Lee Chae-young, South Korean actress
*1987 – Rob Atkinson, English footballer
* 1987 – Sara Errani, Italian tennis player
* 1987 – Andre Russell, Jamaican cricketer
*1988 – Alfred Hui, Hong Kong singer
* 1988 – Taoufik Makhloufi, Algerian athlete
* 1988 – Jonathan Toews, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1988 – Younha, South Korean singer-songwriter and record producer
*1989 – Candace Owens, American political commentator and activist
*1990 – James Faulkner, Australian cricketer
* 1990 – Chris Johnson, American basketball player
*1991 – Adam Smith, English footballer
* 1991 – Jung Hye-sung, South Korean actress
* 1991 – Misaki Doi, Japanese tennis player
*1992 – Alina Rosenberg, German paralympic equestrian
*1994 – Christina Shakovets, German tennis player
*1996 – Katherine Langford, Australian actress
*1998 – Kimberly Birrell, Australian tennis player
* 1998 – Mallory Pugh, American soccer player
*2002 – Sinja Kraus, Austrian tennis player
*2007 – Infanta Sofía of Spain, Spanish princessDeathsPre-1600*1109 – Hugh of Cluny, French abbot (b. 1024)
*1380 – Catherine of Siena, Italian mystic, philosopher and saint (b. 1347)
*1594 – Thomas Cooper, English bishop, lexicographer, and theologian (b. 1517)1601–1900*1630 – Agrippa d'Aubigné, French soldier and poet (b. 1552)
*1658 – John Cleveland, English poet and author (b. 1613)
*1676 – Michiel de Ruyter, Dutch admiral (b. 1607)
*1707 – George Farquhar, Irish-English actor and playwright (b. 1678)
*1768 – Georg Brandt, Swedish chemist and mineralogist (b. 1694)
*1776 – Edward Wortley Montagu, English explorer and author (b. 1713)
*1833 – William Babington, Anglo-Irish physician and mineralogist (b. 1756)
*1848 – Chester Ashley, American politician (b. 1790)
*1854 – Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey, English field marshal and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (b. 1768)1901–present*1903 – Godfrey Carter, Australian businessman and politician, 39th Mayor of Melbourne (b. 1830)
* 1903 – Paul Du Chaillu, French-American anthropologist and zoologist (b. 1835)
*1905 – Ignacio Cervantes, Cuban pianist and composer (b. 1847)
*1916 – Jørgen Pedersen Gram, Danish mathematician and academic (b. 1850)
*1917 – Florence Farr, British actress, composer and director (b. 1860)
*1922 – Richard Croker, Irish American political boss (b. 1843)
*1924 – Ernest Fox Nichols, American educator and physicist (b. 1869)
*1925 – Ralph Delahaye Paine, American journalist and author (b. 1871)
*1933 – Clay Stone Briggs, American politician (b. 1876)
* 1933 – Constantine P. Cavafy, Greek poet and journalist (b. 1863)
*1935 – Leroy Carr, American singer, songwriter and pianist (b. 1905)
*1937 – William Gillette, American actor and playwright (b. 1853)
*1943 – Joseph Achron, Russian composer and violinist (b. 1886)
* 1943 – Ricardo Viñes, Spanish pianist (b. 1875)
*1944 – Billy Bitzer, American cinematographer (b. 1872)
* 1944 – Pyotr Stolyarsky, Soviet violinist (b. 1871)
*1947 – Irving Fisher, American economist and statistician (b. 1867)
*1951 – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian-English philosopher and academic (b. 1889)
* 1956 – Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, German field marshal (b. 1876)
*1959 – Kenneth Anderson, English soldier and Governor of Gibraltar (b. 1891)
*1966 – William Eccles, English physicist and engineer (b. 1875)
* 1966 – Paula Strasberg, American actress and acting coach (b. 1909)
*1967 – J. B. Lenoir, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1929)
*1968 – Aasa Helgesen, Norwegian midwife (b. 1877)
* 1968 – Lin Zhao, Chinese dissident (b. 1932)
*1978 – Theo Helfrich, German race car driver (b. 1913)
*1979 – Muhsin Ertuğrul, Turkish actor and director (b. 1892)
* 1979 – Hardie Gramatky, American author and illustrator (b. 1907)
*1980 – Alfred Hitchcock, English-American director and producer (b. 1899)
*1982 – Raymond Bussières, French actor, producer and screenwriter (b. 1907)
*1992 – Mae Clarke, American actress (b. 1910)
*1993 – Michael Gordon, American actor and director (b. 1909)
* 1993 – Mick Ronson, English guitarist, songwriter and producer (b. 1946)
*1997 – Mike Royko, American journalist and author (b. 1932)
*2000 – Phạm Văn Đồng, Vietnamese lieutenant and politician, 2nd Prime Minister of Vietnam (b. 1906)
*2001 – Arthur B. C. Walker Jr., American physicist and academic (b. 1936)
*2002 – Bob Akin, American race car driver and journalist (b. 1936)
*2003 – Janko Bobetko, Croatian Army general and Chief of the General Staff (b. 1919)
*2004 – John Henniker-Major, British diplomat and civil servant (b. 1916)
*2005 – William J. Bell, American screenwriter and producer (b. 1927)
* 2005 – Louis Leithold, American mathematician and academic (b. 1924)
*2006 – John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian-American economist and diplomat, United States Ambassador to India (b. 1908)
*2007 – Josh Hancock, American baseball player (b. 1978)
* 2007 – Dick Motz, New Zealand cricketer and rugby player (b. 1940)
* 2007 – Ivica Račan, Croatian politician, 7th Prime Minister of Croatia (b. 1944)
*2008 – Gordon Bradley, English-American footballer (b. 1933)
* 2008 – Albert Hofmann, Swiss chemist and academic (b. 1906)
*2010 – Avigdor Arikha, French-Israeli artist, printmaker and art historian (b. 1929)
*2011 – Siamak Pourzand, Iranian journalist and critic (b. 1931)
* 2011 – Joanna Russ, American writer, academic and radical feminist (b. 1937)
*2012 – Shukri Ghanem, Libyan politician, 22nd Prime Minister of Libya (b. 1942)
* 2012 – Joel Goldsmith, American composer and conductor (b. 1957)
* 2012 – Roland Moreno. French engineer, invented the smart card (b. 1945)
* 2012 – Kenny Roberts, American singer-songwriter (b. 1926)
*2013 – Alex Elisala, New Zealand-Australian rugby player (b. 1992)
* 2013 – Pesah Grupper, Israeli politician, 13th Israel Minister of Agriculture (b. 1924)
* 2013 – John La Montaine, American pianist and composer (b. 1920)
* 2013 – Kevin Moore, English footballer (b. 1958)
*2014 – Iveta Bartošová, Czech singer and actress (b. 1966)
* 2014 – Al Feldstein, American author and illustrator (b. 1925)
* 2014 – Bob Hoskins, English actor (b. 1942)
*2015 – François Michelin, French businessman (b. 1926)
* 2015 – Jean Nidetch, American businesswoman, co-founded Weight Watchers (b. 1923)
* 2015 – Calvin Peete, American golfer (b. 1943)
* 2015 – Dan Walker, American lawyer and politician, 36th Governor of Illinois (b. 1922)
*2016 – Renato Corona, Filipino lawyer and jurist, 23rd Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines (b. 1948)
*2017 – R. Vidyasagar Rao, Indian bureaucrat and activist (b. 1939)
*2018 – Luis García Meza, Bolivian general, 57th President of Bolivia (b. 1929)
* 2018 – Michael Martin, British politician (b. 1945)
*2019 – Josef Šural, Czech footballer (b. 1990)
*2020 – Irrfan Khan, Indian actor (b. 1967)
* 2020 – Guido Münch, Mexican astronomer and astrophysicist (b. 1921)
*2021 – Cate Haste, English author (b. 1945)
*2022 – Joanna Barnes, American actress and writer (b. 1934)
*2023 – Padma Desai, Indian-American development economist (b. 1931)
<!--Do not add people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence.-->
Holidays and observances
* Christian feast day:
** Catherine of Siena (Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican Church)
** Hugh of Cluny
** Robert of Molesme
** Wilfrid II
** April 29 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
* Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare (United Nations)
* International Dance Day (UNESCO)
* Shōwa Day, traditionally the start of the Golden Week holiday period, which is April 29 and May 3–5. (Japan)ReferencesExternal links
* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/29 BBC: On This Day]
*
* [https://www.onthisday.com/events/april/29 Historical Events on April 29]
Category:Days of April | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_29 | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.458465 |
1417 | August 14 | Events
Pre-1600
*74 BC – A group of officials, led by the Western Han minister Huo Guang, present articles of impeachment against the new emperor, Liu He, to the imperial regent, Empress Dowager Shangguan.
*29 BC – Octavian holds the second of three consecutive triumphs in Rome to celebrate the victory over the Dalmatian tribes.
*1040 – King Duncan I is killed in battle against his first cousin and rival Macbeth. The latter succeeds him as King of Scotland.
*1183 – Taira no Munemori and the Taira clan take the young Emperor Antoku and the three sacred treasures and flee to western Japan to escape pursuit by the Minamoto clan.
*1264 – After tricking the Venetian galley fleet into sailing east to the Levant, the Genoese capture an entire Venetian trade convoy at the Battle of Saseno.
*1352 – War of the Breton Succession: Anglo-Bretons defeat the French in the Battle of Mauron.
*1370 – Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, grants city privileges to Karlovy Vary.
*1385 – Portuguese Crisis of 1383–85: Battle of Aljubarrota: Portuguese forces commanded by John I of Portugal defeat the Castilian army of John I of Castile.
*1592 – The first sighting of the Falkland Islands by John Davis.
*1598 – Nine Years' War: Battle of the Yellow Ford: Irish forces under Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, defeat an English expeditionary force under Henry Bagenal.1601–1900*1720 – The Spanish military Villasur expedition is defeated by Pawnee and Otoe warriors near present-day Columbus, Nebraska.
*1784 – Russian colonization of North America: Awa'uq Massacre: The Russian fur trader Grigory Shelikhov storms a Kodiak Island Alutiit refuge rock on Sitkalidak Island, killing 500+ Alutiit.
*1790 – The Treaty of Wereloe ended the 1788–1790 Russo-Swedish War.
*1791 – Slaves from plantations in Saint-Domingue hold a Vodou ceremony led by houngan Dutty Boukman at Bois Caïman, marking the start of the Haitian Revolution.
*1814 – A cease fire agreement, called the Convention of Moss, ended the Swedish–Norwegian War.
*1816 – The United Kingdom formally annexes the Tristan da Cunha archipelago, administering the islands from the Cape Colony in South Africa.
*1842 – American Indian Wars: Second Seminole War ends, with the Seminoles forced from Florida.
*1848 – Oregon Territory is organized by act of Congress.
*1880 – Construction of Cologne Cathedral, the most famous landmark in Cologne, Germany, is completed.
*1885 – Japan's first patent is issued to the inventor of a rust-proof paint.
*1893 – France becomes the first country to introduce motor vehicle registration.
*1900 – Battle of Peking: The Eight-Nation Alliance occupies Beijing, China, in a campaign to end the bloody Boxer Rebellion in China.1901–present*1901 – The first claimed powered flight, by Gustave Whitehead in his Number 21.
*1914 – World War I: Start of the Battle of Lorraine, an unsuccessful French offensive.
*1917 – World War I: The Republic of China, which had heretofore been shipping labourers to Europe to assist in the war effort, officially declares war on the Central Powers, although it will continue to send to Europe labourers instead of combatants for the remaining duration of the war.
*1920 – The 1920 Summer Olympics, having started four months earlier, officially open in Antwerp, Belgium, with the newly adopted Olympic flag and the Olympic oath being raised and taken at the Opening Ceremony for the first time in Olympic history.
*1921 – Tannu Uriankhai, later Tuvan People's Republic is established as a completely independent country (which is supported by Soviet Russia).
*1933 – Loggers cause a forest fire in the Coast Range of Oregon, later known as the first forest fire of the Tillamook Burn; destroying of land.
*1935 – Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act, creating a government pension system for the retired.
*1936 – Rainey Bethea is hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky in the last known public execution in the United States.
*1941 – World War II: Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt sign the Atlantic Charter of war stating postwar aims.
*1947 – Pakistan gains independence from the British Empire as the Dominion of Pakistan, due to the partition of India.
*1948 – An Idaho Department of Fish and Game program to relocate beavers known as Beaver drop occurred. This program relocated beavers from Northwestern Idaho to Central Idaho by airplane and then parachuting the beavers into the Chamberlain Basin .
*1959 – Founding and first official meeting of the American Football League.
*1967 – UK Marine Broadcasting Offences Act 1967 declares participation in offshore pirate radio illegal.
*1969 – The Troubles: British troops are deployed in Northern Ireland as political and sectarian violence breaks out, marking the start of the 37-year Operation Banner.
*1971 – Bahrain declares independence from Britain.
*1972 – An Ilyushin Il-62 airliner crashes near Königs Wusterhausen, East Germany killing 156 people.
*1980 – Lech Wałęsa leads strikes at the Gdańsk, Poland shipyards.
*1994 – Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as "Carlos the Jackal", is captured.
*1996 – Greek Cypriot refugee Solomos Solomou is shot and killed by a Turkish security officer while trying to climb a flagpole in order to remove a Turkish flag from its mast in the United Nations Buffer Zone in Cyprus.
*2003 – A widescale power blackout affects the northeast United States and Canada.
*2005 – Helios Airways Flight 522, en route from Larnaca, Cyprus to Prague, Czech Republic via Athens, crashes in the hills near Grammatiko, Greece, killing 121 passengers and crew.
*2006 – Lebanon War: A ceasefire takes effect three days after the United Nations Security Council's approval of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, formally ending hostilities between Lebanon and Israel.
*2006 – Sri Lankan Civil War: Sixty-one schoolgirls killed in Chencholai bombing by Sri Lankan Air Force air strike.
*2007 – The Kahtaniya bombings kill at least 500 people.
*2013 – Egypt declares a state of emergency as security forces kill hundreds of demonstrators supporting former president Mohamed Morsi.
* 2013 – UPS Airlines Flight 1354 crashes short of the runway at Birmingham–Shuttlesworth International Airport, killing both crew members on board.
*2015 – The U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba re-opens after 54 years of being closed when Cuba–United States relations were broken off.
*2018 – The collapse of the Ponte Morandi bridge in Genoa, Italy, left 16 people injured and 43 people killed.
*2021 – A magnitude 7.2 earthquake strikes southwestern Haiti, killing at least 2,248 people and causing a humanitarian crisis.
*2022 – An explosion destroys a market in Armenia, killing six people and injuring dozens.
*2023 – Former U.S. President Donald Trump is charged in Georgia along with 18 others in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election in that state, his fourth indictment of 2023.
Births
Pre-1600
*1479 – Catherine of York (d. 1527)
*1499 – John de Vere, 14th Earl of Oxford, English politician (d. 1526)
*1502 – Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Flemish painter (d. 1550)
*1530 – Giambattista Benedetti, Italian mathematician and physicist (d. 1590)
*1552 – Paolo Sarpi, Italian writer (d. 1623)
*1599 – Méric Casaubon, Swiss-English scholar and author (d. 1671)1601–1900*1642 – Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (d. 1723)
*1653 – Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle, English colonel and politician, Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica (d. 1688)
*1688 – Frederick William I of Prussia (d. 1740)
*1714 – Claude Joseph Vernet, French painter (d. 1789)
*1738 – Leopold Hofmann, Austrian composer and conductor (d. 1793)
*1742 – Pope Pius VII (d. 1823)
*1758 – Carle Vernet, French painter and lithographer (d. 1836)
*1777 – Hans Christian Ørsted, Danish physicist and chemist (d. 1851)
*1802 – Letitia Elizabeth Landon, English poet and novelist (d. 1838)
*1814 – Charlotte Fowler Wells, American phrenologist and publisher (d. 1901)
*1817 – Alexander H. Bailey, American lawyer, judge, and politician (d. 1874)
*1840 – Richard von Krafft-Ebing, German-Austrian psychologist and author (d. 1902)
*1847 – Robert Comtesse, Swiss lawyer and politician (d. 1922)
*1848 – Margaret Lindsay Huggins, Anglo-Irish astronomer and author (d. 1915)
*1851 – Doc Holliday, American dentist and gambler (d. 1887)
*1860 – Ernest Thompson Seton, American author, artist, and naturalist (d. 1946)
*1863 – Ernest Thayer, American poet and author (d. 1940)
*1865 – Guido Castelnuovo, Italian mathematician and academic (d. 1952)
*1866 – Charles Jean de la Vallée-Poussin, Belgian mathematician and academic (d. 1962)
*1867 – Cupid Childs, American baseball player (d. 1912)
* 1867 – John Galsworthy, English novelist and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1933)
*1871 – Guangxu Emperor of China (d. 1908)
*1875 – Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Russian-Lithuanian painter and illustrator (d. 1957)
*1876 – Alexander I of Serbia (d. 1903)
*1881 – Francis Ford, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1953)
*1883 – Ernest Everett Just, American biologist and academic (d. 1941)
*1886 – Arthur Jeffrey Dempster, Canadian-American physicist and academic (d. 1950)
*1889 – Otto Tief, Estonian lawyer and politician, Prime Minister of Estonia (d. 1976)
*1890 – Bruno Tesch, German chemist and businessman (d. 1946)
*1892 – Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, English pianist, composer, and critic (d. 1988)
*1894 – Frank Burge, Australian rugby league player and coach (d. 1958)
*1895 – Jack Gregory, Australian cricketer (d. 1973)
* 1895 – Amaza Lee Meredith, American architect (d. 1984)
*1896 – Albert Ball, English fighter pilot (d. 1917)
* 1896 – Theodor Luts, Estonian director and cinematographer (d. 1980)
*1900 – Margret Boveri, German journalist (d. 1975)1901–present*1910 – Nüzhet Gökdoğan, Turkish astronomer and mathematician (d. 2003)
* 1910 – Willy Ronis, French photographer (d. 2009)
* 1910 – Pierre Schaeffer, French composer and producer (d. 1995)
*1912 – Frank Oppenheimer, American physicist and academic (d. 1985)
*1913 – Hector Crawford, Australian director and producer (d. 1991)
* 1913 – Paul Dean, American baseball player (d. 1981)
*1914 – Herman Branson, American physicist, chemist, and academic (d. 1995)
*1915 – B. A. Santamaria, Australian political activist and publisher (d. 1998)
*1916 – Frank and John Craighead, American naturalists (twins, Frank d. 2001, John d. 2016)
* 1916 – Wellington Mara, American businessman (d. 2005)
*1923 – Alice Ghostley, American actress (d. 2007)
*1924 – Sverre Fehn, Norwegian architect, designed the Hedmark Museum (d. 2009)
* 1924 – Georges Prêtre, French conductor (d. 2017)
*1925 – Russell Baker, American critic and essayist (d. 2019)
*1926 – René Goscinny, French author and illustrator (d. 1977)
* 1926 – Buddy Greco, American singer and pianist (d. 2017)
*1928 – Lina Wertmüller, Italian director and screenwriter (d. 2021)
*1929 – Giacomo Capuzzi, Italian Roman Catholic prelate, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Lodi from 1989 to 2005 (d. 2021).
* 1929 – Dick Tiger, Nigerian boxer (d. 1971)
*1930 – Arthur Latham, British politician and Member of Parliament (d. 2016)
* 1930 – Earl Weaver, American baseball player and manager (d. 2013)
*1931 – Frederic Raphael, American journalist, author, and screenwriter
*1932 – Lee Hoffman, American author (d. 2007)
*1933 – Richard R. Ernst, Swiss chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2021)
*1935 – John Brodie, American football player
*1938 – Bennie Muller, Dutch footballer (d. 2024)
*1941 – David Crosby, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2023)
* 1941 – Connie Smith, American country music singer-songwriter and guitarist
*1942 – Willie Dunn, Canadian singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2013)
*1943 – Ronnie Campbell, English miner and politician (d. 2024)
* 1943 – Ben Sidran, American jazz and rock keyboardist
*1945 – Steve Martin, American actor, comedian, musician, producer, and screenwriter
* 1945 – Wim Wenders, German director, producer, and screenwriter
*1946 – Antonio Fargas, American actor
* 1946 – Susan Saint James, American actress
* 1946 – Tom Walkinshaw, Scottish race car driver and businessman (d. 2010)
*1947 – Maddy Prior, English folk singer
* 1947 – Danielle Steel, American author
* 1947 – Joop van Daele, Dutch footballer
*1949 – Bob Backlund, American wrestler
* 1949 – Morten Olsen, Danish footballer
*1950 – Gary Larson, American cartoonist
* 1951 – Carl Lumbly, American actor
*1953 – James Horner, American composer and conductor (d. 2015)
*1954 – Mark Fidrych, American baseball player and sportscaster (d. 2009)
* 1954 – Stanley A. McChrystal, American general
*1956 – Jackée Harry, American actress and television personality
* 1956 – Andy King, English footballer and manager (d. 2015)
* 1956 – Rusty Wallace, American race car driver
*1959 – Frank Brickowski, American basketball player
* 1959 – Marcia Gay Harden, American actress
* 1959 – Magic Johnson, American basketball player and coach
*1960 – Sarah Brightman, English singer and actress
* 1960 – Fred Roberts, American basketball player
*1961 – Susan Olsen, American actress and radio host
*1962 – Mark Gubicza, American baseball player
*1963 – José Cóceres, Argentinian golfer
*1964 – Neal Anderson, American football player and coach
* 1964 – Jason Dunstall, Australian footballer
*1965 – Paul Broadhurst, English golfer
*1966 – Halle Berry, American model, actress, and producer
* 1966 – Karl Petter Løken, Swedish-Norwegian footballer
*1968 – Ben Bass, American actor
* 1968 – Jason Leonard, English rugby player
*1969 – Tracy Caldwell Dyson, American chemist and astronaut
* 1969 – Stig Tøfting, Danish footballer
*1970 – Kevin Cadogan, American rock guitarist
*1971 – Raoul Bova, Italian actor, producer, and screenwriter
* 1971 – Benito Carbone, Italian footballer
* 1971 – Peter Franzén, Finnish actor
* 1971 – Mark Loretta, American baseball player
*1972 – Laurent Lamothe, Haitian businessman and politician, Prime Minister of Haiti
*1973 – Jared Borgetti, Mexican footballer
* 1973 – Kieren Perkins, Australian swimmer
*1974 – Chucky Atkins, American basketball player
* 1974 – Christopher Gorham, American actor
*1976 – Fabrizio Donato, Italian triple jumper
*1977 – Juan Pierre, American baseball player
*1978 – Anastasios Kyriakos, Greek footballer
* 1978 – Greg Rawlinson, New Zealand rugby player
*1979 – Paul Burgess, Australian pole vaulter
*1980 – Peter Malinauskas, Australian politician, 47th Premier of South Australia
*1981 – Earl Barron, American basketball player
* 1981 – Paul Gallen, Australian rugby league player, boxer, and sportscaster
* 1981 – Julius Jones, American football player
* 1981 – Kofi Kingston, Ghanaian-American wrestler
* 1981 – Scott Lipsky, American tennis player
*1983 – Elena Baltacha, Ukrainian-Scottish tennis player (d. 2014)
* 1983 – Mila Kunis, Ukrainian-American actress
* 1984 – Clay Buchholz, American baseball player
* 1984 – Giorgio Chiellini, Italian footballer
* 1984 – Josh Gorges, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1984 – Nick Grimshaw, English radio and television host
* 1984 – Nicola Slater, Scottish tennis player
* 1984 – Robin Söderling, Swedish tennis player
*1985 – Christian Gentner, German footballer
* 1985 – Shea Weber, Canadian ice hockey player
*1986 – Braian Rodríguez, Uruguayan footballer
*1987 – Johnny Gargano, American wrestler
* 1987 – David Peralta, Venezuelan baseball player
* 1987 – Tim Tebow, American football and baseball player and sportscaster
*1989 – Ander Herrera, Spanish footballer
* 1989 – Kyle Turris, Canadian ice hockey player
*1991 – Richard Freitag, German ski jumper
*1991 – Giovanny Gallegos, Mexican baseball player
*1994 – Maya Jama, British TV presenter.
*1995 – Léolia Jeanjean, French tennis player
*1997 – Greet Minnen, Belgian tennis player
*2004 – Marsai Martin, American actress and producer
<!--Do not add yourself or people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence.-->
Deaths
Pre-1600
* 582 – Tiberius II Constantine, Byzantine emperor
*1040 – Duncan I of Scotland
*1167 – Rainald of Dassel, Italian archbishop
*1204 – Minamoto no Yoriie, second Shōgun of the Kamakura shogunate
*1433 – John I of Portugal (b. 1357)
*1464 – Pope Pius II (b. 1405)
*1573 – Saitō Tatsuoki, Japanese daimyō (b. 1548)1601–1900*1691 – Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, Irish soldier and politician (b. 1630)
*1716 – Madre María Rosa, Capuchin nun from Spain, to Peru (b. 1660)
*1727 – William Croft, English organist and composer (b. 1678)
*1774 – Johann Jakob Reiske, German physician and scholar (b. 1716)
*1784 – Nathaniel Hone the Elder, Irish-born English painter and academic (b. 1718)
*1852 – Margaret Taylor, First Lady of the United States (b. 1788)
*1854 – Carl Carl, Polish-born actor and theatre director (b. 1787)
*1860 – André Marie Constant Duméril, French zoologist and entomologist (b. 1774)
*1870 – David Farragut, American admiral (b. 1801)
*1890 – Michael J. McGivney, American priest, founded the Knights of Columbus (b. 1852)
*1891 – Sarah Childress Polk, First Lady of the United States (b. 1803)1901–present*1905 – Simeon Solomon, English soldier and painter (b. 1840)
*1909 – William Stanley, British engineer and author (b. 1829)
*1922 – Rebecca Cole, American physician and social reformer (b. 1846)
*1928 – Klabund, German author and poet (b. 1890)
*1938 – Hugh Trumble, Australian cricketer and accountant (b. 1876)
*1941 – Maximilian Kolbe, Polish martyr and saint (b. 1894)
* 1941 – Paul Sabatier, French chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1854)
*1943 – Joe Kelley, American baseball player and manager (b. 1871)
*1948 – Eliška Misáková, Czech gymnast (b. 1926)
*1951 – William Randolph Hearst, American publisher and politician, founded the Hearst Corporation (b. 1863)
*1954 – Hugo Eckener, German pilot and designer (b. 1868)
*1955 – Herbert Putnam, American lawyer and publisher, Librarian of Congress (b. 1861)
*1956 – Bertolt Brecht, German poet, playwright, and director (b. 1898)
* 1956 – Konstantin von Neurath, German lawyer and politician, Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs (b. 1873)
*1958 – Frédéric Joliot-Curie, French physicist and chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1900)
*1963 – Clifford Odets, American director, playwright, and screenwriter (b. 1906)
*1964 – Johnny Burnette, American singer-songwriter (b. 1934)
*1965 – Vello Kaaristo, Estonian skier (b. 1911)
*1967 – Bob Anderson, English motorcycle racer and race car driver (b. 1931)
*1972 – Oscar Levant, American actor, pianist, and composer (b. 1906)
* 1972 – Jules Romains, French author and poet (b. 1885)
*1973 – Fred Gipson, American journalist and author (b. 1908)
*1978 – Nicolas Bentley, English author and illustrator (b. 1907)
*1980 – Dorothy Stratten, Canadian-American model and actress (b. 1960)
*1981 – Karl Böhm, Austrian conductor and director (b. 1894)
* 1981 – Dudley Nourse, South African cricketer (b. 1910)
*1982 – Mahasi Sayadaw, Burmese monk and philosopher (b. 1904)
*1984 – Spud Davis, American baseball player, coach, and manager (b. 1904)
* 1984 – J. B. Priestley, English novelist and playwright (b. 1894)
*1985 – Gale Sondergaard, American actress (b. 1899)
*1988 – Roy Buchanan, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1939)
* 1988 – Robert Calvert, South African-English singer-songwriter and playwright (b. 1945)
* 1988 – Enzo Ferrari, Italian race car driver and businessman, founded Ferrari (b. 1898)
*1991 – Alberto Crespo, Argentinian race car driver (b. 1920)
*1992 – John Sirica, American lawyer and judge (b. 1904)
*1994 – Elias Canetti, Bulgarian-Swiss author, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1905)
* 1994 – Alice Childress, American actress, playwright, and author (b. 1912)
*1996 – Sergiu Celibidache, Romanian conductor and composer (b. 1912)
*1999 – Pee Wee Reese, American baseball player and sportscaster (b. 1918)
*2002 – Larry Rivers, American painter and sculptor (b. 1923)
*2003 – Helmut Rahn, German footballer (b. 1929)
*2004 – Czesław Miłosz, Polish-born American novelist, essayist, and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1911)
* 2004 – Trevor Skeet, New Zealand-English lawyer and politician (b. 1918)
*2006 – Bruno Kirby, American actor (b. 1949)
*2007 – Tikhon Khrennikov, Russian pianist and composer (b. 1913)
*2010 – Herman Leonard, American photographer (b. 1923)
*2012 – Vilasrao Deshmukh, Indian lawyer and politician, Chief Minister of Maharashtra (b. 1945)
* 2012 – Svetozar Gligorić, Serbian chess player (b. 1923)
* 2012 – Phyllis Thaxter, American actress (b. 1919)
*2013 – Jack Germond, American journalist and author (b. 1928)
*2014 – Leonard Fein, American journalist and academic, co-founded Moment Magazine (b. 1934)
* 2014 – George V. Hansen, American politician (b. 1930)
*2015 – Bob Johnston, American songwriter and producer (b. 1932)
*2016 – Fyvush Finkel, American actor (b. 1922)
*2018 – Jill Janus, American singer (b. 1975)
*2019 – Polly Farmer, Australian footballer and coach (b. 1935)
*2020 – Julian Bream, English classical guitarist and lutenist (b. 1933)
* 2020 – Angela Buxton, British tennis player (b. 1934)
* 2020 – James R. Thompson, American politician, Governor of Illinois (b. 1936)
*2021 – Michael Aung-Thwin, American historian and scholar of Burmese and Southeast Asian history (b. 1946)
*2023 – Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, Bangladeshi Islamic lecturer, politician (b. 1940)
*2024 – Gena Rowlands, American actress (b. 1930)
<!--Do not add people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence.-->
Holidays and observances
*Christian feast day:
**Arnold of Soissons
**Domingo Ibáñez de Erquicia
**Eusebius of Rome
**Jonathan Myrick Daniels (Episcopal Church)
**Maximilian Kolbe
*Falklands Day is the celebration of the first sighting of the Falkland Islands by John Davis in 1592.
*Independence Day celebrates the independence of Pakistan from the United Kingdom in 1947.References
External links
*
*
*
Category:Days of August | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_14 | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.555651 |
1418 | Absolute zero | (−273.15 °C) is defined as absolute zero.]]
Absolute zero is the coldest point on the thermodynamic temperature scale, a state at which the enthalpy and entropy of a cooled ideal gas reach their minimum value. The fundamental particles of nature have minimum vibrational motion, retaining only quantum mechanical, zero-point energy-induced particle motion. The theoretical temperature is determined by extrapolating the ideal gas law; by international agreement, absolute zero is taken as 0 kelvin (International System of Units), which is −273.15 degrees on the Celsius scale, and equals −459.67 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale (United States customary units or imperial units). The Kelvin and Rankine temperature scales set their zero points at absolute zero by definition.
It is commonly thought of as the lowest temperature possible, but it is not the lowest enthalpy state possible, because all real substances begin to depart from the ideal gas when cooled as they approach the change of state to liquid, and then to solid; and the sum of the enthalpy of vaporization (gas to liquid) and enthalpy of fusion (liquid to solid) exceeds the ideal gas's change in enthalpy to absolute zero. In the quantum-mechanical description, matter at absolute zero is in its ground state, the point of lowest internal energy.
The laws of thermodynamics show that absolute zero cannot be reached using only thermodynamic means, because the temperature of the substance being cooled approaches the temperature of the cooling agent asymptotically. Even a system at absolute zero, if it could somehow be achieved, would still possess quantum mechanical zero-point energy, the energy of its ground state at absolute zero; the kinetic energy of the ground state cannot be removed.
Scientists and technologists routinely achieve temperatures close to absolute zero, where matter exhibits quantum effects such as superconductivity, superfluidity, and Bose–Einstein condensation.
Thermodynamics near absolute zero
At temperatures near , nearly all molecular motion ceases and ΔS = 0 for any adiabatic process, where S is the entropy. In such a circumstance, pure substances can (ideally) form perfect crystals with no structural imperfections as T → 0. Max Planck's strong form of the third law of thermodynamics states the entropy of a perfect crystal vanishes at absolute zero. The original Nernst heat theorem makes the weaker and less controversial claim that the entropy change for any isothermal process approaches zero as T → 0:
:<math> \lim_{T \to 0} \Delta S = 0 </math>
The implication is that the entropy of a perfect crystal approaches a constant value. An adiabat is a state with constant entropy, typically represented on a graph as a curve in a manner similar to isotherms and isobars.
<blockquote>The Nernst postulate identifies the isotherm T 0 as coincident with the adiabat S 0, although other isotherms and adiabats are distinct. As no two adiabats intersect, no other adiabat can intersect the T = 0 isotherm. Consequently no adiabatic process initiated at nonzero temperature can lead to zero temperature (≈ Callen, pp. 189–190).</blockquote>
A perfect crystal is one in which the internal lattice structure extends uninterrupted in all directions. The perfect order can be represented by translational symmetry along three (not usually orthogonal) axes. Every lattice element of the structure is in its proper place, whether it is a single atom or a molecular grouping. For substances that exist in two (or more) stable crystalline forms, such as diamond and graphite for carbon, there is a kind of chemical degeneracy. The question remains whether both can have zero entropy at T = 0 even though each is perfectly ordered.
Perfect crystals never occur in practice; imperfections, and even entire amorphous material inclusions, can and do get "frozen in" at low temperatures, so transitions to more stable states do not occur.
Using the Debye model, the specific heat and entropy of a pure crystal are proportional to T<sup> 3</sup>, while the enthalpy and chemical potential are proportional to T<sup> 4</sup> (Guggenheim, p. 111). These quantities drop toward their T = 0 limiting values and approach with zero slopes. For the specific heats at least, the limiting value itself is definitely zero, as borne out by experiments to below 10 K. Even the less detailed Einstein model shows this curious drop in specific heats. In fact, all specific heats vanish at absolute zero, not just those of crystals. Likewise for the coefficient of thermal expansion. Maxwell's relations show that various other quantities also vanish. These phenomena were unanticipated.
Since the relation between changes in Gibbs free energy (G), the enthalpy (H) and the entropy is
:<math> \Delta G = \Delta H - T \Delta S \,</math>
thus, as T decreases, ΔG and ΔH approach each other (so long as ΔS is bounded). Experimentally, it is found that all spontaneous processes (including chemical reactions) result in a decrease in G as they proceed toward equilibrium. If ΔS and/or T are small, the condition ΔG < 0 may imply that ΔH < 0, which would indicate an exothermic reaction. However, this is not required; endothermic reactions can proceed spontaneously if the TΔS term is large enough.
Moreover, the slopes of the derivatives of ΔG and ΔH converge and are equal to zero at T = 0. This ensures that ΔG and ΔH are nearly the same over a considerable range of temperatures and justifies the approximate empirical Principle of Thomsen and Berthelot, which states that the equilibrium state to which a system proceeds is the one that evolves the greatest amount of heat, i.e., an actual process is the most exothermic one (Callen, pp. 186–187).
One model that estimates the properties of an electron gas at absolute zero in metals is the Fermi gas. The electrons, being fermions, must be in different quantum states, which leads the electrons to get very high typical velocities, even at absolute zero. The maximum energy that electrons can have at absolute zero is called the Fermi energy. The Fermi temperature is defined as this maximum energy divided by the Boltzmann constant, and is on the order of 80,000 K for typical electron densities found in metals. For temperatures significantly below the Fermi temperature, the electrons behave in almost the same way as at absolute zero. This explains the failure of the classical equipartition theorem for metals that eluded classical physicists in the late 19th century.
Relation with Bose–Einstein condensate
atoms at a temperature within a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Left: just before the appearance of a Bose–Einstein condensate. Center: just after the appearance of the condensate. Right: after further evaporation, leaving a sample of nearly pure condensate.]]
A Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter of a dilute gas of weakly interacting bosons confined in an external potential and cooled to temperatures very near absolute zero. Under such conditions, a large fraction of the bosons occupy the lowest quantum state of the external potential, at which point quantum effects become apparent on a macroscopic scale.
This state of matter was first predicted by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein in 1924–1925. Bose first sent a paper to Einstein on the quantum statistics of light quanta (now called photons). Einstein was impressed, translated the paper from English to German and submitted it for Bose to the Zeitschrift für Physik, which published it. Einstein then extended Bose's ideas to material particles (or matter) in two other papers.
Seventy years later, in 1995, the first gaseous condensate was produced by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado at Boulder NIST-JILA lab, using a gas of rubidium atoms cooled to ().
In 2003, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) achieved a temperature of () in a BEC of sodium atoms. The associated black body (peak emittance) wavelength of 6.4 megameters is roughly the radius of Earth.
In 2021, University of Bremen physicists achieved a BEC with a temperature of only , the current coldest temperature record.
Most familiar systems cannot achieve negative temperatures because adding energy always increases their entropy. However, some systems have a maximum amount of energy that they can hold, and as they approach that maximum energy their entropy actually begins to decrease. Because temperature is defined by the relationship between energy and entropy, such a system's temperature becomes negative, even though energy is being added.
History
pioneered the idea of an absolute zero.]]
One of the first to discuss the possibility of an absolute minimal temperature was Robert Boyle. His 1665 New Experiments and Observations touching Cold, articulated the dispute known as the primum frigidum. The concept was well known among naturalists of the time. Some contended an absolute minimum temperature occurred within earth (as one of the four classical elements), others within water, others air, and some more recently within nitre. But all of them seemed to agree that, "There is some body or other that is of its own nature supremely cold and by participation of which all other bodies obtain that quality."
Limit to the "degree of cold"
The question of whether there is a limit to the degree of coldness possible, and, if so, where the zero must be placed, was first addressed by the French physicist Guillaume Amontons in 1703, in connection with his improvements in the air thermometer. His instrument indicated temperatures by the height at which a certain mass of air sustained a column of mercury—the pressure, or "spring" of the air varying with temperature. Amontons therefore argued that the zero of his thermometer would be that temperature at which the spring of the air was reduced to nothing. He used a scale that marked the boiling point of water at +73 and the melting point of ice at +, so that the zero was equivalent to about −240 on the Celsius scale. Amontons held that the absolute zero cannot be reached, so never attempted to compute it explicitly. The value of −240 °C, or "431 divisions [in Fahrenheit's thermometer] below the cold of freezing water" was published by George Martine in 1740.
This close approximation to the modern value of −273.15 °C
Values of this order for the absolute zero were not, however, universally accepted about this period. Pierre-Simon Laplace and Antoine Lavoisier, in their 1780 treatise on heat, arrived at values ranging from 1,500 to 3,000 below the freezing point of water, and thought that in any case it must be at least 600 below. John Dalton in his Chemical Philosophy gave ten calculations of this value, and finally adopted −3,000 °C as the natural zero of temperature.
Charles's law
From 1787 to 1802, it was determined by Jacques Charles (unpublished), John Dalton, and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac that, at constant pressure, ideal gases expanded or contracted their volume linearly (Charles's law) by about 1/273 parts per degree Celsius of temperature's change up or down, between 0° and 100° C. This suggested that the volume of a gas cooled at about −273 °C would reach zero.Lord Kelvin's workAfter James Prescott Joule had determined the mechanical equivalent of heat, Lord Kelvin approached the question from an entirely different point of view, and in 1848 devised a scale of absolute temperature that was independent of the properties of any particular substance and was based on Carnot's theory of the Motive Power of Heat and data published by Henri Victor Regnault. It followed from the principles on which this scale was constructed that its zero was placed at −273 °C, at almost precisely the same point as the zero of the air thermometer,
The race to absolute zero
With a better theoretical understanding of absolute zero, scientists were eager to reach this temperature in the lab. By 1845, Michael Faraday had managed to liquefy most gases then known to exist, and reached a new record for lowest temperatures by reaching . Faraday believed that certain gases, such as oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, were permanent gases and could not be liquefied. Decades later, in 1873 Dutch theoretical scientist Johannes Diderik van der Waals demonstrated that these gases could be liquefied, but only under conditions of very high pressure and very low temperatures. In 1877, Louis Paul Cailletet in France and Raoul Pictet in Switzerland succeeded in producing the first droplets of liquid air at . This was followed in 1883 by the production of liquid oxygen by the Polish professors Zygmunt Wróblewski and Karol Olszewski.
Scottish chemist and physicist James Dewar and Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes took on the challenge to liquefy the remaining gases, hydrogen and helium. In 1898, after 20 years of effort, Dewar was the first to liquefy hydrogen, reaching a new low-temperature record of . However, Kamerlingh Onnes, his rival, was the first to liquefy helium, in 1908, using several precooling stages and the Hampson–Linde cycle. He lowered the temperature to the boiling point of helium . By reducing the pressure of the liquid helium, he achieved an even lower temperature, near 1.5 K. These were the coldest temperatures achieved on Earth at the time and his achievement earned him the Nobel Prize in 1913. Kamerlingh Onnes would continue to study the properties of materials at temperatures near absolute zero, describing superconductivity and superfluids for the first time.Very low temperatures
, a bi-polar, filamentary, likely proto-planetary nebula in Centaurus, has a temperature of 1 K, the lowest observed outside of a laboratory.]]
The average temperature of the universe today is approximately , based on measurements of cosmic microwave background radiation. Standard models of the future expansion of the universe predict that the average temperature of the universe is decreasing over time. This temperature is calculated as the mean density of energy in space; it should not be confused with the mean electron temperature (total energy divided by particle count) which has increased over time.
Absolute zero cannot be achieved, although it is possible to reach temperatures close to it through the use of evaporative cooling, cryocoolers, dilution refrigerators, and nuclear adiabatic demagnetization. The use of laser cooling has produced temperatures of less than a billionth of a kelvin. At very low temperatures in the vicinity of absolute zero, matter exhibits many unusual properties, including superconductivity, superfluidity, and Bose–Einstein condensation. To study such phenomena, scientists have worked to obtain even lower temperatures.
* In November 2000, nuclear spin temperatures below were reported for an experiment at the Helsinki University of Technology's Low Temperature Lab in Espoo, Finland. However, this was the temperature of one particular degree of freedom—a quantum property called nuclear spin—not the overall average thermodynamic temperature for all possible degrees in freedom.
* In February 2003, the Boomerang Nebula was observed to have been releasing gases at a speed of for the last 1,500 years. This has cooled it down to approximately 1 K, as deduced by astronomical observation, which is the lowest natural temperature ever recorded.
* In November 2003, 90377 Sedna was discovered and is one of the coldest known objects in the Solar System, with an average surface temperature of , due to its extremely far orbit of 903 astronomical units.
* In May 2005, the European Space Agency proposed research in space to achieve femtokelvin temperatures.
* In May 2006, the Institute of Quantum Optics at the University of Hannover gave details of technologies and benefits of femtokelvin research in space.
* In January 2013, physicist Ulrich Schneider of the University of Munich in Germany reported to have achieved temperatures formally below absolute zero ("negative temperature") in gases. The gas is artificially forced out of equilibrium into a high potential energy state, which is, however, cold. When it then emits radiation it approaches the equilibrium, and can continue emitting despite reaching formal absolute zero; thus, the temperature is formally negative.
* In September 2014, scientists in the CUORE collaboration at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy cooled a copper vessel with a volume of one cubic meter to for 15 days, setting a record for the lowest temperature in the known universe over such a large contiguous volume.
* In June 2015, experimental physicists at MIT cooled molecules in a gas of sodium potassium to a temperature of 500 nanokelvin, and it is expected to exhibit an exotic state of matter by cooling these molecules somewhat further.
* In 2017, Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL), an experimental instrument was developed for launch to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2018. The instrument has created extremely cold conditions in the microgravity environment of the ISS leading to the formation of Bose–Einstein condensates. In this space-based laboratory, temperatures as low as are projected to be achievable, and it could further the exploration of unknown quantum mechanical phenomena and test some of the most fundamental laws of physics.
* The current world record for effective temperatures was set in 2021 at through matter-wave lensing of rubidium Bose–Einstein condensates.
See also
* Degenerate matter
* Kelvin (unit of temperature)
* Charles's law
* Heat
* International Temperature Scale of 1990
* Orders of magnitude (temperature)
* Thermodynamic temperature
* Triple point
* Ultracold atom
* Kinetic energy
* Entropy
* Planck temperature and Hagedorn temperature, hypothetical upper limits to the thermodynamic temperature scale
References
Further reading
*
*
*
*
* [https://www.bipm.org/en/search?p_p_idsearch_portlet&p_p_lifecycle2&p_p_statenormal&p_p_modeview&p_p_resource_id%2Fdownload%2Fpublication&p_p_cacheabilitycacheLevelPage&_search_portlet_dlFileId41507086&p_p_lifecycle1&_search_portlet_javax.portlet.actionsearch&_search_portlet_formDate1644345579131&_search_portlet_queryabsolute+zero&_search_portlet_sourceBIPM BIPM Mise en pratique - Kelvin - Appendix 2 - SI Brochure].
External links
* [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/zero/ "Absolute zero"]: a two part NOVA episode originally aired January 2008
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20080509100512/http://www.pa.msu.edu/~sciencet/ask_st/012992.html "What is absolute zero?"] Lansing State Journal
Category:Cold
Category:Cryogenics
Category:Temperature | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.595340 |
1419 | Adiabatic process | An adiabatic process (adiabatic ()|impassable}}) is a type of thermodynamic process that occurs without transferring heat between the thermodynamic system and its environment. Unlike an isothermal process, an adiabatic process transfers energy to the surroundings only as work and/or mass flow. As a key concept in thermodynamics, the adiabatic process supports the theory that explains the first law of thermodynamics. The opposite term to "adiabatic" is diabatic.
Some chemical and physical processes occur too rapidly for energy to enter or leave the system as heat, allowing a convenient "adiabatic approximation". For example, the adiabatic flame temperature uses this approximation to calculate the upper limit of flame temperature by assuming combustion loses no heat to its surroundings.
In meteorology, adiabatic expansion and cooling of moist air, which can be triggered by winds flowing up and over a mountain for example, can cause the water vapor pressure to exceed the saturation vapor pressure. Expansion and cooling beyond the saturation vapor pressure is often idealized as a pseudo-adiabatic process whereby excess vapor instantly precipitates into water droplets. The change in temperature of an air undergoing pseudo-adiabatic expansion differs from air undergoing adiabatic expansion because latent heat is released by precipitation.
Description
A process without transfer of heat to or from a system, so that , is called adiabatic, and such a system is said to be adiabatically isolated. The simplifying assumption frequently made is that a process is adiabatic. For example, the compression of a gas within a cylinder of an engine is assumed to occur so rapidly that on the time scale of the compression process, little of the system's energy can be transferred out as heat to the surroundings. Even though the cylinders are not insulated and are quite conductive, that process is idealized to be adiabatic. The same can be said to be true for the expansion process of such a system.
The assumption of adiabatic isolation is useful and often combined with other such idealizations to calculate a good first approximation of a system's behaviour. For example, according to Laplace, when sound travels in a gas, there is no time for heat conduction in the medium, and so the propagation of sound is adiabatic. For such an adiabatic process, the modulus of elasticity (Young's modulus) can be expressed as , where is the ratio of specific heats at constant pressure and at constant volume (}}) and is the pressure of the gas.
Various applications of the adiabatic assumption
For a closed system, one may write the first law of thermodynamics as , where denotes the change of the system's internal energy, the quantity of energy added to it as heat, and the work done by the system on its surroundings.
*If the system has such rigid walls that work cannot be transferred in or out (), and the walls are not adiabatic and energy is added in the form of heat (), and there is no phase change, then the temperature of the system will rise.
*If the system has such rigid walls that pressure–volume work cannot be done, but the walls are adiabatic (), and energy is added as isochoric (constant volume) work in the form of friction or the stirring of a viscous fluid within the system (), and there is no phase change, then the temperature of the system will rise.
*If the system walls are adiabatic () but not rigid (), and, in a fictive idealized process, energy is added to the system in the form of frictionless, non-viscous pressure–volume work (), and there is no phase change, then the temperature of the system will rise. Such a process is called an isentropic process and is said to be "reversible". Ideally, if the process were reversed the energy could be recovered entirely as work done by the system. If the system contains a compressible gas and is reduced in volume, the uncertainty of the position of the gas is reduced, and seemingly would reduce the entropy of the system, but the temperature of the system will rise as the process is isentropic (). Should the work be added in such a way that friction or viscous forces are operating within the system, then the process is not isentropic, and if there is no phase change, then the temperature of the system will rise, the process is said to be "irreversible", and the work added to the system is not entirely recoverable in the form of work.
*If the walls of a system are not adiabatic, and energy is transferred in as heat, entropy is transferred into the system with the heat. Such a process is neither adiabatic nor isentropic, having , and according to the second law of thermodynamics.
Naturally occurring adiabatic processes are irreversible (entropy is produced).
The transfer of energy as work into an adiabatically isolated system can be imagined as being of two idealized extreme kinds. In one such kind, no entropy is produced within the system (no friction, viscous dissipation, etc.), and the work is only pressure-volume work (denoted by ). In nature, this ideal kind occurs only approximately because it demands an infinitely slow process and no sources of dissipation.
The other extreme kind of work is isochoric work (), for which energy is added as work solely through friction or viscous dissipation within the system. A stirrer that transfers energy to a viscous fluid of an adiabatically isolated system with rigid walls, without phase change, will cause a rise in temperature of the fluid, but that work is not recoverable. Isochoric work is irreversible. The second law of thermodynamics observes that a natural process, of transfer of energy as work, always consists at least of isochoric work and often both of these extreme kinds of work. Every natural process, adiabatic or not, is irreversible, with , as friction or viscosity are always present to some extent.
Adiabatic compression and expansion
The adiabatic compression of a gas causes a rise in temperature of the gas. Adiabatic expansion against pressure, or a spring, causes a drop in temperature. In contrast, free expansion is an isothermal process for an ideal gas.
Adiabatic compression occurs when the pressure of a gas is increased by work done on it by its surroundings, e.g., a piston compressing a gas contained within a cylinder and raising the temperature where in many practical situations heat conduction through walls can be slow compared with the compression time. This finds practical application in diesel engines which rely on the lack of heat dissipation during the compression stroke to elevate the fuel vapor temperature sufficiently to ignite it.
Adiabatic compression occurs in the Earth's atmosphere when an air mass descends, for example, in a Katabatic wind, Foehn wind, or Chinook wind flowing downhill over a mountain range. When a parcel of air descends, the pressure on the parcel increases. Because of this increase in pressure, the parcel's volume decreases and its temperature increases as work is done on the parcel of air, thus increasing its internal energy, which manifests itself by a rise in the temperature of that mass of air. The parcel of air can only slowly dissipate the energy by conduction or radiation (heat), and to a first approximation it can be considered adiabatically isolated and the process an adiabatic process.
Adiabatic expansion occurs when the pressure on an adiabatically isolated system is decreased, allowing it to expand in size, thus causing it to do work on its surroundings. When the pressure applied on a parcel of gas is reduced, the gas in the parcel is allowed to expand; as the volume increases, the temperature falls as its internal energy decreases. Adiabatic expansion occurs in the Earth's atmosphere with orographic lifting and lee waves, and this can form pilei or lenticular clouds.
Due in part to adiabatic expansion in mountainous areas, snowfall infrequently occurs in some parts of the Sahara desert.
Adiabatic expansion does not have to involve a fluid. One technique used to reach very low temperatures (thousandths and even millionths of a degree above absolute zero) is via adiabatic demagnetisation, where the change in magnetic field on a magnetic material is used to provide adiabatic expansion. Also, the contents of an expanding universe can be described (to first order) as an adiabatically expanding fluid. (See heat death of the universe.)
Rising magma also undergoes adiabatic expansion before eruption, particularly significant in the case of magmas that rise quickly from great depths such as kimberlites.
In the Earth's convecting mantle (the asthenosphere) beneath the lithosphere, the mantle temperature is approximately an adiabat. The slight decrease in temperature with shallowing depth is due to the decrease in pressure the shallower the material is in the Earth.
Such temperature changes can be quantified using the ideal gas law, or the hydrostatic equation for atmospheric processes.
In practice, no process is truly adiabatic. Many processes rely on a large difference in time scales of the process of interest and the rate of heat dissipation across a system boundary, and thus are approximated by using an adiabatic assumption. There is always some heat loss, as no perfect insulators exist.
Ideal gas (reversible process)
of the working substance must decrease.]]
The mathematical equation for an ideal gas undergoing a reversible (i.e., no entropy generation) adiabatic process can be represented by the polytropic process equation Note that the above formula is only applicable to classical ideal gases (that is, gases far above absolute zero temperature) and not Bose–Einstein or Fermi gases.
One can also use the ideal gas law to rewrite the above relationship between and as
<math display="block">\begin{align}
P_2 &= P_1\left (\frac{V_1}{V_2}\right)^\gamma \\
&= 100\,000~\text{Pa} \times \text{10}^{7/5} \\
&= 2.51 \times 10^6~\text{Pa}
\end{align}</math>
or 25.1 bar. This pressure increase is more than a simple 10:1 compression ratio would indicate; this is because the gas is not only compressed, but the work done to compress the gas also increases its internal energy, which manifests itself by a rise in the gas temperature and an additional rise in pressure above what would result from a simplistic calculation of 10 times the original pressure.
We can solve for the temperature of the compressed gas in the engine cylinder as well, using the ideal gas law, PV = nRT (n is amount of gas in moles and R the gas constant for that gas). Our initial conditions being 100 kPa of pressure, 1 L volume, and 300 K of temperature, our experimental constant (nR) is:
<math display="block">\begin{align}
\frac{PV}{T} &= \mathrm{constant}_2 \\
&= \frac{10^5~\text{Pa} \times 10^{-3}~\text{m}^3}{300~\text{K}} \\
&= 0.333~\text{Pa}\,\text{m}^3\text{K}^{-1}.
\end{align}</math>
We know the compressed gas has 0.1 L and , so we can solve for temperature:
<math display="block">\begin{align}
T &= \frac{P V}{\mathrm{constant}_2} \\
&= \frac{2.51 \times 10^6~\text{Pa} \times 10^{-4}~\text{m}^3}{0.333~\text{Pa}\,\text{m}^3\text{K}^{-1}} \\
&= 753~\text{K}.
\end{align}</math>
That is a final temperature of 753 K, or 479 °C, or 896 °F, well above the ignition point of many fuels. This is why a high-compression engine requires fuels specially formulated to not self-ignite (which would cause engine knocking when operated under these conditions of temperature and pressure), or that a supercharger with an intercooler to provide a pressure boost but with a lower temperature rise would be advantageous. A diesel engine operates under even more extreme conditions, with compression ratios of 16:1 or more being typical, in order to provide a very high gas pressure, which ensures immediate ignition of the injected fuel.
Adiabatic free expansion of a gas
For an adiabatic free expansion of an ideal gas, the gas is contained in an insulated container and then allowed to expand in a vacuum. Because there is no external pressure for the gas to expand against, the work done by or on the system is zero. Since this process does not involve any heat transfer or work, the first law of thermodynamics then implies that the net internal energy change of the system is zero. For an ideal gas, the temperature remains constant because the internal energy only depends on temperature in that case. Since at constant temperature, the entropy is proportional to the volume, the entropy increases in this case, therefore this process is irreversible.
Derivation of P–V relation for adiabatic compression and expansion
The definition of an adiabatic process is that heat transfer to the system is zero, . Then, according to the first law of thermodynamics,
}}
where is the change in the internal energy of the system and is work done by the system. Any work () done must be done at the expense of internal energy , since no heat is being supplied from the surroundings. Pressure–volume work done by the system is defined as
}}
However, does not remain constant during an adiabatic process but instead changes along with .
It is desired to know how the values of and relate to each other as the adiabatic process proceeds. For an ideal gas (recall ideal gas law ) the internal energy is given by
}}
where is the number of degrees of freedom divided by 2, is the universal gas constant and is the number of moles in the system (a constant).
Differentiating equation (a3) yields
{{NumBlk||<math display="block">\begin{align}
d U &= \alpha n R \, dT\\
& = \alpha \, d (P V)\\
& = \alpha (P \, dV + V \, dP).
\end{align}</math>|}}
Equation (a4) is often expressed as because .
Now substitute equations (a2) and (a4) into equation (a1) to obtain
<math display"block"> -P \, dV \alpha P \, dV + \alpha V \, dP,</math>
factorize :
<math display"block"> -(\alpha + 1) P \, dV \alpha V \, dP,</math>
and divide both sides by :
<math display"block"> -(\alpha + 1) \frac{dV}{V} \alpha \frac{dP}{P}. </math>
After integrating the left and right sides from to and from to and changing the sides respectively,
<math display"block"> \ln \left( \frac{P}{P_0} \right) -\frac{\alpha + 1}{\alpha} \ln \left( \frac{V}{V_0} \right). </math>
Exponentiate both sides, substitute }} with , the heat capacity ratio
<math display"block"> \left( \frac{P}{P_0} \right) \left( \frac{V}{V_0} \right)^{-\gamma}, </math>
and eliminate the negative sign to obtain
<math display"block"> \left( \frac{P}{P_0} \right) \left( \frac{V_0}{V} \right)^\gamma. </math>
Therefore,
<math display"block"> \left( \frac{P}{P_0} \right) \left( \frac{V}{V_0} \right)^\gamma 1,</math>
and
<math display"block"> P_0 V_0^\gamma P V^\gamma = \mathrm{constant}. </math>
}}
At the same time, the work done by the pressure–volume changes as a result from this process, is equal to
{{NumBlk||<math display"block"> W \int_{V_1}^{V_2}P \,dV. </math>|}}
Since we require the process to be adiabatic, the following equation needs to be true
}}
By the previous derivation,
{{NumBlk||<math display"block"> P V^\gamma \text{constant} = P_1 V_1^\gamma. </math>|}}
Rearranging (b4) gives
<math display"block"> P P_1 \left(\frac{V_1}{V} \right)^\gamma. </math>
Substituting this into (b2) gives
<math display"block"> W \int_{V_1}^{V_2} P_1 \left(\frac{V_1}{V} \right)^\gamma \,dV. </math>
Integrating, we obtain the expression for work,
<math display="block">\begin{align}
W = P_1 V_1^\gamma \frac{V_2^{1-\gamma} - V_1^{1-\gamma}}{1 - \gamma} \\
&= \frac{P_2 V_2 - P_1 V_1}{1 - \gamma}.
\end{align}</math>
Substituting }} in the second term,
<math display"block"> W -\alpha P_1 V_1^\gamma \left( V_2^{1-\gamma} - V_1^{1-\gamma} \right). </math>
Rearranging,
<math display"block"> W -\alpha P_1 V_1 \left( \left( \frac{V_2}{V_1} \right)^{1-\gamma} - 1 \right). </math>
Using the ideal gas law and assuming a constant molar quantity (as often happens in practical cases),
<math display"block"> W -\alpha n R T_1 \left( \left( \frac{V_2}{V_1} \right)^{1-\gamma} - 1 \right). </math>
By the continuous formula,
<math display"block"> \frac{P_2}{P_1} \left(\frac{V_2}{V_1}\right)^{-\gamma}, </math>
or
<math display"block"> \left(\frac{P_2}{P_1}\right)^{-\frac{1}{\gamma}} \frac{V_2}{V_1}. </math>
Substituting into the previous expression for ,
<math display"block"> W -\alpha n R T_1 \left( \left( \frac{P_2}{P_1} \right)^{\frac{\gamma-1}{\gamma}} - 1 \right). </math>
Substituting this expression and (b1) in (b3) gives
<math display"block"> \alpha n R (T_2 - T_1) \alpha n R T_1 \left( \left( \frac{P_2}{P_1} \right)^{\frac{\gamma-1}{\gamma}} - 1 \right). </math>
Simplifying,
<math display="block">\begin{align}
T_2 - T_1 &= T_1 \left( \left( \frac{P_2}{P_1} \right)^{\frac{\gamma-1}{\gamma}} - 1 \right), \\
\frac{T_2}{T_1} - 1 &= \left( \frac{P_2}{P_1} \right)^{\frac{\gamma-1}{\gamma}} - 1, \\
T_2 &= T_1 \left( \frac{P_2}{P_1} \right)^{\frac{\gamma-1}{\gamma}}.
\end{align}</math>
Derivation of discrete formula and work expression
The change in internal energy of a system, measured from state 1 to state 2, is equal to
<!-- equation missing here? TODO: check revisions -->At the same time, the work done by the pressure–volume changes as a result from this process, is equal to
{{NumBlk||<math display"block"> W \int_{V_1}^{V_2}P \,dV. </math>|}}
Since we require the process to be adiabatic, the following equation needs to be true
}}
By the previous derivation,
{{NumBlk||<math display"block"> P V^\gamma \text{constant} = P_1 V_1^\gamma. </math>|}}
Rearranging (c4) gives
<math display"block"> P P_1 \left(\frac{V_1}{V} \right)^\gamma. </math>
Substituting this into (c2) gives
<math display"block"> W \int_{V_1}^{V_2} P_1 \left(\frac{V_1}{V} \right)^\gamma \,dV. </math>
Integrating we obtain the expression for work,
<math display"block"> W P_1 V_1^\gamma \frac{V_2^{1-\gamma} - V_1^{1-\gamma}}{1 - \gamma} = \frac{P_2 V_2 - P_1 V_1}{1 - \gamma}. </math>
Substituting }} in second term,
<math display"block"> W -\alpha P_1 V_1^\gamma \left( V_2^{1-\gamma} - V_1^{1-\gamma} \right). </math>
Rearranging,
<math display"block"> W -\alpha P_1 V_1 \left( \left( \frac{V_2}{V_1} \right)^{1-\gamma} - 1 \right). </math>
Using the ideal gas law and assuming a constant molar quantity (as often happens in practical cases),
<math display"block"> W -\alpha n R T_1 \left( \left( \frac{V_2}{V_1} \right)^{1-\gamma} - 1 \right). </math>
By the continuous formula,
<math display"block"> \frac{P_2}{P_1} \left(\frac{V_2}{V_1}\right)^{-\gamma}, </math>
or
<math display"block"> \left(\frac{P_2}{P_1}\right)^{-\frac{1}{\gamma}} \frac{V_2}{V_1}. </math>
Substituting into the previous expression for ,
<math display"block"> W -\alpha n R T_1 \left( \left( \frac{P_2}{P_1} \right)^{\frac{\gamma-1}{\gamma}} - 1 \right). </math>
Substituting this expression and (c1) in (c3) gives
<math display"block"> \alpha n R (T_2 - T_1) \alpha n R T_1 \left( \left( \frac{P_2}{P_1} \right)^{\frac{\gamma-1}{\gamma}} - 1 \right). </math>
Simplifying,
<math display="block">\begin{align}
T_2 - T_1 &= T_1 \left( \left( \frac{P_2}{P_1} \right)^{\frac{\gamma-1}{\gamma}} - 1 \right), \\
\frac{T_2}{T_1} - 1 &= \left( \frac{P_2}{P_1} \right)^{\frac{\gamma-1}{\gamma}} - 1, \\
T_2 &= T_1 \left( \frac{P_2}{P_1} \right)^{\frac{\gamma-1}{\gamma}}.
\end{align}</math>
Graphing adiabats
thumb|upright=1.6|P–V diagram with a superposition of adiabats and isotherms:
An adiabat is a curve of constant entropy in a diagram. Some properties of adiabats on a P–V diagram are indicated. These properties may be read from the classical behaviour of ideal gases, except in the region where PV becomes small (low temperature), where quantum effects become important.
# Every adiabat asymptotically approaches both the V axis and the P axis (just like isotherms).
# Each adiabat intersects each isotherm exactly once.
# An adiabat looks similar to an isotherm, except that during an expansion, an adiabat loses more pressure than an isotherm, so it has a steeper inclination (more vertical).
# If isotherms are concave towards the north-east direction (45° from V-axis), then adiabats are concave towards the east north-east (31° from V-axis).
# If adiabats and isotherms are graphed at regular intervals of entropy and temperature, respectively (like altitude on a contour map), then as the eye moves towards the axes (towards the south-west), it sees the density of isotherms stay constant, but it sees the density of adiabats grow. The exception is very near absolute zero, where the density of adiabats drops sharply and they become rare (see Nernst's theorem).
Etymology
The term adiabatic () is an anglicization of the Greek term ἀδιάβατος "impassable" (used by Xenophon of rivers). It is used in the thermodynamic sense by Rankine (1866), and adopted by Maxwell in 1871 (explicitly attributing the term to Rankine).
The etymological origin corresponds here to an impossibility of transfer of energy as heat and of transfer of matter across the wall.
The Greek word ἀδιάβατος is formed from privative ἀ- ("not") and διαβατός, "passable", in turn deriving from διά ("through"), and βαῖνειν ("to walk, go, come").
Furthermore, in atmospheric thermodynamics, a diabatic process is one in which heat is exchanged. An adiabatic process is the opposite – a process in which no heat is exchanged.
Conceptual significance in thermodynamic theory
The adiabatic process has been important for thermodynamics since its early days. It was important in the work of Joule because it provided a way of nearly directly relating quantities of heat and work.
Energy can enter or leave a thermodynamic system enclosed by walls that prevent mass transfer only as heat or work. Therefore, a quantity of work in such a system can be related almost directly to an equivalent quantity of heat in a cycle of two limbs. The first limb is an isochoric adiabatic work process increasing the system's internal energy; the second, an isochoric and workless heat transfer returning the system to its original state. Accordingly, Rankine measured quantity of heat in units of work, rather than as a calorimetric quantity. In 1854, Rankine used a quantity that he called "the thermodynamic function" that later was called entropy, and at that time he wrote also of the "curve of no transmission of heat", which he later called an adiabatic curve. by Carathéodory, The reason is that calorimetry presupposes a type of temperature as already defined before the statement of the first law of thermodynamics, such as one based on empirical scales. Such a presupposition involves making the distinction between empirical temperature and absolute temperature. Rather, the definition of absolute thermodynamic temperature is best left till the second law is available as a conceptual basis.
In the eighteenth century, the law of conservation of energy was not yet fully formulated or established, and the nature of heat was debated. One approach to these problems was to regard heat, measured by calorimetry, as a primary substance that is conserved in quantity. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was recognized as a form of energy, and the law of conservation of energy was thereby also recognized. The view that eventually established itself, and is currently regarded as right, is that the law of conservation of energy is a primary axiom, and that heat is to be analyzed as consequential. In this light, heat cannot be a component of the total energy of a single body because it is not a state variable but, rather, a variable that describes a transfer between two bodies. The adiabatic process is important because it is a logical ingredient of this current view. And Laidler has summarized the complicated etymology of "adiabatic".
Quantum mechanics and quantum statistical mechanics, however, use the word adiabatic in a very different sense, one that can at times seem almost opposite to the classical thermodynamic sense. In quantum theory, the word adiabatic can mean something perhaps near isentropic, or perhaps near quasi-static, but the usage of the word is very different between the two disciplines.
On the one hand, in quantum theory, if a perturbative element of compressive work is done almost infinitely slowly (that is to say quasi-statically), it is said to have been done adiabatically. The idea is that the shapes of the eigenfunctions change slowly and continuously, so that no quantum jump is triggered, and the change is virtually reversible. While the occupation numbers are unchanged, nevertheless there is change in the energy levels of one-to-one corresponding, pre- and post-compression, eigenstates. Thus a perturbative element of work has been done without heat transfer and without introduction of random change within the system. For example, Max Born writes
On the other hand, in quantum theory, if a perturbative element of compressive work is done rapidly, it changes the occupation numbers and energies of the eigenstates in proportion to the transition moment integral and in accordance with time-dependent perturbation theory, as well as perturbing the functional form of the eigenstates themselves. In that theory, such a rapid change is said not to be adiabatic, and the contrary word diabatic is applied to it.
Recent research suggests that the power absorbed from the perturbation corresponds to the rate of these non-adiabatic transitions. This corresponds to the classical process of energy transfer in the form of heat, but with the relative time scales reversed in the quantum case. Quantum adiabatic processes occur over relatively long time scales, while classical adiabatic processes occur over relatively short time scales. It should also be noted that the concept of 'heat' (in reference to the quantity of thermal energy transferred) breaks down at the quantum level, and the specific form of energy (typically electromagnetic) must be considered instead. The small or negligible absorption of energy from the perturbation in a quantum adiabatic process provides a good justification for identifying it as the quantum analogue of adiabatic processes in classical thermodynamics, and for the reuse of the term.
In classical thermodynamics, such a rapid change would still be called adiabatic because the system is adiabatically isolated, and there is no transfer of energy as heat. The strong irreversibility of the change, due to viscosity or other entropy production, does not impinge on this classical usage.
Thus for a mass of gas, in macroscopic thermodynamics, words are so used that a compression is sometimes loosely or approximately said to be adiabatic if it is rapid enough to avoid significant heat transfer, even if the system is not adiabatically isolated. But in quantum statistical theory, a compression is not called adiabatic if it is rapid, even if the system is adiabatically isolated in the classical thermodynamic sense of the term. The words are used differently in the two disciplines, as stated just above.
See also
* Fire piston
* Heat burst
; Related physics topics
* First law of thermodynamics
* Entropy (classical thermodynamics)
* Adiabatic conductivity
* Adiabatic lapse rate
* Total air temperature
* Magnetic refrigeration
* Berry phase
; Related thermodynamic processes
* Cyclic process
* Isobaric process
* Isenthalpic process
* Isentropic process
* Isochoric process
* Isothermal process
* Polytropic process
* Quasistatic process
References
;General
*
* Nave, Carl Rod. "[http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/adiab.html Adiabatic Processes]". HyperPhysics.
* Thorngren, Dr. Jane R. "[http://daphne.palomar.edu/jthorngren/adiabatic_processes.htm Adiabatic Processes]". Daphne – A Palomar College Web Server, 21 July 1995. .
External links
*[http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/adiab.html#c1: Article in HyperPhysics Encyclopaedia]
Category:Thermodynamic processes
Category:Atmospheric thermodynamics
Category:Entropy | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_process | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.616753 |
1422 | Amide | |the anion |Azanide|other uses|Amide (functional group)}}
, the simplest amide]]
(zwitterionic form), an amino acid with a side chain (highlighted) containing an amide group]]
In organic chemistry, an amide, also known as an organic amide or a carboxamide, is a compound with the general formula , where R, R', and R″ represent any group, typically organyl groups or hydrogen atoms. The amide group is called a peptide bond when it is part of the main chain of a protein, and an isopeptide bond when it occurs in a side chain, as in asparagine and glutamine. It can be viewed as a derivative of a carboxylic acid () with the hydroxyl group () replaced by an amino group (); or, equivalently, an acyl (alkanoyl) group () joined to an amino group.
Common of amides are formamide (), acetamide (), benzamide (), and dimethylformamide (). Some uncommon examples of amides are N-chloroacetamide () and chloroformamide ().
Amides are qualified as primary, secondary, and tertiary according to the number of acyl groups bounded to the nitrogen atom.Nomenclature
The core of amides is called the amide group (specifically, carboxamide group).
In the usual nomenclature, one adds the term "amide" to the stem of the parent acid's name. For instance, the amide derived from acetic acid is named acetamide (CH<sub>3</sub>CONH<sub>2</sub>). IUPAC recommends ethanamide, but this and related formal names are rarely encountered. When the amide is derived from a primary or secondary amine, the substituents on nitrogen are indicated first in the name. Thus, the amide formed from dimethylamine and acetic acid is N,N-dimethylacetamide (CH<sub>3</sub>CONMe<sub>2</sub>, where Me CH<sub>3</sub>). Usually even this name is simplified to dimethylacetamide. Cyclic amides are called lactams; they are necessarily secondary or tertiary amides.Applications
Amides are pervasive in nature and technology. Proteins and important plastics like nylons, aramids, Twaron, and Kevlar are polymers whose units are connected by amide groups (polyamides); these linkages are easily formed, confer structural rigidity, and resist hydrolysis. Amides include many other important biological compounds, as well as many drugs like paracetamol, penicillin and LSD. Low-molecular-weight amides, such as dimethylformamide, are common solvents.
Structure and bonding
ed dimer from X-ray crystallography. Selected distances: C-O: 1.243, C-N, 1.325, N---O, 2.925 Å. Color code: red O, blue N, gray C, white H.]]
The lone pair of electrons on the nitrogen atom is delocalized into the Carbonyl group, thus forming a partial double bond between nitrogen and carbon. In fact the O, C and N atoms have molecular orbitals occupied by delocalized electrons, forming a conjugated system. Consequently, the three bonds of the nitrogen in amides is not pyramidal (as in the amines) but planar. This planar restriction prevents rotations about the N linkage and thus has important consequences for the mechanical properties of bulk material of such molecules, and also for the configurational properties of macromolecules built by such bonds. The inability to rotate distinguishes amide groups from ester groups which allow rotation and thus create more flexible bulk material.
The C-C(O)NR<sub>2</sub> core of amides is planar. The C=O distance is shorter than the C-N distance by almost 10%. The structure of an amide can be described also as a resonance between two alternative structures: neutral (A) and zwitterionic (B).
:
It is estimated that for acetamide, structure A makes a 62% contribution to the structure, while structure B makes a 28% contribution (these figures do not sum to 100% because there are additional less-important resonance forms that are not depicted above). There is also a hydrogen bond present between the hydrogen and nitrogen atoms in the active groups. Resonance is largely prevented in the very strained quinuclidone.
<!--needs:
barrier from DMF, and a more general ref than this JACS rpt
comment on syn and anti secondary amides-->
In their IR spectra, amides exhibit a moderately intense ν<sub>CO</sub> band near 1650 cm<sup>−1</sup>. The energy of this band is about 60 cm<sub>−1</sub> lower than for the ν<sub>CO</sub> of esters and ketones. This difference reflects the contribution of the zwitterionic resonance structure.
Basicity
Compared to amines, amides are very weak bases. While the conjugate acid of an amine has a pK<sub>a</sub> of about 9.5, the conjugate acid of an amide has a pK<sub>a</sub> around −0.5. Therefore, compared to amines, amides do not have acid–base properties that are as noticeable in water. This relative lack of basicity is explained by the withdrawing of electrons from the amine by the carbonyl. On the other hand, amides are much stronger bases than carboxylic acids, esters, aldehydes, and ketones (their conjugate acids' pK<sub>a</sub>s are between −6 and −10).
The proton of a primary or secondary amide does not dissociate readily; its pK<sub>a</sub> is usually well above 15. Conversely, under extremely acidic conditions, the carbonyl oxygen can become protonated with a pK<sub>a</sub> of roughly −1. It is not only because of the positive charge on the nitrogen but also because of the negative charge on the oxygen gained through resonance.
Hydrogen bonding and solubility
Because of the greater electronegativity of oxygen than nitrogen, the carbonyl (CO) is a stronger dipole than the N–C dipole. The presence of a CO dipole and, to a lesser extent a N–C dipole, allows amides to act as H-bond acceptors. In primary and secondary amides, the presence of N–H dipoles allows amides to function as H-bond donors as well. Thus amides can participate in hydrogen bonding with water and other protic solvents; the oxygen atom can accept hydrogen bonds from water and the N–H hydrogen atoms can donate H-bonds. As a result of interactions such as these, the water solubility of amides is greater than that of corresponding hydrocarbons. These hydrogen bonds also have an important role in the secondary structure of proteins.
The solubilities of amides and esters are roughly comparable. Typically amides are less soluble than comparable amines and carboxylic acids since these compounds can both donate and accept hydrogen bonds. Tertiary amides, with the important exception of N,N-dimethylformamide, exhibit low solubility in water.
Reactions
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Amides do not readily participate in nucleophilic substitution reactions. Amides are stable to water, and are roughly 100 times more stable towards hydrolysis than esters. Amides can, however, be hydrolyzed to carboxylic acids in the presence of acid or base. The stability of amide bonds has biological implications, since the amino acids that make up proteins are linked with amide bonds. Amide bonds are resistant enough to hydrolysis to maintain protein structure in aqueous environments but are susceptible to catalyzed hydrolysis.
Primary and secondary amides do not react usefully with carbon nucleophiles. Instead, Grignard reagents and organolithiums deprotonate an amide N-H bond. Tertiary amides do not experience this problem, and react with carbon nucleophiles to give ketones; the amide anion (NR<sub>2</sub><sup>−</sup>) is a very strong base and thus a very poor leaving group, so nucleophilic attack only occurs once. When reacted with carbon nucleophiles, N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF) can be used to introduce a formyl group.
Here, phenyllithium 1 attacks the carbonyl group of DMF 2, giving tetrahedral intermediate 3. Because the dimethylamide anion is a poor leaving group, the intermediate does not collapse and another nucleophilic addition does not occur. Upon acidic workup, the alkoxide is protonated to give 4, then the amine is protonated to give 5. Elimination of a neutral molecule of dimethylamine and loss of a proton give benzaldehyde, 6.
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Hydrolysis
Amides hydrolyse in hot alkali as well as in strong acidic conditions. Acidic conditions yield the carboxylic acid and the ammonium ion while basic hydrolysis yield the carboxylate ion and ammonia. The protonation of the initially generated amine under acidic conditions and the deprotonation of the initially generated carboxylic acid under basic conditions render these processes non-catalytic and irreversible. Electrophiles other than protons react with the carbonyl oxygen. This step often precedes hydrolysis, which is catalyzed by both Brønsted acids and Lewis acids. Peptidase enzymes and some synthetic catalysts often operate by attachment of electrophiles to the carbonyl oxygen.
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!Reaction name !! Product !! class="unsortable" | Comment
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| Dehydration
|Nitrile
| Reagent: phosphorus pentoxide; benzenesulfonyl chloride; TFAA/py
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| Hofmann rearrangement
|Amine with one fewer carbon atom
|Reagents: bromine and sodium hydroxide
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| Amide reduction
| Amines, aldehydes
|Reagent: lithium aluminium hydride followed by hydrolysis
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|Vilsmeier–Haack reaction
|Aldehyde (via imine)
| , aromatic substrate, formamide
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|Bischler–Napieralski reaction
|Cyclic aryl imine
| , , etc.
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|Tautomeric chlorination||Imidoyl chloride||Oxophilic halogenating agents, e.g. COCl<sub>2</sub> or SOCl<sub>2</sub>
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Synthesis
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From carboxylic acids and related compounds
Amides are usually prepared by coupling a carboxylic acid with an amine. The direct reaction generally requires high temperatures to drive off the water:
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Esters are far superior substrates relative to carboxylic acids.
Further "activating" both acid chlorides (Schotten-Baumann reaction) and anhydrides (Lumière–Barbier method) react with amines to give amides:
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Peptide synthesis use coupling agents such as HATU, HOBt, or PyBOP.From nitrilesThe hydrolysis of nitriles is conducted on an industrial scale to produce fatty amides. Laboratory procedures are also available.Specialty routesMany specialized methods also yield amides. A variety of reagents, e.g. tris(2,2,2-trifluoroethyl) borate have been developed for specialized applications.
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|+ Specialty Routes to Amides
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!Reaction name !! Substrate !! class="unsortable" | Details
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| Beckmann rearrangement
|Cyclic ketone
| Reagent: hydroxylamine and acid
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| Schmidt reaction
|Ketones
| Reagent: hydrazoic acid
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| Willgerodt–Kindler reaction
| Aryl alkyl ketones
| Sulfur and morpholine
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|Passerini reaction
| Carboxylic acid, ketone or aldehyde
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|Ugi reaction
| Isocyanide, carboxylic acid, ketone, primary amine
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|Bodroux reaction
| Carboxylic acid, Grignard reagent with an aniline derivative ArNHR'
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|Chapman rearrangement
|Aryl imino ether
|For N,N-diaryl amides. The reaction mechanism is based on a nucleophilic aromatic substitution.
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| Leuckart amide synthesis
| Isocyanate
| Reaction of arene with isocyanate catalysed by aluminium trichloride, formation of aromatic amide.
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| Ritter reaction
| Alkenes, alcohols, or other carbonium ion sources
| Secondary amides via an addition reaction between a nitrile and a carbonium ion in the presence of concentrated acids.
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| Photolytic addition of formamide to olefins
| Terminal alkenes
| A free radical homologation reaction between a terminal alkene and formamide.
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|Dehydrogenative coupling
|alcohol, amine
| requires ruthenium dehydrogenation catalyst
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|Transamidation
|amide
|typically slow
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See also
* Amidogen
* Amino radical
* Amidicity
* Imidic acid
* Metal amides
References
External links
* [http://www.rsc.org/Chemsoc/Chembytes/IUPACGoldbook.asp IUPAC Compendium of Chemical Terminology]
Category:Functional groups | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amide | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.634279 |
1423 | Animism | Animism (from meaning 'breath, spirit, life') is the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence. Animism perceives all things—animals, plants, rocks, rivers, weather systems, human handiwork, and in some cases words—as being animated, having agency and free will. Animism is used in anthropology of religion as a term for the belief system of many Indigenous peoples in contrast to the relatively more recent development of organized religions. Animism is a metaphysical belief which focuses on the supernatural universe: specifically, on the concept of the immaterial soul.
Although each culture has its own mythologies and rituals, animism is said to describe the most common, foundational thread of indigenous peoples' "spiritual" or "supernatural" perspectives. The animistic perspective is so widely held and inherent to most indigenous peoples that they often do not even have a word in their languages that corresponds to "animism" (or even "religion"). The term "animism" is an anthropological construct.
Largely due to such ethnolinguistic and cultural discrepancies, opinions differ on whether animism refers to an ancestral mode of experience common to indigenous peoples around the world or to a full-fledged religion in its own right. The currently accepted definition of animism was only developed in the late 19th century (1871) by Edward Tylor. It is "one of anthropology's earliest concepts, if not the first".
Animism encompasses beliefs that all material phenomena have agency, that there exists no categorical distinction between the spiritual and physical world, and that soul, spirit, or sentience exists not only in humans but also in other animals, plants, rocks, geographic features (such as mountains and rivers), and other entities of the natural environment. Examples include water sprites, vegetation deities, and tree spirits, among others. Animism may further attribute a life force to abstract concepts such as words, true names, or metaphors in mythology. Some members of the non-tribal world also consider themselves animists, such as author Daniel Quinn, sculptor Lawson Oyekan, and many contemporary Pagans.
Etymology
English anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor initially wanted to describe the phenomenon as spiritualism, but he realized that it would cause confusion with the modern religion of spiritualism, which was then prevalent across Western nations. He adopted the term animism from the writings of German scientist Georg Ernst Stahl, who had developed the term in 1708 as a biological theory that souls formed the vital principle, and that the normal phenomena of life and the abnormal phenomena of disease could be traced to spiritual causes.
The origin of the word comes from the Latin word , which means life or soul.
The first known usage in English appeared in 1819. "Old animism" definitions Earlier anthropological perspectives, which have since been termed the old animism, were concerned with knowledge on what is alive and what factors make something alive. The old animism assumed that animists were individuals who were unable to understand the difference between persons and things. Critics of the old animism have accused it of preserving "colonialist and dualistic worldviews and rhetoric".
Edward Tylor's definition
developed animism as an anthropological theory.]]
The idea of animism was developed by anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor through his 1871 book Primitive Culture, in which he defined it as "the general doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general". According to Tylor, animism often includes "an idea of pervading life and will in nature;" a belief that natural objects other than humans have souls. This formulation was little different from that proposed by Auguste Comte as "fetishism", but the terms now have distinct meanings.
For Tylor, animism represented the earliest form of religion, being situated within an evolutionary framework of religion that has developed in stages and which will ultimately lead to humanity rejecting religion altogether in favor of scientific rationality. Thus, for Tylor, animism was fundamentally seen as a mistake, a basic error from which all religions grew. He did not believe that animism was inherently illogical, but he suggested that it arose from early humans' dreams and visions and thus was a rational system. However, it was based on erroneous, unscientific observations about the nature of reality. Stringer notes that his reading of Primitive Culture led him to believe that Tylor was far more sympathetic in regard to "primitive" populations than many of his contemporaries and that Tylor expressed no belief that there was any difference between the intellectual capabilities of "savage" people and Westerners.
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Confounding animism with totemism
In 1869 (three years after Tylor proposed his definition of animism), Edinburgh lawyer John Ferguson McLennan, argued that the animistic thinking evident in fetishism gave rise to a religion he named totemism. Primitive people believed, he argued, that they were descended from the same species as their totemic animal.
According to anthropologist Tim Ingold, animism shares similarities with totemism but differs in its focus on individual spirit beings which help to perpetuate life, whereas totemism more typically holds that there is a primary source, such as the land itself or the ancestors, who provide the basis to life. Certain indigenous religious groups such as the Australian Aboriginals are more typically totemic in their worldview, whereas others like the Inuit are more typically animistic.
From his studies into child development, Jean Piaget suggested that children were born with an innate animist worldview in which they anthropomorphized inanimate objects and that it was only later that they grew out of this belief. Conversely, from her ethnographic research, Margaret Mead argued the opposite, believing that children were not born with an animist worldview but that they became acculturated to such beliefs as they were educated by their society.
Stewart Guthrie saw animism—or "attribution" as he preferred it—as an evolutionary strategy to aid survival. He argued that both humans and other animal species view inanimate objects as potentially alive as a means of being constantly on guard against potential threats. His suggested explanation, however, did not deal with the question of why such a belief became central to the religion. In 2000, Guthrie suggested that the "most widespread" concept of animism was that it was the "attribution of spirits to natural phenomena such as stones and trees.""New animism" non-archaic definitions Many anthropologists ceased using the term animism, deeming it to be too close to early anthropological theory and religious polemic. However, the term had also been claimed by religious groups—namely, Indigenous communities and nature worshippers—who felt that it aptly described their own beliefs, and who in some cases actively identified as "animists." It was thus readopted by various scholars, who began using the term in a different way, placing the focus on knowing how to behave toward other beings, some of whom are not human. As religious studies scholar Graham Harvey stated, while the "old animist" definition had been problematic, the term animism was nevertheless "of considerable value as a critical, academic term for a style of religious and cultural relating to the world."
Hallowell and the Ojibwe
chiefs in the 19th century. It was anthropological studies of Ojibwe religion that resulted in the development of the "new animism".|upright=1.2]]
The new animism emerged largely from the publications of anthropologist Irving Hallowell, produced on the basis of his ethnographic research among the Ojibwe communities of Canada in the mid-20th century. For the Ojibwe encountered by Hallowell, personhood did not require human-likeness, but rather humans were perceived as being like other persons, who for instance included rock persons and bear persons. For the Ojibwe, these persons were each willful beings, who gained meaning and power through their interactions with others; through respectfully interacting with other persons, they themselves learned to "act as a person".
Hallowell's approach to the understanding of Ojibwe personhood differed strongly from prior anthropological concepts of animism. He emphasized the need to challenge the modernist, Western perspectives of what a person is, by entering into a dialogue with different worldwide views. Hallowell's approach influenced the work of anthropologist Nurit Bird-David, who produced a scholarly article reassessing the idea of animism in 1999. Seven comments from other academics were provided in the journal, debating Bird-David's ideas.
Postmodern anthropology
More recently, postmodern anthropologists are increasingly engaging with the concept of animism. Modernism is characterized by a Cartesian subject-object dualism that divides the subjective from the objective, and culture from nature. In the modernist view, animism is the inverse of scientism, and hence, is deemed inherently invalid by some anthropologists. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, some anthropologists question modernist assumptions and theorize that all societies continue to "animate" the world around them. In contrast to Tylor's reasoning, however, this "animism" is considered to be more than just a remnant of primitive thought. More specifically, the "animism" of modernity is characterized by humanity's "professional subcultures", as in the ability to treat the world as a detached entity within a delimited sphere of activity.
Human beings continue to create personal relationships with elements of the aforementioned objective world, such as pets, cars, or teddy bears, which are recognized as subjects. As such, these entities are "approached as communicative subjects rather than the inert objects perceived by modernists." These approaches aim to avoid the modernist assumption that the environment consists of a physical world distinct from the world of humans, as well as the modernist conception of the person being composed dualistically of a body and a soul.
Rane Willerslev extends the argument by noting that animists reject this Cartesian dualism and that the animist self identifies with the world, "feeling at once within and apart from it so that the two glide ceaselessly in and out of each other in a sealed circuit". The animist hunter is thus aware of himself as a human hunter, but, through mimicry, is able to assume the viewpoint, senses, and sensibilities of his prey, to be one with it. Shamanism, in this view, is an everyday attempt to influence spirits of ancestors and animals, by mirroring their behaviors, as the hunter does its prey.
Ethical and ecological understanding
Cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram proposed an ethical and ecological understanding of animism, grounded in the phenomenology of sensory experience. In his books The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal, Abram suggests that material things are never entirely passive in our direct perceptual experience, holding rather that perceived things actively "solicit our attention" or "call our focus", coaxing the perceiving body into an ongoing participation with those things.
In the absence of intervening technologies, he suggests that sensory experience is inherently animistic in that it discloses a material field that is animate and self-organizing from the beginning. David Abram used contemporary cognitive and natural science, as well as the perspectival worldviews of diverse indigenous oral cultures, to propose a richly pluralist and story-based cosmology in which matter is alive. He suggested that such a relational ontology is in close accord with humanity's spontaneous perceptual experience by drawing attention to the senses, and to the primacy of sensuous terrain, enjoining a more respectful and ethical relation to the more-than-human community of animals, plants, soils, mountains, waters, and weather-patterns that materially sustains humanity.
In contrast to a long-standing tendency in the Western social sciences, which commonly provide rational explanations of animistic experience, Abram develops an animistic account of reason itself. He holds that civilised reason is sustained only by intensely animistic participation between human beings and their own written signs. For instance, as soon as someone reads letters on a page or screen, they can "see what it says"—the letters speak as much as nature spoke to pre-literate peoples. Reading can usefully be understood as an intensely concentrated form of animism, one that effectively eclipses all of the other, older, more spontaneous forms of animistic participation in which humans were once engaged.
}} Relation to the concept of 'I-thou' Religious studies scholar Graham Harvey defined animism as the belief "that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others." He added that it is therefore "concerned with learning how to be a good person in respectful relationships with other persons."
In his Handbook of Contemporary Animism (2013), Harvey identifies the animist perspective in line with Martin Buber's "I-thou" as opposed to "I-it". In such, Harvey says, the animist takes an I-thou approach to relating to the world, whereby objects and animals are treated as a "thou", rather than as an "it".
Religion
" in the literature|upright=1.2]]
There is ongoing disagreement (and no general consensus) as to whether animism is merely a singular, broadly encompassing religious belief or a worldview in and of itself, comprising many diverse mythologies found worldwide in many diverse cultures. This also raises a controversy regarding the ethical claims animism may or may not make: whether animism ignores questions of ethics altogether; or, by endowing various non-human elements of nature with spirituality or personhood, it in fact promotes a complex ecological ethics. Concepts Distinction from pantheism Animism is not the same as pantheism, although the two are sometimes confused. Moreover, some religions are both pantheistic and animistic. One of the main differences is that while animists believe everything to be spiritual in nature, they do not necessarily see the spiritual nature of everything in existence as being united (monism) the way pantheists do. As a result, animism puts more emphasis on the uniqueness of each individual soul. In pantheism, everything shares the same spiritual essence, rather than having distinct spirits or souls. For example, Giordano Bruno equated the world soul with God and espoused a pantheistic animism. Fetishism / totemism
In many animistic world views, the human being is often regarded as on a roughly equal footing with other animals, plants, and natural forces. African indigenous religions Traditional African religions: most religious traditions of Sub-Saharan Africa are basically a complex form of animism with polytheistic and shamanistic elements and ancestor worship.
In West Africa, the Serer religious (A ƭat Roog) encompasses ancestor veneration (not worship) via the Pangool. The Pangool are the Serer ancestral spirits and interceders between the living and the Divine, Roog.
In East Africa the Kerma culture display Animistic elements similar to other Traditional African religions. In contrast to the later polytheistic Napatan and Meroitic periods, the Kerma culture with displays of animals in Amulets and the esteemed antiques of Lions, appear to be an Animistic culture rather than a polytheistic culture. The Kermans likely treated Jebel Barkal as a special sacred site, and passed it on to the Kushites and Egyptians who venerated the mesa.
In North Africa, the traditional Berber religion includes the traditional polytheistic, animist, and in some rare cases, shamanistic, religions of the Berber people. Asian origin religions Indian-origin religions
In the Indian-origin religions, namely Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, the animistic aspects of nature worship and ecological conservation are part of the core belief system.
Matsya Purana, a Hindu text, has a Sanskrit language shloka (hymn), which explains the importance of reverence of ecology. It states: "A pond equals ten wells, a reservoir equals ten ponds, while a son equals ten reservoirs, and a tree equals ten sons." Indian religions worship trees such as the Bodhi Tree and numerous superlative banyan trees, conserve the sacred groves of India, revere the rivers as sacred, and worship the mountains and their ecology.
Panchavati are the sacred trees in Indic religions, which are sacred groves containing five type of trees, usually chosen from among the Vata (Ficus benghalensis, Banyan), Ashvattha (Ficus religiosa, Peepal), Bilva (Aegle marmelos, Bengal Quince), Amalaki (Phyllanthus emblica, Indian Gooseberry, Amla), Ashoka (Saraca asoca, Ashok), Udumbara (Ficus racemosa, Cluster Fig, Gular), Nimba (Azadirachta indica, Neem) and Shami (Prosopis spicigera, Indian Mesquite).
– the Great Banyan tree revered by the people of Indian-origin religions such as Hinduism (including Vedic, Shaivism, Dravidian Hinduism), Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism|upright1.2]] festival, married women tie threads around a banyan tree in India.|left|upright1.2]]
The banyan is considered holy in several religious traditions of India. The Ficus benghalensis'' is the national tree of India. Vat Purnima is a Hindu festival related to the banyan tree, and is observed by married women in North India and in the Western Indian states of Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat. For three days of the month of Jyeshtha in the Hindu calendar (which falls in May–June in the Gregorian calendar) married women observe a fast, tie threads around a banyan tree, and pray for the well-being of their husbands. Thimmamma Marrimanu, sacred to Indian religions, has branches spread over five acres and was listed as the world's largest banyan tree in the Guinness World Records in 1989.
In Hinduism, the leaf of the banyan tree is said to be the resting place for the god Krishna. In the Bhagavat Gita, Krishna said, "There is a banyan tree which has its roots upward and its branches down, and the Vedic hymns are its leaves. One who knows this tree is the knower of the Vedas." (Bg 15.1)
In Buddhism's Pali canon, the banyan (Pali: nigrodha) is referenced numerous times. Typical metaphors allude to the banyan's epiphytic nature, likening the banyan's supplanting of a host tree as comparable to the way sensual desire (kāma) overcomes humans.
Mun (also known as Munism or Bongthingism) is the traditional polytheistic, animist, shamanistic, and syncretic religion of the Lepcha people.
Sanamahism is an ethnic religion of the Meitei people of in Northeast India. It is a polytheistic and animist religion and is named after Lainingthou Sanamahi, one of the most important deities of the Meitei faith. Chinese religions Shendao () is a term originated by Chinese folk religions influenced by, Mohist, Confucian and Taoist philosophy, referring to the divine order of nature or the Wuxing.
The Shang dynasty's state religion was practiced from 1600 BCE to 1046 BCE, and was built on the idea of spiritualizing natural phenomena.
Japan and Shinto
Shinto is the traditional Japanese folk religion and has many animist aspects. The , a class of supernatural beings, are central to Shinto. All things, including natural forces and well-known geographical locations, are thought to be home to the kami. The kami are worshipped at kamidana household shrines, family shrines, and jinja public shrines.
The Ryukyuan religion of the Ryukyu Islands is distinct from Shinto, but shares similar characteristics.
Kalash people
Kalash people of Northern Pakistan follow an ancient animistic religion identified with an ancient form of Hinduism.
The Kalash (Kalasha: , romanised: , Devanagari: ), or Kalasha, are an Indo-Aryan indigenous people residing in the Chitral District of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan.
They are considered unique among the people of Pakistan. They are also considered to be Pakistan's smallest ethnoreligious group, and traditionally practice what authors characterise as a form of animism.
Muism, the native Korean belief, has many animist aspects. The various deities, called kwisin, are capable of interacting with humans and causing problems if they are not honoured appropriately. priestess in the Philippines making an offering to an apdel, a guardian anito spirit of her village that reside in the water-worn stones known as pinaing|upright1.2]] Philippines indigenous religions In the indigenous Philippine folk religions, pre-colonial religions of Philippines and Philippine mythology, animism is part of their core beliefs as demonstrated by the belief in Anito, Diwata and Bathala as well as their conservation and veneration of sacred Indigenous Philippine shrines, forests, mountains and sacred grounds.
Anito (lit. '[ancestor] spirit') refers to the various indigenous shamanistic folk religions of the Philippines, led by female or feminized male shamans known as babaylan. It includes belief in a spirit world existing alongside and interacting with the material world, as well as the belief that everything has a spirit, from rocks and trees to animals and humans to natural phenomena.
In indigenous Filipino belief, the Bathala is the omnipotent deity which was derived from Sanskrit word for the Hindu supreme deity bhattara, as one of the ten avatars of the Hindu god Vishnu. The omnipotent Bathala also presides over the spirits of ancestors called Anito. Anitos serve as intermediaries between mortals and the divine, such as Agni (Hindu) who holds the access to divine realms; for this reason they are invoked first and are the first to receive offerings, regardless of the deity the worshipper wants to pray to.
In ancient Philippine animism, Diwata or Diwatas in plural is a broad, gender-neutral term for supernatural beings, including gods, goddesses, fairies, nature spirits, and celestial entities. Rooted in Hindu-Buddhist influences, the word originally meant "celestial being" or "descent" in Sanskrit word devata (deity).In modern Filipino culture, Diwata is often interpreted and linked to fairies, muses, nymphs, or even dryads. Abrahamic religions
Animism also has influences in Abrahamic religions.
The Old Testament and the Wisdom literature preach the omnipresence of God (Jeremiah 23:24; Proverbs 15:3; 1 Kings 8:27), and God is bodily present in the incarnation of his Son, Jesus Christ. (Gospel of John 1:14, Colossians 2:9). Animism is not peripheral to Christian identity but is its nurturing home ground, its axis mundi. In addition to the conceptual work the term animism performs, it provides insight into the relational character and common personhood of material existence.
With rising awareness of ecological preservation, recently theologians like Mark I. Wallace argue for animistic Christianity with a biocentric approach that understands God being present in all earthly objects, such as animals, trees, and rocks.
Pre-Islamic Arab religion
Pre-Islamic Arab religion can refer to the traditional polytheistic, animist, and in some rare cases, shamanistic, religions of the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula. The belief in jinn, invisible entities akin to spirits in the Western sense dominant in the Arab religious systems, hardly fit the description of Animism in a strict sense. The jinn are considered to be analogous to the human soul by living lives like that of humans, but they are not exactly like human souls neither are they spirits of the dead. It is unclear if belief in jinn derived from nomadic or sedentary populations.
The New Age movement commonly demonstrates animistic traits in asserting the existence of nature spirits.
Shamanism
A shaman is a person regarded as having access to, and influence in, the world of benevolent and malevolent spirits, who typically enters into a trance state during a ritual, and practices divination and healing.
According to Mircea Eliade, shamanism encompasses the premise that shamans are intermediaries or messengers between the human world and the spirit worlds. Shamans are said to treat ailments and illnesses by mending the soul. Alleviating traumas affecting the soul or spirit restores the physical body of the individual to balance and wholeness. The shaman also enters supernatural realms or dimensions to obtain solutions to problems afflicting the community. Shamans may visit other worlds or dimensions to bring guidance to misguided souls and to ameliorate illnesses of the human soul caused by foreign elements. The shaman operates primarily within the spiritual world, which in turn affects the human world. The restoration of balance results in the elimination of the ailment.
Abram, however, articulates a less supernatural and much more ecological understanding of the shaman's role than that propounded by Eliade. Drawing upon his own field research in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas, Abram suggests that in animistic cultures, the shaman functions primarily as an intermediary between the human community and the more-than-human community of active agencies—the local animals, plants, and landforms (mountains, rivers, forests, winds, and weather patterns, all of which are felt to have their own specific sentience). Hence, the shaman's ability to heal individual instances of disease (or imbalance) within the human community is a byproduct of their more continual practice of balancing the reciprocity between the human community and the wider collective of animate beings in which that community is embedded. Animist life Non-human animals Animism entails the belief that all living things have a soul, and thus, a central concern of animist thought surrounds how animals can be eaten, or otherwise used for humans' subsistence needs. The actions of non-human animals are viewed as "intentional, planned and purposive", and they are understood to be persons, as they are both alive, and communicate with others.
In animist worldviews, non-human animals are understood to participate in kinship systems and ceremonies with humans, as well as having their own kinship systems and ceremonies. Graham Harvey cited an example of an animist understanding of animal behavior that occurred at a powwow held by the Conne River Mi'kmaq in 1996; an eagle flew over the proceedings, circling over the central drum group. The assembled participants called out ('eagle'), conveying welcome to the bird and expressing pleasure at its beauty, and they later articulated the view that the eagle's actions reflected its approval of the event, and the Mi'kmaq's return to traditional spiritual practices.
In animism, rituals are performed to maintain relationships between humans and spirits. Indigenous peoples often perform these rituals to appease the spirits and request their assistance during activities such as hunting and healing. In the Arctic region, certain rituals are common before the hunt as a means to show respect for the spirits of animals.
Flora
Some animists also view plant and fungi life as persons and interact with them accordingly. The most common encounter between humans and these plant and fungi persons is with the former's collection of the latter for food, and for animists, this interaction typically has to be carried out respectfully. Harvey cited the example of Māori communities in New Zealand, who often offer karakia invocations to sweet potatoes as they dig up the latter. While doing so, there is an awareness of a kinship relationship between the Māori and the sweet potatoes, with both understood as having arrived in Aotearoa together in the same canoes.
In other instances, animists believe that interaction with plant and fungi persons can result in the communication of things unknown or even otherwise unknowable. Among some modern Pagans, for instance, relationships are cultivated with specific trees, who are understood to bestow knowledge or physical gifts, such as flowers, sap, or wood that can be used as firewood or to fashion into a wand; in return, these Pagans give offerings to the tree itself, which can come in the form of libations of mead or ale, a drop of blood from a finger, or a strand of wool.
The elements
Various animistic cultures also comprehend stones as persons. Discussing ethnographic work conducted among the Ojibwe, Harvey noted that their society generally conceived of stones as being inanimate, but with two notable exceptions: the stones of the Bell Rocks and those stones which are situated beneath trees struck by lightning, which were understood to have become Thunderers themselves. The Ojibwe conceived of weather as being capable of having personhood, with storms being conceived of as persons known as 'Thunderers' whose sounds conveyed communications and who engaged in seasonal conflict over the lakes and forests, throwing lightning at lake monsters. Wind, similarly, can be conceived as a person in animistic thought.
The importance of place is also a recurring element of animism, with some places being understood to be persons in their own right. Spirits Animism can also entail relationships being established with non-corporeal spirit entities.
Other usage
Science
In the early 20th century, William McDougall defended a form of animism in his book Body and Mind: A History and Defence of Animism (1911).
Physicist Nick Herbert has argued for "quantum animism" in which the mind permeates the world at every level:
Werner Krieglstein wrote regarding his quantum Animism:
In Error and Loss: A Licence to Enchantment, Ashley Curtis (2018) has argued that the Cartesian idea of an experiencing subject facing off with an inert physical world is incoherent at its very foundation and that this incoherence is consistent with rather than belied by Darwinism. Human reason (and its rigorous extension in the natural sciences) fits an evolutionary niche just as echolocation does for bats and infrared vision does for pit vipers, and is epistemologically on a par with, rather than superior to, such capabilities. The meaning or aliveness of the "objects" we encounter, rocks, trees, rivers, and other animals, thus depends for its validity not on a detached cognitive judgment, but purely on the quality of our experience. The animist experience, or the wolf's or raven's experience, thus become licensed as equally valid worldviews to the modern western scientific one; they are indeed more valid, since they are not plagued with the incoherence that inevitably arises when "objective existence" is separated from "subjective experience."
Socio-political impact
Harvey opined that animism's views on personhood represented a radical challenge to the dominant perspectives of modernity, because it accords "intelligence, rationality, consciousness, volition, agency, intentionality, language, and desire" to non-humans. Similarly, it challenges the view of human uniqueness that is prevalent in both Abrahamic religions and Western rationalism.
Art and literature
Animist beliefs can also be expressed through artwork. For instance, among the Māori communities of New Zealand, there is an acknowledgement that creating art through carving wood or stone entails violence against the wood or stone person and that the persons who are damaged therefore have to be placated and respected during the process; any excess or waste from the creation of the artwork is returned to the land, while the artwork itself is treated with particular respect. Harvey, therefore, argued that the creation of art among the Māori was not about creating an inanimate object for display, but rather a transformation of different persons within a relationship.
Harvey expressed the view that animist worldviews were present in various works of literature, citing such examples as the writings of Alan Garner, Leslie Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker, Daniel Quinn, Linda Hogan, David Abram, Patricia Grace, Chinua Achebe, Ursula Le Guin, Louise Erdrich, and Marge Piercy.
Animist worldviews have also been identified in the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki. See also
* Anecdotal cognitivism
* Animatism
* Anima mundi
*Dayawism
* Ecotheology
* Hylozoism
* Mana
* Mauri (life force)
* Kaitiaki
* Panpsychism
* Religion and environmentalism
* Sacred trees
* Shamanism
* Wildlife totemization
Notes
References
Sources
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* |pages55–57}}
*
* Further reading *
*
*
*
* Hallowell, Alfred Irving. 1960. "Ojibwa ontology, behavior, and world view." In Culture in History, edited by S. Diamond. (New York: Columbia University Press).
** Reprint: 2002. Pp. 17–49 in Readings in Indigenous Religions, edited by G. Harvey. London: Continuum.
* Ingold, Tim. 2006. "Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought." Ethnos 71(1):9–20.
* Käser, Lothar. 2004. Animismus. Eine Einführung in die begrifflichen Grundlagen des Welt- und Menschenbildes traditionaler (ethnischer) Gesellschaften für Entwicklungshelfer und kirchliche Mitarbeiter in Übersee. Bad Liebenzell: Liebenzeller Mission. .
** mit dem verkürzten Untertitel Einführung in seine begrifflichen Grundlagen auch bei: Erlanger Verlag für Mission und Okumene, Neuendettelsau 2004,
* Quinn, Daniel. [1996] 1997. The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. New York: Bantam Books, and the essay "Our Religions: Are They the Religions of Humanity Itself?", usually available at Ishmael.org
* Wundt, Wilhelm. 1906. Mythus und Religion, Teil II. Leipzig 1906 (Völkerpsychologie II)
External links
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Category:Anthropology of religion
Category:Indigenous spirituality
Category:Metaphysical theories
Category:Panentheism
Category:Philosophy of religion
Category:Polytheism
Category:Schools of thought
Category:Transtheism | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.701068 |
1425 | Antonio Vivaldi | : "An anonymous portrait in oils in the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica di Bologna is generally believed to be of Vivaldi and may be linked to the Morellon La Cave engraving, which appears to be a modified mirror reflection of it."|group=n}}
| birth_place = Venice
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| death_place = Vienna
| signature = Antonio Vivaldi signature.svg
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Antonio Lucio Vivaldi , ; ; .|groupn}} (4 March 1678 – 28 July 1741) was an Ita<!--DO NOT CHANGE, THIS IS WHAT RELIABLE SOURCES CALL HIM. IT DOESN'T MATTER IF "ITALY WASN'T A STATE"-->lian composer, virtuoso violinist, impresario of Baroque music and Roman Catholic priest. Regarded as one of the greatest Baroque composers, Vivaldi's influence during his lifetime was widespread across Europe, giving origin to many imitators and admirers. He pioneered many developments in orchestration, violin technique and programmatic music. He consolidated the emerging concerto form, especially the solo concerto, into a widely accepted and followed idiom.
Vivaldi composed many instrumental concertos, for the violin and a variety of other musical instruments, as well as sacred choral works and more than fifty operas. His best-known work is a series of violin concertos known as The Four Seasons. Many of his compositions were written for the all-female music ensemble of the , a home for abandoned children. Vivaldi began studying for the Catholic priesthood at the age of 15 and was ordained at 25, but was given dispensation to no longer say public Masses due to a health problem. Vivaldi also had some success with expensive stagings of his operas in Venice, Mantua and Vienna. After meeting the Emperor Charles VI, Vivaldi moved to Vienna, hoping for royal support. However, the Emperor died soon after Vivaldi's arrival, and Vivaldi himself died in poverty less than a year later.
After almost two centuries of decline, Vivaldi's musical reputation underwent a revival in the early 20th century, with much scholarly research devoted to his work. Many of Vivaldi's compositions, once thought lost, have been rediscovered – some as recently as 2015. His music remains widely popular in the present day and is regularly played all over the world.
Early life
Birth and background
, Sestiere di Castello, Venice]]
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was born on 4 March 1678 in Venice, then the capital of the Republic of Venice. He was son of Giovanni Battista Vivaldi and Camilla Calicchio, as recorded in the register of San Giovanni in Bragora.
He was baptized immediately after his birth at his home by the midwife, the reason for which has led to speculation. It was most likely done due to his poor health. There is a false rumor that an earthquake struck the city that day. This rumor may have originated from an earthquake that struck Venice on 17 April 1688. The baptismal ceremonies which had been omitted were supplied two months later.
Vivaldi had five known siblings: Bonaventura Tomaso, Margarita Gabriela, Cecilia Maria, Francesco Gaetano, and Zanetta Anna. Vivaldi's health was problematic. One of his symptoms, ("tightness of the chest"), has been interpreted as a form of asthma. This did not prevent him from learning to play the violin, composing, or taking part in musical activities, although it prevented him from playing wind instruments.YouthHis father, Giovanni Battista, was a barber before becoming a professional violinist and was one of the founders of the , an association of musicians. He taught Antonio to play the violin and then toured Venice, playing the violin with his young son. Antonio was probably taught at an early age, judging by the extensive musical knowledge he had acquired by the age of 24, when he started working at the .
The president of the was Giovanni Legrenzi, an early Baroque composer and the at St Mark's Basilica. It is possible that Legrenzi gave the young Antonio his first lessons in composition. Vivaldi's father may have been a composer himself: in 1689, an opera titled was composed by a Giovanni Battista Rossi—the name under which Vivaldi's father had joined the Sovvegno di Santa Cecilia.In 1691, at the age of thirteen, Vivaldi wrote an early liturgical work – (RV Anh 31).
In 1693, at the age of fifteen, he began studying to become a priest. He was ordained in 1703, aged 25, and was soon nicknamed , "The Red Priest"; is Italian for "red" and would have referred to the color of his hair, a family trait. that this is also due to his habit of composing while celebrating Mass. That he remained committed to his vocation is suggested by the entry in the Vienna death records for him that reads, "Antonio Vivaldi, Secular Priest".|groupn}}
Career
Ospedale della Pietà
Although Vivaldi is most famous as a composer, he was regarded as an exceptional technical violinist as well. The German architect Johann Friedrich Armand von Uffenbach referred to Vivaldi as "the famous composer and violinist" and noted in his diary that "Vivaldi played a solo accompaniment excellently, and at the conclusion he added a free fantasy [an improvised cadenza] which absolutely astounded me, for it is hardly possible that anyone has ever played, or ever will play, in such a fashion." In September 1703, Vivaldi (24) became (master of violin) at an orphanage called the Pio Ospedale della Pietà (Devout Hospital of Mercy) in Venice; although his talents as a violinist probably secured him the job, he soon became a successful teacher of music there.
Over the next thirty years he composed most of his major works while working at the Ospedale. There were four similar institutions in Venice; their purpose was to give shelter and education to children who were abandoned or orphaned, or whose families could not support them. They were financed by funds provided by the Republic. The boys learned a trade and had to leave when they reached the age of fifteen. The girls received a musical education, and the most talented among them stayed and became members of the Ospedale's renowned orchestra and choir.
Shortly after Vivaldi's appointment, the orphans began to gain appreciation and esteem abroad, too. Vivaldi wrote concertos, cantatas and sacred vocal music for them. These sacred works, which number over 60, are varied: they included solo motets and large-scale choral works for soloists, double chorus, and orchestra. In 1704, the position of teacher of ''viola all'inglese was added to his duties as violin instructor. The position of maestro di coro'', which was at one time filled by Vivaldi, required a lot of time and work. He had to compose an oratorio or concerto for every feast and teach the orphans both music theory and how to play certain instruments.
His relationship with the board of directors of the Ospedale was often strained. The board had to vote every year on whether to keep a teacher. The vote on Vivaldi was seldom unanimous and went 7 to 6 against him in 1709. In 1711, after a year as a freelance musician, he was recalled by the Ospedale with a unanimous vote; clearly during his year's absence the board had realized the importance of his role. He became responsible for all of the musical activity of the institution when he was promoted to ''maestro de' concerti (music director) in 1716<!-- Was he promoted in 1713 or 1716? Article apparently stated both --> and responsible for composing two new concertos every month.
In 1705, the first collection (Connor Cassara) of his works was published by Giuseppe Sala. His Opus 1 is a collection of 12 sonatas for two violins and basso continuo, in a conventional style. In 1709, a second collection of 12 sonatas for violin and basso continuo appeared (Opus 2). A real breakthrough as a composer came with his first collection of 12 concerti for one, two, and four violins with strings, L'estro armonico (Opus 3), which was published in Amsterdam in 1711 by Estienne Roger, and dedicated to Grand Prince Ferdinand of Tuscany. The prince sponsored many musicians, including Alessandro Scarlatti and George Frideric Handel. He was a musician himself, and Vivaldi probably met him in Venice. L'estro armonico was a resounding success all over Europe. It was followed in 1714 by La stravaganza'' (Opus 4), a collection of concerti for solo violin and strings, and dedicated to an old violin student of Vivaldi's, the Venetian noble Vettor Dolfin.
In February 1711, Vivaldi and his father traveled to Brescia, where his setting of the Stabat Mater (RV 621) was played as part of a religious festival. The work seems to have been written in haste: the string parts are simple, the music of the first three movements is repeated in the next three, and not all the text is set. Nevertheless, perhaps in part because of the forced essentiality of the music, the work is considered to be one of his early masterpieces.
Despite his frequent travels from 1718, the Ospedale paid him 2 sequins to write two concerti a month for the orchestra and to rehearse with them at least five times when in Venice. The orphanage's records show that he was paid for 140 concerti between 1723 and 1733.
Opera impresario
In early 18th-century Venice, opera was the most popular musical entertainment. It proved most profitable for Vivaldi. There were several theaters competing for the public's attention. Vivaldi started his career as an opera composer as a sideline: his first opera, Ottone in villa (RV 729) was performed not in Venice, but at the Garzerie Theater in Vicenza in 1713. The following year, Vivaldi became the impresario of the Teatro San Angelo in Venice, where his opera Orlando finto pazzo (RV 727) was performed. The work was not to the public's taste, and it closed after a couple of weeks, being replaced with a repeat of a different work already given the previous year.
In 1715, he presented Nerone fatto Cesare (RV 724, now lost), with music by seven different composers, of which he was the leader. The opera contained eleven arias and was a success. In the late season, Vivaldi planned to put on an opera entirely of his own creation, Arsilda, regina di Ponto (RV 700), but the state censor blocked the performance. The main character, Arsilda, falls in love with another woman, Lisea, who is pretending to be a man. Vivaldi got the censor to accept the opera the following year, and it was a resounding success.
During this period, the Pietà commissioned several liturgical works. The most important were two oratorios. Moyses Deus Pharaonis, (RV 643) is now lost. The second, Juditha triumphans (RV 644), celebrates the victory of the Republic of Venice against the Turks and the recapture of the island of Corfu. Composed in 1716, it is one of his sacred masterpieces. All eleven singing parts were performed by girls of the orphanage, both the female and male roles. Many of the arias include parts for solo instruments—recorders, oboes, violas d'amore, and mandolins—that showcased the range of talents of the girls.
Also in 1716, Vivaldi wrote and produced two more operas, ''L'incoronazione di Dario (RV 719) and La costanza trionfante degli amori e degli odi (RV 706). The latter was so popular that it was performed two years later, re-edited and retitled Artabano re dei Parti (RV 701, now lost). It was also performed in Prague in 1732. In the years that followed, Vivaldi wrote several operas that were performed all over Italy.
His progressive operatic style caused him some trouble with more conservative musicians such as Benedetto Marcello, a magistrate and amateur musician who wrote a pamphlet denouncing Vivaldi and his operas. The pamphlet, Il teatro alla moda'', attacks the composer even though it does not mention him directly. The cover drawing shows a boat (the San Angelo), on the left end of which stands a little angel wearing a priest's hat and playing the violin. The Marcello family claimed ownership of the Teatro San Angelo, and a long legal battle had been fought with the management for its restitution, without success. The obscure text under the engraving mentions non-existent places and names: for example, ALDIVIVA is an anagram of "A. Vivaldi".
In a letter written by Vivaldi to his patron Marchese Bentivoglio in 1737, he makes reference to his "94 operas". Only about 50 operas by Vivaldi have been discovered, and no other documentation of the remaining operas exists. Although Vivaldi could have been exaggerating, it is plausible that, in his dual role of composer and impresario, he might have either written or been responsible for the production of as many as 94 operas—given that his career had by then spanned almost 25 years. Although Vivaldi certainly composed many operas in his time, he never attained the prominence of other great composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti, Johann Adolph Hasse, Leonardo Leo, and Baldassare Galuppi, as evidenced by his inability to keep a production running for an extended period of time in any major opera house.
Mantua and the Four Seasons
In 1717 or 1718, Vivaldi was offered a prestigious new position as Maestro di Cappella of the court of Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt, governor of Mantua, in the northwest of Italy He moved there for three years and produced several operas, among them Tito Manlio (RV 738). In 1721, he was in Milan, where he presented the pastoral drama La Silvia (RV 734); nine arias from it survive. He visited Milan again the following year with the oratorio ''L'adorazione delli tre re magi al bambino Gesù'' (RV 645, now lost). In 1722 he moved to Rome, where he introduced his operas' new style. The new Pope Benedict XIII invited Vivaldi to play for him. In 1725, Vivaldi returned to Venice, where he produced four operas in the same year.
During this period, Vivaldi wrote the Four Seasons, four violin concertos that give musical expression to the seasons of the year. The composition is probably one of his most famous. Although three of the concerti are wholly original, the first, "Spring", borrows motifs from a Sinfonia in the first act of Vivaldi's contemporaneous opera Il Giustino. The inspiration for the concertos was probably the countryside around Mantua. They were a revolution in musical conception: in them, Vivaldi represented flowing streams, singing birds (of different species, each specifically characterized), barking dogs, buzzing mosquitoes, crying shepherds, storms, drunken dancers, silent nights, hunting parties from both the hunters' and the prey's point of view, frozen landscapes, ice-skating children, and warming winter fires. Each concerto is associated with a sonnet, possibly by Vivaldi, describing the scenes depicted in the music. They were published as the first four concertos in a collection of twelve, ''Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione, Opus 8, published in Amsterdam by Michel-Charles Le Cène in 1725.
During his time in Mantua, Vivaldi became acquainted with an aspiring young singer Anna Tessieri Girò, who would become his student, protégée, and favorite prima donna''. Anna, along with her older half-sister Paolina, moved in with Vivaldi and regularly accompanied him on his many travels. There was speculation as to the nature of Vivaldi's and Girò's relationship, but no evidence exists to indicate anything beyond friendship and professional collaboration. Vivaldi, in fact, adamantly denied any romantic relationship with Girò in a letter to his patron Bentivoglio, dated 16 November 1737.
Late period
Vivaldi collaborated with choreographer Giovanni Gallo on several of his later operas stage in Venice with Gallo choreographing the ballets found within those works. At the height of his career, he received commissions from European nobility and royalty, some of which were:
* The serenata (cantata) Gloria e Imeneo (RV 687), which was commissioned in 1725 by the French ambassador to Venice in celebration of the marriage of Louis XV, when Vivaldi was 48 years old.
* The serenata, La Sena festeggiante (RV 694), written in 1726 and also premiered at the French embassy, to celebrate the birth of the French royal princesses, Henriette and Louise Élisabeth.
* Vivaldi's Opus 9, La cetra, which was dedicated to Emperor Charles VI. In 1728, Vivaldi met the emperor while the emperor was visiting Trieste to oversee the construction of a new port. Charles VI admired the music of the Red Priest so much that he is said to have spoken more with the composer during their one meeting than he spoke to his ministers in more than two years. He gave Vivaldi the title of knight, a gold medal and an invitation to Vienna. Vivaldi gave Charles a manuscript copy of La cetra, a set of concerti almost completely different from the set of the same title published as Opus 9. The printing was probably delayed, forcing Vivaldi to gather an improvised collection for the emperor.
* His opera Farnace (RV 711) was presented in 1730; it garnered six revivals. Some of his later operas were created in collaboration with two of Italy's major writers of the time. Accompanied by his father, Vivaldi traveled to Vienna and Prague in 1730.
* ''L'Olimpiade and Catone in Utica were written by Pietro Metastasio, the major representative of the Arcadian movement and court poet in Vienna. La Griselda'' was rewritten by the young Carlo Goldoni from an earlier libretto by Apostolo Zeno.
Like many composers of the time, Vivaldi faced financial difficulties in his later years. His compositions were no longer held in such high esteem as they had once been in Venice; changing musical tastes quickly made them outmoded. In response, Vivaldi chose to sell off sizeable numbers of his manuscripts at paltry prices to finance his migration to Vienna. The reasons for Vivaldi's departure from Venice are unclear, but it seems likely that, after the success of his meeting with Emperor Charles VI, he wished to take up the position of a composer in the imperial court. On his way to Vienna, Vivaldi might have stopped in Graz to see Anna Girò.
Death
by P. L. Ghezzi, Rome (1723)<!--There are five editions of Grove's Dictionary, as well as two editions of the subsequent New Grove Dictionary''. All seven articles on Vivaldi are signed. To which article does this claim refer?--> has disputed the authenticity of the last portrait.|groupn}}]]
-Bankverein]]
Vivaldi probably moved to Vienna to stage operas, especially as he took up residence near the Kärntnertortheater. Shortly after his arrival in Vienna, Charles VI died, which left the composer without any imperial patronage or a steady source of income. Soon afterwards, Vivaldi became impoverished|groupn}} and, during the night of 27/28 July 1741, aged 63, reports that he died during the night and his death was the first registered on the next day. states: "The composer's death is noted in the official coroner's report and in the burial account book of St. Stephen's Cathedral Parish as having occurred on 28 July 1741". But the so-called Totenbeschauprotokoll is not a reliable source, since the date can refer to when the entry was made, not to the actual time of death.|groupn}} he died of "internal infection", in a house owned by the widow of a Viennese saddlemaker.
On 28 July, Vivaldi's funeral took place at St. Stephen's Cathedral. Contrary to popular legend, the young Joseph Haydn who was in the cathedral choir at the time had nothing to do with his burial, since no music was performed on that occasion. The funeral was attended by six pall-bearers and six choir boys (Kuttenbuben), at a "mean" cost of 19 florins and 45 kreuzer. Only a Kleingeläut (small peal of bells), the lowest class, was provided, at a cost of 2 florins and 36 kreuzer.
Vivaldi was buried in a simple grave in a burial ground that was owned by the public hospital fund – the Bürgerspital-Gottesacker cemetery, next to St Charles Church, a baroque church in an area that is now part of the site of the TU Wien university. The cemetery existed until 1807. The house where he lived in Vienna has since been destroyed; the Hotel Sacher is built on part of the site. Memorial plaques have been placed at both locations, as well as a Vivaldi "star" in the Viennese Musikmeile and a monument at the Rooseveltplatz.
Only two, possibly three, original portraits of Vivaldi are known to survive: an engraving, an ink sketch and an oil painting. The engraving, which was the basis of several copies produced later by other artists, was made in 1725 by François Morellon de La Cave for the first edition of ''Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione'', and shows Vivaldi holding a sheet of music. The ink sketch, a caricature, was done by Ghezzi in 1723 and shows Vivaldi's head and shoulders in profile. It exists in two versions: a first jotting kept at the Vatican Library, and a much lesser-known, slightly more detailed copy recently discovered in Moscow. The oil painting, which can be seen in the International Museum and Library of Music of Bologna, is by an anonymous artist and is thought to depict Vivaldi due to its strong resemblance to the La Cave engraving.
During his lifetime, Vivaldi was popular in many countries throughout Europe, including France, but after his death his popularity dwindled. After the end of the Baroque period, Vivaldi's published concerti became relatively unknown, and were largely ignored. Even his most famous work, The Four Seasons, was unknown in its original edition during the Classical and Romantic periods. Vivaldi's work was rediscovered in the 20th century.
Works
A composition by Vivaldi is identified by RV number, which refers to its place in the "Ryom-Verzeichnis" or "Répertoire des oeuvres d'Antonio Vivaldi", a catalog created in the 20th century by the musicologist Peter Ryom.
Le quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons) of 1723 is his most famous work. The first four of the 12 concertos, titled ''Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione ("The Contest between Harmony and Invention"), they depict moods and scenes from each of the four seasons. This work has been described as an outstanding example of pre-19th-century program music. Vivaldi's other notable sets of 12 violin concertos include La stravaganza (The Eccentricity), ''L'estro armonico (The Harmonic Inspiration) and La cetra'' (The Lyre).
Vivaldi wrote more than 500 concertos. About 350 of these are for solo instrument and strings, of which 230 are for violin; the others are for bassoon, cello, oboe, flute, viola d'amore, recorder, lute, or mandolin. About forty concertos are for two instruments and strings, and about thirty are for three or more instruments and strings.
As well as about 46 operas, Vivaldi composed a large body of sacred choral music, such as the Gloria, RV 589; Nisi Dominus, RV 608; Magnificat, RV 610 and Stabat Mater, RV 621. Gloria, RV 589 remains one of Vivaldi's more popular sacred works. Other works include sinfonias, about 90 sonatas and chamber music.
Some sonatas for flute, published as Il Pastor Fido, have been erroneously attributed to Vivaldi, but were composed by Nicolas Chédeville.
Catalogues of Vivaldi works
Vivaldi's works attracted cataloging efforts befitting a major composer. Scholarly work intended to increase the accuracy and variety of Vivaldi performances also supported new discoveries that made old catalogs incomplete. Works still in circulation today might be numbered under several different systems (some earlier catalogs are mentioned here).
Because the simply consecutive Complete Edition (CE) numbers did not reflect the individual works (Opus numbers) into which compositions were grouped, numbers assigned by Antonio Fanna were often used in conjunction with CE numbers. Combined Complete Edition (CE)/Fanna numbering was especially common in the work of Italian groups driving the mid-20th-century revival of Vivaldi, such as Gli Accademici di Milano under Piero Santi. For example, the Bassoon Concerto in B major, "La Notte", RV 501, became CE 12, F. VIII,1
Despite the awkwardness of having to overlay Fanna numbers onto the Complete Edition number for meaningful grouping of Vivaldi's oeuvre, these numbers displaced the older Pincherle numbers as the (re-) discovery of more manuscripts had rendered older catalogs obsolete.
This cataloging work was led by the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi, where Gian Francesco Malipiero was both the director and the editor of the published scores (Edizioni G. Ricordi). His work built on that of Antonio Fanna, a Venetian businessman and the institute's founder, and thus formed a bridge to the scholarly catalog dominant today.
Compositions by Vivaldi are identified today by RV number, the number assigned by Danish musicologist Peter Ryom in works published mostly in the 1970s, such as the "Ryom-Verzeichnis" or "Répertoire des oeuvres d'Antonio Vivaldi". Like the Complete Edition before it, the RV does not typically assign its single, consecutive numbers to "adjacent" works that occupy one of the composer's single opus numbers. Its goal as a modern catalog is to index the manuscripts and sources that establish the existence and nature of all known works.Style and influence
The German scholar Walter Kolneder has discerned the influence of Legrenzi's style in Vivaldi's early liturgical work Laetatus sum (RV Anh 31), written in 1691 at the age of thirteen.
Vivaldi was also influenced by the Composer Arcangelo Corelli.
Johann Sebastian Bach was deeply influenced by Vivaldi's concertos and arias (recalled in his St John Passion, St Matthew Passion, and cantatas). Bach transcribed six of Vivaldi's concerti for solo keyboard, a further three for organ, and one for four harpsichords, strings, and basso continuo (BWV 1065) based upon the concerto for four violins, two violas, cello, and basso continuo (RV 580).
Legacy
, from Michel-Charles Le Cène's edition of Vivaldi's Op. 8, 1725)]]
In the early 20th century, Fritz Kreisler's Concerto in C, in the Style of Vivaldi (which he passed off as an original Vivaldi work) helped revive Vivaldi's reputation. Kreisler's concerto in C spurred the French scholar Marc Pincherle to begin an academic study of Vivaldi's oeuvre. Many Vivaldi manuscripts were rediscovered, and were acquired by the Turin National University Library as a result of the generous sponsorship of Turinese businessmen Roberto Foa and Filippo Giordano, in memory of their sons. This led to a renewed interest in Vivaldi by, among others, Mario Rinaldi, Alfredo Casella, Ezra Pound, Olga Rudge, Desmond Chute, Arturo Toscanini, Arnold Schering and Louis Kaufman, all of whom were instrumental in the revival of Vivaldi throughout the 20th century.
In 1926, in a monastery in Piedmont, researchers discovered fourteen bound volumes of Vivaldi's work (later discovered to be fifteen) that were previously thought to have been lost during the Napoleonic Wars. Some missing tomes in the numbered set were discovered in the collections of the descendants of the Grand Duke Durazzo, who had acquired the monastery complex in the 18th century. The volumes contained 300 concertos, 19 operas and over 100 vocal-instrumental works.
The resurrection of Vivaldi's unpublished works in the 20th century greatly benefited from the noted efforts of Alfredo Casella, who in 1939 organized the historic Vivaldi Week, in which the rediscovered Gloria (RV 589) and l'Olimpiade were revived. Since World War II, Vivaldi's compositions have enjoyed wide success. Historically informed performances, often on "original instruments", have increased Vivaldi's fame still further.
Recent rediscoveries of works by Vivaldi include two psalm settings: Psalm 127, Nisi Dominus RV 803 (in eight movements); and Psalm 110, Dixit Dominus RV 807 (in eleven movements). These were identified in 2003 and 2005, respectively, by the Australian scholar Janice Stockigt. The Vivaldi scholar Michael Talbot described RV 807 as "arguably the best nonoperatic work from Vivaldi's pen to come to light since ... the 1920s".
In February 2002, musicologist discovered 70% of the music for the opera Motezuma (RV 723) in the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin archives. Long thought lost, it was described by Dutch musicologist as "the most important Vivaldi discovery in 75 years." One of the earliest operas to have been set in the Americas, versions of it were staged in Düsseldorf in 2005 and Long Beach in 2009.
Vivaldi's 1730 opera, Argippo (RV 697), which had also been considered lost, was rediscovered in 2006 by the harpsichordist and conductor Ondřej Macek, whose Hofmusici orchestra performed the work at Prague Castle on 3 May 2008—its first performance since 1730.
Modern depictions of Vivaldi's life include a 2005 radio play, commissioned by ABC Radio National and written by Sean Riley. Entitled The Angel and the Red Priest, the play was later adapted for the stage and performed at the Adelaide Festival of the Arts. Films about Vivaldi include: (1989), an Italian-French co-production under the direction of Étienne Périer; (2006), an Italian-French co-production under the direction of ; and Vivaldi, the Red Priest (2009), an Italian film created and directed by Liana Marabini, and loosely based on Vivaldi's life as both priest and composer.ReferencesNotes
Citations
Sources
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Further reading
*
* Romijn, André. Hidden Harmonies: The Secret Life of Antonio Vivaldi, 2007
* Selfridge-Field, Eleanor (1994). Venetian Instrumental Music, from Gabrieli to Vivaldi. New York, Dover Publications. .
External links
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Category:1678 births
Category:1741 deaths
Category:18th-century Italian composers
Category:18th-century Italian male musicians
Category:18th-century Italian Roman Catholic priests
Category:Catholic liturgical composers
Category:Composers for cello
Category:Composers for violin
Category:Italian Baroque composers
Category:Italian classical cellists
Category:Italian classical composers of church music
Category:Italian classical violinists
Category:Italian expatriates in Austria
Category:Italian impresarios
Category:Italian male classical violinists
Category:Italian male opera composers
Category:Italian opera composers
Category:Musicians from Venice
Category:Oratorio composers
Category:Republic of Venice clergy | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Vivaldi | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.724616 |
1428 | Adrian | <br /><br /><br><br>
|gender = Male
|feminine = Adriana, Adriane, Adrienne
|meaning = "from Adria"
|region = Pinnaculum Anatarius
|origin = Latin
| nickname = Ade, Ada, Ady,Aďko
|related names = Adriaan, Adriaen, Adriana, Adriane, Adriano/Adrião, Adrianus, Adrien, Adrienne, Ada, Ari, Arie, Hadrien, Jadran, Jadranko
}}
Adrian is a form of the Latin given name Adrianus or Hadrianus. Its ultimate origin is most likely via the former river Adria from the Venetic and Illyrian word adur, meaning "sea" or "water".
The Adria was until the 8th century BC the main channel of the Po River into the Adriatic Sea but ceased to exist before the 1st century BC. Hecataeus of Miletus (c.550 – c.476 BC) asserted that both the Etruscan harbor city of Adria and the Adriatic Sea had been named after it. Emperor Hadrian's family was named after the city or region of Adria/Hadria, now Atri, in Picenum, which most likely started as an Etruscan or Greek colony of the older harbor city of the same name. <!--would be nice to have a more recent reference for this-->
Several saints and six popes have borne this name, including the only English pope, Adrian IV, and the only Dutch pope, Adrian VI. As an English name, it has been in use since the Middle Ages.
Religion
* Pope Adrian I (c. 700–795)
* Pope Adrian II (c. 792–872)
* Pope Adrian III (c. 830–885)
* Pope Adrian IV (c. 1100–1159), English pope
* Pope Adrian V (c. 1205–1276)
* Pope Adrian VI (1459–1523)
* Adrian of Batanea (died 308), Christian martyr and saint
* Adrian of Canterbury (died 710), scholar and Abbot of St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury
* Adrian of Castello (1460–1521), Italian cardinal and writer
* Adrian of May (died 875), Scottish saint from the Isle of May, martyred by Vikings
* Adrian of Moscow (1627–1700), last pre-revolutionary Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia
* Adrian of Nicomedia (died 306), martyr and Herculian Guard of the Roman Emperor Galerius Maximian
* Adrian of Ondrusov (died 1549), Russian Orthodox saint and wonder-worker
* Adrian of Poshekhonye (died 1550), Russian Orthodox saint, hegumen of Dormition monastery in Yaroslavl region
* Adrian of Transylvania (fl. 1183–1201), Hungarian bishop and chancellor
* Adrian Fortescue (martyr) (1476–1539), English courtier at Henry VIII's court, beatified as a Roman Catholic martyr
* Adrian Gouffier de Boissy (1479–1523), French Roman Catholic bishop and cardinal
* Adrian Kivumbi Ddungu (1923–2009), Ugandan Roman Catholic bishop
* Adrian Leo Doyle (born 1936), Australian prelate of the Roman Catholic Church
Government and politics
* Adrian Amstutz (born 1953), Swiss politician
* Adrian Arnold (1932–2018), American politician
* Adrian Bailey (born 1945), British politician
* Adrian Baillie (1898–1947), British politician
* Adrian A. Basora (born 1938), US Ambassador to the Czech Republic
* Adrian Benepe (born 1957), American Commissioner of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation
* Adrian Bennett (1933–2006), Australian politician
* Adrian Benjamin Bentzon (1777–1827), Norwegian Governor of the British West Indies
* Adrian Berry, 4th Viscount Camrose (1937–2016), British hereditary peer and journalist
* Adrian P. Burke (1904–2000), American judge and politician
* Adrián Fernández Cabrera (born 1967), Mexican politician
* Adrian Cioroianu (born 1967), Romanian Minister of Foreign Affairs
* Adrian Cochrane-Watson (born 1967), Irish politician
* Adrian Davis (civil servant), British economist and civil servant
* Adrian Delia (born 1969), Maltese politician
* Adrian Fenty (born 1970), American politician, mayor of Washington D.C.
* Adrian Flook (born 1963), British politician
* Adrian Foster (politician), Canadian politician
* Adrian Hasler (born 1964), Prime Minister of Liechtenstein
* Adrian Knatchbull-Hugessen (1891–1976), Canadian lawyer and senator
* Adrian Kubicki (born 1987), Consul General of the Republic of Poland in New York City.
* Adrián Vázquez Lázara (born 1982), Spanish politician
* Adrian Molin (1880–1942), Swedish writer and political activist
* Adrian Năstase (born 1950), Romanian politician
* Adrian Neritani, former Permanent Representative of Albania to the United Nations
* Adrián Rivera Pérez (born 1962), Mexican politician
* Adrian Piccoli (born 1970), Australian politician
* Adrian Cola Rienzi (1905–1972), Trinidadin and Tobagonian trade unionist, civil rights activist, politician, and lawyer
* Adriano Sánchez Roa (born 1956), Dominican politician
* Adrian Rurawhe (born 1961), New Zealand politician
* Adrian M. Smith (born 1970), American politician
* Adrian Sanders (born 1959), British politician
* Adrian Severin (born 1954), Romanian politician and Member of the European Parliament
* Adrian Smith (politician) (born 1970), American politician
* Adrian Stokes (courtier) (1519–1586), English politician
* Adrian Stoughton (1556–1614), English politician
* Adrian Zuckerman (born 1956), US Ambassador to Romania
Academia
* Adrian Albert (1905–1972), American mathematician<!--Abraham Adrian Albert, but used his middle name as his given name (A. Adrian Albert) -->
* Adrian Baddeley (born 1955), Australian scientist
* Adrian Bailey (academic), American scholar
* Adrian Bejan (born 1948), Romanian-born professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University
* Adrian Beverland (1650–1716), Dutch philosopher and jurist who settled in England
* Adrian Bird (born 1947), British geneticist
* Adrian Bowyer (born 1952), British engineer, creator of the RepRap project
* Adrian John Brown (1852–1919), British professor and pioneer
* Adrian David Cheok (born 1971/1972), Australian electrical engineer and professor
* Adrian Curaj (born 1958), Romanian engineer
* Adrian Darby (born 1937), British conservationist and academic
* Adrian Goldsworthy (born 1969), British historian and author who writes mostly about ancient Roman history
* Adrian Hardy Haworth (1767–1833), English entomologist, botanist and carcinologist
* Adrian Ioana (born 1981), Romanian mathematician
* Adrian Mihai Ionescu, Romanian professor
* Adrian Ioviță (born 1954), Romanian-Canadian mathematician
* Adrian Jacobsen (1853–1947), Norwegian ethnologist and explorer <!--Johan Adrian Jacobsen, but used his middle name as his given name-->
* Adrian Kaehler, American scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, inventor, and author
* Adrian Liston (born 1980), British immunologist and author
* Adrian Paterson, South African scientist and engineer
* Adrián Recinos (1886–1962), Guatemalan historian, Mayanist and diplomat
* Adrian Smith (born 1946), British statistician
* Adrian Stephens (1795–1876), English engineer, inventor of the steam whistle
* Adrian V. Stokes (1945–2020), British computer scientist
* Adrian Webb (born 1943), British academic and public administrator
* Adrian Zenz (born 1974), German anthropologist
Military
* Adrian Becher (1897–1957), British Army officer and cricketer
* Adrian von Bubenberg (1434–1479), Bernese knight, military commander and mayor
* Adrian Carton de Wiart (1880–1963), Belgian-born British Army lieutenant-general awarded the Victoria Cross
* Adrian Cole (RAAF officer) (1895–1966), Australian World War I flying ace
* Adrian Johns (born 1951), English governor of Gibraltar and former Royal Navy vice-admiral
* Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha (1848–1920), German military commander in Africa
* Adrian Marks (1917–1998), United States Navy pilot
* Adrian Consett Stephen (1894–1918), Australian artillery officer and playwright
* Adrian Warburton (1918–1944), British Second World War pilot
* Adrián Woll (1795–1875), French Mexican general during the Texas Revolution and the Mexican–American War
Sports
American football
* Adrian Amos (born 1993), American football player
* Adrian Arrington (born 1985), American football player
* Adrian Awasom (born 1983), Cameroon-born American football player
* Adrian Baird (born 1979), Canadian football player
* Adrian Baril (1898–1961), American football player
* Adrian Battles (born 1987), American football player
* Adrian Breen (quarterback) (born 1965), American football player
* Adrian Burk (1927–2003), American football player
* Adrian Clarke (born 1991), Canadian football player
* Adrian Clayborn (born 1988), American football player
* Adrian Colbert (born 1993), American football player
* Adrian Cooper (born 1968), American football player
* Adrian Davis (Canadian football) (born 1981), Canadian football player
* A. J. Davis (cornerback, born 1983), American football player known as A.J. Davis
* Adrian Dingle (American football) (born 1977), American football player
* Adrian Ealy (born 1999), American football player
* Adrian Ford (1904–1977), American football player
* Adrian Grady (born 1985), American football player
* Adrian Hamilton (born 1987), American football player
* Adrian Hardy (born 1970), American football player
* Adrian Hubbard (born 1992), American football player
* Adrian Jones (American football) (born 1981), American football player
* Adrian Killins (born 1998), American football player
* Adrian Klemm (born 1977), American football player and coach
* Adrian Madise (born 1980), American football player
* Adrian Magee (born 1996), American football player
* Adrian Martinez (American football) (born 2000), American football player
* Adrian Mayes (born 1980), American football player
* Adrian Moten (born 1988), American football player
* Adrian Murrell (born 1970), American football player
* Adrian Peterson (American football, born 1979), American football player
* Adrian Peterson (born 1985), American football player
* Adrian Phillips (born 1992), American football player
* Adrian Robinson (1989–2015), American football player
* Adrian Ross (born 1975), American football player
* Adrian Tracy (born 1988), American football player
* Adrian White (American football) (born 1964), American football player
* Adrian Wilson (American football) (born 1979), American football player
* Adrian Young (American football) (born 1949), American football player
Association football
* Adrián Aldrete (born 1988), Mexican footballer
* Adrian Aliaj (born 1976), Albanian footballer
* Adrian Allenspach (born 1969), Swiss footballer
* Adrian Alston (born 1949), English footballer
* Adrián Álvarez (born 1968), Argentine footballer
* Adrian Anca (born 1976), Romanian footballer and manager
* Adrian Antunović (born 1989), Croatian footballer
* Adrián Argachá (born 1986), Uruguayan footballer
* Adrian García Arias (born 1975), Mexican footballer and manager
* Adrián Arregui (born 1992), Argentine footballer
* Adrián Ascues (born 2002), Peruvian footballer
* Adrian Ávalos (born 1974), Argentine footballer
* Adrian Avrămia (born 1992), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Bajrami (born 2002), Swiss footballer
* Adrian Bakalli (born 1976), Belgian footballer
* Adrian Bălan (born 1990), Romanian footballer
* Adrián Balboa (born 1994), Uruguayan footballer
* Adrian Baldovin (born 1971), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Barbullushi (born 1968), Albanian footballer
* Adrian Bartkowiak (born 1987), Polish footballer
* Adrian Basta (born 1988), Polish footballer
* Adrián Bastía (born 1978), Argentine footballer
* Adrian Beck (born 1997), German footballer
* Adrian Benedyczak (born 2000), Polish footballer
* Adrián Berbia (born 1977), Uruguayan goalkeeper
* Adrián Bernabé (born 2001), Spanish footballer
* Adrian Bevington (born ), British football PR and director
* Adrian Bielawski (born 1996), Polish footballer
* Adrian Bird (born 1969), English footballer
* Adrian Błąd (born 1991), Polish footballer
* Adrian Blake (born 2005), English footballer
* Adrian Bogoi (born 1973), Romanian footballer
* Adrián Bone (born 1988), Ecuadorian footballer
* Adrian Boothroyd (born 1971), English footballer and manager
* Adrian Borza (born 1985), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Budka (born 1980), Polish footballer
* Adrian Bumbescu (born 1960), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Bumbut (born 1984), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Butters (born 1988), Canadian soccer player
* Adrián Butzke (born 1999), Spanish footballer
* Adrian Caceres (born 1982), Argentine footballer
* Adrián Calello (born 1987), Argentine footballer
* Adrián Cañas (born 1992), Spanish footballer
* Adrian Cann (born 1980), Canadian soccer player
* Adrian Cașcaval (born 1987), Moldovan footballer
* Adrián Centurión (born 1993), Argentine footballer
* Adrián Čermák (born 1993), Slovak footballer
* Adrian Chama (born 1989), Zambian footballer
* Adrián Chávez (born 1962), Mexican footballer
* Adrian Chomiuk (born 1988), Polish footballer
* Adrián Chovan (born 1995), Slovak footballer
* Adrian Cieślewicz (born 1990), Polish footballer
* Adrian Clarke (footballer) (born 1974), English footballer
* Adrian Clifton (born 1988), English footballer
* Adrián Colombino (born 1993), Uruguayan footballer
* Adrián Colunga (born 1984), Spanish footballer
* Adrian Coote (born 1978), English footballer
* Adrián Cortés (born 1983), Mexican footballer
* Adrian Cristea (born 1983), Romanian footballer
* Adrián Cruz (born 1987), Spanish footballer
* Adrián Cuadra (born 1997), Chilean footballer
* Adrian Cuciula (born 1986), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Cucovei (born 1982), Moldovan footballer
* Adrian Dabasse (born 1993), French footballer
* Adrián Dalmau (born 1994), Spanish footballer
* Adrian Danek (born 1994), Polish footballer
* Adrián Diéguez (born 1996), Spanish footballer
* Adrian Drida (born 1982), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Dubois (born 1987), American footballer
* Adrian Dulcea (born 1978), Romanian footballer and manager
* Adrian Durrer (born 2001), Swiss footballer
* Adrian Edqvist (born 1999), Swedish footballer
* Adrián El Charani (born 2000), Venezuelan footballer
* Adrian Elrick (born 1949), New Zealand footballer
* Adrián Escudero (1927–2011), Spanish footballer
* Adrián Faúndez (born 1989), Chilean footballer
* Adrian Fein (born 1999), German footballer
* Adrián Fernández (footballer, born 1980), Argentine footballer
* Adrián Fernández (footballer, born 1992), Paraguayan footballer
* Adrian Foncette (born 1988), Trinidadian footballer
* Adrian Forbes (born 1979), English footballer
* Adrian Foster (footballer) (born 1971), English footballer and manager
* Adrián Fuentes (born 1996), Spanish footballer
* Adrián Gabbarini (born 1985), Argentine footballer
* Adrian Dan Găman (born 1978), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Gheorghiu (born 1981), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Gîdea (born 2000), Romanian footballer
* Adrián González (footballer, born 1976), Argentine footballer
* Adrián González (footballer, born 1988), Spanish footballer
* Adrián González (footballer, born 1995), Argentine footballer
* Adrián González (footballer, born 2003), Mexican footballer
* Adrián Hernán González (born 1976), Argentine footballer
* Adrián Goransch (born 1999), Mexican footballer
* Adrian Grbić (born 1996), Austrian footballer
* Adrian Grigoruță (born 1983), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Gryszkiewicz (born 1999), Polish footballer
* Adrián Gunino (born 1989), Uruguayan footballer
* Adrian Hajdari (born 2000), Macedonian footballer
* Adrian Aleksander Hansen (born 2001), Norwegian footballer
* Adrian Heath (born 1961), English footballer and manager
* Adrian Henger (born 1996), Polish footballer
* Adrián José Hernández (born 1983), Spanish footballer, known as Pollo
* Adrián Horváth (born 1987), Hungarian footballer
* Adrian Iencsi (born 1975), Romanian footballer and manager
* Adrian Ilie (born 1974), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Ilie (footballer, born 1981), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Ionescu (footballer, born 1958), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Ionescu (footballer, born 1985), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Ioniță (born 2000), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Iordache (born 1980), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Dragoș Iordache (born 1981), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Jevrić (born 1986), German footballer
* Adrián Jusino (born 1992), Bolivian footballer
* Adrian Kappenberger (born 1996), Danish footballer
* Adrian Kasztelan (born 1986), Polish footballer
* Adrian Klepczyński (born 1981), Polish footballer
* Adrian Klimczak (born 1997), Polish footballer
* Adrian Knup (born 1968), Swiss footballer
* Adrián Kocsis (born 1991), Hungarian footballer
* Adrian Kunz (born 1967), Swiss footballer
* Adrián Lapeña (born 1996), Spanish footballer
* Adrián Torres Lázaro (born 1998), Spanish footballer commonly known as Lele
* Adrian Leijer (born 1986), Australian footballer
* Adrián Leites (born 1992), Uruguayan footballer
* Adrian LeRoy (born 1987), Canadian soccer player
* Adrián Leško (born 1995), Slovak footballer
* Adrian Liber (born 2001), Croatian footballer
* Adrian Lis (born 1992), Polish footballer
* Adrian Littlejohn (born 1970), English footballer
* Adrián Lois (born 1989), Spanish footballer
* Adrián López (footballer, born 1987), Spanish footballer
* Adrián López (born 1988), Spanish footballer
* Adrián Lozano (born 1999), Mexican footballer
* Adrian Lucaci (1966–2020), Romanian footballer
* Adrián Lucero (born 1985), Argentine footballer
* Adrián Marín Lugo (born 1994), Mexican footballer
* Adrián Luna (born 1992), Uruguayan footballer
* Adrian Łyszczarz (born 1999), Polish footballer
* Adrian Madaschi (born 1982), Australian footballer
* Adrian Małachowski (born 1998), Polish footballer
* Adrian Marek (born 1987), Polish footballer
* Adrian Mariappa (born 1986), English footballer
* Adrián Marín (footballer, born 1994), Mexican footballer
* Adrián Marín (footballer, born 1997), Spanish footballer
* Adrian Mărkuș (born 1992), Romanian footballer
* Adrián Martín (footballer) (born 1982), Spanish footballer
* Adrián Martínez (Mexican footballer) (born 1970)
* Adrián Martínez (Venezuelan footballer) (born 1993)
* Adrián Emmanuel Martínez (born 1992), Argentine footballer
* Adrián Nahuel Martínez (born 1992), Argentine footballer
* Adrian Matei (footballer) (born 1968), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Mazilu (born 2005), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Mierzejewski (born 1986), Polish footballer
* Adrian Mihalcea (born 1976), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Moescu (born 2001), Romanian footballer
* Adrián Mouriño (born 1988), Spanish footballer
* Adrian Mrowiec (born 1983), Polish footballer
* Adrian Mutu (born 1979), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Nalați (born 1983), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Napierała (born 1982), Polish footballer
* Adrian Neaga (born 1979), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Negrău (born 1968), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Neniță (born 1996), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Nikçi (born 1989), Swiss footballer
* Adrian Romeo Niță (born 2003), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Olah (born 1981), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Olegov (born 1985), Bulgarian footballer
* Adrian Olszewski (born 1993), Polish footballer
* Adrián Ortolá (born 1993), Spanish footballer
* Adrian Paluchowski (born 1987), Polish footballer
* Adrian Pătraș (born 1984), Moldovan footballer
* Adrian Pătulea (born 1984), Romanian footballer
* Adrián Paz (born 1966), Uruguayan footballer
* Adrian Pelka (born 1981), German footballer
* Adrian Pennock (born 1971), English footballer
* Adrián Peralta (born 1982), Argentine footballer
* Adrian Pereira (born 1999), Norwegian footballer
* Adrian Petre (born 1998), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Pettigrew (born 1986), English footballer
* Adrian Pigulea (born 1968), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Piț (born 1983), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Pitu (born 1975), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Popa (footballer, born 1988), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Popa (footballer, born 1990), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Poparadu (born 1987), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Popescu (born 1960), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Popescu (footballer, born 1975), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Pukanych (born 1981), Ukrainian footballer
* Adrian Pulis (born 1979), Maltese footballer
* Adrian Purzycki (born 1997), Polish footballer
* Adrian Rakowski (born 1990), Polish footballer
* Adrián Ramos (born 1986), Colombian footballer
* Adrián Ricchiuti (born 1978), Argentine footballer
* Adrián Riera (born 1996), Spanish footballer
* Adrián Ripa (born 1985), Spanish footballer
* Adrian Rochet (born 1987), Israeli footballer
* Adrián Rojas (born 1977), Chilean footballer
* Adrian Rolko (born 1978), Czech footballer
* Adrián Romero (Argentine footballer) (born 1975)
* Adrián Romero (Uruguayan footballer) (born 1977)
* Adrian Ropotan (born 1986), Romanian footballer
* Adrián Ruelas (born 1991), American soccer player
* Adrian Rus (born 1996), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Rusu (born 1984), Romanian footballer
* Adrián Sahibeddine (born 1994), French footballer
* Adrian Sălăgeanu (born 1983), Romanian footballer
* Adrián Sánchez (born 1999), Argentine footballer
* Adrián San Miguel del Castillo (born 1987), Spanish football goalkeeper known as simply Adrián
* Adrián Sardinero (born 1990), Spanish footballer
* Adrian Sarkissian (born 1979), Uruguayan footballer
* Adrian Scarlatache (born 1986), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Schlagbauer (born 2002), German footballer
* Adrián Scifo (born 1987), Argentine footballer
* Adrian Šemper (born 1998), Croatian footballer
* Adrian Senin (born 1979), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Serioux (born 1979), Canadian soccer player
* Adrian Sikora (born 1980), Polish footballer
* Adrian Sosnovschi (born 1977), Moldovan footballer and manager
* Adrián Spörle (born 1995), Argentine footballer
* Adrian Spyrka (born 1967), German footballer
* Adrian Stanilewicz (born 2000), German footballer
* Adrian Șter (born 1998), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Stoian (born 1991), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Stoicov (1967–2017), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Șut (born 1999), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Świątek (born 1986), Polish footballer
* Adrián Szekeres (born 1989), Hungarian footballer
* Adrián Szőke (born 1998), Serbian footballer
* Adrian Toma (born 1976), Romanian footballer
* Adrián Torres (born 1989), Argentine footballer
* Adrian Trinidad (born 1982), Argentine footballer
* Adrián Turmo (born 2001), Spanish footballer
* Adrián Ugarriza (born 1997), Peruvian footballer
* Adrian Ursea (born 1967), Romanian footballer and manager
* Adrian Valentić (born 1987), Croatian footballer
* Adrian Vera (born 1997), American footballer
* Adrian Viciu (born 1991), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Viveash (born 1969), English footballer, better known as Adi Viveash
* Adrian Vlas (born 1982), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Ionuț Voicu (born 1992), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Voiculeț (born 1985), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Webster (footballer, born 1951), English footballer and coach
* Adrian Webster (footballer, born 1980), New Zealand footballer
* Adrian Whitbread (born 1971), English footballer and manager
* Adrian Williams, better known as Ady Williams (born 1971), English footballer and manager
* Adrian Winter (born 1986), Swiss footballer
* Adrian Woźniczka (born 1982), Polish footballer
* Adrian Zahra (born 1990), Australian footballer
* Adrian Zaluschi (born 1989), Romanian footballer
* Adrián Zambrano (born 2000), Venezuelan footballer
* Adrián Zela (born 1989), Peruvian footballer
* Adrian Zendejas (born 1995), American footballer
* Adrián Zermeño (born 1979), Mexican footballer
Baseball
* Adrian Constantine Anson better known as Cap Anson (1852–1922), American baseball player
* Adrián Beltré (born 1979), Dominican Republic baseball player
* Adrian Brown (baseball) (born 1974), American baseball player
* Adrian Burnside (born 1977), Australian baseball player
* Adrian Cárdenas (born 1987), American baseball player
* Adrian Devine (1951–2020), American baseball player
* Adrian Garrett (1943–2021), American baseball player and coach
* Adrián González (born 1982), American-Mexican baseball player
* Adrian Houser (born 1993), American baseball player
* Addie Joss (1880–1911), American baseball pitcher
* Adrian Lynch (1897–1934), American baseball player
* Adrián Morejón (born 1999), Cuban baseball player
* Adrián Nieto (born 1989), Cuban baseball player
* Adrian Sampson (born 1991), American baseball player
* Adrián Sánchez (born 1990), Colombian-Venezuelan baseball player
* Adrián Zabala (1916–2002), Cuban baseball player
Basketball
* Adrian Autry (born 1972), American basketball player
* Adrian Banks (born 1986), American basketball player
* Adrian Bauk (born 1985), Australian basketball player
* Adrian Branch (born 1963), American basketball player
* Adrian Caldwell (born 1966), American basketball player
* Adrian Celada, Filipino basketball player
* Adrian Dantley (born 1956), American basketball player
* Adrian Griffin (born 1974), American basketball player
* Adrian Pledger (born 1976), American basketball player
* Adrian Smith (basketball) (born 1936), American basketball player
* Adrian Tudor (born 1985), Romanian basketball player
* Adrian Williams-Strong (born 1977), American basketball player
Boxing
* Adrian Blair (born 1943), Australian boxer
* Adrian Clark (boxer) (born 1986), American boxer
* Adrian Diaconu (born 1978), Romanian boxer
* Adrián Hernández (boxer) (born 1986), Mexican boxer
* Adrian Mora (born 1978), American boxer
Cricket
* Adrian Aymes (born 1964), British cricketer
* Adrian Barath (born 1990), West Indian cricketer
* Adrian Birrell (born 1960), South African cricketer and coach
* Adrian Brown (cricketer) (born 1962), English cricketer
* Adrian Jones (cricketer) (born 1961), English cricketer
* Adrian Rollins (born 1972), English cricketer
Ice hockey
* Adrian Aucoin (born 1973), Canadian ice hockey player
* Adrian Foster (ice hockey) (born 1982), Canadian ice hockey player
* Adrian Kempe (born 1996), Swedish ice hockey player
* Adrian Wichser (born 1980), Swiss ice hockey player
Racing
* Adrian Adgar (born 1965), English cyclist
* Adrian Archibald (born 1969), British motorcycle racer
* Adrian Banaszek (born 1993), Polish cyclist
* Adrián Campos (1960–2021), Spanish racing driver
* Adrián Campos Jr. (born 1988), Spanish racing driver
* Adrian Carrio (born 1989), American racing driver
* Adrian "Wildman" Cenni, American off-road racing driver
* Adrián Fernández (born 1965), Mexican racing driver and team owner
* Adrián Fernández (motorcyclist) (born 2004), Spanish motorcycle racer
* Adrián González (cyclist) (born 1992), Spanish cyclist
* Adrian Kurek (born 1988), Polish road bicycle racer
* Adrián Martín (motorcyclist) (born 1992), Spanish motorcycle racer
* Adrian Newey (born 1958), British race car engineer and designer
* Adrian Quaife-Hobbs (born 1991), British racing driver
* Adrian Aas Stien (born 1992), Norwegian cyclist
* Adrian Sutil (born 1983), German racing driver
* Adrián Vallés (born 1986), Spanish race car driver
* Adrian Zaugg (born 1986), South African racing driver
Rugby
* Adrian Apostol (born 1990), Romanian rugby player
* Adrian Barich (born 1963), Australian rules footballer and television and radio presenter
* Adrian Barone (born 1987), New Zealand rugby union footballer
* Adrian Bassett (born 1967), Australian rules footballer
* Adrian Battiston (born 1963), Australian rules footballer
* Adrian Beer (born 1943), Australian rules footballer
* Adrian Clarke (rugby union) (born 1938), New Zealand rugby player
* Adrian Davies (born 1969), English rugby player
* Adrian Davis (rugby league) (born 1990), Australian rugby player
* Adrian Garvey (born 1968), Zimbabwean-born South African rugby union player
* Adrian Lungu (born 1960), Romanian rugby player
* Adrian Morley (born 1977), English rugby player
* Adrian Pllotschi (born 1959), Romanian rugby player and coach
* Adrian Stoop (1883–1957), English rugby union player
* Adrian Young (footballer) (1943–2020), Australian rugby player
Swimming
* Adrian Andermatt (born 1969), Swiss swimmer
* Adrian Moorhouse (born 1964), English swimmer
* Adrian O'Connor (born 1972), Irish backstroke swimmer
* Adrian Radley (born 1976), Australian swimmer
* Adrian Robinson (swimmer) (born 2000), Botswanan swimmer
* Adrian Romero (swimmer) (born 1972), Guamanian swimmer
* Adrian Turner (born 1977), British Olympic swimmer
Tennis
* Adrian Andreev (born 2001), Bulgarian tennis player
* Adrian Bey (1938–2019), Rhodesian-born American professional tennis player
* Adrian Bodmer (born 1995), Swiss tennis player
* Adrian Bohane (born 1981), Irish-American former professional tennis player
* Adrian Cruciat (born 1983), Romanian tennis player
* Adrian Gavrilă (born 1984), Romanian tennis player
* Adrian Mannarino (born 1988), French tennis player
* Adrian Marcu (born 1961), professional tennis player from Romania
* Adrián Menéndez Maceiras (born 1985), Spanish tennis player
* Adrian Quist (1913–1991), Australian tennis player
* Adrian Ungur (born 1985), Romanian tennis player
* Adrian Voinea (born 1974), Romanian tennis player
Other
* Adrian Adonis (1954–1988), American professional wrestler
* Adrian Ang (born 1988), Malaysian bowler
* Adrián Annus (born 1973), Hungarian hammer thrower
* Adrian Bachmann (born 1976), Swiss sprint canoer
* Adrian Ballinger (born 1976), British-American climber, skier, and mountain guide
* Adrián Ben (born 1998) Spanish middle-distance runner
* Adrian Berce (born 1958), Australian field hockey player
* Adrian Blincoe (born 1979), New Zealand runner
* Adrian Błocki (born 1990), Polish racewalker
* Adrian Breen (hurler) (born 1992), Irish hurler
* Adrian Cosma (1950–1996), Romanian handball player
* Adrian Crișan (born 1980), Romanian table tennis player
* Adrián Gavira (born 1987), Spanish beach volleyball player
* Adrian Gomes (born 1990), Brazilian gymnast
* Adrian Gray (born 1981), English darts player
* Adrian Gunnell (born 1972), English snooker player
* Adrian Hansen (born 1971), South African squash player
* Adrian Lewis (born 1985), English darts player
* Adrian Metcalfe (1942–2021), British runner and sports broadcaster
* Adrian Neville (born 1986), English professional wrestler, known professionally as Pac
* Adrian Parker (born 1951), British modern pentathlete and Olympic champion
* Adrian Patrick (born 1973), English former sprinter
* Adrián Alonso Pereira (born 1988), Spanish futsal player
* Adrián Popa (born 1971), Hungarian weightlifter
* Adrian Rollinson (born 1965), British strongman
* Adrian Schultheiss (born 1988), Swedish figure skater
* Adrian Smith (strongman) (born 1964), British strongman
* Adrian Street (1940–2023), Welsh wrestler and author
* Adrian Strzałkowski (born 1990), Polish long jumper
* Adrián Paz Velázquez (born 1964), Mexican Paralympic athlete
* Adrian Watt (born 1947), American ski jumper
* Adrian White (equestrian) (born 1933), New Zealand equestrian
* Adrian Alejandro Wittwer (born 1986), Swiss extreme athlete and ice swimmer
* Adrian Zieliński (born 1989), Polish weightlifter
Arts and entertainment
* Adrian Adlam (born 1963), British violinist and conductor
* Adrian Aeschbacher (1912–2002), Swiss classical pianist
* Adrian Alandy (born 1980), Filipino actor and model
* Adrian Allinson (1890–1959), British painter, potter and engraver
* Adrián Alonso (born 1994), Mexican actor
* Adrian Alphona, Canadian comic book artist
* Adrian Anantawan (born 1986), Canadian violinist
* Adrian Augier, St. Lucian poet and producer
* Adrian Bică Bădan (born 1988), Romanian footballer
* Adrian Baker (born 1951), English singer, songwriter, and record producer
* Adrian Bărar (1960–2021), Romanian guitarist and composer
* Adrian Barber (1938–2020), English musician and producer
* Adrian Batten (1591–1637), English organist
* Adrian Bawtree (born 1968), English composer and organist
* Adrian Beaumont (born 1937), British composer, conductor, and professor
* Adrian Beers (1916–2004), British double bass player and teacher
* Adrian Belew (born 1949), American guitarist, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and record producer
* Adrian Biddle (1952–2005), English cinematographer
* Adrian Blevins (born 1964), American poet
* Adrian Borland (1957–1999), English singer, songwriter, guitarist and record producer
* Adrian Boult (1889–1983), English conductor
* Adrian Brown (1929–2019), British director and poet
* Adrian Brown (born 1949), British conductor
* Adrian Brunel (1892–1958), English film director and screenwriter
* Adrian Bustamante (born 1981), American actor
* Adrián Caetano (born 1969), Uruguayan-Argentine film director, producer and screenplay writer
* Adrian Carmack (born 1969), American video game artist
* Adrián Carrio (born 1986), Spanish pianist
* Adrian Chiles (born 1967), British television and radio presenter
* Adrian Clarke (photographer), English photographer
* Adrian Clarke (poet), British poet
* Adrian Conan Doyle (1910–1970), English race-car driver, big-game hunter, explorer, and writer
* Adrian Dingle (artist) (1911–1974), Welsh-Canadian painter and comic book artist
* Adrian Dunbar (born 1958), Northern Ireland actor
* Adrian Edmondson (born 1957), better known as Ade Edmondson, English actor, comedian, director, writer and musician
* Adrian Enescu (1948–2016), Romanian composer
* Adrian Erlandsson (born 1970), Swedish heavy metal drummer
* Adrian Fisher (musician) (1952–2000), former guitarist for Sparks (band)
* Adrian Gaxha (born 1984), Macedonian singer-songwriter and producer
* Adrian Ghenie (born 1977), Romanian painter
* Adrian Gonzales (1937–1998), Filipino comic book artist
* Adrián Luis González (born 1939), Mexican potter
* Adrian Gray (born 1961), British artist
* Adrian Adolph Greenburg (1903–1959), costume designer for over 250 films, known as simply Adrian
* Adrian Grenier (born 1976), American actor, producer, director, musician and environmentalist
* Adrian Griffin (drummer), Australian drummer
* Adrian Gurvitz (born 1949), English singer, musician and songwriter
* Adrian Hall (actor) (born 1959), British actor and co-director
* Adrian Hall (artist) (born 1943), British artist
* Adrian Hall (director) (1927–2023), American theatre director
* Adrian Hates (born 1973), German dark wave musician
* Adrian Heath (1920–1992), British painter
* Adrian Heathfield, British writer and curator
* Adrian Hoven (1922–1981), Austrian actor, producer and film director
* Adrian A. Husain (born 1945), Pakistani poet
* Adrian Ivaniţchi (born 1947), Romanian folk musician and guitarist
* Adrian Jones (sculptor) (1845–1938), English sculptor and painter who specialized in animals, particularly horses
* Adrian Jones (born 1978), Swedish musician, member of Gjallarhorn
* Adrian Karsten (1960–2005), American sports reporter
* Adrian Kowanek (born 1977), Polish musician
* Adrian Le Roy (1520–1598), French string player, composer, music publisher and educator
* Adrian Leaper (born 1953), English conductor
* Adrian Legg (born 1948), English guitar player
* Adrian Lester (born 1968), British actor
* Adrian Lucas (born 1962), English organist, tutor, and composer
* Adrian Lulgjuraj (born 1980), Albanian rock singer
* Adrian Lukis (born 1957), British actor
* Adrian Lux (born 1986), Swedish disc jockey and music producer
* Adrian Lyne (born 1941), English filmmaker and producer
* Adrian Martin (born 1959), Australian film and arts critic
* Adrian Martinez (actor) (born 1972), American actor and comedian
* Adrian McKinty (born 1968), Northern Irish writer of crime and mystery novels
* Adrian Minune (born 1974), Romani-Romanian manele singer
* Adrian Mitchell (1932–2008), English poet, novelist and playwright
* Adrian William Moore (born 1956), British philosopher and broadcaster
* Adrián Navarro (born 1969), Argentine actor
* Adrian Noble (born 1950), English theatre director
* Adrian Pasdar (born 1965), American actor and film director
* Adrian Paul (born 1959), English actor
* Adrian Pecknold (1920–1999), Canadian mime, director, and author
* Adrian Petriw (born 1987), Canadian actor
* Adrian Picardi (born 1987), American filmmaker
* Adrian Pintea (1954–2007), Romanian actor
* Adrian Piotrovsky (1898–1937), Russian dramaturge
* Adrian Piper (born 1948), American conceptual artist and philosophy professor
* Adrian R'Mante (born 1978), American television actor
* Adrian Rawlins (born 1958), English actor
* Adrian Ludwig Richter (1803–1884), German painter and etcher
* Adrian Rodriguez (DJ), German DJ
* Adrián Rodríguez (born 1988), Spanish actor and singer from Catalonia
* Adrian Rodriguez, American bass guitarist for The Airborne Toxic Event
* Adrian Rollini (1903–1956), American multi-instrumentalist best known for his jazz music
* Adrian Ross (1859–1933), British lyricist
* Adrián Rubio, Mexican actor and model
* Adrian Scarborough (born 1968), English character actor
* Adrian Scott (1912–1972), American screenwriter and film producer
* Adrian Shaposhnikov (1888–1967), Russian classical composer
* Adrian Sherwood (born 1958), English record producer
* Adrian Sînă (born 1977), Romanian singer-songwriter and record producer
* Adrian D. Smith (born 1944), American architect
* Adrian Smith (born 1957), English musician and one of three guitarists/songwriters in the English band Iron Maiden
* Adrian Smith (illustrator), British illustrator
* Adrian Steirn, Australian photographer and filmmaker working in Africa
* Adrian Consett Stephen (1894–1918), Australian artillery officer and playwright
* Adrian Stokes (critic) (1902–1972), British art critic
* Adrian Scott Stokes (1854–1935), English landscape painter
* Adrian Stroe (born 1959), Romanian serial killer
* Adrian Sturges (born 1976), British film producer
* Adrián Suar (born 1968), Argentine actor and media producer
* Adrian Tanner, English writer and director
* Adrian Taylor (producer) (1954–2014), American television news producer
* Adrian Tchaikovsky (born 1972), British fantasy and science fiction author
* Adrián Terrazas-González (born 1975), Mexican jazz composer and wind player
* Adrian Thaws (born 1968), English musician and actor
* Adrian Tomine (born 1974), American cartoonist
* Adrian Utley (born 1957), English musician best known as a member of the band Portishead
* Adrian Vandenberg (born 1954), Dutch rock guitarist
* Adrian Wells (born 1989), British-American clinical psychologist, singer and songwriter
* Adrian White (musician), Canadian drummer
* Adrian Willaert (c. 1490–1562), Flemish composer of the Renaissance and founder of the Venetian School
* Adrian Wilson (actor) (born 1969), South African model and actor
* Adrian Wilson (artist) (born 1964), British artist and photographer
* Adrian Wong (born 1990), Hong Kong actress
* Adrian Wright (1947–2015), English-Australian actor
* Adrian Young (born 1969), American drummer for the rock band No Doubt
* Adrian Younge (born 1978), American composer, arranger, and music producer
* Adrian Zagoritis (born 1968), British songwriter and record producer
* Adrian Zingg (1734–1816), Swiss painter
* Adrian Zmed (born 1954), American television personality and film actor
Criminals
* Adrian Gonzalez (kidnapper) (born 2000), American kidnapper
* Adrián Gómez González, Mexican drug lord
* Adrián Arroyo Gutiérrez (born 1976), Costa Rican serial killer and rapist, known as The Southern Psychopath
* Adrian Lim (1942–1988), Singaporean serial killer
* Adrian Stroe (born 1959), Romanian serial killer
Other
* Adrian Arendt (born 1952), Romanian sailor
* Adrian Bancker (1703–1772), American silversmith
* Adrian Beecroft (born 1947), British venture capitalist
* Adrian Bell (1901–1980), English ruralist journalist, crossword compiler, and farmer
* Adrian Bellamy (born 1941/1942), British businessman
* Adrian Block (1567–1627), Dutch explorer of the American East Coast
* Adrian Brown (archivist) (born 1969), British archivist
* Adrian Brown (journalist), Australian journalist
* Adrian Cheng (born 1979), Hong Kong entrepreneur and business executive
* Adrian Cioroianu (born 1967), Romanian historian, politician, journalist, and essayist
* Adrian Cronauer (1938–2018), American former lawyer and radio speaker
* Adrian Diel (1756–1839), German physician
* Adrian Finighan (born 1964), British journalist
* Adrian Frutiger (1928–2015), Swiss typeface designer
* Adrian Fulford (born 1953), British judge
* Adrian Geiges (born 1960), German writer and journalist
* Adrian Anthony Gill (1954–2016), British writer and critic
* Adrian Hanauer (born 1966), American businessman and minority owner and general manager of the Seattle Sounders FC
* Adrian Hayes (adventurer) (born 1959), British explorer
* Adrian Holovaty (born 1981), American web developer, journalist and entrepreneur
* Adrian van Hooydonk (born 1964), Dutch automobile designer
* Adrian Albert Jurgens (1886–1953), South African philatelist
* Adrian Kantrowitz (1918–2008), American cardiac surgeon
* Adrian Kashchenko (1858–1921), Ukrainian writer, historian of the Zaporozhian Cossacks
* Adrian Knox (1863–1932), Australian judge
* Adrian Künzi (born 1973), Swiss banker
* Adrian Lamo (born 1981), Colombian-American threat analyst and "grey hat" hacker
* Adrian Long, British civil engineer
* Adrian Mikhalchishin (born 1954), Ukrainian chess grandmaster
* Adrian von Mynsicht (1603–1638), German alchemist
* Adrian Parr (born 1967), Australian philosopher and cultural critic
* Adrian Păunescu (1943–2010), Romanian poet, journalist, and politician
* Adrian Plass (born 1948), English author and speaker
* Adrian Rogers (1931–2005), American pastor, conservative, and author
* Adrian Andrei Rusu (born 1951), Romanian medieval archaeologist
* Adrian Anthony Spears (1910–1991), American judge
* Adrián Steckel, Mexican businessman
* Adrian Stephen (1883–1948), British author and psychoanalyst, brother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell
* Adrian Swire (1932–2018), billionaire British heir and businessman
* Adrian Ursu (born 1968), Romanian journalist
* Adrian Weale (born 1964), English writer, journalist, illustrator and photographer
* Adrian Wewer (1836–1914), German-born American architect and Franciscan friar
* Adrian White (businessman) (born 1942), British businessman, founder of Biwater
* Adrian Zecha (born 1933), Indonesian hotelier
Fictional characters
Male
* Adrien Agreste, a superhero and male protagonist of Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir
*Adrian Blenderbland, a character for The Millionairess, a play by George Bernard Shaw
* Adrian Chase, DC Comics superhero
* Adrian Corbo, alias Flex, a Marvel Comics superhero
* Adrian "Fletch" Fletcher, character on the British medical dramas Casualty and Holby City
* Adrian Ivashkov, character in Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy and protagonist in Bloodlines
* Adrian Leverkühn, protagonist of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus
* Adrian Mole, protagonist of The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
* Adrian Monk, protagonist of the television series Monk
* Adrian Montague, protagonist of the novel ''The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks by Mackenzi Lee
* Adrian Pimento, a recurring character in Brooklyn Nine-Nine
* Adrian Shephard, protagonist of the Half-Life expansion "Half-Life: Opposing Force"
* Adrian Fahrenheit Ţepeş, alias Alucard, character in the Castlevania video games
* Adrian Toomes, alias Vulture, a Marvel Comics villain
* Adrian Veidt, alias Ozymandias, character in the Watchmen graphic novel series
* Adrian Woodhouse, spawn of Satan in the film Rosemary's Baby''
* Adrian, in Shakespeare's Coriolanus
* Adrian, a son of Satan in Little Nicky
Female
* Adrian Andrews, Ace Attorney character from Justice for All
* Adrian Hall, character on the soap opera Home and Away
* Adrian Pennino, wife of Rocky Balboa in the Rocky series
* Adrian Seidelman, character from the Cybersix comic and television series
* Adrian, a mental woman in The Crush (1993)
See also
* Adreian
* Hadrien
References
Sources
*
Category:English masculine given names
Category:Masculine given names
Category:German masculine given names
Category:Dutch masculine given names
Category:Norwegian masculine given names
Category:Swedish masculine given names
Category:Danish masculine given names
Category:Icelandic masculine given names
Category:Romanian masculine given names
Category:Spanish masculine given names
<!-- In the US 6% of Adrians and 1.8% of Adrians born in the last 10 years are female; not enough to call the name "unisex" Category:English-language unisex given names --> | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.756357 |
1433 | Aare | | mouth_location = Rhine below Koblenz, Switzerland
| mouth_coordinates
| map = Aare basin simple.png
| map_caption = Drainage basin of the Aare
| length =
| source1_elevation
| mouth_elevation
| discharge1_location = Untersiggenthal
| discharge1_min (MNQ 1935-2013),<br /> (NNQ, 1963)
| discharge1_avg (MQ 1935-2013)
| discharge1_max (MHQ 1935-2013),<br /> (HHQ, 2007)
| progression =
| tributaries_left = Lütschine (Lake Brienz), Kander (Lake Thun), Gürbe, Saane/La Sarine, Zihl/La Thielle (Lakes of Neuchatel and Bienne), La Suze (Lake of Bienne), Dünnern
| tributaries_right = Gadmerwasser, Zulg, Emme, Murg, Wigger, Suhre, Aabach, Reuss, Limmat, Surb
| waterbodies = Oberaarsee, Grimselsee, Räterichsbodensee, Lake Brienz, Lake Thun, Wohlensee, Lake Biel, Stausee Niederried, Klingnauer Stausee
| basin_size
| extra =
}}
The Aare () or Aar () is the main tributary of the High Rhine (its discharge even exceeds that of the latter at their confluence) and the longest river that both rises and ends entirely within Switzerland.
There are more than 40 hydroelectric plants along the course of the Aare.Course
]]
]]
The Aare rises in the great Aargletschers (Aare Glaciers) of the Bernese Alps, in the canton of Bern and west of the Grimsel Pass. The Oberaargletscher (Upper Aar Glacier) feeds the Oberaarsee, which also flows into the Grimselsee.
* Lake Brienz,
* Lake Thun,
* Niederriedsee, was declared missing after being swept away by the river current. Chronologically, Eril was swimming in the river with his sister and friends. When he wanted to rise to the surface, Eril was dragged by a fairly swift current of the river which had previously received help from his friend. The search efforts involving the police search and rescue team, maritime police, fire department, and authority of the city of Bern. Although on June 9, 2022, Eril's body was located. The funeral procession of Emmeril “Eril” Kahn Mumtadz took place in the family's burial ground located in Cimaung, Bandung regency, West Java. Soon after news about Eril's body brought back to his home, Indonesian netizens review bombed Aare River's Google listing, leaving negative comments and one-star ratings as if the waterway was fully to blame for the tragedy.
See also
* Rivers of Switzerland
Notes
FootnotesReferences*
*
*
*
*
*
* External links
* [http://www.aareschlucht.ch The Aare Gorge (Aareschlucht)]
*
**
**
}}
Category:Rivers of Switzerland
Category:Rivers of the canton of Bern
Category:Rivers of Aargau
Category:Water transport in Switzerland
Category:Rivers of the Alps | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aare | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.772407 |
1435 | Abbotsford, Scottish Borders | | groundbreaking_date | start_date
| completion_date | opened_date
| inauguration_date | renovation_date 1817–1825
| awards | designations Category A Listed Building
}}
Abbotsford is a historic country house in the Scottish Borders, near Galashiels, on the south bank of the River Tweed. Now open to the public, it was built as the residence of historical novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott between 1817 and 1825. It is a Category A Listed Building and the estate is listed in the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland.
Description
, 1844]]
The nucleus of the estate was a farm of , called Cartleyhole, nicknamed Clarty (i.e., muddy) Hole, and was bought by Scott on the lapse of his lease (1811) of the neighbouring house of Ashestiel. Scott renamed it "Abbotsford" after a neighbouring ford used by the monks of Melrose Abbey.
Following a modest enlargement of the original farmhouse in 1811–1812, massive expansions took place in 1816–1819 and 1822–1824. In this mansion Scott gathered a large library, a collection of ancient furniture, arms and armour, and other relics and curiosities especially connected with Scottish history, notably the Celtic Torrs Pony-cap and Horns and the Woodwrae Stone, all now in the Museum of Scotland. Scott described the resulting building as "a sort of romance in Architecture" and "a kind of Conundrum Castle to be sure".
The last and principal acquisition was that of Toftfield (afterwards named Huntlyburn), purchased in 1817. The new house was then begun and completed in 1824.
The general ground-plan is a parallelogram, with irregular outlines, one side overlooking the Tweed; and the style is mainly the Scottish Baronial. With his architects William Atkinson and Edward Blore Scott was a pioneer of the Scottish Baronial style of architecture: the house is recognized as a highly influential creation with themes from Abbotsford being reflected across many buildings in the Scottish Borders and beyond.
The manor as a whole appears as a "castle-in-miniature", with small towers and imitation battlements decorating the house and garden walls. Into various parts of the fabric were built relics and curiosities from historical structures, such as the doorway of the old Tolbooth in Edinburgh.
Scott collected many of these curiosities to be built into the walls of the South Garden, which previously hosted a colonnade of gothic arches along the garden walls. Along the path of the former colonnade sits the remains of Edinburgh's 15th century Mercat Cross and several examples of classical sculpture.
The estate and its neo-Medieval features nod towards Scott's desire for a historical feel, but the writer ensured that the house would provide all the comforts of modern living. As a result, Scott used the space as a proving-ground for new technologies. The house was outfitted with early gas lighting and pneumatic bells connecting residents with servants elsewhere in the house.
Scott had only enjoyed his residence one year when (1825) he met with that reverse of fortune which involved the estate in debt. In 1830, the library and museum were presented to him as a free gift by the creditors. The property was wholly disencumbered in 1847 by Robert Cadell, the publisher, who cancelled the bond upon it in exchange for the family's share in the copyright of Sir Walter's works.
Scott's only son Walter did not live to enjoy the property, having died on his way from India in 1847. Among subsequent possessors were Scott's grandson Walter Scott Lockhart (later Walter Lockhart Scott, 1826–1853), his younger sister Charlotte Harriet Jane Hope-Scott (née Lockhart) 1828–1858, J. R. Hope Scott, QC, and his daughter (Scott's great-granddaughter), the Hon. Mrs Maxwell Scott.
'', by Elizabeth Nasmyth]]
The house was opened to the public in 1833, but continued to be occupied by Scott's descendants until 2004. The last of his direct descendants to hold the Lairdship of Abbotsford was his great-great-great-granddaughter Dame Jean Maxwell-Scott (8 June 1923 – 5 May 2004). She inherited it from her elder sister Patricia Maxwell-Scott in 1998. The sisters turned the house into one of Scotland's premier tourist attractions, after they had to rely on paying visitors to afford the upkeep of the house. It had electricity installed only in 1962.
Dame Jean was at one time a lady-in-waiting to Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, patron of the Dandie Dinmont Club, a breed of dog named after one of Sir Walter Scott's characters; and a horse trainer, one of whose horses, Sir Wattie, ridden by Ian Stark, won two silver medals at the 1988 Summer Olympics.
On Dame Jean's death the Abbotsford Trust was established to safeguard the estate. There have been modifications to the proposed development, but it is still being opposed in 2020.
Sir Walter Scott rescued the "jougs" from Threave Castle in Dumfries and Galloway and attached them to the castellated gateway he built at Abbotsford.
Tweedbank railway station is located near to Abbotsford.
Miscellaneous
Abbotsford gave its name to the Abbotsford Club, founded by William Barclay Turnbull in 1833 or 1834 in Scott's honour, and a successor to the Bannatyne and Maitland Clubs. It was a text publication society, which existed to print and publish historical works connected with Scott's writings. Its publications extended from 1835 to 1864.
In August 2012, a new Visitor Centre opened at Abbotsford which houses a small exhibition, gift shop and Ochiltree's café with views over the house and grounds. The house re-opened to the public after extensive renovations in July 2013.
In 2014 it won the European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Award for its then recent conservation project.
See also
*List of places in the Scottish Borders
Notes
References
* }}
* }}
*
* }}
Attribution
*
External links
*[http://www.scottsabbotsford.co.uk/ Abbotsford – The Home of Sir Walter Scott] – official site
*[http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/55750/details/abbotsford+house/ RCAHMS / CANMORE site record for Abbotsford]
*[http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/biography/homes.html Edinburgh University Library]
*[https://archive.org/details/abbotsford00crociala Abbotsford] (by W S Crockett – 1904 illustrated book pub. A & C Black)
*[https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7948 Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey] by Washington Irving, from Project Gutenberg
*
**
**
}}
Category:Category A listed buildings in the Scottish Borders
Category:Category A listed houses in Scotland
Category:Scottish baronial architecture
Category:Walter Scott
Category:Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes
Category:Gardens in the Scottish Borders
Category:Literary museums in Scotland
Category:Historic house museums in the Scottish Borders
Category:Country houses in the Scottish Borders
Category:Houses completed in 1824
Category:Galashiels | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbotsford,_Scottish_Borders | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.781938 |
1436 | Abraham | <br />
| known_for Namesake of the Abrahamic religions: traditional founder of the Jewish nation, spiritual ancestor of Christians, major Islamic prophet, Manifestation of God and originator of monotheistic faith in Baháʼí Faith, third spokesman (natiq) prophet of Druzes
| spouse =
| religion = Abrahamic
| name = Abraham
| native_name = אַבְרָהָם
| native_name_lang = Hbo
| birth_name = אַבְרָם
| birth_date = 1948 AM
| birth_place = Ur Kasdim, Mesopotamia
| father = Terah
| mother = Amathlai
| children =
| Ishmael (son, with Hagar)
| Isaac (son, with Sarah)
| Zimran (son, with Keturah)
| Jokshan (son, with Keturah)
| Medan (son, with Keturah)
| Midian (son, with Keturah)
| Ishbak (son, with Keturah)
| Shuah (son, with Keturah)
}}
| relatives =
| Haran (brother)
| Nahor (brother)
| Sarah (half-sister and wife)
| Jacob (grandson)
| Esau (grandson)
| Lot (nephew)
| Twelve Tribes of Israel (great-grandsons)
| Dinah (great-granddaughter)
| see: ''Abraham's family tree
}}
| death_place = Cave of Machpelah, Hebron, Canaan
| death_date = 2123 AM
}}
Abraham; |ʾAvraham|ʾAḇrāhām}}; , ; }}, |name|group}} (originally Abram)|ʾAvram|ʾAḇrām}}}} is the common Hebrew patriarch of the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Judaism, he is the founding father of the special relationship between the Jews and God; in Christianity, he is the spiritual progenitor of all believers, whether Jewish or non-Jewish; writes "In the NT Abraham is recognized as the father of Israel and of the Levitical priesthood (Heb. 7), as the "legal" forebear of Jesus (i.e. ancestor of Joseph according to Matt. 1), and spiritual progenitor of all Christians (Rom. 4; Gal. 3:16, 29; cf. also the Visio Pauli'')"}} and in Islam, he is a link in the chain of Islamic prophets that begins with Adam and culminates in Muhammad. As the namesake of the Abrahamic religions, Abraham is also revered in other Abrahamic religions, such as the Baháʼí Faith and the Druze faith.
The story of the life of Abraham, as told in the narrative of the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, revolves around the themes of posterity and land. He is said to have been called by God to leave the house of his father Terah and settle in the land of Canaan, which God now promises to Abraham and his progeny. This promise is subsequently inherited by Isaac, Abraham's son by his wife Sarah, while Isaac's half-brother Ishmael is also promised that he will be the founder of a great nation. Abraham purchases a tomb (the Cave of the Patriarchs) at Hebron to be Sarah's grave, thus establishing his right to the land; and, in the second generation, his heir Isaac is married to a woman from his own kin to earn his parents' approval. Abraham later marries Keturah and has six more sons; but, on his death, when he is buried beside Sarah, it is Isaac who receives "all Abraham's goods" while the other sons receive only "gifts".
Most scholars view the patriarchal age, along with the Exodus and the period of the biblical judges, as a late literary construct that does not relate to any particular historical era. It is largely concluded that the Torah, the series of books that includes Genesis, was composed during the Persian period, as a result of tensions between Jewish landowners who had stayed in Judah during the Babylonian captivity and traced their right to the land through their "father Abraham", and the returning exiles who based their counterclaim on Moses and the Exodus tradition of the Israelites.
The Abraham Cycle
Structure and narrative programs
The Abraham cycle is not structured by a unified plot centered on a conflict and its resolution or a problem and its solution. The episodes are often only loosely linked, and the sequence is not always logical, but it is unified by the presence of Abraham himself, as either actor or witness, and by the themes of posterity and land. These themes form "narrative programs" set out in [https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.11.27 Genesis 11:27–31] concerning the sterility of Sarah and [https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.12.1-3 12:1–3] in which Abraham is ordered to leave the land of his birth for the land God will show him.Origins and callingTerah, the ninth in descent from Noah, was the father of Abram, Nahor, Haran ( Hārān) and Sarah. Haran was the father of Lot, who was Abram's nephew; the family lived in Ur of the Chaldees. Haran died there. Abram married Sarah (Sarai). Terah, Abram, Sarai, and Lot departed for Canaan, but settled in a place named Haran ( Ḥārān), where Terah died at the age of 205. According to some exegetes (like Nahmanides), Abram was actually born in Haran and he later relocated to Ur, while some of his family remained in Haran.
God had told Abram to leave his country and kindred and go to a land that he would show him, and promised to make of him a great nation, bless him, make his name great, bless them that bless him, and curse them who may curse him. Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran with his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, and their possessions and people that they had acquired, and traveled to Shechem in Canaan.
Sarai
, (Jewish Museum, New York)]]
There was a severe famine in the land of Canaan, so that Abram, Lot, and their households traveled to Egypt. On the way Abram told Sarai to say that she was his sister, so that the Egyptians would not kill him. When they entered Egypt, the Pharaoh's officials praised Sarai's beauty to Pharaoh, and they took her into the palace and gave Abram goods in exchange. God afflicted Pharaoh and his household with plagues, which led Pharaoh to try to find out what was wrong. Upon discovering that Sarai was a married woman, Pharaoh demanded that Abram and Sarai leave.
Abram and Lot separate
When they lived for a while in the Negev after being banished from Egypt and came back to the Bethel and Ai area, Abram's and Lot's sizable herds occupied the same pastures. This became a problem for the herdsmen, who were assigned to each family's cattle. The conflicts between herdsmen had become so troublesome that Abram suggested that Lot choose a separate area, either on the left hand or on the right hand, that there be no conflict between them. Lot decided to go eastward to the plain of Jordan, where the land was well watered everywhere as far as Zoara, and he dwelled in the cities of the plain toward Sodom. Abram went south to Hebron and settled in the plain of Mamre, where he built another altar to worship God.
Chedorlaomer
, –1467]]
During the rebellion of the Jordan River cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, against Elam, Abram's nephew, Lot, was taken prisoner along with his entire household by the invading Elamite forces. The Elamite army came to collect the spoils of war, after having just defeated the king of Sodom's armies. Lot and his family, at the time, were settled on the outskirts of the Kingdom of Sodom which made them a visible target.
One person who escaped capture came and told Abram what happened. Once Abram received this news, he immediately assembled 318 trained servants. Abram's force headed north in pursuit of the Elamite army, who were already worn down from the Battle of Siddim. When they caught up with them at Dan, Abram devised a battle plan by splitting his group into more than one unit, and launched a night raid. Not only were they able to free the captives, Abram's unit chased and slaughtered the Elamite King Chedorlaomer at Hobah, just north of Damascus. They freed Lot, as well as his household and possessions, and recovered all of the goods from Sodom that had been taken.
Upon Abram's return, Sodom's king came out to meet with him in the Valley of Shaveh, the "king's dale". Also, Melchizedek king of Salem (Jerusalem), a priest of El Elyon, brought out bread and wine and blessed Abram and God. Abram then gave Melchizedek a tenth of everything. The king of Sodom then offered to let Abram keep all the possessions if he would merely return his people. Abram declined to accept anything other than the share to which his allies were entitled.
Covenant of the pieces
The voice of the Lord came to Abram in a vision and repeated the promise of the land and descendants as numerous as the stars. Abram and God made a covenant ceremony, and God told of the future bondage of Israel in Egypt. God described to Abram the land that his offspring would claim: the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaims, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites.
Hagar
and Hagar, Bible illustration from 1897]]
Abram and Sarai tried to make sense of how he would become a progenitor of nations, because after 10 years of living in Canaan, no child had been born. Sarai then offered her Egyptian slave, Hagar, to Abram with the intention that she would bear him a son.
After Hagar found she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress, Sarai. Sarai responded by mistreating Hagar, and Hagar fled into the wilderness. An angel spoke with Hagar at the fountain on the way to Shur. He instructed her to return to Abram's camp and that her son would be "a wild ass of a man; his hand shall be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the face of all his brethren." She was told to call her son Ishmael. Hagar then called God who spoke to her "El-roi", ("Thou God seest me:" KJV). From that day onward, the well was called Beer-lahai-roi, ("The well of him that liveth and seeth me." KJV margin), located between Kadesh and Bered. She then did as she was instructed by returning to her mistress in order to have her child. Abram was 86 years of age when Ishmael was born.
Sarah
Thirteen years later, when Abram was 99 years of age, God declared Abram's new name: "Abraham" – "a father of many nations". Abraham then received the instructions for the covenant of the pieces, of which circumcision was to be the sign.
God declared Sarai's new name: "Sarah", blessed her, and told Abraham, "I will give thee a son also of her". Abraham laughed, and "said in his heart, 'Shall a child be born unto him that is a hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear [a child]?'" Immediately after Abraham's encounter with God, he had his entire household of men, including himself (age 99) and Ishmael (age 13), circumcised.
Three visitors
, ]]
Not long afterward, during the heat of the day, Abraham had been sitting at the entrance of his tent by the terebinths of Mamre. He looked up and saw three men in the presence of God. Then he ran and bowed to the ground to welcome them. Abraham then offered to wash their feet and fetch them a morsel of bread, to which they assented. Abraham rushed to Sarah's tent to order ash cakes made from choice flour, then he ordered a servant-boy to prepare a choice calf. When all was prepared, he set curds, milk and the calf before them, waiting on them, under a tree, as they ate.
One of the visitors told Abraham that upon his return next year, Sarah would have a son. While at the tent entrance, Sarah overheard what was said and she laughed to herself about the prospect of having a child at their ages. The visitor inquired of Abraham why Sarah laughed at bearing a child at her age, as nothing is too hard for God. Frightened, Sarah denied laughing.
Abraham's plea
, ]]
After eating, Abraham and the three visitors got up. They walked over to the peak that overlooked the 'cities of the plain' to discuss the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah for their detestable sins that were so great, it moved God to action. Because Abraham's nephew was living in Sodom, God revealed plans to confirm and judge these cities. At this point, the two other visitors left for Sodom. Then Abraham turned to God and pleaded decrementally with Him (from fifty persons to less) that "if there were at least ten righteous men found in the city, would not God spare the city?" For the sake of ten righteous people, God declared that he would not destroy the city.
When the two visitors arrived in Sodom to conduct their report, they planned on staying in the city square. However, Abraham's nephew, Lot, met with them and strongly insisted that these two "men" stay at his house for the night. A rally of men stood outside of Lot's home and demanded that Lot bring out his guests so that they may "know" ( 5) them. However, Lot objected and offered his virgin daughters who had not "known" (v. 8) man to the rally of men instead. They rejected that notion and sought to break down Lot's door to get to his male guests, thus confirming the wickedness of the city and portending their imminent destruction.
Early the next morning, Abraham went to the place where he stood before God. He "looked out toward Sodom and Gomorrah" and saw what became of the cities of the plain, where not even "ten righteous" (v. 18:32) had been found, as "the smoke of the land went up as the smoke of a furnace."
Abimelech
, before 1903 (Jewish Museum, New York)]]
Abraham settled between Kadesh and Shur in what the Bible anachronistically calls "the land of the Philistines". While he was living in Gerar, Abraham openly claimed that Sarah was his sister. Upon discovering this news, King Abimelech had her brought to him. God then came to Abimelech in a dream and declared that taking her would result in death because she was a man's wife. Abimelech had not laid hands on her, so he inquired if he would also slay a righteous nation, especially since Abraham had claimed that he and Sarah were siblings. In response, God told Abimelech that he did indeed have a blameless heart and that is why he continued to exist. However, should he not return the wife of Abraham back to him, God would surely destroy Abimelech and his entire household. Abimelech was informed that Abraham was a prophet who would pray for him.
Early next morning, Abimelech informed his servants of his dream and approached Abraham inquiring as to why he had brought such great guilt upon his kingdom. Abraham stated that he thought there was no fear of God in that place, and that they might kill him for his wife. Then Abraham defended what he had said as not being a lie at all: "And yet indeed she is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife." Abimelech returned Sarah to Abraham, and gave him gifts of sheep, oxen, and servants; and invited him to settle wherever he pleased in Abimelech's lands. Further, Abimelech gave Abraham a thousand pieces of silver to serve as Sarah's vindication before all. Abraham then prayed for Abimelech and his household, since God had stricken the women with infertility because of the taking of Sarah.
After living for some time in the land of the Philistines, Abimelech and Phicol, the chief of his troops, approached Abraham because of a dispute that resulted in a violent confrontation at a well. Abraham then reproached Abimelech due to his Philistine servant's aggressive attacks and the seizing of Abraham's Well. Abimelech claimed ignorance of the incident. Then Abraham offered a pact by providing sheep and oxen to Abimelech. Further, to attest that Abraham was the one who dug the well, he also gave Abimelech seven ewes for proof. Because of this sworn oath, they called the place of this well: Beersheba. After Abimelech and Phicol headed back to Philistia, Abraham planted a tamarisk grove in Beersheba and called upon "the name of the , the everlasting God."
Isaac
As had been prophesied in Mamre the previous year, Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham, on the first anniversary of the covenant of circumcision. Abraham was "an hundred years old", when his son whom he named Isaac was born; and he circumcised him when he was eight days old. For Sarah, the thought of giving birth and nursing a child, at such an old age, also brought her much laughter, as she declared, "God hath made me to laugh, so that all who hear will laugh with me." Isaac continued to grow and on the day he was weaned, Abraham held a great feast to honor the occasion. During the celebration, however, Sarah found Ishmael mocking; an observation that would begin to clarify the birthright of Isaac.
Ishmael
, (Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Rhode Island)]]
Ishmael was fourteen years old when Abraham's son Isaac was born to Sarah. When she found Ishmael teasing Isaac, Sarah told Abraham to send both Ishmael and Hagar away. She declared that Ishmael would not share in Isaac's inheritance. Abraham was greatly distressed by his wife's words and sought the advice of his God. God told Abraham not to be distressed but to do as his wife commanded. God reassured Abraham that "in Isaac shall seed be called to thee." He also said Ishmael would make a nation, "because he is thy seed".
Early the next morning, Abraham brought Hagar and Ishmael out together. He gave her bread and water and sent them away. The two wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba until her bottle of water was completely consumed. In a moment of despair, she burst into tears. After God heard the boy's voice, an angel of the Lord confirmed to Hagar that he would become a great nation, and will be "living on his sword". A well of water then appeared so that it saved their lives. As the boy grew, he became a skilled archer living in the wilderness of Paran. Eventually his mother found a wife for Ishmael from her home country, the land of Egypt.
Binding of Isaac
, 1635 (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg)]]
At some point in Isaac's youth, Abraham was commanded by God to offer his son up as a sacrifice in the land of Moriah. The patriarch traveled three days until he came to the mount that God told him of. He then commanded the servants to remain while he and Isaac proceeded alone into the mount. Isaac carried the wood upon which he would be sacrificed. Along the way, Isaac asked his father where the animal for the burnt offering was, to which Abraham replied "God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering". Just as Abraham was about to sacrifice his son, he was interrupted by the angel of the Lord, and he saw behind him a "ram caught in a thicket by his horns", which he sacrificed instead of his son. The place was later named as Jehovah-jireh. For his obedience he received another promise of numerous descendants and abundant prosperity. After this event, Abraham went to Beersheba.
Later years
Sarah died, and Abraham buried her in the Cave of the Patriarchs (the "cave of Machpelah"), near Hebron which he had purchased along with the adjoining field from Ephron the Hittite. After the death of Sarah, Abraham took another wife, a concubine named Keturah, by whom he had six sons: Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. According to the Bible, reflecting the change of his name to "Abraham" meaning "a father of many nations", Abraham is considered to be the progenitor of many nations mentioned in the Bible, among others the Israelites, Ishmaelites, Edomites, Amalekites, Kenizzites, Midianites and Assyrians, and through his nephew Lot he was also related to the Moabites and Ammonites. Abraham lived to see Isaac marry Rebekah, and to see the birth of his twin grandsons Jacob and Esau. He died at age 175, and was buried in the cave of Machpelah by his sons Isaac and Ishmael.
Historical context
Historicity
at Beersheba, Israel]]
In the early and middle 20th century, leading archaeologists such as William F. Albright and G. Ernest Wright and biblical scholars such as Albrecht Alt and John Bright believed that the patriarchs and matriarchs were either real individuals or believable composites of people who lived in the "patriarchal age", the 2nd millennium BCE. But, in the 1970s, new arguments concerning Israel's past and the biblical texts challenged these views; these arguments can be found in Thomas L. Thompson's The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (1974), and John Van Seters' Abraham in History and Tradition (1975). Thompson, a literary scholar, based his argument on archaeology and ancient texts. His thesis centered on the lack of compelling evidence that the patriarchs lived in the 2nd millennium BCE, and noted how certain biblical texts reflected first millennium conditions and concerns. Van Seters examined the patriarchal stories and argued that their names, social milieu, and messages strongly suggested that they were Iron Age creations. Van Seters' and Thompson's works were a paradigm shift in biblical scholarship and archaeology, which gradually led scholars to no longer consider the patriarchal narratives as historical. Some conservative scholars attempted to defend the Patriarchal narratives in the following years, but this has not found acceptance among scholars. By the beginning of the 21st century, archaeologists had stopped trying to recover any context that would make Abraham, Isaac or Jacob credible historical figures.
Origins of the narrative
]]
Abraham's story, like those of the other patriarchs, most likely had a substantial oral prehistory (he is mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel and the Book of Isaiah). As with Moses, Abraham's name is apparently very ancient, as the tradition found in the Book of Genesis no longer understands its original meaning (probably "Father is exalted" – the meaning offered in [https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.17:5 Genesis 17:5], "Father of a multitude", is a folk etymology). At some stage the oral traditions became part of the written tradition of the Pentateuch; a majority of scholars believe this stage belongs to the Persian period, roughly 520–320 BCE. The mechanisms by which this came about remain unknown, but there are currently at least two hypotheses. The first, called Persian Imperial authorisation, is that the post-Exilic community devised the Torah as a legal basis on which to function within the Persian Imperial system; the second is that the Pentateuch was written to provide the criteria for determining who would belong to the post-Exilic Jewish community and to establish the power structures and relative positions of its various groups, notably the priesthood and the lay "elders".
The completion of the Torah and its elevation to the centre of post-Exilic Judaism was as much or more about combining older texts as writing new ones – the final Pentateuch was based on existing traditions. In the Book of Ezekiel, written during the Exile (i.e., in the first half of the 6th century BCE), Ezekiel, an exile in Babylon, tells how those who remained in Judah are claiming ownership of the land based on inheritance from Abraham; but the prophet tells them they have no claim because they do not observe Torah. The Book of Isaiah similarly testifies of tension between the people of Judah and the returning post-Exilic Jews (the "gôlâ"), stating that God is the father of Israel and that Israel's history begins with the Exodus and not with Abraham. The conclusion to be inferred from this and similar evidence (e.g., Ezra–Nehemiah), is that the figure of Abraham must have been preeminent among the great landowners of Judah at the time of the Exile and after, serving to support their claims to the land in opposition to those of the returning exiles.
Amorite origin hypothesis
According to Nissim Amzallag, the Book of Genesis portrays Abraham as having an Amorite origin, arguing that the patriarch's provenance from the region of Harran as described in associates him with the territory of the Amorite homeland. He also notes parallels between the biblical narrative and the Amorite migration into the Southern Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Likewise, some scholars like Daniel E. Fleming and Alice Mandell have argued that the biblical portrayal of the Patriarchs' lifestyle appears to reflect the Amorite culture of the 2nd millennium BCE as attested in texts from the ancient city-state of Mari, suggesting that the Genesis stories retain historical memories of the ancestral origins of some of the Israelites. Alan Millard argues that the name Abram is of Amorite origin and that it is attested in Mari as ʾabī-rām. He also suggests that the Patriarch's name corresponds to a form typical of the Middle Bronze Age and not of later periods.Palestine origin hypothesisThe earliest possible reference to Abraham may be the name of a town in the Negev listed in a victory inscription of Pharaoh Sheshonq I (biblical Shishak), which is referred as "the Fortress of Abraham", suggesting the possible existence of an Abraham tradition in the 10th century BCE. The orientalist Mario Liverani proposed to see in the name Abraham the mythical eponym of a Palestinian tribe from the 13th century BCE, that of the Raham, of which mention was found in the stele of Seti I found in Beth-She'an and dating back to 'around 1289 BCE. The tribe probably lived in the area surrounding or close to Beth-She'an, in Galilee (the stele in fact refers to fights that took place in the area). The semi-nomadic and pastoral Semitic tribes of the time used to prefix their names with the term banū ("sons of"), so it is hypothesized that the Raham called themselves Banu Raham. Furthermore, many interpreted blood ties between tribe members as common descent from an eponymous ancestor (i.e., one who gave the tribe its name), rather than as the result of intra-tribal ties. The name of this eponymous mythical ancestor was constructed with the patronymic (prefix) Abū ("father"), followed by the name of the tribe; in the case of the Raham, it would have been Abu Raham, later to become Ab-raham, Abraham. Abraham's Journey from Ur to Harran could be explained as a retrospective reflection of the story of the return of the Jews from the Babylonian exile. Indeed, Israel Finkelstein suggested that the oldest Abraham traditions originated in the Iron Age (monarchic period) and that they contained an autochthonous hero story, as the oldest mentions of Abraham outside the book of Genesis ([https://www.sefaria.org/Ezekiel.33 Ezekiel 33] and [https://www.sefaria.org/Isaiah.51 Isaiah 51]): do not depend on Genesis 12–26; do not have an indication of a Mesopotamian origin of Abraham; and present only two main themes of the Abraham narrative in Genesis—land and offspring. Yet, unlike Liverani, Finkelstein considered Abraham as ancestor who was worshiped in Hebron, which is too far from Beit She'an, and the oldest tradition of him might be about the altar he built in Hebron.
Hanan bar Rava taught in Abba Arikha's name that Abraham's mother was named ʾĂmatlaʾy bat Karnebo. Hiyya bar Abba taught that Abraham worked in Teraḥ's idol shop in his youth.
In Legends of the Jews, God created heaven and earth for the sake of the merits of Abraham. After the biblical flood, Abraham was the only one among the pious who solemnly swore never to forsake God, studied in the house of Noah and Shem to learn about the "Ways of God," continued the line of High Priest from Noah and Shem, and assigning the office to Levi and his seed forever. Before leaving his father's land, Abraham was miraculously saved from the fiery furnace of Nimrod following his brave action of breaking the idols of the Chaldeans into pieces. During his sojourning in Canaan, Abraham was accustomed to extend hospitality to travelers and strangers and taught how to praise God also knowledge of God to those who had received his kindness.
Along with Isaac and Jacob, he is the one whose name would appear united with God, as God in Judaism was called ''Elohei Abraham, Elohei Yitzchaq ve Elohei Ya'aqob ("God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob") and never the God of anyone else. He was also mentioned as the father of thirty nations.
Christianity
, (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam)]]
In Christianity, Abraham is revered as the prophet to whom God chose to reveal himself and with whom God initiated a covenant (cf. Covenant Theology''). Paul the Apostle declared that all who believe in Jesus (Christians) are "included in the seed of Abraham and are inheritors of the promise made to Abraham." In Romans 4, Abraham is praised for his "unwavering faith" in God, which is tied into the concept of partakers of the covenant of grace being those "who demonstrate faith in the saving power of Christ". In the introduction to his 15th-century translation of the Golden Legend's account of Abraham, William Caxton noted that this patriarch's life was read in church on Quinquagesima Sunday.
He is the patron saint of those in the hospitality industry. The Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates him as the "Righteous Forefather Abraham", with two feast days in its liturgical calendar. The first time is on 9 October (for those churches which follow the traditional Julian Calendar, 9 October falls on 22 October of the modern Gregorian Calendar), where he is commemorated together with his nephew "Righteous Lot". The other is on the "Sunday of the Forefathers" (two Sundays before Christmas), when he is commemorated together with other ancestors of Jesus. Abraham is also mentioned in the Divine Liturgy of Basil the Great, just before the Anaphora, and Abraham and Sarah are invoked in the prayers said by the priest over a newly married couple. A popular hymn sung in many English-speaking Sunday Schools by children is known as "Father Abraham" and emphasizes the patriarch as the spiritual progenitor of Christians.
Some Christian theologians equate the "three visitors" with the Holy Trinity, seeing in their apparition a theophany experienced by Abraham (see also the articles on the Constantinian basilica at Mamre and the church at the so-called "Oak of Mamre").
Islam
Islam regards Ibrahim (Abraham) as a link in the chain of prophets that begins with Adam and culminates in Muhammad via Ismail (Ishmael).
Ibrāhīm is mentioned in 35 chapters of the Quran, more often than any other biblical personage apart from Moses. He is called both a hanif (monotheist) and muslim (one who submits), and Muslims regard him as a prophet and patriarch, the archetype of the perfect Muslim, and the revered reformer of the Kaaba in Mecca. Islamic traditions consider Ibrāhīm the first Pioneer of Islam (which is also called millat Ibrahim, the "religion of Abraham"), and that his purpose and mission throughout his life was to proclaim the Oneness of God. In Islam, Abraham holds an exalted position among the major prophets and he is referred to as "Ibrahim Khalilullah", meaning "Abraham the Friend of God".
Besides Ishaq and Yaqub, Ibrahim is among the most honorable and the most excellent men in sight of God. Ibrahim was also mentioned in Quran as "Father of Muslims" and the role model for the community.
Druze
The Druze regard Abraham as the third spokesman (natiq) after Adam and Noah, who helped transmit the foundational teachings of monotheism (tawhid) intended for the larger audience. He is also among the seven prophets who appeared in different periods of history according to the Druze faith.MandaeismIn Mandaeism, Abraham () is mentioned in Book 18 of the Right Ginza as the patriarch of the Jewish people. Mandaeans consider Abraham to have been originally a Mandaean priest, however they differ with Abraham and Jews regarding circumcision which they consider to be bodily mutilation and therefore forbidden.
Baháʼí Faith
Baháʼís considered Abraham as a Manifestation of God, and as the originator of monotheistic religion. ʻAbdu'l-Bahá states that Abraham was born in Mesopotamia, and Bahá'u'lláh states that the language which Abraham spoke, when "he crossed the Jordan", is Hebrew ('Ibrání), so "the language of the crossing." To ʻAbdu'l-Bahá, the Abraham was born to a family that was ignorant of the oneness of God. Abraham opposed his own people and government, and even his own kin, he rejected all their gods, and, alone and single-handed, he withstood a powerful nation. These people believed not in one God but in many gods, to whom they ascribed miracles, and hence they all rose up against Abraham. No one supported him except his nephew Lot and "one or two other individuals of no consequence". At last the intensity of his enemies' opposition obliged him, utterly wronged, to forsake his native land. Abraham then came to "these regions", that is, to the Holy Land. To Bahá'u'lláh, the "Voice of God" commanded Abraham to offer up Ishmael as a sacrifice, so that his steadfastness in the faith of God and his detachment from all else but him may be demonstrated unto men. The purpose of God, moreover, was to sacrifice him as a ransom for the sins and iniquities of all the peoples of the earth.
In the Baháʼí texts, like the Islamic texts, Abraham is often referred to as "the Friend of God". 'Abdu'l-Bahá described Abraham as the founder of monotheism.
ʻAbdu'l-Bahá also suggested the "holy manifestations who have been the sources or founders of the various religious systems" were united and agreed in purpose and teaching, and the Abraham, Moses, Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh are one in "spirit and reality". Artistic depictions Painting and sculpture
. The hand of God originally came down to restrain Abraham's knife (both are now missing).]]
Paintings on the life of Abraham tend to focus on only a few incidents: the sacrifice of Isaac; meeting Melchizedek; entertaining the three angels; Hagar in the desert; and a few others. Additionally, Martin O'Kane, a professor of Biblical Studies, writes that the parable of Lazarus resting in the "Bosom of Abraham", as described in the Gospel of Luke, became an iconic image in Christian works. According to O'Kane, artists often chose to divert from the common literary portrayal of Lazarus sitting next to Abraham at a banquet in Heaven and instead focus on the "somewhat incongruous notion of Abraham, the most venerated of patriarchs, holding a naked and vulnerable child in his bosom". Several artists have been inspired by the life of Abraham, including Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Caravaggio (1573–1610), Donatello, Raphael, Philip van Dyck (Dutch painter, 1680–1753), and Claude Lorrain (French painter, 1600–1682). Rembrandt (Dutch, 1606–1669) created at least seven works on Abraham, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) did several, Marc Chagall did at least five on Abraham, Gustave Doré (French illustrator, 1832–1883) did six, and James Tissot (French painter and illustrator, 1836–1902) did over twenty works on the subject.
The Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus depicts a set of biblical stories, including Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac. These sculpted scenes are on the outside of a marble Early Christian sarcophagus used for the burial of Junius Bassus. He died in 359. This sarcophagus has been described as "probably the single most famous piece of early Christian relief sculpture." The sarcophagus was originally placed in or under Old St. Peter's Basilica, was rediscovered in 1597, and is now below the modern basilica in the Museo Storico del Tesoro della Basilica di San Pietro (Museum of St. Peter's Basilica) in the Vatican. The base is approximately . The Old Testament scenes depicted were chosen as precursors of Christ's sacrifice in the New Testament, in an early form of typology. Just to the right of the middle is Daniel in the lion's den and on the left is Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac.
George Segal created figural sculptures by molding plastered gauze strips over live models in his 1987 work ''Abraham's Farewell to Ishmael''. The human condition was central to his concerns, and Segal used the Old Testament as a source for his imagery. This sculpture depicts the dilemma faced by Abraham when Sarah demanded that he expel Hagar and Ishmael. In the sculpture, the father's tenderness, Sarah's rage, and Hagar's resigned acceptance portray a range of human emotions. The sculpture was donated to the Miami Art Museum after the artist's death in 2000.
Christian iconography
, Serbia]]
Abraham can sometimes be identified by the context of the image the meeting with Melchizedek, the three visitors, or the sacrifice of Isaac. In solo portraits a sword or knife may be used as his accessory, as in this statue by Giovanni Maria Morlaiter or this painting by Lorenzo Monaco.
As early as the beginning of the 3rd century, Christian art followed Christian typology in making the sacrifice of Isaac a foreshadowing of Christ's sacrifice on the cross, and its memorial in the sacrifice of the Mass. See for example this 11th-century Christian altar engraved with Abraham's and other sacrifices taken to prefigure that of Christ in the Eucharist.
of Abraham in Heaven from the Holy Mother Church, Ploieşti, Romania]]
Some early Christian writers interpreted the three visitors as the triune God. Thus in Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, a 5th-century mosaic portrays only the visitors against a gold ground and puts semitransparent copies of them in the "heavenly" space above the scene. In Eastern Orthodox art, the visit is the chief means by which the Trinity is pictured (example). Some images do not include Abraham and Sarah, like Andrei Rublev's Trinity, which shows only the three visitors as beardless youths at a table.LiteratureFear and Trembling (original Danish title: Frygt og Bæven) is an influential philosophical work by Søren Kierkegaard, published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio (John the Silent). Kierkegaard wanted to understand the anxiety that must have been present in Abraham when God asked him to sacrifice his son. W. G. Hardy's novel Father Abraham (1935) tells the fictionalized life story of Abraham. In her short story collection Sarah and After, Lynne Reid Banks tells the story of Abraham and Sarah, with an emphasis on Sarah's view of events.
Music
In 1681, Marc-Antoine Charpentier released a Dramatic motet (Oratorio), Sacrificim Abrahae H.402 – 402 a – 402 b, for soloists, chorus, doubling instruments and continuo. Sébastien de Brossard composed a cantata ''Abraham ou le sacrifice d'Isaac.'' between 1703 and 1708.
In 1994, Steve Reich released an opera named The Cave. The title refers to the Cave of the Patriarchs. The narrative of the opera is based on the story of Abraham, and his immediate family, as it is recounted in religious texts, and understood by individuals from different cultures and religious traditions.
Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" is the title track for his 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked the song as number 364 in their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The song has five stanzas. In each stanza, someone describes an unusual problem that is ultimately resolved on Highway 61. In Stanza 1, God tells Abraham to "kill me a son". God wants the killing done on Highway 61. Abram, the original name of the biblical Abraham, is also the name of Dylan's own father. See also
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External links
* [http://www.azamra.org/Earth/mount-03.html Abraham smashes the idols] (accessed 24 March 2011).
* [http://www.wdl.org/en/item/2890 "Journey and Life of the Patriarch Abraham"], a map dating back to 1590.
* [http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/b/KI/ki-1.html Kitáb-i-Íqán]
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Category:Vayeira | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.850539 |
1437 | Abraxas | Abraxas (, variant form <small>romanized:</small> )<!--9,380 hits on Google scholar for Abraxas, vs 934 for Abrasax--> is a word of mystic meaning in the system of the Gnostic Basilides, being there applied to the "Great Archon" (), the princeps of the 365 spheres (). The word is found in Gnostic texts such as the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, and also appears in the Greek Magical Papyri. It was engraved on certain antique gemstones, called on that account Abraxas stones, which were used as amulets or charms. As the initial spelling on stones was (), the spelling of seen today probably originates in the confusion made between the Greek letters sigma (Σ) and xi (Ξ) in the Latin transliteration.
The seven letters spelling its name may represent each of the seven classic planets. The word may be related to Abracadabra, although other explanations exist.
There are similarities and differences between such figures in reports about Basilides's teaching, ancient Gnostic texts, the larger Greco-Roman magical traditions, and modern magical and esoteric writings. Speculations have proliferated on Abraxas in recent centuries, which has been claimed to be both an Egyptian god and a demon. Etymology Gaius Julius Hyginus (Fab. 183) gives Abrax Aslo Therbeeo as names of horses of the sun mentioned by 'Homerus'. The passage is miserably corrupt, but it may not be accidental that the first three syllables make Abraxas.
The proper form of the name is evidently Abrasax, as with the Greek writers, Hippolytus, Epiphanius, Didymus (De Trin. iii. 42), and Theodoret; also Augustine and Praedestinatus; and in nearly all the legends on gems. By a probably euphonic inversion the translator of Irenaeus and the other Latin authors have Abraxas, which is found in the magical papyri, and even, though most sparingly, on engraved stones.
The attempts to discover a derivation for the name, Greek, Hebrew, Coptic, or other, have not been entirely successful:
Egyptian
Chuvash linguists, the word was translated as Ouroboros
* Claudius Salmasius (1588–1653) thought it Egyptian, but never gave the proofs which he promised.
*J. J. Bellermann thinks it is a compound of the Egyptian words and , meaning "the honorable and hallowed word", or "the word is adorable".
* Samuel Sharpe finds in it an Egyptian invocation to the Godhead, meaning "hurt me not". Hebrew * Abraham Geiger sees in it a Grecized form of , "The Blessing." Charles William King supports this gloss, citing a similar translation of the word abracadabra as , "Pronounce the Blessing."
*J. B. Passerius derives it from , "father", , "to create", and negative—"the uncreated Father".
*Giuseppe Barzilai goes back for explanation to the first verse of the prayer attributed to Nehunya ben HaKanah, the literal rendering of which is "O [God], with thy mighty right hand deliver the unhappy [people]", forming from the initial and final letters of the words the word Abrakd (pronounced Abrakad), with the meaning "the host of the winged ones", i.e., angels. While this theory can explain the mystic word Abracadabra, the association of this phrase with Abraxas is uncertain. Greek * Wendelin discovers a compound of the initial letters, amounting to 365 in numerical value, of four Hebrew and three Greek words, all written with Greek characters: ("Father, Son, Spirit, holy; salvation from the cross").
*According to a note of Isaac de Beausobre's, Jean Hardouin accepted the first three of these, taking the four others for the initials of the Greek , "saving mankind by the holy cross". He designates Abraxas more distinctly as "the power above all, and First Principle", "the cause and first archetype" of all things; and mentions that the Basilidians referred to 365 as the number of parts (mele) in the human body, as well as of days in the year.
The author of the appendix to Tertullian De Praescr. Haer. (c. 4), who likewise follows Hippolytus's Compendium, adds some further particulars; that 'Abraxas' gave birth to Mind (nous), the first in the series of primary powers enumerated likewise by Irenaeus and Epiphanius; that the world, as well as the 365 heavens, was created in honour of 'Abraxas'; and that Christ was sent not by the Maker of the world but by 'Abraxas'.
Nothing can be built on the vague allusions of Jerome, according to whom 'Abraxas' meant for Basilides "the greatest God" (De vir. ill. 21), "the highest God" (Dial. adv. Lucif. 23), "the Almighty God" (Comm. in Amos iii. 9), and "the Lord the Creator" (Comm. in Nah. i. 11). The notices in Theodoret (Haer. fab. i. 4), Augustine (Haer. 4), and 'Praedestinatus' (i. 3), have no independent value.
It is evident from these particulars that Abrasax was the name of the first of the 365 Archons, and accordingly stood below Sophia and Dynamis and their progenitors; but his position is not expressly stated, so that the writer of the supplement to Tertullian had some excuse for confusing him with "the Supreme God".
As an aeon
With the availability of primary sources, such as those in the Nag Hammadi library, the identity of Abraxas remains unclear. The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, for instance, refers to Abraxas as an Aeon dwelling with Sophia and other Aeons of the Pleroma in the light of the luminary Eleleth. In several texts, the luminary Eleleth is the last of the luminaries (Spiritual Lights) that come forward, and it is the Aeon Sophia, associated with Eleleth, who encounters darkness and becomes involved in the chain of events that leads to the Demiurge's rule of this world, and the salvage effort that ensues. As such, the role of Aeons of Eleleth, including Abraxas, Sophia, and others, pertains to this outer border of the Pleroma that encounters the ignorance of the world of Lack and interacts to rectify the error of ignorance in the world of materiality.
As a demon
The Catholic church later deemed Abraxas a pagan god, and ultimately branded him a demon as documented in J. Collin de Plancy's Infernal Dictionary, Abraxas (or Abracax) is labeled the "supreme God" of the Basilidians, whom he describes as "heretics of the second century". He further indicated the Basilidians attributed to Abraxas the rule over "365 skies" and "365 virtues". In a final statement on Basilidians, de Plancy states that their view was that Jesus Christ was merely a "benevolent ghost sent on Earth by Abraxas". Abraxas stones
A vast number of engraved stones are in existence, to which the name "Abraxas-stones" has long been given. One particularly fine example was included as part of the Thetford treasure from fourth century Norfolk, England. The subjects are mythological, and chiefly grotesque, with various inscriptions, in which ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ often occurs, alone or with other words. Sometimes the whole space is taken up with the inscription. In certain obscure magical writings of Egyptian origin ἀβραξάς or ἀβρασάξ is found associated with other names which frequently accompany it on gems; it is also found on the Greek metal tesseræ among other mystic words. The meaning of the legends is seldom intelligible: but some of the gems are amulets; and the same may be the case with nearly all.
's ''L'antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures'' (Band 2,2 page 358 ff plaque 144) with different images of Abraxas.]]
*The Abraxas-image alone, without external Iconisms, and either without, or but a simple, inscription. The Abrasax-imago proper is usually found with a shield, a sphere or wreath and whip, a sword or sceptre, a cock's head, the body clad with armor, and a serpent's tail. There are, however, innumerable modifications of these figures: Lions', hawks', and eagles' skins, with or without mottos, with or without a trident and star, and with or without reverses.
*'Abraxas combined with other Gnostic Powers. If, in a single instance, this supreme being was represented in connection with powers of subordinate rank, nothing could have been more natural than to represent it also in combination with its emanations, the seven superior spirits, the thirty Aeons, and the three hundred and sixty-five cosmical Genii; and yet this occurs upon none of the relics as yet discovered, whilst those with Powers not belonging to the Gnostic system are frequently met with.
*Abraxas with Jewish symbols.' This combination predominates, not indeed with symbolical figures, but in the form of inscriptions, such as: Iao, Eloai, Adonai, Sabaoth, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, Onoel, Ananoel, Raphael, Japlael, and many others. The name ΙΑΩ, to which ΣΑΒΑΩΘ is sometimes added, is found with this figure even more frequently than ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ, and they are often combined. Beside an Abrasax figure the following, for instance, is found: ΙΑΩ ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ ΑΔΩΝ ΑΤΑ, "Iao Abrasax, thou art the Lord". With the Abrasax-shield are also found the divine names Sabaoth Iao, Iao Abrasax, Adonai Abrasax, etc.
*Abraxas with Persian deities. Chiefly, perhaps exclusively, in combination with Mithras, and possibly a few specimens with the mystical gradations of mithriaca, upon Gnostic relics.
*Abraxas with Egyptian deities. It is represented as a figure, with the sun-god Phre leading his chariot, or standing upon a lion borne by a crocodile; also as a name, in connection with Isis, Phtha, Neith, Athor, Thot, Anubis, Horus, and Harpocrates in a Lotus-leaf; also with a representation of the Nile, the symbol of prolificacy, with Agathodaemon (Chnuphis), or with scarabs, the symbols of the revivifying energies of nature.
*Abraxas with Grecian deities, sometimes as a figure, and again with the simple name, in connection with the planets, especially Venus, Hecate, and Zeus, richly engraved.
*Simple or ornamental representations of the journey of departed spirits through the starry world to Amenti, borrowed, as those above-named, from the Egyptian religion. The spirit wafted from the earth, either with or without the corpse, and transformed at times into Osiris or Helios, is depicted as riding upon the back of a crocodile, or lion, guided in some instances by Anubis, and other genii, and surrounded by stars; and thus attended hastening to judgment and a higher life.
*Representations of the judgment, which, like the preceding, are either ornamental or plain, and imitations of Egyptian art, with slight modifications and prominent symbols, as the vessel in which Anubis weighs the human heart, as comprehending the entire life of man, with all its errors.
*Worship and consecrating services were, according to the testimony of Origen in his description of the ophitic diagram, conducted with figurative representations in the secret assemblies of the Gnostics unless indeed the statement on which this opinion rests designates, as it readily may, a statue of glyptic workmanship. It is uncertain if any of the discovered specimens actually represent the Gnostic cultus and religious ceremonies, although upon some may be seen an Abrasax-figure laying its hand upon a person kneeling, as though for baptism or benediction.
*Astrological groups. The Gnostics referred everything to astrology. Even the Bardesenists located the inferior powers, the seven, twelve and thirty-six, among the planets, in the zodiac and starry region, as rulers of the celestial phenomena which influence the earth and its inhabitants. Birth and health, wealth and allotment, are considered to be mainly under their control. Other sects betray still stronger partiality for astrological conceits. Many of these specimens also are improperly ascribed to Gnosticism, but the Gnostic origin of others is too manifest to allow of contradiction.
*Inscriptions, of which there are three kinds:
**Those destitute of symbols or iconisms, engraved upon stone, iron, lead and silver plates, in Greek, Latin, Coptic or other languages, of amuletic import, and in the form of prayers for health and protection.
**Those with some symbol, as a serpent in an oval form.
**Those with iconisms, at times very small, but often made the prominent object, so that the legend is limited to a single word or name. Sometimes the legends are as important as the images. It is remarkable, however, that thus far none of the plates or medals found seem to have any of the forms or prayers reported by Origen. It is necessary to distinguish those specimens that belong to the proper Gnostic period from such as are indisputably of later origin, especially since there is a strong temptation to place those of more recent date among the older class.
Gallery
<gallery caption="Prints from Bernard de Montfaucon's ''L'antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (Band 2,2) page 358 ff.">
File:Montfaucon 358 Abraxas.xcf|Plaque 144
File:Montfaucon Abraxas Plaque 145.xcf|Plaque 145
File:Montfaucon Abraxas Plaque 146.xcf|Plaque 146
File:Montfaucon Abraxas Plaque 147.xcf|Plaque 147
File:Montfaucon Abraxas Plaque 148.xcf|Plaque 148
File:Montfaucon Abraxas Plaque 149.xcf|Plaque 149
</gallery>
Anguipede
In a great majority of instances the name Abraxas is associated with a singular composite figure, having a Chimera-like appearance somewhat resembling a basilisk or the Greek primordial god Chronos (not to be confused with the Greek titan Cronus). According to E. A. Wallis Budge, "as a Pantheus, i.e. All-God, he appears on the amulets with the head of a cock (Phœbus) or of a lion (Ra or Mithras), the body of a man, and his legs are serpents which terminate in scorpions, types of the Agathodaimon. In his right hand he grasps a club, or a flail, and in his left is a round or oval shield." This form was also referred to as the Anguipede. Budge surmised that Abrasax was "a form of the Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalists and the Primal Man whom God made in His own image".
Some parts at least of the figure mentioned above are solar symbols, and the Basilidian Abrasax is manifestly connected with the sun. J. J. Bellermann has speculated that "the whole represents the Supreme Being, with his Five great Emanations, each one pointed out by means of an expressive emblem. Thus, from the human body, the usual form assigned to the Deity, forasmuch as it is written that God created man in his own image, issue the two supporters, Nous and Logos'', symbols of the inner sense and the quickening understanding, as typified by the serpents, for the same reason that had induced the old Greeks to assign this reptile for an attribute to Pallas. His head—a cock's—represents Phronesis, the fowl being emblematical of foresight and vigilance. His two hands bear the badges of Sophia and Dynamis, the shield of Wisdom, and the scourge of Power." Origin In the absence of other evidence to show the origin of these curious relics of antiquity the occurrence of a name known as Basilidian on patristic authority has not unnaturally been taken as a sufficient mark of origin, and the early collectors and critics assumed this whole group to be the work of Gnostics. During the last three centuries attempts have been made to sift away successively those gems that had no claim to be considered in any sense Gnostic, or specially Basilidian, or connected with Abrasax. The subject is one which has exercised the ingenuity of many savants, but it may be said that all the engraved stones fall into three classes:
* Abraxas, or stones of Basilidian origin The patriarchs are sometimes addressed as deities; for which fact many instances may be adduced. In the group "Iakoubia, Iaōsabaōth Adōnai Abrasax", the first name seems to be composed of Jacob and Ya. Similarly, entities considered angels in Judaism are invoked as gods alongside Abrasax: thus "I conjure you ... by the god Michaēl, by the god Souriēl, by the god Gabriēl, by the god Raphaēl, by the god Abrasax Ablathanalba Akrammachari ...".
In text PGM V. 96–172, Abraxas is identified as part of the "true name which has been transmitted to the prophets of Israel" of the "Headless One, who created heaven and earth, who created night and day ... Osoronnophris whom none has ever seen ... awesome and invisible god with an empty spirit"; the name also includes Iaō and Adōnai. "Osoronnophris" represents Egyptian Wsir Wn-nfr, "Osiris the Perfect Being". Another identification with Osiris is made in PGM VII. 643-51: "you are not wine, but the guts of Osiris, the guts of ... Ablanathanalba Akrammachamarei Eee, who has been stationed over necessity, Iakoub Ia Iaō Sabaōth Adōnai Abrasax." PGM VIII. 1-63, on the other hand, identifies Abraxas as a name of "Hermes" (i.e. Thoth). Here the numerological properties of the name are invoked, with its seven letters corresponding to the seven planets and its isopsephic value of 365 corresponding to the days of the year. Thoth is also identified with Abrasax in PGM LXXIX. 1-7: "I am the soul of darkness, Abrasax, the eternal one, Michaēl, but my true name is Thōouth, Thōouth."
One papyrus titled the "Monad" or the "Eighth Book of Moses" (PGM XIII. 1–343) contains an invocation to a supreme creator God; Abraxas is given as being the name of this God in the language of the baboons. The papyrus goes on to describe a cosmogonic myth about Abraxas, describing how he created the Ogdoad by laughing. His first laughter created light; his second divided the primordial waters; his third created the mind; his fourth created fertility and procreation; his fifth created fate; his sixth created time (as the sun and moon); and his seventh and final laughter created the soul. Then, from various sounds made by Abrasax, there arose the serpent Python who "foreknew all things", the first man (or Fear), and the god Iaō, "who is lord of all". The man fought with Iaō, and Abrasax declared that Iaō's power would derive from both of the others, and that Iaō would take precedence over all the other gods. This text also describes Helios as an archangel of God/Abrasax.
The Leyden Papyrus recommends that this invocation be pronounced to the moon:
}}
The magic word "Ablanathanalba", which reads in Greek the same backward as forward, also occurs in the Abraxas-stones as well as in the magic papyri. This word is usually conceded to be derived from the Hebrew (Aramaic), meaning "Thou art our father" (אב לן את), and also occurs in connection with Abraxas; the following inscription is found upon a metal plate in the Karlsruhe Museum:
In architecture
* Les Espaces d'Abraxas is a high-density housing complex in Noisy-le-Grand near Paris, France designed by Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill and opened in 1983.
In literature
| Jacques Collin de Plancy's (Infernal Dictionary), published in 1818, states that Abraxas (or Abracax) was an anguipede (a deity represented with snake feet) pagan God of "Asian theogonies" with a "rooster's head, dragon's feet and a whip in his hand". De Plancy says that demonologists describe Abraxas as a demon having a "king's head and snakes in lieu of feet".
| Abrasax is invoked in Aleister Crowley's 1913 work, "The Gnostic Mass" of Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica:
| Abraxas is an important figure in Carl Jung's 1916 book Seven Sermons to the Dead, a representation of the driving force of individuation (synthesis, maturity, oneness), referred with the figures for the driving forces of differentiation (emergence of consciousness and opposites), Helios God-the-Sun, and the Devil.
| Several references to the god Abraxas appear in Hermann Hesse's 1919 novel Demian, such as:
| In James Branch Cabell's novel Jurgen (1919) in Chapter 44: In the Manager's Office, Koshchei, who made all things as they are, when identified as Koshchei the Deathless, calls himself "Koshchei, or Adnari, or Ptha, or Jaldalaoth, or Abraxas—it is all one what I may be called hereabouts." Since Jung wrote about Koshchei (see above) in 1916, and Jurgen was published in 1919, Cabell might well have been familiar with Jung's treatise when he used the name.
| Salman Rushdie's novel ''Midnight's Children (1981) contains a reference to Abraxas in the chapter "Abracadabra":
}}
In popular culture
*In the L word Season 1, the character Jennifer Schechter writes a story with a demon called Abraxas
*The band Santana's second studio album was called "Abraxas." It was released September 23, 1970.
*In Foundation'', the Abraxas Conjecture is a mathematic proof that was unsolved for over five hundred years. Gaal Dornick solved Abraxas using Kalle's Ninth Proof of Folding.
*In the 2021 immersive sim video game Cruelty Squad, developed and published by artist Ville Kallio, Abraxas appears as the final assassination target in the game's final level, "Archon Grid."
*In the 2022 folk horror video game ''The Excavation of Hob's Barrow'', published by Wadjet Eye Games, Abraxas features as a long-dormant god/demon inspired by the original Gnostic mythology.
*The 2023 horror movie Late Night with the Devil includes mention of a fictional cult that worships Abraxas.
*In the 2023–2024 South Korean television series My Demon, Abraxas is the pseudonym of one of the antagonist in the series and mention a passage in the book, Demian.
*The videogame franchise Megami Tensei includes Abraxas as a recurring demon.
*The original Charmed includes Abraxas as demon who tries to steal the book of shadows in season 2 episode 1.
*In the 2024 episodic adventure video game Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, Abraxas is the name of a collegiate secret society.
See also
* Arimanius
* Chronos
* Sator Square
References
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*Wendelin, in a letter in
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*Idem, Abraxas in Herzog, RE, 2d ed., 1877.
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*Idem, Appendice alla dissertazione sugli Abraxas, ib. 1874.
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*Harnack, Geschichte, i. 161. The older material is listed by Matter, ut sup., and Wessely, Ephesia grammata, vol. ii., Vienna, 1886.
* Eng. transl., 10 vols., London, 1721–2725.
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* [http://www.gnosis.org/library/7Sermons.htm The complete texts of Carl Jung's "The Seven Sermons To The Dead"]
* [https://www.themystica.com/abraxas/ Abraxas article from The Mystica]
Category:Gnostic deities
Category:Magic words
Category:Mythological hybrids
Category:Names of God in Gnosticism
Category:Theophoric names
Category:Thoth
Category:Hermes
Category:Osiris | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraxas | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.889628 |
1438 | Absalom | | death_place = Ephraim, Kingdom of Israel
| burial_date | predecessor
| successor | wife
| consort | issue
| 3 unnamed sons In the narrative of 2 Samuel 13, his sister Tamar takes refuge at his house after she is raped by their paternal half-brother Amnon (born to David and Ahinoam, who was from Jezreel); David is angered by the incident, but does nothing, as Amnon is his heir apparent. Infuriated by the rape and David's inaction, Absalom assassinates Amnon and subsequently flees to Geshur, which is ruled by his and Tamar's maternal grandfather Talmai.
Following three years in exile, he returns to Israel and rallies popular support against the House of David. A war ensues when Absalom's rebels mobilize at Hebron and begin fighting David's army in an attempt to overthrow him, but their revolt ends in failure when Absalom is killed by David's nephew and army commander Joab during the Battle of the Wood of Ephraim. In the aftermath of his death, Absalom's sister is described as being left "a desolate woman in her brother's house" and the sole guardian of his orphaned daughter, who is also named Tamar.
Biblical narrative
Background
around 1650]]
Absalom, David's third son, by Maacah, was born in Hebron. At an early age, he moved, along with the transfer of the capital, to Jerusalem, where he spent most of his life. He was a great favorite of his father and of the people. His charming manners, personal beauty, insinuating ways, love of pomp, and royal pretensions captivated the hearts of the people from the beginning. He lived in great style, drove in a magnificent chariot, and had fifty men run before him.
Little is known of Absalom's family life, but the biblical narrative states that he had three sons and one daughter, Tamar, who is described as a beautiful woman. It may be that his sons died before his statement, or, as Matthew Henry suggests, Absalom's three sons may have been born after his statement.
Aside from his daughter Tamar, Absalom had another daughter or granddaughter, Maacah, who later became the favorite wife of Rehoboam. }} Maacah was the mother of Abijah of Judah and the grandmother of Asa of Judah. She served as queen mother for Asa until he deposed her for idolatry.
Murder of Amnon
, 17th century]]
, "Scenes from the Life of David"]]
, "Scenes from the Life of Absalom", c. 1250]]
(1391–1458), - tiled floor, south transept of Siena Cathedral ]]
Absalom also had a sister named Tamar, who was raped by her half-brother Amnon, David's eldest son. Absalom waited two years after the rape for vengeance, sending his servants to murder a drunken Amnon at a feast to which Absalom had invited all of King David's sons.
After this murder, Absalom fled to his maternal grandfather Talmai, the king of Geshur. Not until three years later was Absalom fully reinstated in David's favour and finally returned to Jerusalem.
The revolt at Hebron
In Jerusalem, Absalom built support for himself by speaking to those who came to King David for justice, saying, "See, your claims are good and right; but there is no one deputed by the king to hear you", perhaps reflecting flaws in the judicial system of the united monarchy. "If only I were the judge of the land! Then all who had a suit or cause might come to me, and I would give them justice." He made gestures of flattery by kissing those who bowed before him instead of accepting supplication. He "stole the hearts of the people of Israel".
After four years, he declared himself king, raised a revolt at Hebron, the former capital, and publicly raped his father's ten concubines. It is said that this was God punishing David for his sin with Bathsheba tenfold. All Israel and Judah flocked to him, and David, attended only by the Cherethites and Pelethites and his former bodyguard, which had followed him from Gath, found it expedient to flee. The priests Zadok and Abiathar remained in Jerusalem, and their sons Jonathan and Ahimaaz served as David's spies. Absalom reached the capital and consulted with the renowned Ahitophel (sometimes spelled Achitophel). It is also speculated that Ahitophel could have joined Absalom's cause as David had previously committed adultery with his granddaughter, Bathsheba.
David took refuge from Absalom's forces beyond the Jordan River. However, he took the precaution of instructing a servant, Hushai, to infiltrate Absalom's court and subvert it. Once in place, Hushai convinced Absalom to ignore Ahitophel's advice to attack his father while he was on the run, and instead to prepare his forces for a major attack. This gave David critical time to prepare his own troops for the battle. When Ahitophel saw that his advice was not followed, he committed suicide by hanging himself.
Battle of Ephraim's Wood
A fateful battle was fought in the Wood of Ephraim (the name suggests a locality west of the Jordan) and Absalom's army was completely routed. When Absalom fled from David's army, his head was caught in the boughs of an oak tree as the mule he was riding ran beneath it. He was discovered there still alive by one of David's men, who reported this to Joab, the king's commander. Joab, accustomed to avenging himself, took this opportunity to even the score with Absalom. Absalom had once set Joab's field of barley on fire and then made Amasa Captain of the Host instead of Joab. Killing Absalom was against David's explicit command, "Beware that none touch the young man Absalom". Joab injured Absalom with three darts through the heart and Absalom was subsequently killed by ten of Joab's armor-bearers.
When David heard that Absalom was killed, although not how he was killed, he greatly sorrowed.
David withdrew to the city of Mahanaim in mourning, until Joab roused him from "the extravagance of his grief" and called on him to fulfill his duty to his people.Memorial
in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, Jerusalem, which has no connection to biblical Absalom.]]
Absalom had erected a monument near Jerusalem to perpetuate his name:
However, archaeologists have now dated the tomb to the 1st century AD. In a 2013 conference, Professor Gabriel Barkay suggested that it could be the tomb of Herod Agrippa I, the grandson of Herod the Great, based in part on the similarity to Herod's newly discovered tomb at Herodium. For centuries, it was the custom among passers-by—Jews, Christians and Muslims—to throw stones at the monument. Residents of Jerusalem would bring their unruly children to the site to teach them what became of a rebellious son.Rabbinic literatureThe explanation in Rabbanic Literature about why Ahithophel had advised Absalom to act against his father: The Talmud speaks of this counsellor of David as "a man, like Balaam, whose great wisdom was not received in humility as a gift from heaven, and so became a stumbling block to him." He was "one of those who, while casting longing eyes upon things not belonging to them, also lose the things they possess." Accordingly, Ahithophel was granted access by Almighty God into the Divine powers of God. And being thus familiar with Divine wisdom and knowledge as imparted through the Holy Spirit, he was consulted as an oracle like the Urim and Thummim. "..and great as was his wisdom, it was equalled by his scholarship. Therefore, David did not hesitate to submit himself to his instruction, even though Ahithophel was a very young
man at his death, not more than thirty-three years old. The one thing lacking in him was sincere piety, which proved his undoing in the end, for it induced him to participate in Absalom's rebellion against David. Thus, he forfeited even his share in the world to come.
To this dire course of action, he was misled by astrology and other signs, which he interpreted as prophecies of his kingship when in reality, they pointed to the royal destiny of his granddaughter Bath-sheba. Possessed by his erroneous belief, he cunningly urged Absalom to commit an unheard-of crime. Thus, Absalom would profit nothing by his rebellion, for, though he accomplished his father's ruin, he would yet be held to account and condemned to death for his violation of family purity, and the way to the throne would be clear for Ahithophel, the great sage in Israel."
The life and death of Absalom offered to the rabbis a welcome theme wherewith to warn the people against false ambition, vainglory, and unfilial conduct. The vanity with which he displayed his beautiful hair, the rabbis say, became his snare and his stumbling-block. "By his long hair the Nazirite entangled the people to rebel against his father, and by it he himself became entangled, to fall a victim to his pursuers". And again, elsewhere: "By his vile stratagem he deceived and stole three hearts, that of his father, of the elders, and finally of the whole nation of Israel, and for this reason three darts were thrust into his heart to end his treacherous life". More striking is the following: "Did one ever hear of an oak-tree having a heart? And yet in the oak-tree in whose branches Absalom was caught, we read that upon its heart he was held up still alive while the darts were thrust through him. This is to show that when a man becomes so heartless as to make war against his own father, nature itself takes on a heart to avenge the deed."
"The knowledge that a part of Absalom's following sided with him in secret,--that, though he was pursued by his son, his friends remained true to him,--somewhat consoled David in his distress. He thought that in these circumstances, if the worst came to the worst, Absalom would at least feel pity for him. At first, however, the despair of David knew no bounds. He was on the point of worshipping an idol, when his friend Hushai the Archite approached him, saying: "The people will wonder that such a king should serve idols." David replied: "Should a king such as I am be killed by his own son? It is better for me to serve idols than that God should be held responsible for my misfortune, and His Name thus be desecrated." Hushai reproached him: "Why didst thou marry a captive?" "There is no wrong in that," replied David, "it is permitted according to the law." Thereupon Hushai: "But thou didst disregard the connection between the passage permitting it and the one that follows almost immediately after it in the Scriptures, dealing with the disobedient and rebellious son, the natural issue of such a marriage." Absalom's end was beset with terrors. When he was caught in the branches of the oak-tree, he was about to sever his hair with a sword stroke, but suddenly he saw hell yawning beneath him, and he preferred to hang in the tree to throwing himself into the abyss alive. Absalom's crime was, indeed, of a nature to deserve the supreme torture, for which reason he is one of the few Jews who have no portion in the world to come.
Popular legend states that the eye of Absalom was of immense size, signifying his insatiable greed. Indeed, "hell itself opened beneath him, and David, his father, cried seven times: 'My son! my son!' while bewailing his death, praying at the same time for his redemption from the seventh section of Gehenna, to which he was consigned". According to R. Meir, "he has no share in the life to come". And according to the description of Gehenna by Joshua ben Levi, who, like Dante, wandered through hell under the guidance of the angel Duma, Absalom still dwells there, having the rebellious heathen in charge; and when the angels with their fiery rods run also against Absalom to smite him like the rest, a heavenly voice says: "Spare Absalom, the son of David, My servant." "That the extreme penalties of hell were thus averted from him, was on account of David's eightfold repetition of his son's name in his lament over him. Besides, David's intercession had the effect of re-attaching Absalom's severed head to his body. An account of Joshua Ben Levi going to the fifth compartment of PAradise reports:"The fifth compartment is of silver, and gold, and refined gold, and of crystal, and bdellium; and through its midst flows the river Gihon. The walls are of silver and gold, and a perfume breathes through it more exquisite than the perfume of Lebanon. And beds of silver and gold are there prepared, covered with violet and purple covers, woven by Eve, and mixed with scarlet and made of hair of goats, woven by angels. Here dwell the Messiah and Elijah in a palanquin of the wood of Lebanon; the pillars thereof of silver, the bottom thereof of gold, the seat of it of purple. Herein lieth the Messiah, the son of David, who is the love of the daughters of Jerusalem, the midst thereof is love. The prophet Elijah takes the head of the Messiah and places it in his bosom and says to him: "Be quiet and wait, for the end draweth nigh." On every Monday and Thursday and Saturday and Holiday the Patriarchs come to him and the fathers of the Tribes and Moses and Aaron and David and Solomon and every king of Israel and of the house of Judah, and they weep with him and comfort him, and say unto him: "Be quiet and wait and rely upon thy Creator, for the end draweth nigh." Also Korah and his company and Dathan and Abiram and Absalom come to him on every Wednesday, and ask him: "When will the end of our misery come? When wilt thou reveal thyself?"16. He answereth them and says: "Go to your fathers and ask them." And when they hear of their fathers they feel ashamed and do not ask any further. King David’s prayers granted his rebellious son Avshalom access to the World to Come At his death Absalom was childless, for all his children, his three sons and his daughter, died before him, as a punishment for his having set fire to a field of grain belonging to Joab." Although Absalom avenged his sister defilement by Amnon ironically he proved himself not to be very much different from Amnon. As Amnon had sought the advice of Jonadab in order to rape Tamar, Absalom had sought the advice of Ahitophel who advised Absalom to have incestuous relations with his father's concubines in order to show all Israel how odious he was to his father [2 Samuel 16:20] .Likewise as Amnon had brought two curses on himself for incest with his half sister and failing to fulfill the Torah Law, Absalom brought four curses on himself for dishonoring his father; relations with his father's wives [concubines]; and failing to fulfill the Torah Law twice. [Deuteronomy 27:20 26] The Rabbis explain that the concubines were not punished by G-d. They were violated by Absalom. Absalom with his own free will, choose to do that. It is true G-d created a world where we humans can choose good or evil, but the choice in the end remains ours. Although G-d had told David that his wives would be taken, he did not ordain or force Absalom to violate them. He just foretold it. Is A lesson to be learned of the consequences from Absalom life is that his lust for power was so deep that he engaged in acts of chillul hashem and brought upon himself 4 curses from the Torah? (Dishonoring his father by his revolt; dishonoring his father's wives; and twice bring curses on himself for not fulfilling the Torah law)?Yes. He was a prince who could had almost anything. The only things he wanted were things he could not have. He lusted after his sister and his father's throne. Wealth is not determined by possessions but by mindset. In his mind, Absalom was a pauper. He only looked at what he did not have.
Art and literature
Poetry
* The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, with the Tragedie of Absalon, a play by George Peele, written before 1594 and published in 1599.
* Absalom and Achitophel (1681), a satirical poem by John Dryden, uses the biblical story as an allegory for contemporary politics.
* "Absalom" by Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867).
* "Absaloms Abfall" by Rainer Maria Rilke ("The Fall of Absalom", trans. Stephen Cohn).
* "Absalom" is a section in Muriel Rukeyser's long poem The Book of the Dead (1938), inspired by the biblical text, spoken by a mother who lost three sons to silicosis.
* "Avshalom" by Yona Wallach, published in her first poetry collection Devarim (1966), alludes to the biblical character.
* "Prayer for Sunset" by Leonard Cohen, published in his first poetry collection Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), Absalom appears in a simile.Fiction* In the 1946 short story "Absalom" by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, the character Absalom is a child prodigy, who does non-consensual brain surgery on his father (a former child prodigy, though not as intelligent as his son) to make the father totally focused on Absalom's success. This relates to the Biblical story of the son usurping his father.
* Georg Christian Lehms, Des israelitischen Printzens Absolons und seiner Prinzcessin Schwester Thamar Staats- Lebens- und Helden-Geschichte (The Heroic Life and History of the Israelite Prince Absolom and his Princess Sister Tamar), novel in German published in Nuremberg, 1710.
* Absalom, Absalom! is a novel by William Faulkner, and refers to the return of the main character Thomas Sutpen's son.
* Oh Absalom! was the original title of Howard Spring's novel My Son, My Son!, later adapted for the film of the latter name.
* Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. Absalom was the name of Stephen Kumalo's son in the novel. Like the Biblical Absalom, Absalom Kumalo was at odds with his father, the two fighting a moral and ethical battle of sorts over the course of some of the novel's most important events. Absalom kills and murders a man, and also meets an untimely death.
* Throughout Robertson Davies's The Manticore a comparison is repeatedly made between the protagonist's problematic relations with his father and those of the Biblical Absalom and King David. Paradoxically, in the modern version, it is the rebellious son who has the first name "David". The book also introduces the term "Absalonism", as a generic term for a son's rebellion against his father.
* Absalom appears as a prominent character in Peter Shaffer's play Yonadab, which portrays Amnon's rape of Tamar and his murder at Absalom's hands.
* A scene in the Swedish writer Frans G. Bengtsson's historical novel "The Long Ships" depicts a 10th Century Christian missionary recounting the story of Absalom's rebellion to the assembled Danish court, including the aging King Harald Bluetooth and his son Sweyn Forkbeard; thereupon, King Harald exclaims "Some people can learn a lesson from this story!", casting a meaningful glance at his son Sweyn—whom the King (rightly) suspects of plotting a rebellion.
* In the novel The Book of Tamar by Nel Havas, the story of Absalom is presented from the viewpoint of his sister. While closely following the main events as related in the Bible, Havas concentrates on the motives behind Absalom's actions, which Havas presents as more complex than depicted in the scriptures.
* In the novel ''Ender's Shadow'' by Orson Scott Card, the main character Bean invokes the quote to give solace to the kamikaze pilots Ender had unknowingly sent to their deaths to defeat the Formics.
*The role played by luxuriant hair in the death of Absalom is referenced to telling effect in the ghost story The Diary of Mr Poynter by master of the genre M.R. James. The ghost in question is that of dissolute young nobleman Sir Everard Charlett, known to his Oxford University cronies by the nickname Absalom, on account of his beautiful, long hair and debauched lifestyle. Sir Everard has commemorated his flowing locks by the unusual expedient of having them portrayed in a wallpaper pattern, which later proves to have the power to summon his malign, hair-covered ghost - much to the horror of James's unfortunate protagonist, Mr. James Denton.Music
* Josquin des Prez composed the motet "Absalon, fili mi" on the occasion of the death of Juan Borgia (Absalon being a further alternative spelling).
* Nicholas Gombert composed the two-part, eight-voice motet "Lugebat David Absalon".
* Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672) composed "Fili mi, Absalon" as part of his Sinfoniae Sacrae, op. 6.
* The single verse, 2 Samuel 18:33, regarding David's grief at the loss of his son ("And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"), is the inspiration for the text of several pieces of choral music, usually entitled When David Heard (such as those by Renaissance composers Thomas Tomkins and Thomas Weelkes, or modern composers Eric Whitacre, Joshua Shank, and Norman Dinerstein). This verse is also used in "David's Lamentation" by William Billings, first published in 1778.
* Leonard Cohen's poem "Prayer for Sunset" compares the setting sun to the raving Absalom, and asks whether another Joab will arrive tomorrow night to kill Absalom again.
* "Absalom, Absalom" is a song on the 1996 Compass CD Making Light of It by singer/songwriter Pierce Pettis, incorporating several elements of the biblical narrative.
* The Australian composer Nigel Butterley set the verse in his 2008 choral work "Beni Avshalom", commissioned by the Sydney Chamber Choir.
* During the finale of the song "Distant Early Warning" by Canadian band Rush, Geddy Lee sings, "Absalom, Absalom, Absalom"; lyrics written by drummer Neil Peart.
* David Olney's 2000 CD ''Omar's Blues'' includes the song "Absalom". The song depicts David grieving over the death of his son.
* The story of Absalom is referred to several places in folk singer Adam Arcuragi's song "Always Almost Crying".
* The San Francisco–based band Om mentions Absalom in their song "Kapila's Theme" from their debut album Variations on a Theme.
* The garage folk band David's Doldrums references Absalom in their song, "My Name Is Absalom". The song alludes to Absalom's feelings of solemnity and abandonment of love and hope.
* In "Every Kind Word" by Lackthereof, Danny Seim's project parallel to Menomena, Seim sings "... and your hair is long like Absalom."
* "Barach Hamelech", an Israeli song by Amos Etinger and Yosef Hadar.
* The grindcore band Discordance Axis references Absalom at the end of the track entitled "Castration Rite".<!--
Don't seem to be notable, no article: * The progressive metal band from Barranquilla, Colombia, Absalom has his name. -->
* In 2007 Ryland Angel released "Absalom" on Ryland Angel-Manhattan Records.
* "Hanging By His Hair" from the 1998 Wormwood album by The Residents recounts Absalom's defiance and death. Also performed on Roadworms (The Berlin Sessions) and Wormwood Live.
* "Absalom" is a song on Brand New Shadows's debut album, White Flags. It is a mournful lament from King David's perspective.
* "Absalom" is an album by the experimental/progressive band Stick Men featuring Tony Levin, Markus Reuter and Pat Mastelotto.
* The American Rock band Little Feat reference Absalom in their song "Gimme a Stone" on the album entitled Chinese Work Songs. This song is written from the perspective of King David—mainly focusing on the task of fighting Goliath—but contains a lament to Absalom. This was a cover of the song, the original being on the 1998 Americana concept album Largo, by David Forman and Levon Helm.
References
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* Some musical scores of David's lament for Absalom: [http://www1.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Absalon,_fili_mi Absalon, fili mi] ()
Category:Rapists
Category:Incestual abuse
Category:Mythological people involved in incest
Category:Biblical murderers
Category:Children of David
Category:Jewish rebels
Category:Jewish royalty
Category:Rebel princes
Category:Sons of kings
Category:Heirs apparent who never acceded
Category:Mythological fratricides
Category:Mythological rapists | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absalom | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.907467 |
1439 | Abydos | Abydos may refer to:
Abydos, a progressive metal side project of German singer Andy Kuntz
Abydos (Hellespont), an ancient city in Mysia, Asia Minor
Abydos (Stargate), name of a fictional planet in the Stargate science fiction universe
Abydos, Egypt, a city in ancient Egypt
Abydos Station, a pastoral lease and cattle station in Western Australia
See also
Abidu, a village in Iran
Abidos, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, in southwestern France | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abydos | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.909721 |
1440 | Abydos, Egypt | ; Abedju
| image = AbydosFacade.jpg
| map_dot_label=Abydos
| alt |reliefyes
| caption = Façade of the Temple of Seti I in Abydos, built
| map_type = Nile#Egypt
| coordinates
| location = El-Balyana, Sohag Governorate, Egypt
| region = Upper Egypt
| type = Settlement
| epochs = First Dynasty to Thirtieth Dynasty
}}
Abydos ( or ; Sahidic ) is one of the oldest cities of ancient Egypt, and also of the eighth nome in Upper Egypt. It is located about west of the Nile at latitude 26° 10' N, near the modern Egyptian towns of El Araba El Madfuna and El Balyana. In the ancient Egyptian language, the city was called Abedju (ꜣbḏw or AbDw)(Arabic Abdu عبد-و).
The English name Abydos comes from the Greek , a name borrowed by Greek geographers from the unrelated city of Abydos on the Hellespont.
Considered one of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt, the sacred city of Abydos was the site of many ancient temples, including Umm el-Qa'ab, a royal necropolis where early pharaohs were entombed. These tombs began to be seen as extremely significant burials and in later times it became desirable to be buried in the area, leading to the growth of the town's importance as a cult site.
Today, Abydos is notable for the memorial temple of Seti I, which contains an inscription from the Nineteenth Dynasty known to the modern world as the Abydos King List. This is a chronological list showing cartouches of most dynastic pharaohs of Egypt from Menes until Seti I's father, Ramesses I. It is also notable for the Abydos graffiti, ancient Phoenician and Aramaic graffiti found on the walls of the Temple of Seti I.
The Great Temple and most of the ancient town are buried under the modern buildings to the north of the Seti temple. Many of the original structures and the artifacts within them are considered irretrievable and lost; many may have been destroyed by the new construction.
History
, on the Gebel el-Arak Knife, Louvre Museum, 3300–3200 BCE. The conflicts leading to the supremacy of Abydos may appear on numerous reliefs of the Naqada II period, such as the Gebel el-Arak Knife, or the frieze of Tomb 100 at Hierakonpolis.
Tombs and at least one temple of rulers of the Predynastic period have been found at Umm El Qa'ab including that of Narmer, dating to . The temple and town continued to be rebuilt at intervals down to the times of the Thirtieth Dynasty, and the cemetery was in continuous use.
The pharaohs of the First Dynasty were buried in Abydos, including Narmer, who is regarded as the founder of the First Dynasty, and his successor, Aha. It was in this time period that the Abydos boats were constructed. Some pharaohs of the Second Dynasty were also buried in Abydos. The temple was renewed and enlarged by these pharaohs as well. Funerary enclosures, misinterpreted in modern times as great 'forts', were built on the desert behind the town by three kings of the Second Dynasty; the most complete is that of Khasekhemwy, the Shunet El Zebib.
<gallery class"center" widths"200px" heights"200px" perrow"2" caption="King Khasekhemwy fort">
File:Khasekhemwy Monument (II).jpg|King Khasekhemwy "fort" in Abydos.
File:Enceinte de khasekhemouy.jpg|King Khasekhemwy "fort" in Abydos.
</gallery>
]]
, Late Period, Twenty-sixth Dynasty of Egypt, reign of Psammetichus I]]
From the Fifth Dynasty, the deity Khentiamentiu, foremost of the Westerners, came to be seen as a manifestation of the dead pharaoh in the underworld. Pepi I (Sixth Dynasty) constructed a funerary chapel which evolved over the years into the Great Temple of Osiris, the ruins of which still exist within the town enclosure. Abydos became the centre of the worship of the Isis and Osiris cult.
During the First Intermediate Period, the principal deity of the area, Khentiamentiu, began to be seen as an aspect of Osiris, and the deities gradually merged and came to be regarded as one. Khentiamentiu's name became an epithet of Osiris. King Mentuhotep II was the first to build a royal chapel. In the Twelfth Dynasty a gigantic tomb was cut into the rock by Senusret III. Associated with this tomb was a cenotaph, a cult temple and a small town known as "Wah-Sut", that was used by the workers for these structures. Next to the cenotaph at least two kings of the Thirteenth Dynasty were buried (in tombs S9 and S10) as well as some rulers of the Second Intermediate Period, such as Senebkay. An indigenous line of kings, the Abydos Dynasty, may have ruled the region from Abydos at the time.
New construction during the Eighteenth Dynasty began with a large chapel of Ahmose I. The Pyramid of Ahmose I was also constructed at Abydos—the only pyramid in the area; very little of it remains today.
Thutmose III built a far larger temple, about . He also made a processional way leading past the side of the temple to the cemetery beyond, featuring a great gateway of granite.
Seti I, during the Nineteenth Dynasty, founded a temple to the south of the town in honor of the ancestral pharaohs of the early dynasties; this was finished by Ramesses II, who also built a lesser temple of his own. Merneptah added the Osireion, just to the north of the temple of Seti.
The last building added was a new temple of Nectanebo I, built in the Thirtieth Dynasty. From the Ptolemaic times of the Greek occupancy of Egypt, that began three hundred years before the Roman occupancy that followed, the structures began to decay and no later works are known. Cult centre
From earliest times, Abydos was a cult centre, first of the local deity, Khentiamentiu, and from the end of the Old Kingdom, the rising cult of Osiris. A tradition developed that the Early Dynastic cemetery was the burial place of Osiris and the tomb of Djer was reinterpreted as that of Osiris.
Decorations in tombs throughout Egypt, such as the one displayed to the right, record pilgrimages to Abydos by wealthy families. Great Osiris Temple
temple: Horus presents royal regalia to a worshipping Seti I.]]
From the First Dynasty to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, nine or ten temples were successively built on one site at Abydos. The first was an enclosure, about , enclosed by a thin wall of unbaked bricks. Incorporating one wall of this first structure, the second temple of about square was built with walls about thick. An outer temenos (enclosure) wall surrounded the grounds. This outer wall was made wider some time around the Second or Third Dynasty. The old temple entirely vanished in the Fourth Dynasty, and a smaller building was erected behind it, enclosing a wide hearth of black ashes. Pottery models of offerings are found in these ashes and were probably the substitutes for live sacrifices decreed by Khufu (or Cheops) in his temple reforms.
At an undetermined date, a great clearance of temple offerings had been made and the modern discovery of a chamber into which they were gathered yielded the fine ivory carvings and the glazed figures and tiles that demonstrate the splendid work of the First Dynasty. A vase of Menes with purple hieroglyphs inlaid into a green glaze and tiles with relief figures are the most important pieces found. The Khufu Statuette in ivory, found in the stone chamber of the temple, gives the only portrait of this great pharaoh.
The temple was entirely rebuilt on a larger scale by Pepi I in the Sixth Dynasty. He placed a great stone gateway to the temenos, an outer wall and gateway, with a colonnade between the gates. His temple was about inside, with stone gateways front and back, showing that it was of the processional type. In the Eleventh Dynasty Mentuhotep II added a colonnade and altars. Soon after, Mentuhotep III entirely rebuilt the temple, laying a stone pavement over the area, about square. He also added subsidiary chambers. Soon thereafter, in the Twelfth Dynasty, Senusret I laid massive foundations of stone over the pavement of his predecessor. A great temenos'' was laid out enclosing a much larger area and the new temple itself was about three times the earlier size. Brewery On 14 February 2021, Egyptian and American archaeologists discovered what could be the oldest brewery in the world dating from around 3100 BCE at the reign of King Narmer. Dr. Matthew Adams, one of the leaders of the mission, stated that it was used to make beer for royal rituals. Main sites Seti I Temple
The temple of Seti I was built on entirely new ground half a mile to the south of the long series of temples just described. This surviving building is best known as the Great Temple of Abydos, being nearly complete and an impressive sight. A principal purpose of the temple was to serve as a memorial to king Seti I, as well as to show reverence for the early pharaohs, which is incorporated within as part of the "Rite of the Ancestors".
The long list of the pharaohs of the principal dynasties—recognized by Seti—are carved on a wall and known as the "Abydos King List" (showing the cartouche name of many dynastic pharaohs of Egypt from the first, Narmer or Menes, until Seti's time). There were significant names deliberately left off of the list. So rare, as an almost complete list of pharaoh names, the Table of Abydos, rediscovered by William John Bankes, has been called the "Rosetta Stone" of Egyptian archaeology, analogous to the Rosetta Stone for Egyptian writing, beyond the Narmer Palette.
at the rear of the temple]]
There were also seven chapels built for the worship of the pharaoh and principal deities. These included three chapels for the "state" deities Ptah, Re-Horakhty, and (centrally positioned) Amun and the challenge for the Abydos triad of Osiris, Isis and Horus. The rites recorded in the deity chapels represent the first complete form known of the Daily Ritual, which was performed daily in temples across Egypt throughout the pharaonic period. At the back of the temple is an enigmatic structure known as the Osireion, which served as a cenotaph for Seti-Osiris, and is thought to be connected with the worship of Osiris as an "Osiris tomb". It is possible that from those chambers was led out the great Hypogeum for the celebration of the Osiris mysteries, built by Merenptah. The temple was originally long, but the forecourts are scarcely recognizable, and the part still in good condition is about
long and wide, including the wing at the side. Magazines for food and offerings storage were built to either side of the forecourts, as well as a small palace for the king and his retinue, to the southeast of the first forecourt (Ghazouli, The Palace and Magazines Attached to the Temple of Sety I at Abydos and the Facade of This Temple. ASAE 58 (1959)).
Except for the list of pharaohs and a panegyric on Ramesses II, the subjects are not historical, but religious in nature, dedicated to the transformation of the king after his death. The temple reliefs are celebrated for their delicacy and artistic refinement, utilizing both the archaism of earlier dynasties with the vibrancy of late 18th Dynasty reliefs. The sculptures had been published mostly in hand copy, not facsimile, by Auguste Mariette in his Abydos, I. The temple has been partially recorded epigraphically by Amice Calverley and Myrtle Broome in their 4 volume publication of The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos (1933–1958).
King's List
In The Gallery of Ancestors, also referred to as The Gallery of the List, one can find the Abydos King List. This list is depicted in low relief, carved under the reign of Seti I, and it shows Seti and Ramesses making offerings to their royal ancestors. These royal ancestors are the past kings of Egypt. Notably, some rulers, like the 15th Dynasty Hyksos that ruled Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period 1650-1550 BCE and the reign of the 18th Dynasty heretic Akhenaten of the New Kingdom 1550-1069, were omitted from the list, possibly due to being associated with periods of internal weakness and divisions. The Gallery of Ancestors led into the storerooms and the desert behind the temple. Osireion
The Osirion or Osireon, meaning "Menmaatre beneficial to Osiris" sometimes called the Osiris Complex, is an ancient Egyptian temple. It is located to the rear of the temple of Seti I. It is an integral part of Seti I's funeral complex and is built to resemble an 18th Dynasty Valley of the Kings tomb. This was possibly used in ritual purposes with the growing of barely that allowed for the symbolic representation of the resurrection of Osiris. Today parts of the Osierion contain water due to the Aswan Dam and rising floodwaters. Helicopter hieroglyphs
Some of the hieroglyphs carved over an arch on the site have been interpreted in esoteric and "ufological" circles as depicting modern technology, having been the subject of pyramidology.
The "helicopter" image is the result of carved stone being re-used over time. The initial carving was made during the reign of Seti I and translates to "He who repulses the nine [enemies of Egypt]". This carving was later filled in with plaster and re-carved during the reign of Ramesses II with the title "He who protects Egypt and overthrows the foreign countries". Over time, the plaster has eroded away, leaving both inscriptions partially visible and creating a palimpsest-like effect of overlapping hieroglyphs.
Ramesses II temple
The adjacent temple of Ramesses II was much smaller and simpler in plan, but it had a fine historical series of scenes around the outside that lauded his achievements, of which the lower parts remain. The outside of the temple was decorated with scenes of the Battle of Kadesh. His list of pharaohs, similar to that of Seti I, formerly stood here; the fragments were removed by the French consul and sold to the British Museum. King's List Inside the temple once stood another Gallery of Ancestors. This list is also depicted in low relief, carved under the reign of Ramesses II, but is more damaged. The surviving fragments were removed by the French consul in 1837 and sold to the British Museum.
Umm El Qa'ab
of Nesnubhotep, top of a limestone chapel monument. A scarab and adoring baboons in relief. Dynasty XXVI, Abydos, Egypt. Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, London]]
bead found in Abydos, tomb 197, thought to have been imported from the Indus Valley civilisation through Mesopotamia, in an example of Egypt-Mesopotamia relations. Late Middle Kingdom of Egypt. London, Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, ref. UC30334.]]
The royal necropolises of the earliest dynasties were placed about a mile into the great desert plain, in a place now known as Umm El Qa'ab "The Mother of Pots" because of the shards remaining from all of the devotional objects left by religious pilgrims.
The earliest burial is about inside, a pit lined with brick walls and originally roofed with timber and matting. Other tombs also built before Menes are . The probable tomb of Menes is of the latter size. Afterwards, the tombs increased in size and complexity. The tomb-pit was surrounded by chambers to hold offerings, the sepulchre being a great wooden chamber in the midst of the brick-lined pit. Rows of small pits, tombs for the servants of the pharaoh, surrounded the royal chamber, many dozens of such burials being usual. Some of the offerings included sacrificed animals, such as the asses found in the tomb of Merneith. Evidence of human sacrifice exists in the early tombs, such as the 118 servants in the tomb of Merneith, but this practice was changed later into symbolic offerings.
By the end of the Second Dynasty the type of tomb constructed changed to a long passage with chambers on either side, the royal burial being in the middle of the length. The greatest of these tombs with its dependencies, covered a space of over , however it is possible for this to have been several tombs which abutted one another during construction; the Egyptians had no means of mapping the positioning of the tombs. The contents of the tombs have been nearly destroyed by successive plunderers; but enough remained to show that rich jewellery was placed on the mummies, a profusion of vases of hard and valuable stones from the royal table service stood about the body, the store-rooms were filled with great jars of wine, perfumed ointments, and other supplies, and tablets of ivory and of ebony were engraved with a record of the yearly annals of the reigns. The seals of various officials, of which over 200 varieties have been found, give an insight into the public arrangements.
A cemetery for private persons was put into use during the First Dynasty, with some pit-tombs in the town. It was extensive in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Dynasties and contained many rich tombs. A large number of fine tombs were made in the Eighteenth to Twentieth Dynasties, and members of later dynasties continued to bury their dead here until the Roman period. Many hundreds of funeral steles were removed by Auguste Mariette's workmen, without any details of the burials being noted. Later excavations have been recorded by Edward R. Ayrton, Abydos, iii.; MacIver, El Amrah and Abydos; and Garstang, El Arabah. "Forts" Some of the tomb structures, referred to as "forts" by modern researchers, lay behind the town. Known as Shunet ez Zebib, it is about over all, and one still stands high. It was built by Khasekhemwy, the last pharaoh of the Second Dynasty. Another structure nearly as large adjoined it, and probably is older than that of Khasekhemwy. A third "fort" of a squarer form is now occupied by a convent of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria; its age cannot be ascertained.
Kom El Sultan
The area now known as Kom El Sultan is a big mudbrick structure, the purpose of which is not clear and thought to have been at the original settlement area, dated to the Early Dynastic Period. The structure includes the early temple of Osiris.
See also
* List of ancient Egyptian towns and cities
* S 9 (Abydos)
* S 10 (Abydos)
* Mahat chapel of Mentuhotep II
Notes
References
*
*
*
*
*
* Mariette, Auguste, Abydos, ii. and iii.
* William Flinders Petrie, Abydos, i. and ii.
* William Flinders Petrie, Royal Tombs, i. and ii.
External links
*
* Encyclopædia Britannica Online, "Abydos" search: [http://www.britannica.com/search?queryAbydos&ct EncBrit-Abydos], importance of Abydos
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20150923202308/http://www.charlesmiller.co.uk/fla/templans/abydos.htm The Mortuary Temple of Seti I at Abydos]
* [http://www.sas.upenn.edu/aamw/resources/fieldwork/#Abydos%20%28Egypt%29 University of Pennsylvania Museum excavations at Abydos]
Category:Populated places established in the 4th millennium BC
Category:Populated places disestablished in the 4th century BC
Category:Cities in ancient Egypt
Category:Populated places in Sohag Governorate
Category:Former populated places in Egypt
Category:Archaeological sites in Egypt
Category:Naqada III | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abydos,_Egypt | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.928349 |
1441 | Abydos (Hellespont) | | alternate_name | image Gold stater reverse Philippos CdM Paris FG1973-1-71.jpg
| alt | caption Macedonian gold stater, Abydos mint. 323–317 or 297 BC.
| image_size = 300px
| map_type = Turkey Marmara
| map_alt | map_size 300
| relief = yes
| coordinates
| location = Çanakkale, Çanakkale Province, Turkey
| map_dot_label = Abydos
| region = Mysia
| type = Settlement
| part_of | length
| width | area
| height | builder
| material | built or the Troad. The city is also mentioned in Rodanthe and Dosikles, a novel written by Theodore Prodromos, a 12th-century writer, in which Dosikles kidnaps Rodanthe at Abydos.
Archaeology
In 1675, the site of Abydos was first identified, and was subsequently visited by numerous classicists and travellers, such as Robert Wood, Richard Chandler, and Lord Byron. The city's acropolis is known in Turkish as Mal Tepe. and remains of walls and buildings continued to be reported until at least the 19th century, however, little remains and the area was declared a restricted military zone in the early 20th century, thus little to no excavation has taken place.HistoryClassical periodAbydos is mentioned in the Iliad as a Trojan ally, and, according to Strabo, was occupied by Bebryces and later Thracians after the Trojan War. It has been suggested that the city was originally a Phoenician colony as there was a temple of Aphrodite Porne (Aphrodite the Harlot) within Abydos. Abydos was settled by Milesian colonists contemporaneously with the foundation of the cities of Priapos and Prokonnesos in . Strabo related that Gyges, King of Lydia, granted his consent to the Milesians to settle Abydos; it is argued that this was carried out by Milesian mercenaries to act as a garrison to prevent Thracian raids into Asia Minor. The city became a thriving centre for tuna exportation as a result of the high yield of tuna in the Hellespont.
Abydos was ruled by Daphnis, a pro-Persian tyrant, in the 520s BC, but was occupied by the Persian Empire in 514. at which time he was made harmost (commander/governor) of Abydos. A Spartan fleet was defeated by Athens at Abydos in the autumn of 411 BC. Abydos was attacked by the Athenians in the winter of 409/408 BC, but was repelled by a Persian force led by Pharnabazus, satrap (governor) of Hellespontine Phrygia. Dercylidas held the office of harmost of Abydos until at least . At the conclusion of the Corinthian War, under the terms of the Peace of Antalcidas in 387 BC, Abydos was annexed to the Persian Empire. and was ruled by the tyrant Philiscus in 368. In , the city came under the control of the tyrant Iphiades. In 335, whilst Parmenion besieged the city of Pitane, Abydos was besieged by a Persian army led by Memnon of Rhodes, forcing Parmenion to abandon his siege of Pitane and march north to relieve Abydos. Alexander ferried across from Sestos to Abydos in 334 and travelled south to the city of Troy, after which he returned to Abydos.
After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, Abydos, as part of the satrapy of Hellespontine Phrygia, came under the control of Leonnatus as a result of the Partition of Babylon. At the Partition of Triparadisus in 321 BC, Arrhidaeus succeeded Leonnatus as satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia.
In 302, during the Fourth War of the Diadochi, Lysimachus, King of Thrace, crossed over into Asia Minor and invaded the kingdom of Antigonus I. Unlike the neighbouring cities of Parium and Lampsacus which surrendered, Abydos resisted Lysimachus and was besieged. The city of Dardanus also came under the control of Abydos at some point in the Hellenistic period. Abydos became part of the Seleucid Empire after 281 BC. The city was conquered by Ptolemy III Euergetes, King of Egypt, in 245 BC, and remained under Ptolemaic control until at least 241, as Abydos had become part of the Kingdom of Pergamon by c. 200 BC.
tetradrachm of Abydos, with the legend ΑΒΥΔΗΝΩΝ ("of the Abydenes")]]
During the Second Macedonian War, Abydos was besieged by Philip V, King of Macedonia, in 200 BC, during which many of its citizens chose to commit suicide rather than surrender. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus met with Philip V during the siege to deliver an ultimatum on behalf of the Roman senate. Ultimately, the city was forced to surrender to Philip V due to a lack of reinforcements.
In the spring of 196 BC, Abydos was seized by Antiochus III, Megas Basileus of the Seleucid Empire, who refortified the city in 192/191 BC. Dardanus was subsequently liberated from Abydene control, A gymnasium was active at Abydos in the 2nd century BC.
Roman period
Attalus III, King of Pergamon, bequeathed his kingdom to Rome upon his death in 133 BC, and thus Abydos became part of the province of Asia. The gold mines of Abydos at Astyra or Kremaste were near exhaustion at the time was Strabo was writing. and formed part of the conventus iuridicus Adramytteum. The mint of Abydos ceased to function in the mid-3rd century AD.
It is believed that Abydos, with Sestos and Lampsacus, is referred to as one of the "three large capital cities" of the Roman Empire in Weilüe, a 3rd-century AD Chinese text. The city was the centre for customs collection at the southern entrance of the Sea of Marmara, and was administered by a komes ton Stenon (count of the Straits) or an archon from the 3rd century to the 5th century AD.
Medieval period
Pope Martin I rested at Abydos in the summer of 653 whilst en route to Constantinople. As a result of the administrative reforms of the 7th century, Abydos came to be administered as part of the theme of Opsikion. The office of kommerkiarios of Abydos is first attested in the mid-7th century, and was later sometimes combined with the office of paraphylax, the military governor of the fort, introduced in the 8th century, at which time the office of komes ton stenon is last mentioned.
After the 7th century AD, Abydos became a major seaport. Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik, during his campaign against Constantinople, crossed over into Thrace at Abydos in July 717. The office of archon at Abydos was restored in the late 8th century and endured until the early 9th century. The city later also became part of the theme of the Aegean Sea and was the seat of a tourmarches. The revolt of Bardas Phokas was defeated by Emperor Basil II at Abydos in 989 AD. In 992, the Venetians were granted reduced commercial tariffs at Abydos as a special privilege. Following the Battle of Manzikert, Abydos was seized by the Seljuk Turks, but was recovered in 1086 AD, in which year Leo Kephalas was appointed katepano of Abydos. Abydos' population likely increased at this time as a result of the arrival of refugees from northwestern Anatolia who had fled the advance of the Turks. Emperor Manuel I Komnenos repaired Abydos' fortifications in the late 12th century. During the Fourth Crusade, in 1204, the Venetians seized Abydos, Henry of Flanders passed through Abydos on 11 November 1204 and continued his march to Adramyttium. Abydos was seized by the Empire of Nicaea, a successor state of the Eastern Roman Empire, during its offensive in 1206–1207, but was reconquered by the Latin Empire in 1212–1213. The city was later recovered by Emperor John III Vatatzes.
Seals attest Theodosius as bishop of Abydos in the 11th century, and John as metropolitan bishop of Abydos in the 11/12th century. Abydos remained a metropolitan see until the city fell to the Turks in the 14th century. Simeon Kruzhkov was bishop of Abydos from May to September 1998. Kyrillos Katerelos was consecrated bishop of Abydos in 2008.
In 1222, during the Latin occupation, the papal legate Giovanni Colonna united the dioceses of Abydos and Madytos and placed the see under direct Papal authority. No longer a residential bishopric, Abydus is today listed by the Catholic Church as a titular see.See also* List of ancient Greek citiesReferences
Notes
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External links
Category:Ancient Greek archaeological sites in Turkey
Category:Former populated places in Turkey
Category:Greek colonies in Mysia
Category:Milesian colonies
Category:Members of the Delian League
Category:Populated places established in the 7th century BC
Category:Populated places of the Byzantine Empire
Category:Roman towns and cities in Turkey
Category:Populated places in ancient Mysia
Category:History of Çanakkale Province | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abydos_(Hellespont) | 2025-04-05T18:25:39.951244 |
1442 | August 15 | Events
Pre-1600
* 636 – Arab–Byzantine wars: The Battle of Yarmouk between the Byzantine Empire and the Rashidun Caliphate begins.
* 717 – Arab–Byzantine wars: Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik begins the Second Arab Siege of Constantinople, which will last for nearly a year.
* 718 – Arab–Byzantine wars: Raising of the Second Arab Siege of Constantinople.
*747 – Carloman, mayor of the palace of Austrasia, renounces his position as majordomo and retires to a monastery near Rome. His brother, Pepin the Short, becomes the sole ruler (de facto) of the Frankish Kingdom.
* 778 – The Battle of Roncevaux Pass takes place between the army of Charlemagne and a Basque army.
* 805 – Noble Erchana of Dahauua grants the Bavarian town of Dachau to the Diocese of Freising
* 927 – The Saracens conquer and destroy Taranto.
* 982 – Holy Roman Emperor Otto II is defeated by the Saracens in the Battle of Capo Colonna, in Calabria.
*1018 – Byzantine general Eustathios Daphnomeles blinds and captures Ibatzes of Bulgaria by a ruse, thereby ending Bulgarian resistance against Emperor Basil II's conquest of Bulgaria.
*1038 – King Stephen I, the first king of Hungary, dies; his nephew, Peter Orseolo, succeeds him.
*1057 – King Macbeth is killed at the Battle of Lumphanan by the forces of Máel Coluim mac Donnchada.
*1070 – The Pavian-born Benedictine Lanfranc is appointed as the new Archbishop of Canterbury in England.
*1096 – Starting date of the First Crusade as set by Pope Urban II.
*1185 – The cave city of Vardzia is consecrated by Queen Tamar of Georgia.
*1224 – The Livonian Brothers of the Sword, a Catholic military order, occupy Tarbatu (today Tartu) as part of the Livonian Crusade.
*1237 – Spanish Reconquista: The Battle of the Puig between the Moorish forces of Taifa of Valencia against the Kingdom of Aragon culminates in an Aragonese victory.
*1248 – The foundation stone of Cologne Cathedral, built to house the relics of the Three Wise Men, is laid. (Construction is eventually completed in 1880.)
*1261 – Michael VIII Palaiologos is crowned as the first Byzantine emperor in fifty-seven years.
*1281 – Mongol invasion of Japan: The Mongolian fleet of Kublai Khan is destroyed by a "divine wind" for the second time in the Battle of Kōan.
*1310 – The city of Rhodes surrenders to the forces of the Knights of St. John, completing their conquest of Rhodes. The knights establish their headquarters on the island and rename themselves the Knights of Rhodes.
*1430 – Francesco Sforza, lord of Milan, conquers Lucca.
*1461 – The Empire of Trebizond surrenders to the forces of Sultan Mehmed II. This is regarded by some historians as the real end of the Byzantine Empire. Emperor David is exiled and later murdered.
*1483 – Pope Sixtus IV consecrates the Sistine Chapel.
*1511 – Afonso de Albuquerque of Portugal conquers Malacca, the capital of the Malacca Sultanate.
*1517 – Seven Portuguese armed vessels led by Fernão Pires de Andrade meet Chinese officials at the Pearl River estuary.
*1519 – Panama City, Panama is founded.
*1534 – Ignatius of Loyola and six classmates take initial vows, leading to the creation of the Society of Jesus in September 1540.
*1537 – Asunción, Paraguay is founded.
*1540 – Arequipa, Peru is founded.
*1549 – Jesuit priest Francis Xavier comes ashore at Kagoshima (Traditional Japanese date: 22 July 1549).
*1592 – Imjin War: At the Battle of Hansan Island, the Korean Navy, led by Yi Sun-sin, Yi Eok-gi, and Won Gyun, decisively defeats the Japanese Navy, led by Wakisaka Yasuharu.
*1599 – Nine Years' War: Battle of Curlew Pass: Irish forces led by Hugh Roe O'Donnell successfully ambush English forces, led by Sir Conyers Clifford, sent to relieve Collooney Castle.
1601–1900
*1695 – French forces end the bombardment of Brussels.
*1760 – Seven Years' War: Battle of Liegnitz: Frederick the Great's victory over the Austrians under Ernst Gideon von Laudon.
*1824 – The Marquis de Lafayette, the last surviving French general of the American Revolutionary War, arrives in New York and begins a tour of 24 states.
*1843 – The Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace in Honolulu, Hawaii is dedicated. Now the cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Honolulu, it is the oldest Roman Catholic cathedral in continuous use in the United States.
* 1843 – Tivoli Gardens, one of the oldest still intact amusement parks in the world, opens in Copenhagen, Denmark.
*1863 – The Anglo-Satsuma War begins between the Satsuma Domain of Japan and the United Kingdom (Traditional Japanese date: July 2, 1863).
*1893 – Ibadan area becomes a British Protectorate after a treaty signed by Fijabi, the Baale of Ibadan with the British acting Governor of Lagos, George C. Denton.
*1899 – Fratton Park football ground in Portsmouth, England is officially first opened.
1901–present
*1907 – Ordination in Constantinople of Fr. Raphael Morgan, the first African-American Orthodox priest, "Priest-Apostolic" to America and the West Indies.
*1914 – A servant of American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, sets fire to the living quarters of Wright's Wisconsin home, Taliesin, and murders seven people there.
* 1914 – The Panama Canal opens to traffic with the transit of the cargo ship .
* 1914 – World War I: The First Russian Army, led by Paul von Rennenkampf, enters East Prussia.
* 1914 – World War I: Beginning of the Battle of Cer, the first Allied victory of World War I.
*1915 – A story in New York World newspaper reveals that the Imperial German government had purchased excess phenol from Thomas Edison that could be used to make explosives for the war effort and diverted it to Bayer for aspirin production.
*1920 – Polish–Soviet War: Battle of Warsaw, so-called Miracle at the Vistula.
*1935 – Will Rogers and Wiley Post are killed after their aircraft develops engine problems during takeoff in Barrow, Alaska.
*1939 – Twenty-six Junkers Ju 87 bombers commanded by Walter Sigel meet unexpected ground fog during a dive-bombing demonstration for Luftwaffe generals at Neuhammer. Thirteen of them crash and burn.
* 1939 – The Wizard of Oz premieres at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, California.
*1940 – An Italian submarine torpedoes and sinks the at Tinos harbor during peacetime, marking the most serious Italian provocation prior to the outbreak of the Greco-Italian War in October.
*1941 – Corporal Josef Jakobs is executed by firing squad at the Tower of London at 07:12, making him the last person to be executed at the Tower for espionage.
*1942 – World War II: Operation Pedestal: The oil tanker reaches the island of Malta barely afloat carrying vital fuel supplies for the island's defenses.
*1943 – World War II: Battle of Trahili: Superior German forces surround Cretan partisans, who manage to escape against all odds.
*1944 – World War II: Operation Dragoon: Allied forces land in southern France.
*1945 – Emperor Hirohito broadcasts his declaration of surrender following the effective surrender of Japan in World War II; Korea gains independence from the Empire of Japan.
*1947 – India gains independence from British rule after near 190 years of British company and crown rule and joins the Commonwealth of Nations.
* 1947 – Founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah is sworn in as first Governor-General of Pakistan in Karachi.
*1948 – The First Republic of Korea (South Korea) is established in the southern half of the peninsula.
*1950 – Measuring 8.6, the largest earthquake on land occurs in the Assam-Tibet-Myanmar border, killing 4,800.
*1952 – A flash flood drenches the town of Lynmouth, England, killing 34 people.
*1954 – Alfredo Stroessner begins his dictatorship in Paraguay.
*1959 – American Airlines Flight 514, a Boeing 707, crashes near the Calverton Executive Airpark in Calverton, New York, killing all five people on board.
*1960 – Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville) becomes independent from France.
*1961 – Border guard Conrad Schumann flees from East Germany while on duty guarding the construction of the Berlin Wall.
*1962 – James Joseph Dresnok defects to North Korea after running across the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Dresnok died in 2016.
*1963 – Execution of Henry John Burnett, the last man to be hanged in Scotland.
* 1963 – President Fulbert Youlou is overthrown in the Republic of the Congo, after a three-day uprising in the capital.
*1965 – The Beatles play to nearly 60,000 fans at Shea Stadium in New York City, an event later regarded as the birth of stadium rock.
*1969 – The Woodstock Music & Art Fair opens in Bethel, New York, featuring some of the top rock musicians of the era.
*1970 – Patricia Palinkas becomes the first woman to play professionally in an American football game.
*1971 – President Richard Nixon completes the break from the gold standard by ending convertibility of the United States dollar into gold by foreign investors.
* 1971 – Bahrain gains independence from the United Kingdom.
*1973 – Vietnam War: The USAF bombing of Cambodia ends.
*1974 – Yuk Young-soo, First Lady of South Korea, is killed during an apparent assassination attempt upon President Park Chung Hee.
*1975 – Bangladeshi leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is killed along with most members of his family during a military coup.
* 1975 – Takeo Miki makes the first official pilgrimage to Yasukuni Shrine by an incumbent prime minister on the anniversary of the end of World War II.
*1976 – SAETA Flight 232 crashes into the Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador, killing all 59 people on board; the wreckage is not discovered until 2002.
*1977 – The Big Ear, a radio telescope operated by Ohio State University as part of the SETI project, receives a radio signal from deep space; the event is named the "Wow! signal" from the notation made by a volunteer on the project.
*1984 – The Kurdistan Workers' Party in Turkey starts a campaign of armed attacks upon the Turkish Armed Forces with an attack on police and gendarmerie bases in Şemdinli and Eruh.
*1985 – Signing of the Assam Accord, an agreement between representatives of the Government of India and the leaders of the Assam Movement to end the movement.
*1989 – China Eastern Airlines Flight 5510 crashes after takeoff from Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport, killing 34 of the 40 people on board.
*1995 – In South Carolina, Shannon Faulkner becomes the first female cadet matriculated at The Citadel (she drops out less than a week later).
* 1995 – Tomiichi Murayama, Prime Minister of Japan, releases the Murayama Statement, which formally expresses remorse for Japanese war crimes committed during World War II.
*1998 – Northern Ireland: Omagh bombing takes place; 29 people (including a woman pregnant with twins) killed and some 220 others injured.
* 1998 – Apple introduces the iMac computer.
*1999 – Beni Ounif massacre in Algeria: Some 29 people are killed at a false roadblock near the Moroccan border, leading to temporary tensions with Morocco.
*2005 – Israel's unilateral disengagement plan to evict all Israelis from the Gaza Strip and from four settlements in the northern West Bank begins.
* 2005 – The Helsinki Agreement between the Free Aceh Movement and the Government of Indonesia was signed, ending almost three decades of fighting.
*2007 – An 8.0-magnitude earthquake off the Pacific coast devastates Ica and various regions of Peru killing 514 and injuring 1,090.
*2013 – At least 27 people are killed and 226 injured in an explosion in southern Beirut near a complex used by Lebanon's militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon. A previously unknown Syrian Sunni group claims responsibility in an online video.
* 2013 – The Smithsonian announces the discovery of the olinguito, the first new carnivorous species found in the Americas in 35 years.
*2015 – North Korea moves its clock back half an hour to introduce Pyongyang Time, 8 hours ahead of UTC.
*2020 – Russia begins production on the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine.
*2021 – Kabul falls into the hands of the Taliban as Ashraf Ghani flees Afghanistan along with local residents and foreign nationals, effectively reestablishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
Births
Pre-1600
*1013 – Teishi, empress of Japan (d. 1094)
*1171 – Alfonso IX, king of León and Galicia (d. 1230)
*1195 – Anthony of Padua, Portuguese priest and saint (d. 1231)
*1385 – Richard de Vere, 11th Earl of Oxford, English commander (d. 1417)
*1432 – Luigi Pulci, Italian poet (d. 1484)
*1455 – George, duke of Bavaria (d. 1503)
*1507 – George III, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, German prince (d. 1553)
*1575 – Bartol Kašić, Croatian linguist and lexicographer (d. 1650)
*1589 – Gabriel Báthory, Prince of Transylvania (d. 1613)
1601–1900
*1607 – Herman IV, landgrave of Hesse-Rotenburg (d. 1658)
*1608 – Henry Howard, 22nd Earl of Arundel, English politician (d. 1652)
*1613 – Gilles Ménage, French lawyer, philologist, and scholar (d. 1692)
*1615 – Marie de Lorraine, duchess of Guise (d. 1688)
*1652 – John Grubb, American politician (d. 1708)
*1702 – Francesco Zuccarelli, Italian painter and Royal Academician (d. 1788)
*1717 – Blind Jack, English engineer (d. 1810)
*1736 – Johann Christoph Kellner, German organist and composer (d. 1803)
*1740 – Matthias Claudius, German poet and author (d. 1815)
*1769 – Napoleon Bonaparte, French general and emperor (d. 1821)
*1771 – Walter Scott, Scottish novelist, playwright, and poet (d. 1832)
*1785 – Thomas De Quincey, English journalist and author (d. 1859)
*1787 – Eliza Lee Cabot Follen, American writer, editor, abolitionist (d. 1860)
*1798 – Sangolli Rayanna, Indian warrior (d. 1831)
*1807 – Jules Grévy, French lawyer and politician, 4th President of the French Republic (d. 1891)
*1810 – Louise Colet, French poet (d. 1876)
*1824 – John Chisum, American businessman (d. 1884)
*1839 – Antonín Petrof, Czech piano maker (d. 1915)
*1844 – Thomas-Alfred Bernier, Canadian journalist, lawyer, and politician (d. 1908)
*1845 – Walter Crane, English artist and book illustrator (d. 1915)
*1856 – Keir Hardie, Scottish politician and trade unionist (d. 1915)
*1857 – Albert Ballin, German businessman (d. 1918)
*1858 – E. Nesbit, English author and poet (d. 1924)
*1859 – Charles Comiskey, American baseball player and manager (d. 1931)
*1860 – Florence Harding, American publisher, 31st First Lady of the United States (d. 1924)
*1863 – Aleksey Krylov, Russian mathematician and engineer (d. 1945)
*1865 – Mikao Usui, Japanese spiritual leader, founded Reiki (d. 1926)
*1866 – Italo Santelli, Italian fencer (d. 1945)
*1872 – Sri Aurobindo, Indian guru, poet, and philosopher (d. 1950)
*1873 – Ramaprasad Chanda, Indian archaeologist and historian (d. 1942)
*1875 – Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, English pianist, violinist, and composer (d. 1912)
*1876 – Stylianos Gonatas, Greek colonel and politician, 111th Prime Minister of Greece (d. 1966)
*1877 – Tachiyama Mineemon, Japanese sumo wrestler, the 22nd Yokozuna (d. 1941)
*1879 – Ethel Barrymore, American actress (d. 1959)
*1881 – Alfred Wagenknecht, German-American activist and politician (d. 1956)
*1882 – Marion Bauer, American composer and critic (d. 1955)
* 1882 – Gisela Richter, English archaeologist and art historian (d. 1972)
*1883 – Ivan Meštrović, Croatian sculptor and architect (d. 1962)
*1885 – Edna Ferber, American novelist, short story writer, and playwright (d. 1968)
*1886 – Bill Whitty, Australian cricketer (d. 1974)
*1890 – Jacques Ibert, French composer and educator (d. 1962)
*1892 – Louis de Broglie, French physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1987)
* 1892 – Abraham Wachner, New Zealand politician, 35th Mayor of Invercargill (d. 1950)
*1893 – Leslie Comrie, New Zealand astronomer and academic (d. 1950)
*1896 – Gerty Cori, Czech-American biochemist and physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1957)
* 1896 – Catherine Doherty, Russian-Canadian activist, founded the Madonna House Apostolate (d. 1985)
* 1896 – Paul Outerbridge, American photographer and educator (d. 1958)
*1898 – Jan Brzechwa, Polish author and poet (d. 1966)
*1900 – Estelle Brody, American silent film actress (d. 1995)
* 1900 – Jack Tworkov, Polish-American painter and educator (d. 1982)
1901–present
*1901 – Arnulfo Arias Madrid, Panamanian politician, 21st President of Panamá (d. 1988)
* 1901 – Pyotr Novikov, Russian mathematician and theorist (d. 1975)
*1902 – Jan Campert, Dutch journalist and critic (d. 1943)
*1904 – George Klein, Canadian inventor, invented the motorized wheelchair (d. 1992)
*1909 – Hugo Winterhalter, American composer and bandleader (d. 1973)
*1912 – Julia Child, American chef and author (d. 2004)
* 1912 – Wendy Hiller, English actress (d. 2003)
*1914 – Paul Rand, American graphic designer and art director (d. 1996)
*1915 – Signe Hasso, Swedish-American actress (d. 2002)
*1916 – Aleks Çaçi, Albanian journalist and author (d. 1989)
*1917 – Jack Lynch, Irish footballer and politician, 5th Taoiseach of Ireland (d. 1999)
* 1917 – Óscar Romero, Salvadoran archbishop (d. 1980)
*1919 – Huntz Hall, American actor (d. 1999)
* 1919 – Benedict Kiely, Irish journalist and author (d. 2007)
*1920 – Judy Cassab, Austrian-Australian painter (d. 2008)
*1921 – August Kowalczyk, Polish actor and director (d. 2012)
*1922 – Leonard Baskin, American sculptor and illustrator (d. 2000)
* 1922 – Giorgos Mouzakis, Greek trumpet player and composer (d. 2005)
* 1922 – Sabino Barinaga, Spanish footballer and manager (d. 1988)
*1923 – Rose Marie, American actress and singer (d. 2017)
*1924 – Robert Bolt, English playwright and screenwriter (d. 1995)
* 1924 – Hedy Epstein, German-American Holocaust survivor and activist (d. 2016)
* 1924 – Yoshirō Muraki, Japanese production designer, art director, and fashion designer (d. 2009)
* 1924 – Phyllis Schlafly, American lawyer, writer, and political activist (d. 2016)
*1925 – Mike Connors, American actor and producer (d. 2017)
* 1925 – Rose Maddox, American singer-songwriter and fiddle player (d. 1998)
* 1925 – Oscar Peterson, Canadian pianist and composer (d. 2007)
* 1925 – Bill Pinkney, American singer (d. 2007)
* 1925 – Erik Schmidt, Swedish-Estonian painter and author (d. 2014)
*1926 – Julius Katchen, American pianist and composer (d. 1969)
* 1926 – Eddie Little Sky, American actor (d. 1997)
* 1926 – Sami Michael, Iraqi-Israeli author and playwright (d. 2024)
* 1926 – John Silber, American philosopher and academic (d. 2012)
* 1926 – Konstantinos Stephanopoulos, Greek lawyer and politician, 6th President of Greece (d. 2016)
*1927 – Eddie Leadbeater, English cricketer (d. 2011)
* 1927 – Oliver Popplewell, English cricketer and judge (d. 2024)
*1928 – Carl Joachim Classen, German scholar and academic (d. 2013)
* 1928 – Malcolm Glazer, American businessman (d. 2014)
* 1928 – Nicolas Roeg, English director and cinematographer (d. 2018)
*1931 – Ernest C. Brace, American captain and pilot (d. 2014)
* 1931 – Richard F. Heck, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2015)
*1932 – Abby Dalton, American actress (d. 2020)
* 1932 – Robert L. Forward, American physicist and engineer (d. 2002)
* 1932 – Jim Lange, American game show host and DJ (d. 2014)
* 1932 – Johan Steyn, Baron Steyn, South African-English lawyer and judge (d. 2017)
*1933 – Bobby Helms, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1997)
* 1933 – Stanley Milgram, American social psychologist (d. 1984)
* 1933 – Mike Seeger, American folk musician and folklorist (d. 2009)
*1934 – Bobby Byrd, American singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2007)
* 1934 – Purushottam Upadhyay, Indian musician, singer and composer (d. 2024)
* 1934 – Reginald Scarlett, Jamaican cricketer and coach (d. 2019)
* 1934 – Darrell K. Sweet, American illustrator (d. 2011)
* 1934 – Valentin Varlamov, Soviet pilot and cosmonaut instructor (d. 1980)
*1935 – Jim Dale, English actor, narrator, singer, director, and composer
* 1935 – Régine Deforges, French author, playwright, and director (d. 2014)
*1936 – Pat Priest, American actress
* 1936 – Rita Shane, American soprano and educator (d. 2014)
*1938 – Stephen Breyer, American lawyer and jurist, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
* 1938 – Stix Hooper, American jazz drummer
* 1938 – Pran Kumar Sharma, Indian cartoonist (d. 2014)
* 1938 – Maxine Waters, American educator and politician
* 1938 – Janusz Zajdel, Polish engineer and author (d. 1985)
*1940 – Gudrun Ensslin, German militant leader, founded Red Army Faction (d. 1977)
*1941 – Jim Brothers, American sculptor (d. 2013)
* 1941 – Don Rich, American country musician (d. 1974)
*1942 – Pete York, English rock drummer
*1943 – Eileen Bell, Northern Irish civil servant and politician, 2nd Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly
*1944 – Dimitris Sioufas, Greek lawyer and politician, Greek Minister of Health (d. 2019)
*1945 – Khaleda Zia, Bangladeshi politician, Prime Minister of Bangladesh
*1946 – Jimmy Webb, American singer-songwriter and pianist
*1947 – Rakhee Gulzar, Indian film actress
*1948 – Patsy Gallant, Canadian singer-songwriter and actress
* 1948 – Tom Johnston, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
*1949 – Phyllis Smith, American actress
*1950 – Tommy Aldridge, American drummer
* 1950 – Tess Harper, American actress
* 1950 – Tom Kelly, American baseball player
* 1950 – Anne, Princess Royal of the United Kingdom
*1951 – Ann Biderman, American screenwriter and producer
* 1951 – Bobby Caldwell, American singer-songwriter (d. 2023)
* 1951 – John Childs, English cricketer
*1952 – Chuck Burgi, American drummer
*1953 – Carol Thatcher, English journalist and author
* 1953 – Mark Thatcher, English businessman
* 1953 – Wolfgang Hohlbein, German author
*1954 – Stieg Larsson, Swedish journalist and author (d. 2004)
*1956 – Lorraine Desmarais, Canadian pianist and composer
* 1956 – Freedom Neruda, Ivorian journalist
* 1956 – Robert Syms, English businessman and politician
*1957 – Željko Ivanek, Slovenian-American actor
*1958 – Simon Baron-Cohen, English-Canadian psychiatrist and author
* 1958 – Craig MacTavish, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
* 1958 – Simple Kapadia, Indian actress and costume designer (d. 2009)
* 1958 – Victor Shenderovich, Russian journalist and radio host
* 1958 – Rondell Sheridan, American actor and comedian
*1959 – Scott Altman, American captain, pilot, and astronaut
*1961 – Ed Gillespie, American political strategist
* 1961 – Matt Johnson, English singer-songwriter and musician
* 1961 – Gary Kubiak, American football player and coach
* 1961 – Suhasini Maniratnam, Indian actress and screenwriter
*1962 – Tom Colicchio, American chef and author
* 1962 – Rıdvan Dilmen, Turkish footballer and manager
* 1962 – Inês Pedrosa, Portuguese writer
* 1962 – Vilja Savisaar-Toomast, Estonian lawyer and politician
*1963 – Alejandro González Iñárritu, Mexican director, producer, and screenwriter
* 1963 – Simon Hart, Welsh soldier and politician
* 1963 – Jack Russell, England cricketer and coach
*1964 – Jane Ellison, English lawyer and politician
* 1964 – Melinda Gates, American businesswoman and philanthropist, co-founded the Gates Foundation
*1965 – Rob Thomas, American author, screenwriter, and producer
*1966 – Scott Brosius, American baseball player and coach
* 1966 – Dimitris Papadopoulos, Greek basketball player and coach
*1967 – Tony Hand, Scottish ice hockey player and coach
* 1967 – Peter Hermann, American actor
*1968 – Debra Messing, American actress
*1969 – Bernard Fanning, Australian singer-songwriter
* 1969 – Carlos Roa, Argentine footballer
*1970 – Anthony Anderson, American comedian, actor, and producer
* 1970 – Ben Silverman, American actor, producer, and screenwriter, founded Electus Studios
*1971 – Adnan Sami, Indian singer, musician, music composer, pianist and actor
*1972 – Ben Affleck, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter
* 1972 – Jennifer Alexander, Canadian ballerina (d. 2007)
* 1972 – Mikey Graham, Irish singer
*1974 – Natasha Henstridge, Canadian model and actress
* 1974 – Tomasz Suwary, Polish footballer
*1975 – Bertrand Berry, American football player and radio host
* 1975 – Vijay Bharadwaj, Indian cricketer and coach
* 1975 – Brendan Morrison, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1975 – Kara Wolters, American basketball player
*1976 – Boudewijn Zenden, Dutch footballer and manager
*1977 – Martin Biron, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1977 – Anthony Rocca, Australian footballer and coach
*1978 – Waleed Aly, Australian journalist and television host
* 1978 – Lilia Podkopayeva, Ukrainian gymnast
* 1978 – Stavros Tziortziopoulos, Greek footballer
* 1978 – Kerri Walsh Jennings, American volleyball player
*1979 – Carl Edwards, American race car driver
*1980 – Fiann Paul, Icelandic explorer
*1981 – Brendan Hansen, American swimmer
* 1981 – Óliver Pérez, American baseball player
*1982 – Casey Burgener, American weightlifter
* 1982 – Germán Caffa, Argentine footballer
* 1982 – David Harrison, American basketball player
*1983 – Siobhan Chamberlain, English association football goalkeeper
* 1983 – Rachel Haot, American businesswoman
*1984 – Jarrod Dyson, American baseball player
* 1984 – Emily Kinney, American actress and singer-songwriter
*1985 – Nipsey Hussle, American rapper (d. 2019)
*1987 – Ryan D'Imperio, American football player
* 1987 – Michel Kreder, Dutch cyclist
* 1987 – Sean McAllister, English footballer
*1988 – Oussama Assaidi, Moroccan footballer
*1989 – Joe Jonas, American singer-songwriter
* 1989 – Ryan McGowan, Australian footballer
* 1989 – Carlos PenaVega, American actor and singer
* 1989 – Jordan Rapana, New Zealand rugby league player
*1990 – Jennifer Lawrence, American actress
*1991 – Petja Piiroinen, Finnish snowboarder
*1992 – Baskaran Adhiban, Indian chess player
* 1992 – Matthew Judon, American football player
*1993 – Rieah Holder, Barbadian netball player
* 1993 – Clinton N'Jie, Cameroonian footballer
* 1993 – Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, English footballer
*1994 – Lasse Vigen Christensen, Danish footballer
* 1994 – Kosuke Hagino, Japanese swimmer
*1995 – Chief Keef, American rapper
* 1995 – Setyana Mapasa, Indonesian-Australian badminton player <!-- please archive this -->
*1999 – Paola Reis, BMX rider
<!--Please do not add yourself, non-notable people, fictional characters, or people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust “this year in history” websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence.-->
Deaths
Pre-1600
* 398 – Lan Han, official of the Xianbei state Later Yan
* 423 – Honorius, Roman emperor (b. 384)
* 465 – Libius Severus, Roman emperor (b. 420)
* 698 – Theodotus of Amida, Syrian Orthodox holy man
*767 – Abu Hanifa, Iraqi scholar and educator (b. 699)
* 778 – Roland, Frankish military leader
* 873 – Yi Zong, Chinese emperor (b. 833)
* 874 – Altfrid, bishop of Hildesheim
* 912 – Han Jian, Chinese warlord (b. 855)
* 932 – Ma Xisheng, Chinese governor and king (b. 899)
* 955 – Bulcsú, Hungarian tribal chieftain (harka)
* 955 – Lehel, Hungarian tribal chieftain
*1022 – Nikephoros Phokas Barytrachelos, Byzantine rebel
*1038 – Stephen I, Hungarian king (b. 975)
*1057 – Macbeth, King of Scotland
*1118 – Alexios I Komnenos, Byzantine emperor (b. 1048)
*1196 – Conrad II, Duke of Swabia (b. 1173)
*1224 – Marie of France, Duchess of Brabant (b. 1198)
*1257 – Saint Hyacinth of Poland
*1274 – Robert de Sorbon, French theologian and educator, founded the College of Sorbonne (b. 1201)
*1275 – Lorenzo Tiepolo, Doge of Venice
*1328 – Yesün Temür, emperor of the Yuan dynasty (b. 1293)
*1369 – Philippa of Hainault, Queen consort of Edward III of England (b. 1314)
*1388 – Adalbertus Ranconis de Ericinio, Bohemian theologian and rector of the University of Paris (b. circa 1320)
*1399 – Ide Pedersdatter Falk, Danish noblewoman (b. 1358)
*1496 – Infanta Isabella of Portugal, Queen of Castile and León (b. 1428)
*1506 – Alexander Agricola, Flemish composer (b. c. 1445)
*1507 – John V, Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg (b. 1439)
*1528 – Odet of Foix, Viscount of Lautrec, French general (b. 1485)
*1552 – Hermann of Wied, German archbishop (b. 1477)
*1594 – Thomas Kyd, English playwright (b. 1558)
1601–1900
*1621 – John Barclay, Scottish poet and author (b. 1582)
*1666 – Johann Adam Schall von Bell, German missionary and astronomer (b. 1591)
*1714 – Constantin Brâncoveanu, Romanian prince (b. 1654)
*1728 – Marin Marais, French viol player and composer (b. 1656)
*1758 – Pierre Bouguer, French mathematician, geophysicist, and astronomer (b. 1698)
*1799 – Giuseppe Parini, Italian poet and author (b. 1729)
*1844 – José María Coppinger, governor of Spanish East Florida (b. 1733)
*1852 – Johan Gadolin, Finnish chemist, physicist, and mineralogist (b. 1760)
*1859 – Nathaniel Claiborne, American farmer and politician (b. 1777)1901–present*1907 – Joseph Joachim, Hungarian violinist, composer, and conductor (b. 1831)
*1909 – Euclides da Cunha, Brazilian sociologist and journalist (b. 1866)
*1917 – Thomas J. Higgins, American sergeant, Medal of Honor recipient (b. 1831)
*1925 – Konrad Mägi, Estonian painter and educator (b. 1878)
*1928 – Anatole von Hügel, Italian ethnologist and academic, co-founded St Edmund's College, Cambridge (b. 1854)
*1935 – Wiley Post, American pilot (b. 1898)
* 1935 – Will Rogers, American actor, comedian, and screenwriter (b. 1879)
* 1935 – Paul Signac, French painter and author (b. 1863)
*1936 – Grazia Deledda, Italian novelist and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1871)
*1942 – Mahadev Desai, Indian activist and author (b. 1892)
*1945 – Korechika Anami, Japanese general and politician, 54th Japanese Minister of the Army (b. 1887)
* 1945 – Fred Hockley, English lieutenant and pilot (b. 1923)
*1951 – Artur Schnabel, Polish pianist and composer (b. 1882)
*1953 – Ludwig Prandtl, German physicist and engineer (b. 1875)
*1962 – Lei Feng, Chinese soldier (b. 1940)
*1967 – René Magritte, Belgian painter (b. 1898)
*1971 – Paul Lukas, Hungarian-American actor (b. 1887)
*1974 – Clay Shaw, American businessman (b. 1913)
*1975 – Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladeshi politician, 1st President of Bangladesh (b. 1920)
* 1975 – Harun Karadeniz, Turkish political activist and author (b. 1942)
*1981 – Carol Ryrie Brink, American author (b. 1895)
* 1981 – Jørgen Løvset, Norwegian gynaecologist and academic (b. 1896)
*1982 – Ernie Bushmiller, American cartoonist (b. 1905)
* 1982 – Jock Taylor, Scottish motorcycle sidecar racer (b. 1954)
* 1982 – Hugo Theorell, Swedish biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1903)
*1989 – Minoru Genda, Japanese general, pilot, and politician (b. 1904)
* 1989 – Thrasyvoulos Tsakalotos, Greek general and diplomat (b. 1897)
*1990 – Viktor Tsoi, Russian musician and actor (b. 1962)
*1992 – Linda Laubenstein, American physician and academic (b. 1947)
*1994 – Wout Wagtmans, Dutch cyclist (b. 1929)
*1995 – John Cameron Swayze, American journalist and actor (b. 1906)
*1997 – Ida Gerhardt, Dutch poet and educator (b. 1905)
*1999 – Hugh Casson, English architect and interior designer (b. 1910)
*2000 – Lancelot Ware, English barrister and biochemist, co-founder of Mensa (b. 1915)
*2001 – Yavuz Çetin, Turkish singer-songwriter (b. 1970)
* 2001 – Richard Chelimo, Kenyan runner (b. 1972)
* 2001 – Kateryna Yushchenko, Ukrainian computer scientist and academic (b. 1919)
*2004 – Sune Bergström, Swedish biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1916)
* 2004 – Amarsinh Chaudhary, Indian politician, 8th Chief Minister of Gujarat (b. 1941)
*2005 – Bendapudi Venkata Satyanarayana, Indian dermatologist and academic (b. 1927)
*2006 – Te Atairangikaahu, New Zealand queen (b. 1931)
* 2006 – Rick Bourke, Australian rugby league player (b. 1955)
* 2006 – Coenraad Bron, Dutch computer scientist and academic (b. 1937)
* 2006 – Faas Wilkes, Dutch footballer and manager (b. 1923)
*2007 – Richard Bradshaw, English conductor and director (b. 1944)
* 2007 – John Gofman, American biologist, chemist, and physicist (b. 1918)
* 2007 – Geoffrey Orbell, New Zealand physician (b. 1908)
* 2007 – Sam Pollock, Canadian businessman (b. 1925)
*2008 – Vic Toweel, South African-Australian boxer (b. 1929)
* 2008 – Jerry Wexler, American journalist and producer (b. 1917)
*2011 – Rick Rypien, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1984)
*2012 – Bob Birch, American bass player and saxophonist (b. 1956)
* 2012 – Altamiro Carrilho, Brazilian flute player and composer (b. 1924)
* 2012 – Harry Harrison, American author and illustrator (b. 1925)
*2013 – Rosalía Mera, Spanish businesswoman, co-founded Inditex and Zara (b. 1944)
* 2013 – Sławomir Mrożek, Polish-French author and playwright (b. 1930)
* 2013 – Marich Man Singh Shrestha, Nepali politician, 28th Prime Minister of Nepal (b. 1942)
* 2013 – August Schellenberg, Canadian actor (b. 1936)
*2014 – Licia Albanese, Italian-American soprano and actress (b. 1909)
*2015 – Julian Bond, American academic, leader of the civil rights movement, and politician (b. 1940)
* 2015 – Hamid Gul, Pakistani general (b. 1936)
*2017 – Gunnar Birkerts, Latvian-American architect (b. 1925)
*2020 – Robert Trump, American real-estate developer, business executive (b. 1948)
*2021 – Gerd Müller, German footballer (b. 1945)
*2024 – Peter Marshall, American game show host, performer, and singer (b. 1926)
*<!-- Do not add people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust “this year in history” websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence. -->
Holidays and observances
* Armed Forces Day (Poland)
* Christian feast day:
** Altfrid
** Alypius of Thagaste
** Feast day of the Assumption of Mary, one of the Catholic holy days of obligation (a public holiday in Austria, Belgium, Benin, Bosnia, Burundi, Cameroon, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, France, some states in Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Italy, Ivory Coast, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malta, Mauritius, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Senegal, Seychelles, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Togo, and Vanuatu); and its related observances:
*** Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos (Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches)
*** Ferragosto (Italy)
*** Lady's Day (Ireland)
*** Māras (Latvia)
*** Mother's Day (Antwerp and Costa Rica)
*** National Acadian Day (Acadians)
***Navy Day (Romania)
*** Virgin of Candelaria, patron of the Canary Islands. (Tenerife, Spain)
**San La Muerte (Paraguayan Folk Catholicism)
**Santa Muerte (Mexican Folk Catholicism)
** Tarcisius
** August 15 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
* Constitution Day (Equatorial Guinea)
* Founding of Asunción (Paraguay)
* Independence Day, celebrates the independence of Korea from Japan in 1945:
** Gwangbokjeol, "Independence Day" (South Korea)
** Jogukhaebangui nal, "Fatherland Liberation Day" (North Korea)
* Independence Day, celebrates the independence of India from the United Kingdom in 1947.
* Independence Day, celebrates the independence of the Republic of the Congo from France in 1960.
* National Day (Liechtenstein)
* National Day of Mourning (Bangladesh)
* The first day of Flooding of the Nile, or Wafaa El-Nil (Egypt and Coptic Church)
* The main day of Bon Festival (Japan), and its related observances:
** Awa Dance Festival (Tokushima Prefecture)
* Victory over Japan Day (United Kingdom), and its related observances:
** End-of-war Memorial Day, when the National Memorial Service for War Dead is held (Japan)
References
External links
*
*
*
Category:Days of August | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_15 | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.050141 |
1445 | Acacia sensu lato | Acacia s.l. (pronounced or ), known commonly as mimosa, acacia, thorntree or wattle, is a polyphyletic genus of shrubs and trees belonging to the subfamily Mimosoideae of the family Fabaceae. It was described by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in 1773 based on the African species Acacia nilotica. Many non-Australian species tend to be thorny, whereas the majority of Australian acacias are not. All species are pod-bearing, with sap and leaves often bearing large amounts of tannins and condensed tannins that historically found use as pharmaceuticals and preservatives.
The genus Acacia constitutes, in its traditional circumspection, the second largest genus in Fabaceae (Astragalus being the largest), with roughly 1,300 species, about 960 of them native to Australia, with the remainder spread around the tropical to warm-temperate regions of both hemispheres, including Europe, Africa, southern Asia, and the Americas (see List of Acacia species). The genus was divided into five separate genera under the tribe "Acacieae". The genus now called Acacia represents the majority of the Australian species and a few native to southeast Asia, Réunion, and Pacific Islands. Most of the species outside Australia, and a small number of Australian species, are classified into Vachellia and Senegalia. The two final genera, Acaciella and Mariosousa, each contain about a dozen species from the Americas (but see "Classification" below for the ongoing debate concerning their taxonomy).
Desert of southern Israel]]
), the floral emblem of Australia]]]]
Classification
English botanist and gardener Philip Miller adopted the name Acacia in 1754. The generic name is derived from (), the name given by early Greek botanist-physician Pedanius Dioscorides (middle to late first century) to the medicinal tree A. nilotica in his book Materia Medica. This name derives from the Ancient Greek word for its characteristic thorns, (; "thorn"). The species name nilotica'' was given by Linnaeus from this tree's best-known range along the Nile river. This became the type species of the genus.
The traditional circumscription of Acacia eventually contained approximately 1,300 species. However, evidence began to accumulate that the genus as described was not monophyletic. Queensland botanist Leslie Pedley proposed the subgenus Phyllodineae be renamed Racosperma and published the binomial names. This was taken up in New Zealand but generally not followed in Australia, where botanists declared more study was needed.
Eventually , consensus emerged that Acacia needed to be split as it was not monophyletic. This led to Australian botanists Bruce Maslin and Tony Orchard pushing for the retypification of the genus with an Australian species instead of the original African type species, an exception to traditional rules of priority that required ratification by the International Botanical Congress. That decision has been controversial, and debate continued, with some taxonomists (and many other biologists) deciding to continue to use the traditional Acacia sensu lato circumscription of the genus, However, a second International Botanical Congress has now confirmed the decision to apply the name Acacia to the mostly Australian plants, which some had been calling Racosperma, and which had formed the overwhelming majority of Acacia sensu lato. Debate continues regarding the traditional acacias of Africa, possibly placed in Senegalia and Vachellia, and some of the American species, possibly placed in Acaciella and Mariosousa.
Acacias belong to the subfamily Mimosoideae, the major clades of which may have formed in response to drying trends and fire regimes that accompanied increased seasonality during the late Oligocene to early Miocene (~25 mya). Pedley (1978), following Vassal (1972), viewed Acacia as comprising three large subgenera, but subsequently (1986) raised the rank of these groups to genera Acacia, Senegalia (s.l.) and Racosperma,
The plants often bear spines, especially those species growing in arid regions. These sometimes represent branches that have become short, hard, and pungent, though they sometimes represent leaf-stipules. Acacia armata is the kangaroo-thorn of Australia, and Acacia erioloba (syn. Acacia eriolobata) is the camelthorn of Africa.
Acacia seeds can be difficult to germinate. Research has found that immersing the seeds in various temperatures (usually around 80 °C (176 °F)) and manual seed coat chipping can improve growth to around 80%.Symbiosis
stipules]]
. An entry hole can be seen at the base of one of the spines of the largest domatia. From the MHNT]]
In the Central American bullthorn acacias—Acacia sphaerocephala, Acacia cornigera and Acacia collinsii — some of the spiny stipules are large, swollen and hollow. These afford shelter for several species of Pseudomyrmex'' ants, which feed on extrafloral nectaries on the leaf-stalk and small lipid-rich food-bodies at the tips of the leaflets called Beltian bodies. In return, the ants add protection to the plant against herbivores. Some species of ants will also remove competing plants around the acacia, cutting off the offending plants' leaves with their jaws and ultimately killing them. Other associated ant species appear to do nothing to benefit their hosts.
Similar mutualisms with ants occur on Acacia trees in Africa, such as the whistling thorn acacia. The acacias provide shelter for ants in similar swollen stipules and nectar in extrafloral nectaries for their symbiotic ants, such as Crematogaster mimosae. In turn, the ants protect the plant by attacking large mammalian herbivores and stem-boring beetles that damage the plant.
The predominantly herbivorous spider Bagheera kiplingi, which is found in Central America and Mexico, feeds on nubs at the tips of the acacia leaves, known as Beltian bodies, which contain high concentrations of protein. These nubs are produced by the acacia as part of a symbiotic relationship with certain species of ant, which also eat them.
Pests
In Australia, Acacia species are sometimes used as food plants by the larvae of hepialid moths of the genus Aenetus including A. ligniveren. These burrow horizontally into the trunk then vertically down. Other Lepidoptera larvae which have been recorded feeding on Acacia include brown-tail, Endoclita malabaricus and turnip moth. The leaf-mining larvae of some bucculatricid moths also feed on Acacia; Bucculatrix agilis feeds exclusively on Acacia horrida and Bucculatrix flexuosa feeds exclusively on Acacia nilotica.
Acacias contain a number of organic compounds that defend them from pests and grazing animals.
Uses
Use as human food
seeds]]
Acacia seeds are often used for food and a variety of other products.
In Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand, the feathery shoots of Acacia pennata (common name cha-om, ชะอม and su pout ywet in Burmese) are used in soups, curries, omelettes, and stir-fries.
Gum
Various species of acacia yield gum. True gum arabic is the product of Acacia senegal, abundant in dry tropical West Africa from Senegal to northern Nigeria.
Acacia nilotica (syn. Acacia arabica) is the gum arabic tree of India, but yields a gum inferior to the true gum arabic. Gum arabic is used in a wide variety of food products, including some soft drinks and confections.
The ancient Egyptians used acacia gum in paints.
]]
The gum of Acacia xanthophloea and Acacia karroo has a high sugar content and is sought out by the lesser bushbaby. Acacia karroo gum was once used for making confectionery and traded under the name "Cape Gum". It was also used medicinally to treat cattle suffering poisoning by Moraea species.
Uses in folk medicine
Acacia species have possible uses in folk medicine. A 19th-century Ethiopian medical text describes a potion made from an Ethiopian species (known as grar) mixed with the root of the tacha, then boiled, as a cure for rabies.
An astringent medicine high in tannins, called catechu or cutch, is procured from several species, but more especially from Senegalia catechu (syn. Acacia catechu), by boiling down the wood and evaporating the solution so as to get an extract. The catechu extract from A. catechu figures in the history of chemistry in giving its name to the catechin, catechol, and catecholamine chemical families ultimately derived from it.
Ornamental uses
A few species are widely grown as ornamentals in gardens; the most popular perhaps is A. dealbata (silver wattle), with its attractive glaucous to silvery leaves and bright yellow flowers; it is erroneously known as "mimosa" in some areas where it is cultivated, through confusion with the related genus Mimosa.
Another ornamental acacia is the fever tree. Southern European florists use A. baileyana, A. dealbata, A. pycnantha and A. retinodes as cut flowers and the common name there for them is mimosa.
Ornamental species of acacias are also used by homeowners and landscape architects for home security. The sharp thorns of some species are a deterrent to trespassing, and may prevent break-ins if planted under windows and near drainpipes. The aesthetic characteristics of acacia plants, in conjunction with their home security qualities, makes them a reasonable alternative to constructed fences and walls.
Perfume
]]
Acacia farnesiana is used in the perfume industry due to its strong fragrance. The use of acacia as a fragrance dates back centuries.
Symbolism and ritual
]]
Egyptian mythology has associated the acacia tree with characteristics of the tree of life, such as in the Myth of Osiris and Isis.
Several parts (mainly bark, root, and resin) of Acacia species are used to make incense for rituals. Acacia is used in incense mainly in India, Nepal, and China including in its Tibet region. Smoke from acacia bark is thought to keep demons and ghosts away and to put the gods in a good mood. Roots and resin from acacia are combined with rhododendron, acorus, cytisus, salvia, and some other components of incense. Both people and elephants like an alcoholic beverage made from acacia fruit.
According to Easton's Bible Dictionary, the acacia tree may be the "burning bush" (Exodus 3:2) which Moses encountered in the desert. Also, when God gave Moses the instructions for building the Tabernacle, he said to "make an ark" and "a table of acacia wood" (Exodus 25:10 & 23, Revised Standard Version). Also, in the Christian tradition, Christ's crown of thorns is thought to have been woven from acacia.
Acacia was used for Zulu warriors' iziQu (or isiKu) beads, which passed on through Robert Baden-Powell to the Scout movement's Wood Badge training award.
In Russia, Italy, and other countries, it is customary to present women with yellow mimosas (among other flowers) on International Women's Day (March 8). These "mimosas" may be from A. dealbata (silver wattle).
In 1918, May Gibbs, the popular Australian children's author, wrote the book 'Wattle Babies', in which a third-person narrator describes the lives of imaginary inhabitants of the Australian forests (the 'bush'). The main characters are the Wattle Babies, who are tiny people that look like acacia flowers and who interact with various forest creatures. Gibbs wrote "Wattle Babies are the sunshine of the Bush. In Winter, when the sky is grey and all the world seems cold, they put on their yellowest clothes and come out, for they have such cheerful hearts." Gibbs was referring to the fact that an abundance of acacias flower in August in Australia, in the midst of the southern hemisphere winter.
Tannin
The bark of various Australian species, known as wattles, is very rich in tannin and forms an important article of export; important species include A. pycnantha (golden wattle), A. decurrens (tan wattle), A. dealbata (silver wattle) and A. mearnsii (black wattle).
Black wattle is grown in plantations in South Africa and South America. The pods of A. nilotica (under the name of neb-neb), and of other African species, are also rich in tannin and used by tanners. In Yemen, the principal tannin substance was derived from the leaves of the salam-tree (Acacia etbaica), a tree known locally by the name qaraẓ (garadh). A bath solution of the crushed leaves of this tree, into which raw leather had been inserted for prolonged soaking, would take only 15 days for curing. The water and leaves, however, required changing after seven or eight days, and the leather needed to be turned over daily.Wood
wood]]
Some Acacia species are valuable as timber, such as A. melanoxylon (blackwood) from Australia, which attains a great size; its wood is used for furniture, and takes a high polish; and A. omalophylla (myall wood, also Australian), which yields a fragrant timber used for ornaments. A. seyal is thought to be the shittah-tree of the Bible, which supplied shittim-wood. According to the Book of Exodus, this was used in the construction of the Ark of the Covenant. A. koa from the Hawaiian Islands and A. heterophylla from Réunion are both excellent timber trees. Depending on abundance and regional culture, some Acacia species (e.g. A. fumosa) are traditionally used locally as firewoods. It is also used to make homes for different animals.
Pulpwood
In Indonesia (mainly in Sumatra) and in Malaysia (mainly in Sabah), plantations of A. mangium are being established to supply pulpwood to the paper industry.
Acacia wood pulp gives high opacity and below average bulk paper. This is suitable in lightweight offset papers used for Bibles and dictionaries. It is also used in paper tissue where it improves softness.
Land reclamation
Acacias can be planted for erosion control, especially after mining or construction damage.Ecological invasionFor the same reasons it is favored as an erosion-control plant, with its easy spreading and resilience, some varieties of acacia are potentially invasive species. At least fourteen Acacia species introduced to South Africa are categorized as invasive, due to their naturally aggressive propagation. One of the most globally significant invasive acacias is black wattle A. mearnsii'', which is taking over grasslands and abandoned agricultural areas worldwide, especially in moderate coastal and island regions where mild climate promotes its spread. Australian/New Zealand Weed Risk Assessment gives it a "high risk, score of 15" rating and it is considered one of the world's 100 most invasive species.
Extensive ecological studies should be performed before further introduction of acacia varieties, as this fast-growing genus, once introduced, spreads quickly and is extremely difficult to eradicate.
Phytochemistry
Cyanogenic glycosides
Nineteen different species of Acacia in the Americas contain cyanogenic glycosides, which, if exposed to an enzyme which specifically splits glycosides, can release hydrogen cyanide (HCN) in the "leaves". This sometimes results in the poisoning death of livestock.
If fresh plant material spontaneously produces 200 ppm or more HCN, then it is potentially toxic. This corresponds to about 7.5 μmol HCN per gram of fresh plant material. It turns out that, if acacia "leaves" lack the specific glycoside-splitting enzyme, then they may be less toxic than otherwise, even those containing significant quantities of cyanic glycosides.
Some Acacia species containing cyanogens include Acacia erioloba, A. cunninghamii, A. obtusifolia, A. sieberiana, and A. sieberiana var. woodiiFamous acaciasThe Arbre du Ténéré in Niger was the most isolated tree in the world, about from any other tree. The tree was knocked down by a truck driver in 1973.
In Nairobi, Kenya, the Thorn Tree Café is named after a Naivasha thorn tree (Acacia xanthophloea) in its centre. Travelers used to pin notes to others to the thorns of the tree. The current tree is the third of the same variety.
References
Further reading
*
*
* Shulgin, Alexander and Ann, TiHKAL the Continuation. Transform Press, 1997.
External links
* [http://www.worldwidewattle.com/ World Wide Wattle]
* [http://www.acacia-world.net/ Acacia-world]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20151110064020/http://waynesword.palomar.edu/plaug99.htm Wayne's Word] on "The Unforgettable Acacias"
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20090401222429/http://mulga.yage.net/acacia/ The genus Acacia and Entheogenic Tryptamines, with reference to Australian and related species, by mulga]
* [http://www.bookofherbs.com/a/Acacia_ruggs.htm A description of Acacia from Pomet's 1709 reference book, History of Druggs]
* [http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/ Dr. Duke's] Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20101227113726/http://www.flora.sa.gov.au/id_tool/acacia.html#Keys Flora identification tools from the State Herbarium of South Australia]
* [http://www.biochemj.org/bj/078/0834/0780834.pdf Tannins in Some Interrelated Wattles]
* [http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/FLORA/cgi/b98_list?genusAcacia&species List of Acacia Species in the U.S.]
* [http://www.fao.org/docrep/V5360E/v5360e0f.htm FAO Timber Properties of Various Acacia Species]
* [http://www.fao.org/docrep/006/ad317e/AD317E05.htm FAO Comparison of Various Acacia Species as Forage]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20070614021602/http://www.afip.org/vetpath/WSC/wsc98/98wsc21.htm Vet. Path. ResultsAFIP Wednesday Slide Conference – No. 21 February 24, 1999]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20070921100707/http://www.ilri.org/InfoServ/Webpub/Fulldocs/Browse_in_Africa/Chapter33.htm Acacia cyanophylla lindl as supplementary feed/for small stock in Libya]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20071012200235/http://smallstock.info/research/reports/R5732/NR08UE/B1701_2.HTM Description of Acacia Morphology]
<!-- http://www.aciar.gov.au/web.nsf/att/JFRN-6BN9EE/$file/mn115part2.pdf 404 page not found -->
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20160208042613/http://aciar.gov.au/files/node/619/mn115part1.pdf Nitrogen Fixation in Acacias]
*
* [https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12717361.200-antelope-activate-the-acacias-alarm-system-.html Acacia Alarm System]
*
Category:Excipients
Category:Medicinal plants
Category:Medicinal plants of Australia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acacia_sensu_lato | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.077907 |
1446 | Acapulco | | image_flag | image_seal
| image_shield = Escudo de Acapulco.svg
| image_map | mapsize 270px
| map_caption = Location of Acapulco within Guerrero
| pushpin_map = Mexico Guerrero#Mexico
| pushpin_mapsize = 270
| pushpin_map_caption =
<!-- Location ------------------>
| subdivision_type = Country
| subdivision_name = Mexico
| subdivision_type1 = State
| subdivision_name1 = Guerrero
| subdivision_type2 = Municipality
| subdivision_name2 = Acapulco, Guerrero
| government_footnotes | government_type
| leader_party = <small></small>
| leader_title = Municipal president
| leader_name = Abelina López
| leader_title1 = <!-- for places with, say, both a mayor and a city manager -->
| leader_name1 | leader_title2
| leader_name2 | established_title Founded
| established_date = March 12, 1550
| established_title2 = Municipal status
| established_date2 | established_title3
| established_date3 =
<!-- Area --------------------->
| area_magnitude | area_footnotes
| area_total_km2 = 1880.60
| area_land_km2 | area_water_km2
| area_water_percent | area_urban_km2 85
| area_metro_km2 = 3538.5
<!-- Population ----------------------->
| population_as_of = 2020 census
| population_footnotes | population_note
| population_total = 658609
| population_density_km2 = auto
| population_metro = 852,622
| population_demonyms = Acapulqueño (a)<br />Porteño (a)
<!-- GDP --------------->
| demographics_type1 = GDP (PPP, constant 2015 values)
| demographics1_footnotes | demographics1_title1 Year
| demographics1_info1 = 2023
| demographics1_title2 = Total
| demographics1_info2 $10.3 billion
| demographics1_title3 = Per capita
| demographics1_info3 = $10,100
<!-- General information --------------->
| timezone = CST
| utc_offset = −6
| coordinates
| elevation_point = of seat
| elevation_m = 30
<!-- Area/postal codes & others -------->
| postal_code_type = Postal codes
| postal_code = 39300–39937
| area_code = 744
| website =
| footnotes =
}}
Acapulco de Juárez (), commonly called Acapulco ( , ; It is a port of call for shipping and cruise lines running between Panama and San Francisco, California, United States. The city of Acapulco is the largest in the state, far larger than the state capital Chilpancingo. Acapulco is also Mexico's largest beach and balneario resort city. Acapulco de Juárez, Guerrero is the municipal seat of the municipality of Acapulco, Guerrero.
The city is one of Mexico's oldest beach resorts, coming into prominence in the 1940s through the 1960s as a getaway for Hollywood stars and millionaires. Acapulco was once a popular tourist resort, but due to a massive upsurge in gang violence and homicide numbers since 2014, Acapulco no longer attracts many foreign tourists, and most now only come from within Mexico itself. It is both the ninth deadliest city in Mexico and the tenth-deadliest city in the world as of 2022; the US government has warned its citizens not to travel there. In 2016 there were 918 murders, and the homicide rate was one of the highest in the world: 103 in every 100,000. In September 2018, the city's entire police force was disarmed by the military, due to suspicions that it had been infiltrated by drug gangs.
The resort area is divided into three parts: the north end of the bay and beyond is the "traditional" area, which encompasses the area from Parque Papagayo through the and onto the beaches of Caleta and Caletilla, the main part of the bay known as "" ('golden zone' in Spanish), where the famous in the mid-20th century vacationed, and the south end, "" ('diamond' in Spanish), which is dominated by newer luxury high-rise hotels and condominiums.
The name "Acapulco, Guerrero" comes from Nahuatl language Aca-pōl-co, and means "where the reeds were destroyed or washed away" or "at the big reeds", which inspired the city's seal, which is an Aztec-type glyph showing two hands breaking reeds.
16th century
: "Acapulco's Yope Indian, at the South Sea".]]
There are two stories about how Acapulco bay was discovered by Europeans. The first states that two years after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, Hernán Cortés sent explorers west to find gold. The explorers had subdued this area after 1523, and Captain Saavedra Cerón was authorized by Cortés to found a settlement here. The other states that the bay was discovered on December 13, 1526, by a small ship named the El Tepache Santiago captained by Santiago Guevara.
The galleon trade made its yearly run from the mid-16th century until the early 19th. The luxury items it brought to New Spain attracted the attention of English and Dutch pirates, such as Francis Drake, Henry Morgan and Thomas Cavendish, who called it "The Black Ship". A Dutch fleet invaded Acapulco in 1615, destroying much of the town before being driven off. The Fort of San Diego was built the following year to protect the port and the cargo of arriving ships. The fort was destroyed by an earthquake in 1776 and was rebuilt between 1778 and 1783.
At the beginning of the 19th century, King Charles IV declared Acapulco a Ciudad Official and it became an essential part of the Spanish Crown. However, not long after, the Mexican War of Independence began. In 1810, José María Morelos y Pavón attacked and burnt down the city, after he defeated royalist commander Francisco Parés at the Battle of Tres Palos. 20th century In 1911, revolutionary forces took over the main plaza of Acapulco. Much of the original hotel and trading infrastructure was built by a businessman named Albert B. Pullen from Corrigan, Texas, in the area now known as Old Acapulco. In 1933, Carlos Barnard started the first section of Hotel El Mirador, with 12 rooms on the cliffs of La Quebrada. Albert Pullen built the Las Americas Hotel. In the late 1930s, “La Fraccionadora de Acapulco, S.A.” (FASA), consisting of William Pullen, Anacleto Martínez, Juan M. Salcedo, and Wolf Schoenburg, who was especially instrumental, started tourism development in earnest.
In the mid-1940s, the first commercial wharf and warehouses were built.
From a population of only 4,000 or 5,000 in the 1940s, by the early 1960s, Acapulco had a population of about 50,000. In 1958, the Diocese of Acapulco was created by Pope Pius XII. It became an archdiocese in 1983.
During the 1960s and 1970s, new hotel resorts were built, and accommodation and transport were made cheaper. It was no longer necessary to be a millionaire to spend a holiday in Acapulco; the foreign and Mexican middle class could now afford to travel here. However, as more hotels were built in the south part of the bay, the old hotels of the 1950s lost their grandeur. For the 1968 Summer Olympics in neighboring Mexico City, Acapulco hosted the sailing (then yachting) events.
In the 1970s, there was a significant expansion of the port. In 1983, singer-songwriter Juan Gabriel wrote the song "Amor eterno", which pays homage to Acapulco. The song was first and most famously recorded by Rocío Dúrcal. Additionally, Acapulco is the hometown of actress, singer, and comedian Aída Pierce, who found fame during the 1980s, 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century.
The tollway known as the Ruta del Sol was built during the 1990s, crossing the mountains between Mexico City and Acapulco. The journey takes only about three-and-a-half hours, making Acapulco a favorite weekend destination for Mexico City inhabitants. It was in that time period that the economic impact of Acapulco as a tourist destination increased positively, and as a result new types of services emerged, such as the Colegio Nautilus. This educational project, backed by the state government, was created for the families of local and foreign investors and businessmen living in Acapulco who were in need of a bilingual and international education for their children.
The port continued to grow and in 1996, a new private company, API Acapulco, was created to manage operations. This consolidated operations and now Acapulco is the major port for car exports to the Pacific.
21st century
.]]
In the 21st century, the Mexican Drug War has had a negative effect on tourism in Acapulco as rival drug traffickers fight each other for the Guerrero coast route that brings drugs from South America as well as soldiers that have been fighting the cartels since 2006.
A major gun battle between 18 gunmen and soldiers took place in the summer of 2009 in the Old Acapulco seaside area, lasting hours and killing 16 of the gunmen and two soldiers. This came after the 2009 swine flu pandemic outbreak earlier in the year nearly paralyzed the Mexican economy, forcing hotels to give discounts to bring tourists back. The death of Arturo Beltrán Leyva in December 2009 resulted in infighting among different groups within the Beltrán Leyva cartel.
Gang violence continued to plague Acapulco through 2010 and into 2011, most notably with at least 15 dying in drug-related violence on March 13, 2010, and another 15 deaths on January 8, 2011. Among the first incident's dead were six members of the city police and the brother of an ex-mayor. In the second incident, the headless bodies of 15 young men were found dumped near the Plaza Sendero shopping center. On August 20, 2011, Mexican authorities reported that five headless bodies were found in Acapulco, three of which were placed in the city's main tourist area and two of which were cut into multiple pieces. On September 28, 2014, Mexican politician Braulio Zaragoza was gunned down at the El Mirador hotel in the city. He was the leader of the conservative opposition National Action Party (PAN) in southern Guerrero state. Several politicians have been targeted by drug cartels operating in the area. Investigations are under way, but no arrests have yet been made as of September 29. The insecurity due to individuals involved with drug cartels has cost the city of Acapulco its popularity among national and international tourists. It was stated by the Dirección General de Aeronáutica Civil that the number of international flyers coming to Acapulco decreased from 355,760 flyers registered in 2006 to 52,684 flyers in the year 2015, the number of international tourists flying to Acapulco dropped 85% in the interval of nine years. In 2018, the Mexican Armed Forces entered the city, placing it under occupation. The police department was disarmed after allegations of the latter being linked to the cartels.Hurricane OtisOn October 25, 2023, Hurricane Otis, a Category 5 hurricane with 1-minute sustained winds of , caused widespread devastation throughout the city while making landfall nearby.
Hurricane John
Hurricane John struck Acapulco and Mexico's Pacific coast in late September 2024 as a Category 3 hurricane, delivering powerful winds and extreme rainfall that led to widespread flooding and significant damage. Acapulco experienced nearly one meter of rainfall, resulting in submerged neighborhoods and serious disruptions. Roads became impassable due to landslides, and extensive power outages left tens of thousands without electricity across Guerrero and Oaxaca. Around 40,000 homes were damaged impacting over 150,000 residents. Geography
.]]
The city, located on the Pacific coast of Mexico in the state of Guerrero, is classified as one of the state's seven regions, dividing the rest of the Guerrero coast into the Costa Grande and the Costa Chica. Forty percent of the municipality is mountainous terrain; another forty percent is semi-flat; and the other twenty percent is flat. Elevation varies from sea level to . The highest peaks are Potrero, San Nicolas, and Alto Camarón. One major river runs through the municipality, the Papagayo, along with a number of arroyos (streams). There are also two small lagoons, Tres Palos and Coyuca, along with a number of thermal springs.
Climate
Acapulco features a tropical wet and dry climate (Köppen: Aw): hot with distinct wet and dry seasons, with more even temperatures between seasons than resorts farther north in Mexico, but this varies depending on altitude. The warmest areas are next to the sea where the city is. Pacific hurricanes and tropical storms are threats from May through November; notably, the city was struck directly by Category 5 Hurricane Otis on October 25, 2023, which caused extensive damage. The forested area tends to lose leaves during the winter dry season, with evergreen pines in the highest elevations. Fauna consists mostly of deer, small mammals, a wide variety of both land and seabirds, and marine animals such as turtles.
|source 2 NCEI
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The temperature of the sea is quite stable, with lows of between January – March, and a high of in August. These sea surface temperatures are much warmer than those further north along the Pacific coast, and indeed warmer than most places further south, as sea surface temperatures begin to decline with proximity to the Southern Hemisphere's Humboldt Current.
Government
As the seat of a municipality, the city of Acapulco is the government authority for over 700 other communities,
For the names and terms of some Acapulco mayors, you can check a List of municipal presidents of Acapulco.
Demographics
Population
Acapulco is the most populated city in the state of Guerrero, according to the results of the II Population and Housing Census 2010 carried out by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) with a census date of June 12, 2010, The city had until then a total population of 673,479 inhabitants, of that amount, 324,746 were men and 348,733 women. It is considered the twenty-second most populous city in Mexico and the tenth most populous metropolitan area in Mexico. It is also the city with the highest concentration of population of the homonymous municipality, representing 85.25 percent of the 789,971 inhabitants. In the 2020 census of 658,609 people where counted in the locality and 779,566 in the municipality of Acapulco, a small drop from the last census.
The metropolitan area of Acapulco is made up of six towns in the municipality of Acapulco de Juárez and four in the municipality of Coyuca de Benítez. In agreement with the last count and official delimitation realized in 2010 altogether by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, the National Council of Population and the Secretariat of Social Development, the metropolitan area of Acapulco grouped a total of 863,431 inhabitants in a surface of 3,538.5 km<sup>2</sup>, which placed it as the tenth most populated district in Mexico.
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in the background.]]
Acapulco's main attraction is its nightlife, as it has been for many decades. Nightclubs change names and owners frequently.
For example, Baby 'O has been open to the national and international public since 1976 and different celebrities have visited their installations such as Mexican singer Luis Miguel, Bono from U2 and Sylvester Stallone. Another nightclub is Palladium, located in the Escénica Avenue, the location gives the nightclub a view of the Santa Lucia Bay at night. Various DJs have had performances in Palladium among them DVBBS, Tom Swoon, Nervo and Junkie KID.
Informal lobby or poolside cocktail bars often offer free live entertainment. In addition, there is the beach bar zone, where younger crowds go. These are located along the Costera road, face the ocean and feature techno or alternative rock. Most are concentrated between the Fiesta Americana and Continental Plaza hotels. These places tend to open earlier and have more informal dress. There is a bungee jump in this area as well.
.]]
Another attraction at Acapulco is the La Quebrada Cliff Divers. Today the divers are professionals,
There are a number of beaches in the Acapulco Bay and the immediate coastline. In the bay proper there are the La Angosta (in the Quebrada), Caleta, Caletilla, Dominguillo, Tlacopanocha, Hornos, Hornitos, Honda, Tamarindo, Condesa, Guitarrón, Icacos, Playuela, Playuelilla and Playa del Secreto. In the adjoining, smaller Bay of Puerto Marqués there is Pichilingue, Las Brisas, and Playa Roqueta. Facing open ocean just northwest of the bays is Pie de la Cuesta and southeast are Playa Revolcadero, Playa Aeromar, Playa Encantada and Barra Vieja. Two lagoons are in the area, Coyuca to the northwest of Acapulco Bay and Tres Palos to the southeast. Both lagoons have mangroves and offer boat tours. Tres Palos also has sea turtle nesting areas which are protected.
In addition to sunbathing, the beaches around the bay offer a number of services, such as boat rentals, boat tours, horseback riding, scuba diving and other aquatic sports. One popular cruise is from Caletilla Beach to Roqueta Island, which has places to snorkel, have lunch, and a lighthouse. There is also an underwater statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe here, created in 1958 by Armando Quesado in memory of a group of divers who died here. Many of the scuba-diving tours come to this area as well, where there are sunken ships, sea mountains, and cave rock formations. Another popular activity is deep-sea fishing. The major attraction is sail fishing. Fish caught here have weighed between 89 and 200 pounds. Sailfish are so plentiful that boat captains have been known to bet with a potential customer that if he does not catch anything, the trip is free. Today the fort serves as the Museo Histórico de Acapulco (Acapulco Historical Museum), which shows the port's history from the pre-Hispanic period until independence. There are temporary exhibits as well.
The El Rollo Acapulco is a sea-life and aquatic park located on Costera Miguel Aleman. It offers wave pools, water slides and water toboggans. There are also dolphin shows daily and a swim with dolphins program. The center mostly caters to children.
The annual French Festival takes place throughout Acapulco city and offers a multitude of events that cement cultural links between Mexico and France. The main features are a fashion show and a gourmet food fair. The Cinépolis Galerías Diana and the Teatro Juan Ruíz de Alarcón present French and French literary figures who give talks on their specialised subjects. Even some of the local nightclubs feature French DJs. Other festivals celebrated here include Carnival, the feast of San Isidro Labrador on 15 May, and in November, a crafts and livestock fair called the Nao de China.
Acapulco also has a bullring, called the Plaza de Toros, near Caletilla Beach. The season runs during the winter and is called the Fiesta Brava. The main reason students head to Mexico is the drinking age of 18 years (versus 21 for the United States), something that has been marketed by tour operators along with the sun and ocean. This has become attractive since the 1990s, especially since more traditional spring break places such as Daytona Beach, Florida, have enacted restrictions on drinking and other behaviors. This legislation has pushed spring break tourism to various parts of Mexico, with Acapulco as one of the top destinations.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Cancún had been favored as the spring break destination of choice. However, Cancún has taken some steps to control the reckless behavior associated with the event, and students have been looking for someplace new. This led many more to choose Acapulco, in spite of the fact that for many travelers, the flight is longer and more expensive than to Cancún. Many were attracted by the glitzy hotels on the south side and Acapulco's famous nightlife. In 2008, 22,500 students came to Acapulco for spring break. Hotels did not get that many in 2009, due mostly to the economic situation in the United States, and partially because of scares of drug-related violence.
In February 2009, the US State Department issued a travel alert directed at college students planning spring break trips to Acapulco. The warning—a result of violent activity springing from Mexico's drug cartel débâcle—took college campuses by storm, with some schools going so far as to warn their students about the risks of travel to Mexico over spring break. Bill O'Reilly devoted a segment of his show, ''The O'Reilly Factor'', to urge students to stay away from Acapulco. However, no incidents of violence against travelers on spring break were reported.
Transportation
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Nine passenger airlines, including four international ones, fly to Acapulco International Airport. In the city, there are many buses and taxi services one can take to get from place to place, but most of the locals choose to walk to their destinations. However, an important mode of transportation is the government-subsidized 'Colectivo' cab system. These cabs cost 13 pesos per person to ride, but they are not private. The driver will pick up more passengers as long as seats are available, and will transport them to their destination based on first-come, first-served rules. The colectivos each travel a designated area of the city, the three main ones being Costera, Colosio, Coloso, or a mixture of the three. Coloso cabs travel mainly to old Acapulco. Colosio cabs travel through most of the tourist area of Acapulco. Costera cabs drive up and down the coast of Acapulco, where most of the hotels for visitors are located, but which includes some of old Acapulco. Drivers have discretion over destinations; some are willing to travel to the other designated areas, especially during slow periods of the day.
The bus system is highly complex and can be rather confusing to an outsider. As far as transportation goes, it is the cheapest form, other than walking, in Acapulco. The most expensive buses have air conditioning, while the cheaper buses do not. For tourists, the Acapulco city government has established a system of yellow buses with Acapulco painted on the side of them. These buses are not for tourists only, but are certainly the nicest and most uniform of the bus systems. These buses travel the tourist section of Acapulco, driving up and down the coast. There are buses with specific routes and destinations, generally written on their windshields or shouted out by a barker riding in the front seat. Perhaps the most unusual thing about the privately operated buses is the fact that they are all highly decorated and personalized, with decals and home-made interior designs that range from comic book scenes, to pornography, and even to "Hello Kitty" themes.
The bus network was simplified on 25 June 2016 with the implementation of the . The bus rapid transit system spans , with 16 stations spread throughout the city of Acapulco along five routes. Boarding is sped by pre- payment at stations. International relations Consulates {| class"wikitable" style="text-align:left; background:white; width:50%;"
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Twin towns and partner cities
International
* Manila, 1969
* Netanya, 1980
* Santa Marta, 2005
* Manta, 2005
* Sosúa, 2012
* Callao, 2014
* Cartagena, 2017
* Eilat, 2017
Domestic
* Teocaltiche, 2005
* Guanajuato City, 2010
* Boca del Río, 2012
* Morelia, 2013UNESCO World Heritage Site nominations
In 2014, the idea to nominate the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade Route was initiated by the Mexican ambassador to UNESCO with the Filipino ambassador to UNESCO.
An Experts' Roundtable Meeting was held at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) on April 23, 2015, as part of the preparation of the Philippines for the possible transnational nomination of the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade Route to the World Heritage List. The nomination will be made jointly with Mexico.
The following are the experts and the topics they discussed during the roundtable meeting: Dr. Celestina Boncan on the Tornaviaje; Dr. Mary Jane A. Bolunia on Shipyards in the Bicol Region; Mr. Sheldon Clyde Jago-on, Bobby Orillaneda, and Ligaya Lacsina on Underwater Archaeology; Dr. Leovino Garcia on Maps and Cartography; Fr. Rene Javellana, S.J. on Fortifications in the Philippines; Felice Sta. Maria on Food; Dr. Fernando Zialcita on Textile; and Regalado Trota Jose on Historical Dimension. The papers presented and discussed during the roundtable meeting will be synthesized into a working document to establish the route's Outstanding Universal Value.
The Mexican side reiterated that they will also follow suit with the preparations for the route's nomination.
Spain has also backed the nomination of the Manila-Acapulco Trade Route in the UNESCO World Heritage Site list and has also suggested the Archives of the Manila-Acapulco Galleons to be nominated as part of a separate UNESCO list, the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
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| style="font-weight:bold;" | The Historic ManilaAcapulco Galleon Trade Route
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See also
* Acapulco (municipality)
* Acapulco Chair
* Triangle of the Sun
* Loco in Acapulco
References
Bibliography
External links
*
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Category:1550 establishments in the Spanish Empire
Category:Populated coastal places in Mexico
Category:Beaches of Guerrero
Category:Populated places established in 1525
Category:Populated places in Guerrero
Category:Port cities and towns on the Mexican Pacific coast
Category:Seaside resorts in Mexico | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acapulco | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.125344 |
1448 | August 16 | Events
Pre-1600
*1 BC – Wang Mang consolidates his power in China and is declared marshal of state. Emperor Ai of Han, who died the previous day, had no heirs.
* 942 – Start of the four-day Battle of al-Mada'in, between the Hamdanids of Mosul and the Baridis of Basra over control of the Abbasid capital, Baghdad.
* 963 – Nikephoros II Phokas is crowned emperor of the Byzantine Empire.
*1328 – The House of Gonzaga seizes power in the Duchy of Mantua, and will rule until 1708.
*1513 – Battle of the Spurs (Battle of Guinegate): King Henry VIII of England and his Imperial allies defeat French Forces who are then forced to retreat.
*1570 – The Principality of Transylvania is established after John II Zápolya renounces his claim as King of Hungary in the Treaty of Speyer.
1601–1900
*1652 – Battle of Plymouth: Inconclusive naval action between the fleets of Michiel de Ruyter and George Ayscue in the First Anglo-Dutch War.
*1777 – American Revolutionary War: The Americans led by General John Stark rout British and Brunswick troops under Friedrich Baum at the Battle of Bennington in Walloomsac, New York.
*1780 – American Revolutionary War: Battle of Camden: The British defeat the Americans near Camden, South Carolina.
*1792 – Maximilien de Robespierre presents the petition of the Commune of Paris to the Legislative Assembly, which demanded the formation of a revolutionary tribunal.
*1793 – French Revolution: A levée en masse is decreed by the National Convention.
*1812 – War of 1812: American General William Hull surrenders Fort Detroit without a fight to the British Army.
*1819 – Peterloo Massacre: Seventeen people die and over 600 are injured in cavalry charges at a public meeting at St. Peter's Field, Manchester, England.
*1841 – U.S. President John Tyler vetoes a bill which called for the re-establishment of the Second Bank of the United States. Enraged Whig Party members riot outside the White House in the most violent demonstration on White House grounds in U.S. history.
*1844 – Governor-general of the Philippines Narciso Claveria, signs a decree to reform the country's calendar by skipping Tuesday, December 31, as a solution to anomalies that had existed since Ferdinand Magellan's arrival in 1521.
*1858 – U.S. President James Buchanan inaugurates the new transatlantic telegraph cable by exchanging greetings with Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. However, a weak signal forces a shutdown of the service in a few weeks.
*1859 – The Grand Duchy of Tuscany formally deposes the exiled House of Lorraine.
*1863 – The Dominican Restoration War begins when Gregorio Luperón raises the Dominican flag in Santo Domingo after Spain had recolonized the country.
*1869 – Battle of Acosta Ñu: A Paraguayan battalion largely made up of children is massacred by the Brazilian Army during the Paraguayan War.
*1870 – Franco-Prussian War: The Battle of Mars-la-Tour is fought, resulting in a Prussian victory.
*1876 – Richard Wagner's Siegfried, the penultimate opera in his Ring cycle, is premiered at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.
*1891 – The Basilica of San Sebastian, Manila, the first all-steel church in Asia, is officially inaugurated and blessed.
*1896 – Skookum Jim Mason, George Carmack and Dawson Charlie discover gold in a tributary of the Klondike River in Canada, setting off the Klondike Gold Rush.
*1900 – The Battle of Elands River during the Second Boer War ends after a 13-day siege is lifted by the British. The battle had begun when a force of between 2,000 and 3,000 Boers had surrounded a force of 500 Australians, Rhodesians, Canadians and British soldiers at a supply dump at Brakfontein Drift.
1901–present
*1906 – The 8.2 Valparaíso earthquake hits central Chile, killing 3,882 people.
*1913 – Tōhoku Imperial University of Japan (modern day Tohoku University) becomes the first university in Japan to admit female students.
* 1913 – Completion of the Royal Navy battlecruiser .
*1916 – The Migratory Bird Treaty between Canada and the United States is signed.
*1918 – The Battle of Lake Baikal was fought between the Czechoslovak Legion and the Red Army.
*1920 – Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians is hit on the head by a fastball thrown by Carl Mays of the New York Yankees. Next day, Chapman will become the second player to die from injuries sustained in a Major League Baseball game.
* 1920 – The congress of the Communist Party of Bukhara opens. The congress would call for armed revolution.
* 1920 – Polish–Soviet War: The Battle of Radzymin concludes; the Soviet Red Army is forced to turn away from Warsaw.
*1923 – The United Kingdom gives the name "Ross Dependency" to part of its claimed Antarctic territory and makes the Governor-General of the Dominion of New Zealand its administrator.
*1927 – The Dole Air Race begins from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii, during which six out of the eight participating planes crash or disappear.
*1929 – The 1929 Palestine riots break out in Mandatory Palestine between Palestinian Arabs and Jews and continue until the end of the month. In total, 133 Jews and 116 Arabs are killed.
*1930 – The first color sound cartoon, Fiddlesticks, is released by Ub Iwerks.
* 1930 – The first British Empire Games are opened in Hamilton, Ontario, by the Governor General of Canada, the Viscount Willingdon.
*1933 – Christie Pits riot takes place in Toronto, Ontario.
*1942 – World War II: US Navy L-class blimp L-8 drifts in from the Pacific and eventually crashes in Daly City, California. The two-man crew cannot be found.
*1944 – First flight of a jet with forward-swept wings, the Junkers Ju 287.
*1945 – The National Representatives' Congress, the precursor of the current National Assembly of Vietnam, convenes in Sơn Dương.
*1946 – Mass riots in Kolkata begin; more than 4,000 people would be killed in 72 hours.
* 1946 – The All Hyderabad Trade Union Congress is founded in Secunderabad.
*1954 – The first issue of Sports Illustrated is published.
*1960 – Cyprus gains its independence from the United Kingdom.
* 1960 – Joseph Kittinger parachutes from a balloon over New Mexico, United States, at , setting three records that held until 2012: High-altitude jump, free fall, and highest speed by a human without an aircraft.
*1964 – Vietnam War: A ''coup d'état'' replaces Dương Văn Minh with General Nguyễn Khánh as President of South Vietnam. A new constitution is established with aid from the U.S. Embassy.
*1966 – Vietnam War: The House Un-American Activities Committee begins investigations of Americans who have aided the Viet Cong. The committee intends to introduce legislation making these activities illegal. Anti-war demonstrators disrupt the meeting and 50 people are arrested.
*1972 – In an unsuccessful coup d'état attempt, the Royal Moroccan Air Force fires upon Hassan II of Morocco's plane while he is traveling back to Rabat.
*1975 – Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam symbolically hands over land to the Gurindji people after the eight-year Wave Hill walk-off, a landmark event in the history of Indigenous land rights in Australia, commemorated in a 1991 song by Paul Kelly and an annual celebration.
*1987 – Northwest Airlines Flight 255, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, crashes after takeoff in Detroit, Michigan, killing 154 of the 155 on board, plus two people on the ground.
*1989 – A solar particle event affects computers at the Toronto Stock Exchange, forcing a halt to trading.
*1991 – Indian Airlines Flight 257, a Boeing 737-200, crashes during approach to Imphal Airport, killing all 69 people on board.
*2005 – West Caribbean Airways Flight 708, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, crashes in Machiques, Venezuela, killing all 160 people on board.
*2008 – The Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago is topped off at , at the time becoming the world's highest residence above ground-level.
*2010 – AIRES Flight 8250 crashes at Gustavo Rojas Pinilla International Airport in San Andrés, San Andrés y Providencia, Colombia, killing two people.
*2012 – South African police fatally shoot 34 miners and wound 78 more during an industrial dispute at Marikana near Rustenburg.
*2013 – The ferry St. Thomas Aquinas collides with a cargo ship and sinks at Cebu, Philippines, killing 61 people with 59 others missing.
*2015 – More than 96 people are killed and hundreds injured following a series of air-raids by the Syrian Arab Air Force on the rebel-held market town of Douma.
* 2015 – Trigana Air Flight 267, an ATR 42, crashes in Oksibl, Bintang Mountains Regency, killing all 54 people on board.
*2020 – The August Complex fire in California burns more than one million acres of land.
Births
Pre-1600
*1355 – Philippa, 5th Countess of Ulster (d. 1382)
*1378 – Hongxi Emperor of China (d. 1425)
*1401 – Jacqueline, Countess of Hainaut (d. 1436)
*1557 – Agostino Carracci, Italian painter and etcher (d. 1602)
*1565 – Christina, Grand Duchess of Tuscany (d. 1637)
*1573 – Anne of Austria, Queen of Poland (d. 1598)
1601–1900
*1637 – Countess Emilie Juliane of Barby-Mühlingen (d. 1706)
*1645 – Jean de La Bruyère, French philosopher and author (d. 1696)
*1650 – Vincenzo Coronelli, Italian monk, cosmographer, and cartographer (d. 1718)
*1682 – Louis, Duke of Burgundy (d. 1712)
*1744 – Pierre Méchain, French astronomer and surveyor (d. 1804)
*1761 – Yevstigney Fomin, Russian pianist and composer (d. 1800)
*1815 – John Bosco, Italian priest and educator (d. 1888)
*1816 – Octavia Taylor, daughter of Zachary Taylor (d. 1820)
*1816 – Sara Prinsep, British salon organiser (d. 1959)
*1820 – Andrew Rainsford Wetmore, Canadian lawyer and politician, 1st Premier of New Brunswick (d. 1892)
*1821 – Arthur Cayley, English mathematician and academic (d. 1895)
*1824 – John Chisum, American cattle baron (d. 1884)
*1831 – John Jones Ross, Canadian lawyer and politician, 7th Premier of Quebec (d. 1901)
*1832 – Wilhelm Wundt, German physician, psychologist, and physiologist (d. 1920)
*1842 – Jakob Rosanes, Ukrainian-German mathematician, chess player, and academic (d. 1922)
*1845 – Gabriel Lippmann, Luxembourger-French physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1921)
*1848 – Vladimir Sukhomlinov, Russian general (d. 1926)
*1855 – James McGowen, Australian politician, 18th Premier of New South Wales (d. 1922)
*1856 – Aparicio Saravia, Uruguayan general and politician (d. 1904)
*1858 – Arthur Achleitner, German author (d. 1927)
*1860 – Martin Hawke, 7th Baron Hawke, English-Scottish cricketer (d. 1938)
* 1860 – Jules Laforgue, Uruguayan-French poet and author (d. 1887)
*1862 – Amos Alonzo Stagg, American baseball player and coach (d. 1965)
*1864 – Elsie Inglis, Scottish surgeon and suffragette (d. 1917)
*1865 – Mary Gilmore, Australian socialist, poet and journalist (d. 1962)
*1868 – Bernarr Macfadden, American bodybuilder and publisher, founded Macfadden Publications (d. 1955)
*1876 – Ivan Bilibin, Russian illustrator and stage designer (d. 1942)
*1877 – Roque Ruaño, Spanish priest and engineer (d. 1935)
*1882 – Désiré Mérchez, French swimmer and water polo player (d. 1968)
*1884 – Hugo Gernsback, Luxembourger-American author and publisher (d. 1967)
*1888 – T. E. Lawrence, British colonel, diplomat, writer and archaeologist (d. 1935)
* 1888 – Armand J. Piron, American violinist, composer, and bandleader (d. 1943)
*1892 – Hal Foster, Canadian-American author and illustrator (d. 1982)
* 1892 – Otto Messmer, American cartoonist and animator, co-created Felix the Cat (d. 1983)
*1894 – George Meany, American plumber and labor leader (d. 1980)
*1895 – Albert Cohen, Greek-Swiss author and playwright (d. 1981)
* 1895 – Liane Haid, Austrian-Swiss actress and singer (d. 2000)
* 1895 – Arthur Rose Eldred, First Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America (d. 1951)
*1900 – Ida Browne, Australian geologist and palaeontologist (d. 1976)
1901–present
*1902 – Georgette Heyer, English author (d. 1974)
* 1902 – Wallace Thurman, American author and playwright (d. 1934)
*1904 – Minoru Genda, Japanese general, pilot, and politician (d. 1989)
* 1904 – Wendell Meredith Stanley, American biochemist and virologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1971)
*1908 – Orlando Cole, American cellist and educator (d. 2010)
* 1908 – William Keepers Maxwell, Jr., American editor, novelist, short story writer, and essayist (d. 2000)
*1909 – Paul Callaway, American organist and conductor (d. 1995)
*1910 – Gloria Blondell, American actress (d. 1986)
* 1910 – Mae Clarke, American actress (d. 1992)
*1911 – E. F. Schumacher, German economist and statistician (d. 1977)
*1912 – Ted Drake, English footballer and manager (d. 1995)
*1913 – Menachem Begin, Belarusian-Israeli politician, Prime Minister of Israel, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1992)
*1915 – Al Hibbler, American baritone singer (d. 2001)
*1916 – Iggy Katona, American race car driver (d. 2003)
*1917 – Matt Christopher, American author (d. 1997)
* 1917 – Roque Cordero, Panamanian composer and educator (d. 2008)
*1919 – Karl-Heinz Euling, German captain (d. 2014)
*1920 – Charles Bukowski, German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer (d. 1994)
*1922 – James Casey, English comedian, radio scriptwriter and producer (d. 2011)
* 1922 – Ernie Freeman, American pianist and bandleader (d. 2001)
*1923 – Millôr Fernandes, Brazilian journalist and playwright (d. 2012)
*1924 – Fess Parker, American actor (d. 2010)
* 1924 – Inez Voyce, American baseball player (d. 2022)
*1925 – Willie Jones, American baseball player (d. 1983)
* 1925 – Mal Waldron, American pianist and composer (d. 2002)
*1927 – Lois Nettleton, American actress (d. 2008)
*1928 – Ann Blyth, American actress and singer
* 1928 – Eydie Gormé, American singer (d. 2013)
* 1928 – Ara Güler, Turkish photographer and journalist (d. 2018)
* 1928 – Eddie Kirkland, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2011)
* 1928 – Wyatt Tee Walker, American pastor, theologian, and activist (d. 2018)
*1929 – Bill Evans, American pianist and composer (d. 1980)
* 1929 – Helmut Rahn, German footballer (d. 2003)
* 1929 – Fritz Von Erich, American wrestler and trainer (d. 1997)
*1930 – Robert Culp, American actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 2010)
* 1930 – Frank Gifford, American football player, sportscaster, and actor (d. 2015)
* 1930 – Leslie Manigat, Haitian educator and politician, 43rd President of Haiti (d. 2014)
* 1930 – Flor Silvestre, Mexican singer and actress (d. 2020)
*1933 – Reiner Kunze, German poet and translator
* 1933 – Tom Maschler, English author and publisher (d. 2020)
* 1933 – Julie Newmar, American actress
* 1934 – Diana Wynne Jones, English author (d. 2011)
* 1934 – Douglas Kirkland, Canadian-American photographer (d. 2022)
* 1934 – Ketty Lester, American singer and actress
* 1934 – Sam Trimble, Australian cricketer (d. 2019)
*1935 – Cliff Fletcher, Canadian businessman
* 1935 – Andreas Stamatiadis, Greek footballer and coach
*1936 – Anita Gillette, American actress and singer
*1946 – Masoud Barzani, Iranian-Kurdish politician, President of Iraqi Kurdistan
* 1946 – Lesley Ann Warren, American actress
* 1958 – Angela Bassett, American actress
* 1958 – José Luis Clerc, Argentinian tennis player and coach
*1959 – Marc Sergeant, Belgian cyclist and manager
*1960 – Rosita Baltazar, Belizean choreographer, dancer, and dance instructor (d. 2015)
* 1960 – Timothy Hutton, American actor, producer and director
*1963 – Aloísio Pires Alves, Brazilian footballer and manager
* 1963 – Christine Cavanaugh, American voice artist (d. 2014)
*1964 – Jimmy Arias, American tennis player and sportscaster
*1966 – Eddie Olczyk, American ice hockey player, coach, and commentator
*1967 – Mark Coyne, Australian rugby league player
* 1967 – Ulrika Jonsson, Swedish journalist, actress, and author
*1968 – Arvind Kejriwal, Indian civil servant and politician, 7th Chief Minister of Delhi
* 1968 – Andy Milder, American actor
* 1972 – Emily Strayer, American singer and musician
* 1974 – Didier Cuche, Swiss skier
* 1974 – Krisztina Egerszegi, Hungarian swimmer
* 1974 – Iván Hurtado, Ecuadorian footballer and politician
* 1974 – Ryan Longwell, American football player
*1975 – Didier Agathe, French footballer
* 1975 – Jonatan Johansson, Finnish footballer, coach, and manager
* 1975 – George Stults, American actor
*1979 – Paul Gallacher, Scottish footballer
* 1979 – Ian Moran, Australian cricketer
*1980 – Vanessa Carlton, American singer-songwriter
* 1980 – Bob Hardy, English bass player
* 1980 – Emerson Ramos Borges, Brazilian footballer
* 1980 – Piet Rooijakkers, Dutch cyclist
*1981 – Roque Santa Cruz, Paraguayan footballer
*1982 – Cam Gigandet, American actor
* 1984 – Konstantin Vassiljev, Estonian footballer
*1985 – Cristin Milioti, American actress
* 1986 – Shawn Pyfrom, American actor
* 1987 – Eri Kitamura, Japanese voice actress and singer.
*1988 – Ismaïl Aissati, Moroccan footballer
* 1988 – Ryan Kerrigan, American football player
* 1988 – Rumer Willis, American actress
* 1989 – Wang Hao, Chinese race walker
* 1989 – Moussa Sissoko, French footballer
*1990 – Godfrey Oboabona, Nigerian footballer
*1991 – José Eduardo de Araújo, Brazilian footballer
* 1991 – Evanna Lynch, Irish actress
* 1991 – Young Thug, American rapper, singer and songwriter
*1992 – Diego Schwartzman, Argentinian tennis player
*1993 – Cameron Monaghan, American actor and model
*1996 – Caeleb Dressel, American swimmer
*1997 – Greyson Chance, American musician
*1999 – Karen Chen, American figure skater
*2001 – Jannik Sinner, Italian tennis player
<!--Please do not add yourself, non-notable people, fictional characters, or people without Wikipedia articles to this list. No red links, please. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence. If there are multiple people in the same birth year, put them in alphabetical order. Do not rely on "this year in history" websites for accurate date information.-->
Deaths
Pre-1600
*AD 79 – Empress Ma, Chinese Han dynasty consort (b. 40)
* 856 – Theutbald I, bishop of Langres
* 963 – Marianos Argyros, Byzantine general (b. 944)
*1027 – George I of Georgia (b. 998)
*1153 – Bernard de Tremelay, fourth Grand Master of the Knights Templar
*1225 – Hōjō Masako, Japanese regent and onna-bugeisha (b. 1156)
*1258 – Theodore II Laskaris, Byzantine-Greek emperor (b. 1222)
*1285 – Philip I, Count of Savoy (b. 1207)
*1297 – John II of Trebizond (b. 1262)
*1327 – Roch, French saint (b. 1295)
*1339 – Azzone Visconti, founder of the state of Milan (b. 1302)
*1358 – Albert II, Duke of Austria (b. 1298)
*1419 – Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia (b. 1361)
*1443 – Ashikaga Yoshikatsu, Japanese shōgun (b. 1434)
*1492 – Beatrice of Silva, Dominican nun
*1518 – Loyset Compère, French composer (b. 1445)
*1532 – John, Elector of Saxony (b. 1468)
1601–1900
*1661 – Thomas Fuller, English historian and author (b. 1608)
*1678 – Andrew Marvell, English poet and author (b. 1621)
*1705 – Jacob Bernoulli, Swiss mathematician and theorist (b. 1654)
*1733 – Matthew Tindal, English philosopher and author (b. 1657)
*1791 – Charles-François de Broglie, marquis de Ruffec, French soldier and diplomat (b. 1719)
*1836 – Marc-Antoine Parseval, French mathematician and theorist (b. 1755)
*1855 – Henry Colburn, English publisher (b. 1785)
*1861 – Ranavalona I, Queen consort of Kingdom of Madagascar and then sovereign (b. 1778)
*1878 – Richard Upjohn, English-American architect (b. 1802)
*1886 – Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Indian mystic and philosopher (b. 1836)
*1887 – Webster Paulson, English civil engineer (b. 1837)
*1888 – John Pemberton, American pharmacist and chemist, invented Coca-Cola (b. 1831)
*1893 – Jean-Martin Charcot, French neurologist and academic (b. 1825)
*1899 – Robert Bunsen, German chemist and academic (b. 1811)
*1900 – José Maria de Eça de Queirós, Portuguese journalist and author (b. 1845)
1901–present
*1904 – Prentiss Ingraham, American soldier and author (b. 1843)
*1911 – Patrick Francis Moran, Irish-Australian cardinal (b. 1830)
*1914 – Carl Theodor Schulz, German-Norwegian gardener (b. 1835)
*1916 – George Scott, English footballer (b. 1885)
*1920 – Henry Daglish, Australian politician, Premier of Western Australia (b. 1866)
*1921 – Peter I of Serbia (b. 1844)
*1938 – Andrej Hlinka, Slovak priest, journalist, and politician (b. 1864)
* 1938 – Robert Johnson, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1911)
*1945 – Takijirō Ōnishi, Japanese admiral (b. 1891)
*1948 – Babe Ruth, American baseball player and coach (b. 1895)
*1949 – Margaret Mitchell, American journalist and author (b. 1900)
*1952 – Lydia Field Emmet, American painter and academic (b. 1866)
*1956 – Bela Lugosi, Hungarian-American actor (b. 1882)
*1957 – Irving Langmuir, American chemist and physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1881)
*1958 – Jacob M. Lomakin, Soviet Consul General in New York City, journalist and economist (b. 1904)
*1959 – William Halsey, Jr., American admiral (b. 1882)
* 1959 – Wanda Landowska, Polish-French harpsichord player (b. 1879)
*1961 – Abdul Haq, Pakistani linguist and scholar (b. 1870)
*1963 – Joan Eardley, British artist (b. 1921)
*1971 – Spyros Skouras, Greek-American businessman (b. 1893)
*1972 – Pierre Brasseur, French actor and screenwriter (b. 1905)
*1973 – Selman Waksman, Ukrainian-American biochemist and microbiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1888)
*1977 – Elvis Presley, American singer and actor (b. 1935)
*1978 – Alidius Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer, Dutch soldier and politician, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies (b. 1888)
*1979 – John Diefenbaker, Canadian lawyer and politician, 13th Prime Minister of Canada (b. 1895)
*1983 – Earl Averill, American baseball player (b. 1902)
*1984 – Duško Radović, Serbian children's writer, poet, journalist, aphorist and TV editor (b. 1922)
*1986 – Ronnie Aird, English cricketer and administrator (b. 1902)
* 1986 – Jaime Sáenz, Bolivian author and poet (b. 1921)
*1989 – Amanda Blake, American actress (b. 1929)
*1990 – Pat O'Connor, New Zealand wrestler and trainer (b. 1925)
*1991 – Luigi Zampa, Italian director and screenwriter (b. 1905)
*1992 – Mark Heard, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1951)
*1993 – Stewart Granger, English-American actor (b. 1913)
*1997 – Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Pakistani musician and Qawwali singer (b. 1948)
* 1997 – Sultan Ahmad Nanupuri, Bangladeshi Islamic scholar and teacher (b. 1914)
*1998 – Phil Leeds, American actor (b. 1916)
* 1998 – Dorothy West, American journalist and author (b. 1907)
*2002 – Abu Nidal, Palestinian terrorist leader (b. 1937)
* 2002 – Jeff Corey, American actor (b. 1914)
* 2002 – John Roseboro, American baseball player and coach (b. 1933)
*2003 – Idi Amin, Ugandan field marshal and politician, 3rd President of Uganda (b. 1928)
*2004 – Ivan Hlinka, Czech ice hockey player and coach (b. 1950)
* 2004 – Balanadarajah Iyer, Sri Lankan journalist and poet (b. 1957)
* 2004 – Carl Mydans, American photographer and journalist (b. 1907)
* 2004 – Robert Quiroga, American boxer (b. 1969)
*2005 – Vassar Clements, American fiddler (b. 1928)
* 2005 – Tonino Delli Colli, Italian cinematographer (b. 1922)
* 2005 – William Corlett, English novelist and playwright (b. 1938)
* 2005 – Frère Roger, Swiss monk and mystic (b. 1915)
*2006 – Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguayan general and dictator; 46th President of Paraguay (b. 1912)
*2007 – Bahaedin Adab, Iranian engineer and politician (b. 1945)
*2008 – Dorival Caymmi, Brazilian singer-songwriter and actor (b. 1914)
* 2008 – Ronnie Drew, Irish musician, folk singer and actor (b. 1934)
* 2008 – Masanobu Fukuoka, Japanese farmer and author (b. 1913)
*2010 – Dimitrios Ioannidis, Greek general (b. 1923)
*2011 – Mihri Belli, Turkish activist and politician (b. 1916)
*2012 – Princess Lalla Amina of Morocco (b. 1954)
* 2012 – Martine Franck, Belgian photographer and director (b. 1938)
* 2012 – Abune Paulos, Ethiopian patriarch (b. 1935)
* 2012 – William Windom, American actor (b. 1923)
*2013 – David Rees, Welsh mathematician and academic (b. 1918)
*2014 – Patrick Aziza, Nigerian general and politician, Governor of Kebbi State (b. 1947)
* 2014 – Vsevolod Nestayko, Ukrainian author (b. 1930)
* 2014 – Mario Oriani-Ambrosini, Italian-South African lawyer and politician (b. 1960)
* 2014 – Peter Scholl-Latour, German journalist, author, and academic (b. 1924)
*2015 – Jacob Bekenstein, Mexican-American physicist, astronomer, and academic (b. 1947)
* 2015 – Anna Kashfi, British actress (b. 1934)
* 2015 – Shuja Khanzada, Pakistani colonel and politician (b. 1943)
* 2015 – Mile Mrkšić, Serb general (b. 1947)
*2016 – João Havelange, Brazilian water polo player, lawyer, and businessman (b. 1916)
* 2016 – John McLaughlin, American television personality (b. 1927)
*2018 – Aretha Franklin, American singer-songwriter (b. 1942)
* 2018 – Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Indian prime minister (b. 1924)
* 2018 – Wakako Yamauchi, American-Japanese writer (b. 1924)
*2019 – Peter Fonda, American actor, director, and screenwriter. (b. 1940)
* 2019 – Richard Williams, Canadian-British animator (b. 1933)
*2021 – Sean Lock, English comedian and actor (b. 1963)
*2023 – Howard S. Becker, American sociologist (b. 1928)
<!--Do not add people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not rely on "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence.-->
Holidays and observances
*Bennington Battle Day (Vermont, United States)
*Children's Day (Paraguay)
*Christian feast day:
** Ana Petra Pérez Florido
** Armel (Armagillus)
** Diomedes of Tarsus
**Roch
**Stephen I of Hungary
**Translation of the Acheiropoietos icon from Edessa to Constantinople. (Eastern Orthodox Church)
**August 16 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
*Gozan no Okuribi (Kyoto, Japan)
*National Airborne Day (United States)
*Restoration Day (Dominican Republic)
*The first day of the Independence Days, celebrates the independence of Gabon from France in 1960.
*Xicolatada (Palau-de-Cerdagne, France)
References
External links
*
*
*
Category:Days of August | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_16 | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.196994 |
1449 | Alan Kay | | birth_place = Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.
| death_date = <!-- (death date then birth date)-->
| death_place | fields Computer science
| workplaces = Xerox PARC<br/>Stanford University<br/>Atari Inc.<br/>Apple Inc. ATG<br/>Walt Disney Imagineering<br/>UCLA<br/>Kyoto University<br/>MIT<br/>Viewpoints Research Institute<br/>Hewlett-Packard Labs
| education = University of Colorado at Boulder (BS)<br>University of Utah College of Engineering (MS, PhD)
| thesis_title = FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language
| thesis_url = https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD0761962.pdf
| thesis_year = 1968
| doctoral_advisors = David C. Evans<br/>Robert S. Barton
| academic_advisors | doctoral_students
| notable_students = David Canfield Smith
| known_for = Dynabook<br/>Object-oriented programming<br/>Smalltalk<br/>Desktop metaphor <br/>Graphical user interface<br/>Windows
| influences | influenced
| awards = ACM Turing Award (2003)<br/>Kyoto Prize<br/>Charles Stark Draper Prize
| spouse = Bonnie MacBird
| signature = <!-- Filename only -->
| footnotes =
}}
Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist who pioneered work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. At Xerox PARC he led the design and development of the first modern windowed computer desktop interface. There he also led the development of the influential object-oriented programming language Smalltalk, both personally designing most of the early versions of the language and coining the term "object-oriented."
He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He received the Turing Award in 2003.
Early life and work
In an interview on education in America with the Davis Group Ltd., Kay said:
Originally from Springfield, Massachusetts, Kay's family relocated several times due to his father's career in physiology before ultimately settling in the New York metropolitan area.
He attended Brooklyn Technical High School. Having accumulated enough credits to graduate, he then attended Bethany College in Bethany, West Virginia, where he majored in biology and minored in mathematics.
Kay then taught guitar in Denver, Colorado for a year. He was drafted in the United States Army, then qualified for officer training in the United States Air Force, where he became a computer programmer after passing an aptitude test.
After his discharge, he enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder and earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in mathematics and molecular biology in 1966.
In the autumn of 1966, he began graduate school at the University of Utah College of Engineering. He earned a Master of Science in electrical engineering in 1968, then a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science in 1969. His doctoral dissertation, FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language, described the invention of a computer language named FLEX. While there, he worked with "fathers of computer graphics" David C. Evans (who had recently been recruited from the University of California, Berkeley to start Utah's computer science department) and Ivan Sutherland (best known for writing such pioneering programs as Sketchpad). Kay credits Sutherland's 1963 thesis for influencing his views on objects and computer programming. As he grew busier with research for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), he ended his musical career.
In 1968, he met Seymour Papert and learned of the programming language Logo, a dialect of Lisp optimized for educational purposes. This led him to learn of the work of Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and of constructionist learning, further influencing his professional orientation. On December 9 of that same year he was present in San Francisco for the Mother of all Demos, a landmark computer demonstration by Douglas Engelbart. Even though he was sick with a high fever on that day, the event was very influential in Kay's career. He recalled later: "It was one of the greatest experiences in my life".
In 1969, Kay became a visiting researcher at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in anticipation of accepting a professorship at Carnegie Mellon University. Instead, in 1970, he joined the Xerox PARC research staff in Palo Alto, California. Through the decade, he developed prototypes of networked workstations using the programming language Smalltalk.
Along with some colleagues at PARC, Kay is one of the fathers of the idea of object-oriented programming (OOP), which he named. Some original object-oriented concepts, including the use of the words 'object' and 'class', had been developed for Simula 67 at the Norwegian Computing Center. Kay said:
<blockquote>I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term "objects" for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is "messaging".</blockquote>
While at PARC, Kay conceived the Dynabook concept, a key progenitor of laptop and tablet computers and the e-book. He is also the architect of the modern overlapping windowing graphical user interface (GUI). Because the Dynabook was conceived as an educational platform, he is considered one of the first researchers into mobile learning; many features of the Dynabook concept have been adopted in the design of the One Laptop Per Child educational platform, with which Kay is actively involved. Subsequent work From 1981 to 1984, Kay was Chief Scientist at Atari. In 1984, he became an Apple Fellow. After the closure of the Apple Advanced Technology Group in 1997, he was recruited by his friend Bran Ferren, head of research and development at Disney, to join Walt Disney Imagineering as a Disney Fellow. He remained there until Ferren left to start Applied Minds Inc with Imagineer Danny Hillis, leading to the cessation of the Fellows program.
In 2001, Kay founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to children, learning, and advanced software development. For their first ten years, Kay and his Viewpoints group were based at Applied Minds in Glendale, California, where he and Ferren worked on various projects. Kay served as president of the Institute until its closure in 2018.
In 2002 Kay joined HP Labs as a senior fellow, departing when HP disbanded the Advanced Software Research Team on July 20, 2005.
He has been an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, a visiting professor at Kyoto University, and an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Kay served on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard.
Squeak, Etoys, and Croquet
In December 1995, while still at Apple, Kay collaborated with many others to start the open source Squeak version of Smalltalk. As part of this effort, in November 1996, his team began research on what became the Etoys system. More recently he started, with David A. Smith, David P. Reed, Andreas Raab, Rick McGeer, Julian Lombardi, and Mark McCahill, the Croquet Project, an open-source networked 2D and 3D environment for collaborative work.
Tweak
In 2001, it became clear that the Etoy architecture in Squeak had reached its limits in what the Morphic interface infrastructure could do. Andreas Raab, a researcher in Kay's group then at Hewlett-Packard, proposed defining a "script process" and providing a default scheduling mechanism that avoided several more general problems. The result was a new user interface, proposed to replace the Squeak Morphic user interface. Tweak added mechanisms of islands, asynchronous messaging, players and costumes, language extensions, projects, and tile scripting. Its underlying object system is class-based, but to users (during programming) it acts as if it were prototype-based. Tweak objects are created and run in Tweak project windows. The Children's Machine In November 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society, the MIT research laboratories unveiled a new laptop computer for educational use around the world. It has many names, including the $100 Laptop, the One Laptop per Child program, the Children's Machine, and the XO-1. The program was founded and is sustained by Kay's friend Nicholas Negroponte, and is based on Kay's Dynabook ideal. Kay is a prominent co-developer of the computer, focusing on its educational software using Squeak and Etoys. Reinventing programming
Kay has lectured extensively on the idea that the computer revolution is very new, and all of the good ideas have not been universally implemented. His lectures at the OOPSLA 1997 conference, and his ACM Turing Award talk, "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet", were informed by his experiences with Sketchpad, Simula, Smalltalk, and the bloated code of commercial software.
On August 31, 2006, Kay's proposal to the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) was granted, funding Viewpoints Research Institute for several years. The proposal title was "STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming: A compact and Practical Model of Personal Computing as a Self-exploratorium". STEPS is a recursive acronym that stands for "STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems". A sense of what Kay is trying to do comes from this quote, from the abstract of a seminar at Intel Research Labs, Berkeley: "The conglomeration of commercial and most open source software consumes in the neighborhood of several hundreds of millions of lines of code these days. We wonder: how small could be an understandable practical 'Model T' design that covers this functionality? 1M lines of code? 200K LOC? 100K LOC? 20K LOC?"Personal life
Kay is a former professional jazz guitarist, composer, and theatrical designer.
He also is an amateur classical pipe organist.
Awards and honors
Kay has received many awards and honors, including:
* UdK 01-Award in Berlin, Germany for pioneering the GUI; J-D Warnier Prix D'Informatique; NEC C&C Prize (2001)
* Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado (2002)
* ACM Turing Award "For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing" (2004)
* UPE Abacus Award, for individuals who have provided extensive support and leadership for student-related activities in the computing and information disciplines (2012)
* Honorary doctorates:
:– Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm (2002)
:– Georgia Institute of Technology (2005)
:– Columbia College Chicago awarded Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa (2005)
:– Laurea Honoris Causa in Informatica, Università di Pisa, Italy (2007)
:– University of Waterloo (2008)
:– Kyoto University (2009)
:– Universidad de Murcia (2010)
:– University of Edinburgh (2017)
* <!-- 2004? --> Honorary Professor, Berlin University of the Arts
* Elected fellow of:
:– American Academy of Arts and Sciences
:– National Academy of Engineering for inventing the concept of portable personal computing. (1997)
:– Royal Society of Arts
:– Computer History Museum "for his fundamental contributions to personal computing and human-computer interface development." (1999)
:– Association for Computing Machinery "For fundamental contributions to personal computing and object-oriented programming." (2008)
:– Hasso Plattner Institute (2011)
His other honors include the J-D Warnier Prix d'Informatique, the ACM Systems Software Award, the NEC Computers & Communication Foundation Prize, the Funai Foundation Prize, the Lewis Branscomb Technology Award, and the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education.
See also
* List of pioneers in computer science
References
External links
* [http://www.vpri.org/ Viewpoints Research Institute]
*
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnFWlU5Gv8A "There is no information content in Alan Kay" 2012]
* [http://forth.org/POL.pdf Programming a problem-oriented language], an unpublished book, by Charles H. Moore, June 1970
Category:1940 births
Category:American computer programmers
Category:American computer scientists
Category:Apple Inc. employees
Category:Apple Fellows
Category:Atari people
Category:American computer science educators
Category:Draper Prize winners
Category:Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Category:2008 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Category:Hewlett-Packard people
Category:Human–computer interaction researchers
Category:Living people
Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
Category:Open source advocates
Category:Scientists from Springfield, Massachusetts
Category:Programming language designers
Category:Scientists at PARC (company)
Category:Turing Award laureates
Category:University of California, Los Angeles faculty
Category:University of Colorado Boulder alumni
Category:University of Utah alumni
Category:Kyoto laureates in Advanced Technology
Category:Academic staff of the Berlin University of the Arts | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.210353 |
1451 | APL (programming language) | * FP
* J
* K
* MATLAB
* Nial
* PPL
* Python
* q (kdb)
* S
* Snap!
* Speakeasy
* Wolfram Language
}}
APL (named after the book A Programming Language) is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code. It has been an important influence on the development of concept modeling, spreadsheets, functional programming, and computer math packages.
In 1979, Iverson received the Turing Award for his work on APL. Development into a computer programming language
As early as 1962, the first attempt to use the notation to describe a complete computer system happened after Falkoff discussed with William C. Carter his work to standardize the instruction set for the machines that later became the IBM System/360 family.
In 1963, Herbert Hellerman, working at the IBM Systems Research Institute, implemented a part of the notation on an IBM 1620 computer, and it was used by students in a special high school course on calculating transcendental functions by series summation. Students tested their code in Hellerman's lab. This implementation of a part of the notation was called Personalized Array Translator (PAT).
In 1963, Falkoff, Iverson, and Edward H. Sussenguth Jr., all working at IBM, used the notation for a formal description of the IBM System/360 series machine architecture and functionality, which resulted in a paper published in IBM Systems Journal in 1964. After this was published, the team turned their attention to an implementation of the notation on a computer system. One of the motivations for this focus of implementation was the interest of John L. Lawrence who had new duties with Science Research Associates, an educational company bought by IBM in 1964. Lawrence asked Iverson and his group to help use the language as a tool to develop and use computers in education.
After Lawrence M. Breed and Philip S. Abrams of Stanford University joined the team at IBM Research, they continued their prior work on an implementation programmed in FORTRAN IV for a part of the notation which had been done for the IBM 7090 computer running on the IBSYS operating system. This work was finished in late 1965 and later named IVSYS (for Iverson system). The basis of this implementation was described in detail by Abrams in a Stanford University Technical Report, "An Interpreter for Iverson Notation" in 1966. The academic aspect of this was formally supervised by Niklaus Wirth. Like Hellerman's PAT system earlier, this implementation omitted the APL character set, but used special English reserved words for functions and operators. The system was later adapted for a time-sharing system and, by November 1966, it had been reprogrammed for the IBM System/360 Model 50 computer running in a time-sharing mode and was used internally at IBM.
Hardware
A key development in the ability to use APL effectively, before the wide use of cathode-ray tube (CRT) terminals, was the development of a special IBM Selectric typewriter interchangeable typing element with all the special APL characters on it. This was used on paper printing terminal workstations using the Selectric typewriter and typing element mechanism, such as the IBM 1050 and IBM 2741 terminal. Keycaps could be placed over the normal keys to show which APL characters would be entered and typed when that key was struck. For the first time, a programmer could type in and see proper APL characters as used in Iverson's notation and not be forced to use awkward English keyword representations of them. Falkoff and Iverson had the special APL Selectric typing elements, 987 and 988, designed in late 1964, although no APL computer system was available to use them. Iverson cited Falkoff as the inspiration for the idea of using an IBM Selectric typing element for the APL character set.
Many APL symbols, even with the APL characters on the Selectric typing element, still had to be typed in by over-striking two extant element characters. An example is the grade up character, which had to be made from a delta (shift-H) and a Sheffer stroke (shift-M). This was necessary because the APL character set was much larger than the 88 characters allowed on the typing element, even when letters were restricted to upper-case (capitals).
Commercial availability
The first APL interactive login and creation of an APL workspace was in 1966 by Larry Breed using an IBM 1050 terminal at the IBM Mohansic Labs near Thomas J. Watson Research Center, the home of APL, in Yorktown Heights, New York. It would run in as little as 8k 16-bit words of memory, and used a dedicated 1 megabyte hard disk.
APL gained its foothold on mainframe timesharing systems from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, in part because it would support multiple users on lower-specification systems that had no dynamic address translation hardware. Additional improvements in performance for selected IBM System/370 mainframe systems included the APL Assist Microcode in which some support for APL execution was included in the processor's firmware, as distinct from being implemented entirely by higher-level software. Somewhat later, as suitably performing hardware was finally growing available in the mid- to late-1980s, many users migrated their applications to the personal computer environment.
Early IBM APL interpreters for IBM 360 and IBM 370 hardware implemented their own multi-user management instead of relying on the host services, thus they were their own timesharing systems. First introduced for use at IBM in 1966, the APL\360 system was a multi-user interpreter. The ability to programmatically communicate with the operating system for information and setting interpreter system variables was done through special privileged "I-beam" functions, using both monadic and dyadic operations.
In 1973, IBM released APL.SV, which was a continuation of the same product, but which offered shared variables as a means to access facilities outside of the APL system, such as operating system files. In the mid-1970s, the IBM mainframe interpreter was even adapted for use on the IBM 5100 desktop computer, which had a small CRT and an APL keyboard, when most other small computers of the time only offered BASIC. In the 1980s, the VSAPL program product enjoyed wide use with Conversational Monitor System (CMS), Time Sharing Option (TSO), VSPC, MUSIC/SP, and CICS users.
In 1973–1974, Patrick E. Hagerty directed the implementation of the University of Maryland APL interpreter for the 1100 line of the Sperry UNIVAC 1100/2200 series mainframe computers. In 1974, student Alan Stebbens was assigned the task of implementing an internal function. Xerox APL was available from June 1975 for Xerox 560 and Sigma 6, 7, and 9 mainframes running CP-V and for Honeywell CP-6.
In the 1960s and 1970s, several timesharing firms arose that sold APL services using modified versions of the IBM APL\360
Microcomputers
On microcomputers, which became available from the mid-1970s onwards, BASIC became the dominant programming language. Nevertheless, some microcomputers provided APL instead – the first being the Intel 8008-based MCM/70 which was released in 1974 and which was primarily used in education. Another machine of this time was the VideoBrain Family Computer, released in 1977, which was supplied with its dialect of APL called APL/S.
The Commodore SuperPET, introduced in 1981, included an APL interpreter developed by the University of Waterloo.
In 1976, Bill Gates claimed in his Open Letter to Hobbyists that Microsoft Corporation was implementing APL for the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 but had "very little incentive to make [it] available to hobbyists" because of software piracy. It was never released. APL2 Starting in the early 1980s, IBM APL development, under the leadership of Jim Brown, implemented a new version of the APL language that contained as its primary enhancement the concept of nested arrays, where an array can contain other arrays, and new language features which facilitated integrating nested arrays into program workflow. Ken Iverson, no longer in control of the development of the APL language, left IBM and joined I. P. Sharp Associates, where one of his major contributions was directing the evolution of Sharp APL to be more in accord with his vision. APL2 was first released for CMS and TSO in 1984. The APL2 Workstation edition (Windows, OS/2, AIX, Linux, and Solaris) followed later.
As other vendors were busy developing APL interpreters for new hardware, notably Unix-based microcomputers, APL2 was almost always the standard chosen for new APL interpreter developments. Even today, most APL vendors or their users cite APL2 compatibility as a selling point for those products. IBM cites its use for problem solving, system design, prototyping, engineering and scientific computations, expert systems, for teaching mathematics and other subjects, visualization and database access.
Modern implementations
Various implementations of APL by APLX, Dyalog, et al., include extensions for object-oriented programming, support for .NET, XML-array conversion primitives, graphing, operating system interfaces, and lambda calculus expressions. Freeware versions include GNU APL for Linux and NARS2000 for Windows (which also runs on Linux under Wine). Both of these are fairly complete versions of APL2 with various language extensions.
Derivative languages
APL has formed the basis of, or influenced, the following languages:
* A and A+, an alternative APL, the latter with graphical extensions.
* FP, a functional programming language.
* Ivy, an interpreter for an APL-like language developed by Rob Pike, and which uses ASCII as input.
* J, which was also designed by Iverson, and which uses ASCII with digraphs instead of special symbols.
* K, a proprietary variant of APL developed by Arthur Whitney.
* MATLAB, a numerical computation tool.
* Nial, a high-level array programming language with a functional programming notation.
* Polymorphic Programming Language, an interactive, extensible language with a similar base language.
* S, a statistical programming language (usually now seen in the open-source version known as R).
* Snap!, a low-code block-based programming language, born as an extended reimplementation of Scratch
* Speakeasy, a numerical computing interactive environment.
* Wolfram Language, the programming language of Mathematica. Language characteristics Character set
APL has been criticized and praised for its choice of a unique character set. In the 1960s and 1970s, few terminal devices or even displays could reproduce the APL character set. The most popular ones employed the IBM Selectric print mechanism used with a special APL type element. One of the early APL line terminals (line-mode operation only, not full screen) was the Texas Instruments TI Model 745 () with the full APL character set which featured half and full duplex telecommunications modes, for interacting with an APL time-sharing service or remote mainframe to run a remote computer job, remote job entry (RJE).
Over time, with the universal use of high-quality graphic displays, printing devices and Unicode support, the APL character font problem has largely been eliminated. However, entering APL characters requires the use of input method editors, keyboard mappings, virtual/on-screen APL symbol sets, or easy-reference printed keyboard cards which can frustrate beginners accustomed to other programming languages. With beginners who have no prior experience with other programming languages, a study involving high school students found that typing and using APL characters did not hinder the students in any measurable way.
In defense of APL, it requires fewer characters to type, and keyboard mappings become memorized over time. Special APL keyboards are also made and in use today, as are freely downloadable fonts for operating systems such as Microsoft Windows. acting on arrays. APL has many nonstandard primitives (functions and operators) that are indicated by a single symbol or a combination of a few symbols. All primitives are defined to have the same precedence, and always associate to the right. Thus, APL is read or best understood from right-to-left.
Early APL implementations ( or so) had no programming loop control flow structures, such as <code>do</code> or <code>while</code> loops, and <code>if-then-else</code> constructs. Instead, they used array operations, and use of structured programming constructs was often unneeded, since an operation could be performed on a full array in one statement. For example, the <code>iota</code> function (<code>ι</code>) can replace for-loop iteration: ιN when applied to a scalar positive integer yields a one-dimensional array (vector), 1 2 3 ... N. Later APL implementations generally include comprehensive control structures, so that data structure and program control flow can be clearly and cleanly separated.
The APL environment is called a workspace. In a workspace the user can define programs and data, i.e., the data values exist also outside the programs, and the user can also manipulate the data without having to define a program. In the examples below, the APL interpreter first types six spaces before awaiting the user's input. Its own output starts in column one.
{| class="wikitable"
|-
| width"240pt" | <syntaxhighlight lang"apl"> n ← 4 5 6 7</syntaxhighlight>
| Assigns vector of values, {4 5 6 7}, to variable <code>n</code>, an array create operation. An equivalent yet more concise APL expression would be <syntaxhighlight lang="apl" inline>n ← 3 + ⍳4</syntaxhighlight>. Multiple values are stored in array <code>n</code>, the operation performed without formal loops or control flow language.
|-
| <syntaxhighlight lang="apl"> n
4 5 6 7</syntaxhighlight>
| Display the contents of <code>n</code>, currently an array or vector.
|-
| <syntaxhighlight lang="apl"> n+4
8 9 10 11</syntaxhighlight>
| 4 is now added to all elements of vector <code>n</code>, creating a 4-element vector {8 9 10 11}.<br/> As above, APL's interpreter displays the result because the expression's value was not assigned to a variable (with a <code>←</code>).
|-
| <syntaxhighlight lang="apl"> +/n
22</syntaxhighlight>
| APL displays the sum of components of the vector <code>n</code>, i.e., <code>22 (= 4 + 5 + 6 + 7)</code> using a very compact notation: read +/ as "plus, over..." and a slight change would be "multiply, over..."
|-
| <syntaxhighlight lang="apl"> m ← +/3+⍳4
m
22</syntaxhighlight>
| These operations can be combined into one statement, remembering that APL evaluates expressions right to left: first <syntaxhighlight lang"apl" inline>⍳4</syntaxhighlight> creates an array, <syntaxhighlight lang"apl" inline>[1,2,3,4]</syntaxhighlight>, then 3 is added to each component, which are summed together and the result stored in variable <code>m</code>, finally displayed. In normal mathematical notation, it is equivalent to: <math>\displaystyle m\sum\limits_{i1}^4 (i+3)</math>. Recall that mathematical expressions are not read or evaluated from right-to-left.
|}
The user can save the workspace with all values, programs, and execution status.
APL uses a set of non-ASCII symbols, which are an extension of traditional arithmetic and algebraic notation. Having single character names for single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) vector functions is one way that APL enables compact formulation of algorithms for data transformation such as computing Conway's Game of Life in one line of code. In nearly all versions of APL, it is theoretically possible to express any computable function in one expression, that is, in one line of code.
Due to the unusual character set, many programmers use special keyboards with APL keytops to write APL code. Although there are various ways to write APL code using only ASCII characters, in practice it is almost never done. (This may be thought to support Iverson's thesis about notation as a tool of thought.) Most if not all modern implementations use standard keyboard layouts, with special mappings or input method editors to access non-ASCII characters. Historically, the APL font has been distinctive, with uppercase italic alphabetic characters and upright numerals and symbols. Most vendors continue to display the APL character set in a custom font.
Advocates of APL claim that the examples of so-called write-only code (badly written and almost incomprehensible code) are almost invariably examples of poor programming practice or novice mistakes, which can occur in any language. Advocates also claim that they are far more productive with APL than with more conventional computer languages, and that working software can be implemented in far less time and with far fewer programmers than using other technology.
They also may claim that because it is compact and terse, APL lends itself well to larger-scale software development and complexity, because the number of lines of code can be reduced greatly. Many APL advocates and practitioners also view standard programming languages such as COBOL and Java as being comparatively tedious. APL is often found where time-to-market is important, such as with trading systems. Terminology APL makes a clear distinction between functions and operators. Functions take arrays (variables or constants or expressions) as arguments, and return arrays as results. Operators (similar to higher-order functions) take functions or arrays as arguments, and derive related functions. For example, the sum function is derived by applying the reduction operator to the addition function. Applying the same reduction operator to the maximum function (which returns the larger of two numbers) derives a function which returns the largest of a group (vector) of numbers. In the J language, Iverson substituted the terms verb for function and adverb or conjunction for operator.
APL also identifies those features built into the language, and represented by a symbol, or a fixed combination of symbols, as primitives. Most primitives are either functions or operators. Coding APL is largely a process of writing non-primitive functions and (in some versions of APL) operators. However a few primitives are considered to be neither functions nor operators, most noticeably assignment.
Some words used in APL literature have meanings that differ from those in both mathematics and the generality of computer science.
{| class="wikitable"
|+Terminology of APL operators
|-
!scope="col"| Term
!scope="col"| Description
|-
!scope="row"| function
| operation or mapping that takes zero, one (right) or two (left & right) arguments which may be scalars, arrays, or more complicated structures, and may return a similarly complex result. A function may be:
* Primitive: built-in and represented by a single glyph;
* Defined: as a named and ordered collection of program statements;
|-
!scope="row"| niladic
| not taking or requiring any arguments, nullary
|-
!scope="row"| monadic
| requiring only one argument; on the right for a function, on the left for an operator, unary Examples Hello, world
This displays "Hello, world":
<syntaxhighlight lang="apl">
'Hello, world'
</syntaxhighlight>
A design theme in APL is to define default actions in some cases that would produce syntax errors in most other programming languages.
The 'Hello, world' string constant above displays, because display is the default action on any expression for which no action is specified explicitly (e.g. assignment, function parameter).
Exponentiation
Another example of this theme is that exponentiation in APL is written as , which indicates raising 2 to the power 3 (this would be written as or in some languages, or relegated to a function call such as in others). Many languages use to signify multiplication, as in , but APL chooses to use . However, if no base is specified (as with the statement in APL, or in other languages), most programming languages one would see this as a syntax error. APL, however, assumes the missing base to be the natural logarithm constant e, and interprets as .
Simple statistics
Suppose that is an array of numbers. Then gives its average. Reading right-to-left, gives the number of elements in X, and since is a dyadic operator, the term to its left is required as well. It is surrounded by parentheses since otherwise X would be taken (so that the summation would be of —each element of X divided by the number of elements in X), and gives the sum of the elements of X. Building on this, the following expression computes standard deviation:
Naturally, one would define this expression as a function for repeated use rather than rewriting it each time. Further, since assignment is an operator, it can appear within an expression, so the following would place suitable values into T, AV and SD: Pick 6 lottery numbers
This following immediate-mode expression generates a typical set of Pick 6 lottery numbers: six pseudo-random integers ranging from 1 to 40, guaranteed non-repeating, and displays them sorted in ascending order:
<syntaxhighlight lang="apl">
x[⍋x←6?40]
</syntaxhighlight>
The above does a lot, concisely, although it may seem complex to a new APLer. It combines the following APL functions (also called primitives and glyphs):
* The first to be executed (APL executes from rightmost to leftmost) is dyadic function <code>?</code> (named <code>deal</code> when dyadic) that returns a vector consisting of a select number (left argument: 6 in this case) of random integers ranging from 1 to a specified maximum (right argument: 40 in this case), which, if said maximum ≥ vector length, is guaranteed to be non-repeating; thus, generate/create 6 random integers ranging from 1 to 40.
* This vector is then assigned (<code>←</code>) to the variable <code>x</code>, because it is needed later.
* This vector is then sorted in ascending order by a monadic <code>⍋</code> function, which has as its right argument everything to the right of it up to the next unbalanced close-bracket or close-parenthesis. The result of <code>⍋</code> is the indices that will put its argument into ascending order.
* Then the output of <code>⍋</code> is used to index the variable <code>x</code>, which we saved earlier for this purpose, thereby selecting its items in ascending sequence.
Since there is no function to the left of the left-most x to tell APL what to do with the result, it simply outputs it to the display (on a single line, separated by spaces) without needing any explicit instruction to do that.
<code>?</code> also has a monadic equivalent called <code>roll</code>, which simply returns one random integer between 1 and its sole operand [to the right of it], inclusive. Thus, a role-playing game program might use the expression <code>?20</code> to roll a twenty-sided die.
Prime numbers
The following expression finds all prime numbers from 1 to R. In both time and space, the calculation complexity is <math>O(R^2)\,\!</math> (in Big O notation).
<syntaxhighlight lang="apl">
(~R∊R∘.×R)/R←1↓⍳R
</syntaxhighlight>
Executed from right to left, this means:
* Iota <code>⍳</code> creates a vector containing integers from <code>1</code> to <code>R</code> (if <code>R= 6</code> at the start of the program, <code>⍳R</code> is <code>1 2 3 4 5 6</code>)
* Drop first element of this vector (<code>↓</code> function), i.e., <code>1</code>. So <code>1↓⍳R</code> is <code>2 3 4 5 6</code>
* Set <code>R</code> to the new vector (<code>←</code>, assignment primitive), i.e., <code>2 3 4 5 6</code>
* The <code>/</code> replicate operator is dyadic (binary) and the interpreter first evaluates its left argument (fully in parentheses):
* Generate outer product of <code>R</code> multiplied by <code>R</code>, i.e., a matrix that is the multiplication table of R by R (<code>°.×</code> operator), i.e.,
{| class"wikitable" style"text-align:right;"
|-
| 4
| 6
| 8
| 10
| 12
|-
| 6
| 9
| 12
| 15
| 18
|-
| 8
| 12
| 16
| 20
| 24
|-
| 10
| 15
| 20
| 25
| 30
|-
| 12
| 18
| 24
| 30
| 36
|}
* Build a vector the same length as <code>R</code> with <code>1</code> in each place where the corresponding number in <code>R</code> is in the outer product matrix (<code>∈</code>, set inclusion or element of or Epsilon operator), i.e., <code>0 0 1 0 1</code>
* Logically negate (not) values in the vector (change zeros to ones and ones to zeros) (<code>∼</code>, logical not or Tilde operator), i.e., <code>1 1 0 1 0</code>
* Select the items in <code>R</code> for which the corresponding element is <code>1</code> (<code>/</code> replicate operator), i.e., <code>2 3 5</code>
(This assumes the APL origin is 1, i.e., indices start with 1. APL can be set to use 0 as the origin, so that <code>ι6</code> is <code>0 1 2 3 4 5</code>, which is convenient for some calculations.)
Sorting
The following expression sorts a word list stored in matrix X according to word length:
<syntaxhighlight lang="apl">
X[⍋X+.≠' ';]
</syntaxhighlight>
Game of Life
The following function "life", written in Dyalog APL, takes a Boolean matrix and calculates the new generation according to Conway's Game of Life. It demonstrates the power of APL to implement a complex algorithm in very little code, but understanding it requires some advanced knowledge of APL (as the same program would in many languages).
<syntaxhighlight lang="apl">
life ← {⊃1 ⍵ ∨.∧ 3 4 = +/ +⌿ ¯1 0 1 ∘.⊖ ¯1 0 1 ⌽¨ ⊂⍵}
</syntaxhighlight>
HTML tags removal
In the following example, also Dyalog, the first line assigns some HTML code to a variable <code>txt</code> and then uses an APL expression to remove all the HTML tags:
<syntaxhighlight lang="apl">
txt←'<html><body><p>This is <em>emphasized</em> text.</p></body></html>'
{⍵ /⍨ ~{⍵∨≠\⍵}⍵∊'<>'} txt
This is emphasized text.
</syntaxhighlight>
Naming
APL derives its name from the initials of Iverson's book A Programming Language,}}
APL is occasionally re-interpreted as Array Programming Language or Array Processing Language, thereby making APL into a backronym.
Logo
There has always been cooperation between APL vendors, and joint conferences were held on a regular basis from 1969 until 2010. At such conferences, APL merchandise was often handed out, featuring APL motifs or collection of vendor logos. Common were apples (as a pun on the similarity in pronunciation of apple and APL) and the code snippet which are the symbols produced by the classic APL keyboard layout when holding the APL modifier key and typing "APL".
Despite all these community efforts, no universal vendor-agnostic logo for the programming language emerged. As popular programming languages increasingly have established recognisable logos, Fortran getting one in 2020, British APL Association launched a campaign in the second half of 2021, to establish such a logo for APL, and after a community election and multiple rounds of feedback, a logo was chosen in May 2022.
Use
APL is used for many purposes including financial and insurance applications,
neural networks
and robotics. It has been argued that APL is a calculation tool and not a programming language; its symbolic nature and array capabilities have made it popular with domain experts and data scientists who do not have or require the skills of a computer programmer.
APL is well suited to image manipulation and computer animation, where graphic transformations can be encoded as matrix multiplications. One of the first commercial computer graphics houses, Digital Effects, produced an APL graphics product named Visions, which was used to create television commercials and animation for the 1982 film Tron. Latterly, the [https://stormwind.fi/en/ Stormwind] boating simulator uses APL to implement its core logic, its interfacing to the rendering pipeline middleware and a major part of its physics engine.
Today, APL remains in use in a wide range of commercial and scientific applications, for example
investment management,
asset management,
health care,
and DNA profiling. Notable implementations APL\360 The first implementation of APL using recognizable APL symbols was APL\360 which ran on the IBM System/360, and was completed in November 1966 though at that time remained in use only within IBM.
In 1975, the IBM 5100 microcomputer offered APL\360 as one of two built-in ROM-based interpreted languages for the computer, complete with a keyboard and display that supported all the special symbols used in the language.
Significant developments to APL\360 included CMS/APL, which made use of the virtual storage capabilities of CMS and APLSV, which introduced shared variables, system variables and system functions. It was subsequently ported to the IBM System/370 and VSPC platforms until its final release in 1983, after which it was replaced by APL2. It became the most popular IBM Type-III Library software that IBM released. APL*Plus and Sharp APL
APL*Plus and Sharp APL are versions of APL\360 with added business-oriented extensions such as data formatting and facilities to store APL arrays in external files. They were jointly developed by two companies, employing various members of the original IBM APL\360 development team.
The two companies were I. P. Sharp Associates (IPSA), an APL\360 services company formed in 1964 by Ian Sharp, Roger Moore and others, and STSC, a time-sharing and consulting service company formed in 1969 by Lawrence Breed and others. Together the two developed APL*Plus and thereafter continued to work together but develop APL separately as APL*Plus and Sharp APL. STSC ported APL*Plus to many platforms with versions being made for the VAX 11, PC and UNIX, whereas IPSA took a different approach to the arrival of the personal computer and made Sharp APL available on this platform using additional PC-XT/360 hardware. In 1993, Soliton Incorporated was formed to support Sharp APL and it developed Sharp APL into SAX (Sharp APL for Unix). , APL*Plus continues as APL2000 APL+Win.
In 1985, Ian Sharp, and Dan Dyer of STSC, jointly received the Kenneth E. Iverson Award for Outstanding Contribution to APL.
APLGOL
In 1972, APLGOL was released as an experimental version of APL that added structured programming language constructs to the language framework. New statements were added for interstatement control, conditional statement execution, and statement structuring, as well as statements to clarify the intent of the algorithm. It was implemented for Hewlett-Packard in 1977. Dyalog APL Dyalog APL was first released by British company Dyalog Ltd. in 1983 and, , is available for AIX, Linux (including on the Raspberry Pi), macOS and Microsoft Windows platforms. It is based on APL2, with extensions to support object-oriented programming, functional programming, and tacit programming. Licences are free for personal/non-commercial use.
In 1995, two of the development team – John Scholes and Peter Donnelly – were awarded the Iverson Award for their work on the interpreter. Gitte Christensen and Morten Kromberg were joint recipients of the Iverson Award in 2016.
NARS2000
NARS2000 is an open-source APL interpreter written by Bob Smith, a prominent APL developer and implementor from STSC in the 1970s and 1980s. NARS2000 contains advanced features and new datatypes and runs natively on Microsoft Windows, and other platforms under Wine. It is named after a development tool from the 1980s, NARS (Nested Arrays Research System).
APLX
APLX is a cross-platform dialect of APL, based on APL2 and with several extensions, which was first released by British company MicroAPL in 2002. Although no longer in development or on commercial sale it is now available free of charge from Dyalog.
York APL
York APL was developed at the York University, Ontario around 1968, running on IBM 360 mainframes. One notable difference between it and APL\360 was that it defined the "shape" (ρ) of a scalar as 1 whereas APL\360 defined it as the more mathematically correct 0 — this made it easier to write functions that acted the same with scalars and vectors. GNU APL GNU APL is a free implementation of Extended APL as specified in ISO/IEC 13751:2001 and is thus an implementation of APL2. It runs on Linux, macOS, several BSD dialects, and on Windows (either using Cygwin for full support of all its system functions or as a native 64-bit Windows binary with some of its system functions missing). GNU APL uses Unicode internally and can be scripted. It was written by Jürgen Sauermann.
Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, was an early adopter of APL, using it to write a text editor as a high school student in the summer of 1969. Interpretation and compilation of APL APL is traditionally an interpreted language, having language characteristics such as weak variable typing not well suited to compilation. However, with arrays as its core data structure it provides opportunities for performance gains through parallelism, parallel computing, massively parallel applications, and very-large-scale integration (VLSI), and from the outset APL has been regarded as a high-performance language – for example, it was noted for the speed with which it could perform complicated matrix operations "because it operates on arrays and performs operations like matrix inversion internally".
Nevertheless, APL is rarely purely interpreted and compilation or partial compilation techniques that are, or have been, used include the following:
Idiom recognition
Most APL interpreters support idiom recognition and evaluate common idioms as single operations. For example, by evaluating the idiom <code>BV/⍳⍴A</code> as a single operation (where <code>BV</code> is a Boolean vector and <code>A</code> is an array), the creation of two intermediate arrays is avoided.
Optimised bytecode
Weak typing in APL means that a name may reference an array (of any datatype), a function or an operator. In general, the interpreter cannot know in advance which form it will be and must therefore perform analysis, syntax checking etc. at run-time. However, in certain circumstances, it is possible to deduce in advance what type a name is expected to reference and then generate bytecode which can be executed with reduced run-time overhead. This bytecode can also be optimised using compilation techniques such as constant folding or common subexpression elimination. The interpreter will execute the bytecode when present and when any assumptions which have been made are met. Dyalog APL includes support for optimised bytecode. which was released around 1971. In order to be able to compile APL, language limitations have to be imposed. APEX is a research APL compiler which was written by Robert Bernecky and is available under the GNU General Public License.
The STSC APL Compiler is a hybrid of a bytecode optimiser and a compiler – it enables compilation of functions to machine code provided that its sub-functions and globals are declared, but the interpreter is still used as a runtime library and to execute functions which do not meet the compilation requirements. Standards APL has been standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) working group X3J10 and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 Subcommittee 22 Working Group 3. The Core APL language is specified in ISO 8485:1989, and the Extended APL language is specified in ISO/IEC 13751:2001. References Further reading * [https://www-public.slac.stanford.edu/sciDoc/docMeta.aspx?slacPubNumberslac-r-114 An APL Machine] (1970 Stanford doctoral dissertation by Philip Abrams)
* [https://sigapl.org/Articles/MichaelMontalbanoPersonalViewOfAPL.php A Personal History Of APL] (1982 article by Michael S. Montalbano)
*
*
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20141027152546/http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/Books/APROGRAMMING%20LANGUAGE/view A Programming Language] by Kenneth E. Iverson
* [https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/Papers/197201_APL%20In%20Exposition_320-3010.pdf/view APL in Exposition] by Kenneth E. Iverson
* Brooks, Frederick P.; Kenneth Iverson (1965). Automatic Data Processing, System/360 Edition. .
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* [http://www.donnamaie.com/<!-- https://web.archive.org/web/20170415220158/http://www.donnamaie.com/ -->] [https://books.google.com/books?idg3uzAAAAIAAJ]
Video
* – a 1974 talk show style interview with the original developers of APL.
* – a 1975 live demonstration of APL by Professor Bob Spence, Imperial College London.
* – a 2009 tutorial by John Scholes of Dyalog Ltd. which implements Conway's Game of Life in a single line of APL.
* – a 2009 introduction to APL by Graeme Robertson.
External links
Online resources
* [https://tryapl.org/ TryAPL.org], an online APL primer
* [http://www.apl2c.de/home/Links/links.html APL2C], a source of links to APL compilers
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Category:Articles with example code | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language) | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.259359 |
1453 | ALGOL | | typing = Static, strong
| scope = Lexical
| implementations | influenced Most subsequent imperative languages (including so-called ALGOL-like languages)<br/>e.g. PL/I, Simula, Pascal, C and Scheme
}}
ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in textbooks and academic sources for more than thirty years.
In the sense that the syntax of most modern languages is "Algol-like", it was arguably more influential than three other high-level programming languages among which it was roughly contemporary: FORTRAN, Lisp, and COBOL. It was designed to avoid some of the perceived problems with FORTRAN and eventually gave rise to many other programming languages, including PL/I, Simula, BCPL, B, Pascal, Ada, and C.
ALGOL introduced code blocks and the <code>begin</code>...<code>end</code> pairs for delimiting them. It was also the first language implementing nested function definitions with lexical scope. Moreover, it was the first programming language which gave detailed attention to formal language definition and through the Algol 60 Report introduced Backus–Naur form, a principal formal grammar notation for language design.
There were three major specifications, named after the years they were first published:
* ALGOL 58 – originally proposed to be called IAL, for International Algebraic Language.
* ALGOL 60 – first implemented as X1 ALGOL 60 in 1961. Revised 1963.
* ALGOL 68 – introduced new elements including flexible arrays, slices, parallelism, operator identification. Revised 1973.
ALGOL 68 is substantially different from ALGOL 60 and was not well received, so reference to "Algol" is generally understood to mean ALGOL 60 and its dialects.
History
ALGOL was developed jointly by a committee of European and American computer scientists in a meeting in 1958 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (cf. ALGOL 58). It specified three different syntaxes: a reference syntax, a publication syntax, and an implementation syntax, syntaxes that permitted it to use different keyword names and conventions for decimal points (commas vs periods) for different languages.
Peter Naur: "As editor of the ALGOL Bulletin I was drawn into the international discussions of the language and was selected to be member of the European language design group in November 1959. In this capacity I was the editor of the ALGOL 60 report, produced as the result of the ALGOL 60 meeting in Paris in January 1960."
The following people attended the meeting in Paris (from 11 to 16 January):LegacyA significant contribution of the ALGOL 58 Report was to provide standard terms for programming concepts: statement, declaration, type, label, primary, block, and others.
ALGOL 60 inspired many languages that followed it. Tony Hoare remarked: "Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors." The Scheme programming language, a variant of Lisp that adopted the block structure and lexical scope of ALGOL, also adopted the wording "Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme" for its standards documents in homage to ALGOL.
Properties
ALGOL 60 as officially defined had no I/O facilities; implementations defined their own in ways that were rarely compatible with each other. In contrast, ALGOL 68 offered an extensive library of transput (input/output) facilities.
ALGOL 60 allowed for two evaluation strategies for parameter passing: the common call-by-value, and call-by-name. Call-by-name has certain effects in contrast to call-by-reference. For example, without specifying the parameters as value or reference, it is impossible to develop a procedure that will swap the values of two parameters if the actual parameters that are passed in are an integer variable and an array that is indexed by that same integer variable. Think of passing a pointer to swap(i, A[i]) in to a function. Now that every time swap is referenced, it is reevaluated. Say i :1 and A[i] : 2, so every time swap is referenced it will return the other combination of the values ([1,2], [2,1], [1,2] and so on). A similar situation occurs with a random function passed as actual argument.
Call-by-name is known by many compiler designers for the interesting "thunks" that are used to implement it. Donald Knuth devised the "man or boy test" to separate compilers that correctly implemented "recursion and non-local references." This test contains an example of call-by-name.
ALGOL 68 was defined using a two-level grammar formalism invented by Adriaan van Wijngaarden and which bears his name. Van Wijngaarden grammars use a context-free grammar to generate an infinite set of productions that will recognize a particular ALGOL 68 program; notably, they are able to express the kind of requirements that in many other programming language standards are labelled "semantics" and have to be expressed in ambiguity-prone natural language prose, and then implemented in compilers as ad hoc code attached to the formal language parser.
Examples and portability
Code sample comparisonsALGOL 60
(The way the bold text has to be written depends on the implementation, e.g. 'INTEGER'—quotation marks included—for integer. This is known as stropping.)
procedure Absmax(a) Size:(n, m) Result:(y) Subscripts:(i, k);
value n, m; array a; integer n, m, i, k; real y;
comment The absolute greatest element of the matrix a, of size n by m,
is copied to y, and the subscripts of this element to i and k;
begin
integer p, q;
y :0; i : k := 1;
for p := 1 step 1 until n do
for q := 1 step 1 until m do
if abs(a[p, q]) > y then
begin y := abs(a[p, q]);
i :p; k : q
end
end Absmax
Here is an example of how to produce a table using Elliott 803 ALGOL.
FLOATING POINT ALGOL TEST'
BEGIN REAL A,B,C,D'
READ D'
FOR A:= 0.0 STEP D UNTIL 6.3 DO
BEGIN
PRINT ,££L??'
B := SIN(A)'
C := COS(A)'
PRINT PUNCH(3),,,A,B,C'
END
END'
ALGOL 68
The following code samples are ALGOL 68 versions of the above ALGOL 60 code samples.
ALGOL 68 implementations used ALGOL 60's approaches to stropping. In ALGOL 68's case tokens with the bold typeface are reserved words, types (modes) or operators.
proc abs max = ([,]real a, ref real y, ref int i, k)real:
comment The absolute greatest element of the matrix a, of size ⌈a by 2⌈a
is transferred to y, and the subscripts of this element to i and k; comment
begin
real y :0; i : ⌊a; k := 2⌊a;
for p from ⌊a to ⌈a do
for q from 2⌊a to 2⌈a do
if abs a[p, q] > y then
y := abs a[p, q];
i :p; k : q
fi
od
od;
y
end # abs max #
Note: lower (⌊) and upper (⌈) bounds of an array, and array slicing, are directly available to the programmer.
floating point algol68 test:
(
real a,b,c,d;
# printf – sends output to the file stand out. #
# printf($p$); – selects a new page #
printf(($pg$,"Enter d:"));
read(d);
for step from 0 while a:step*d; a < 2*pi do
printf($l$); # $l$ - selects a new line. #
b := sin(a);
c := cos(a);
printf(($z-d.6d$,a,b,c)) # formats output with 1 digit before and 6 after the decimal point. #
od
)
Timeline: Hello world
The variations and lack of portability of the programs from one implementation to another is easily demonstrated by the classic hello world program.ALGOL 58 (IAL)
ALGOL 58 had no I/O facilities.
ALGOL 60 family
Since ALGOL 60 had no I/O facilities, there is no portable hello world program in ALGOL.
The next three examples are in Burroughs Extended Algol. The first two direct output at the interactive terminal they are run on. The first uses a character array, similar to C. The language allows the array identifier to be used as a pointer to the array, and hence in a REPLACE statement.
A simpler program using an inline format:
An even simpler program using the Display statement. Note that its output would end up at the system console ('SPO'):
An alternative example, using Elliott Algol I/O is as follows. Elliott Algol used different characters for "open-string-quote" and "close-string-quote", represented here by and .
Below is a version from Elliott 803 Algol (A104). The standard Elliott 803 used five-hole paper tape and thus only had upper case. The code lacked any quote characters so £ (UK Pound Sign) was used for open quote and ? (Question Mark) for close quote. Special sequences were placed in double quotes (e.g£. £L?? produced a new line on the teleprinter).
HIFOLKS'
BEGIN
PRINT £HELLO WORLD£L??'
END'
The ICT 1900 series Algol I/O version allowed input from paper tape or punched card. Paper tape 'full' mode allowed lower case. Output was to a line printer. The open and close quote characters were represented using '(' and ')' and spaces by %.
'BEGIN'
WRITE TEXT('('HELLO%WORLD')');
'END'
ALGOL 68
ALGOL 68 code was published with reserved words typically in lowercase, but bolded or underlined.
begin
printf(($gl$,"Hello, world!"))
end
In the language of the "Algol 68 Report" the input/output facilities were collectively called the "Transput".
Timeline of ALGOL special characters
The ALGOLs were conceived at a time when character sets were diverse and evolving rapidly; also, the ALGOLs were defined so that only uppercase letters were required.
1960: IFIP – The Algol 60 language and report included several mathematical symbols which are available on modern computers and operating systems, but, unfortunately, were unsupported on most computing systems at the time. For instance: ×, ÷, ≤, ≥, ≠, ¬, ∨, ∧, ⊂, ≡, ␣ and ⏨.
1961 September: ASCII – The ASCII character set, then in an early stage of development, had the \ (Back slash) character added to it in order to support ALGOL's Boolean operators /\ and \/.
1962: ALCOR – This character set included the unusual "᛭"<!-- U+16ED --> runic cross character for multiplication and the "⏨" Decimal Exponent Symbol for floating point notation.
1964: GOST – The 1964 Soviet standard GOST 10859 allowed the encoding of 4-bit, 5-bit, 6-bit and 7-bit characters in ALGOL.
1968: The "Algol 68 Report" – used extant ALGOL characters, and further adopted →, ↓, ↑, □, ⌊, ⌈, ⎩, ⎧, ○, ⊥, and ¢ characters which can be found on the IBM 2741 keyboard with typeball (or golf ball) print heads inserted (such as the APL golf ball). These became available in the mid-1960s while ALGOL 68 was being drafted. The report was translated into Russian, German, French, and Bulgarian, and allowed programming in languages with larger character sets, e.g., Cyrillic alphabet of the Soviet BESM-4. All ALGOL's characters are also part of the Unicode standard and most of them are available in several popular fonts.
2009 October: Unicode – The <code>⏨</code> (Decimal Exponent Symbol) for floating point notation was added to Unicode 5.2 for backward compatibility with historic Buran programme ALGOL software.
ALGOL implementations
To date there have been at least 70 augmentations, extensions, derivations and sublanguages of Algol 60.
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
!|Name
!|Year
!|Author
!|Country
!|Description
!|Target CPU
|-
| ZMMD-implementation|| 1958 || Friedrich L. Bauer, Heinz Rutishauser, Klaus Samelson, Hermann Bottenbruch || || implementation of ALGOL 58 || Z22 <br /> (later Zuse's Z23 was delivered with an Algol 60 compiler)
|-
|X1 ALGOL 60 || 1960 August || Edsger W. Dijkstra and Jaap A. Zonneveld || || First implementation of ALGOL 60 || Electrologica X1
|-
|Elliott ALGOL || 1960s || C. A. R. Hoare || || Subject of the 1980 Turing Award Lecture|| Elliott 803, Elliott 503, Elliott 4100 series
|-
|JOVIAL || 1960 || Jules Schwartz || || A DOD HOL prior to Ada || Various (see article)
|-
|Burroughs Algol <br /> (Several variants)|| 1961 || Burroughs Corporation (with participation by Hoare, Dijkstra, and others) || || Basis of the Burroughs (and now Unisys MCP based) computers || Burroughs Large Systems and their midrange also.
|-
|Case ALGOL || 1961 || Case Institute of Technology || || Simula was originally contracted as a simulation extension of the Case ALGOL || UNIVAC 1107
|-
|GOGOL || 1961 || William M. McKeeman || || For ODIN time-sharing system || PDP-1
|-
|RegneCentralen ALGOL || 1961 || Peter Naur, Jørn Jensen || || Implementation of full Algol 60 || DASK at Regnecentralen
|-
|Dartmouth ALGOL 30 || 1962 || Thomas Eugene Kurtz et al. || || || LGP-30
|-
|USS 90 Algol || 1962 || L. Petrone <!-- ? --> || ||
|-
|ALGOL 60
|1962
|Bernard Vauquois, Louis Bolliet
|
|Institut d'Informatique et Mathématiques Appliquées de Grenoble (IMAG) and Compagnie des Machines Bull
|Bull Gamma 60
|-
| Algol Translator || 1962 || G. van der Mey and W.L. van der Poel || || Staatsbedrijf der Posterijen, Telegrafie en Telefonie || ZEBRA
|-
|Kidsgrove Algol || 1963 || F. G. Duncan <!-- ? --> || || || English Electric Company KDF9
|-
|VALGOL || 1963 || Val Schorre || || A test of the META II compiler compiler
|-
|Whetstone || 1964 || Brian Randell and L. J. Russell || || Atomic Power Division of English Electric Company. Precursor to Ferranti Pegasus, National Physical Laboratories ACE and English Electric DEUCE implementations. || English Electric Company KDF9
|-
|NU ALGOL || 1965 || || || || UNIVAC
|-
|ALGEK || 1965 || || || АЛГЭК, based on ALGOL-60 and COBOL support, for economical tasks || Minsk-22
|-
|ALGOL W || 1966 || Niklaus Wirth || || Proposed successor to ALGOL 60 || IBM System/360
|-
|MALGOL || 1966 || publ. A. Viil, M Kotli & M. Rakhendi, || || || Minsk-22
|-
|ALGAMS || 1967 || GAMS group (ГАМС, группа автоматизации программирования для машин среднего класса), cooperation of Comecon Academies of Science || Comecon || || Minsk-22, later ES EVM, BESM
|-
|ALGOL/ZAM || 1967 || || || || Polish ZAM computer
|-
|Simula 67 || 1967 || Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard || || Algol 60 with classes || UNIVAC 1107
|-
|Triplex-ALGOL Karlsruhe || 1967/1968 || || Karlsruhe, || ALGOL 60 (1963) with triplex numbers for interval arithmetic ||
|-
|[https://web.archive.org/web/20080722231533/http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp7288&languageChinese%20Algol Chinese Algol]|| 1972 ||
| || Chinese characters, expressed via the Symbol system
|-
|DG/L || 1972 || || || || DG Eclipse family of Computers
|-
|S-algol || 1979 || Ron Morrison || || Addition of orthogonal datatypes with intended use as a teaching language || PDP-11 with a subsequent implementation on the Java VM
|}
The Burroughs dialects included special Bootstrapping dialects such as ESPOL and NEWP. The latter is still used for Unisys MCP system software.
See also
References
Further reading
* . On the design of the Whetstone Compiler, and one of the early published descriptions of implementing a compiler.
*
* External links
* [http://www.masswerk.at/algol60/report.htm Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Algol 60 by Peter Naur, et al.]
* [http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id808370&typepdf&coll&dlACM&CFID15151515&CFTOKEN6184618 The European Side of the Last Phase of the Development of ALGOL 60, by Peter Naur]
* [http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/ A History of ALGOL] from the Computer History Museum
Category:ALGOL 60 dialect
Category:Articles with example ALGOL 60 code
Category:Computer-related introductions in 1958
Category:Procedural programming languages
Category:Programming languages created in 1958
Category:Structured programming languages
Category:Systems programming languages | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.284763 |
1456 | AWK | | latest_release_version = [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/awk.html IEEE Std 1003.1-2008] (POSIX) / 1985
| designer = Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan
| typing = none; can handle strings, integers and floating-point numbers; regular expressions
| implementations = awk, GNU Awk, mawk, nawk, MKS AWK, Thompson AWK (compiler), Awka (compiler)
| dialects = old awk oawk 1977, new awk nawk 1985, GNU Awk gawk
| influenced_by C, sed, SNOBOL
| influenced = Tcl, AMPL, Perl<!--1987-->, Korn Shell (ksh93<!--1993-->, dtksh, tksh), Lua<!--1993-->
| operating_system = Cross-platform
| website =
}}
AWK ( and it is a standard feature of most Unix-like operating systems.
The AWK language is a data-driven scripting language consisting of a set of actions to be taken against streams of textual data – either run directly on files or used as part of a pipeline – for purposes of extracting or transforming text, such as producing formatted reports. The language extensively uses the string datatype, associative arrays (that is, arrays indexed by key strings), and regular expressions. While AWK has a limited intended application domain and was especially designed to support one-liner programs, the language is Turing-complete, and even the early Bell Labs users of AWK often wrote well-structured large AWK programs.
AWK was created at Bell Labs in the 1970s, and its name is derived from the surnames of its authors: Alfred Aho (author of egrep), Peter Weinberger (who worked on tiny relational databases), and Brian Kernighan. The acronym is pronounced the same as the name of the bird species auk, which is illustrated on the cover of The AWK Programming Language.
As one of the early tools to appear in Version 7 Unix, AWK added computational features to a Unix pipeline besides the Bourne shell, the only scripting language available in a standard Unix environment. It is one of the mandatory utilities of the Single UNIX Specification, and is required by the Linux Standard Base specification.
In 1983, AWK was one of several UNIX tools available for Charles River Data Systems' UNOS operating system under Bell Laboratories license.
AWK was significantly revised and expanded in 1985–88, resulting in the GNU AWK implementation written by Paul Rubin, Jay Fenlason, and Richard Stallman, released in 1988. because it is included with GNU-based Linux packages. GNU AWK has been maintained solely by Arnold Robbins since 1994. Brian Kernighan's nawk (New AWK) source was first released in 1993 unpublicized, and publicly since the late 1990s; many BSD systems use it to avoid the GPL license.}}
An AWK program is a series of pattern action pairs, written as:
<syntaxhighlight lang="awk">
condition { action }
condition { action }
...
</syntaxhighlight>
where condition is typically an expression and action is a series of commands. The input is split into records, where by default records are separated by newline characters so that the input is split into lines. The program tests each record against each of the conditions in turn, and executes the action for each expression that is true. Either the condition or the action may be omitted. The condition defaults to matching every record. The default action is to print the record. This is the same pattern-action structure as sed.
In addition to a simple AWK expression, such as <code>foo 1</code> or <code>/^foo/</code>, the condition can be <code>BEGIN</code> or <code>END</code> causing the action to be executed before or after all records have been read, or pattern1, pattern2 which matches the range of records starting with a record that matches pattern1 up to and including the record that matches pattern2 before again trying to match against pattern1 on subsequent lines.
In addition to normal arithmetic and logical operators, AWK expressions include the tilde operator, <code>~</code>, which matches a regular expression against a string. As handy syntactic sugar, /regexp/ without using the tilde operator matches against the current record; this syntax derives from sed, which in turn inherited it from the ed editor, where <code>/</code> is used for searching. This syntax of using slashes as delimiters for regular expressions was subsequently adopted by Perl and ECMAScript, and is now common. The tilde operator was also adopted by Perl.
Commands
AWK commands are the statements that are substituted for action in the examples above. AWK commands can include function calls, variable assignments, calculations, or any combination thereof. AWK contains built-in support for many functions; many more are provided by the various flavors of AWK. Also, some flavors support the inclusion of dynamically linked libraries, which can also provide more functions.
The print command
The print command is used to output text. The output text is always terminated with a predefined string called the output record separator (ORS) whose default value is a newline. The simplest form of this command is:
; <code>print</code>
:This displays the contents of the current record. In AWK, records are broken down into fields, and these can be displayed separately:
; <code>print $1</code>
: Displays the first field of the current record
; <code>print $1, $3</code>
: Displays the first and third fields of the current record, separated by a predefined string called the output field separator (OFS) whose default value is a single space character
Although these fields ($X) may bear resemblance to variables (the $ symbol indicates variables in the usual Unix shells and in Perl), they actually refer to the fields of the current record. A special case, $0, refers to the entire record. In fact, the commands "<code>print</code>" and "<code>print $0</code>" are identical in functionality.
The print command can also display the results of calculations and/or function calls:
<syntaxhighlight lang="awk">
/regex_pattern/ {
# Actions to perform in the event the record (line) matches the above regex_pattern
print 3+2
print foobar(3)
print foobar(variable)
print sin(3-2)
}
</syntaxhighlight>
Output may be sent to a file:
<syntaxhighlight lang="awk">
/regex_pattern/ {
# Actions to perform in the event the record (line) matches the above regex_pattern
print "expression" > "file name"
}
</syntaxhighlight>
or through a pipe:
<syntaxhighlight lang="awk">
/regex_pattern/ {
# Actions to perform in the event the record (line) matches the above regex_pattern
print "expression" | "command"
}
</syntaxhighlight>
Built-in variables
AWK's built-in variables include the field variables: $1, $2, $3, and so on ($0 represents the entire record). They hold the text or values in the individual text-fields in a record.
Other variables include:
* <code>NR</code>: Number of Records. Keeps a current count of the number of input records read so far from all data files. It starts at zero, but is never automatically reset to zero.
* <code>FNR</code>: File Number of Records. Keeps a current count of the number of input records read so far in the current file. This variable is automatically reset to zero each time a new file is started.
* BWK awk, also known as nawk, refers to the version by Brian Kernighan. It has been dubbed the "One True AWK" because of the use of the term in association with the book that originally described the language and the fact that Kernighan was one of the original authors of AWK. FreeBSD refers to this version as one-true-awk. This version also has features not in the book, such as <code>tolower</code> and <code>ENVIRON</code> that are explained above; see the FIXES file in the source archive for details. This version is used by, for example, Android, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, and illumos. Brian Kernighan and Arnold Robbins are the main contributors to a source repository for nawk: .
* gawk (GNU awk) is another free-software implementation and the only implementation that makes serious progress implementing internationalization and localization and TCP/IP networking. It was written before the original implementation became freely available. It includes its own debugger, and its profiler enables the user to make measured performance enhancements to a script. It also enables the user to extend functionality with shared libraries. Some Linux distributions include gawk as their default AWK implementation. As of version 5.2 (September 2022) gawk includes a persistent memory feature that can remember script-defined variables and functions from one invocation of a script to the next and pass data between unrelated scripts, as described in the Persistent-Memory gawk User Manual: .
** gawk-csv. The CSV extension of gawk provides facilities for inputting and outputting CSV formatted data.
* mawk is a very fast AWK implementation by Mike Brennan based on a bytecode interpreter.
* libmawk is a fork of mawk, allowing applications to embed multiple parallel instances of awk interpreters.
* awka (whose front end is written atop the mawk program) is another translator of AWK scripts into C code. When compiled, statically including the author's libawka.a, the resulting executables are considerably sped up and, according to the author's tests, compare very well with other versions of AWK, Perl, or Tcl. Small scripts will turn into programs of 160–170 kB.
* tawk (Thompson AWK) is an AWK compiler for Solaris, DOS, OS/2, and Windows, previously sold by Thompson Automation Software (which has ceased its activities).
* Jawk is a project to implement AWK in Java, hosted on SourceForge. Extensions to the language are added to provide access to Java features within AWK scripts (i.e., Java threads, sockets, collections, etc.).
* xgawk is a fork of gawk that extends gawk with dynamically loadable libraries. The XMLgawk extension was integrated into the official GNU Awk release 4.1.0.
* QSEAWK is an embedded AWK interpreter implementation included in the QSE library that provides embedding application programming interface (API) for C and C++.
* libfawk is a very small, function-only, reentrant, embeddable interpreter written in C
* BusyBox includes an AWK implementation written by Dmitry Zakharov. This is a very small implementation suitable for embedded systems.
* CLAWK by Michael Parker provides an AWK implementation in Common Lisp, based upon the regular expression library of the same author.
* goawk is an AWK implementation in Go with a few convenience extensions by Ben Hoyt, hosted on [https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk Github].
The gawk manual has a list of more AWK implementations.
Books
*
*
*
*
* See also
* Data transformation
* Event-driven programming
* List of Unix commands
* sed
References
Further reading
*
* – Interview with Alfred V. Aho on AWK
*
*
*
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20081031084509/http://www.think-lamp.com/2008/10/awk-a-boon-for-cli-enthusiasts/ AWK – Become an expert in 60 minutes]
*
*
External links
* [http://doc.cat-v.org/henry_spencer/amazing_awk_assembler/ The Amazing Awk Assembler] by Henry Spencer.
*
* [http://awklang.org awklang.org] The site for things related to the awk language
*
Category:1977 software
Category:Cross-platform software
Category:Domain-specific programming languages
Category:Free and open source interpreters
Category:Pattern matching programming languages
Category:Plan 9 commands
Category:Programming languages created in 1977
Category:Scripting languages
Category:Standard Unix programs
Category:Text-oriented programming languages
Category:Unix SUS2008 utilities
Category:Unix text processing utilities | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.326897 |
1460 | Asgard | In Nordic mythology, Asgard (Old Norse: Ásgarðr; "Garden of the Æsir") is a location associated with the gods. It appears in several Old Norse sagas and mythological texts, including the Eddas, however it has also been suggested to be referred to indirectly in some of these sources. It is described as the fortified home of the Æsir gods and is often associated with gold imagery and contains many other locations known in Nordic mythology such as Valhöll, Iðavöllr and Hlidskjálf.
In some euhemeristic accounts, Asgard is portrayed as being a city in Asia or Troy, however in other accounts that likely more accurately reflect its conception in Old Nordic religion, it is depicted as not conforming to a naturalistic geographical position. In these latter accounts, it is found in a range of locations such as over the rainbow bridge Bifröst, in the middle of the world and over the sea.
Etymology
The compound word Ásgarðr combines Old Norse ("god") and ("enclosure"). Possible anglicisations include: Ásgarthr, Ásgard, Ásegard, Ásgardr, Asgardr, Ásgarth, Asgarth, Esageard, and Ásgardhr. Attestations The Poetic Edda Asgard is named twice in Eddic poetry. The first case is in Hymiskviða, when Thor and Týr journey from Asgard to Hymir's hall to obtain a cauldron large enough to brew beer for a feast for Ægir and the gods. The second instance is in Þrymskviða when Loki is attempting to convince Thor to dress up as Freyja in order to get back Mjölnir by claiming that without his hammer to protect them, jötnar would soon be living in Asgard.
Grímnismál contains among its cosmological descriptions, a number of abodes of the gods, such as Álfheim, Nóatún and Valhalla, which some scholars have identified as being in Asgard. Asgard is not mentioned at any point in the poem. Furthermore, Völuspá references Iðavöllr, one of the most common meeting places of Æsir gods, which in Gylfaginning, Snorri locates in the centre of Asgard. The Prose Edda Prologue The Prose Edda's euhemeristic prologue portrays the Æsir gods as people who travelled from the East to northern territories. According to Snorri, Asgard represented the town of Troy before Greek warriors overtook it. After the defeat, Trojans moved to northern Europe, where they became a dominant group due to their "advanced technologies and culture". Eventually, other tribes began to perceive the Trojans and their leader Trór (Thor in Old Norse) as gods. Gylfaginning In Gylfaginning, Snorri Sturluson describes how during the creation of the world, the gods made the earth and surrounded it with the sea. They made the sky from the skull of Ymir and settled the on the shores of the earth. They set down the brows of Ymir, forming Midgard, and in the centre of the world they built Asgard, which he identifies as Troy:
{| width="100%"
! width"50%" | Old Norse text
! width"50%" | Brodeur translation
|-
|
|
Next they made for themselves in the middle of the world a city which is called Ásgard; men call it Troy. There dwelt the gods and their kindred; and many tidings and tales of it have come to pass both on earth and aloft. There is one abode called Hlidskjálf, and when Allfather sat in the high-seat there, he looked out over the whole world and saw every man's acts, and knew all things which he saw.
|}
After Asgard is made, the gods then built a hof named Glaðsheimr at Iðavöllr, in the centre of the burg, or walled city, with a high seat for Odin and twelve seats for other gods. It is described as like gold both on the inside and the outside, and as the best of all buildings in the world. They also built Vingólf for the female gods, which is described as both a hall and a hörgr, and a forge with which they crafted objects from gold. After Ragnarök, some gods such as Váli and Baldr will meet at Iðavöllr where Asgard once stood and discuss matters together. There they will also find in the grass the golden chess pieces that the Æsir had once owned.
Later, the section describes how an unnamed jötunn came to the gods with his stallion, Svaðilfari and offered help in building a burg for the gods in three winters, asking in return for the sun, moon, and marriage with Freyja. Despite Freyja's opposition, together the gods agree to fulfill his request if he completes his work in just one winter. As time goes on, the gods grow desperate as it becomes apparent that the jötunn will construct the burg on time. To their surprise, his stallion contributes much of the progress, swiftly moving boulders and rocks. To deal with the problem, Loki comes up with a plan whereupon he changes his appearance to that of a mare, and distracts Svaðilfari to slow down construction. Without the help of his stallion, the builder realises he cannot complete his task in time and goes into a rage, revealing his identity as a jötunn. Thor then kills the builder with Mjöllnir, before any harm to the gods is done. The chapter does not explicitly name Asgard as the fortress but they are commonly identified by scholars.
In Gylfaginning, the central cosmic tree Yggdrasil is described as having three roots that hold it up; one of these goes to the Æsir, which has been interpreted as meaning Asgard. In Grímnismál, this root instead reaches over the realm of men. The bridge Bifröst is told to span from the heavens to the earth and over it the Æsir cross each day to hold council beneath Yggdrasil at the Urðarbrunnr. Based on this, Bifröst is commonly interpreted as the bridge to Asgard.
Skáldskaparmál
Asgard is mentioned briefly throughout Skáldskaparmál as the name for the home of the Æsir, as in Gylfaginning. In this section, a number of locations are described as lying within Asgard including Valhalla, and in front of its doors, the golden grove Glasir. It also records a name for Thor as 'Defender of Ásgard' ().
Ynglinga Saga
In the Ynglinga saga, found in Heimskringla, Snorri describes Asgard as a city in Asia, based on a perceived, but erroneous, connection between the words for Asia and Æsir. In the opening stanzas of the Saga of the Ynglings, Asgard is the capital of Asaland, a section of Asia east of the river Tana-kvísl or Vana-Kvísl (kvísl is "arm"), which Snorri explains is the river Tanais (now Don), flowing into the Black Sea. Odin then leaves to settle in the northern part of the world and leaves his brothers Vili and Vé to rule over the city. When the euhemerised Odin dies, the account states that the Swedes believed he had returned to Asgard and would live there forever.Interpretation and discussionCosmology in Old Nordic religion is presented in a vague and often contradictory manner when viewed from a naturalistic standpoint. Snorri places Asgard in the centre of the world, surrounded by Midgard and then the lands inhabited by , all of which are finally encircled by the sea. He also locates the homes of the gods in the heavens. This had led to the proposition of a system of concentric circles, centred on Asgard or Yggdrasil, and sometimes with a vertical axis, leading upwards towards the heavens. There is debate between scholars over whether the gods were conceived of as living in the heavens, with some aligning their views with Snorri, and others proposing that he at times presents the system in a Christian framework and that this organisation is not seen in either Eddic or skaldic poetry. The concept of attempting to create a spatial cosmological model has itself been criticised by scholars who argue that the oral traditions did not form a naturalistic, structured system that aimed to be internally geographically consistent. An alternative proposal is that the world should be conceived of as a number of realms connected by passages that cannot be typically traversed. This would explain how Asgard can be located both to the east and west of the realm of men, over the sea and over Bifröst.
It has been noted that the tendency to link Asgard to Troy is part of a wider European cultural practice of claiming Trojan origins for one's culture, first seen in the Aeneid and also featuring in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae for the founding of Britain. Depictions in popular culture Both Asgard and Valhalla have been portrayed many times in popular cultureIn filmAsgard is depicted in the 1989 film comedy film Erik the Viking as a frozen wasteland dominated by the Halls of Valhalla on a high plateau. In the film the Æsir are depicted as spoilt children In comicsThor first appeared in the Marvel Universe within comic series Journey into Mystery in the issues #83 during August 1962. Following this release, he becomes one of the central figures in the comics along with Loki and Odin. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor and Loki make their first appearance together in the 2011 film Thor. After that, Thor becomes a regular character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and reappears in several films, including the Avengers series. Asgard becomes the central element of the film Thor: Ragnarok, where it is destroyed following the Old Norse mythos. These and other Norse mythology elements also appear in video games, TV series, and books based in and on the Marvel Universe, although these depictions do not closely follow historical sources.
In video games
Asgard is an explorable realm in the video game God of War: Ragnarök, a sequel to 2018's Norse-themed God of War.
In the ''Assassin's Creed Valhalla'' video game, Asgard is featured as part of a "vision quest".
See also
* Mount Olympus – home of the Olympian gods
Citations
Bibliography
Primary
*
*
*
*
*
*
* | titleGylfaginning (Old Norse) |urlhttps://heimskringla.no/wiki/Gylfaginning |websiteheimskringla.no |access-date=4 October 2022}}
* |urlhttps://heimskringla.no/wiki/Sk%C3%A1ldskaparm%C3%A1l |websiteheimskringla.no |access-date=8 October 2022}}
Secondary
*
*
*
*
*
*
* |title Asgard Norse mythology|urlhttps://www.britannica.com/topic/Asgard|access-date2020-06-03 |websiteEncyclopedia Britannica|languageen}}
* |urlhttps://www.pcgamesn.com/assassins-creed-valhalla/asgard-jotunheim |titleYou can visit Asgard and Jotunheim in Assassin's Creed Valhalla |websitePCGamesN |date=15 October 2020 }}
* |urlhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?appdesktop&vnOJrXHLQPx8|titleGod Of War Ragnarök Developer Interview|websiteIGN|date=9 September 2021}}
External links
* [https://myndir.uvic.ca/Asgrd01.html MyNDIR (My Norse Digital Image Repository)] Illustrations of Asgard from manuscripts and early print books.
Category:Locations in Norse mythology | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asgard | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.346153 |
1461 | Apollo program | | status = Completed
| duration = 1961–1972
| firstflight =
}}
| firstcrewed =
}}
| lastflight =
}}
| successes = 32
| failures = 2 (Apollo 1 and 13)
| partialfailures = 1 (Apollo 6)
| launchsite =
| crewvehicle =
| launcher =
}}
The Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo, was the United States human spaceflight program led by NASA, which successfully landed the first humans on the Moon in 1969. Apollo followed Project Mercury that put the first Americans in space. It was conceived in 1960 as a three-person spacecraft during President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration. Apollo was later dedicated to President John F. Kennedy's national goal for the 1960s of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" in an address to Congress on May 25, 1961. It was the third US human spaceflight program to fly, preceded by Project Gemini conceived in 1961 to extend spaceflight capability in support of Apollo.
Kennedy's goal was accomplished on the Apollo 11 mission when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their Apollo Lunar Module (LM) on July 20, 1969, and walked on the lunar surface, while Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit in the command and service module (CSM), and all three landed safely on Earth in the Pacific Ocean on July 24. Five subsequent Apollo missions also landed astronauts on the Moon, the last, Apollo 17, in December 1972. In these six spaceflights, twelve people walked on the Moon.
(pictured) walked on the Moon with Neil Armstrong, on Apollo 11, July 20–21, 1969.|alt=Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, standing on the Moon]]
]]
'', the iconic 1968 image from Apollo 8 taken by astronaut William Anders]]
Apollo ran from 1961 to 1972, with the first crewed flight in 1968. It encountered a major setback in 1967 when an Apollo 1 cabin fire killed the entire crew during a prelaunch test. After the first successful landing, sufficient flight hardware remained for nine follow-on landings with a plan for extended lunar geological and astrophysical exploration. Budget cuts forced the cancellation of three of these. Five of the remaining six missions achieved successful landings, but the Apollo 13 landing had to be aborted after an oxygen tank exploded en route to the Moon, crippling the CSM. The crew barely managed a safe return to Earth by using the lunar module as a "lifeboat" on the return journey. Apollo used the Saturn family of rockets as launch vehicles, which were also used for an Apollo Applications Program, which consisted of Skylab, a space station that supported three crewed missions in 1973–1974, and the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, a joint United States-Soviet Union low Earth orbit mission in 1975.
Apollo set several major human spaceflight milestones. It stands alone in sending crewed missions beyond low Earth orbit. Apollo 8 was the first crewed spacecraft to orbit another celestial body, and Apollo 11 was the first crewed spacecraft to land humans on one.
Overall, the Apollo program returned of lunar rocks and soil to Earth, greatly contributing to the understanding of the Moon's composition and geological history. The program laid the foundation for NASA's subsequent human spaceflight capability and funded construction of its Johnson Space Center and Kennedy Space Center. Apollo also spurred advances in many areas of technology incidental to rocketry and human spaceflight, including avionics, telecommunications, and computers.
Name
The program was named after Apollo, the Greek god of light, music, and the Sun, by NASA manager Abe Silverstein, who later said, "I was naming the spacecraft like I'd name my baby." Silverstein chose the name at home one evening, early in 1960, because he felt "Apollo riding his chariot across the Sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program".
The context of this was that the program focused at its beginning mainly on developing an advanced crewed spacecraft, the Apollo command and service module, succeeding the Mercury program. A lunar landing became the focus of the program only in 1961. Thereafter Project Gemini instead followed the Mercury program to test and study advanced crewed spaceflight technology.
Background
Origin and spacecraft feasibility studies
The Apollo program was conceived during the Eisenhower administration in early 1960, as a follow-up to Project Mercury. While the Mercury capsule could support only one astronaut on a limited Earth orbital mission, Apollo would carry three. Possible missions included ferrying crews to a space station, circumlunar flights, and eventual crewed lunar landings.
In July 1960, NASA Deputy Administrator Hugh L. Dryden announced the Apollo program to industry representatives at a series of Space Task Group conferences. Preliminary specifications were laid out for a spacecraft with a mission module cabin separate from the command module (piloting and reentry cabin), and a propulsion and equipment module. On August 30, a feasibility study competition was announced, and on October 25, three study contracts were awarded to General Dynamics/Convair, General Electric, and the Glenn L. Martin Company. Meanwhile, NASA performed its own in-house spacecraft design studies led by Maxime Faget, to serve as a gauge to judge and monitor the three industry designs.
Political pressure builds
In November 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president after a campaign that promised American superiority over the Soviet Union in the fields of space exploration and missile defense. Up to the election of 1960, Kennedy had been speaking out against the "missile gap" that he and many other senators said had developed between the Soviet Union and the United States due to the inaction of President Eisenhower. Beyond military power, Kennedy used aerospace technology as a symbol of national prestige, pledging to make the US not "first but, first and, first if, but first period". Despite Kennedy's rhetoric, he did not immediately come to a decision on the status of the Apollo program once he became president. He knew little about the technical details of the space program, and was put off by the massive financial commitment required by a crewed Moon landing. When Kennedy's newly appointed NASA Administrator James E. Webb requested a 30 percent budget increase for his agency, Kennedy supported an acceleration of NASA's large booster program but deferred a decision on the broader issue.
On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space, reinforcing American fears about being left behind in a technological competition with the Soviet Union. At a meeting of the US House Committee on Science and Astronautics one day after Gagarin's flight, many congressmen pledged their support for a crash program aimed at ensuring that America would catch up. Kennedy was circumspect in his response to the news, refusing to make a commitment on America's response to the Soviets.
Kennedy delivers his proposal to put a man on the Moon before a joint session of Congress, May 25, 1961.|alt=President John F. Kennedy addresses a joint session of Congress, with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn seated behind him]]
On April 20, Kennedy sent a memo to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, asking Johnson to look into the status of America's space program, and into programs that could offer NASA the opportunity to catch up. Johnson responded approximately one week later, concluding that "we are neither making maximum effort nor achieving results necessary if this country is to reach a position of leadership." His memo concluded that a crewed Moon landing was far enough in the future that it was likely the United States would achieve it first.}}
}}
NASA expansion
At the time of Kennedy's proposal, only one American had flown in space—less than a month earlier—and NASA had not yet sent an astronaut into orbit. Even some NASA employees doubted whether Kennedy's ambitious goal could be met. By 1963, Kennedy even came close to agreeing to a joint US-USSR Moon mission, to eliminate duplication of effort.
With the clear goal of a crewed landing replacing the more nebulous goals of space stations and circumlunar flights, NASA decided that, in order to make progress quickly, it would discard the feasibility study designs of Convair, GE, and Martin, and proceed with Faget's command and service module design. The mission module was determined to be useful only as an extra room, and therefore unnecessary. They used Faget's design as the specification for another competition for spacecraft procurement bids in October 1961. On November 28, 1961, it was announced that North American Aviation had won the contract, although its bid was not rated as good as the Martin proposal. Webb, Dryden and Robert Seamans chose it in preference due to North American's longer association with NASA and its predecessor.
Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $}} in US dollars) ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.
On July 1, 1960, NASA established the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama. MSFC designed the heavy lift-class Saturn launch vehicles, which would be required for Apollo.Manned Spacecraft Center
It became clear that managing the Apollo program would exceed the capabilities of Robert R. Gilruth's Space Task Group, which had been directing the nation's crewed space program from NASA's Langley Research Center. So Gilruth was given authority to grow his organization into a new NASA center, the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC). A site was chosen in Houston, Texas, on land donated by Rice University, and Administrator Webb announced the conversion on September 19, 1961. It was also clear NASA would soon outgrow its practice of controlling missions from its Cape Canaveral Air Force Station launch facilities in Florida, so a new Mission Control Center would be included in the MSC.
, September 12, 1962 (17 min, 47 s).]]
In September 1962, by which time two Project Mercury astronauts had orbited the Earth, Gilruth had moved his organization to rented space in Houston, and construction of the MSC facility was under way, Kennedy visited Rice to reiterate his challenge in a famous speech:
...
We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win...}}}}
The MSC was completed in September 1963. It was renamed by the United States Congress in honor of Lyndon B. Johnson soon after his death in 1973.
Launch Operations Center
It also became clear that Apollo would outgrow the Canaveral launch facilities in Florida. The two newest launch complexes were already being built for the Saturn I and IB rockets at the northernmost end: LC-34 and LC-37. But an even bigger facility would be needed for the mammoth rocket required for the crewed lunar mission, so land acquisition was started in July 1961 for a Launch Operations Center (LOC) immediately north of Canaveral at Merritt Island. The design, development and construction of the center was conducted by Kurt H. Debus, a member of Wernher von Braun's original V-2 rocket engineering team. Debus was named the LOC's first Director. Construction began in November 1962. Following Kennedy's death, President Johnson issued an executive order on November 29, 1963, to rename the LOC and Cape Canaveral in honor of Kennedy.
, Wernher von Braun, and Eberhard Rees watch the AS-101 launch from the firing room.]]
The LOC included Launch Complex 39, a Launch Control Center, and a Vertical Assembly Building (VAB). in which the space vehicle (launch vehicle and spacecraft) would be assembled on a mobile launcher platform and then moved by a crawler-transporter to one of several launch pads. Although at least three pads were planned, only two, designated AandB, were completed in October 1965. The LOC also included an Operations and Checkout Building (OCB) to which Gemini and Apollo spacecraft were initially received prior to being mated to their launch vehicles. The Apollo spacecraft could be tested in two vacuum chambers capable of simulating atmospheric pressure at altitudes up to , which is nearly a vacuum.
Organization
Administrator Webb realized that in order to keep Apollo costs under control, he had to develop greater project management skills in his organization, so he recruited George E. Mueller for a high management job. Mueller accepted, on the condition that he have a say in NASA reorganization necessary to effectively administer Apollo. Webb then worked with Associate Administrator (later Deputy Administrator) Seamans to reorganize the Office of Manned Space Flight (OMSF). On July 23, 1963, Webb announced Mueller's appointment as Deputy Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight, to replace then Associate Administrator D. Brainerd Holmes on his retirement effective September 1. Under Webb's reorganization, the directors of the Manned Spacecraft Center (Gilruth), Marshall Space Flight Center (von Braun), and the Launch Operations Center (Debus) reported to Mueller.
Based on his industry experience on Air Force missile projects, Mueller realized some skilled managers could be found among high-ranking officers in the U.S. Air Force, so he got Webb's permission to recruit General Samuel C. Phillips, who gained a reputation for his effective management of the Minuteman program, as OMSF program controller. Phillips's superior officer Bernard A. Schriever agreed to loan Phillips to NASA, along with a staff of officers under him, on the condition that Phillips be made Apollo Program Director. Mueller agreed, and Phillips managed Apollo from January 1964, until it achieved the first human landing in July 1969, after which he returned to Air Force duty.
Charles Fishman, in One Giant Leap, estimated the number of people and organizations involved into the Apollo program as "410,000 men and women at some 20,000 different companies contributed to the effort".
<!----This probably completes this section, the intent of which is to keep the narrative flow of Webb's big 1963 reorganization. These remainders should be highlighted, probably as appropriate in later sections.
* Shea
* Christopher Kraft
* Gene Kranz
* Deke Slayton
* Rocco Petrone
---->
Choosing a mission mode
explaining the LOR concept]]
and Earth Orbit Rendezvous, 1961]]
Once Kennedy had defined a goal, the Apollo mission planners were faced with the challenge of designing a spacecraft that could meet it while minimizing risk to human life, limiting cost, and not exceeding limits in possible technology and astronaut skill. Four possible mission modes were considered:
* Direct Ascent: The spacecraft would be launched as a unit and travel directly to the lunar surface, without first going into lunar orbit. A Earth return ship would land all three astronauts atop a descent propulsion stage, which would be left on the Moon. This design would have required development of the extremely powerful Saturn C-8 or Nova launch vehicle to carry a payload to the Moon.
* Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR): Multiple rocket launches (up to 15 in some plans) would carry parts of the Direct Ascent spacecraft and propulsion units for translunar injection (TLI). These would be assembled into a single spacecraft in Earth orbit.
* Lunar Surface Rendezvous: Two spacecraft would be launched in succession. The first, an automated vehicle carrying propellant for the return to Earth, would land on the Moon, to be followed some time later by the crewed vehicle. Propellant would have to be transferred from the automated vehicle to the crewed vehicle.
* Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR): This turned out to be the winning configuration, which achieved the goal with Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969: a single Saturn V launched a spacecraft that was composed of a Apollo command and service module which remained in orbit around the Moon and a two-stage Apollo Lunar Module spacecraft which was flown by two astronauts to the surface, flown back to dock with the command module and was then discarded. Landing the smaller spacecraft on the Moon, and returning an even smaller part () to lunar orbit, minimized the total mass to be launched from Earth, but this was the last method initially considered because of the perceived risk of rendezvous and docking.
In early 1961, direct ascent was generally the mission mode in favor at NASA. Many engineers feared that rendezvous and docking, maneuvers that had not been attempted in Earth orbit, would be nearly impossible in lunar orbit. LOR advocates including John Houbolt at Langley Research Center emphasized the important weight reductions that were offered by the LOR approach. Throughout 1960 and 1961, Houbolt campaigned for the recognition of LOR as a viable and practical option. Bypassing the NASA hierarchy, he sent a series of memos and reports on the issue to Associate Administrator Robert Seamans; while acknowledging that he spoke "somewhat as a voice in the wilderness", Houbolt pleaded that LOR should not be discounted in studies of the question.
Seamans's establishment of an ad hoc committee headed by his special technical assistant Nicholas E. Golovin in July 1961, to recommend a launch vehicle to be used in the Apollo program, represented a turning point in NASA's mission mode decision. This committee recognized that the chosen mode was an important part of the launch vehicle choice, and recommended in favor of a hybrid EOR-LOR mode. Its consideration of LOR—as well as Houbolt's ceaseless work—played an important role in publicizing the workability of the approach. In late 1961 and early 1962, members of the Manned Spacecraft Center began to come around to support LOR, including the newly hired deputy director of the Office of Manned Space Flight, Joseph Shea, who became a champion of LOR. The engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), who were heavily invested in direct ascent, took longer to become convinced of its merits, but their conversion was announced by Wernher von Braun at a briefing on June 7, 1962.
But even after NASA reached internal agreement, it was far from smooth sailing. Kennedy's science advisor Jerome Wiesner, who had expressed his opposition to human spaceflight to Kennedy before the President took office, and had opposed the decision to land people on the Moon, hired Golovin, who had left NASA, to chair his own "Space Vehicle Panel", ostensibly to monitor, but actually to second-guess NASA's decisions on the Saturn V launch vehicle and LOR by forcing Shea, Seamans, and even Webb to defend themselves, delaying its formal announcement to the press on July 11, 1962, and forcing Webb to still hedge the decision as "tentative".
Wiesner kept up the pressure, even making the disagreement public during a two-day September visit by the President to Marshall Space Flight Center. Wiesner blurted out "No, that's no good" in front of the press, during a presentation by von Braun. Webb jumped in and defended von Braun, until Kennedy ended the squabble by stating that the matter was "still subject to final review". Webb held firm and issued a request for proposal to candidate Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) contractors. Wiesner finally relented, unwilling to settle the dispute once and for all in Kennedy's office, because of the President's involvement with the October Cuban Missile Crisis, and fear of Kennedy's support for Webb. NASA announced the selection of Grumman as the LEM contractor in November 1962.
Space historian James Hansen concludes that:
The LOR method had the advantage of allowing the lander spacecraft to be used as a "lifeboat" in the event of a failure of the command ship. Some documents prove this theory was discussed before and after the method was chosen. In 1964 an MSC study concluded, "The LM [as lifeboat]... was finally dropped, because no single reasonable CSM failure could be identified that would prohibit use of the SPS." Ironically, just such a failure happened on Apollo 13 when an oxygen tank explosion left the CSM without electrical power. The lunar module provided propulsion, electrical power and life support to get the crew home safely.Spacecraft
command module is on exhibit in the Meteor Crater Visitor Center in Winslow, Arizona.]]
Faget's preliminary Apollo design employed a cone-shaped command module, supported by one of several service modules providing propulsion and electrical power, sized appropriately for the space station, cislunar, and lunar landing missions. Once Kennedy's Moon landing goal became official, detailed design began of a command and service module (CSM) in which the crew would spend the entire direct-ascent mission and lift off from the lunar surface for the return trip, after being soft-landed by a larger landing propulsion module. The final choice of lunar orbit rendezvous changed the CSM's role to the translunar ferry used to transport the crew, along with a new spacecraft, the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM, later shortened to LM (Lunar Module) but still pronounced ) which would take two individuals to the lunar surface and return them to the CSM. Also, there was no provision for docking with the lunar module. A 1964 program definition study concluded that the initial design should be continued as Block I which would be used for early testing, while Block II, the actual lunar spacecraft, would incorporate the docking equipment and take advantage of the lessons learned in Block I development.
Apollo Lunar Module
Lunar Module Eagle (and Buzz Aldrin) on the Moon, photographed by Neil Armstrong]]
The Apollo Lunar Module (LM) was designed to descend from lunar orbit to land two astronauts on the Moon and take them back to orbit to rendezvous with the command module. Not designed to fly through the Earth's atmosphere or return to Earth, its fuselage was designed totally without aerodynamic considerations and was of an extremely lightweight construction. It consisted of separate descent and ascent stages, each with its own engine. The descent stage contained storage for the descent propellant, surface stay consumables, and surface exploration equipment. The ascent stage contained the crew cabin, ascent propellant, and a reaction control system. The initial LM model weighed approximately , and allowed surface stays up to around 34 hours. An extended lunar module (ELM) weighed over , and allowed surface stays of more than three days. The contract for design and construction of the lunar module was awarded to Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, and the project was overseen by Thomas J. Kelly.
Launch vehicles
, Saturn I, Saturn IB, and Saturn V]]
Before the Apollo program began, Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket engineers had started work on plans for very large launch vehicles, the Saturn series, and the even larger Nova series. In the midst of these plans, von Braun was transferred from the Army to NASA and was made Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center. The initial direct ascent plan to send the three-person Apollo command and service module directly to the lunar surface, on top of a large descent rocket stage, would require a Nova-class launcher, with a lunar payload capability of over . The June 11, 1962, decision to use lunar orbit rendezvous enabled the Saturn V to replace the Nova, and the MSFC proceeded to develop the Saturn rocket family for Apollo.
Since Apollo, like Mercury, used more than one launch vehicle for space missions, NASA used spacecraft-launch vehicle combination series numbers: AS-10x for Saturn I, AS-20x for Saturn IB, and AS-50x for Saturn V (compare Mercury-Redstone 3, Mercury-Atlas 6) to designate and plan all missions, rather than numbering them sequentially as in Project Gemini. This was changed by the time human flights began. four LES test flights (A-001 through 004) were made at the White Sands Missile Range between May 1964 and January 1966.
Saturn I
, 1968]]
Saturn I, the first US heavy lift launch vehicle, was initially planned to launch partially equipped CSMs in low Earth orbit tests. The S-I first stage burned RP-1 with liquid oxygen (LOX) oxidizer in eight clustered Rocketdyne H-1 engines, to produce of thrust. The S-IV second stage used six liquid hydrogen-fueled Pratt & Whitney RL-10 engines with of thrust. The S-V third stage flew inactively on Saturn I four times.
The first four Saturn I test flights were launched from LC-34, with only the first stage live, carrying dummy upper stages filled with water. The first flight with a live S-IV was launched from LC-37. This was followed by five launches of boilerplate CSMs (designated AS-101 through AS-105) into orbit in 1964 and 1965. The last three of these further supported the Apollo program by also carrying Pegasus satellites, which verified the safety of the translunar environment by measuring the frequency and severity of micrometeorite impacts.
In September 1962, NASA planned to launch four crewed CSM flights on the Saturn I from late 1965 through 1966, concurrent with Project Gemini. The payload capacity would have severely limited the systems which could be included, so the decision was made in October 1963 to use the uprated Saturn IB for all crewed Earth orbital flights.Saturn IB
The Saturn IB was an upgraded version of the Saturn I. The S-IB first stage increased the thrust to by uprating the H-1 engine. The second stage replaced the S-IV with the S-IVB-200, powered by a single J-2 engine burning liquid hydrogen fuel with LOX, to produce of thrust. A restartable version of the S-IVB was used as the third stage of the Saturn V. The Saturn IB could send over into low Earth orbit, sufficient for a partially fueled CSM or the LM. Saturn IB launch vehicles and flights were designated with an AS-200 series number, "AS" indicating "Apollo Saturn" and the "2" indicating the second member of the Saturn rocket family. The three-stage Saturn V was designed to send a fully fueled CSM and LM to the Moon. It was in diameter and stood tall with its lunar payload. Its capability grew to for the later advanced lunar landings. The S-IC first stage burned RP-1/LOX for a rated thrust of , which was upgraded to . The second and third stages burned liquid hydrogen; the third stage was a modified version of the S-IVB, with thrust increased to and capability to restart the engine for translunar injection after reaching a parking orbit.Astronauts
crew: Ed White, command pilot Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee]]
NASA's director of flight crew operations during the Apollo program was Donald K. "Deke" Slayton, one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts who was medically grounded in September 1962 due to a heart murmur. Slayton was responsible for making all Gemini and Apollo crew assignments.
Thirty-two astronauts were assigned to fly missions in the Apollo program. Twenty-four of these left Earth's orbit and flew around the Moon between December 1968 and December 1972 (three of them twice). Half of the 24 walked on the Moon's surface, though none of them returned to it after landing once. One of the moonwalkers was a trained geologist. Of the 32, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were killed during a ground test in preparation for the Apollo 1 mission.
NASA awarded all 32 of these astronauts its highest honor, the Distinguished Service Medal, given for "distinguished service, ability, or courage", and personal "contribution representing substantial progress to the NASA mission". The medals were awarded posthumously to Grissom, White, and Chaffee in 1969, then to the crews of all missions from Apollo 8 onward. The crew that flew the first Earth orbital test mission Apollo 7, Walter M. Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham, were awarded the lesser NASA Exceptional Service Medal, because of discipline problems with the flight director's orders during their flight. In October 2008, the NASA Administrator decided to award them the Distinguished Service Medals. For Schirra and Eisele, this was posthumously.Lunar mission profileThe first lunar landing mission was planned to proceed:
<gallery modepacked widths"190" heights="131">
File:Apollo11-01.png|Launch The three SaturnV stages burn for about 11 minutes to achieve a circular parking orbit. The third stage burns a small portion of its fuel to achieve orbit.
File:Apollo11-02.png|Translunar injection After one to two orbits to verify readiness of spacecraft systems, the S-IVB third stage reignites for about six minutes to send the spacecraft to the Moon.
File:Apollo11-03.png|Transposition and docking The Spacecraft Lunar Module Adapter (SLA) panels separate to free the CSM and expose the LM. The command module pilot (CMP) moves the CSM out a safe distance, and turns 180°.
File:Apollo11-04.png|Extraction The CMP docks the CSM with the LM, and pulls the complete spacecraft away from the S-IVB. The lunar voyage takes between two and three days. Midcourse corrections are made as necessary using the SM engine.
File:Apollo11-05.png|Lunar orbit insertion The spacecraft passes about behind the Moon, and the SM engine is fired to slow the spacecraft and put it into a orbit, which is soon circularized at 60 nautical miles by a second burn.
File:Apollo11-07.png|After a rest period, the commander (CDR) and lunar module pilot (LMP) move to the LM, power up its systems, and deploy the landing gear. The CSM and LM separate; the CMP visually inspects the LM, then the LM crew move a safe distance away and fire the descent engine for Descent orbit insertion, which takes it to a perilune of about .
File:Apollo11-08.png|Powered descent At perilune, the descent engine fires again to start the descent. The CDR takes control after pitchover for a vertical landing.
File:Apollo11-09.png|The CDR and LMP perform one or more EVAs exploring the lunar surface and collecting samples, alternating with rest periods.
File:Apollo11-10.png|The ascent stage lifts off, using the descent stage as a launching pad.
File:Apollo11-11.png|The LM rendezvouses and docks with the CSM.
File:Apollo11-12.png|The CDR and LMP transfer back to the CM with their material samples, then the LM ascent stage is jettisoned, to eventually fall out of orbit and crash on the surface.
File:Apollo11-13.png|Trans-Earth injection The SM engine fires to send the CSM back to Earth.
File:Apollo11-14.png|The SM is jettisoned just before reentry, and the CM turns 180° to face its blunt end forward for reentry.
File:Apollo11-15.png|Atmospheric drag slows the CM. Aerodynamic heating surrounds it with an envelope of ionized air which causes a communications blackout for several minutes.
File:Apollo11-16.png|Parachutes are deployed, slowing the CM for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. The astronauts are recovered and brought to an aircraft carrier.
</gallery>
Profile variations
pilots the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle and lands himself and navigator Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, July 20, 1969.]]
* The first three lunar missions (Apollo 8, Apollo 10, and Apollo 11) used a free return trajectory, keeping a flight path coplanar with the lunar orbit, which would allow a return to Earth in case the SM engine failed to make lunar orbit insertion. Landing site lighting conditions on later missions dictated a lunar orbital plane change, which required a course change maneuver soon after TLI, and eliminated the free-return option.
* After Apollo 12 placed the second of several seismometers on the Moon, the jettisoned LM ascent stages on Apollo 12 and later missions were deliberately crashed on the Moon at known locations to induce vibrations in the Moon's structure. The only exceptions to this were the Apollo 13 LM which burned up in the Earth's atmosphere, and Apollo 16, where a loss of attitude control after jettison prevented making a targeted impact.
* As another active seismic experiment, the S-IVBs on Apollo 13 and subsequent missions were deliberately crashed on the Moon instead of being sent to solar orbit.
* Starting with Apollo 13, descent orbit insertion was to be performed using the service module engine instead of the LM engine, in order to allow a greater fuel reserve for landing. This was actually done for the first time on Apollo 14, since the Apollo 13 mission was aborted before landing.Development historyUncrewed flight tests
<imagemap>
File:Apollo unmanned launches.png|thumb|right|upright1.15|Apollo uncrewed development mission launches. Click on a launch image to read the main article about each mission.|altComposite image of uncrewed development Apollo mission launches in chronological sequence.
rect 0 0 91 494 AS-201 first uncrewed CSM test
rect 92 0 181 494 AS-203 S-IVB stage development test
rect 182 0 270 494 AS-202 second uncrewed CSM test
rect 271 0 340 494 Apollo 4 first uncrewed Saturn V test
rect 341 0 434 494 Apollo 5 uncrewed LM test
rect 435 0 494 494 Apollo 6 second uncrewed Saturn V test
</imagemap>
Two Block I CSMs were launched from LC-34 on suborbital flights in 1966 with the Saturn IB. The first, AS-201 launched on February 26, reached an altitude of and splashed down downrange in the Atlantic Ocean. The second, AS-202 on August 25, reached altitude and was recovered downrange in the Pacific Ocean. These flights validated the service module engine and the command module heat shield.
A third Saturn IB test, AS-203 launched from pad 37, went into orbit to support design of the S-IVB upper stage restart capability needed for the Saturn V. It carried a nose cone instead of the Apollo spacecraft, and its payload was the unburned liquid hydrogen fuel, the behavior of which engineers measured with temperature and pressure sensors, and a TV camera. This flight occurred on July 5, before AS-202, which was delayed because of problems getting the Apollo spacecraft ready for flight.Preparation for crewed flightTwo crewed orbital Block I CSM missions were planned: AS-204 and AS-205. The Block I crew positions were titled Command Pilot, Senior Pilot, and Pilot. The Senior Pilot would assume navigation duties, while the Pilot would function as a systems engineer. The astronauts would wear a modified version of the Gemini spacesuit.
After an uncrewed LM test flight AS-206, a crew would fly the first Block II CSM and LM in a dual mission known as AS-207/208, or AS-278 (each spacecraft would be launched on a separate Saturn IB). The Block II crew positions were titled Commander, Command Module Pilot, and Lunar Module Pilot. The astronauts would begin wearing a new Apollo A6L spacesuit, designed to accommodate lunar extravehicular activity (EVA). The traditional visor helmet was replaced with a clear "fishbowl" type for greater visibility, and the lunar surface EVA suit would include a water-cooled undergarment.
Deke Slayton, the grounded Mercury astronaut who became director of flight crew operations for the Gemini and Apollo programs, selected the first Apollo crew in January 1966, with Grissom as Command Pilot, White as Senior Pilot, and rookie Donn F. Eisele as Pilot. But Eisele dislocated his shoulder twice aboard the KC135 weightlessness training aircraft, and had to undergo surgery on January 27. Slayton replaced him with Chaffee.
In December 1966, the AS-205 mission was canceled, since the validation of the CSM would be accomplished on the 14-day first flight, and AS-205 would have been devoted to space experiments and contribute no new engineering knowledge about the spacecraft. Its Saturn IB was allocated to the dual mission, now redesignated AS-205/208 or AS-258, planned for August 1967. McDivitt, Scott and Schweickart were promoted to the prime AS-258 crew, and Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham were reassigned as the Apollo1 backup crew.Program delaysThe spacecraft for the AS-202 and AS-204 missions were delivered by North American Aviation to the Kennedy Space Center with long lists of equipment problems which had to be corrected before flight; these delays caused the launch of AS-202 to slip behind AS-203, and eliminated hopes the first crewed mission might be ready to launch as soon as November 1966, concurrently with the last Gemini mission. Eventually, the planned AS-204 flight date was pushed to February 21, 1967.
North American Aviation was prime contractor not only for the Apollo CSM, but for the SaturnV S-II second stage as well, and delays in this stage pushed the first uncrewed SaturnV flight AS-501 from late 1966 to November 1967. (The initial assembly of AS-501 had to use a dummy spacer spool in place of the stage.)
The problems with North American were severe enough in late 1965 to cause Manned Space Flight Administrator George Mueller to appoint program director Samuel Phillips to head a "tiger team" to investigate North American's problems and identify corrections. Phillips documented his findings in a December 19 letter to NAA president Lee Atwood, with a strongly worded letter by Mueller, and also gave a presentation of the results to Mueller and Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans. Meanwhile, Grumman was also encountering problems with the Lunar Module, eliminating hopes it would be ready for crewed flight in 1967, not long after the first crewed CSM flights.Apollo 1 fire
Grissom, White, and Chaffee decided to name their flight Apollo1 as a motivational focus on the first crewed flight. They trained and conducted tests of their spacecraft at North American, and in the altitude chamber at the Kennedy Space Center. A "plugs-out" test was planned for January, which would simulate a launch countdown on LC-34 with the spacecraft transferring from pad-supplied to internal power. If successful, this would be followed by a more rigorous countdown simulation test closer to the February 21 launch, with both spacecraft and launch vehicle fueled.
The plugs-out test began on the morning of January 27, 1967, and immediately was plagued with problems. First, the crew noticed a strange odor in their spacesuits which delayed the sealing of the hatch. Then, communications problems frustrated the astronauts and forced a hold in the simulated countdown. During this hold, an electrical fire began in the cabin and spread quickly in the high pressure, 100% oxygen atmosphere. Pressure rose high enough from the fire that the cabin inner wall burst, allowing the fire to erupt onto the pad area and frustrating attempts to rescue the crew. The astronauts were asphyxiated before the hatch could be opened.
NASA immediately convened an accident review board, overseen by both houses of Congress. While the determination of responsibility for the accident was complex, the review board concluded that "deficiencies existed in command module design, workmanship and quality control". Webb also reassigned Apollo Spacecraft Program Office (ASPO) Manager Joseph Francis Shea, replacing him with George Low.
To remedy the causes of the fire, changes were made in the Block II spacecraft and operational procedures, the most important of which were use of a nitrogen/oxygen mixture instead of pure oxygen before and during launch, and removal of flammable cabin and space suit materials. The Block II design already called for replacement of the Block I plug-type hatch cover with a quick-release, outward opening door.
In September 1967, Mueller approved a sequence of mission types which had to be successfully accomplished in order to achieve the crewed lunar landing. Each step had to be successfully accomplished before the next ones could be performed, and it was unknown how many tries of each mission would be necessary; therefore letters were used instead of numbers. The A missions were uncrewed Saturn V validation; B was uncrewed LM validation using the Saturn IB; C was crewed CSM Earth orbit validation using the Saturn IB; D was the first crewed CSM/LM flight (this replaced AS-258, using a single Saturn V launch); E would be a higher Earth orbit CSM/LM flight; F would be the first lunar mission, testing the LM in lunar orbit but without landing (a "dress rehearsal"); and G would be the first crewed landing. The list of types covered follow-on lunar exploration to include H lunar landings, I for lunar orbital survey missions, and J for extended-stay lunar landings.
The delay in the CSM caused by the fire enabled NASA to catch up on human-rating the LM and SaturnV. Apollo4 (AS-501) was the first uncrewed flight of the SaturnV, carrying a BlockI CSM on November 9, 1967. The capability of the command module's heat shield to survive a trans-lunar reentry was demonstrated by using the service module engine to ram it into the atmosphere at higher than the usual Earth-orbital reentry speed.
Apollo 5 (AS-204) was the first uncrewed test flight of the LM in Earth orbit, launched from pad 37 on January 22, 1968, by the Saturn IB that would have been used for Apollo 1. The LM engines were successfully test-fired and restarted, despite a computer programming error which cut short the first descent stage firing. The ascent engine was fired in abort mode, known as a "fire-in-the-hole" test, where it was lit simultaneously with jettison of the descent stage. Although Grumman wanted a second uncrewed test, George Low decided the next LM flight would be crewed.
This was followed on April 4, 1968, by Apollo 6 (AS-502) which carried a CSM and a LM Test Article as ballast. The intent of this mission was to achieve trans-lunar injection, followed closely by a simulated direct-return abort, using the service module engine to achieve another high-speed reentry. The Saturn V experienced pogo oscillation, a problem caused by non-steady engine combustion, which damaged fuel lines in the second and third stages. Two S-II engines shut down prematurely, but the remaining engines were able to compensate. The damage to the third stage engine was more severe, preventing it from restarting for trans-lunar injection. Mission controllers were able to use the service module engine to essentially repeat the flight profile of Apollo 4. Based on the good performance of Apollo6 and identification of satisfactory fixes to the Apollo6 problems, NASA declared the SaturnV ready to fly crew, canceling a third uncrewed test.Crewed development missions
<imagemap>
File:Apollo manned development missions insignia.png|thumb|right|upright1.15|Apollo crewed development mission patches. Click on a patch to read the main article about that mission.|altComposite image of six crewed Apollo development mission patches, from Apollo1 to Apollo 11.
rect 0 0 595 600 Apollo 1 unsuccessful first crewed CSM test
rect 596 0 1376 600 Apollo 7 first crewed CSM test
rect 1377 0 2076 600 Apollo 8 first crewed flight to the Moon
rect 0 601 595 1200 Apollo 9 crewed Earth orbital LM test
rect 596 601 1376 1200 Apollo 10 crewed lunar orbital LM test
rect 1377 601 2076 1200 Apollo 11 first crewed Moon landing
</imagemap>
Apollo 7, launched from LC-34 on October 11, 1968, was the Cmission, crewed by Schirra, Eisele, and Cunningham. It was an 11-day Earth-orbital flight which tested the CSM systems.
Apollo 8 was planned to be the D mission in December 1968, crewed by McDivitt, Scott and Schweickart, launched on a SaturnV instead of two Saturn IBs. In the summer it had become clear that the LM would not be ready in time. Rather than waste the Saturn V on another simple Earth-orbiting mission, ASPO Manager George Low suggested the bold step of sending Apollo8 to orbit the Moon instead, deferring the Dmission to the next mission in March 1969, and eliminating the E mission. This would keep the program on track. The Soviet Union had sent two tortoises, mealworms, wine flies, and other lifeforms around the Moon on September 15, 1968, aboard Zond 5, and it was believed they might soon repeat the feat with human cosmonauts. The decision was not announced publicly until successful completion of Apollo 7. Gemini veterans Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, and rookie William Anders captured the world's attention by making ten lunar orbits in 20 hours, transmitting television pictures of the lunar surface on Christmas Eve, and returning safely to Earth.
descends the LM's ladder in preparation for the first steps on the lunar surface, as televised live on July 20, 1969.]]
The following March, LM flight, rendezvous and docking were successfully demonstrated in Earth orbit on Apollo 9, and Schweickart tested the full lunar EVA suit with its portable life support system (PLSS) outside the LM. The F mission was successfully carried out on Apollo 10 in May 1969 by Gemini veterans Thomas P. Stafford, John Young and Eugene Cernan. Stafford and Cernan took the LM to within of the lunar surface.
The G mission was achieved on Apollo 11 in July 1969 by an all-Gemini veteran crew consisting of Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin. Armstrong and Aldrin performed the first landing at the Sea of Tranquility at 20:17:40 UTC on July 20, 1969. They spent a total of 21 hours, 36 minutes on the surface, and spent 2hours, 31 minutes outside the spacecraft,
Production lunar landings
In November 1969, Charles "Pete" Conrad became the third person to step onto the Moon, which he did while speaking more informally than had Armstrong:
<imagemap>
File:Apollo lunar landing missions insignia.png|thumb|right|upright1.15|Apollo production crewed lunar landing mission patches. Click on a patch to read the main article about that mission.|altComposite image of six production crewed Apollo lunar landing mission patches, from Apollo 12 to Apollo 17.
rect 0 0 602 600 Apollo 12 second crewed Moon landing
rect 603 0 1205 600 Apollo 13 unsuccessful Moon landing attempt
rect 1206 0 1885 600 Apollo 14 third crewed Moon landing
rect 0 601 602 1200 Apollo 15 fourth crewed Moon landing
rect 603 601 1205 1200 Apollo 16 fifth crewed Moon landing
rect 1206 601 1885 1200 Apollo 17 sixth crewed Moon landing
</imagemap>
Conrad and rookie Alan L. Bean made a precision landing of Apollo 12 within walking distance of the Surveyor 3 uncrewed lunar probe, which had landed in April 1967 on the Ocean of Storms. The command module pilot was Gemini veteran Richard F. Gordon Jr. Conrad and Bean carried the first lunar surface color television camera, but it was damaged when accidentally pointed into the Sun. They made two EVAs totaling 7hours and 45 minutes. On one, they walked to the Surveyor, photographed it, and removed some parts which they returned to Earth.
The contracted batch of 15 Saturn Vs was enough for lunar landing missions through Apollo 20. Shortly after Apollo 11, NASA publicized a preliminary list of eight more planned landing sites after Apollo 12, with plans to increase the mass of the CSM and LM for the last five missions, along with the payload capacity of the Saturn V. These final missions would combine the I and J types in the 1967 list, allowing the CMP to operate a package of lunar orbital sensors and cameras while his companions were on the surface, and allowing them to stay on the Moon for over three days. These missions would also carry the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) increasing the exploration area and allowing televised liftoff of the LM. Also, the Block II spacesuit was revised for the extended missions to allow greater flexibility and visibility for driving the LRV.
The success of the first two landings allowed the remaining missions to be crewed with a single veteran as commander, with two rookies. Apollo 13 launched Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise in April 1970, headed for the Fra Mauro formation. But two days out, a liquid oxygen tank exploded, disabling the service module and forcing the crew to use the LM as a "lifeboat" to return to Earth. Another NASA review board was convened to determine the cause, which turned out to be a combination of damage of the tank in the factory, and a subcontractor not making a tank component according to updated design specifications.
Mission cutbacks
About the time of the first landing in 1969, it was decided to use an existing Saturn V to launch the Skylab orbital laboratory pre-built on the ground, replacing the original plan to construct it in orbit from several Saturn IB launches; this eliminated Apollo 20. NASA's yearly budget also began to shrink in light of the successful landing, and NASA also had to make funds available for the development of the upcoming Space Shuttle. By 1971, the decision was made to also cancel missions 18 and 19. The two unused Saturn Vs became museum exhibits at the John F. Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida, George C. Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama, Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
The cutbacks forced mission planners to reassess the original planned landing sites in order to achieve the most effective geological sample and data collection from the remaining four missions. Apollo 15 had been planned to be the last of the H series missions, but since there would be only two subsequent missions left, it was changed to the first of three J missions.
Apollo 13's Fra Mauro mission was reassigned to Apollo 14, commanded in February 1971 by Mercury veteran Alan Shepard, with Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell. This time the mission was successful. Shepard and Mitchell spent 33 hours and 31 minutes on the surface, and completed two EVAs totalling 9hours 24 minutes, which was a record for the longest EVA by a lunar crew at the time.
Extended missions
used on Apollos 15–17]]
Apollo 15 was launched on July 26, 1971, with David Scott, Alfred Worden and James Irwin. Scott and Irwin landed on July 30 near Hadley Rille, and spent just under two days, 19 hours on the surface. In over 18 hours of EVA, they collected about of lunar material.
Apollo 16 landed in the Descartes Highlands on April 20, 1972. The crew was commanded by John Young, with Ken Mattingly and Charles Duke. Young and Duke spent just under three days on the surface, with a total of over 20 hours EVA.
Apollo 17 was the last of the Apollo program, landing in the Taurus–Littrow region in December 1972. Eugene Cernan commanded Ronald E. Evans and NASA's first scientist-astronaut, geologist Harrison H. Schmitt. Schmitt was originally scheduled for Apollo 18, but the lunar geological community lobbied for his inclusion on the final lunar landing. Cernan and Schmitt stayed on the surface for just over three days and spent just over 23 hours of total EVA.
|-
| Apollo 14 || Jan 31 – Feb 9, 1971 || SA-509 || CSM-110<br />Kitty Hawk || LM-8<br />Antares || Alan Shepard<br />Stuart Roosa<br />Edgar Mitchell || Third landing, in Fra Mauro formation. Surface EVA time: 9h 21m. Samples returned: .
|-
| Apollo 15 || Jul 26 – Aug 7, 1971 || SA-510 || CSM-112<br />Endeavour|| LM-10<br />Falcon || David Scott<br />Alfred Worden<br />James Irwin || Fourth landing, in Hadley-Apennine. First extended mission, used Rover on Moon. Surface EVA time: 18h 33m. Samples returned: .
|-
| Apollo 16 || Apr 16–27, 1972 || SA-511 || CSM-113<br />Casper || LM-11<br />Orion || John Young<br />Ken Mattingly<br />Charles Duke || Fifth landing, in Plain of Descartes. Second extended mission, used Rover on Moon. Surface EVA time: 20h 14m. Samples returned: .
|-
| Apollo 17 || Dec 7–19, 1972 || SA-512 || CSM-114<br />America || LM-12<br />Challenger || Eugene Cernan<br />Ronald Evans<br />Harrison Schmitt || Only Saturn V night launch. Sixth landing, in Taurus–Littrow. Third extended mission, used Rover on Moon. First geologist on the Moon. Apollo's last crewed Moon landing. Surface EVA time: 22h 2m. Samples returned: .
|}
Source: Apollo by the Numbers: A Statistical Reference (Orloff 2004).Samples returned
The Apollo program returned over of lunar rocks and soil to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston. Today, 75% of the samples are stored at the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility built in 1979.
The rocks collected from the Moon are extremely old compared to rocks found on Earth, as measured by radiometric dating techniques. They range in age from about 3.2 billion years for the basaltic samples derived from the lunar maria, to about 4.6 billion years for samples derived from the highlands crust. As such, they represent samples from a very early period in the development of the Solar System, that are largely absent on Earth. One important rock found during the Apollo Program is dubbed the Genesis Rock, retrieved by astronauts David Scott and James Irwin during the Apollo 15 mission. This anorthosite rock is composed almost exclusively of the calcium-rich feldspar mineral anorthite, and is believed to be representative of the highland crust. A geochemical component called KREEP was discovered by Apollo 12, which has no known terrestrial counterpart. KREEP and the anorthositic samples have been used to infer that the outer portion of the Moon was once completely molten (see lunar magma ocean).
Almost all the rocks show evidence of impact process effects. Many samples appear to be pitted with micrometeoroid impact craters, which is never seen on Earth rocks, due to the thick atmosphere. Many show signs of being subjected to high-pressure shock waves that are generated during impact events. Some of the returned samples are of impact melt (materials melted near an impact crater.) All samples returned from the Moon are highly brecciated as a result of being subjected to multiple impact events.
From analyses of the composition of the returned lunar samples, it is now believed that the Moon was created through the impact of a large astronomical body with Earth.
Costs
Apollo cost $25.4 billion or approximately $257 billion (2023) using improved cost analysis.
Of this amount, $20.2 billion ($}} adjusted) was spent on the design, development, and production of the Saturn family of launch vehicles, the Apollo spacecraft, spacesuits, scientific experiments, and mission operations. The cost of constructing and operating Apollo-related ground facilities, such as the NASA human spaceflight centers and the global tracking and data acquisition network, added an additional $5.2 billion ($}} adjusted).
The amount grows to $28 billion ($280 billion adjusted) if the costs for related projects such as Project Gemini and the robotic Ranger, Surveyor, and Lunar Orbiter programs are included.
Project Apollo was a massive undertaking, representing the largest research and development project in peacetime. At its peak, it employed over 400,000 employees and contractors around the country and accounted for more than half of NASA's total spending in the 1960s. After the first Moon landing, public and political interest waned, including that of President Nixon, who wanted to rein in federal spending. NASA's budget could not sustain Apollo missions which cost, on average, $445 million ($}} adjusted) each while simultaneously developing the Space Shuttle. The final fiscal year of Apollo funding was 1973.Apollo Applications Program
Looking beyond the crewed lunar landings, NASA investigated several post-lunar applications for Apollo hardware. The Apollo Extension Series (Apollo X) proposed up to 30 flights to Earth orbit, using the space in the Spacecraft Lunar Module Adapter (SLA) to house a small orbital laboratory (workshop). Astronauts would continue to use the CSM as a ferry to the station. This study was followed by design of a larger orbital workshop to be built in orbit from an empty S-IVB Saturn upper stage and grew into the Apollo Applications Program (AAP). The workshop was to be supplemented by the Apollo Telescope Mount, which could be attached to the ascent stage of the lunar module via a rack. The most ambitious plan called for using an empty S-IVB as an interplanetary spacecraft for a Venus fly-by mission.
The S-IVB orbital workshop was the only one of these plans to make it off the drawing board. Dubbed Skylab, it was assembled on the ground rather than in space, and launched in 1973 using the two lower stages of a Saturn V. It was equipped with an Apollo Telescope Mount. Skylab's last crew departed the station on February 8, 1974, and the station itself re-entered the atmosphere in 1979 after development of the Space Shuttle was delayed too long to save it.
Recent observations
, imaged in March 2012 by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter]]
In 2008, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's SELENE probe observed evidence of the halo surrounding the Apollo 15 Lunar Module blast crater while orbiting above the lunar surface.
Beginning in 2009, NASA's robotic Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, while orbiting above the Moon, photographed the remnants of the Apollo program left on the lunar surface, and each site where crewed Apollo flights landed. All of the U.S. flags left on the Moon during the Apollo missions were found to still be standing, with the exception of the one left during the Apollo 11 mission, which was blown over during that mission's lift-off from the lunar surface; the degree to which these flags retain their original colors remains unknown. The flags cannot be seen through a telescope from Earth.
In a November 16, 2009, editorial, The New York Times opined:
...
There the [Apollo 11] lunar module sits, parked just where it landed 40 years ago, as if it still really were 40 years ago and all the time since merely imaginary.}}LegacyScience and engineering
standing next to the navigation software that she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo project]]
The Apollo program has been described as the greatest technological achievement in human history. Apollo stimulated many areas of technology, leading to over 1,800 spinoff products as of 2015, including advances in the development of cordless power tools, fireproof materials, heart monitors, solar panels, digital imaging, and the use of liquid methane as fuel. The flight computer design used in both the lunar and command modules was, along with the Polaris and Minuteman missile systems, the driving force behind early research into integrated circuits (ICs). By 1963, Apollo was using 60 percent of the United States' production of ICs. The crucial difference between the requirements of Apollo and the missile programs was Apollo's much greater need for reliability. While the Navy and Air Force could work around reliability problems by deploying more missiles, the political and financial cost of failure of an Apollo mission was unacceptably high.
Technologies and techniques required for Apollo were developed by Project Gemini. The Apollo project was enabled by NASA's adoption of new advances in semiconductor electronic technology, including metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) in the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) and silicon integrated circuit chips in the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).Cultural impact
photograph taken on December7, 1972, during Apollo 17. "We went to explore the Moon, and in fact discovered the Earth." —Eugene Cernan]]
The crew of Apollo 8 sent the first live televised pictures of the Earth and the Moon back to Earth, and read from the creation story in the Book of Genesis, on Christmas Eve 1968. An estimated one-quarter of the population of the world saw—either live or delayed—the Christmas Eve transmission during the ninth orbit of the Moon, and an estimated one-fifth of the population of the world watched the live transmission of the Apollo 11 moonwalk.
The Apollo program also affected environmental activism in the 1970s due to photos taken by the astronauts. The most well known include Earthrise, taken by William Anders on Apollo 8, and The Blue Marble, taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts. The Blue Marble'' was released during a surge in environmentalism, and became a symbol of the environmental movement as a depiction of Earth's frailty, vulnerability, and isolation amid the vast expanse of space.
According to The Economist, Apollo succeeded in accomplishing President Kennedy's goal of taking on the Soviet Union in the Space Race by accomplishing a singular and significant achievement, to demonstrate the superiority of the free-market system. The publication noted the irony that in order to achieve the goal, the program required the organization of tremendous public resources within a vast, centralized government bureaucracy.Apollo 11 broadcast data restoration project
Prior to Apollo 11's 40th anniversary in 2009, NASA searched for the original videotapes of the mission's live televised moonwalk. After an exhaustive three-year search, it was concluded that the tapes had probably been erased and reused. A new digitally remastered version of the best available broadcast television footage was released instead.
Depictions on film
Documentaries
Numerous documentary films cover the Apollo program and the Space Race, including:
* Footprints on the Moon (1969)
* Moonwalk One (1970)
* The Greatest Adventure (1978)
* For All Mankind (1989)
* Moon Shot (1994 miniseries)
* "Moon" from the BBC miniseries The Planets (1999)
* Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D (2005)
* The Wonder of It All (2007)
* In the Shadow of the Moon (2007)
* When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions (2008 miniseries)
* Moon Machines (2008 miniseries)
* James May on the Moon (2009)
* ''NASA's Story (2009 miniseries)
* Apollo 11'' (2019)
* Chasing the Moon (2019 miniseries)
Docudramas
Some missions have been dramatized:
* Apollo 13 (1995)
* Apollo 11 (1996)
* From the Earth to the Moon (1998)
* The Dish (2000)
* Space Race (2005)
* Moonshot (2009)
* First Man (2018)
Fictional
The Apollo program has been the focus of several works of fiction, including:
*Apollo 18 (2011), horror movie which was released to negative reviews.
*Men in Black 3 (2012), Science Fiction/Comedy movie. Agent J played by Will Smith goes back to the Apollo 11 launch in 1969 to ensure that a global protection system is launched in to space.
*For All Mankind (2019), TV series depicting an alternate history in which the Soviet Union was the first country to successfully land a man on the Moon.
*Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), fifth Indiana Jones film, in which Jürgen Voller, a NASA member and ex-Nazi involved with the Apollo program, wants to time travel. The New York City parade for the Apollo 11 crew is portrayed as a plot point.See also
* Apollo 11 in popular culture
* Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package
* Exploration of the Moon
* Leslie Cantwell collection
* List of artificial objects on the Moon
* List of crewed spacecraft
* List of missions to the Moon
* Soviet crewed lunar programs
* Stolen and missing Moon rocks
* Artemis Program
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
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* Chaikin interviewed all the surviving astronauts and others who worked with the program.
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Further reading
* NASA Report JSC-09423, April 1975
* The autobiography of Michael Collins' experiences as an astronaut, including his flight aboard Apollo 11.
* Although this book focuses on Apollo 13, it provides a wealth of background information on Apollo technology and procedures.
* History of the Apollo program from Apollos 1–11, including many interviews with the Apollo astronauts.
* Gleick, James, "Moon Fever" [review of Oliver Morton, The Moon: A History of the Future; ''Apollo's Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, July 3 – September 22, 2019; Douglas Brinkley, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race; Brandon R. Brown, The Apollo Chronicles: Engineering America's First Moon Missions; Roger D. Launius, Reaching for the Moon: A Short History of the Space Race; Apollo 11, a documentary film directed by Todd Douglas Miller; and Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys (50th Anniversary Edition)], The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVI, no. 13 (15 August 2019), pp. 54–58.
* Factual, from the standpoint of a flight controller during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs.
* Details the flight of Apollo 13.
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* Tells Grumman's story of building the lunar modules.
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* History of the crewed space program from 1September 1960, to 5January 1968.
* Account of Deke Slayton's life as an astronaut and of his work as chief of the astronaut office, including selection of Apollo crews.
* From origin to November 7, 1962
* November 8, 1962 – September 30, 1964
* October 1, 1964 – January 20, 1966
* January 21, 1966 – July 13, 1974
* The history of lunar exploration from a geologist's point of view.
External links
* [https://web.archive.org/web/19991013042039/http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/history/apollo/index.html Apollo program history] at NASA's Human Space Flight (HSF) website
* [https://history.nasa.gov/apollo.html The Apollo Program] at the NASA History Program Office
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* [http://airandspace.si.edu/explore-and-learn/topics/apollo/ The Apollo Program] at the National Air and Space Museum
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20040804051632/http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/apollo11/index1.html Apollo 35th Anniversary Interactive Feature] at NASA (in Flash)
* [http://www.lpi.usra.edu/expmoon/apollo_landings.html Lunar Mission Timeline] at the Lunar and Planetary Institute
* [http://libarchstor.uah.edu:8081/repositories/2/resources/69 Apollo Collection, The University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections]
NASA reports
* [https://history.nasa.gov/apsr/apsr.htm Apollo Program Summary Report] (PDF), NASA, JSC-09423, April 1975
* [https://history.nasa.gov/series95.html NASA History Series Publications]
* [https://history.nasa.gov/diagrams/apollo.html Project Apollo Drawings and Technical Diagrams] at the NASA History Program Office
* [http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/frame.html The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal] edited by Eric M. Jones and Ken Glover
* [https://history.nasa.gov/afj/ The Apollo Flight Journal] by W. David Woods, et al.
Multimedia
* [https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/index.html NASA Apollo Program images and videos]
* [http://apollo.sese.asu.edu/ Apollo Image Archive] at Arizona State University
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20160601211812/http://millercenter.org/presidentialrecordings/jfk-mtg-63 Audio recording and transcript of President John F. Kennedy, NASA administrator James Webb, et al., discussing the Apollo agenda] (White House Cabinet Room, November 21, 1962)
* [http://www.apolloarchive.com/ The Project Apollo Archive] by Kipp Teague is a large repository of Apollo images, videos, and audio recordings
* [https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/ The Project Apollo Archive on Flickr]
* [http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollo/ Apollo Image Atlas]—almost 25,000 lunar images, Lunar and Planetary Institute
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* [https://catalog.archives.gov/id/649447 The short film The Time of Apollo (1975) is available for free viewing and download at the National Archives.]
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Category:1960s in the United States
Category:1970s in the United States
Category:Articles containing video clips
Category:Engineering projects
Category:Exploration of the Moon
Category:Human spaceflight programs
Category:NASA programs
Category:Space program of the United States | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.422037 |
1466 | Assault | In the terminology of law, an assault is the act of causing physical harm or unwanted physical contact to another person, or, in some legal definitions, the threat or attempt to do so. It is both a crime and a tort and, therefore, may result in criminal prosecution, civil liability, or both. Additionally, assault is a criminal act in which a person intentionally causes fear of physical harm or offensive contact to another person. Assault can be committed with or without a weapon and can range from physical violence to threats of violence. Assault is frequently referred to as an attempt to commit battery, which is the deliberate use of physical force against another person. The deliberate inflicting of fear, apprehension, or terror is another definition of assault that can be found in several legal systems. Depending on the severity of the offense, assault may result in a fine, imprisonment, or even death.
Generally, the common law definition is the same in criminal and tort law.
Traditionally, common law legal systems have separate definitions for assault and battery. When this distinction is observed, battery refers to the actual bodily contact, whereas assault refers to a credible threat or attempt to cause battery. Some jurisdictions combined the two offenses into a single crime called "assault and battery", which then became widely referred to as "assault". The result is that in many of these jurisdictions, assault has taken on a definition that is more in line with the traditional definition of battery. The legal systems of civil law and Scots law have never distinguished assault from battery.
Legal systems generally acknowledge that assaults can vary greatly in severity. In the United States, an assault can be charged as either a misdemeanor or a felony. In England and Wales and Australia, it can be charged as either common assault, assault occasioning actual bodily harm (ABH) or grievous bodily harm (GBH). Canada also has a three-tier system: assault, assault causing bodily harm and aggravated assault. Separate charges typically exist for sexual assaults, affray and assaulting a police officer. Assault may overlap with an attempted crime; for example, an assault may be charged as attempted murder if it was done with intent to kill.
Related definitions
Battery
Battery is a criminal offense that involves the use of physical force against another person without their consent. It is a type of assault and is considered a serious crime. Battery can include a wide range of actions, from slapping someone to causing serious harm or even death. Depending on the severity of the offense, it can carry a wide range of punishments, including jail time, fines, and probation.
In jurisdictions that make a distinction between the two, assault usually accompanies battery if the assailant both threatens to make unwanted contact and then carries through with this threat. See common assault. The elements of battery are that it is a volitional act, done for the purpose of causing a harmful or offensive contact with another person or under circumstances that make such contact substantially certain to occur, and which causes such contact.
Aggravated assault
Aggravated assault is a violent crime that involves violence or the threat of violence. It is generally described as an intentional act that causes another person to fear imminent physical harm or injury. This can include the use of a weapon, or the threat of using a weapon. It is usually considered a felony offense and can carry severe penalties. Aggravated assault is often considered a very serious crime and can lead to long-term prison sentences.
Aggravated assault is, in some jurisdictions, a stronger form of assault, usually using a deadly weapon. A person has committed an aggravated assault when that person attempts to:
* cause serious bodily injury to another person with a deadly weapon
* have sexual relations with a person who is under the age of consent
* cause bodily harm by recklessly operating a motor vehicle during road rage; often referred to as either vehicular assault or aggravated assault with a motor vehicle.
Aggravated assault can also be charged in cases of attempted harm against police officers or other public servants.DefensesAlthough the range and precise application of defenses varies between jurisdictions, the following represents a list of the defenses that may apply to all levels of assault:ConsentExceptions exist to cover unsolicited physical contact which amount to normal social behavior known as de minimis harm. Assault can also be considered in cases involving the spitting on or unwanted exposure of bodily fluids to others.
Consent may be a complete or partial defense to assault. In some jurisdictions, most notably England, it is not a defense where the degree of injury is severe, as long as there is no legally recognized good reason for the assault. This can have important consequences when dealing with issues such as consensual sadomasochistic sexual activity, the most notable case being the Operation Spanner case. Legally recognized good reasons for consent include surgery, activities within the rules of a game (mixed martial arts, wrestling, boxing, or contact sports), bodily adornment (R v Wilson [1996] Crim LR 573), or horseplay (R v Jones [1987] Crim LR 123). However, any activity outside the rules of the game is not legally recognized as a defense of consent. In Scottish law, consent is not a defense for assault.Arrest and other official actsPolice officers and court officials have a general power to use force for the purpose of performing an arrest or generally carrying out their official duties. Thus, a court officer taking possession of goods under a court order may use force if reasonably necessary.Punishment
In some jurisdictions such as Singapore, judicial corporal punishment is part of the legal system. The officers who administer the punishment have immunity from prosecution for assault.
In the United States, England, Northern Ireland, Australia and Canada, corporal punishment administered to children by their parent or legal guardian is not legally considered to be assault unless it is deemed to be excessive or unreasonable. What constitutes "reasonable" varies in both statutory law and case law. Unreasonable physical punishment may be charged as assault or under a separate statute for child abuse.
In English law, s. 58 Children Act 2004 limits the availability of the lawful correction defense to common assault. This defence was abolished in Wales in 2022.
Many countries, including some US states, also permit the use of controversial corporal punishment for children in school or home.
Prevention of crime
This may or may not involve self-defense in that, using a reasonable degree of force to prevent another from committing a crime could involve preventing an assault, but it could be preventing a crime not involving the use of personal violence.
Defense of property
Some jurisdictions allow force to be used in defense of property, to prevent damage either in its own right, or under one or both of the preceding classes of defense in that a threat or attempt to damage property might be considered a crime (in English law, under s5 Criminal Damage Act 1971 it may be argued that the defendant has a lawful excuse to damage property during the defense and a defense under s3 Criminal Law Act 1967) subject to the need to deter vigilantes and excessive self-help. Furthermore, some jurisdictions, such as Ohio, allow residents in their homes to use force when ejecting an intruder. The resident merely needs to assert to the court that they felt threatened by the intruder's presence.
By country
Statistics
The below table shows the rate of reported serious assault for individual countries according to United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for the last available year.
{| class"wikitable sortable sticky-header col1left" style"text-align:center;"
! Country !! Reported<br>serious assaults <br>per 100,000
Each state has legislation relating to the act of assault, and offences against the act that constitute assault are heard in the magistrates' court of that state or indictable offences are heard in a district or supreme court of that state. The legislation that defines assault of each state outline what the elements are that make up the assault, where the assault is sectioned in legislation or criminal codes, and the penalties that apply for the offence of assault.
In New South Wales, the Crimes Act 1900 defines a range of assault offences deemed more serious than common assault and which attract heavier penalties. These include:
Assault with further specific intent
* Acts done to the person with intent to murder
* Wounding or grievous bodily harm
* Use or possession of a weapon to resist arrest
Assault causing certain injuries
* Actual bodily harm – the term is not defined in the Crimes Act, but case law indicates actual bodily harm may include injuries such as bruises and scratches, as well as psychological injuries if the injury inflicted is more than merely transient (the injury does not necessarily need to be permanent)
* Wounding – where there is breaking of the skin; – which includes the destruction of a fetus, permanent or serious disfiguring, and transmission of a grievous bodily disease
Assault causing death
* Death
* Death when intoxicated (in regards to the offender)
Canada
Assault is an offence under s. 265 of the Canadian Criminal Code. There is a wide range of the types of assault that can occur. Generally, an assault occurs when a person directly or indirectly applies force intentionally to another person without their consent. It can also occur when a person attempts to apply such force, or threatens to do so, without the consent of the other person. An injury need not occur for an assault to be committed, but the force used in the assault must be offensive in nature with an intention to apply force. It can be an assault to "tap", "pinch", "push", or direct another such minor action toward another, but an accidental application of force is not an assault.
The potential punishment for an assault in Canada varies depending on the manner in which the charge proceeds through the court system and the type of assault that is committed. The Criminal Code defines assault as a dual offence (indictable or summary offence). Police officers can arrest someone without a warrant for an assault if it is in the public's interest to do so notwithstanding S.495(2)(d) of the Code. Two well-known cases are found in the speeches of Demosthenes, a prominent statesman and orator in ancient Greece. These two examples occurred when first, in addition to other acts of violence, Meidias allegedly punched Demosthenes in the face in the theater (Against Meidias), and second (Against Konon), when the defendant allegedly severely beat him.
Hubris, though not specifically defined, was a legal term and was considered a crime in classical Athens. It was also considered the greatest sin of the ancient Greek world. That was so because it not only was proof of excessive pride, but also resulted in violent acts by or to those involved. The category of acts constituting hubris for the ancient Greeks apparently broadened from the original specific reference to mutilation of a corpse, or a humiliation of a defeated foe, or irreverent, "outrageous treatment", in general.
The meaning was eventually further generalized in its modern English usage to apply to any outrageous act or exhibition of pride or disregard for basic moral laws. Such an act may be referred to as an "act of hubris", or the person committing the act may be said to be hubristic. Atë, Greek for 'ruin, folly, delusion', is the action performed by the hero, usually because of their hubris, or great pride, that leads to their death or downfall.
Crucial to this definition are the ancient Greek concepts of honor (timē) and shame. The concept of timē included not only the exaltation of the one receiving honor, but also the shaming of the one overcome by the act of hubris. This concept of honor is akin to a zero-sum game. Rush Rehm simplifies this definition to the contemporary concept of "insolence, contempt, and excessive violence".
India
The Indian Penal Code covers the punishments and types of assault in Chapter 16, sections 351 through 358.
The Code further explains that "mere words do not amount to an assault. But the words which a person uses may give to their gestures or preparation such a meaning as may make those gestures or preparations amount to an assault". Assault is in Indian criminal law an attempt to use criminal force (with criminal force being described in s.350). The attempt itself has been made an offence in India, as in other states.
Nigeria
The Criminal Code Act (chapter 29 of Part V; sections 351 to 365) creates a number of offences of assault. Assault is defined by section 252 of that Act. Assault is a misdemeanor punishable by one year imprisonment; assault with "intent to have carnal knowledge of him or her" or who indecently assaults another, or who commits other more-serious variants of assault (as defined in the Act) are guilty of a felony, and longer prison terms are provided for.
Pacific Islands
Marshall Islands
The offence of assault is created by section 113 of the Criminal Code. A person is guilty of this offence if they unlawfully offer or attempt, with force or violence, to strike, beat, wound, or do bodily harm to, another.
Republic of Ireland
Section 2 of the Non-Fatal Offences against the Person Act 1997 creates the offence of assault, and section 3 of that Act creates the offence of assault causing harm.
South Africa
South African law does not draw the distinction between assault and battery. Assault is a common law crime defined as "unlawfully and intentionally applying force to the person of another, or inspiring a belief in that other that force is immediately to be applied to him". The law also recognises the crime of assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, where grievous bodily harm is defined as "harm which in itself is such as seriously to interfere with health". The common law crime of indecent assault was repealed by the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Related Matters) Amendment Act, 2007, and replaced by a statutory crime of sexual assault.United Kingdom
;Piracy with violence: Section 2 of the Piracy Act 1837 provides that it is an offence, amongst other things, for a person, with intent to commit or at the time of or immediately before or immediately after committing the crime of piracy in respect of any ship or vessel, to assault, with intent to murder, any person being on board of or belonging to such ship or vessel.
;Assault on an officer of Revenue and Customs: This offence (relating to officers of HMRC) is created by section 32(1) of the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005.
;Assaulting an immigration officer: This offence is created by [http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2007/30/section/22 section 22(1)] of the UK Borders Act 2007.
;Assaulting an accredited financial investigator: This section is created by section 453A of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.
;Assaulting a member of an international joint investigation team: This offence is created by [http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2005/15/section/57 section 57(2)] of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005.
;Attacks on internationally protected persons: Section 1(1)(a) of the Internationally Protected Persons Act 1978 (c.17) makes provision for assault occasioning actual bodily harm or causing injury on "protected persons" (including Heads of State).
;Attacks on UN Staff workers: Section 1(2)(a) of the United Nations Personnel Act 1997 (c.13) makes provision for assault causing injury, and section 1(2)(b) makes provision for assault occasioning actual bodily harm, on UN staff.
;Assault by person committing an offence under the Night Poaching Act 1828: This offence is created by section 2 of the Night Poaching Act 1828.
Abolished offences:
;Assault on customs and excise officers, etc.: Section 16(1)(a) of the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979 (c.2) provided that it was an offence to, amongst other things, assault any person duly engaged in the performance of any duty or the exercise of any power imposed or conferred on him by or under any enactment relating to an assigned matter, or any person acting in his aid. For the meaning of "assault" in this provision, see Logdon v. DPP [1976] Crim LR 121, DC. This offence was abolished and replaced by the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act 2005.
;Assaulting a person designated under section 43 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005: This offence was created by [http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2005/15/section/51 section 51(1)] of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. It related to officers of the Serious Organized Crime Agency and was repealed when that agency was abolished.
England and Wales
English law provides for two offences of assault: common assault and battery. Assault (or common assault) is committed if one intentionally or recklessly causes another person to apprehend immediate and unlawful personal violence. Violence in this context means any unlawful touching, though there is some debate over whether the touching must also be hostile. The terms "assault" and "common assault" often encompass the separate offence of battery, even in statutory settings such as section 40(3)(a) of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 (c. 33).
A common assault is an assault that lacks any of the aggravating features which Parliament has deemed serious enough to deserve a higher penalty. Section 39 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 provides that common assault, like battery, is triable only in a magistrates' court in England and Wales (unless it is linked to a more serious offence, which is triable in the Crown Court). Additionally, if a defendant has been charged on an indictment with assault occasioning actual bodily harm (ABH), or racially/religiously aggravated assault, then a jury in the Crown Court may acquit the defendant of the more serious offence, but still convict of common assault if it finds common assault has been committed.
Aggravated assault
An assault which is aggravated by the scale of the injuries inflicted may be charged as offences causing "actual bodily harm" (ABH) or, in the severest cases, "grievous bodily harm" (GBH).
;Assault occasioning actual bodily harm: This offence is created by section 47 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 (24 & 25 Vict. c. 100).
;Inflicting grievous bodily harm: Also referred to as "malicious wounding" or "unlawful wounding". This offence is created by section 20 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 (24 & 25 Vict. c. 100).
;Causing grievous bodily harm with intent: Also referred to as "wounding with intent". This offence is created by section 18 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 (24 & 25 Vict. c. 100).
Other aggravated assault charges refer to assaults carried out against a specific target or with a specific intent:
;Assault with intent to rob: The penalty for assault with intent to rob, a common law offence, is provided by section 8(2) of the Theft Act 1968.
;Racially or religiously aggravated common assault: This offence is created by section 29(1)(c) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 (c. 37), defined in terms of the common law offence.
;Racially or religiously aggravated assault occasioning actual bodily harm: This offence is created by section 29(1)(b) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 (c. 37), defined in terms of the common law offence.
;Assault with intent to resist arrest: This offence is created by section 38 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 (24 & 25 Vict. c. 100).
;Assaulting a constable in the execution of his duty: Section 89(1) of the Police Act 1996 (c. 16) provides that it is an offence for a person to assault a constable acting in the execution of his duty or a person assisting a constable in the execution of his duty. It is a summary offence with the same maximum penalty as common assault.
;Assaulting a traffic officer: This offence is created by section/10 section 10(1) of the Traffic Management Act 2004 (c. 18). This offence applies to Traffic Wardens, Civil Enforcement Officers and PCSOs if they have been conferred with road traffic powers by their force.
;Assaulting a person designated or accredited under sections 38 or 39 or 41 or 41A of the Police Reform Act 2002: This offence is created by section/46 section 46(1) of the Police Reform Act 2002 (c. 30). Those sections relate respectively to persons given police powers by a chief police officer, such as PCSOs detention officers or contractors retained by police, accredited contractors under a community safety accreditation scheme, and weights and measures inspectors.
;Assault on a prison custody officer: This offence is created by section 90(1) of the Criminal Justice Act 1991 (c. 53).
;Assault on a secure training centre custody officer: This offence is created by section 13(1) of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (c. 33).
;Assault on officer saving wreck: This offence is created by section 37 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 (24 & 25 Vict. c. 100).
;Assaulting an officer of the court: This offence is created by section 14(1)(b) of the County Courts Act 1984 (c. 28).
;Cruelty to persons under sixteen: This offence is created by section 1(1) of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 (23 & 24 Geo. 5. c. 12) and applies to a person who has responsibility for the child. In England (but not Wales since 2022), common law provides a defence of "reasonable punishment" to battery (i.e. assaults involving touching); the Children Act 2004 (c. 31) limits the defence to exclude, among other offences, cruelty under the 1933 act, but not battery, which implies that smacking is not always to be considered cruelty.
;Sexual assault: The offence of sexual assault is created by section 3 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (c. 42). It is not defined in terms of the offences of common assault or battery. It instead requires intentional touching and the absence of a reasonable belief in consent.
;Assault by penetration: This offence is defined by section 2 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (c. 42). Whereas rape consists only of penetration with the perpetrator's penis, assault by penetration can be committed with anything, though unlike rape it excludes penetration of the mouth. It carries the same maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
; Assault on an emergency worker: The Assaults on Emergency Workers (Offences) Act 2018 (c. 23) makes common assault an either way offence (section 1) when committed against an emergency worker (defined in section 3), with a maximum sentence of two years' imprisonment if tried on indictment. The act did not repeal any enactments, so the existing offence of assault on a constable is still available, but that offence cannot be tried on indictment and is therefore limited to six months.
Scotland
In Scots law, assault is defined as an "attack upon the person of another". There is no distinction made in Scotland between assault and battery (which is not a term used in Scots law), although, as in England and Wales, assault can be occasioned without a physical attack on another's person, as demonstrated in Atkinson v. HM Advocate wherein the accused was found guilty of assaulting a shop assistant by simply jumping over a counter while wearing a ski mask. The court said:
Scots law also provides for a more serious charge of aggravated assault on the basis of such factors as severity of injury, the use of a weapon, or Hamesucken (to assault a person in their own home). The mens rea for assault is simply "evil intent", although this has been held to mean no more than that assault "cannot be committed accidentally or recklessly or negligently" as upheld in ''Lord Advocate's Reference No 2 of 1992'' where it was found that a "hold-up" in a shop justified as a joke would still constitute an offence.
It is a separate offence to assault on a constable in the execution of their duty, under section 90 of the Police and Fire Reform (Scotland) Act 2012 (asp 8) (previously section 41 of the Police (Scotland) Act 1967 (c. 77)) which provides that it is an offence for a person to, amongst other things, assault a constable in the execution of their duty or a person assisting a constable in the execution of their duty.
Northern Ireland
Several offences of assault exist in Northern Ireland. The Offences against the Person Act 1861 (24 & 25 Vict. c. 100) creates the offences of:
* Common assault and battery: a summary offence, under section 42;
* Aggravated assault and battery: a summary offence, under section 43
* Common assault: under section 47
* Assault occasioning actual bodily harm: under section 47
The Criminal Justice (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act (Northern Ireland) 1968 (c. 28 (N.I.)) creates the offences of:
* Assault with intent to resist arrest: under section 7(1)(b); this offence was formerly created by section 38 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 (24 & 25 Vict. c. 100).
That act formerly created the offence of 'Assault on a constable in the execution of his duty'. under section 7(1)(a), but that section has been superseded by section 66(1) of the Police (Northern Ireland) Act 1998 (c. 32) which now provides that it is an offence for a person to, amongst other things, assault a constable in the execution of his duty, or a person assisting a constable in the execution of his duty.
United States
In the United States,<!-- federal? some states? all states and territories? including Louisiana which did not incorporate English common law? --> assault may be defined as an attempt to commit a battery. However, the crime of assault can encompass acts in which no battery is intended, but the defendant's act nonetheless creates reasonable fear in others that a battery will occur.
Four elements were required at common law:
* The apparent, present ability to carry out;
* An unlawful attempt;
* To commit a violent injury;
* Upon another.
As the criminal law evolved, element one was weakened in most jurisdictions so that a reasonable fear of bodily injury would suffice. These four elements were eventually codified in most states.
The crime of assault generally requires that both the perpetrator and the victim of an assault be a natural person. Thus, unless the attack is directed by a person, an animal attack does not constitute an assault. However, under limited circumstances the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 treats a fetus as a separate person for the purposes of assault and other violent crimes.
Possible examples of defenses, mitigating circumstances, or failures of proof that may be raised in response to an assault charge include:
* Lack of intent: A defendant could argue that since they were drunk, they could not form the specific intent to commit assault. This defense would most likely fail, however, since only involuntary intoxication is accepted as a defense in most American jurisdictions.
* Mutual consent: A defendant could also argue that they were engaged in mutually consensual behavior. For example, boxers who are fighting in an organized boxing match and do not significantly deviate from the rules of the sport cannot be charged with assault.
State laws
Laws on assault vary by state. Since each state has its own criminal laws, there is no universal assault law. Acts classified as assault in one state may be classified as battery, menacing, intimidation, reckless endangerment, etc. in another state. Assault is often subdivided into two categories, simple assault and aggravated assault.
* Simple assault involves an intentional act that causes another person to be in reasonable fear of an imminent battery. Simple assault may also involve an attempt to cause harm to another person, where that attempt does not succeed. Simple assault is typically classified as a misdemeanor offense, unless the victim is a member of a protected class, such as being a law enforcement officer. Even as a misdemeanor, an assault conviction may still result in incarceration and in a criminal record.
* Aggravated assault involves more serious actions, such as an assault that is committed with the intent to cause a serious bodily injury, or an assault that is committed with a deadly weapon such as a firearm. Aggravated assault is typically classified as a felony offense.
Modern American statutes may define assault as including:
* an attempt to cause or purposely, knowingly, or recklessly causing bodily injury to another
* negligently causing bodily injury to another with a dangerous weapon (assault with a deadly weapon).
* causing bodily harm by reckless operation of a motor vehicle (vehicular assault).
* threatening another in a menacing manner.
* knowingly causing physical contact with another person knowing the other person will regard the contact as offensive or provocative
* causing stupor, unconsciousness or physical injury by intentionally administering a drug or controlled substance without consent
*purposely or knowingly causing reasonable apprehension of bodily injury in another
*any act which is intended to place another in fear of immediate physical contact which will be painful, injurious, insulting, or offensive, coupled with the apparent ability to execute the act.
In some states, consent is a complete defense to assault. In other jurisdictions, mutual consent is an incomplete defense to an assault charge such that an assault charge is prosecuted as a less significant offense such as a petty misdemeanor.
States vary on whether it is possible to commit an "attempted assault" since it can be considered a double inchoate offense.
Kansas
In Kansas the law on assault states:
New York
In New York State, assault (as defined in the New York State Penal Code Article 120) requires an actual injury. Other states define this as battery; there is no crime of battery in New York. However, in New York if a person threatens another person with imminent injury without engaging in physical contact, that is called "menacing". A person who engages in that behavior is guilty of aggravated harassment in the second degree (a Class A misdemeanor; punishable with up to one year incarceration, probation for an extended time, and a permanent criminal record) when they threaten to cause physical harm to another person, and guilty of aggravated harassment in the first degree (a Class E felony) if they have a previous conviction for the same offense. New York also has specific laws against hazing, when such threats are made as requirement to join an organization.
North Dakota
North Dakota law states:
}}
Pennsylvania
In Pennsylvania, an offender can be charged with simple assault if they:
* injure someone else recklessly, knowingly, or purposefully
* accidentally injure someone with a firearm or weapon
* cause a needle-stick to an officer or correctional employee during a search or arrest
* threaten or intimidate someone causing fear of imminent serious bodily injury
A person convicted of simple assault can be ordered to up to two years in prison as a second-degree misdemeanor.
An offender can be charged with aggravated assault if the offender:
* demonstrates extreme indifference to the victim's life
* injures or threatens to injure a law enforcement officer, correctional officer, firefighter, police officer, or teacher on duty, or for incapacitating any of these individuals
A person convicted of aggravated assault can face up to 10 years in prison as a second-degree felony. However, if the crime is perpetrated against a firefighter or police officer, the offender may face first-degree felony charges carrying a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.
}}
See also
* Crime statistics
* Domestic violence
* Gay bashing
* Hate crime
* Mayhem
* Offences Against the Person Act 1861
Citations
General and cited references
* <!-- Which edition?: https://www.worldcat.org/title/textbook-of-criminal-law/oclc/1110221098/editions?sddesc&start_edition1&refererbr&seyr&qtsort_yr_desc&editionsViewtrue&fq-->External links
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20090201151414/http://criminallawonline.com/artassaults.php A guide to the non fatal offences against the person]
Category:Crimes | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.611794 |
1478 | Álfheimr | , 1866]]
In Norse cosmology, Álfheimr (Old Norse: , "Land of the Elves" or "Elfland"; anglicized as Alfheim), also called "Ljósálfheimr" ( , "home of the Light Elves"), is home of the Light Elves.
Attestations
Álfheim as an abode of the Elves is mentioned only twice in Old Norse texts.
Grímnismál
The Eddic poem Grímnismál describes twelve divine dwellings beginning the stanza 5 with:
{| width="75%"
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:
:
:
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:Ydalir call they the place where Ull
:A hall for himself hath set;
:And Alfheim the gods to Freyr once gave
:As a tooth-gift in ancient times.
|}
A tooth-gift is a gift given to an infant on the cutting of the first tooth.Gylfaginning
In the 12th century Eddic prose Gylfaginning, Snorri Sturluson relates it in the stanza 17 as the first of a series of abodes in heaven:
{| width="100%"
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Many places are there, and glorious. That which is called Álfheimr is one, where dwell the peoples called Light-Elves; but the Dark-Elves dwell down in the earth, and they are unlike in appearance, but by far more unlike in nature. The Light-Elves are fairer to look upon than the sun, but the Dark-Elves are blacker than pitch.
|}
Later in the section, in speaking of a hall in the Highest Heaven called Gimlé that shall survive when heaven and earth have died, explains:
{| width="100%"
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It is said that another heaven is to the southward and upward of this one, and it is called Andlangr; but the third heaven is yet above that, and it is called Vídbláinn, and in that heaven we think this abode is. But we believe that none but Light-Elves inhabit these mansions now.
|}
See also
* Álfheimr (region)
* Alfheimbjerg
* Fairyland, a folkloric location sometimes referred to as Elfame
* Svartálfaheimr
* Svartálfar (black elves)
Citations
Bibliography
Primary
*
*
* | title Grímnismál (Old Norse) |urlhttps://heimskringla.no/wiki/Gr%C3%ADmnism%C3%A1l |websiteheimskringla.com|access-date=3 April 2023}}
* | titleGylfaginning (Old Norse) |urlhttps://heimskringla.no/wiki/Gylfaginning |websiteheimskringla.no |access-date3 April 2023}}External links
*
Category:Locations in Norse mythology
Category:Saga locations
Category:Elves
Category:Freyr | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Álfheimr | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.619929 |
1482 | Ask and Embla | thumb|300px|upright|"Hœnir, Lóðurr and Odin create Askr and Embla" (1895) by Lorenz Frølich.
In Norse mythology, Ask and Embla ()—man and woman respectively—were the first two humans, created by the gods. The pair are attested in both the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, and the Prose Edda, composed in the 13th century. In both sources, three gods, one of whom is Odin, find Ask and Embla and bestow upon them various corporeal and spiritual gifts. A number of theories have been proposed to explain the two figures, and there are occasional references to them in popular culture.
Etymology
thumb|upright|A depiction of Ask and Embla (1919) by Robert Engels.
Old Norse literally means "ash tree" but the etymology of embla is uncertain, and two possibilities of the meaning of embla are generally proposed. The first meaning, "elm tree", is problematic, and is reached by deriving *Elm-la from *Almilōn and subsequently to ('elm'). The second suggestion is "vine", which is reached through *Ambilō, which may be related to the Greek term (), itself meaning "vine, liana". The latter etymology has resulted in a number of theories.
Linguist Gunlög Josefsson claims that the name Embla comes from the roots + which would mean 'firemaker' or 'smokebringer' inflected for either gender. She connects this to the ancient practice of creating fire through a fire plough which was considered a magical and holy way of fire making in folk belief in Scandinavia long into modern times. She identifies the emergence of fire through the plowing symbolically to the moment of orgasm and hence fertilization and reproduction.
According to Benjamin Thorpe, "Grimm says the word embla, emla, signifies a busy woman, from amr, ambr, aml, ambl, assiduous labour; the same relation as Meshia and Meshiane, the ancient Persian names of the first man and woman, who were also formed from trees."
Attestations
In stanza 17 of the Poetic Edda poem , the seeress reciting the poem states that Hœnir, Lóðurr and Odin once found Ask and Embla on land. The seeress says that the two were capable of very little, lacking in and says that they were given three gifts by the three gods:
Old Norse:
Benjamin Thorpe translation:
Spirit they possessed not, sense they had not,
blood nor motive powers, nor goodly colour.
Spirit gave Odin, sense gave Hœnir,
blood gave Lodur, and goodly colour.Henry Adams Bellows translation:
Soul they had not, sense they had not,
Heat nor motion, nor goodly hue;
Soul gave Othin, sense gave Hönir,
Heat gave Lothur and goodly hue.
The meaning of these gifts has been a matter of scholarly disagreement and translations therefore vary.
According to chapter 9 of the Prose Edda book , the three brothers Vili, Vé, and Odin, are the creators of the first man and woman. The brothers were once walking along a beach and found two trees there. They took the wood and from it created the first human beings; Ask and Embla. One of the three gave them the breath of life, the second gave them movement and intelligence, and the third gave them shape, speech, hearing and sight. Further, the three gods gave them clothing and names. Ask and Embla go on to become the progenitors of all humanity and were given a home within the walls of Midgard.
Theories
thumb|upright|"Ask och Embla" (1948) by Stig Blomberg
Indo-European origins
A Proto-Indo-European basis has been theorized for the duo based on the etymology of embla meaning "vine." In Indo-European societies, an analogy is derived from the drilling of fire and sexual intercourse. Vines were used as a flammable wood, where they were placed beneath a drill made of harder wood, resulting in fire. Further evidence of ritual making of fire in Scandinavia has been theorized from a depiction on a stone plate on a Bronze Age grave in Kivik, Scania, Sweden.
Jaan Puhvel comments that "ancient myths teem with trite 'first couples' similar to the type of Adam and his by-product Eve. In Indo-European tradition, these range from the Vedic Yama and Yamī and the Iranian Mašya and Mašyānag to the Icelandic Askr and Embla, with trees or rocks as preferred raw material, and dragon's teeth or other bony substance occasionally thrown in for good measure".
In his study of the comparative evidence for an origin of mankind from trees in Indo-European society, Anders Hultgård observes that "myths of the origin of mankind from trees or wood seem to be particularly connected with ancient Europe and Indo-Europe and Indo-European-speaking peoples of Asia Minor and Iran. By contrast the cultures of the Near East show almost exclusively the type of anthropogonic stories that derive man's origin from clay, earth or blood by means of a divine creation act".
Other potential Germanic analogues
Two wooden figures—the Braak Bog Figures—of "more than human height" were unearthed from a peat bog at Braak in Schleswig, Germany. The figures depict a nude man and a nude woman. Hilda Ellis Davidson comments that these figures may represent a "Lord and Lady" of the Vanir, a group of Norse gods, and that "another memory of [these wooden deities] may survive in the tradition of the creation of Ask and Embla, the man and woman who founded the human race, created by the gods from trees on the seashore".
A figure named Æsc (Old English "ash tree") appears as the son of Hengest in the Anglo-Saxon genealogy for the kings of Kent. This has resulted in a number of theories that the figures may have had an earlier basis in pre-Norse Germanic mythology.
Connections have been proposed between Ask and Embla and the Vandal kings Assi and Ambri, attested in Paul the Deacon's 7th century AD work Origo Gentis Langobardorum. There, the two ask the god Godan (Odin) for victory. The name Ambri, like Embla, likely derives from *Ambilō. Carolyne Larrington theorizes that humans are metaphorically designated as trees in Old Norse works (examples include "trees of jewellery" for women and "trees of battle" for men) due to the origin of humankind stemming from trees; Ask and Embla.
Modern depictions
Ask and Embla have been the subject of a number of references and artistic depictions.
A sculpture depicting the two, created by Stig Blomberg in 1948, stands in Sölvesborg in southern Sweden.
Ask and Embla are depicted on two of the sixteen wooden panels by Dagfin Werenskiold on Oslo City Hall.
Ask to Embla is the title of a poem, parts of which are quoted, by R. H. Ash, one of the protagonists in A. S. Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance, which won the Booker prize in 1990.
In the video game Fire Emblem Heroes, the two main warring kingdoms are Askr and Embla, which is where the Summoner, the player, finds themselves in, as the kingdom has been at war with the Emblian Empire when the game starts. It is later revealed both kingdoms are named after a pair of Ancient Dragons; with Askr being male and Embla female.
In the videogame Valheim, the developers named an armor set after Embla, as stated in their development blog entry on November 21, 2023: "we have named this set after one of the two first humans in Norse mythology: Embla".
See also
Líf and Lífþrasir
Sacred trees and groves in Germanic paganism and mythology
Bibliography
Notes
References
Bellows, Henry Adams (Trans.) (1936). The Poetic Edda. Princeton University Press. New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation.
Byock, Jesse (Trans.) (2006). The Prose Edda. Penguin Classics.
Davidson, H. R. Ellis (1975). Scandinavian Mythology. Paul Hamlyn.
Hultgård, Anders (2006). "The Askr and Embla Myth in a Comparative Perspective". In Andrén, Anders; Jennbert, Kristina; Raudvere, Catharina (editors).Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives. Nordic Academic Press.
Dronke, Ursula (Trans.) (1997). The Poetic Edda: Volume II: Mythological Poems. Oxford University Press.
Larrington, Carolyne (Trans.) (1999). The Poetic Edda. Oxford World's Classics.
Lindow, John (2001). Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs. Oxford University Press.
Orchard, Andy (1997). Dictionary of Norse Myth and Legend. Cassell.
Puhvel, Jaan (1989 [1987]). Comparative Mythology. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Schach, Paul (1985). "Some Thoughts on Völuspá" as collected in Glendinning, R. J. Bessason, Heraldur (Editors). Edda: a Collection of Essays. University of Manitoba Press.
Thorpe, Benjamin (Trans.) (1907). The Elder Edda of Saemund Sigfusson. Norrœna Society.
Thorpe, Benjamin (Trans.) (1866). Edda Sæmundar Hinns Frôða: The Edda of Sæmund the Learned. Part I. London: Trübner & Co.
Category:Legendary progenitors
Category:Mythological first humans
Category:People in Norse mythology
Category:Mythological duos
Category:Fraxinus excelsior
Category:Mythological lovers | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask_and_Embla | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.632799 |
1484 | Alabama River | | source1_elevation
| mouth = Mobile River
| mouth_location = Mount Vernon, Alabama
| mouth_coordinates
| mouth_elevation
| subdivision_type1 = Country
| subdivision_name1 = United States
| length =
| discharge1_avg | basin_size
| progression = Mobile → Gulf of Mexico
| map = MobileAlabamaCoosa3.png
| map_caption = The Mobile, Alabama, and Coosa rivers are essentially a single river the name of which changes at the confluences of major tributaries.
| extra =
}}
The Alabama River, in the U.S. state of Alabama, is formed by the Tallapoosa and Coosa rivers, which unite about north of Montgomery, near the town of Wetumpka.
Over a course of approximately , the river meanders west towards Selma, then southwest until, about from Mobile, it unites with the Tombigbee, forming the Mobile and Tensaw rivers, which discharge into Mobile Bay. Its width varies from , and its depth from . Its length as measured by the United States Geological Survey is , and by steamboat measurement, .
The river crosses the richest agricultural and timber districts of the state. Railways connect it with the mineral regions of north-central Alabama.
After the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers, the principal tributary of the Alabama is the Cahaba River, which is about long the Alabama, Coosa, and Tallapoosa rivers were central to the homeland of the Creek Indians before their removal by United States forces to the Indian Territory in the 1830s.
Lock and dams
The Alabama River has three lock and dams between Montgomery and the Mobile River. The Robert F. Henry Lock & Dam is located at river mile 236.2, the Millers Ferry Lock & Dam is located at river mile 133.0, and the Claiborne Lock & Dam is located at river mile 72.5. These dams create R.E. "Bob" Woodruff Lake, William Dannely Reservoir, and Claiborne Lake respectively.
Gallery
<gallery>
Image:USACE Claiborne Lock and Dam.jpg|Claiborne Lock and Dam on the Alabama River, approximately upriver from Claiborne, Monroe County
Image:USACE Robert F Henry Lock and Dam.jpg|Robert F. Henry Lock and Dam on the Alabama River, approximately east of Selma
Image:Cesam249.jpg|Millers Ferry Lock and Dam on the Alabama River in Wilcox County, approximately northwest of Camden
Image:Alabama River RM192 Selma.JPG|Alabama River in Dallas County looking upstream towards Selma.
Image:Alabama River at Benton Park.JPG|The Alabama River in Lowndes County as seen from Benton Park in Benton, Alabama.
Image:Edmund Pettus Bridge over Alabama River.jpg|The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma overlooking the Alabama River.
File:Selma December 2018 11 (Alabama River).jpg|The Alabama River in Selma
File:Riverfront Park December 2018 07 (Alabama River).jpg|Alabama River at Riverfront Park in Montgomery
</gallery>
See also
*List of Alabama rivers
*Tallapoosa River
*Coosa River
*Mobile River
* South Atlantic-Gulf Water Resource Region
References
External links
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20050930120237/http://reference.allrefer.com/gazetteer/A/A02218-alabama-river.html Allrefer.com]
*
*
Category:Alabama placenames of Native American origin
Category:Rivers of Autauga County, Alabama
Category:Rivers of Monroe County, Alabama
Category:Rivers of Montgomery County, Alabama
Category:Rivers of Wilcox County, Alabama
Category:Rivers of Dallas County, Alabama
Category:Rivers of Mobile County, Alabama
Category:Rivers of Elmore County, Alabama
Category:Rivers of Alabama | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama_River | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.639528 |
1485 | Alain de Lille | *Aristotle
*Pythagoras
*Neoplatonism
*Peter Abelard
*Gilbert de la Porrée
*Thierry of Chartres
*Boethius
| era = Medieval philosophy
| main_interests = Philosophy, mysticism, theology, poetry
}}
Alain de Lille (Alan of Lille; Latin: Alanus ab Insulis; 11281202/1203) was a French theologian and poet. He was born in Lille some time before 1128. His exact date of death remains unclear as well, with most research pointing toward it being between 14 April 1202 and 5 April 1203. He is known for writing a number of works based upon the teachings of the liberal arts, with one of his most renowned poems, De planctu Naturae ("The Complaint of Nature"), focusing on sexual conduct among humans. Although Alain was widely known during his lifetime, little is known about his personal life.
As a theologian, Alain de Lille opposed scholasticism in the second half of the 12th century. His philosophy is characterized by rationalism and mysticism. Alain claimed that reason, guided by prudence, could discover most truths about the physical order without help; but in order to understand religious truth and to know God, the wise must be believers.
Life
Little is known of his life. Alain entered the schools no earlier than the late 1140s; first attending the school at Paris, and then at Chartres. He probably studied under masters such as Peter Abelard, Gilbert of Poitiers, and Thierry of Chartres. This is known through the writings of John of Salisbury, who is thought to have been a contemporary student of Alain of Lille. Alain's earliest writings were probably written in the 1150s, and probably in Paris. He spent many years as a professor of theology at the University of Paris and he attended the Lateran Council in 1179. Though the only accounts of his lectures seem to show a sort of eccentric style and approach, he was said to have been good friends with many other masters at the school in Paris, and taught there, as well as some time in southern France, into his old age. He afterwards inhabited Montpellier (he is sometimes called Alanus de Montepessulano), lived for a time outside the walls of any cloister, and finally retired to Cîteaux, where he died in 1202.
He had a very widespread reputation during his lifetime, and his knowledge caused him to be called Doctor Universalis. Many of Alain's writings cannot be exactly dated, and the circumstances surrounding his writing are often unknown as well. It does seem clear that his first notable work, Summa Quoniam Homines, was completed between 1155 and 1165, with the most conclusive date being 1160, and was probably developed through his lectures at the school in Paris. The Anticlaudianus was translated into French and German in the following century, and toward 1280 was re-worked into a musical anthology by Adam de la Bassée. One of Alan's most popular and widely distributed works is his manual on preaching, Ars Praedicandi, or The Art of Preaching. This work shows how Alan saw theological education as being a fundamental preliminary step in preaching and strove to give clergyman a manuscript to be "used as a practical manual" when it came to the formation of sermons and art of preaching.
Alain wrote three very large theological textbooks, one being his first work, Summa Quoniam Homines. Another of his theological textbooks that strove to be more minute in its focus, is his De Fide Catholica, dated somewhere between 1185 and 1200, Alan sets out to refute heretical views, specifically that of the Waldensians and Cathars.<ref name"auto2" /> In his third theological textbook, Regulae Caelestis Iuris, he presents a set of what seems to be theological rules; this was typical of the followers of Gilbert of Poitiers, of which Alan could be associated.<ref name"auto2" /> Other than these theological textbooks, and the aforementioned works of the mixture of prose and poetry, Alan of Lille had numerous other works on numerous subjects, primarily including Speculative Theology, Theoretical Moral Theology, Practical Moral Theology, and various collections of poems.
Alain de Lille has often been confounded with other persons named Alain, in particular with another Alanus (Alain, bishop of Auxerre), Alan, abbot of Tewkesbury, Alain de Podio, etc. Certain facts of their lives have been attributed to him, as well as some of their works: thus the Life of St Bernard should be ascribed to Alain of Auxerre and the Commentary upon Merlin to Alan of Tewkesbury. Alan of Lille was not the author of a Memoriale rerum difficilium, published under his name, nor of Moralium dogma philosophorum, nor of the satirical Apocalypse of Golias once attributed to him; and it is exceedingly doubtful whether the Dicta Alani de lapide philosophico really issued from his pen. On the other hand, it now seems practically demonstrated that Alain de Lille was the author of the Ars catholicae fidei and the treatise Contra haereticos.
In his sermons on capital sins, Alain argued that sodomy and homicide are the most serious sins, since they call forth the wrath of God, which led to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. His chief work on penance, the Liber poenitenitalis dedicated to Henry de Sully, exercised great influence on the many manuals of penance produced as a result of the Fourth Lateran Council. Alain's identification of the sins against nature included bestiality, masturbation, oral and anal intercourse, incest, adultery and rape. In addition to his battle against moral decay, Alan wrote a work against Islam, Judaism and Christian heretics dedicated to William VIII of Montpellier.
List of known works
*
*Anticlaudianus
*Rhythmus de Incarnatione et de Septem Artibus
*De Miseria Mundi
*Quaestiones Alani Textes
*Summa Quoniam Homines
*Regulae Theologicae
*Hierarchia Alani
*De Fide Catholica: Contra Haereticos, Valdenses, Iudaeos et Paganos
*De Virtutibus, de Vitiis, de Donis Spiritus Sancti
*Liber Parabolarum
*Distinctiones Dictionum Theologicalium
*Elucidatio in Cantica Canticorum
*Glosatura super Cantica
*Expositio of the Pater Noster
*Expositiones of the Nicene and Apostolic Creeds
*Expositio Prosae de Angelis
*Quod non-est celebrandum bis in die
*Liber Poenitentialis
*De Sex Alis Cherubim
*Ars Praedicandi
*Sermones<ref name"auto1" />References
Attribution:
*Translations
*Alan of Lille, A Concise Explanation of the Song of Songs in Praise of the Virgin Mary, trans Denys Turner, in Denys Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs, (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995), 291–308
*The Plaint of Nature, translated by James J Sheridan, (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980)
*Anticlaudian: Prologue, Argument and Nine Books, edited by W. H. Cornog, (Philadelphia, 1935)
Further reading
* Alain de Lille: De planctu Naturae, ed. Nikolaus M. Häring, Studi Medievali 19 (1978), 797–879. Latin edition of the De planctu Naturae.
* Dynes, Wayne R. 'Alan of Lille.' in Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, Garland Publishing, 1990. p. 32.
* Alanus de insulis, Anticlaudianus, a c. di . M. Sannelli, La Finestra editrice, Lavis, 2004.
* Evans, G. R. (1983), Alan of Lille: The Frontiers of Theology in the Later Twelfth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge. .
*
*
*
External links
*(Latin) [http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost12/Alanus/ala_ac00.html Alanus ab Insulis, Anticlaudianus sive De officiis viri boni et perfecti]
*(Latin) [http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/alanus/alanus1.html Alanus ab Insulis, Liber de planctu Naturae]
*(Latin) [http://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Omnis_mundi_creatura Alanus ab Insulis, Omnis mundi creatura]
*(Latin) [http://mlat.uzh.ch/?c2&wAlDeIn.DiDiTh Alanus ab Insulis, Distinctiones dictionum theologicalium]
*(English) [https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/alain-deplanctu.asp Alain of Lille, The Complaint of Nature]. Translation of Liber de planctu Naturae''
Category:1110s births
Category:Year of birth unknown
Category:1200s deaths
Category:Year of death uncertain
Category:Writers from Lille
Category:12th-century writers in Latin
Category:12th-century Christian mystics
Category:Scholastic philosophers
Category:Roman Catholic mystics
Category:12th-century French Catholic theologians
Category:Medieval Latin-language poets
Category:12th-century French poets
Category:12th-century French philosophers
Category:University of Paris alumni | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_de_Lille | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.648015 |
1486 | Alemanni | The Alemanni or Alamanni were a confederation of Germanic tribes on the Upper Rhine River during the first millennium. First mentioned by Cassius Dio in the context of the campaign of Roman emperor Caracalla of 213 CE, the Alemanni captured the in 260, and later expanded into present-day Alsace and northern Switzerland, leading to the establishment of the Old High German language in those regions, which by the eighth century were collectively referred to as Alamannia.
In 496, the Alemanni were conquered by the Frankish leader Clovis and incorporated into his dominions. Mentioned as still pagan allies of the Christian Franks, the Alemanni were gradually Christianized during the seventh century. The is a record of their customary law during this period. Until the eighth century, Frankish suzerainty over Alemannia was mostly nominal. After an uprising by Theudebald, Duke of Alamannia, however, Carloman executed the Alamannic nobility and installed Frankish dukes.
During the later and weaker years of the Carolingian Empire, the Alemannic counts became almost independent, and a struggle for supremacy took place between them and the Bishopric of Constance. The chief family in Alamannia was that of the counts of , who were sometimes called margraves, and one of whom, Burchard II, established the Duchy of Swabia, which was recognized by Henry the Fowler in 919 and became a stem duchy of the Holy Roman Empire.
The area settled by the Alemanni corresponds roughly to the area where Alemannic German dialects remain spoken, including German Swabia and Baden, French Alsace, German-speaking Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Austrian Vorarlberg. The French-language name of Germany, , is derived from their name, from Old French aleman(t), and from French was loaned into a number of other languages, including Middle English, which commonly used the term Almains for Germans. Likewise, the Arabic name for Germany is (Almanya), the Turkish is Almanya, the Spanish is Alemania, the Portuguese is Alemanha, the Welsh is Yr Almaen and the Persian is (Alman).
Name
According to Gaius Asinius Quadratus (quoted in the mid-sixth century by Byzantine historian Agathias), the name Alamanni (Ἀλαμανοι) means "all men". It indicates that they were a conglomeration drawn from various Germanic tribes. The Romans and the Greeks called them as such (Alamanni, all men, in the sense of a group composed of men of all groups in the region). This derivation was accepted by Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and by the anonymous contributor of notes assembled from the papers of Nicolas Fréret, published in 1753.
This etymology has remained the standard derivation of the name.
An alternative suggestion proposes derivation from *alah'' "sanctuary".
Walafrid Strabo in the ninth century remarked, in discussing the people of Switzerland and the surrounding regions, that only foreigners called them the Alemanni, but that they gave themselves the name of Suebi.
The Suebi are given the alternative name of Ziuwari (as Cyuuari) in an Old High German gloss, interpreted by Jacob Grimm as Martem colentes ("worshippers of Mars"). Annio da Viterbo a scholar and historian of the 15th century claimed the Alemanni had their name from the Hebrew language, as in Hebrew the river Rhine was translated into Mannum and the people who live at its shores were called Alemannus. This was refuted by Beatus Rhenanus, a humanist of the 16th century. He uses the term Agri Decumates to describe the region between the Rhine, Main and Danube rivers. He says that it had once been the home of the Helvetians, who had moved westwards into Gaul in the time of Julius Caesar. The people living there in Caesar's time are not Germanic. Instead, "Reckless adventurers from Gaul, emboldened by want, occupied this land of questionable ownership. After a while, our frontier having been advanced, and our military positions pushed forward, it was regarded as a remote nook of our empire and a part of a Roman province."
at Weingarten]]
The Alemanni were first mentioned by Cassius Dio describing the campaign of Caracalla in 213. At that time, they apparently dwelt in the basin of the Main, to the south of the Chatti. They had asked for his help, according to Dio, but instead he colonized their country, changed their place names, and executed their warriors under a pretext of coming to their aid. When he became ill, the Alemanni claimed to have put a hex on him. Caracalla, it was claimed, tried to counter this influence by invoking his ancestral spirits.
In retribution, Caracalla then led the Legio II Traiana Fortis against the Alemanni, who lost and were pacified for a time. The legion was as a result honoured with the name Germanica. The fourth-century fictional Historia Augusta, Life of Antoninus Caracalla, relates (10.5) that Caracalla then assumed the name Alemannicus, at which Helvius Pertinax jested that he should really be called Geticus Maximus, because in the year before he had murdered his brother, Geta.
Through much of his short reign, Caracalla was known for unpredictable and arbitrary operations launched by surprise after a pretext of peace negotiations. If he had any reasons of state for such actions, they remained unknown to his contemporaries. Whether or not the Alemanni had been previously neutral, they were certainly further influenced by Caracalla to become thereafter notoriously implacable enemies of Rome.
This mutually antagonistic relationship is perhaps the reason why the Roman writers persisted in calling the Alemanni "barbari," meaning "savages." The archaeology, however, shows that they were largely Romanized, lived in Roman-style houses and used Roman artefacts, the Alemannic women having adopted the Roman fashion of the tunica even earlier than the men.
Most of the Alemanni were probably at the time, in fact, resident in or close to the borders of Germania Superior. Although Dio is the earliest writer to mention them, Ammianus Marcellinus used the name to refer to Germans on the Limes Germanicus in the time of Trajan's governorship of the province shortly after it was formed, around 98–99 AD. At that time, the entire frontier was being fortified for the first time. Trees from the earliest fortifications found in Germania Inferior are dated by dendrochronology to 99–100 AD.
Ammianus relates ([https://web.archive.org/web/20060211084122/http://www.gmu.edu/departments/fld/CLASSICS/ammianus17.html xvii.1.11]) that much later the Emperor Julian undertook a punitive expedition against the Alemanni, who by then were in Alsace, and crossed the Main (Latin Menus), entering the forest, where the trails were blocked by felled trees. As winter was upon them, they reoccupied a
"fortification which was founded on the soil of the Alemanni that Trajan wished to be called with his own name".
In this context, the use of Alemanni is possibly an anachronism, but it reveals that Ammianus believed they were the same people, which is consistent with the location of the Alemanni of Caracalla's campaigns.
Conflicts with the Roman Empire
83 to 260 CE]]
The Alemanni were continually engaged in conflicts with the Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries. They launched a major invasion of Gaul and northern Italy in 268 when the Romans were forced to denude much of their German frontier of troops in response to a massive invasion of the Goths from the east. Their raids throughout the three parts of Gaul were traumatic: Gregory of Tours (died ca 594) mentions their destructive force at the time of Valerian and Gallienus (253–260), when the Alemanni assembled under their "king", whom he calls Chrocus, who acted "by the advice, it is said, of his wicked mother, and overran the whole of the Gauls, and destroyed from their foundations all the temples which had been built in ancient times. And coming to Clermont he set on fire, overthrew and destroyed that shrine which they call Vasso Galatae in the Gallic tongue," martyring many Christians ([http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/gregory-hist.html#book3 Historia Francorum Book I.32–34]). Thus sixth-century Gallo-Romans of Gregory's class, surrounded by the ruins of Roman temples and public buildings, attributed the destruction they saw to the plundering raids of the Alemanni.
In the early summer of 268, the Emperor Gallienus halted their advance into Italy but then had to deal with the Goths. When the Gothic campaign ended in Roman victory at the Battle of Naissus in September, Gallienus' successor Claudius Gothicus turned north to deal with the Alemanni, who were swarming over all Italy north of the Po River.
After efforts to secure a peaceful withdrawal failed, Claudius forced the Alemanni to battle at the Battle of Lake Benacus in November. The Alemanni were routed, forced back into Germany, and did not threaten Roman territory for many years afterwards.
Their most famous battle against Rome took place in Argentoratum (Strasbourg), in 357, where they were defeated by Julian, later Emperor of Rome, and their king Chnodomarius was taken prisoner to Rome. but after his death they were again subjugated by the Franks under Theudebert I in 536. Subsequently, the Alemanni formed part of the Frankish dominions and were governed by a Frankish duke.
In 746, Carloman ended an uprising by summarily executing all Alemannic nobility at the blood court at Cannstatt, and for the following century, Alemannia was ruled by Frankish dukes. Following the treaty of Verdun of 843, Alemannia became a province of the eastern kingdom of Louis the German, the precursor of the Holy Roman Empire. The duchy persisted until 1268.
Culture
Language
The German spoken today over the range of the former Alemanni is termed Alemannic German, and is recognised among the subgroups of the High German languages. Alemannic runic inscriptions such as those on the Pforzen buckle are among the earliest testimonies of Old High German. The High German consonant shift is thought to have originated around the fifth century either in Alemannia or among the Lombards; before that, the dialect spoken by Alemannic tribes was little different from that of other West Germanic peoples.
Alemannia lost its distinct jurisdictional identity when Charles Martel absorbed it into the Frankish empire, early in the eighth century. Today, Alemannic is a linguistic term, referring to Alemannic German, encompassing the dialects of the southern two-thirds of Baden-Württemberg (German State), in western Bavaria (German State), in Vorarlberg (Austrian State), Swiss German in Switzerland and the Alsatian language of the Alsace (France).
Political organization
The Alemanni established a series of territorially defined pagi (cantons) on the east bank of the Rhine. The exact number and extent of these pagi is unclear and probably changed over time.
Pagi, usually pairs of pagi combined, formed kingdoms (regna) which, it is generally believed, were permanent and hereditary. Ammianus describes Alemanni rulers with various terms: reges excelsiores ante alios ("paramount kings"), reges proximi ("neighbouring kings"), reguli ("petty kings") and regales ("princes"). This may be a formal hierarchy, or they may be vague, overlapping terms, or a combination of both. In 357, there appear to have been two paramount kings (Chnodomar and Westralp) who probably acted as presidents of the confederation and seven other kings (reges). Their territories were small and mostly strung along the Rhine (although a few were in the hinterland). It is possible that the reguli were the rulers of the two pagi in each kingdom. Underneath the royal class were the nobles (called optimates by the Romans) and warriors (called armati by the Romans). The warriors consisted of professional warbands and levies of free men. Each nobleman could raise an average of c. 50 warriors.
Religion
(sixth or seventh century) shows typical iconography of the pagan period. The bracteate depicts the "horse-stabber underhoof" scene, a supine warrior stabbing a horse while it runs over him. The scene is adapted from Roman era gravestones of the region.]]
, found near Sigmaringen, Baden-Württemberg, is a late testimony of pagan ritual in Alemannia, showing a warrior in ritual wolf costume, holding a ring-spatha.]]
The Christianization of the Alemanni took place during Merovingian times (sixth to eighth centuries). We know that in the sixth century, the Alemanni were predominantly pagan, and in the eighth century, they were predominantly Christian. The intervening seventh century was a period of genuine syncretism during which Christian symbolism and doctrine gradually grew in influence.
Some scholars have speculated that members of the Alemannic elite such as king Gibuld due to Visigothic influence may have been converted to Arianism even in the later fifth century.
In the mid-6th century, the Byzantine historian Agathias records, in the context of the wars of the Goths and Franks against Byzantium, that the Alemanni fighting among the troops of Frankish king Theudebald were like the Franks in all respects except religion, since
He also spoke of the particular ruthlessness of the Alemanni in destroying Christian sanctuaries and plundering churches while the genuine Franks were respectful towards those sanctuaries. Agathias expresses his hope that the Alemanni would assume better manners through prolonged contact with the Franks, which is by all appearances, in a manner of speaking, what eventually happened.
Apostles of the Alemanni were Columbanus and his disciple Saint Gall. Jonas of Bobbio records that Columbanus was active in Bregenz, where he disrupted a beer sacrifice to Wodan. Despite these activities, for some time, the Alemanni seem to have continued their pagan cult activities, with only superficial or syncretistic Christian elements. In particular, there was no change in burial practice, and tumulus warrior graves continued to be erected throughout Merovingian times. Syncretism of traditional Germanic animal style with Christian symbolism is also present in artwork, but Christian symbolism became more and more prevalent during the seventh century. Unlike the later Christianization of the Saxons and of the Slavs, the Alemanni seem to have adopted Christianity gradually, and voluntarily, spread in emulation of the Merovingian elite.
From c. the 520s to the 620s, there was a surge of Alemannic Elder Futhark inscriptions. About 70 specimens have survived, roughly half of them on fibulae, others on belt buckles (see Pforzen buckle, Bülach fibula) and other jewellery and weapon parts. The use of runes subsides with the advance of Christianity.
The Nordendorf fibula (early seventh century) clearly records pagan theonyms, logaþorewodanwigiþonar read as "Wodan and Donar are magicians/sorcerers", but this may be interpreted as either a pagan invocation of the powers of these deities, or a Christian protective charm against them.
A runic inscription on a fibula found at Bad Ems reflects Christian pious sentiment (and is also explicitly marked with a Christian cross), reading god fura dih deofile ᛭'' ("God for/before you, Theophilus!", or alternatively "God before you, Devil!"). Dated to between AD 660 and 690, it marks the end of the native Alemannic tradition of runic literacy. Bad Ems is in Rhineland-Palatinate, on the northwestern boundary of Alemannic settlement, where Frankish influence would have been strongest.
The establishment of the bishopric of Konstanz cannot be dated exactly and was possibly undertaken by Columbanus himself (before 612). In any case, it existed by 635, when Gunzo appointed John of Grab bishop. Constance was a missionary bishopric in newly converted lands, and did not look back on late Roman church history unlike the Raetian bishopric of Chur (established 451) and Basel (an episcopal seat from 740, and which continued the line of Bishops of Augusta Raurica, see Bishop of Basel). The establishment of the church as an institution recognized by worldly rulers is also visible in legal history. In the early seventh century Pactus Alamannorum hardly ever mentions the special privileges of the church, while Lantfrid's Lex Alamannorum of 720 has an entire chapter reserved for ecclesial matters alone.
Genetics
A genetic study published in Science Advances in September 2018 examined the remains of eight individuals buried at a seventh-century Alemannic graveyard in Niederstotzingen, Germany. This is the richest and most complete Alemannic graveyard ever found. The highest-ranking individual at the graveyard was a male with Frankish grave goods. Four males were found to be closely related to him. They were all carriers of types of the paternal haplogroup R1b1a2a1a1c2b2b. A sixth male was a carrier of the paternal haplogroup R1b1a2a1a1c2b2b1a1 and the maternal haplogroup U5a1a1. Along with the five closely related individuals, he displayed close genetic links to northern and eastern Europe, particularly Lithuania and Iceland. Two individuals buried at the cemetery were found to be genetically different from both the others and each other, displaying genetic links to Southern Europe, particularly northern Italy and Spain. Along with the sixth male, they might have been adoptees or slaves.See also
* Annales Alamannici
* List of rulers of Alamannia
* List of confederations of Germanic tribes
* Armalausi
* Varisci
* Helvetii
* Charietto
References
Sources
* Ammianus Marcellinus, passim
* O. Bremer in H. Paul, Grundriss der germanischen Philologie (2nd ed., Strassburg, 1900), vol. iii. pp. 930 ff.
* Dio Cassius lxvii. ff.
*
* Ian Wood (ed.), Franks and Alamanni in the Merovingian Period: An Ethnographic Perspective (Studies in Historical Archaeoethnology), Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2003, .
* Melchior Goldast, Rerum Alamannicarum scriptores (1606, 2nd ed. Senckenburg 1730)
* Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, book ii.
* }}
* C. Zeuss, Die Deutschen und die Nachbarstämme (Munich, 1837), pp. 303 ff.
External links
* [http://members.tripod.com/~Linus_Gemvik/decumates.html The Agri Decumates]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20060614052450/http://www.hp.uab.edu/image_archive/ujg/ujgd.html The Alemanni] (archived)
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20060824100404/http://www.anistor.co.hol.gr/english/enback/e022.htm The Military Orientation of the Roman Emperors Septimius Severus to Gallienus (146–268 C.E.)] (archived)
* [https://www.alemannische-seiten.de/bilder/schwaebisch-alemannische-fasnet/ Brauchtum und Masken Alemannic Fastnacht]
Category:Early Germanic peoples
Category:Germanic tribal confederacies
Category:History of Swabia
Category:History of Alsace
Category:Medieval history of Switzerland | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alemanni | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.675915 |
1488 | NYSE American | (as New York Curb Market Agency)
|owner = Intercontinental Exchange
|key_people |currency United States dollar
|commodity |listings
|mcap |volume
|indexes |homepage [https://www.nyse.com/markets/nyse-american NYSE American]
|footnotes =
}}
NYSE American, formerly known as the American Stock Exchange (AMEX), and more recently as NYSE MKT, is an American stock exchange situated in New York City. AMEX was previously a mutual organization, owned by its members. Until 1953, it was known as the New York Curb Exchange.
NYSE Euronext acquired AMEX on October 1, 2008, with AMEX integrated with the Alternext European small-cap exchange and renamed the NYSE Alternext U.S. In March 2009, NYSE Alternext U.S. was changed to NYSE Amex Equities. On May 10, 2012, NYSE Amex Equities changed its name to NYSE MKT LLC.
Following the SEC approval of competing stock exchange IEX in 2016, NYSE MKT rebranded as NYSE American and introduced a 350-microsecond delay in trading, referred to as a "speed bump", which is also present on the IEX.
History
The Curb market
The exchange grew out of the loosely organized curb market of curbstone brokers on Broad Street in Manhattan. Efforts to organize and standardize the market started early in the 20th century under Emanuel S. Mendels and Carl H. Pforzheimer. The curb brokers had been kicked out of the Mills Building front by 1907, and had moved to the pavement outside the Blair Building where cabbies lined up. There they were given a "little domain of asphalt" fenced off by the police on Broad Street between Exchange Place and Beaver Street.
Organizing and 'Curb list'
As of 1907, E. S. Mendels gave the brokers rules "by right of seniority", but the curb brokers intentionally avoided organizing. According to the Times, this came from a general belief that if a curb exchange was organized, the exchange authorities would force members to sell their other exchange memberships. In 1911, Mendels and his advisers drew up a constitution and formed the New York Curb Market Association, which can be considered the first formal constitution of American Stock Exchange.1920s-1940s: Move indoors
, constructed in 1921]]
In 1920, journalist Edwin C. Hill wrote that the curb exchange on lower Broad Street was a "roaring, swirling whirlpool" that "tears control of a gold-mine from an unlucky operator, and pauses to auction a puppy-dog. It is like nothing else under the astonished sky that is its only roof." After a group of Curb brokers formed a real estate company to design a building, Starrett & Van Vleck designed the new exchange building on Greenwich Street in Lower Manhattan between Thames and Rector, at 86 Trinity Place. It opened in 1921, In 1929, the New York Curb Market changed its name to the New York Curb Exchange. The Curb Exchange soon became the leading international stock market, and according to historian Robert Sobel, "had more individual foreign issues on its list than [...] all other American securities markets combined."
Edward Reid McCormick was the first president of the New York Curb Market Association and is credited with moving the market indoors. George Rea was approached about the position of president of the New York Curb Exchange in 1939. He was unanimously elected He left the position having "done such a good job that there is virtually no need for a full-time successor."
Modernization as the American Stock Exchange
In 1953, the Curb Exchange was renamed the American Stock Exchange. The exchange was shaken by a scandal in 1961, and in 1962 began a reorganization.
As of 1971, it was the second largest stock exchange in the United States. Paul Kolton succeeded Ralph S. Saul as AMEX president on June 17, 1971, making him the first person to be selected from within the exchange to serve as its leader, succeeding Ralph S. Saul, who announced his resignation in March 1971. In November 1972, Kolton was named as the exchange's first chief executive officer and its first salaried top executive. As chairman, Kolton oversaw the introduction of options trading. Kolton opposed the idea of a merger with the New York Stock Exchange while he headed the exchange saying that "two independent, viable exchanges are much more likely to be responsive to new pressures and public needs than a single institution".
In 1977, Thomas Peterffy purchased a seat on the American Stock Exchange. Peterffy created a major stir among traders by introducing handheld computers onto the trading floor in the early 1980s. Introducing ETFs ETFs or exchange-traded funds had their genesis in 1989 with Index Participation Shares, an S&P 500 proxy that traded on the American Stock Exchange and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. This product was short-lived after a lawsuit by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange was successful in stopping sales in the United States.
In 1990, a similar product, Toronto Index Participation Shares, which tracked the TSE 35 and later the TSE 100 indices, started trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE) in 1990. The popularity of these products led the American Stock Exchange to try to develop something that would satisfy regulations by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Nathan Most and Steven Bloom, under the direction of Ivers Riley, designed and developed Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts (NYSE Arca: SPY), which were introduced in January 1993. Known as SPDRs or "Spiders", the fund became the largest ETF in the world. In May 1995, State Street Global Advisors introduced the S&P 400 MidCap SPDRs (NYSE Arca: MDY).
Barclays, in conjunction with MSCI and Funds Distributor Inc., entered the market in 1996 with [https://www.nasdaq.com/glossary/w/world-equity-benchmark-series World Equity Benchmark Shares (WEBS)], which became iShares MSCI Index Fund Shares. WEBS originally tracked 17 MSCI country indices managed by the funds' index provider, Morgan Stanley. WEBS were particularly innovative because they gave casual investors easy access to foreign markets. While SPDRs were organized as unit investment trusts, WEBS were set up as a mutual fund, the first of their kind.
In 1998, State Street Global Advisors introduced "Sector Spiders", separate ETFs for each of the sectors of the S&P 500 Index. Also in 1998, the "Dow Diamonds" (NYSE Arca: DIA) were introduced, tracking the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In 1999, the influential "cubes" (Nasdaq: QQQ), were launched, with the goal of replicate the price movement of the NASDAQ-100.
The iShares line was launched in early 2000. By 2005, it had a 44% market share of ETF assets under management. Barclays Global Investors was sold to BlackRock in 2009.
NYSE merger
As of 2003, AMEX was the only U.S. stock market to permit the transmission of buy and sell orders through hand signals.
In October 2008 NYSE Euronext completed acquisition of the AMEX for $260 million in stock. Before the closing of the acquisition, NYSE Euronext announced that the AMEX would be integrated with the Alternext European small-cap exchange and renamed the NYSE Alternext U.S. In March 2009, NYSE Alternext U.S. was changed to NYSE Amex Equities. On May 10, 2012, NYSE Amex Equities changed its name to NYSE MKT LLC.
On July 24, 2017, the NYSE renamed NYSE MKT to NYSE American, and announced plans to introduce its own 350-microsecond "speed bump" in trading on the small and mid-cap company exchange.
* John L. McCormack (1911–1914)
* Edward R. McCormick (1914–1923)
* John W. Curtis (1923–1925)
* David U. Page (1925–1928)
* William S. Muller (1928–1932)
* Howard C. Sykes (1932–1934)
* E. Burd Grubb (1934–1935)
* Fred C. Moffatt (1935–1939; 1942–1945)
* George P. Rea (1939–1942)
* Edwin Posner (1945–1947; January–September, 1962)
* Edward C. Werle (February–March, 1947)
* Francis Adams Truslow (1947–1951)
* Edward T. McCormick (1951–1961)
* Joseph F. Reilly (1961–1962)
* Edwin D. Etherington (1962–1966)
* Ralph S. Saul (1966–1971)
* Paul Kolton (1971–1973)
* Richard M. Burdge (1973–1977)
* Robert J. Birnbaum (1977–1986)
* Kenneth R. Leibler (1986–1990)
Past chairmen of the American Stock Exchange include:
* Clarence A. Bettman (1939–1941)
* Fred C. Moffatt (1941–1945)
* Edwin Posner (1945–1947; 1962–1965)
* Edward C. Werle (1947–1950)
* Mortimer Landsberg (1950–1951)
* John J. Mann (1951–1956)
* James R. Dyer (1956–1960)
* Joseph E. Reilly (1960–1962)
* David S. Jackson (1965–1968)
* Macrae Sykes (1968–1969)
* Frank C. Graham Jr. (1969–1973)
* Paul Kolton (1973–1978)
* Arthur Levitt Jr. (1978–1989)
* James R. Jones (1989–1993)
* Salvatore F. Sodano (1999–2005)
Gallery
<gallery>
File:Cotton Exchange Building plague 2017.jpg|The text reads: "On June 27, 1921, the curbstone brokers moved from their outdoor Market on Broad Street to establish on this site the indoor securities market that became the American Stock Exchange."
File:US Navy 040601-N-6371Q-096 Vice Adm. Gary Roughead, right, rings the opening bell at the American Stock Exchange, during the 17th Annual Fleet Week in New York.jpg|2004: Vice Adm. Gary Roughead, right, rings the opening bell at the American Stock Exchange, during the 17th Annual Fleet Week in New York
File:Old American Stock Exchange Building 2009.JPG|Old American Stock Exchange Building 2009
</gallery>
See also
* NYSE Arca Major Market Index
*Microcap stock
* Economy of New York City
* List of stock exchanges in the Americas
* List of stock exchange mergers in the Americas
* Consolidated Tape System
*Hal S. Scott
*Michael J. Meehan
References
Further reading
*
* External links
* [https://www.nyse.com/markets/nyse-american NYSE American]
Category:Financial services companies established in 1908
Category:Intercontinental Exchange
Category:Self-regulatory organizations in the United States
Category:Stock exchanges in the United States
Category:2008 mergers and acquisitions | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NYSE_American | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.690175 |
1490 | August 17 | Events
Pre-1600
* 310 – Pope Eusebius dies, possibly from a hunger strike, shortly after being banished by the Emperor Maxentius to Sicily.
* 682 – Pope Leo II begins his pontificate.
* 986 – Byzantine–Bulgarian wars: Battle of the Gates of Trajan: The Bulgarians under the Comitopuli Samuel and Aron defeat the Byzantine forces at the Gate of Trajan, with Byzantine Emperor Basil II barely escaping.
*1186 – Georgenberg Pact: Ottokar IV, Duke of Styria and Leopold V, Duke of Austria sign a heritage agreement in which Ottokar gives his duchy to Leopold and to his son Frederick under the stipulation that Austria and Styria would henceforth remain undivided.
*1386 – Karl Topia, the ruler of Princedom of Albania forges an alliance with the Republic of Venice, committing to participate in all wars of the Republic and receiving coastal protection against the Ottomans in return.
*1424 – Hundred Years' War: Battle of Verneuil: An English force under John, Duke of Bedford defeats a larger French army under Jean II, Duke of Alençon, John Stewart, and Earl Archibald of Douglas.
*1488 – Konrad Bitz, the Bishop of Turku, marks the date of his preface to Missale Aboense, the oldest known book of Finland.
*1498 – Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI, becomes the first person in history to resign the cardinalate; later that same day, King Louis XII of France names him Duke of Valentinois.
*1549 – Battle of Sampford Courtenay: The Prayer Book Rebellion is quashed in England.
*1560 – The Catholic Church is overthrown and Protestantism is established as the national religion in Scotland.
*1585 – Eighty Years' War: Siege of Antwerp: Antwerp is captured by Spanish forces under Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, who orders Protestants to leave the city and as a result over half of the 100,000 inhabitants flee to the northern provinces.
* 1585 – A first group of colonists sent by Sir Walter Raleigh under the charge of Ralph Lane lands in the New World to create Roanoke Colony on Roanoke Island, off the coast of present-day North Carolina.
*1597 – Islands Voyage: Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and Sir Walter Raleigh set sail on an expedition to the Azores.
1601–1900
*1668 – The magnitude 8.0 North Anatolia earthquake causes 8,000 deaths in northern Anatolia, Ottoman Empire.
*1717 – Austro-Turkish War of 1716–18: The month-long Siege of Belgrade ends with Prince Eugene of Savoy's Austrian troops capturing the city from the Ottoman Empire.
*1723 – Ioan Giurgiu Patachi becomes Bishop of Făgăraș and is festively installed in his position at the St. Nicolas Cathedral in Făgăraș, after being formally confirmed earlier by Pope Clement XI.
*1740 – Pope Benedict XIV, previously known as Prospero Lambertini, succeeds Clement XII as the 247th Pope.
*1784 – Classical composer Luigi Boccherini receives a pay rise of 12,000 reals from his employer, the Infante Luis, Count of Chinchón.
*1798 – The Vietnamese Catholics report a Marian apparition in Quảng Trị, an event which is called Our Lady of La Vang.
*1807 – Robert Fulton's North River Steamboat leaves New York City for Albany, New York, on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world.
*1808 – The Finnish War: The Battle of Alavus is fought.
*1827 – Dutch King William I and Pope Leo XII sign concord.
*1836 – British parliament accepts registration of births, marriages and deaths.
*1862 – American Indian Wars: The Dakota War of 1862 begins in Minnesota as Dakota warriors attack white settlements along the Minnesota River.
* 1862 – American Civil War: Major General J. E. B. Stuart is assigned command of all the cavalry of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.
*1863 – American Civil War: In Charleston, South Carolina, Union batteries and ships bombard Confederate-held Fort Sumter.
*1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Gainesville: Confederate forces defeat Union troops near Gainesville, Florida.
*1866 – The Grand Duchy of Baden announces its withdrawal from the German Confederation and signs a treaty of peace and alliance with Prussia.
*1876 – Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung, the last opera in his Ringcycle, premieres at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.
*1883 – The first public performance of the Dominican Republic's national anthem, Himno Nacional.
*1896 – Bridget Driscoll became the first recorded case of a pedestrian killed in a collision with a motor car in the United Kingdom.
1901–present
*1914 – World War I: Battle of Stallupönen: The German army of General Hermann von François defeats the Russian force commanded by Paul von Rennenkampf near modern-day Nesterov, Russia.
*1915 – Jewish American Leo Frank is lynched in Marietta, Georgia, USA after his death sentence is commuted by Governor John Slaton.
* 1915 – A Category 4 hurricane hits Galveston, Texas with winds at .
*1916 – World War I: Romania signs a secret treaty with the Entente Powers. According to the treaty, Romania agreed to join the war on the Allied side.
*1918 – Bolshevik revolutionary leader Moisei Uritsky is assassinated.
*1942 – World War II: U.S. Marines raid the Japanese-held Pacific island of Makin.
*1943 – World War II: The U.S. Eighth Air Force suffers the loss of 60 bombers on the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission.
* 1943 – World War II: The U.S. Seventh Army under General George S. Patton arrives in Messina, Italy, followed several hours later by the British 8th Army under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, thus completing the Allied conquest of Sicily.
* 1943 – World War II: First Québec Conference of Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and William Lyon Mackenzie King begins.
* 1943 – World War II: The Royal Air Force begins Operation Hydra, the first air raid of the Operation Crossbow strategic bombing campaign against Germany's V-weapon program.
*1945 – Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaim the independence of Indonesia, igniting the Indonesian National Revolution against the Dutch Empire.
* 1945 – The novella Animal Farm by George Orwell is first published.
* 1945 – Evacuation of Manchukuo: At Talitzou by the Sino-Korean border, Puyi, then the Kangde Emperor of Manchukuo, formally renounces the imperial throne, dissolves the state, and cedes its territory to the Republic of China.
*1947 – The Radcliffe Line, the border between the Dominions of India and Pakistan, is revealed.
*1949 – The 6.7 Karlıova earthquake shakes eastern Turkey with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme), leaving 320–450 dead.
*1949 – Matsukawa derailment: Unknown saboteurs cause a passenger train to derail and overturn in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, killing three crew members and igniting a political firestorm between the Japanese Communist Party and the government of Occupied Japan that will eventually lead to the Japanese Red Purge.
*1953 – First meeting of Narcotics Anonymous takes place, in Southern California.
*1955 – Hurricane Diane made landfall near Wilmington, North Carolina, and it went on to cause major floods and kill more than 184 people.
*1958 – Pioneer 0, America's first attempt at lunar orbit, is launched using the first Thor-Able rocket and fails. Notable as one of the first attempted launches beyond Earth orbit by any country.
*1959 – Quake Lake is formed by the magnitude 7.2 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake near Hebgen Lake in Montana.
*1960 – Aeroflot Flight 036 crashes in Soviet Ukraine, killing 34.
*1962 – Peter Fechter is shot and bleeds to death while trying to cross the new Berlin Wall.
*1969 – Category 5 Hurricane Camille hits the U.S. Gulf Coast, killing 256 and causing $1.42 billion in damage.
*1970 – Soviet Union Venera program: Venera 7 launched. It will become the first spacecraft to successfully transmit data from the surface of another planet (Venus).
*1976 – A magnitude 7.9 earthquake hits off the coast of Mindanao, Philippines, triggering a destructive tsunami, killing between 5,000 and 8,000 people and leaving more than 90,000 homeless.
*1977 – The Soviet icebreaker Arktika becomes the first surface ship to reach the North Pole.
*1978 – Double Eagle II becomes first balloon to cross the Atlantic Ocean when it lands in Miserey, France near Paris, 137 hours after leaving Presque Isle, Maine.
*1985 – The 1985–86 Hormel strike begins in Austin, Minnesota.
*1988 – President of Pakistan Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and U.S. Ambassador Arnold Raphel are killed in a plane crash.
*1991 – Strathfield massacre: In Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, taxi driver Wade Frankum shoots seven people and injures six others before turning the gun on himself.
*1998 – Lewinsky scandal: US President Bill Clinton admits in taped testimony that he had an "improper physical relationship" with White House intern Monica Lewinsky; later that same day he admits before the nation that he "misled people" about the relationship.
*1999 – The 7.6 İzmit earthquake shakes northwestern Turkey with a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX (Violent), leaving 17,118–17,127 dead and 43,953–50,000 injured.
*2004 – The National Assembly of Serbia unanimously adopts new state symbols for Serbia: Bože pravde becomes the new anthem and the coat of arms is adopted for the whole country.
*2005 – The first forced evacuation of settlers, as part of Israeli disengagement from Gaza, starts.
* 2005 – Over 500 bombs are set off by terrorists at 300 locations in 63 out of the 64 districts of Bangladesh.
*2008 – American swimmer Michael Phelps becomes the first person to win eight gold medals at one Olympic Games.
*2009 – An accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya Dam in Khakassia, Russia, kills 75 and shuts down the hydroelectric power station, leading to widespread power failure in the local area.
*2015 – A bomb explodes near the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok, Thailand, killing at least 19 people and injuring 123 others.
*2017 – Barcelona attacks: A van is driven into pedestrians in La Rambla, killing 14 and injuring at least 100.
*2019 – A bomb explodes at a wedding in Kabul killing 63 people and leaving 182 injured.Births
<!-- Please do not add yourself, non-notable people, fictional characters, or people without Wikipedia articles to this list. No red links, please.
Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence. If there are multiple people in the same birth year, put them in alphabetical order. Do not trust "this day in history" websites for accurate date information. -->
Pre-1600
*1153 – William IX, Count of Poitiers (d. 1156)
*1465 – Philibert I, Duke of Savoy (d. 1482)
*1473 – Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York (d. 1483)
*1501 – Philipp II, Count of Hanau-Münzenberg (d. 1529)
*1556 – Alexander Briant, English martyr and saint (d. 1581)
*1578 – Francesco Albani, Italian painter (d. 1660)
* 1578 – Johann, Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, first prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (d. 1638)
*1582 – John Matthew Rispoli, Maltese philosopher (d. 1639)
*1586 – Johann Valentin Andrea, German theologian (d. 1654)
1601–1900
*1603 – Lennart Torstensson, Swedish Field Marshal, Privy Councillour and Governor-General (d. 1651)
*1629 – John III Sobieski, Polish–Lithuanian king (d. 1696)
*1686 – Nicola Porpora, Italian composer and educator (d. 1768)
*1753 – Josef Dobrovský, Bohemian philologist and historian (d. 1828)
*1768 – Louis Desaix, French general (d. 1800)
*1786 – Davy Crockett, American soldier and politician (d. 1836)
* 1786 – Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (d. 1861)
*1801 – Fredrika Bremer, Swedish writer and feminist (d. 1865)
*1828 – Jules Bernard Luys, French neurologist and physician (d. 1897)
*1840 – Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, English poet and activist (d. 1922)
*1845 – Henry Cadwalader Chapman, American physician and naturalist (d. 1909)
*1849 – William Kidston, Scottish-Australian politician, 17th Premier of Queensland (d. 1919)
*1863 – Gene Stratton-Porter, American author and photographer (d. 1924)
*1865 – Julia Marlowe, English-American actress (d. 1950)
*1866 – Mahbub Ali Khan, Asaf Jah VI, Indian 6th Nizam of Hyderabad (d. 1911)
*1873 – John A. Sampson, American gynecologist and academic (d. 1946)
*1877 – Ralph McKittrick, American golfer and tennis player (d. 1923)
*1878 – Reggie Duff, Australian cricketer (d. 1911)
*1880 – Percy Sherwell, South African cricketer and tennis player (d. 1948)
*1887 – Charles I of Austria (d. 1922)
* 1887 – Marcus Garvey, Jamaican journalist and activist, founded Black Star Line (d. 1940)
*1888 – Monty Woolley, American actor, raconteur, and pundit (d. 1963)
*1889 – Lalla Carlsen, Norwegian singer and actress (d. 1967)
*1890 – Stefan Bastyr, Polish soldier and pilot (d. 1920)
* 1890 – Harry Hopkins, American politician and diplomat, 8th United States Secretary of Commerce (d. 1946)
*1893 – John Brahm, German-American director and production manager (d. 1982)
* 1893 – Mae West, American stage and film actress (d. 1980)
*1894 – William Rootes, 1st Baron Rootes, English businessman, founded Rootes Group (d. 1964)
*1896 – Leslie Groves, American general and engineer (d. 1970)
* 1896 – Tõnis Kint, Estonian lieutenant and politician, Prime Minister of Estonia in exile (d. 1991)
* 1896 – Oliver Waterman Larkin, American historian and author (d. 1970)
*1899 – Janet Lewis, American poet and novelist (d. 1998)
*1900 – Vivienne de Watteville, British travel writer and adventurer (d. 1957)
* 1900 – Pauline A. Young, American teacher, historian, aviator and activist (d. 1991)
1901–present
*1904 – Mary Cain, American journalist and politician (d. 1984)
* 1904 – Leopold Nowak, Austrian composer and musicologist (d. 1991)
*1909 – Larry Clinton, American trumpet player and bandleader (d. 1985)
* 1909 – Wilf Copping, English footballer (d. 1980)
*1911 – Mikhail Botvinnik, Russian chess player and engineer (d. 1995)
* 1911 – Martin Sandberger, German colonel and lawyer (d. 2010)
*1913 – Mark Felt, American lawyer and agent, 2nd Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (d. 2008)
* 1913 – Oscar Alfredo Gálvez, Argentinian race car driver (d. 1989)
* 1913 – Rudy York, American baseball player and manager (d. 1970)
*1914 – Bill Downs, American journalist (d. 1978)
* 1914 – Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., American lawyer and politician (d. 1988)
*1916 – Moses Majekodunmi, Nigerian physician and politician (d. 2012)
*1918 – Evelyn Ankers, British-American actress (d. 1985)
* 1918 – Ike Quebec, American saxophonist and pianist (d. 1963)
* 1918 – Michael John Wise, English geographer and academic (d. 2015)
*1919 – Georgia Gibbs, American singer (d. 2006)
*1920 – Maureen O'Hara, Irish-American actress and singer (d. 2015)
* 1920 – Lida Moser, American photographer and author (d. 2014)
*1921 – Geoffrey Elton, German-English historian and academic (d. 1994)
*1922 – Roy Tattersall, English cricketer (d. 2011)
*1923 – Carlos Cruz-Diez, Venezuelan artist (d. 2019)
* 1923 – Larry Rivers, American painter and sculptor (d. 2002)
*1924 – Evan S. Connell, American novelist, poet, and short story writer (d. 2013)
*1926 – Valerie Eliot, English businesswoman (d. 2012)
* 1926 – Jiang Zemin, Chinese engineer and politician, former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (paramount leader) and 5th President of China (d. 2022)
*1927 – Sam Butera, American saxophonist and bandleader (d. 2009)
* 1927 – F. Ray Keyser Jr., American lawyer and politician, Governor of Vermont (d. 2015)
*1928 – T. J. Anderson, American composer, conductor, and educator
* 1928 – Willem Duys, Dutch tennis player, sportscaster, and producer (d. 2011)
*1929 – Francis Gary Powers, American captain and pilot (d. 1977)
*1930 – Harve Bennett, American screenwriter and producer (d. 2015)
* 1930 – Ted Hughes, English poet and playwright (d. 1998)
*1931 – Tony Wrigley, English historian, demographer, and academic (d. 2022)
*1932 – V. S. Naipaul, Trinidadian-English novelist and essayist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2018)
* 1932 – Duke Pearson, American pianist and composer (d. 1980)
* 1932 – Jean-Jacques Sempé, French cartoonist (d. 2022)
*1933 – Mark Dinning, American pop singer (d. 1986)
*1934 – João Donato, Brazilian pianist and composer (d. 2023)
* 1934 – Ron Henry, English footballer (d. 2014)
*1936 – Seamus Mallon, Irish educator and politician, Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland (d. 2020)
* 1936 – Margaret Heafield Hamilton, American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner
*1938 – Theodoros Pangalos, Greek lawyer and politician, Deputy Prime Minister of Greece (d. 2023)
*1939 – Luther Allison, American blues guitarist and singer (d. 1997)
*1940 – Eduardo Mignogna, Argentinian director and screenwriter (d. 2006)
* 1940 – Barry Sheerman, English academic and politician
*1941 – Lothar Bisky, German businessman and politician (d. 2013)
* 1941 – Jean Pierre Lefebvre, Canadian director and screenwriter
* 1941 – Boog Powell, American baseball player
*1942 – Shane Porteous, Australian actor, animator, and screenwriter
*1943 – Edward Cowie, English composer, painter, and author
* 1943 – Robert De Niro, American actor, entrepreneur, director, and producer
* 1943 – John Humphrys, Welsh journalist and author
* 1943 – Dave "Snaker" Ray, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2002)
*1944 – Larry Ellison, American businessman, co-founded the Oracle Corporation
* 1944 – Jean-Bernard Pommier, French pianist and conductor
*1945 – Rachel Pollack, American author, poet, and educator (d. 2023)
*1946 – Hugh Baiocchi, South African golfer
* 1946 – Martha Coolidge, American director, producer, and screenwriter
* 1946 – Patrick Manning, Trinidadian-Tobagonian politician, 4th Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago (d. 2016)
*1947 – Mohamed Abdelaziz, Sahrawi politician, President of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (d. 2016)
* 1947 – Gary Talley, American guitarist, singer-songwriter, and author
*1949 – Norm Coleman, American lawyer and politician, 52nd Mayor of St. Paul
* 1949 – Sue Draheim, American fiddler and composer (d. 2013)
* 1949 – Julian Fellowes, English actor, director, screenwriter, and politician
*1950 – Geraint Jarman, Welsh musician, poet and television producer (d. 2025)
*1951 – Richard Hunt, American Muppet performer (d. 1992)
* 1951 – Robert Joy, Canadian actor
* 1958 – Fred Goodwin, Scottish banker and accountant
* 1958 – Maurizio Sandro Sala, Brazilian race car driver
*1959 – Jonathan Franzen, American novelist and essayist
* 1959 – Jacek Kazimierski, Polish footballer
* 1959 – Eric Schlosser, American journalist and author
* 1959 – David Koresh, American cult leader (d. 1993)
*1960 – Stephan Eicher, Swiss singer-songwriter
* 1960 – Sean Penn, American actor, director, and political activist
*1962 – Gilby Clarke, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
* 1962 – Dan Dakich, American basketball player, coach, and sportscaster
*1963 – Jon Gruden, American football player, coach, and sportscaster
* 1963 – Jackie Walorski, American politician (d. 2022)
*1964 – Colin James, Canadian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
* 1964 – Maria McKee, American singer-songwriter
* 1968 – Ed McCaffrey, American football player and sportscaster
* 1968 – Helen McCrory, English actress (d. 2021)
*1969 – Christian Laettner, American basketball player and coach
* 1969 – Kelvin Mercer, American rapper, songwriter and producer
*1970 – Jim Courier, American tennis player and sportscaster
* 1970 – Andrus Kivirähk, Estonian author
* 1970 – Øyvind Leonhardsen, Norwegian footballer and coach
*1971 – Uhm Jung-hwa, South Korean singer and actress
* 1971 – Jorge Posada, Puerto Rican-American baseball player
* 1971 – Shaun Rehn, Australian footballer and coach
*1972 – Habibul Bashar, Bangladeshi cricketer
*1974 – Giuliana Rancic, Italian-American journalist and television personality
*1976 – Eric Boulton, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1976 – Geertjan Lassche, Dutch journalist and director
* 1976 – Serhiy Zakarlyuka, Ukrainian footballer and manager (d. 2014)
*1977 – Nathan Deakes, Australian race walker
* 1977 – William Gallas, French footballer
* 1977 – Thierry Henry, French footballer
* 1977 – Mike Lewis, Welsh guitarist
* 1977 – Tarja Turunen, Finnish singer-songwriter and producer
*1979 – Antwaan Randle El, American football player and journalist
* 1979 – Nicole Sunitsch, Austrian politician
*1980 – Keith Dabengwa, Zimbabwean cricketer
* 1980 – Daniel Güiza, Spanish footballer
* 1980 – Jan Kromkamp, Dutch footballer
* 1980 – Lene Marlin, Norwegian singer-songwriter
*1982 – Phil Jagielka, English footballer
* 1982 – Cheerleader Melissa, American wrestler and manager
* 1982 – Mark Salling, American actor and musician (d. 2018)
*1983 – Dustin Pedroia, American baseball player
*1984 – Dee Brown, American basketball player
* 1984 – Oksana Domnina, Russian ice dancer
* 1984 – Liam Heath, British sprint canoeist
* 1984 – Garrett Wolfe, American football player
*1985 – Yū Aoi, Japanese actress and model
*1986 – Rudy Gay, American basketball player
* 1986 – Tyrus Thomas, American basketball player
*1988 – Brady Corbet, American actor and director
* 1989 – Rachel Corsie, Scottish footballer
*1990 – Rachel Hurd-Wood, English actress
*1991 – Austin Butler, American actor
*1992 – Saraya Bevis, English wrestler
* 1992 – Alex Elisala, New Zealand-Australian rugby player (d. 2013)
* 1992 – Chanel Mata'utia, Australian rugby league player
* 1992 – Maru Teferi, Israeli marathon runner
*1993 – Ederson Moraes, Brazilian footballer
* 1993 – Sarah Sjöström, Swedish swimmer
* 1993 – Xie Zhenye, Chinese athlete
*1994 – Phoebe Bridgers, American singer/songwriter
* 1994 – Jack Conklin, American football player
* 1994 – Taissa Farmiga, American actress
* 2003 – The Kid Laroi, Australian rapper and songwriter
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Deaths
Pre-1600
* 754 – Carloman, mayor of the palace of Austrasia
* 949 – Li Shouzhen, Chinese general and governor
*1153 – Eustace IV, Count of Boulogne (b. 1130)
*1304 – Emperor Go-Fukakusa of Japan (b. 1243)
*1324 – Irene of Brunswick (b. 1293)
*1338 – Nitta Yoshisada, Japanese samurai (b. 1301)
*1424 – John Stewart, Earl of Buchan (b. c. 1381)
*1510 – Edmund Dudley, English politician, Speaker of the House of Commons (b. 1462)
* 1510 – Richard Empson, English statesman
*1547 – Katharina von Zimmern, Swiss sovereign abbess (b. 1478)1601–1900
*1673 – Regnier de Graaf, Dutch physician and anatomist (b. 1641)
*1676 – Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, German author (b. 1621)
*1720 – Anne Dacier, French scholar and translator (b. 1654)
*1723 – Joseph Bingham, English scholar and academic (b. 1668)
*1768 – Vasily Trediakovsky, Russian poet and playwright (b. 1703)
*1785 – Jonathan Trumbull, English-American merchant and politician, 16th Governor of Connecticut (b. 1710)
*1786 – Frederick the Great, Prussian king (b. 1712)
*1809 – Matthew Boulton, English businessman and engineer, co-founded Boulton and Watt (b. 1728)
*1814 – John Johnson, English architect and surveyor (b. 1732)
*1834 – Husein Gradaščević, Ottoman general (b. 1802)
*1838 – Lorenzo Da Ponte, Italian playwright and poet (b. 1749)
*1850 – José de San Martín, Argentinian general and politician, 1st President of Peru (b. 1778)
*1861 – Alcée Louis la Branche, American politician and diplomat, 1st United States Ambassador to Texas (b. 1806)
*1870 – Perucho Figueredo, Cuban poet and activist (b. 1818)
*1875 – Wilhelm Bleek, German linguist and anthropologist (b. 1827)
*1897 – William Jervois, English engineer and diplomat, 10th Governor of South Australia (b. 1821)1901–present*1901 – Edmond Audran, French organist and composer (b. 1842)
*1903 – Hans Gude, Norwegian-German painter and academic (b. 1825)
*1908 – Radoje Domanović, Serbian satirist and journalist (b. 1873)
*1909 – Madan Lal Dhingra, Indian activist (b. 1883)
*1918 – Moisei Uritsky, Russian activist and politician (b. 1873)
*1920 – Ray Chapman, American baseball player (b. 1891)
*1924 – Tom Kendall, English-Australian cricketer and journalist (b. 1851)
*1925 – Ioan Slavici, Romanian journalist and author (b. 1848)
*1935 – Adam Gunn, American decathlete (b. 1872)
* 1935 – Charlotte Perkins Gilman, American sociologist and author (b. 1860)
*1936 – José María of Manila, Spanish-Filipino priest and martyr (b. 1880)
*1940 – Billy Fiske, American soldier and pilot (b. 1911)
*1945 – Reidar Haaland, Norwegian police officer and soldier (b. 1919)
*1949 – Gregorio Perfecto, Filipino journalist, jurist, and politician (b. 1891)
*1958 – Arthur Fox, English-American fencer (b. 1878)
*1966 – Ken Miles, English race car driver and engineer (b. 1918)
*1969 – Otto Stern, German physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1888)
*1970 – Rattana Pestonji, Thai director and producer (b. 1908)
*1971 – Maedayama Eigorō, Japanese sumo wrestler, the 39th Yokozuna (b. 1914)
* 1971 – Wilhelm List, German field marshal (b. 1880)
*1973 – Conrad Aiken, American novelist, short story writer, critic, and poet (b. 1889)
* 1973 – Jean Barraqué, French pianist and composer (b. 1928)
* 1973 – Paul Williams, American singer and choreographer (b. 1939)
*1977 – Delmer Daves, American screenwriter, director and producer (b. 1904)
*1979 – John C. Allen, American roller coaster designer (b. 1907)
* 1979 – Vivian Vance, American actress and singer (b. 1909)
*1983 – Ira Gershwin, American songwriter (b. 1896)
*1987 – Gary Chester, Italian drummer and educator (b. 1924)
* 1987 – Rudolf Hess, German soldier and politician (b. 1894)
* 1987 – Shaike Ophir, Israeli actor and screenwriter (b. 1929)
*1988 – Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistani general and politician, 6th President of Pakistan (b. 1924)
* 1988 – Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., American lawyer and politician (b. 1914)
*1990 – Pearl Bailey, American actress and singer (b. 1918)
*1993 – Feng Kang, Chinese mathematician and academic (b. 1920)
*1994 – Luigi Chinetti, Italian-American race car driver and businessman (b. 1901)
* 1994 – Jack Morrison, Australian rugby league player (b. 1905)
* 1994 – Jack Sharkey, American boxer and referee (b. 1902)
*1995 – Howard E. Koch, American playwright and screenwriter (b. 1902)
* 1995 – Ted Whitten, Australian footballer and coach (b. 1933)
*1998 – Władysław Komar, Polish shot putter and actor (b. 1940)
* 1998 – Tadeusz Ślusarski, Polish pole vaulter (b. 1950)
*2005 – John N. Bahcall, American astrophysicist and academic (b. 1934)
*2006 – Shamsur Rahman, Bangladeshi poet and journalist (b. 1929)
*2007 – Bill Deedes, English journalist and politician (b. 1913)
* 2007 – Eddie Griffin, American basketball player (b. 1982)
*2008 – Franco Sensi, Italian businessman and politician (b. 1926)
*2010 – Francesco Cossiga, Italian lawyer and politician, 8th President of Italy (b. 1928)
*2012 – Aase Bjerkholt, Norwegian politician, Minister of Children, Equality and Social Inclusion (b. 1915)
* 2012 – Victor Poor, American engineer, developed the Datapoint 2200 (b. 1933)
* 2012 – Patrick Ricard, French businessman (b. 1945)
* 2012 – John Lynch-Staunton, Canadian lawyer and politician (b. 1930)
*2013 – Odilia Dank, American educator and politician (b. 1938)
* 2013 – Jack Harshman, American baseball player (b. 1927)
* 2013 – John Hollander, American poet and critic (b. 1929)
* 2013 – David Landes, Jewish-American historian and economist (b. 1924)
* 2013 – Frank Martínez, American painter (b. 1924)
* 2013 – Gus Winckel, Dutch lieutenant and pilot (b. 1912)
*2014 – Børre Knudsen, Norwegian minister and activist (b. 1937)
* 2014 – Wolfgang Leonhard, German historian and author (b. 1921)
* 2014 – Sophie Masloff, American civil servant and politician, 56th Mayor of Pittsburgh (b. 1917)
* 2014 – Miodrag Pavlović, Serbian poet and critic (b. 1928)
* 2014 – Pierre Vassiliu, French singer-songwriter (b. 1937)
*2015 – Yvonne Craig, American ballet dancer and actress (b. 1937)
* 2015 – Gerhard Mayer-Vorfelder, German businessman (b. 1933)
* 2015 – László Paskai, Hungarian cardinal (b. 1927)
*2016 – Arthur Hiller, Canadian actor, director, and producer (b. 1923)
*2024 – Virginia Ogilvy, Countess of Airlie, British countess (b. 1933)
*2024 – Silvio Santos, Brazilian media mogul and television host (b. 1930)
<!-- Do not add people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence. -->
Holidays and observances
*Christian feast day:
**Saint Beatrice of Silva
**Saint Clare of Montefalco
**Saint Hyacinth of Poland
**Saint Jeanne Delanoue
**Saint Mammes of Caesarea
**Samuel Johnson, Timothy Cutler, and Thomas Bradbury Chandler (Episcopal Church)
**August 17 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
*Engineer's Day (Colombia)
*Independence Day, celebrates the independence proclamation of Indonesia from Japan in 1945.
References
External links
*
*
*
Category:Days of August | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_17 | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.764350 |
1491 | August 12 | Events
Pre-1600
*1099 – First Crusade: Battle of Ascalon Crusaders under the command of Godfrey of Bouillon defeat Fatimid forces led by Al-Afdal Shahanshah. This is considered the last engagement of the First Crusade.
*1121 – Battle of Didgori: The Georgian army under King David IV wins a decisive victory over the famous Seljuk commander Ilghazi.
*1164 – Battle of Harim: Nur ad-Din Zangi defeats the Crusader armies of the County of Tripoli and the Principality of Antioch.
*1323 – The Treaty of Nöteborg between Sweden and Novgorod Republic is signed, regulating the border between the two countries for the first time.
*1492 – Christopher Columbus arrives in the Canary Islands on his first voyage to the New World.
*1499 – First engagement of the Battle of Zonchio between Venetian and Ottoman fleets.
1601–1900
*1624 – Charles de La Vieuville is arrested and replaced by Cardinal Richelieu as the French king's chief advisor.
*1676 – Praying Indian John Alderman shoots and kills Metacomet, the Wampanoag war chief, ending King Philip's War.
*1687 – Battle of Mohács: Charles of Lorraine defeats the Ottoman Empire.
*1765 – Treaty of Allahabad is signed. The Treaty marks the political and constitutional involvement and the beginning of Company rule in India.
*1788 – The Anjala conspiracy is signed.
*1793 – The Rhône and Loire départments are created when the former département of Rhône-et-Loire is split into two.
*1806 – Santiago de Liniers, 1st Count of Buenos Aires re-takes the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina after the first British invasion.
*1831 – French intervention forces William I of the Netherlands to abandon his attempt to suppress the Belgian Revolution.
*1851 – Isaac Singer is granted a patent for his sewing machine.
*1865 – Joseph Lister, British surgeon and scientist, performs the first antiseptic surgery.
*1883 – The last quagga dies at the Natura Artis Magistra, a zoo in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
*1898 – The Hawaiian flag is lowered from ʻIolani Palace in an elaborate annexation ceremony and replaced with the flag of the United States to signify the transfer of sovereignty from the Republic of Hawaii to the United States where it is formally recognized as Hawaii.
1901–present
*1914 – World War I: The United Kingdom and the British Empire declare war on Austria-Hungary.
* 1914 – World War I: The Battle of Halen a.k.a. Battle of the Silver Helmets a clash between large Belgian and German cavalry formations at Halen, Belgium.
*1944 – Waffen-SS troops massacre 560 people in Sant'Anna di Stazzema.
* 1944 – Nazi German troops end the week-long Wola massacre, during which time at least 40,000 people are killed indiscriminately or in mass executions.
* 1944 – Alençon is liberated by General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, the first city in France to be liberated from the Nazis by French forces.
*1948 – Between 15 and 150 unarmed members of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement are killed by Pakistani police.
*1950 – Korean War: Bloody Gulch massacre: Seventy-five American POWs are massacred by the North Korean Army.
*1952 – The Night of the Murdered Poets: Thirteen prominent Jewish intellectuals are murdered in Moscow, Russia, Soviet Union.
*1953 – First thermonuclear bomb test: The Soviet atomic bomb project continues with the detonation of "RDS-6s" (Joe 4) using a "layered" scheme.
* 1953 – The 7.2 Ionian earthquake shakes the southern Ionian Islands with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme). Between 445 and 800 people are killed.
*1960 – Echo 1A, NASA's first successful communications satellite, is launched.
*1964 – South Africa is banned from the Olympic Games due to the country's racist policies.
*1969 – Violence erupts after the Apprentice Boys of Derry march in Derry, Northern Ireland, resulting in a three-day communal riot known as the Battle of the Bogside.
*1976 – Between 1,000 and 3,500 Palestinians are killed in the Tel al-Zaatar massacre, one of the bloodiest events of the Lebanese Civil War.
*1977 – The first free flight of the .
* 1977 – The Sri Lanka Riots: Targeting the minority Sri Lankan Tamils, begin, less than a month after the United National Party came to power. Over 300 Tamils are killed.
*1981 – The IBM Personal Computer is released.
*1984 – An infamous brawl takes place at the Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium between the Atlanta Braves and San Diego Padres.
*1985 – Japan Air Lines Flight 123 crashes into Osutaka ridge in Gunma Prefecture, Japan, killing 520, to become the worst single-plane air disaster.
*1990 – Sue, the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton found to date, is discovered by Sue Hendrickson in South Dakota.
*1992 – Canada, Mexico and the United States announce completion of negotiations for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
*1994 – Major League Baseball players go on strike, eventually forcing the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.
*2000 – The Russian Navy submarine explodes and sinks in the Barents Sea during a military exercise, killing her entire 118-man crew.
*2015 – At least two massive explosions kill 173 people and injure nearly 800 more in Tianjin, China.
*2016 – Syrian civil war: The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) capture the city of Manbij from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
*2017 - The Unite the Right rally occurs in Charlottesville, Virginia, leading to the deaths of 3 and injuring nearly 50 more.
*2018 – Thirty-nine civilians, including a dozen children, are killed in an explosion at a weapons depot in Sarmada, Syria.
*2021 – Six people, five victims and the perpetrator are killed in Keyham, Plymouth in the worst mass shooting in the UK since 2010.BirthsPre-1600
*1452 – Abraham Zacuto, Jewish astronomer, astrologer, mathematician, rabbi and historian (d. 1515)
*1503 – Christian III of Denmark (d. 1559)
*1506 – Franciscus Sonnius, Dutch counter-Reformation theologian (d. 1576)
*1591 – Louise de Marillac, co-founder of the Daughters of Charity (d. 1660)
*1599 – Sir William Curtius FRS, German magistrate, English baronet (d. 1678)
1601–1900
*1604 – Tokugawa Iemitsu, Japanese shōgun (d. 1651)
*1626 – Giovanni Legrenzi, Italian composer (d. 1690)
*1629 – Archduchess Isabella Clara of Austria, Austrian archduchess (d. 1685)
*1644 – Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, Bohemian-Austrian violinist and composer (d. 1704)
*1686 – John Balguy, English philosopher and author (d. 1748)
*1696 – Maurice Greene, English organist and composer (d. 1755)
*1762 – George IV of the United Kingdom (d. 1830)
*1773 – Karl Faber, Prussian historian and academic (d. 1853)
*1774 – Robert Southey, English poet and author (d. 1843)
*1831 – Helena Blavatsky, Russian theosophist and scholar (d. 1891)
*1852 – Michael J. McGivney, American priest and founder of the Knights of Columbus (d. 1890)
*1856 – Diamond Jim Brady, American businessman and philanthropist (d. 1917)
*1857 – Ernestine von Kirchsberg, Austrian painter and educator (d. 1924)
*1859 – Katharine Lee Bates, American poet and author (d. 1929)
*1860 – Klara Hitler, Austrian mother of Adolf Hitler (d. 1907)
*1866 – Jacinto Benavente, Spanish playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1954)
* 1866 – Henrik Sillem, Dutch target shooter, mountaineer, and jurist (d. 1907)
*1867 – Edith Hamilton, German-American author and educator (d. 1963)
*1870 – Henry Reuterdahl, Swedish-American artist (d. 1925)
*1871 – Gustavs Zemgals, Latvian politician, 2nd President of Latvia (d. 1939)
*1876 – Mary Roberts Rinehart, American author and playwright (d. 1958)
*1877 – Albert Bartha, Hungarian general and politician, Hungarian Minister of Defence (d. 1960)
*1880 – Radclyffe Hall, English poet, author, and activist (d. 1943)
* 1880 – Christy Mathewson, American baseball player and manager (d. 1925)
*1881 – Cecil B. DeMille, American director and producer (d. 1959)
*1883 – Martha Hedman, Swedish-American actress and playwright (d. 1974)
* 1883 – Marion Lorne, American actress (d. 1968)
*1885 – Jean Cabannes, French physicist and academic (d. 1959)
* 1885 – Keith Murdoch, Australian journalist (d. 1952)
* 1885 – Juhan Simm, Estonian composer and conductor (d. 1959)
*1887 – Erwin Schrödinger, Austrian physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1961)
*1889 – Zerna Sharp, American author and educator (d. 1981)
*1891 – C. E. M. Joad, English philosopher and academic (d. 1953)
* 1891 – John McDermott, American golfer (d. 1971)
*1892 – Alfred Lunt, American actor and director (d. 1977)
*1897 – Maurice Fernandes, Guyanese cricketer (d. 1981)
*1899 – Ben Sealey, Trinidadian cricketer (d. 1963)
1901–present
*1902 – Mohammad Hatta, Indonesian statesman, 1st Vice President of Indonesia (d. 1980)
*1904 – Idel Jakobson, Latvian-Estonian NKVD officer (d. 1997)
* 1904 – Tamás Lossonczy, Hungarian painter (d. 2009)
* 1904 – Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia (d. 1918)
*1906 – Harry Hopman, Australian tennis player and coach (d. 1985)
* 1906 – Tedd Pierce, American animator, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1972)
*1907 – Gladys Bentley, American blues singer (d. 1960)
* 1907 – Joe Besser, American actor (d. 1988)
* 1907 – Boy Charlton, Australian swimmer (d. 1975)
* 1907 – Benjamin Sheares, Singaporean physician and politician, 2nd President of Singapore (d. 1981)
*1909 – Bruce Matthews, Canadian general and businessman (d. 1991)
*1910 – Yusof bin Ishak, Singaporean journalist and politician, 1st President of Singapore (d. 1970)
* 1910 – Jane Wyatt, American actress (d. 2006)
*1911 – Cantinflas, Mexican actor, screenwriter, and producer (d. 1993)
*1912 – Samuel Fuller, American actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 1997)
*1913 – Richard L. Bare, American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2015)
*1914 – Gerd Buchdahl, German-English philosopher and author (d. 2001)
* 1914 – Ruth Lowe, Canadian pianist and songwriter (d. 1981)
*1915 – Michael Kidd, American dancer and choreographer (d. 2007)
*1916 – Ioan Dicezare, Romanian general and pilot (d. 2012)
* 1916 – Edward Pinkowski, American writer, journalist and Polonia historian (d. 2020)
*1917 – Oliver Crawford, American screenwriter and author (d. 2008)
* 1917 – Ebba Haslund, Norwegian writer (d. 2009)
*1918 – Sid Bernstein, American record producer (d. 2013)
* 1918 – Guy Gibson, Anglo-Indian commander and pilot, Victoria Cross recipient (d. 1944)
*1919 – Margaret Burbidge, English-American astrophysicist and academic (d. 2020)
* 1919 – Vikram Sarabhai, Indian physicist and academic (d. 1971)
*1920 – Charles Gibson, American ethnohistorian (d. 1985)
* 1920 – Percy Mayfield, American R&B singer-songwriter (d. 1984)
*1922 – Fulton Mackay, Scottish actor and playwright (d. 1987)
* 1922 – Miloš Jakeš, Czech communist politician (d. 2020)
*1923 – John Holt, Jamaican cricketer (d. 1997)
*1924 – Derek Shackleton, English cricketer, coach, and umpire (d. 2007)
* 1924 – Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistani general and politician, 6th President of Pakistan (d. 1988)
*1925 – Dale Bumpers, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 38th Governor of Arkansas (d. 2016)
* 1925 – Guillermo Cano Isaza, Colombian journalist (d. 1986)
* 1925 – Donald Justice, American poet and writing teacher (d. 2004)
* 1925 – Norris McWhirter, Scottish publisher and activist co-founded the Guinness World Records (d. 2004)
* 1925 – Ross McWhirter, Scottish publisher and activist, co-founded the Guinness World Records (d. 1975)
* 1925 – George Wetherill, American physicist and academic (d. 2006)
*1926 – Douglas Croft, American child actor (d. 1963)
* 1926 – John Derek, American actor, director, and cinematographer (d. 1998)
* 1926 – Joe Jones, American R&B singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2005)
*1927 – Porter Wagoner, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2007)
*1928 – Charles Blackman, Australian painter and illustrator (d. 2018)
* 1928 – Bob Buhl, American baseball player (d. 2001)
* 1928 – Dan Curtis, American director and producer (d. 2006)
*1929 – Buck Owens, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2006)
*1930 – George Soros, Hungarian-American businessman and investor, founded the Soros Fund Management
* 1930 – Kanagaratnam Sriskandan, Sri Lankan engineer and civil servant (d. 2010)
* 1930 – Jacques Tits, Belgian-French mathematician and academic (d. 2021)
*1931 – William Goldman, American author, playwright, and screenwriter (d. 2018)
*1932 – Dallin H. Oaks, American lawyer, jurist, and religious leader
* 1932 – Charlie O'Donnell, American radio and television announcer (d. 2010)
* 1932 – Sirikit, Queen mother of Thailand
*1933 – Parnelli Jones, American race car driver and businessman (d. 2024)
* 1933 – Frederic Lindsay, Scottish author and educator (d. 2013)
*1934 – Robin Nicholson, English metallurgist and academic
*1935 – John Cazale, American actor (d. 1978)
*1936 – Kjell Grede, Swedish director and screenwriter (d. 2017)
*1937 – Walter Dean Myers, American author and poet (d. 2014)
*1938 – Jean-Paul L'Allier, Canadian journalist and politician, 38th Mayor of Quebec City (d. 2016)
*1939 – George Hamilton, American actor
* 1939 – David Jacobs, American television writer and producer (d. 2023)
* 1939 – S. Jayakumar, Singaporean politician, 4th Senior Minister of Singapore
* 1939 – Pam Kilborn, Australian track and field athlete
* 1939 – David King, South African chemist and academic
* 1939 – Sushil Koirala, Nepalese politician, 37th Prime Minister of Nepal (d. 2016)
* 1939 – Roy Romanow, Canadian lawyer and politician, 12th Premier of Saskatchewan
*1940 – Eddie Barlow, South African cricketer and coach (d. 2005)
* 1940 – John Waller, English historical European martial arts (HEMA) revival pioneer and fight director (d. 2018)
*1941 – L. M. Kit Carson, American actor, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2014)
* 1941 – Réjean Ducharme, Canadian author and playwright (d. 2017)
* 1941 – Dana Ivey, American actress
*1942 – Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt, German physician and author
*1943 – Javeed Alam, Indian academician (d. 2016)
*1945 – Dorothy E. Denning, American computer scientist and academic
* 1945 – Ron Mael, American keyboard player and songwriter
*1946 – Terry Nutkins, English television host and author (d. 2012)
*1947 – John Nathan-Turner, English author and television director, producer, and writer (d. 2002)
*1948 – Siddaramaiah, Indian lawyer and politician, 22nd Chief Minister of Karnataka
* 1948 – Graham J. Zellick, English academic and jurist
*1949 – Panagiotis Chinofotis, Greek admiral and politician
* 1949 – Mark Knopfler, Scottish-English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
* 1949 – Lou Martin, Northern Irish pianist, songwriter, and producer (d. 2012)
* 1949 – Alex Naumik, Lithuanian-Norwegian singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2013)
* 1949 – Rick Ridgeway, American mountaineer and photographer
*1950 – Jim Beaver, American actor, director, and screenwriter
* 1950 – August "Kid Creole" Darnell, American musician, bandleader, singer-songwriter, and record producer
* 1950 – George McGinnis, American basketball player (d. 2023)
*1951 – Klaus Toppmöller, German football manager and former player
*1952 – Daniel Biles, American associate justice of the Kansas Supreme Court
* 1952 – Sitaram Yechury, Indian politician and leader of CPI(M) (d. 2024)
*1954 – Rob Borbidge, Australian politician, 35th Premier of Queensland
* 1954 – Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong businessman and politician, 3rd Chief Executive of Hong Kong
* 1954 – Ibolya Dávid, Hungarian lawyer and politician, Minister of Justice of Hungary
* 1954 – François Hollande, French lawyer and politician, 24th President of France
* 1954 – Sam J. Jones, American actor
* 1954 – Pat Metheny, American jazz guitarist and composer
*1956 – Lee Freedman, Australian horse trainer
* 1956 – Bruce Greenwood, Canadian actor and producer
* 1956 – Sidath Wettimuny, Sri Lankan cricketer
*1957 – Friedhelm Schütte, German footballer
* 1957 – Amanda Redman, English actress
*1958 – Jürgen Dehmel, German bass player and songwriter
*1959 – Kerry Boustead, Australian rugby league player
*1960 – Laurent Fignon, French cyclist and sportscaster (d. 2010)
* 1960 – Greg Thomas, Welsh-English cricketer
*1961 – Roy Hay, English guitarist, keyboard player, and composer
* 1961 – Mark Priest, New Zealand cricketer
*1963 – Kōji Kitao, Japanese sumo wrestler, the 60th Yokozuna (d. 2019)
* 1963 – Campbell Newman, Australian politician, 38th Premier of Queensland
* 1963 – Sir Mix-a-Lot, American rapper, producer, and actor
*1964 – Txiki Begiristain, Spanish footballer
* 1964 – Michael Hagan, Australian rugby league player and coach
*1965 – Peter Krause, American actor
*1966 – Tobias Ellwood, American-English captain and politician
*1967 – Andy Hui, Hong Kong singer-songwriter and actor
* 1967 – Andrey Plotnikov, Russian race walker
* 1967 – Regilio Tuur, Dutch boxer
*1968 – Thorsten Boer, German footballer and manager
*1969 – Aga Muhlach, Filipino actor and politician
* 1969 – Stuart Williams, Nevisian cricketer
* 1969 – Tanita Tikaram, British pop/folk singer-songwriter
*1970 – Aleksandar Đurić, Bosnian footballer
* 1970 – Charles Mesure, English-Australian actor and screenwriter
* 1970 – Toby Perkins, English businessman and politician
* 1970 – Jim Schlossnagle, American baseball player and coach
* 1970 – Anthony Swofford, American soldier and author
*1971 – Michael Ian Black, American comedian, actor, director, producer, and screenwriter
* 1971 – Yvette Nicole Brown, American actress, comedian, and talk show host
* 1971 – Rebecca Gayheart, American actress
* 1971 – Pete Sampras, American tennis player
*1972 – Demir Demirkan, Turkish singer-songwriter and producer
* 1972 – Mark Kinsella, Irish footballer and manager
* 1972 – Takanohana Kōji, Japanese sumo wrestler, the 65th Yokozuna
* 1972 – Gyanendra Pandey, Indian cricketer
* 1972 – Del the Funky Homosapien, American rapper
*1973 – Jonathan Coachman, American sportscaster and wrestler
* 1973 – Mark Iuliano, Italian footballer and manager
* 1973 – Todd Marchant, American ice hockey player and coach
*1974 – Matt Clement, American baseball player and coach
* 1974 – Karl Stefanovic, Australian television host
*1975 – Casey Affleck, American actor
*1976 – Pedro Collins, Barbadian cricketer
* 1976 – Mikko Lindström, Finnish guitarist
* 1976 – Henry Tuilagi, Samoan rugby player
* 1976 – Antoine Walker, American basketball player
*1977 – Plaxico Burress, American football player
* 1977 – Jesper Grønkjær, Danish footballer
* 1977 – Park Yong-ha, South Korean actor (d. 2010)
*1978 – Chris Chambers, American football player
* 1978 – Hayley Wickenheiser, Canadian ice hockey player
*1979 – D. J. Houlton, American baseball player
* 1979 – Ian Hutchinson, English motorcycle racer
* 1979 – Cindy Klassen, Canadian speed skater
* 1979 – Austra Skujytė, Lithuanian pentathlete
*1980 – Javier Chevantón, Uruguayan footballer
* 1980 – Maggie Lawson, American actress
* 1980 – Dominique Swain, American actress
* 1980 – Matt Thiessen, Canadian-American singer-songwriter and guitarist
*1981 – Tony Capaldi, Norwegian–Northern Irish footballer
* 1981 – Djibril Cissé, French footballer
*1982 – Boban Grnčarov, Macedonian footballer
* 1982 – Alexandros Tzorvas, Greek footballer
*1983 – Klaas-Jan Huntelaar, Dutch footballer
* 1983 – Kléber Giacomance de Souza Freitas, Brazilian footballer
* 1983 – Manoa Vosawai, Italian rugby player
*1984 – Bryan Pata, American football player (d. 2006)
*1985 – Danny Graham, English footballer
* 1985 – Franck Moutsinga, German rugby player
*1986 – Andrei Agius, Maltese footballer
* 1986 – Kyle Arrington, American football player
*1987 – Vanessa Watts, West Indian cricketer
*1988 – Tyson Fury, English boxer
* 1988 – Matt Gillett, Australian rugby league player
*1989 – Tom Cleverley, English footballer
* 1989 – Hong Jeong-ho, South Korean footballer
* 1989 – Sunye, South Korean singer
*1990 – Mario Balotelli, Italian footballer
* 1990 – Marvin Zeegelaar, Dutch footballer
* 1990 – Martin Zurawsky, German footballer
*1991 – Jesinta Campbell, Australian model
* 1991 – Sam Hoare, Australian rugby league player
* 1991 – Khris Middleton, American basketball player
* 1991 – LaKeith Stanfield, American actor and musician
*1992 – Cara Delevingne, English model and actress
* 1992 – Jacob Loko, Australian rugby player
* 1992 – Teo Gheorghiu, Swiss pianist and actor
*1993 – Ewa Farna, Czech singer-songwriter
* 1993 – Luna, South Korean singer, actress and presenter
*1994 – Ian Happ, American baseball player
*1996 – Choi Yu-jin, South Korean singer and actress
* 1996 – Julio Urías, Mexican baseball player
* 1996 – Arthur Melo, Brazilian footballer
* 1996 – Samuel Moutoussamy, Congolese footballer
*1998 – Stefanos Tsitsipas, Greek tennis player
*1999 – Matthijs de Ligt, Dutch footballer
* 1999 – Dream, American YouTuber
* 1999 – Jule Niemeier, German tennis player
*2000 – Tristan Charpentier, French racing driver
*2001 – Dixie D'Amelio, American social media personality and singer
<!-- Do not add your own name or people without Wikipedia articles to this list. No red links, please. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence. -->
Deaths
Pre-1600
*30 BC – Cleopatra, Egyptian queen (b. 69 BC)
* 792 – Jænberht, archbishop of Canterbury
* 875 – Louis II, Holy Roman Emperor (b. 825)
* 960 – Li Gu, chancellor of Later Zhou (b. 903)
* 961 – Yuan Zong, emperor of Southern Tang (b. 916)
*1222 – Vladislaus III, duke of Bohemia
*1295 – Charles Martel, king of Hungary (b. 1271)
*1319 – Rudolf I, duke of Bavaria (b. 1274)
*1315 – Guy de Beauchamp, 10th Earl of Warwick, English nobleman
*1335 – Prince Moriyoshi, Japanese shōgun (b. 1308)
*1399 – Demetrius I Starshy, Prince of Trubczewsk (in battle) (b. 1327)
*1424 – Yongle, emperor of the Ming Empire (b. 1360)
*1484 – Sixtus IV, pope of the Catholic Church (b. 1414)
*1546 – Francisco de Vitoria, Spanish theologian (b. 1492)
*1577 – Thomas Smith, English scholar and diplomat (b. 1513)
*1588 – Alfonso Ferrabosco the elder, Italian-English composer (b. 1543)
1601–1900
*1602 – Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak, Mughal vizier and historian (b. 1551)
*1612 – Giovanni Gabrieli, Italian organist and composer (b. 1557)
*1638 – Johannes Althusius, German jurist and philosopher (b. 1557)
*1674 – Philippe de Champaigne, Belgian-French painter and educator (b. 1602)
*1689 – Pope Innocent XI (b. 1611)
*1778 – Peregrine Bertie, 3rd Duke of Ancaster and Kesteven, English general and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire (b. 1714)
*1809 – Mikhail Kamensky, Russian field marshal (b. 1738)
*1810 – Étienne Louis Geoffroy, French pharmacist and entomologist (b. 1725)
*1822 – Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, Irish-English politician, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (b. 1769)
*1827 – William Blake, English poet and painter (b. 1757)
*1829 – Charles Sapinaud de La Rairie, French general (b. 1760)
*1848 – George Stephenson, English engineer and academic (b. 1781)
*1849 – Albert Gallatin, Swiss-American ethnologist, linguist, and politician, 4th United States Secretary of the Treasury (b. 1761)
*1861 – Eliphalet Remington, American inventor and businessman, founded Remington Arms (b. 1793)
*1864 – Sakuma Shōzan, Japanese scholar and politician (b. 1811)
*1865 – William Jackson Hooker, English botanist and academic (b. 1785)
*1891 – James Russell Lowell, American poet and critic (b. 1819)
*1896 – Thomas Chamberlain, American colonel (b. 1841)
*1900 – Wilhelm Steinitz, Austrian chess player and theoretician (b. 1836)
1901–present
*1901 – Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, Finnish-Swedish botanist, geologist, mineralogist, and explorer (b. 1832)
*1904 – William Renshaw, English tennis player (b. 1861)
*1914 – John Philip Holland, Irish engineer, designed (b. 1840)
*1918 – William Thompson, American archer (b. 1848)
*1921 – Pyotr Boborykin, Russian playwright and journalist (b. 1836)
*1922 – Arthur Griffith, Irish journalist and politician, 3rd President of Dáil Éireann (b. 1871)
*1924 – Sándor Bródy, Hungarian journalist and author (b. 1863)
*1928 – Leoš Janáček, Czech composer and educator (b. 1854)
*1934 – Hendrik Petrus Berlage, Dutch architect, designed the Beurs van Berlage (b. 1856)
*1935 – Friedrich Schottky, German mathematician and academic (b. 1851)
*1940 – Nikolai Triik, Estonian painter, illustrator, and academic (b. 1884)
*1941 – Freeman Freeman-Thomas, 1st Marquess of Willingdon, English soldier and politician, 56th Governor General of Canada (b. 1866)
* 1941 – Bobby Peel, English cricketer and umpire (b. 1857)
*1943 – Vittorio Sella, Italian photographer and mountaineer (b. 1859)
*1944 – Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., American lieutenant and pilot (b. 1915)
* 1944 – Jacques Pellegrin, French zoologist (b. 1873)
*1952 – David Bergelson, Ukrainian author and playwright (b. 1884)
*1955 – Thomas Mann, German author and critic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1875)
* 1955 – James B. Sumner, American chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1887)
*1959 – Mike O'Neill, Irish-American baseball player and manager (b. 1877)
*1964 – Ian Fleming, English spy, journalist, and author (b. 1908)
*1966 – Artur Alliksaar, Estonian poet and author (b. 1923)
*1967 – Esther Forbes, American historian and author (b. 1891)
*1973 – Walter Rudolf Hess, Swiss physiologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1881)
* 1973 – Karl Ziegler, German chemist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1898)
*1976 – Tom Driberg, British politician/journalist (b. 1905)
*1978 – John Williams, English motorcycle racer (b. 1946)
*1979 – Ernst Boris Chain, German-Irish biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1906)
*1982 – Henry Fonda, American actor (b. 1905)
* 1982 – Salvador Sánchez, Mexican boxer (b. 1959)
*1983 – Theodor Burchardi, German admiral (b. 1892)
*1984 – Ladi Kwali, Nigerian potter (b. 1925)
*1985 – Kyu Sakamoto, Japanese singer-songwriter (b. 1941)
* 1985 – Manfred Winkelhock, German race car driver (b. 1951)
*1986 – Evaline Ness, American author and illustrator (b. 1911)
*1988 – Jean-Michel Basquiat, American painter (b. 1960)
*1989 – Aimo Koivunen, Finnish soldier and corporal (b. 1917)
* 1989 – William Shockley, American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1910)
*1990 – Dorothy Mackaill, English-American actress (b. 1903)
*1992 – John Cage, American composer and theorist (b. 1912)
*1996 – Victor Ambartsumian, Georgian-Armenian astrophysicist and academic (b. 1908)
* 1996 – Mark Gruenwald, American author and illustrator (b. 1953)
*1997 – Jack Delano, American photographer and composer (b. 1914)
*1999 – Jean Drapeau, Canadian lawyer and politician, 37th Mayor of Montreal (b. 1916)
*2000 – Gennady Lyachin, Russian captain (b. 1955)
* 2000 – Loretta Young, American actress (b. 1913)
*2002 – Enos Slaughter, American baseball player and manager (b. 1916)
*2004 – Godfrey Hounsfield, English biophysicist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1919)
*2005 – John Loder, English sound engineer and producer, founded Southern Studios (b. 1946)
*2006 – Victoria Gray Adams, American civil rights activist (b. 1926)
*2007 – Merv Griffin, American actor, singer, and producer, created Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune (b. 1925)
* 2007 – Mike Wieringo, American author and illustrator (b. 1963)
*2008 – Christie Allen, English-Australian singer (b. 1954)
* 2008 – Helge Hagerup, Norwegian playwright, poet and novelist (b. 1933)
*2009 – Les Paul, American guitarist and songwriter (b. 1915)
*2010 – Isaac Bonewits, American Druid, author, and activist; founded Ár nDraíocht Féin (b. 1949)
* 2010 – Guido de Marco, Maltese lawyer and politician, 6th President of Malta (b. 1931)
* 2010 – Richie Hayward, American drummer and songwriter (b. 1946)
* 2010 – André Kim, South Korean fashion designer (b. 1935)
*2011 – Robert Robinson, English journalist and author (b. 1927)
*2012 – Jimmy Carr, American football player and coach (b. 1933)
* 2012 – Jerry Grant, American race car driver (b. 1935)
* 2012 – Joe Kubert, Polish-American illustrator, founded The Kubert School (b. 1926)
* 2012 – Édgar Morales Pérez, Mexican engineer and politician
* 2012 – Alf Morris, English politician and activist (b. 1928)
*2013 – Tereza de Arriaga, Portuguese painter (b. 1915)
* 2013 – Hans-Ekkehard Bob, German soldier and pilot (b. 1917)
* 2013 – Pauline Maier, American historian and academic (b. 1938)
* 2013 – David McLetchie, Scottish lawyer and politician (b. 1952)
* 2013 – Vasiliy Mihaylovich Peskov, Russian ecologist and journalist (b. 1930)
*2014 – Lauren Bacall, American model, actress, and singer (b. 1924)
* 2014 – Futatsuryū Jun'ichi, Japanese sumo wrestler (b. 1950)
* 2014 – Kongō Masahiro, Japanese sumo wrestler (b. 1948)
*2015 – Jaakko Hintikka, Finnish philosopher and academic (b. 1929)
* 2015 – Stephen Lewis, English actor and screenwriter (b. 1926)
* 2015 – Meshulim Feish Lowy, Hungarian-Canadian rabbi and author (b. 1921)
* 2015 – John Scott, English organist and conductor (b. 1956)
*2016 – Juan Pedro de Miguel, Spanish handball player (b. 1958)
*2017 – Bryan Murray, Canadian ice hockey coach (b. 1942)
*2019 – DJ Arafat, Ivorian DJ and singer (b. 1986)
*2020 – Bill Yeoman, American college football player and coach (b. 1927)
*2021 – Una Stubbs, English actress, TV personality, and dancer (b. 1937)
*2024 – Kim Kahana, American actor and stunt performer (b. 1929)
<!-- Do not add people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence. -->
Holidays and observances
* Christian feast day:
** Euplius
** Eusebius of Milan
** Herculanus of Brescia
** Pope Innocent XI
** Jænberht
** Jane Frances de Chantal
** Muiredach (or Murtagh)
** Porcarius II
** August 12 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
* Glorious Twelfth (United Kingdom)
* HM the Queen Mother's Birthday and National Mother's Day (Thailand)
* International Youth Day (United Nations)
* Russian Air Force Day (Russia)
* Russian Railway Troops Day (Russia)
* Sea Org Day (Scientology)
* World Elephant Day (International)
References
External links
*
*
*
Category:Days of August | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_12 | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.802718 |
1494 | Alfred Russel Wallace | | image = Alfred-Russel-Wallace-c1895.jpg
| caption = Wallace in 1895
| birth_date
| birth_place Llanbadoc, Monmouthshire<!--Whether Monmouthshire was in Wales in 1872 is debatable. Please leave this alone; this page is not the place for this debate-->
| death_date }}
| death_place = Broadstone, Dorset, England
| known_for =
| author_abbrev_bot = Wallace
| spouse = Annie Mitten (m. 1866)
| children = Herbert, Violet, William
| field =
| prizes = (1870)
* Darwin Medal (1890)
* Founder's Medal (1892)
* Linnean Medal (1892)
* Copley Medal (1908)
* Darwin–Wallace Medal (Gold, 1908)
* Order of Merit (1908)
}}
}}
Alfred Russel Wallace (8 January 1823 – 7 November 1913) was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection; his 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic.
Wallace was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century, working on warning color<!--yes, BE uses -or- not -our- here-->ation in animals and reinforcement (sometimes known as the Wallace effect), a way that natural selection could contribute to speciation by encouraging the development of barriers against hybridisation. Wallace's 1904 book ''Man's Place in the Universe was the first serious attempt by a biologist to evaluate the likelihood of life on other planets. He was one of the first scientists to write a serious exploration of whether there was life on Mars.
Aside from scientific work, he was a social activist, critical of what he considered to be an unjust social and economic system in 19th-century Britain. His advocacy of spiritualism and his belief in a non-material origin for the higher mental faculties of humans strained his relationship with other scientists. He was one of the first prominent scientists to raise concerns over the environmental impact of human activity. He wrote prolifically on both scientific and social issues; his account of his adventures and observations during his explorations in Southeast Asia, The Malay Archipelago'', was first published in 1869. It continues to be both popular and highly regarded.
Biography
Early life
Alfred Russel Wallace was born on 8 January 1823 in Llanbadoc, Monmouthshire.<!--Whether Monmouthshire was in Wales in 1872 is debatable. Please leave this alone; this page is not the place for this debate--> He was the eighth of nine children born to Mary Anne Wallace () and Thomas Vere Wallace. His mother was English, while his father was of Scottish ancestry. His family claimed a connection to William Wallace, a leader of Scottish forces during the Wars of Scottish Independence in the 13th century. to which place his family moved when Wallace was five years old. He attended Hertford Grammar School until 1837, when he reached the age of 14, the normal leaving age for a pupil not going on to university.
.|alt=a building designed by Wallace and his brother]]
Wallace then moved to London to board with his older brother John, a 19-year-old apprentice builder. This was a stopgap measure until William, his oldest brother, was ready to take him on as an apprentice surveyor. While in London, Alfred attended lectures and read books at the London Mechanics Institute. Here he was exposed to the radical political ideas of the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen and of the English-born political theorist Thomas Paine. He left London in 1837 to live with William and work as his apprentice for six years. They moved repeatedly to different places in Mid-Wales. Then at the end of 1839, they moved to Kington, Herefordshire, near the Welsh border, before eventually settling at Neath in Wales. Between 1840 and 1843, Wallace worked as a land surveyor in the countryside of the west of England and Wales. The natural history of his surroundings aroused his interest; from 1841 he collected flowers and plants as an amateur botanist. Other historians have questioned this because neither of his parents were Welsh, his family only briefly lived in Monmouthshire, the Welsh people Wallace knew in his childhood considered him to be English, and because he consistently referred to himself as English rather than Welsh. One Wallace scholar has stated that the most reasonable interpretation is therefore that he was an Englishman born in Wales. During this period, he exchanged letters with Bates about books. By the end of 1845, Wallace was convinced by Robert Chambers's anonymously published treatise on progressive development, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, but he found Bates was more critical. Wallace re-read Darwin's Journal, and on 11 April 1846 wrote "As the Journal of a scientific traveller, it is second only to Humboldt's 'Personal Narrative'—as a work of general interest, perhaps superior to it."
William Jevons, the founder of the Neath institute, was impressed by Wallace and persuaded him to give lectures there on science and engineering. In the autumn of 1846, Wallace and his brother John purchased a cottage near Neath, where they lived with their mother and sister Fanny.
Exploration and study of the natural world
Inspired by the chronicles of earlier and contemporary travelling naturalists, Wallace decided to travel abroad. He later wrote that Darwin's Journal and Humboldt's Personal Narrative were "the two works to whose inspiration I owe my determination to visit the tropics as a collector." After reading A Voyage up the River Amazon by William Henry Edwards, Wallace and Bates estimated that by collecting and selling natural history specimens such as birds and insects they could meet their costs, with the prospect of good profits. In June Wallace wrote to Murchison at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) for support, proposing to again fund his exploring entirely from sale of duplicate collections. He later recalled that, while researching in the insect-room of the British Museum, he was introduced to Darwin and they "had a few minutes' conversation." After presenting a paper and a large map of the Rio Negro to the RGS, Wallace was elected a Fellow of the society on 27 February 1854. Free passage arranged on Royal Navy ships was stalled by the Crimean War, but eventually the RGS funded first class travel by P&O steamships. Wallace and a young assistant, Charles Allen, embarked at Southampton on 4 March 1854. After the overland journey to Suez and another change of ship at Ceylon they disembarked at Singapore on 19 April 1854.
From 1854 to 1862, Wallace travelled around the islands of the Malay Archipelago or East Indies (now Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia). His main objective "was to obtain specimens of natural history, both for my private collection and to supply duplicates to museums and amateurs". In addition to Allen, he "generally employed one or two, and sometimes three Malay servants" as assistants, and paid large numbers of local people at various places to bring specimens. His total was 125,660 specimens, most of which were insects including more than 83,000 beetles, Several thousand of the specimens represented species new to science, Overall, more than thirty men worked for him at some stage as full-time paid collectors. He also hired guides, porters, cooks and boat crews, so well over 100 individuals worked for him.
On reaching Singapore in May 1856, Wallace hired a bird-skinner. With Ali as cook, they collected for two days on Bali, then from 17 June to 30 August on Lombok. In December 1856, Darwin had written to contacts worldwide to get specimens for his continuing research into variation under domestication. At Lombok's port city, Ampanam, Wallace wrote telling his agent, Stevens, about specimens shipped, including a domestic duck variety "for Mr. Darwin & he would perhaps also like the jungle cock, which is often domesticated here & is doubtless one of the originals of the domestic breed of poultry."
In the same letter, Wallace said birds from Bali and Lombok, divided by a narrow strait, "belong to two quite distinct zoological provinces, of which they form the extreme limits", Java, Borneo, Sumatra and Malacca, and Australia and the Moluccas. Stevens arranged publication of relevant paragraphs in the January 1857 issue of The Zoologist. After further investigation, the zoogeographical boundary eventually became known as the Wallace Line.
Ali became Wallace's most trusted assistant, a skilled collector and researcher. Wallace collected and preserved the delicate insect specimens, while most of the birds were collected and prepared by his assistants; of those, Ali collected and prepared around 5000.
While exploring the archipelago, Wallace refined his thoughts about evolution, and had his famous insight on natural selection. In 1858 he sent an article outlining his theory to Darwin; it was published, along with a description of Darwin's theory, that same year.
Accounts of Wallace's studies and adventures were eventually published in 1869 as The Malay Archipelago. This became one of the most popular books of scientific exploration of the 19th century, and has never been out of print. It was praised by scientists such as Darwin (to whom the book was dedicated), by Lyell, and by non-scientists such as the novelist Joseph Conrad. Conrad called the book his "favorite bedside companion" and used information from it for several of his novels, especially Lord Jim.
A set of 80 bird skeletons Wallace collected in Indonesia are held in the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology, and described as of exceptional historical significance.
{| class="center toccolours"
|+ Specimens and illustrations
|<gallery mode"packed" heights"200px" style="line-height:130%">
File:Alfred Russel Wallace01.jpg|Arenga pinnata sketched by Wallace in Celebes, reworked by Walter Hood Fitch|alt=Wallace's sketch of a tree
File:Naturalis Biodiversity Center - RMNH.AVES.144722 2 - Mino anais anais (Lesson, 1839) - Sturnidae - bird skin specimen.jpeg|Wallace collected many specimens, such as this Mino anais anais from South West Papua, 1863.|alt=photograph of a bird specimen collected by Wallace
File:Wallace frog.jpg|An illustration from The Malay Archipelago depicts the flying frog that a workman handed to Wallace.|alt=illustration of Wallace's flying frog
</gallery>
|-
| style="text-align:left" |
|}
Return to Britain, marriage and children
In 1862, Wallace returned to Britain, where he moved in with his sister Fanny Sims and her husband Thomas. While recovering from his travels, Wallace organised his collections and gave numerous lectures about his adventures and discoveries to scientific societies such as the Zoological Society of London. Later that year, he visited Darwin at Down House, and became friendly with both Lyell and the philosopher Herbert Spencer. During the 1860s, Wallace wrote papers and gave lectures defending natural selection. He corresponded with Darwin about topics including sexual selection, warning coloration<!--yes, BE uses -or- here-->, and the possible effect of natural selection on hybridisation and the divergence of species. In 1865, he began investigating spiritualism.
After a year of courtship, Wallace became engaged in 1864 to a young woman whom, in his autobiography, he would only identify as Miss L. Miss L. was the daughter of Lewis Leslie who played chess with Wallace, but to Wallace's great dismay, she broke off the engagement. In 1866, Wallace married Annie Mitten. Wallace had been introduced to Mitten through the botanist Richard Spruce, who had befriended Wallace in Brazil and who was a friend of Annie Mitten's father, William Mitten, an expert on mosses. In 1872, Wallace built the Dell, a house of concrete, on land he leased in Grays in Essex, where he lived until 1876. The Wallaces had three children: Herbert (1867–1874), Violet (1869–1945), and William (1871–1951). Financial struggles In the late 1860s and 1870s, Wallace was very concerned about the financial security of his family. While he was in the Malay Archipelago, the sale of specimens had brought in a considerable amount of money, which had been carefully invested by the agent who sold the specimens for Wallace. On his return to the UK, Wallace made a series of bad investments in railways and mines that squandered most of the money, and he found himself badly in need of the proceeds from the publication of The Malay Archipelago.
Despite assistance from his friends, he was never able to secure a permanent salaried position such as a curatorship in a museum. To remain financially solvent, Wallace worked grading government examinations, wrote 25 papers for publication between 1872 and 1876 for various modest sums, and was paid by Lyell and Darwin to help edit some of their works.
In 1876, Wallace needed a £500 advance from the publisher of The Geographical Distribution of Animals to avoid having to sell some of his personal property. Darwin was very aware of Wallace's financial difficulties and lobbied long and hard to get Wallace awarded a government pension for his lifetime contributions to science. When the £200 annual pension was awarded in 1881, it helped to stabilise Wallace's financial position by supplementing the income from his writings.
Social activism
In 1881, Wallace was elected as the first president of the newly formed Land Nationalisation Society. In the next year, he published a book, Land Nationalisation; Its Necessity and Its Aims, on the subject. He criticised the UK's free trade policies for the negative impact they had on working-class people. In 1889, Wallace read Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy and declared himself a socialist, despite his earlier foray as a speculative investor. After reading Progress and Poverty, the bestselling book by the progressive land reformist Henry George, Wallace described it as "Undoubtedly the most remarkable and important book of the present century."
Wallace opposed eugenics, an idea supported by other prominent 19th-century evolutionary thinkers, on the grounds that contemporary society was too corrupt and unjust to allow any reasonable determination of who was fit or unfit. In his 1890 article "Human Selection" he wrote, "Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent ..." He said, "The world does not want the eugenicist to set it straight," "Give the people good conditions, improve their environment, and all will tend towards the highest type. Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant, scientific priestcraft."
In 1898, Wallace wrote a paper advocating a pure paper money system, not backed by silver or gold, which impressed the economist Irving Fisher so much that he dedicated his 1920 book Stabilizing the Dollar to Wallace.
Wallace wrote on other social and political topics, including in support of women's suffrage and repeatedly on the dangers and wastefulness of militarism. In an 1899 essay, he called for popular opinion to be rallied against warfare by showing people "that all modern wars are dynastic; that they are caused by the ambition, the interests, the jealousies, and the insatiable greed of power of their rulers, or of the great mercantile and financial classes which have power and influence over their rulers; and that the results of war are never good for the people, who yet bear all its burthens (burdens)". In a letter published by the Daily Mail in 1909, with aviation in its infancy, he advocated an international treaty to ban the military use of aircraft, arguing against the idea "that this new horror is 'inevitable', and that all we can do is to be sure and be in the front rank of the aerial assassins—for surely no other term can so fitly describe the dropping of, say, ten thousand bombs at midnight into an enemy's capital from an invisible flight of airships."
In 1898, Wallace published The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Its Failures, about developments in the 19th century. The first part of the book covered the major scientific and technical advances of the century; the second part covered what Wallace considered to be its social failures including the destruction and waste of wars and arms races, the rise of the urban poor and the dangerous conditions in which they lived and worked, a harsh criminal justice system that failed to reform criminals, abuses in a mental health system based on privately owned sanatoriums, the environmental damage caused by capitalism, and the evils of European colonialism. Wallace continued his social activism for the rest of his life, publishing the book The Revolt of Democracy just weeks before his death. Further scientific work In 1880, he published Island Life as a sequel to The Geographic Distribution of Animals. In November 1886, Wallace began a ten-month trip to the United States to give a series of popular lectures. Most of the lectures were on Darwinism (evolution through natural selection), but he also gave speeches on biogeography, spiritualism, and socio-economic reform. During the trip, he was reunited with his brother John who had emigrated to California years before. He spent a week in Colorado, with the American botanist Alice Eastwood as his guide, exploring the flora of the Rocky Mountains and gathering evidence that would lead him to a theory on how glaciation might explain certain commonalities between the mountain flora of Europe, Asia and North America, which he published in 1891 in the paper "English and American Flowers". He met many other prominent American naturalists and viewed their collections. His 1889 book Darwinism used information he collected on his American trip and information he had compiled for the lectures. Death Cemetery, Dorset, restored by the A. R. Wallace Memorial Fund in 2000. It features a fossil tree trunk 7 feet (2.1 m) tall from Portland, mounted on a block of Purbeck limestone.|altphotograph of Wallace's grave]]
On 7 November 1913, Wallace died at home, aged 90, in the country house he called Old Orchard, which he had built a decade earlier. His death was widely reported in the press. The New York Times called him "the last of the giants [belonging] to that wonderful group of intellectuals composed of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Lyell, Owen, and other scientists, whose daring investigations revolutionized and evolutionized the thought of the century". Another commentator in the same edition said: "No apology need be made for the few literary or scientific follies of the author of that great book on the 'Malay Archipelago'." ([https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2530 Vol.1], [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2539 Vol.2])
Some of Wallace's friends suggested that he be buried in Westminster Abbey, but his wife followed his wishes and had him buried in the small cemetery at Broadstone, Dorset. Several prominent British scientists formed a committee to have a medallion of Wallace placed in Westminster Abbey near where Darwin had been buried. The medallion was unveiled on 1 November 1915.
Theory of evolution
Early evolutionary thinking
Wallace began his career as a travelling naturalist who already believed in the transmutation of species. The concept had been advocated by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Erasmus Darwin, and Robert Grant, among others. It was widely discussed, but not generally accepted by leading naturalists, and was considered to have radical, even revolutionary connotations. Prominent anatomists and geologists such as Georges Cuvier, Richard Owen, Adam Sedgwick, and Lyell attacked transmutation vigorously. It has been suggested that Wallace accepted the idea of the transmutation of species in part because he was always inclined to favour radical ideas in politics, religion and science, and because he was unusually open to marginal, even fringe, ideas in science.
Wallace was profoundly influenced by Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a controversial work of popular science published anonymously in 1844. It advocated an evolutionary origin for the Solar System, the Earth, and living things. Wallace wrote to Henry Bates in 1845 describing it as "an ingenious hypothesis strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies, but which remains to be proven by ... more research". In 1847, he wrote to Bates that he would "like to take some one family [of beetles] to study thoroughly, ... with a view to the theory of the origin of species."
Wallace planned fieldwork to test the evolutionary hypothesis that closely related species should inhabit neighbouring territories. During his work in the Amazon basin, he came to realise that geographical barriers—such as the Amazon and its major tributaries—often separated the ranges of closely allied species. He included these observations in his 1853 paper "On the Monkeys of the Amazon". Near the end of the paper he asked the question, "Are very closely allied species ever separated by a wide interval of country?"
In February 1855, while working in Sarawak on the island of Borneo, Wallace wrote "On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species". The paper was published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History in September 1855. In this paper, he discussed observations of the geographic and geologic distribution of both living and fossil species, a field that became biogeography. His conclusion that "Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a closely allied species" has come to be known as the "Sarawak Law", answering his own question in his paper on the monkeys of the Amazon basin. Although it does not mention possible mechanisms for evolution, this paper foreshadowed the momentous paper he would write three years later.
The paper challenged Lyell's belief that species were immutable. Although Darwin had written to him in 1842 expressing support for transmutation, Lyell had continued to be strongly opposed to the idea. Around the start of 1856, he told Darwin about Wallace's paper, as did Edward Blyth who thought it "Good! Upon the whole! ... Wallace has, I think put the matter well; and according to his theory the various domestic races of animals have been fairly developed into species." Despite this hint, Darwin mistook Wallace's conclusion for the progressive creationism of the time, writing that it was "nothing very new ... Uses my simile of tree [but] it seems all creation with him." Lyell was more impressed, and opened a notebook on species in which he grappled with the consequences, particularly for human ancestry. Darwin had already shown his theory to their mutual friend Joseph Hooker and now, for the first time spelt out the full details of natural selection to Lyell. Although Lyell could not agree, he urged Darwin to publish to establish priority. Darwin demurred at first, but began writing up a species sketch of his continuing work in May 1856.
Natural selection and Darwin
By February 1858, Wallace had been convinced by his biogeographical research in the Malay Archipelago that evolution was real. He later wrote in his autobiography that the problem was of how species change from one well-marked form to another. He stated that it was while he was in bed with a fever that he thought about Malthus's idea of positive checks on human population, and had the idea of natural selection. His autobiography says that he was on the island of Ternate at the time; but the evidence of his journal suggests that he was in fact on the island of Gilolo. From 1858 to 1861, he rented a house on Ternate from the Dutchman Maarten Dirk van Renesse van Duivenbode, which he used as a base for expeditions to other islands such as Gilolo.
Wallace describes how he discovered natural selection as follows:
}}
was issued by the Linnean Society on the 50th anniversary of the reading of Darwin and Wallace's papers on natural selection. Wallace received the only gold example.|altphotograph of the Darwin-Wallace medal]]
Wallace had once briefly met Darwin, and was one of the correspondents whose observations Darwin used to support his own theories. Although Wallace's first letter to Darwin has been lost, Wallace carefully kept the letters he received. In the first letter, dated 1 May 1857, Darwin commented that Wallace's letter of 10 October which he had recently received, as well as Wallace's paper "On the Law which has regulated the Introduction of New Species" of 1855, showed that they thought alike, with similar conclusions, and said that he was preparing his own work for publication in about two years time. The second letter, dated 22 December 1857, said how glad he was that Wallace was theorising about distribution, adding that "without speculation there is no good and original observation" but commented that "I believe I go much further than you". Wallace believed this and sent Darwin his February 1858 essay, "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type", asking Darwin to review it and pass it to Charles Lyell if he thought it worthwhile. Although Wallace had sent several articles for journal publication during his travels through the Malay archipelago, the Ternate essay was in a private letter. Darwin received the essay on 18 June 1858. Although the essay did not use Darwin's term "natural selection", it did outline the mechanics of an evolutionary divergence of species from similar ones due to environmental pressures. In this sense, it was very similar to the theory that Darwin had worked on for 20 years, but had yet to publish. Darwin sent the manuscript to Charles Lyell with a letter saying "he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters ... he does not say he wishes me to publish, but I shall, of course, at once write and offer to send to any journal." Distraught about the illness of his baby son, Darwin put the problem to Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, who decided to publish the essay in a joint presentation together with unpublished writings which highlighted Darwin's priority. Wallace's essay was presented to the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, along with excerpts from an essay which Darwin had disclosed privately to Hooker in 1847 and a letter Darwin had written to Asa Gray in 1857.
Communication with Wallace in the far-off Malay Archipelago involved months of delay, so he was not part of this rapid publication. Wallace accepted the arrangement after the fact, happy that he had been included at all, and never expressed bitterness in public or in private. Darwin's social and scientific status was far greater than Wallace's, and it was unlikely that, without Darwin, Wallace's views on evolution would have been taken seriously. Lyell and Hooker's arrangement relegated Wallace to the position of co-discoverer, and he was not the social equal of Darwin or the other prominent British natural scientists. All the same, the joint reading of their papers on natural selection associated Wallace with the more famous Darwin. This, combined with Darwin's (as well as Hooker's and Lyell's) advocacy on his behalf, would give Wallace greater access to the highest levels of the scientific community. The reaction to the reading was muted, with the president of the Linnean Society remarking in May 1859 that the year had not been marked by any striking discoveries; but, with Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species later in 1859, its significance became apparent. When Wallace returned to the UK, he met Darwin. Although some of Wallace's opinions in the ensuing years would test Darwin's patience, they remained on friendly terms for the rest of Darwin's life.
Over the years, a few people have questioned this version of events. In the early 1980s, two books, one by Arnold Brackman and another by John Langdon Brooks, suggested not only that there had been a conspiracy to rob Wallace of his proper credit, but that Darwin had actually stolen a key idea from Wallace to finish his own theory. These claims have been examined and found unconvincing by a number of scholars. Shipping schedules show that, contrary to these accusations, Wallace's letter could not have been delivered earlier than the date shown in Darwin's letter to Lyell.
Defence of Darwin and his ideas
After Wallace returned to England in 1862, he became one of the staunchest defenders of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. In an incident in 1863 that particularly pleased Darwin, Wallace published the short paper "Remarks on the Rev. S. Haughton's Paper on the Bee's Cell, And on the Origin of Species". This rebutted a paper by a professor of geology at the University of Dublin that had sharply criticised Darwin's comments in the Origin on how hexagonal honey bee cells could have evolved through natural selection.
An even longer defence was a 1867 article in the Quarterly Journal of Science called "Creation by Law". It reviewed George Campbell, the 8th Duke of Argyll's book, The Reign of Law, which aimed to refute natural selection.
After an 1870 meeting of the British Science Association, Wallace wrote to Darwin complaining that there were "no opponents left who know anything of natural history, so that there are none of the good discussions we used to have".Differences between Darwin and WallaceHistorians of science have noted that, while Darwin considered the ideas in Wallace's paper to be essentially the same as his own, there were differences. Darwin emphasised competition between individuals of the same species to survive and reproduce, whereas Wallace emphasised environmental pressures on varieties and species forcing them to become adapted to their local conditions, leading populations in different locations to diverge. The historian of science Peter J. Bowler has suggested that in the paper he mailed to Darwin, Wallace might have been discussing group selection. Against this, Malcolm Kottler showed that Wallace was indeed discussing individual variation and selection.
Others have noted that Wallace appeared to have envisioned natural selection as a kind of feedback mechanism that kept species and varieties adapted to their environment (now called 'stabilizing", as opposed to 'directional' selection). Bateson revisited the topic in his 1979 book Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, and other scholars have continued to explore the connection between natural selection and systems theory. Warning coloration and sexual selection
: a wasp (top) mimicked by a beetle in Wallace's 1889 book Darwinism|alt=see caption]]
Warning coloration<!--Brit. usage is colour, but coloration, see structural coloration for detailed explanation--> was one of Wallace's contributions to the evolutionary biology of animal coloration. In 1867, Darwin wrote to Wallace about a problem in explaining how some caterpillars could have evolved conspicuous colour schemes. Darwin had come to believe that many conspicuous animal colour schemes were due to sexual selection, but he saw that this could not apply to caterpillars. Wallace responded that he and Bates had observed that many of the most spectacular butterflies had a peculiar odour and taste, and that he had been told by John Jenner Weir that birds would not eat a certain kind of common white moth because they found it unpalatable. Since the moth was as conspicuous at dusk as a coloured caterpillar in daylight, it seemed likely that the conspicuous colours served as a warning to predators and thus could have evolved through natural selection. Darwin was impressed by the idea. At a later meeting of the Entomological Society, Wallace asked for any evidence anyone might have on the topic. In 1869, Weir published data from experiments and observations involving brightly coloured caterpillars that supported Wallace's idea.<!--mentioned also in Wallace's Darwinism, ch. 9, and in [http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtypeside&itemIDF1548.1&pageseq322 a letter by Darwin to A. Weismann on 1 May 1875]--> Wallace attributed less importance than Darwin to sexual selection. In his 1878 book [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/73563 Tropical Nature and Other Essays], he wrote extensively about the coloration of animals and plants, and proposed alternative explanations for a number of cases Darwin had attributed to sexual selection. He revisited the topic at length in his 1889 book Darwinism. In 1890, he wrote a critical review in Nature of his friend Edward Bagnall Poulton's The Colours of Animals which supported Darwin on sexual selection, attacking especially Poulton's claims on the "aesthetic preferences of the insect world".
Wallace effect
In 1889, Wallace wrote the book Darwinism, which explained and defended natural selection. In it, he proposed the hypothesis that natural selection could drive the reproductive isolation of two varieties by encouraging the development of barriers against hybridisation. Thus it might contribute to the development of new species. He suggested the following scenario: When two populations of a species had diverged beyond a certain point, each adapted to particular conditions, hybrid offspring would be less adapted than either parent form and so natural selection would tend to eliminate the hybrids. Furthermore, under such conditions, natural selection would favour the development of barriers to hybridisation, as individuals that avoided hybrid matings would tend to have more fit offspring, and thus contribute to the reproductive isolation of the two incipient species. This idea came to be known as the Wallace effect, later called reinforcement. Wallace had suggested to Darwin that natural selection could play a role in preventing hybridisation in private correspondence as early as 1868, but had not worked it out to this level of detail. It continues to be a topic of research in evolutionary biology today, with both computer simulation and empirical results supporting its validity. Application of theory to humans, and role of teleology in evolution to humans in Wallace's 1889 book Darwinism shows a chimpanzee.|altillustration of a chimpanzee from one of Wallace's books]]
In 1864, Wallace published a paper, "The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of 'Natural Selection, applying the theory to humankind. Darwin had not yet publicly addressed the subject, although Thomas Huxley had in ''Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature''. Wallace explained the apparent stability of the human stock by pointing to the vast gap in cranial capacities between humans and the great apes. Unlike some other Darwinists, including Darwin himself, he did not "regard modern primitives as almost filling the gap between man and ape". He saw the evolution of humans in two stages: achieving a bipedal posture that freed the hands to carry out the dictates of the brain, and the "recognition of the human brain as a totally new factor in the history of life". In 1864, in the aforementioned paper, he stated "It is the same great law of the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life, which leads to the inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which Europeans come in contact." He argued that the natives die out due to an unequal struggle.
Shortly afterwards, Wallace became a spiritualist. At about the same time, he began to maintain that natural selection could not account for mathematical, artistic, or musical genius, metaphysical musings, or wit and humour. He stated that something in "the unseen universe of Spirit" had interceded at least three times in history: the creation of life from inorganic matter; the introduction of consciousness in the higher animals; and the generation of the higher mental faculties in humankind. He believed that the raison d'être of the universe was the development of the human spirit.
While some historians have concluded that Wallace's belief that natural selection was insufficient to explain the development of consciousness and the higher functions of the human mind was directly caused by his adoption of spiritualism, other scholars have disagreed, and some maintain that Wallace never believed natural selection applied to those areas. Reaction to Wallace's ideas on this topic among leading naturalists at the time varied. Lyell endorsed Wallace's views on human evolution rather than Darwin's. Wallace's belief that human consciousness could not be entirely a product of purely material causes was shared by a number of prominent intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All the same, many, including Huxley, Hooker, and Darwin himself, were critical of Wallace's views.
As the historian of science and sceptic Michael Shermer has stated, Wallace's views in this area were at odds with two major tenets of the emerging Darwinian philosophy. These were that evolution was not teleological (purpose-driven), and that it was not anthropocentric (human-centred). Much later in his life Wallace returned to these themes, that evolution suggested that the universe might have a purpose, and that certain aspects of living organisms might not be explainable in terms of purely materialistic processes. He set out his ideas in a 1909 magazine article entitled The World of Life, later expanded into a book of the same name. Shermer commented that this anticipated ideas about design in nature and directed evolution that would arise from religious traditions throughout the 20th century.
Assessment of Wallace's role in history of evolutionary theory
In many accounts of the development of evolutionary theory, Wallace is mentioned only in passing as simply being the stimulus to the publication of Darwin's own theory. In reality, Wallace developed his own distinct evolutionary views which diverged from Darwin's, and was considered by many (especially Darwin) to be a leading thinker on evolution in his day, whose ideas could not be ignored. One historian of science has pointed out that, through both private correspondence and published works, Darwin and Wallace exchanged knowledge and stimulated each other's ideas and theories over an extended period. Wallace is the most-cited naturalist in Darwin's Descent of Man, occasionally in strong disagreement. Darwin and Wallace agreed on the importance of natural selection, and some of the factors responsible for it: competition between species and geographical isolation. But Wallace believed that evolution had a purpose ("teleology") in maintaining species' fitness to their environment, whereas Darwin hesitated to attribute any purpose to a random natural process. Scientific discoveries since the 19th century support Darwin's viewpoint, by identifying additional mechanisms and triggers such as mutations triggered by environmental radiation or mutagenic chemicals. Wallace remained an ardent defender of natural selection for the rest of his life. By the 1880s, evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles, but natural selection less so. Wallace's 1889 Darwinism was a response to the scientific critics of natural selection. Of all Wallace's books, it is the most cited by scholarly publications.
Other scientific contributions
Biogeography and ecology
In 1872, at the urging of many of his friends, including Darwin, Philip Sclater, and Alfred Newton, Wallace began research for a general review of the geographic distribution of animals. Initial progress was slow, in part because classification systems for many types of animals were in flux. He resumed the work in earnest in 1874 after the publication of a number of new works on classification. Extending the system developed by Sclater for birds—which divided the earth into six separate geographic regions for describing species distribution—to cover mammals, reptiles and insects as well, Wallace created the basis for the zoogeographic regions in use today. He discussed the factors then known to influence the current and past geographic distribution of animals within each geographic region.
These factors included the effects of the appearance and disappearance of land bridges (such as the one currently connecting North America and South America) and the effects of periods of increased glaciation. He provided maps showing factors, such as elevation of mountains, depths of oceans, and the character of regional vegetation, that affected the distribution of animals. He summarised all the known families and genera of the higher animals and listed their known geographic distributions. The text was organised so that it would be easy for a traveller to learn what animals could be found in a particular location. The resulting two-volume work, The Geographical Distribution of Animals, was published in 1876 and served as the definitive text on zoogeography for the next 80 years.
The book included evidence from the fossil record to discuss the processes of evolution and migration that had led to the geographical distribution of modern species. For example, he discussed how fossil evidence showed that tapirs had originated in the Northern Hemisphere, migrating between North America and Eurasia and then, much more recently, to South America after which the northern species became extinct, leaving the modern distribution of two isolated groups of tapir species in South America and Southeast Asia. Wallace was very aware of, and interested in, the mass extinction of megafauna in the late Pleistocene. In The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876) he wrote, "We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared". He added that he believed the most likely cause for the rapid extinctions was glaciation, but by the time he wrote World of Life (1911) he had come to believe those extinctions were "due to man's agency".
In 1880, Wallace published the book Island Life as a sequel to The Geographical Distribution of Animals. It surveyed the distribution of both animal and plant species on islands. Wallace classified islands into oceanic and two types of continental islands. Oceanic islands, in his view, such as the Galapagos and Hawaiian Islands (then called Sandwich Islands) formed in mid-ocean and never part of any large continent. Such islands were characterised by a complete lack of terrestrial mammals and amphibians, and their inhabitants (except migratory birds and species introduced by humans) were typically the result of accidental colonisation and subsequent evolution. Continental islands, in his scheme, were divided into those that were recently separated from a continent (like Britain) and those much less recently (like Madagascar). Wallace discussed how that difference affected flora and fauna. He discussed how isolation affected evolution and how that could result in the preservation of classes of animals, such as the lemurs of Madagascar that were remnants of once widespread continental faunas. He extensively discussed how changes of climate, particularly periods of increased glaciation, may have affected the distribution of flora and fauna on some islands, and the first portion of the book discusses possible causes of these great ice ages. Island Life was considered a very important work at the time of its publication. It was discussed extensively in scientific circles both in published reviews and in private correspondence. Environmentalism Wallace's extensive work in biogeography made him aware of the impact of human activities on the natural world. In Tropical Nature and Other Essays (1878), he warned about the dangers of deforestation and soil erosion, especially in tropical climates prone to heavy rainfall. Noting the complex interactions between vegetation and climate, he warned that the extensive clearing of rainforest for coffee cultivation in Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka) and India would adversely impact the climate in those countries and lead to their impoverishment due to soil erosion. In Island Life, Wallace again mentioned deforestation and invasive species. On the impact of European colonisation on the island of Saint Helena, he wrote that the island was "now so barren and forbidding that some persons find it difficult to believe that it was once all green and fertile". He explained that the soil was protected by the island's vegetation; once that was destroyed, the soil was washed off the steep slopes by heavy tropical rain, leaving "bare rock or sterile clay". He attributed the "irreparable destruction" to feral goats, introduced in 1513. The island's forests were further damaged by the "reckless waste" of the East India Company from 1651, which used the bark of valuable redwood and ebony trees for tanning, leaving the wood to rot unused. Wallace's comments on environment grew more urgent later in his career. In The World of Life (1911) he wrote that people should view nature "as invested with a certain sanctity, to be used by us but not abused, and never to be recklessly destroyed or defaced."
Astrobiology
Wallace's 1904 book ''Man's Place in the Universe was the first serious attempt by a biologist to evaluate the likelihood of life on other planets. He concluded that the Earth was the only planet in the Solar System that could possibly support life, mainly because it was the only one in which water could exist in the liquid phase. His treatment of Mars in this book was brief, and in 1907, Wallace returned to the subject with the book Is Mars Habitable?'' to criticise the claims made by the American astronomer Percival Lowell that there were Martian canals built by intelligent beings. Wallace did months of research, consulted various experts, and produced his own scientific analysis of the Martian climate and atmospheric conditions. He pointed out that spectroscopic analysis had shown no signs of water vapour in the Martian atmosphere, that Lowell's analysis of Mars's climate badly overestimated the surface temperature, and that low atmospheric pressure would make liquid water, let alone a planet-girding irrigation system, impossible. Richard Milner comments that Wallace "effectively debunked Lowell's illusionary network of Martian canals." Wallace became interested in the topic because his anthropocentric philosophy inclined him to believe that man would be unique in the universe.
Other activities
<!--Poetry
Wallace included metrical verse such as his "A Description of Javíta" in his book Travels on the Amazon.-->
Spiritualism<!--linked from 'Spiritualism (philosophy)'-->
Wallace was an enthusiast of phrenology. Early in his career, he experimented with hypnosis, then known as mesmerism, managing to hypnotise some of his students in Leicester. When he began these experiments, the topic was very controversial: early experimenters, such as John Elliotson, had been harshly criticised by the medical and scientific establishment. Wallace drew a connection between his experiences with mesmerism and spiritualism, arguing that one should not deny observations on "a priori grounds of absurdity or impossibility".
taken by Frederick Hudson of Wallace and his late mother in 1882; he may have used double exposure.|alt=a purported spirit photograph of Wallace and his late mother as if together]]
Wallace began investigating spiritualism in the summer of 1865, possibly at the urging of his older sister Fanny Sims. After reviewing the literature and attempting to test what he witnessed at séances, he came to believe in it. For the rest of his life, he remained convinced that at least some séance phenomena were genuine, despite accusations of fraud and evidence of trickery. One biographer suggested that the emotional shock when his first fiancée broke their engagement contributed to his receptiveness to spiritualism. Other scholars have emphasised his desire to find scientific explanations for all phenomena.
Wallace's public advocacy of spiritualism and his repeated defence of spiritualist mediums against allegations of fraud in the 1870s damaged his scientific reputation. In 1875 he published the evidence he believed proved his position in On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism. His attitude permanently strained his relationships with previously friendly scientists such as Henry Bates, Thomas Huxley, and even Darwin. Others, such as the physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter and zoologist E. Ray Lankester became publicly hostile to Wallace over the issue. Wallace was heavily criticised by the press; The Lancet was particularly harsh. When, in 1879, Darwin first tried to rally support among naturalists to get a civil pension awarded to Wallace, Joseph Hooker responded that "Wallace has lost caste considerably, not only by his adhesion to Spiritualism, but by the fact of his having deliberately and against the whole voice of the committee of his section of the British Association, brought about a discussion on Spiritualism at one of its sectional meetings ... This he is said to have done in an underhanded manner, and I well remember the indignation it gave rise to in the B.A. Council." Hooker eventually relented and agreed to support the pension request.
Flat Earth wager
In 1870, a flat-Earth proponent named John Hampden offered a £500 wager (roughly ) in a magazine advertisement to anyone who could demonstrate a convex curvature in a body of water such as a river, canal, or lake. Wallace, intrigued by the challenge and short of money at the time, designed an experiment in which he set up two objects along a stretch of canal. Both objects were at the same height above the water, and he mounted a telescope on a bridge at the same height above the water as well. When seen through the telescope, one object appeared higher than the other, showing the curvature of the Earth. The judge for the wager, the editor of Field magazine, declared Wallace the winner, but Hampden refused to accept the result. He sued Wallace and launched a campaign, which persisted for several years, of writing letters to various publications and to organisations of which Wallace was a member denouncing him as a swindler and a thief. Wallace won multiple libel suits against Hampden, but the resulting litigation cost Wallace more than the amount of the wager, and the controversy frustrated him for years.
Anti-vaccination campaign
In the early 1880s, Wallace joined the debate over mandatory smallpox vaccination. Wallace originally saw the issue as a matter of personal liberty; but, after studying statistics provided by anti-vaccination activists, he began to question the efficacy of vaccination. At the time, the germ theory of disease was new and far from universally accepted. Moreover, no one knew enough about the human immune system to understand why vaccination worked. Wallace discovered instances where supporters of vaccination had used questionable, in a few cases completely false, statistics to support their arguments. Always suspicious of authority, Wallace suspected that physicians had a vested interest in promoting vaccination, and became convinced that reductions in the incidence of smallpox that had been attributed to vaccination were due to better hygiene and improvements in public sanitation.
Another factor in Wallace's thinking was his belief that, because of the action of natural selection, organisms were in a state of balance with their environment, and that everything in nature, served a useful purpose. Wallace pointed out that vaccination, which at the time was often unsanitary, could be dangerous.
In 1890, Wallace gave evidence to a Royal Commission investigating the controversy. It found errors in his testimony, including some questionable statistics. The Lancet averred that Wallace and other activists were being selective in their choice of statistics. The commission found that smallpox vaccination was effective and should remain compulsory, though they recommended some changes in procedures to improve safety, and that the penalties for people who refused to comply be made less severe. Years later, in 1898, Wallace wrote a pamphlet, Vaccination a Delusion; Its Penal Enforcement a Crime, attacking the commission's findings. It, in turn, was attacked by The Lancet, which stated that it repeated many of the same errors as his evidence given to the commission. Legacy and historical perception Honours '' (1889)|altfrontispiece of one of Wallace's books]]
As a result of his writing, Wallace became a well-known figure both as a scientist and as a social activist, and was often sought out for his views. He became president of the anthropology section of the British Association in 1866, and of the Entomological Society of London in 1870. The British Association elected him as head of its biology section in 1876. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1893. and the Order of Merit in 1908.
Obscurity and rehabilitation
Wallace's fame faded quickly after his death. For a long time, he was treated as a relatively obscure figure in the history of science. Reasons for this lack of attention may have included his modesty, his willingness to champion unpopular causes without regard for his own reputation, and the discomfort of much of the scientific community with some of his unconventional ideas. The reason that the theory of evolution is popularly credited to Darwin is likely the impact of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. A web page dedicated to Wallace scholarship is maintained at Western Kentucky University.
In a 2010 book, the environmentalist Tim Flannery argued that Wallace was "the first modern scientist to comprehend how essential cooperation is to our survival", and suggested that Wallace's understanding of natural selection and his later work on the atmosphere should be seen as a forerunner to modern ecological thinking. A collection of his medals, including the Order of Merit, were sold at auction for £273,000 in 2022. Centenary celebrations
statue of Wallace, looking up at a bronze model of a Wallace's golden birdwing butterfly. Natural History Museum, London, unveiled 7 November 2013.|alt=photograph of a statue of Wallace in London]]
The Natural History Museum, London, co-ordinated commemorative events for the Wallace centenary worldwide in the 'Wallace100' project in 2013. On 24 January, his portrait was unveiled in the Main Hall of the museum by Bill Bailey, a fervent admirer. Bailey further championed Wallace in his 2013 BBC Two series "Bill Bailey's Jungle Hero". On 7 November 2013, the 100th anniversary of Wallace's death, Sir David Attenborough unveiled a statue of Wallace at the museum. The statue, sculpted by Anthony Smith, was donated by the A. R. Wallace Memorial Fund. It depicts Wallace as a young man, collecting in the jungle. November 2013 marked the debut of The Animated Life of A. R. Wallace, a paper-puppet animation film dedicated to Wallace's centennial. In addition, Bailey unveiled a bust of Wallace, sculpted by Felicity Crawley, in Twyn Square in Usk, Monmouthshire in November 2021. Bicentenary celebrations Commemorations of the 200th anniversary of Wallace's birth celebrated during the course of 2023 range from naturalist walk events to scientific congresses and presentations. A Harvard Museum of Natural History event in April 2023 will also include a mixologist-designed special cocktail to honor Wallace's legacy.
Memorials
Mount Wallace in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range was named in his honour in 1895. In 1928, a house at Richard Hale School (then called Hertford Grammar School, where he had been a pupil) was named after Wallace. as are impact craters on Mars and the Moon. Several hundred species of plants and animals, both living and fossil, have been named after Wallace, such as the gecko Cyrtodactylus wallacei, and the freshwater stingray Potamotrygon wallacei. More recently, several new species have been named during the bicentenary year of Wallace's birth, including a large spider from Peru, Linothele wallacei Sherwood et al., 2023 and a South African weevil, Nama wallacei Meregalli & Borovec, 2023.
Writings
Wallace was a prolific author. In 2002, historian of science Michael Shermer published a quantitative analysis of Wallace's publications. He found that Wallace had published 22 full-length books and at least 747 shorter pieces, 508 of which were scientific papers (191 of them published in Nature). He further broke down the 747 short pieces by their primary subjects: 29% were on biogeography and natural history, 27% were on evolutionary theory, 25% were social commentary, 12% were on anthropology, and 7% were on spiritualism and phrenology. An online bibliography of Wallace's writings has more than 750 entries.<ref name"Bibliography"/>
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References Notes CitationsSources
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* [http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtypeside&itemIDA237.1&pageseq1 Vol. 1]
* . [http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtypeside&itemIDA237.2&pageseq1 Vol. 2]
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Further reading
There is an extensive literature on Wallace. Recent books on him<!-- other than those used as Sources, see below--> include:
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* [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15998 Vol. 2 (Parts III – VII)] (Project Gutenberg). London: Cassell and Company. Published in a single volume by Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York and London, June 1916.
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External links
* [https://wallacefund.myspecies.info/ The Alfred Russel Wallace Website] by George Beccaloni
* [http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/index1.htm Alfred Russel Wallace] at Western Kentucky University
* [https://wallaceletters.myspecies.info/ The Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project]
* [http://wallace-online.org/ Wallace Online], ed. John van Wyhe – The first complete online edition of the writings of Alfred Russel Wallace
* [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000cldv Great Lives – Bill Bailey on his hero Alfred Russel Wallace] on BBC Radio 4
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Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.857450 |
1495 | Australian Labor Party | | logo = ALP logo 2017.svg
| abbreviation = ALP
| slogan = ''Building Australia's Future''
| leader1_title = Leader
| leader1_name = Anthony Albanese
| leader2_title = Deputy Leader
| leader2_name = Richard Marles
| leader3_title = Senate Leader
| leader3_name = Penny Wong
| leader4_title = National President
| leader4_name Wayne Swan
| leader5_title = National Secretary
| leader5_name = Paul Erickson
| foundation |Federal Caucus:<br />}}
| headquarters = 5/9 Sydney Avenue, Barton, Australian Capital Territory
| womens_wing = Labor Women's Network
| youth_wing = Australian Young Labor
| wing2_title = Indigenous wing
| wing2 Aboriginal Labor Network
| wing3_title = Overseas wing
| wing3 ALP Abroad
| blank1_title = Governing body
| blank1 = National Executive
| blank2_title = Parliamentary party
| blank2 = Caucus
| blank3_title = Party branches
| blank3 =
| affiliation1_title = Union affiliate
| affiliation1 = ACTU
| think_tank = Chifley Research Centre
| membership 60,085
| membership_year = 2020
| ideology <!-- It is important to seek and gain broad consensus on the article talk page before changing this --> Social democracy
| position = <!-- It is important to seek and gain broad consensus on the article talk page before changing this --> Centre-left
| national | international
| colours |borderdarkgray}} Red
| seats1_title = House of Representatives
| seats1 }}
| seats2_title = Senate
| seats2 }}
| seats3_title = State/territory governments
| seats3 }}
| seats4 }}
| seats4_title = State/territory lower houses
| seats5 }}
| seats5_title = State upper houses
| website =
| country = Australia
| wing1 Rainbow Labor
| wing1_title = LGBT wing
}}
The Australian Labor Party (ALP), also known simply as the Labor Party or Labor, is the major centre-left political party in Australia and one of two major parties in Australian politics, along with the centre-right Liberal Party of Australia. The party has been in government since the 2022 federal election, and with political branches active in all the Australian states and territories, they currently hold government in New South Wales, South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia, and the Australian Capital Territory. As of 2025, Queensland, Tasmania and Northern Territory are the only states or territories where Labor currently forms the opposition. It is the oldest continuously operating political party in Australian history, having been established on 8 May 1901 at Parliament House, Melbourne; the meeting place of the first Federal Parliament.
The ALP is descended from the labour parties founded in the various Australian colonies by the emerging labour movement. Colonial Labour parties contested seats from 1891, and began contesting federal seats following Federation at the 1901 federal election. In 1904, the ALP briefly formed what is considered the world's first labour party government and the world's first democratic socialist or social democratic government at a national level. At the 1910 federal election, Labor became the first party in Australia to win a majority in either house of the Australian parliament. In every election since 1910 Labor has either served as the governing party or the opposition. There have been 13 Labor prime ministers and 10 periods of federal Labor governments, including under Billy Hughes from 1915 to 1916, James Scullin from 1929 to 1932, John Curtin from 1941 to 1945, Ben Chifley from 1945 to 1949, Gough Whitlam from 1972 to 1975, Bob Hawke from 1983 to 1991, Paul Keating from 1991 to 1996, Kevin Rudd from 2007 to 2010 and 2013, and Julia Gillard from 2010 to 2013.
The Labor Party is often called the party of unions due to its close ties to the labour movement in Australia and historical founding by trade unions, with the majority of Australian trade unions being affiliated with the Labor Party. The party's structure allocates 50% of delegate representation at state and national conferences to affiliated unions, with the remaining 50% to rank-and-file party members. At the federal and state/colony level, the Australian Labor Party predates both the British Labour Party and the New Zealand Labour Party in party formation, government, and policy implementation. Internationally, the ALP is a member of the Progressive Alliance, a network of progressive, democratic socialist and social democratic parties, having previously been a member of the Socialist International.
Name and spelling
In standard Australian English, the word labour is spelt with a u. However, the political party uses the spelling Labor, without a u. There was originally no standardised spelling of the party's name, with Labor and Labour both in common usage. According to Ross McMullin, who wrote an official history of the Labor Party, the title page of the proceedings of the Federal Conference used the spelling "Labor in 1902, "Labour" in 1905 and 1908, and then "Labor" from 1912 onwards. In 1908, James Catts put forward a motion at the Federal Conference that "the name of the party be the Australian Labour Party", which was carried by 22 votes to 2. A separate motion recommending state branches adopt the name was defeated. There was no uniformity of party names until 1918 when the Federal party resolved that state branches should adopt the name "Australian Labor Party", now spelt without a u. Each state branch had previously used a different name, due to their different origins.
Although the ALP officially adopted the spelling without a u, it took decades for the official spelling to achieve widespread acceptance. According to McMullin, "the way the spelling of 'Labor Party' was consolidated had more to do with the chap who ended up being in charge of printing the federal conference report than any other reason". Some sources have attributed the official choice of Labor to influence from King O'Malley, who was born in the United States and was reputedly an advocate of English-language spelling reform; the spelling without a u is the standard form in American English.
Andrew Scott, who wrote "Running on Empty: 'Modernising' the British and Australian Labour Parties", suggests that the adoption of the spelling without a u "signified one of the ALP's earliest attempts at modernisation", and served the purpose of differentiating the party from the Australian labour movement as a whole and distinguishing it from other British Empire labour parties. The decision to include the word "Australian" in the party's name, rather than just "Labour Party" as in the United Kingdom, Scott attributes to "the greater importance of nationalism for the founders of the colonial parties". History
's ministry leaving Parliament House, Brisbane, after being sworn in on 1 December 1899. His was the first government formed by a Labour party in the world]]
The Australian Labor Party has its origins in the Labour parties founded in the 1890s in the Australian colonies prior to federation. Labor tradition ascribes the founding of Queensland Labour to a meeting of striking pastoral workers under a ghost gum tree (the Tree of Knowledge) in Barcaldine, Queensland in 1891. The 1891 shearers' strike is credited as being one of the factors for the formation of the Australian Labor Party. On 9 September 1892 the Manifesto of the Queensland Labour Party was read out under the well known Tree of Knowledge at Barcaldine following the Great Shearers' Strike. The State Library of Queensland now holds the manifesto; in 2008 the historic document was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Australian Register and, in 2009, the document was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World International Register. The Balmain, New South Wales branch of the party claims to be the oldest in Australia. However, the Scone Branch has a receipt for membership fees for the Labour Electoral League dated April 1891. This predates the Balmain claim. This can be attested in the Centenary of the ALP book. Labour as a parliamentary party dates from 1891 in New South Wales and South Australia, 1893 in Queensland, and later in the other colonies.
The first election contested by Labour candidates was the 1891 New South Wales election, when Labour candidates (then called the Labor Electoral League of New South Wales) won 35 of 141 seats. The major parties were the Protectionist and Free Trade parties and Labour held the balance of power. It offered parliamentary support in exchange for policy concessions. The United Labor Party (ULP) of South Australia was founded in 1891, and three candidates were that year elected to the South Australian Legislative Council. The first successful South Australian House of Assembly candidate was John McPherson at the 1892 East Adelaide by-election. Richard Hooper however was elected as an Independent Labor candidate at the 1891 Wallaroo by-election, while he was the first labor member of the House of Assembly he was not a member of the newly formed ULP.
At the 1893 South Australian elections, the ULP was immediately elevated to balance of power status with 10 of 54 lower house seats. The liberal government of Charles Kingston was formed with the support of the ULP, ousting the conservative government of John Downer. So successful, less than a decade later at the 1905 state election, Thomas Price formed the world's first stable Labor government. John Verran led Labor to form the state's first of many majority governments at the 1910 state election.
In 1899, Anderson Dawson formed a minority Labour<!-- do not change spelling, it is correct in historical context --> government in Queensland, the first in the world, which lasted one week while the conservatives regrouped after a split.
The colonial Labour<!-- Do not change spelling, it is correct in historical context. --> parties and the trade unions were mixed in their support for the Federation of Australia. Some Labour representatives argued against the proposed constitution, claiming that the Senate as proposed was too powerful, similar to the anti-reformist colonial upper houses and the British House of Lords. They feared that federation would further entrench the power of the conservative forces. However, the first Labour<!-- Do not change spelling, it is correct in historical context. --> leader and Prime Minister Chris Watson was a supporter of federation.
Historian Celia Hamilton, examining New South Wales, argues for the central role of Irish Catholics. Before 1890, they opposed Henry Parkes, the main Liberal leader, and of free trade, seeing them both as the ideals of Protestant Englishmen who represented landholding and large business interests. In the strike of 1890 the leading Catholic, Sydney's Archbishop Patrick Francis Moran was sympathetic toward unions, but Catholic newspapers were negative. After 1900, says Hamilton, Irish Catholics were drawn to the Labour Party because its stress on equality and social welfare fitted with their status as manual labourers and small farmers. In the 1910 elections Labour gained in the more Catholic areas and the representation of Catholics increased in Labour's parliamentary ranks.
Early decades at the federal level
The federal parliament in 1901 was contested by each state Labour Party. In total, they won 15 of the 75 seats in the House of Representatives, collectively holding the balance of power, and the Labour members now met as the Federal Parliamentary Labour<!-- do not change spelling, it is correct in historical context --> Party (informally known as the caucus) on 8 May 1901 at Parliament House, Melbourne, the meeting place of the first federal Parliament. The caucus decided to support the incumbent Protectionist Party in minority government, while the Free Trade Party formed the opposition. It was some years before there was any significant structure or organisation at a national level. Labour <!-- Do not change spelling, is correct in historical context. -->under Chris Watson doubled its vote at the 1903 federal election and continued to hold the balance of power. In April 1904, however, Watson and Alfred Deakin fell out over the issue of extending the scope of industrial relations laws concerning the Conciliation and Arbitration bill to cover state public servants, the fallout causing Deakin to resign. Free Trade leader George Reid declined to take office, which saw Watson become the first Labour<!-- Do not change spelling, is correct in historical context. --> Prime Minister of Australia, and the world's first Labour head of government at a national level (Anderson Dawson had led a short-lived Labour government in Queensland in December 1899), though his was a minority government that lasted only four months. He was aged only 37, and is still the youngest prime minister in Australia's history.
George Reid of the Free Trade Party adopted a strategy of trying to reorient the party system along Labour vs. non-Labour lines prior to the 1906 federal election and renamed his Free Trade Party to the Anti-Socialist Party. Reid envisaged a spectrum running from socialist to anti-socialist, with the Protectionist Party in the middle. This attempt struck a chord with politicians who were steeped in the Westminster tradition and regarded a two-party system as very much the norm.
Although Watson led the party to a plurality victory (though not government, thanks to the union of Free Traders and Protectionists) in 1906, he stepped down from the leadership the following year, to be succeeded by Andrew Fisher's minority government for seven months until it fell in June 1909. At the 1910 federal election, Fisher led Labor to victory, forming Australia's first elected federal majority government, Australia's first elected Senate majority, the world's first Labour Party majority government at a national level, and after the 1904 Chris Watson minority government the world's second Labour Party government at a national level. It was the first time a Labour Party had controlled any house of a legislature, and the first time the party controlled both houses of a bicameral legislature. The state branches were also successful, except in Victoria, where the strength of Deakinite liberalism inhibited the party's growth. The state branches formed their first majority governments in New South Wales and South Australia in 1910, Western Australia in 1911, Queensland in 1915 and Tasmania in 1925. Such success eluded the other Commonwealth Labour parties for another decade; the Labour Party in Great Britain would not form even a minority government until 1929, and would have to wait another sixteen years to win a majority in its own right. Even in neighboring New Zealand, Labour would not take power until 1935. In Canada, a national labour party was not even formed until 1932 and never formed government.
Analysis of the early NSW Labor caucus reveals "a band of unhappy amateurs", made up of blue collar workers, a squatter, a doctor, and even a mine owner, indicating that the idea that only the socialist working class formed Labor is untrue. In addition, many members from the working class supported the liberal notion of free trade between the colonies; in the first grouping of state MPs, 17 of the 35 were free-traders.
In the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917, support for socialism grew in trade union ranks, and at the 1921 All-Australian Trades Union Congress a resolution was passed calling for "the socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange". The 1922 Labor Party National Conference adopted a similarly worded socialist objective which remained official policy for many years. The resolution was immediately qualified, however, by the Blackburn amendment, which said that "socialisation" was desirable only when was necessary to "eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features". Only once has a federal Labor government attempted to nationalise any industry (Ben Chifley's bank nationalisation of 1947), and that was held by the High Court to be unconstitutional. The commitment to nationalisation was dropped by Gough Whitlam, and Bob Hawke's government carried out the floating of the dollar. privatisation of state enterprises such as Qantas airways and the Commonwealth Bank was carried out by the Paul Keating government.
The Labor Party is commonly described as a social democratic party, and its constitution stipulates that it is a democratic socialist party. The party was created by, and has always been influenced by, the trade unions, and in practice its policy at any given time has usually been the policy of the broader labour movement. Thus at the first federal election 1901 Labor's platform called for a White Australia policy, a citizen army and compulsory arbitration of industrial disputes. Labor has at various times supported high tariffs and low tariffs, conscription and pacifism, White Australia and multiculturalism, nationalisation and privatisation, isolationism and internationalism.
From 1900 to 1940, Labor and its affiliated unions were strong defenders of the White Australia policy, which banned all non-European migration to Australia. This policy was motivated by fears of economic competition from low-wage overseas workers which was shared by the vast majority of Australians and all major political parties. In practice the Labor party opposed all migration, on the grounds that immigrants competed with Australian workers and drove down wages, until after World War II, when the Chifley government launched a major immigration program. The party's opposition to non-European immigration did not change until after the retirement of Arthur Calwell as leader in 1967. Subsequently, Labor has become an advocate of multiculturalism. World War II and beyond The Curtin and Chifley governments governed Australia through the latter half of the Second World War and initial stages of transition to peace. Labor leader John Curtin became prime minister in October 1941 when two independents crossed the floor of Parliament. Labor, led by Curtin, then led Australia through the years of the Pacific War. In December 1941, Curtin announced that "Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom", thus helping to establish the Australian-American alliance (later formalised as ANZUS by the Menzies Government). Remembered as a strong war time leader and for a landslide win at the 1943 federal election, Curtin died in office just prior to the end of the war and was succeeded by Ben Chifley. Chifley Labor won the 1946 federal election and oversaw Australia's initial transition to a peacetime economy.
Labor was defeated at the 1949 federal election. At the conference of the New South Wales Labor Party in June 1949, Chifley sought to define the labour movement as follows: "We have a great objective – the light on the hill – which we aim to reach by working for the betterment of mankind.... [Labor would] bring something better to the people, better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people."
To a large extent, Chifley saw centralisation of the economy as the means to achieve such ambitions. With an increasingly uncertain economic outlook, after his attempt to nationalise the banks and a strike by the Communist-dominated Miners' Federation, Chifley lost office in 1949 to Robert Menzies' Liberal-National Coalition. Labor commenced a 23-year period in opposition. The party was primarily led during this time by H. V. Evatt and Arthur Calwell.
on 24 November 1975.]]
Various ideological beliefs were factionalised under reforms to the ALP under Gough Whitlam, resulting in what is now known as the Socialist Left who tend to favour a more interventionist economic policy and more socially progressive ideals, and Labor Right, the now dominant faction that tends to be more economically liberal and focus to a lesser extent on social issues. The Whitlam Labor government, marking a break with Labor's socialist tradition, pursued social democratic policies rather than democratic socialist policies. In contrast to earlier Labor leaders, Whitlam also cut tariffs by 25 percent. Whitlam led the Federal Labor Party back to office at the 1972 and 1974 federal elections, and passed a large amount of legislation. The Whitlam government lost office following the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis and dismissal by Governor-General John Kerr after the Coalition blocked supply in the Senate after a series of political scandals, and was defeated at the 1975 federal election in the largest landslide of Australian federal history. Whitlam remains the only Prime Minister to have his commission terminated in that manner. Whitlam also lost the 1977 federal election and subsequently resigned as leader.
Bill Hayden succeeded Whitlam as leader. At the 1980 federal election, the party achieved a big swing, though the unevenness of the swing around the nation prevented an ALP victory. In 1983, Bob Hawke became leader of the party after Hayden resigned to avoid a leadership spill.
Bob Hawke led Labor back to office at the 1983 federal election and the party won four consecutive elections under Hawke. In December 1991 Paul Keating defeated Bob Hawke in a leadership spill. The ALP then won the 1993 federal election. It was in power for five terms over 13 years, until severely defeated by John Howard at the 1996 federal election. This was the longest period the party has ever been in government at the national level.
Kim Beazley led the party to the 1998 federal election, winning 51 percent of the two-party-preferred vote but falling short on seats, and the ALP lost ground at the 2001 federal election. After a brief period when Simon Crean served as ALP leader, Mark Latham led Labor to the 2004 federal election but lost further ground. Beazley replaced Latham in 2005; not long afterwards he in turn was forced out of the leadership by Kevin Rudd.
Rudd went on to defeat John Howard at the 2007 federal election with 52.7 percent of the two-party vote (Howard became the first prime minister since Stanley Melbourne Bruce to lose not just the election but his own parliamentary seat). The Rudd government ended prior to the 2010 federal election with the overthrow of Rudd as leader of the party by deputy leader Julia Gillard. Gillard, who was also the first woman to serve as prime minister of Australia, remained prime minister in a hung parliament following the election. Her government lasted until 2013, when Gillard lost a leadership spill, with Rudd becoming leader once again. Later that year the ALP lost the 2013 election.
After this defeat, Bill Shorten became leader of the party. The party narrowly lost the 2016 election, yet gained 14 seats. It remained in opposition after the 2019 election, despite having been ahead in opinion polls for the preceding two years. The party lost in 2019 some of the seats which it had won back in 2016. After the 2019 defeat, Shorten resigned from the leadership, though he remained in parliament. Anthony Albanese was elected as leader unopposed and led the party to victory in the 2022 election, and became the new prime minister.
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Between the 2007 federal election and the 2008 Western Australian state election, Labor was in government nationally and in all eight state and territory parliaments. This was the first time any single party or any coalition had achieved this since the ACT and the NT gained self-government. Labor narrowly lost government in Western Australia at the 2008 state election and Victoria at the 2010 state election. These losses were further compounded by landslide defeats in New South Wales in 2011, Queensland in 2012, the Northern Territory in 2012, Federally in 2013 and Tasmania in 2014. Labor secured a good result in the Australian Capital Territory in 2012 and, despite losing its majority, the party retained government in South Australia in 2014.
However, most of these reversals proved only temporary with Labor returning to government in Victoria in 2014 and in Queensland in 2015 after spending only one term in opposition in both states. Furthermore, after winning the 2014 Fisher by-election by nine votes from a 7.3 percent swing, the Labor government in South Australia went from minority to majority government. Labor won landslide victories in the 2016 Northern Territory election, the 2017 Western Australian election and the 2018 Victorian state election. However, Labor lost the 2018 South Australian state election after 16 years in government.
In 2022, Labor returned to government after defeating the Liberal Party in the 2022 South Australian state election. Despite favourable polling, the party also did not return to government in the 2019 New South Wales state election or the 2019 federal election. The latter has been considered a historic upset due to Labor's consistent and significant polling lead; the result has been likened to the Coalition's loss in the 1993 federal election, with 2019 retrospectively referred to in the media as the "unloseable election".
Anthony Albanese later led the party into the 2022 Australian federal election, in which the party once again won a majority government. Despite Labor's win, Labor nevertheless recorded its lowest primary vote since either 1903 or 1934, depending on whether the Lang Labor vote is included.
In 2023, Labor won the march 2023 New South Wales state election returning to government for the first time since 2011. This victory marked the first time in 15 years that Labor were in government in all mainland states.
In 2024, Labor lost in a landslide in the 2024 Northern Territory election. losing its first mainland state or territory since the 2018 South Australian election. Labor would also lose in the 2024 Queensland state election.
National platform
The policy of the Australian Labor Party is contained in its National Platform, which is approved by delegates to Labor's National Conference, held every three years. According to the Labor Party's website, "The Platform is the result of a rigorous and constructive process of consultation, spanning the nation and including the cooperation and input of state and territory policy committees, local branches, unions, state and territory governments, and individual Party members. The Platform provides the policy foundation from which we can continue to work towards the election of a federal Labor government."
The platform gives a general indication of the policy direction which a future Labor government would follow, but does not commit the party to specific policies. It maintains that "Labor's traditional values will remain a constant on which all Australians can rely." While making it clear that Labor is fully committed to a market economy, it says that: "Labor believes in a strong role for national government – the one institution all Australians truly own and control through our right to vote." Labor "will not allow the benefits of change to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, or located only in privileged communities. The benefits must be shared by all Australians and all our regions." The platform and Labor "believe that all people are created equal in their entitlement to dignity and respect, and should have an equal chance to achieve their potential." For Labor, "government has a critical role in ensuring fairness by: ensuring equal opportunity; removing unjustifiable discrimination; and achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth, income and status." Further sections of the platform stress Labor's support for equality and human rights, labour rights and democracy.
In practice, the platform provides only general policy guidelines to Labor's federal, state and territory parliamentary leaderships. The policy Labor takes into an election campaign is determined by the Cabinet (if the party is in office) or the Shadow Cabinet (if it is in opposition), in consultation with key interest groups within the party, and is contained in the parliamentary Leader's policy speech delivered during the election campaign. When Labor is in office, the policies it implements are determined by the Cabinet, subject to the platform. Generally, it is accepted that while the platform binds Labor governments, how and when it is implemented remains the prerogative of the parliamentary caucus. It is now rare for the platform to conflict with government policy, as the content of the platform is usually developed in close collaboration with the party's parliamentary leadership as well as the factions. However, where there is a direct contradiction with the platform, Labor governments have sought to change the platform as a prerequisite for a change in policy. For example, privatisation legislation under the Hawke government occurred only after holding a special national conference to debate changing the platform.
Party structure
National executive and secretariat
The Australian Labor Party National Executive is the party's chief administrative authority, subject only to Labor's national conference. The executive is responsible for organising the triennial national conference; carrying out the decisions of the conference; interpreting the national constitution, the national platform and decisions of the national conference; and directing federal members.
The party holds a national conference every three years, which consists of delegates representing the state and territory branches (many coming from affiliated trade unions, although there is no formal requirement for unions to be represented at the national conference). The national conference decides the party's platform, elects the national executive and appoints office-bearers such as the national secretary, who also serves as national campaign director during elections. The current national secretary is Paul Erickson. The most recent national conference was the 48th conference held in December 2018.
The head office of the ALP, the national secretariat, is managed by the national secretary. It plays a dual role of administration and a national campaign strategy. It acts as a permanent secretariat to the national executive by managing and assisting in all administrative affairs of the party. As the national secretary also serves as national campaign director during elections, it is also responsible for the national campaign strategy and organisation.
Federal Parliamentary Labor Party
The elected members of the Labor party in both houses of the national Parliament meet as the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, also known as the Caucus (see also caucus). Besides discussing parliamentary business and tactics, the Caucus also is involved in the election of the federal parliamentary leaders.
Federal parliamentary leaders
Until 2013, the parliamentary leaders were elected by the Caucus from among its members. The leader has historically been a member of the House of Representatives. Since October 2013, a ballot of both the Caucus and by the Labor Party's rank-and-file members determined the party leader and the deputy leader. When the Labor Party is in government, the party leader is the prime minister and the deputy leader is the deputy prime minister. If a Labor prime minister resigns or dies in office, the deputy leader acts as prime minister and party leader until a successor is elected. The deputy prime minister also acts as prime minister when the prime minister is on leave or out of the country. Members of the Ministry are also chosen by Caucus, though the leader may allocate portfolios to the ministers.
Anthony Albanese is the leader of the federal Labor party, serving since 30 May 2019. The deputy leader is Richard Marles, also serving since 30 May 2019.
State and territory branches
The Australian Labor Party is a federal party, consisting of eight branches from each state and territory. While the National Executive is responsible for national campaign strategy, each state and territory are an autonomous branch and are responsible for campaigning in their own jurisdictions for federal, state and local elections. State and territory branches consist of both individual members and affiliated trade unions, who between them decide the party's policies, elect its governing bodies and choose its candidates for public office.
Members join a state branch and pay a membership fee, which is graduated according to income. The majority of trade unions in Australia are affiliated to the party at a state level. Union affiliation is direct and not through the Australian Council of Trade Unions. Affiliated unions pay an affiliation fee based on the size of their membership. Union affiliation fees make up a large part of the party's income. Other sources of funds for the party include political donations and public funding.
Members are generally expected to attend at least one meeting of their local branch each year, although there are differences in the rules from state to state. In practice, only a dedicated minority regularly attend meetings. Many members are only active during election campaigns.
The members and unions elect delegates to state and territory conferences (usually held annually, although more frequent conferences are often held). These conferences decide policy, and elect state or territory executives, a state or territory president (an honorary position usually held for a one-year term), and a state or territory secretary (a full-time professional position). However, ACT Labor directly elects its president. The larger branches also have full-time assistant secretaries and organisers. In the past the ratio of conference delegates coming from the branches and affiliated unions has varied from state to state, however under recent national reforms at least 50% of delegates at all state and territory conferences must be elected by branches.
In some states, the party also contests local government elections or endorses local candidates. In others it does not, preferring to allow its members to run as non-endorsed candidates. The process of choosing candidates is called preselection. Candidates are preselected by different methods in the various states and territories. In some they are chosen by ballots of all party members, in others by panels or committees elected by the state conference, in still others by a combination of these two.
The state and territory Labor branches are the following:
{|class"wikitable" style"font-size:95%; text-align: center;"
!colspan2 rowspan3 |Branch
!rowspan=3 |Leader
!colspan=6| Last state/territory election
!rowspan=3| Status
! colspan="2" | Federal representatives
|-
!colspan=4| Lower house
!colspan=2| Upper house
! rowspan="2" |MPs
! rowspan="2" |Senators
|-
!Year
!Votes (%)
!Seats
!TPP (%)
!Votes (%)
!Seats
|-
|style="width:2px;background:;"|
|New South Wales Labor
|Chris Minns
|2023
|37.1
|}}
|54.3
|37.1
|}}
|
|}}
|}}
|-
|style="width:2px;background:;"|
|Victorian Labor
|Jacinta Allan
|2022
|36.7
|}}
|55.0
|33.0
|}}
|
|}}
|}}
|-
|style="width:2px;background:;"|
|Queensland Labor
|Steven Miles
|2024
|32.6
|}}
|46.2
|aligncenter colspan2
|
|}}
|}}
|-
|style="width:2px;background:;"|
|Western Australian Labor
|Roger Cook
|2021
|59.1
|}}
|69.2
|60.3
|}}
|
|}}
|}}
|-
|style="width:2px;background:;"|
|South Australian Labor
|Peter Malinauskas
|2022
|40.0
|}}
|54.6
|37.0
|}}
|
|}}
|}}
|-
|style="width:2px;background:;"|
|Tasmanian Labor
|Dean Winter
|2024
|29.0
|}}
|align=right
|align=right
|}}
|
|}}
|}}
|-
|style="width:2px;background:;"|
|ACT Labor
|Andrew Barr
|2024
|34.5
|}}
|align=right
|aligncenter colspan2
|
|}}
|}}
|-
|style="width:2px;background:;"|
|Territory Labor
|Selena Uibo
|2024
|28.7
|}}
|42.0
|aligncenter colspan2
|
|}}
|}}
|}
Country Labor
The Country Labor Party, commonly known as Country Labor, was an affiliated organisation of the Labor Party. Although not expressly defined, Country Labor operated mainly within rural New South Wales, and was mainly seen as an extension of the New South Wales branch that operates in rural electorates.
Country Labor was used as a designation by candidates contesting elections in rural areas. The Country Labor Party was registered as a separate party in New South Wales, and was also registered with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) for federal elections. It did not have the same status in other states and, consequently, that designation could not be used on the ballot paper.
The creation of a separation designation for rural candidates was first suggested at the June 1999 ALP state conference in New South Wales. In May 2000, following Labor's success at the 2000 Benalla by-election in Victoria, Kim Beazley announced that the ALP intended to register a separate "Country Labor Party" with the AEC; this occurred in October 2000.
The Country Labor Party was de-registered by the New South Wales Electoral Commission in 2021.
Australian Young Labor
Australian Young Labor is the youth wing of the Australian Labor Party, where all members under age 26 are automatically members. It is the peak youth body within the ALP. Former presidents of AYL have included former NSW Premier Bob Carr, Federal Leader of the House Tony Burke, former Special Minister of State Senator John Faulkner, former Australian Workers Union National Secretary, current Member for Maribyrnong and former Federal Labor Leader Bill Shorten as well as dozens of State Ministers and MPs. The current National President is Manu Risoldi.
Networks
The Australian Labor Party (ALP) includes a variety of networks and associations that connect members, advocate for issues, and contribute to the party’s policy development. The national platform currently mandates or encourages state branches to formally establish these groups along with calling for generalised interest groups known as policy action caucuses. Examples of such groups include the Labor Environment Action Network, the LGBTQ wing Rainbow Labor, Labor For Choice, the women's wing Labor Women's Network, Labor for Drug Law Reform Labor for Refugees, Labor for Housing, Labor Teachers Network, Aboriginal Labor Network, and recently, Labor Enabled – the action group for Disability Advocacy
These groups operate under different names across states and territories and are categorized into equity groups, which focus on representation based on identity or shared characteristics, and policy-focused groups, which emphasize thematic advocacy. In Queensland, these networks are formally referred to as Equity Groups and Associations, which are distinct entities. Other states use terms such as forums, caucuses, or committees.
{| class=wikitable
|+ Equity Groups
|-
!colspan1 rowspan2 |Organisation
!colspan=9| Branches Organisation is Present in
|-
!colspan=1| Federal
!colspan=1| NSW
!colspan=1| QLD
!colspan=1| Vic
!colspan=1| WA
!colspan=1| SA
!colspan=1| Tas
!colspan=1| ACT
!colspan=1| NT
|-
|National Labor Women’s Network
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|Rainbow Labor
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|Aboriginal Labor Network
|
|
|
Factions
| native_name | logo File:Australian Labor Party Federal Caucus.svg
| colorcode =
| seats1_title = Labor Right
| seats1
| seats2_title = Labor Left
| seats2
}}
The Labor Party has always had a left wing and a right wing; however, since 1989, it has been organised into formal factions.
The two largest factional groupings are the Labor Left, who are supportive of democratic socialist ideals, and the Labor Right who generally support social democratic traditions. The national factional groupings are themselves divided into formal factions, primarily state-based such as Centre Unity in New South Wales and Labor Forum in Queensland. Important unions supporting the left include the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU), United Workers Union, the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) and the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU). all significantly lower than the 2014 donations by a Chinese donor Zi Chun Wang, which at $850,000 was the largest donation to any political party in the 2013–2014 financial year. At least one newspaper report queried the identity of this donor stating "news archive searches do not produce results for this name, suggesting Wang operates under another name". Another report mentions that in addition to a hotel and a travel agency, the donor's listed address at the Old Communist Cadres Activity Centre in Shijiazhuang houses several Chinese government entities, stating also that another publisher "tried many times without success" to contact the donor on the phone number listed in the donation return form.
The Labor Party also receives undisclosed funding through several methods, such as "associated entities". John Curtin House, Industry 2020, IR21 and the Happy Wanderers Club are entities which have been used to funnel donations to the Labor Party without disclosing the source.
A 2019 report found that the Labor Party received $33,000 from pro-gun groups during the 2011–2018 periods compared to $82,000 received by the Coalition.See also
* Australian labour movement
* Labor Against War
* Socialism in Australia
* Third Way
* Tasmanian Labor–Green Accord (1989-1990)
* Australian Capital Territory Labor–Greens coalition (2012–2024)
Further reading
* Ormonde, Paul (1982). A Foolish Passionate Man: a biography of Jim Cairns. Ringwood, Vic, Australia: Penguin Books. .
* Ormonde, Paul (1972). The Movement. Sydney: Thomas Nelson.
* Charlesworth, M. J. (2000) Ormonde, Paul (Ed). Santamaria : the politics of fear : critical reflections. Richmond, Vic.: Spectrum Publications.
Notes
References
Bibliography
* Bramble, Tom, and Rick Kuhn. ''Labor's Conflict: Big Business, Workers, and the Politics of Class (Cambridge University Press; 2011) 240 pages.
* Calwell, A. A. (1963). Labor's Role in Modern Society''. Melbourne, Lansdowne Press.
*
*
*
External links
* [https://www.viclabor.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Final-Rules-April-2013.pdf Australian Labor Party Victorian Branch Rules, April 2013]
* [https://www.amw.org.au/register/listings/manifesto-queensland-labour-party-1892 Manifesto of the Queensland Labour Party, 1892] – UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register
* [https://www.slq.qld.gov.au/blog/125th-anniversary-manifesto-queensland-labour-party 125th anniversary of the Manifesto of the Queensland Labour Party] – John Oxley Library Blog, State Library of Queensland.
* [http://onesearch.slq.qld.gov.au/permalink/f/1upgmng/slq_alma21148463600002061 OM69-18 Charles Seymour Papers 1880–1924] – Collection record, State Library of Queensland
* [https://www.slq.qld.gov.au/blog/charles-seymour-papers-1880-1924-treasure-collection-john-oxley-library Charles Seymour Papers 1880–1924: Treasure collection of the John Oxley Library] – John Oxley Library Blog, State Library of Queensland.
}}
Category:1891 establishments in Australia
Category:Democratic socialist parties in Oceania
Category:Former member parties of the Socialist International
Category:Centre-left parties
Category:Labour parties
Category:Political parties established in 1891
Category:Progressive Alliance
Category:Republican parties in Australia
Category:Social democratic parties in Oceania | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Labor_Party | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.955362 |
1496 | August 18 | Events
Pre-1600
* 684 – Battle of Marj Rahit: Umayyad partisans defeat the supporters of Ibn al-Zubayr and cement Umayyad control of Syria.
*707 – Princess Abe accedes to the imperial Japanese throne as Empress Genmei.
*1304 – The Battle of Mons-en-Pévèle is fought to a draw between the French army and the Flemish militias.
*1487 – The Siege of Málaga ends with the taking of the city by Castilian and Aragonese forces.
*1492 – The first grammar of the Spanish language (Gramática de la lengua castellana) is presented to Queen Isabella I.
*1572 – The Huguenot King Henry III of Navarre marries the Catholic Margaret of Valois, ostensibly to reconcile the feuding Protestants and Catholics of France.
*1590 – John White, the governor of the Roanoke Colony, returns from a supply trip to England and finds his settlement deserted.1601–1900
*1612 – The trial of the Pendle witches, one of England's most famous witch trials, begins at Lancaster Assizes.
*1634 – Urbain Grandier, accused and convicted of sorcery, is burned alive in Loudun, France.
*1721 – The city of Shamakhi in Safavid Shirvan is sacked.
*1783 – A huge fireball meteor is seen across Great Britain as it passes over the east coast.
*1809 – The Senate of Finland is established in the Grand Duchy of Finland after the official adoption of the Statute of the Government Council by Tsar Alexander I of Russia.
*1826 – Major Gordon Laing becomes the first European to enter Timbuktu.
*1838 – The Wilkes Expedition, which would explore the Puget Sound and Antarctica, weighs anchor at Hampton Roads.
*1848 – Camila O'Gorman and Ladislao Gutierrez are executed on the orders of Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas.
*1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Globe Tavern: Union forces try to cut a vital Confederate supply-line into Petersburg, Virginia, by attacking the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad.
*1868 – French astronomer Pierre Janssen discovers helium.
*1870 – Franco-Prussian War: Battle of Gravelotte is fought.
*1877 – American astronomer Asaph Hall discovers Phobos, one of Mars’s moons.
*1891 – A major hurricane strikes Martinique, leaving 700 dead.
1901–present
*1903 – German engineer Karl Jatho allegedly flies his self-made, motored gliding airplane four months before the first flight of the Wright brothers.
*1917 – A Great Fire in Thessaloniki, Greece, destroys 32% of the city leaving 70,000 individuals homeless.
*1920 – The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing women's suffrage.
*1923 – The first British Track and Field championships for women are held in London, Great Britain.
*1933 – The Volksempfänger is first presented to the German public at a radio exhibition; the presiding Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, delivers an accompanying speech heralding the radio as the ‘eighth great power’.
*1937 – A lightning strike starts the Blackwater Fire of 1937 in Shoshone National Forest, killing 15 firefighters within three days and prompting the United States Forest Service to develop their smokejumper program.
*1938 – The Thousand Islands Bridge, connecting New York, United States, with Ontario, Canada, over the Saint Lawrence River, is dedicated by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
*1940 – World War II: The Hardest Day air battle, part of the Battle of Britain, takes place. At that point, it is the largest aerial engagement in history with heavy losses sustained on both sides.
*1945 – Sukarno takes office as the first president of Indonesia, following the country's declaration of independence the previous day.
* 1945 – Soviet-Japanese War: Battle of Shumshu: Soviet forces land at Takeda Beach on Shumshu Island and launch the Battle of Shumshu; the Soviet Union’s Invasion of the Kuril Islands commences.
*1949 – 1949 Kemi strike: Two protesters die in the scuffle between the police and the strikers' protest procession in Kemi, Finland.
*1950 – Julien Lahaut, the chairman of the Communist Party of Belgium, is assassinated. The Party newspaper blames royalists and Rexists.
*1958 – Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita is published in the United States.
* 1958 – Brojen Das from Bangladesh swims across the English Channel in a competition as the first Bengali and the first Asian to do so, placing first among the 39 competitors.
*1963 – Civil rights movement: James Meredith becomes the first African American to graduate from the University of Mississippi.
*1965 – Vietnam War: Operation Starlite begins: United States Marines destroy a Viet Cong stronghold on the Van Tuong peninsula in the first major American ground battle of the war.
*1966 – Vietnam War: The Battle of Long Tan ensues after a patrol from the 6th Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment clashes with a Viet Cong force in Phước Tuy Province.
*1971 – Vietnam War: Australia and New Zealand decide to withdraw their troops from Vietnam.
*1973 – Aeroflot Flight A-13 crashes after takeoff from Baku-Bina International Airport in Azerbaijan, killing 56 people and injuring eight.
*1976 – The Korean axe murder incident in Panmunjom results in the deaths of two US Army officers.
* 1976 – The Soviet Union’s robotic probe Luna 24 successfully lands on the Moon.
*1977 – Steve Biko is arrested at a police roadblock under Terrorism Act No. 83 of 1967 in King William's Town, South Africa. He later dies from injuries sustained during this arrest, bringing attention to South Africa's apartheid policies.
*1983 – Hurricane Alicia hits the Texas coast, killing 21 people and causing over US$1 billion in damage (1983 dollars).
*1989 – Leading presidential hopeful Luis Carlos Galán is assassinated near Bogotá in Colombia.
*1993 – American International Airways Flight 808 crashes at Leeward Point Field at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, injuring the three crew members.
*2003 – One-year-old Zachary Turner is murdered in Newfoundland by his mother, who was awarded custody despite facing trial for the murder of Zachary's father. The case was documented in the film Dear Zachary and led to reform of Canada's bail laws.
*2005 – A massive power blackout hits the Indonesian island of Java; affecting almost 100 million people, it is one of the largest and most widespread power outages in history.
*2008 – The President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, resigns under threat of impeachment.
* 2008 – War of Afghanistan: The Uzbin Valley ambush occurs.
*2011 – A terrorist attack on Israel's Highway 12 near the Egyptian border kills 16 and injures 40.
*2017 – The first terrorist attack ever sentenced as a crime in Finland kills two and injures eight.
*2019 – One hundred activists, officials, and other concerned citizens in Iceland hold a funeral for Okjökull glacier, which has completely melted after having once covered six square miles (15.5 km<sup>2</sup>).
Births
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Pre-1600
*1305 – Ashikaga Takauji, Japanese Shōgun (d. 1358)
*1450 – Marko Marulić, Croatian poet and author (d. 1524)
*1458 – Lorenzo Pucci, Catholic cardinal (d. 1531)
*1497 – Francesco Canova da Milano, Italian composer (d. 1543)
*1542 – Charles Neville, 6th Earl of Westmorland (d. 1601)
*1579 – Countess Charlotte Flandrina of Nassau (d. 1640)
*1587 – Virginia Dare, granddaughter of Governor John White of the Colony of Roanoke, first child born to English parents in the Americas (date of death unknown)
*1596 – Jean Bolland, Flemish priest and hagiographer (d. 1665)
1601–1900
*1605 – Henry Hammond, English churchman and theologian (d. 1660)
*1606 – Maria Anna of Spain (d. 1646)
*1629 – Agneta Horn, Swedish writer (d. 1672)
*1657 – Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena, Italian architect and painter (d. 1743)
*1685 – Brook Taylor, English mathematician and theorist (d. 1731)
*1692 – Louis Henri, Duke of Bourbon (d. 1740)
*1700 – Baji Rao I, first Peshwa of Maratha Empire (d. 1740)
*1720 – Laurence Shirley, 4th Earl Ferrers, English politician (d. 1760)
*1750 – Antonio Salieri, Italian composer and conductor (d. 1825)
*1754 – François, marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat, French general and engineer (d. 1833)
*1774 – Meriwether Lewis, American soldier, explorer, and politician (d. 1809)
*1792 – John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, English politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1878)
*1803 – Nathan Clifford, American lawyer, jurist, and politician, 19th United States Attorney General (d. 1881)
*1807 – B. T. Finniss, Australian politician, 1st Premier of South Australia (d. 1893)
*1819 – Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia (d. 1876)
*1822 – Isaac P. Rodman, American general and politician (d. 1862)
*1830 – Franz Joseph I of Austria (d. 1916)
*1831 – Ernest Noel, Scottish businessman and politician (d. 1931)
*1834 – Marshall Field, American businessman, founded Marshall Field's (d. 1906)
*1841 – William Halford, English-American lieutenant, Medal of Honor recipient (d. 1919)
*1855 – Alfred Wallis, English painter and illustrator (d. 1942)
*1857 – Libert H. Boeynaems, Belgian-American bishop and missionary (d. 1926)
*1866 – Mahboob Ali Khan, 6th Nizam of Hyderabad (d. 1911)
*1869 – Carl Rungius, German-American painter and educator (d. 1959)
*1870 – Lavr Kornilov, Russian general and explorer (d. 1918)
*1879 – Alexander Rodzyanko, Russian general (d. 1970)
*1885 – Nettie Palmer, Australian poet and critic (d. 1964)
*1887 – John Anthony Sydney Ritson, English rugby player, mines inspector, engineer and professor of mining (d. 1957)
*1890 – Walther Funk, German economist and politician, Reich Minister of Economics (d. 1960)
*1893 – Burleigh Grimes, American baseball player and manager (d. 1985)
* 1893 – Ernest MacMillan, Canadian conductor and composer (d. 1973)
*1896 – Jack Pickford, Canadian-American actor and director (d. 1933)
*1898 – Clemente Biondetti, Italian race car driver (d. 1955)
*1900 – Ruth Bonner, Soviet Communist activist, sentenced to a labor camp during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge (d. 1987)
* 1900 – Ruth Norman, American religious leader (d. 1993)
1901–present
*1902 – Adamson-Eric, Estonian painter (d. 1968)
* 1902 – Margaret Murie, American environmentalist and author (d. 2003)
*1903 – Lucienne Boyer, French singer (d. 1983)
*1904 – Max Factor, Jr., American businessman (d. 1996)
*1905 – Enoch Light, American bandleader, violinist, and recording engineer (d. 1978)
*1906 – Marcel Carné, French director and screenwriter (d. 1996)
* 1906 – Curtis Jones, American blues pianist and singer (d. 1971)
*1908 – Edgar Faure, French historian and politician, 139th Prime Minister of France (d. 1988)
* 1908 – Olav H. Hauge, Norwegian poet and gardener (d. 1994)
* 1908 – Bill Merritt, New Zealand cricketer and sportscaster (d. 1977)
*1909 – Gérard Filion, Canadian businessman and journalist (d. 2005)
*1910 – Herman Berlinski, Polish-American pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 2001)
* 1910 – Robert Winters, Canadian colonel, engineer, and politician, 26th Canadian Minister of Public Works (d. 1969)
*1911 – Amelia Boynton Robinson, American activist (d. 2015)
* 1911 – Klara Dan von Neumann, Hungarian computer scientist and programmer (d. 1963)
* 1911 – Maria Ulfah Santoso, Indonesian politician and women's rights activist (d. 1988)
*1912 – Otto Ernst Remer, German general (d. 1997)
*1913 – Romain Maes, Belgian cyclist (d. 1983)
*1914 – Lucy Ozarin, United States Navy lieutenant commander and psychiatrist (d. 2017)
*1915 – Max Lanier, American baseball player and manager (d. 2007)
*1916 – Neagu Djuvara, Romanian historian, journalist, and diplomat (d. 2018)
* 1916 – Moura Lympany, English pianist (d. 2005)
*1917 – Caspar Weinberger, American captain, lawyer, and politician, 15th United States Secretary of Defense (d. 2006)
*1918 – Cisco Houston, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1961)
*1919 – Wally Hickel, American businessman and politician, 2nd Governor of Alaska (d. 2010)
*1920 – Godfrey Evans, English cricketer (d. 1999)
* 1920 – Bob Kennedy, American baseball player and manager (d. 2005)
* 1920 – Shelley Winters, American actress (d. 2006)
*1921 – Lydia Litvyak, Russian lieutenant and pilot (d. 1943)
* 1921 – Zdzisław Żygulski, Polish historian and academic (d. 2015)
*1922 – Alain Robbe-Grillet, French director, screenwriter, and novelist (d. 2008)
*1923 – Katherine Victor, American actress (d. 2004)
*1925 – Brian Aldiss, English author and critic (d. 2017)
* 1925 – Pierre Grondin, Canadian surgeon and academic (d. 2006)
* 1925 – Anis Mansour, Egyptian journalist and author (d. 2011)
*1927 – Rosalynn Carter, 41st First Lady of the United States (d. 2023)
*1928 – Marge Schott, American businesswoman (d. 2004)
* 1928 – Sonny Til, American R&B singer (d. 1981)
*1929 – Hugues Aufray, French singer-songwriter
*1930 – Liviu Librescu, Romanian-American engineer and academic (d. 2007)
* 1930 – Rafael Pineda Ponce, Honduran academic and politician (d. 2014)
*1931 – Bramwell Tillsley, Canadian 14th General of The Salvation Army (d. 2019)
* 1931 – Hans van Mierlo, Dutch journalist and politician, Deputy Prime Minister of the Netherlands (d. 2010)
* 1931 – Grant Williams, American film, theater and television actor (d. 1985)
*1932 – Luc Montagnier, French virologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2022)
*1933 – Just Fontaine, Moroccan-French footballer and manager (d. 2023)
* 1933 – Roman Polanski, French-Polish director, producer, screenwriter, and actor
* 1933 – Frank Salemme, American gangster and hitman (d. 2022)
*1934 – Vincent Bugliosi, American lawyer and author (d. 2015)
* 1934 – Roberto Clemente, Puerto Rican-American baseball player and soldier (d. 1972)
* 1934 – Gulzar, Indian poet, lyricist and film director
* 1934 – Rafer Johnson, American decathlete and actor (d. 2020)
* 1934 – Michael May, German-Swiss race car driver and engineer
*1935 – Gail Fisher, American actress (d. 2000)
* 1935 – Hifikepunye Pohamba, Namibian lawyer and politician, 2nd President of Namibia
*1936 – Robert Redford, American actor, director, and producer
*1937 – Sheila Cassidy, English physician and author
*1939 – Maxine Brown, American soul/R&B singer-songwriter
* 1939 – Robert Horton, English businessman (d. 2011)
* 1939 – Johnny Preston, American pop singer (d. 2011)
*1940 – Adam Makowicz, Polish-Canadian pianist and composer
* 1940 – Gil Whitney, American journalist (d. 1982)
*1942 – Henry G. Sanders, American actor
*1943 – Martin Mull, American actor and comedian (d. 2024)
* 1943 – Gianni Rivera, Italian footballer and politician
* 1943 – Carl Wayne, English singer and actor (d. 2004)
*1944 – Paula Danziger, American author (d. 2004)
* 1944 – Robert Hitchcock, Australian sculptor and illustrator
*1945 – Sarah Dash, American singer-songwriter and actress (d. 2021)
* 1945 – Värner Lootsmann, Estonian lawyer and politician
* 1945 – Lewis Burwell Puller, Jr., American soldier, lawyer, and author (d. 1994)
*1948 – James Jones, English bishop
* 1948 – John Scarlett, English intelligence officer
*1949 – Nigel Griggs, English bass player, songwriter, and producer
*1950 – Dennis Elliott, English drummer and sculptor
*1952 – Elayne Boosler, American actress, director, and screenwriter
* 1952 – Patrick Swayze, American actor and dancer (d. 2009)
* 1952 – Ricardo Villa, Argentinian footballer and coach
*1953 – Louie Gohmert, American captain, lawyer, and politician
* 1953 – Marvin Isley, American R&B bass player and songwriter (d. 2010)
*1954 – Umberto Guidoni, Italian astrophysicist, astronaut, and politician
*1955 – Bruce Benedict, American baseball player and coach
* 1955 – Taher Elgamal, Egyptian-American cryptographer
*1956 – John Debney, American composer and conductor
* 1956 – Sandeep Patil, Indian cricketer and coach
* 1956 – Jon Schwartz, American drummer and producer
* 1956 – Kelly Willard, American singer-songwriter
* 1956 – Rainer Woelki, German cardinal
*1957 – Carole Bouquet, French actress
* 1957 – Tan Dun, Chinese composer
* 1957 – Denis Leary, American comedian, actor, producer, and screenwriter
* 1957 – Ron Strykert, Australian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
*1958 – Didier Auriol, French race car driver
* 1958 – Madeleine Stowe, American actress
*1959 – Tom Prichard, American wrestler and trainer
*1960 – Mike LaValliere, American baseball player
* 1960 – Fat Lever, American basketball player and sportscaster
*1961 – Huw Edwards, Welsh journalist and author
* 1961 – Timothy Geithner, American banker and politician, 75th United States Secretary of the Treasury
* 1961 – Bob Woodruff, American journalist and author
*1962 – Felipe Calderón, Mexican lawyer and politician, 56th President of Mexico
* 1962 – Geoff Courtnall, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
* 1962 – Adam Storke, American actor
*1964 – Craig Bierko, American actor and singer
* 1964 – Andi Deris, German singer and songwriter
* 1964 – Mark Sargent, Australian rugby league player
* 1964 – Kenny Walker, American basketball player and sportscaster
*1965 – Ikue Ōtani, Japanese voice actress
*1966 – Gustavo Charif, Argentinian director and producer
*1967 – Daler Mehndi, Indian Punjabi singer, songwriter and record producer
* 1967 – Brian Michael Bendis, American author and illustrator
*1969 – Everlast, American singer, rapper, and musician
* 1969 – Masta Killa, American rapper
* 1969 – Mark Kuhlmann, German rugby player and coach
* 1969 – Edward Norton, American actor
* 1969 – Christian Slater, American actor and producer
*1970 – Jason Furman, American economist and politician
* 1970 – Malcolm-Jamal Warner, American actor and producer
*1971 – Patrik Andersson, Swedish footballer
* 1971 – Richard David James, English musician and record producer
*1974 – Nicole Krauss, American novelist and critic
*1975 – Kaitlin Olson, American actress and comedian
*1977 – Paraskevas Antzas, Greek footballer
* 1977 – Even Kruse Skatrud, Norwegian musician and educator
*1978 – Andy Samberg, American actor and comedian
*1979 – Stuart Dew, Australian footballer
*1980 – Esteban Cambiasso, Argentinian footballer
* 1980 – Rob Nguyen, Australian race car driver
* 1980 – Ryan O'Hara, Australian rugby league player
* 1980 – Bart Scott, American football player
* 1980 – Jeremy Shockey, American football player
*1981 – César Delgado, Argentinian footballer
* 1981 – Dimitris Salpingidis, Greek footballer
*1983 – Mika, Lebanese-born English recording artist and singer-songwriter
* 1983 – Cameron White, Australian cricketer
*1984 – Sigourney Bandjar, Dutch footballer
* 1984 – Robert Huth, German footballer
*1985 – Inge Dekker, Dutch swimmer
* 1985 – Bryan Ruiz, Costa Rican footballer
*1986 – Evan Gattis, American baseball player
* 1986 – Ross McCormack, Scottish footballer
*1987 – Joanna Jędrzejczyk, Polish mixed martial artist
* 1987 – Justin Wilson, American baseball player
*1988 – Jack Hobbs, English footballer
* 1988 – Eggert Jónsson, Icelandic footballer
* 1988 – G-Dragon, South Korean rapper, singer-songwriter and record producer
*1989 – Anna Akana, American actress, comedian, musician, and YouTuber
* 1989 – Yu Mengyu, Singaporean table tennis player
*1991 – Liz Cambage, Australian basketball player
* 1991 – Richard Harmon, Canadian actor
*1992 – Elizabeth Beisel, American swimmer
* 1992 – Bogdan Bogdanović, Serbian basketball player
* 1992 – Frances Bean Cobain, American visual artist and model
*1993 – Jung Eun-ji, South Korean singer-songwriter
* 1993 – Maia Mitchell, Australian actress and singer
*1994 – Madelaine Petsch, American actress and YouTuber
* 1994 – Morgan Sanson, French footballer
* 1994 – Seiya Suzuki, Japanese baseball player
*1995 – Alīna Fjodorova, Latvian figure skater
* 1995 – Parker McKenna Posey, American actress
*1997 – Josephine Langford, Australian actress
* 1997 – Renato Sanches, Portuguese footballer
*1998 – Brian To'o, Australian-Samoan rugby league player
* 1998 – Clairo, American singer-songwriter
* 1998 – Nick Fuentes, American far-right political commentator
*1999 – Cassius Stanley, American basketball player
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Deaths
Pre-1600
* 353 – Decentius, Roman usurper
* 440 – Pope Sixtus III
* 472 – Ricimer, Roman general and politician (b. 405)
* 670 – Fiacre, Irish hermit
* 673 – Kim Yu-shin, general of Silla (b. 595)
* 849 – Walafrid Strabo, German monk and theologian (b. 808)
*911 – Al-Hadi ila'l-Haqq Yahya, first Zaydi Imam of Yemen (b. 859)
*1095 – King Olaf I of Denmark
*1211 – Narapatisithu, king of Burma (b. 1150)
*1258 – Theodore II Laskaris, emperor of Nicea (Byzantine emperor in exile)
*1276 – Pope Adrian V (b. 1220)
*1318 – Clare of Montefalco, Italian nun and saint (b. 1268)
*1430 – Thomas de Ros, 8th Baron de Ros, English soldier and politician (b. 1406)
*1500 – Alfonso of Aragon, Spanish prince (b. 1481)
*1502 – Knut Alvsson, Norwegian nobleman and politician (b. 1455)
*1503 – Pope Alexander VI (b. 1431)
*1550 – Antonio Ferramolino, Italian architect and military engineer
*1559 – Pope Paul IV (b. 1476)
*1563 – Étienne de La Boétie, French judge and philosopher (b. 1530)
*1600 – Sebastiano Montelupi, Italian businessman (b. 1516)
1601–1900
*1613 – Giovanni Artusi, Italian composer and theorist (b. 1540)
*1620 – Wanli Emperor of China (b. 1563)
*1625 – Edward la Zouche, 11th Baron Zouche, English diplomat (b. 1556)
*1634 – Urbain Grandier, French priest (b. 1590)
*1642 – Guido Reni, Italian painter and educator (b. 1575)
*1648 – Ibrahim of the Ottoman Empire (b. 1615)
*1683 – Charles Hart, English actor (b. 1625)
*1707 – William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Devonshire, English soldier and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire (b. 1640)
*1712 – Richard Savage, 4th Earl Rivers, English general and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Essex (b. 1660)
*1765 – Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor (b. 1708)
*1815 – Chauncey Goodrich, American lawyer and politician, 8th Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut (b. 1759)
*1823 – André-Jacques Garnerin, French balloonist and the inventor of the frameless parachute (b. 1769)
*1842 – Louis de Freycinet, French explorer and navigator (b. 1779)
*1850 – Honoré de Balzac, French novelist and playwright (b. 1799)
*1852 – James Finlayson, Scottish Quaker (b. 1772)
*1886 – Eli Whitney Blake, American inventor, invented the Mortise lock (b. 1795)
1901–present
*1919 – Joseph E. Seagram, Canadian businessman and politician, founded the Seagram Company (b. 1841)
*1940 – Walter Chrysler, American businessman, founded Chrysler (b. 1875)
*1942 – Erwin Schulhoff, Austro-Czech composer and pianist (b. 1894)
*1943 – Ali-Agha Shikhlinski, Azerbaijani general (b. 1865)
*1944 – Ernst Thälmann, German soldier and politician (b. 1886)
*1945 – Subhas Chandra Bose, Indian activist and politician (b. 1897)
*1946 – Che Yaoxian, Chinese communist (b. 1894)
* 1946 – Luo Shiwen, Chinese communist (b. 1904)
*1964 – Hildegard Trabant, Berlin Wall victim (b. 1927)
*1968 – Arthur Marshall, American pianist and composer (b. 1881)
*1975 – Odd Lindbäck-Larsen, Norwegian Army general and war historian (b. 1897)
*1979 – Vasantrao Naik, Indian politician (b. 1913)
*1981 – Anita Loos, American author and screenwriter (b. 1889)
*1983 – Nikolaus Pevsner, German-English historian and scholar (b. 1902)
*1986 – Harun Babunagari, Bangladeshi Islamic scholar and educationist (b. 1902)
*1990 – B. F. Skinner, American psychologist and philosopher, invented the Skinner box (b. 1904)
*1994 – Francis Raymond Shea, American bishop (b. 1913)
*1998 – Persis Khambatta, Indian model and actress, Femina Miss India 1965 (b. 1948)
*2001 – David Peakall, English chemist and toxicologist (b. 1931)
*2002 – Dean Riesner, American actor and screenwriter (b. 1918)
*2003 – Tony Jackson, English singer and bassist (b. 1938)
*2004 – Elmer Bernstein, American composer and conductor (b. 1922)
* 2004 – Hiram Fong, American soldier and politician (b. 1906)
*2005 – Chri$ Ca$h, American wrestler (b. 1982)
*2006 – Ken Kearney, Australian rugby player (b. 1924)
*2007 – Michael Deaver, American soldier and politician, White House Deputy Chief of Staff (b. 1938)
* 2007 – Magdalen Nabb, English author (b. 1947)
*2009 – Kim Dae-jung, South Korean lieutenant and politician, 15th President of South Korea, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1925)
* 2009 – Rose Friedman, Ukrainian-American economist and author (b. 1910)
* 2009 – Robert Novak, American journalist and author (b. 1931)
*2010 – Hal Connolly, American hammer thrower and coach (b. 1931)
* 2010 – Benjamin Kaplan, American scholar and jurist (b. 1911)
*2012 – Harrison Begay, American painter (b. 1917)
* 2012 – John Kovatch, American football player (b. 1920)
* 2012 – Scott McKenzie, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1939)
* 2012 – Ra. Ki. Rangarajan, Indian journalist and author (b. 1927)
* 2012 – Jesse Robredo, Filipino public servant and politician, 23rd Secretary of the Interior and Local Government (b. 1958)
*2013 – Josephine D'Angelo, American baseball player (b. 1924)
* 2013 – Jean Kahn, French lawyer and activist (b. 1929)
* 2013 – Albert Murray, American author and critic (b. 1916)
*2014 – Gordon Faber, American soldier and politician, 39th Mayor of Hillsboro, Oregon (b. 1930)
* 2014 – Jim Jeffords, American captain, lawyer, and politician (b. 1934)
* 2014 – Levente Lengyel, Hungarian chess player (b. 1933)
* 2014 – Don Pardo, American radio and television announcer (b. 1918)
*2015 – Khaled al-Asaad, Syrian archaeologist and author (b. 1932)
* 2015 – Roger Smalley, English-Australian pianist, composer, and conductor (b. 1943)
* 2015 – Suvra Mukherjee, Wife of former Indian president Pranab Mukherjee (b. 1940)
* 2015 – Louis Stokes, American lawyer and politician (b. 1925)
* 2015 – Bud Yorkin, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1926)
*2016 – Ernst Nolte, German historian (b. 1923)
*2017 – Bruce Forsyth, English television presenter and entertainer (b. 1928)
* 2017 – Zoe Laskari, Greek actress and beauty pageant winner (b. 1944)
*2018 – Denis Edozie, Nigerian Supreme Court judge (b. 1935)
* 2018 – Kofi Annan, Ghanaian diplomat and seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations (b. 1938)
*2020 – Ben Cross, English stage and film actor (b. 1947)
*2023 – Lolita, the second-oldest orca in captivity (b. ca. 1966)
* 2023 – Al Quie, American politician, 35th Governor of Minnesota (b. 1923)
*2024 – Ruth Johnson Colvin, American author and educator, founded ProLiteracy Worldwide (b. 1916)
*2024 – Alain Delon, French-Swiss actor (b. 1935)
*2024 – Phil Donahue, American talk show host and producer (b. 1935)
<!-- Do not add people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence. -->
Holidays and observances
*Christian feast day:
**Agapitus of Palestrina
**Alberto Hurtado
**Daig of Inniskeen
**Evan (or Inan)
**Fiacre
**Florus and Laurus
**Helena of Constantinople (Roman Catholic Church)
**August 18 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
*Arbor Day (Pakistan)
*Armed Forces Day (North Macedonia)
*Birthday of Virginia Dare (Roanoke Island)
*Constitution Day (Indonesia)
*Long Tan Day, also called Vietnam Veterans' Day (Australia)
*National Science Day (Thailand)
References
Sources
*
*
External links
*
*
*
Category:Days of August | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_18 | 2025-04-05T18:25:40.998720 |
1497 | August 19 | Events
Pre-1600
*295 BC – The first temple to Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility, is dedicated by Quintus Fabius Maximus Gurges during the Third Samnite War.
*43 BC – Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, later known as Augustus, compels the Roman Senate to elect him Consul.
* 947 – Abu Yazid, a Kharijite rebel leader, is defeated and killed in the Hodna Mountains in modern-day Algeria by Fatimid forces.
*1153 – Baldwin III of Jerusalem takes control of the Kingdom of Jerusalem from his mother Melisende, and also captures Ascalon.
*1458 – Pope Pius II is elected the 211th Pope.
*1504 – In Ireland, the Hiberno-Norman de Burghs (Burkes) and Cambro-Norman Fitzgeralds fight in the Battle of Knockdoe.
*1561 – Mary, Queen of Scots, aged 18, returns to Scotland after spending 13 years in France.
1601–1900
*1604 – Eighty Years War: a besieging Dutch and English army led by Maurice of Orange forces the Spanish garrison of Sluis to capitulate.
*1612 – The "Samlesbury witches", three women from the Lancashire village of Samlesbury, England, are put on trial, accused of practicing witchcraft, one of the most famous witch trials in British history.
*1666 – Second Anglo-Dutch War: Rear Admiral Robert Holmes leads a raid on the Dutch island of Terschelling, destroying 150 merchant ships, an act later known as "Holmes's Bonfire".
*1692 – Salem witch trials: In Salem, province of Massachusetts Bay, five people, one woman and four men, including a clergyman, are executed after being convicted of witchcraft.
*1745 – Prince Charles Edward Stuart raises his standard in Glenfinnan: The start of the Second Jacobite Rebellion, known as "the 45".
* 1745 – Ottoman–Persian War: In the Battle of Kars, the Ottoman army is routed by Persian forces led by Nader Shah.
*1759 – Battle of Lagos: Naval battle during the Seven Years' War between Great Britain and France.
*1772 – Gustav III of Sweden stages a coup d'état, in which he assumes power and enacts a new constitution that divides power between the Riksdag and the King.
*1782 – American Revolutionary War: Battle of Blue Licks: The last major engagement of the war, almost ten months after the surrender of the British commander Charles Cornwallis following the Siege of Yorktown.
*1812 – War of 1812: American frigate defeats the British frigate off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada earning the nickname "Old Ironsides".
*1813 – Gervasio Antonio de Posadas joins Argentina's Second Triumvirate.
*1839 – The French government announces that Louis Daguerre's photographic process is a gift "free to the world".
*1848 – California Gold Rush: The New York Herald breaks the news to the East Coast of the United States of the gold rush in California (although the rush started in January).
*1854 – The First Sioux War begins when United States Army soldiers kill Lakota chief Conquering Bear and in return are massacred.
*1861 – First ascent of Weisshorn, fifth highest summit in the Alps.
*1862 – Dakota War: During an uprising in Minnesota, Lakota warriors decide not to attack heavily defended Fort Ridgely and instead turn to the settlement of New Ulm, killing white settlers along the way.
1901–present
*1903 – The Transfiguration Uprising breaks out in East Thrace, resulting in the establishment of the Strandzha Commune.
*1909 – The Indianapolis Motor Speedway opens for automobile racing. William Bourque and his mechanic are killed during the first day's events.
*1920 – The Tambov Rebellion breaks out, in response to the Bolshevik policy of Prodrazvyorstka.
*1927 – Patriarch Sergius of Moscow proclaims the declaration of loyalty of the Russian Orthodox Church to the Soviet Union.
*1934 – The first All-American Soap Box Derby is held in Dayton, Ohio.
* 1934 – The German referendum of 1934 approves Adolf Hitler's appointment as head of state with the title of Führer.
*1936 – The Great Purge of the Soviet Union begins when the first of the Moscow Trials is convened.
*1940 – First flight of the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber.
*1941 – Germany and Romania sign the Tiraspol Agreement, rendering the region of Transnistria under control of the latter.
*1942 – World War II: Operation Jubilee (The Dieppe Raid): The 2nd Canadian Infantry Division leads an amphibious assault by allied forces on Dieppe, France and fails.
*1944 – World War II: Liberation of Paris: Paris, France rises against German occupation with the help of Allied troops.
*1945 – August Revolution: Viet Minh led by Ho Chi Minh take power in Hanoi, Vietnam.
*1953 – Cold War: The CIA and MI6 help to overthrow the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and reinstate the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
*1955 – In the Northeast United States, severe flooding caused by Hurricane Diane, claims 200 lives.
*1960 – Cold War: In Moscow, Russia, Soviet Union, downed American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers is sentenced to ten years imprisonment by the Soviet Union for espionage.
* 1960 – Sputnik program: Korabl-Sputnik 2: The Soviet Union launches the satellite with the dogs Belka and Strelka, 40 mice, two rats and a variety of plants.
*1964 – Syncom 3, the first geostationary communication satellite, is launched. Two months later, it would enable live coverage of the 1964 Summer Olympics.
*1965 – Japanese prime minister Eisaku Satō becomes the first post-World War II sitting prime minister to visit Okinawa Prefecture.
*1978 – In Iran, the Cinema Rex fire causes more than 400 deaths.
*1980 – Saudia Flight 163, a Lockheed L-1011 TriStar burns after making an emergency landing at Riyadh International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing 301 people.
* 1980 – Otłoczyn railway accident: In Poland's worst post-war railway accident, 67 people lose their lives and a further 62 are injured.
*1981 – Gulf of Sidra Incident: United States F-14A Tomcat fighters intercept and shoot down two Libyan Sukhoi Su-22 fighter jets over the Gulf of Sidra.
*1987 – Hungerford massacre: In the United Kingdom, Michael Ryan kills sixteen people with a semi-automatic rifle and then commits suicide.
*1989 – Polish president Wojciech Jaruzelski nominates Solidarity activist Tadeusz Mazowiecki to be the first non-communist prime minister in 42 years.
* 1989 – Several hundred East Germans cross the frontier between Hungary and Austria during the Pan-European Picnic, part of the events that began the process of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
*1991 – Dissolution of the Soviet Union: The August Coup begins when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev is placed under house arrest while on holiday in the town of Foros, Ukraine.
* 1991 – Crown Heights riot begins.
*1999 – In Belgrade, Yugoslavia, tens of thousands of Serbians rally to demand the resignation of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia President Slobodan Milošević.
*2002 – Khankala Mi-26 crash: A Russian Mil Mi-26 helicopter carrying troops is hit by a Chechen missile outside Grozny, killing 118 soldiers.
*2003 – A truck-bomb attack on United Nations headquarters in Iraq kills the agency's top envoy Sérgio Vieira de Mello and 21 other employees.
* 2003 – Shmuel HaNavi bus bombing: A suicide attack on a bus in Jerusalem, planned by Hamas, kills 23 Israelis, seven of them children.
*2004 – Google Inc. has its initial public offering on Nasdaq.
*2005 – The first-ever joint military exercise between Russia and China, called Peace Mission 2005 begins.
*2009 – A series of bombings in Baghdad, Iraq, kills 101 and injures 565 others.
*2010 – Operation Iraqi Freedom ends, with the last of the United States brigade combat teams crossing the border to Kuwait.
*2013 – The Dhamara Ghat train accident kills at least 37 people in the Indian state of Bihar.
*2017 – Tens of thousands of farmed non-native Atlantic salmon are accidentally released into the wild in Washington waters in the 2017 Cypress Island Atlantic salmon pen break.
Births
Pre-1600
* 232 – Marcus Aurelius Probus, Roman emperor (d. 282)
*1342 – Catherine of Bohemia, duchess of Austria (d. 1395)
*1398 – Íñigo López de Mendoza, 1st Marquis of Santillana, Spanish poet and politician (d. 1458)
*1570 – Salamone Rossi, Italian violinist and composer (probable; d. 1630)
*1583 – Daišan, Chinese prince and statesman (d. 1648)
*1590 – Henry Rich, 1st Earl of Holland, English soldier and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Berkshire (d. 1649)
*1596 – Elizabeth Stuart, queen of Bohemia (d. 1662)1601–1900
*1609 – Jan Fyt, Flemish painter (d. 1661)
*1621 – Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Dutch painter, etcher, and poet (d. 1674)
*1631 – John Dryden, English poet, literary critic and playwright (d. 1700)
*1646 – John Flamsteed, English astronomer and academic (d. 1719)
*1686 – Eustace Budgell, English journalist and politician (d. 1737)
*1689 (baptized) – Samuel Richardson, English author and publisher (d. 1761)
*1711 – Edward Boscawen, English admiral and politician (d. 1761)
*1719 – Charles-François de Broglie, marquis de Ruffec, French soldier and diplomat (d. 1781)
*1743 – Madame du Barry, French mistress of Louis XV of France (d. 1793)
*1777 – Francis I, king of the Two Sicilies (d. 1830)
*1815 – Harriette Newell Woods Baker, American editor and children's book writer (d. 1893)
*1819 – Julius van Zuylen van Nijevelt, Luxembourger-Dutch politician, Prime Minister of the Netherlands (d. 1894)
*1830 – Julius Lothar Meyer, German chemist (d. 1895)
*1835 – Tom Wills, Australian cricketer and pioneer of Australian rules football (d. 1880)
*1843 – C. I. Scofield, American minister and theologian (d. 1921)
*1846 – Luis Martín, Spanish religious leader, 24th Superior General of the Society of Jesus (d. 1906)
*1848 – Gustave Caillebotte, French painter and engineer (d. 1894)
*1849 – Joaquim Nabuco, Brazilian politician and diplomat (d. 1910)
*1858 – Ellen Willmott, English horticulturalist (d. 1934)
*1870 – Bernard Baruch, American businessman and philanthropist (d. 1965)
*1871 – Orville Wright, American engineer and pilot, co-founded the Wright Company (d. 1948)
*1873 – Fred Stone, American actor and producer (d. 1959)
*1878 – Manuel L. Quezon, Filipino soldier, lawyer, and politician, 2nd President of the Philippines (d. 1944)
*1881 – George Enescu, Romanian violinist, pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1955)
* 1881 – George Shepherd, 1st Baron Shepherd (d. 1954)
*1883 – Coco Chanel, French fashion designer, founded the Chanel Company (d. 1971)
* 1883 – José Mendes Cabeçadas, Portuguese admiral and politician, 9th President of Portugal (d. 1965)
*1885 – Grace Hutchins, American labor reformer and researcher (d. 1969)
*1887 – S. Satyamurti, Indian lawyer and politician (d. 1943)
*1895 – C. Suntharalingam, Sri Lankan lawyer, academic, and politician (d. 1985)
*1899 – Colleen Moore, American actress (d. 1988)
*1900 – Gontran de Poncins, French author and adventurer (d. 1962)
* 1900 – Gilbert Ryle, English philosopher, author, and academic (d. 1976)
* 1900 – Dorothy Burr Thompson, American archaeologist and art historian (d. 2001)
1901–present
*1902 – Ogden Nash, American poet (d. 1971)
*1903 – James Gould Cozzens, American novelist and short story writer (d. 1978)
*1904 – Maurice Wilks, English engineer and businessman (d. 1963)
*1906 – Philo Farnsworth, American inventor, invented the Fusor (d. 1971)
*1907 – Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Indian historian, author, and scholar (d. 1979)
*1909 – Ronald King, New Zealand rugby player (d. 1988)
*1910 – Saint Alphonsa, first woman of Indian origin to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church (d. 1946)
*1911 – Anna Terruwe, Dutch psychiatrist and author (d. 2004)
*1912 – Herb Narvo, Australian rugby league player, coach, and boxer (d. 1958)
*1913 – John Argyris, Greek engineer and academic (d. 2004)
* 1913 – Peter Kemp, Indian-English soldier and author (d. 1993)
* 1913 – Richard Simmons, American actor (d. 2003)
*1914 – Lajos Baróti, Hungarian footballer and manager (d. 2005)
* 1914 – Fumio Hayasaka, Japanese composer (d. 1955)
* 1914 – Rose Heilbron, British barrister and judge (d. 2005)
*1915 – Ring Lardner, Jr., American journalist and screenwriter (d. 2000)
* 1915 – Alfred Rouleau, Canadian businessman (d. 1985)
*1916 – Dennis Poore, English racing driver and businessman (d. 1987)
*1918 – Jimmy Rowles, American singer-songwriter and pianist (d. 1996)
*1919 – Malcolm Forbes, American publisher and politician (d. 1990)
*1921 – Gene Roddenberry, American screenwriter and producer (d. 1991)
*1923 – Edgar F. Codd, English computer scientist, inventor of relational model of data (d. 2003)
*1924 – Willard Boyle, Canadian physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2011)
* 1924 – William Marshall, American actor, director, and opera singer (d. 2003)
*1925 – Claude Gauvreau, Canadian poet and playwright (d. 1971)
*1926 – Angus Scrimm, American actor and author (d. 2016)
*1928 – Shiv Prasaad Singh, Indian Hindi writer (d. 1998)
* 1928 – Bernard Levin, English journalist, author, and broadcaster (d. 2004)
*1929 – Bill Foster, American basketball player and coach (d. 2016)
* 1929 – Ion N. Petrovici, Romanian-German neurologist and academic (d. 2021)
*1930 – Frank McCourt, American author and educator (d. 2009)
*1932 – Thomas P. Salmon, American lawyer and politician, 75th Governor of Vermont
* 1932 – Banharn Silpa-archa, Thai politician, Prime Minister (1995–1996) (d. 2016)
*1933 – Bettina Cirone, American model and photographer
* 1933 – David Hopwood, English microbiologist and geneticist
* 1933 – Debra Paget, American actress
*1940 – Roger Cook, English songwriter, singer, and producer
* 1940 – Johnny Nash, American singer-songwriter (d. 2020)
* 1941 – Mihalis Papagiannakis, Greek educator and politician (d. 2009)
*1942 – Fred Thompson, American actor, lawyer, and politician (d. 2015)
* 1943 – Billy J. Kramer, English pop singer
* 1944 – Bodil Malmsten, Swedish author and poet (d. 2016)
* 1944 – Eddy Raven, American country music singer-songwriter
* 1946 – Dawn Steel, American film producer (d. 1997)
*1947 – Dave Dutton, English actor and screenwriter
* 1947 – Terry Hoeppner, American football player and coach (d. 2007)
* 1947 – Gerald McRaney, American actor
*1951 – John Deacon, English bass player and songwriter
* 1952 – Jimmy Watson, Canadian ice hockey player
*1954 – Oscar Larrauri, Argentinian racing driver
*1955 – Mary-Anne Fahey, Australian actress
* 1955 – Peter Gallagher, American actor
*1959 – Chris Mortimer, Australian rugby league player
* 1959 – Ivan Neville, American singer-songwriter
*1961 – Jonathan Coe, English author and academic
*1963 – John Stamos, American actor
*1965 – Kevin Dillon, American actor
*1966 – Lee Ann Womack, American singer-songwriter
* 1969 – Douglas Allen Tunstall Jr., American professional wrestler and politician
*1969 – Nate Dogg, American rapper (d. 2011)
* 1969 – Matthew Perry, American actor, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2023)
* 1969 – Kazuyoshi Tatsunami, Japanese baseball player and coach
* 1969 – Clay Walker, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
*1970 – Fat Joe, American rapper
* 1973 – Tasma Walton, Australian actress
*1975 – Tracie Thoms, American actress
* 1978 – Thomas Jones, American football player
*1979 – Oumar Kondé, Swiss footballer
*1980 – Darius Campbell, Scottish singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor (d. 2022)
* 1980 – Craig Frawley, Australian rugby league player
* 1980 – Jun Jin, South Korean singer
* 1980 – Paul Parry, Welsh footballer
* 1980 – Michael Todd, American bass player
*1981 – Nick Kennedy, English rugby player
* 1981 – Taylor Pyatt, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1981 – Percy Watson, American football player and wrestler
*1982 – Erika Christensen, American actress
* 1982 – Melissa Fumero, American actress
*1983 – Mike Conway, English racing driver
* 1983 – Missy Higgins, Australian singer-songwriter
* 1983 – Tammin Sursok, South African-Australian actress and singer
* 1987 – Nick Driebergen, Dutch swimmer
* 1987 – Nico Hülkenberg, German racing driver
*1988 – Kirk Cousins, American football player
* 1988 – Veronica Roth, American author
*1989 – Romeo Miller, American basketball player, rapper, actor
*1990 – Danny Galbraith, Scottish footballer
*1991 – Salem Al-Dawsari, Saudi Arabian footballer
*1992 – David Rittich, Czech ice hockey player
*1993 – Pio Seci, Fijian rugby league player
*1994 – Nafissatou Thiam, Belgian pentathlete and heptathlete
* 1994 – Fernando Gaviria, Colombian cyclist
*1996 – Jung Ye-rin, South Korean singer and actress
* 1996 – Lachlan Lewis, Australian rugby league player
*1999 – Ethan Cutkosky, American actor and musician
*2000 – Keegan Murray, American basketball player
*2001 – Awak Kuier, Finnish basketball player
<!--Do not add people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence.-->
Deaths
Pre-1600
* 607 BC – Duke Ling of Jin, Chinese monarch
*AD 14 – Augustus, Roman emperor (b. 63 BC)
* 780 – Credan, English abbot and saint
* 947 – Abu Yazid, Kharijite rebel leader (b. 873)
* 998 – Fujiwara no Sukemasa, Japanese noble, statesman and calligrapher (b. 944)
*1072 – Hawise, Duchess of Brittany (b. 1037)
*1085 – Al-Juwayni, Muslim scholar and imam (b. 1028)
*1186 – Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany (b. 1158)
*1245 – Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Provence (b. 1195)
*1284 – Alphonso, Earl of Chester (b. 1273)
*1297 – Louis of Toulouse, French bishop and saint (b. 1274)
*1457 – Andrea del Castagno, Italian painter (b. 1421)
*1470 – Richard Olivier de Longueil, French cardinal (b. 1406)
*1493 – Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor (b. 1415)
*1506 – King Alexander Jagiellon of Poland (b. 1461)
*1541 – Vincenzo Cappello, Venetian admiral and statesman (b. 1469)
*1580 – Andrea Palladio, Italian architect, designed the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore (b. 1508)
1601–1900
*1646 – Alexander Henderson, Scottish theologian and academic (b. 1583)
*1654 – Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, Bohemian rabbi (b. 1579)
*1662 – Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher (b. 1623)
*1674 – František Maxmilián Kaňka, Czech architect (d. 1766)
*1680 – Jean Eudes, French priest, founded the Congregation of Jesus and Mary (b. 1601)
*1691 – Köprülü Fazıl Mustafa Pasha, Ottoman commander and politician, 117th Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire (b. 1637)
*1702 – Anthony Grey, 11th Earl of Kent, English politician (b. 1645)
*1753 – Johann Balthasar Neumann, German engineer and architect, designed Basilica of the Fourteen Holy Helpers (b. 1687)
*1808 – Fredrik Henrik af Chapman, Swedish admiral and shipbuilder (b. 1721)
*1822 – Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre, French mathematician and astronomer (b. 1749)
*1883 – Jeremiah S. Black, American lawyer and politician, 24th United States Attorney General (b. 1810)
*1889 – Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, French author, poet, and playwright (b. 1838)
*1895 – John Wesley Hardin, American Old West outlaw, gunfighter (b. 1853)
*1900 – Jean-Baptiste Accolay, Belgian violinist, composer, and conductor (b. 1833)
1901–present
*1914 – Franz Xavier Wernz, German religious leader, 25th Superior General of the Society of Jesus (b. 1844)
*1915 – Tevfik Fikret, Turkish poet and educator (b. 1867)
*1923 – Vilfredo Pareto, Italian sociologist and economist (b. 1845)
*1928 – Stephanos Skouloudis, Greek banker and diplomat, 97th Prime Minister of Greece (b. 1838)
*1929 – Sergei Diaghilev, Russian critic and producer, founded Ballets Russes (b. 1872)
*1932 – Louis Anquetin, French painter (b. 1861)
*1936 – Federico García Lorca, Spanish poet, playwright, and director (b. 1898)
*1942 – Harald Kaarmann, Estonian footballer (b. 1901)
* 1942 – Heinrich Rauchinger, Kraków-born painter (b. 1858)
*1944 – Henry Wood, English conductor (b. 1869)
*1945 – Tomás Burgos, Chilean philanthropist (b. 1875)
*1950 – Giovanni Giorgi, Italian physicist and engineer (b. 1871)
*1954 – Alcide De Gasperi, Italian journalist and politician, 30th Prime Minister of Italy (b. 1881)
*1957 – David Bomberg, English soldier and painter (b. 1890)
*1967 – Hugo Gernsback, Luxembourg-born American author and publisher (b. 1884)
* 1967 – Isaac Deutscher, Polish-English journalist and historian (b. 1907)
*1968 – George Gamow, Ukrainian-American physicist and cosmologist (b. 1904)
*1970 – Paweł Jasienica, Polish soldier and historian (b. 1909)
*1975 – Mark Donohue, American race car driver and engineer (b. 1937)
*1976 – Alastair Sim, Scottish-English actor (b. 1900)
* 1976 – Ken Wadsworth, New Zealand cricketer (b. 1946)
*1977 – Aleksander Kreek, Estonian shot putter and discus thrower (b. 1914)
* 1977 – Groucho Marx, American comedian and actor (b. 1890)
*1980 – Otto Frank, German-Swiss businessman, father of Anne Frank (b. 1889)
*1981 – Jessie Matthews, English actress, singer, and dancer (b. 1907)
*1982 – August Neo, Estonian wrestler (b. 1908)
*1986 – Hermione Baddeley, English actress (b. 1906)
* 1986 – Viv Thicknesse, Australian rugby player (b. 1910)
*1993 – Utpal Dutt, Bangladeshi actor, director, and playwright (b. 1929)
*1994 – Linus Pauling, American chemist and biologist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1901)
*1995 – Pierre Schaeffer, French composer and musicologist (b. 1910)
*2000 – Bineshwar Brahma, Indian poet, author, and educator (b. 1948)
*2001 – Donald Woods, South African journalist and activist (b. 1933)
*2003 – Carlos Roberto Reina, Honduran lawyer and politician, President of Honduras (b. 1926)
* 2003 – Sérgio Vieira de Mello, Brazilian diplomat (b. 1948)
*2005 – Mo Mowlam, English academic and politician, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (b. 1949)
*2008 – Levy Mwanawasa, Zambian lawyer and politician, 3rd President of Zambia (b. 1948)
*2009 – Don Hewitt, American television producer, created 60 Minutes (b. 1922)
*2011 – Raúl Ruiz, Chilean director and producer (b. 1941)
*2012 – Donal Henahan, American journalist and critic (b. 1921)
* 2012 – Ivar Iversen, Norwegian canoe racer (b. 1914)
* 2012 – Tony Scott, English-American director and producer (b. 1944)
* 2012 – Edmund Skellings, American poet and academic (b. 1932)
*2013 – Musa'id bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Saudi Arabian prince (b. 1923)
* 2013 – Russell S. Doughten, American director and producer (b. 1927)
* 2013 – Abdul Rahim Hatif, Afghan politician, 8th President of Afghanistan (b. 1926)
* 2013 – Donna Hightower, American singer-songwriter (b. 1926)
*2014 – Samih al-Qasim, Palestinian poet and journalist (b. 1939)
* 2014 – Simin Behbahani, Iranian poet and activist (b. 1927)
* 2014 – James Foley, American photographer and journalist (b. 1973)
* 2014 – Candida Lycett Green, Anglo-Irish journalist and author (b. 1942)
*2015 – George Houser, American minister and activist (b. 1916)
* 2015 – Sanat Mehta, Indian activist and politician (b. 1935)
*2016 – Jack Riley, American actor and voice artist (b. 1935)
*2017 – Dick Gregory, American comedian, author and activist (b. 1932)
*2019 – Lars Larsen, Danish businessman and billionaire, founder and owner of the Danish retail chain JYSK (b. 1948)
*2021 – Sonny Chiba, Japanese actor (b. 1939)
*2022 – Tekla Juniewicz, Polish supercentenarian (b. 1906)
*2023 – Václav Patejdl, Slovak musician (b. 1954)
*2024 – Maria Branyas, American-Spanish supercentenarian (b. 1907)
<!--Do not add people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence.-->
Holidays and observances
*Afghan Independence Day, commemorates the Treaty of Rawalpindi in 1919, granting independence from Britain (Afghanistan)
*August Revolution Commemoration Day (Vietnam)
*Birthday of Crown Princess Mette-Marit (Norway)
*Christian Feast Day:
**Bernardo Tolomei
**Bertulf of Bobbio
**Saint Calminius
**Ezequiél Moreno y Díaz
**Feast of the Transfiguration (Julian calendar), and its related observances:
***Buhe (Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church)
***Saviour's Transfiguration, popularly known as the "Apples Feast" (Russian Orthodox Church and Georgian Orthodox Church)
**Jean-Eudes de Mézeray
**Louis of Toulouse
**Maginus
**Magnus of Anagni
**Magnus of Avignon
**Sebaldus
**August 19 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
*Manuel Luis Quezón Day (Quezon City and other places in the Philippines named after Manuel L. Quezon)
*National Aviation Day (United States)
*World Humanitarian Day
References
External links
*
*
*
Category:Days of August | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_19 | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.067539 |
1499 | August 21 | Events
Pre-1600
* 959 – Eraclus becomes the 25th bishop of Liège.
*1140 – Song dynasty general Yue Fei defeats an army led by Jin dynasty general Wuzhu at the Battle of Yancheng during the Jin–Song Wars.
*1169 – Battle of the Blacks: Uprising by the black African forces of the Fatimid army, along with a number of Egyptian emirs and commoners, against Saladin.
*1192 – Minamoto no Yoritomo becomes Sei-i Taishōgun and the de facto ruler of Japan. (Traditional Japanese date: the 12th day of the seventh month in the third year of the Kenkyū (建久) era).
*1331 – King Stefan Uroš III, after months of anarchy, surrenders to his son and rival Stefan Dušan, who succeeds as King of Serbia.
*1415 – Henry the Navigator leads Portuguese forces to victory over the Marinids at the Conquest of Ceuta.1601–1900
*1680 – Pueblo Indians capture Santa Fe from the Spanish during the Pueblo Revolt.
*1689 – The Battle of Dunkeld in Scotland.
*1716 – Seventh Ottoman–Venetian War: The arrival of naval reinforcements and the news of the Battle of Petrovaradin force the Ottomans to abandon the Siege of Corfu, thus preserving the Ionian Islands under Venetian rule.
*1770 – James Cook formally claims eastern Australia for Great Britain, naming it New South Wales.
*1772 – King Gustav III completes his coup d'état by adopting a new Constitution, ending half a century of parliamentary rule in Sweden and installing himself as an enlightened despot.
*1778 – American Revolutionary War: British forces begin besieging the French outpost at Pondichéry.
*1791 – A Vodou ceremony, led by Dutty Boukman, turns into a violent slave rebellion, beginning the Haitian Revolution.
*1808 – Battle of Vimeiro: British and Portuguese forces led by General Arthur Wellesley defeat French force under Major-General Jean-Andoche Junot near the village of Vimeiro, Portugal, the first Anglo-Portuguese victory of the Peninsular War.
*1810 – Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, Marshal of France, is elected Crown Prince of Sweden by the Swedish Riksdag of the Estates.
*1821 – Jarvis Island is discovered by the crew of the ship, Eliza Frances.
*1831 – Nat Turner leads black slaves and free blacks in a rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, which will claim the lives of 55 to 65 whites and about twice that number of blacks.
*1852 – Tlingit Indians destroy Fort Selkirk, Yukon Territory.
*1858 – The first of the Lincoln–Douglas debates is held in Ottawa, Illinois.
*1862 – The Stadtpark, the first public park in Vienna, opens to the public.
*1863 – Lawrence, Kansas is destroyed by pro-Confederate guerrillas known as Quantrill's Raiders.
*1878 – The American Bar Association is founded in Saratoga Springs, New York.
*1879 – The locals of Knock, County Mayo, Ireland report their having seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary. The apparition is later named “Our Lady of Knock” and the spot transformed into a Catholic pilgrimage site.
*1883 – An F5 tornado strikes Rochester, Minnesota, leading to the creation of the Mayo Clinic.
*1888 – The first successful adding machine in the United States is patented by William Seward Burroughs.
1901–present
*1901 – Six hundred American school teachers, Thomasites, arrived in Manila on the USAT Thomas.
*1911 – The Mona Lisa is stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia, a Louvre employee.
*1914 – World War I: The Battle of Charleroi, a successful German attack across the River Sambre that pre-empted a French offensive in the same area.
*1918 – World War I: The Second Battle of the Somme begins.
*1942 – World War II: The Guadalcanal Campaign: American forces defeat an attack by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in the Battle of the Tenaru.
*1944 – Dumbarton Oaks Conference, prelude to the United Nations, begins.
* 1944 – World War II: Canadian and Polish units capture the strategically important town of Falaise, Calvados, France.
*1945 – Physicist Harry Daghlian is fatally irradiated in a criticality accident during an experiment with the Demon core at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
*1957 – The Soviet Union successfully conducts a long-range test flight of the R-7 Semyorka, the first intercontinental ballistic missile.
*1959 – United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs an executive order proclaiming Hawaii the 50th state of the union. Hawaii's admission is currently commemorated by Hawaii Admission Day.
*1963 – Xá Lợi Pagoda raids: The Army of the Republic of Vietnam Special Forces loyal to Ngô Đình Nhu, brother of President Ngo Dinh Diem, vandalizes Buddhist pagodas across the country, arresting thousands and leaving an estimated hundreds dead.
*1965 – The Socialist Republic of Romania is proclaimed, following the adoption of a new constitution.
*1968 – Cold War: Nicolae Ceaușescu, leader of the Socialist Republic of Romania, publicly condemns the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, encouraging the Romanian population to arm itself against possible Soviet reprisals.
* 1968 – James Anderson Jr. posthumously receives the first Medal of Honor to be awarded to an African American U.S. Marine.
*1971 – A bomb exploded in the Liberal Party campaign rally in Plaza Miranda, Manila, Philippines with several anti-Marcos political candidates injured.
*1982 – Lebanese Civil War: The first troops of a multinational force lands in Beirut to oversee the Palestine Liberation Organization's withdrawal from Lebanon.
*1983 – Philippine opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr. is assassinated at Manila International Airport (now renamed Ninoy Aquino International Airport in his honor).
*1986 – Carbon dioxide gas erupts from volcanic Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing up to 1,800 people within a range.
*1988 – The 6.9 Nepal earthquake shakes the Nepal–India border with a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe), leaving 709–1,450 people killed and thousands injured.
*1991 – Latvia declares renewal of its full independence after its occupation by the Soviet Union since 1940.
* 1991 – Coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev collapses.
*1993 – NASA loses contact with the Mars Observer spacecraft.
*1994 – Royal Air Maroc Flight 630 crashes in Douar Izounine, Morocco, killing all 44 people on board.
*1995 – Atlantic Southeast Airlines Flight 529, an Embraer EMB 120 Brasilia, attempts to divert to West Georgia Regional Airport after the left engine fails, but the aircraft crashes in Carroll County near Carrollton, Georgia, killing nine of the 29 people on board.
*2000 – American golfer Tiger Woods wins the 82nd PGA Championship and becomes the first golfer since Ben Hogan in 1953 to win three majors in a calendar year.
*2013 – Hundreds of people are reported killed by chemical attacks in the Ghouta region of Syria.
*2017 – A solar eclipse traverses the continental United States.
Births
Pre-1600
*1165 – Philip II of France (d. 1223)
*1481 – Jorge de Lencastre, Duke of Coimbra (d. 1550)
*1535 – Shimazu Yoshihiro, Japanese general (d. 1619)
*1552 – Muhammad Qadiri, Founder of the Naushahia branch of the Qadri order (d. 1654)
*1567 – Francis de Sales, Swiss bishop and saint (d. 1622)
*1579 – Henri, Duke of Rohan (d. 1638)
*1597 – Roger Twysden, English historian and politician (d. 1672)
1601–1900
*1625 – John Claypole, English politician (d. 1688)
*1643 – Afonso VI of Portugal (d. 1683)
*1660 – Hubert Gautier, French mathematician and engineer (d. 1737)
*1665 – Giacomo F. Maraldi, French-Italian astronomer and mathematician (d. 1729)
*1670 – James FitzJames, 1st Duke of Berwick, French general and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire (d. 1734)
*1725 – Jean-Baptiste Greuze, French painter and educator (d. 1805)
*1754 – William Murdoch, Scottish engineer and inventor, created gas lighting (d. 1839)
* 1754 – Banastre Tarleton, English general and politician (d. 1833)
*1765 – William IV of the United Kingdom (d. 1837)
*1787 – John Owen, American governor of North Carolina (d. 1841)
*1789 – Augustin-Louis Cauchy, French mathematician and academic (d. 1857)
*1798 – Jules Michelet, French historian and philosopher (d. 1874)
*1800 – Hiram Walden, American general and politician (d. 1880)
*1801 – Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, Dutch historian and politician (d. 1876)
*1813 – Jean Stas, Belgian chemist and physician (d. 1891)
*1816 – Charles Frédéric Gerhardt, French chemist and academic (d. 1856)
*1823 – Nathaniel Everett Green, English painter and astronomer (d. 1899)
*1826 – Carl Gegenbaur, German anatomist and academic (d. 1903)
*1829 – Otto Goldschmidt, German composer, conductor and pianist (d. 1907)
*1840 – Ferdinand Hamer, Dutch bishop and missionary (d. 1900)
*1851 – Charles Barrois, French geologist and palaeontologist (d. 1939)
*1856 – Medora de Vallombrosa, Marquise de Morès, American heiress (d. 1921)
*1858 – Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria (d. 1889)
*1862 – Emilio Salgari, Italian journalist and author (d. 1911)
*1869 – William Henry Ogilvie, Scottish-Australian poet and author (d. 1963)
*1872 – Aubrey Beardsley, English author and illustrator (d. 1898)
*1878 – Richard Girulatis, German footballer and manager (d. 1963)
*1879 – Claude Grahame-White, English pilot and engineer (d. 1959)
*1884 – Chandler Egan, American golfer and architect (d. 1936)
*1885 – Édouard Fabre, Canadian runner (d. 1939)
*1886 – Ruth Manning-Sanders, Welsh-English author and poet (d. 1988)
*1887 – James Paul Moody, English sailor (d. 1912)
*1891 – Emiliano Mercado del Toro, Puerto Rican-American soldier (d. 2007)
*1892 – Charles Vanel, French actor and director (d. 1989)
*1894 – Christian Schad, German painter (d. 1982)
*1895 – Blossom Rock, American actress (d. 1978)
*1897 – Keith Arbuthnott, 15th Viscount of Arbuthnott, Scottish soldier and peer (d. 1966)
1901–present
*1902 – Angel Karaliychev, Bulgarian author (d. 1972)
*1903 – Kostas Giannidis, Greek pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1984)
*1904 – Count Basie, American pianist, composer, and bandleader (d. 1984)
*1905 – Bipin Gupta, Indian actor and producer (d. 1981)
*1906 – Friz Freleng, American animator, director, and producer (d. 1995)
*1907 – P. Jeevanandham, Indian lawyer and politician (d. 1963)
*1909 – Nikolay Bogolyubov, Russian mathematician and physicist (d. 1992)
*1912 – Toe Blake, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (d. 1995)
*1914 – Doug Wright, English cricketer and coach (d. 1998)
*1916 – Bill Lee, American actor and singer (d. 1980)
* 1916 – Consuelo Velázquez, Mexican pianist and songwriter (d. 2005)
*1917 – Leonid Hurwicz, Russian economist and mathematician (d. 2008)
*1918 – Billy Reay, Canadian-American ice hockey player and coach (d. 2004)
*1921 – Reuven Feuerstein, Romanian-Israeli psychologist and academic (d. 2014)
*1922 – Albert Irvin, English soldier and painter (d. 2015)
*1923 – Keith Allen, Canadian-American ice hockey player, coach, and manager (d. 2014)
*1924 – Jack Buck, American sportscaster (d. 2002)
* 1924 – Jack Weston, American actor (d. 1996)
*1926 – Can Yücel, Turkish poet and translator (d. 1999)
*1927 – Thomas S. Monson, American religious leader, 16th President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (d. 2018)
*1928 – Addison Farmer, American bassist (d. 1963)
* 1928 – Art Farmer, American trumpet player and composer (d. 1999)
* 1928 – Bud McFadin, American football player (d. 2006)
*1929 – Herman Badillo, Puerto Rican-American lawyer and politician (d. 2014)
* 1929 – X. J. Kennedy, American poet, translator, anthologist, editor
* 1929 – Ahmed Kathrada, South African politician and political prisoner (d. 2017)
*1930 – Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (d. 2002)
* 1930 – Frank Perry, American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1995)
*1932 – Menashe Kadishman, Israeli sculptor and painter (d. 2015)
* 1932 – Melvin Van Peebles, American actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 2021)
*1933 – Janet Baker, English soprano and educator
* 1933 – Michael Dacher, German mountaineer (d. 1994)
* 1933 – Barry Norman, English author and critic (d. 2017)
* 1933 – Erik Paaske, Danish actor and singer (d. 1992)
*1934 – Sudhakarrao Naik, Indian lawyer and politician, 13th Chief Minister of Maharashtra (d. 2001)
* 1934 – Paul Panhuysen, Dutch composer (d. 2015)
*1936 – Wilt Chamberlain, American basketball player and coach (d. 1999)
* 1936 – Radish Tordia, Georgian painter and educator
*1937 – Donald Dewar, Scottish politician, first First Minister of Scotland (d. 2000)
* 1937 – Gustavo Noboa, Ecuadorian academic and politician, 51st President of Ecuador (d. 2021)
* 1937 – Robert Stone, American novelist and short story writer (d. 2015)
*1938 – Steve Cowper, American politician, 6th Governor of Alaska
* 1938 – Kenny Rogers, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actor (d. 2020)
* 1938 – Mike Weston, English rugby player (d. 2023)
*1939 – James Burton, American Hall of Fame guitarist
* 1939 – Festus Mogae, Botswana economist and politician, third President of Botswana
* 1939 – Clarence Williams III, American actor (d. 2021)
*1940 – Dominick Harrod, English journalist, historian, and author (d. 2013)
* 1940 – Endre Szemerédi, Hungarian-American mathematician and computer scientist
*1941 – Jackie DeShannon, American singer-songwriter
*1943 – Patrick Demarchelier, French photographer (d. 2022)
* 1943 – Jonathan Schell, American journalist and author (d. 2014)
* 1943 – Lucius Shepard, American author and critic (d. 2014)
* 1943 – Hugh Wilson, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2018)
*1944 – Perry Christie, Bahamian politician, third Prime Minister of the Bahamas
* 1944 – Peter Weir, Australian director, producer, and screenwriter
*1945 – Basil Poledouris, Greek-American composer, conductor (d. 2006)
* 1945 – Celia Brayfield, English journalist and author
* 1945 – Jerry DaVanon, American baseball player
* 1945 – Willie Lanier, American football player
* 1945 – Patty McCormack, American actress
*1947 – Carl Giammarese, American singer-songwriter and musician
*1949 – Loretta Devine, American actress and singer
* 1949 – Daniel Sivan, Israeli scholar and academic
*1950 – Patrick Juvet, Swiss singer-songwriter and model (d. 2021)
* 1950 – Arthur Bremer, American attempted assassin of George Wallace
*1951 – Eric Goles, Chilean mathematician and computer scientist
* 1951 – Glenn Hughes, English musician
* 1951 – Yana Mintoff, Maltese politician, economist and educator
* 1951 – Chesley V. Morton, American businessman and politician
*1952 – Keith Hart, Canadian firefighter, wrestler, and trainer
* 1952 – Jiří Paroubek, Czech soldier and politician, sixth Prime Minister of the Czech Republic
* 1952 – Bernadette Porter, English nun and educator
* 1952 – Joe Strummer, English singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2002)
*1953 – Ivan Stang, American author, publisher, and director
*1954 – Archie Griffin, American football player
* 1954 – Steve Smith, American drummer
* 1954 – Mark Williams, New Zealand-Australian singer-songwriter
*1956 – Kim Cattrall, English-Canadian actress
* 1956 – Jon Tester, American farmer and politician
*1957 – Frank Pastore, American baseball player and radio host (d. 2012)
*1958 – Steve Case, American businessman, co-founder of America Online (AOL)
* 1958 – Mark Williams, Australian footballer and coach
*1959 – Anne Hobbs, English tennis player and coach
* 1959 – Jim McMahon, American football player and coach
*1961 – Gerardo Barbero, Argentinian chess player and coach (d. 2001)
* 1961 – V. B. Chandrasekhar, Indian cricketer and coach (d. 2019)
* 1961 – Stephen Hillenburg, American marine biologist, cartoonist, animator and creator of SpongeBob SquarePants (d. 2018)
*1962 – Cleo King, American actress
* 1962 – John Korfas, Greek-American basketball player and coach
* 1962 – Gilberto Santa Rosa, Puerto Rican bandleader and singer of salsa and bolero
* 1962 – Pete Weber, American bowler
*1963 – Mohammed VI of Morocco, King of Morocco
* 1963 – Nigel Pearson, English footballer and manager
*1964 – Gary Elkerton, Australian surfer
*1965 – Jim Bullinger, American baseball player
*1966 – John Wetteland, American baseball player and coach
*1967 – Darren Bewick, Australian footballer
* 1967 – Charb, French journalist and cartoonist (d. 2015)
* 1967 – Carrie-Anne Moss, Canadian actress
* 1967 – Serj Tankian, Lebanese-born Armenian-American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer
*1968 – Dina Carroll, English singer-songwriter
* 1968 – Goran Ćurko, Serbian footballer
* 1968 – Laura Trevelyan, English journalist and author
*1969 – Bruce Anstey, New Zealand motorcycle racer
* 1969 – Josée Chouinard, Canadian figure skater
*1970 – Craig Counsell, American baseball player and coach
* 1970 – Erik Dekker, Dutch cyclist and manager
* 1970 – Cathy Weseluck, Canadian actress
*1971 – Mamadou Diallo, Senegalese footballer
* 1971 – Robert Harvey, Australian footballer and coach
* 1971 – Liam Howlett, English keyboard player, DJ, and producer
*1973 – Sergey Brin, Russian-American computer scientist and businessman, co-founded Google
* 1973 – Steve McKenna, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
*1974 – Martin Andanar, Filipino journalist and radio host
* 1974 – Paul Mellor, Australian rugby league player and referee
*1975 – Simon Katich, Australian cricketer and manager
* 1975 – Alicia Witt, American actress and musician
*1976 – Alex Brooks, American ice hockey player and scout
* 1976 – Jeff Cunningham, Jamaican-American soccer player
* 1976 – Robert Miles, Australian rugby league player
* 1976 – Ramón Vázquez, Puerto Rican-American baseball player and coach
*1978 – Peter Buxton, English rugby player and manager
* 1978 – Reuben Droughns, American football player and coach
* 1978 – Lee Gronkiewicz, American baseball player and coach
* 1978 – Alan Lee, Irish footballer and coach
* 1978 – Jason Marquis, American baseball player
*1979 – Kelis, American singer-songwriter, producer, chef and author
* 1979 – Diego Klattenhoff, Canadian actor
*1980 – Bryan Allen, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1980 – Burney Lamar, American race car driver
* 1980 – Paul Menard, American race car driver
* 1980 – Jasmin Wöhr, German tennis player
*1981 – Jarrod Lyle, Australian golfer (d. 2018)
* 1981 – Cameron Winklevoss, American rower and businessman, co-founded ConnectU
* 1981 – Tyler Winklevoss, American rower and businessman, co-founded ConnectU
* 1981 – Ross Thomas, American actor
*1982 – Jason Eaton, New Zealand rugby player
* 1982 – Omar Sachedina, Canadian television journalist, correspondent, and news anchor
*1983 – Brody Jenner, American television personality and model
* 1983 – Scott McDonald, Australian footballer
*1984 – Neil Dexter, South African cricketer
* 1984 – Melvin Upton, Jr., American baseball player
* 1984 – Alizée, French singer
*1985 – Nicolás Almagro, Spanish tennis player
* 1985 – Aleksandra Kiryashova, Russian pole vaulter
*1986 – Usain Bolt, Jamaican sprinter
* 1986 – Wout Brama, Dutch footballer
* 1986 – Koki Sakamoto, Japanese gymnast
* 1986 – Brooks Wheelan, American comedian and actor
*1987 – DeWanna Bonner, American-Macedonian basketball player
* 1987 – Cody Kasch, American actor
* 1987 – J. D. Martinez, American baseball player
* 1987 – Jodie Meeks, American basketball player and coach
*1988 – Robert Lewandowski, Polish footballer
* 1988 – Joanna Mitrosz, Polish rhythmic gymnast
* 1988 – Kacey Musgraves, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
*1989 – Charlison Benschop, Dutch footballer
* 1989 – James Davey, English rugby league player
* 1989 – Matteo Gentili, Italian footballer
* 1989 – Hayden Panettiere, American actress
* 1989 – Aleix Vidal, Spanish footballer
*1990 – Bo Burnham, American comedian, musician, actor, filmmaker and poet
* 1990 – Christian Vázquez, Puerto Rican baseball player
*1991 – Leandro Bacuna, Dutch footballer
* 1991 – Jesse Rutherford, American singer and songwriter
*1992 – Brandon Drury, American baseball player
* 1992 – RJ Mitte, American actor
* 1992 – Felipe Nasr, Brazilian race car driver
*1993 – Millie Bright, English footballer
* 1993 – Mike Evans, American football player
*1994 – Alexandra Cooper, American podcaster
*1994 – Ekin-Su Cülcüloğlu, British-Turkish reality television personality, actress and model
*1995 – Dominik Kubalík, Czech ice hockey player
*1996 – Karolína Muchová, Czech tennis player
*1999 – Maxim Knight, American actor
*2000 – Corbin Carroll, American baseball player
<!-- Please do not add yourself, non-notable people, fictional characters, or people without Wikipedia articles to this list. No red links, please. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence. If there are multiple people in the same birth year, put them in alphabetical order. Do not trust "this day in history" websites for accurate date information. -->
Deaths
Pre-1600
* 672 – Emperor Kōbun of Japan (b. 648)
* 784 – Alberic, archbishop of Utrecht
* 913 – Tang Daoxi, Chinese general
*1131 – King Baldwin II of Jerusalem
*1148 – William II, Count of Nevers (b. c. 1089)
*1157 – Alfonso VII of León and Castile (b. 1105)
*1245 – Alexander of Hales, English theologian
*1271 – Alphonse, Count of Poitiers (b. 1220)
*1534 – Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, 44th Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller (b. 1464)
*1568 – Jean Parisot de Valette, 49th Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller (b. 1495)
1601–1900
*1614 – Elizabeth Báthory, Hungarian countess and purported serial killer (b. 1560)
*1622 – Juan de Tassis, 2nd Count of Villamediana, Spanish poet and politician (b. 1582)
*1627 – Jacques Mauduit, French composer and academic (b. 1557)
*1673 – Henry Grey, 1st Earl of Stamford, English soldier (b. 1599)
*1689 – William Cleland, Scottish poet and soldier (b. 1661)
*1870 – Ma Xinyi, Chinese general and politician, Viceroy of Liangjiang (b. 1821)
*1888 – James Farnell, Australian politician, eighth Premier of New South Wales (b. 1825)
1901–present
*1905 – Alexander von Oettingen, Estonian theologian and statistician (b. 1827)
*1910 – Bertalan Székely, Hungarian painter and academic (b. 1835)
*1911 – Mahboob Ali Khan, sixth Nizam of Hyderabad State (b. 1866)
*1919 – Laurence Doherty, English tennis player (b. 1875)
*1935 – John Hartley, English tennis player (b. 1849)
*1940 – Hermann Obrecht, Swiss lawyer and politician (b. 1882)
* 1940 – Ernest Thayer, American poet and author (b. 1863)
* 1940 – Leon Trotsky, Russian theorist and politician, founded the Red Army (b. 1879)
*1943 – Henrik Pontoppidan, Danish journalist and author, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1857)
*1947 – Ettore Bugatti, Italian-French engineer and businessman, founded Bugatti (b. 1881)
*1951 – Constant Lambert, English composer and conductor (b. 1905)
*1957 – Mait Metsanurk, Estonian author and playwright (b. 1879)
* 1957 – Nels Stewart, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1902)
* 1957 – Harald Sverdrup, Norwegian meteorologist and oceanographer (b. 1888)
*1960 – David B. Steinman, American engineer, designed the Mackinac Bridge (b. 1886)
*1964 – Palmiro Togliatti, Italian journalist and politician, Italian Minister of Justice (b. 1893)
*1968 – Germaine Guèvremont, Canadian journalist and author (b. 1893)
*1971 – George Jackson, American activist and author, co-founded the Black Guerrilla Family (b. 1941)
*1974 – Buford Pusser, American police officer (b. 1937)
* 1974 – Kirpal Singh, Indian spiritual master (b. 1894)
*1978 – Charles Eames, American architect, co-designed the Eames House (b. 1907)
*1979 – Giuseppe Meazza, Italian footballer and manager (b. 1910)
*1981 – Kaka Kalelkar, Indian Hindi Writer(b. 1885)
*1983 – Benigno Aquino Jr., Filipino journalist and politician (b. 1932)
*1988 – Teodoro de Villa Diaz, Filipino guitarist and songwriter (b. 1963)
* 1988 – Ray Eames, American architect, co-designed the Eames House (b. 1912)
*1989 – Raul Seixas, Brazilian singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1945)
*1993 – Tatiana Troyanos, American soprano and actress (b. 1938)
*1995 – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Indian-American astrophysicist and mathematician, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1910)
* 1995 – Chuck Stevenson, American race car driver (b. 1919)
*1996 – Mary Two-Axe Earley, Canadian indigenous women's rights activist (b. 1911)
*2000 – Tomata du Plenty, American singer-songwriter and playwright (b. 1948)
* 2000 – Daniel Lisulo, Zambian politician, third Prime Minister of Zambia (b. 1930)
* 2000 – Andrzej Zawada, Polish mountaineer and author (b. 1928)
*2001 – Calum MacKay, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1927)
*2003 – John Coplans, British artist (b. 1920)
* 2003 – Kathy Wilkes, English philosopher and academic (b. 1946)
*2004 – Sachidananda Routray, Indian Oriya-language poet (b. 1916)
*2005 – Martin Dillon, American tenor and educator (b. 1957)
* 2005 – Robert Moog, American businessman, founded Moog Music (b. 1934)
* 2005 – Dahlia Ravikovitch, Israeli poet and translator (b. 1936)
*2005 – Marcus Schmuck, Austrian mountaineer (b. 1925)
*2006 – Bismillah Khan, Indian musician, Bharat Ratna recipient (b. 1916)
*2006 – Paul Fentener van Vlissingen, Dutch businessman and philanthropist (b. 1941)
*2007 – Frank Bowe, American academic (b. 1947)
* 2007 – Siobhan Dowd, British author (b. 1960)
* 2007 – Elizabeth P. Hoisington, American general (b. 1918)
*2008 – Jerry Finn, American engineer and producer (b. 1969)
*2009 – Rex Shelley, Singaporean engineer and author (b. 1930)
*2010 – Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, Argentinean sociologist and author (b. 1941)
*2012 – Georg Leber, German soldier and politician, Federal Minister of Defence for Germany (b. 1920)
* 2012 – J. Frank Raley Jr., American soldier and politician (b. 1926)
* 2012 – Don Raleigh, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (b. 1926)
* 2012 – Guy Spitaels, Belgian academic and politician, seventh Minister-President of Wallonia (b. 1931)
* 2012 – William Thurston, American mathematician and academic (b. 1946)
*2013 – Jean Berkey, American lawyer and politician (b. 1938)
* 2013 – Sid Bernstein, American record producer (b. 1918)
* 2013 – C. Gordon Fullerton, American colonel, engineer, and astronaut (b. 1936)
* 2013 – Fred Martin, Scottish footballer (b. 1929)
* 2013 – Enos Nkala, Zimbabwean politician, Zimbabwean Minister of Defence (b. 1932)
*2014 – Gerry Anderson, Irish radio and television host (b. 1944)
* 2014 – Helen Bamber, English psychotherapist and academic (b. 1925)
* 2014 – Steven R. Nagel, American colonel, engineer, and astronaut (b. 1946)
* 2014 – Jean Redpath, Scottish singer-songwriter (b. 1937)
* 2014 – Albert Reynolds, Irish businessman and politician, ninth Taoiseach of Ireland (b. 1932)
*2015 – Colin Beyer, New Zealand lawyer and businessman (b. 1938)
* 2015 – Wang Dongxing, Chinese commander and politician (b. 1916)
* 2015 – Jimmy Evert, American tennis player and coach (b. 1924)
*2017 – Bajram Rexhepi, First Kosovan Prime Ministers of UN mission administration in Kosovo (b. 1954)
*2018 – Stefán Karl Stefánsson, Icelandic actor and singer (b. 1975)
*2019 – Celso Piña, Mexican singer, composer, arranger, and accordionist (b. 1953)
*2024 – Nell McCafferty, Northern Irish journalist, playwright and civil rights campaigner (b. 1944)
*2024 – Bill Pascrell, American politician (b. 1937)
*2024 – John Amos, American actor (b. 1939)
<!-- Do not add people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence. -->
Holidays and observances
* Christian Feast Day:
** Abraham of Smolensk (Eastern Orthodox Church)
** Euprepius of Verona
** Maximilian of Antioch
** Our Lady of Knock
** Pope Pius X
** Sidonius Apollinaris
** August 21 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
* Ninoy Aquino Day (Philippines)
* Youth Day (Morocco)
* World Senior Citizen's Day
References
External links
*
*
*
Category:Days of August | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_21 | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.102197 |
1500 | Dodo (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) | The Dodo is a fictional character appearing in Chapters 2 and 3 of the 1865 book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). The Dodo is a caricature of the author. A popular but unsubstantiated belief is that Dodgson chose the particular animal to represent himself because of his stammer, and thus would accidentally introduce himself as "Do-do-dodgson".
Historically, the dodo was a flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. It became extinct in the mid 17th century during the colonisation of the island by the Dutch.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
thumb|left|upright|Depiction by Arthur Rackham, 1907
In this passage Lewis Carroll incorporated references to the original boating expedition of 4 July 1862 during which Alice's Adventures were first told, with Alice as herself, and the others represented by birds: the Lory was Lorina Liddell, the Eaglet was Edith Liddell, the Dodo was Dodgson, and the Duck was Rev. Robinson Duckworth. In order to get dry after a swim, the Dodo proposes that everyone run a Caucus race – where the participants run in patterns of any shape, starting and leaving off whenever they like, so that everyone wins. At the end of the race, Alice distributes comfits from her pocket to all as prizes. However this leaves no prize for herself. The Dodo inquires what else she has in her pocket. As she has only a thimble, the Dodo requests it from her and then awards it to Alice as her prize. The Caucus Race, as depicted by Carroll, is a satire on the political caucus system, mocking its lack of clarity and decisiveness.
Interpretations
Disney animated film version
In the Disney film, the Dodo plays a much greater role in the story than in the book. He is merged with the character of Pat the Gardener, which leads to him sometimes being nicknamed Pat the Dodo, but this name is never mentioned in the film. The Dodo is also the leader of the caucus race. He has the appearance and personality of a sea captain. The Dodo is voiced by Bill Thompson and animated by Milt Kahl.
Dodo is first seen as Alice is floating on the sea in a bottle. Dodo is seen singing, but when Alice asks him for help, he does not notice her. On shore, Dodo is seen on a rock, organizing a caucus race. This race involves running around until one gets dry, but the attempts are hampered by incoming waves.
Dodo is later summoned by the White Rabbit, when the rabbit believes a monster, actually Alice having magically grown to a giant size, is inside his home. Dodo brings Bill the Lizard, and attempts to get him to go down the chimney. Bill refuses at first, but Dodo is able to convince him otherwise. However, the soot causes Alice to sneeze, sending Bill high up into the sky. Dodo then decides to burn the house down, much to the chagrin of the White Rabbit. He begins gathering wood, such as the furniture, for this purpose. However, Alice is soon able to return to a smaller size and exit the house by eating a carrot from the White Rabbit's garden.
The White Rabbit soon leaves, while Dodo asks for matches, not realizing that the situation has been resolved. He then asks Alice for a match, but when she doesn't have any, Dodo complains about the lack of cooperation and uses his pipe to light the fire.
The Dodo later appears briefly at the end of the film, conducting another Caucus Race while Alice is being chased by the Queen of Hearts and her card soldiers.
In Alice's Wonderland Bakery, appears Captain Dodo, being unknown if he is the same character from the film, or a descendant as is the case of other characters from Wonderland in the series (the plot placed several decades after the events in the film). Captain Dodo also has a son named Jojo.
Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland version
In Tim Burton's adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, the Dodo's appearance retains the subtle apparent nature from John Tenniel's illustration. He bears a down of brilliant blue and wears a navy blue waistcoat and white spats along with glasses and a cane. He is one of Alice's good-willed advisers, taking first note of her abilities as the true Alice. He is also one of the oldest inhabitants. His name is Uilleam, and he is portrayed by Michael Gough. He goes with the White Rabbit, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and Dormouse to take Alice to Caterpillar to decide whether Alice is the real one. He is later captured by the Red Queen's forces. When Alice came to the Red Queen's castle, he was seen at the Red Queen's castle yard as a caddy for the Queen's croquet game. After the Red Queen orders the release of the Jubjub bird to kill all her subjects from rebelling, he is then seen briefly running from it when the Tweedles went to hide from it and escaped but was snatched by the Jubjub and was never seen again throughout the film.
His name may be based on a lecture on William the Conqueror from Chapter Three of the original novel. The character is voiced by Michael Gough in his final feature film role before his death in 2011. Gough came out of retirement to appear in the film but the character only speaks three lines, so Gough managed to record in one day.
References
Category:Lewis Carroll characters
Category:Fictional flightless birds
Category:Literary characters introduced in 1865
Category:Dodo
Category:Male characters in literature | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_(Alice's_Adventures_in_Wonderland) | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.106809 |
1501 | Lory (disambiguation) | A Lory is a small to medium-sized arboreal parrot.
Lory may also refer to:
People
Al De Lory (1930–2012), an American record producer, arranger, conductor and session musician
Donna De Lory (born 1964), an American singer, dancer and songwriter
Milo B. Lory (1903–1974), an American sound editor
Other uses
Lory, a fictional parrot, a minor character in the Alice series by Lewis Carroll
Lory Lake, in Minnesota, U.S.
Lory State Park, near Fort Collins, Colorado, U.S.
See also
Lorry (disambiguation)
Lori (disambiguation)
Loris (disambiguation)
Loris, strepsirrhine primates | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lory_(disambiguation) | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.108388 |
1504 | Albert | Albert may refer to:
Companies
Albert Computers, Inc., a computer manufacturer in the 1980s
Albert Czech Republic, a supermarket chain in the Czech Republic
Albert Heijn, a supermarket chain in the Netherlands
Albert Market, a street market in The Gambia
Albert Music, an Australian music company now known as Alberts
Albert Productions, a record label
Albert (organisation), an environmental organisation concerning film and television productions
Entertainment
Albert (1985 film), a Czechoslovak film directed by František Vláčil
Albert (2015 film), a film by Karsten Kiilerich
Albert (2016 film), an American TV movie
Albert (album), by Ed Hall, 1988
"Albert" (short story), by Leo Tolstoy
Albert (comics), a character in Marvel Comics
Albert (Discworld), a character in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series
Albert, a character in Dario Argento's 1977 film Suspiria
People
Albert (given name)
Albert (surname)
Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha
Albert (dancer) (François-Ferdinand 1789–1865), French ballet dancer
Albert, a ring name of professional wrestler Matt Bloom (born 1972)
Places
Canada
Albert (1846–1973 electoral district), a provincial electoral district in New Brunswick from 1846 to 1973
Albert (federal electoral district), a federal electoral district in New Brunswick from 1867 to 1903
Albert (provincial electoral district), a provincial electoral district in New Brunswick
Albert County, New Brunswick
Rural Municipality of Albert, Manitoba, Canada
United States
Albert, Kansas
Albert Township, Michigan
Albert, Oklahoma
Albert, Texas, a ghost town
The Albert (Detroit), formerly the Griswold Building, an American apartment block
Elsewhere
Albert (Belize House constituency), a Belize City-based electoral constituency
Albert, New South Wales, a town in Australia
Electoral district of Albert, a former electoral district in Queensland, Australia
Albert, Somme, a French commune
Transportation
Albert (automobile), a 1920s British light car
Albert (motorcycle), a 1920s German vehicle brand
Albert (tugboat), a 1979 U.S. tugboat
Other
719 Albert, Amor asteroid
Albert (crater), a lunar crater
The Albert, a pub in London
Albert and Alberta Gator, mascots for the Florida Gators
See also
Alberta (disambiguation)
Alberts (disambiguation)
Alberte (born 1963), a Danish singer and actress
Albertet, a diminutive of Albert
Albret, a seigneurie in Landes, France
Aubert, an Anglo-Saxon surname | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.112578 |
1505 | Albert I | Albert I may refer to:
People
Born before 1300
Albert I, Count of Vermandois (917–987)
Albert I, Count of Namur ()
Albert I of Moha
Albert I of Brandenburg (), first margrave of Brandenburg
Albert I, Margrave of Meissen (1158–1195)
Albert I of Käfernburg (), Archbishop of Magdeburg
Albert I of Pietengau ()
Albert I, Lord of Mecklenburg (after 1230–1265)
Albert I, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1236–1279), second duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg
Albert I of Germany (1255–1308), king of Germany and archduke of Austria
Albert I, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst (–1316)
Born after 1300
Albert I, Duke of Bavaria (1336–1404), duke of Bavaria-Straubing, count of Holland, Hainault and Zealand
Albert I, Duke of Mecklenburg-Stargard
Albert I, Duke of Brunswick-Grubenhagen ()
Albert I, Duke of Münsterberg-Oels (1468–1511)
Albert I, Duke of Prussia (1490–1568), first Duke of Prussia
Albert I, Prince of Monaco (1848–1922)
Albert I of Belgium (1875–1934), king of the Belgians
Albert I Kalonji Ditunga (1929–2015), Congolese politician
Other uses
Albert I (monkey), the first mammal used in a subspace rocket launch, June 11, 1948
See also
Albert (given name) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_I | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.114600 |
1506 | Albert II | Albert II may refer to:
Monkeys
Albert II (monkey), first primate and first mammal in space, died on impact following V-2 flight June 14, 1949
People
Albert II, Count of Namur (died 1067)
Albert II, Count of Tyrol (died 1120s)
Albert II, Margrave of Brandenburg (–1220)
Albert II, Archbishop of Riga (1200–1273)
Albert II, Margrave of Meissen (1240–1314),
Albert II, Duke of Saxony (1250–1298)
Albert II, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (–1318)
Albert II of Austria (1298–1358)
Albert II, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst (died 1362)
Albert II, Duke of Mecklenburg (1318–1379)
Albert II, Duke of Bavaria-Straubing (1368–1397)
Albert II, Count of Holstein-Rendsburg (1369–1403)
Albert II of Germany (1397–1439), King of Germany, Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia, Duke of Austria
Albert II, Duke of Brunswick-Grubenhagen (1419–1485)
Albert II, Duke of Mecklenburg-Stargard (1400s)
Albert II, Count of Hoya (1526–1563)
Albert II, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach (1620–1667)
Albert II of Belgium (born 1934), King of the Belgians
Albert II, Prince of Monaco (born 1958), ruler of the principality of Monaco
Albert II, Prince of Thurn and Taxis (born 1983), Prince of Thurn und Taxis, German prince | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_II | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.116385 |
1507 | Albert III | Albert III may refer to:
Albert III, Count of Namur (1048–1102)
Albert III, Count of Habsburg (died 1199)
Albert III, Margrave of Brandenburg-Salzwedel (–1300)
Albert III, Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg (1281–1308)
Albert III, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst (died 1359)
Albert III, Count of Gorizia (died 1374)
Albert III of Mecklenburg (c. 1338 – 1412)
Albert III, Duke of Austria (1349–1395)
Albert III, Duke of Saxe-Wittenberg (1375/1380–1422)
Albrecht III Achilles, Elector of Brandenburg (1414–1486)
Albert III, Duke of Bavaria (1438–1460)
Albert III, Duke of Saxony (1443–1500) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_III | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.117724 |
1508 | Albert Alcibiades, Margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach | | death_place = Pforzheim
}}
Albert II (; 28 March 15228 January 1557) was the margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach (Brandenburg-Bayreuth) from 1527 to 1553. He was a member of the Franconian branch of the House of Hohenzollern. Because of his bellicose nature, Albert was given the cognomen Bellator ("the Warlike") during his lifetime. Posthumously, he became known as Alcibiades.Biography
Albert was born in Ansbach and, losing his father Casimir in 1527, he came under the regency of his uncle George, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, a strong adherent of Protestantism.
In 1541, he received Bayreuth as his share of the family lands, but as the chief town of his principality was Kulmbach, he is sometimes referred to as the Margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach.
His restless and turbulent nature marked him out for a military career; and having collected a small band of soldiers, he assisted Emperor Charles V in his war with France in 1543.
The Peace of Crépy in September 1544 deprived him of this employment, but he won a considerable reputation, and when Charles was preparing to attack the Schmalkaldic League, he took pains to win Albert's assistance.
Sharing in the attack on the Electorate of Saxony, Albert was taken prisoner at Rochlitz in March 1547 by Elector John Frederick of Saxony, but was released as a result of the Emperor's victory at the Battle of Mühlberg in the succeeding April.
He then followed the fortunes of his friend Elector Maurice of Saxony, deserted Charles, and joined the league which proposed to overthrow the Emperor by an alliance with King Henry II of France.
He took part in the subsequent campaign, but when the Peace of Passau was signed in August 1552 he separated himself from his allies and began a crusade of plunder in Franconia, which led to the Second Margrave War.
Having extorted a large sum of money from the citizens of Nuremberg, he quarrelled with his supporter, the French King, and offered his services to the Emperor.
Charles, anxious to secure such a famous fighter, gladly assented to Albert's demands and gave the imperial sanction to his possession of the lands taken from the bishops of Würzburg and Bamberg; and his conspicuous bravery was of great value to the Emperor on the retreat from the Siege of Metz in January 1553.
When Charles left Germany a few weeks later, Albert renewed his depredations in Franconia. These soon became so serious that a league was formed to crush him, and Maurice of Saxony led an army against his former comrade.
The rival forces met at Sievershausen on 9 July 1553, and after a combat of unusual ferocity Albert was put to flight. Henry, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, then took command of the troops of the league, and after Albert had been placed under the Imperial ban in December 1553 he was defeated by Duke Henry, and compelled to flee to France.
He there entered the service of Henry II of France and had undertaken a campaign to regain his lands when he died at Pforzheim on 8 January 1557.
He is defined by Thomas Carlyle as "a failure of a Fritz," with "features" of a Frederick the Great in him, "but who burnt away his splendid qualities as a mere temporary shine for the able editors, and never came to anything, full of fire, too much of it wildfire, not in the least like an Alcibiades except in the change of fortune he underwent". He was buried at Heilsbronn Münster. His hymn "Was mein Got will, das g'scheh allzeit" was translated as "The will of God is always best".
References
Citations
Works cited
* Endnote: See J. Voigt, Markgraf Albrecht Alcibiades von Brandenburg-Kulmbach (Berlin, 1852).
Category:1522 births
Category:1557 deaths
Category:House of Hohenzollern
Category:People from Ansbach
Category:People from the Principality of Ansbach
Category:Margraves of Bayreuth | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Alcibiades,_Margrave_of_Brandenburg-Kulmbach | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.121430 |
1509 | Albert the Bear | | birth_place | death_date (aged 70)
| death_place = possibly Stendal
| burial_place = Ballenstedt
}}
Albert the Bear (; 1100 – 18 November 1170) was the first margrave of Brandenburg from 1157 to his death and was briefly duke of Saxony between 1138 and 1142.
Life
Albert was the only son of Otto, Count of Ballenstedt, and Eilika, daughter of Magnus Billung, Duke of Saxony. He inherited his father's valuable estates in northern Saxony in 1123, and on his mother's death, in 1142, succeeded to one-half of the lands of the house of Billung. Albert was a loyal vassal of his relation, Lothar I, Duke of Saxony, from whom, about 1123, he received the Margraviate of Lusatia, to the east; after Lothar became King of the Germans, he accompanied him on a disastrous expedition to Bohemia against the upstart, Soběslav I, Duke of Bohemia in 1126 at the Battle of Kulm, where he suffered a short imprisonment.
Albert's entanglements in Saxony stemmed from his desire to expand his inherited estates there. After the death of his brother-in-law, Henry II, Margrave of the Nordmark, who controlled a small area on the Elbe called the Saxon Northern March, in 1128, Albert, disappointed at not receiving this fief himself, attacked Udo V, Count of Stade, the heir, and was consequently deprived of Lusatia by Lothar. Udo, however, was said to have been assassinated by servants of Albert on 15 March 1130 near Aschersleben. In spite of this, Albert went to Italy in 1132 in the train of the king, and his services there were rewarded in 1134 by the investiture of the Northern March, which was again without a ruler.
In 1138 Conrad III, the Hohenstaufen King of the Germans, deprived Albert's cousin and nemesis, Henry the Proud, of his Saxon duchy, which was awarded to Albert if he could take it. After some initial success in his efforts to take possession, Albert was driven from Saxony, and also from his Northern March by a combined force of Henry and Jaxa of Köpenick, and compelled to take refuge in south Germany. Henry died in 1139 and an arrangement was found. Henry's son, Henry the Lion, received the duchy of Saxony in 1142. In the same year, Albert renounced the Saxon duchy and received the counties of Weimar and Orlamünde.
Once he was firmly established in the Northern March, Albert's covetous eye lay also on the thinly populated lands to the north and east. For three years he was occupied in campaigns against the Slavic Wends, who as pagans were considered fair game, and whose subjugation to Christianity was the aim of the Wendish Crusade of 1147 in which Albert took part. Albert was a part of the army that besieged Demmin, and at the end of the war, recovered Havelberg, which had been lost since 983. Diplomatic measures were more successful, and by an arrangement made with the last of the Wendish princes of Brandenburg, Pribislav-Henry of the Hevelli, Albert secured this district when the prince died in 1150. Taking the title "Margrave in Brandenburg", he pressed the crusade against the Wends, extended the area of his mark, encouraged Dutch and German settlement in the Elbe-Havel region (Ostsiedlung), established bishoprics under his protection, and so became the founder of the Margraviate of Brandenburg in 1157, which his heirs — the House of Ascania — held until the line died out in 1320.
In 1158 a feud with Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, was interrupted by a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. On his return in 1160, he, with the consent of his sons, Siegfried not being mentioned, donated land to the Knights of Saint John in memory of his wife, Sofia, at Werben on the Elbe. Around this same time, he minted a pfennig in memory of his deceased wife. In 1162 Albert accompanied Emperor Frederick Barbarossa to Italy, where he distinguished himself at the storming of Milan.
In 1164 Albert joined a league of princes formed against Henry the Lion, and peace being made in 1169, Albert divided his territories among his six sons. He died on 18 November 1170, and was buried at Ballenstedt.
Cognomen
.]]
Albert's personal qualities won for him the cognomen of the Bear, "not from his looks or qualities, for he was a tall handsome man, but from the cognisance on his shield, an able man, had a quick eye as well as a strong hand, and could pick what way was straightest among crooked things, was the shining figure and the great man of the North in his day, got much in the North and kept it, got Brandenburg for one there, a conspicuous country ever since," says Thomas Carlyle, who called Albert "a restless, much-managing, wide-warring man." He was also called "the Handsome."
Marriage and children
Albert was married in 1124 to Sophie of Winzenburg (died 25 March 1160) and they had the following children:
# Otto I, Margrave of Brandenburg (1126/1128–7 March 1184)
# Count Hermann I of Orlamünde (died 1176), father of Siegfried III, Count of Weimar-Orlamünde
# Siegfried (died 24 October 1184), Bishop of Brandenburg from 1173 to 1180, Prince-Archbishop of Bremen, the first ranked prince, from 1180 to 1184
# Heinrich (died after 1185), a canon in Magdeburg
# Count Albert of Ballenstedt (died after 6 December 1172)
# Count Dietrich of Werben (died after 5 September 1183)
# Count Bernhard of Anhalt (1138/1142–9 February 1212), Duke of Saxony from 1180 to 1212 as Bernard III
# Hedwig (d. 1203), married to Otto II, Margrave of Meissen
# Gertrude, married in }} to Duke Děpold of Moravia
# Unknown daughter,}} married to Vladislav of Olomouc, the eldest son of Soběslav I, Duke of Bohemia
# Adelheid (died before 1162), a nun in Lamspringe
# Unknown daughter,}} married before 1146 Otto the Younger, son of Otto of Salm
# Sybille (died ), Abbess of QuedlinburgNotesReferencesWorks cited*
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General references
*
*
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External links
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20080516030944/http://carlyle.classicauthors.net/Friedrich/Friedrich14.html Thomas Carlyle, History of Friedrich ii] Chapter iv: Albert the Bear
*The History Files: [http://www.historyfiles.co.uk/KingListsEurope/GermanyBrandenburg.htm Rulers of Brandenburg]
Albert 00
Category:Margraves of Brandenburg
Category:Counts of Anhalt
Category:People from Brandenburg an der Havel
Category:Christians of the Wendish Crusade
Category:1100s births
Category:1170 deaths
Category:Year of birth uncertain
Category:Place of birth unknown | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_the_Bear | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.129618 |
1513 | Albert of Brandenburg | | birth_place = Kölln
| death_date
| death_place = Martinsburg, Mainz
| previous_post | nationality
| signature = Signatur Albrecht von Brandenburg.PNG
| created_cardinal_by = Leo X
}}
Albert of Brandenburg (; 28 June 149024 September 1545) was a German cardinal, elector, Archbishop of Mainz from 1514 to 1545, and Archbishop of Magdeburg from 1513 to 1545.
Through his notorious sale of indulgences, he became the catalyst for Martin Luther's Reformation and its staunch opponent.
Biography
Career
]]
Born in Cölln on the Spree, now a central part of Berlin, into the ruling House of Hohenzollern, Albert was the younger son of John Cicero, Elector of Brandenburg and Margaret of Thuringia.
After their father's death in 1499, Albert's older brother Joachim I Nestor became elector of Brandenburg while Albert held only the title of a margrave of Brandenburg. Albert studied at the university of Frankfurt (Oder), and in 1513 became Archbishop of Magdeburg at the age of 23 and administrator of the Diocese of Halberstadt.
In 1514 he was also elected Archbishop of Mainz and thus sovereign of the Electorate of Mainz and archchancellor of the Holy Roman Empire. By electing him, the Mainz cathedral chapter hoped for the support of the Elector of Brandenburg in defending the city of Erfurt, which belonged to the archbishopric of Mainz, against the expansionist efforts of the neighboring Saxon dukes. However, this choice violated the canonical prohibition to hold more than one bishopric. Albert also did not meet the requirements for taking over any diocese, since he had not yet reached the age, and he didn't have a college degree; therefore he received a study dispensation in 1513. Albert borrowed 20,000 guilders from Jacob Fugger to pay the confirmation fee to the Roman Curia (see: simony). In 1514 Albert suggested to Pope Leo X that a special indulgence be announced in his three dioceses as well as in his native diocese of Brandenburg and that half of the income should be used for the construction of the new St. Peter's Basilica and half for Albert's own cash register. The papal bull was issued on 31 March 1515. The indulgence was entrusted to Albert in 1517 for publication in Saxony and Brandenburg. It cost him the considerable sum of ten thousand ducats, and Albert employed Johann Tetzel for the actual preaching of the indulgence. Later, Martin Luther addressed a letter of protest to Albert concerning the conduct of Tetzel.
Largely in reaction to Tetzel's actions, Luther wrote his famous Ninety-five Theses, which led to the Reformation. Luther sent these to Albert on 31 October 1517, and according to a disputable tradition, nailed a copy to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg. Albert forwarded the theses to Rome, suspecting Luther of heresy.
As Archbishop of Mainz, he tried unsuccessfully in 1515 and 1516 to expel the Jews living in Mainz. In 1518, at the age of 28, he was made a cardinal. When the imperial election of 1519 drew near, partisans of the two leading candidates (kings Charles I of Spain and Francis I of France) eagerly solicited the vote of the Prince-Archbishop of Mainz, and Albert appears to have received a large amount of money for his vote. The electors eventually chose Charles, who became the Emperor Charles V.
Albert's large and liberal ideas, his correspondence with leading humanists, his friendship with Ulrich von Hutten whom he drew to his court, and his political ambitions, appear to have raised hopes that he could be won over to Protestantism; but after the German Peasants' War of 1525 he ranged himself definitely among the supporters of Catholicism, and was among the princes who joined the League of Dessau in July 1525. Despite the losses caused by wars, looting and sales, the Aschaffenburg collection is considered the largest Cranach collection in Europe. In addition to 17 altar wings, some of which consist of several panels, and individual paintings from the Cranach workshop, 9 autographed works by the older and 2 by the younger Cranach are on display. In addition, a crucifixion group by Hans Baldung Grien and a large number of paintings by Cranach's students. Some other altars and paintings from the school are also preserved in the St. Peter und Alexander's church and its museum. Other paintings are in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.
<gallery perrow="7">
Lucas Cranach d.Ä. - Kardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg als Heiliger Hieronymus.jpg|Cardinal Albert as Saint Jerome (Lucas Cranach the Elder)
Mathis Gothart Grünewald 011.jpg|Cardinal Albert as Saint Erasmus with Saint Mauritius (Matthias Grünewald, )
Mathis Gothart Grünewald 009.jpg|Cardinal Albert as Saint Erasmus (detail)
Albrecht-von-brandenburg-als hl-martin.jpg|Cardinal Albert as Saint Martin (Simon Franck, 1543)
Albrecht-v-Brandenburg-1520.jpg|Cardinal Albert praying before the cross (Lucas Cranach the Elder)
AB StGal Schule CranachÄ Messe Gregor02.jpg|Mass of St. Gregory with Cardinal Albert (workshop of Lucas Cranach)
Cranach il vecchio, altare pfirtscher 01, 1526–1530 ca, aschaffenburg, staatsgalerie.jpg|St. Martinus (with the facial features of Cardinal Albert) and St. Stephen (Lucas Cranach the Elder)
Simon Franck - Ursula Redinger as Saint Ursula - Stiftsmuseum Aschaffenburg.jpg|Cardinal Albert's mistress Leys Schütz as St. Ursula
</gallery>
Death
Albert died at the Martinsburg, Mainz in 1545. His tomb is in Mainz Cathedral.
Ancestry
References
Sources
* Helmut Börsch-Supan, et al. "Hohenzollern, House of." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 24 Jul. 2016.
* Roesgen, Manfred von. Kardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg : ein Renaissancefürst auf dem Mainzer Bischofsthron. Moers : Steiger, 1980.
* Schauerte, Thomas and Andreas Tacke. Der Kardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg : Renaissancefürst und Mäzen. 2 v. Regensburg : Schnell + Steiner, 2006. Contents: Bd. 1. Katalog / herausgegeben von Thomas Schauerte—Bd. 2. Essays / herausgegeben von Andreas Tacke ; mit Beiträgen von Bodo Brinkmann ... [et al.]. Note: Exhibition held September 9November 26, 2006, Halle an der Saale.
* "Prayer Book of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg." [http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/1402/simon-bening-prayer-book-of-cardinal-albrecht-of-brandenburg-flemish-about-1525-1530/ The J. Paul Getty Museum], viewed 24 July 2016.
External links
*
Category:1490 births
Category:1545 deaths
Category:16th-century German cardinals
Category:Archbishop-electors of Mainz
Category:Archbishops of Magdeburg
Category:Clergy from Berlin
Category:Knights' War
Category:Roman Catholic prince-bishops of Halberstadt
Category:Simony
Category:Sons of prince-electors | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_of_Brandenburg | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.138842 |
1514 | Albert, Duke of Prussia | Albert of Hohenzollern}}
1525
| predecessor = Duke Frederick of Saxony
| successor = Walter von Cronberg
| succession1 = Duke of Prussia
| reign1 = 10 April 152520 March 1568
| successor1 = Albert Frederick of Prussia
| house = House of Hohenzollern
| father = Frederick I of Brandenburg-Ansbach
| mother = Sophia of Poland
| spouse <br />
| issue = Anna Sophia<br />Albert Frederick
| issue-link = #Spouse and issue
| issue-pipe = among others...
| religion = Catholicism (until 1525)<br />Lutheranism (from 1525)
| birth_date = 17 May 1490
| birth_place = Ansbach, Brandenburg-Ansbach, Holy Roman Empire<br /><small>(now Bavaria, Germany)</small>
| death_date
| death_place = Tapiau Castle, Tapiau, Prussia<br /><small>(now Gvardeysk, Russia)</small>
}}
Albert of Prussia (; 17 May 149020 March 1568) was a German prince who was the 37th grand master of the Teutonic Knights and, after converting to Lutheranism, became the first ruler of the Duchy of Prussia, the secularized state that emerged from the former Monastic State of the Teutonic Knights. Albert was the first European ruler to establish Lutheranism, and thus Protestantism, as the official state religion of his lands. He proved instrumental in the political spread of Protestantism in its early stage, ruling the Prussian lands for nearly six decades (1510–1568).
Albert was great-grandson of the converted pagan ruler Jogaila of Poland and Lithuania, vanquisher of the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Grunwald. He was also a member of the Brandenburg-Ansbach branch of the House of Hohenzollern. He became grand master of the Teutonic Knights in their attempt to diplomatically win over the Polish-Lithuanian union. His skill in political administration and leadership ultimately succeeded in reversing the decline of the Teutonic Order. But Albert was sympathetic to the demands of Martin Luther, whose teachings had become popular in his lands. So he rebelled against the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire by converting the Teutonic state into a Protestant and hereditary realm, the Duchy of Prussia, for which he paid homage to his uncle, Sigismund I, king of Poland. That arrangement was confirmed by the Treaty of Kraków in 1525. Albert pledged a personal oath to the king and in return was invested with the duchy for himself and his heirs.
Albert's rule in Prussia was fairly prosperous. Although he had some trouble with the peasantry, the confiscation of the lands and treasures of the Catholic Church enabled him to propitiate the nobles and provide for the expenses of the newly established Prussian court. He was active in imperial politics, joining the League of Torgau in 1526, and acted in unison with the Protestants in plotting to overthrow Emperor Charles V after the issue of the Augsburg Interim in May 1548. Albert established schools in every town and founded the University of Königsberg in 1544. He promoted culture and arts, patronising the works of Erasmus Reinhold and Caspar Hennenberger. During the final years of his rule, Albert was forced to raise taxes instead of further confiscating now-depleted church lands, causing peasant rebellion. The intrigues of the court favourites Johann Funck and Paul Skalić also led to various religious and political disputes. Albert spent his final years virtually deprived of power and died at Tapiau on 20 March 1568. His son, Albert Frederick, succeeded him as Duke of Prussia.Early lifeAlbert was born in Ansbach in Franconia as the third son of Frederick I, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. His mother was Sophia, daughter of Casimir IV Jagiellon, Grand Duke of Lithuania and king of Poland, and his wife Elisabeth of Austria. His great-grandfather was Władysław II Jagiełło, the last pagan ruler in Europe, who defeated the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410. He was raised for a career in the Church and spent some time at the court of Hermann IV of Hesse, Elector of Cologne, who appointed him canon of the Cologne Cathedral.
Osiander's appointment was the beginning of the troubles which clouded the closing years of Albert's reign. Osiander's divergence from Luther's doctrine of justification by faith involved him in a violent quarrel with Philip Melanchthon, who had adherents in Königsberg, and these theological disputes soon created an uproar in the town. The duke strenuously supported Osiander, and the area of the quarrel soon broadened. There were no longer church lands available with which to conciliate the nobles, the burden of taxation was heavy, and Albert's rule became unpopular.
Albert was a voluminous letter writer, and corresponded with many of the leading personages of the time. Another relief by an unknown artist was included in the wall of the Albertina's original campus. This depiction, which showed the duke with his sword over his shoulder, was the popular "Albertus", the symbol of the university. The original was moved to Königsberg Public Library to protect it from the elements, while the sculptor Paul Kimritz created a duplicate for the wall. Albert Wolff also designed an equestrian statue of Albert located at the new campus of the Albertina. King's Gate contains a statue of Albert.
Albert was oft-honored in the quarter Maraunenhof in northern Königsberg. Its main street was named Herzog-Albrecht-Allee in 1906. Its town square, König-Ottokar-Platz, was renamed Herzog-Albrecht-Platz in 1934 to match its church, the Herzog-Albrecht-Gedächtniskirche.
Spouse and issue
]]
Albert married first, to Dorothea (1 August 150411 April 1547), daughter of King Frederick I of Denmark, in 1526. They had six children:
* Anna Sophia (11 June 15276 February 1591), married John Albert I, Duke of Mecklenburg-Güstrow.
* Katharina (b. and d. 24 February 1528) died at birth.
* Frederick Albert (5 December 15291 January 1530). died young.
* Lucia Dorothea (8 April 15311 February 1532) died in infancy.
* Lucia (3 February 1537 1 May 1539) died young.
* Albert (b. and d. 1 March 1539) died at birth.
He married secondly to Anna Maria (1532–20 March 1568), daughter of Eric I, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, in 1550. The couple had two children:
* Elisabeth (20 May 155119 February 1596) died unmarried and without issue.
* Albert Frederick (29 April 155318 August 1618), Duke of Prussia.
Ancestors
Notes
References
*
*
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External links
*
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20010703023705/http://department.monm.edu/history/urban/articles/State_of_the_grandmasters.htm William Urban on the situation in Prussia]
* [http://zs.thulb.uni-jena.de/receive/jportal_jparticle_00054867 K. P. Faber: Briefe Luthers an Herzog Albrecht (1811)] letters of Martin Luther to Albrecht
|-
Category:Dukes of Prussia
Category:Protestant monarchs
Category:1490 births
Category:1568 deaths
Category:16th-century dukes of Prussia
Category:Converts to Lutheranism from Roman Catholicism
Category:German people of Polish descent
Category:German Lutherans
Category:Grand masters of the Teutonic Order
Category:House of Hohenzollern
Category:People excommunicated by the Catholic Church
Category:People from Ansbach
Category:People from the Principality of Ansbach
Category:People from the Duchy of Prussia
Category:People of the Polish–Teutonic War (1519–1521)
Category:University of Königsberg
Category:Duchy of Prussia<!--monarch-->
Category:People of the Count's Feud
Category:16th-century Lutheran theologians
Category:German Lutheran hymnwriters
Category:German people of Lithuanian descent | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert,_Duke_of_Prussia | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.148157 |
1519 | August 25 | Events
Pre-1600
* 766 – Emperor Constantine V humiliates nineteen high-ranking officials, after discovering a plot against him. He executes the leaders, Constantine Podopagouros and his brother Strategios.
*1248 – The Dutch city of Ommen receives city rights and fortification rights from Otto III, the Archbishop of Utrecht.
*1258 – Regent George Mouzalon and his brothers are killed during a coup headed by the aristocratic faction under Michael VIII Palaiologos, paving the way for its leader to ultimately usurp the throne of the Empire of Nicaea.
*1270 – Philip III, although suffering from dysentery, becomes King of France following the death of his father Louis IX, during the Eighth Crusade. His uncle, Charles I of Naples, is forced to begin peace negotiations with Muhammad I al-Mustansir, Hafsid Sultan of Tunis.
*1537 – The Honourable Artillery Company, the oldest surviving regiment in the British Army, and the second most senior, is formed.
*1543 – António Mota and a few companions become the first Europeans to visit Japan.
*1580 – War of the Portuguese Succession: Spanish victory at the Battle of Alcântara brings about the Iberian Union.
1601–1900
*1609 – Galileo Galilei demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.
*1630 – Portuguese forces are defeated by the Kingdom of Kandy at the Battle of Randeniwela in Sri Lanka.
*1758 – Seven Years' War: Frederick II of Prussia defeats the Russian army at the Battle of Zorndorf.
*1814 – War of 1812: On the second day of the Burning of Washington, British troops torch the Library of Congress, United States Treasury, Department of War, and other public buildings.
*1823 – American fur trapper Hugh Glass is mauled by a grizzly bear while on an expedition in South Dakota.
*1825 – The Thirty-Three Orientals declare the independence of Uruguay from Brazil.
*1830 – The Belgian Revolution begins.
*1835 – The first Great Moon Hoax article is published in The New York Sun, announcing the discovery of life and civilization on the Moon.
*1875 – Captain Matthew Webb becomes the first person to swim across the English Channel, traveling from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in 21 hours and 45 minutes.
*1883 – France and Viet Nam sign the Treaty of Huế, recognizing a French protectorate over Annam and Tonkin.
*1894 – Kitasato Shibasaburō discovers the infectious agent of the bubonic plague and publishes his findings in The Lancet.
1901–present
*1904 – Russo-Japanese War: The Battle of Liaoyang begins.
*1912 – The Kuomintang is founded for the first time in Peking.
*1914 – World War I: Japan declares war on Austria-Hungary.
* 1914 – World War I: The library of the Catholic University of Leuven is deliberately destroyed by the German Army. Hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable volumes and Gothic and Renaissance manuscripts are lost.
*1916 – The United States National Park Service is created.
*1920 – Polish–Soviet War: Battle of Warsaw, which began on August 13, ends with the Red Army's defeat.
*1933 – The Diexi earthquake strikes Mao County, Sichuan, China and kills 9,000 people.
*1933 – Nazi Germany and the Zionist Federation of Germany signed the Haavara Agreement. The agreement was a major factor in breaking the anti-Nazi boycott of 1933 and facilitated Jewish emigration from Germany and into Palestine.
*1939 – The Irish Republican Army carries out the 1939 Coventry bombing in which five civilians were killed.
*1939 – The United Kingdom and Poland form a military alliance in which the UK promises to defend Poland in case of invasion by a foreign power.
*1940 – World War II: The first Bombing of Berlin by the British Royal Air Force.
* 1941 – World War II: Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran: The United Kingdom and the Soviet Union jointly stage an invasion of the Imperial State of Iran.
*1942 – World War II: Second day of the Battle of the Eastern Solomons; a Japanese naval transport convoy headed towards Guadalcanal is turned back by an Allied air attack.
* 1942 – World War II: Battle of Milne Bay: Japanese marines assault Allied airfields at Milne Bay, New Guinea, initiating the Battle of Milne Bay.
*1944 – World War II: Paris is liberated by the Allies.
*1945 – Ten days after World War II ends with Japan announcing its surrender, armed supporters of the Chinese Communist Party kill U.S. intelligence officer John Birch, regarded by some of the American right as the first victim of the Cold War.
* 1945 – The August Revolution ends as Emperor Bảo Đại abdicates, ending the Nguyễn dynasty.
*1948 – The House Un-American Activities Committee holds first-ever televised congressional hearing: "Confrontation Day" between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.
*1950 – To avert a threatened strike during the Korean War, President Truman orders Secretary of the Army Frank Pace to seize control of the nation's railroads.
*1958 – The world's first publicly marketed instant noodles, Chikin Ramen, are introduced by Taiwanese-Japanese businessman Momofuku Ando.
*1960 – The Games of the XVII Olympiad commence in Rome, Italy.
*1961 – President Jânio Quadros of Brazil resigns after just seven months in power, initiating a political crisis that culminates in a military coup in 1964.
*1967 – George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, is assassinated by a former member of his group.
*1980 – Zimbabwe joins the United Nations.
*1981 – Voyager 2 spacecraft makes its closest approach to Saturn.
*1985 – Bar Harbor Airlines Flight 1808 crashes near Auburn/Lewiston Municipal Airport in Auburn, Maine, killing all eight people on board including peace activist and child actress Samantha Smith.
*1989 – Voyager 2 spacecraft makes its closest approach to Neptune, the last planet in the Solar System at the time, due to Pluto being within Neptune's orbit from 1979 to 1999.
* 1989 – Pakistan International Airlines Flight 404, carrying 54 people, disappears over the Himalayas after takeoff from Gilgit Airport in Pakistan. The aircraft was never found.
*1991 – Belarus gains its independence from the Soviet Union.
* 1991 – The Battle of Vukovar begins. An 87-day siege of Vukovar by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), supported by various Serb paramilitary forces, between August and November 1991 (during the Croatian War of Independence).
* 1991 – Linus Torvalds announces the first version of what will become Linux.
*1997 – Egon Krenz, the former East German leader, is convicted of a shoot-to-kill policy at the Berlin Wall.
*2001 – American singer Aaliyah and several members of her entourage are killed as their overloaded aircraft crashes shortly after takeoff from Marsh Harbour Airport, Bahamas.
*2003 – NASA successfully launches the Spitzer Space Telescope into space.
*2005 – Hurricane Katrina makes landfall in Florida.
*2006 – Former Prime Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Lazarenko is sentenced to nine years imprisonment for money laundering, wire fraud, and extortion.
*2010 – A Filair Let L-410 Turbolet crashes on approach to Bandundu Airport, killing 20.
*2011 – Fifty-two people are killed during an arson attack caused by members of the drug cartel Los Zetas.
*2012 – Voyager 1 spacecraft enters interstellar space, becoming the first man-made object to do so.
*2017 – Hurricane Harvey makes landfall in Texas as a powerful Category 4 hurricane, the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the United States since 2004.
* 2017 – Conflict in Rakhine State (2016–present): One hundred seventy people are killed in at least 26 separate attacks carried out by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, leading to the governments of Myanmar and Malaysia designating the group as a terrorist organisation.
Births
Pre-1600
*1467 – Francisco Fernández de la Cueva, 2nd Duke of Alburquerque, Spanish duke (d. 1526)
*1491 – Innocenzo Cybo, Italian cardinal (d. 1550)
*1509 – Ippolito II d'Este, Italian cardinal and statesman (d. 1572)
*1530 – Ivan the Terrible, Russian ruler (d. 1584)
*1540 – Lady Catherine Grey, English noblewoman (d. 1568)
*1561 – Philippe van Lansberge, Dutch astronomer and mathematician (d. 1632)
1601–1900
*1605 – Philipp Moritz, Count of Hanau-Münzenberg, German noble (d. 1638)
*1624 – François de la Chaise, French priest (d. 1709)
*1662 – John Leverett the Younger, American lawyer, academic, and politician (d. 1724)
*1707 – Louis I of Spain (d. 1724)
*1724 – George Stubbs, English painter and academic (d. 1806)
*1741 – Karl Friedrich Bahrdt, German theologian and author (d. 1792)
*1744 – Johann Gottfried Herder, German poet, philosopher, and critic (d. 1803)
*1758 – Franz Teyber, Austrian organist and composer (d. 1810)
*1767 – Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, French soldier and politician (d. 1794)
*1776 – Thomas Bladen Capel, English admiral (d. 1853)
*1786 – Ludwig I of Bavaria, King of Bavaria (d. 1868)
*1793 – John Neal, American writer, critic, editor, lecturer, and activist (d. 1876)
*1796 – James Lick, American carpenter and piano builder (d. 1876)
*1802 – Nikolaus Lenau, Romanian-Austrian poet and author (d. 1850)
*1803 – Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, Duke of Caxias (d. 1880)
*1812 – Nikolay Zinin, Russian organic chemist (d. 1880)
*1817 – Marie-Eugénie de Jésus, French nun and saint, founded the Religious of the Assumption (d. 1898)
*1829 – Carlo Acton, Italian pianist and composer (d. 1909)
*1836 – Bret Harte, American short story writer and poet (d. 1902)
*1840 – George C. Magoun, American businessman (d. 1893)
*1841 – Emil Theodor Kocher, Swiss physician and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1917)
*1845 – Ludwig II of Bavaria, King of Bavaria (d. 1886)
*1850 – Charles Richet, French physiologist and occultist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1935)
*1867 – James W. Gerard, American lawyer and diplomat, United States Ambassador to Germany (d. 1951)
*1869 – Tom Kiely, British-Irish decathlete (d. 1951)
*1875 – Agnes Mowinckel, Norwegian actress (d. 1963)
*1877 – Joshua Lionel Cowen, American businessman, co-founded the Lionel Corporation (d. 1965)
*1878 – Ted Birnie, English footballer and manager (d. 1935)
*1882 – Seán T. O'Kelly, Irish journalist and politician, 2nd President of Ireland (d. 1966)
*1889 – Alexander Mair, Australian politician, 26th Premier of New South Wales (d. 1969)
*1891 – David Shimoni, Belarusian-Israeli poet and translator (d. 1956)
*1893 – Henry Trendley Dean, American dentist (d. 1962)
*1898 – Helmut Hasse, German mathematician and academic (d. 1975)
* 1898 – Arthur Wood, English cricketer (d. 1973)
*1899 – Paul Herman Buck, American historian and author (d. 1978)
*1900 – Isobel Hogg Kerr Beattie, Scottish architect (d. 1970)
* 1900 – Hans Adolf Krebs, German physician and biochemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1981)
1901–present
*1902 – Stefan Wolpe, German-American composer and educator (d. 1972)
*1903 – Arpad Elo, Hungarian-American chess player, created the Elo rating system (d. 1992)
*1905 – Faustina Kowalska, Polish nun and saint (d. 1938)
*1906 – Jim Smith, English cricketer (d. 1979)
*1909 – Ruby Keeler, Canadian-American actress, singer, and dancer (d. 1993)
* 1909 – Michael Rennie, English actor and producer (d. 1971)
*1910 – George Cisar, American baseball player (d. 2010)
* 1910 – Dorothea Tanning, American painter, sculptor, and poet (d. 2012)
*1911 – Võ Nguyên Giáp, Vietnamese general and politician, 3rd Minister of Defence for Vietnam (d. 2013)
*1912 – Erich Honecker, German politician (d. 1994)
*1913 – Don DeFore, American actor (d. 1993)
* 1913 – Walt Kelly, American illustrator and animator (d. 1973)
*1916 – Van Johnson, American actor (d. 2008)
* 1916 – Frederick Chapman Robbins, American pediatrician and virologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2003)
* 1916 – Saburō Sakai, Japanese lieutenant and pilot (d. 2000)
*1917 – Mel Ferrer, American actor, director, and producer (d. 2008)
*1918 – Leonard Bernstein, American pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1990)
* 1918 – Richard Greene, English actor (d. 1985)
*1919 – William P. Foster, American bandleader and educator (d. 2010)
* 1919 – George Wallace, American lawyer, and politician, 45th Governor of Alabama (d. 1998)
* 1921 – Bryce Mackasey, Canadian businessman and politician, 20th Canadian Minister of Labour (d. 1999)
* 1921 – Brian Moore, Northern Irish-Canadian author and screenwriter (d. 1999)
*1923 – Álvaro Mutis, Colombian-Mexican author and poet (d. 2013)
* 1923 – Allyre Sirois, Canadian lawyer and judge (d. 2012)
*1924 – Zsuzsa Körmöczy, Hungarian tennis player and coach (d. 2006)
*1925 – Thea Astley, Australian journalist and author (d. 2004)
* 1925 – Hilmar Hoffmann, German film and culture academic (d. 2018)
* 1925 – Stepas Butautas, Lithuanian basketball player and coach (d. 2001)
*1927 – Althea Gibson, American tennis player and golfer (d. 2003)
* 1930 – György Enyedi, Hungarian economist and geographer (d. 2012)
* 1930 – Graham Jarvis, Canadian actor (d. 2003)
* 1930 – Crispin Tickell, English academic and diplomat, British Permanent Representative to the United Nations (d. 2022)
*1931 – Regis Philbin, American actor and television host (d. 2020)
*1933 – Patrick F. McManus, American journalist and author (d. 2018)
* 1933 – Wayne Shorter, American saxophonist and composer (d. 2023)
*1934 – Lise Bacon, Canadian judge and politician, Deputy Premier of Quebec
* 1934 – Eddie Ilarde, Filipino journalist and politician (d. 2020)
*1935 – Charles Wright, American poet
*1936 – Giridharilal Kedia, Indian businessman, founded the Image Institute of Technology & Management (d. 2009)
*1937 – Jimmy Hannan, Australian television host and singer (d. 2019)
* 1937 – Virginia Euwer Wolff, American author
*1938 – David Canary, American actor (d. 2015)
* 1938 – Frederick Forsyth, English journalist and author
*1940 – Wilhelm von Homburg, German boxer and actor (d. 2004)
* 1941 – Mario Corso, Italian footballer and coach (d. 2020)
* 1941 – Ludwig Müller, German footballer (d. 2021)
*1942 – Nathan Deal, American lawyer, and politician, 82nd Governor of Georgia
*1942 – Pat Ingoldsby, Irish poet and television presenter (d. 2025)
* 1942 – Ivan Koloff, Canadian wrestler (d. 2017)
*1944 – Conrad Black, Canadian historian and author
* 1944 – Jacques Demers, Canadian ice hockey player, coach, and politician
* 1944 – Anthony Heald, American actor
* 1961 – Ally Walker, American actress
* 1965 – Sanjeev Sharma, Indian cricketer and coach
* 1965 – Mia Zapata, American singer (d. 1993)
*1966 – Albert Belle, American baseball player
* 1966 – Robert Maschio, American actor
*1973 – Fatih Akın, German director, producer, and screenwriter
*1974 – Eric Millegan, American actor
* 1976 – Javed Qadeer, Pakistani cricketer and coach
* 1976 – Alexander Skarsgård, Swedish actor
*1977 – Masumi Asano, Japanese voice actress and producer
* 1977 – Andy McDonald, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1977 – Jonathan Togo, American actor
*1983 – James Rossiter, English race car driver
*1984 – Florian Mohr, German footballer
* 1984 – Anya Monzikova, Russian-American model and actress
*1986 – Rodney Ferguson, American footballer
*1987 – Stacey Farber, Canadian actress
* 1987 – Velimir Jovanović, Serbian footballer
* 1987 – Blake Lively, American model and actress
*1989 – Hiram Mier, Mexican footballer
*1990 – Max Muncy, American baseball player
*1992 – Miyabi Natsuyaki, Japanese singer and actress
* 1992 – Ricardo Rodriguez, Swiss footballer
*1994 – Edmunds Augstkalns, Latvian ice hockey player
* 1994 – Caris LeVert, American basketball player
*1995 – Ong Seong-wu, South Korean singer and actor
* 1995 – Dowoon, South Korean musician
*1998 – China Anne McClain, American actress and singer
*2003 – Rebeka Jančová, Slovak alpine ski racer
*2004 – Evann Girault, French-Nigerien sabre fencer
<!-- Do not add yourself or people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence. -->
Deaths
Pre-1600
*AD 79 – Pliny the Elder, Roman commander and philosopher (b. 23)
* 274 – Yang Yan, Jin Dynasty empress (b. 238)
* 306 – Saint Maginus, Christian hermit and martyr from Tarragona
*383 – Gratian, Roman emperor (b. 359)
* 471 – Gennadius I, patriarch of Constantinople
* 766 – Constantine Podopagouros, Byzantine official
* 766 – Strategios Podopagouros, Byzantine general
* 985 – Dietrich of Haldensleben, German margrave
*1091 – Sisnando Davides, military leader
*1192 – Hugh III, Duke of Burgundy (b. 1142)
*1258 – George Mouzalon, regent of the Empire of Nicaea
*1270 – Louis IX of France (b. 1214)
* 1270 – Alphonso of Brienne (b. c. 1225)
*1271 – Joan, Countess of Toulouse (b. 1220)
*1282 – Thomas de Cantilupe, English bishop and saint (b. 1218)
*1322 – Beatrice of Silesia, queen consort of Germany (b. c. 1292)
*1327 – Demasq Kaja, Chobanid
*1330 – Sir James Douglas, Scottish guerrilla leader (b. 1286)
*1339 – Henry de Cobham, 1st Baron Cobham (b. 1260)
*1368 – Andrea Orcagna, Italian painter, sculptor, and architect
*1482 – Margaret of Anjou wife of Henry VI and Queen of England (b. 1429)
*1485 – William Catesby, supporter of Richard III (b. 1450)
*1554 – Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, English soldier and politician, Lord High Treasurer (b. 1473)
*1592 – William IV, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel (b. 1532)
*1600 – Hosokawa Gracia, Japanese aristocrat and Catholic convert (b. 1563)
1601–1900
*1603 – Ahmad al-Mansur, Sultan of the Saadi dynasty (b. 1549)
*1631 – Nicholas Hyde, Lord Chief Justice of England (b.c. 1572)
*1632 – Thomas Dekker, English author and playwright (b. 1572)
*1688 – Henry Morgan, Welsh admiral and politician, Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica (b. 1635)
*1699 – Christian V of Denmark (b. 1646)
*1711 – Edward Villiers, 1st Earl of Jersey, English politician, Secretary of State for the Southern Department (b. 1656)
*1742 – Carlos Seixas, Portuguese organist and composer (b. 1704)
*1774 – Niccolò Jommelli, Italian composer and educator (b. 1714)
*1776 – David Hume, Scottish economist, historian, and philosopher (b. 1711)
*1794 – Florimond Claude, Comte de Mercy-Argenteau, Belgian-Austrian diplomat (b. 1727)
*1797 – Thomas Chittenden, Governor of the Vermont Republic, and first Governor of the State of Vermont (b. 1730)
*1815 – Stephen Badlam, American artisan and military officer (b. 1815)
*1819 – James Watt, Scottish engineer and instrument maker (b. 1736)
*1822 – William Herschel, German-English astronomer and composer (b. 1738)
*1867 – Michael Faraday, English physicist and chemist (b. 1791)
*1882 – Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, Estonian physician and author (b. 1803)
*1886 – Zinovios Valvis, Greek lawyer and politician, 35th Prime Minister of Greece (b. 1791)
*1892 – William Champ, English-Australian politician, 1st Premier of Tasmania (b. 1808)
*1900 – Friedrich Nietzsche, German philologist, philosopher, and critic (b. 1844)
1901–present
*1904 – Henri Fantin-Latour, French painter and lithographer (b. 1836)
*1908 – Henri Becquerel, French physicist and chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1852)
*1916 – Mary Tappan Wright, American novelist and short story writer (b. 1851)
*1921 – Nikolay Gumilyov, Russian poet and critic (b. 1886)
*1924 – Mariano Álvarez, Filipino general and politician (b. 1818)
* 1924 – Velma Caldwell Melville, American editor, and writer of prose and poetry (b. 1858)
*1925 – Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, Austrian field marshal (b. 1852)
*1930 – Frankie Campbell, American boxer (b. 1904)
*1931 – Dorothea Fairbridge, South African author and co-founder of Guild of Loyal Women (b. 1862)
*1936 – Juliette Adam, French author (b. 1836)
*1938 – Aleksandr Kuprin, Russian pilot, explorer, and author (b. 1870)
*1939 – Babe Siebert, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (b. 1904)
*1940 – Prince Jean, Duke of Guise (b. 1874)
*1942 – Prince George, Duke of Kent (b. 1902)
*1945 – John Birch, American soldier and missionary (b. 1918)
*1956 – Alfred Kinsey, American biologist and academic (b. 1894)
*1965 – Moonlight Graham, American baseball player and physician (b. 1879)
*1966 – Lao She, Chinese novelist and dramatist (b. 1899)
*1967 – Stanley Bruce, Australian lawyer and politician, 8th Prime Minister of Australia (b. 1883)
* 1967 – Oscar Cabalén, Argentine race car driver (b. 1928)
* 1967 – Paul Muni, Ukrainian-born American actor (b. 1895)
* 1967 – George Lincoln Rockwell, American commander, politician, and activist, founded the American Nazi Party (b. 1918)
*1968 – Stan McCabe, Australian cricketer and coach (b. 1910)
*1969 – Robert Cosgrove, Australian politician, 30th Premier of Tasmania (b. 1884)
*1970 – Tachū Naitō, Japanese architect and engineer, designed the Tokyo Tower (b. 1886)
*1971 – Ted Lewis, American singer and clarinet player (b. 1890)
*1973 – Dezső Pattantyús-Ábrahám, Hungarian lawyer and politician, Prime Minister of Hungary (b. 1875)
*1976 – Eyvind Johnson, Swedish novelist and short story writer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1900)
*1977 – Károly Kós, Hungarian architect, ethnologist, and politician (b. 1883)
*1979 – Stan Kenton, American pianist, composer, and bandleader (b. 1911)
*1980 – Gower Champion, American dancer and choreographer (b. 1919)
*1981 – Nassos Kedrakas, Greek actor and cinematographer (b. 1915)
*1982 – Anna German, Polish singer (b. 1936)
*1984 – Truman Capote, American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter (b. 1924)
* 1984 – Viktor Chukarin, Ukrainian gymnast and coach (b. 1921)
* 1984 – Waite Hoyt, American baseball player and sportscaster (b. 1899)
*1988 – Art Rooney, American businessman, founded the Pittsburgh Steelers (b. 1901)
*1990 – Morley Callaghan, Canadian author and playwright (b. 1903)
*1995 – Doug Stegmeyer, American bass player and producer (b. 1951)
*1998 – Lewis F. Powell, Jr., American lawyer and Supreme Court justice (b. 1907)
*1999 – Rob Fisher, English keyboard player and songwriter (b. 1956)
*2000 – Carl Barks, American author and illustrator (b. 1901)
* 2000 – Frederick C. Bock, American soldier and pilot (b. 1918)
* 2000 – Jack Nitzsche, American pianist, composer, and producer (b. 1937)
* 2000 – Allen Woody, American bass player and songwriter (b. 1955)
*2001 – Aaliyah, American singer and actress (b. 1979)
* 2001 – Carl Brewer, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1938)
* 2001 – Üzeyir Garih, Turkish engineer and businessman, co-founded Alarko Holding (b. 1929)
* 2001 – Ken Tyrrell, English race car driver and businessman, founded Tyrrell Racing (b. 1924)
*2002 – Dorothy Hewett, Australian author and poet (b. 1923)
*2003 – Tom Feelings, American author and illustrator (b. 1933)
*2005 – Peter Glotz, Czech-German academic and politician (b. 1939)
*2006 – Noor Hassanali, Trinidadian-Tobagonian lawyer and politician, 2nd President of Trinidad and Tobago (b. 1918)
*2007 – Benjamin Aaron, American lawyer and scholar (b. 1915)
* 2007 – Ray Jones, English footballer (b. 1988)
*2008 – Ahmad Faraz, Pakistani poet (b. 1931)
* 2008 – Kevin Duckworth, American basketball player (b. 1964)
*2009 – Ted Kennedy, American politician (b. 1932)
* 2009 – Mandé Sidibé, Malian economist and politician, Prime Minister of Mali (b. 1940)
*2011 – Lazar Mojsov, Macedonian politician (b. 1920)
*2012 – Florencio Amarilla, Paraguayan footballer, coach, and actor (b. 1935)
* 2012 – Neil Armstrong, American pilot, engineer, and astronaut (b. 1930)
* 2012 – Roberto González Barrera, Mexican banker and businessman (b. 1930)
* 2012 – Donald Gorrie, Scottish politician (b. 1933)
*2013 – Ciril Bergles, Slovene poet and translator (b. 1934)
* 2013 – António Borges, Portuguese economist and banker (b. 1949)
* 2013 – William Froug, American screenwriter and producer (b. 1922)
* 2013 – Liu Fuzhi, Chinese academic and politician, 3rd Minister of Justice for China (b. 1917)
* 2013 – Raghunath Panigrahi, Indian singer-songwriter (b. 1932)
* 2013 – Gylmar dos Santos Neves, Brazilian footballer (b. 1930)
*2014 – William Greaves, American director and producer (b. 1926)
* 2014 – Marcel Masse, Canadian educator and politician, 29th Canadian Minister of National Defence (b. 1936)
* 2014 – Nico M. M. Nibbering, Dutch chemist and academic (b. 1938)
* 2014 – Uziah Thompson, Jamaican-American drummer and producer (b. 1936)
* 2014 – Enrique Zileri, Peruvian journalist and publisher (b. 1931)
*2015 – José María Benegas, Spanish lawyer and politician (b. 1948)
* 2015 – Francis Sejersted, Norwegian historian and academic (b. 1936)
*2016 – Marvin Kaplan, American actor (b. 1927)
*2017 – Rich Piana, American bodybuilder (b. 1971)
*2018 – John McCain, American politician (b. 1936)
*2019 – Ferdinand Piëch, Austrian business magnate and engineer (b. 1937)
*2022 – Mable John, American blues vocalist (b. 1930)
*2024 – Salim Al-Huss, Lebanese statesman, 34th Prime Minister of Lebanon (b. 1929)
<!-- Do not add people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence. -->
Holidays and observances
* Christian feast day:
** Æbbe of Coldingham
** Aredius
** Genesius of Arles
** Genesius of Rome
** Ginés de la Jara (or Genesius of Cartagena)
** Gregory of Utrecht
** Joseph Calasanz
** Louis IX of France
** Blessed Ludovicus Baba
** Blessed Ludovicus Sasada
** Blessed Luis Sotelo
** Menas of Constantinople
** Blessed Miguel de Carvalho
** Patricia of Naples
** Blessed Pedro Vásquez
** Thomas de Cantilupe (or of Hereford)
**August 25 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
* Day of Songun (North Korea)
* Independence Day, celebrates the independence of Uruguay from Brazil in 1825.
* Soldier's Day (Brazil)
References
External links
*
*
*
Category:Days of August | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_25 | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.217791 |
1520 | Aachen | <small>(Aachen dialect)</small>
| type = City
| image_skyline =
| image_coa = DEU Aachen COA.svg
| image_flag = Flag de-city of Aachen.svg
| coordinates
| image_plan = Aachen in AC (2009).svg
| plantext = Location of Aachen within Städteregion Aachen
| state = North Rhine-Westphalia
| region = Cologne
| district = Aachen
| elevation = 173
| area = 160.85
| postal_code = 52062–52080
| area_code = 0241 / 02405 / 02407 / 02408
| licence = AC / MON
| Gemeindeschlüssel = 05334002
| divisions | mayor Sibylle Keupen
| leader_term = 2020–25
| Bürgermeistertitel = Oberbürgermeister
| party = Independent
| ruling_party1 = The Greens
| ruling_party2 SPD
| ruling_party3 | website
}}
<!--For future edits, consider avoid fill up the lead with unwanted, unreliable sources, because as per Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Layout#Order_of_article_elements, the lead will usually repeat information that is in the body, editors should balance the desire to avoid redundant citations in the lead with the desire to aid readers in locating sources for challengeable material.-->
Aachen ( , ; ; ; French and historical English: Aix-la-Chapelle , , .}} or ) is the 13th-largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia and the 27th-largest city of Germany, with around 261,000 inhabitants.
Aachen is located at the northern foothills of the High Fens and the Eifel Mountains. It sits on the Wurm River, a tributary of the Rur, and together with Mönchengladbach, it is the only larger German city in the drainage basin of the Meuse. It is the westernmost larger city in Germany, lying approximately west of Cologne and Bonn, directly bordering Belgium in the southwest, and the Netherlands in the northwest. The city lies in the Meuse–Rhine Euroregion and is the seat of the district of Aachen (Städteregion Aachen).
The once Celtic settlement was equipped with several in the course of colonization by Roman pioneers settling at the warm Aachen thermal springs around the 1st century. After the withdrawal of the Roman troops, the vicus Aquae Granni was Frankized around the 5th century. This was followed by a period of sedentism under first Merovingian and then Carolingian rule. With the completion of the Carolingian Palace of Aachen at the transition to the 9th century, Aachen was constituted as the main royal residence of the Frankish Empire ruled by Charlemagne. Because of that the city is sometimes called "cradle of Europe". After the Treaty of Verdun, the city was within the borders of Middle Francia, until it became part of East Francia after the Treaty of Meerssen (870). It subsequently was part of the Holy Roman Empire and was granted city rights in 1166 by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, becoming an imperial city. It served as the coronation site where 31 Holy Roman Emperors were crowned Kings of the Germans from 936 to 1531, until Frankfurt am Main became the preferred place of coronation.
One of Germany's leading institutes of higher education in technology, the RWTH Aachen University (), is located in the city. Its university hospital Uniklinikum Aachen is Europe's largest single-building hospital. Aachen's industries include science, engineering and information technology. In 2009, Aachen was ranked eighth among cities in Germany for innovation.
The regional dialect spoken in the city is a Central Franconian, Ripuarian variant with strong Limburgish influences from the dialects in the neighbouring Netherlands. As a Rhenish city, Aachen is one of the main centres of carnival celebrations in Germany, along with Cologne and Mainz. The culinary specialty for which the city is best known is Aachener Printen, a type of gingerbread.
Etymology
The name Aachen is a modern descendant, like southern German , , meaning "river" or "stream", from Old High German , meaning "water" or "stream", which directly translates (and etymologically corresponds) to Latin , referring to the springs. The location has been inhabited by humans since the Neolithic era, about 5,000 years ago, attracted to its warm mineral springs. Latin figures in Aachen's Roman name , which meant "waters of Grannus", referring to the Celtic god of healing who was worshipped at the springs. This word became in Walloon and in French, and subsequently to distinguish it from Aix-en-Provence, after Charlemagne had his palatine chapel built there in the late 8th century and then made the city his empire's capital.
The city is known by a variety of different names in other languages:
{| class="wikitable sortable"
! Language
! Name
! class="unsortable" | Pronunciation in IPA
|-
| Aachen dialect
|
|
|-
| Catalan
|
| ,
|-
| Czech
|
|
|-
| Dutch / Low German
|
|
|-
| French
| ,
|
|-
| Limburgish
|
|
|-
| Luxembourgish
|
|
|-
| Polish
|
|
|-
| Portuguese
| ,
| ,
|-
| Russian
| (Akhen)
|
|-
| Spanish
| who were perhaps drawn by the marshy Aachen basin's hot sulphur springs where they worshipped Grannus, god of light and healing.
The 25-hectare Roman spa resort town of Aquae Granni was, according to legend, founded by Grenus, under Hadrian, around 124 AD. Grenus refers to the Celtic god, and it seems it was the Roman 6th Legion at the start of the 1st century AD that first channelled the hot springs into a spa at Büchel, adding at the end of the same century the Münstertherme spa, two water pipelines, and a probable sanctuary dedicated to Grannus. A kind of forum, surrounded by colonnades, connected the two spa complexes. There was an extensive residential area. The Romans built bathhouses near Burtscheid. A temple precinct called Vernenum was built near the modern Kornelimünster/Walheim. Today, remains have been found of three bathhouses, including two fountains in the Elisenbrunnen and the Burtscheid bathhouse.
Roman civil administration in Aachen eventually broke down as the baths and other public buildings (along with most of the villae rusticae of the surrounding countryside) were destroyed around AD 375 at the start of the migration period. The last Roman coin finds are from the time of Emperor Gratian (AD 375–383). Rome withdrew its troops from the area, but the town remained populated. By 470, the town came to be ruled by the Ripuarian Franks and subordinated to their capital, Cologne. During the Roman period, Aachen was the site of a flourishing Jewish community.
Middle Ages
Pepin the Short had a castle residence built in the town, due to the proximity of the hot springs and also for strategic reasons as it is located between the Rhineland and northern France. Einhard mentions that in 765–766 Pepin spent both Christmas and Easter at Aquis villa () ("and [he] celebrated the birth of the Lord [Christmas] in the town Aquis, and similarly Easter"), which must have been sufficiently equipped to support the royal household for several months. In the year of his coronation as king of the Franks, 768, Charlemagne came to spend Christmas at Aachen for the first time. Manuscript production Aachen was an important site for the production of historical manuscripts. Under Charlemagne's purview, both the Ada Gospels and the Coronation Gospels may have been produced in Aachen. In addition, quantities of the other texts in the court library were also produced locally. During the reign of Louis the Pious (814–840), substantial quantities of ancient texts were produced at Aachen, including legal manuscripts such as the leges scriptorium group, patristic texts including the five manuscripts of the Bamberg Pliny Group. From the early 16th century, Aachen started to lose its power and influence. First the coronations of emperors were moved from Aachen to Frankfurt. This was followed by the religious wars and the great fire of 1656. After the destruction of most of the city in 1656, the rebuilding was mostly in the Baroque style. Traces of this hidden agenda of the city's history are found in the 18th-century guidebooks to Aachen as well as to the other spas.
The main indication for visiting patients, ironically, was syphilis; only by the end of the 19th century had rheumatism become the most important object of cures at Aachen and Burtscheid.
Aachen was chosen as the site of several important congresses and peace treaties: the first congress of Aachen (often referred to as the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in English) on 2 May 1668, leading to the First Treaty of Aachen in the same year which ended the War of Devolution. The second congress ended with the second treaty in 1748, ending the War of the Austrian Succession. In 1789, there was a constitutional crisis in the Aachen government, and in 1794 Aachen lost its status as a free imperial city. The city suffered extreme overcrowding and deplorable sanitary conditions until 1875, when the medieval fortifications were abandoned as a limit to building and new, better housing was built in the east of the city, where sanitary drainage was easiest. In December 1880, the Aachen tramway network was opened, and in 1895 it was electrified. In the 19th century and up to the 1930s, the city was important in the production of railway locomotives and carriages, iron, pins, needles, buttons, tobacco, woollen goods, and silk goods.
20th century
World War II
After World War I, Aachen was occupied by the Entente until 1930, along with the rest of German territory west of the Rhine.
Aachen was heavily damaged during World War II. According to Jörg Friedrich in The Fire (2008), two Allied air raids on 11 April and 24 May 1944 "radically destroyed" the city. The first killed 1,525, including 212 children, and bombed six hospitals. During the second, 442 aircraft hit two railway stations, killed 207, and left 15,000 homeless. The raids destroyed Aachen-Eilendorf and Aachen-Burtscheid.
The city and its fortified surroundings were besieged from 12 September to 21 October 1944 by the US 1st Infantry Division with the 3rd Armored Division assisting from the south. Around 13 October the US 2nd Armored Division, coming from the north, and got as close as Würselen, while the 30th Infantry Division completed the encirclement of Aachen on 16 October 1944. With reinforcements from the US 28th Infantry Division the battle continued involving direct assaults through the heavily defended city, which forced the German garrison to surrender on 21 October 1944. What remained of the city was destroyed—in some areas completely—during the fighting, mostly by American artillery fire and demolitions carried out by the Waffen-SS defenders. Damaged buildings included medieval churches of and the Rathaus (city hall), although Aachen Cathedral was largely unscathed. 4,000 inhabitants remained in the city; the rest had followed evacuation orders. Its first Allied-appointed mayor, Franz Oppenhoff, was assassinated by an SS commando unit.
Expulsion of Aachen Jews
, November 1938]]
On 16 May 1815, the Jewish community of the city offered an homage in its synagogue to the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm III. In 1862, a large synagogue was built, later called the . By 1933, 1,345 Jews lived in the city. On Kristallnacht in 1938, the synagogue was destroyed. By the onset of World War II in 1939, many Jews had emigrated or were arrested, and only 782 remained in the city. At the end of the war in 1945, only 62 Jews lived in the city. As of 2003, 1,434 Jews were again living in Aachen. 21st century The city of Aachen has developed into a technology hub as a by-product of hosting one of the leading universities of technology in Germany with the RWTH Aachen (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule), known especially for mechanical engineering, automotive and manufacturing technology as well as for its research and academic hospital Klinikum Aachen, one of the largest medical facilities in Europe. Geography
, with the university hospital visible, from the Vaalserberg, the highest elevation in Aachen and of the European part of the Netherlands.]]
Aachen is located in the middle of the Meuse–Rhine Euroregion, close to the border tripoint of Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The town of Vaals in the Netherlands lies nearby at about from Aachen's city centre, while the Dutch city of Heerlen and Eupen, the capital of the German-speaking Community of Belgium, are both located about from Aachen city centre. Aachen lies near the head of the open valley of the Wurm (which today flows through the city in canalised form), part of the larger basin of the Meuse, and about north of the High Fens, which form the northern edge of the Eifel uplands of the Rhenish Massif.
The maximum dimensions of the city's territory are from north to south, and from east to west. The city limits are long, of which border Belgium and the Netherlands. The highest point in Aachen, located in the far southeast of the city, lies at an elevation of above sea level. The lowest point, in the north, and on the border with the Netherlands, is at .
Climate
As the westernmost city in Germany (and close to the Low Countries), Aachen and the surrounding area belongs to a temperate climate zone (Cfb), with humid weather, mild winters, and warm summers. Because of its location north of the Eifel and the High Fens and its subsequent prevailing westerly weather patterns, rainfall in Aachen (on average 805 mm/year) is comparatively higher than, for example, in Bonn (with 669 mm/year). Another factor in the local weather forces of Aachen is the occurrence of Foehn winds on the southerly air currents, which results from the city's geographic location on the northern edge of the Eifel.
Because the city is surrounded by hills, it suffers from inversion-related smog. Some areas of the city have become urban heat islands as a result of poor heat exchange, both because of the area's natural geography and from human activity. The city's numerous cold air corridors, which are slated to remain as free as possible from new construction, therefore play an important role in the urban climate of Aachen.
The January average is
, while the July average is . Precipitation is almost evenly spread throughout the year.
The city's oceanic climate provides comparably mild winters: While Aachen falls within the coldest extents covered by USDA plant hardiness zone 8b in the 1991–2020 period, having an average yearly minimum of -9.22 °C (15.4 °F), the Canadian city of Regina, Saskatchewan which is located at a similar latitude but at the heart of the North American landmass, far away from the sea's moderating effects, is classified as being in zone 3a.
In the 1991–2020 period, the last freeze (at 2 m above ground) of spring occurred on April 28th and the first fall freeze on October 13th, on average.
The Aachen weather station has recorded the following extreme values:
|source 2 Data derived from Deutscher Wetterdienst
| date = May 2013
}}
Geology
and claystone formation from the Devonian period below St. Adalbert Church in Aachen]]
The geology of Aachen is very structurally heterogeneous. The oldest occurring rocks in the area surrounding the city originate from the Devonian period and include carboniferous sandstone, greywacke, claystone and limestone. These formations are part of the Rhenish Massif, north of the High Fens. In the Pennsylvanian subperiod of the Carboniferous geological period, these rock layers were narrowed and folded as a result of the Variscan orogeny. After this event, and over the course of the following 200 million years, this area has been continuously flattened.
During the Cretaceous period, the ocean penetrated the continent from the direction of the North Sea up to the mountainous area near Aachen, bringing with it clay, sand, and chalk deposits. While the clay (which was the basis for a major pottery industry in nearby Raeren) is mostly found in the lower areas of Aachen, the hills of the Aachen Forest and the Lousberg were formed from upper Cretaceous sand and chalk deposits. More recent sedimentation is mainly located in the north and east of Aachen and was formed through tertiary and quaternary river and wind activities.
Along the major thrust fault of the Variscan orogeny, there are over 30 thermal springs in Aachen and Burtscheid. Additionally, the subsurface of Aachen is traversed by numerous active faults that belong to the Rurgraben fault system, which has been responsible for numerous earthquakes in the past, including the 1756 Düren earthquake and the 1992 Roermond earthquake, which was the strongest earthquake ever recorded in the Netherlands.
Demographics
{| class="wikitable floatright"
|+ Largest groups of foreign residents
|-
! Nationality
! Population (30.06.2024)
|-
|
| 6,745
|-
|
| 4,365
|-
|
| 3,998
|-
|
| 3,751
|-
|
| 3,662
|-
|
| 2,369
|-
|
| 1,786
|-
|
| 1,836
|-
|
| 1,745
|-
|
| 1,542
|-
|
| 1,495
|-
|}
Aachen has 245,885 inhabitants (as of 31 December 2015), of whom 118,272 are female, and 127,613 are male.
At the end of 2009, the foreign-born residents of Aachen made up 13.6 percent of the total population. A significant portion of foreign residents are students at the RWTH Aachen University.
{| class="wikitable sortable"
! Year
! Population
|-
| 1994
| 246,570
|-
| 2007
| 247,740 the largest cathedral north of the Alps. It was modelled after the Basilica of San Vitale, in Ravenna, Italy, On his death, Charlemagne's remains were interred in the cathedral and can be seen there to this day. The cathedral was extended several times in later ages, turning it into a curious and unique mixture of building styles. The throne and gallery portion date from the Ottonian, with portions of the original opus sectile floor still visible. In addition to holding the remains of its founder, it became the burial place of his successor Otto III. In the upper chamber of the gallery, Charlemagne's marble throne is housed. Aachen Cathedral has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Most of the marble and columns used in the construction of the cathedral were brought from Rome and Ravenna, including the sarcophagus in which Charlemagne was eventually laid to rest. A bronze bear from Gaul was placed inside, along with an equestrian statue from Ravenna, believed to be Theodric, in contrast to a wolf and a statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Capitoline. lies between two central squares, the Markt (marketplace) and the Katschhof (between city hall and cathedral). The coronation hall is on the first floor of the building. Inside one can find five frescoes by the Aachen artist Alfred Rethel which show legendary scenes from the life of Charlemagne, as well as Charlemagne's signature. Also, precious replicas of the Imperial Regalia are kept here. One of the contributors to the reconstructions of the synagogue was Jürgen Linden, the Lord Mayor of Aachen from 1989 to 2009.
There are numerous other notable churches and monasteries, a few remarkable 17th- and 18th-century buildings in the particular Baroque style typical of the region, a synagogue, a collection of statues and monuments, park areas, cemeteries, among others. Among the museums in the town are the Suermondt-Ludwig Museum, which has a fine sculpture collection and the Aachen Museum of the International Press, which is dedicated to newspapers from the 16th century to the present. The area's industrial history is reflected in dozens of 19th- and early 20th-century manufacturing sites in the city.
<gallery>
File:Aachen Grashaus.jpg|Grashaus
File:Aachen elisenbrunnen blau.jpg|Elisenbrunnen in Aachen
File:Aachen Theatre.jpg|Aachen Theatre
File:Aachen Neues Kurhaus.jpg|Neues Kurhaus
File:CarolusThermen01.JPG|Carolus Thermen, thermal baths named after Charlemagne
File:Aachen-SomeBoulevard.JPG|A statue commemorating David Hansemann
</gallery>
Economy
Research Center, Aachen]]
Aachen is the administrative centre for the coal-mining industries in neighbouring places to the northeast. Though once a major player in Aachen's economy, today glassware and textile production make up only 10% of total manufacturing jobs in the city.
In December 2014 DHL Group purchased the StreetScooter company from Günther, operating it as a wholly owned subsidiary.
In 2015, Günther founded a new electric vehicle company, e.GO Mobile, which started producing the e.GO Life electric passenger car and other vehicles in April 2019.
By April 2016, StreetScooter announced that it would produce 2000 of its electric vans, branded the Work, in Aachen by the end of the year, and would be scaling up to manufacture approximately 10,000 Works annually, starting in 2017, also in Aachen. At the time, this target would make it the largest electric light utility vehicle manufacturer in Europe, surpassing Renault's smaller Kangoo Z.E.
Culture
(Karneval, Fasching), in which families dress in colourful costumes.]]
* In 1372, Aachen became the first coin-minting city in the world to regularly place an Anno Domini date on a general circulation coin, a groschen.
* The Scotch Club in Aachen was the first discothèque in Germany, opened from 19 October 1959 until 1992. Klaus Quirini as DJ Heinrich was the first DJ ever.
* The thriving Aachen black metal scene is among the most notable in Germany, with such bands as Nagelfar, The Ruins of Beverast, Graupel and Verdunkeln.
* The local speciality of Aachen is an originally hard type of sweet bread, baked in large flat loaves, called Aachener Printen. Unlike Lebkuchen, a German form of gingerbread sweetened with honey, Printen use a syrup made from sugar. Today, a soft version is sold under the same name which follows an entirely different recipe.
* Asteroid 274835 Aachen, discovered by amateur astronomer Erwin Schwab in 2009, was named after the city. Over time, a host of software and computer industries have developed around the university. It also maintains a botanical garden (the Botanischer Garten Aachen).
FH Aachen, Aachen University of Applied Sciences (AcUAS) was founded in 1971. The AcUAS offers a classic engineering education in professions such as mechatronics, construction engineering, mechanical engineering or electrical engineering. German and international students are educated in more than 20 international or foreign-oriented programmes and can acquire German as well as international degrees (Bachelor/Master) or Doppelabschlüsse (double degrees). Foreign students account for more than 21% of the student body.
The Katholische Hochschule Nordrhein-Westfalen – Abteilung Aachen (Catholic University of Applied Sciences Northrhine-Westphalia – Aachen department) offers its some 750 students a variety of degree programmes: social work, childhood education, nursing, and co-operative management. It also has the only programme of study in Germany especially designed for mothers.
The (Cologne University of Music) is one of the world's foremost performing arts schools and one of the largest music institutions for higher education in Europe with one of its three campuses in Aachen. The Aachen campus substantially contributes to the Opera/Musical Theatre master's programme by collaborating with the Theater Aachen and the recently established musical theatre chair through the Rheinische Opernakademie.
The German army's Technical School (Ausbildungszentrum Technik Landsysteme) is in Aachen.
Sports
, home ground of Alemannia Aachen]]
The annual CHIO (short for the French term Concours Hippique International Officiel) is the biggest equestrian meeting of the world and among horsemen is considered to be as prestigious for equitation as the tournament of Wimbledon for tennis. Aachen hosted the 2006 FEI World Equestrian Games.
The local football team Alemannia Aachen had a short run in Germany's first division, after its promotion in 2006. However, the team could not sustain its status and is now back in the third division. The stadium "Tivoli", opened in 1928, served as the venue for the team's home games and was well known for its incomparable atmosphere throughout the whole of the second division. Before the old stadium's demolition in 2011, it was used by amateurs, whilst the Bundesliga Club held its games in the new stadium "Neuer Tivoli" – meaning New Tivoli—a couple of metres down the road. The building work for the stadium which has a capacity of 32,960, began in May 2008 and was completed by the beginning of 2009.
The Ladies in Black women's volleyball team (part of the "PTSV Aachen" sports club since 2013) has played in the first German volleyball league (DVL) since 2008.
In June 2022, the local basketball club BG Aachen e.V. was promoted to the 1st regional league.
Transport
]]
Rail
Aachen's railway station, the Hauptbahnhof (Central Station), was constructed in 1841 for the Cologne–Aachen railway line. In 1905, it was moved closer to the city centre. It serves main lines to Cologne, Mönchengladbach and Liège as well as branch lines to Heerlen, Alsdorf, Stolberg and Eschweiler. ICE high speed trains from Brussels via Cologne to Frankfurt am Main and Eurostar trains from Paris to Cologne also stop at Aachen Central Station. Four RE lines and two RB lines connect Aachen with the Ruhrgebiet, Mönchengladbach, Spa (Belgium), Düsseldorf and the Siegerland. The Euregiobahn, a regional railway system, reaches several minor cities in the Aachen region.
There are four smaller stations in Aachen: Aachen West, Aachen Schanz, Aachen-Rothe Erde and Eilendorf. Slower trains stop at these. Aachen West has gained in importance with the expansion of RWTH Aachen University.
Intercity bus stations
There are two stations for intercity bus services in Aachen: Aachen West station, in the north-west of the city, and Aachen Wilmersdorfer Straße, in the north-east. Public transport
of the city's transit authority ASEAG, at the university hospital bus stop]]
The first horse tram line in Aachen opened in December 1880. After electrification in 1895, it attained a maximum length of in 1915, thus becoming the fourth-longest tram network in Germany. Many tram lines extended to the surrounding towns of Herzogenrath, Stolberg, Alsdorf as well as the Belgian and Dutch communes of Vaals, Kelmis (then Altenberg) and Eupen. The Aachen tram system was linked with the Belgian national interurban tram system. Like many tram systems in Western Europe, the Aachen tram suffered from poorly-maintained infrastructure and was so deemed unnecessary and disrupting for car drivers by local politics. On 28 September 1974, the last line 15 (Vaals–Brand) operated for one last day and was then replaced by buses. A proposal to reinstate a tram/light rail system under the name Campusbahn was dropped after a referendum.
Today, the ASEAG (Aachener Straßenbahn und Energieversorgungs-AG, literally "Aachen tram and power supply company") operates a bus network with 68 bus routes. Because of the location at the border, many bus routes extend to Belgium and the Netherlands. Lines 14 to Eupen, Belgium and 44 to Heerlen, Netherlands are jointly operated with Transport en Commun and Veolia Transport Nederland, respectively. ASEAG is one of the main participants in the Aachener Verkehrsverbund (AVV), a tariff association in the region. Along with ASEAG, city bus routes of Aachen are served by private contractors such as Sadar, Taeter, Schlömer, or DB Regio Bus. Line 350, which runs from Maastricht, also enters Aachen.
Roads
Aachen is connected to the Autobahn A4 (west-east), A44 (north-south) and A544 (a smaller motorway from the A4 to the Europaplatz near the city centre). There are plans to eliminate traffic jams at the Aachen road interchange.
Airport
Maastricht Aachen Airport is the main airport of Aachen and Maastricht. It is located around northwest of Aachen. There is a shuttle-service between Aachen and the airport.
Recreational aviation is served by the (formerly military) Aachen Merzbrück Airfield.
Charlemagne Prize
Angela Merkel, wearing the Charlemagne Prize awarded to her in 2008]]
Since 1950, a committee of Aachen citizens annually awards the Charlemagne Prize () to personalities of outstanding service to the unification of Europe. It is traditionally awarded on Ascension Day at the City Hall. In 2016, the Charlemagne Award was awarded to Pope Francis.
The International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen was awarded in the year 2000 to US president Bill Clinton, for his special personal contribution to co-operation with the states of Europe, for the preservation of peace, freedom, democracy and human rights in Europe, and for his support of the enlargement of the European Union. In 2004, Pope John Paul II's efforts to unite Europe were honoured with an "Extraordinary Charlemagne Medal", which was awarded for the only time ever.
Literature
Aix is the destination in Robert Browning's poem "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix", which was published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845. The poem is a first-person narrative told, in breathless galloping meter, by one of three riders; an urgent midnight errand to deliver "the news which alone could save Aix from her fate".
Notable people
Twin towns – sister cities
Aachen is twinned with:
* Montebourg, France (1960)
* Reims, France (1967)
* Halifax, England (1979)
* Toledo, Spain (1985)
* Ningbo, China (1986)
* Naumburg, Germany (1988)
* Arlington County, United States (1993)
* Sarıyer, Istanbul, Turkey (2013)
* Cape Town, South Africa (2017)
Former twin towns
* Kostroma, Russia (2005, suspended since March 2022)
See also
* Aachen (district)
* Aachen Prison
* Aachen tram
* Aachener
* Aachener Chronik
* Aachener Bachverein
* List of mayors of Aachen
* Council of Aachen
* Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (disambiguation)
* Maastricht Aachen Airport
* Computer museum Aachen
*
Notes
References
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* |archive-date20 November 2008 |archive-urlhttps://web.archive.org/web/20081120103157/http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9003197 |url-status=live }}
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Further reading
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* Rice, Eric, ''Music and Ritual at Charlemagne's Marienkirche in Aachen.'' Kassel: Merseburger, 2009.
External links
*
Category:Aachen (district)
Category:Belgium–Germany border crossings
Category:Catholic pilgrimage sites
Category:Cities in North Rhine-Westphalia
Category:1st century
Category:Free imperial cities
Category:Jewish German history
Category:Matter of France
Category:Populated places established in the 1st century
Category:Rhineland
Category:Roman towns and cities in Germany
Category:765
Category:Spa towns in Germany | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aachen | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.283504 |
1523 | Agate | specimen of crazy lace agate from Chihuahua, Mexico next to a tennis ball; wide
| formula = SiO<sub>2</sub> (silicon dioxide)
| molweight | color Often multicolored; commonly colorless, pale blue to black, red to orange, yellow, white, brown, pink, purple; rarely green
| habit = Cryptocrystalline silica
| system = Trigonal (quartz) or monoclinic (moganite)
| twinning | cleavage None
| fracture = Conchoidal
| mohs = 6.5–7
| luster = Waxy, vitreous when polished
| refractive = 1.530-1.543
| opticalprop = Uniaxial (+)
| birefringence = Up to 0.004
| dispersion= None
| pleochroism = Absent
| streak = White
| gravity = 2.60–2.64
| density = 2.6 g/cm³
| melt | tenacity Brittle
| fusibility | diagnostic
| solubility | diaphaneity Transparent to opaque (usually translucent)
| other | references
}}
Agate ( ) is a banded variety of chalcedony. Agate stones are characterized by alternating bands of different colored chalcedony and sometimes include macroscopic quartz. They are common in nature and can be found globally in a large number of different varieties. There are some varieties of chalcedony without bands that are commonly called agate (moss agate, fire agate, etc.); however, these are more properly classified solely as varieties of chalcedony. Agates are primarily formed as nodules within volcanic rock, but they can also form in veins or in sedimentary rock. Agate has been popular as a gemstone in jewelry for thousands of years, and today it is also popular as a collector's stone. Some duller agates sold commercially are artificially dyed to enhance their color.
Etymology
Agate was given its name by Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher and naturalist. He discovered the stone c. 350 BCE along the shoreline of the River Achates (), now the Dirillo River, on the Italian island of Sicily, which at the time was a Greek territory.
Agate is composed of multiple bands, or layers, of chalcedony fibers, specifically length-fast chalcedony fibers and sometimes quartzine (length-slow chalcedony fibers). The vesicle walls are often coated with thin layers of celadonite or chlorite,
Agates can also form within rock fissures, called veins. This process is called silicification, a form of petrification. Examples include petrified wood, agatized coral, and Turritella agate (Elimia tenera).
Eye agates have one or more circular, concentric rings on their surface. These "eyes" are actually hemispheres that form on the husk of the agate and extend inward like a bowl. Tube agates contain tunnel-like structures that extend all the way through the agate. These "tubes" may sometimes be banded or hollow, or both. Both tube and eye agates form when chalcedony grows around a needle-shaped crystal of another mineral embedded within the agate, forming stalactitic structures. Visible "eyes" can also appear on the surface of tube agates if a cut is made (or the agate is weathered) perpendicular to the stalactitic structure.
Iris agates have bands that are so microscopically fine that when thinly sliced, they cause white light to be diffracted into its spectral colors. This "iris effect" usually occurs in colorless agates, but it can also occur in brightly colored ones. Level-banded agates Agates with level banding are traditionally called onyx, although the formal definition of the term onyx refers to color pattern, not the shape of the bands. Accordingly, the name "onyx" is also used for wall-banded agates. Onyx is also frequently misused as a name for banded calcite. The name originates from the Greek word for the human nail, which has parallel ridges. Typically, onyx bands alternate between black and white or other light and dark colors. Sardonyx is a variety with red-to-brown bands alternated with either white or black bands.
Thunder eggs are frequently level-banded, however they may also have wall banding. Level banding is also common in Lake Superior agates.
<gallery mode"packed" heights"130px">
Agate 6 (32375570980).jpg|Agate with both wall banding (top) and level banding (bottom)
Agate Braziilia.jpg|Brazilian agate with classic fortification banding
Crazy Lace Agate 06.jpg|Crazy lace agate
Eyeballed by all the eye agates (27395607964).jpg|Tumbled Lake Superior eye agates
Detail, Dendritic agate (cropped).jpg|Dendritic agate from India
Four moss agate cabochons.jpg|Moss agate cabochons
Iris Agate from (Agatized Petrified Wood), Stinking Water, Oregon detail, from- Oregon004 (cropped).jpg|Iris agate from petrified wood
Agate D Bruyere.jpg|Level-banded agate
Onyx Mainzer Becken.jpg|Onyx agate
Thunder Egg Agate (Priday Blue Bed, John Day Formation, Miocene; near Madras, Oregon, USA) 5.jpg|Level-banded thunder egg from Oregon, USA
</gallery>
Varieties (by locality)
Agates are very common, and they have been found on every continent, including Antarctica. In addition to names used to describe their structure, numerous geological, local, and trade names are applied to agates from different localities. Asia
* India has produced agates since as early as the 11th century. These include carnelian agates, moss agates, and dendritic agates.
* Yemen is home to a variety of agate called mocha stone, named after the port city of Mocha (also spelled Mokha or Mukha) on the Red Sea. These agates likely formed in tuff deposits of Late Oligocene and Early Miocene age.
* Agates have also been found in Iran, Mongolia, China,
* Crazy lace agate is a brightly colored lace agate from Mexico with a complex pattern, demonstrating randomized distribution of contour lines and circular droplets, scattered throughout the rock. The stone is typically colored red and white but is also seen to exhibit yellow and grey combinations as well. Crazy lace agate is a vein agate that formed in sedimentary rock of the late Cretaceous period.
* Laguna agate is a brightly colored agate variety that was first discovered in Ojo Laguna, Chihuahua, Mexico. It features vibrant bands in shades of red, orange, pink, or purple. Laguna agates formed in andesite and are geologically young. They frequently contain inclusions and many exhibit parallax or shadow banding. they formed as nodules in basalt up to 1.2 billion years ago during the Late Precambrian. These agates are primarily found near the shores of Lake Superior in the U.S. states of Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and in the Canadian province of Ontario. They are not named after the lake, but rather the Lake Superior Till, the Pleistocene glacial deposit in which they are found.
* Sweetwater agates are small moss agates found in Miocene age sandstone near Sweetwater River, Wyoming. They also contain brown or black dendrites and fluoresce under UV light.
* Other varieties of agate have also been found in nearly every U.S. state, northern Mexico, and in the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia, Manitoba, and British Columbia. The ornamental use of agate was common in ancient Greece, in assorted jewelry and in the seal stones of Greek warriors.
Idar-Oberstein was a historically important location in Germany that made use of agate on an industrial scale, dating back to c. 1375 CE.
<gallery mode"packed" heights"130px">
File:Tumbled agate and jasper.jpg|A barrel full of tumble-polished agate and jasper
File:Zegelring in goud met intaglio met portret van Commodus in nicolo, 180 tot 200 NC, vindplaats- Tongeren, de Schaetzengaarde 22, 1998, losse vondst (mogelijk goudschat), collectie Gallo-Romeins Museum Tongeren, GRM 1892.jpg|Gold Roman signet ring with portrait of emperor Commodus in niccolo agate, 180-200 CE, found in Tongeren, Gallo-Roman Museum (Tongeren)
File:Byzantine - The "Rubens Vase" - Walters 42562.jpg|The "Rubens Vase" (Byzantine Empire). Carved in high relief from a single piece of agate, most likely created in an imperial workshop for a Byzantine emperor.
File:Victorian banded agate ear rings.jpg|Victorian banded agate earrings
File:Maryland Agate.jpg|Patuxent River stone from Maryland — cut and illuminated from behind as a nightlight
File:唐-玛瑙兽首杯.jpg|Agate drinking horn, Tang dynasty
</gallery>
Health impact
Respiratory diseases such as silicosis, and a higher incidence of tuberculosis among workers involved in the agate industry, have been studied in India and China.
See also
*
References
External links
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20141227143847/http://snr.unl.edu/data/geologysoils/agates/index-agates.aspx "Agates"], School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (retrieved 27 December 2014).
Category:Gemstones
Category:Hardstone carving
Category:Silicate minerals
Category:Symbols of Florida | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agate | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.305164 |
1525 | Aspirin | Aspirin (TV series)}}
| tradename = Bayer Aspirin, others
| Drugs.com =
| MedlinePlus = a682878
| DailyMedID = Acetylsalicylic acid
| pregnancy_AU = C
| pregnancy_AU_comment
| pregnancy_category | routes_of_administration Oral, rectal
| class = Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)
| ATC_prefix = A01
| ATC_suffix = AD05
| ATC_supplemental = ,
<!-- Legal status -->
| legal_AU = OTC
| legal_AU_comment / Schedule 2, 4, 5, 6
| legal_BR = <!-- OTC, A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, D1, D2, E, F-->
| legal_BR_comment | legal_CA OTC
| legal_CA_comment
| legal_DE = <!-- Anlage I, II, III or Unscheduled-->
| legal_DE_comment | legal_NZ <!-- Class A, B, C -->
| legal_NZ_comment | legal_UK GSL
| legal_UK_comment | legal_US OTC
| legal_US_comment = / Rx-only
| legal_UN = <!-- N I, II, III, IV / P I, II, III, IV-->
| legal_UN_comment | legal_status <!--For countries not listed above-->
<!-- Pharmacokinetic data -->
| bioavailability 80–100%
| protein_bound 80–90%
| metabolism Liver (CYP2C19 and possibly CYP3A), some is also hydrolysed to salicylate in the gut wall.}}
<!-- Chemical and physical data -->
| IUPAC_name = 2-acetyloxybenzoic acid
| C = 9
| H = 8
| O = 4
| SMILES OC(C)Oc1ccccc1C(=O)O
| StdInChI = 1S/C9H8O4/c1-6(10)13-8-5-3-2-4-7(8)9(11)12/h2-5H,1H3,(H,11,12)
| StdInChI_Ref =
| StdInChI_comment | StdInChIKey BSYNRYMUTXBXSQ-UHFFFAOYSA-N
| StdInChIKey_Ref =
| density = 1.40
| density_notes | melting_point 135
| melting_high | melting_notes ) is the genericized trademark for acetylsalicylic acid (ASA), a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) used to reduce pain, fever, and inflammation, and as an antithrombotic. Specific inflammatory conditions that aspirin is used to treat include Kawasaki disease, pericarditis, and rheumatic fever. In 1853, chemist Charles Frédéric Gerhardt treated the medicine sodium salicylate with acetyl chloride to produce acetylsalicylic acid for the first time. Over the next 50 years, other chemists, mostly of the German company Bayer, established the chemical structure and devised more efficient production methods. By 1899, Bayer had dubbed this drug Aspirin and was selling it globally. and is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. In 2022, it was the 36th most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than 16million prescriptions.Brand vs. generic nameIn 1897, scientists at the Bayer company began studying acetylsalicylic acid as a less-irritating replacement medication for common salicylate medicines. By 1899, Bayer had named it "Aspirin" and was selling it around the world.
Aspirin's popularity grew over the first half of the 20th century, leading to competition between many brands and formulations. The word Aspirin was Bayer's brand name; however, its rights to the trademark were lost or sold in many countries.
Like flour mills, factories producing aspirin tablets must control the amount of the powder that becomes airborne inside the building, because the powder-air mixture can be explosive. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a recommended exposure limit in the United States of 5mg/m<sup>3</sup> (time-weighted average). In 1989, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) set a legal permissible exposure limit for aspirin of 5mg/m<sup>3</sup>, but this was vacated by the AFL-CIO v. OSHA decision in 1993.
Synthesis
The synthesis of aspirin is classified as an esterification reaction. Salicylic acid is treated with acetic anhydride, an acid derivative, causing a chemical reaction that turns salicylic acid's hydroxyl group into an ester group (R-OH → R-OCOCH<sub>3</sub>). This process yields aspirin and acetic acid, which is considered a byproduct of this reaction. Small amounts of sulfuric acid (and occasionally phosphoric acid) are almost always used as a catalyst. This method is commonly demonstrated in undergraduate teaching labs.
Reaction between acetic acid and salicylic acid can also form aspirin but this esterification reaction is reversible and the presence of water can lead to hydrolysis of the aspirin. So, an anhydrous reagent is preferred.
;Reaction mechanism
Formulations containing high concentrations of aspirin often smell like vinegar because aspirin can decompose through hydrolysis in moist conditions, yielding salicylic and acetic acids.Physical propertiesAspirin, an acetyl derivative of salicylic acid, is a white, crystalline, weakly acidic substance that melts at , and decomposes around . Its acid dissociation constant (pK<sub>a</sub>) is 3.5 at .Polymorphism
Polymorphism, or the ability of a substance to form more than one crystal structure, is important in the development of pharmaceutical ingredients. Many drugs receive regulatory approval for only a single crystal form or polymorph.
Until 2005, there was only one proven polymorph of aspirin (Form I), though the existence of another polymorph was debated since the 1960s, and one report from 1981 reported that when crystallized in the presence of aspirin anhydride, the diffractogram of aspirin has weak additional peaks. Though at the time it was dismissed as mere impurity, it was, in retrospect, Form II aspirin.
Form II was reported in 2005, found after attempted co-crystallization of aspirin and levetiracetam from hot acetonitrile.
In form I, pairs of aspirin molecules form centrosymmetric dimers through the acetyl groups with the (acidic) methyl proton to carbonyl hydrogen bonds. In form II, each aspirin molecule forms the same hydrogen bonds, but with two neighbouring molecules instead of one. With respect to the hydrogen bonds formed by the carboxylic acid groups, both polymorphs form identical dimer structures. The aspirin polymorphs contain identical 2-dimensional sections and are therefore more precisely described as polytypes.
Pure Form II aspirin could be prepared by seeding the batch with aspirin anhydrate in 15% weight. Form IV was reported in 2017. It is stable at ambient conditions.Mechanism of action
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Discovery of the mechanism
In 1971, British pharmacologist John Robert Vane, then employed by the Royal College of Surgeons in London, showed aspirin suppressed the production of prostaglandins and thromboxanes. For this discovery he was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, jointly with Sune Bergström and Bengt Ingemar Samuelsson.
Prostaglandins and thromboxanes
Aspirin's ability to suppress the production of prostaglandins and thromboxanes is due to its irreversible inactivation of the cyclooxygenase (COX; officially known as prostaglandin-endoperoxide synthase, PTGS) enzyme required for prostaglandin and thromboxane synthesis. Aspirin acts as an acetylating agent where an acetyl group is covalently attached to a serine residue in the active site of the COX enzyme (Suicide inhibition). This makes aspirin different from other NSAIDs (such as diclofenac and ibuprofen), which are reversible inhibitors.
Low-dose aspirin use irreversibly blocks the formation of thromboxane A<sub>2</sub> in platelets, producing an inhibitory effect on platelet aggregation during the lifetime of the affected platelet (8–9 days). This antithrombotic property makes aspirin useful for reducing the incidence of heart attacks in people who have had a heart attack, unstable angina, ischemic stroke or transient ischemic attack. 40mg of aspirin a day is able to inhibit a large proportion of maximum thromboxane A<sub>2</sub> release provoked acutely, with the prostaglandin I<sub>2</sub> synthesis being little affected; however, higher doses of aspirin are required to attain further inhibition.
Prostaglandins, local hormones produced in the body, have diverse effects, including the transmission of pain information to the brain, modulation of the hypothalamic thermostat, and inflammation. Thromboxanes are responsible for the aggregation of platelets that form blood clots. Heart attacks are caused primarily by blood clots, and low doses of aspirin are seen as an effective medical intervention to prevent a second acute myocardial infarction.COX-1 and COX-2 inhibitionAt least two different types of cyclooxygenases, COX-1 and COX-2, are acted on by aspirin. Aspirin irreversibly inhibits COX-1 and modifies the enzymatic activity of COX-2. COX-2 normally produces prostanoids, most of which are proinflammatory. Aspirin-modified COX-2 (aka prostaglandin-endoperoxide synthase 2 or PTGS2) produces epi-lipoxins, most of which are anti-inflammatory. Newer NSAID drugs, COX-2 inhibitors (coxibs), have been developed to inhibit only COX-2, with the intent to reduce the incidence of gastrointestinal side effects. Endothelial cells lining the microvasculature in the body are proposed to express COX-2, and, by selectively inhibiting COX-2, prostaglandin production (specifically, PGI<sub>2</sub>; prostacyclin) is downregulated with respect to thromboxane levels, as COX-1 in platelets is unaffected. Thus, the protective anticoagulative effect of PGI<sub>2</sub> is removed, increasing the risk of thrombus and associated heart attacks and other circulatory problems. Since platelets have no DNA, they are unable to synthesize new COX-1 once aspirin has irreversibly inhibited the enzyme, an important difference as compared with reversible inhibitors.
Furthermore, aspirin, while inhibiting the ability of COX-2 to form pro-inflammatory products such as the prostaglandins, converts this enzyme's activity from a prostaglandin-forming cyclooxygenase to a lipoxygenase-like enzyme: aspirin-treated COX-2 metabolizes a variety of polyunsaturated fatty acids to hydroperoxy products which are then further metabolized to specialized proresolving mediators such as the aspirin-triggered lipoxins(15-epilipoxin-A4/B4), aspirin-triggered resolvins, and aspirin-triggered maresins. These mediators possess potent anti-inflammatory activity. It is proposed that this aspirin-triggered transition of COX-2 from cyclooxygenase to lipoxygenase activity and the consequential formation of specialized proresolving mediators contributes to the anti-inflammatory effects of aspirin.Additional mechanismsAspirin has been shown to have at least three additional modes of action. It uncouples oxidative phosphorylation in cartilaginous (and hepatic) mitochondria, by diffusing from the inner membrane space as a proton carrier back into the mitochondrial matrix, where it ionizes once again to release protons. Aspirin buffers and transports the protons. When high doses are given, it may actually cause fever, owing to the heat released from the electron transport chain, as opposed to the antipyretic action of aspirin seen with lower doses. In addition, aspirin induces the formation of NO-radicals in the body, which have been shown in mice to have an independent mechanism of reducing inflammation. This reduced leukocyte adhesion is an important step in the immune response to infection; however, evidence is insufficient to show aspirin helps to fight infection. More recent data also suggest salicylic acid and its derivatives modulate signalling through NF-κB. NF-κB, a transcription factor complex, plays a central role in many biological processes, including inflammation.
Aspirin is readily broken down in the body to salicylic acid, which itself has anti-inflammatory, antipyretic, and analgesic effects. In 2012, salicylic acid was found to activate AMP-activated protein kinase, which has been suggested as a possible explanation for some of the effects of both salicylic acid and aspirin. The acetyl portion of the aspirin molecule has its own targets. Acetylation of cellular proteins is a well-established phenomenon in the regulation of protein function at the post-translational level. Aspirin is able to acetylate several other targets in addition to COX isoenzymes. These acetylation reactions may explain many hitherto unexplained effects of aspirin.Formulations
Aspirin is produced in many formulations, with some differences in effect. In particular, aspirin can cause gastrointestinal bleeding, and formulations are sought which deliver the benefits of aspirin while mitigating harmful bleeding. Formulations may be combined (e.g., buffered + vitamin C).
*Tablets, typically of about 75–100 mg and 300–320 mg of immediate-release aspirin (IR-ASA).
*Dispersible tablets.
*Enteric-coated tablets.
*Buffered formulations containing aspirin with one of many buffering agents.
*Formulations of aspirin with vitamin C (ASA-VitC)
*A phospholipid-aspirin complex liquid formulation, PL-ASA. the phospholipid coating was being trialled to determine if it caused less gastrointestinal damage.
Pharmacokinetics
Acetylsalicylic acid is a weak acid, and very little of it is ionized in the stomach after oral administration. Acetylsalicylic acid is quickly absorbed through the cell membrane in the acidic conditions of the stomach. The increased pH and larger surface area of the small intestine causes aspirin to be absorbed more slowly there, as more of it is ionized. Owing to the formation of concretions, aspirin is absorbed much more slowly during overdose, and plasma concentrations can continue to rise for up to 24 hours after ingestion.
About 50–80% of salicylate in the blood is bound to human serum albumin, while the rest remains in the active, ionized state; protein binding is concentration-dependent. Saturation of binding sites leads to more free salicylate and increased toxicity. The volume of distribution is 0.1–0.2 L/kg. Acidosis increases the volume of distribution because of enhancement of tissue penetration of salicylates. When small doses (less than 250mg in an adult) are ingested, all pathways proceed by first-order kinetics, with an elimination half-life of about 2.0 h to 4.5 h. When higher doses of salicylate are ingested (more than 4 g), the half-life becomes much longer (15 h to 30 h), because the biotransformation pathways concerned with the formation of salicyluric acid and salicyl phenolic glucuronide become saturated. Renal excretion of salicylic acid becomes increasingly important as the metabolic pathways become saturated, because it is extremely sensitive to changes in urinary pH. A 10- to 20-fold increase in renal clearance occurs when urine pH is increased from 5 to 8. The use of urinary alkalinization exploits this particular aspect of salicylate elimination. It was found that short-term aspirin use in therapeutic doses might precipitate reversible acute kidney injury when the patient was ill with glomerulonephritis or cirrhosis.
History
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Medicines made from willow and other salicylate-rich plants appear in clay tablets from ancient Sumer as well as the Ebers Papyrus from ancient Egypt. after the Rev Edward Stone of Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, noticed that the bitter taste of willow bark resembled the taste of the bark of the cinchona tree, known as "Peruvian bark", which was used successfully in Peru to treat a variety of ailments. Stone experimented with preparations of powdered willow bark on people in Chipping Norton for five years and found it to be as effective as Peruvian bark and a cheaper domestic version. In 1763 he sent a report of his findings to the Royal Society in London. By the nineteenth century, pharmacists were experimenting with and prescribing a variety of chemicals related to salicylic acid, the active component of willow extract.
Aspirin sales revived considerably in the last decades of the 20th century, and remain strong in the 21st century with widespread use as a preventive treatment for heart attacks and strokes. Today, aspirin is a generic trademark in many countries. Aspirin, with a capital "A", remains a registered trademark of Bayer in Germany, Canada, Mexico, and in over 80 other countries, for acetylsalicylic acid in all markets, but using different packaging and physical aspects for each.
Compendial status
* United States Pharmacopeia
* British Pharmacopoeia
Medical use
Aspirin is used in the treatment of a number of conditions, including fever, pain, rheumatic fever, and inflammatory conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis, pericarditis, and Kawasaki disease. There is evidence that aspirin is effective at preventing colorectal cancer, though the mechanisms of this effect are unclear.
Pain
Aspirin is an effective analgesic for acute pain, although it is generally considered inferior to ibuprofen because aspirin is more likely to cause gastrointestinal bleeding. Aspirin is generally ineffective for those pains caused by muscle cramps, bloating, gastric distension, or acute skin irritation. As with other NSAIDs, combinations of aspirin and caffeine provide slightly greater pain relief than aspirin alone. Effervescent formulations of aspirin relieve pain faster than aspirin in tablets, which makes them useful for the treatment of migraines. Topical aspirin may be effective for treating some types of neuropathic pain.
Aspirin, either by itself or in a combined formulation, effectively treats certain types of a headache, but its efficacy may be questionable for others. Secondary headaches, meaning those caused by another disorder or trauma, should be promptly treated by a medical provider. Among primary headaches, the International Classification of Headache Disorders distinguishes between tension headache (the most common), migraine, and cluster headache. Aspirin or other over-the-counter analgesics are widely recognized as effective for the treatment of tension headaches. Aspirin, especially as a component of an aspirin/paracetamol/caffeine combination, is considered a first-line therapy in the treatment of migraine, and comparable to lower doses of sumatriptan. It is most effective at stopping migraines when they are first beginning.
Fever
Like its ability to control pain, aspirin's ability to control fever is due to its action on the prostaglandin system through its irreversible inhibition of COX. Although aspirin's use as an antipyretic in adults is well established, many medical societies and regulatory agencies, including the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Food and Drug Administration, strongly advise against using aspirin for the treatment of fever in children because of the risk of Reye's syndrome, a rare but often fatal illness associated with the use of aspirin or other salicylates in children during episodes of viral or bacterial infection. Because of the risk of Reye's syndrome in children, in 1986, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) required labeling on all aspirin-containing medications advising against its use in children and teenagers.InflammationAspirin is used as an anti-inflammatory agent for both acute and long-term inflammation, as well as for the treatment of inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis. It is generally not recommended for routine use by people with no other health problems, including those over the age of 70.
The 2009 Antithrombotic Trialists' Collaboration published in Lancet evaluated the efficacy and safety of low dose aspirin in secondary prevention. In those with prior ischaemic stroke or acute myocardial infarction, daily low dose aspirin was associated with a 19% relative risk reduction of serious cardiovascular events (non-fatal myocardial infarction, non-fatal stroke, or vascular death). This did come at the expense of a 0.19% absolute risk increase in gastrointestinal bleeding; however, the benefits outweigh the hazard risk in this case. Data from previous trials have suggested that weight-based dosing of aspirin has greater benefits in primary prevention of cardiovascular outcomes.
After percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs), such as the placement of a coronary artery stent, a U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality guideline recommends that aspirin be taken indefinitely. Frequently, aspirin is combined with an ADP receptor inhibitor, such as clopidogrel, prasugrel, or ticagrelor to prevent blood clots. This is called dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT). Duration of DAPT was advised in the United States and European Union guidelines after the CURE and PRODIGY studies. In 2020, the systematic review and network meta-analysis from Khan et al. showed promising benefits of short-term (< 6 months) DAPT followed by P2Y12 inhibitors in selected patients, as well as the benefits of extended-term (> 12 months) DAPT in high risk patients. In conclusion, the optimal duration of DAPT after PCIs should be personalized after outweighing each patient's risks of ischemic events and risks of bleeding events with consideration of multiple patient-related and procedure-related factors. Moreover, aspirin should be continued indefinitely after DAPT is complete.
The status of the use of aspirin for the primary prevention in cardiovascular disease is conflicting and inconsistent, with recent changes from previously recommending it widely decades ago, and that some referenced newer trials in clinical guidelines show less of benefit of adding aspirin alongside other anti-hypertensive and cholesterol lowering therapies. The ASCEND study demonstrated that in high-bleeding risk diabetics with no prior cardiovascular disease, there is no overall clinical benefit (12% decrease in risk of ischaemic events v/s 29% increase in GI bleeding) of low dose aspirin in preventing the serious vascular events over a period of 7.4 years. Similarly, the results of the ARRIVE study also showed no benefit of same dose of aspirin in reducing the time to first cardiovascular outcome in patients with moderate risk of cardiovascular disease over a period of five years. Aspirin has also been suggested as a component of a polypill for prevention of cardiovascular disease. Complicating the use of aspirin for prevention is the phenomenon of aspirin resistance. For people who are resistant, aspirin's efficacy is reduced. Some authors have suggested testing regimens to identify people who are resistant to aspirin.
As of , the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) determined that there was a "small net benefit" for patients aged 40–59 with a 10% or greater 10-year cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk, and "no net benefit" for patients aged over 60. Determining the net benefit was based on balancing the risk reduction of taking aspirin for heart attacks and ischaemic strokes, with the increased risk of gastrointestinal bleeding, intracranial bleeding, and hemorrhagic strokes. Their recommendations state that age changes the risk of the medicine, with the magnitude of the benefit of aspirin coming from starting at a younger age, while the risk of bleeding, while small, increases with age, particular for adults over 60, and can be compounded by other risk factors such as diabetes and a history of gastrointestinal bleeding. As a result, the USPSTF suggests that "people ages 40 to 59 who are at higher risk for CVD should decide with their clinician whether to start taking aspirin; people 60 or older should not start taking aspirin to prevent a first heart attack or stroke." Primary prevention guidelines from made by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association state they might consider aspirin for patients aged 40–69 with a higher risk of atherosclerotic CVD, without an increased bleeding risk, while stating they would not recommend aspirin for patients aged over 70 or adults of any age with an increased bleeding risk. There is substantial evidence for lowering the risk of colorectal cancer (CRC), but aspirin must be taken for at least 10–20 years to see this benefit. It may also slightly reduce the risk of endometrial cancer and prostate cancer.
Some conclude the benefits are greater than the risks due to bleeding in those at average risk. Given this uncertainty, the 2007 United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) guidelines on this topic recommended against the use of aspirin for prevention of CRC in people with average risk. Nine years later however, the USPSTF issued a grade B recommendation for the use of low-dose aspirin (75 to 100mg/day) "for the primary prevention of CVD [cardiovascular disease] and CRC in adults 50 to 59 years of age who have a 10% or greater 10-year CVD risk, are not at increased risk for bleeding, have a life expectancy of at least 10 years, and are willing to take low-dose aspirin daily for at least 10 years".
A meta-analysis through 2019 said that there was an association between taking aspirin and lower risk of cancer of the colorectum, esophagus, and stomach.
In 2021, the U.S. Preventive services Task Force raised questions about the use of aspirin in cancer prevention. It notes the results of the 2018 ASPREE (Aspirin in Reducing Events in the Elderly) Trial, in which the risk of cancer-related death was higher in the aspirin-treated group than in the placebo group.
In 2025, a group of scientists at the University of Cambridge found that aspirin stimulates the immune system to reduce cancer metastasis. They found that a protein called ARHGEF1 suppresses T cells, that are required for attacking metastatic cancer cells. Aspirin appeared to counteract this suppression by targeting a clotting factor called thromboxane A2 (TXA2), which activates ARHGEF1, thus preventing it from suppressing the T cells. The researchers called the discovery a "Eureka moment". It was reported that the findings could lead to a more targeted use for aspirin in cancer research. It was also said that taking self-medicating with aspirin should not be done yet due to its potential side effects until clinical trials were held.PsychiatryBipolar disorderAspirin, along with several other agents with anti-inflammatory properties, has been repurposed as an add-on treatment for depressive episodes in subjects with bipolar disorder in light of the possible role of inflammation in the pathogenesis of severe mental disorders. A 2022 systematic review concluded that aspirin exposure reduced the risk of depression in a pooled cohort of three studies (HR 0.624, 95% CI: 0.0503, 1.198, P0.033). However, further high-quality, longer-duration, double-blind randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are needed to determine whether aspirin is an effective add-on treatment for bipolar depression. Thus, notwithstanding the biological rationale, the clinical perspectives of aspirin and anti-inflammatory agents in the treatment of bipolar depression remain uncertain. Schizophrenia Some researchers have speculated the anti-inflammatory effects of aspirin may be beneficial for schizophrenia. Small trials have been conducted but evidence remains lacking.Other usesAspirin is a first-line treatment for the fever and joint-pain symptoms of acute rheumatic fever. The therapy often lasts for one to two weeks, and is rarely indicated for longer periods. After fever and pain have subsided, the aspirin is no longer necessary, since it does not decrease the incidence of heart complications and residual rheumatic heart disease. Naproxen has been shown to be as effective as aspirin and less toxic, but due to the limited clinical experience, naproxen is recommended only as a second-line treatment.
Along with rheumatic fever, Kawasaki disease remains one of the few indications for aspirin use in children in spite of a lack of high quality evidence for its effectiveness.
Low-dose aspirin supplementation has moderate benefits when used for prevention of pre-eclampsia. This benefit is greater when started in early pregnancy.
Aspirin has also demonstrated anti-tumoral effects, via inhibition of the PTTG1 gene, which is often overexpressed in tumors.Resistance
For some people, aspirin does not have as strong an effect on platelets as for others, an effect known as aspirin-resistance or insensitivity. One study has suggested women are more likely to be resistant than men, and a different, aggregate study of 2,930 people found 28% were resistant.
A study in 100 Italian people found, of the apparent 31% aspirin-resistant subjects, only 5% were truly resistant, and the others were noncompliant.
Another study of 400 healthy volunteers found no subjects who were truly resistant, but some had "pseudoresistance, reflecting delayed and reduced drug absorption".
Meta-analysis and systematic reviews have concluded that laboratory confirmed aspirin resistance confers increased rates of poorer outcomes in cardiovascular and neurovascular diseases. Although the majority of research conducted has surrounded cardiovascular and neurovascular, there is emerging research into the risk of aspirin resistance after orthopaedic surgery where aspirin is used for venous thromboembolism prophylaxis. Aspirin resistance in orthopaedic surgery, specifically after total hip and knee arthroplasties, is of interest as risk factors for aspirin resistance are also risk factors for venous thromboembolisms and osteoarthritis; the sequelae of requiring a total hip or knee arthroplasty. Some of these risk factors include obesity, advancing age, diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia and inflammatory diseases. No medical significance occurs due to the slight difference in dosage between the 75mg and the 81mg tablets. The dose required for benefit appears to depend on a person's weight. For those weighing less than , low dose is effective for preventing cardiovascular disease; for patients above this weight, higher doses are required. with doses near the maximal daily dose used historically for the treatment of rheumatic fever. For the prevention of myocardial infarction (MI) in someone with documented or suspected coronary artery disease, much lower doses are taken once daily. The WHI study of postmenopausal women found that aspirin resulted in a 25% lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease and a 14% lower risk of death from any cause, though there was no significant difference between 81mg and 325mg aspirin doses. The 2021 ADAPTABLE study also showed no significant difference in cardiovascular events or major bleeding between 81mg and 325mg doses of aspirin in patients (both men and women) with established cardiovascular disease.
Low-dose aspirin use was also associated with a trend toward lower risk of cardiovascular events, and lower aspirin doses (75 or 81mg/day) may optimize efficacy and safety for people requiring aspirin for long-term prevention.
Adverse effects
In October 2020, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) required the drug label to be updated for all nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications to describe the risk of kidney problems in unborn babies that result in low amniotic fluid. One exception to the recommendation is the use of low-dose 81mg aspirin at any point in pregnancy under the direction of a health care professional. or who have salicylate intolerance or a more generalized drug intolerance to NSAIDs, and caution should be exercised in those with asthma or NSAID-precipitated bronchospasm. Owing to its effect on the stomach lining, manufacturers recommend people with peptic ulcers, mild diabetes, or gastritis seek medical advice before using aspirin. Even if none of these conditions is present, the risk of stomach bleeding is still increased when aspirin is taken with alcohol or warfarin. Use of aspirin during dengue fever is not recommended owing to increased bleeding tendency. Aspirin taken at doses of ≤325 mg and ≤100 mg per day for ≥2 days can increase the odds of suffering a gout attack by 81% and 91% respectively. This effect may potentially be worsened by high purine diets, diuretics, and kidney disease, but is eliminated by the urate lowering drug allopurinol. Daily low dose aspirin does not appear to worsen kidney function. Aspirin may reduce cardiovascular risk in those without established cardiovascular disease in people with moderate CKD, without significantly increasing the risk of bleeding. Aspirin should not be given to children or adolescents under the age of 16 to control cold or influenza symptoms, as this has been linked with Reye's syndrome.GastrointestinalAspirin increases the risk of upper gastrointestinal bleeding. Enteric coating on aspirin may be used in manufacturing to prevent release of aspirin into the stomach to reduce gastric harm, but enteric coating does not reduce gastrointestinal bleeding risk. Enteric-coated aspirin may not be as effective at reducing blood clot risk. Combining aspirin with other NSAIDs has been shown to further increase the risk of gastrointestinal bleeding.
Blockade of COX-1 by aspirin apparently results in the upregulation of COX-2 as part of a gastric defense. There is no clear evidence that simultaneous use of a COX-2 inhibitor with aspirin may increase the risk of gastrointestinal injury.
"Buffering" is an additional method used with the intent to mitigate gastrointestinal bleeding, such as by preventing aspirin from concentrating in the walls of the stomach, although the benefits of buffered aspirin are disputed. Almost any buffering agent used in antacids can be used; Bufferin, for example, uses magnesium oxide. Other preparations use calcium carbonate. Gas-forming agents in effervescent tablet and powder formulations can also double as a buffering agent, one example being sodium bicarbonate, used in Alka-Seltzer.
Taking vitamin C with aspirin has been investigated as a method of protecting the stomach lining. In trials vitamin C-releasing aspirin (ASA-VitC) or a buffered aspirin formulation containing vitamin C was found to cause less stomach damage than aspirin alone.
Retinal vein occlusion
It is a widespread habit among eye specialists (ophthalmologists) to prescribe aspirin as an add-on medication for patients with retinal vein occlusion (RVO), such as central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO) and branch retinal vein occlusion (BRVO). The reason of this widespread use is the evidence of its proven effectiveness in major systemic venous thrombotic disorders, and it has been assumed that may be similarly beneficial in various types of retinal vein occlusion.
However, a large-scale investigation based on data of nearly 700 patients showed "that aspirin or other antiplatelet aggregating agents or anticoagulants adversely influence the visual outcome in patients with CRVO and hemi-CRVO, without any evidence of protective or beneficial effect". Several expert groups, including the Royal College of Ophthalmologists, recommended against the use of antithrombotic drugs (incl. aspirin) for patients with RVO.Central effectsLarge doses of salicylate, a metabolite of aspirin, cause temporary tinnitus (ringing in the ears) based on experiments in rats, via the action on arachidonic acid and NMDA receptors cascade.
Reye's syndrome
Reye's syndrome, a rare but severe illness characterized by acute encephalopathy and fatty liver, can occur when children or adolescents are given aspirin for a fever or other illness or infection. From 1981 to 1997, 1207 cases of Reye's syndrome in people younger than 18 were reported to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Of these, 93% reported being ill in the three weeks preceding the onset of Reye's syndrome, most commonly with a respiratory infection, chickenpox, or diarrhea. Salicylates were detectable in 81.9% of children for whom test results were reported. After the association between Reye's syndrome and aspirin was reported, and safety measures to prevent it (including a Surgeon General's warning, and changes to the labeling of aspirin-containing drugs) were implemented, aspirin taken by children declined considerably in the United States, as did the number of reported cases of Reye's syndrome; a similar decline was found in the United Kingdom after warnings against pediatric aspirin use were issued.SkinFor a small number of people, taking aspirin can result in symptoms including hives, swelling, and headache. Aspirin can exacerbate symptoms among those with chronic hives, or create acute symptoms of hives. These responses can be due to allergic reactions to aspirin, or more often due to its effect of inhibiting the COX-1 enzyme. Skin reactions may also tie to systemic contraindications, seen with NSAID-precipitated bronchospasm,
Aspirin and other NSAIDs, such as ibuprofen, may delay the healing of skin wounds. Earlier findings from two small, low-quality trials suggested a benefit with aspirin (alongside compression therapy) on venous leg ulcer healing time and leg ulcer size, however larger, more recent studies of higher quality have been unable to corroborate these outcomes. As such, further research is required to clarify the role of aspirin in this context.
Other adverse effects
Aspirin can induce swelling of skin tissues in some people. In one study, angioedema appeared one to six hours after ingesting aspirin in some of the people. However, when the aspirin was taken alone, it did not cause angioedema in these people; the aspirin had been taken in combination with another NSAID-induced drug when angioedema appeared.
Aspirin causes an increased risk of cerebral microbleeds, having the appearance on MRI scans of 5 to 10mm or smaller, hypointense (dark holes) patches.
A study of a group with a mean dosage of aspirin of 270mg per day estimated an average absolute risk increase in intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) of 12 events per 10,000 persons. In cases where ICH already has occurred, aspirin use results in higher mortality, with a dose of about 250mg per day resulting in a relative risk of death within three months after the ICH around 2.5 (95% confidence interval 1.3 to 4.6).
Aspirin and other NSAIDs can cause abnormally high blood levels of potassium by inducing a hyporeninemic hypoaldosteronism state via inhibition of prostaglandin synthesis; however, these agents do not typically cause hyperkalemia by themselves in the setting of normal renal function and euvolemic state.
Use of low-dose aspirin before a surgical procedure has been associated with an increased risk of bleeding events in some patients, however, ceasing aspirin prior to surgery has also been associated with an increase in major adverse cardiac events. An analysis of multiple studies found a three-fold increase in adverse events such as myocardial infarction in patients who ceased aspirin prior to surgery. The analysis found that the risk is dependent on the type of surgery being performed and the patient indication for aspirin use.
On 9 July 2015, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) toughened warnings of increased heart attack and stroke risk associated with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID).
Overdose
Aspirin overdose can be acute or chronic. In acute poisoning, a single large dose is taken; in chronic poisoning, higher than normal doses are taken over a period of time. Acute overdose has a mortality rate of 2%. Chronic overdose is more commonly lethal, with a mortality rate of 25%; chronic overdose may be especially severe in children. Toxicity is managed with a number of potential treatments, including activated charcoal, intravenous dextrose and normal saline, sodium bicarbonate, and dialysis. The diagnosis of poisoning usually involves measurement of plasma salicylate, the active metabolite of aspirin, by automated spectrophotometric methods. Plasma salicylate levels in general range from 30 to 100mg/L after usual therapeutic doses, 50–300mg/L in people taking high doses and 700–1400mg/L following acute overdose. Salicylate is also produced as a result of exposure to bismuth subsalicylate, methyl salicylate, and sodium salicylate.
Interactions
Aspirin is known to interact with other drugs. For example, acetazolamide and ammonium chloride are known to enhance the intoxicating effect of salicylates, and alcohol also increases the gastrointestinal bleeding associated with these types of drugs. Although limited evidence suggests this may not result in a reduced cardioprotective effect of aspirin. Furthermore, antiplatelet doses of aspirin are deemed too small to produce an interaction with spironolactone. Aspirin is known to compete with penicillin G for renal tubular secretion. Aspirin may also inhibit the absorption of vitamin C.ResearchThe ISIS-2 trial demonstrated that aspirin at doses of 160mg daily for one month, decreased the mortality by 21% of participants with a suspected myocardial infarction in the first five weeks. A single daily dose of 324mg of aspirin for 12 weeks has a highly protective effect against acute myocardial infarction and death in men with unstable angina. Bipolar disorder Aspirin has been repurposed as an add-on treatment for depressive episodes in subjects with bipolar disorder.Cancer preventionEvidence from observational studies was conflicting on the effect of aspirin in breast cancer prevention; a randomized controlled trial showed that aspirin had no significant effect in reducing breast cancer, thus further studies are needed to clarify the effect of aspirin in cancer prevention.
In gardening
There are anecdotal reports that aspirin can improve the growth and resistance of plants, though most research has involved salicylic acid instead of aspirin. Veterinary medicine Aspirin is sometimes used in veterinary medicine as an anticoagulant or to relieve pain associated with musculoskeletal inflammation or osteoarthritis. Aspirin should be given to animals only under the direct supervision of a veterinarian, as adverse effects—including gastrointestinal issues—are common. An aspirin overdose in any species may result in salicylate poisoning, characterized by hemorrhaging, seizures, coma, and even death.
Dogs are better able to tolerate aspirin than cats are. No clinical signs of toxicosis occurred when cats were given 25mg/kg of aspirin every 48 hours for 4 weeks, but the recommended dose for relief of pain and fever and for treating blood clotting diseases in cats is 10mg/kg every 48 hours to allow for metabolization. References Further reading
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Category:Wikipedia medicine articles ready to translate | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirin | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.399522 |
1526 | Abner | away from Paltiel (Morgan Bible, 1240s).]]
In the Hebrew Bible, Abner ( ) was the cousin of King Saul and the commander-in-chief of his army. His name also appears as "Abiner son of Ner", where the longer form Abiner means "my father is Ner".
Biblical narrative
Abner is initially mentioned incidentally in Saul's history, first appearing as the son of Ner, Saul's uncle, and the commander of Saul's army. He then comes to the story again as the commander who introduced David to Saul following David's killing of Goliath. He is not mentioned in the account of the disastrous battle of Gilboa when Saul's power was crushed. Seizing the youngest but only surviving of Saul's sons, Ish-bosheth, also called Eshbaal, Abner set him up as king over Israel at Mahanaim, east of the Jordan. David, who was accepted as king by Judah alone, was meanwhile reigning at Hebron, and for some time war was carried on between the two parties.
The only engagement between the rival factions told at length was preceded by an encounter at Gibeon between 12 chosen men from each side, in which all 24 seem to have perished. In the general engagement which followed, Abner was defeated and put to flight. He was closely pursued by Asahel, brother of Joab, who is said to have been "light of foot as a wild roe". As Asahel would not desist from the pursuit, though warned, Abner was compelled to slay him in self-defense, planting his spear in the ground and allowing Asahel to impale himself. This originated a deadly feud between the leaders of the opposite parties, for Joab, as next of kin to Asahel, was by the law and custom of the country the avenger of his blood. one of Saul's concubines, an alliance which, according to contemporary notions, would imply pretensions to the throne.
Abner was indignant at the rebuke, and immediately opened negotiations with David, who welcomed him on the condition that his wife Michal should be restored to him. This was done, and the proceedings were ratified by a feast. Almost immediately after, however, Joab, who had been sent away, perhaps intentionally, returned and slew Abner at the gate of Hebron. The ostensible motive for the assassination was a desire to avenge Asahel, and this would be a sufficient justification for the deed according to the moral standard of the time (although Abner should have been safe from such a revenge killing in Hebron, which was a City of Refuge). The conduct of David after the event was such as to show that he had no complicity in the act, though he could not venture to punish its perpetrators. "And David said to all the people who were with him, 'Rend your clothes and gird yourselves with sackcloth, and wail before Abner.' And King David went after the bier. And they buried Abner in Hebron, and the king raised his voice and wept on Abner's grave, and all the people wept."
Shortly after Abner's death, Ish-bosheth was assassinated as he slept, and David became king of the reunited kingdoms.
Rabbinical literature
Midrashic writings establish Abner as the son of the Witch of En-dor (Pirḳe R. El. xxxiii.), and the hero par excellence in the Haggadah (Yalḳ., Jer. 285; Eccl. R. on ix. 11; Ḳid. 49b). Conscious of his extraordinary strength, he exclaimed: "If I could only catch hold of the earth, I could shake it" (Yalḳ. l.c.)—a saying which parallels the famous utterance of Archimedes, "Had I a fulcrum, I could move the world." According to the Midrash (Eccl. R. l.c.) it would have been easier to move a wall six yards thick than one of the feet of Abner, who could hold the Israelitish army between his knees. Yet when his time came, Joab smote him. But even in his dying hour, Abner seized his foe like a ball of thread, threatening to crush him. Then the Israelites came and pleaded for Joab's life, saying: "If thou killest him we shall be orphaned, and our women and all our belongings will become a prey to the Philistines." Abner answered: "What can I do? He has extinguished my light" (has wounded me fatally). The Israelites replied: "Entrust thy cause to the true judge [God]." Then Abner released his hold upon Joab and fell dead to the ground (Yalḳ. l.c.).
The rabbis agree that Abner deserved this violent death, though opinions differ concerning the exact nature of the sin that entailed so dire a punishment on one who was, on the whole, considered a "righteous man" (Gen. R. lxxxii. 4). Some reproach him that he did not use his influence with Saul to prevent him from murdering the priests of Nob (Yer. Peah, i. 16a; Lev. R. xxvi. 2; Sanh. 20a)—convinced as he was of the innocence of the priests and of the propriety of their conduct toward David, Abner holding that as leader of the army David was privileged to avail himself of the Urim and Thummim (I Sam. xxii. 9–19). Instead of contenting himself with passive resistance to Saul's command to murder the priests (Yalḳ., Sam. 131), Abner ought to have tried to restrain the king. Others maintain that Abner did make such an attempt, but in vain, and that his one sin consisted in that he delayed the beginning of David's reign over Israel by fighting him after Saul's death for two years and a half (Sanh. l.c.). Others, again, while excusing him for this—in view of a tradition founded on Gen. xlix. 27, according to which there were to be two kings of the house of Benjamin—blame Abner for having prevented a reconciliation between Saul and David on the occasion when the latter, in holding up the skirt of Saul's robe (I Sam. xxiv. 11), showed how unfounded was the king's mistrust of him. Saul was inclined to be pacified; but Abner, representing to him that David might have found the piece of the garment anywhere—possibly caught on a thorn—prevented the reconciliation (Yer. Peah, l.c., Lev. R. l.c., and elsewhere). Moreover, it was wrong in Abner to permit Israelitish youths to kill one another for sport (II Sam. ii. 14–16). No reproach, however, attaches to him for the death of Asahel, since Abner killed him in self-defense (Sanh. 49a).
It is characteristic of the rabbinical view of the Bible narratives that Abner, the warrior pure and simple, is styled "Lion of the Law" (Yer. Peah, l.c.), and that even a specimen is given of a halakic discussion between him and Doeg as to whether the law in Deut. xxiii. 3 excluded Ammonite and Moabite women from the Jewish community as well as men. Doeg was of the opinion that David, being descended from the Moabitess Ruth, was not fit to wear the crown, nor even to be considered a true Israelite; while Abner maintained that the law affected only the male line of descent. When Doeg's dialectics proved more than a match for those of Abner, the latter went to the prophet Samuel, who not only supported Abner in his view, but utterly refuted Doeg's assertions (Midr. Sam. xxii.; Yeb. 76b et seq.).
One of the most prominent families (Ẓiẓit ha-Kesat) in Jerusalem in the middle of the first century of the common era claimed descent from Abner (Gen. R. xcviii.).
Tomb of Abner
The site known as the Tomb of Abner is located not far from the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and receives visitors throughout the year. Many travelers have recorded visiting the tomb over the centuries.
Benjamin of Tudela, who began his journeys in 1165, wrote in the journal, "The valley of Eshkhol is north of the mountain upon which Hebron stood, and the cave of Makhpela is east thereof. A bow-shot west of the cave is the sepulchre of Abner the son of Ner."
A rabbi in the 12th century records visiting the tomb as reprinted in Elkan Nathan Adler's book Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages: 19 Firsthand Accounts. The account states, "I, Jacob, the son of R. Nathaniel ha Cohen, journeyed with much difficulty, but God helped me to enter the Holy Land, and I saw the graves of our righteous Patriarchs in Hebron and the grave of Abner the son of Ner." Adler postulates that the visit must have occurred prior to Saladin's capture of Jerusalem in 1187.
Rabbi Moses Basola records visiting the tomb in 1522. He states, "Abner's grave is in the middle of Hebron; the Muslims built a mosque over it." Another visitor in the 1500s states that "at the entrance to the market in Hebron, at the top of the hill against the wall, Abner ben Ner is buried, in a church, in a cave." This visit was recorded in Sefer Yihus ha-Tzaddiqim (Book of Genealogy of the Righteous), a collection of travelogues from 1561. Abraham Moshe Lunz reprinted the book in 1896.
Menahem Mendel of Kamenitz, considered the first hotelier in the Land of Israel, wrote about the Tomb of Abner is his 1839 book Korot Ha-Itim, which was translated into English as The Book of the Occurrences of the Times to Jeshurun in the Land of Israel. He states, "Here I write of the graves of the righteous to which I paid my respects. Hebron – Described above is the character and order of behavior of those coming to pray at the Cave of ha-Machpelah. I went there, between the stores, over the grave of Avner ben Ner and was required to pay a Yishmaeli – the grave was in his courtyard – to allow me to enter."
The author and traveler J. J. Benjamin mentioned visiting the tomb in his book Eight Years in Asia and Africa (1859, Hanover). He states, "On leaving the Sepulchre of the Patriarchs, and proceeding on the road leading to the Jewish quarter, to the left of the courtyard, is seen a Turkish dwelling house, by the side of which is a small grotto, to which there is a descent of several steps. This is the tomb of Abner, captain of King Saul. It is held in much esteem by the Arabs, and the proprietor of it takes care that it is always kept in the best order. He requires from those who visit it a small gratuity."
The British scholar Israel Abrahams wrote in his 1912 book The Book of Delight and Other Papers, "Hebron was the seat of David's rule over Judea. Abner was slain here by Joab, and was buried here – they still show Abner's tomb in the garden of a large house within the city. By the pool at Hebron were slain the murderers of Ishbosheth..."
Over the years the tomb fell into disrepair and neglect. It was closed to the public in 1994. In 1996, a group of 12 Israeli women filed a petition with the Supreme Court requesting the government to reopen the Tomb of Abner. More requests were made over the years and eventually arrangements were made to have the site open to the general public on ten days throughout the year corresponding to the ten days that the Isaac Hall of the Cave of the Patriarchs is open. In early 2007 new mezuzot were affixed to the entrance of the site.
In popular culture
*1960, David and Goliath (film) – Abner is portrayed by Massimo Serato. In this version, Abner tries to murder David (Ivica Pajer) when he returns in triumph after killing Goliath. However, here Abner is slain by King Saul (Orson Welles).
*1961, A Story of David (film) – Abner is portrayed by Welsh actor David Davies.
*1976, The Story of David (television series) – Younger version of Abner is portrayed by Israeli actor Yehuda Efroni. Older version of Abner is portrayed by British actor Brian Blessed.
*1985, King David (film) – Abner is portrayed by English actor John Castle. King David portrayed by Richard Gere.
*1997, King David (musical) – written by Tim Rice and Alan Menken. Abner is portrayed by American actor Timothy Shew.
*1997, David (television drama) – Abner is portrayed by Richard Ashcroft.
*2009, Kings (television series) – Abner portrayed by Wes Studi as General Linus Abner. The series is set in a multi-ethnic Western culture similar to that in the present-day United States, but with characters drawn from the Bible.
*2012, Rei Davi (Brazilian television series) – Abner is portrayed by Iran Malfitano.
*2025, House of David – Abner is portrayed by Oded Fehr
Notes
References
Citations
Cited sources
* External links
*
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20090903163552/http://hebron.web.aplus.net/english/article.php?id=240 Pictures of Avner ben Ner's Tomb in Hebron]
* [http://en.hebron.org.il/history/235 Tomb of Abner page on Hebron.com website].
* David, Abraham (ed.) (1999). In Zion and Jerusalem: The Itinerary of Rabbi Moses Basola (1521–1523) C. G. Foundation Jerusalem Project Publications of the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies of Bar-Ilan University . Reference is made to visiting the tomb of Abner. ([https://web.archive.org/web/20160304132346/http://courses.umass.edu/juda373/outlines/Basola,%20through%20p.148.pdf p. 77]).
* [http://www.imagekind.com/Prayer-at-Cave-of-Avner-ben-Ner_art?IMID=f2c778c4-bcb1-4446-9ef4-c8489643a845 Photo of prayer at the Tomb of Abner from Imagekind].
* [http://www.picjew.com/en/photos/holy-places/avner-ben-ner-tomb/3803 Photo of prayer at the Tomb of Abner from PicJew].
* Photos of Tomb of Abner Ben Ner from the book Sites in Hebron by David Wilder. ASIN: B00ALHB89Y. [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ALHB89Y/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb]
Category:Biblical murder victims
Category:Warriors of Asia
Category:House of Saul
ca:Llista de personatges bíblics#Abner | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abner | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.410669 |
1527 | Ahmed I | | coronation = 23 December 1603
| cor-type =
| predecessor = Mehmed III
| successor = Mustafa I
| succession = Sultan of the Ottoman Empire<br/>(Padishah)
| spouse Kösem Sultan<br/>Mahfiruz Hatun
| spouse-type = Consorts
| issue = Osman II<br />Şehzade Mehmed<br/>Ayşe Sultan<br/>Gevherhan Sultan<br/>Fatma Sultan<br/>Hanzade Sultan<br/>Murad IV<br/>Şehzade Bayezid<br />Şehzade Süleyman<br/>Şehzade Kasım<br/>Atike Sultan<br/>Ibrahim I
| issue-link = #Sons
| issue-pipe = Among others
| full name = Şah Ahmed bin Mehmed Han
| house = Ottoman
| house-type = Dynasty
| father = Mehmed III
| mother = Handan Sultan
| birth_date
| birth_place = Manisa Palace, Manisa, Ottoman Empire
| death_date
| death_place = Topkapı Palace, Constantinople, Ottoman Empire
| burial_date | burial_place Sultan Ahmed Mosque, Istanbul, Turkey
| signature_type = Tughra
| religion = Sunni Islam
| signature = Tughra of Ahmed I.JPG
}}
Ahmed I ( ; ; 18 April 1590 – 22 November 1617) was the sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1603 to 1617. Ahmed's reign is noteworthy for marking the first breach in the Ottoman tradition of royal fratricide; henceforth, Ottoman rulers would no longer systematically execute their brothers upon accession to the throne. He is also well known for his construction of the Blue Mosque, one of the most famous mosques in Turkey.
Early life
Ahmed was born at the Manisa Palace, Manisa, probably on 18 April 1590, when his father Mehmed was still a prince and the governor of the Sanjak of Manisa. His mother was Handan Sultan. After his grandfather Murad III's death in 1595, his father came to Constantinople and ascended the throne as Sultan Mehmed III. Mehmed ordered the execution of his nineteen half brothers. Ahmed's elder brother Şehzade Mahmud was also executed by his father Mehmed on 7 June 1603, just before Mehmed's own death on 22 December 1603. Mahmud was buried along with his mother (Halime Sultan, dead after 1623) in a separate mausoleum built by Ahmed in Şehzade Mosque, Constantinople.ReignAhmed ascended the throne after his father's death in 1603, at the age of thirteen, when his powerful grandmother Safiye Sultan was still alive. With his accession to the throne, the power struggle in the harem flared up; between his mother Handan Sultan and his grandmother Safiye Sultan, who in the previous reign had absolute power within the walls (behind the throne), in the end, with the support of Ahmed, the fight ended in favor of his mother. Ahmed broke with the traditional fratricide following previous enthronements and did not order the execution of his three years old half-brother Mustafa, the second son of Halime Sultan. Instead, Mustafa was sent to live at the old palace at Bayezit along with his mother and their grandmother, Safiye Sultan. This was most likely due to Ahmed's young age - he had not yet demonstrated his ability to sire children, and Mustafa was then the only other candidate for the Ottoman throne. His brother's execution would have endangered the dynasty, and thus he was spared.
Relations with Morocco
During his reign the ruler of Morocco was Mulay Zidan whose father and predecessor Ahmad al-Mansur had paid a tribute of vassalage as a vassal of the Ottomans until his death. The Saadi civil wars had interrupted this tribute of vassalage, but Mulay Zidan proposed to submit to it in order to protect himself from Algiers, and so he resumed paying the tribute to the Ottomans.
Ottoman-Safavid War: 1604–06
The Ottoman–Safavid War had begun shortly before the death of Ahmed's father Mehmed III. Upon ascending the throne, Ahmed I appointed Cigalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha as the commander of the eastern army. The army marched from Constantinople on 15 June 1604, which was too late, and by the time it had arrived on the eastern front on 8 November 1604, the Safavid army had captured Yerevan and entered the Kars Eyalet, and could only be stopped in Akhaltsikhe. Despite the conditions being favourable, Sinan Pasha decided to stay for the winter in Van, but then marched to Erzurum to stop an incoming Safavid attack. This caused unrest within the army and the year was practically wasted for the Ottomans.
In 1605, Sinan Pasha marched to take Tabriz, but the army was undermined by Köse Sefer Pasha, the Beylerbey of Erzurum, marching independently from Sinan Pasha and consequently being taken prisoner by the Safavids. The Ottoman army was routed at Urmia and had to flee firstly to Van and then to Diyarbekir. Here, Sinan Pasha sparked a rebellion by executing the Beylerbey of Aleppo, Canbulatoğlu Hüseyin Pasha, who had come to provide help, upon the pretext that he had arrived too late. He soon died himself and the Safavid army was able to capture Ganja, Shirvan and Shamakhi in Azerbaijan.]]
The new Grand Vizier, Nasuh Pasha, did not want to fight with the Safavids. The Safavid Shah also sent a letter saying that he was willing to sign a peace treaty, with which he would have to send 200 loads of silk every year to Constantinople. On 20 November 1612, the Treaty of Nasuh Pasha was signed, which ceded all the lands the Ottoman Empire had gained in the war of 1578–90 back to Persia and reinstated the 1555 boundaries.
The known consorts are:
* Mahpeyker Kösem Sultan ( - 2 September 1651). She was his favourite consort, Haseki Sultan, and legal wife, and the mother of many of his children, among them Murad IV and Ibrahim I.
* Hatice Mahfiruz Hatun ( - ). Also called Mahfiruze Hatun, she was his first concubine and the mother of his firstborn son Osman II.
Sons
Ahmed I had at least thirteen sons:
*Osman II (3 November 1604, Constantinople, Topkapı Palace – murdered by janissaries, 20 May 1622, Constantinople, Topkapı Palace, buried in Ahmed I Mausoleum, Sultan Ahmed Mosque) - with Mahfiruz Hatun. 16th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire;
* Şehzade Mehmed (11 March 1605, Constantinople, Topkapı Palace – murdered by Osman II, 12 January 1621, Istanbul, Topkapı Palace, buried in Ahmed I Mausoleum, Sultan Ahmed Mosque) - with Kösem Sultan;
* Şehzade Orhan (1609, Constantinople – 1612, Constantinople, buried in Ahmed I Mausoleum, Sultan Ahmed Mosque) – maybe with Kösem Sultan.
* Şehzade Cihangir (1609, Constantinople – 1609, Constantinople, buried in Ahmed I Mausoleum, Sultan Ahmed Mosque). 17th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire;
* Şehzade Hasan (25 November 1612, Constantinople – 1615, Constantinople, buried in Ahmed I Mausoleum, Sultan Ahmed Mosque).
* Şehzade Süleyman (1613?/1615?, Constantinople – murdered by Murad IV, 27 July 1635, Constantinople, Topkapı Palace, buried in Ahmed I Mausoleum, Sultan Ahmed Mosque) - with Kösem Sultan; Constantinople – 1657, Constantinople, buried in Ahmed I Mausoleum, Sultan Ahmed Mosque) - with Kösem Sultan,
*Gevherhan Sultan (1605/1606 or 1608, Constantinople – 1660, Constantinople, buried in Ahmed I Mausoleum, Sultan Ahmed Mosque) - with Kösem Sultan,
*Hatice Sultan (Constantinople, 1608 – Constantinople, 1610, buried in Ahmed I Mausoleum, Sultan Ahmed Mosque)
*Zeynep Sultan (Constantinople, 1617 – Constantinople, 1619, buried in Ahmed I Mausoleum, Sultan Ahmed Mosque) She married Shehit Ali Pasha.
*Abide Sultan (Constantinople, 1618 – Constantinople, 1648, buried in Ahmed I Mausoleum, Sultan Ahmed Mosque). Called also Übeyde Sultan, married in 1642 to Koca Musa Pasha (died in 1647).<ref name"auto"/>LegacyToday, Ahmed I is remembered mainly for the construction of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (also known as the Blue Mosque), one of the masterpieces of Islamic architecture. The area in Fatih around the Mosque is today called Sultanahmet. He died at Topkapı Palace in Constantinople and is buried in a mausoleum right outside the walls of the famous mosque.In popular cultureIn the 2015 TV series Muhteşem Yüzyıl: Kösem, Ahmed I is portrayed by Turkish actor Ekin Koç.See also
*Transformation of the Ottoman Empire
* Abbas I's Kakhetian and Kartlian campaigns
References
External links
[aged 27]
Category:1590 births
Category:1617 deaths
Category:Deaths from typhus
Category:Child monarchs
Category:Ottoman people of the Ottoman–Persian Wars
Category:Infectious disease deaths in the Ottoman Empire
Category:17th-century sultans of the Ottoman Empire
Category:Turks from the Ottoman Empire
Category:People from the Ottoman Empire of Bosnian descent
Category:Sons of sultans | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_I | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.424125 |
1528 | Ahmed II | | coronation | cor-type
| predecessor = Suleiman II
| regent | reg-type
| successor = Mustafa II
| succession = Sultan of the Ottoman Empire (Padishah)
| spouse = Rabia Sultan<br>Şayeste Hatun
| spouse-type = Consort
| issue = Şehzade Ibrahim <br> Şehzade Selim <br>Asiye Sultan<br>Atike Sultan<br>Hatice Sultan
| full name = Ahmed bin Ibrahim
| house = Ottoman
| house-type = Dynasty
| father = Ibrahim
| mother = Muazzez Sultan
| birth_date = 25 February 1643 or 1 August 1642
| birth_place = Constantinople, Ottoman Empire
| death_date
| death_place = Edirne, Ottoman Empire
| burial_date | burial_place Süleymaniye Mosque, Istanbul, Turkey
| signature_type = Tughra
| religion = Sunni Islam
| signature = Tughra of Ahmed II.svg
}}
Ahmed II (; ;<span dir"ltr"> 25 February 1643 or 1 August 1642 – 6 February 1695)</span> was the sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1691 to 1695.
Early life
Ahmed II was born on 25 February 1643 or 1 August 1642, the son of Sultan Ibrahim and Muazzez Sultan. On 21 October 1649, Ahmed, along with his brothers Mehmed and Suleiman was circumcised.
During the reigns of his older brothers, Ahmed was imprisoned in Kafes, and he stayed there almost 43 years.
of Ahmed II is located inside the türbe of Suleiman the Magnificent. <small>(In the above picture, his tomb is seen side by side with Suleiman II and Suleiman the Magnificent).</small>]]
Reign
During his reign, Ahmed II devoted most of his attention to the wars against the Habsburgs and related foreign policy, governmental and economic issues. Of these, the most important were the tax reforms and the introduction of the lifelong tax farm system (malikâne''). Following the recovery of Belgrade under his predecessor, Suleiman II, the military frontier reached a rough stalemate on the Danube, with the Habsburgs no longer able to advance south of it, and the Ottomans attempting, ultimately unsuccessfully, to regain the initiative north of it.
Among the most important features of Ahmed's reign was his reliance on Köprülüzade Fazıl Mustafa Pasha. Following his accession to the throne, Ahmed II confirmed Fazıl Mustafa Pasha in his office as grand vizier. In office from 1689, Fazıl Mustafa Pasha was from the Köprülü family of grand viziers, and like most of his Köprülü predecessors in the same office, was an able administrator and military commander. Like his father Köprülü Mehmed Pasha (grand vizier, 1656–61) before him, Fazıl Mustafa Pasha ordered the removal and execution of dozens of corrupt state officials of the previous regime and replaced them with men loyal to himself. He overhauled the tax system by adjusting it to the capabilities of the taxpayers affected by the latest wars. He also reformed troop mobilization and increased the pool of conscripts available for the army by drafting tribesmen in the Balkans and Anatolia. In October 1690, Fazıl Mustafa Pasha recaptured Belgrade, a key fortress that commanded the confluence of the rivers Danube and Sava; in Ottoman hands since 1521, the fortress had been conquered by the Habsburgs in 1688.
Fazıl Mustafa Pasha's victory at Belgrade was a major military achievement that gave the Ottomans hope that the military debacles of the 1680s—which had led to the loss of Hungary and Transylvania, an Ottoman vassal principality ruled by pro-Istanbul Hungarian princes—could be reversed. However, the Ottoman success proved ephemeral. On 19 August 1691, Fazıl Mustafa Pasha suffered a devastating defeat at the Battle of Slankamen at the hands of Louis William, the Habsburg commander in chief in Hungary, nicknamed “Türkenlouis” (Louis the Turk) for his victories against the Ottomans. In the confrontation, recognized by contemporaries as “the bloodiest battle of the century,” the Ottomans suffered heavy losses: 20,000 men, including the grand vizier. With him, the sultan lost his most capable military commander and the last member of the Köprülü family, who for the previous half century had been instrumental in strengthening the Ottoman military.
Under Fazıl Mustafa Pasha's successors, the Ottomans suffered further defeats. In June 1692 the Habsburgs conquered Oradea, the seat of an Ottoman governor () since 1660. In 1694, they attempted to recapture Oradea, but to no avail. On 12 January 1695, they surrendered the fortress of Gyula, the center of an Ottoman sanjak (subprovince) since 1566. With the fall of Gyula, the only territory still in Ottoman hands in Hungary was to the east of the River Tisza and to the south of the river Maros, with its center at Timișoara. Three weeks later, on 6 February 1695, Ahmed II died in Edirne Palace.
Family
Consorts
Ahmed II had two known consorts:
*Rabia Sultan (died Eski Palace, Istanbul, 14 January 1712, buried in Suleiman I Mausoleum, Süleymaniye Mosque). Ahmed II's most beloved consort and the last haseki sultan of the Ottoman Empire;
*Şayeste Hatun (died in 1710). Second concubine of Ahmed II, perhaps mother of his other daughters. Sons
Ahmed II had two sons:
*Şehzade Ibrahim (Edirne Palace, Edirne, 6 October 1692 – Topkapı Palace, Istanbul, 4 May 1714, buried in Mustafa I Mausoleum, Hagia Sophia), with Rabia Sultan, Selim's twin, became crown prince on 22 August 1703 until his death;
*Şehzade Selim (Edirne Palace, Edirne, 6 October 1692 – Edirne Palace, Edirne, 15 May 1693, buried in Sultan Mustafa Mausoleum, Hagia Sophia), with Rabia Sultan, he was Ibrahim's twin. Daughters
Ahmed II had three daughters:
*Asiye Sultan (Edirne Palace, Edirne, 24 August 1694 – Eski Palace, Bayezid, Istanbul, 9 December 1695, buried in Suleiman I Mausoleum, Süleymaniye Mosque), with Rabia Sultan;
*Atike Sultan (born 21 October 1694), probably with Şayeste Hatun. Died in infancy.
*Hatice Sultan, probably with Şayeste Hatun. Died in infancy.
In addition to his daughters, Ahmed II was deeply attached to his niece Ümmügülsüm Sultan, daughter of his half-brother Mehmed IV, so much so that he treated her as if she were his own daughter.
References
Citations
Sources
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Further reading
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*Michael Hochendlinger, Austria's Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1683–1797 (London: Longman, 2003), 157–64.
External links
Category:1640s births
Category:1695 deaths
Category:Ottoman people of the Great Turkish War
Category:17th-century sultans of the Ottoman Empire
Category:Turks from the Ottoman Empire
Category:Sons of sultans | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_II | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.430435 |
1529 | Ahmed III | 20 September 1730
| coronation | cor-type
| predecessor = Mustafa II
| regent | reg-type
| successor = Mahmud I
| spouse = Emetullah Kadın<br/>Mihrişah Kadın<br>Rabia Şermi Kadın<br>Musli Kadın<br/>others
| spouse-type = Consorts
| issue =
| issue-link = #Family
| issue-pipe = Among others
| full name = Ahmed bin Mehmed
| house = Ottoman
| house-type = Dynasty
| father = Mehmed IV
| mother = Gülnuş Sultan
| birth_date = 30 December 1673
| birth_place = Hacıoğlu Pazarcık, Ottoman Empire
| death_date
| death_place = Constantinople, Ottoman Empire
| burial_date | burial_place Tomb of Turhan Sultan, Istanbul, Turkey
| signature_type = Tughra
| religion = Sunni Islam
| signature = Tughra of Ahmed III.JPG
}}
Ahmed III (, Aḥmed-i <u>s</u>āli<u>s</u>; <span dir"ltr">30 December 16731 July 1736)</span> was sultan of the Ottoman Empire and a son of sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648–1687). His mother was Gülnuş Sultan, originally named Evmania Voria, who was an ethnic Greek. He was born at Hacıoğlu Pazarcık, in Dobruja. He succeeded to the throne in 1703 on the abdication of his brother Mustafa II (1695–1703). Nevşehirli Damat İbrahim Pasha and the Sultan's daughter, Fatma Sultan (wife of the former) directed the government from 1718 to 1730, a period referred to as the Tulip Era.
During the initial days of Ahmed III's reign, significant efforts were made to appease the janissaries. However, Ahmed's effectiveness in dealing with the janissaries who had elevated him to the sultanate was limited. Grand Vizier Çorlulu Ali Pasha, whom Ahmed appointed, provided valuable assistance in administrative affairs and implemented new measures for the treasury. He supported Ahmed in his struggles against rival factions and provided stability to the government. Ahmed was an avid reader, skilled in calligraphy and knowledgeable on history and poetry.
Early life and education
Sultan Ahmed was born on 30 December 1673. His father was Sultan Mehmed IV, and his mother was Gülnuş Sultan, originally named Evmenia. His birth occurred in Hacıoğlupazarı, where Mehmed stayed to hunt on his return from Poland in 1673, while Gülnuş was pregnant at that time. In 1675, He and his brother, Prince Mustafa (future Mustafa II) were circumcised. During the same ceremony their sisters Hatice Sultan and Fatma Sultan were married to Musahip Mustafa Pasha and Kara Mustafa Pasha respectively. The celebrations lasted 20 days.
He grew up in the Edirne Palace. His schooling began during one of the sporadic visits of the court to Istanbul, following a courtly ceremony called bad-i basmala, which took place on 9 August 1679 in the Istavroz Palace. He was brought up in the imperial harem in Edirne with a traditional princely education, studying the Qur’an, the hadiths (traditions of Muhammad), and the fundamentals of Islamic sciences, history, poetry and music under the supervision of private tutors. One of his tutors was chief mufti Feyzullah Efendi.
Ahmed was apparently curious and intellectual in nature, spending most of his time reading and practising calligraphy. The poems that he wrote manifest his profound knowledge of poetry, history, Islamic theology and philosophy. He was also interested in calligraphy, which he had studied with the leading court calligraphers, primarily with Hafız Osman Efendi (died 1698), who influenced his art immensely, and, therefore, practiced it because of the influence of his elder brother, the future Sultan Mustafa II, who also became a notable calligrapher.
During his princehood in Edirne, Ahmed made friends with a bright officer-scribe, Ibrahim, from the city of Nevşehir, who was to become one of the outstanding Grand Viziers of his future reign. From 1687, following the deposition of his father, he lived in isolation for sixteen years in the palaces of Edirne and Istanbul. During this period he dedicated himself to calligraphy and intellectual activities.
Reign
Accession
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The Edirne succession occurred between 19 August to 23 August. Under Mustafa, Istanbul had been out of control for a long time. As arrests and executions mounted, theft and robbery incidents became common. The people were dissatisfied with the poor governing of the Empire. Mustafa was deposed by the Janissaries and Ahmed, who succeeded him to the throne on 22 August 1703. The first Friday salute was held in Bayezid Mosque.
Fındıklılı Mehmed Ağa welcomed the new sultan at the Harem gate on the Hasoda side, entered the arm, brought him to the Cardigan-i Saadet Department and placed them on the throne, and were among the first to pay tribute to him.
As part of the fief system, Ahmed reorganized the land law in 1705. Bringing order to land ownership reduced the crime wave and brought peace to the troubled Empire. Due to his ardent support of the new laws, Ahmed was given the title 'law-giver', a title given to only three sultans earlier, Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512), Selim I (r. 1512–1520) and Suleiman I (r. 1520–1566). In the first three years of his reign, Ahmed appointed four separate Grand Viziers. However, the government only gained some stability after the appointment of Çorlulu Ali Pasha in May 1706.Russo-Turkish War of 1710–1711
Ahmed III cultivated good relations with France, doubtless in view of Russia's menacing attitude. He afforded refuge in Ottoman territory to Charles XII of Sweden (1682–1718) after the Swedish defeat at the hands of Peter I of Russia (1672–1725) in the Battle of Poltava of 1709. In 1710 Charles XII convinced Sultan Ahmed III to declare war against Russia, and the Ottoman forces under Baltacı Mehmet Pasha won a major victory at the Battle of Prut. In the aftermath, Russia returned Azov back to the Ottomans, agreed to demolish the fortress of Taganrog and others in the area, and to stop interfering in the affairs of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Forced against his will into war with Russia, Ahmed III came nearer than any Ottoman sovereign before or since to breaking the power of his northern rival, whose armies his grand vizier Nevşehirli Damat İbrahim Pasha succeeded in completely surrounding at the Pruth River Campaign in 1711.
The Mughal Emperor Farrukhsiyar, another grandson of Aurangzeb, is also known to have sent a letter to the Ottomans but this time it was received by the Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Damad Ibrahim Pasha. The letter provided a graphic description of the efforts of the Mughal commander Syed Hassan Ali Khan Barha fighting against the Rajput and Maratha rebellion.
Deposition
Sultan Ahmed III had become unpopular by reason of the excessive pomp and costly luxury in which he and his principal officers indulged; on 20 September 1730, a mutinous riot of seventeen Janissaries, led by the Albanian Patrona Halil, was aided by the citizens as well as the military until it swelled into an insurrection, this consequently led the Sultan to give up his throne.
Ahmed voluntarily led his nephew Mahmud I (1730–1754) to the seat of sovereignty and paid allegiance to him as Sultan of the Empire. He then retired to the Kafes previously occupied by Mahmud and died at Topkapı Palace after six years of confinement.
Architecture
Ahmed III commissioned the building of water claps, fountains, park waterfalls and three libraries, one inside the Topkapı Palace, with the famous lines "Ahmed was a master in the writings on plates" which have survived. The “Basmala” at the Topkapi Palace apartment door with its plates in the Üsküdar Yeni Mosque are among them.
A library was built by Ahmed in 1724–1725 situated next to the tomb entrance of Turhan Sultan, the structure has stone-brick alternate meshed walls, is square-shaped and covered with a flattened dome with an octagonal rim, which is provided with pendentives. There are original pen works left in the pendentives and dome of the library.
Disasters
In 1714, an Egyptian galleon near the Gümrük (Eminönü) Pier caught fire and burned, which resulted in the deaths of 200 people.
While Nevşehirli Damat Ibrahim Pasha continued his preparations for his return to Istanbul, a fire broke out in the city. The districts of Unkapanı, Azapkapı, Zeyrek, Fatih, Saraçhane, Horhor, Etmeydanı, Molla Gürani, Altımermer, Ayazma Gate, Kantarcılar, Vefa, Vez Neciler, Old Rooms, Acemioğlanlar Barracks, Çukur Çeşme, Langa, Davudpaşa were burned from the fire.
A large three-minute earthquake occurred on 14 May 1719. While the city walls of Istanbul were destroyed in the earthquake, 4,000 people died in Izmit and Yalova was destroyed. Reconstruction work followed after the quake ended in Istanbul. The most meaningful element to reflect the cultural aspect or weight of these works today is the Topkapı Palace Enderun Library, which was built in that year. A rich foundation was established for this institution, which is also known as the Sultan Ahmed-i Salis Library, which has a face-to-face with its architectural and valuable manuscripts. Family
Ahmed III is known to be the Sultan with the largest family (and harem) of the Ottoman dynasty. The hostess of his harem was Dilhayat Kalfa, known to be one of the greatest Turkish composeress of the early modern period.
Consorts
Ahmed III had at least twenty-one consorts:
* Emetullah Banu Kadın. Baş Kadin (first consort) and his first concubine, she was the mother of Fatma Sultan, Ahmed's firstborn and favorite daughter. She was Ahmed's most beloved consort, who dedicated a mosque, a school and a fountain to her. Very devoted and active in charity, she died in 1740 in the Old Palace.
* Emine Mihrişah Kadın. She was the mother of four sons including Mustafa III, 26th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, but she died before her son's rise and therefore was never Valide Sultan. She died in April 1732. Her son built the Ayazma Mosque in her honor in Üsküdar.
* Rabia Şermi Kadın. She was the mother of Abdülhamid I, 27th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, but she premorted at the rise of her son and therefore was never Valide Sultan. In 1728, a fountain was dedicated to her in Üsküdar. She died in 1732. Her son built the Beylerbeyi Mosque in her honor.
* Ayşe Mihri Behri Kadın. Before she became a consort, she was treasurer of the harem.
* Hatem Kadın. Mother of twins, she died in 1772 and was buried in Eyüp cemetery.
* Emine Musli Kadın. Also called Muslıhe Kadın, Muslu Kadin or Musalli Kadın. She was the mother of two daughters, she died in 1750 and was buried with them in the Yeni Cami.
* Rukiye Kadın. Mother of a daughter and a son, she built a fountain near the Yeni Cami. She died after 1738 and was buried with her daughter in the Yeni Cami.
* Fatma Hümaşah Kadın. She died in 1732 and was buried by the Yeni Cami.
* Gülneş Kadın. Also called Gülnuş Kadın. She is listed in a document naming her consorts exiled to Old Palace after the deposition of Ahmed III whose jewels were confiscated. She died after 1730.
* Hürrem Kadın. Listed in a document that names the consorts exiled to Old Palace after the deposition of Ahmed III whose jewels were confiscated. She died after 1730.
* Meyli Kadın. Listed in a document that names the consorts exiled to Old Palace after the deposition of Ahmed III whose jewels were confiscated. She died after 1730.
* Hatice Kadın. She died in 1722 and was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Nazife Kadın. Listed in a document that names the consorts exiled to Old Palace after the deposition of Ahmed III whose jewels were confiscated. She died after 1730, perphaps the 29 December 1764.
* Nejat Kadın. Listed in a document that names the consorts exiled to Old Palace after the deposition of Ahmed III whose jewels were confiscated. She died after 1730.
* Sadık Kadın. Also called Sadıka Kadin. Listed in a document that names the consorts exiled to Old Palace after the deposition of Ahmed III whose jewels were confiscated. She died after 1730.
* Hüsnüşah Kadın. She died in 1733 and was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Şahin Kadın. She died in 1732 and was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Ümmügülsüm Kadın. She died in 1768 and was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Zeyneb Kadın. Mother of a daughter, she died in 1757 and was buried by the Yeni Cami.
* Hanife Kadın. Mother of a daughter, she died in 1750 and was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Şayeste Hanim. BaşIkbal. She died in 1722 and was buried by the Yeni Cami.
Sons
Ahmed III had at least twenty-one sons, all buried, apart from the two who became Sultans, in the Yeni Cami: She was her father's favorite daughter. She married twice and had two sons and two daughters. She and her second husband were the real power during the Tulip Era. She fell from grace after the Patrona Halil revolt and was confined to Çırağan Palace, where she died three years later.
* Ayşe Sultan (? - 1706). Buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Mihrimah Sultan (17 June 1706 - ?). She died as a child and was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Hatice Sultan (21 January 1707 - 22 January 1708). Buried in the mausoleum Turhan Sultan in the Yeni Cami.
* Rukiye Sultan (3 March 1707 - 29 August 1707). She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Ümmügülsüm Sultan (11 February 1708 - 28 November 1732). Twin of Zeynep Sultan. She married once and had four sons and a daughter.
* Zeynep Sultan (11 February 1708 - 5 November 1708). Twin sister of Ümmügülsüm Sultan. She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Zeynep Sultan (5 January 1710 - July 1710). She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Hatice Sultan (8 February 1710 - 1710, before September). She was buried in the Turhan Sultan mausoleum in Yeni Cami.
* Hatice Sultan (27 September 1710 - 1738) - with Rukiye Kadın. She married twice and had a son.
* Emine Sultan (1711 - 1720). She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Atike Sultan (29 February 1712 - 2 April 1737). She got married once and she had a son.
* Rukiye Sultan (7 March 1713 - October 1715). Buried in the Turhan Sultan mausoleum in Yeni Cami.
* Zeynep Asima Sultan (8 April 1714 - March 25, 1774). She married twice and she had a son.
* Saliha Sultan (21 March 1715 - 11 October 1778) - with Hatem Kadın. Twin of Şehzade Selim. She was married five times and had a son and four daughters.
* Ayşe Sultan (10 October 1715 - 9 July 1775) - with Musli Kadın. Nicknamed Küçük Ayşe (meaning Ayşe the youngest) to distinguish her from her cousin Ayşe the eldest, daughter of Mustafa II. She married three times and had a daughter.
* Ferdane Sultan (? - 1718). She died as a child and she was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Reyhane Sultan (1718 - 1729). Also called Reyhan Sultan or Rihane Sultan. She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Ümmüseleme Sultan (? - 1719). Also called Ümmüselma Sultan. She died as a child and was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Rabia Sultan (19 November 1719 - before 1727). She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Emetullah Sultan (1719 - 1723) Also called Ümmetullah Sultan. She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Rukiye Sultan (? - 1720). She died as a child and was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Beyhan Sultan (? - 1720). She died as a child and was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Emetullah Sultan (17 September 1723 - 28 January 1724). She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Emine Sultan (late 1723/early 1724 - 1732). She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Nazife Sultan (May 1723/1725 - before 1730 or 29 December 1764). Exceptionally, she never married, most likely because she was chronically ill or had physical and/or mental problems. She lived in seclusion in the Old Palace all her life. However, according to other historians, she actually died a child and the Nazife who died in the Old Palace in 1764 was instead one of Ahmed III's consorts with the same name, Nazife Kadin.
* Ümmüselene Sultan (12 October 1724 - 5 December 1732). She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Naile Sultan (15 December 1725 - October 1727). She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Esma Sultan (14 March 1726 - 13 August 1778) - with Hanife Kadın or Zeyneb Kadın. Nicknamed Büyük Esma (meaning Esma the eldest) to distinguish her from her niece Esma the younger, daughter of Abdülhamid I. She married three times and had a daughter.
* Sabiha Sultan (19 December 1726 - 17 December 1726). She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Rabia Sultan (28 October 1727 - 4 April 1728). Also called Rebia Sultan. She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Zübeyde Sultan (28 March 1728 - 4 June 1756) - with Musli Kadın. She married twice.
* Ümmi Sultan (? - 1729). Called also Ümmügülsüm Sultan. She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Ümmühabibe Sultan (? - 1730). She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Akile Sultan (? - 1737). She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
* Ümmi Sultan (1730 - 1742). Called also Ümmügülsüm Sultan. She was buried in the Yeni Cami.
Death
Ahmed lived in Kafes of the Topkapi Palace for six years following his deposition, where he fell ill and died on 1 July 1736. He was buried in his grandmother's tomb in Turhan Sultan Mausoleum in New Mosque, at Eminönü in Istanbul.In fiction
In Voltaire's Candide, the eponymous main character meets the deposed Ahmed III on a ship from Venice to Constantinople. The Sultan is in the company of five other deposed European monarchs, and he tells Candide, who initially doubts his credentials:
<blockquote>I am not jesting, my name is Achmet III. For several years I was Sultan; I dethroned my brother; my nephew dethroned me; they cut off the heads of my viziers; I am ending my days in the old seraglio; my nephew, Sultan Mahmoud, sometimes allows me to travel for my health, and I have come to spend the Carnival at Venice."</blockquote>
This episode was taken up by the modern Turkish writer Nedim Gürsel as the setting of his 2001 novel Le voyage de Candide à Istanbul.
In fact, there is no evidence of the deposed Sultan being allowed to make such foreign travels, nor did Voltaire (or Gürsel) assert that it had any actual historical foundation.
See also
* Fountain of Ahmed III
* Fountain of Ahmed III (Üsküdar)
* Ibrahim Muteferrika
References
Sources
* This article incorporates text from the History of Ottoman Turks (1878)
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External links
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1 October 1730}}
Category:Turkish male poets
Category:1673 births
Category:1736 deaths
Category:18th-century sultans of the Ottoman Empire
Category:Dethroned monarchs
Category:Sons of sultans | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_III | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.445586 |
1530 | Ainu people | | population | popplace
| image = Historical expanse of Ainu.png
| image_caption = Historical homeland and distribution of Ainu people
| region1 = (Hokkaido)
| pop1 = 11,450 surveyed in 2023
| ref1
| region2 = (Kamchatka, Khabarovsk, Sakhalin)
| pop2 = 300 (2021 census)
| ref2
| langs
| rels =
| related =
}}
The Ainu are an indigenous ethnic group who reside in northern Japan and southeastern Russia, including Hokkaido and the Tōhoku region of Honshu, as well as the land surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk, such as Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, the Kamchatka Peninsula, and the Khabarovsk Krai. They have occupied these areas, known to them as "Ainu Mosir" (), since before the arrival of the modern Yamato and Russians. These regions are often referred to as and its inhabitants as in historical Japanese texts. Along with the Yamato and Ryukyu ethnic groups, the Ainu people are one of the primary historic ethnic groups of Japan.
Official surveys of the known Ainu population in Hokkaido received 11,450 responses in 2023, and the Ainu population in Russia was estimated at 300 in 2021. In recent years, there have been increasing efforts to revitalize the Ainu language.NamesThis people's most widely known ethnonym, (}}; ; ), means 'human' in the Ainu language, particularly as opposed to , 'divine beings'. Ainu also identify themselves as ('comrades' or 'people'). Official documents use both names.
The name first appeared as in a 1591 Latin manuscript titled . This document gives the native name of Hokkaido as , or , 'land of the Ainu'. The terms and did not come into common use as ethnonyms until the early 19th century. The ethnonym first appeared in an 1819 German encyclopedia article. Neither European nor Japanese sources conceived of the Ainu as a distinct ethnic group until the late 1700s.
The Ainu were also called the Kuye by their neighbors. The Qing dynasty called Sakhalin ("island of the Ainu"). The island was also called . The word used by the Qing is "most probably related to kuyi, the name given to the Sakhalin Ainu by their Nivkh and Nanai neighbors." When the Ainu migrated onto the mainland, the Chinese described a "strong Kui (or Kuwei, Kuwu, Kuye, Kugi, i.e. Ainu) presence in the area otherwise dominated by the Gilemi or Jilimi (Nivkh and other Amur peoples)." Related names were in widespread use in the region, for example the Kuril Ainu called themselves .
The Old Japanese exonym () was coined according to the Kojiki-den from ("shrimp") + ("barbarian") as a reference to their hairiness and savagery. The term is considered an insult by contemporary Ainu.
History
The Ainu are considered the native people of Hokkaido, southern Sakhalin, and the Kurils. Ainu toponyms support the historical view that the Ainu people lived in several places throughout northern Honshu. There is also a possibility that Ainu speakers lived throughout the Amur region as suggested by various Ainu loanwords found in the Uilta and Ulch languages. Ainu shares a number of cognates with Old Korean, that appear unlikely to be the result of a Japonic intermediary.
The ancestors of the Ainu, who were referred to as Emishi, came under Japanese subjugation starting in the 9th century and were pushed to the northern islands.
Ainu Culture period (Nibutani period)
Following the Zoku-Jōmon period, which began in the 5th century BC, and the subsequent Satsumon period, from around the 13th century the Ainu established their own culture by absorbing the surrounding culture while engaging in transit trade between Honshu and north-east Asia. This is called the Ainu Culture period or Nibutani period.
Active contact between the Wajin (ethnonym for Japanese, also known as Yamato people) and the Ainu of Ezogashima (now known as Hokkaido) began in this period. The Ainu formed a society of hunter-gatherers, surviving mainly by hunting and fishing. They followed a religion that was based on natural phenomena.
After the Mongols conquered the Jin dynasty (1234), Karafuto (Sakhalin)-Ainu suffered raids by the Nivkh and Udege peoples. In response, the Mongols established an administration post at Nurgan (present-day Tyr, Russia) at the junction of the Amur and Amgun rivers in 1263, and forced the submission of the two peoples. In 1264, the Karafuto-Ainu invaded the land of the Nivkh people. They also started an expedition into the Amur region, which was then controlled by the Yuan dynasty, resulting in reprisals by the Mongols who invaded Sakhalin.
From the Nivkh perspective, their surrender to the Mongols essentially established a military alliance against the Ainu who had invaded their lands. According to the History of Yuan, a group of people known as the Guwei (, the phonetic approximation of the Nivkh name for Ainu) from Sakhalin invaded and fought with the Jilimi (Nivkh people) every year. On November 30, 1264, the Mongols attacked the Ainu. The Karafuto-Ainu resisted the Mongol invasions but by 1308 had been subdued. They paid tribute to the Mongol Yuan dynasty at posts in Wuliehe, Nanghar, and Boluohe.
The Chinese Ming dynasty (1368–1644) placed Sakhalin under its "system for subjugated peoples" (). From 1409 to 1411 the Ming established an outpost called the Nurgan Regional Military Commission near the ruins of Tyr on the Siberian mainland, which continued operating until the mid-1430s. There is some evidence that the Ming eunuch Admiral Yishiha reached Sakhalin in 1413 during one of his expeditions to the lower Amur, and granted Ming titles to a local chieftain.
The Ming recruited headmen from Sakhalin for administrative posts such as commander (), assistant commander (), and "official charged with subjugation" (). In 1431, one such assistant commander, Alige, brought marten pelts as tribute to the Wuliehe post. In 1437, four other assistant commanders (Zhaluha, Sanchiha, Tuolingha, and Alingge) also presented tribute. According to the Ming Veritable Records, these posts, like the position of headman, were hereditary and passed down the patrilineal line. During these tributary missions, the headmen would bring their sons, who later inherited their titles. In return for tribute, the Ming awarded them with silk uniforms.
Nivkh women in Sakhalin married Han Chinese Ming officials when the Ming took tribute from Sakhalin and the Amur River region. Due to Ming rule in Manchuria, Chinese cultural and religious influence such as Chinese New Year, the "Chinese god", and motifs such as dragons, spirals, and scrolls spread among the Ainu, Nivkh, and Amur natives such as the Udeghes, Ulchis, and Nanais. These groups also adopted material goods and practices such as agriculture, husbandry, heating, iron cooking pots, silk, and cotton.
are a part of Japan.]]
The Manchu Qing dynasty, which came to power in China in 1644, called Sakhalin "Kuyedao" () or "Kuye Fiyaka" (). The Manchus called it "Sagaliyan ula angga hada" (Island at the Mouth of the Black River). The Qing first asserted influence over Sakhalin after the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, which defined the Stanovoy Mountains as the border between the Qing and the Russian Empires. In the following year the Qing sent forces to the Amur estuary and demanded that the residents, including the Sakhalin Ainu, pay tribute. This was followed by several further visits to the island as part of the Qing effort to map the area. To enforce its influence, the Qing sent soldiers and mandarins across Sakhalin, reaching most parts of the island except the southern tip. The Qing imposed a fur-tribute system on the region's inhabitants. The Tokugawa bakufu (feudal government) granted the Matsumae clan exclusive rights to trade with the Ainu in the northern part of the island. Later, the Matsumae began to lease out trading rights to Japanese merchants, and contact between Japanese and Ainu became more extensive. Throughout this period, Ainu groups competed with each other to import goods from the Japanese, and epidemic diseases such as smallpox reduced the population. In an early colonization attempt, a Japanese settlement was established at Ōtomari on Sakhalin's southern end in 1679.
In the 1780s, the influence of the Japanese Tokugawa Shogunate on the Ainu of southern Sakhalin increased significantly. By the beginning of the 19th century, the Japanese economic zone extended midway up the east coast, to Taraika. With the exception of the Nayoro Ainu located on the west coast in close proximity to China, most Ainu stopped paying tribute to the Qing dynasty. The Matsumae clan was nominally in charge of Sakhalin, but they neither protected nor governed the Ainu there. Instead they extorted the Ainu for Chinese silk, which they sold in Honshu as Matsumae's special product. To obtain Chinese silk, the Ainu fell into debt, owing much fur to the Santan (Ulch people), who lived near the Qing office. The Ainu also sold the silk uniforms (mangpao, bufu, and chaofu) given to them by the Qing, which made up the majority of what the Japanese knew as nishiki and jittoku. As dynastic uniforms, the silk was of considerably higher quality than that traded at Nagasaki, and enhanced Matsumae prestige as exotic items. Eventually the Tokugawa government, realizing that they could not depend on the Matsumae, took control of Sakhalin in 1807.
|Brett L. Walker}}
From 1799 to 1806, the Tokugawa shogunate took direct control of southern Hokkaido. Japan proclaimed sovereignty over Sakhalin in 1807, and in 1809 Mamiya Rinzō claimed that it was an island. During this period, Ainu women were separated from their husbands and either subjected to rape or forcibly married to Japanese men. Meanwhile, Ainu men were deported to merchant subcontractors for five- and ten-year terms of service. Policies of family separation and assimilation, combined with the impact of smallpox, caused the Ainu population to drop significantly in the early 19th century. In the 18th century, there were 80,000 Ainu, but by 1868, there were only about 15,000 Ainu in Hokkaido, 2,000 in Sakhalin, and around 100 in the Kuril Islands.
Despite their growing influence in the area in the early 19th century as a result of these policies, the Tokugawa shogunate was unable to gain a monopoly on Ainu trade with those on the Asian mainland, even by the year 1853. Santan traders, a group composed mostly of the Ulchi, Nanai, and Oroch peoples of the Amur River, commonly interacted with the Ainu people independent of the Japanese government, especially in the northern part of Hokkaido. In addition to their trading ventures, Santan traders sometimes kidnapped or purchased Ainu women from Rishiri to become their wives. This further escalated Japan's presence in the area, as the Tokugawa shogunate believed a monopoly on the Santan trade would better protect the Ainu people.Japanese annexation of Hokkaido
In 1869, the imperial government established the Hokkaidō Development Commission as part of the Meiji Restoration. Researcher Katarina Sjöberg quotes Yūko Baba's 1980 account of the Japanese government's reasoning:
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As a result of the Treaty of Saint Petersburg (1875), the Kuril Islandsalong with their Ainu inhabitantscame under Japanese administration. In 1899, the Japanese government passed an act labeling the Ainu as "former aborigines", with the idea that they would assimilate. This resulted in the Japanese government taking the land where the Ainu people lived and placing it under Japanese control. Also at this time, the Ainu were granted automatic Japanese citizenship, effectively denying them the status of an indigenous group.
The Ainu went from being a relatively isolated group of people to having their land, language, religion, and customs assimilated into those of the Japanese. Their land was distributed to the Yamato Japanese settlers to create and maintain farms in the model of Western industrial agriculture. It was known as "colonization" (拓殖) at the time, but later by the euphemism, "opening up undeveloped land" (). Additionally, factories like flour mills and beer breweries, along with mining practices, resulted in the creation of infrastructure such as roads and railway lines during a development period that lasted until 1904. During this time, the Ainu were ordered to cease religious practices such as animal sacrifice and the custom of tattooing. The same act applied to the native Ainu on Sakhalin after its annexation as Karafuto Prefecture.
Assimilation after annexation
in 1904]]
The Ainu have historically suffered from economic and social discrimination, as both the Japanese government and mainstream population regarded them as dirty and primitive barbarians. The majority of Ainu were forced to be petty laborers during the Meiji Restoration, which saw the introduction of Hokkaido into the Japanese Empire and the privatization of traditional Ainu lands. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the Japanese government denied the rights of the Ainu to their traditional cultural practices, such as hunting, gathering, and speaking their native language.
The legal denial of Ainu cultural practices mostly stemmed from the 1899 Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act. This law and its associated policies were designed to fully integrate the Ainu into Japanese society while erasing Ainu culture and identity. The Ainu's position as manual laborers and their forced integration into larger Japanese society have led to discriminatory practices by the Japanese government that can still be felt today.
Intermarriage between Japanese and Ainu was actively promoted by the Ainu to lessen the chances of discrimination against their offspring. As a result, many Ainu today are indistinguishable from their Japanese neighbors, but some Ainu-Japanese are interested in traditional Ainu culture. For example, Oki, born as the child of an Ainu father and a Japanese mother, became a musician who plays the traditional Ainu instrument, the . There are also many small towns in the southeastern or Hidaka region of Hokkaido where ethnic Ainu live, such as in Nibutani ().
From the early 1870s, Christian missionary work was conducted among the Ainu. The Anglican Communion missionaries included the Rt. Rev. Philip Fyson, Bishop of Hokkaido, and the Rev. John Batchelor. Batchelor wrote extensively in English about the beliefs and daily life of the Ainu in Yezo (or Ezo), and his publications are a source of photographs of the Japanese and Ainu close to the missions.
Standard of living
The discrimination and negative stereotypes assigned to the Ainu have manifested in lower levels of education, income, and participation in the economy as compared to their ethnically Japanese counterparts. The Ainu community in Hokkaido in 1993 received welfare payments at a 2.3 times higher rate than that of Hokkaido as a whole. They also had an 8.9% lower enrollment rate from junior high school to high school and a 15.7% lower enrollment into college from high school. Due to this noticeable and growing gap, the Japanese government has been lobbied by activists to research the Ainu's standard of living nationwide. The Japanese government will provide ¥7 million (US$63,000), beginning in 2015, to conduct surveys nationwide on this matter.
Ainu and ethnic homogeneity in Japan
The existence of the Ainu has challenged the notion of ethnic homogeneity in post-WWII Japan. After the demise of the multi-ethnic Empire of Japan in 1945, successive governments forged a single Japanese identity by advocating monoculturalism and denying the existence of more than one ethnic group in Japan.
On June 6, 2008, the National Diet of Japan passed a non-binding, bipartisan resolution calling upon the government to recognize the Ainu as indigenous people.
In 2019, eleven years after this resolution, the Diet finally passed an act recognizing the Ainu as an indigenous people of Japan. Despite this recognition of the Ainu as an ethnically distinct group, political figures in Japan continue to define ethnic homogeneity as key to the overall Japanese national identity. For example, then Deputy Prime Minister Tarō Asō notably claimed in 2020, "No other country but this one has lasted for as long as 2,000 years with one language, one ethnic group, and one dynasty."Origins
, right, with her niece Yukie Chiri, a famous Ainu Japanese transcriber and translator of Ainu epic tales. (1922)]]
The Ainu are regarded as having descended from the indigenous Japanese hunter-gatherers who lived in Japan during the Jōmon period ( 14,000 to 300 BCE).
The exact origins of the early Ainu remain unclear, but it is generally agreed to be linked to the Satsumon culture of the Epi-Jōmon period, with later influences from the nearby Okhotsk culture. The Ainu culture may be better described as an "Ainu cultural complex", taking into account the regional variable subgroups of Ainu peoples. While the Ainu can be considered a continuation of the indigenous Jomon culture, they also display links to surrounding cultures, pointing to a larger cultural complex flourishing around the Sea of Okhotsk. Some authors have also described the development of the Ainu culture as the "resistance" of a Jomon society to the emerging Japanese state.
One of their , or legends, tells that "[T]he Ainu lived in this place a hundred thousand years before the Children of the Sun came."
The historical Ainu economy was based on farming as well as hunting, fishing, and gathering.
The general consensus among historians is to associate the Ainu with the Satsumon culture, which was located in an area stretching from northern Honshu to Hokkaido. Linguists such as Juha Janhunen and Alexander Vovin argue for a Satsumon origin of Ainu dialects, with deeper links to cultures centered in Central or Northern Honshu.
It has also been noted that the Okhotsk culture played a role in the formation of the later Ainu culture. The origin of the Okhotsk culture itself is subject to research. While Okhotsk remains display affinity to the modern Nivkh people of northern Sakhalin, both also display affinities to the Jōmon peoples of Japan, pointing to a possible heterogeneous makeup of Okhotsk society. Satsumon pottery has been found among Okhotsk sites, pointing to a complex network of contacts in the wider area around the Sea of Okhotsk.
The emergence of the Ainu culture is henceforth primarily attributed to the Satsumon culture, which later received some contributions from the Okhotsk culture via cultural contacts in northern Hokkaido after the Satsumon culture expanded northwards and into Sakhalin. This view has been corroborated by later analyses.
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Relationship with the historical Emishi
While the view that the ancient Emishi were identical to the Ainu has been largely disproven by current research, the exact relationship between them is still under dispute. It is agreed that at least some Emishi spoke Ainu languages and were ethnically related to the Ainu. The Emishi may, however, have also included non-Ainu groups, which can either be associated with groups distantly related to the Ainu (Ainu-like groups) but forming their own ethnicity, or early Japonic-speakers outside the influence of the Yamato court.
From the mid-Heian period onward, Emishi who did not fall under the governance of the Yamato Kingship were singled out as northern Emishi. They began to be referred to as "Ezo" (Emishi).
The first written reference to "Ezo", which is thought to be Ainu, can be found in Suwa Daimyōjin Ekotoba, which was written in 1356. Indeed, Ainu have lived in Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Hokkaido, and the northern Tohoku region since the 13th century.GeneticsPaternal lineages
in traditional dress]]
An analysis of 16 Ainu male individuals found that the majority (14/16) belong to Y-DNA Haplogroup D-M55, while a minority (2/16) belongs to Haplogroup C-M217. D-M55 is found throughout the Japanese archipelago, with very high frequencies among the Ainu of Hokkaido. C-M217 is found more commonly among populations from Northeast Asia and Central Asia. Another analysis found that one out of four Ainu men belonged to haplogroup C-M217, while the remaining three belonged to haplogroup D-M55.
Maternal lineages
An analysis of 51 Ainu individuals found that around 51% of their mtDNA subclades are unique to the Ainu, while the remaining haplogroups are shared with other Asian populations, especially with the Nivkhs in northern Sakhalin and the Koryaks on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Of the 51 Ainu individuals, around 27% (14/51) belong to N9 (of which 10 were assigned to subclade Y and four to unclassifed N9 clades), around 24% (12/51) to D, around 20% (10/51) to M7, and around 20% (10/51) to G; the minor haplogroups are A (2/51), B (1/51), F (1/51), and an unclassified subclade of M not belonging to M7, M8, CZ, D, or G.
Autosomal DNA
The Ainu appear genetically most closely related to the Jōmon period peoples of Japan. Previous genetic analyses of Jomon remains found them to represent a deeply diverged East Asian lineage. The Jomon lineage is inferred to have diverged from Ancient East Asians before the divergence between Ancient Northern East Asians and Ancient Southern East Asians, but after the divergence of the basal Tianyuan man and/or Hoabinhians. Beyond their broad affinity with Eastern Asian lineages, the Jomon also display a weak affinity for Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), which may be associated with the introduction of microblade technology to Northeast Asia and northern East Asia during the Last Glacial Maximum via the ANE or Ancient Paleo-Siberians.
The genetic makeup of the Ainu represents a "deep branch of East Asian diversity". Compared to contemporary East Asian populations, the Ainu share "a closer genetic relationship with northeast Siberians". The Ainu also display a relative closer genetic affinity with "lowland East Asians" than "highland East Asians" and may have contributed some ancestry to surrounding populations around the Sea of Okhotsk. Differences in the frequency of the derived EDAR gene variant between the Ainu and contemporary East Asians suggest that the ancestors of the Ainu may not have shared the selective pressures with other Ancestral East Asian populations. The Ainu, however, share two variants in the ADH gene cluster with other East Asians at high frequency, unlike Tibetans and Sherpa, "raising the possibility that selective pressure on these variants was different in the high-altitude environments."
The closest modern ethnic groups to the Ainu are the Ryukyuans in southern Japan, followed by contemporary Japanese people. Compared with other East Asian populations, the Ainu are an outgroup, pointing to long-lasting isolation after their divergence. By analyzing the SNP loci of Ainu individuals, it was found that they carry genes associated with facial structure found among Europeans and hair and tooth morphology found among East Asians. Genetic analyses of HLA I and HLA II genes as well as HLA-A, B, and DRB1 gene frequencies placed the Ainu in an intermediate position between indigenous peoples of the Americas and contemporary Northeast Asians.
Studies on modern-day Ainu estimate that they derive between 66% and 79.3% of their ancestry from the Jōmon lineage. Another study on modern Ainu individuals found that they derive c. 49% of their ancestry directly from the Jōmon people, c. 22% from the Okhotsk people (who themselves could be modeled as 54% Ancient Northeast Asian, 22% Ancient Paleo-Siberian, and 24% Jōmon), and ~29% from the Yamato Japanese (who carried around 11% Jōmon and 89% Yayoi ancestry), corresponding with historical events.
Military service
Russo-Japanese War
Ainu men were first recruited into the Japanese military in 1898. Sixty-four Ainu served in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), eight of whom died in battle or from illness contracted during military service. Two received the Order of the Golden Kite, granted for bravery, leadership, or command in battle.
Culture
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Traditional Ainu culture is quite different from Japanese culture. According to Tanaka Sakurako from the University of British Columbia, the Ainu culture can be included into a wider "northern circumpacific region", referring to various indigenous cultures of Northeast Asia and "beyond the Bering Strait" in North America. The Ainu culture developed from the 13th century (late Kamakura period) to the present day. While most Ainu in Japan now live outwardly similar lives to the Wajin (ethnic Japanese) due to assimilation policies, many still maintain their Ainu identity and respect for traditional Ainu ways, known as "Ainu puri". The distinctive Ainu patterns (Ainu mon'yō) and oral literature (Yukar) have been designated as Hokkaido Heritage.
Language
In 2008, the news block World Watch gave an estimate of fewer than 100 remaining speakers of the Ainu language. In 1993, linguist Alexander Vovin placed the number at fewer than 15 speakers, characterizing the language as "almost extinct". Because so few present-day speakers are left, study of the Ainu language is limited and is based largely on historical research. Historically, the status of the Ainu language was rather high and was used by early Russian and Japanese administrative officials to communicate with each other and with the Ainu people.
Despite the small number of native speakers of Ainu, there is an active movement to revitalize the language, mainly in Hokkaido but also elsewhere, such as in Kanto. Ainu oral literature has been documented both in hopes of safeguarding it for future generations and for use as a teaching tool for language learners. As of 2011, there were an increasing number of second-language learners, especially in Hokkaido.
The resurgence of Ainu culture and language is in large part due to the pioneering efforts of the late Ainu folklorist, activist, and former Diet member Shigeru Kayano, himself a native speaker. He first opened an Ainu language school in 1987, funded by Ainu Kyokai.
Although some researchers have attempted to show that the Ainu and Japanese languages are related, modern scholars have rejected the idea that the relationship goes beyond contact, such as the mutual borrowing of words. No attempt to show a relationship with Ainu to any other language has gained wide acceptance, and linguists currently classify Ainu as a language isolate. Most Ainu people speak either Japanese or Russian.
The Ainu language has no indigenous system of writing and has historically been transliterated using Japanese kana or Russian Cyrillic. , it was typically written either in katakana or in the Latin alphabet.
Many of the Ainu dialects, especially those from different extremities of Hokkaido, are not mutually intelligible. However, all Ainu speakers understand the classic Ainu language of the , a form of Ainu epic. Without a writing system, the Ainu were masters of narration, with the and other forms of narration such as () tales being committed to memory and related at gatherings that often lasted many hours or even days.
<!--ethnologue data is incorrect; see ainu language-->
Concepts expressed with prepositions in English, such as 'to', 'from', 'by', 'in', and 'at', appear as postpositional forms in Ainu. Whereas prepositions come before the word they modify, postpositions come after it. A single sentence in Ainu can comprise many added or agglutinated sounds or affixes that represent nouns or ideas.Social structure
, Japan]]
Ainu society was traditionally organized into small villages called kotan, typically located in river basins or along seashores where food was readily available, particularly in rivers where salmon traveled upstream. In early modern times, Ainu were forced to relocate their kotan near Japanese fishing grounds to provide labor. As a result, traditional kotan disappeared, and large villages of several dozen families were formed around fishing grounds. The Ainu social structure included chiefs, but judicial functions were not entrusted to them. Instead, an indefinite number of community members sat in judgment upon criminals. Capital punishment did not exist, nor did the community resort to imprisonment. Beating was considered a sufficient and final penalty. However, in the case of murder, the nose and ears of the culprit were cut off, or the tendons of their feet were severed.
In winter, the skins of animals are worn, with leggings of deerskin and, in Sakhalin, boots made from the skin of dogs or salmon. Ainu culture regards earrings, traditionally made from grapevines, as gender-neutral. Women also wear a beaded necklace called a tamasay.HuntingThe Ainu traditionally hunt from late autumn to early summer, in part because in late autumn, plant gathering, salmon fishing, and other activities of securing food come to an end, and hunters readily find game in fields and mountains in which plants have withered. A village typically possesses a hunting-ground of its own, or several villages use a joint hunting territory, called an . Heavy penalties were imposed on any outsiders trespassing on such hunting grounds or on joint hunting territory. The Ainu traditionally hunt Ussuri brown bears, Asian black bears, Ezo deer (a subspecies of sika deer), hares, red foxes, Japanese raccoon dogs, and other animals. Ezo deer are a particularly important food resource for the Ainu, as are salmon. The Ainu also hunt sea eagles, such as white-tailed sea eagles, along with ravens and other birds. The Ainu hunted eagles for their tail feathers, which they used in trade with the Japanese. 54]}} Historically, the Ainu hunted sea-otters and traded their pelts in the Japanese market.
The Ainu hunted with arrows and spears with poison-coated points. 24]}} They obtained the poison, called , from the roots and stalks of aconites. The recipe for this poison was a household secret that differed from family to family. They enhanced the poison with mixtures of roots and stalks of dog's bane, boiled juice of Mekuragumo (a type of harvestman), Matsumomushi (Notonecta triguttata, a species of backswimmer), tobacco, and other ingredients. They also used stingray stingers or skin-covering stingers.
They traditionally hunt in groups with dogs. Before hunting, particularly for bears and similar animals, they may pray to the , the house guardian goddess, to convey their wishes for a large catch and to the god of mountains for safe hunting. 116]}} The Ainu traditionally hunt bears during the spring thaw. At that time, bears are weak because they haven't eaten during their long hibernation. Ainu hunters catch hibernating bears or bears that have just left hibernation dens. When they hunt bears in summer, they use a spring trap loaded with an arrow, called an . The Ainu usually use arrows to hunt deer. 85]}} Also, they drive deer into a river or sea and shoot them with arrows. For a large catch, a whole village would drive a herd of deer off a cliff and club them to death.
Fishing
Fishing is important to Ainu culture. They largely catch trout in summer and salmon in autumn, as well as (Japanese huchen), dace, and other fish. Spears called were often used. Other methods were fishing, fishing, and fishing. Many villages were built near rivers or along the coast. Each village or individual had a definite river fishing territory. Outsiders could not freely fish there and needed to ask the owner.Japanese lacquerware
)]]
Japanese lacquerware was used in everyday life as tableware and often used in ceremonies (ritual utensils), such as the cups used to offer alcohol when praying to the kamui. Lacquerware was often treated as treasure, and it was also used as containers for storing other treasures.
One of the characteristics of Ainu lacquerware is that it is almost entirely imported from the south of Honshu. Some pieces may have been lacquered in Matsumae in southern Hokkaido, but since the technique of lacquering is from Honshu, lacquerware can be considered an introduced item among Ainu folk implements.
There are examples of spatulas and other objects used by the Ainu people for ceremonial purposes that remain in clusters of the same size, and some are specifically produced for trading with the Ainu.
Ornaments
in 1904]]
Traditionally, Ainu men wear a crown called a for important ceremonies. are made from wood fiber with bundles of partially shaved wood. The crown has wooden figures of animal gods and other ornaments in its center. Men carry an (ceremonial sword) 107]}} secured by an strap to their shoulders.
Ainu women traditionally wear , embroidered headbands, and , metal earrings with balls. and were originally also worn by men. Furthermore, aprons called are now part of women's formal clothes. However, some old documents state that men wore . Women sometimes wear a bracelet called a .
Women may wear a necklace called a , a long, narrow strip of cloth with metal plaques. The parents choose her husband from the men who visit her.
The age of marriage is 17 to 18 years of age for men and 15 to 16 years of age for women, Children are raised almost naked until about the ages of four to five. Even when they wear clothes, they do not wear belts and leave the front of their clothes open. Subsequently, they wear bark clothes without patterns, such as , until they come of age.
Ainu babies traditionally are not given permanent names when they are born. Rather, they are called by various temporary names until the age of two or three.
Newborn babies are named ("a baby's crying"), , ("small excrement"), and ("old excrement"). Their tentative names have a portion meaning "excrement" or "old things" to ward off the demon of ill-health. Some children are named based on their behavior or habits; others are named after notable events or after their parents' wishes for their future. When children are named, they are never given the same names as others. 294]}}
Men traditionally wear loincloths and have their hair dressed properly for the first time at age 15 to 16. Women are also considered adults at the age of 15 to 16. They traditionally wear underclothes called 320]|loc"Ainu women's underclothes were called mour, literally "deer," a sort of one-piece dress with an open front, ..."}} and have their hair dressed properly, with wound waistcloths called and around their bodies.
When women reached the age of 12 or 13, the lips, hands, and arms were traditionally tattooed. When they reached the age of 15 or 16, their tattoos would be completed, indicating their qualification for marriage.Religion
}}, or bear spirit sending ceremony, in Hokkaido (1875)]]
The Ainu are traditionally animists, believing that everything in nature has a (spirit or god) on the inside. The most important include:
* , goddess of the hearth
* , god of bears and mountains
* , god of the sea, fishing, and marine animals
* , regarded as the creator of the world in the Ainu religion
Ainu craftsmen, and the Ainu as a whole, traditionally believed that "anything made with deep sincerity was imbued with spirit and also became a []". They also held the belief that ancestors and the power of the family could be invoked through certain patterns in art to protect them from malignant influences.
The Ainu religion has no priests by profession. Instead, the village chief performs whatever religious ceremonies are necessary. Ceremonies are confined to making libations of , saying prayers, and offering willow sticks with wooden shavings attached to them.
John Batchelor reported that the Ainu view the world as being a spherical ocean on which many islands float, a view based on the fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. He wrote that they believe the world rests on the back of a large fish, which, when it moves, causes earthquakes.
Ainu assimilated into mainstream Japanese society have adopted Buddhism and Shintō; some northern Ainu were converted as members of the Russian Orthodox Church. Regarding Ainu communities in Shikotan and other areas that fall within the Russian sphere of cultural influence, there have been a few churches constructed, and some Ainu are reported to have accepted the Christian faith. There have also been reports that the Russian Orthodox Church has performed some missionary projects in the Sakhalin Ainu community. However, there are only reports of a few conversions to Christianity. Converts have been scorned as (Russian Ainu) by other members of the Ainu community. Reports indicate that many Ainu have kept their faith in their traditional deities.
According to a 2012 survey conducted by Hokkaido University, a high percentage of Ainu are members of their household family religion, which is Buddhism (especially Buddhism). However, it is noted that, similar to the Japanese religious consciousness, there is not a strong feeling of identification with a particular religion, with Buddhist and traditional beliefs both being part of their daily lives.
The Ainu observed a ritual that would return , a divine or spiritual being in Ainu mythology, to the spiritual realm. This sending ritual was called Omante. A bear cub would be captured alive during hibernation and raised in the village as a child. Women would care for the cubs as if they were their children, sometimes even nursing them if needed. Once the bears reached maturity, they would hold another ritual every 5 to 10 years called Iomante (sometimes Iyomante). People from neighboring villages were invited to help celebrate this ritual, in which members of the village would send the bear back to the realm of spirits by gathering around it in a central area and using special ceremonial arrows to shoot it. Afterwards, they would eat the meat. However, in 1955, this ritual was outlawed as animal cruelty. In 2007, it became exempt due to its cultural significance to the Ainu. The ritual has since been modified; it is now an annual festival. The festival begins at sundown with a torch parade. A play is then performed, and this is followed by music and dancing.
Other rituals were performed for things such as food and illness. The Ainu had a ritual to welcome the salmon, praying for a big catch, and another to thank the salmon at the end of the season. There was also a ritual for warding off that would bring epidemics, using strong-smelling herbs placed in doorways, windows, and gardens to turn away epidemic . Similarly to many religions, the Ainu also gave prayers and offerings to their ancestors in the spirit world or afterlife. They would also pray to the fire to deliver their offerings of broken snacks and fruit, as well as tobacco.Funerals
Funerals included prayers and offerings to the fire , as well as verse laments expressing wishes for a smooth journey to the next world. The items that were to be buried with the dead were first broken or cracked to allow spirits to be released and travel to the afterlife together. Sometimes a burial would be followed by burning the residence of the dead. In the event of an unnatural death, there would be a speech raging against the gods.
In the afterlife, recognized ancestral spirits moved through and influenced the world, though neglected spirits would return to the living world and cause misfortune. Prosperity of family in the afterlife would depend on prayers and offerings left by living descendants; this often led to Ainu parents teaching their children to look after them in the afterlife. established in 2007; and various museums and cultural centers. The Ainu people living in Tokyo have also developed a vibrant political and cultural community.<!-- Links to these organizations needed, also Tokyo Ainu documentary -->
Since late 2011, the Ainu have developed cultural exchange and cooperation with the Sámi people of northern Europe. Both the Sámi and the Ainu participate in the organization for Arctic indigenous peoples and the Sámi research office in Lapland (Finland).
Currently, there are several Ainu museums and cultural parks. Some of them are:
* National Ainu Museum
* Kawamura Kaneto Ainu Museum
* Ainu Kotan
* Ainu Folklore Museum
* Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples
* Nibutani Ainu Culture Museum
* Shinhidaka Ainu Museum
Ethnic rights
, in Germany in 2007.]]
Legal action
On March 27, 1997, the Sapporo District Court decided a landmark case that, for the first time in Japanese history, recognized the right of the Ainu people to enjoy their distinct culture and traditions. The case arose because of a 1978 government plan to build two dams in the Saru River watershed in southern Hokkaidō. The dams were part of a series of development projects under the Second National Development Plan that were intended to industrialize the north of Japan. The planned location for one of the dams was across the valley floor near Nibutani village, the home of a large community of Ainu people and an important center of Ainu culture and history. When the government commenced construction on the Nibutani Dam in the early 1980s, two Ainu landowners refused to agree to the expropriation of their property. These landowners were Tadashi Kaizawa and Shigeru Kayano—well-known and important leaders in the Ainu community. After Kaizawa and Kayano declined to sell their land, the Hokkaidō Development Bureau applied for and was subsequently granted a Project Authorization, which required the men to vacate their land. When their appeal of the Authorization was denied, Kayano and Kaizawa's son Koichi (Kaizawa died in 1992) filed suit against the Hokkaidō Development Bureau.
The final decision denied the relief sought by the plaintiffs for pragmatic reasons (the dam was already in place), but the decision was nonetheless heralded as a landmark victory for the Ainu people. Nearly all of the plaintiffs' claims were recognized. Moreover, the decision marked the first time Japanese case law acknowledged the Ainu as an indigenous people and contemplated the responsibility of the Japanese nation to the indigenous people within its borders. The decision included broad fact-finding that underscored the long history of the oppression of the Ainu people by Japan's majority, referred to as in the case, and discussions about the case. The decision was issued on March 27, 1997. Because of the broad implications for Ainu rights, the plaintiffs decided not to appeal the decision, which became final two weeks later. After the decision was issued, on May 8, 1997, the Diet passed the Ainu Culture Law and repealed the Ainu Protection Act—the 1899 law that had been the vehicle of Ainu oppression for almost one hundred years. While the Ainu Culture Law has been widely criticized for its shortcomings, the shift that it represents in Japan's view of the Ainu people is a testament to the importance of the Nibutani decision. In 2007, the "Cultural Landscape along the Sarugawa River resulting from Ainu Tradition and Modern Settlement" was designated an Important Cultural Landscape of Japan. A later action seeking the restoration of Ainu assets held in trust by the Japanese government was dismissed in 2008.
Governmental bodies on Ainu affairs
There is no single government body to coordinate Ainu affairs. Rather, various advisory boards are set up by the Hokkaido government to advise on specific matters. One such committee operated in the late 1990s, and its work resulted in the .Formation of Ainu political partyOn January 21, 2012, the was founded after a group of Ainu activists in Hokkaidō announced the formation of a political party for the Ainu on October 30, 2011. The Ainu Association of Hokkaidō reported that Kayano Shiro, the son of the former Ainu leader Kayano Shigeru, would head the party. Their aim is to contribute to the realization of a society where the Ainu and Japanese can coexist and possess equal rights in Japan.
Official promotion
The "2019 Ainu act" simplified procedures for obtaining various permissions from authorities in regards to the traditional lifestyle of the Ainu and nurtured the identity and cultures of the Ainu without defining the ethnic group by blood lineage.
On July 12, 2020, the National Ainu Museum was opened. It had originally been scheduled to open on April 24, 2020, prior to the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games scheduled in the same year in Shiraoi, Hokkaidō. The park was planned to be a base for the protection and promotion of Ainu people, culture, and language. The museum promotes the culture and habits of the Ainu people, who are the original inhabitants of Hokkaidō. Upopoy in the Ainu language means "singing in a large group". The National Ainu Museum building has images and videos exhibiting the history and daily life of the Ainu.
The Ainu cultural contribution is also recognized by a UNESCO listing, in consequence of a UNESCO decision to list non-physical cultural assets, including songs and dancing.
In July 2023, it was reported that a group of Ainu from Hokkaido was suing the government to reclaim the right of salmon river fishing. This has been outlawed for a century, except for the exemption of a limited number of salmon for ceremonial purposes. The group claimed the Japanese government did not abide by the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which it had signed.GeographyThe traditional locations of the Ainu are Hokkaido, Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Kamchatka, and the northern Tōhoku region. Many of the place names that remain in Hokkaido and the Kuril Islands have a phonetic equivalent of the Ainu place names.
Russia
As a result of the Treaty of Saint Petersburg (1875), the Kuril Islands, along with their Ainu inhabitants, came under Japanese administration. A total of 83 North Kuril Ainu arrived in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky on September 18, 1877, after they decided to remain under Russian rule. They refused the offer by Russian officials to move to new reservations in the Commander Islands. An agreement was reached in 1881, and the Ainu decided to settle in the village of Yavin, Kamchatka. In March 1881, the group left Petropavlovsk and started the journey towards Yavin on foot. Four months later, they arrived at their new homes. Another village, Golygino, was founded later. Under Soviet rule, both villages were forced to disband, and residents were moved to the Russian-dominated Zaporozhye rural settlement in Ust-Bolsheretsky Raion. As a result of intermarriage, the three ethnic groups assimilated to form the Kamchadal community. In 1953, K. Omelchenko, the minister for the protection of military and state secrets in the USSR, banned the press from publishing any more information on the Ainu living in the USSR. This order was revoked after two decades.
, the North Kuril Ainu of Zaporozhye form the largest Ainu subgroup in Russia. The Nakamura clan (South Kuril Ainu on their paternal side), the smallest group, numbers just six people residing in Petropavlovsk. On Sakhalin Island, a few dozen people identify themselves as Sakhalin Ainu, but many more with partial Ainu ancestry do not acknowledge it. Most of the 888 Japanese people living in Russia (2010 Census) are of mixed Japanese–Ainu ancestry, although they do not acknowledge it (full Japanese ancestry gives them the right of visa-free entry to Japan). Similarly, no one identifies themselves as Amur Valley Ainu, although people of partial descent live in Khabarovsk. There is no evidence of living descendants of the Kamchatka Ainu.
In the 2010 Census of Russia, nearly 100 people tried to register themselves as ethnic Ainu in the village, but the governing council of Kamchatka Krai rejected their claim and enrolled them as ethnic Kamchadal. In 2011, the leader of the Ainu community in Kamchatka, Alexei Vladimirovich Nakamura, requested that Vladimir Ilyukhin (Governor of Kamchatka) and Boris Nevzorov (Chairman of the State Duma) include the Ainu in the central list of the Indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East. This request was also denied.
Ethnic Ainu living in Sakhalin Oblast and Khabarovsk Krai are not organized politically. According to Alexei Nakamura, , only 205 Ainu live in Russia (up from just 12 people who self-identified as Ainu in 2008). They, along with the Kurile Kamchadals (Itelmen of the Kuril Islands), are fighting for official recognition. Since the Ainu are not recognized in the official list of the peoples living in Russia, they are counted as people without nationality, as ethnic Russians, or as Kamchadals.
The Ainu have emphasized that they were the natives of the Kuril Islands, and that the Japanese and Russians were both invaders. In 2004, the small Ainu community living in Russia in Kamchatka Krai wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin, urging him to reconsider any move to award the Southern Kuril Islands to Japan. In the letter, they blamed the Japanese, the Tsarist Russians, and the Soviets for crimes against the Ainu, such as killings and assimilation; they also urged him to recognize the Japanese genocide against the Ainu people. This proposal was rejected.
Ainu family behind their house in 1912.]]
, both the Kuril Ainu and Kuril Kamchadal ethnic groups lack the fishing and hunting rights that the Russian government grants to the indigenous tribal communities of the far north.
In March 2017, Alexei Nakamura revealed that plans for an Ainu village to be created in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and plans for an Ainu dictionary are underway.
Population
The population of the Ainu during the Edo period was a maximum of 26,800; it has since declined, due in part to the spread of infectious diseases. It was traditionally regarded as a Tenryō territory.
According to the 1897 Russian census, 1,446 Ainu native speakers lived in Russian territory.
Currently, there is no Ainu category in the Japanese national census, and no fact-finding has been conducted by national institutions. Therefore, the exact number of Ainu people is unknown. However, multiple surveys have been conducted that provide an indication of the total population.
According to a 2006 Hokkaido Agency survey, there were 23,782 Ainu people in Hokkaido. When viewed by the branch office (currently the Promotion Bureau), there are many in the Iburi / Hidaka branch office. The definition of "Ainu" by the Hokkaido Agency in this survey is "a person who seems to have inherited the blood of Ainu" or "the same livelihood as those with marriage or adoption." Additionally, if the other person is declared not to be "Ainu", then it is not subject to investigation.
A 1971 survey determined an Ainu population of 77,000. Another survey yielded a total of 200,000 Ainu living in Japan. However, there are no other surveys that support this high estimate.
Many Ainu live outside of Hokkaido. A 1988 survey estimated that the population of Ainu living in Tokyo was 2,700. On the other hand, the descendant of the children born in Poland by the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Piłsudski, who was a leading Ainu researcher and left a vast amount of research material, such as photographs and wax tubes, was born in Japan.
According to a 2017 survey, the Ainu population in Hokkaido is about 13,000. This is a sharp drop from 24,000 in 2006. However, this is partially due to a decrease in membership in the Ainu Association of Hokkaido, which is cooperating with the survey. Additionally, interest in protecting personal information has increased. It is thought that the number of individuals who cooperate is declining and that it does not match the actual population of Ainu people.
Subgroups
These are unofficial subgroups of the Ainu people, with location and population estimates.
{| class="sortable wikitable"
|-
! Subgroup !! Location !! Description !! Population
!Year
|-
| Hokkaido Ainu ||Hokkaido
||Hokkaido Ainu (the predominant community of Ainu in the world today): A Japanese census in 1916 returned 13,557 pure-blooded Ainu in addition to 4,550 multiracial individuals. A 2017 survey says the Ainu population in Hokkaido is about 13,000. It decreased sharply from 24,000 in 2006. There are people who consider themselves descendants of Shimokita Ainu on the Shimokita Peninsula, while the people on the Tsugaru Peninsula are generally considered Yamato but may be descendants of Tsugaru Ainu after cultural assimilation.
|| Extinct
|17th century
|-
|Sakhalin Ainu
|Sakhalin
|Sakhalin Ainu: Pure-blooded individuals may be surviving in Hokkaidō. From both Northern and Southern Sakhalin, a total of 841 Ainu were relocated to Hokkaidō in 1875 by Japan. Only a few in remote interior areas remained when the island was turned over to Russia. Even when Japan was granted Southern Sakhalin in 1905, only a handful returned. The Japanese census of 1905 counted only 120 Sakhalin Ainu (down from 841 in 1875, 93 in Karafuto, and 27 in Hokkaidō). The Soviet census of 1926 counted 5 Ainu, while several of their multiracial children were recorded as ethnic Nivkh, Slav, or Uilta.
* North Sakhalin: Only five pure-blooded individuals were recorded during the 1926 Soviet Census in Northern Sakhalin. Most of the Sakhalin Ainu (mainly from coastal areas) were relocated to Hokkaidō in 1875 by Japan. The few that remained (mainly in the remote interior) were mostly married to Russians, as can be seen from the works of Bronisław Piłsudski.
* Southern Sakhalin (Karafuto): Japanese rule until 1945. Japan evacuated almost all the Ainu to Hokkaidō after World War II. Isolated individuals might have remained on Sakhalin. In 1949, there were about 100 Ainu living on Soviet Sakhalin.
|100
|1949
|-
|Northern Kuril Ainu
|Northern Kuril islands
|Northern Kuril Ainu (no known living population in Japan; existence is not recognized by the Russian government in Kamchatka Krai): Also known as Kurile in Russian records. They were under Russian rule until 1875; they first came under Japanese rule after the Treaty of Saint Petersburg (1875). The majority of the population was located on the island of Shumshu, with a few others on islands like Paramushir. Together, they numbered 221 in 1860. These individuals had Russian names, spoke Russian fluently, and were Russian Orthodox in religion. As the islands were given to the Japanese, more than a hundred Ainu fled to Kamchatka along with their Russian employers (where they were assimilated into the Kamchadal population). Only about half remained under Japanese rule. To derussify the Kurile, the entire population of 97 individuals was relocated to Shikotan in 1884, given Japanese names, and the children were enrolled in Japanese schools. Unlike the other Ainu groups, the Kurile failed to adjust to their new surroundings; by 1933, only 10 individuals survived (plus another 34 multiracial individuals). The last group of 20 individuals (including a few pure-blooded Ainu) was evacuated to Hokkaidō in 1941, where they soon vanished as a separate ethnic group.
|Extinct
|20th century
|-
|Southern Kuril Ainu
|Southern Kuril islands
|Southern Kuril Ainu (no known living population): This group numbered almost 2,000 people (mainly in Kunashir, Iturup, and Urup) during the 18th century. In 1884, their population had decreased to 500. Around 50 individuals (mostly multiracial) who remained in 1941 were evacuated to Hokkaidō by the Japanese soon after World War II. The last of the tribe (partial ancestry), Tanaka Kinu, died on Hokkaidō in 1973. They were probably assimilated into the Slavic rural population. Although no one identifies as Ainu today in Khabarovsk Krai, there are a large number of ethnic Ulch with partial Ainu ancestry. 37]}}
|Extinct
|20th century
|}
In popular culture
* The characters Nakoruru, Rimururu, and Rera from the SNK game series Samurai Shodown are Ainu.
* In the 2006 video game Ōkami, the Oina people, who inhabit the northern land of Kamui, are heavily inspired by the Ainu.
* The manga and anime series Golden Kamuy has an Ainu girl, Asirpa, as one of the protagonists and features many aspects of Ainu culture.
* The character Fredzilla from Big Hero 6 is of Ainu descent.
* The character Okuru from the anime series Samurai Champloo is the sole survivor of an Ainu village wiped out by disease.
* Usui Horokeu, also known as Horohoro in the manga series Shaman King, is a member of an Ainu tribe.
* "Ainu" is a playable nation in the game Europa Universalis IV.
* The history of the island of Hokkaidō and of the Ainu people are part of the plot of a chapter in the manga Silver Spoon.
* A coming-of-age film, Ainu Mosir, was released in Japan on October 17, 2020. The film portrays Kanto, a sensitive 14-year-old Ainu boy who struggles to come to terms with his father's death and his identity. The film also focuses on the dilemma of the controversial bear sacrifice ritual under the shadow of modern Japanese society and the Ainu's heavy reliance on tourists for their livelihood. Along with other restless teenagers, Kanto is under pressure to retain his Ainu identity and participate in the cultural rituals.
* In the James Bond novel You Only Live Twice and film, Bond's character spends some time living in an Ainu village and (in the film) is supposedly disguised as one of the local people, "marrying" a local pearl fisher () as part of his cover.
* In the 2013 samurai film Unforgiven, starring Ken Watanabe and which is a remake of the 1992 Clint Eastwood Western film of the same name, the character of Goro Sawada (Yuya Yagira) is half-Ainu.
See also
* Ainu-ken
* Ainu Revolution Theory
* Akira Ifukube
* Anti-Japaneseism
* Bibliography of the Ainu
* Bikki Sunazawa
* Burakumin
* Constitution of Japan
* Ethnic issues in Japan
** Human rights in Japan
** Racism in Japan
* Ethnocide
* Genocide of indigenous peoples
* Hiram M. Hiller Jr.
* Kankō Ainu
* Matagi
* Mieko Chikappu
* Shizue Ukaji
Ainu culture
* Ainu flag
* Ainu genre painting
* Ikupasuy
References
Citations
Works cited
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Further reading
*
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* Hitchingham, Masako Yoshida (trans.), [https://www.webcitation.org/5t212GASC?url=http://www.hawaii.edu/aplpj/articles/APLPJ_01.1_hitchingham_masako.pdf Act for the Promotion of Ainu Culture & Dissemination of Knowledge Regarding Ainu Traditions], Asian-Pacific Law & Policy Journal, vol. 1, no. 1 (2000).
* Kayano, Shigeru (1994). Our Land Was A Forest: An Ainu Memoir. Westview Press. . .
*
*
* (Indiana University, digitized September 3, 2009)
* [Original from Harvard University Digitized January 30, 2008] [YOKOHAMA : R. MEIKLEJOHN & CO., NO 49.]
* The Collected Works of Bronisław Piłsudski, translated and edited by Alfred F. Majewicz with the assistance of Elzbieta Majewicz.
** Volume 1: The Aborigines of Sakhalin
** [https://polona.pl/item/materials-for-the-study-of-the-ainu-language-and-folklore,MjU3MzgwMjc/8/#info:metadata Volume 2: Materials for the Study of the Ainu Language and Folklore (Kraków 1912)]
** Volume 3: Materials for the Study of the Ainu Language and Folklore II
** Volume 4: Materials for the Study of Tungusic Languages and Folklore
External links
; Organizations
* [http://www.ainu-assn.or.jp/ Hokkaido Utari Kyokai/Ainu Association of Hokkaido]
* [http://www.city.sapporo.jp/shimin/pirka-kotan/en/index.html Sapporo Pirka Kotan Ainu Cultural Center]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20171214183443/https://www.frpac.or.jp/web/english/ Foundation for Research and Promotion of Ainu Culture (centers located in Sapporo and Tokyo)]
* [http://www.cais.hokudai.ac.jp/english/ Hokkaido University Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies]
* [http://city.hokkai.or.jp/~ayaedu/ Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Ainu] in Samani, Hokkaidō
* [https://www.ff-ainu.or.jp/web/english/together.html/The Foundation for Ainu Culture]
; Museums and exhibits
* [http://www.mnh.si.edu/arctic/features/ainu/ Smithsonian Institution]
* [http://archive.fieldmuseum.org/research_collections/anthropology/anthro_sites/boone/ainu/gal_jp_ainu.html The Boone Collection]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20160130060719/http://www.ainu-museum-nibutani.org/ Nibutani Ainu Cultural Museum]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20151029080519/http://www.ainu-museum.or.jp/en/ The Ainu Museum at Shiraoi]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20180726170031/https://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/eastasian/japanrice/ Ainu Komonjo (18th & 19th century records) – Ohnuki Collection]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20030927154809/http://www.molli.org.uk/explorers/the_regions/north_america.asp The Regions: North America]—Ainu–North American cultural similarities
; Articles
* [https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2008/0609/p04s01-woap.html "Japan's Ainu hope new identity leads to more rights"] in The Christian Science Monitor, June 9, 2008
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20090225075127/http://www.blm.gov/education/00_resources/articles/Columbia_river_basin/posterback.html A Salmon's Life: An Incredible Journey (Columbia River basin, June 8, 2016)]—Posterback Activities
; Video
* [http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/a-trip-through-japan-with-the-ywca-ca-1919 "A Trip through Japan with the YWCA (ca. 1919)"] —Rare Japanese video featuring Ainu
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=endv3PVpXFg The Ainu: The First Peoples of Japan. Old videos and photographs arranged by Rawn Joseph]
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjBYtYAOsJc "The Despised Ainu People". The Ainus' Tense Relationship with Japan. 1994. Journeyman.tv]
Category:Ethnic groups in Japan
Category:Ethnic groups in Russia
Category:History of Hokkaido
Category:History of Northeast Asia
Category:History of Sakhalin
Category:Indigenous peoples of East Asia
Category:People of Kamakura-period Japan
Category:Japanese people of Russian descent
Category:Russian people of Japanese descent
Category:Genocide of indigenous peoples in Asia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.552349 |
1536 | Acropolis | thumb|upright=1.5|Acropolis of Athens in Athens, Greece
An acropolis was the settlement of an upper part of an ancient Greek city, especially a citadel, and frequently a hill with precipitous sides, mainly chosen for purposes of defense. The term is typically used to refer to the Acropolis of Athens, yet every Greek city had an acropolis of its own. Acropolises were used as religious centers and places of worship, forts, and places in which the royal and high-status resided. Acropolises became the nuclei of large cities of classical ancient times, and served as important centers of a community. Some well-known acropolises have become the centers of tourism in present-day, and, especially, the Acropolis of Athens has been a revolutionary center for the studies of ancient Greece since the Mycenaean period. Many of them have become a source of revenue for Greece, and represent some great technology during the period.
Origin
An acropolis is defined by the Greek definition of , ; from () or () meaning “highest; edge; extremity”, and () meaning “city.” The plural of () is , also commonly as and , and in Greek. The term acropolis is also used to describe the central complex of overlapping structures, such as plazas and pyramids, in many Maya cities, including Tikal and Copán. Acropolis is also the term used by archaeologists and historians for the urban Castro culture settlements located in Northwestern Iberian hilltops.
thumb|Acropolis of Lindos, on the island of Rhodes, Greece
It is primarily associated with the Greek cities of Athens, Argos (with Larisa), Thebes (with Cadmea), Corinth (with its Acrocorinth), and Rhodes (with its Acropolis of Lindos). It may also be applied generically to all such citadels including Rome, Carthage, Jerusalem, Celtic Bratislava, Asia Minor, or Castle Rock in Edinburgh. An example in Ireland is the Rock of Cashel. In Central Italy, many small rural communes still cluster at the base of a fortified habitation known as of the commune. Other parts of the world have developed other names for the high citadel, or , which often have reinforced a naturally strong site. Because of this, many cultures have included acropolises in their societies, however, do not use the same name for them.
Differing acropolises
The acropolis of a city was used in many ways, with regards to ancient time and through references. Because an acropolis was built at the highest part of a city, it served as a highly functional form of protection, a fortress, and was as well as a home to the royal of a city and a centre for religion through the worshipping of different gods. There have been many classical and ancient acropolises, including the most commonly-known, Acropolis of Athens, as well as the Tepecik Acropolis at Patara, Ankara Acropolis, Acropolis of La Blanca, Acropolis at the Maya Site in Guatemala, and the Acropolis at Halieis.
thumb|left|The Parthenon in Athens
The most famous example is the Athenian Acropolis, which is a collection of structures featuring a citadel on the highest part of land in ancient (and modern-day) Athens, Greece. Many notable structures at the site were constructed in the 5th century BCE, including the Propylaea, Erechtheion, and the Temple of Athena. The Temple is also commonly known as the Parthenon, which is derived from the divine Athena Parthenos. Its fortification wall and Bastion date back to the Classical period. It included a fortified wall, sanctuary of Apollo (two temples, an altar, a race course), and necropolis (cemetery). This acropolis was well known as a spot for holy worshipping, and was symbolic of the time. It has also been a place that has historically recognized the legislative changes that Turkey has faced. This acropolis developed as a place of residence for the city of La Blanca's rulers. This funerary structure was integrated into this sacred landscape, and illustrated the prosperity of power between the royal figures of Pedras Negras in Guatemala. The civilization developed its religious, educational, and cultural aspects of the acropolis, and is used today as a location that holds events, such as operas.
The neighborhood of Morningside Heights in New York City is commonly referred to as the "Academic Acropolis" due to its high elevation and the concentration of educational institutions in the area, including Columbia University and its affiliates, Barnard College, Teachers College, Union Theological Seminary and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America; Manhattan School of Music; Bank Street College of Education; and New York Theological Seminary. The analogy is also aided by the neoclassical architecture of the Columbia University campus, which was designed by McKim, Mead & White in the early 20th century.
Excavations
Much of the modern-day uses of acropolises have been discovered through excavations that have developed over the course of many years. For example, the Athenian Acropolis includes a Great Temple that holds the Parthenon, a specific space for ancient worship. Through today's findings and research, the Parthenon treasury is able to be recognized as the west part of the structure (the Erechtheion), as well as the Parthenon itself. Most excavations have been able to provide archaeologists with samples of pottery, ceramics, and vessels. The excavation of the Acropolis of Halieis produced remains that provided context that dated the Acropolis at Halieis from the Final Neolithic period through the first Early Helladic period.
See also
Acropolis of Rhodes
Acropolis Palaiokastro
Idjang
Tell (archaeology)
Hillfort
References
External links
Acropolis Museum
Acropolis: description, photo album
The Acropolis of Athens (Greek Government website)
The Acropolis Restoration Project (Greek Government website)
The Acropolis: A Walk Through History
The Parthenon Frieze (Hellenic Ministry of Culture web site)
UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Acropolis, Athens
Category:Ancient Greek architecture
Category:Culture of Greece
Category:Archaeological terminology
Category:Ancient Greek fortifications | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acropolis | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.567913 |
1537 | Acupuncture | | ICD9unlinked = -
| MeshID = D015670
| OPS301 = .2
| other_codes =
}}
or in traditional contexts.}}
|l="needling [and] moxibustion"
|p=zhēnjiǔ
|w=chên<sup>1</sup>-chiu<sup>3</sup>
|mi=
|j=zam<sup>1</sup>-gau<sup>3</sup>
|y=jāmgau
|ci=
|poj=chiam-kù
}}
Acupuncture (needle) and (to puncture).}} is a form of alternative medicine and a component of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in which thin needles are inserted into the body. the theories and practices of TCM are not based on scientific knowledge, Acupuncture is most often used to attempt pain relief,
The global acupuncture market was worth US$24.55 billion in 2017. The market was led by Europe with a 32.7% share, followed by Asia-Pacific with a 29.4% share and the Americas with a 25.3% share. It was estimated in 2021 that the industry would reach a market size of US$55 billion by 2023.
<!-- Efficacy and safety -->
The conclusions of trials and systematic reviews of acupuncture generally provide no good evidence of benefits, which suggests that it is not an effective method of healthcare. "The traditional principles of acupuncture are deeply flawed, as there is no evidence at all to demonstrate the existence of Ch'i or meridians" and "As yin and yang, acupuncture points and meridians are not a reality, but merely the product of an ancient Chinese philosophy".}} though it is also used to treat a wide range of conditions. Acupuncture is generally only used in combination with other forms of treatment.
Acupuncture is the insertion of thin needles into the skin. It can be associated with the application of heat, pressure, or laser light. There is also a non-invasive therapy developed in early 20th-century Japan using an elaborate set of instruments other than needles for the treatment of children ( or ).
Clinical practice varies depending on the country. Chinese herbs are often used. There is a diverse range of acupuncture approaches, involving different philosophies. The main methods practiced in the UK are TCM and Western medical acupuncture. The Western medical acupuncture approach involves using acupuncture after a medical diagnosis.
In traditional acupuncture, the acupuncturist decides which points to treat by observing and questioning the patient to make a diagnosis according to the tradition used. In TCM, the four diagnostic methods are: inspection, auscultation and olfaction, inquiring, and palpation. Inspection focuses on the face and particularly on the tongue, including analysis of the tongue size, shape, tension, color and coating, and the absence or presence of teeth marks around the edge.
Needles
The most common mechanism of stimulation of acupuncture points employs penetration of the skin by thin metal needles, which are manipulated manually or the needle may be further stimulated by electrical stimulation (electroacupuncture). In many areas, only sterile, single-use acupuncture needles are allowed, including the State of California, USA. Needles vary in length between , with shorter needles used near the face and eyes, and longer needles in areas with thicker tissues; needle diameters vary from 0 to 0, with thicker needles used on more robust patients. Thinner needles may be flexible and require tubes for insertion. The tip of the needle should not be made too sharp to prevent breakage, although blunt needles cause more pain.
Apart from the usual filiform needle, other needle types include three-edged needles and the Nine Ancient Needles. Needling technique Insertion The skin is sterilized and needles are inserted, frequently with a plastic guide tube. Needles may be manipulated in various ways, including spinning, flicking, or moving up and down relative to the skin. Since most pain is felt in the superficial layers of the skin, a quick insertion of the needle is recommended. Often the needles are stimulated by hand in order to cause a dull, localized, aching sensation that is called de qi, as well as "needle grasp," a tugging feeling felt by the acupuncturist and generated by a mechanical interaction between the needle and skin. The acupuncturist's skill level may influence the painfulness of the needle insertion; a sufficiently skilled practitioner may be able to insert the needles without causing any pain.
Once is observed, techniques might be used which attempt to "influence" the ; for example, by certain manipulation the can allegedly be conducted from the needling site towards more distant sites of the body.<!---is this threading?---> Other techniques aim at "tonifying" () or "sedating" () qi.
* Acupuncture is often accompanied by moxibustion, the burning of cone-shaped preparations of moxa (made from dried mugwort) on or near the skin, often but not always near or on an acupuncture point. Traditionally, acupuncture was used to treat acute conditions while moxibustion was used for chronic diseases. Moxibustion could be direct (the cone was placed directly on the skin and allowed to burn the skin, producing a blister and eventually a scar), or indirect (either a cone of moxa was placed on a slice of garlic, ginger or other vegetable, or a cylinder of moxa was held above the skin, close enough to either warm or burn it).
* Cupping therapy is an ancient Chinese form of alternative medicine in which a local suction is created on the skin; practitioners believe this mobilizes blood flow in order to promote healing.
* Tui na is a TCM method of attempting to stimulate the flow of qi by various bare-handed techniques that do not involve needles.
* Electroacupuncture is a form of acupuncture in which acupuncture needles are attached to a device that generates continuous electric pulses (this has been described as "essentially transdermal electrical nerve stimulation <nowiki>[</nowiki>TENS<nowiki>]</nowiki> masquerading as acupuncture").
* Fire needle acupuncture also known as fire needling is a technique which involves quickly inserting a flame-heated needle into areas on the body.
* Sonopuncture is a stimulation of the body similar to acupuncture using sound instead of needles. This may be done using purpose-built transducers to direct a narrow ultrasound beam to a depth of 6–8 centimetres at acupuncture meridian points on the body. Alternatively, tuning forks or other sound emitting devices are used.
* Acupuncture point injection is the injection of various substances (such as drugs, vitamins or herbal extracts) into acupoints. This technique combines traditional acupuncture with injection of what is often an effective dose of an approved pharmaceutical drug, and proponents claim that it may be more effective than either treatment alone, especially for the treatment of some kinds of chronic pain. However, a 2016 review found that most published trials of the technique were of poor value due to methodology issues and larger trials would be needed to draw useful conclusions.
* Auriculotherapy, commonly known as ear acupuncture, auricular acupuncture, or auriculoacupuncture, is considered to date back to ancient China. It involves inserting needles to stimulate points on the outer ear.
* Scalp acupuncture, developed in Japan, is based on reflexological considerations regarding the scalp.
* Koryo hand acupuncture, developed in Korea, centers around assumed reflex zones of the hand. Medical acupuncture attempts to integrate reflexological concepts, the trigger point model, and anatomical insights (such as dermatome distribution) into acupuncture practice, and emphasizes a more formulaic approach to acupuncture point location.
* Cosmetic acupuncture is the use of acupuncture in an attempt to reduce wrinkles on the face.
* Bee venom acupuncture is a treatment approach of injecting purified, diluted bee venom into acupoints.
* Veterinary acupuncture is the use of acupuncture on domesticated animals.
Efficacy
, many thousands of papers had been published on the efficacy of acupuncture for the treatment of various adult health conditions, but there was no robust evidence it was beneficial for anything, except shoulder pain and fibromyalgia. For Science-Based Medicine, Steven Novella wrote that the overall pattern of evidence was reminiscent of that for homeopathy, compatible with the hypothesis that most, if not all, benefits were due to the placebo effect, and strongly suggestive that acupuncture had no beneficial therapeutic effects at all.
Harriet Hall noticed that according to Edzard Ernst, systematic reviews agree that acupuncture works for neck pain, but not for every other pain—and that makes its whole enterprise suspicious.
Research methodology and challenges
Sham acupuncture and research
It is difficult but not impossible to design rigorous research trials for acupuncture. Due to acupuncture's invasive nature, one of the major challenges in efficacy research is in the design of an appropriate placebo control group. For efficacy studies to determine whether acupuncture has specific effects, "sham" forms of acupuncture where the patient, practitioner, and analyst are blinded seem the most acceptable approach. Sham acupuncture uses non-penetrating needles or needling at non-acupuncture points, e.g. inserting needles on meridians not related to the specific condition being studied, or in places not associated with meridians. The under-performance of acupuncture in such trials may indicate that therapeutic effects are due entirely to non-specific effects, or that the sham treatments are not inert, or that systematic protocols yield less than optimal treatment.
A 2014 review in Nature Reviews Cancer found that "contrary to the claimed mechanism of redirecting the flow of qi through meridians, researchers usually find that it generally does not matter where the needles are inserted, how often (that is, no dose-response effect is observed), or even if needles are actually inserted. In other words, "sham" or "placebo" acupuncture generally produces the same effects as "real" acupuncture and, in some cases, does better." There has been little systematic investigation of which components of an acupuncture session may be important for any therapeutic effect, including needle placement and depth, type and intensity of stimulation, and number of needles used. The research seems to suggest that needles do not need to stimulate the traditionally specified acupuncture points or penetrate the skin to attain an anticipated effect (e.g. psychosocial factors). As the evidence for most types of alternative medicine such as acupuncture is far from strong, the use of alternative medicine in regular healthcare can present an ethical question.
Using the principles of evidence-based medicine to research acupuncture is controversial, and has produced different results. Some research suggests acupuncture can alleviate pain but the majority of research suggests that acupuncture's effects are mainly due to placebo. There is insufficient evidence to support use of acupuncture compared to mainstream medical treatments. Acupuncture is not better than mainstream treatment in the long term. Acupuncture has been called "theatrical placebo", A 1998 review of studies on acupuncture found that trials originating in China, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan were uniformly favourable to acupuncture, as were ten out of eleven studies conducted in Russia. A 2011 assessment of the quality of randomized controlled trials on traditional Chinese medicine, including acupuncture, concluded that the methodological quality of most such trials (including randomization, experimental control, and blinding) was generally poor, particularly for trials published in Chinese journals (though the quality of acupuncture trials was better than the trials testing traditional Chinese medicine remedies). Chinese authors use more Chinese studies, which have been demonstrated to be uniformly positive. A 2012 review of 88 systematic reviews of acupuncture published in Chinese journals found that less than half of these reviews reported testing for publication bias, and that the majority of these reviews were published in journals with impact factors of zero. A 2015 study comparing pre-registered records of acupuncture trials with their published results found that it was uncommon for such trials to be registered before the trial began. This study also found that selective reporting of results and changing outcome measures to obtain statistically significant results was common in this literature.
Scientist Steven Salzberg identifies acupuncture and Chinese medicine generally as a focus for "fake medical journals" such as the Journal of Acupuncture and Meridian Studies and Acupuncture in Medicine. Safety Adverse events Acupuncture is generally safe when administered by an experienced, appropriately trained practitioner using clean-needle technique and sterile single-use needles. When improperly delivered it can cause adverse effects. A 2009 overview of Cochrane reviews found acupuncture is not effective for a wide range of conditions. People with serious spinal disease, such as cancer or infection, are not good candidates for acupuncture.
English-language
A 2013 systematic review of the English-language case reports found that serious adverse events associated with acupuncture are rare, but that acupuncture is not without risk.
A 2013 systematic review found 31 cases of vascular injuries caused by acupuncture, three causing death. The same review found vascular injuries were rare, bleeding and pseudoaneurysm were most prevalent.
A 2012 review found that a number of adverse events were reported after acupuncture in the UK's National Health Service (NHS), 95% of which were not severe,
Acupuncture seems to be safe in people getting anticoagulants, assuming needles are used at the correct location and depth,
Chinese, Korean, and Japanese-language
A 2010 systematic review of the Chinese-language literature found numerous acupuncture-related adverse events, including pneumothorax, fainting, subarachnoid hemorrhage, and infection as the most frequent, and cardiovascular injuries, subarachnoid hemorrhage, pneumothorax, and recurrent cerebral hemorrhage as the most serious, most of which were due to improper technique. The same review concluded that acupuncture can be considered inherently safe when practiced by properly trained practitioners, but the review also stated there is a need to find effective strategies to minimize the health risks. Between the 1980s and 2002, the Japanese-language literature contained reports of 150 adverse events.
Children and pregnancy
Although acupuncture has been practiced for thousands of years in China, its use in pediatrics in the United States did not become common until the early 2000s. In 2007, the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) conducted by the National Center For Health Statistics (NCHS) estimated that approximately 150,000 children had received acupuncture treatment for a variety of conditions.
In 2008, a study determined that the use of acupuncture-needle treatment on children was "questionable" due to the possibility of adverse side-effects and the pain manifestation differences in children versus adults. The study also includes warnings against practicing acupuncture on infants, as well as on children who are over-fatigued, very weak, or have over-eaten.
When used on children, acupuncture is considered safe when administered by well-trained, licensed practitioners using sterile needles; however, a 2011 review found there was limited research to draw definite conclusions about the overall safety of pediatric acupuncture. The incidence of serious adverse events was 5 per one million, which included children and adults.
Although acupuncture is not contraindicated in pregnant women, some specific acupuncture points are particularly sensitive to needle insertion; these spots, as well as the abdominal region, should be avoided during pregnancy. Professional ethics codes set by accrediting organizations such as the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine require practitioners to make "timely referrals to other health care professionals as may be appropriate." Stephen Barrett states that there is a "risk that an acupuncturist whose approach to diagnosis is not based on scientific concepts will fail to diagnose a dangerous condition".
Conceptual basis
Traditional
Acupuncture is a substantial part of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Early acupuncture beliefs relied on concepts that are common in TCM, such as a life force energy called qi. Qi was believed to flow from the body's primary organs (zang-fu organs) to the "superficial" body tissues of the skin, muscles, tendons, bones, and joints, through channels called meridians. Acupuncture points where needles are inserted are mainly (but not always) found at locations along the meridians.
In TCM, disease is generally perceived as a disharmony or imbalance in energies such as yin, yang, qi, xuĕ, zàng-fǔ, meridians, and of the interaction between the body and the environment. Therapy is based on which "pattern of disharmony" can be identified. For example, some diseases are believed to be caused by meridians being invaded with an excess of wind, cold, and damp. In order to determine which pattern is at hand, practitioners examine things like the color and shape of the tongue, the relative strength of pulse-points, the smell of the breath, the quality of breathing, or the sound of the voice. TCM and its concept of disease does not strongly differentiate between the cause and effect of symptoms.Purported scientific basisMany within the scientific community consider acupuncture to be quackery and pseudoscience, having no effect other than as "theatrical placebo". David Gorski has argued that of all forms of quackery, acupuncture has perhaps gained most acceptance among physicians and institutions. Academics Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry describe acupuncture as a "borderlands science" lying between science and pseudoscience.
A 2015 paper by several professors states that acupuncture has "no credible or respectable place in medicine", because it is often considered to be pseudoscience or quackery.Rationalizations of traditional medicineIt is a generally held belief within the acupuncture community that acupuncture points and meridians structures are special conduits for electrical signals, but no research has established any consistent anatomical structure or function for either acupuncture points or meridians. Human tests to determine whether electrical continuity was significantly different near meridians than other places in the body have been inconclusive. A Nature editorial described TCM as "fraught with pseudoscience", with the majority of its treatments having no logical mechanism of action. Quackwatch states that "TCM theory and practice are not based upon the body of knowledge related to health, disease, and health care that has been widely accepted by the scientific community. TCM practitioners disagree among themselves about how to diagnose patients and which treatments should go with which diagnoses. Even if they could agree, the TCM theories are so nebulous that no amount of scientific study will enable TCM to offer rational care." Some studies suggest acupuncture causes a series of events within the central nervous system, and that it is possible to inhibit acupuncture's analgesic effects with the opioid antagonist naloxone. Mechanical deformation of the skin by acupuncture needles appears to result in the release of adenosine. A 2014 review in Nature Reviews Cancer analyzed mouse studies that suggested acupuncture relieves pain via the local release of adenosine, which then triggered nearby A1 receptors. The review found that in those studies, because acupuncture "caused more tissue damage and inflammation relative to the size of the animal in mice than in humans, such studies unnecessarily muddled a finding that local inflammation can result in the local release of adenosine with analgesic effect." Most historians believe the practice began in China, though there are some conflicting narratives on when it originated. Academics David Ramey and Paul Buell said the exact date acupuncture was founded depends on the extent to which dating of ancient texts can be trusted and the interpretation of what constitutes acupuncture.
According to an article in Rheumatology, the first documentation of an "organized system of diagnosis and treatment" for acupuncture was in Inner Classic of Huang Di (Huangdi Neijing) from about 100 BC. According to Plinio Prioreschi, the earliest known historical record of acupuncture is the Shiji ("Records of the Grand Historian"), written by a historian around 100 BC. however, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine calls this theory "speculative". It is considered unlikely that acupuncture was practised before 2000 BC. It is likely bloodletting was an antecedent to acupuncture. However, historians Lu and Needham said it was unlikely a needle could be made out of the materials available in China during this time period. At the time, scientific knowledge of medicine was not yet developed, especially because in China dissection of the deceased was forbidden, preventing the development of basic anatomical knowledge. The network concept was made up of acu-tracts, such as a line down the arms, where it said acupoints were located. Some of the sites acupuncturists use needles at today still have the same names as those given to them by the Yellow Emperor's Classic''. The Imperial Medical Service and the Imperial Medical College, which both supported acupuncture, became more established and created medical colleges in every province. It became rarer in the following centuries, and was associated with less prestigious professions like alchemy, shamanism, midwifery and moxibustion. China, where acupuncture was believed to have originated, was increasingly influenced by Western medicine. arguing that the practice was based on scientific principles. During the Cultural Revolution, disbelief in acupuncture anesthesia was subjected to ruthless political repression.
In 1971, New York Times reporter James Reston published an article on his acupuncture experiences in China, which led to more investigation of and support for acupuncture. One patient receiving open heart surgery while awake was ultimately found to have received a combination of three powerful sedatives as well as large injections of a local anesthetic into the wound. and in 1973 the American Internal Revenue Service allowed acupuncture to be deducted as a medical expense.
In 2006, a BBC documentary Alternative Medicine filmed a patient undergoing open heart surgery allegedly under acupuncture-induced anesthesia. It was later revealed that the patient had been given a cocktail of anesthetics.
In 2010, UNESCO inscribed "acupuncture and moxibustion of traditional Chinese medicine" on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List following China's nomination.
Adoption
Acupuncture is most heavily practiced in China In the United Kingdom, a total of 4 million acupuncture treatments were administered in 2009. Acupuncture is used in most pain clinics and hospices in the UK. In Japan, it is estimated that 25 percent of the population will try acupuncture at some point, Less than one percent of the US population reported having used acupuncture in the early 1990s. By the early 2010s, more than 14 million Americans reported having used acupuncture as part of their health care. CDC clinical practice guidelines from 2022 list acupuncture among the types of complementary and alternative medicines physicians should consider in preference to opioid prescription for certain kinds of pain.
The use of acupuncture in Germany increased by 20% in 2007, after the German acupuncture trials supported its efficacy for certain uses. and insurance companies have estimated that two-thirds of German users are women. Some insurers in Germany chose to stop reimbursement of acupuncture because of the trials. For other conditions, insurers in Germany were not convinced that acupuncture had adequate benefits over usual care or sham treatments. Highlighting the results of the placebo group, researchers refused to accept a placebo therapy as efficient.
Regulation
There are various government and trade association regulatory bodies for acupuncture in the United Kingdom, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, and in European countries and elsewhere. The World Health Organization recommends that an acupuncturist receive 200 hours of specialized training if they are a physician and 2,500 hours for non-physicians before being licensed or certified; many governments have adopted similar standards.
In Hong Kong, the practice of acupuncture is regulated by the Chinese Medicine Council, which was formed in 1999 by the Legislative Council. It includes a licensing exam, registration, and degree courses approved by the board. Canada has acupuncture licensing programs in the provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta and Quebec; standards set by the Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture Association of Canada are used in provinces without government regulation. Regulation in the US began in the 1970s in California, which was eventually followed by every state but Wyoming and Idaho. Licensing requirements vary greatly from state to state. The needles used in acupuncture are regulated in the US by the Food and Drug Administration. In some states acupuncture is regulated by a board of medical examiners, while in others by the board of licensing, health or education.
In Japan, acupuncturists are licensed by the Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare after passing an examination and graduating from a technical school or university. In Australia, the Chinese Medicine Board of Australia regulates acupuncture, among other Chinese medical traditions, and restricts the use of titles like 'acupuncturist' to registered practitioners only. The practice of Acupuncture in New Zealand in 1990 acupuncture was included into the Governmental Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) Act. This inclusion granted qualified and professionally registered acupuncturists the ability to provide subsidised care and treatment to citizens, residents, and temporary visitors for work- or sports-related injuries that occurred within the country of New Zealand. The two bodies for the regulation of acupuncture and attainment of ACC treatment provider status in New Zealand are Acupuncture NZ, and The New Zealand Acupuncture Standards Authority. At least 28 countries in Europe have professional associations for acupuncturists.
See also
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Notes
References Bibliography
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Further reading
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* FRONTLINE: The Alternative Fix - "[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/altmed/themes/acupuncture.html What is acupuncture?]" (4 November 2003). PBS Video.
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Category:Alternative medicine
Category:Chinese inventions
Category:Energy therapies
Category:Pain management
Category:Pseudoscience
Category:Traditional Chinese medicine | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.648101 |
1538 | Adder (disambiguation) | Vipera berus, the common European adder, is a snake found in Europe and northern Asia.
Adder may also refer to:
AA-12 Adder, a Russian air-to-air missile
Adder (electronics), an electronic circuit designed to do addition
Adder Technology, a manufacturing company
Armstrong Siddeley Adder, a late 1940s British turbojet engine
Blackadder, a series of BBC sitcoms
Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder, a video game
HMS Adder, any of seven ships of the Royal Navy
Any of several groups of venomous snakes
USS Adder, a US submarine
See also
Addition, a mathematical operation | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adder_(disambiguation) | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.652171 |
1540 | Aeneas | | consort =
| abode = Alba Longa
| deity_of = Founder of Alba Longa
| parents = Anchises and Aphrodite
}}
, 1598 (Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy)]]
In Greco-Roman mythology, Aeneas ( , ; from ) was a Trojan hero, the son of the Trojan prince Anchises and the Greek goddess Aphrodite (equivalent to the Roman Venus). His father was a first cousin of King Priam of Troy (both being grandsons of Ilus, founder of Troy), making Aeneas a second cousin to Priam's children (such as Hector and Paris). He is a minor character in Greek mythology and is mentioned in Homer's Iliad. Aeneas receives full treatment in Roman mythology, most extensively in Virgil's Aeneid, where he is cast as an ancestor of Romulus and Remus. He became the first true hero of Rome. Snorri Sturluson identifies him with the Norse god Víðarr of the Æsir. Etymology
, with portrait of Aeneas. c. 510–480 BCE.]]
Aeneas is the Romanization of the hero's original Greek name (Aineías). Aineías is first introduced in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite when Aphrodite gives him his name from the adjective
(,
"terrible"), for the "terrible grief" () he has caused her by being born a mortal who will age and die. It is a popular etymology for the name, apparently exploited by Homer in the Iliad. Later in the Medieval period there were writers who held that, because the Aeneid was written by a philosopher, it is meant to be read philosophically. As such, in the "natural order", the meaning of Aeneas' name combines Greek ("dweller") with ("body"), which becomes or "in-dweller"—i.e. as a god inhabiting a mortal body. However, there is no certainty regarding the origin of his name.
Epithets
In imitation of the Iliad, Virgil borrows epithets of Homer, including: Anchisiades, magnanimum, magnus, heros, and bonus. Though he borrows many, Virgil gives Aeneas two epithets of his own, in the Aeneid: pater and pius. The epithets applied by Virgil are an example of an attitude different from that of Homer, for whilst Odysseus is ("wily"), Aeneas is described as ("pious"), which conveys a strong moral tone. The purpose of these epithets seems to enforce the notion of Aeneas' divine hand as father and founder of the Roman race, and their use seems circumstantial: when Aeneas is praying he refers to himself as pius, and is referred to as such by the author only when the character is acting on behalf of the gods to fulfill his divine mission. Likewise, Aeneas is called pater when acting in the interest of his men.Greek myth and eposHomeric Hymn to Aphrodite
(1889 or 1890)|thumb]]
The story of the birth of Aeneas is told in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, one of the major Homeric Hymns. Aphrodite has caused Zeus the king of the Gods to fall in love with mortal women. In retaliation, Zeus decided to put a desire over her heart for the mortal Prince Anchises, who is tending his cattle among the hills near Mount Ida. When Aphrodite saw him, she was immediately smitten. She adorns herself as if for a wedding among the gods and appears before him. He is overcome by her beauty, believing that she is a goddess, but Aphrodite identifies herself as a Phrygian princess. After they make love, Aphrodite reveals her true identity to him and Anchises fears what might happen to him as a result of their liaison. Aphrodite assures him that he will be protected and tells him that she will bear him a son to be called Aeneas. However, she warns him that he must never tell anyone that he has lain with a goddess. When Aeneas is born, Aphrodite takes him to the nymphs of Mount Ida, instructing them to raise the child to age five, then take him to Anchises.Homer's Iliad
, black-figured oinochoe, 520–510 BCE, Louvre (F 118)]]
Aeneas is a minor character in the Iliad, where he is twice saved from death by the gods as if for an as-yet-unknown destiny but is an honorable warrior in his own right. Having held back from the fighting, aggrieved with Priam because in spite of his brave deeds he was not given his due share of honor, he leads an attack against Idomeneus to recover the body of his brother-in-law Alcathous at the urging of Deiphobus. He is the leader of the Trojans' Dardanian allies, as well as a third cousin and principal lieutenant of Hector, son and heir of the Trojan king Priam.
Aeneas's mother Aphrodite frequently comes to his aid on the battlefield, and he is a favorite of the Sun God Apollo. Aphrodite and Apollo would frequently rescue Aeneas from combat with Diomedes of Argos, who nearly kills him, and carry him away to Pergamos for healing. Even the Sea God Poseidon, who usually favors the Greeks, comes to Aeneas's rescue after he falls under the assault of Achilles, noting that Aeneas, though from a junior branch of the royal family, is destined to become king of the Trojan people.
Bruce Louden presents Aeneas as an archetype: The sole virtuous individual (or family) spared from general destruction, following the mytheme of Utnapishtim, Baucis and Philemon, Noah, and Lot. Pseudo-Apollodorus in his Bibliotheca explains that "... the Greeks [spared] him alone, on account of his piety." Heinrich Schliemann wrote that it seemed "extremely probable that, at the time of Homer's visit [to the Troad], the King of Troy declared that his race was descended in a direct line from Æneas."
Other sources
The Roman mythographer Gaius Julius Hyginus ( – CE 17) in his Fabulae credits Aeneas with killing 28 enemies in the Trojan War. Aeneas also appears in the Trojan narratives attributed to Dares Phrygius and Dictys of Crete.
Roman myth and literature
The history of Aeneas was continued by Roman authors. One influential source was the account of Rome's founding in Cato the Elder's Origines. The Aeneas legend was well known in Virgil's day and appeared in various historical works, including the Roman Antiquities of the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus (relying on Marcus Terentius Varro), Ab Urbe Condita by Livy (probably dependent on Quintus Fabius Pictor, fl. 200 BCE), and Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus (now extant only in an epitome by Justin).Virgil's Aeneid
]]
The Aeneid which is 12 books of the legendary foundation of Lavinium which explains that Aeneas is one of the few Trojans who were not killed or enslaved when Troy fell. Aeneas, after being commanded by the gods to flee, gathered a group, collectively known as the Aeneads, who then traveled to Italy and became progenitors of the Romans. The Aeneads included Aeneas's trumpeter Misenus, his father Anchises, his friends Achates, Sergestus, and Acmon, the healer Iapyx, the helmsman Palinurus, and his son Ascanius (also known as Iulus, Julus, or Ascanius Julius). He carried with him the Lares and Penates, the statues of the household gods of Troy, and transplanted them to Italy.
Several attempts to find a new home failed; one such stop was on Sicily, where in Drepanum, on the island's western coast, his father, Anchises, died peacefully.
]]
After a brief but fierce storm sent up against the group at Juno's request, Aeneas and his fleet made landfall at Carthage after six years of wanderings. Aeneas had a year-long affair with the Carthaginian queen Dido (also known as Elissa), who proposed that the Trojans settle in her land and that she and Aeneas reign jointly over their peoples. A marriage of sorts was arranged between Dido and Aeneas at the instigation of Juno, who was told that her favorite city would eventually be defeated by the Trojans' descendants. Aeneas's mother Venus (the Roman adaptation of Aphrodite) realized that her son and his company needed a temporary respite to reinforce themselves for the journey to come. However, the messenger god Mercury (the adaptation of Hermes) was sent by Jupiter (who was Zeus in this version) and Venus to remind Aeneas of his journey and his purpose, compelling him to leave secretly. When Dido learned of this, she uttered a curse that would forever pit Carthage against Rome, an enmity that would culminate in the Punic Wars. She then committed suicide by stabbing herself with the same sword she gave Aeneas when they first met.
After the sojourn in Carthage, the Trojans returned to Sicily where Aeneas organized funeral games to honor his father, who had died a year before. The company traveled on and landed on the western coast of Italy. Aeneas descended into the underworld where he met Dido (who turned away from him to return to her husband) and his father, who showed him the future of his descendants and thus the history of Rome.
, by Luca Giordano, 1634–1705. The genius of Aeneas is shown ascendant, looking into the light of the future, while that of Turnus is setting, shrouded in darkness]]
Latinus, king of the Latins, welcomed Aeneas's army of exiled Trojans and let them reorganize their lives in Latium. His daughter Lavinia had been promised to Turnus, king of the Rutuli, but Latinus received a prophecy that Lavinia would be betrothed to one from another land – namely, Aeneas. Latinus heeded the prophecy, and Turnus consequently declared war on Aeneas at the urging of Juno, who was aligned with King Mezentius of the Etruscans and Queen Amata of the Latins. Aeneas's forces prevailed. Turnus was killed, and Virgil's account ends abruptly.
Other sources
The rest of Aeneas's biography is gleaned from other ancient sources, including Livy and Ovid's Metamorphoses. According to Livy, Aeneas was victorious, but Latinus died in the war. Aeneas founded the city of Lavinium, named after his wife. He later welcomed Dido's sister, Anna Perenna, who then committed suicide after learning of Lavinia's jealousy. After Aeneas's death, Venus asked Jupiter to make her son immortal. Jupiter agreed. The river god Numicus cleansed Aeneas of all his mortal parts and Venus anointed him with ambrosia and nectar, making him a god. Aeneas was recognized as the god Jupiter Indiges. It's also been stated that Prince Aeneas is the ancestor to the founders of Rome, the twin brothers Romulus and Remus; the two orphan boys who are seen suckling from a she-wolf.[https://www.britannica.com/biography/Romulus-and-Remus]
English mythology
The Brut Chronicle tells the story of Britain's settling by Brutus of Troy, son of Aeneas. Belief in this story was once widespread, but by the time of the Renaissance had begun to fade. Further reading * One surviving version of the Brut Chronicle is a late Middle Ages manuscript, known as the St Albans Chronicle.Medieval accountsSnorri Sturlason, in the Prologue of the Prose Edda, tells of the world as parted in three continents: Africa, Asia and the third part called Europe or Enea. Snorri also tells of a Trojan named Munon (or Mennon), who marries the daughter of the High King (Yfirkonungr) Priam called Troan and travels to distant lands, marries the Sybil and got a son, Tror, who, as Snorri tells, is identical to Thor. This tale resembles some episodes of the Aeneid.
Continuations of Trojan matter in the Middle Ages had their effects on the character of Aeneas as well. The 12th-century French ''Roman d'Enéas'' addresses Aeneas's sexuality. Though Virgil appears to deflect all homoeroticism onto Nisus and Euryalus, making his Aeneas a purely heterosexual character, in the Middle Ages there was at least a suspicion of homoeroticism in Aeneas. The ''Roman d'Enéas'' addresses that charge, when Queen Amata opposes Aeneas's marrying Lavinia.
Medieval interpretations of Aeneas were greatly influenced by both Virgil and other Latin sources. Specifically, the accounts by Dares and Dictys, which were reworked by the 13th-century Italian writer Guido delle Colonne (in Historia destructionis Troiae), colored many later readings. From Guido, for instance, the Pearl Poet and other English writers get the suggestion In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th century) the Pearl Poet, like many other English writers, employed Aeneas to establish a genealogy for the foundation of Britain, and explains that Aeneas was "impeached for his perfidy, proven most true" (line 4).
Family and legendary descendants
, by Bartolomeo Pinelli]]
Aeneas had an extensive family tree. His wet-nurse was Caieta, and he is the father of Ascanius with Creusa, and of Silvius with Lavinia. Ascanius, also known as Iulus (or Julius), founded Alba Longa and was the first in a long series of kings. According to the mythology used by Virgil in the Aeneid, Romulus and Remus were both descendants of Aeneas through their mother Rhea Silvia, making Aeneas the progenitor of the Roman people. Some early sources call him their father or grandfather, but once the dates of the fall of Troy (1184 BCE) and the founding of Rome (753 BCE) became accepted, authors added generations between them. The Julian family of Rome, most notably Julius Cæsar and Augustus, traced their lineage to Ascanius and Aeneas, thus to the goddess Venus. Through the Julians, the Palemonids make this claim. The legendary kings of Britain – including King Arthur – trace their family through a grandson of Aeneas, Brutus.Character and appearance
and Aeneas, from a Roman fresco, Pompeian Third Style (10 BCE – 45 CE), Pompeii, Italy]]
Aeneas's consistent epithet in Virgil and other Latin authors is pius, a term that connotes reverence toward the gods and familial dutifulness. There is significant scholarly debate, however, over the degree to which this epithet is genuine within the poem, and to what extent its deployment by Virgil is sarcastic.
In the Aeneid, Aeneas is described as strong and handsome, but neither his hair colour nor complexion are described. In late antiquity however sources add further physical descriptions. The De excidio Troiae of Dares Phrygius describes Aeneas as "auburn-haired, stocky, eloquent, courteous, prudent, pious, and charming. His eyes were black and twinkling". There is also a brief physical description found in the 6th-century John Malalas' Chronographia: "Aeneas: short, fat, with a good chest, powerful, with a ruddy complexion, a broad face, a good nose, fair skin, bald on the forehead, a good beard, grey eyes."
Modern portrayals
Literature
Aeneas appears as a character in William Shakespeare's play Troilus and Cressida, set during the Trojan War.
Aeneas is a major character in Christopher Marlowe's play Dido, Queen of Carthage.
Aeneas and Dido are the main characters of a 17th-century broadside ballad called "The Wandering Prince of Troy". The ballad ultimately alters Aeneas's fate from traveling on years after Dido's death to joining her as a spirit soon after her suicide.
In modern literature, Aeneas is the speaker in two poems by Allen Tate, "Aeneas at Washington" and "Aeneas at New York". He is a main character in Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia, a re-telling of the last six books of the Aeneid told from the point of view of Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus of Latium.
Aeneas appears in David Gemmell's Troy series as a main heroic character who goes by the name Helikaon.
In Rick Riordan's book series The Heroes of Olympus, Aeneas is regarded as the first Roman demigod, son of Venus rather than Aphrodite.
Will Adams' novel City of the Lost assumes that much of the information provided by Virgil is mistaken, and that the true Aeneas and Dido did not meet and love in Carthage but in a Phoenician colony at Cyprus, on the site of the modern Famagusta. Their tale is interspersed with that of modern activists who, while striving to stop an ambitious Turkish Army general trying to stage a coup, accidentally discover the hidden ruins of Dido's palace.
Opera, film and other media
performs an aria from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with Les Arts Florissants in 2020]]
Aeneas is a title character in Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas (), and Jakob Greber's (Aeneas in Carthage) (1711), and one of the principal roles in Hector Berlioz' opera Les Troyens (), as well as in Metastasio's immensely popular opera libretto Didone abbandonata. Canadian composer James Rolfe composed his opera Aeneas and Dido (2007; to a libretto by André Alexis) as a companion piece to Purcell's opera.
Despite its many dramatic elements, Aeneas's story has generated little interest from the film industry. Ronald Lewis portrayed Aeneas in Helen of Troy, directed by Robert Wise, as a supporting character, who is a member of the Trojan Royal family, and a close and loyal friend to Paris, and escapes at the end of the film. Portrayed by Steve Reeves, he was the main character in the 1961 sword and sandal film Guerra di Troia (The Trojan War). Reeves reprised the role the following year in the film The Avenger, about Aeneas's arrival in Latium and his conflicts with local tribes as he tries to settle his fellow Trojan refugees there.
Giulio Brogi, portrayed as Aeneas in the 1971 Italian TV miniseries series called Eneide, which gives the whole story of the Aeneid, from Aeneas escape from to Troy, to his meeting of Dido, his arrival in Italy, and his duel with Turnus.
The most recent cinematic portrayal of Aeneas was in the film Troy, in which he appears as a youth charged by Paris to protect the Trojan refugees, and to continue the ideals of the city and its people. Paris gives Aeneas Priam's sword, in order to give legitimacy and continuity to the royal line of Troy – and lay the foundations of Roman culture. In this film, he is not a member of the royal family and does not appear to fight in the war.
In the role-playing game Vampire: The Requiem by White Wolf Game Studios, Aeneas figures as one of the mythical founders of the Ventrue Clan.
in the action game Warriors: Legends of Troy, Aeneas is a playable character. The game ends with him and the Aeneans fleeing Troy's destruction and, spurned by the words of a prophetess thought crazed, goes to a new country (Italy) where he will start an empire greater than Greece and Troy combined that shall rule the world for 1000 years, never to be outdone in the tale of men (the Roman Empire).
In the 2018 TV miniseries Troy: Fall of a City, Aeneas is portrayed by Alfred Enoch. He also featured as an Epic Fighter of the Dardania faction in the Total War Saga: Troy in 2020.
Depictions in art
Scenes depicting Aeneas, especially from the Aeneid, have been the focus of study for centuries. They have been the frequent subject of art and literature since their debut in the 1st century.
Villa Valmarana
The artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was commissioned by Gaetano Valmarana in 1757 to fresco several rooms in the Villa Valmarana, the family villa situated outside Vicenza. Tiepolo decorated the palazzina with scenes from epics such as Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid.
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Aeneas flees Troy
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| (between 1507 and 1510).]]
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| (c. 1750).]]
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Aeneas with Dido
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| (c. 1630)]]
|, by Nathaniel Dance-Holland (1766)]]
| (1769)]]
| (3 January 1780)]]
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Family tree
See also
* Cumaean Sibyl
* Lacrimae rerum
* The Golden Bough
* Latin kings of Alba Longa
Notes
References
Sources
* Homer, Iliad II. 819–21; V. 217–575; XIII. 455–544; XX. 75–352.
* Apollodorus, Bibliotheca III. xii. 2; Epitome III. 32–IV. 2; V. 21.
* Virgil, Aeneid.
* Ovid, Metamorphoses XIII. 623–715; XIV. 75–153; 581–608.
* Ovid, Heroides, VII.
* Livy, Book 1.1–2.
* Dictys Cretensis.
* Dares Phrygius.
Further reading
* Cramer, D. "The Wrath of Aeneas: Iliad'' 13.455–67 and 20.75–352." Syllecta Classica, vol. 11, 2000, pp. 16–33. .
* de Vasconcellos, P.S. "A Sound Play on Aeneas' Name in the Aeneid: A Brief Note on VII.69." Vergilius (1959–), vol. 61, 2015, pp. 125–29. .
* Farron, S. "The Aeneas–Dido Episode as an Attack on Aeneas' Mission and Rome." Greece & Rome, vol. 27, no. 1, 1980, pp. 34–47. . .
* Gowers, E. "Trees and Family Trees in the Aeneid." Classical Antiquity, vol. 30, no. 1, 2011, pp. 87–118. . .
* Grillo, L. "Leaving Troy and Creusa: Reflections on Aeneas' Flight." The Classical Journal, vol. 106, no. 1, 2010, pp. 43–68. . .
* Noonan, J. "Sum Pius Aeneas: Aeneas and the Leader as Conservator/Σωτήρ" The Classical Bulletin. vol. 83, no. 1, 2007, pp. 65–91.
* Putnam, M.C.J. ''The Humanness of Heroes: Studies in the Conclusion of Virgil's Aeneid''. The Amsterdam Vergil lectures, 1. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011.
* Starr, R.J. "Aeneas the Rhetorician: 'Aeneid IV', 279–95." Latomus, vol. 62, no. 1, 2003, pp. 36–46. .
* Scafoglio, G. "The Betrayal of Aeneas." Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, vol. 53 no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–14.
* Schauer, M. Aeneas dux in Vergils Aeneis. Eine literarische Fiktion in augusteischer Zeit. Zetemata vol. 128. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2007.
External links
* [http://iconographic.warburg.sas.ac.uk/vpc/VPC_search/subcats.php?cat_18&cat_215&cat_3626&cat_4970 Warburg Institute Iconographic Database (about 900 images related to the Aeneid)]
Category:Trojan Leaders
Category:Characters in the Aeneid
Category:Greek mythological heroes
Category:Children of Aphrodite
Category:Characters in Roman mythology
Category:Characters in the Divine Comedy
Category:Katabasis in classical mythology
Category:Demigods in classical mythology
Category:Legendary progenitors
Category:Metamorphoses characters
Category:Articles containing video clips
Category:Deified men | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeneas | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.671059 |
1541 | April 13 | Events
Pre-1600
*1111 – Henry V is crowned Holy Roman Emperor.
*1204 – Constantinople falls to the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade, temporarily ending the Byzantine Empire.
*1455 – Thirteen Years' War: the beginning of the Battle for Kneiphof.1601–1900*1612 – Samurai Miyamoto Musashi defeats Sasaki Kojirō in a duel at Funajima island.
*1613 – Samuel Argall, having captured Pocahontas in Passapatanzy, Virginia, sets off with her to Jamestown with the intention of exchanging her for English prisoners held by her father.
*1699 – The Sikh religion is formalised as the Khalsa – the brotherhood of Warrior-Saintsby Guru Gobind Singh in northern India, in accordance with the Nanakshahi calendar.
*1742 – George Frideric Handel's oratorio Messiah makes its world premiere in Dublin, Ireland.
*1777 – American Revolutionary War: American forces are ambushed and defeated in the Battle of Bound Brook, New Jersey.
*1829 – The Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 gives Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom the right to vote and to sit in Parliament.
*1849 – Lajos Kossuth presents the Hungarian Declaration of Independence in a closed session of the National Assembly.
*1861 – American Civil War: Union forces surrender Fort Sumter to Confederate forces.
*1865 – American Civil War: Raleigh, North Carolina is occupied by Union forces.
*1870 – The New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art is founded.
*1873 – The Colfax massacre: More than 60 to 150 black men are murdered in Colfax, Louisiana, while surrendering to a mob of former Confederate soldiers and members of the Ku Klux Klan.
1901–present
*1909 – The 31 March Incident leads to the overthrow of Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
*1919 – Jallianwala Bagh massacre: British Indian Army troops led by Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer kill approximately 379–1,000 unarmed demonstrators including men and women in Amritsar, India; and approximately 1,500 injured.
*1941 – A pact of neutrality between the USSR and Japan is signed.
*1943 – World War II: The discovery of mass graves of Polish prisoners of war killed by Soviet forces in the Katyń Forest Massacre is announced, causing a diplomatic rift between the Polish government-in-exile in London and the Soviet Union, which denies responsibility.
* 1943 – The Jefferson Memorial is dedicated in Washington, D.C., on the 200th anniversary of President Thomas Jefferson's birth.
*1945 – World War II: German troops kill more than 1,000 political and military prisoners in Gardelegen, Germany.
* 1945 – World War II: Soviet and Bulgarian forces capture Vienna.
*1948 – In an ambush, 78 Jewish doctors, nurses and medical students from Hadassah Hospital, and a British soldier, are massacred by Arabs in Sheikh Jarrah. This event came to be known as the Hadassah medical convoy massacre.
*1953 – CIA director Allen Dulles launches the mind-control program Project MKUltra.
*1960 – The United States launches Transit 1-B, the world's first satellite navigation system.
*1964 – At the Academy Awards, Sidney Poitier becomes the first African-American man to win the Best Actor award for the 1963 film Lilies of the Field.
*1970 – An oxygen tank aboard the Apollo 13 Service Module explodes, putting the crew in great danger and causing major damage to the Apollo command and service module (codenamed "Odyssey") while en route to the Moon.
*1972 – The Universal Postal Union decides to recognize the People's Republic of China as the only legitimate Chinese representative, effectively expelling the Republic of China administering Taiwan.
* 1972 – Vietnam War: The Battle of An Lộc begins.
*1975 – An attack by the Phalangist resistance kills 26 militia members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, marking the start of the 15-year Lebanese Civil War.
*1976 – The United States Treasury Department reintroduces the two-dollar bill as a Federal Reserve Note on Thomas Jefferson's 233rd birthday as part of the United States Bicentennial celebration.
* 1976 – Forty workers die in the Lapua Cartridge Factory explosion, the deadliest industrial accident in modern Finnish history.
*1996 – Two women and four children are killed after Israeli helicopter fired rockets at an ambulance in Mansouri, Lebanon.
*1997 – Tiger Woods becomes the youngest golfer to win the Masters Tournament.
*2023 – The house of Jack Teixeira is raided in an investigation into leaked Pentagon documents; he is arrested on the same day.
*2024 – Six people and the perpetrator are killed and twelve others injured in a mass stabbing at Westfield Bondi Junction shopping centre in Sydney, Australia.BirthsPre-1600*1229 – Louis II, Duke of Bavaria (d. 1294)
*1350 – Margaret III, Countess of Flanders (d. 1405)
*1506 – Peter Faber, French priest and theologian, co-founded the Society of Jesus (d. 1546)
*1519 – Catherine de' Medici, Italian-French wife of Henry II of France (d. 1589)
*1570 – Guy Fawkes, English soldier, member of the Gunpowder Plot (probable; d. 1606)
*1573 – Christina of Holstein-Gottorp (d. 1625)
*1593 – Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, English soldier and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (d. 1641)
1601–1900
*1618 – Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy, French author (d. 1693)
*1636 – Hendrik van Rheede, Dutch botanist (d. 1691)
*1648 – Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon, French mystic (d. 1717)
*1713 – Pierre Jélyotte, French tenor (d. 1797)
*1729 – Thomas Percy, Irish bishop and poet (d. 1811)
*1732 – Frederick North, Lord North, English politician, Prime Minister of Great Britain (d. 1792)
*1735 – Isaac Low, American merchant and politician, founded the New York Chamber of Commerce (d. 1791)
*1743 – Thomas Jefferson, American lawyer and politician, 3rd President of the United States (d. 1826)
*1747 – Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (d. 1793)
*1764 – Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr, French general and politician, French Minister of War (d. 1830)
*1769 – Thomas Lawrence, English painter and educator (d. 1830)
*1771 – Richard Trevithick, Cornish-English engineer and explorer (d. 1833)
*1780 – Alexander Mitchell, Irish engineer, invented the Screw-pile lighthouse (d. 1868)
*1784 – Friedrich Graf von Wrangel, Prussian field marshal (d. 1877)
*1787 – John Robertson, American lawyer and politician (d. 1873)
*1794 – Jean Pierre Flourens, French physiologist and academic (d. 1867)
*1802 – Leopold Fitzinger, Austrian zoologist and herpetologist (d. 1884)
*1808 – Antonio Meucci, Italian-American engineer (d. 1889)
*1810 – Félicien David, French composer (d. 1876)
*1824 – William Alexander, Irish archbishop, poet, and theologian (d. 1911)
*1825 – Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Irish-Canadian journalist and politician (d. 1868)
*1828 – Josephine Butler, English feminist and social reformer (d. 1906)
* 1828 – Joseph Lightfoot, English bishop and theologian (d. 1889)
*1832 – Juan Montalvo, Ecuadorian author and diplomat (d. 1889)
*1841 – Louis-Ernest Barrias, French sculptor and academic (d. 1905)
*1850 – Arthur Matthew Weld Downing, Irish astronomer (d. 1917)
*1851 – Robert Abbe, American surgeon and radiologist (d. 1928)
* 1851 – William Quan Judge, Irish occultist and theosophist (d. 1896)
*1852 – Frank Winfield Woolworth, American businessman, founded the F. W. Woolworth Company (d. 1919)
*1854 – Lucy Craft Laney, American founder of the Haines Normal and Industrial School, Augusta, Georgia (d. 1933)
*1860 – James Ensor, English-Belgian painter, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism (d. 1949)
*1866 – Butch Cassidy, American criminal (d. 1908)
*1872 – John Cameron, Scottish international footballer and manager (d. 1935)
* 1872 – Alexander Roda Roda, Austrian-Croatian journalist and author (d. 1945)
*1873 – John W. Davis, American lawyer and politician, 14th United States Solicitor General (d. 1955)
*1875 – Ray Lyman Wilbur, American physician, academic, and politician, 31st United States Secretary of the Interior (d. 1949)
*1879 – Edward Bruce, American lawyer and painter (d. 1943)
* 1879 – Oswald Bruce Cooper, American type designer, lettering artist, graphic designer, and educator (d. 1940)
*1880 – Charles Christie, Canadian-American businessman, co-founded the Christie Film Company (d. 1955)
*1885 – Vean Gregg, American baseball player (d. 1964)
* 1885 – Juhan Kukk, Estonian politician, Head of State of Estonia (d. 1942)
* 1885 – György Lukács, Hungarian philosopher and critic (d. 1971)
* 1885 – Pieter Sjoerds Gerbrandy, Dutch politician (d. 1961)
*1887 – Gordon S. Fahrni, Canadian physician and golfer (d. 1995)
*1889 – Herbert Yardley, American cryptologist and author (d. 1958)
*1890 – Frank Murphy, American jurist and politician, 56th United States Attorney General (d. 1949)
* 1890 – Dadasaheb Torne, Indian director and producer (d. 1960)
*1891 – Maurice Buckley, Australian sergeant, Victoria Cross recipient (d. 1921)
* 1891 – Nella Larsen, Danish/African-American nurse, librarian, and author (d. 1964)
* 1891 – Robert Scholl, German accountant and politician (d. 1973)
*1892 – Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet, English air marshal (d. 1984)
* 1892 – Robert Watson-Watt, Scottish engineer, invented Radar (d. 1973)
*1894 – Arthur Fadden, Australian accountant and politician, 13th Prime Minister of Australia (d. 1973)
* 1894 – May Brodney, Australian labour activist (d. 1973)
*1896 – Fred Barnett, English footballer (d. 1982)
*1897 – Werner Voss, German lieutenant and pilot (d. 1917)
*1899 – Alfred Mosher Butts, American architect and game designer, created Scrabble (d. 1993)
* 1899 – Harold Osborn, American high jumper and decathlete (d. 1975)
*1900 – Sorcha Boru, American potter and ceramic sculptor (d. 2006)
* 1900 – Pierre Molinier, French painter and photographer (d. 1976)
1901–present
*1901 – Jacques Lacan, French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (d. 1981)
* 1901 – Alan Watt, Australian public servant and diplomat, Australian Ambassador to Japan (d. 1988)
*1902 – Philippe de Rothschild, French Grand Prix driver, playwright, and producer (d. 1988)
* 1902 – Marguerite Henry, American author (d. 1997)
*1904 – David Robinson, English businessman and philanthropist (d. 1987)
*1905 – Rae Johnstone, Australian jockey (d. 1964)
*1906 – Samuel Beckett, Irish novelist, poet, and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1989)
* 1906 – Bud Freeman, American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader (d. 1991)
*1907 – Harold Stassen, American lawyer and politician, 25th Governor of Minnesota (d. 2001)
*1909 – Eudora Welty, American short story writer and novelist (d. 2001)
*1911 – Ico Hitrec, Croatian footballer and manager (d. 1946)
* 1911 – Jean-Louis Lévesque, Canadian businessman and philanthropist (d. 1994)
* 1911 – Nino Sanzogno, Italian conductor and composer (d. 1983)
*1913 – Dave Albritton, American high jumper and coach (d. 1994)
* 1913 – Kermit Tyler, American lieutenant and pilot (d. 2010)
*1914 – Orhan Veli Kanık, Turkish poet and author (d. 1950)
*1916 – Phyllis Fraser, Welsh-American actress, journalist, and publisher, co-founded Beginner Books (d. 2006)
*1917 – Robert Orville Anderson, American businessman, founded Atlantic Richfield Oil Co. (d. 2007)
* 1917 – Bill Clements, American soldier, engineer, and politician, 15th United States Deputy Secretary of Defense (d. 2011)
*1919 – Roland Gaucher, French journalist and politician (d. 2007)
* 1919 – Howard Keel, American actor and singer (d. 2004)
* 1919 – Madalyn Murray O'Hair, American activist, founded American Atheists (d. 1995)
*1920 – Roberto Calvi, Italian banker (d. 1982)
* 1920 – Claude Cheysson, French lieutenant and politician, French Minister of Foreign Affairs (d. 2012)
* 1920 – Liam Cosgrave, Irish lawyer and politician, 6th Taoiseach of Ireland (d. 2017)
* 1920 – Theodore L. Thomas, American chemical engineer, Patent attorney and writer (d. 2005)
*1922 – Heinz Baas, German footballer and manager (d. 1994)
* 1922 – John Braine, English librarian and author (d. 1986)
* 1922 – Julius Nyerere, Tanzanian politician and teacher, 1st President of Tanzania (d. 1999)
* 1922 – Valve Pormeister, Estonian architect (d. 2002)
*1923 – Don Adams, American actor and director (d. 2005)
* 1923 – A. H. Halsey, English sociologist and academic (d. 2014)
*1924 – John T. Biggers, American painter (d. 2001)
* 1924 – Jack T. Chick, American author, illustrator, and publisher (d. 2016)
* 1924 – Stanley Donen, American film director and choreographer (d. 2019)
*1926 – Ellie Lambeti, Greek actress (d. 1983)
* 1926 – John Spencer-Churchill, 11th Duke of Marlborough, English businessman (d. 2014)
*1927 – Rosemary Haughton, English philosopher, theologian, and author
* 1927 – Maurice Ronet, French actor and director (d. 1983)
*1928 – Alan Clark, English historian and politician, Minister of State for Trade (d. 1999)
* 1928 – Gianni Marzotto, Italian racing driver and businessman (d. 2012)
*1929 – Marilynn Smith, American golfer (d. 2019)
*1931 – Anita Cerquetti, Italian soprano (d. 2014)
* 1931 – Robert Enrico, French director and screenwriter (d. 2001)
* 1931 – Dan Gurney, American race car driver and engineer (d. 2018)
* 1931 – Jon Stone, American composer, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1997)
*1932 – Orlando Letelier, Chilean-American economist and politician, Chilean Minister of National Defense (d. 1976)
*1934 – John Muckler, Canadian ice hockey player, coach, and manager (d. 2021)
*1937 – Col Joye, Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist
* 1937 – Edward Fox, English actor
* 1937 – Lanford Wilson, American playwright, co-founded the Circle Repertory Company (d. 2011)
*1938 – Klaus Lehnertz, German pole vaulter
*1939 – Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2013)
* 1939 – Paul Sorvino, American actor and singer (d. 2022)
*1940 – Mike Beuttler, Egyptian-English racing driver (d. 1988)
* 1940 – J. M. G. Le Clézio, Breton French-Mauritian author and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
* 1940 – Vladimir Cosma, French composer, conductor and violinist
* 1940 – Jim McNab, Scottish footballer (d. 2006)
* 1940 – Max Mosley, English racing driver and engineer, co-founded March Engineering, former president of the FIA (d. 2021)
* 1940 – Ruby Puryear Hearn, African-American biophysicist
*1941 – Michael Stuart Brown, American geneticist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
* 1941 – Jean-Marc Reiser, French author and illustrator (d. 1983)
*1942 – Bill Conti, American composer and conductor
*1943 – Alan Jones, Australian rugby coach and radio host
* 1943 – Tim Krabbé, Dutch journalist and author
*1944 – Susan Davis, Russian-American social worker and politician
*1945 – Judy Nunn, Australian actress and author
*1946 – Al Green, American singer-songwriter, producer, and pastor
*1948 – Nam Hae-il, South Korean admiral
* 1948 – Drago Jančar, Slovenian author and playwright
* 1948 – Mikhail Shufutinsky, Soviet and Russian singer, actor, TV presenter
*1949 – Len Cook, New Zealand-English mathematician and statistician
* 1949 – Frank Doran, Scottish lawyer and politician (d. 2017)
* 1949 – Christopher Hitchens, English-American essayist, literary critic, and journalist (d. 2011)
*1950 – Ron Perlman, American actor
* 1950 – Tommy Raudonikis, Australian rugby league player and coach (d. 2021)
* 1950 – William Sadler, American actor
*1951 – Leszek Borysiewicz, Welsh immunologist and academic
* 1951 – Peabo Bryson, American singer
* 1951 – Peter Davison, English actor
* 1951 – Max Weinberg, American musician and bandleader
*1952 – Gabrielle Gourdeau, Canadian writer (d. 2006)
* 1952 – Jonjo O'Neill, Irish jockey and trainer
*1955 – Steve Camp, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
* 1955 – Muwenda Mutebi II, current King of Buganda Kingdom
*1956 – César, Brazilian footballer (d. 2024)
*1959 – John Middendorf, American mountain climber (d. 2024)
*1960 – Rudi Völler, German footballer and manager
*1963 – Garry Kasparov, Russian chess player and author
* 1967 – Michael Eisen, American biologist and academic
* 1967 – Olga Tañón, Puerto Rican singer-songwriter
*1970 – Ricky Schroder, American actor
*1971 – Franck Esposito, French swimmer
* 1971 – Danie Mellor, Australian painter and sculptor
* 1971 – Bo Outlaw, American basketball player
*1972 – Aaron Lewis, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
*1973 – Bokeem Woodbine, American actor
*1975 – Lou Bega, German singer
* 1976 – Dan Campbell, American football player and coach
* 1976 – Glenn Howerton, American actor
*1977 – Margus Tsahkna, Estonian lawyer and politician
*1978 – Carles Puyol, Spanish footballer
*1979 – Baron Davis, American basketball player
*1980 – Kelli Giddish, American actress
* 1980 – Quentin Richardson, American basketball player
*1982 – Nellie McKay, British-American singer-songwriter, musician, and actress
* 1982 – Ty Dolla Sign, American singer, songwriter, and musician
*1983 – Hunter Pence, American baseball player
*1986 – Lorenzo Cain, American baseball player
*1987 – Steven De Vuyst, Belgian politician
* 1987 – John-Allison Weiss, American singer-songwriter
*1988 – Allison Williams, American actress and singer
*1989 – Josh Reynolds, Australian rugby league player
*1991 – Josh Gordon, American football player
*1992 – Jordan Silk, Australian cricketer
*1993 – Melvin Gordon, American football player
* 1993 – Darrun Hilliard, American basketball player
*1994 – Kahraba, Egyptian footballer
*2000 – Rasmus Dahlin, Swedish ice hockey player
<!--Please do not add yourself, non-notable people, fictional characters, or people without Wikipedia articles to this list. No red links, please. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence. If there are multiple people in the same birth year, put them in alphabetical order. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information.-->
Deaths
Pre-1600
* 548 – Lý Nam Đế, Vietnamese emperor (b. 503)
* 585 – Hermenegild, Visigothic prince and saint
* 799 – Paul the Deacon, Italian monk and historian (b. 720)
* 814 – Krum, khan of the Bulgarian Khanate
* 862 – Donald I, king of the Picts (b. 812)
* 989 – Bardas Phokas, Byzantine general
*1035 – Herbert I, Count of Maine
*1093 – Vsevolod I of Kiev (b. 1030)
*1113 – Ida of Lorraine, saint and noblewoman (b. c. 1040)
*1138 – Simon I, Duke of Lorraine (b. 1076)
*1213 – Guy of Thouars, regent of Brittany
*1275 – Eleanor of England (b. 1215)
*1367 – John Tiptoft, 2nd Baron Tibetot (b. 1313)
*1592 – Bartolomeo Ammannati, Italian architect and sculptor (b. 1511)
1601–1900
*1605 – Boris Godunov, Tsar of Russia (b. 1551)
*1612 – Sasaki Kojirō, Japanese samurai (b. 1585)
*1635 – Fakhr-al-Din II, Ottoman prince (b. 1572)
*1638 – Henri, Duke of Rohan (b. 1579)
*1641 – Richard Montagu, English bishop (b. 1577)
*1695 – Jean de La Fontaine, French author and poet (b. 1621)
*1716 – Arthur Herbert, 1st Earl of Torrington, English admiral and politician (b. 1648)
*1722 – Charles Leslie, Irish priest and theologian (b. 1650)
*1793 – Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, French botanist, lawyer, and politician (b. 1763)
*1794 – Nicolas Chamfort, French playwright and poet (b. 1741)
*1826 – Franz Danzi, German cellist, composer, and conductor (b. 1763)
*1853 – Leopold Gmelin, German chemist and academic (b. 1788)
* 1853 – James Iredell, Jr., American lawyer and politician, 23rd Governor of North Carolina (b. 1788)
*1855 – Henry De la Beche, English geologist and palaeontologist (b. 1796)
*1868 – Tewodros II of Ethiopia (b. 1818)
*1880 – Robert Fortune, Scottish botanist and author (b. 1813)
*1882 – Bruno Bauer, German historian and philosopher (b. 1809)
*1886 – John Humphrey Noyes, American religious leader, founded the Oneida Community (b. 1811)
*1890 – Samuel J. Randall, American captain, lawyer, and politician, 33rd Speaker of the United States House of Representatives (b. 1828)
1901–present
*1909 – Whitley Stokes, Anglo-Irish lawyer and scholar (b. 1830)
*1910 – William Quiller Orchardson, Scottish-English painter and educator (b. 1835)
*1911 – John McLane, Scottish-American politician, 50th Governor of New Hampshire (b. 1852)
* 1911 – George Washington Glick, American lawyer and politician, 9th Governor of Kansas (b. 1827)
*1912 – Takuboku Ishikawa, Japanese poet and author (b. 1886)
*1917 – Diamond Jim Brady, American businessman and philanthropist (b. 1856)
*1918 – Lavr Kornilov, Russian general (b. 1870)
*1927 – Georg Voigt, German politician, Mayor of Frankfurt (b. 1866)
*1936 – Konstantinos Demertzis, Greek politician 129th Prime Minister of Greece (b. 1876)
*1938 – Grey Owl, English-Canadian environmentalist and author (b. 1888)
*1941 – Annie Jump Cannon, American astronomer and academic (b. 1863)
* 1941 – William Twaits, Canadian soccer player (b. 1879)
*1942 – Henk Sneevliet, Dutch politician (b. 1883)
* 1942 – Anton Uesson, Estonian engineer and politician, 17th Mayor of Tallinn (b. 1879)
*1944 – Cécile Chaminade, French pianist and composer (b. 1857)
*1945 – Ernst Cassirer, Polish-American philosopher and academic (b. 1874)
*1954 – Samuel Jones, American high jumper (b. 1880)
* 1954 – Angus Lewis Macdonald, Canadian lawyer and politician, 12th Premier of Nova Scotia (b. 1890)
*1956 – Emil Nolde, Danish-German painter and educator (b. 1867)
*1959 – Eduard van Beinum, Dutch pianist, violinist, and conductor (b. 1901)
*1961 – John A. Bennett, American soldier (b. 1936)
*1962 – Culbert Olson, American lawyer and politician, 29th Governor of California (b. 1876)
*1964 – Kristian Krefting, Norwegian footballer and chemical engineer (b. 1891)
*1966 – Abdul Salam Arif, Iraqi colonel and politician, 2nd President of Iraq (b. 1921)
* 1966 – Carlo Carrà, Italian painter (b. 1881)
* 1966 – Georges Duhamel, French soldier and author (b. 1884)
*1967 – Nicole Berger, French actress (b. 1934)
*1969 – Ambrogio Gianotti, Italian partigiano and priest (b. 1901)
* 1969 – Alfred Karindi, Estonian pianist and composer (b. 1901)
*1971 – Michel Brière, Canadian ice hockey player (b. 1949)
* 1971 – Juhan Smuul, Estonian author, poet, and screenwriter (b. 1921)
*1975 – Larry Parks, American actor and singer (b. 1914)
* 1975 – François Tombalbaye, Chadian soldier, academic, and politician, 1st President of Chad (b. 1918)
*1978 – Jack Chambers, Canadian painter and director (b. 1931)
* 1978 – Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Nigerian educator and women's rights activist (b. 1900)
*1980 – Markus Höttinger, Austrian racing driver (b. 1956)
*1983 – Gerry Hitchens, English footballer (b. 1934)
* 1983 – Theodore Stephanides, Greek physician, author, and poet (b. 1896)
*1984 – Ralph Kirkpatrick, American harpsichordist and musicologist (b. 1911)
*1988 – Jean Gascon, Canadian actor and director (b. 1920)
*1992 – Maurice Sauvé, Canadian economist and politician (b. 1923)
* 1992 – Feza Gürsey, Turkish mathematician and physicist (b. 1921)
* 1992 – Daniel Pollock, Australian actor (b. 1968)
*1993 – Wallace Stegner, American novelist, short story writer, and essayist (b. 1909)
*1996 – Leila Mackinlay, English author and educator (b. 1910)
*1997 – Bryant Bowles, American soldier and white supremacist, founded the National Association for the Advancement of White People (b. 1920)
* 1997 – Alan Cooley, Australian public servant (b. 1920)
* 1997 – Dorothy Frooks, American author and actress (b. 1896)
* 1997 – Voldemar Väli, Estonian wrestler (b. 1903)
*1998 – Patrick de Gayardon, French skydiver and base jumper (b. 1960)
*1999 – Ortvin Sarapu, Estonian-New Zealand chess player and author (b. 1924)
* 1999 – Willi Stoph, German engineer and politician, 2nd Prime Minister of East Germany (b. 1914)
*2000 – Giorgio Bassani, Italian author and poet (b. 1916)
* 2000 – Frenchy Bordagaray, American baseball player and manager (b. 1910)
*2004 – Caron Keating, Northern Irish television host (b. 1962)
*2005 – Johnnie Johnson, American pianist and songwriter (b. 1924)
* 2005 – Phillip Pavia, American painter and sculptor (b. 1912)
*2006 – Muriel Spark, Scottish novelist, poet, and critic (b. 1918)
*2008 – John Archibald Wheeler, American physicist and academic (b. 1911)
*2012 – Cecil Chaudhry, Pakistani pilot, academic, and activist (b. 1941)
* 2012 – Shūichi Higurashi, Japanese illustrator (b. 1936)
*2013 – Stephen Dodgson, English composer and educator (b. 1924)
*2014 – Ernesto Laclau, Argentinian-Spanish philosopher and theorist (b. 1935)
* 2014 – Michael Ruppert, American journalist and author (b. 1951)
*2015 – Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan journalist and author (b. 1940)
* 2015 – Günter Grass, German novelist, poet, playwright, and illustrator, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1927)
* 2015 – Herb Trimpe, American author and illustrator (b. 1939)
*2017 – Dan Rooney, American football executive and former United States Ambassador to Ireland (b. 1932)
*2022 – Michel Bouquet, French stage and film actor (b. 1925)
* 2022 – Gloria Parker, American musician and bandleader (b. 1921)
* 2024 – Faith Ringgold, American artist and author (b. 1930)
<!--Do not add people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence.-->
Holidays and observances
* Christian feast day:
** Ida of Louvain
** Margaret of Castello
* April 13 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
* Songkran
** Songkran (Thailand)
** Water-Sprinkling Festival
* Vaisakhi (between 1902 and 2011)
References
External links
* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/13 BBC: On This Day]
*
* [https://www.onthisday.com/events/april/13 Historical Events on April 13]
Category:Days of April | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_13 | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.712928 |
1542 | Amaranth | Amaranthus is a cosmopolitan group of more than 50 species which make up the genus of annual or short-lived perennial plants collectively known as amaranths. Some of the better known names include "prostrate pigweed" and "love lies bleeding". Some amaranth species are cultivated as leaf vegetables, pseudocereals, and ornamental plants.
Catkin-like cymes of densely-packed flowers grow in summer or fall. Amaranth varies in flower, leaf, and stem color with a range of striking pigments from the spectrum of maroon to crimson and can grow longitudinally from tall with a cylindrical, succulent, fibrous stem that is hollow with grooves and bracteoles when mature. Members of this genus share many characteristics and uses with members of the closely related genus Celosia. Amaranth grain is collected from the genus. The leaves of some species are also eaten. Names and etymology Amaranthus comes from the name of this plant in Ancient Greek, , "amaranth, immortal", noun formed from the privative prefix , "without", and the verb , "to consume, to exhaust". Indeed, the amaranth has a reputation for not withering, with in particular its calice which remains persistent, and for this reason, represents a symbol of immortality. Some species are used in dry bouquets.
The form (with H), comes from an erroneous association with the Greek etymon (lat. ) meaning , found in the name of many plants (agapanthus, for example).
Its denominations in the languages of the peoples cultivating it since ancient times in America are in Nahuatl, , in Quechua, or in Maya, ahparie in Purépecha, in Huichol, and guegui in Tarahumara.
Description
(right)]]
Amaranth is a herbaceous plant or shrub that is either annual or perennial across the genus. Flowers vary interspecifically from the presence of 3 or 5 tepals and stamens, whereas a 7-porate pollen grain structure remains consistent across the family. Inflorescences are in the form a large panicle that varies from terminal to axial, color, and sex. The tassel of fluorescence is either erect or bent and varies in width and length between species. Flowers are radially symmetric and either bisexual or unisexual with very small, bristly perianth and pointy bracts.ChemistryAmaranth grain contains phytochemicals that are not defined as nutrients and may be antinutrient factors, such as polyphenols, saponins, tannins, and oxalates. These compounds are reduced in content and antinutrient effect by cooking.
Taxonomy
Amaranthus shows a wide variety of morphological diversity among and even within certain species. Amaranthus is part of the Amaranthaceae that is part of the larger grouping of the Carophyllales.
In 1955, Sauer classified the genus into two subgenera, differentiating only between monoecious and dioecious species: Acnida (L.) Aellen ex K.R. Robertson and Amaranthus. The support for the addition of the subdivision Albersia because of its indehiscent fruits coupled with three elliptic to linear tepals to be exclusive characters to members of this subgenus. The classification of these groups are further supported with a combination of floral characters, reproductive strategies, geographic distribution, and molecular evidence.
The phylogenies of Amaranthus using maximum parsimony and Bayesian analysis of nuclear and chloroplast genes suggest five clades within the genus: Diecious / Pumilus, Hybris, Galapagos, Eurasian/ South African, Australian (ESA), ESA + South American.
There is near certainty that A. hypochondriacus is the common ancestor to the cultivated grain species, however the later series of domestication to follow remains unclear. There has been opposing hypotheses of a single as opposed to multiple domestication events of the three grain species. There is evidence of phylogenetic and geographical support for clear groupings that indicate separate domestication events in South America and Central America.
* Amaranthus acanthochiton – greenstripe
* Amaranthus acutilobus – a synonym of Amaranthus viridis
* Amaranthus minimus
* Amaranthus mitchellii
* Amaranthus muricatus – African amaranth
* Amaranthus obcordatus – Trans-Pecos amaranth
* Amaranthus palmeri – Palmer's amaranth, Palmer pigweed, careless weed
* Amaranthus polygonoides – tropical amaranth
* Amaranthus powellii – green amaranth, Powell amaranth, Powell pigweed
* Amaranthus pringlei – Pringle's amaranth
* Amaranthus pumilus – seaside amaranth
* Amaranthus quitensis - Mucronate Amaranth
* Amaranthus retroflexus – red-root amaranth, redroot pigweed, common amaranth
* Amaranthus saradhiana - purpal stem amaranth, green leaf amaranth
* Amaranthus scleranthoides – variously Amaranthus sclerantoides
* Amaranthus scleropoides – bone-bract amaranth
* Amaranthus spinosus – spiny amaranth, prickly amaranth, thorny amaranth
* Amaranthus standleyanus
* Amaranthus thunbergii – Thunberg's amaranth
* Amaranthus torreyi – Torrey's amaranth
* Amaranthus tricolor – Joseph's-coat
* Amaranthus tuberculatus – rough-fruit amaranth, tall waterhemp
* Amaranthus viridis – slender amaranth, green amaranth
* Amaranthus watsonii – Watson's amaranth
* Amaranthus wrightii – Wright's amaranth
Etymology
"Amaranth" derives from Greek (), "unfading", with the Greek word for "flower", (), factoring into the word's development as amaranth, the unfading flower. Amarant is an archaic variant. The name was first applied to the related Celosia (Amaranthus and Celosia share long-lasting dried flowers), as Amaranthus plants were not yet known in Europe.
Ecology
Amaranth weed species have an extended period of germination, rapid growth, and high rates of seed production, The following 9 species of Amaranthus are considered invasive and noxious weeds in the U.S. and Canada: A. albus, A. blitoides, A. hybridus, A. palmeri, A. powellii, A. retroflexus, A. spinosus, A. tuberculatus, and A. viridis.
A new herbicide-resistant strain of A. palmeri has appeared; it is glyphosate-resistant and so cannot be killed by herbicides using the chemical. Also, this plant can survive in tough conditions. The species Amaranthus palmeri (Palmer amaranth) causes the greatest reduction in soybean yields and has the potential to reduce yields by 17-68% in field experiments. This makes the proper identification of Amaranthus species at the seedling stage essential for agriculturalists. Proper weed control needs to be applied before the species successfully colonizes in the crop field and causes significant yield reductions.
An evolutionary lineage of around 90 species within the genus has acquired the carbon fixation pathway, which increases their photosynthetic efficiency. This probably occurred in the Miocene. Uses
All parts of the plant are considered edible, though some may have sharp spines that need to be removed before consumption. Amaranth is high in oxalates, but this may be partially offset by its high calcium content.
Nutrition
Uncooked amaranth grain by weight is 12% water, 65% carbohydrates (including 7% dietary fiber), 14% protein, and 7% fat (table). A reference serving of uncooked amaranth grain provides of food energy, and is a rich source (20% or more of the Daily Value, DV) of protein, dietary fiber, pantothenic acid, vitamin B6, folate, and several dietary minerals (table). Uncooked amaranth is particularly rich in manganese (159% DV), phosphorus (80% DV), magnesium (70% DV), iron (59% DV), and selenium (34% DV). Amaranth has a high oxalate content.
Cooking decreases its nutritional value substantially across all nutrients, with only dietary minerals remaining at moderate levels. Cooked amaranth leaves are a rich source of vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, and manganese, with moderate levels of folate, iron, magnesium, and potassium. Amaranth does not contain gluten.
History
The native range of the genus is cosmopolitan. Known to the Aztecs as , amaranth is thought to have represented up to 80% of their energy consumption before the Spanish conquest. Another important use of amaranth throughout Mesoamerica was in ritual drinks and foods. To this day, amaranth grains are toasted much like popcorn and mixed with honey, molasses, or chocolate to make a treat called , meaning "joy" in Spanish.
While all species are believed to be native to the Americas, several have been cultivated and introduced to warm regions worldwide. Amaranth's cosmopolitan distribution makes it one of many plants providing evidence of pre-Columbian oceanic contact. The earliest archeological evidence for amaranth in the Old World was found in an excavation in Narhan, India, dated to 1000–800 BCE.
Because of its importance as a symbol of indigenous culture, its palatability, ease of cooking, and a protein that is particularly well-suited to human nutritional needs, interest in amaranth seeds (especially A. cruentus and A. hypochondriacus) revived in the 1970s. It was recovered in Mexico from wild varieties and is now commercially cultivated. It is a popular snack in Mexico, sometimes mixed with chocolate or puffed rice, and its use has spread to Europe and other parts of North America.
Seed
Several species are raised for amaranth "grain" in Asia and the Americas. Amaranth and its relative quinoa are considered pseudocereals because of their similarities to cereals in flavor and cooking. The spread of Amaranthus is of a joint effort of human expansion, adaptation, and fertilization strategies. Grain amaranth has been used for food by humans in several ways. The grain can be ground into a flour for use like other grain flours. It can be popped like popcorn, or flaked like oatmeal.
Seeds of Amaranth grain have been found in Antofagasta de la Sierra Department, Catamarca, Argentina in the southern Puna desert of the north of Argentina dating from 4,500 years ago, with evidence suggesting earlier use.
Ancient amaranth grains still used include the three species Amaranthus caudatus, A. cruentus, and A. hypochondriacus. Evidence from single-nucleotide polymorphisms and chromosome structure supports A. hypochondriacus as the common ancestor of the three grain species.
It has been proposed as an inexpensive native crop that could be cultivated by indigenous people in rural areas for several reasons:
* A small amount of seed plants a large area (seeding rate 1 kg/ha).
* Yields are high compared to the seeding rate: 1,000 kg or more per hectare.
* It is easily harvested and easily processed, post harvest, as there are no hulls to remove.
* Its seeds are a source of protein.
* It has rich content of the dietary minerals, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, and potassium.
* It is easy to cook. Boil in water with twice the amount of water as grain by volume (or 2.4 times as much water by weight). Amaranth seed can also be popped one tablespoon at a time in a hot pan without oil, shaken every few seconds to avoid burning.
* It grows fast and, in three cultivated species, the large seedheads can weigh up to 1 kg and contain a half-million small seeds.
<!--original research Seed flour
Amaranth seed flour has been evaluated as an additive to wheat flour by food specialists. To determine palatability, different levels of amaranth grain flour were mixed with the wheat flour and baking ingredients (1% salt, 2.5% fat, 1.5% yeast, 10% sugar, and 52–74% water), fermented, molded, pan-proofed, and baked. The baked products were evaluated for loaf volume, moisture content, color, odor, taste, and texture. The amaranth-containing products were then compared with bread made from 100% wheat flour. The loaf volume decreased by 40% and the moisture content increased from 22 to 42% with increase in amaranth grain flour. The study found that the sensory scores of the taste, odor, color, and texture decreased with increasing amounts of amaranth. Generally, above 15% amaranth grain flour, significant differences occurred in the evaluated sensory qualities and the high amaranth-containing product was found to be of unacceptable palatability to the population sample that evaluated the baked products.
-->
Leaves, roots, and stems
made with Cheera (amaranth) leaves]]
Amaranth species are cultivated and consumed as a leaf vegetable in many parts of the world. Four species of Amaranthus are documented as cultivated vegetables in eastern Asia: Amaranthus cruentus, Amaranthus blitum, Amaranthus dubius, and Amaranthus tricolor.
Asia
In Indonesia and Malaysia, leaf amaranth is called (although the word has since been loaned to refer to spinach, in a different genus). In the Philippines, the Ilocano word for the plant is ; the Tagalog word for the plant is or .
In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in India, it is called and is a popular red leafy vegetable (referred to in the class of vegetable preparations called ). It is called chua in Kumaun area of Uttarakhand, where it is a popular red-green vegetable. In Karnataka in India, it is called (). It is used to prepare curries such as hulee, palya, majjigay-hulee, and so on. In Kerala, it is called cheera and is consumed by stir-frying the leaves with spices and red chili peppers to make a dish called cheera thoran. In Tamil Nadu, it is called and is regularly consumed as a favourite dish, where the greens are steamed and mashed with light seasoning of salt, red chili pepper, and cumin. It is called . In the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and other Telugu speaking regions of the country, this leaf is called as "Thotakura" and is cooked as a standalone curry, added as a part of mix leafy vegetable curry or added in preparation of a popular dal called () in (Telugu). In Maharashtra, it is called and is available in both red and white colour. In Orissa, it is called , it is used to prepare , in which the leaf is fried with chili and onions. In West Bengal, the green variant is called () and the red variant is called ().
In China, the leaves and stems are used as a stir-fry vegetable, or in soups. In Vietnam, it is called and is used to make soup. Two species are popular as edible vegetable in Vietnam: (Amaranthus tricolor) and or (Amaranthus viridis).
Africa
A traditional food plant in Africa, amaranth has the potential to improve nutrition, boost food security, foster rural development and support sustainable land care.
In Bantu regions of Uganda and western Kenya, it is known as doodo or litoto. It is also known among the Kalenjin as a drought crop (chepkerta). In Lingala (spoken in the Congo), it is known as or . In Nigeria, it is a common vegetable and goes with all Nigerian starch dishes. It is known in Yoruba as , a short form of (meaning "make the husband fat"), or (meaning "we have money left over for fish"). In Botswana, it is referred to as morug and cooked as a staple green vegetable. Europe In Greece, purple amaranth (Amaranthus blitum) is a popular dish called , or . It is boiled, then served with olive oil and lemon juice like a salad, sometimes alongside fried fish. Greeks stop harvesting the plant (which also grows wild) when it starts to bloom at the end of August. Americas
In Brazil, green amaranth was, and to a degree still is, often considered an invasive species as all other species of amaranth (except the generally imported A. caudatus cultivar), though some have traditionally appreciated it as a leaf vegetable, under the names of or , which is consumed cooked, generally accompanying the staple food, rice and beans.
In the Caribbean, the leaves are called bhaji in Trinidad and callaloo in Jamaica, and are sautéed with onions, garlic, and tomatoes, or sometimes used in a soup called pepperpot soup.
Oil
Making up about 5% of the total fatty acids of amaranth, squalene is extracted as a vegetable-based alternative to the more expensive shark oil for use in dietary supplements and cosmetics. Dyes The flowers of the 'Hopi Red Dye' amaranth were used by the Hopi (a tribe in the western United States) as the source of a deep red dye. Also a synthetic dye was named "amaranth" for its similarity in color to the natural amaranth pigments known as betalains. This synthetic dye is also known as Red No. 2 in North America and E123 in the European Union. Ornamentals
The genus also contains several well-known ornamental plants, such as Amaranthus caudatus (love-lies-bleeding), a vigorous, hardy annual with dark purplish flowers crowded in handsome drooping spikes. Another Indian annual, A. hypochondriacus (prince's feather), has deeply veined, lance-shaped leaves, purple on the under face, and deep crimson flowers densely packed on erect spikes.
Amaranths are recorded as food plants for some Lepidoptera (butterfly and moth) species including the nutmeg moth and various case-bearer moths of the genus Coleophora: C. amaranthella, C. enchorda (feeds exclusively on Amaranthus), C. immortalis (feeds exclusively on Amaranthus), C. lineapulvella, and C. versurella (recorded on A. spinosus).
Culture
Diego Durán described the festivities for the Aztec god . The Aztec month of (7 December to 26 December) was dedicated to . People decorated their homes and trees with paper flags; ritual races, processions, dances, songs, prayers, and finally human sacrifices were held. This was one of the more important Aztec festivals, and the people prepared for the whole month. They fasted or ate very little; a statue of the god was made out of amaranth seeds and honey, and at the end of the month, it was cut into small pieces so everybody could eat a piece of the god. After the Spanish conquest, cultivation of amaranth was outlawed, while some of the festivities were subsumed into the Christmas celebration.
Amaranth is associated with longevity and, poetically, with death and immortality. Amaranth garlands were used in the mourning of Achilles.
John Milton's Paradise Lost portrays a showy amaranth in the Garden of Eden, "remov'd from Heav'n" when it blossoms because the flowers "shade the fountain of life". He describes amaranth as "immortal" in reference to the flowers that generally do not wither and retain bright reddish tones of color, even when deceased; referred to in one species as "love-lies-bleeding."
Gallery
<gallery widths=180>
Amaranthus caudatus1.jpg|Love-lies-bleeding (A. caudatus)
Amaranthus.hybridus1web.jpg|Green amaranth (A. hybridus)
Amaranth2.jpg|Seabeach amaranth (A. pumilus), an amaranth on the Federal Threatened species List
Illustration Amaranthus retroflexus0.jpg|Red-root amaranth (A. retroflexus)—from Thomé, Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz 1885
Amaranthus.spinosus1web.jpg|Spiny amaranth (A. spinosus)
Amaranthus.viridis1web.jpg|Green amaranth (A. viridis)
Amaranth sp 2.jpg| Popping amaranth (Amaranthus sp.)
Fepm (8).jpg|Amaranth from Chilpancingo
</gallery>
See also
* Ancient grains
References
Further reading
* Howard, Brian Clark. "[https://web.archive.org/web/20140808071935/http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/08/130812-amaranth-oaxaca-mexico-obesity-puente-food/?google_editors_picks=true Amaranth: Another Ancient Wonder Food, But Who Will Eat It?]". National Geographic Online, August 12, 2013.
* Fanton M., Fanton J. Amaranth The Seed Savers' Handbook. (1993)
* Assad, R., Reshi, Z. A., Jan, S., & Rashid, I. (2017). Biology of amaranths. The Botanical Review, 83(4), 382–436.
External links
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20131104004544/http://www.cropsforthefuture.org/crop-of-the-week-archive/grain-amaranth-amaranthus-spp-amaranthaceae/ Grain amaranth, Crops For A Future]
Category:Leaf vegetables
Category:Tropical agriculture
Category:Asian vegetables
Category:Pseudocereals
Category:E-number additives | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.746933 |
1543 | Agapanthus africanus | |synonyms_ref =
}}
Agapanthus africanus, or the African lily, is a flowering plant from the genus Agapanthus found only on rocky sandstone slopes of the winter rainfall fynbos from the Cape Peninsula to Swellendam. It is also known as the lily-of-the-Nile in spite of only occurring in South Africa. Description The plant is a rhizomatous evergreen geophyte from in height. The leathery leaves are suberect and long and strap shaped. The flowers grow in large clusters, with each flower being long. This species flowers from November to April, particularly after fire.
The name A. africanus has long been misapplied to A. praecox in horticultural use and publications across the world, and horticultural plants sold as A. africanus are actually hybrids or cultivars of A. praecox. Similarly, it has found to induce resistance to rust leaf in wheat through increasing the activity of pathogenesis related proteins.
Conservation
While the species as a whole has not yet been assessed, A. africanus subsp. walshii is considered to be endangered by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). It is known only from a small area in the Elgin valley (less than five locations) and the population continues to decline. The largest subpopulation is threatened by unregulated informal settlement expansion. A proportion of the population is protected within the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve and is not threatened.
See also
* List of plants known as lily
References
External links
*[http://www.plantweb.co.za/Plant_Pictures/Agapanthus/Agapanthus_africanus/ Plantweb: Agapanthus africanus]
*
africanus
Category:Endemic flora of the Cape Provinces
Category:Plants described in 1824
Category:Plants described in 1753
Category:Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agapanthus_africanus | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.753533 |
1544 | Agamemnon | In Greek mythology, Agamemnon (; Agamémnōn) was a king of Mycenae who commanded the Achaeans during the Trojan War. He was the son (or grandson) of King Atreus and Queen Aerope, the brother of Menelaus, the husband of Clytemnestra, and the father of Iphigenia, Iphianassa, Electra, Laodike, Orestes and Chrysothemis. Legends make him the king of Mycenae or Argos, thought to be different names for the same area. Agamemnon was killed upon his return from Troy by Clytemnestra, or in an older version of the story, by Clytemnestra's lover Aegisthus.
Etymology
Different etymologies have been proposed for the name Agamemnon (). According to one view, the name means 'very steadfast', 'unbowed' or 'resolute'. This is based on the interpretation of the name as a compound word comprising the elements 'very much' and 'to stay, wait; stand fast'. According to another view, the name developed from the unattested form * (*), a compound word composed of the elements 'very much' and 'to think on, provide for', with the overall meaning of 'very mindful'. Yet another proposal derives the second part of the compound word from 'to be inclined, to wish eagerly, to strive' for the overall meaning of 'very eagerly wishing'.
Ancestry and early life
Agamemnon was a descendant of Pelops, son of Tantalus. According to the common story (as told in the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer), Agamemnon and his younger brother Menelaus were the sons of Atreus, king of Mycenae, and Aerope, daughter of the Cretan king Catreus. However, according to another tradition, Agamemnon and Menelaus were the sons of Atreus' son Pleisthenes, with their mother being Aerope, Cleolla, or Eriphyle. In this tradition, Pleisthenes dies young, with Agamemnon and Menelaus being raised by Atreus. Agamemnon had a sister Anaxibia (or Astyoche) who married Strophius, the son of Crisus.thumb|Fourth century BC depiction of Chryses attempting to ransom his daughter Chryseis from Agamemnon.Agamemnon's father, Atreus, murdered the sons of his twin brother Thyestes and fed them to Thyestes after discovering Thyestes' adultery with his wife Aerope. Thyestes fathered Aegisthus with his own daughter, Pelopia, and this son vowed gruesome revenge on Atreus' children. Aegisthus murdered Atreus, restored Thyestes to the throne, and took possession of the throne of Mycenae and jointly ruled with his father. During this period, Agamemnon and his brother Menelaus took refuge with Tyndareus, King of Sparta.
In Sparta, Agamemnon and Menelaus respectively married Tyndareus' daughters Clytemnestra and Helen. In some stories (such as Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides) Clytemnestra was already married to Tantalus, and Agamemnon murders him and the couple's infant son before marrying Clytemnestra.
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had four children: one son, Orestes, and three daughters, Iphigenia, Electra, and Chrysothemis. Menelaus succeeded Tyndareus in Sparta, while Agamemnon, with his brother's assistance, drove out Aegisthus and Thyestes to recover his father's kingdom. He extended his dominion by conquest and became the most powerful prince in Greece.
Agamemnon's family history had been tarnished by murder, incest, and treachery, consequences of the heinous crime perpetrated by his ancestor, Tantalus, and then of a curse placed upon Pelops, son of Tantalus, by Myrtilus, whom he had murdered. Thus misfortune hounded successive generations of the House of Atreus, until atoned by Orestes in a court of justice held jointly by humans and gods.
Trojan War
Sailing for Troy
thumb|The Sacrifice of Iphigenia by Charles de La Fosse
Agamemnon gathers the reluctant Greek forces to sail for Troy. In order to recruit Odysseus, who is feigning madness so as to not have to go to war, Agamemnon sends Palamedes, who threatens to kill Odysseus' infant son Telemachus. Odysseus is forced to stop acting mad in order to save his son and joined the assembled Greek forces. Preparing to depart from Aulis, a port in Boeotia, Agamemnon's army incurs the wrath of the goddess Artemis, although the myths give various reasons for this. In Aeschylus' play Agamemnon, Artemis is angry for she predicts that so many young men will die at Troy, whereas in Sophocles' Electra, Agamemnon has slain an animal sacred to Artemis, and subsequently boasts that he is her equal in hunting. Misfortunes, including a plague and a lack of wind, prevent the army from sailing. Finally, the prophet Calchas announces that the wrath of the goddess can only be propitiated by the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia.
Classical dramatizations differ on how willing either father or daughter are to this fate; some include such trickery as claiming she was to be married to Achilles, but Agamemnon does eventually sacrifice Iphigenia. Her death appeases Artemis and the Greek army set out for Troy. Several alternatives to the human sacrifice have been presented in Greek mythology. Other sources, such as Iphigenia at Aulis, say that Agamemnon is prepared to kill his daughter but that Artemis accepts a deer in her place and whisks her away to Tauris in the Crimean Peninsula. However, this version is widely considered to be the work of an interpolator, and not Euripides himself. Hesiod says she became the goddess Hecate.
During the war, but before the events of the Iliad, Odysseus contrives a plan to get revenge on Palamedes for threatening his son's life. By forging a letter from Priam, king of the Trojans, and caching some gold in Palamedes tent, Odysseus has Palamedes accused of treason and Agamemnon orders him to be stoned to death.
The Iliad
thumb|Achilles' surrender of Briseis to Agamemnon, from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii, fresco, 1st century AD, now in the Naples National Archaeological Museum
The Iliad tells the story of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles in the final year of the war. In Book One, following one of the Achaean army's raids, Chryseis, daughter of Chryses, one of Apollo's priests, is taken as a war prize by Agamemnon. Chryses pleads with Agamemnon to free his daughter but meets with little success. Chryses then prays to Apollo for the safe return of his daughter. Apollo responds by unleashing a plague over the Achaean army. The prophet Calchas tells that the plague may be dispelled by returning Chryseis to her father. After bitterly berating Calchas for his painful prophecies, which first forced him to sacrifice his daughter and now to return his concubine, Agamemnon reluctantly agrees. However, Agamemnon demands a new prize from the army as compensation and seizes Achilles' prize, the beautiful captive Briseis. This creates deadly resentment between Achilles and Agamemnon, causing Achilles to withdraw from battle and refuse to fight.
Agamemnon is then visited in a dream by Zeus who tells him to rally his forces and attack the Trojans (in Book Two). After several days of fighting, including duels between Menelaus and Paris, and between Ajax and Hector, the Achaeans are pushed back to the fortifications around their ships. In Book Nine, Agamemnon, having realized Achilles's importance in winning the war, sends ambassadors begging for Achilles to return, offering him riches and the hand of his daughter in marriage. Achilles refuses, only being spurred back into action when his companion Patroclus is killed in battle by Hector, eldest son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba. In Book Nineteen, Agamemnon, reconciled with Achilles, gives him the offered rewards for returning to the war. Achilles sets out to turn back the Trojans and to duel with Hector. After Hector's death, Agamemnon assists Achilles in performing Patroclus' funeral in Book Twenty-three. Agamemnon volunteers for the javelin throwing contest, one of the games being held in Patroclus' honor, but his skill with the javelin is so well known that Achilles awards him the prize without contest.
Although not the equal of Achilles in bravery, Agamemnon was a representative of "kingly authority". As commander-in-chief, he summoned the princes to the council and led the army in battle. His chief fault was his overwhelming haughtiness; an over-exalted opinion of his position that led him to insult Chryses and Achilles, thereby bringing great disaster upon the Greeks.
Agamemnon was the commander-in-chief of the Greeks during the Trojan War. During the fighting, Agamemnon killed Antiphus and fifteen other Trojan soldiers, according to one source. In the Iliad itself, he is shown to slaughter hundreds more in Book Eleven during his aristeia, loosely translated to "day of glory", which is the most similar to Achilles' aristeia in Book Twenty-one. Even before his aristeia, Agamemnon is considered to be one of the three best warriors on the Greek side, as proven when Hector challenges any champion of the Greek side to fight him in Book Seven, and Agamemnon (along with Diomedes and Ajax the Greater) is one of the three Hector most wishes to fight out of the nine strongest Greek warriors who volunteer.
End of the war
thumb|The suicide of Ajax depicted on Greek pottery by Exekias, now on display at the Château-musée de Boulogne-sur-Mer
According to Sophocles's Ajax, after Achilles had fallen in battle, Agamemnon and Menelaus award Achilles' armor to Odysseus. This angers Ajax, who feels he is now the strongest among the Achaean warriors and so deserves the armor. Ajax considers killing them, but is driven to madness by Athena and instead slaughters the herdsmen and cattle that had not yet been divided as spoils of war. He then commits suicide in shame for his actions. As Ajax dies he curses the sons of Atreus (Agamemnon and Menelaus), along with the entire Achaean army. Agamemnon and Menelaus consider leaving Ajax's body to rot, denying him a proper burial, but are convinced otherwise by Odysseus and Ajax's half-brother Teucer. After the capture of Troy, Cassandra, the doomed prophetess and daughter of Priam, fell to Agamemnon's lot in the distribution of the prizes of war.
Return to Greece and death
thumb|The assassination of Agamemnon, an illustration from Stories from the Greek Tragedians by Alfred Church, 1897.
After a stormy voyage, Agamemnon and Cassandra land in Argolis, or, in another version, are blown off course and land in Aegisthus's country. Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife, has taken Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, as a lover. When Agamemnon comes home he is slain by Aegisthus (in the oldest versions of the story) or by Clytemnestra. According to the accounts given by Pindar and the tragedians, Agamemnon is slain in a bath by his wife alone, after being ensnared by a blanket or a net thrown over him to prevent resistance. This is the case in Aeschylus's Oresteia.
thumb|Orestes slaying Clytemnestra
In Homer's version of the story in the Odyssey, Aegisthus ambushes and kills Agamemnon in a feasting hall under the pretense of holding a feast in honor of Agamemnon's return home from Troy. Clytemnestra also kills Cassandra. Her motivations are her wrath at the sacrifice of Iphigenia (as in the Oresteia and Iphigenia at Aulis) and her jealousy of Cassandra and other war prizes taken by Agamemnon (as in the Odyssey and works by Ovid).
Aegisthus and Clytemnestra then rule Agamemnon's kingdom for a time, Aegisthus claiming his right of revenge for Atreus's crimes against Thyestes (Thyestes then crying out "thus perish all the race of Pleisthenes!", thus explaining Aegisthus' action as justified by his father's curse). Agamemnon's son Orestes later avenges his father's murder, with the help or encouragement of his sister Electra, by murdering Aegisthus and Clytemnestra (his own mother), thereby inciting the wrath of the Erinyes (English: the Furies), winged goddesses who track down wrongdoers with their hounds' noses and drive them to insanity.
The Curse of the House of Atreus
Agamemnon's family history is rife with misfortune, born from several curses contributing to the miasma around the family. The curse begins with Agamemnon's great-grandfather Tantalus, who is in Zeus's favor until he tries to feed his son Pelops to the gods in order to test their omniscience, as well as stealing some ambrosia and nectar. Tantalus is then banished to the underworld, where he stands in a pool of water that evaporates every time he reaches down to drink, and above him is a fruit tree whose branches are blown just out of reach by the wind whenever he reaches for the fruit. This begins the cursed house of Atreus, and his descendants would face similar or worse fates.
thumb|Family Tree of the House of Atreus
Later, using his relationship with Poseidon, Pelops convinces the god to grant him a chariot so he may beat Oenomaus, king of Pisa, in a race, and win the hand of his daughter Hippodamia. Myrtilus, who in some accounts helps Pelops win his chariot race, attempts to lie with Pelops's new bride Hippodamia. In anger, Pelops throws Myrtilus off a cliff, but not before Myrtilus curses Pelops and his entire line.
Atreus and Aerope have three children, Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Anaxibia. The continued miasma surrounding the house of Atreus expresses itself in several events throughout their lives. Agamemnon is forced to sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigenia, to appease the gods and allow the Greek forces to sail for Troy. When Agamemnon refuses to return Chryseis to her father Chryses, he brings plague upon the Greek camp. He is also later killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, who conspires with her new lover Aegisthus in revenge for the death of Iphigenia. Menelaus's wife, Helen of Troy, runs away with Paris, ultimately leading to the Trojan War. According to book 4 of the Odyssey, after the war his fleet is scattered by the gods to Egypt and Crete. When Menelaus finally returns home, his marriage with Helen is now strained and they produce no sons. He buries him, honored with a tomb and a shrine to Aphrodite Argynnis. This episode is also found in Clement of Alexandria, in Stephen of Byzantium (Kopai and Argunnos), and in Propertius, III with minor variations.
The fortunes of Agamemnon have formed the subject of numerous tragedies, ancient and modern, the most famous being the Oresteia of Aeschylus. In the legends of the Peloponnesus, Agamemnon was regarded as the highest type of a powerful monarch, and in Sparta he was worshipped under the title of Zeus Agamemnon. His tomb was pointed out among the ruins of Mycenae and at Amyclae.
In works of art, there is considerable resemblance between the representations of Zeus, king of the gods, and Agamemnon, king of men. He is generally depicted with a sceptre and diadem, conventional attributes of kings.
Agamemnon's mare is named Aetha. She is also one of two horses driven by Menelaus at the funeral games of Patroclus.
In Homer's Odyssey Agamemnon makes an appearance in the kingdom of Hades after his death. There, the former king meets Odysseus and explains just how he was murdered before he offers Odysseus a warning about the dangers of trusting a woman.
Agamemnon is a character in William Shakespeare's play Troilus and Cressida, set during the Trojan War.
In Frank Herbert's Dune, the House of Atreides trace themselves back to the House of Atreus. At a key point in Children of Dune, Alia Atreides, in a struggle with her ancestral memories, hears Agamemnon shouting "I, your ancestor Agamemnon, demand audience!"
In media and art
Visual arts
General works
thumb|Clytemnestra and Agamemnon by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin
The Mask of Agamemnon, discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876, on display at National Archeological Museum of Athens, Athens
The Tomb of Agamemnon, by Louis Desprez, 1787, on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, 1817, on display at the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans, Orléans
Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon, by Frederic Leighton, 1868, on display at Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston upon Hull
Agamemnon Killing Odios, anonymous, 1545, on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
With Iphigenia
thumb|The Sacrifice of Iphigenia by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Sacrifice of Iphigenia, by Arnold Houbraken, 1690–1700, on display at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, by Charles de la Fosse, 1680, on display at the Palace of Versailles, Versailles
The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, by Gaetano Gandolfi, 1789, on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Sacrificio di Ifigenia, by Pietro Testa, 1640
The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1757, on display at the Villa Varmarana, Vicenza
Sacrifice of Iphigenia, by Jan Steen, 1671, on display at the Leiden Collection, New York
The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, by Sebastian Bourdon, 1653, on display at the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans, Orléans
With Achilles
thumb|The Anger of Achilles by Jacques-Louis David
The Quarrel Between Agamemnon and Achilles, by Giovanni Battista Gaulli, 1695, on display at the Museé de l’Oise, Beauvais
The Anger of Achilles, by Jacques-Louis David, 1819, on display at Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
The Wrath of Achilles, by Michel-Martin Drolling, 1810, on display at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris
Quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon, by William Page, on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC
See also
HMS Agamemnon
National Archaeological Museum of Athens
Citations
General references
Secondary sources
Aeschylus, Agamemnon in Aeschylus, with an English translation by Herbert Weir Smyth, Ph. D. in two volumes, Vol 2, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1926, Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Apollodorus, Apollodorus, The Library, with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters, Volume VI: Books 12-13.594b, edited and translated by S. Douglas Olson, Loeb Classical Library No. 345, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2011. . Online version at Harvard University Press.
Collard, Christopher and Martin Cropp (2008a), Euripides Fragments: Aegeus–Meleanger, Loeb Classical Library No. 504, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2008. . Online version at Harvard University Press.
Collard, Christopher and Martin Cropp (2008b), Euripides Fragments: Oedipus-Chrysippus: Other Fragments, Loeb Classical Library No. 506, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2008. . Online version at Harvard University Press.
Dictys Cretensis, The Trojan War. The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian, translated by R. M. Frazer (Jr.). Indiana University Press. 1966.
Euripides, Helen, translated by E. P. Coleridge in The Complete Greek Drama, edited by Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill Jr. Volume 2. New York. Random House. 1938. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris, translated by Robert Potter in The Complete Greek Drama, edited by Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill Jr. Volume 2. New York. Random House. 1938. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Euripides, Orestes, translated by E. P. Coleridge in The Complete Greek Drama, edited by Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill Jr. Volume 1. New York. Random House. 1938. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Gantz, Timothy, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, Two volumes: (Vol. 1), (Vol. 2).
Grimal, Pierre, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Wiley-Blackwell, 1996. .
Hard, Robin, The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology: Based on H.J. Rose's "Handbook of Greek Mythology", Psychology Press, 2004, . Google Books.
Homer, The Iliad with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, Ph.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Homer, The Odyssey with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, PH.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1919. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Hyginus, Gaius Julius, Fabulae, in The Myths of Hyginus, edited and translated by Mary A. Grant, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960. Online version at ToposText.
Most, G.W., Hesiod: The Shield, Catalogue of Women, Other Fragments, Loeb Classical Library, No. 503, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2007, 2018. . Online version at Harvard University Press.
Parada, Carlos, Genealogical Guide to Greek Mythology, Jonsered, Paul Åströms Förlag, 1993. .
Pausanias, Pausanias Description of Greece with an English Translation by W.H.S. Jones, Litt.D., and H.A. Ormerod, M.A., in 4 Volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1918. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Sophocles, The Ajax of Sophocles. Edited with introduction and notes by Sir Richard Jebb, Sir Richard Jebb. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1893 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Primary sources
Homer, Iliad
Euripides, Electra
Sophocles, Electra
Seneca, Agamemnon
Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers
Homer, Odyssey I, 28–31; XI, 385–464
Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Apollodorus, Epitome, II, 15 – III, 22; VI, 23
External links
Agamemnon – World History Encyclopedia
Category:Achaean Leaders
Category:Deeds of Artemis
Category:Filicide in mythology
Category:Greek mythological heroes
Category:Kings of Mycenae
Category:Metamorphoses characters
Category:Atreidai
Category:Characters in the Iliad
Category:Characters in the Odyssey | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agamemnon | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.817225 |
1545 | Aga Khan I | }}
| religion = Isma'ilism
| denomination = Isma'ilism
| school = Nizari
| title = Aga Khan I
| office1 = 46th hereditary Imam of the Nizari Isma'ilism Muslim
| term_start1 = 1817
| term_end1 = 12 April 1881
| predecessor1 = Shah Khalil Allah III
| successor1 = Aga Khan II
| lineage = Fatimid (direct descendant of Muhammad)
| birth_name = Prince Hasan Ali Shah
| birth_date = 1804
| birth_place = Kahak, Sublime State of Iran
| death_date = 12 April
| death_place = Bombay, British India
| resting_place = Hasanabad, Bombay
| resting_place_coordinates <!-- -->
| spouse = Sarv-i Jahan Khanum
| children = Aqa Ali Shah (successor)
| parents =
| post | honorific prefix His Highness
}}
Prince Hasan Ali Shah (; 1804 – 12 April 1881), known as Aga Khan I (), was the 46th hereditary imam of the Nizari Isma'ilis. He served as the governor of Kerman and a prominent leader in Iran and later in the Indian subcontinent. He was the first Nizari imam to hold the title Aga Khan.
Early life and family
The Imam Hasan Ali Shah was born in 1804 in Kahak, Iran to Shah Khalil Allah III, the 45th Ismaili Imam, and Bibi Sarkara, the daughter of Muhammad Sadiq Mahallati (d. 1815), a poet and a Ni‘mat Allahi Sufi. Shah Khalil Allah moved to Yazd in 1815, probably out of concern for his Indian followers, who used to travel to Persia to see their Imam and for whom Yazd was a much closer and safer destination than Kahak. Meanwhile, his wife and children (Including Hasan Ali) continued to live in Kahak off the revenues obtained from the family holdings in the Mahallat () region. Two years later, in 1817, Shah Khalil Allah was killed in Yazd during a brawl between some of his followers and local shopkeepers. He was succeeded by his eldest son Hasan Ali Shah, also known as Muhammad Hasan, who became the 46th Imam.
The title of 'His Highness' was initially granted by the British Monarch to the Ismaili Imams dating back in mid 1800s, to the first Aga Khan, in recognition as a religious leader of global importance and his role as spiritual head of the Ismaili community resides in Commonwealth countries.
Notes
Further reading
*
Category:People of Qajar Iran
Category:1804 births
Category:1881 deaths
Category:Aga Khans
Category:Iranian Ismailis
Category:Indian Ismailis
Category:Indian imams
Category:People from Qom province
Category:Iranian emigrants to India
Category:19th-century Iranian people
Category:19th-century Ismailis | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aga_Khan_I | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.823411 |
1546 | Aga Khan III | | native_name_lang | image HH the AGA KHAN 1936.jpg
| caption = Aga Khan III in 1936
| office1 = 48th Imam of the Nizari Isma'ilism Muslim
| term_start1 = 17 August 1885
| term_end1 = 11 July 1957
| predecessor1 = Aga Khan II
| successor1 = Aga Khan IV
| office3 = Member of the Assembly of The League of Nations
| term_start3 = 1934
| term_end3 = 1937
| office2 = Permanent President of the All-India Muslim League
| term_start2 = 1906
| term_end2 = 1957
| office4 = President of the Assembly of The League of Nations
| term_start4 = 1937
| term_end4 = 1938
| predecessor4 = Tevfik Rüştü Aras
| successor4 = Éamon de Valera
| religion = Shia Islam
| denomination = Isma'ilism
| school = Nizari Ismaili
| lineage = Fatimid
| other_name = Sultan Mohammad Shah
| dharma_names = <!-- or:
| dharma_name = -->
| monastic_name | pen_name
| posthumous_name | nationality
| home_town | birth_name
| birth_date
| birth_place = Karachi, Bombay Presidency, British India
| death_date Aga Khan called on the British Raj to consider Muslims to be a separate nation within India, the famous 'Two Nation Theory'. Even after he resigned as president of the AIML in 1912, he still exerted a major influence on its policies and agendas. He was nominated to represent India at the League of Nations in 1932 and served as President of the 18th Assembly of The League of Nations (1937–1938). Early life He was born in Karachi, Sindh (now in Pakistan), in 1877 under the British Raj, to Aga Khan II (who had emigrated from Persia) and his third wife, Nawab A'lia Shamsul-Muluk, a granddaughter of Fath Ali Shah of Persia. After attending Eton College, he studied at the University of Cambridge.
Career
In 1885, at the age of seven, he succeeded his father as Imam of the Shi'a Isma'ili Muslims. He was made a Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Star of India (GCSI) by George V (1912) and appointed a GCMG in 1923. He received recognition for his public services from the German Emperor, the Sultan of Turkey, the Shah of Persia, and other potentates.
In 1906, Aga Khan was a founding member and first president of the All India Muslim League, a political party that pushed for the creation of an independent Muslim nation in the north-west regions of India, then under British colonial rule, and later established the country of Pakistan in 1947.
During the three Round Table Conferences (India) in London from 1930 to 1932, he played an important role in bringing about Indian constitutional reforms. Ismailis have marked the jubilees of their Imāms with public celebrations, which are symbolic affirmations of the ties that link the Ismāʿīlī Imām and its followers. Although the Jubilees have no religious significance, they serve to reaffirm the Imamat's worldwide commitment to the improvement of the quality of human life, especially in developing countries.
Following the Second World War, far-reaching social, economic and political changes profoundly affected a number of areas where Ismāʿīlīs resided. In 1947, British rule in the Indian Subcontinent was replaced by the sovereign, independent nations of India, Pakistan and later Bangladesh, resulting in the migration of millions people and significant loss of life and property. In the Middle East, the Suez crisis of 1956 as well as the preceding crisis in Iran, demonstrated the sharp upsurge of nationalism, which was as indicative of the region's social and economic aspirations as of its political independence. Africa was also set on its course to decolonisation, swept by what Harold Macmillan, the then British prime minister, termed the "wind of change". By the early 1960s, most of East and Central Africa, where the majority of the Ismāʿīlī population on the continent resided, including Tanganyika, Kenya, Uganda, Madagascar, Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire, had attained their political independence.
Religious and social views
The Aga Khan was deeply influenced by the views of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Along with Sir Sayyid, the Aga Khan was one of the backers and founders of the Aligarh University, for which he tirelessly raised funds and to which he donated large sums of his own money. The Aga Khan himself can be considered an Islamic modernist and an intellectual of the Aligarh movement.
From a religious standpoint, the Aga Khan followed a modernist approach to Islam. Although he opposed a wholesale replication of Western society by Muslims, the Aga Khan did believe increased contact with the West would be overall beneficial to Muslim society.
Like many other Islamic modernists, the Aga Khan held a low opinion of the traditional religious establishment (the ʿUlamāʾ) as well as what he saw as their rigid formalism, legalism, and literalism. Instead, he advocated for renewed ijtihād (independent reasoning) and ijmāʿ (consensus), the latter of which he understood in a modernist way to mean consensus-building. Once the principles of the faith were discovered, they would be seen to be universal and modern. Islam, in his view, had an underlying liberal and democratic spirit. He also called for full civil and religious liberties, peace and disarmament, and an end to all wars.
The Aga Khan opposed sectarianism, which he believed to sap the strength and unity of the Muslim community. In specific, he called for a rapprochement between Sunnism and Shīʿism. This did not mean that he thought religious differences would go away, and he himself instructed his Ismāʿīlī followers to be dedicated to their own teachings. However, he believed in unity through accepting diversity, and by respecting differences of opinion. On his view, there was strength to be found in the diversity of Muslim traditions.
The Aga Khan called for social reform in Muslim society, and he was able to implement them within his own Ismāʿīlī community. As he believed Islam to essentially be a humanitarian religion, the Aga Khan called for the reduction and eradication of poverty. Like Sir Sayyid, the Aga Khan was concerned that Muslims had fallen behind the Hindu community in terms of education. According to him, education was the path to progress. He was a tireless advocate for compulsory and universal primary education, and also for the creation of higher institutions of learning.
In terms of women's rights, the Aga Khan was more progressive in his views than Sir Sayyid and many other Islamic modernists of his time. The Aga Khan framed his pursuit of women's rights not simply in the context of women being better mothers or wives, but rather, for women's own benefit. He endorsed the spiritual equality of men and women in Islam, and he also called for full political equality. This included the right to vote and the right to an education. In regards to the latter issue, he endorsed compulsory primary education for girls. He also encouraged women to pursue higher university-level education, Whereas Sir Sayyid prioritized the education of boys over girls, the Aga Khan instructed his followers that if they had a son and daughter, and if they could only afford to send one of them to school, they should send the daughter over the boy.
The Aga Khan campaigned against the institution of purda and zenāna, which he felt were oppressive and un-Islamic institutions. The Aga Khan also restricted polygamy, encouraged marriage to widows, and banned child marriage. He also made marriage and divorce laws more equitable to women. Racehorse ownership and equestrianism
He was an owner of Thoroughbred racing horses, including a record equaling five winners of The Derby (Blenheim, Bahram, Mahmoud, My Love, Tulyar) and a total of sixteen winners of British Classic Races. He was a British flat racing Champion Owner thirteen times. According to Ben Pimlott, biographer of Queen Elizabeth II, the Aga Khan presented Her Majesty with a filly called Astrakhan, who won at Hurst Park Racecourse in 1950.
In 1926, the Aga Khan gave a cup (the Aga Khan Trophy) to be awarded to the winners of an international team show jumping competition held at the annual horse show of the Royal Dublin Society in Dublin, Ireland, every first week in August. It attracts competitors from all of the main show jumping nations and is carried live on Irish national television.
Marriages and children
* He married, on November 2, 1896, in Pune, India, Shahzadi Begum, his first cousin and a granddaughter of Aga Khan I.
* He married in 1908, Cleope Teresa Magliano (1888–1926). They had two sons: Prince Giuseppe Mahdi Khan (d. February 1911) and Prince Aly Khan (1911–1960). She died in 1926, following an operation on December 1, 1926.
* He married, on 7 December 1929 (civil), in Aix-les-Bains, France, and 13 December 1929 (religious), in Bombay, India, Andrée Joséphine Carron (1898–1976). A co-owner of a dressmaking shop in Paris, she became known as Princess Andrée Aga Khan. By this marriage, he had one son, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan (1933–2003). The couple was divorced in 1943.
* He married, on October 9, 1944, in Geneva, Switzerland, Begum Om Habibeh Aga Khan (Yvonne Blanche Labrousse) (15 February 19061 July 2000). According to an interview she gave to an Egyptian journalist, her first name was Yvonne, though she is referred to as Yvette in most published references. The daughter of a tram conductor and a dressmaker, she was working as Aga Khan's social secretary at the time of their marriage. She converted to Islam and became known as Om Habibeh (Little Mother of the Beloved). In 1954, her husband bestowed upon her the title "Mata Salamat".
Publications
He wrote a number of books and papers two of which are of immense importance, namely (1) India in Transition, about the prepartition politics of India and (2) The Memoirs of Aga Khan: World Enough and Time, his autobiography. The Aga Khan III proposed "the South Asiatic Federation" in India in Transition that India might be re-organized into some states, and those states should have their own autonomies. He was the first person to design a detailed plan of such a federation of India.
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Death and succession
Aga Khan III was succeeded as Aga Khan by his grandson Karim Aga Khan, who succeeded him as Imam of the Ismaili Muslims. At the time of his death on 11 July 1957, he was surrounded by his family members in Versoix. His last words were repeating the verses of the Quran.
On July 12, a solicitor brought the will of the Aga Khan III from London to Geneva and read it before the family:
<blockquote>"Ever since the time of my ancestor Ali, the first Imam, that is to say over a period of thirteen hundred years, it has always been the tradition of our family that each Imam chooses his successor at his absolute and unfettered discretion from amongst any of his descendants, whether they be sons or remote male issue and in these circumstances and in view of the fundamentally altered conditions in the world in very recent years due to the great changes which have taken place including the discoveries of atomic science, I am convinced that it is in the best interest of the Shia Muslim Ismailia Community that I should be succeeded by a young man who has been brought up and developed during recent years and in the midst of the new age and who brings a new outlook on life to his office as Imam.<br>For these reasons, I appoint my grandson Karim, the son of my own son, Aly Salomone Khan to succeed to the title of Aga Khan and to the Imam and Pir of all Shia Ismailian followers.<br>I desire that my successor shall, during the first seven years of his Imamat, be guided on questions of general Imamat Policy, by my said wife, Yvette called Yve Blanche Labrousse Om Habibeh, the Begum Aga Khan, who has been familiar for many years with the problems facing my followers, and in whose wise judgment, I place the greatest confidence. I warn my successor to the Imamat, never to do anything during his Imamat that would reduce the responsibility of the Imam for the maintenance of the true Shia Imami Ismaili faith, as developed historically from the time of my ancestor Ali, the founder until my own."</blockquote>
He is buried in the Mausoleum of Aga Khan, on the Nile in Aswan, Egypt (at ).
Legacy
Pakistan Post issued a special 'Birth Centenary of Agha Khan III' postage stamp in his honor in 1977. Pakistan Post again issued a postage stamp in his honor in its 'Pioneers of Freedom' series in 1990. Honours * 21 May 1898 Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire, KCIE
* 1901 First Class of the Royal Prussian Order of the Crown – in recognition of the valuable services rendered by His Highness to the Imperial German Government in the settlement of various matters with the Mohammedan population of German East Africa
* 26 June 1902 Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire, GCIE
* 12 December 1911 Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Star of India, GCSI
* 30 May 1923 Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, GCVO – ''on the occasion of the King's birthday''
* 1 January 1934 Appointed a member of His Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council by King George V
* 1 January 1955 Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George, GCMG –
* 14 November 1960 Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Henry the Navigator, GCIH.
Notes
References Sources *
*
* Daftary, F., "The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines", Cambridge University Press, 1990.
* Khoja-Moolji, Shenila. “Redefining Muslim women: Aga Khan III’s reforms for women’s education.” South Asia Graduate Research Journal 20, no. 1, 2011, 69-94.
* Khoja-Moolji, Shenila. Forging the Ideal Educated Girl. The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.
* Naoroji M. Dumasia, A Brief History of the Aga Khan (1903).
* Aga Khan III, "The Memoirs of Aga Khan: World Enough and Time", London: Cassel & Company, 1954; published the same year in the United States by Simon & Schuster.
* Edwards, Anne (1996). "Throne of Gold: The Lives of the Aga Khans", New York: William Morrow, 1996
* Naoroji M. Dumasia, "The Aga Khan and his ancestors", New Delhi: Readworthy Publications (P) Ltd., 2008
* Valliani, Amin; "Aga Khan's Role in the Founding and Consolidation of the All India Muslim League", Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society (2007) 55# 1/2, pp 85–95.
External links
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20071025075211/http://www.history.com/media.do?actionclip&idtdih_0712 Video Clip] from the History Channel website
* [http://www.iis.ac.uk/view_article.asp?ContentID104628 Institute of Ismaili Studies: Selected speeches of Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah Aga Khan III]
* [http://www.theismaili.org] The Official Ismaili Website
* [http://www.akdn.org] Official Website of Aga Khan Development Network
* [http://www.saadigitalarchive.org/search/aga%20khan Aga Khan materials in the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)]
*
Category:1877 births
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Category:20th-century Ismailis | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aga_Khan_III | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.838173 |
1547 | Agasias | Agasias was the name of several people in classical history, including two Greek sculptors.
Agasias of Arcadia, a warrior mentioned by Xenophon
Agasias, son of Dositheus, Ephesian sculptor of the Borghese Gladiator
Agasias, son of Menophilus (), Ephesian sculptor
Category:Greek masculine given names
Category:Masculine given names | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agasias | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.839375 |
1548 | Alexander Agassiz | | birth_place = Neuchâtel, Switzerland
| death_date
| death_place = North Atlantic Ocean (aboard the RMS Adriatic)
| nationality = Swiss, American
| alma_mater = Harvard University (AB, BS)
| known_for | awards American Philosophical Society (1862)<br />Pour le Mérite (German order)
| father = Louis Agassiz
| children = 3, including Rodolphe Louis Agassiz
| signature = Appletons' Agassiz Alexander signature.jpg
| author_abbrev_zoo = A. Agassiz, A. Ag.
}}
Alexander Emmanuel Rodolphe Agassiz (December 17, 1835March 27, 1910), son of Louis Agassiz and stepson of Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, was an American scientist and engineer.BiographyAgassiz was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and immigrated to the United States with his parents, Louis and Cecile (Braun) Agassiz, in 1846. Agassiz was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1862. Up until the summer of 1866, Agassiz worked as assistant curator in the museum of natural history that his father founded at Harvard. He assisted Charles Wyville Thomson in the examination and classification of the collections of the 1872 Challenger Expedition, and wrote the Review of the Echini (2 vols., 1872–1874) in the reports. Between 1877 and 1880, he took part in the three dredging expeditions of the steamer Blake of the Coast Survey (renamed the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1878), and presented a full account of them in two volumes (1888).
In 1896, Agassiz visited Fiji and Queensland and inspected the Great Barrier Reef, publishing a paper on the subject in 1898.
Of Agassiz's other writings on marine zoology, most are contained in the bulletins and memoirs of the museum of comparative zoology. However, in 1865, he published with Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, his stepmother, Seaside Studies in Natural History, a work at once exact and stimulating. They also published, in 1871, Marine Animals of Massachusetts Bay.
Agassiz served as a president of the National Academy of Sciences, which since 1913 has awarded the Alexander Agassiz Medal in his memory. He died in 1910 on board the RMS Adriatic en route to New York from Southampton.
He and his wife Anna Russell (1840–1873) were the parents of three sons – George Russell Agassiz (1861–1951), Maximilian Agassiz (1866–1943) and Rodolphe Louis Agassiz (1871–1933).
Legacy
Alexander Agassiz is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of lizard, Anolis agassizi, and a fish, Leptochilichthys agassizii.
A statue of Alexander Agassiz erected in 1923 is located in Calumet, Michigan, next to his summer home where he stayed while fulfilling his duties as the President of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company. The Company Headquarters, Agassiz' statue, and many other buildings and landmarks from the now defunct company are today administered and maintained by the Keweenaw National Historical Park, whose headquarters overlook the statue of Agassiz. A major building of the Hopkins Marine Station is named after him.Publications
*Agassiz, Alexander (1863). [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/30465#page/25/mode/1up "List of the echinoderms sent to different institutions in exchange for other specimens, with annotations".] Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 1 (2): 17–28.
*Agassiz, Elizabeth C., and Alexander Agassiz (1865). [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/16902#page/7/mode/1up Seaside Studies in Natural History.] Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
*Agassiz, Alexander (1872–1874). [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/4327273#page/7/mode/1up "Illustrated Catalogue of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, at Harvard College. No. VII. Revision of the Echini. Parts 1–4".] Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 3: 1–762. [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/24338#page/6/mode/1up Plates]
*Agassiz, Alexander (1877). [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/4304836#page/9/mode/1up "North American starfishes".] Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 5 (1): 1–136.
*Agassiz, Alexander (1881). [https://web.archive.org/web/20161118100508/http://www.19thcenturyscience.org/HMSC/HMSC-Reports/Zool-09/htm/doc.html "Report on the Echinoidea dredged by H.M.S. Challenger during the years 1873–1876".] Report of the Scientific Results of the Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger During the Years 1873–76. Zoology. 9: 1–321.
*Agassiz, Alexander (1903). [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/95214#page/7/mode/1up "Three cruises of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey steamer 'Blake' in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Caribbean Sea, and along the Atlantic coast of the United States, from 1877 to 1880. Vol I".] Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 14: 1–314.
*Agassiz, Alexander (1903). [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/28876145#page/1/mode/1up "Three cruises of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey steamer 'Blake' in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Caribbean Sea, and along the Atlantic coast of the United States, from 1877 to 1880. Vol II".] Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 15: 1–220.
*Agassiz, Alexander (1903). [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/32751#page/13/mode/1up "The coral reefs of the tropical Pacific".] Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 28: 1–410. [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/32464#page/3/mode/1up Plates I.] [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/25357#page/3/mode/1up Plates II.] [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/91611#page/1/mode/1up Plates III.]
*Agassiz, Alexander (1903). [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/96343#page/11/mode/1up "The coral reefs of the Maldives".] Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 29: 1–168.
*Agassiz, Alexander (1904). [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/25650#page/11/mode/1up "The Panamic deep sea Echini".] Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 31: 1–243. [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/91621#page/11/mode/1up Plates.]
See also
*Agassiz family
References
External links
* Agassiz, George (1913). [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/113452#page/11/mode/1up Letters and Recollections of Alexander Agassiz with a sketch of his life and work]. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.
*
* Murray, John (1911). "[https://books.google.com/books?id=NLsWAAAAYAAJ Alexander Agassiz: His Life and Scientific Work]". [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/2803#/summary Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology] 54 (3). pp 139–158.
*
*
*
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20160304050608/http://libraries.admin.ch/cgi-bin/gw/chameleon?skinhelveticat&instconsortium&submittheformSearch&usersrch1&beginsrch1&elementcount3&functionINITREQ&searchKEYWORD&rootsearchKEYWORD&lngen&pos1&conf.%2Fchameleon.conf&t1alexander%2A%20agassiz%2A&u11003&op1OR&t2alexander%2A%20agassiz%2A&u221&op2AND&t3&u31035&hostbiblio.admin.ch%2B3601%2BDEFAULT&patronhostbiblio.admin.ch%203601%20DEFAULT Publications by and about Alexander Agassiz] in the catalogue Helveticat of the Swiss National Library
* [http://www.mininghalloffame.org/inductee.asp?i26&binductees%2Easp&tn&pA&sNational Mining Hall of Fame: Alexander Agassiz]
*[http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/agassiz-alexander.pdf National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir]
* [https://www.nps.gov/kewe/index.htm Keweenaw National Historical Park] Preserving many significant buildings and an archives of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company and Alexander Agassiz.
Category:1835 births
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Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Agassiz | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.846860 |
1549 | Agathon | re-imagines a scene from Plato's Symposium, in which the tragedian Agathon welcomes the drunken Alcibiades into his home. 1869.]]
Agathon (; ; ) was an Athenian tragic poet whose works have been lost. He is best known for his appearance in Plato's Symposium, which describes the banquet given to celebrate his obtaining a prize for his first tragedy at the Lenaia in 416. He is also a prominent character in Aristophanes' comedy the Thesmophoriazusae.Life and careerAgathon was the son of Tisamenus, and the lover of Pausanias, with whom he appears in both the Symposium and Plato's Protagoras. Together with Pausanias, around 407 BC he moved to the court of Archelaus, king of Macedon, who was recruiting playwrights; it is here that he probably died around 401 BC. Agathon introduced certain innovations into the Greek theater: Aristotle tells us in the Poetics (1451<sup>b</sup>21) that the characters and plot of his Anthos were original and not, following Athenian dramatic orthodoxy, borrowed from mythological or historical subjects. Agathon was also the first playwright to write choral parts which were apparently independent from the main plot of his plays.
Agathon is portrayed by Plato as a handsome young man, well dressed, of polished manners, courted by the fashion, wealth, and wisdom of Athens, and dispensing hospitality with ease and refinement. The epideictic speech in praise of love which Agathon recites in the Symposium is full of beautiful but artificial rhetorical expressions, and has led some scholars to believe he may have been a student of Gorgias. In the Symposium, Agathon is presented as the friend of the comic poet Aristophanes, but this alleged friendship did not prevent Aristophanes from harshly criticizing Agathon in at least two of his comic plays: the Thesmophoriazousae and the (now lost) Gerytades. In the later play Frogs, Aristophanes softens his criticisms, but even so, it may be only for the sake of punning on Agathon's name (ἁγαθός "good") that he makes Dionysus call him a "good poet".
Agathon was also a friend of Euripides, another recruit to the court of Archelaus of Macedon.
Physical appearance
Agathon's extraordinary physical beauty is brought up repeatedly in the sources; the historian W. Rhys Roberts observes that "ὁ καλός Ἀγάθων (ho kalos Agathon) has become almost a stereotyped phrase." The most detailed surviving description of Agathon is in the Thesmophoriazousae, in which Agathon appears as a pale, clean-shaven young man dressed in women's clothes. Scholars are unsure how much of Aristophanes' portrayal is fact and how much mere comic invention.
After a close reading of the Thesmophoriazousae, the historian Jane McIntosh Snyder observed that Agathon's costume was almost identical to that of the famous lyric poet Anacreon, as he is portrayed in early 5th-century vase-paintings. Snyder theorizes that Agathon might have made a deliberate effort to mimic the sumptuous attire of his famous fellow poet, although by Agathon's time, such clothing, especially the κεκρύφαλος (kekryphalos, an elaborate covering for the hair) had long fallen out of fashion for men. According to this interpretation, Agathon is mocked in the Thesmophoriazousae not only for his notorious effeminacy, but also for the pretentiousness of his dress: "he seems to think of himself, in all his elegant finery, as a rival to the old Ionian poets, perhaps even to Anacreon himself."Plato's epigram
Agathon is the subject of an epigram attributed to Plato:
<blockquote>τὴν ψυχὴν Ἀγάθωνα φιλῶν ἐπὶ χείλεσιν εἶχον·
ἦλθε γὰρ ἡ τλήμων ὡς διαβησομένη.</blockquote>
One translation reads:
<blockquote>My soul was on my lips as I was kissing Agathon. Poor soul! she came hoping to cross over to him.</blockquote>
The epigram was probably not composed by Plato. Stylistic evidence suggests that the poem (with most of Plato's other alleged epigrams) was actually written sometime after Plato had died: its form is that of the Hellenistic erotic epigram, which did not become popular until after 300 BC. According to 20th-century scholar Walther Ludwig, the poems were spuriously inserted into an early biography of Plato sometime between 250 BC and 100 BC and adopted by later writers from this source. It is unlikely Plato would write a love epigram about Agathon, who was approximately twenty years older than him.
Known plays
Of Agathon's plays, only six titles and thirty-one fragments have survived:
*Aerope
*Alcmeon
*Anthos or Antheus ("The Flower")
*Mysoi ("Mysians")
*Telephos ("Telephus")
*Thyestes
Fragments in A Nauck, Tragicorum graecorum fragmenta (1887).
Fragments in Greek with English translations in Matthew Wright's "The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy (Volume 1)
Neglected Authors" (2016)
Quotations
See also
*List of speakers in Plato's dialogues
*Symposium (Feuerbach)
References
Notes
Sources
*The Drama: Its History, Literature and Influence on Civilization, volume 1, by Alfred Bates. (London: Historical Publishing Company, 1906)
*Thesmoph. 59, 106, Eccles. 100 (Aristophanes)
*''Lovers' Lips by Plato in the Project Gutenberg eText Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology'' by J. W. Mackail. [http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/8efgm10.txt]
External links
*
*
*[http://demonax.info/doku.php?id=text:agathon_poems Agathon Poems]
Category:440s BC births
Category:Year of birth unknown
Category:400s BC deaths
Category:Year of death unknown
Category:5th-century BC Athenians
Category:Ancient Greek dramatists and playwrights
Category:Ancient Greek poets
Category:Ancient Greek LGBTQ people
Category:Courtiers of Archelaus of Macedon
Category:Tragic poets
Category:5th-century BC poets | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agathon | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.853667 |
1550 | Agesilaus II | 400 – 360 BC
| predecessor = Agis II
| successor = Archidamus III
| birth_date = 445/4 BC
| birth_place = Sparta
| death_date = 360/59 BC (aged 84)
| death_place = Cyrenaica
| spouse = Cleora
| issue = Archidamus III
| native_lang1 = Greek
| native_lang1_name1 =
| dynasty = Eurypontid
| father = Archidamus II
| mother = Eupoleia
| module Boeotian War
}}
}}
Agesilaus II (; ; 445/4 – 360/59 BC) was king of Sparta from 400 to 360 BC. Generally considered the most important king in the history of Sparta, Agesilaus was the main actor during the period of Spartan hegemony that followed the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). Although brave in combat, Agesilaus lacked the diplomatic skills to preserve Sparta's position, especially against the rising power of Thebes, which reduced Sparta to a secondary power after its victory at Leuctra in 371 BC.
Despite the traditional secrecy fostered by the Spartiates, the reign of Agesilaus is particularly well-known thanks to the works of his friend Xenophon, who wrote a large history of Greece (the Hellenica) covering the years 411 to 362 BC, therefore extensively dealing with Agesilaus' rule. Xenophon furthermore composed a panegyric biography of his friend, perhaps to clean his memory from the criticisms voiced against him. Another historical tradition—much more hostile to Agesilaus than Xenophon's writings—has been preserved in the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, and later continued by Diodorus of Sicily. Moreover, Plutarch wrote a biography of Agesilaus in his Parallel Lives, which contains many elements deliberately omitted by Xenophon.
Early life
Youth
Agesilaus' father was King Archidamos II (r. 469–427), who belonged to the Eurypontid dynasty, one of the two royal families of Sparta. Archidamos already had a son from a first marriage with Lampito (his own step-aunt) named Agis. After the death of Lampito, Archidamos remarried in the early 440s with Eupolia, daughter of Melesippidas, whose name indicates an aristocratic status. The dates of Agesilaus' birth, death, and reign are disputed. The only secured information is that he was 84 at his death. The majority opinion is to date his birth to 445/4, but a minority of scholars move it a bit later, c.442. Most of the other dates of Agesilaus are similarly disputed, with the minority moving them about two years later than the majority. Agesilaus also had a sister named Kyniska (the first woman in ancient history to achieve an Olympic victory). The name Agesilaus was rare and harks back to Agesilaus I, one of the earliest kings of Sparta.
Agesilaus was born lame, a fact that should have cost him his life, since in Sparta deformed babies were thrown into a chasm.
Starting at the age of 7, Agesilaus had to go through the rigorous education system of Sparta, called the agoge. Despite his disability, he brilliantly completed the training, which massively enhanced his prestige, especially after he became king. Indeed, as heirs-apparent were exempted of the agoge, few Spartan kings had gone through the same training as the citizens; another notable exception was Leonidas, the embodiment of the "hero-king". Between 433 and 428, Agesilaus also became the younger lover of Lysander, an aristocrat from the circle of Archidamos, whose family had some influence in Libya. Spartan prince
Little is known of Agesilaus' adult life before his reign, principally because Xenophon—his friend and main biographer—only wrote about his reign. Due to his special status, Agesilaus likely became a member of the Krypteia, an elite corps of young Spartans going undercover in Spartan territory to kill some helots deemed dangerous. Once he turned 20 and became a full citizen, Agesilaus was elected to a common mess, presumably that of his elder half-brother Agis II, who had become king in 427, of which Lysander was perhaps a member.
Agesilaus probably served during the Peloponnesian War (431–404) against Athens, likely at the Battle of Mantinea in 418. Agesilaus married Kleora at some point between 408 and 400. Despite the influence she apparently had on her husband, she is mostly unknown. Her father was Aristomenidas, an influential noble with connections in Thebes.
Thanks to three treaties signed with Persia in 412–411, Sparta received funding from the Persians, which it used to build a fleet that ultimately defeated Athens. This fleet was essentially led by Lysander, whose success gave him an enormous influence in the Greek cities of Asia as well as in Sparta, where he even schemed to become king. In 403 the two kings, Agis and Pausanias, acted together to relieve him from his command.
Reign
Accession to the throne (400–398 BC)
Agis II died while returning from Delphi between 400 and 398. dates it to the late summer of 400, Hamilton to 398. }} After his funeral, Agesilaus contested the claim of Leotychidas, the son of Agis II, using the widespread belief in Sparta that Leotychidas was an illegitimate son of Alcibiades—a famous Athenian statesman and nephew of Pericles, who had gone into exile in Sparta during the Peloponnesian War, and then seduced the queen. The rumours were strengthened by the fact that even Agis only recognised Leotychidas as his son on his deathbed.
Diopeithes, a supporter of Leotychidas, however quoted an old oracle telling that a Spartan king could not be lame, thus refuting Agesilaus' claim, but Lysander cunningly returned the objection by saying that the oracle had to be understood figuratively. The lameness warned against by the oracle would therefore refer to the doubt on Leotychidas' paternity, and this reasoning won the argument. The role of Lysander in the accession of Agesilaus has been debated among historians, principally because Plutarch makes him the main instigator of the plot, while Xenophon downplays Lysander's influence. Lysander doubtless supported Agesilaus' accession because he hoped that the new king would in return help him to regain the importance that he lost in 403.
Conspiracy of Cinadon (399 BC)
The Conspiracy of Cinadon took place during the first year of Agesilaus' reign, in the summer of 399. Cinadon was a hypomeion, a Spartan who had lost his citizen status, presumably because he could not afford the price of the collective mess—one of the main reasons for the dwindling number of Spartan citizens in the Classical Era, called oliganthropia. It is probable that the vast influx of wealth coming to the city after its victory against Athens in 404 triggered inflation in Sparta, which impoverished many citizens with a fixed income, like Cinadon, and caused their downgrade. Therefore, the purpose of the plot was likely to restore the status of these disfranchised citizens. However, the plot was uncovered and Cinadon and its leaders executed—probably with the active participation of Agesilaus, but no further action was taken to solve the social crisis at the origin of the conspiracy. The failure of Agesilaus to acknowledge the critical problem suffered by Sparta at the time has been criticised by modern historians.
Invasion of Asia Minor (396–394 BC)
According to the treaties signed in 412 and 411 between Sparta and the Persian Empire, the latter became the overlord of the Greek city-states of Asia Minor. In 401, these cities and Sparta supported the bid of Cyrus the Younger (the Persian Emperor's younger son and a good friend of Lysander) against his elder brother, the new emperor Artaxerxes II, who nevertheless defeated Cyrus at Cunaxa. As a result, Sparta remained at war with Artaxerxes, and supported the Greek cities of Asia, which fought against Tissaphernes, the satrap of Lydia and Caria. In 397 Lysander engineered a large expedition in Asia headed by Agesilaus, likely to recover the influence he had over the Asian cities at the end of the Peloponnesian War. In order to win the approval of the Spartan assembly, Lysander built an army with only 30 Spartiates (full Spartan citizens), so the risk would be limited; the bulk of the army consisted of 2,000 neodamodes (freed helots) and 6,000 Greek allies. In addition, Agesilaus obtained the support of the oracles of Zeus at Olympia and Apollo at Delphi. The sacrifice at Aulis (396 BC) Lysander and Agesilaus had intended the expedition to be a Panhellenic enterprise, but Athens, Corinth, and especially Thebes, refused to participate. In Spring 396, Agesilaus came to Aulis (in Boeotian territory) to sacrifice on the place where Agamemnon had done so just before his departure to Troy at the head of the Greek army in the Iliad, thus giving a grandiose aspect to the expedition. However he did not inform the Boeotians and brought his own seer to perform the sacrifice, instead of the local one. Learning this, the Boeotians prevented him from sacrificing and further humiliated him by casting away the victim; they perhaps intended to provoke a confrontation, as the relations between Sparta and Thebes had become execrable. Agesilaus then left to Asia, but Thebes remained hateful to him for the rest of his life. (right) in 395 BC, when Agesilaus agreed to remove himself from Hellespontine Phrygia.]] Campaign in Asia (396–394 BC)
Once Agesilaus landed in Ephesus, the Spartan main base, he concluded a three months' truce with Tissaphernes, likely to settle the affairs among the Greek allies. He integrated some of the Greek mercenaries formerly hired by Cyrus the Younger (the Ten Thousand) in his army. They had returned from Persia under the leadership of Xenophon, who also remained in Agesilaus' staff. In Ephesus, Agesilaus' authority was nevertheless overshadowed by Lysander, who was reacquainted with many of his supporters, men he had placed in control of the Greek cities at the end of the Peloponnesian War. Angered by his local aura, Agesilaus humiliated Lysander several times to force him to leave the army, despite his former relationship and Lysander's role in his accession to the throne. Plutarch adds that after Agesilaus' emancipation from him, Lysander returned to his undercover scheme to make the monarchy elective.
After Lysander's departure, Agesilaus raided Phrygia, the satrapy of Pharnabazus, until his advance guard was defeated not far from Daskyleion by the superior Persian cavalry. He then wintered at Ephesus, where he trained a cavalry force, perhaps on the advice of Xenophon, who had commanded the cavalry of the Ten Thousand. In 395, the Spartan king managed to trick Tissaphernes into thinking that he would attack Caria, in the south of Asia Minor, forcing the satrap to hold a defence line on the Meander river. Instead, Agesilaus moved north to the important city of Sardis. Tissaphernes hastened to meet the king there, but his cavalry sent in advance was defeated by Agesilaus' army. After his victory at the Battle of Sardis, Agesilaus became the first king to be given the command of both land and sea. He delegated the naval command to his brother-in-law Peisander, whom he appointed navarch despite his inexperience; perhaps Agesilaus wanted to avoid the rise of a new Lysander, who owed his prominence to his time as navarch. After his defeat, Tissaphernes was executed and replaced as satrap by Tithraustes, who gave Agesilaus 30 talents to move north to the satrapy of Pharnabazus (Persian satraps were often bitter rivals). Augesilaus' Phrygian campaign of 394 was fruitless, as he lacked the siege equipment required to take the fortresses of Leonton Kephalai, Gordion, and Miletou Teichos. (popularly called "archers"), the main currency in Persia, were used to bribe the Greek states to start a war against Sparta, so that Agesilaus would have to be recalled from Asia.]]Xenophon tells that Agesilaus then wanted to campaign further east in Asia and sow discontent among the subjects of the Achaemenid empire, or even to conquer Asia. Corinthian War (395–387 BC) Although Thebes and Corinth had been allies of Sparta throughout the Peloponnesian War, they were dissatisfied by the settlement of the war in 404, with Sparta as leader of the Greek world. Sparta's imperialist expansion in the Aegean greatly upset its former allies, notably by establishing friendly regimes and garrisons in smaller cities. Through large gifts, Tithraustes also encouraged Sparta's former allies to start a war in order to force the recall of Agesilaus from Asia—even though the influence of Persian gold has been exaggerated. The initiative came from Thebes, which provoked a war between their ally Ozolian Locris and Phocis in order to bring Sparta to the latter's defence. Lysander and the other king Pausanias entered Boeotia, which enabled the Thebans to bring Athens in the war. Lysander then besieged Haliartus without waiting for Pausanias and was killed in a Boeotian counter-attack. In Sparta, Pausanias was condemned to death by Lysander's friends and went into exile. After its success at Haliartus, Thebes was able to build a coalition against Sparta, with notably Argos and Corinth, where a war council was established, and securing the defection of most of the cities of northern and central Greece. Unable to wage war on two fronts and with the loss of Lysander and Pausanias, Sparta had no choice but to recall Agesilaus from Asia. The Asian Greeks fighting for him said they wanted to continue serving with him, while Agesilaus promised he would return to Asia as soon as he could.
Agesilaus returned to Greece by land, crossing the Hellespont and from there along the coast of the Aegean Sea. In Thessaly he won a cavalry battle near Narthacium against the Pharsalians who had made an alliance with Thebes. He then entered Boeotia by the Thermopylae, where he received reinforcements from Sparta. Meanwhile, Aristodamos—the regent of the young Agiad king Agesipolis—won a major victory at Nemea near Argos, which was offset by the disaster of the Spartan navy at Cnidus against the Persian fleet led by Conon, an exiled Athenian general. Agesilaus lied to his men about the outcome of the battle of Knidos to avoid demoralising them as they were about to fight a large engagement against the combined armies of Thebes, Athens, Argos and Corinth. The following Battle of Coronea was a classic clash between two lines of hoplites. The anti-Spartan allies were rapidly defeated, but the Thebans managed to retreat in good order, despite Agesilaus' activity on the front line, which caused him several injuries. The next day the Thebans requested a truce to recover their dead, therefore conceding defeat, although they had not been bested on the battlefield. Agesilaus appears to have tried to win an honourable victory, by risking his life and being merciful with some Thebans who had sought shelter in the nearby Temple of Athena Itonia. He then moved to Delphi, where he offered one tenth of the booty he had amassed since his landing at Ephesus, and returned to Sparta. The loss of the Spartan fleet besides allowed Konon to capture the island of Kythera, in the south of the Peloponnese, from where he could raid Spartan territory. In 392, Sparta sent Antalcidas to Asia in order to negotiate a general peace with Tiribazus, the satrap of Lydia, while Sparta would recognise Persia's sovereignty over the Asian Greek cities. However, the Greek allies also sent emissaries to Sardis to refuse Antalcidas' plan, and Artaxerxes likewise rejected it. A second peace conference in Sparta failed the following year because of Athens. A personal enemy of Antalcidas, Agesilaus likely disapproved these talks, which show that his influence at home had waned. Plutarch says that he befriended the young Agiad king Agesipolis, possibly to prevent his opponents from coalescing behind him.
By 391 Agesilaus had apparently recovered his influence as he was appointed at the head of the army, while his half-brother Teleutias became navarch. The target was Argos, which had absorbed Corinth into a political union the previous year. but two years later the Peace of Antalcidas, warmly supported by Agesilaus, put an end to the war, maintaining Spartan hegemony over Greece and returning the Greek cities of Asia Minor to the Achaemenid Empire. In this interval, Agesilaus declined command over Sparta's aggression on Mantineia, and justified Phoebidas' seizure of the Theban Cadmea so long as the outcome provided glory to Sparta.
In 370 Agesilaus was engaged in an embassy to Mantineia, and reassured the Spartans with an invasion of Arcadia. He preserved an unwalled Sparta against the revolts and conspiracies of helots, perioeci and even other Spartans; and against external enemies, with four different armies led by Epaminondas penetrating Laconia that same year.
Asia Minor expedition (366 BC)
In 366 BC, Sparta and Athens, dissatisfied with the Persian king's support of Thebes following the embassy of Philiscus of Abydos, decided to provide careful military support to the opponents of the Achaemenid king. Athens and Sparta provided support for the revolting satraps in the Revolt of the Satraps, in particular Ariobarzanes: Sparta sent a force to Ariobarzanes under an aging Agesilaus, while Athens sent a force under Timotheus, which was however diverted when it became obvious that Ariobarzanes had entered frontal conflict with the Achaemenid king. An Athenian mercenary force under Chabrias was also sent to the Egyptian Pharaoh Tachos, who was also fighting against the Achaemenid king. According to Xenophon, Agesilaus, in order to gain money for prosecuting the war, supported the satrap Ariobarzanes of Phrygia in his revolt against Artaxerxes II in 364 (Revolt of the Satraps).
Again, in 362, Epaminondas almost succeeded in seizing the city of Sparta with a rapid and unexpected march. The Battle of Mantinea, in which Agesilaus took no part, was followed by a general peace: Sparta, however, stood aloof, hoping even yet to recover her supremacy.
Expedition to Egypt
, Egypt.]]
Sometime after the Battle of Mantineia, Agesilaus went to Egypt at the head of a mercenary force to aid the king Nectanebo I and his regent Teos against Persia. In the summer of 358, he transferred his services to Teos's cousin and rival, Nectanebo II, who, in return for his help, gave him a sum of over 200 talents. On his way home Agesilaus died in Cyrenaica, around the age of 84, after a reign of some 41 years. and Hamilton (1991) disagreed on Agesilaus's date of death, with the former preferring the winter of 360–59 and the latter that of 359–8. One more recent study, using Egyptian regnal dates, concludes that Nectanebo II seized power in the summer of 358 BC, and that Agesilaus died later that same year, right after the campaigning and sailing season. }} His body was embalmed in wax, and buried at Sparta.
As a statesman he won himself both enthusiastic adherents and bitter enemies. Agesilaus was most successful in the opening and closing periods of his reign: commencing but then surrendering a glorious career in Asia; and in extreme age, maintaining his prostrate country. Other writers acknowledge his extremely high popularity at home, but suggest his occasionally rigid and arguably irrational political loyalties and convictions contributed greatly to Spartan decline, notably his unremitting hatred of Thebes, which led to Sparta's humiliation at the Battle of Leuctra and thus the end of Spartan hegemony.
Plutarch also describes how often, to remove the threat of instigators of internal dissension, Agesilaus would send his enemies abroad with governorships, where they often were corrupt and procured themselves enemies. Agesilaus would then protect them against these new enemies of theirs, so as to make them his friends. As a result, he no longer had to face internal opposition, as his enemies had henceforth become allies.
As for his personal life, though he had two daughters, Eupolia and Prolyta, and a wife, Cleora, he nonetheless had the habit of forming homosexual "attachments for young men".
's Agesilaus.]]
Other historical accounts paint Agesilaus as a prototype for the ideal leader. His awareness, thoughtfulness, and wisdom were all traits to be emulated diplomatically, while his bravery and shrewdness in battle epitomised the heroic Greek commander. These historians point towards the unstable oligarchies established by Lysander in the former Athenian Empire and the failures of Spartan leaders (such as Pausanias and Kleombrotos) for the eventual suppression of Spartan power. The ancient historian Xenophon was a huge admirer and served under Agesilaus during the campaigns into Asia Minor.
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Agesilaus lived in the most frugal style alike at home and in the field, and though his campaigns were undertaken largely to secure booty, he was content to enrich the state and his friends and to return as poor as he had set forth.NotesReferencesSources Ancient sources
*Plutarch, Parallel Lives.
*Xenophon, Hellenica.
Modern sources
* Hans Beck & Peter Funke, Federalism in Greek Antiquity, Cambridge University Press, 2015.
* Paul Cartledge, Sparta and Lakonia, A Regional History 1300–362 BC, London, Routledge, 1979 (originally published in 1979).
* }}
*George L. Cawkwell, "Agesilaus and Sparta", The Classical Quarterly 26 (1976): 62–84.
*David, Ephraim. Sparta Between Empire and Revolution (404-243 BC): Internal Problems and Their Impact on Contemporary Greek Consciousness. New York: Arno Press, 1981.
*Forrest, W.G. A History of Sparta, 950-192 B.C. 2d ed. London: Duckworth, 1980.
*Dustin A. Gish, "Spartan Justice: The Conspiracy of Kinadon in Xenophon's Hellenika", in Polis, vol. 26, no. 2, 2009, pp. 339–369.
* }}
*Hamilton, Charles D. ''Sparta's Bitter Victories: Politics and Diplomacy in the Corinthian War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979.
*D. M. Lewis, John Boardman, Simon Hornblower, M. Ostwald (editors), The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. VI, The Fourth Century B.C., Cambridge University Press, 1994.
*
*Anton Powell (editor), A Companion to Sparta, Volume I, Hoboken/Chichester, Wiley Blackwell, 2018.
*D. R. Shipley, A Commentary on Plutarch's Life of Agesilaos: Response to Sources in the Presentation of Character, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997.
*Debby Sneed, "[https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2972/hesperia.90.4.0747 Disability and Infanticide in Ancient Greece]", Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Vol. 90, No. 4, 2021, pp. 747–772.
*Maria Stamatopoulou, "[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09518960802005760 Thessalians Abroad, the Case of Pharsalos]", in Mediterranean Historical Review, vol. 22.2 (2007), pp. 211–236.
*Graham Wylie, "Agesilaus and the Battle of Sardis", in Klio'', n°74 (1992), pp. 118–130.
Category:440s BC births
Category:Year of birth uncertain
Category:358 BC deaths
Category:Year of death uncertain
Category:4th-century BC Spartans
Category:Eurypontid kings of Sparta
Category:Ancient Greek generals
Category:Ancient Greek LGBTQ people
Category:Spartan hegemony | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agesilaus_II | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.870912 |
1551 | Agis | Agis or AGIS may refer to:
People
Agis I (died 900 BC), Spartan king
Agis II (died 401 BC), Spartan king
Agis III (died 331 BC), Spartan king
Agis IV (265–241 BC), Spartan king
Agis (Paeonian) (died 358 BC), King of the Paeonians
Agis of Argos, ancient Greek poet
Maurice Agis (1931–2009), British sculptor and artist
Other uses
Agis (play), by John Home
Agis, several fictional emperors of Isaac Asimov's Galactic Empire
Apex Global Internet Services
Atomic gravitational wave interferometric sensor
Advanced Glaucoma Intervention Study, conducted by the National Eye Institute
See also
Agide (disambiguation), modern Italian given name related to Agis
Category:Greek masculine given names
Category:Masculine given names | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agis | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.872564 |
1552 | Antonio Agliardi | |ordination = 22 December 1855
|consecration = 12 October 1884
|consecrated_by = Giovanni Simeoni
|cardinal = 22 June 1896
|created_cardinal_by = Pope Leo XIII
|rank = Cardinal-Priest (1896–99)
|birth_date = 4 September 1832
|birth_place = Cologno al Serio, Bergamo, Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia
|death_date
|death_place = Rome, Kingdom of Italy
|parents = Domenico Agliardi<br/>Lidia Vimercati
|previous_post =
|alma_mater = Roman Seminary<br/>Pontifical Roman Athenaeum Saint Apollinare
|coat_of_arms = Coat of arms of Antonio Agliardi.svg }}
Antonio Agliardi (4 September 1832 – 19 March 1915) was an Italian Roman Catholic Cardinal, archbishop, and papal diplomat.
Biography
Agliardi was born at Cologno al Serio, in what is now the Province of Bergamo.
He studied theology and canon law, and after acting as parish priest in his native diocese for twelve years was sent by the pope to Canada as a bishop's chaplain. On his return he was appointed secretary to the Congregation of the Propaganda.
In 1884, he was created by Pope Leo XIII Archbishop of Caesarea in partibus and sent to India as an Apostolic Delegate to report on the establishment of the hierarchy there.
In 1887 he again visited India, to carry out the terms of the concordat arranged with Portugal. The same year he was appointed secretary of the Congregation super negotiis ecclesiae extraordinariis. In 1889 he became papal Apostolic Nuncio to Bavaria at Munich and in 1892 at Vienna. Allowing himself to be involved in the ecclesiastical disputes that divided Hungary in 1895, he was made the subject of formal complaint by the Hungarian government and in 1896 was recalled.
In the consistory of 1896 he was elevated to Cardinal-Priest of Santi Nereo e Achilleo. In 1899 he was made Cardinal Bishop of Albano. In 1903, he was named vice-chancellor of the Catholic Church, and became the Chancellor of the Apostolic Chancery in the Secretariat of State in 1908.
He died in Rome and was buried in Bergamo.Episcopal lineageAgliardi's episcopal lineage, or apostolic succession was:
* Cardinal Scipione Rebiba
* Cardinal Giulio Antonio Santorio
* Cardinal Girolamo Bernerio
* Archbishop Galeazzo Sanvitale
* Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi
* Cardinal Luigi Caetani
* Cardinal Ulderico Carpegna
* Cardinal Paluzzo Paluzzi Altieri degli Albertoni
* Pope Benedict XIII
* Pope Benedict XIV
* Cardinal Enrico Enríquez
* Archbishop Manuel Quintano Bonifaz
* Cardinal Buenaventura Fernández de Córdoba Spínola
* Cardinal Giuseppe Doria Pamphili
* Pope Pius VIII
* Pope Pius IX
* Cardinal Alessandro Franchi
* Cardinal Giovanni Simeoni
* Cardinal Antonio Agliardi
Notes
References
*
*
*
External links
*[http://catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bagliardi.html Catholic-Hierarchy.org] }}
9 May 1887}}
Category:1832 births
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Category:19th-century Italian Roman Catholic archbishops
Category:20th-century Italian Roman Catholic archbishops
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Category:Cardinals created by Pope Leo XIII
Category:Roman Catholic titular archbishops of Caesarea | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Agliardi | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.878621 |
1553 | Agnes of Merania | | death_place | burial_place |
}}
Agnes of Merania (1175 – July 1201) was Queen of France by marriage to King Philip II.
She is called Marie by some of the French chroniclers.BiographyAgnes Maria was the daughter of Berthold, Duke of Merania and Agnes of Rochlitz.
In June 1196, Agnes married Philip II of France, who had repudiated his second wife Ingeborg of Denmark in 1193. Pope Innocent III espoused the cause of Ingeborg; but Philip did not submit until 1200, when, nine months after interdict had been added to excommunication, he consented to a separation from Agnes.
Agnes died, possibly in childbirth, in July of the next year, at the castle of Poissy, and was buried in the Convent of St. Corentin, near Nantes.Family
Agnes and Philip had two children:
*Mary, b. 1198
*Philip I, Count of Boulogne, b 1200
Both were legitimized by the Pope in 1201.ReferencesSources*
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*External links
Category:1175 births
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Category:Queens consort of France
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Category:House of Andechs
Category:House of Capet
Category:12th-century French people
Category:12th-century French women
Category:13th-century French people
Category:13th-century French women
Category:Wives of Philip II of France
Category:Deaths in childbirth | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_of_Merania | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.881733 |
1556 | Agrippina the Elder | | birth_place = Athens, Greece
| death_date = AD 33 (aged 46)
| death_place = Pandataria
| burial_date | burial_place AD 33<br />Pandataria<br />relocated in March AD 37 to the <br />Mausoleum of Augustus
| spouse = Germanicus
| issue =
| dynasty = Julio-Claudian
| father = Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa
| mother = Julia the Elder
}}
(Vipsania) Agrippina the Elder (also, in Latin, ,}} To distinguish Agrippa and Julia's daughter from their granddaughter Julia Agrippina, historians refer to this daughter as "Agrippina the Elder" (Latin: Agrippina Maior). Likewise, Agrippina's daughter is referred to as
"Agrippina the Younger" (Minor). Like her father, Agrippina the Elder avoided her nomen and has not been found to have used "Vipsania" in inscription. An inscription in Rhodiapolis records her with the nomen "Julia", although this appears to be a mistake.
Background
depicting Agrippa wearing a combination of the corona muralis and the corona rostalis''. ]]
Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was an early supporter of Augustus (then "Octavius"). He was a key general in Augustus' armies, commanding troops during the wars against Sextus Pompey and Mark Antony. From early in the emperor's reign, Agrippa was trusted to handle affairs in the eastern provinces and was even given the signet ring of Augustus, who appeared to be on his deathbed in 23BC, a sign that he would become princeps were Augustus to die. It is probable that he was to rule until the emperor's nephew, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, came of age. However, Marcellus died that year of an illness that became an epidemic in Rome.
Now, with Marcellus dead, Augustus arranged for the marriage of Agrippa to his daughter Julia the Elder, who was previously the wife of Marcellus. Agrippa was given tribunicia potestas ("the tribunician power") in 18 BC, a power that only the emperor and his immediate heir could hope to attain. The tribunician power allowed him to control the Senate, and it was first given to Julius Caesar. Agrippa acted as tribune in the Senate to pass important legislation and, though he lacked some of the emperor's power and authority, he was approaching the position of co-regent.
Early life and family
Agrippina was born in 14 BC to Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa and Julia the Elder, before their return to Rome in 13 BC. She had several siblings, including half-sisters Vipsania Agrippina, Vipsania Attica, Vipsania Marcella and Vipsania Marcellina (from her father's marriages to Pomponia Caecilia Attica and Claudia Marcella Major); and four full siblings, with three brothers; Gaius, Lucius, and Postumus Agrippa (all were adopted by Augustus; Gaius and Lucius were adopted together following Lucius' birth in 17 BC; Postumus in AD 4), and a sister Julia the Younger.
She was a prominent member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. On her mother's side, she was the younger granddaughter of Augustus. She was the Stepdaughter of Tiberius by her mother's marriage to him, and sister in law of Claudius, the brother of her husband Germanicus. Her son Gaius, better known as "Caligula", would be the third emperor, and her grandson Nero would be the last emperor of the dynasty.
In 13 BC, her father returned to Rome and was promptly sent to Pannonia to suppress a rebellion. Agrippa arrived there that winter (in 12 BC), but the Pannonians gave up that same year. Agrippa returned to Campania in Italy, where he fell ill and died soon after. After her father's death, she spent the rest of her childhood in Augustus' household where access to her was strictly controlled.
Some of the currency issued in 13–12 BC, the aurei and denarii, make it clear that her brothers Gaius and Lucius were Augustus' intended heirs. Their father was no longer available to assume the reins of power if the Emperor were to die, and Augustus had to make it clear who his intended heirs were in case anything should happen. Lucius' and Gaius' military and political careers would steadily advance until their deaths in AD 2 and 4, respectively.
The death of her brothers meant that Augustus had to find other heirs. Although he initially considered Agrippina's second cousin Germanicus a potential heir for a time, Livia convinced Augustus to adopt Tiberius, Livia's son from her first marriage with Tiberius Claudius Nero. Although Augustus adopted Tiberius, it was on condition that Tiberius first adopt Germanicus so that Germanicus would become second in the line of succession. It was a corollary to the adoption, probably in the next year, that Agrippina was married to Germanicus.
By her husband Germanicus, she had nine children: Nero Julius Caesar, Drusus Julius Caesar, Tiberius Julius Caesar, a child of unknown name (normally referenced as Ignotus), Gaius the Elder, the Emperor Caligula (Gaius the Younger), the Empress Agrippina the Younger, Julia Drusilla, and Julia Livilla. Only six of her children came of age; Tiberius and Ignotus died as infants, and Gaius the Elder in his early childhood.
On 18 May AD 14, her one-year-old son Gaius was sent by Augustus from Rome to join her in Gaul. She was pregnant at the time and, while Germanicus was collecting taxes across Gaul, she remained at an unspecified separate location, presumably for her safety. Augustus sent her a letter with her son's party, which read:}}
Later that year, on 19 August, Augustus died while away in Campania. As a result, Tiberius was made princeps. While Germanicus was administering the oath of fealty to Tiberius, a mutiny began among the forces on the Rhine. During the mutiny, Agrippina brought out their sixth child, Gaius, and made preparations to take him away to a safer town nearby. He was in a full army outfit including the legionary hobnailed boots (caligae). These military-booties earned Gaius the nickname "Caligula" (lit. "little boots"), and garnered sympathy for Agrippina and the child among the soldiery. Tacitus attributes her actions as having quelled the mutiny (Tacitus, Annals 1.40–4).
Once the mutiny was put to an end, Germanicus allowed the soldiers to deal with the ringleaders, which they did with brutal severity. He then led them against the Germanic tribes, perhaps in an effort to prevent future mutiny. Germanicus would remain in Gaul fighting against the Germanic tribes until AD 16, at which time he was recalled to Rome by Tiberius. His campaigns won him much renown among the Roman people, and he was awarded a triumph on 26 May AD 17.Widowhood, Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus (1768), oil on canvas. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.]]
In AD 18, Agrippina left for the eastern provinces with her family. Germanicus was sent the east to govern the provinces, the same assignment her father was given years earlier. Agrippina was pregnant on their journey east and, on the way to Syria, she gave birth to her youngest daughter Julia Livilla on the island of Lesbos. Inscriptions celebrating her fertility have been found on the island.
Tiberius sent Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso to assist her husband, naming him governor of Syria. During their time there, Germanicus was active in his administration of the eastern regions. Rumours spread of Piso poisoning her husband on the emperor's orders.]]
Her marriage to Germanicus had served to unite the imperial family. Agrippina may have suspected Tiberius' involvement in the death of her husband and, with Germanicus dead, she no longer had any familial ties to the emperor. Historian Richard Alston says it is likely that either Tiberius or Livia were behind the exile of Agrippina's sister Julia the Younger and the death of Postumus. He notes the death of Agrippina's mother, who starved herself to death amidst her exile in AD 14, linking her death to Tiberius' disdain for her.
Agrippina was vocal about her feelings claiming that Germanicus was murdered to promote Drusus the Younger as Tiberius' heir, and worried that the birth of the Younger Drusus' twin sons would displace her own sons in the line of succession.
At about this time, Tiberius' Praetorian Prefect Sejanus was becoming powerful in Rome and began feuding with Drusus the Younger. While the exact causes of the feud are unknown, it ended when the Younger Drusus died of seemingly natural causes on 14 September AD 23. After the death of Tiberius' son, Agrippina wanted to advance the careers of her sons, who were all potential heirs for Tiberius. It has been suggested that to achieve this, Agrippina commissioned the Great Cameo of France and presented it to Tiberius as a personalized gift that positioned the family of Germanicus around the emperor. The work was designed to convince Tiberius to choose her children as his heirs.
Ultimately, the death of Tiberius' son elevated her own children to the position of heirs. Her sons were the logical choice, because they were the sons of Germanicus and Tiberius' grandsons were too young. Nero was becoming popular in the Senate due in part, Tacitus says, to his resemblance with his father. The rise of her children was threatening to Sejanus' position. Resultantly, Sejanus began spreading rumors about Agrippina in the imperial court. The coming years were marked with increasing hostility between Sejanus and Agrippina and her sons. This effectively caused factions to rise in the aristocracy between her family and Sejanus.Political rivalryof Caligula with Agrippina on the obverse, minted circa AD 37.]]
On New Year's Day, AD 24, Sejanus had the priests and magistrates add prayers for the health of Nero and Drusus in addition to those normally offered to the emperor on that day. Tiberius was not happy with this and he voiced his displeasure in the Senate. In addition, he questioned the priests of the Palatine. Some of the priests who offered the prayers were relatives of Agrippina and Germanicus. This made Tiberius suspicious of her and marked a change in his attitude toward her and her older sons, but not Caligula.
In AD 25, Sejanus requested Livilla's hand in marriage. Livilla was a niece of the emperor, which would have made him a member of the imperial family. While this did make his ambitions clear, his request was denied. The loss may have been huge for Sejanus had the dissensions in the imperial household not been deteriorating. Relations were so bad that Agrippina refused to eat at Tiberius' dinner parties for fear of being poisoned. She also asked Tiberius if she could be allowed to remarry, which he also refused.
Downfall
With Tiberius away from Rome, the city would see a rise of politically motivated trials on the part of Sejanus and his supporters against Agrippina and her associates. Many of her friends and associates were subsequently accused of maiestas ("treason") by the growing number of accusers. It was also common to see charges of sexual misconduct and corruption. In AD 27, Agrippina found herself placed under house arrest in her suburban villa outside Herculaneum.
In AD 28, the Senate voted that altars to Clementia (mercy) and Amicitia (friendship) be raised. At that time, Clementia was considered a virtue of the ruling class, for only the powerful could give clemency. The altar of Amicitia was flanked by statues of Sejanus and Tiberius. By this time, his association with Tiberius was such that there were those in Roman society who erected statues in his honor and gave prayers and sacrifices in his honor. Sejanus' birthday was honored as if he were a member of the imperial family. According to Richard Alston, "Sejanus' association with Tiberius must have at least indicated to the people that he would be further elevated."]]
near the Tabularium.]]
Her son Drusus was later also exiled on charges of sexual misdemeanors. Sejanus remained powerful until his sudden downfall and summary execution in October AD 31, just after the death of Nero, the exact cause for which remains unclear. Alston suggests that Sejanus may have been acting in Tiberius' favor to remove Germanicus' family from power, noting that Agrippina and Nero's brother Drusus were left in exile even after Sejanus' death.
The deaths of Agrippina's older sons elevated her youngest son Caligula to the position of successor and he became princeps when Tiberius died in AD 37. Drusus the Younger's son Tiberius Gemellus was summoned to Capri by his grandfather Tiberius, where he and Caligula were made joint-heirs. When Caligula assumed power he made Gemellus his adopted son, but Caligula soon had Gemellus killed for plotting against him. According to Philo, Caligula's pretended reason was a conspiracy.
After he became emperor, Caligula took on the role of a dutiful son and brother in a public show of pietas ("piety"). He went out to the islands of Pontia and Pandateria in order to recover the remains of Agrippina and Nero. It was not easy to recover Nero's bones as they were scattered and buried. Moreover, he had a stormy passage; however, the difficulty in his task made his devotion seem even greater. The ashes were brought to Ostia, from where they were carried up the Tiber and brought to the Campus Martius, from where equestrians placed them on briers to join the ashes of Germanicus in the mausoleum of Augustus. The move was reminiscent of when Agrippina carried the ashes of her husband just over 17 years earlier. Agrippina's funerary urn still survives ().
The tablet made of marble reads:
"OSSA
AGRIPPINAE M AGRIPPAE F
DIVI AVG NEPTIS VXORIS
GERMANICI CAESARIS
MATRIS C CAESARIS AVG
GERMANICI PRINCIPIS"
which translates as "Bones of Agrippina; daughter of Marcus Agrippa, granddaughter of Divus Augustus, wife of Germanicus Caesar, mother of Princeps Gaius Caesar Germanicus".
Personality
Agrippina was fiercely independent, a trait she shared with her mother. Dio described her as having ambitions to match her pedigree. However, Anthony A. Barrett notes that Agrippina was fully aware that a woman in ancient Rome could not hold power in her own right. Instead, Agrippina followed the model of Livia in promoting the careers of her children.
Tacitus also records serious tension between Agrippina and Livia. He describes Livia as having visited "stepmotherly provocations" on Agrippina. He says of Agrippina: "were it not that through her moral integrity and love for her husband she converted an otherwise ungovernable temper to the good" (Tacitus, Annals 1.33).
Tacitus
The Annals of Tacitus is a history of the Julio-Claudian dynasty beginning with the death of Augustus. In it, he portrays women as having a profound influence on politics. The women of the imperial family in particular are depicted by Tacitus as having a notable prominence in the public sphere as well as possessing a ferocity and ambition with which they pursue it. Tacitus presents them as living longer than the imperial men and thus being more wise as they advance in age. Among the most broad of his portrayals is that of Agrippina. He emphasizes their role in connecting genetically back to Augustus, a significant factor in the marriages of the emperors and princes of the dynasty. The Annals repeatedly has Agrippina competing for influence with Tiberius simply because she is related to Augustus biologically.
Tacitus presents Agrippina as being kindred to aristocratic males, }}
Using the above epithet, "(femina) ingens animi" ("..[a woman], great for her courage"), he assigns a haughty attitude to Agrippina that compels her to explore the affairs of men. He records her as having reversed the natural order of things when she quelled the mutiny of the Rhine in AD 14. In so doing, he describes her as having usurped her husband's power, a power rightfully belonging only to a general.
Portraiture
(AD 50) depicting Claudius (front left), Agrippina the Younger (back left), Germanicus (front right), and Agrippina the Elder (back right).]]
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Portraits of Roman women from the Julio-Claudian dynasty display a freer hair treatment than those of traditional Roman men and are more keen on the sensitivity of recording on different textures. These changes in style served to make reproducing them more popular in the mid-first-century AD. Reproductions of her image would continue to be made into that period. In the portrait, she is given a youthful face despite the fact that she lived to middle age. Agrippina's hair is a mass of curls that covers both sides of her head and is long going down to her shoulders. Her portraiture can be contrasted with that of Livia who had a more austere Augustan hairstyle.
There are three different periods during the first-century AD when portraits were created for Agrippina: at the time of her marriage to Germanicus (which made her the mother of a potential emperor); when her son Caligula came into power in AD 37, and collected her ashes from the island of Pandateria for relocation to the Mausoleum of Augustus; and at the time of Claudius' marriage to Agrippina the Younger, who wanted to connect himself to the lineage of Augustus by evoking Agrippina's image. Coins and inscriptions cannot act as a method of discerning her age, because her hairstyle remains unchanged in all the representations.
The easiest phase of portraits to identify are those dating to the time of Caligula, when a fair abundance of coins were minted with an image of his mother on them. It is a posthumous portrait of her with idealized features. In the phase following Claudius' marriage, her features are made to more closely resemble those of her daughter. The goal was to strengthen Agrippina the Younger's connection with her mother. Finally, the portraits of her dating to the time of Tiberius are still idealized, but not as much as those from the period of Caligula's reign. Images of Agrippina from this period are the most lifelike.
She is also remembered in De Mulieribus Claris, a collection of biographies of historical and mythological women by the Florentine author Giovanni Boccaccio, composed in 136162. It is notable as the first collection devoted exclusively to biographies of women in Western literature. Other notable works of which include:
*Agrippina Mourning over the ashes of Germanicus (1775), an etching by Scottish painter Alexander Runciman.
*The Caesars (1968), a television series by Philip Mackie for Granada TV. She was played by Caroline Blakiston.
*I, Claudius (1976), a television series by Jack Pulman for the BBC. She was played by Fiona Walker.See also
*Julio-Claudian family tree
*Gaius Silius
Notes
References
Bibliography
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Category:10s BC births
Category:33 deaths
Category:1st-century BC Roman women
Category:1st-century Roman women
Category:1st-century Romans
Category:Ancient Roman women in warfare
Category:Burials at the Mausoleum of Augustus
Category:Children of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa
Category:Deaths by starvation
Category:Germanicus
Category:Julio-Claudian dynasty
Category:Vipsanii Agrippae
Category:Women in 1st-century warfare
Category:Year of birth uncertain
Category:Mothers of Roman emperors | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippina_the_Elder | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.902087 |
1557 | Agrippina the Younger | Julia Agrippina (6 November AD 15 – 23 March AD 59), also referred to as Agrippina the Younger, was Roman empress from AD 49 to 54, the fourth wife and niece of emperor Claudius, and the mother of Nero.
Agrippina was one of the most prominent women in the Julio-Claudian dynasty. She was the great-granddaughter of Augustus (the first Roman emperor) and the daughter of the Roman general Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder. Her father, Germanicus, was the nephew and heir apparent of the second emperor, Tiberius. Agrippina's brother Caligula became emperor in AD 37. After Caligula was assassinated in AD 41, Germanicus' brother Claudius took the throne. Agrippina married Claudius in AD 49.
Agrippina has been described by modern and ancient sources as ruthless, ambitious, domineering and using her powerful political ties to influence the affairs of the Roman state, even managing to successfully maneuver her son Nero into the line of succession. Claudius eventually became aware of her plotting, but died in AD 54 under suspicious circumstances, potentially poisoned by Agrippina herself. She exerted significant political influence in the early years of her son's reign, but eventually fell out of favor with him and was killed in AD 59. Physically, Agrippina was described as a beautiful and reputable woman; and, according to Pliny the Elder, had a double canine in her upper right jaw, which was regarded as a sign of good fortune in Ancient Rome.
Family
Agrippina was the first daughter and fourth living child of Agrippina the Elder and Germanicus.
She had three elder brothers, Nero Caesar, Drusus Caesar, and the future emperor Caligula, and two younger sisters, Julia Drusilla and Julia Livilla. Agrippina's two eldest brothers and her mother were victims of the intrigues of the Praetorian Prefect Lucius Aelius Sejanus.
She was the namesake of her mother. Agrippina the Elder was remembered as a modest and heroic matron, who was the second daughter and fourth child of Julia the Elder and the statesman Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. The father of Julia the Elder was the emperor Augustus, and Julia was his only natural child from his second marriage to Scribonia, who had close blood relations with Pompey the Great and Lucius Cornelius Sulla.
Germanicus, Agrippina's father, was a very popular general and politician. His mother was Antonia Minor and his father was the general Nero Claudius Drusus. He was Antonia Minor's first child. Germanicus had two younger siblings: Livilla and Claudius, making the pair Agrippina's aunt and uncle, respectively. Not only would Claudius later serve as Roman emperor, he would also go on to take Agrippina, his own niece, as his wife.
Antonia Minor was a daughter to Octavia the Younger by her second marriage to triumvir Mark Antony, and Octavia was the second eldest sister and full-blooded sister of Augustus. Germanicus' father, Drusus the Elder, was the second son of the Empress Livia Drusilla by her first marriage to praetor Tiberius Nero, and was the emperor Tiberius's younger brother and Augustus's stepson.
In the year AD 9, Augustus ordered Tiberius to adopt Germanicus, who happened to be Tiberius's nephew, as his son and heir. Germanicus was a favourite of Augustus, who hoped that he would succeed Tiberius, who was Augustus's adopted son and heir and then emperor following Augustus' death in AD 14. This in turn meant that Tiberius was also Agrippina's adoptive grandfather in addition to her paternal great-uncle.
Birth and early life
Agrippina was born on 6 November in AD 15, or possibly AD 14, at Oppidum Ubiorum, a Roman outpost on the Rhine River located in present-day Cologne, Germany. A second sister Julia Drusilla was born on 16 September AD 16, also in Germany.
Agrippina's place of birth is disputed, with Cologne being seen as a likely place considering how Agrippina would favor the city and the Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium being established at her prompting there.
Suetonius however claims that both of Germanicus's eldest daughters were born in Trier in Gaul.
As a small child, Agrippina travelled with her parents throughout Germany until she and her siblings (apart from Caligula) returned to Rome to live with and be raised by their paternal grandmother Antonia. Her parents departed for Syria in AD 18 to conduct official duties, and, according to Tacitus, the third and youngest sister was born en route on the island of Lesbos, namely Julia Livilla, probably on 18 March. In October of AD 19, Germanicus died suddenly in Antioch (present-day Antakya, Turkey).
Germanicus' death caused much public grief in Rome, and gave rise to rumours that he had been murdered by Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso and Munatia Plancina on the orders of Tiberius, as his widow Agrippina the Elder returned to Rome with his ashes. Agrippina the Younger was thereafter supervised by her mother, her paternal grandmother Antonia Minor, and her great-grandmother, Livia. She lived on the Palatine Hill in Rome.
Marriage to Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus
thumb|left|Bust of Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus|290x290px
After her thirteenth birthday in AD 28, Tiberius arranged for Agrippina to marry her paternal first cousin once removed Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus and ordered the marriage to be celebrated in Rome. Domitius came from a distinguished family of consular rank. Through his mother Antonia Major, Domitius was a great nephew of Augustus, first cousin to Claudius, and first cousin once removed to Agrippina and Caligula. He had two sisters; Domitia Lepida the Elder and Domitia Lepida the Younger. Domitia Lepida the Younger was the mother of the Empress Valeria Messalina.
Antonia Major was the elder sister to Antonia Minor, and the first daughter of Octavia Minor and Mark Antony. Domitius, who was, according to Suetonius, "in every aspect of his life detestable," served as consul in AD 32. Agrippina and Domitius lived between Antium and Rome. Not much is known about the relationship between them.
Reign of Caligula
thumb|right|upright=1.4|During the reign of Caligula, coins like the one pictured here were issued depicting his three sisters, Drusilla, Livilla, and Agrippina the Younger.
Public role and political intrigues
Tiberius died on 16 March AD 37, and Agrippina's only surviving brother, Caligula, became the new emperor. Being the emperor's sister gave Agrippina some influence.
Agrippina and her younger sisters Julia Drusilla and Julia Livilla received various honours from their brother, which included but were not limited to
receiving the rights of the Vestal Virgins, such as the freedom to view public games from the upper seats in the stadium;
being honoured with a new type of coinage, depicting images of Caligula and his sisters on opposite faces;
having their names added to motions, including loyalty oaths (e.g., "I will not value my life or that of my children less highly than I do the safety of the Emperor and his sisters") and consular motions (e.g., "Good fortune attend to the Emperor and his sisters)".
Around the time that Tiberius died, Agrippina had become pregnant. Domitius had acknowledged the paternity of the child. On 15 December AD 37, in the early morning, in Antium, Agrippina gave birth to a son. Agrippina and Domitius named their son Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, after Domitius' recently deceased father. This child would grow up to become the emperor Nero. Nero was Agrippina's only natural child. Suetonius states that Domitius was congratulated by friends on the birth of his son, whereupon he replied "I don't think anything produced by me and Agrippina could possibly be good for the state or the people".
Caligula and his sisters were accused of having incestuous relationships. On 10 June AD 38, Drusilla died, possibly of a fever, rampant in Rome at the time. Caligula was particularly fond of Drusilla, claiming to treat her as he would his own wife, even though Drusilla had a husband. Following her death, Caligula showed no special love or respect toward the surviving sisters and was said to have gone insane.
In AD 39, Agrippina and Livilla, with their maternal cousin, Drusilla's widower Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, were involved in a failed plot to murder Caligula, a plot known as the Plot of the Three Daggers, which was to make Lepidus the new emperor. Lepidus, Agrippina and Livilla were accused of being lovers. Not much is known concerning this plot and the reasons behind it. At the trial of Lepidus, Caligula felt no compunction about denouncing them as adulteresses, producing handwritten letters discussing how they were going to kill him. The three were found guilty as accessories to the crime.
Exile
Lepidus was executed. According to the fragmentary inscriptions of the Arval Brethren, Agrippina was forced to carry the urn of Lepidus' ashes back to Rome.
Claudius had Lucius' inheritance reinstated. Lucius became more wealthy despite his youth shortly after Gaius Sallustius Crispus Passienus divorced Lucius' aunt, Domitia Lepida the Elder (Lucius' first paternal aunt) so that Crispus could marry Agrippina. They married, and Crispus became a step-father to Lucius. Crispus was an influential, wealthy and powerful man who served twice as consul. He was the adopted grandson and biological great-great-nephew of the historian Sallust. Little is known about their relationship, but Crispus soon died and left his estate to Nero.
During the first years his reign, Claudius was married to the Empress Valeria Messalina. Messalina was Agrippina's paternal second cousin. Among the victims of Messalina's intrigues were Agrippina's surviving sister Livilla, who was charged with adultery with Seneca the Younger. Although Agrippina was very influential at this time, she kept a low profile and stayed away from the imperial palace and the court of the emperor.
Messalina considered Agrippina's son a threat to her son's position and sent assassins to strangle Lucius during his siesta. The assassins left after they saw a snake beneath Lucius' pillow, considering it a bad omen. It was, however, only a sloughed-off snake-skin. By Agrippina's order, the serpent's skin was enclosed in a bracelet that the young Lucius wore on his right arm.
In AD 47, Crispus died. At his funeral, a rumour spread that Agrippina had poisoned Crispus to gain his estate. After being widowed a second time, Agrippina was left very wealthy. Later that year, Messalina and Britannicus attended the performance of the Troy Pageant at the Secular Games, where Agrippina was also present with Lucius. Agrippina and Lucius received greater applause from the audience than Messalina and Britannicus did. Many people began to show pity and sympathy to Agrippina, due to the unfortunate circumstances of her life.
Marriage to Claudius
Messalina was executed in AD 48 for conspiring with Gaius Silius to overthrow her husband. Around this time, Agrippina became the mistress to one of Claudius' advisers, the Greek freedman Marcus Antonius Pallas. After ending his marriage, Claudius considered remarrying for the fourth time and his advisers began discussing which noblewoman he should marry. Claudius had a reputation that he was easily persuaded; but it has been suggested that the Senate may have pushed for the marriage between Agrippina and Claudius to end the feud between the Julian and Claudian branches. This feud dated back to Agrippina's mother's actions against Tiberius after the death of Germanicus. Another reason was to bring in Agrippina's son, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, as a candidate for the succession. His prestige as the descendent of Augustus and Germanicus would have helped the survival of Claudius' regime.
Claudius was said to have made references to her in his speeches: "my daughter and foster child, born and bred, in my lap, so to speak". When Claudius decided to marry her, he persuaded a group of senators that the marriage should be arranged in the public interest. In Roman society, an uncle (Claudius) marrying his niece (Agrippina) was considered incestuous and immoral.
Agrippina and Claudius married on New Year's Day in AD 49 and the marriage was met with widespread disapproval. Agrippina's marriage to Claudius was not based on love, but powerpossibly being a part of her plan to make her son Lucius the new emperor. Shortly after marrying Claudius, Agrippina eliminated her rival Lollia Paulina by persuading Claudius to charge Paulina with allegations of black magic use. Claudius stipulated that Paulina did not receive a hearing and her property was confiscated. She left Italy, but Agrippina was unsatisfied. Allegedly on Agrippina's orders, a tribune forced Lollia Paulina to commit suicide.
In the months leading up to her marriage to Claudius, Agrippina's maternal second cousin, the praetor Lucius Junius Silanus Torquatus, was betrothed to Claudius' daughter Claudia Octavia. This betrothal was broken off in AD 48, when Agrippina, scheming with the consul Lucius Vitellius the Elder, the father of the future emperor Aulus Vitellius, falsely accused Silanus of incest with his sister Junia Calvina. Agrippina did this hoping to secure a marriage between Octavia and her son. Consequently, Claudius broke off the engagement and forced Silanus to resign from public office.
Silanus committed suicide on the day that Agrippina married her uncle, and Calvina was exiled from Italy in early AD 49. Calvina was called back from exile after the death of Agrippina. Towards the end of AD 54, Agrippina would order the murder of Silanus' eldest brother Marcus Junius Silanus Torquatus without Nero's knowledge, so that he would not seek revenge against her over his brother's death.
Empress
thumb|upright=1.4|Denarius of Agrippina and Claudius, minted in AD 50–54. She was the first Roman empress to be depicted on official Roman coins in an unambiguous manner
Agrippina became empress in AD 49 upon marrying her uncle Claudius. She also became stepmother to Claudia Antonia, Claudius' daughter and only child from his second marriage to Aelia Paetina; and to the young Claudia Octavia and Britannicus, Claudius' children with Valeria Messalina. Agrippina removed or eliminated anyone from the palace or the imperial court whom she thought was loyal and dedicated to the memory of the late Messalina. She also eliminated or removed anyone whom she considered was a potential threat to her position and the future of her son, one of her victims being Lucius' second paternal aunt and Messalina's mother Domitia Lepida the Younger.
Griffin describes how Agrippina "had achieved this dominant position for her son and herself by a web of political alliances," which included Claudius chief secretary and bookkeeper Pallas, his doctor Xenophon, and Afranius Burrus: the head of the Praetorian Guard (the imperial bodyguard), who owed his promotion to Agrippina. Neither ancient nor modern historians of Rome have doubted that Agrippina had her eye on securing the throne for Nero from the very day of the marriageif not earlier. Dio Cassius observation seems to bear that out: "As soon as Agrippina had come to live in the palace she gained complete control over Claudius."
In AD 49, Agrippina was seated on a dais at a parade of captives when their leader the Celtic King Caratacus bowed before her with the same homage and gratitude as he accorded the emperor. In AD 50, Agrippina was granted the honorific title of Augusta. She was third Roman woman (after Livia Drusilla and Antonia Minor) and only the second living Roman woman (the first being Livia) to receive this title.
In her capacity as Augusta, Agrippina quickly became a trusted advisor to Claudius, and by AD 54, she exerted a considerable influence over the decisions of the emperor. Statues of her were erected in many cities across the Empire and her face appeared on official Roman coins unambiguously, a first for a living empress. In the Senate, her followers were advanced with public offices and governorships. She listened to the Senate from behind the scenes. According to Cassius Dio, Agrippina was often present with Claudius in public, seated on her own platform, when he was transacting government businesses or receiving foreign ambassadors. Pliny the Elder writes that he saw her seated beside the emperor during mock naval combats, wearing a golden cloak. Tacitus claims that she boasted being a "partner in the empire". However, this privileged position caused resentment among the senatorial class and the imperial family.
Also that year, Claudius founded a Roman colony and called the colony Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensis or Agrippinensium, today known as Cologne, after Agrippina who was born there. This was the only Roman colony to be named after a Roman woman. In AD 51, she was given a carpentum: a ceremonial carriage usually reserved for priests such as the Vestal Virgins and sacred statues. That same year she secured the appointment of Sextus Afranius Burrus as the head of the Praetorian Guard, replacing the previous head of the Praetorian Guard, Rufrius Crispinus.
She assisted Claudius in administering the empire and became very wealthy and powerful. Ancient sources claim that Agrippina successfully influenced Claudius into adopting her son and making him his successor. Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus was adopted by his great maternal uncle and stepfather in AD 50. Lucius' name was changed to Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus and he became Claudius's adopted son, heir and recognized successor. Agrippina and Claudius betrothed Nero to his step sister Claudia Octavia, and Agrippina arranged to have Seneca the Younger return from exile to tutor the future emperor. Claudius chose to adopt Nero because of his Julian and Claudian lineage.
Agrippina deprived Britannicus of his heritage and further isolated him from his father and succession for the throne in every way possible. For instance, in AD 51, Agrippina ordered the execution of Britannicus' tutor Sosibius. Sosibus had confronted her, outraged by Claudius' adoption of Nero and his choice of Nero as successor over his own son Britannicus.
Nero and Octavia were married on 9 June AD 53. Claudius later regretted marrying Agrippina and adopting Nero and began to favor Britannicus, preparing him for the throne. These actions gave Agrippina a motive to allegedly eliminate Claudius. Ancient sources say she poisoned Claudius on 13 October AD 54 with a plate of deadly mushrooms at a banquet, thus enabling Nero to quickly take the throne as emperor. Accounts vary wildly with regard to this private incident, and according to more modern sources, it is possible that Claudius died of natural causes, being 63 years old. In the aftermath of Claudius's death, Agrippina, who initially kept the death secret, tried to consolidate power by immediately ordering that the palace and the capital be sealed. After all the gates were blockaded and exit of the capital forbidden, she introduced Nero first to the soldiers and then to the senators as emperor.
thumb|upright=0.8|Sculpture of Agrippina crowning her young son Nero ( AD 54–59)
In year one of Nero's reign, Agrippina began losing influence over Nero when he began to have an affair with the freed woman Claudia Acte, which Agrippina strongly disapproved of and violently scolded him for. Agrippina began to support Britannicus in her possible attempt to make him emperor, or to threaten Nero. The panicking emperor decided on whether to eliminate his mother or his step-brother. Soon, Nero had Britannicus secretly poisoned during his own banquet in February AD 55. The power struggle between Agrippina and her son had begun.
Between AD 56 and 58, Agrippina became very watchful and critical of her son. In AD 56, Agrippina was forced out of the palace by her son to live in the imperial residence. However, Agrippina retained some degree of influence over her son for several more years, and they are considered the best years of Nero's reign. But, as their relationship grew more hostile, Nero gradually began to deprive his mother of honours and power, and even removed her Roman and German bodyguards. Nero even threatened his mother that he would abdicate the throne and would go to live on the Greek Island of Rhodes, a place where Tiberius had lived after divorcing Julia the Elder. Pallas also was dismissed from the court. The fall of Pallas and the opposition of Burrus and Seneca to Agrippina contributed to her scaling down of authority. In mid AD 56, she was forced out of everyday and active participation in the governance of Rome.
While Agrippina lived in her residence or when she went on short visits to Rome, Nero sent people to annoy her. Although living in Misenum, she was always hailed as "Augusta", and Agrippina and Nero would see each other on short visits. In late AD 58, Agrippina and a group of soldiers and senators were accused of attempting to overthrow Nero, and it was said they planned to move with Gaius Rubellius Plautus. In addition, she revealed Nero's relationship with Poppaea Sabina.
Death and aftermath
The circumstances that surround Agrippina's death are uncertain due to historical contradictions and anti-Nero bias. However, ancient accounts agree that Nero had her murdered following an unsuccessful attempt on her life on a boat.
Tacitus's account
According to Tacitus, in AD 58, Nero became involved with the noble woman Poppaea Sabina. She taunted him for being a "mummy's boy". She also convinced him of the autonomy of any other emperor. With the reasoning that a divorce from Octavia and a marriage to Poppaea was not politically feasible with Agrippina alive, Nero decided to kill Agrippina. Yet, Nero did not marry Poppaea until AD 62, calling into question this motive. Additionally, Suetonius reveals that Poppaea's husband, Otho, was not sent away by Nero until after Agrippina's death in AD 59, making it highly unlikely that already married Poppaea would be pressing Nero. Some modern historians theorise that Nero's decision to kill Agrippina was prompted by her plot to replace him with either Gaius Rubellius Plautus (Nero's maternal second cousin) or Britannicus (Claudius' biological son).
Tacitus claims that Nero considered poisoning or stabbing her, but felt these methods were too difficult and suspicious, so he settled on – after the advice of his former tutor and freedman Anicetus – building a self-sinking boat. Though aware of the plot, Agrippina embarked on this boat and was nearly crushed by a collapsing lead ceiling only to be saved by the side of a couch breaking the ceiling's fall. Though the collapsing ceiling missed Agrippina, it crushed her attendant who was outside by the helm. News of Agrippina's survival reached Nero so he asked Seneca and Burrus for the advice. After a moment of silence, they recommended Anicetus to carry out the act, since the Praetorians were loyal to the children of Germanicus. So Nero sent Anicetus, the trierach Herculeius, and the marine centurion Obaritus, as well as an "armed and menacing column" to kill her.
Cassius Dio's account
The tale of Cassius Dio is also somewhat different. It starts again with Poppaea and Seneca as the motive behind the murder. Nero designed a ship that would open at the bottom while at sea. Then he pretended to reconcile with Agrippina and put her aboard on the vessel. Once the bottom of the ship opened up, she fell into the water. Pretending to ignore the conspiracy, she sent Nero a letter informing of her well-being, so Nero sent Anicetus to kill her. Her reputed last words, uttered as the assassin was about to strike, were "Strike here, Anicetus, strike here, for this bore Nero".
Nero then told the Senate that Agrippina had plotted to kill him and committed suicide.
Burial
After Agrippina's death, Nero viewed her corpse and, according to some, commented how beautiful she was. Her body was cremated that night on a dining couch. At his mother's funeral, Nero was witless, speechless and rather scared. When the news spread that Agrippina had died, the Roman army, senate, and various people sent him letters of congratulations that he had been saved from his mother's plots.
Aftermath
During the remainder of Nero's reign, Agrippina's grave was not covered or enclosed. Her household later on gave her a modest tomb in Misenum.
In music and literature
She is remembered in De Mulieribus Claris, a collection of biographies of historical and mythological women by the Florentine author Giovanni Boccaccio, composed in 136162. It is notable as the first collection devoted exclusively to biographies of women in western literature.Octavia, a Roman tragedy written during the Flavian periodAgrippina: Trauerspiel (1665), a German baroque tragedy by Daniel Casper von Lohenstein
G.F. Handel's 1709 opera Agrippina with a libretto by Vincenzo GrimaniEmpress of Rome (1978), a novel by Robert DeMaria (Vineyard Press edition, 2001, )
Agrippina is considered to be the founder of Cologne and is still symbolised there today by the robe of the virgin of the Cologne triumvirate. In the sculpture programme of the Cologne town hall tower, a figure by Heribert Calleen was dedicated to Agrippina on the ground floor.
In film, television, and radio
The 1911 Italian film AgrippinaMio Figlio Nerone (1956) played by Gloria Swanson I, Claudius (1976) played by Barbara Young (here called Agrippinilla).Caligula (1979) and also Messalina, Messalina (1977) played by Lori Wagner.Caligula and Messalina (1981) played by Françoise Blanchard.A.D. (1985 miniseries) played by Ava Gardner.Boudica (2003) played by Frances Barber.Imperium: Nero (2005) played by Laura Morante.Ancients Behaving Badly (2009), History Channel documentary. Episode Nero.Roman Empire (2016), Netflix, played by Teressa Liane.
Agrippina the Younger was portrayed by Betty Lou Gerson in the August 31, 1953, episode of the CBS radio program Crime Classics that was entitled "Your Loving Son, Nero." The episode chronicles the killing of Agrippina by her son Nero who was portrayed by William Conrad.
Horrible Histories – The Movie (2019) Agrippina is portrayed by Kim Catrall
Historiography
Ancient
Most ancient Roman sources are quite critical of Agrippina the Younger. Tacitus considered her vicious and had a strong disposition against her. Other sources are Suetonius and Cassius Dio.
Modern
Girod, Virginie, Agrippine, sexe, crimes et pouvoir dans la Rome impériale , Paris, Tallandier, 2015, 300 p.
Minaud, Gérard, Les vies de 12 femmes d'empereur romain – Devoirs, Intrigues & Voluptés , Paris, L'Harmattan, 2012, ch. 3, La vie d'Agrippine, femme de Claude, pp. 65–96.
E. Groag, A. Stein, L. Petersen, Prosopographia Imperii Romani saeculi I, II et III, Berlin, 1933
H. H. Scullard, From the Gracchi to Nero: History of Rome from 133 B.C. to A.D. 68, London, 19825
Guglielmo Ferrero, The Women of the Caesars (1911)
Barrett, Anthony A., Agrippina: Sex, Power and Politics in the Early Roman Empire, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1996.
Annelise Freisenbruch, The first ladies of Rome
McDaniel, W. B. "Bauli the Scene of the Murder of Agrippina". The Classical Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 2 (April 1910)
Salmonson, Jessica Amanda. (1991) The Encyclopedia of Amazons. Paragon House. pp. 4–5.
Donna Hurley, Agrippina the Younger (Wife of Claudius).
L. Foubert, Agrippina. Keizerin van Rome, Leuven, 2006.
Opera by G. F. Handel: AgrippinaSee also
List of unsolved murders
Notes
Tacitus, Annales xii.1–10, 64–69, xiv.1–9Suetonius, De vita Caesarum – Claudius v.44 and Nero vi.5.3, 28.2, 34.1–4''
References
Category:15 births
Category:59 deaths
Category:1st-century executions
Category:1st-century Roman empresses
Category:Augustae
Category:Children of Germanicus
Category:Family of Nero
Category:Female murder victims
Category:Incest
Category:Julii Caesares
Category:Murdered ancient Roman empresses
Category:People from Cologne
Category:Unsolved murders in Italy
Category:Wives of Claudius
Category:Mothers of Roman emperors | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippina_the_Younger | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.940466 |
1558 | American Chinese cuisine | ]]
American Chinese cuisine is a cuisine developed by Chinese Americans based on the wide variety of Chinese food. Most of the dishes served in many North American Chinese restaurants are modified to suit American peoples' tastes and are often quite different from Chinese cuisine.
History
, 1884, Chinese Restaurant, oil on canvas, 83 x 56 cm, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento]]
The history of American Chinese cuisine can be chased back to the California Gold Rush (1848-1855). Chinese immigrants came to the United States to search for work as gold miners and railroad workers. As many Chinese immigrants arrived, the United States introduced laws that prohibited them from owning land. Chinese immigrants started small businesses in the west coast, including restaurants and laundry services, also known in society as “Chinese workers” back in that time period. Early American Chinese food tended to be homogenized, requiring adaptation of local ingredients and catering to Americanized tastes. By the 19th century, Chinese Americans in San Francisco operated luxurious restaurants patronized mainly by Chinese. These restaurants are in smaller towns (mostly owned by Chinese immigrants) , serving food based on what their customers requested, anything ranging from pork chop sandwiches and apple pie, to beans and eggs. Many of these small-town restaurant owners were self-taught family cooks who improvised on different cooking methods using whatever ingredients were available.
These smaller restaurants were responsible for the development of American Chinese food, adapting the food to suit tastes of Americans. They began by serving miners and railroad workers, and then opened new Chinese restaurants in towns where Chinese food was completely unknown, using local ingredients and cooking procedures to adapt their customers' tastes.
California Gold Rush (1848–1855) brought 20,000–30,000 immigrants to the US from Canton (Guangdong province) , China. The first Chinese restaurant in America raises many debates. Some say it was Macau and Woosung, while others cite Canton Restaurant. Both of these restaurant didn't have any photos exist today, the only information that we can get is these two restaurants were founded in 1849 in San Francisco. Either way, these and other such restaurants were central features in the daily lives of immigrants. They provided a connection to home, particularly for the many bachelors who did not have the resources or knowledge to cook for themselves. In 1852, the ratio of male to female Chinese immigrants was a 18:1. These restaurants served as gathering places and cultural centers for the Chinese community. By 1850, there were five Chinese restaurants in San Francisco. Soon after, significant amounts of food were being imported from China to America's west coast.
The trend spread steadily eastward with the development of the American railways, particularly to New York City. The Chinese Exclusion Act allowed merchants to enter the country, and in 1915, restaurant owners became eligible for merchant visas, these visas fueled the opening of Chinese restaurants as an immigration vehicle. The merchant status was based on the use of rotating managers. Restaurants would operate as a partnership among many people, rotating different partners through the management responsibilities and establishing them as merchants to earn the exemption.
portrays a Chinese American restaurant in New York City]]
By the early decades of the 20th century, Chinese restaurants had brought new culinary ingredients to towns and cities across the United States, including soy sauce, sesame oil, bean sprouts, water chestnuts, dried mushrooms, fried noodles, Oolong tea and almond cookies. Bok choi, then called "Pak choi", was sometimes called "Chinese Romaine". Similarly, Napa cabbage was called "Chinese cabbage". In those years, it was commonplace for prosperous American families, especially on the West Coast, to employ Chinese cooks as domestic servants. In 1915, a manual was published in San Francisco, instructing Chinese immigrants how to cook for American families. As for 2023, the United States had around 37,000 Chinese restaurants.
Along the way, cooks adapted southern Chinese dishes and developed a style of Chinese food not found in China, such as chop suey. Restaurants (along with Chinese laundries) provided an ethnic niche for small businesses at a time when Chinese people were excluded from most jobs in the wage economy by ethnic discrimination or lack of language fluency. By the 1920s, this cuisine, particularly chop suey, became popular among middle-class Americans. However, after World War II it began to be dismissed for not being "authentic", though it continued to be popular.
In 1955, the Republic of China (having itself retreated to Taiwan) evacuated the Dachen Islands. Many who escaped to Taiwan later moved to the United States as they lacked strong social networks and access to opportunities in Taiwan. Chefs from the Dachen Islands had a strong influence on American Chinese food.
Chinese-American restaurants played a key role in ushering in the era of take-out and delivery food in the United States. In New York City, delivery was pioneered in the 1970s by Empire Szechuan Gourmet Franchise, which hired Taiwanese students studying at Columbia University to do the work. Chinese American restaurants were among the first restaurants to use picture menus in the US. and Wenzhounese from Zhejiang in mainland China, specifically destined to work in Chinese restaurants in New York City, beginning in the 1980s.
Adapting Chinese cooking techniques to local produce and tastes has led to the development of American Chinese cuisine. Many of the Chinese restaurant menus in the US are printed in Chinatown, Manhattan, which has a strong Chinese-American demographic.
Late 20th-century tastes have been more accommodating to the local residents. By this time, it had become evident that Chinese restaurants no longer catered mainly to Chinese customers.
In 2011, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History displayed some of the historical background and cultural artifacts of American Chinese cuisine in its exhibit entitled, Sweet & Sour: A Look at the History of Chinese Food in the United States.Differences from other regional cuisines in China
Many of the dishes that commonly recognized as "Chinese food" were actually developed in America and bear little resemblance to traditional Chinese cuisine, some examples include fortune cookies, crab rangoon, and General Tso's chicken, non of which originated in China. Instead, these dishes were crafted to suit American palates, often showing sweetness, deep-frying, and bold sauces.
American Chinese cuisine has its roots in the culinary traditions of Chinese immigrants from Guangdong province, particularly the Toisan (Taishan) district, the origin of most Chinese immigration before the closure of immigration from China in 1924. These Chinese immagrants developed new styles and used readily available ingredients, especially in California. The type of Chinese-American cooking served in restaurants was different from the foods eaten in Chinese-American homes. Among various regional cuisines in China, Cantonese cuisine has been the most influential in the development of American Chinese food.
American Chinese food typically features greater quantities of meat than traditional Chinese cuisine. An increasing number of American Chinese restaurants—including some upscale establishments—have begun to incorporate more authentic dishes in response to growing customer demand for traditional flavors. While Chinese cuisine makes frequent use of Asian leaf vegetables, like bok choy and gai-lan, American Chinese food makes use of some ingredients that are rarely used in China. For example, Western broccoli () instead of Chinese broccoli (gai-lan, ).
Chinese ingredients considered "exotic" in North America have become more available over time, including fresh fruits and vegetables which previously had been rare. For example, edible snow pea pods have become widely available, while the less-known dau miu (also called "pea sprouts", "pea pod stems", or "pea shoots") are also appearing on menus, and even in supermarkets in North America.
buffet restaurant in the United States]]
American-Chinese food also has had a reputation for high levels of MSG to enhance flavor. Around the early to mid-2000s through the 2010s and into the 2020s, market forces and customer demand have encouraged many restaurants to offer "MSG Free" or "No MSG" menus, or to omit this ingredient on request. But some discussion appeared in 2020 discussed how MSG's reputation has evolved in recent years, suggesting this shift has been ongoing for at least the past decade or more.
.]]
An typical example to show how American Chinese cuisine differs from traditional Chinese food is Egg fried rice. In American Chinese cuisine it's prepared with more soy sauce added for more flavor whereas the traditional egg fried rice uses less soy sauce. Some food styles, such as dim sum, were also modified to fit American palates, such as added batter for fried dishes and extra soy sauce.
Both Chinese and American-Chinese cooking utilize similar methods of preparation, such as stir frying, pan frying, and deep frying, which are all easily done using a wok.
Ming Tsai, chef and former owner of the Blue Ginger restaurant in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and host of PBS culinary show Simply Ming, has commented on the traits of American Chinese restaurants. He highlighted that these establishments often contains dishes representing three to five regions of China simultaneously and normally include items such as chop suey, diverse sweet and sour dishes, and an array of chow mein or fried rice. Tsai said "Chinese-American cuisine as an adaptation of traditional Chinese food, modified to attract American customers by making it blander, thicker, and sweeter.
Most American Chinese primarily cater to non-Chinese customers, offering menus written in English accompanied descriptive pictures. In some cases, separate Chinese-written menus are available, typically including traditional dishes such items as liver, chicken feet, or other meat dishes that might scare American customers (such as offal). In Chinatown, Manhattan, certain restaurants are known to offer a so-called "phantom" menu, which features items preferred by ethnic Chinese diners but often excluded from the standard menu due to the perception that they would not attract non-Chinese customers.
Dishes
Menu items not found in China
Dishes that often appear on American Chinese restaurant menus include:
* Almond chicken — Chicken breaded in batter containing ground almonds, fried and served with almonds and onions.
* Chicken and broccoli — Similar to beef and broccoli, but with chicken instead of beef.
* Chinese chicken salad — Usually contains sliced or shredded chicken, uncooked leafy greens, carrots, cucumbers, crispy noodles (or fried wonton skins) and sesame dressing. Some version include mandarin oranges.
* Chop suey — Derived from a term meaning "assorted pieces" in Chinese. It typically consists of vegetables and meat in a brown sauce but can also be served in a white sauce.
* Crab rangoon — Fried wonton skins stuffed with (usually) artificial crab meat (surimi) and cream cheese.
* Fortune cookie — Invented in California as a Westernized version of the Japanese omikuji senbei, fortune cookies have become sweetened and found their way to many American Chinese restaurants.
* Fried wontons — Somewhat similar to crab rangoon, a filling, (most often pork), is wrapped in a wonton skin and deep fried.
* General Tso's chicken — Chunks of chicken that are dipped in batter, deep fried, and seasoned with ginger, garlic, sesame oil, scallions, and hot chili peppers. This dish was named after Qing dynasty statesman and military leader Zuo Zongtang, often referred to as General Tso.
* Mongolian beef — Fried beef with scallions or white onions in a spicy and often sweet brown sauce.
* Pepper steak — Sliced steak, green bell peppers, tomatoes, and white or green onions stir fried with salt, sugar, and soy sauce. Bean sprouts are a less common addition.
* Royal beef—Deep-fried sliced beef, doused in a wine sauce and often served with steamed broccoli.
* Sesame chicken — Boned, marinated, battered, and deep-fried chicken which is then dressed with a translucent red or orange, sweet and mildly spicy sauce, made from soy sauce, corn starch, vinegar, chicken broth, and sugar, and topped with sesame seeds.
strips are commonly served as complimentary appetizers along with duck sauce and hot mustard]]
* Sushi — despite being served in the Japanese and American styles, some American Chinese restaurants serve various types of sushi, usually on buffets.
* Sweet roll — yeast rolls, typically fried, covered in granulated sugar or powdered sugar. Some variants are stuffed with cream cheese or icing.
* Wonton strips — these deep-fried strips of dough are commonly offered as complimentary appetizers, along with duck sauce and hot mustard, or with soup when ordering take-out.
Other American Chinese dishes
[https://omnivorescookbook.com/stir-fried-pea-shoots/ Dau miu] is a Chinese vegetable that has become popular since the early 1990s, and now not only appears on English-language menus, usually as "pea shoots", but is often served by some non-Asian restaurants as well. Originally, it was only available during a few months of the year, but it is now grown in greenhouses and is available year-round.
Versions of dishes also found in China
* Beijing beef — in China, this dish uses gai lan (Chinese broccoli) rather than American broccoli.
* Beef and broccoli — flank steak cut into small pieces, stir-fried with broccoli, and covered in a dark sauce made with soy sauce and oyster sauce and thickened with cornstarch.
* Cashew chicken — stir-fried tender chicken pieces with cashew nuts.
* Chow mein — literally means "stir-fried noodles". Chow mein consists of fried crispy noodles with bits of meat and vegetables. It can come with chicken, pork, shrimp or beef.
* Egg foo young — Chinese-style omelet with vegetables and meat, usually served with a brown gravy. While some restaurants in North America deep-fry the omelet, versions found in Asia are more likely to fry in the wok.
* Egg roll — while spring rolls have a thin, light beige crispy skin that flakes apart, and is filled with mushrooms, bamboo, and other vegetables inside, the American-style egg roll has a thicker, chewier, dark brown bubbly skin stuffed with cabbage and usually bits of meat or seafood (such as pork or shrimp), but no egg. In some regions, a filling of shredded and dried celery replaces cabbage, resulting in a more greenish tinge to the filling.
* Fried rice — fried-rice dishes are popular offerings in American Chinese food due to the speed and ease of preparation and their appeal to American tastes.It is commonly prepared with rice cooled overnight, allowing restaurants to put leftover rice to good use (freshly cooked rice is actually less suitable for fried rice). The American-Chinese version of this dish typically uses more soy sauce than the versions found in China, and it's offered with different combinations of meat (pork, chicken, shrimp ) and vegetables.
* Ginger beef () — tender beef cut in chunks, mixed with ginger and Chinese mixed vegetables.
* Ginger fried beef () — tender beef cut in strings, battered, deep fried, then re-fried in a wok mixed with a sweet sauce, a variation of a popular Northern Chinese dish.
* Hulatang — a traditional Chinese soup with hot spices, often called "spicy soup" on menus.
* Hot and sour soup — the North American soups tend to have starch added as a thickener.
* Kung Pao chicken — a spicy Sichuan dish that is served with peanuts, scallions, and Sichuan peppers. Some versions in North America may include zucchini and bell peppers.
* Lo mein ("stirred noodles") — frequently made with eggs and flour, making them chewier than a recipe simply using water. Thick, spaghetti-shaped noodles are pan fried with vegetables (mainly bok choy and Chinese cabbage or napa) and meat. Sometimes this dish is referred to as chow mein (which literally means "stir-fried noodles" in Cantonese).
* Mei fun — noodles usually simmered in broth with other ingredients such as fish balls, beef balls or slices of fishcake.
* Moo shu pork — the original version uses more typically Chinese ingredients (including wood ear fungi and daylily buds) and thin flour pancakes, while the American version often uses vegetables more familiar to Americans, and thicker pancakes. This dish is quite popular in Chinese restaurants in the United States, but not as popular in China.
* Orange chicken — chopped, battered, fried chicken with a sweet orange flavored chili sauce that is thickened and glazed. The traditional version consists of stir-fried chicken in a light, slightly sweet soy sauce flavored with dried orange peels.
* Wonton soup — In most American Chinese restaurants, only wonton dumplings in broth are served, while versions found in China may come with noodles. (In Guangdong, it can be a full meal in itself, consisting of thin egg noodles and several pork and prawn wontons in a pork or chicken soup broth or noodle broth). Especially in takeout restaurants, wonton are often made with thicker dough skins, to withstand the rigors of delivery.
Regional variations
New York City
The New York metropolitan area is home to the largest Chinese population outside of Asia, which also constitutes the largest metropolitan Asian-American group in the United States and the largest Asian-national metropolitan diaspora in the Western Hemisphere. The Chinese-American population of the New York City metropolitan area was an estimated 893,697 as of 2017.
Given the New York metropolitan area's continuing status as by far the leading gateway for Chinese immigrants to the United States, all popular styles of every Chinese regional cuisine have commensurately become ubiquitously accessible in New York City, including Hakka, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Hunanese, Szechuan, Cantonese, Fujianese, Xinjiang, Zhejiang, and Korean Chinese cuisine. Even the relatively obscure Dongbei style of cuisine indigenous to Northeast China is now available in Flushing, Queens, as well as Mongolian cuisine and Uyghur cuisine.
Kosher preparation
Kosher preparation of Chinese food is also widely available in New York City, given the metropolitan area's large Jewish and particularly Orthodox Jewish populations.
The perception that American Jews eat at Chinese restaurants on Christmas Day is documented in media. The tradition may have arisen from the lack of other open restaurants on Christmas Day, the close proximity of Jewish and Chinese immigrants to each other in New York City, and the absence of dairy foods combined with meat.
Kosher Chinese food is usually prepared in New York City, as well as in other large cities with Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, under strict rabbinical supervision as a prerequisite for Kosher certification.
Los Angeles County
Chinese populations in Los Angeles represent at least 21 of the 34 provincial-level administrative units of China, along with the largest population of Taiwanese-born immigrants outside of Taiwan, making greater Los Angeles home to a diverse population of Chinese people in the United States.
Chinese-American cuisine in the Greater Los Angeles area is concentrated in Chinese ethnoburbs rather than traditional Chinatowns. The oldest Chinese ethnoburb is Monterey Park, considered to be the nation's first suburban Chinatown.
Although Chinatown in Los Angeles is still a significant commercial center for Chinese immigrants, the majority are centered in the San Gabriel Valley which is the one of the largest concentration of Asian-Americans in the country, stretching from Monterey Park into the cities of Alhambra, San Gabriel, Rosemead, San Marino, South Pasadena, West Covina, Walnut, City of Industry, Diamond Bar, Arcadia, and Temple City.
The Valley Boulevard corridor is the main artery of Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley. Another hub with a significant Chinese population is Irvine (Orange County). More than 200,000 Chinese Americans live in the San Gabriel Valley alone, with over 67% being foreign-born. The valley has become a brand-name tourist destination in China, although droughts in California are creating a difficult impact upon its water security and existential viability. Of the ten cities in the United States with the highest proportions of Chinese Americans, the top eight are located in the San Gabriel Valley, making it one of the largest concentrated hubs for Chinese Americans in North America.
Some regional styles of Chinese cuisine include Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, Dalian, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Hunan, Mongolian hot pot, Nanjing, Shanghai, Shanxi, Shenyang, Wuxi, Xinjiang, Yunnan, and Wuhan.
Food blogger David R. Chan has visited more than 8000 Chinese restaurants, including hundreds around his home in Los Angeles.
San Francisco Bay Area
Since the early 1990s, many American Chinese restaurants influenced by California cuisine have opened in the San Francisco Bay Area. The trademark dishes of American Chinese cuisine remain on the menu, but there is more emphasis on fresh vegetables, and the selection is vegetarian-friendly.
This new cuisine has exotic ingredients like mangos and portobello mushrooms. Brown rice is often offered as an alternative to white rice.
Some restaurants substitute grilled wheat flour tortillas for the rice pancakes in mushu dishes. This occurs even in some restaurants that would not otherwise be identified as California Chinese, both the more Westernized places and the more authentic places. There is a Mexican bakery that supplies some restaurants with thinner tortillas made for use with mushu. Mushu purists do not always react positively to this trend.
In addition, many restaurants serving more native-style Chinese cuisines exist, due to the high numbers and proportion of ethnic Chinese in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Restaurants specializing in Cantonese, Sichuanese, Hunanese, Northern Chinese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong traditions are widely available, as are more specialized restaurants such as seafood restaurants, Hong Kong-style diners and cafes, also known as Cha chaan teng (), dim sum teahouses, and hot pot restaurants. Many Chinatown areas also feature Chinese bakeries, boba milk tea shops, roasted meat, vegetarian cuisine, and specialized dessert shops.
Chop suey is not widely available in San Francisco, and the area's chow mein is different from Midwestern chow mein.
Boston
Chinese cuisine in Boston results from a combination of economic and regional factors, in association with the wide Chinese academic scene. The growing Boston Chinatown accommodates Chinese-owned bus lines shuttling an increasing number of passengers to and from the numerous Chinatowns in New York City, and this has led to some exchange between Boston Chinese cuisine and that in New York.
A large immigrant Fujianese immigrant population has made a home in Boston, leading to Fuzhou cuisine being readily available there. An increasing Vietnamese population has also had an influence on Chinese cuisine in Greater Boston.
In addition, innovative dishes incorporating chow mein and chop suey as well as locally farmed produce and regionally procured seafood are found in Chinese as well as non-Chinese food in and around Boston. The selection of Chinese bakery products has increased markedly in the 21st century, although the range of choices in New York City remains supreme.
Joyce Chen introduced northern Chinese (Mandarin) and Shanghainese dishes to Boston in the 1950s, including Peking duck, moo shu pork, hot and sour soup, and potstickers, which she called "Peking Ravioli" or "Ravs". Her restaurants were frequented by early pioneers of the ARPANET, as well as celebrities such as John Kenneth Galbraith, James Beard, Julia Child, Henry Kissinger, Beverly Sills, and Danny Kaye. A former Harvard University president called her eating establishment "not merely a restaurant, but a cultural exchange center". In addition, her single-season PBS national television series Joyce Chen Cooks popularized some dishes which could be made at home, and she often encouraged using substitute ingredients when necessary.PhiladelphiaThe evolving American Chinese cuisine scene in Philadelphia has similarities with the situation in both New York City and Boston. As with Boston, Philadelphia is experiencing significant Chinese immigration from New York City, to the north, and from China, the top country of birth by a significant margin for a new arrivals there .
There is a growing Fujianese community in Philadelphia as well, and Fuzhou cuisine is readily available in the Philadelphia Chinatown. Also, emerging Vietnamese cuisine in Philadelphia is contributing to evolution in local Chinese cuisine, with some Chinese-American restaurants adopting Vietnamese influences or recipes.
Washington, D.C.
Although Washington, D.C.'s Chinese community has not achieved as high of a local profile as that in other major cities along the Mid-Atlantic United States, it is now growing, and rapidly so, due to the gentrification of DC's Chinatown and the status of Washington, D.C., as the capital of the United States. The growing Chinese community in D.C. and its suburbs has revitalized the influence of Chinese cuisine in the area.
Washington, D.C.'s population is 1% Chinese, making them the largest single Asian ancestry in the city. However, the Chinese community in the DC area is no longer solely concentrated in the area of Chinatown, which is about 15% Chinese and 25% Asian, but is mostly concentrated throughout various towns in suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia. The largest concentration of Chinese and Taiwanese in the D.C. area is in Rockville, Maryland, in Montgomery County.
A popular dish localized in Chinese American carryouts across the DMV region consists of whole fried chicken wings served with mumbo sauce, a sweet, tangy ketchup-based condiment.
In D.C. proper, there are Chinese-owned restaurants specializing in both Chinese American and authentic Chinese cuisine. Regional variations of Chinese cuisine that restaurants in D.C. specialize in include Shanghainese cuisine, Cantonese cuisine, Uyghur cuisine, Mongolian cuisine, and Sichuan cuisine. In the suburbs of D.C. in Maryland and Virginia, many of which have a much higher Chinese population than D.C., regional variations present aside from the ones previously mentioned include Hong Kong cuisine, Hunan cuisine, Shaanxi cuisine, Taiwanese cuisine, and Yunnan cuisine.
Puerto Rico
Hawaii
Hawaiian-Chinese food developed somewhat differently from Chinese cuisine in the continental United States.
Owing to the diversity of Pacific ethnicities in Hawaii and the history of the Chinese influence in Hawaii, resident Chinese cuisine forms a component of the cuisine of Hawaii, which is a fusion of different culinary traditions. Some Chinese dishes are typically served as part of plate lunches in Hawaii.
The names of foods are different as well, such as Manapua'', from the Hawaiian contraction of "Mea ono pua'a" or "delicious pork item" from the dim sum bao, though the meat is not necessarily pork.
Other regions
* Chow mein sandwich — sandwich of chow mein and gravy (Southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island)
* Chop suey sandwich — sandwich of chicken chop suey on a hamburger bun (North Shore of Massachusetts)
* St. Paul sandwich — egg foo young patty in plain white sandwich bread (St. Louis, Missouri)
* Springfield-style cashew chicken — a style of cashew chicken that combines breaded deep-fried chicken, cashew nuts, and oyster sauce (Springfield, Missouri)
* War/wor sue gai (boneless almond chicken) — bite-sized Southern-style fried chicken with yellow sauce (Columbus, Ohio)
* Yaka mein — Chinese-Creole food found in New Orleans that evolved from beef noodle soup
Chain restaurants
meal: Kung Pao chicken, orange chicken, chow mein and steamed vegetables]]
* China Coast — closed in 1995; owned by General Mills Corporation, formerly 52 locations throughout the United States
* Leeann Chin — Minnesota and North Dakota; owned at one time by General Mills Corp.
* Manchu Wok — throughout the United States and Canada, as well as Guam, Korea and Japan
* Panda Express — throughout North America (including Canada and Mexico), plus locations in Asia and the Middle East
* Pei Wei Asian Diner — throughout the United States; formerly a subsidiary of P.F. Chang's
* P. F. Chang's China Bistro — throughout the United States; featuring California-Chinese fusion cuisine
* Pick Up Stix — California, Arizona, and Nevada
* Stir Crazy — Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, Florida, Indiana, Texas, and Ohio. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stir_Crazy_%28restaurant%29?utm_source Stir Crazy has faced closures in recent years]. As of 2025, its operational status is uncertain, and it may have ceased operations.
Popular culture
Many American films (for example: The Godfather; Ghostbusters; The Lost Boys; The Naked Gun; Crossing Delancey; Paid in Full; and Inside Out) involve scenes where Chinese take-out food is eaten from oyster pails. A consistent choice of cuisine in all these cases, however, might just be an indicator of its popularity. A running gag in Dallas is Cliff Barnes' fondness for inexpensive Chinese take-out food, as opposed to his nemesis J. R. Ewing frequenting fine restaurants.
Among the numerous American television series and films that feature Chinese restaurants as a setting include A Christmas Story, Seinfeld (particularly the episode "The Chinese Restaurant"), Sex and the City, Big Trouble in Little China, South Park, Year of the Dragon, Lethal Weapon 4, Mickey Blue Eyes, Booty Call, Rush Hour 2, and Men in Black 3. In most cases, it is not an actual restaurant but a movie set that typifies the stereotypical American Chinese eatery, featuring "paper lanterns and intricate woodwork", with "numerous fish tanks and detailed [red] wallpaper [with gold designs]" and "golden dragons", plus "hanging ducks in the window". For Chinese Americans, American Chinese cuisine has already become part of their childhood memories and life, which also would be a bridge between Chinese and American cultural communications and interactions. For example, Panda Express and P.F. Chang's, two of the most famous American Chinese restaurants in the United States that have become the symbol of American Chinese cuisine and have gained appreciation from many Americans.
Additionally, American Chinese cuisine brought some new ingredients and cooking methods to the United States, such as stir-frying and steaming. Thus, many restaurants in the United States started to combine non-Chinese dishes with traditional Chinese cooking techniques and flavors, which promoted the development of fusion cuisine.
Authenticity in Restaurants
Articles have stated that authenticity involves “more than food; [https://friedmanhospitalitygroup.com/perfecting-the-ambiance-the-role-of-decor-and-service/ ambiance], [https://modwineco.com/music-for-restaurants-matters/ music], serving style come into play”. Restaurants’ authenticity is often not fixed, but rather based on communication, symbols, and changing ideas. Some argue that ethnic restaurants, such as Chinese restaurants, helping immigrants feel connected culturally. According to researchers “relationship (guanxi) surfaces as a key expression of what makes a culinary experience authentic”, aligning with the idea that publicity, reputation and relationship factoring in for Chinese in terms of public relations. This suggests that social connections and reputations contribute towards how authenticity is perceived in the culinary context. However, past studies argue that the concept of authenticity is simply a marketing ploy to attract non-chinese customers rather than a true reflection of the culture. In other words, the concept of authenticity has often been examined from the perspective of the tourist seeking an authentic experience.
Nutritional Concerns
The adaptation of Chinese cuisine to American tastes has also shifted its nutritional content. Many have claimed that these modifications have made it less healthy, as the dishes now contain higher levels of sodium, fat, and oil. This has influenced some to perceive the ‘Americanization’ of the cuisine to have contributed to the reduced nutritional value. For example, the Orange Chicken at Panda Express contains 22 grams of fat, exceeding the recommended daily intake of 20 grams. Similarly, the Kung Pao Chicken contains 21 grams of fat, which also surpasses the dietary guidelines. However, it is possible to customize the meals to fit an individual’s nutritional needs.
MSG Panic
In the 1980s, a popular food seasoning known as monosodium glutamate (MSG) became the subject of health concerns leading up to the “MSG panic.” A report from Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok in a medical journal describing the symptoms he experienced after dining at a Chinese restaurant, contributed to the growing concerns about MSG. Media coverage amplified these concerns which popularized the term “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome,” despite MSG being a widely used seasoning in a range of foods. In response to a heightened public concern, researchers hastily conducted studies that framed the issue towards Chinese cuisine rather than the seasoning MSG, though it has been claimed as the initial linkage.
Sociologist Stanley Cohen defined the fear surrounding MSG in which “a condition, episode, person, or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.” Some researchers characterize the fear of MSG in Chinese cuisine as a "moral panic”, and claim it was influenced by historical xenophobia toward Chinese Americans and immigrants, contributing to the stigmatization of Chinese cuisine as being of lower quality or unhealthy due to its MSG content. Impact on China Although some Chinese people will regard American Chinese food as inauthentic food and less likely to have it, or they will not recognize American Chinese cuisine, in recent years, some American Chinese food restaurants have opened in some cities of China, such as Beijing and Shanghai.See also
* American cuisine
* Australian Chinese cuisine
* British Chinese cuisine
* Canadian Chinese cuisine
* Chinese bakery products
* Chinese cuisine
* Chinese Latin American cuisine
* Filipino Chinese cuisine
* Fortune Cookie
* Fusion cuisine
* Indian Chinese cuisine
* List of Chinese restaurants
* New Zealand Chinese cuisine
* Oyster pail
Citations
References and further reading
Studies
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* Free download:
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* Lv, Nan, and J. Lynne Brown (2010). Chinese American Family Food Systems: Impact of Western Influences. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 106-114. doi:10.1016/j.jneb.2009.04.005.
* Library of Congress (2021). Chinese Americans and the Gold Rush. Inside Adams: Science, Technology & Business, Library of Congress.
Cookbooks
* Sara Bosse, Onoto Watanna, with an Introduction by Jacqueline M. Newman. Chinese-Japanese Cook Book. (1914; reprinted, Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 2006). . .
*
* Eileen Yin-Fei Lo and Alexandra Grablewski. ''The Chinese Kitchen: Recipes, Techniques and Ingredients, History, and Memories from America's Leading Authority on Chinese Cooking.'' (New York: William Morrow, 1999). .
External links
* "Chinese food in America History" (The Food Timeline) [http://www.foodtimeline.org/restaurants.html#chineserestaurants The Food Timeline: history notes--restaurants, chefs & foodservice]
* [https://viuspace.viu.ca/handle/10613/2699 Imogen Lim Restaurant Menu Collection: American menus]. Vancouver Island University Library.
* [https://archive.org/details/spiller?tab=about Harley J. Spiller Collection of Chinese Restaurant Menus] University of Toronto, Scarborough Library
Cuisine
Cuisine
Category:Chinese cuisine
Category:Hawaiian cuisine | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Chinese_cuisine | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.988332 |
1559 | Ahenobarbus | Ahenobarbus (Latin, 'red-beard', literally 'bronze-beard'), also spelled Aenobarbus or Ænobarbus, may refer to:
Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus (disambiguation), Romans
Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (disambiguation), Romans
Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, birth name of Nero, Roman emperor 54–68
Frederick Barbarossa, known in Latin as Fridericus Ænobarbus, Holy Roman Emperor 1155–1190
See also | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahenobarbus | 2025-04-05T18:25:41.991421 |
1560 | Ahmad Shah Durrani | | title = Padishah<br>Ghazi<br> Shāh Durr-i-Durrān ("King, Pearl of Pearls")
| image = Portrait of Ahmad-Shah Durrani. Mughal miniature. ca. 1757, Bibliothèque nationale de France.jpg
| image_size | caption Portrait of Ahmad Shah Durrani, 1757, Bibliothèque nationale de France
| succession1 = Afghan Emperor
| reign1 = July 1747 – 4 June 1772
| coronation1 = July 1747
| predecessor1 = Office established<br>(Nader Shah as the Shah of Iran)
| successor1 = Timur Shah Durrani
| house = House of Durrani
| house-type = Dynasty
| father = Zaman Khan
| mother Zarghona Anaa
| birth_name = Ahmad Khan Abdali
| birth_date = 1720—1722
| birth_place = Herat
or Multan
| death_date
| death_place = Maruf, Durrani Empire
| burial_date = June 1772
| burial_place = Tomb of Ahmad Shah Durrani, Kandahar
| religion = Sunni Islam
| spouse =
*
}}
| module = Afsharid Empire<br> Durrani Empire
| branch Persian Army<br> Afghan Army
| serviceyears = 1738–1772
| rank = Sipahi, Ispahsalar, Emir, Shah
| battles =
}}
}}
Ahmad Shāh Durrānī (; }}), also known as Ahmad Shāh Abdālī' (), was the first ruler and founder of the Durrani Empire. He is often regarded as the founder of modern Afghanistan.
Throughout his reign, Ahmad Shah fought over fifteen major military campaigns. Nine of them being centered in India, three in Khorasan, and three in Afghan Turkestan. Having rarely lost a battle, historians widely recognize Ahmad Shah as a brilliant military leader and tactician, typically being compared to rulers such as Mahmud of Ghazni, Babur, and as well as Nader Shah. Historian Hari Ram Gupta refers to Ahmad Shah as the "greatest general of Asia of his time", as well as one of the greatest conquerors in Asian history.
Name and title
His birth name was Ahmad Khan, born into the Abdali tribe. After his accession to power in 1747, he became known as Ahmad Shah. His tribe also changed the name from Abdali, instead becoming the Durrani. Afghans often call him Ahmad Shāh Bābā'', meaning "Ahmad Shah the Father".
In historical sources, his tribes name is interchangeably used between Abdali and Durrani, with other common names for him being Ahmad Shah Abdali.
Early life
Ahmad Shah was born between 1720 and 1722 in either Herat, Afghanistan, or Multan, Pakistan. Sources are disputed on where he was born. Modern scholarship came to the consensus that Ahmad Shah was born in Multan, but this is disputed by Nejatie, who states that the majority of sources from Ahmad Shah's time state that he was born in Herat, rather than Multan, including the Tarikh-i Ahmad Shahi, a primary source commissioned by Ahmad Shah.
His father, Zaman Khan, was the emir of Herat. Zaman Khan had died in 1721, leading to Ahmad Shah being raised alongside his brother Zulfiqar Khan in Shindand and Farah. In the mid-1720s, Zulfiqar Khan was invited to rule Herat. Nothing else is heard of Ahmad Shah until 1731–1732, when Zulfiqar Khan was defeated by Nader Shah, forcing both Zulfiqar Khan and Ahmad Shah to flee to Kandahar, where they remained political prisoners of Hussain Hotak.
After Nader Shah conquered Kandahar, Ahmad Shah and Zulfiqar Khan were freed. Ahmad Shah spent much of his early life in the service of Nader Shah. Accompanying him on his invasion of India, Ahmad Shah was later resettled in Mazandaran alongside his brother. Iranica states that Ahmad Shah may have become the governor of Mazandaran. After the death of his brother, Ahmad Shah enlisted in the Afsharid military in 1742. Some sources suggest that it was only Zulfiqar Khan that left for Mazandaran, while Ahmad Shah remained in Nader Shah's service as an officer.
During Nader Shah's invasion of India, Ahmad Shah personally commanded a regiment of Durrani tribesmen. Ahmad Shah's forces committed massacres and sacked Delhi alongside Nader Shah's army in 1739. According to legend, Nizam ul-Mulk, the Mughal governor of Hyderabad, who was an expert in physiognomy, predicted that Ahmad Shah would become king. Nader Shah took notice of this and also believed in the prophecy, supposedly clipping a piece of Ahmad Shah's ears, and remarking "When you become a king, this will remind you of me". Nader Shah also requested that Ahmad Shah be generous with his descendants. Nejatie is skeptical of the account.
In 1744, Ahmad Shah was promoted to a personal staff of Nader Shah. In a campaign against the Ottomans, Ahmad Shah distinguished himself and was allowed to raise a contingent of 3–4,000 Durrani tribesmen by Nader Shah. Ahmad Shah's contingent became one of Nader Shah's most trusted, utilizing them to shatter the power of his other commanders due to his perception that they were planning to rebel or kill him.
Death of Nader Shah
In June 1747, Nader Shah was convinced that his personal guard intended to assassinate him. As a result, he summoned Ahmad Shah and other loyal commanders. Nader Shah ordered Ahmad Shah to assemble his Durrani regiments, and to arrest his personal guard. If the personal guard resisted, Ahmad Shah was given permission to kill them all. He was ordered to do this at first light. Nader Shah then chose to sleep with his favorite wife, but did so outside the royal tent, where the same guards he accused of treachery presumed night duty, while Ahmad Shah with his regiments were established at the defenses of the camp.
News of Nader Shah's plan leaked, with the conspirators being forced to act. Four conspirators entered the royal enclosure and entered Nader Shah's tent at Quchan, assassinating him. Chaos ensued afterward, and plans to coverup the killing by the conspirators failed. They resorted to pillaging the royal enclosure while news of Nader Shah's death rapidly spread. The next morning, the royal guard attacked Ahmad Shah's forces, who despite being heavily outnumbered, drove the Persians and Qizilbash off. Ahmad Shah then entered the tent of Nader Shah, taking the Koh-i-Noor diamond and a signet ring from his body.
Return to Kandahar
]]
Having driven off the Persians and Qizilbash, Ahmad Shah departed for Kandahar with his regiments, and his Uzbek ally, Hajji Bi Ming. Ahmad Shah first settled the dispute of leadership, asserting himself as the leader of Durrani tribesmen by forcing the former leader to step down. Ahmad Shah also killed 'Abd al-Ghani Khan, his uncle and the governor of Kandahar to secure complete power over the Durrani regiments. With the dispute over leadership concluded, Ahmad Shah's forces grew to 6,000 Afghans.
Following this, Ahmad Shah moved through Khabushan, advancing to Kashmar. While on-route, Ahmad Shah accumulated supplies for his army and proceeded toward Torbat-e Heydarieh, where they received news that Adel Shah had sent a force to halt the Afghans. As a result, Ahmad Shah led his forces to Tun and then Farah, where they defeated an army sent by Adel Shah. With Farah under his control, the Afghans proceeded to Grishk, and then Kandahar.
While on-route to Kandahar, Ahmad Shah recovered a military convoy that contained the annual tribute from Sindh. The value of the treasure is disputed, but it's given within an estimate of 3,000,000–260,000,000 rupees. The convoy was escorted by Mohammad Taqi Khan Shirazi, a disgruntled former officer of Nader Shah, and Nasir Khan, the governor of Kabul and Peshawar. Taqi Khan joined Ahmad Shah and divided the wealth, while Nasir Khan refused and was imprisoned. Later, he was ransomed on the conditions of an annual tribute of 500,000 rupees, and that he would enter Ahmad Shah's suzerainty. The army of Ahmad Shah grew to over 18,000 men, also including war elephants.Accession and coronation
of Ahmad Shah Durrani by Abdali chiefs at Kandahar in 1747]]
Upon reaching Kandahar, Ahmad Shah established camp in Naderabad and prepared to be crowned as King. According to legend, Ahmad Shah declared a Jirga, summoning all tribal leaders who unanimously selected Ahmad Shah as king. A piece of wheat or barley was then placed on Ahmad Shah's turban. Singh cites this account, despite there being no contemporary evidence to suggest this occurred.
In reality, Ahmad Shah was brought to power through a nine-man military council. Ahmad Shah's accession was further disputed by Jamal Khan, the leader of the Barakzai tribe. The Barakzai were the most powerful clan of the Durranis centered in the Kandahar and Helmand regions. The dispute over accession continued until an agreement was made where Jamal Khan would submit to Ahmad Shah as king, while Ahmad Shah would make Jamal Khan and his descendants Wazir. With an agreement reached, Sabir Shah, Ahmad Shah's advisor, took a piece of greenery or stalk and attached it to Ahmad Shah's cap, officially crowning him. Scholars state that Ahmad Shah's rise to power was effectively a military coup, rather than an election.
Following his accession, Ahmad Shah adopted the epithet "Durr-i Durrān", meaning "Pearl of Pearls", also changing the name of his tribe from Abdali to Durrani.Reign as Shah (1747–1772), who Ahmad Shah often envisioned himself as the successor of.]]AdministrationAt the beginning of his rule, Ahmad Shah's empire consisted of Kandahar, Helmand, and Farah. The Hazaras of Bala Murghab and the Khanate of Kalat ruled by Nasir Khan also rested under Afghan suzerainty.
However, Ahmad Shah had no administrative experience, nor did much of his closest advisors. As a result, he chose to adopt a government style similar to the Mughals and Safavids, with his main idea of a government based on an absolute monarchy. A tribal council ruled in hand with Ahmad Shah as well, serving as a form of cabinet. However, Ahmad Shah had made the positions of his cabinet hereditary, thus making it difficult to dismiss advisors without causing conflict. Their roles, however, were mostly purely de-jure, and tasks were delegated to subordinates.
The civil service of the empire was dominated by the Qizilbash, as most of the Durrani elite were illiterate. The Qizilbash also significantly formed the major part of Ahmad Shah's bodyguard, counterbalancing other Durrani leaders and tribes. The complications and effectively divided government made the administration difficult to function, and caused ethnic tension between the Qizilbash and tribal council of Ahmad Shah.
Further complications erupted in Ahmad Shah's administration over exempting his own tribe from taxation. Other Afghan tribes and ethnicities were discontent from such, as they were also devoid of being allowed to serve in the administration of the empire. This was further exasperated by Ahmad Shah when he gave the right of revenue collection to the highest bidder. The victors of these auctions, typically members of Ahmad Shah's own tribe, were completely free in taxing as much as they wished. While members of the Durrani tribe rapidly became rich, some landholders were forced into complete debt, forcing many to sell their lands or flee the kingdom, likely being bought up by the Durranis who had driven them to bankruptcy.
Ahmad Shah envisioned himself as the successor of Nader Shah. Instead of establishing a capable administration, Ahmad Shah focused on wars and military campaigns to supply his treasury, with any downturns easily being covered by the treasures of war. Throughout his reign, he rarely spent his time in Kandahar, the capital of his empire, and instead pursued military campaigns, returning only to restore stability after conflict. By the end of his reign, Ahmad Shah committed to over fifteen military campaigns, Nine of them being centered in India, three in Khorasan, and three in Afghan Turkestan.ObjectivesAfghanistan was a relatively poor country. As a result, Ahmad Shah, following in the footsteps of conquerors before him such as Mahmud of Ghazni, invaded India to plunder and obtain wealth. Relating as well from Muhammad of Ghor, Ahmad Shah invaded India to also establish his own political dominance, as the power vacuum following the decline of the Mughal Empire allowed him to repeat extensive campaigns, while also reviving the prominence of Afghans in India. Furthermore, by institutionalizing the casus belli of holy war, Ahmad Shah was able to direct the majority of his campaigns toward India.
Moreover, Ahmad Shah saw invasions as the proper way to propagate his strength. The Afghan chiefs and nobility initially saw him as an upstart, and as a result, Ahmad Shah sought victories to legitimize himself and to bring the nobility under him.Military campaignsCampaign to Kabul (1747)Weeks after Ahmad Shah's accession, Nasir Khan, the governor of Kabul, Ghazni, and Peshawar revolted against him. Ahmad Shah previously imprisoned Nasir Khan and ransomed him for an annual tribute of 500,000 rupees, and while Nasir Khan was attempting to raise this amount, the Ghilzai tribes refused to pay their taxes toward the Durranis, and only wished to do so to their Mughal sovereign, Muhammad Shah. With a growing Ghilzai revolt, Nasir Khan declared his independence from Durrani suzerainty and began raising an army of Uzbeks and Hazaras, while also frantically asking Muhammad Shah for aid.
In Autumn of 1747, Ahmad Shah began his campaign against Nasir Khan. Appointing his nephew Luqman Khan as the regent in Kandahar while he left on campaign, Ahmad Shah marched his army toward Ghazni only to be halted at Qalati Ghilji by his former allies, the Tokhi Ghilzai. Ahmad Shah stormed the fortress of Qalat, bringing the Tokhis to submission and annexing their lands over the following decades. Ahmad Shah continued to Ghazni, defeating the governor established there and conquering it with little opposition.
Before advancing on Kabul, Ahmad Shah garnered the support of the Suleimankhel tribes in the region, while Taqi Khan managed to procure the defection of the Qizilbash garrison in Kabul, so that once the Afghan army would arrive, they'd hand over the city. The acceptance of these terms forced Nasir Khan to flee to Peshawar, and when Ahmad Shah arrived at Kabul in October 1747, the Qizilbash handed over the Bala Hissar fortress. Ahmad Shah awarded the Qizilbash by giving them districts in Chindawol and Murad Khani.First invasion of India (1747–1748)
With Kabul under his control, Ahmad Shah dispatched his Commander-in-chief, Jahan Khan, toward Peshawar with the intention of advancing as far as Attock. Jahan Khan quickly overran Jalalabad, and Nasir Khan was unable mount a defense at the Khyber Pass, forcing him to flee. The Afghan armies approached Peshawar, prompting many Pashtun tribes to declare for them, such as the Yusufzai, Afridi, and Khattak. With Nasir Khan overwhelmed, he completely withdrew from Peshawar and fled to Delhi.
Shah Nawaz Khan, the Mughal governor of the Punjab, opened correspondence with the Afghans after they had seized Peshawar. Shah Nawaz, having toppled his brother from power to assume control over the Punjab, was opposed by the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah, who refused to recognize him as governor. As a result, the Afghans promised to affirm Shah Nawaz as governor of the Punjab if he accepted Durrani suzerainty. Shah Nawaz accepted this before the Mughal vizier promised to confirm him as governor if he opposed the Afghan invasion instead, which Shah Nawaz accepted.
The betrayal saw Ahmad Shah dispatch Sabir Shah to try and convince Shah Nawaz once again. However, after insulting Shah Nawaz, Sabir Shah was imprisoned and executed, and Shah Nawaz began marching against the Afghan army. Ahmad Shah crossed the Ravi River on 10 January, and established himself at the Shalimar Gardens, outside of Lahore. The armies of Shah Nawaz and Ahmad Shah began battle on 11 January, and as the battle began, the Afghan regiments of Shah Nawaz's army defected. Despite commanding a much larger army then the Afghans, the Mughals were utterly defeated, and Shah Nawaz fled to Delhi.
With their victory, the Afghans entered Lahore, plundering and massacring the city. Thousands were also conscripted, while the Mughals began mobilizing a larger army. Ahmad Shah left Lahore on 19 February with his forces, beginning to advance on Delhi. He captured Sirhind and continued advancing, outmaneuvering Mughal forces until they were caught at Manupur, where they battled. The Afghan army pressed the attack until a catastrophe occurred in the form that the ammunition stores of the Afghan army caught fire and exploded, incinerating 1,000 men, and forcing a complete withdrawal from the battlefield. The Mughals did not pursue the Afghan army due to the death of Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah, and turmoil in the camp.
Withdrawing to Lahore, Ahmad Shah became aware that his nephew, Luqman Khan, who had been left as regent in Kandahar, had revolted. Ahmad Shah immediately returned to Afghanistan, and marched on Kandahar, quickly quelling the revolt. He spent the summer of 1748 preparing for his second invasion of India. The timing was significant for Ahmad Shah, as Qamar-ud-Din, a significant commander for the Mughals at Manupur, had been killed, while the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah's death saw him succeeded by Bahadur Shah, who largely focused on pleasure-seeking. Ahmad Shah also wished to avenge his defeat.
Second invasion of India (1748)
In November 1748, Ahmad Shah began his second invasion of India. Moin-ul-Mulk, the new governor of the Punjab, urgently requested reinforcement from the Mughals in Delhi. Moin-ul-Mulk, wishing to not fight the Afghans on open plains, remained on the defensive at Sodhra, as an ongoing power struggle with the former Mughal governor of Kabul, Nasir Khan, threatened his position. As a result, Jahan Khan was able to raid the countryside, including the Chaj Doab, whilst a party of Sikhs raided Lahore.
Ahmad Shah advanced to Kopra, and engaged in skirmishes with Moin-ul-Mulk's army. Overwhelmed with the rising power of the Sikhs and the Afghan invasion, Moin-ul-Mulk opened negotiation, ceding the revenues of Gujrat, Aurangabad, Sialkot, and Pasrur, which all amounted to revenues worth 1.4 million rupees yearly. Ahmad Shah returned to Afghanistan following the treaty, crossing through Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan, and Dera Ghazi Khan. The regions of Dera Ismail Khan and Dera Ghazi Khan fell as he returned to Afghanistan, confirming the former tribal chiefs as governors in the region under his suzerainty.
First Khorasan campaign (1749–1751)
Between 1749 and 1750, after his second invasion of India, Ahmad Shah launched his first campaign into Khorasan. Intent on conquering Herat, Ahmad Shah besieged the city for a long period of time until it finally fell in late 1750.
With the fall of Herat, Ahmad Shah continued his campaign into Khorasan, invading the Afsharids and besieging Mashhad, where he remained until November 1750. Attempts to storm the city by the Afghans were unsuccessful, and Lee and Gupta state that Shahrokh Shah surrendered to Ahmad Shah personally so he could raise the siege. Shahrokh Shah accepted Afghan suzerainty, paying large tribute and releasing members of Ahmad Shah's family.
Noelle however, states that Ahmad Shah lifted the siege on 10 November, and was intent on returning years later. Shahrokh Shah had released a son of Ahmad Shah, possibly being Timur Shah Durrani, or Ahmad Shah's youngest son, Sanjar Mirza.
Nonetheless, after the siege of Mashhad, Ahmad Shah advanced to Nishapur, which was ruled by the Qara Bayat Amirdom. He besieged the city and demanded its surrender, which the governor, Jafar Khan, refused despite only having a few thousand men as garrison. Ahmad Shah ordered the walls to be breached, utilizing cannons, which the Afghans surged through. However, the defenders of the city had established defenses and a trap, which the Afghans fell into. Close-quarters combat began after, in which Jafar Khan was killed. His nephew, Abbas Quli, took command of the garrison and repulsed the Afghan forces, inflicting horrific casualties unto them, including some 12,000 dead, and thousands more wounded.
With his army seriously weakened, Ahmad Shah ordered a retreat to Herat. The harsh winter weather killed thousands while the Afghans retreated, and Ahmad Shah was forced to leave behind much of his baggage, including his artillery and food supplies. When the Afghans reached the Hari Rud river, it was completely frozen. Attempting to cross it caused much of the ice to break, killing even more men and sweeping away pack animals for the army.
Upon the armies return to Herat, Ahmad Shah faced an assassination conspiracy from Darwish Ali Khan Hazara, Ahmad Shah's governor of Herat. The conspiracy was quickly quelled and Darwish Ali was imprisoned, where in his stead, Ahmad Shah appointed Timur Shah as the new governor.
Third invasion of India (1751–1752)
Possibly due to Ahmad Shah's struggle in Khorasan, Moin-ul-Mulk failed to pay the agreed tribute to Ahmad Shah from his second invasion on the revenues of Gujrat, Aurangabad, Sialkot, and Pasrur. Inducing Ahmad Shah to invade again, he began in November 1751, leading his forces to invade the Punjab. Moin-ul-Mulk immediately sent 900,000 rupees forward as tribute, which Ahmad Shah seized and continued his march. With the advance guard under Jahan Khan, Ahmad Shah led his forces through Rohtas, Gujrat, and Shahdara. Jahan Khan's forces pillaged the countryside while skirmishes began with Moin-ul-Mulk, who raised his own force to meet the Afghans in battle. The advance of Ahmad Shah triggered mass panic in Lahore, with many fleeing to Delhi or Jammu for safety.
In January 1752, Ahmad Shah forded the Ravi in secrecy at Ghazipur, before advancing on Lahore. Jahan Khan began advancing on Lahore as well, initially being driven out of Faiz Bagh, and instead establishing himself at the Shalimar gardens. Moin-ul-Mulk immediately dashed back to Lahore, to which the Afghans laid siege for over four months. Receiving no aid from the Mughals, or any other nobles, Moin-ul-Mulk settled for a pitched battle with the Afghans outside of Lahore.
On 6 March, after a fierce battle, Moin-ul-Mulk was defeated and surrendered to Ahmad Shah, who received him in person. Impressed by the efforts of Moin-ul-Mulk in his resistance, Ahmad Shah instated him as the governor of Lahore under his suzerainty. Lahore was however, plundered and slaughtered. Following this, Ahmad Shah drafted a peace treaty with Moin-ul-Mulk, officiating the annexation of the Punjab including Multan and Lahore, and as far as Sirhind to the Durrani Empire. The Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah signed the treaty on 3 April 1752, ending Mughal rule in the Punjab.
Having conquered the Punjab, Ahmad Shah also dispatched his general, Shah Pasand Khan, with 15,000 men to Kashmir, which was embroiled in civil war. Supporting the deposed governor, Mir Muqim, Afghan forces quickly occupied Srinagar and established complete control in the province.
Turkestan (1751–1768)
At the start of Ahmad Shah's reign, he had held friendly relations with the ruler of the Maimana Khanate, Hajji Bi, who had assumed control over the Chahar Wilayat. Coming into conflict against Hazara Bi, the ruler of Qataghan, Hajji Bi lost control over Balkh to the Qataghanids. In 1751, Hajji Bi, with a delegation of amirs, traveled to Herat, seeking Ahmad Shah's aid to reclaim Balkh. Ahmad Shah accepted the call to arms, forging an alliance with Hajji Bi, and sent thousands of Afghan and Qizilbash men under Allah Khan Turkman. Hajji Bi was also bestowed by Ahmad Shah the titles of governor of Balkh and tax collector.
Not much information is given about the campaign against the Qataghanids. However, by the summer of 1752, the forces of the alliance were victorious, and Balkh was restored to the rule of the Maimana Khanate. While the campaign ensued, a commander of one of the Afghan Qizilbash forces fought with Allah Khan, prompting Mizrab Bi, a son of Hazara Bi, to revolt in 1753. Hajji Bi urgently requested aid from Ahmad Shah again, which he responded with by sending 5,000 men north. After having been restored to Balkh, Hajji Bi pursued a campaign in Qataghan, and with aid from the Afghans, the revolt was defeated. Mizrab Bi was brought to submission, and Badakhshan was subjugated as well.
In 1755–1756, Hajji Bi petitioned Ahmad Shah at Kabul to be made commander-in-chief of forces in Balkh. The request was accepted, stripping Allah Khan of his position. However, Hajji Bi became noted for his abuse of power in the position, triggering an investigation by the Afghans, who sent Allah Khan to oversee the affairs of the region. Allah Khan immediately declared the reports of oppression to be true, and was reinstated as commander-in-chief in Balkh. Ahmad Shah also declared a new governor of Balkh, Nawab Khan Alakozai.
Believing that it was the beginning of the Afghans attempting to assert their own hegemony over all of Turkestan, Hajji Bi began plotting with Izbasar, the ruler of Sheberghan. The two began a rebellion that achieved little, ending in a pardon for both Hajji Bi and Izbasar. In 1761, Rahim Bi Manghit, the ruler of Bukhara, began an invasion of Afghan Turkestan, intent on re-establishing Bukharan suzerainty over the region. Izbazar declared his loyalty to the ruler of Bukhara, and aided in the invasion. Bukharan forces initially overran Aqcha before being defeated by Allah Khan, who built a pyramid with the head of dead Bukharan soldiers. Afghan forces continued to Aqcha, where the Bukharans and Izbasar were defeated again. Aqcha was besieged, while another force of 8,000 Bukharans were sent to Aqcha to relieve the siege, only to be defeated by the combined forces of Allah Khan and Hajji Bi.
Attempts to breach the walls of Aqcha failed, and instead, negotiations began. The Bukharans withdrew across the Amu Darya, while Allah Khan was sent to Sheberghan to bring Izbasar into submission. Izbasar, however, opened negotiation with Nawab Khan, who demanded Allah Khan be put to death due to an enmity between the two. Izbasar complied, executing Allah Khan, receiving a pardon from Nawab Khan as a result.
In 1768, a rebellion in Qataghan and Badakhshan prompted an invasion from Shah Murad Manghit, the next Bukharan ruler. Ahmad Shah sent 6,000 men under Shah Wali Khan to face the rebels. As a result, Shah Murad crossed the Amu Darya, advancing to Qarshi, and threatening to attack Aqcha. In response, Ahmad Shah mobilized an army, affirming his authority in Maimana, Andkhoy, Sheberghan, and Balkh as he advanced. This quickly brought Shah Murad to negotiation, who recognized Afghan control over Balkh, with the amirs of the Chahar Wilayat also submitting tribute to the Durranis. To further avoid a battle with the Afghans, Shah Murad surrendered the cloak of Muhammad after Ahmad Shah had demanded it. With the cloak, Ahmad Shah created a shrine known as the Kirka Sharif, which was built next to his tomb.Second Khorasan campaign (1754–1755)
In 1754, Ahmad Shah began preparing for a second campaign to Khorasan. During this time, Nishapur was besieged by Alam Khan, a former Afsharid viceroy. When Ahmad Shah began his invasion, Alam Khan's army completely dispersed, forcing his withdrawal to Sabzevar.
Beginning his campaign in May 1754, Ahmad Shah departed from Herat with his army and advanced toward Tun. He dispatched Jahan Khan and Nasir Khan, the ruler of the Khanate of Kalat, to devastate the countryside. Following this, the Afghan forces marched against the governor of Tabas, Ali Murad Khan, who assembled his own army and met the Afghans in battle. Singh describes the battle that took place as one of the most bloodiest battles in Persian history. Ammunition failed to gain any clear advantage for both sides, forcing both armies to draw swords and began clashing. The battle remained indecisive until Ali Murad Khan was killed, and the remaining Persian army was completely routed.
With the Persians defeated, Tabas and Tun were conquered in between June and July 1754 by the Afghans. Ahmad Shah then led his forces to Mashhad, arriving before the city on 23 July. A long siege protracted until the Afsharids finally submitted to Ahmad Shah on 1 December 1754. On the 4th, Ahmad Shah's name was read in the sermon, acknowledging his sovereignty over the Afsharids. With their victory, the Durranis annexed territories of Torshiz, Bakharz, Jam, Khaf, and Turbat-e Haidari from the Afsharids. On 9 May 1755, Shahrokh Shah was officially re-instated as ruler over Mashhad, effectively as a Durrani protectorate. Following this, Ahmad Shah began his march on Nishapur in the spring of 1755, while Shah Pasand Khan was dispatched toward Mazandaran against the Qajars.
dedicated to Ahmad Shah Durrani, c.1754]]
During the siege of Mashhad, The Camesgazak Kurd contingent of Alam Khan's forces completely defected to the Afghans, killing Alam Khan after dragging him from Sabzevar, which was conquered.
On 17 June 1755, the Afghan armies arrived at Nishapur, resulting in Abbas Quli's immediate submission. Abbas Quli sought to be pardoned for giving resistance during Ahmad Shah's first campaign. Not long after, however, Nishapur raised in rebellion due to news that Shah Pasand Khan had been defeated by the Qajars. The gates of the city were closed on Ahmad Shah's troops, prompting the Afghans to begin a one-week siege. During the siege, Ahmad Shah lacked important siege equipment, which he solved by having every mounted soldier carry kilograms of gunmetals. As the siege began, Ahmad Shah's Armenian cannon makers melted down the metal the soldiers had carried, forging a large cannon. The first shot of the cannon blasted through the city walls, and caused havoc in the city through houses and bazaars.
The weapon forced the submission of the cities elders, and they opened the gates of the city despite Abbas Quli's opposition. The city was then subsequently plundered, with the populace of the city spared if they went to mosques and didn't take anything with them. Afghan forces went to houses and tore down the defenses, razing significant portions of the city. Following the victory at Nishapur, Ahmad Shah defeated the Qajars and advanced further by sacking the cities of Tun and Tabas, instilling massacres in their cities.
Abbas Quli was initially taken by Ahmad Shah until he had earned his favor. Abbas Quli married one of Ahmad Shah's daughters, while Ahmad Shah married Abbas Quli's sister. With the arrangements, Abbas Quli was allowed to return to Nishapur as governor of the city. He would remain close to Ahmad Shah throughout his life.Fourth invasion of India (1756–1757)
]]
Moin-ul-Mulk governed the Punjab until his death in November 1753, and was succeeded by Mughlani Begum. In March 1756, Mughal vizier Imad ul-Mulk imprisoned and replaced her with Adina Beg. Mughlani Begum pleaded Ahmad Shah to lead another invasion, promising wealth.
Due to the tyrannies of Imad ul-Mulk, several nobles such as Najib ud-Daula, a chief of Rohilkand, and the new Mughal emperor Alamgir II, pleaded for Ahmad Shah to invade. Ahmad Shah accepted the invitations and began his fourth invasion in November 1756, leaving Peshawar on the 15th, and crossing Attock on the 26th with an army of 80,000 men. He reached Lahore on 20 December, seizing the city with little resistance. Ahmad Shah garnered tribute from the city before continuing his march, crossing the Sutlej river on 10 January at Ludhiana, while the advance guard under his general, Jahan Khan, seized Sirhind, Karnal, and Panipat.
The Marathas, who had signed a treaty to protect the Mughals from foreign invasions in 1752, assembled a contingent of 3,400 men under Antaji Mankeshwar, battling the Afghans at Narela. The Maratha forces, however, were defeated and forced to withdraw with losses of 100 men. Following the defeat of the Marathas, Najib ud-Daula defected to the Afghans, with Imad ul-Mulk surrendering not long after. Jahan Khan continued his advance to Luni and besieged Shahdara on 17 January, with the Jama Masjid in Delhi reading Ahmad Shah's name in the Khutbah as a sign of sovereignty. The Afghan forces continued advancing on Delhi, arriving before the city on 28 January.
, where Alamgir received Ahmad Shah before he entered Delhi]]
Meeting with Alamgir at the Fatehpuri Mosque, Ahmad Shah led a grand entry into Delhi, which was marked with a gun salute. However many inhabitants of the city had already fled or hidden, with the streets completely deserted. Many people barricaded themselves in their houses. Ahmad Shah's name was also inserted in the Khutbah for other mosques. Initially, the Afghan army was ordered not to sack the city.
Alamgir was placed under house arrest, and houses outside the city of Delhi were ravaged. On the 29th, the bazaars of the city were sacked and Jahan Khan's soldiers extracted tribute from Feroz Shah Kotla, a large fortress in Delhi. On 30 January, Ahmad Shah minted coins in his name. He further married Hazrat Begum, a daughter of Alamgir, whilst also marrying his son, Timur Shah Durrani, to another daughter of Alamgir.
Ahmad Shah then ordered all Hindus to wear distinctive marks on their head, as well as forbidding non-Muslims from wearing the turban. Extortionate demands were also placed upon the Mughal nobility. The Mughal nobility refused, to which Ahmad Shah dispatched his own tax collectors, demanding additional tribute. Those suspected of concealing valuables were subjected to torture, including foot whipping. Many thousands died or were crippled as a result, while others resorted to suicide. Additionally, a tax was imposed on every household in Delhi.
Imad ul-Mulk was forced to hand over gold and ornaments valued at 10 million rupees, and another 300,000 gold coins. Intizam-ud-Daulah was summoned, and many of his assets were confiscated, including over 10 million rupees and 100 of his wives. Unable to produce the required wealth, Intizam admitted that his father had buried a fortune, which the Afghans uncovered. The Afghans recovered over 15 million rupees in cash, along with various goods, including 200 golden candles that were the size of a man. The treasure also included diamonds, rubies, pearls, and emeralds.
After the sacking, Ahmad Shah campaigned against the Jats. Suraj Mal, the ruler of the Jats, initially submitted to Ahmad Shah, but refused to send asylum seekers from the sacking of Delhi, resulting in conflict. An Afghan force was sent to Faridabad, seizing the fortress and razing it. However, a Jat raid under Jawahar Singh defeated the Afghans, massacring them. Ahmad Shah, in response, laid siege to Ballabhgarh, while Jahan Khan and Najib ud-Daula were dispatched to loot the surrounding regions. They advanced toward Mathura, while Jawahar Singh met them for battle at Chaumuhan. The battle that ensued left between 10 and 12,000 dead on both sides combined, with an innumerable amount of men wounded as well. Jawahar Singh, however, alongside Antaji Mankeshwar, reinforced Ballabhgarh. The cannon fire of the Afghans completely broke the defenses of the fortress, forcing Jawahar to withdraw in the night, with Afghan forces seizing the city on 4 March. An expedition under Abdus Samad Khan, another one of Ahmad Shah's generals, nearly arrested Jawahar Singh through ambush, but Jawahar ultimately evaded capture.
Toward the end of February 1757, the Afghan forces arrived at and attacked Mathura. The city, despite being inhabited overwhelmingly by non-combatants, mainly pilgrims due to the Hindu Holi festival, was attacked and the inhabitants were massacred by the Afghans. The Afghan forces slaughtered and defiled the bodies of Hindu ascetics by humiliating them with slaughtered cows. Temples of the city were razed, and the images of idols were destroyed. Jahan Khan furthered the massacre by rewarding a bounty of five rupees for every Hindu head, resulting in the death of thousands of men, women, and children. The Muslims of the city were subjected to the attack as well. Following his massacre at Mathura, Jahan Khan continued his campaign, with the city of Vrindavan being attacked and its inhabitants massacred on 6 March. The Tarikh-I-Husain Shahi establishes the idol destruction in line with iconoclasm, remarking: "Idols were broken and kicked about like polo-balls by the Islamic heroes."
Ahmad Shah, following Jahan Khan, attacked the city of Gokul on 16 March, which was inhabited by Naga Sadhus, a Hindu Bhakti sect. The Afghans attacked the city where a battle ensued, resulting in the death of 2,000 men for both sides. Jugal Kishor, a diplomat from the Bengal Subah, informed Ahmad Shah that there was nothing of value in Gokul. Ahmad Shah ordered a withdrawal, sparing the city from a sacking.
On 21 March, Jahan Khan arrived before Agra with 15,000 men, besieging the city. Civilians from the town received Jahan Khan and his army, promising 500,000 rupees in tribute. However, after failing to raise the amount, Afghan forces entered the city, plundering it and massacring over 2,000. The Afghan forces attempted to seize the citadel but failed due to the defense of Mirza Saifullah, the garrison commander. He defended the fort with extensive artillery usage, preventing the Afghans from approaching with cannons. Jahan Khan seized 100,000 rupees in tribute, before withdrawing to Ahmad Shah's camp on 24 March after being recalled.
Cholera had broken out in the Afghan camp, killing around 150 men per day, beginning mainly from the polluted Yamuna River which was overwhelmed with bodies. As a result, Ahmad Shah intended to return to Afghanistan, especially to secure the loot from the campaign. The heat as a result from the beginning of the Indian summer also convinced him. As a result, Ahmad Shah began returning for Afghanistan in April 1757, declaring his son, Timur Shah, governor of the Punjab, while Jahan Khan served as his deputy. Sirhind was annexed from the Mughals, while Imad ul-Mulk was re-instated as vizier, with Najib ud-Daula given the office of Mir Bakhshi. Alamgir was permitted to rule Delhi, however as a vassal of the Durrani Empire.
The Afghan invasion had dire consequences for the Mughal Empire, as most of the Mughal army, along with those from the Bengal Subah, were forcibly deployed against the Afghans. Mere months later, the army of the Bengal Subah, weakened due to the Afghan invasion, were utterly defeated at the Battle of Plassey, beginning the rise of British power in India.
The total loot Ahmad Shah carried back to Afghanistan is disputed. Its been estimated from contemporary writers that the Afghans seized 30 to 300 million rupees worth of goods. Over 28,000 elephants, camels, and mules carried Ahmad Shah's loot, alongside his 80,000 men, who carried whatever they took, with many of the Afghan cavalry returning on foot, while they loaded loot unto their horses. The massacres done by the Afghans throughout the campaign made the Yamuna River flow red with blood for two weeks.Durrani administration of the Punjab (1757–1758)
(1757) between the Sikhs and Afghans]]
Timur Shah, being only eleven years old, saw the Punjab governed mostly by Jahan Khan, who was noted as an experienced warrior, but incapable administrator. He attacked the Sikhs who were celebrating the Diwali festival at Amritsar in 1757, as well as destroying and polluting many Sikh shrines, declaring Jihad. The tyrannies of Jahan Khan resulted in the Sikhs forging an alliance with Adina Beg, who had initially fled during Ahmad Shah's fourth invasion.
As a result, Jahan Khan led a campaign against Adina Beg in the Jalandhar Doab, pillaging the region. Adina Beg acquiesced to submitting tribute, but ignored summons to the Afghan court in Lahore. On one such occasion of being summoned, Adina Beg refused to trust Jahan Khan and fled to the Hill states, where he forged an alliance with Vadbhag Singh Sodhi and Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, the leader of the Dal Khalsa.
Jahan Khan dispatched a force under Murad Khan in response, meeting the alliance at the battle of Mahilpur, where the Afghans were defeated, resulting in the looting of the Jalandhar Doab. Further dispatches from Lahore were sent to quell the alliance but all were defeated, allowing the Sikhs to plunder the suburbs of Lahore.
Further complications occurred for the Afghans, as a Maratha force led by Raghunath Rao had arrived at Agra in May 1757 by the time Ahmad Shah was crossing the Indus River back to Afghanistan. The Maratha forces completely seized the Ganges Doab, and defeated Najib ud-Daula at the battle of Delhi in September 1757. Alamgir II was retained on the throne as a puppet, and Imad ul-Mulk remained as vizier. Adina Beg thus requested the Marathas to invade the Punjab, which Raghunath Rao accepted.
The Maratha invasion began in February 1758, advancing and reaching Sirhind in March, which was besieged. Abdus Samad Khan, the Afghan governor of Sirhind, fled the city but was eventually captured, with Sirhind being plundered after. The developments at Sirhind alerted Jahan Khan, who raised an army of 2,000 men and scouted far ahead of Lahore, but refused to give battle to the alliance. Upon receiving news that the Marathas were approaching Lahore, he began preparing to return to Afghanistan on 19 April.
Establishing camp at Shahdara, the Afghans retreated across the Ravi, leaving Lahore in lawlessness, and to be captured by the alliance. Afghan rearguard contingents were ambushed by the Marathas, emboldening Jahan Khan and Timur Shah to speed their progress to Afghanistan. Further close encounters at Eminabad saw the Afghans driven to the Chenab below Wazirabad, where they were attacked by the Marathas and Sikhs, who took some two hundred Afghan prisoners. After this encounter, modern scholarship designates the end of the Maratha pursuit. Near contemporary sources state that the Marathas were able to establish themselves at Attock, and possibly even Peshawar.Kalat Rebellion (1758—1759)With the Maratha conquest of the Punjab, Nasir Khan, the ruler of the Khanate of Kalat, declared his independence from Ahmad Shah. Attempts to conciliate and have Nasir Khan return to Afghan suzerainty failed, prompting Ahmad Shah to dispatch a force under Shah Wali Khan, which was defeated at Pringuez, forcing their retreat to Quetta.
Informed of the defeat, Ahmad Shah raised his own force and marched against Kalat in the summer of 1758. He met Nasir Khan in battle at Mastung, where the forces of Kalat were defeated, prompting Nasir Khan's withdrawal to Kalat, which Ahmad Shah besieged. The siege of Kalat continued for forty days to no avail, and numerous storming attempts by the Afghans failed.
Nasir Khan, beleaguered of having been trapped in his capital, opened peace negotiations with the Afghans, apologizing for his rebellion. Ahmad Shah, having no intentions to annex Kalat or to bestow the province unto another governor, reaffirmed Nasir Khan in his position. A treaty was made, stipulating that Nasir Khan would re-enter and recognize the suzerainty of Ahmad Shah, but he would pay no tribute, and would furnish troops when called upon for war paid by the Shah. After the treaty, Ahmad Shah married a cousin of Nasir Khan.
Months later, a dervish began a revolt by having an individual named Mir Khush Khan Durrani proclaimed as King. The rebellion however, was crushed with the dervish who instigated the revolt being executed, and Mir Khush Khan being blinded.Fifth invasion of India (1759–1761)
Preoccupied with the uprising in Kalat, Ahmad Shah was unable to pursue a campaign against the Marathas. He dispatched many of his generals to lead attacks unto them, such as Jahan Khan and Nur ud-Din Bamizai, who were both defeated. In October 1759, Ahmad Shah began his fifth invasion of India. He had been invited by numerous rulers and religious leaders across India, including Shah Waliullah Dehlawi, who wrote to Ahmad Shah pleading for him to save the Muslims of India. Ahmad Shah utilized this in having it declared a jihad by religious leaders in Kandahar. Further invitations were sent by Najib ud-Daula, who wanted India to become a permanent extension of the Afghan empire. Alamgir II sent fervent requests to Ahmad Shah for aid, affirming his loyalty and informing him of the intentions of Imad ul-Mulk, who wished to him. Even Hindu rulers such as Madho Singh, the ruler of Amber, and Vijay Singh, the ruler of Marwar, were discontent over Maratha expansion, and sent letters to Ahmad Shah. Ahmad Shah also wished to avenge the defeat of his son, Timur Shah, and to reclaim the lost territories of the Punjab.
Beginning his invasion, Ahmad Shah split his forces to attack from two sides. Jahan Khan advanced from Kandahar to Kabul, and then through the Khyber Pass with an army of 20,000, while Ahmad Shah led a force of 40,000 through the Bolan Pass. He was further reinforced by Nasir Khan, and other Afghan chiefs, eventually fording the Indus on 25 October, 1759. As Ahmad Shah entered the Punjab, Jahan Khan had forced the Maratha forces stationed at Attock to evacuate, pursuing them and battling at Rohtas, where the Maratha army was routed, forcing a withdrawal to as far as Delhi.
As this happened, Ahmad Shah approached Multan with his army. The Maratha governor in response, fled to Lahore, leaving the city to be captured without resistance. With the Afghans converging on Lahore, the Maratha forces withdrew to Batala, and then Sirhind, with some Maratha detachments being caught and destroyed. At Lahore, Jahan Khan battled with the Sikhs. No clear victor emerged, and the Afghans suffered some 2,000 dead, while Jahan Khan was wounded during the battle.
The approach of Ahmad Shah Durrani caused havoc throughout all of Northern India, and Imad ul-Mulk had Alamgir and Intizam-ud-Daulah murdered as a result, placing Shah Jahan III on the Mughal throne. Ahmad Shah continued advancing through the Punjab, with Jahan Khan seizing Sirhind on 27 November, with both armies uniting at Sirhind in December 1759.
Enraged by the execution of Alamgir, Ahmad Shah began racing toward Delhi. He reached Ambala on 20 December, and advanced toward Taraori, beginning a battle against the Marathas led by Dattaji Scindia. The advance guard of the Afghan army came in clash against the Marathas, and was initially routed, beginning a withdrawal. However, Ahmad Shah, ready to support the battle, dispatched 5,000 men under Shah Pasand Khan. The forces of Imad ul-Mulk in the battle completely fled at the sight of Shah Pasand's flag, and the Afghans attacked with muskets. Further detachments of the Afghan army sent by Ahmad Shah brought the battle to an end, with the Maratha force completely surrounded and destroyed.
Following the battle, Ahmad Shah forded the Yamuna and united with the forces of Najib ud-Daula and other Rohilla leaders at Saharanpur. The combined armies marched toward Delhi, encamping at Luni, some 10 kilometers from the Red Fort of Delhi on the other side of the Yamuna. Dattaji Scindia returned to Kunjpura following his defeat at Taraori, and began preparing to defend Delhi from the Afghan army. He first sent Imad ul-Mulk to prepare the defenses of the city. However, Imad ul-Mulk completely deserted the Marathas and fled to Suraj Mal.
Dattaji then advanced to Sonipat, attempting to track Ahmad Shah's movements, which was made difficult as the Afghans kept their movement confidential by killing every Indian that was found outside their houses. As a result, Dattaji established camp at Barari on 4 January, 1760. On 9 January, Najib ud-Daula began crossing the Yamuna with Ahmad Shah following him, beginning the battle of Barari Ghat. The Maratha forces opposed the advance of the Afghans across the river but were overpowered by musketeers, with much of the Maratha army only armed with spears and swords. Dattaji, attempting to enter the fray himself, was shot either in the eye, or the ribs, causing his death. Further Maratha reinforcements were useless against the Afghan musket fire, forcing the Marathas to withdraw from the field with a thousand dead, and the Afghans victorious.
Having defeated the Marathas at Barari Ghat, Ahmad Shah entered Delhi, with his men plundering the city. Much of the population of the city had already fled, and he took Shah Jahan III under his protection instead of claiming the Mughal throne for himself. Ahmad Shah also placed Yaqub Ali Khan as governor of the city, a nephew of his vizier, Shah Wali Khan, before beginning to march against Suraj Mal.
Leaving Delhi on 27 January, Ahmad Shah besieged Deeg on 7 February, although not committing to the siege seriously. While besieging, he sent a detachment under Jahan Khan which routed a Maratha army on 11 February at Rewari. Following this, Ahmad Shah pursued a Maratha force led by Malhar Rao Holkar, who was stationed at Narnaul. After reaching Rewari, Ahmad Shah was evaded by Holkar, and the Maratha force crossed the Yamuna river on 26—27 February, entering Najib ud-Daula's territories. On 28 February, Holkar advanced to Sikandrabad, awaiting for news of the Afghan position. On 1 March 1760, Ahmad Shah dispatched a force of 15,000 under Jahan Khan, Shah Pasand Khan, and Qalandar Khan to halt the Maratha army. The Marathas were caught on 4 March and were completely routed at the battle of Sikandarabad, with many Maratha officers slain. Holkar himself fled for his life to Agra, and then to Bharatpur, meeting Suraj Mal.
With another victory over the Marathas, Ahmad Shah proceeded to Aligarh, which belonged to the Jats, and besieged it. Unable to receive any reinforcement, the fort was surrendered to the Afghans. At Aligarh, Najib ud-Daula advised Ahmad Shah to rest and wait out for the summer and monsoon seasons to pass, especially as the summer had been so catastrophic for the Afghans during the fourth invasion of India. Ahmad Shah accepted, and Najib ud-Daula used this to expel the Marathas from Shikohabad, Phaphund, and Bithoor.
As the Afghans settled in, they resorted to diplomacy to strengthen their position. Ahmad Khan Bangash, although an initial Maratha ally, was appealed to by Shah Wali Khan, Ahmad Shah's vizier, as an Afghan brother. Ahmad Khan thus allied with the Durranis and arrived at their camp on 13 April 1760. The Afghans also successfully negotiated with the ruler of Oudh, Shuja ud-Daula, who united with the Durrani camp in July 1760. Ahmad Shah also held friendly relations with the Rajputs, even declaring to them his intention to invade the Deccan in the winter.
As this occurred, the Marathas sent reinforcements under Sadashivrao Bhau, the cousin of the Peshwa, Balaji Baji Rao. The reinforcements also included Vishwasrao, the heir of the Maratha Confederacy, and nearly all significant Maratha commanders. Sadashivrao was described as an ignorant commander with a short temper and pride, ignoring the advice of more senior commanders who had experience in Northern India, and failing to anticipate certain outcomes.
The Maratha force reached Agra on 14 July. Sadashivrao, finding the Yamuna river overflowing, settled on advancing to Delhi. The Marathas advanced from Mathura and reached Delhi on 23 July, where it was stormed. The city had fallen to the Marathas, but the citadel held out. On 29 July, negotiations for the garrisons withdrawal went underway, and Yaqub Ali was allowed to leave the city with his men unharmed to Ahmad Shah's camp, with Maratha forces entering the fort on 1 August.
The Marathas began facing difficulties when on 4 August, Suraj Mal and Imad ul-Mulk defected from the Marathas and returned to their posts. Furthermore, the Maratha army lacked food and feed for their horses. The situation became so difficult that Sadashivrao recorded in a letter that there was no food to pay for money, and that the men of the army alongside the horses were fasting. Peace negotiations corresponding from Ahmad Shah and the Marathas had also failed, with both seeking their own extensive demands.
By the end of September 1760, the Maratha camp was overridden with starvation. Ahmad Shah was anxious to return to Afghanistan since his settling at Aligarh, as he never intended to form an Afghan empire based in India. The Marathas left Delhi on 10 October, which Ahmad Shah responded by having his army arrayed across the Yamuna. Sadashivrao, intending to seize Kunjpura, which had vast supplies, arrived before the city on 16 October. The battle of Kunjpura ensued which saw the Marathas victorious and the Afghan governor at Kunjpura, Najabat Khan, alongside Abdus Samad Khan killed. Ahmad Shah was unable to help the defenders of Delhi and Kunjpura due to him being stuck on the other side of the Yamuna.
Ahmad Shah, infuriated at the fall of Kunjpura, began preparing a ford over the flooded Yamuna river at Baghpat. The Afghan forces crossed between 25—26 October, massacring a Maratha detachment at near Sonipat. Another battle at Sambhalka saw the Marathas forced back to their camp now established at Panipat. On 30 October, Ahmad Shah reached Sambhalka, and arrayed before the Marathas on 1 November.
Najib ud-Daula was dispatched by Ahmad Shah to prevent Maratha supplies flowing in from Delhi, defeating the forces of Naro Shankar, the Maratha governor of Delhi. Saashivrao in response sent Govind Pant Bundela to invade the Rohilla territories and cut off Afghan supply. Marching with 12,000 horsemen, the Maratha detachment advanced as far as Meerut before being set upon by an Afghan contingent of 14,000 dispatched by Ahmad Shah on 17 December under Atai Khan, who slew Govind and routed the Maratha force, with large amounts of supplies being seized by the Afghans.
With this, the Marathas were cut off from all supplies. A last desperate attempt for peace was sent by Sadashivrao, even agreeing on any term Ahmad Shah deemed fit. Najib ud-Daula shut down the idea and Ahmad Shah rejected peace. As starvation gripped the Maratha camp, Sadashivrao concluded with his cabinet of war on 13 January to attack the Afghans. On 14 January, the Maratha forces assembled and began marching on the Afghan camp. The numbers of the battle vary by source. Mehta presents the Afghans at having 79,800 men, and the Marathas 85,000, with numerous non-combatants. The Afghans had a gradual flow of manpower stream into the army while the Marathas did not, making it definite that the Marathas were far outnumbered at the battle.
in Northern India]]
Beginning the third battle of Panipat, Ibrahim Khan Gardi unleashed his cannons on the Afghans. However, the troops operating the cannons were completely inexperienced and upon firing, the artillery shots merely flew overhead the Afghan army. Ibrahim Khan, realizing his failure in this regard, held his cannon fire and instead engaged with a detachment of his troops against the Rohilla portions of Ahmad Shah's army. Other Maratha officers attempted to engage as well by Ibrahim Khan's forces, which was met with musket fire from the Rohillas that saw the Marathas beaten back with heavy casualties, while Ibrahim Khan's forces were devastated by Rohilla cavalry, resulting in the losses of over six battalions and Ibrahim Khan himself being wounded, with the Maratha left wing failing.
Sadashivrao led an attack on the Afghan centre as well during this, with both sides numerically similar. Despite the Rohilla victory on the left wing, the Afghan centre was exposed, with the Marathas dismantling over three lines in the Afghan centre, and inflicting some 3,000 dead or wounded. At the pivotal moment, Ahmad Shah surged his reinforcements, some 4,000 Qizilbash to the right wing and 10,000 men to the Afghan centre. Ahmad Shah also dispatched his zamburaks, inflicting heavy casualties onto the Marathas. A counter-attack was thus launched by the Afghans across all fronts.
Amidst the fray, Vishwasrao was killed by a bullet. News of his death spread quickly throughout the Maratha camp, and it led to the desertion of over 2,000 Afghans and Rohillas that were in service of the Marathas. The Maratha left wing was thus dismantled, and routed. As the Rohillas launched their own attack, Holkar fled the battle. The Afghan left wing thus caved in on the centre. The Maratha right wing was completely annihilated by Najib ud-Daula, and Ahmad Shah advanced to the centre to command the final operation of battle.
Sadashivrao attempted to assault the Afghan centre twice but was pushed back with heavy losses. Ahmad Shah then ordered eight thousand reinforcements from his own tribe to attack, which saw Sadashivrao killed amidst the fray. The death of Sadashivrao saw all Maratha resistance dissipate and the Maratha centre was slaughtered. Marathas who tried to escape the battle were pursued.
The casualties of the battle saw as low as 75,000 Marathas estimated to have been killed, to as high as 100,000. This included over 30,000 Marathas perishing in battle, another 10,000 being killed while retreating, and another 10,000 reported missing. While following the battle, 50,000 Maratha camp followers were massacred or sold to slavery.
Panipat resulted in the end of Maratha influence over Northern India. The day following the battle, Ahmad Shah entered the city of Panipat wearing jewels such as the Koh-i-Noor. The Afghan troops massacred any male over the age of fourteen and enslaved the woman and children of the city. Ahmad Shah afterward made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Bu Ali Shah Qalandar, and then left Panipat on 19 July to enter Delhi. Proceeding formally into the Red fort on 29 January, with the khutbah being read in his name and coins being struck. After resting for two months, Ahmad Shah's troops demanded to return to Afghanistan, as much of them had been unpaid for over a year and a half. As a result, after plundering Delhi, he began returning to Afghanistan on 20—22 March.
Ahmad Shah settled the affairs of India by placing Shah Alam II on the Mughal throne with Najib ud-Daula as his Bakhshi, with Jawan Bakht being recognized as heir to Shah Alam. Delhi was given to Najib ud-Daula and Jawan Bakht to rule together, while Imad ul-Mulk was permitted to serve as vizier again. No peace deal was made with the Marathas as the Maratha Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao died soon after Panipat.
While returning to Afghanistan, the Afghan army was attacked by the Sikhs under Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, who carried away stragglers. The Sikhs attacked the Afghan flanks typically at night but maintained distance to avoid the Afghan artillery and cavalry, and avoiding pitched battle. A surprise attack on the Beas river by the Sikhs freed many Maratha prisoners. In response, Ahmad Shah established defenses around his camp every night, and at Lahore, he sent numerous expeditions against the Sikhs that captured and killed many. He completed his return to Afghanistan by May 1761.Rebellions in Afghanistan (1760—1762)While Ahmad Shah campaigned, numerous incidents occurred throughout Afghanistan. When the Marathas occupied Delhi, an uprising triggered under Hajji Jamal Khan Zargarani, who followed off reports that Ahmad Shah had been killed, and proclaimed himself king of Afghanistan. At Kandahar, he struck coins. However, as news of Ahmad Shah's victories trickled in from India, he renounced his claim and fled for his life to a remote area of the country.
Another revolt that had began was under Darwish Ali Khan Hazara, who avoided Shah Pasand's forces, before eventually being allowed to return to Herat between 1761—1762. While in early 1761, Abd al-Khaliq Khan, alongside Dilawar Khan Ishaqzai and Zal Beg Popalzai, who were among Ahmad Shah's tribal council, rebelled. They first went toward the fortress of Grishk, falsely proclaiming that Ahmad Shah had been defeated in India, and declared Abd al-Khaliq as king. The combined forces from Griskh marched to Kandahar, making Ahmad Shah's son, Sulaiman Mirza abandon the capital.
Shah Pasand Khan was dispatched to crush the revolt, and he arrived before the city, elaborating that Ahmad Shah was alive. The rebellion's support thus dissipated and the leaders of the rebellion went to Shah Pasand's camp for mercy. Lesser involved individuals were spared, while Zal Beg Popalzai and other significant leaders were executed. Dilawar Khan fled to Herat where Timur Shah allowed him to become the commander of his personal bodyguard, while Abd al-Khaliq was imprisoned.
Sixth invasion of India (1762)
triumphantly enter Lahore in November 1761|alt=Depiction of the fall of Lahore in November 1761 to Sikh armies]]
As Ahmad Shah retired to Afghanistan from his fifth invasion of India, the Sikhs defeated numerous of his governors, including a decisive battle at Gujranwala that resulted in the fall of Lahore in November 1761. Enraged at the defeat of his deputies, Ahmad Shah prepared for his sixth invasion of India, beginning it in February 1762.
With a light cavalry force, he dashed through the Punjab in a rapid march, with the news of which reaching the Sikhs who were engaged in a siege at Jandiala. The Sikhs raised the siege and withdrew, until their position was compromised by the Afghan governor of Malerkotla. Ahmad Shah led his forces including Zain Khan Sirhindi, catching the Sikhs at the village of Kup. The Sikhs, under Jassa Singh and Charat Singh, were completely defeated and massacred in an event known as the Vadda Ghalughara. Ahmad Shah had ordered that nobody wearing Indian clothes was to be left alive, with mostly camp followers including women and children being killed.
Following the battle of Kup, Ahmad Shah invaded through the domains of Patiala State, ruled by Ala Singh. Ahmad Shah stormed the fortress of Barnala, before Ala Singh produced himself before the Shah, submitting tribute. With this, Ahmad Shah returned to Lahore on 3 March after camping at Sirhind.
. Afghan forces had razed it and polluted the lake|alt=19th century watercolor painting of the Golden Temple]]
At Lahore, he assembled his forces and attacked Amritsar, arriving at the city on 10 April, a day before the Vaisakhi festival. The city was sacked and a massacre ensued where the Golden Temple was razed, being blown with gunpowder and the blood of men and cows polluting the lake surrounding it. While the temple was blown with gunpowder, a piece of shrapnel hit Ahmad Shah on the nose, causing an open wound that would plague him for the rest of his life.
Following this, Ahmad Shah rested at Lahore, intending to settle the affairs of India. He firstly sent an expedition toward Kashmir which had declared it's independence under Sukh Jiwan Mal, which was successful and Kashmir was re-conquered. Other political settlements also occurred, with peace negotiations ensuing with the Marathas, while also calling upon Indian princes to recognize Shah Alam II as the Mughal Emperor.
Between April–May 1762, Zain Khan was defeated by the Sikhs at Harnaulgarh. During the summer months, Ahmad Shah moved his camp to Kalanaur. The Sikhs capitalized off of this, with Jassa Singh alongside Tara Singh invading the Jalandhar Doab, while Charat Singh plundered the regions north of Lahore.
In October 1762, Ahmad Shah possibly fought a battle at Amritsar, which is not accepted by all historians. The possible battle was fought under a complete solar eclipse that raged until the night, where Ahmad Shah withdrew to Lahore before returning to see the Sikhs had also withdrawn.
Afterward, Ahmad Shah placed a Hindu, Kabuli Mal, as the Durrani governor of the Punjab, believing it would bring stability. Ahmad Shah began withdrawing back to Afghanistan on 12 December, where while proceeding, he routed a Sikh army on the banks of the Ravi river. His health was significantly affected during the invasion as a result of the summer heat, adding to his wounded nose.
Encounters with the Qing (1763—1764, 1768—1769)
Fazil Biy, the ruler of Kokand, and other Kyrgyz chieftains pleaded to Ahmad Shah to aid them against Qing expansionism. Ahmad Shah, delighted to use a casus belli in the name of Islam, accepted, sending men to occupy the regions between Tashkent and Kokand, though these men later withdrew by 1764 as any alliance failed to be forged.
In 1763, Ahmad Shah had dispatched an embassy to the Qing. His aims in this are unknown, however, an embassy allowed Ahmad Shah to establish himself as an emperor. The letter he sent to the Qing emperor Qianlong is missing, but from the Qing reply, the letter was likely dedicated to his conquests and victory at Panipat, alongside Qing expansion.
The letter positioned Ahmad Shah's expansions as bringing order and stability to areas overrun with rebels and lawlessness (in reference to his campaigns in Iran and India). The battle of Panipat was strongly detailed in the letter, in what was likely a fath-nama, meaning a victory letter or declaration to celebrate ones victory. The Qing emperor ignored the effective threat and downplayed the Afghan victory.
In the second part of the letter, the Qianlong appeared much more defensive, in need of justifying the Qing conquest of the Dzungars and the Altishahr Khojas. He accused them of causing devastation and laying false accusations against him. A report also suggested that Ahmad Shah considered the territories the Qing claimed belonged to the Muslims. In reality, Ahmad Shah possibly wanted to establish spheres of influence, which was similarly done with the Ottomans which divided Iran between them, and a treaty with Bukhara that had established the Amu Darya as the border.
|author = A Qing grand councillor, remarking at the Afghan envoy's refusal to Kowtow
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When the Afghan embassy had arrived in Beijing, the chief envoy, Khwaja Mirhan, had refused to kowtow before the Qing emperor. The Qing officials, in shock, demanded he kowtow, to which Mirhan acquiesced. This incident damaged the Qing-Afghan relations and Qianlong cut ties with the Afghans following this. No immediate consequence occurred, and the envoy was given favor.
Mirhan's refusal possibly came out of religious reasons, but the Qing received it as Ahmad Shah declaring himself equal to Qianlong. Qianlong, however, was reconciliatory and instead shifted blame on their escort. From Qianlong's view, he saw the Afghans as a significant power and attempted to impress the envoy and in contrast, Ahmad Shah, of the Qing empire. This was especially done in motivation of Altishahr's recent conquest and concerns over stability in the region.
Ahmad Shah's gifts to the Qing emperor included four horses, which were painted by the Qing court painter, Giuseppe Castiglione. Nonetheless, by the time of the envoy's return journey to Afghanistan, Qianlong made preparations to secure Qing territories.
In 1759, as the revolt of the Altishahr Khojas crumbled, two descendants of the Afaqi Sufi lineage crossed into Badakhshan, being pursued by the Qing forces. Fude, the Qing general of the expedition, demanded that Sultan Shah, the ruler of Badakhshan, to arrest the brothers. Sultan Shah accepted, likely wishing to have Qing military aid, especially against the Durrani Empire. Distrust occurred between the Qing and Sultan Shah due to the Afaqi descendants residing in Badakhshan for months, including Sultan Shah's possible initial refusal to hand them over, possibly intending to send them to Bukhara. Qianlong threatened invasion, which did not occur as one of the descendant's remains were sent to Yarkand.
The death of the Afaqi brothers spurned relations with the Afghans, causing Sultan Shah to plead to the Qing, claiming that Ahmad Shah intended to exact revenge for their deaths. No immediate Afghan invasion occurred. The Qing however, faced numerous frustrations with their tributaries in Central Asia, alongside a major insurrection in Uch-Turfan that required tremendous effort to defeat.
As a result, Qianlong adopted a policy of strict non-interference, realizing that Qing troops in Altishahr were significantly stretched and spread thin. The Afghans, however, seen as a threat, would show the weakness of Qing control in the region.
In August 1768, Qianlong was informed of the Afghan invasion of Badakhshan led by Shah Wali Khan in May, with Afghan forces seizing Sultan Shah's capital, Fayzabad, who fled north. A Qing agent, Yunggui, held the position that the Qing should interfere in the conflict. Qianlong, however, affirmed that military intervention would irrational, and strictly forbade any military interference. Historians see this as surprising, as the invasion by the Afghans threatened the Qing Empire itself.
, 1761]]
Qing sources affirm that the Afghans established Sarimsaq, a child of the Afaqi's who escaped to Badakhshan, in Kunduz. Qianlong was distraught, as another possible revolt could revolve around Sarimsaq, with reports of Muslim travelers and funds being sent to Sarimsaq. This still did not convince Qianlong to act, and he refused to send any message negatively to Ahmad Shah at all. During this, Sultan Shah defeated the Afghan governor and reoccupied his capital, but feared another Afghan invasion, sending desperate letters to the Qing in the winter of 1768 to ask for help, claiming that Ahmad Shah would invade next year.
Qianlong harshly rebutted, blaming Sultan Shah for provoking the conflict with the Afghans and affirmed that he would only fight the Afghans if they actually invaded Qing territory. Sultan Shah wrote a letter to Emin Khoja in response in August 1769, expecting aid as he was a vassal, only to find himself totally abandoned. In December 1769, Sultan Shah wrote another letter which Qianlong received that accused him of failing to uphold his duties. Qianlong rebuked him, and stated that under no circumstances would the Qing aid him.
|author = Qianlong's reply to Sultan Shah's plea for aid against Ahmad Shah
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Qianlong had initially considered the Afghans tributaries, but after the former incident, he no longer even sought the prospect of any form of Durrani submission. His reply to Sultan Shah effectively saw the Qing recognize the Afghans as a rival power to them, with Qianlong recognizing that the Afghans were unable to be treated like tributaries. Rather then aiding the ruler of Badakhshan as his initial policy had implicated him to, Qianlong instead justified the Afghan invasion, prompted to by overextended armies, the distance, and stability. Instead, gambling on the difficult terrain between the Afghan and Qing realms for safety.
Within the year, Ahmad Shah occupied Badakhshan and Sultan Shah was executed.Death and legacy
in Kandahar City, which also serves as the Congregational Mosque and contains the sacred cloak that the Islamic Prophet Muhammad wore.]]
]]
Ahmad Shah may have suffered an injury due to a flying brick striking his nose when the Harimandir Sahib was destroyed with gunpowder. Other sources state that he suffered from what Afghan sources described as a "gangrenous ulcer", which may attribute to numerous illnesses, such as Leprosy, Syphilis, or a tumor.
Lee writes: "Ahmad Shah gained poor health as a result of all his campaigns. Despite all attempts to treat it, a wound in his nose remained. The ulcer in his later years began eating into his brain". Following the advice of his physicians, he spent part of the summer in the cooler climate of the Margha plain in the Toba Achakzai range during the last few years of his life. He died of his illness on 4 June 1772 (2 Rabi' al-Awwal 1186) in Maruf, Toba Achakzai, east of Kandahar. Some other sources state that he died on 16 October 1772.
Ahmad Shah was buried in the city of Kandahar adjacent to the Shrine of the Cloak, where a large mausoleum was built. It has been described in the following way:
In his tomb his epitaph is written:
Durrani's victory over the Marathas influenced the history of the subcontinent and, in particular, the policies of the East India Company in the region. His refusal to continue his campaigns deeper into India prevented a clash with the company and allowed them to continue to acquire power and influence after they established complete control over the former Mughal province of Bengal in 1793. Fear of another Afghan invasion influenced company policy-makers for almost half a century after the Battle of Panipat. The acknowledgment of Durrani's military accomplishments is reflected in an intelligence report made by Company officials on the Battle of Panipat, which referred to Ahmad Shah as the 'King of Kings'. This fear led in 1798 to a Company envoy being sent to the Persian court in part to instigate the Persians in their claims on Herat to forestall a possible Afghan invasion of India that might have halted Company expansion.
Poetry
Durrani wrote a collection of odes in his native Pashto. He was also the author of several poems in Persian. One of his most famous Pashto poems was Love of a Nation:
By blood, we are immersed in love of you
The youth lose their heads for your sake
I come to you and my heart finds rest
Away from you, grief clings to my heart like a snake
Whatever countries I conquer in the world,
I will never forget your beautiful gardens
I forget the throne of Delhi when I remember,
The mountain tops of my beautiful Pashtunkhwa
The eras of Farid [Sher Shah Suri] and Hamid [Lodi] will return,
When I launch attacks on all sides
If I must choose between the world and you,
I shall not hesitate to claim your barren deserts as my own</poem>}}
In popular culture
* In the 1994 television series The Great Maratha, the character of Ahmad Shah Durrani is portrayed by Bob Christo.
* In the 2019 Bollywood war drama Panipat film, Ahmad Shah Durrani appears as the main antagonist who invades the Maratha Empire, and is portrayed by Sanjay Dutt.See also* List of monarchs of Afghanistan References Notes Citations Bibliography
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Category:1720s births
Category:1772 deaths
Category:18th-century Afghan monarchs
Category:Emirs of Afghanistan
Ahmad Shah
Category:18th-century Afghan poets
Category:Afsharid generals
Category:Pashtun people
Category:Pashto-language poets
Category:People from Herat
Category:People from Kandahar
Category:People from Multan
Category:Afghan Muslims
Category:18th-century monarchs in Asia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Shah_Durrani | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.043203 |
1563 | Arthur Aikin | | birth_place = Warrington, Lancashire, England
| death_date
| death_place = Hoxton, Middlesex, England
| residence | nationality British
| field = Chemistry
| work_institutions | alma_mater
| known_for = Geological Society of London
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Arthur Aikin (19 May 177315 April 1854) was an English chemist, mineralogist and scientific writer, and was a founding member of the Chemical Society (now the Royal Society of Chemistry). He first became its treasurer in 1841, and later became the society's second president.Life
He was born at Warrington, Lancashire into a distinguished literary family of prominent Unitarians. The best known of these was his paternal aunt, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, a woman of letters who wrote poetry and essays as well as early children's literature. His father, Dr John Aikin, was a medical doctor, historian, and author. His grandfather, also called John (1713–1780), was a Unitarian scholar and theological tutor, closely associated with Warrington Academy. His sister Lucy (1781–1864) was a historical writer. Their brother Charles Rochemont Aikin was adopted by their famous aunt and brought up as their cousin.
Arthur Aikin studied chemistry under Joseph Priestley in the New College at Hackney, and gave attention to the practical applications of the science. In early life, he was a Unitarian minister for a short time. Aikin lectured on chemistry at Guy's Hospital for thirty-two years. He became the President of the British Mineralogical Society in 1801 for five years up until 1806 when the Society merged with the Askesian Society.<ref nameKnights-earth /> From 1803 to 1808 he was editor of the Annual Review. In 1805 Aiken also became a proprietor of the London Institution, which was officially founded in 1806. He was one of the founders of the Geological Society of London in 1807 and was its honorary secretary in 1812–1817. He also gave lectures in 1813 and 1814.<ref nameKnights-earth /> He contributed papers on the Wrekin and the Shropshire coalfield, among others, to the transactions of that society.<ref name"EB1911"/> His Manual of Mineralogy was published in 1814. Later he became the paid secretary of the Society of Arts and later was elected as a fellow. He was founder of the Chemical Society of London in 1841, being its first treasurer and, between 1843 and 1845, second president.
In order to support himself, outside of his work with the British Mineralogical Society, the London Institution and the Geological Society, Aiken worked as a writer, translator and lecturer to the public and to medical students at Guy's Hospital. His writing and journalism were useful for publicising foreign scientific news to the wider British public. He was also a member of the Linnean Society and in 1820 joined the Institution of Civil Engineers.
He was highly esteemed as a man of sound judgement<ref name"EB1911"/> and wide knowledge. Aikin never married, and died at Hoxton in London in 1854.<ref nameKnights-earth />
Publications
* [https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-natural-history-of-t_aikin-arthur_1798/page/n1/mode/2up ''The natural history of the year; being an enlargement of Dr. Aikin's Calendar of nature], 1798
* [https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_tpEGvJnP3lIC/page/n5/mode/2up Journal of a Tour through North Wales and Part of Shropshire with Observations in Mineralogy and Other Branches of Natural History] (London, 1797)
* [https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_syllabus-of-a-course-of-_aikin-arthur_1799 Syllabus of a course of lectures on chemistry, by A. and C.R. Aikin], 1799
* [https://archive.org/details/annualreviewand00aikigoog/page/n7/mode/2up The Annual review and history of literature; for 1807], 1808
* [https://archive.org/details/amanualmineralo00aikigoog/page/n4/mode/2up A Manual of Mineralogy] (1814; ed. 2, 1815)
* [https://archive.org/details/b22011638_0001/page/n3/mode/2up dictionary of chemistry and mineralogy, with an account of the processes employed in many of the most important chemical manufactures. To which are added a description of chemical apparatus, and various useful tables of weights and measures, chemical instruments, &c. &c. Vol. I]; [https://archive.org/details/b22011638_0002/page/n3/mode/2up Vol. II] (with his brother C. R. Aikin), 2 vols. (London, 1807, 1814).
*[https://archive.org/details/AnAccountOfTheMostImportantRecentDiscoveriesAndImprovementsInChemistryAndMineralogy/aikin-a-account-1814-RTL000985-LowRes/page/n5/mode/2up An account of the most important recent discoveries and improvements in chemistry and mineralogy, to the present time : being an appendix to their Dictionary of chemistry and mineralogy], 1814
For Rees's Cyclopædia'' he wrote articles about chemistry, geology and mineralogy, but the topics are not known.
References
External links
* [https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/finding-aids/D190/ The Aikin Family Papers], D.190, at Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester.
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Category:1773 births
Category:1854 deaths
Category:English mineralogists
Category:19th-century English chemists
Category:People from Warrington
Category:Fellows of the Linnean Society of London
Category:People from Hoxton
Category:English Unitarians
Category:Anna Laetitia Barbauld
Category:18th-century English writers
Category:18th-century English male writers
Category:19th-century English writers | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Aikin | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.048107 |
1564 | Ailanthus | *Pongelion
|synonyms_ref
}}
Ailanthus (; derived from ailanto, an Ambonese word probably meaning "tree of the gods" or "tree of heaven") is a genus of trees belonging to the family Simaroubaceae, in the order Sapindales (formerly Rutales or Geraniales). The genus is native from east Asia south to northern Australasia. One species, the Tree-of-Heaven (Ailanthus altissima,) is considered a weed in some parts of the world.Selected species
The number of living species is disputed, with some authorities accepting up to ten species, while others accept six or fewer. Species include:
*Ailanthus altissima (tree of heaven, syn. A. vilmoriniana ) – northern and central mainland China, Taiwan. Invasive in North America, Europe, Britain, and Australia. Serves as central metaphor in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
*Ailanthus excelsa – India and Sri Lanka
*Ailanthus fordii – China
*Ailanthus integrifolia – New Guinea and Queensland, Australia
*Ailanthus triphysa (white siris syn. A. malabarica) – India, South-east Asia and Australia
*Ailanthus vietnamensis – Vietnam
There is a good fossil record of Ailanthus with many species names based on their geographic occurrence, but almost all of these have very similar morphology and have been grouped as a single species among the three species recognized:
*Ailanthus tardensis – from a single locality in Hungary
*Ailanthus confucii – Tertiary period, Europe, Asia, and North America
*Ailanthus gigas – from a single locality in Slovenia
*Ailanthus pythii – known from the Miocene of Iceland, Styria in Austria and the Gavdos island in Greece
*Ailanthus kurzii – endemic to the Andaman Islands, India
*Ailanthus maximus - known from the latest Paleocene to late Oligocene in the Tibetan Plateau
Ailanthus silk moth
A silk spinning moth, the ailanthus silkmoth (Samia cynthia), lives on Ailanthus leaves, and yields a silk more durable and cheaper than mulberry silk, but inferior to it in fineness and gloss. This moth has been introduced to the eastern United States and is common near many towns; it is about 12 cm across, with angulated wings, and in color olive brown, with white markings.<ref name"EB1911"/> Other Lepidoptera whose larvae feed on Ailanthus include Endoclita malabaricus, and Atteva aurea (commonly known as the Ailanthus webworm moth).See also* Spotted lanternfly References
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*[https://web.archive.org/web/20001023195846/http://www.ars-grin.gov/cgi-bin/npgs/html/splist.pl?326 Germplasm Resources Information Network: Ailanthus]
*[http://www.nps.gov/plants/alien/fact/aial1.htm Plant Conservation Alliance's Alien Plant Working Group: Least Wanted]
Category:Sapindales genera | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ailanthus | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.052914 |
1565 | Aimoin of Fleury | Aimoin of Fleury (; ) was a medieval French monk and chronicler active in the late 10th and early 11th centuries. He was born at Villefranche-de-Longchat, in Southwestern France, about 960. Early in his life he entered the monastery of Fleury, where he became a monk and then passed the greater part of his life. Between c. 980 and 985 Aimoin wrote about Saint Benedict in the Abbey of Fleury-sur-Loire. His chief work is the Historia Francorum, or Libri V. de Gestis Francorum, which deals with the history of the Franks from the earliest times to 653, and was continued by other writers until the middle of the 12th century. It was much in vogue during the Middle Ages, but its historical value is now regarded as slight. It was edited in the 19th century by G. Waitz and published in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores, Band xxvi (Hanover and Berlin, 1826–1892).
In 1004 Aimoin also wrote Vita Abbonis, abbatis Floriacensis, the last of a series of lives of the abbots of Fleury, all of which, except the life of Abbo, have been lost. This was published by J. Mabillon in the Acta sanctorum ordinis sancti Benedicti (Paris, 1668–1701).
Aimoin's third work was the composition of books ii and iii of the Miracula sancti Benedicti, the first book of which was written by another monk of Fleury named Adrevald ( – 878). This also appears in the Acta sanctorum.
References
External links
Opera Omnia by Migne Patrologia Latina with analytical indices
Category:960s births
Category:Year of birth unknown
Category:1010s deaths
Category:Year of death unknown
Category:French chroniclers
Category:French Christian monks
Category:11th-century French historians
Category:11th-century writers in Latin | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimoin_of_Fleury | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.054971 |
1566 | Akkadian Empire | <br /><span style"font-weight: normal"></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: normal"></span>
| conventional_long_name = Akkadian Empire
| common_name = Akkadian Empire
| era = Bronze Age
| government_type = Monarchy
| year_start =
| year_end
| life_span 2154 BC}}
| event1 = Conquests of Sargon of Akkad
| date_event1 2284 BC}}
| p1 = Early Dynastic Period (Mesopotamia)Early Dynastic Period
| p2 | p3
| s1 = Gutian dynasty of SumerGutian Period (Sumer)
| s2 | s3
| stat_year1 2350 BC
| stat_area1 = 30000
| stat_year2 2300 BC succeeding the long-lived city-states of Sumer. Centered on the city of Akkad () and its surrounding region, the empire united Akkadian and Sumerian speakers under one rule and exercised significant influence across Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Anatolia, sending military expeditions as far south as Dilmun and Magan (modern United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman) in the Arabian Peninsula.
The Akkadian Empire reached its political peak between the 24th and 22nd centuries BC, following the conquests by its founder Sargon of Akkad. Under Sargon and his successors, the Akkadian language was briefly imposed on neighboring conquered states such as Elam and Gutium. Akkad is sometimes regarded as the first empire in history, though the meaning of this term is not precise, and there are earlier Sumerian claimants.
Contemporary epigraphic sources
Epigraphic sources from the Sargonic (Akkadian Empire) period are in relatively short supply, partly because the capital Akkad, like the capitals of the later Mitanni and Sealand, has not yet been located, though there has been much speculation. Some cuneiform tablets have been excavated at cities under Akkadian Empire control such as Eshnunna and Tell Agrab.
Other tablets have become available on the antiquities market and are held in museums and private collections such as those from the Akkadian governor in Adab. Internal evidence allows their dating to the Sargonic period and sometimes to the original location. Archives are especially important to historians and only a few have become available. An archive of 47 tablets was found at the excavation of Tell el-Suleimah in the Hamrin Basin.
Various royal inscriptions by the Akkadian rulers have also been found. Most of the original examples are short, or very fragmentary like the Victory Stele of Naram-Sin and the Sargonic victory stele from Telloh. A few longer ones are known because of later copies made, often from the much later Old Babylonian period. While these are assumed to be mostly accurate, it is difficult to know if they had been edited to reflect current political conditions. One of the longer surviving examples is the Bassetki Statue, the copper base of a Narim-Sin statue:
The final contemporary source are seals and their sealing dates. These are especially important here, as markers, with the shortage of other Akkadian Empire epigraphics and very useful to historians. As an example, two seals and one sealing were found in the Royal Cemetery at Ur which contained the name of Sargons's daughter En-hedu-ana. This provided confirmation of her existence. The seals read "En-hedu-ana, daughter of Sargon: Ilum-pal[il] (is) her coiffeur" and "Adda, estate supervisor/majordomo of En-hedu-ana".Later copies and literary compositions
So great was the Akkadian Empire, especially Sargon and Narim-Sin, that its history was passed down for millennia. This ranged on one end to purported copies of still existing Sargonic period inscriptions to literary tales made up from the whole cloth at the other. A few examples:
*Great Rebellion Against Naram-Sin – At one point in his reign much of the Empire, especially in the old mainly Sumerian city-states, rose up against Naram-Sin. The revolt was crushed but the echoes of the event were passed down in history. Some of the tales, like "Naram-Sin and the Enemy Hordes" (Old Babylonian – purported to be a copy of an inscription at the temple of Nergal in Cutha) and "Gula-AN and the Seventeen Kings against Naram-Sin" were literary compositions which further developed and changed the themes. The earliest examplar, from the Old Babylonian period, is found in several incomplete tablets and fragments, which differ somewhat, purporting to be copies of an inscription on a statue of Naram-Sin standing in the Ekur temple of Enlil at Nippur. Because it aligns with known contemporary inscriptions and year name it is considered authentic, which the usual Mesopotamian slant that something going wrong means you displeased the gods.
There were a number of these, passed down as part of scribel tradition including The Birth Legend of Sargon (Neo-Assyrian), Weidner Chronicle, and the Geographical Treatise on Sargon of Akkad's Empire.
Archaeology
Identifying architectural remains is hindered by the fact that there are sometimes no clear distinctions between features thought to stem from the preceding Early Dynastic period, and those thought to be Akkadian. Likewise, material that is thought to be Akkadian continues to be in use into the Ur III period. There is a similar issue with cuneiform tablets. In the early Akkadian Empire tablets and the signs on them are much like those from earlier periods, before developing into the much different Classical Sargonic style.
With the capital, Akkad, still unlocated, archaeological remains of the empire are still to be found, mainly at the cities where they established regional governors. An example is Adab where Naram-Sin established direct imperial control after Adab joined the "great revolt". After destroying the city of Mari the Akkadian Empire rebuilt it as an administrative center with an imperial governor. The city of Nuzi was established by the Akkadians and a number of economic and administrative texts were found there. Similarly, there are Marad, Nippur, Tutub and Ebla.
Excavation at the modern site of Tell Brak has suggested that the Akkadians rebuilt a city ("Brak" or "Nagar") on this site, for use as an administrative center. The city included two large buildings including a complex with temple, offices, courtyard, and large ovens.
Dating and periodization
The Akkadian period is generally dated to 2334–2154 BC (according to the middle chronology). The short-chronology dates of 2270–2083 BC are now considered less likely. It was preceded by the Early Dynastic Period of Mesopotamia (ED) and succeeded by the Ur III Period, although both transitions are blurry. For example, it is likely that the rise of Sargon of Akkad coincided with the late ED Period and that the final Akkadian kings ruled simultaneously with the Gutian kings alongside rulers at the city-states of both Uruk and Lagash. The Akkadian Period is contemporary with EB IV (in Israel), EB IVA and EJ IV (in Syria), and EB IIIB (in Turkey).Timeline of rulers
The relative order of Akkadian kings is clear, while noting that the Ur III version of the Sumerian King List inverts the order of Rimush and Manishtushu. The absolute dates of their reigns are approximate (as with all dates prior to the Late Bronze Age collapse c. 1200 BC).
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Ruler
!
! Middle chronology<br/><small>All dates BC</small>
!Family tree
|-
|Sargon
|
| style="text-align:center;"| 2334–2279
| style"text-align:center;" rowspan7|
|-
|Rimush
|
| style="text-align:center;"| 2278–2270
|-
|Manishtushu
|
| style="text-align:center;"| 2269–2255
|-
|Naram-Sin
|
| style="text-align:center;"| 2254–2218
|-
|Shar-Kali-Sharri
|
| style="text-align:center;"| 2217–2193
|-
|Dudu
|
| style="text-align:center;"| 2189–2169
|-
|Shu-turul
|
| style="text-align:center;"| 2168–2154
|}
History and development of the empire
Pre-Sargonic Akkad
under its last king Lugal-Zage-Si appears in orange. Circa 2350 BC]]
, holding a mace and wearing a flounced royal coat on his left shoulder with a large belt (left), followed by an attendant holding a royal umbrella. The name of Sargon in cuneiform ("King Sargon") appears faintly in front of his face.Sargon of Akkad
The earliest records in the Akkadian language date to the time of Sargon of Akkad, who defeated the Sumerian king Lugal-zage-si at the Battle of Uruk and conquered his former territory, establishing the Akkadian Empire. Sargon was claimed to be the son of a gardener in the Sumerian King List. Later legends named his father as La'ibum or Itti-Bel and his birth mother as a priestess (or possibly even a hierodule) of Ishtar, the Akkadian equivalent of the Sumerian goddess Inanna. One legend of Sargon from Neo-Assyrian times quotes him as saying
It refers to his campaign in "Elam", where he defeated a coalition army led by the King of Awan and forced the vanquished to become his vassals.
Also shortly after, another revolt took place:
The Bible refers to the city of Akkad in the Book of Genesis, which states:
Nimrod's historical inspiration remains uncertain, but he has been identified with Sargon of Akkad by some scholars who also propose that the name of Sargon's grandson and successor Naram-Sin is the root of Nimrod's, while others have noted similarities between Nimrod and the legendary Gilgamesh, king of Uruk (Erech).
Rimush and Manishtushu
Sargon had crushed opposition even at old age. These difficulties broke out again in the reign of his sons, where revolts broke out during the nine-year reign of Rimush (2278–2270 BC), who fought hard to retain the empire, and was successful until he was assassinated by some of his own courtiers. According to his inscriptions, he faced widespread revolts, and had to reconquer the cities of Ur, Umma, Adab, Lagash, Der, and Kazallu from rebellious ensis:
{| class"wikitable" align"center" style"margin-left: 1em;" style"font-size: 80%;"
|-
| colspan"7" align"center" cellspacing"0" style"background:lightgrey; color:black" |Sumerian casualties from the campaigns of Rimush
He also faced revolts at the start of his reign, but quickly crushed them.
, celebrating victory against the Lullubi from Zagros 2260 BC. He is wearing a horned helmet, a symbol of divinity, and is also portrayed in a larger scale in comparison to others to emphasize his superiority. Brought back from Sippar to Susa as war prize in the 12th century BC.]]
Naram-Sin also recorded the Akkadian conquest of Ebla as well as Armanum and its king.
at Tell Brak.]]
To better police Syria, he built a royal residence at Tell Brak, a crossroads at the heart of the Khabur River basin of the Jezirah. Naram-Sin campaigned against Magan which also revolted; Naram-Sin "marched against Magan and personally caught Mandannu, its king", where he instated garrisons to protect the main roads. The chief threat seemed to be coming from the northern Zagros Mountains, the Lulubis and the Gutians. A campaign against the Lullubi led to the carving of the "Victory Stele of Naram-Suen", now in the Louvre. Hittite sources claim Naram-Sin of Akkad even ventured into Anatolia, battling the Hittite and Hurrian kings Pamba of Hatti, Zipani of Kanesh, and 15 others.
The economy was highly planned. Grain was cleaned, and rations of grain and oil were distributed in standardized vessels made by the city's potters. Taxes were paid in produce and labour on public walls, including city walls, temples, irrigation canals and waterways, producing huge agricultural surpluses. This newfound Akkadian wealth may have been based upon benign climatic conditions, huge agricultural surpluses and the confiscation of the wealth of other peoples.
In later Assyrian and Babylonian texts, the name Akkad, together with Sumer, appears as part of the royal title, as in the Sumerian LUGAL KI-EN-GI KI-URI or Akkadian Šar māt Šumeri u Akkadi, This title was assumed by the king who seized control of Nippur, the intellectual and religious center of southern Mesopotamia.
During the Akkadian period, the Akkadian language became the lingua franca of the Middle East, and was officially used for administration, although the Sumerian language remained as a spoken and literary language. The spread of Akkadian stretched from Syria to Elam, and even the Elamite language was temporarily written in Mesopotamian cuneiform. Akkadian texts later found their way to far-off places, from Egypt (in the Amarna Period) and Anatolia, to Persia (Behistun).
Submission of Sumerian kings
The submission of some Sumerian rulers to the Akkadian Empire, is recorded in the seal inscriptions of Sumerian rulers such as Lugal-ushumgal, governor (ensi) of Lagash ("Shirpula"), circa 2230–2210 BC. Several inscriptions of Lugal-ushumgal are known, particularly seal impressions, which refer to him as governor of Lagash and at the time a vassal (, arad, "servant" or "slave") of Naram-Sin, as well as his successor Shar-kali-sharri. One of these seals proclaims:
It can be considered that Lugal-ushumgal was a collaborator of the Akkadian Empire, as was Meskigal, ruler of Adab. Later however, Lugal-ushumgal was succeeded by Puzer-Mama who, as Akkadian power waned, achieved independence from Shar-Kali-Sharri, assuming the title of "King of Lagash" and starting the illustrious Second Dynasty of Lagash. Collapse
capturing a Babylonian city, as the Akkadians are making a stand outside of their city. 19th century illustration.]]
The empire of Akkad likely fell in the 22nd century BC, within 180 years of its founding, ushering in a "Dark Age" with no prominent imperial authority until the Third Dynasty of Ur. The region's political structure may have reverted to the status quo ante of local governance by city-states.
By the end of Sharkalisharri's reign, the empire had begun to unravel.
After several years of chaos (and four kings), Shu-turul and Dudu appear to have restored some centralized authority for several decades; however, they were unable to prevent the empire from eventually collapsing outright, eventually ceding power to Gutians, based in Adab, who had been conquered by Akkad during the reign of Sharkalisharri.
Little is known about the Gutian period, or how long it endured. Cuneiform sources suggest that the Gutians' administration showed little concern for maintaining agriculture, written records, or public safety; they reputedly released all farm animals to roam about Mesopotamia freely and soon brought about famine and rocketing grain prices. The Sumerian king Ur-Nammu (2112–2095 BC) cleared the Gutians from Mesopotamia during his reign.
The Sumerian King List, describing the Akkadian Empire after the death of Shar-kali-shari, states:
However, there are no known year-names or other archaeological evidence verifying any of these later kings of Akkad or Uruk, apart from several artefact referencing king Dudu of Akkad and Shu-turul. The named kings of Uruk may have been contemporaries of the last kings of Akkad, but in any event could not have been very prominent.
|url= http://art.thewalters.org/detail/4594
|title= Cylinder Seal with King or God and Vanquished Lion}}</ref> The Walters Art Museum.]]
The period between BC and 2004 BC is known as the Ur III period. Documents again began to be written in Sumerian, although Sumerian was becoming a purely literary or liturgical language, much as Latin later became in Medieval Europe.
One explanation for the end of the Akkadian empire is simply that the Akkadian dynasty could not maintain its political supremacy over other independently powerful city-states. Natural causes: drought, seasonal weather patterns
One theory, which remains controversial, associates regional decline at the end of the Akkadian period (and of the First Intermediary Period following the Old Kingdom in Ancient Egypt) with rapidly increasing aridity, and failing rainfall in the region of the Ancient Near East, caused by a global centennial-scale drought, sometimes called the 4.2 kiloyear event. Harvey Weiss has shown that
The Akkadian government formed a "classical standard" with which all future Mesopotamian states compared themselves. Traditionally, the ensi was the highest functionary of the Sumerian city-states. In later traditions, one became an ensi by marrying the goddess Inanna, legitimising the rulership through divine consent.
Initially, the monarchical lugal (lu man, galGreat) was subordinate to the priestly ensi, and was appointed at times of troubles, but by later dynastic times, it was the lugal who had emerged as the preeminent role, having his own "é" (house) or "palace", independent from the temple establishment. By the time of Mesalim, whichever dynasty controlled the city of Kish was recognised as šar kiššati ( king of Kish), and was considered preeminent in Sumer, possibly because this was where the two rivers approached, and whoever controlled Kish ultimately controlled the irrigation systems of the other cities downstream.
As Sargon extended his conquest from the "Lower Sea" (Persian Gulf), to the "Upper Sea" (Mediterranean), it was felt that he ruled "the totality of the lands under heaven", or "from sunrise to sunset", as contemporary texts put it. Under Sargon, the ensis generally retained their positions, but were seen more as provincial governors. The title šar kiššati became recognised as meaning "lord of the universe". Sargon is even recorded as having organised naval expeditions to Dilmun (Bahrain) and Magan, amongst the first organised military naval expeditions in history. Whether he also did in the case of the Mediterranean with the kingdom of Kaptara (possibly Cyprus), as claimed in later documents, is more questionable.
With Naram-Sin, Sargon's grandson, this went further than with Sargon, with the king not only being called "Lord of the Four-Quarters (of the Earth)", but also elevated to the ranks of the dingir (= gods), with his own temple establishment. Previously a ruler could, like Gilgamesh, become divine after death but the Akkadian kings, from Naram-Sin onward, were considered gods on earth in their lifetimes. Their portraits showed them of larger size than mere mortals and at some distance from their retainers.
One strategy adopted by both Sargon and Naram-Sin, to maintain control of the country, was to install their daughters, Enheduanna and Emmenanna respectively, as high priestess to Sin, the Akkadian version of the Sumerian moon deity, Nanna, at Ur, in the extreme south of Sumer; to install sons as provincial ensi governors in strategic locations; and to marry their daughters to rulers of peripheral parts of the Empire (Urkesh and Marhashe). A well documented case of the latter is that of Naram-Sin's daughter Tar'am-Agade at Urkesh.
Records at the Brak administrative complex suggest that the Akkadians appointed locals as tax collectors.
Economy
The population of Akkad, like nearly all pre-modern states, was entirely dependent upon the agricultural systems of the region, which seem to have had two principal centres: the irrigated farmlands of southern Iraq that traditionally had a yield of 30 grains returned for each grain sown and the rain-fed agriculture of northern Iraq, known as the "Upper Country."
Southern Iraq during Akkadian period seems to have been approaching its modern rainfall level of less than per year, with the result that agriculture was totally dependent upon irrigation. Before the Akkadian period, the progressive salinisation of the soils, produced by poorly drained irrigation, had been reducing yields of wheat in the southern part of the country, leading to the conversion to more salt-tolerant barley growing. Urban populations there had peaked already by 2,600 BC, and demographic pressures were high, contributing to the rise of militarism apparent immediately before the Akkadian period (as seen in the Stele of the Vultures of Eannatum). Warfare between city states had led to a population decline, from which Akkad provided a temporary respite. It was this high degree of agricultural productivity in the south that enabled the growth of the highest population densities in the world at this time, giving Akkad its military advantage.
bearing the name of Rimush, king of Kish, BC, Louvre, traded from the Mediterranean coast where it was used by Canaanites to make a purple dye.]]
The water table in this region was very high and replenished regularly—by winter storms in the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates from October to March and from snow-melt from March to July. Flood levels, that had been stable from about 3,000 to 2,600 BC, had started falling, and by the Akkadian period were a half-meter to a meter lower than recorded previously. Even so, the flat country and weather uncertainties made flooding much more unpredictable than in the case of the Nile; serious deluges seem to have been a regular occurrence, requiring constant maintenance of irrigation ditches and drainage systems. Farmers were recruited into regiments for this work from August to October—a period of food shortage—under the control of city temple authorities, thus acting as a form of unemployment relief. Gwendolyn Leick has suggested that this was Sargon's original employment for the king of Kish, giving him experience in effectively organising large groups of men; a tablet reads, "Sargon, the king, to whom Enlil permitted no rival—5,400 warriors ate bread daily before him".
Harvest was in the late spring and during the dry summer months. Nomadic Amorites from the northwest pastured their flocks of sheep and goats to graze on the crop residue and were watered from the river and irrigation canals. For this privilege, they had to pay a tax in wool, meat, milk, and cheese to the temples, who distributed these products to the bureaucracy and priesthood. In good years, all went well, but in bad years, wild winter pastures were in short supply, nomads sought to pasture their flocks in the grain fields, resulting in conflicts with farmers. It appeared that the subsidizing of southern populations by the import of wheat from the north of the Empire temporarily overcame this problem, and it seems to have allowed economic recovery and a growing population within this region.Foreign trade
, Magan, Dilmun, Marhashi and Meluhha.]]
As a result, Sumer and Akkad had a surplus of agricultural products but was short of almost everything else, particularly metal ores, timber and building stone, all of which had to be imported. The spread of the Akkadian state as far as the "silver mountain" (possibly the Taurus Mountains), the "cedars" of Lebanon, and the copper deposits of Magan, was largely motivated by the goal of securing control over these imports. One tablet, an Old Babylonian Period copy of an original inscription, reads:
International trade developed during the Akkadian period. Indus–Mesopotamia relations also seem to have expanded: Sargon of Akkad (circa 2300 or 2250 BC), was the first Mesopotamian ruler to make an explicit reference to the region of Meluhha, which is generally understood as being the Balochistan or the Indus area.
}}
In art, there was a great emphasis on the kings of the dynasty, alongside much that continued earlier Sumerian art. Little architecture remains. In large works and small ones such as seals, the degree of realism was considerably increased, but the seals show a "grim world of cruel conflict, of danger and uncertainty, a world in which man is subjected without appeal to the incomprehensible acts of distant and fearful divinities who he must serve but cannot love. This sombre mood ... remained characteristic of Mesopotamian art..."
Akkadian sculpture is remarkable for its fineness and realism, which shows a clear advancement compared to the previous period of Sumerian art.
<gallery widths"200" heights"200" perrow="4">
File:Bassetki Statue, Akkadian period, 23rd century BCE, from Bassetki, Iraq. Iraq Museum.jpg|The Bassetki statue, another example of Akkadian artistic realism
File:Statue de Manishtusu - Sb 47 - Antiquités orientales du Louvre.jpg|The Manishtushu statue
File:Statue of an Akkadian ruler of Assur city. From Assur, Iraq, c. 2300 BCE. Pergamon Museum.jpg|Statue of an Akkadian ruler. From Assur, Iraq, c. 2300 BC. Pergamon Museum.
File:Fragment of the statue of a devotee, with inscription in the name of Naram-Sin.jpg|Fragment of the statue of a devotee, with inscription in the name of Naram-Sin: "To the god Erra, for the life of Naram-Sin, the powerful, his companion, the king of the four regions, Shu'astakkal, the scribe, the majordomo, has dedicated his statue".
</gallery>
Seals
The Akkadians used visual arts as a vehicle of ideology. They developed a new style for cylinder seals by reusing traditional animal decorations but organizing them around inscriptions, which often became central parts of the layout. The figures also became more sculptural and naturalistic. New elements were also included, especially in relation to the rich Akkadian mythology.
<gallery widths"200px" heights"100px" perrow="4">
File:Adda Seal Akkadian Empire 2300 BC.jpg|upright1.8|Inscription "Adda, the scribe", hunting god with bow and an arrow, Ishtar with weapons rising from her shoulders, emerging sun-god Shamash, Zu bird of destiny, water god Ea with bull between legs, two-faced attendant god Usimu with right hand raised.
File:Akkadian seal Agricultural scene Louvre Museum.jpg|Akkadian seal depicting an agricultural scene. Louvre Museum
File:Le dieu de l ete et dumuzi.jpg|Summer God and Dumuzi. Louvre Museum
File:Periodo accadico, sigillo in calcare verde con eroi a sei ricci che sottomettono un bufalo d'acqua e un leone, 2350-2150 ac ca.jpg|Ea wrestling with a water buffalo, and bull-man Enkidu fighting with a lion.
</gallery>
Language
During the 3rd millennium BC, there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian (and vice versa) is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a massive scale, to syntactic, morphological, and phonological convergence. but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary, and scientific language in Mesopotamia until the 1st century AD.Poet–priestess Enheduanna
, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, circa 2300 BC]]
Sumerian literature continued in rich development during the Akkadian period. Enheduanna, the "wife (Sumerian dam high priestess) of Nanna [the Sumerian moon god] and daughter of Sargon" of the temple of Sin at Ur, who lived –2250 BC, is the first poet in history whose name is known. Her known works include hymns to the goddess Inanna, the Exaltation of Inanna and In-nin sa-gur-ra. A third work, the Temple Hymns, a collection of specific hymns, addresses the temples and their occupants, the deities to whom they were consecrated. The works of this poet are significant, because although they start out using the third person, they shift to the first person voice of the poet herself, and they mark a significant development in the use of cuneiform. As poet, princess, and priestess, she was a person who, according to William W. Hallo, "set standards in all three of her roles for many succeeding centuries"
In the Exultation of Inanna,
on an Akkadian seal, 2350–2150 BC]]
The kings of Akkad were legendary among later Mesopotamian civilizations, with Sargon understood as the prototype of a strong and wise leader, and his grandson Naram-Sin considered the wicked and impious leader (Unheilsherrscher in the analysis of Hans Gustav Güterbock) who brought ruin upon his kingdom.
Technology
A tablet from the periods reads, "(From the earliest days) no-one had made a statue of lead, (but) Rimush king of Kish, had a statue of himself made of lead. It stood before Enlil; and it recited his (Rimush's) virtues to the idu of the gods". The copper Bassetki Statue, cast with the lost wax method, testifies to the high level of skill that craftsmen achieved during the Akkadian period.<ref name"Mieroop2007" />See also
* List of cities of the ancient Near East
* List of Mesopotamian deities
* History of Mesopotamia
* List of Mesopotamian dynasties
Notes
Bibliography
* Liverani, Mario, ed. (1993). Akkad: The First World Empire: Structure, Ideology Traditions. Padova: Sargon srl.
* Oates, Joan (2004). "Archaeology in Mesopotamia: Digging Deeper at Tell Brak". 2004 Albert Reckitt Archaeological Lecture. In Proceedings of the British Academy: 2004 Lectures; Oxford University Press, 2005. .
*
Further reading
*Gough, M.A, [http://www.rosetta.bham.ac.uk/Issue_01/Gough2006.pdf Historical Perception in the Sargonic Literary Tradition. The Implication of Copied Texts], Rosetta 1, pp 1–9, 2006
*[https://www.czasopisma.ltn.lodz.pl/index.php/Acta-Archaeologica-Lodziensia/article/download/1848/1704] Paszke, Marcin Z, "From Sargon To Narām-Sîn: some remarks on Akkadian military activity in the II nd half of the III rd millennium bc. The example of eastern campaigns", Acta Archaeologica Lodziensia 68, pp. 75–83, 2022
*
* E. A. Speiser, "Some Factors in the Collapse of Akkad", Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 72, no. 3, pp. 97–101, (Jul. - Sep. 1952)
External links
* [http://www.penn.museum/sites/iraq/ Iraq's Ancient Past] – Penn Museum
* [http://cdli.ucla.edu/tools/yearnames/HTML/T2K3.htm Year Names of Narim-Sin – CDLI]
* [http://cdli.ucla.edu/tools/yearnames/HTML/T2K4.htm Year Named of Shar-kali-Sharri – CDLI]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20091212064322/http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Enheduanna.html Site on Enheduanna at Virginia Tech University] (archived 12 December 2009)
Category:States and territories established in the 3rd millennium BC
Category:States and territories disestablished in the 3rd millennium BC
Category:Ancient Mesopotamia
Category:Ancient Upper Mesopotamia
Category:Ancient Levant
Category:24th-century BC establishments
Category:3rd-millennium BC disestablishments
Category:Former monarchies of Asia
Category:Nimrod
Category:Former empires | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_Empire | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.091929 |
1567 | Ajax the Lesser | thumb|Ajax the Lesser by Francesco Sabatelli, 1829
thumb|Scene from the Trojan War: Cassandra clings to the Palladium, the wooden cult image of Athene, while Ajax the Lesser is about to drag her away in front of her father Priam (standing on the left). Fresco from the atrium of the Casa del Menandro (I 10, 4) in Pompeii.
thumb|Ajax, 1820 painting by Henri Serrur
Ajax ( Aias according to Graves means "of the earth".) was a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris. He was called the "Ajax the Less", the "lesser" or "Locrian" Ajax, to distinguish him from Ajax the Great, son of Telamon. He was the leader of the Locrian contingent during the Trojan War. He is a significant figure in Homer's Iliad and is also mentioned in the Odyssey, in Virgil's Aeneid and in Euripides' The Trojan Women. In Etruscan legend, he was known as Aivas Vilates.
Description
In the account of Dares the Phrygian, Ajax was described as "stocky, powerfully built, swarthy, a pleasant person, and brave."
Mythology
Life
thumb|left|Ajax the Lesser and Cassandra
Ajax's mother's name was Eriopis. According to Strabo, he was born in Naryx in Locris, where Ovid calls him Narycius heros. According to the Iliad, he led his Locrians in forty ships against Troy. He is described as one of the great heroes among the Greeks. In battle, he wore a linen cuirass (, ), was brave and intrepid, especially skilled in throwing the spear and, next to Achilles, the swiftest of all the Greeks. The chronicler Malalas portrayed him as "tall, strong, tawny, squinting, good nose, curly hair, black hair, thick beard, long face, daring warrior, magnanimous, a womanizer."
In the funeral games at the pyre of Patroclus, Ajax contended with Odysseus and Antilochus for the prize in the footrace; but Athena, who was hostile towards him and favored Odysseus, made him stumble and fall, so that he won only the second prize.
In later traditions, this Ajax is called a son of Oileus and the nymph Rhene, and is also mentioned among the suitors of Helen. After the taking of Troy, he rushed into the temple of Athena, where Cassandra had taken refuge, and was embracing the statue of the goddess in supplication. Ajax violently dragged her away to the other captives. According to some writers, he raped Cassandra inside the temple. Odysseus called for Ajax's death by stoning for this crime, but Ajax saved himself by claiming innocence with an oath to Athena, clutching her statue in supplication.
Death
Since Ajax dragged the supplicant from her temple, Athena had cause to be indignant. According to the Bibliotheca, no one was aware that Ajax had raped Cassandra until Calchas, the Greek seer, warned the Greeks that Athena was furious at the treatment of her priestess and she would destroy the Greek ships if they did not kill him immediately. Despite this, Ajax managed to hide at the altar of a deity where the Greeks, fearing divine retribution should they kill him and destroy the altar, allowed him to live. When the Greeks left without killing Ajax, despite their sacrifices, Athena became so angry that she persuaded Zeus to send a storm that sank many of their ships.
thumb|Poseidon killing Ajax the Lesser, drawing by Bonaventura Genelli
As Ajax was returning from Troy, Athena hit his ship with a thunderbolt and the vessel was wrecked on the Whirling Rocks (). But he escaped with some of his men, managing to cling onto a rock through the assistance of Poseidon. He would have been saved in spite of Athena, but he then audaciously declared that he would escape the dangers of the sea in defiance of the immortals. Offended by this presumption, Poseidon split the rock with his trident and Ajax was swallowed up by the sea. Thetis buried him when the corpse washed up on Mykonos. Other versions depict a different death for Ajax, showing him dying when on his voyage home. In these versions, when Ajax came to the Capharean Rocks on the coast of Euboea, his ship was wrecked in a fierce storm, he himself was lifted up in a whirlwind and impaled with a flash of rapid fire from Athena in his chest, and his body thrust upon sharp rocks, which afterwards were called the rocks of Ajax.
After Ajax's death, his spirit dwelt in the island of Leuce. The Opuntian Locrians worshipped Ajax as their national hero, and so great was their faith in him that when they drew up their army in battle, they always left one place open for him, believing that, although invisible to them, he was fighting for and among them. The story of Ajax was frequently made use of by ancient poets and artists, and the hero who appears on some Locrian coins with the helmet, shield, and sword is probably this Ajax.
Other accounts of Ajax's death are offered by Philostratus, Euripides, and the scholiast on Lycophron.
Art
thumb|upright|Ajax and Cassandra by Solomon Joseph Solomon (1886)
The abduction of Cassandra by Ajax was frequently represented in Greek works of art, such as the chest of Cypselus described by Pausanias and in extant works.
Notes
References
Apollodorus, The Library with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. . Online version at the Perseus Digital Library. Greek text available from the same website.
Conon, Fifty Narrations, surviving as one-paragraph summaries in the Bibliotheca (Library) of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople translated from the Greek by Brady Kiesling. Online version at the Topos Text Project.
Dictys Cretensis, from The Trojan War. The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian translated by Richard McIlwaine Frazer Jr. Indiana University Press. 1966. Online version at the Topos Text Project.
Gaius Julius Hyginus, Fabulae from The Myths of Hyginus translated and edited by Mary Grant. University of Kansas Publications in Humanistic Studies. Online version at the Topos Text Project.
Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths, Harmondsworth, London, England, Penguin Books, 1960.
Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths: The Complete and Definitive Edition. Penguin Books Limited. 2017.
Homer, The Iliad with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, Ph.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924. . Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Homer, Homeri Opera in five volumes. Oxford, Oxford University Press. 1920. . Greek text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
Homer, The Odyssey with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, Ph.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1919. . Online version at the Perseus Digital Library. Greek text available from the same website.
Lycophron, The Alexandra translated by Alexander William Mair. Loeb Classical Library Volume 129. London: William Heinemann, 1921. Online version at the Topos Text Project.
Lycophron, Alexandra translated by A.W. Mair. London: William Heinemann; New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. 1921. Greek text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
Pausanias, Description of Greece with an English Translation by W.H.S. Jones, Litt.D., and H.A. Ormerod, M.A., in 4 Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1918. . Online version at the Perseus Digital Library
Pausanias, Graeciae Descriptio. 3 vols. Leipzig, Teubner. 1903. Greek text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses translated by Brookes More. Boston, Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses. Hugo Magnus. Gotha (Germany). Friedr. Andr. Perthes. 1892. Latin text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
Publius Vergilius Maro, Aeneid. Theodore C. Williams. trans. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Co. 1910. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Publius Vergilius Maro, Bucolics, Aeneid, and Georgics. J. B. Greenough. Boston. Ginn & Co. 1900. Latin text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
Quintus Smyrnaeus, The Fall of Troy translated by Way. A. S. Loeb Classical Library Volume 19. London: William Heinemann, 1913. Online version at theio.com
Quintus Smyrnaeus, The Fall of Troy. Arthur S. Way. London: William Heinemann; New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. 1913. Greek text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
Strabo, The Geography of Strabo. Edition by H.L. Jones. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Strabo, Geographica edited by A. Meineke. Leipzig: Teubner. 1877. Greek text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
Tryphiodorus, Capture of Troy translated by Mair, A. W. Loeb Classical Library Volume 219. London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1928. Online version at theoi.com
Tryphiodorus, Capture of Troy with an English Translation by A.W. Mair. London, William Heinemann, Ltd.; New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. 1928. Greek text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
Tzetzes, John, Allegories of the Iliad translated by Goldwyn, Adam J. and Kokkini, Dimitra. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, Harvard University Press, 2015.
External links
Category:Suitors of Helen
Category:Achaean Leaders
Category:Mythological rapists
Category:Metamorphoses characters
Category:Characters in the Aeneid
Category:Locrians
Category:Deeds of Poseidon
Category:Greek mythological heroes
Category:Cassandra | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_the_Lesser | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.125613 |
1568 | Ajax the Great | Ajax () or Aias (; , Aíantos; archaic ) is a Greek mythological hero, the son of King Telamon and Periboea, and the half-brother of Teucer. He plays an important role in the Trojan War, and is portrayed as a towering figure and a warrior of great courage in Homer's Iliad and in the Epic Cycle, a series of epic poems about the Trojan War, being second only to Achilles among Greek heroes of the war. He is also referred to as "Telamonian Ajax" (, in Etruscan recorded as Aivas Tlamunus), "Greater Ajax", or "Ajax the Great", which distinguishes him from Ajax, son of Oileus, also known as Ajax the Lesser.
Family
Ajax is the son of Telamon. Telamon was the son of Aeacus and grandson of Zeus, and his first wife Periboea. By Telamon, he is also the elder half-brother of Teucer. Through his uncle Peleus (Telamon's brother), he is the cousin of Achilles.
The etymology of his given name is uncertain. By folk etymology, his name was said to come from the root of aiazō which means "to lament", translating to "one who laments; mourner". Hesiod provided a different folk etymology in a story in his "The Great Eoiae", where Ajax the great receives his name when Heracles prays to Zeus that a son might be born to Telemon and Eriboea: Zeus sends an eagle (aetos αετός) as a sign, and Heracles then bids the parents call their son Ajax after the eagle.
Many illustrious Athenians, including Cimon, Miltiades, Alcibiades and the historian Thucydides, traced their descent from Ajax. On an Etruscan tomb dedicated to Racvi Satlnei in Bologna (5th century BC), there is an inscription that says aivastelmunsl, which means "[family] of Telamonian Ajax".
Mythology
Description
In the account of Dares the Phrygian, Ajax was illustrated as ". . .powerful. His voice was clear, his hair black and curly. He was perfectly single-minded and unrelenting in the onslaught of battle." Meanwhile, In Homer's Iliad he is described as of great stature, colossal frame, and strongest of all the Achaeans. Known as the "bulwark of the Achaeans", he was trained by the centaur Chiron (who had trained Ajax's father Telamon and Achilles' father Peleus and later died of an accidental wound inflicted by a poison arrow belonging to Heracles). He was described as fearless, strong, and powerful but also with a very high level of combat intelligence. Ajax commands his army wielding a huge shield made of seven cowhides with a layer of bronze. Most notably, Ajax is not wounded in any of the battles described in the Iliad, and he is the only principal character on either side who does not receive substantial assistance from any of the gods (except for Agamemnon) who take part in the battles, although, in book 13, Poseidon strikes Ajax with his staff, renewing his strength. Unlike Diomedes, Agamemnon, and Achilles, Ajax appears as a mainly defensive warrior, instrumental in the defense of the Greek camp and ships and that of Patroclus' body. When the Trojans are on the offensive, he is often seen covering the retreat of the Achaeans. Significantly, while one of the deadliest heroes in the whole poem, Ajax has no aristeia depicting him on the offensive.thumb|The Belvedere Torso, a marble sculpture carved in the first century BC depicting Ajax.
Trojan War
In the Iliad, Ajax is notable for his abundant strength and courage, seen particularly in two fights with Hector. In Book 7, Ajax is chosen by lot to meet Hector in a duel which lasts most of a whole day. Ajax at first gets the better of the encounter, wounding Hector with his spear and knocking him down with a large stone, but Hector battles on until the heralds, acting at the direction of Zeus, call a draw, with the two combatants exchanging gifts, Ajax giving Hector his "war-belt, glistening purple" and Hector giving Ajax his "silver-studded sword"
The second fight between Ajax and Hector occurs when the latter breaks into the Mycenaean camp, and battles with the Greeks among the ships. In Book 14, Ajax throws a giant rock at Hector which almost kills him. In Book 15, Hector is restored to his strength by Apollo and returns to attack the ships. Ajax, wielding an enormous spear as a weapon and leaping from ship to ship, holds off the Trojan armies virtually single-handedly. In Book 16, Hector and Ajax duel once again. Hector then disarms Ajax (although Ajax is not hurt) and Ajax is forced to retreat, seeing that Zeus is clearly favoring Hector. Hector and the Trojans succeed in burning one Greek ship, the culmination of an assault that almost finishes the war. Ajax is responsible for the death of many Trojan lords, including Phorcys.
Ajax often fought in tandem with his brother Teucer, known for his skill with the bow. Ajax would wield his magnificent shield, as Teucer stood behind picking off enemy Trojans.
Achilles was absent during these encounters because of his feud with Agamemnon. In Book 9, Agamemnon and the other Mycenaean chiefs send Ajax, Odysseus and Phoenix to the tent of Achilles in an attempt to reconcile with the great warrior and induce him to return to the fight. Although Ajax speaks earnestly and is well received, he does not succeed in convincing Achilles.
When Patroclus is killed, Hector tries to steal his body. Ajax, assisted by Menelaus, succeeds in fighting off the Trojans and taking the body back with his chariot; however, the Trojans have already stripped Patroclus of Achilles' armor. Ajax's prayer to Zeus to remove the fog that has descended on the battle to allow them to fight or die in the light of day has become proverbial. According to Hyginus, in total, Ajax killed 28 people at Troy.
thumb|A copy of the 4th century BC fresco from the François Tomb, showing the sacrifice of Trojan slaves. Ajax the Great is the second from the right
Death
thumb|The Argument between Ajax and Odysseus over Achilles' armour, by Agostino Masucci
thumb|Sorrowful Ajax (Asmus Jacob Carstens, c. 1791)
As the Iliad comes to a close, Ajax and the majority of other Greek warriors are alive and well. When Achilles dies, killed by Paris (with help from Apollo), Ajax and Odysseus are the heroes who fight against the Trojans to get the body and bury it with his companion, Patroclus. Ajax, with his great shield and spear, manages to recover the body and carry it to the ships, while Odysseus fights off the Trojans. After the burial, each claims Achilles' magical armor, which had been forged on Mount Olympus by the smith-god Hephaestus, for himself as recognition for his heroic efforts. A competition is held to determine who deserves the armor. Ajax argues that because of his strength and the fighting he has done for the Greeks, including saving the ships from Hector, and driving him off with a massive rock, he deserves this magical protection. However, Odysseus proves to be more eloquent, and with the aid of Athena, the council gives him the armor. Ajax, distraught by this result and "conquered by his own grief", plunges his sword into his own chest, killing himself. In the Little Iliad, Ajax goes mad with rage at Odysseus' victory and slaughters the cattle of the Greeks. After returning to his senses, he kills himself out of shame.
The Belvedere Torso, a marble torso now in the Vatican Museums, is considered to depict Ajax "in the act of contemplating his suicide".
In Sophocles' play Ajax, a famous retelling of Ajax's demise, after the armor is awarded to Odysseus, Ajax feels so insulted that he wants to kill Agamemnon and Menelaus. Athena intervenes and clouds his mind and vision, and he goes to a flock of sheep and slaughters them, imagining they are the Achaean leaders, including Odysseus and Agamemnon. When he comes to his senses, covered in blood, he realizes that what he has done has diminished his honor, and decides that he prefers to kill himself rather than live in shame. He does so with the same sword which Hector gave him when they exchanged presents. From his blood sprang a red flower, as at the death of Hyacinthus, which bore on its leaves the initial letters of his name Ai, also expressive of lament. His ashes were deposited in a golden urn on the Rhoetean promontory at the entrance of the Hellespont.
Ajax's half-brother Teucer stood trial before his father for not bringing Ajax's body or famous weapons back. Teucer was acquitted for responsibility but found guilty of negligence. He was disowned by his father and was not allowed to return to his home, the island of Salamis off the coast of Athens.
Homer is somewhat vague about the precise manner of Ajax's death but does ascribe it to his loss in the dispute over Achilles' armor; when Odysseus visits Hades, he begs the soul of Ajax to speak to him, but Ajax, still resentful over the old quarrel, refuses and descends silently back into Erebus.
Like Achilles, he is represented (although not by Homer) as living after his death on the island of Leuke at the mouth of the Danube. Ajax, who in the post-Homeric legend is described as the grandson of Aeacus and the great-grandson of Zeus, was the tutelary hero of the island of Salamis, where he had a temple and an image, and where a festival called Aianteia was celebrated in his honour. At this festival a couch was set up, on which the panoply of the hero was placed, a practice which recalls the Roman Lectisternium. The identification of Ajax with the family of Aeacus was chiefly a matter which concerned the Athenians, after Salamis had come into their possession, on which occasion Solon is said to have inserted a line in the Iliad (2.557–558), for the purpose of supporting the Athenian claim to the island. Ajax then became an Attic hero; he was worshipped at Athens, where he had a statue in the market-place, and the tribe Aiantis was named after him.
See also
Corpus vasorum antiquorum
Troy VII
Notes
References
Bibliography
Homer. Iliad, 7.181–312.
Homer, Odyssey 11.543–67.
Bibliotheca. Epitome III, 11-V, 7.
Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths, Harmondsworth, London, England, Penguin Books, 1960.
Graves, Robert, The Greek Myths: The Complete and Definitive Edition. Penguin Books Limited. 2017.
Ovid. Metamorphoses 12.620–13.398.
Friedrich Schiller, Das Siegerfest.
Pindar's Nemeans, 7, 8; Isthmian 4
Tzetzes, John, Allegories of the Iliad translated by Goldwyn, Adam J. and Kokkini, Dimitra. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, Harvard University Press, 2015.
External links
A translation of the debate and Ajax's death. http://classics.mit.edu/Ovid/metam.13.thirteenth.html
Category:Suitors of Helen
Category:Achaean Leaders
Category:Kings of Argos
Category:Characters in the Odyssey
Category:Suicides in Greek mythology
Category:Tutelary gods
Category:Metamorphoses characters
Category:Mythological Salaminians
Category:Metamorphoses into flowers in Greek mythology
Category:Greek mythological heroes | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_the_Great | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.141326 |
1569 | Ajax | Ajax may refer to:
Greek mythology and tragedy
Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea
Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris
Ajax (play), by the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles, about Ajax the Great
Arts and entertainment
Fictional characters
Ajax Duckman, in the animated television series Duckman
Marvel Comics:
Ajax the Greater, another name for Ajak, one of the Eternals from Marvel Comics
Ajax the Lesser, another name for Arex, one of the Eternals from Marvel Comics
Ajax, a member of the Pantheon appearing in Marvel Comics
Ajax (Francis Freeman), a fictional supervillain first appearing in Deadpool #14
Martian Manhunter, a DC Comics superhero called Ajax in Brazil and Portugal
Ajax, a Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 operative
Ajax, the real name of Tartaglia, a character in 2020 video game Genshin Impact
Music
A-Jax (band), a South Korean boy band
Ajax (band), an electronic music band from New York City
Ajax (opera), by the French composer Toussaint Bertin de la Doué
DJ Ajax (1971–2013; born Adrian Thomas), an Australian electro mashup DJ
Lisa Ajax (born 1998), Swedish singer
"Ajax" (song), a song by Tante Leen, 1969
Ajax Records, a former North American record company
Other arts and entertainment
Ajax (painting), a painting by John Steuart Curry
Ajax (Disney), a fictional company (the Disney equivalent of Looney Tunes' Acme Corporation)
A-Jax (video game), a 1987 Konami arcade game
Computing
Ajax (floppy disk controller), a floppy disk controller fitted to the Atari STE
Ajax (programming), Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, a method used in web application development, and a software framework for it
Places
Canada
Ajax (federal electoral district), in the Durham Region of Ontario
Ajax (provincial electoral district), in Ontario
Ajax, Ontario, a town in the Greater Toronto Area
United States
Ajax, Louisiana, an unincorporated community
Ajax, Missouri, a ghost town
Ajax Peak, a summit near Telluride, Colorado
Ajax, South Dakota, an unincorporated community
Ajax, Utah, a ghost town
Ajax, Virginia, an unincorporated community
Ajax, West Virginia, an unincorporated community
Aspen Mountain (Colorado), also known as Ajax Mountain
Elsewhere
Mount Ajax, part of the Admiralty Mountains, Victoria Land, Antarctic
1404 Ajax, an asteroid
People
Ajax (missionary), Arian missionary who converted the Suevi to Christianity ( 466)
Ajax, pen name of Sidney William Jackson (1873–1946), Australian naturalist and ornithologist
Ajax, nickname of Heinrich Bleichrodt (1909–1977), German World War II U-boat commander
Sport
Association football (soccer)
AFC Ajax, a football club in Amsterdam, Netherlands
Ajax Cape Town F.C., a South African football club
Ajax Futebol Clube, a Brazilian football club
Ajax de Ouenzé, a Congolese football club
FC Ajax Lasnamäe, an Estonian football club
Ajax Orlando Prospects, American soccer team from Orlando, Florida, a.k.a. Ajax America
Ajax America Women, American women's soccer team from California
Aias Salamina F.C., a football club in Salamina, Greece
Ajax Sportsman Combinatie, a cricket and football club in Leiden, Netherlands
Rabat Ajax F.C., a Maltese football club
Unión Ájax, a football club in Trujillo, Honduras
V.V. Ajax, a Surinamese football club
Other sports
Aias Evosmou, a Greek sports club
Ajax Kenitra, a Moroccan futsal (indoor football) club
Ajax København, a Danish handball team
Ajax (horse) (born 1901), a French Champion racehorse
Ajax II (born 1934), an Australian Champion racehorse
Military
, several ships of the Royal Navy
, several ships of the US Navy
General Dynamics Ajax, a family of armoured fighting vehicles for the British Army
Operation Ajax, the 1953 Iranian coup d'état
Transport
Ajax (1906 automobile), a Swiss automobile
Ajax (1913 automobile), a French automobile by the American Briscoe brothers
Ajax (1914 automobile), an American automobile by Ajax Motors Co. of Seattle, Washington
Ajax (1921 automobile), an American prototype that was not produced
Ajax (Nash Motors), an automobile brand of Nash Motors, 1925–1926
Ajax (locomotive), several train locomotives
Ajax (motorcycle), manufactured in England between 1923 and 1924
Ajax (crane barge), a floating crane used to install the Panama Canal locks
Ajax (ship), various ships
Ajax GO Station, a train and bus station in Ajax, Ontario, Canada
Ajax Motors Co., an American carmaker, manufacturer of the Ajax (1914 automobile)
Other uses
Ajax (cleaning product), a brand of household cleaning products
AFC Ajax N.V., a sports company associated with AFC Ajax
Kanichee Mine, Temagami, Ontario, also known as Ajax Mine
Ajax High School, a public high school in Ajax, Ontario, Canada
AJAX furnace, a type of open hearth furnace
See also
Nike Ajax, the world's first operational surface-to-air missile
Ayaks (Ajax), a hypersonic waverider aircraft program started in the Soviet Union
Ayaks (disambiguation) () | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.147484 |
1570 | Alaric I | | birth_date = Unknown, 370
| birth_place = Peuce Island, Danube Delta
| death_date = 411
| death_place = Consentia, Italia, Roman Empire
| place of burial = Busento River, Calabria, Italy
| religion = Arianism
}}
Alaric I (; , 'ruler of all'; – 411 AD) was the first king of the Visigoths, from 395 to 410. He rose to leadership of the Goths who came to occupy Moesia—territory acquired a couple of decades earlier by a combined force of Goths and Alans after the Battle of Adrianople.
Alaric began his career under the Gothic soldier Gainas and later joined the Roman army. Once an ally of Rome under the Roman emperor Theodosius, Alaric helped defeat the Franks and other allies of a would-be Roman usurper. Despite losing many thousands of his men, he received little recognition from Rome and left the Roman army disappointed. After the death of Theodosius and the disintegration of the Roman armies in 395, he is described as king of the Visigoths. As the leader of the only effective field force remaining in the Balkans, he sought Roman legitimacy, never quite achieving a position acceptable to himself or to the Roman authorities.
He operated mainly against the successive Western Roman regimes, and marched into Italy, where he died. He is responsible for the sack of Rome in 410; one of several notable events in the Western Roman Empire's eventual decline.
Early life, federate status in the Balkans
According to Jordanes, a 6th-century Roman bureaucrat of Gothic origin—who later turned his hand to history—Alaric was born on Peuce Island at the mouth of the Danube Delta in present-day Romania and belonged to the noble Balti dynasty of the Thervingian Goths. There is no way to verify this claim.}} Historian Douglas Boin does not make such an unequivocal assessment about Alaric's Gothic heritage and instead claims he came from either the Thervingi or the Greuthung tribes. When the Goths suffered setbacks against the Huns, they made a mass migration across the Danube, and fought a war with Rome. Alaric was probably a child during this period who grew up along Rome's periphery. Alaric's upbringing was shaped by living along the border of Roman territory in a region that the Romans viewed as a veritable "backwater"; some four centuries before, the Roman poet Ovid regarded the area along the Danube and Black Sea where Alaric was reared as a land of "barbarians", among "the most remote in the vast world."}}
Alaric's childhood in the Balkans, where the Goths had settled by way of an agreement with Theodosius, was spent in the company of veterans who had fought at the Battle of Adrianople in 378,}} during which they had annihilated much of the Eastern army and killed Emperor Valens. Imperial campaigns against the Visigoths were conducted until a treaty was reached in 382. This treaty was the first foedus on imperial Roman soil and required these semi-autonomous Germanic tribes—among whom Alaric was raised—to supply troops for the Roman army in exchange for peace, control of cultivatable land, and freedom from Roman direct administrative control. Correspondingly, there was hardly a region along the Roman frontier during Alaric's day without Gothic slaves and servants of one form or another. For several subsequent decades, many Goths like Alaric were "called up into regular units of the eastern field army" while others served as auxiliaries in campaigns led by Theodosius against the western usurpers Magnus Maximus and Eugenius.Rebellion against Rome, rise to Gothic leadershipA new phase in the relationship between the Goths and the empire resulted from the treaty signed in 382, as more and more Goths attained aristocratic rank from their service in the imperial army. Alaric began his military career under the Gothic soldier Gainas, and later joined the Roman army.}} He first appeared as leader of a mixed band of Goths and allied peoples, who invaded Thrace in 391 but were stopped by the Roman general Stilicho. While the Roman poet Claudian belittled Alaric as "a little-known menace" terrorizing southern Thrace during this time, Alaric's abilities and forces were formidable enough to prevent the Roman emperor Theodosius from crossing the Hebrus River.
Service under Theodosius I
By 392, Alaric had entered Roman military service, which coincided with a reduction of hostilities between Goths and Romans. In 394, he led a Gothic force that helped Emperor Theodosius defeat the Frankish usurper Arbogast—fighting at the behest of Eugenius—at the Battle of Frigidus. Despite sacrificing around 10,000 of his men, who had been victims of Theodosius' callous tactical decision to overwhelm the enemies' front lines using Gothic foederati, Alaric received little recognition from the emperor. Alaric was among the few who survived the protracted and bloody affair. Many Romans considered it their "gain" and a victory that so many Goths had died during the Battle of Frigidus River. Alaric biographer Douglas Boin (2020) posited that seeing ten thousand of his (Alaric's) dead kinsmen likely elicited questions about what kind of ruler Theodosius actually had been and whether remaining in direct Roman service was best for men like him. Refused the reward he expected, which included a promotion to the position of magister militum and command of regular Roman units, Alaric mutinied and began to march against Constantinople.
On 17 January 395, Theodosius died of an illness, leaving his two young and incapable sons Arcadius and Honorius in Stilicho's guardianship. Modern writers regard Alaric as king of the Visigoths from 395. According to historian Peter Heather, it is not entirely clear in the sources if Alaric rose to prominence at the time the Goths revolted following Theodosius's death, or if he had already risen within his tribe as early as the war against Eugenius. The sources do not make it clear whether Alaric's "desire for a generalship" was a means to legitimize himself "further within a Gothic following," or whether he was simply an ambitious man, who was at heart, "essentially a Roman soldier." Kulikowski adds that trying to determine either "depends upon our own previous assumptions, not upon the evidence."}} Whatever the circumstances, Jordanes recorded that the new king persuaded his people to "seek a kingdom by their own exertions rather than serve others in idleness."Semi-independent action in Eastern Roman interests, Eastern Roman recognition
Whether or not Alaric was a member of an ancient Germanic royal clan—as claimed by Jordanes and debated by historians—is less important than his emergence as a leader, the first of his kind since Fritigern. Theodosius's death left the Roman field armies collapsing and the Empire divided again between his two sons, one taking the eastern and the other the western portion of the Empire. Stilicho made himself master of the West and attempted to establish control in the East as well, and led an army into Greece. Alaric rebelled again. Historian Roger Collins points out that while the rivalries created by the two halves of the Empire vying for power worked to Alaric's advantage and that of his people, simply being called to authority by the Gothic people did not solve the practicalities of their needs for survival. He needed Roman authority in order to be supplied by Roman cities.
, as imagined by Ludwig Thiersch in 1879 ]]
Alaric took his Gothic army on what Stilicho's propagandist Claudian described as a "pillaging campaign" that began first in the East. Historian Thomas Burns's interpretation is that Alaric and his men were recruited by Rufinus's Eastern regime in Constantinople, and sent to Thessaly to stave off Stilicho's threat. No battle took place. Alaric's forces made their way down to Athens and along the coast, where he sought to force a new peace upon the Romans. In 396, he marched through Thermopylae and sacked Athens, where archaeological evidence shows widespread damage to the city. Stilicho's propagandist Claudian accuses his troops of plundering for the next year or so as far south as the mountainous Peloponnese peninsula, and reports that only Stilicho's surprise attack with his western field army (having sailed from Italy) stemmed the plundering as he pushed Alaric's forces north into Epirus. Zosimus adds that Stilicho's troops destroyed and pillaged too, and let Alaric's men escape with their plunder.
Stilicho was forced to send some of his Eastern forces home. They went to Constantinople under the command of one Gainas, a Goth with a large Gothic following. On arrival, Gainas murdered Rufinus, and was appointed magister militum for Thrace by Eutropius, the new supreme minister and the only eunuch consul of Rome, who, Zosimus claims, controlled Arcadius "as if he were a sheep". A poem by Synesius advises Arcadius to display manliness and remove a "skin-clad savage" (probably referring to Alaric) from the councils of power and his barbarians from the Roman army. We do not know if Arcadius ever became aware of this advice, but it had no recorded effect.
Stilicho obtained a few more troops from the German frontier and continued to campaign indecisively against the Eastern empire; again he was opposed by Alaric and his men. During the next year, 397, Eutropius personally led his troops to victory over some Huns who were marauding in Asia Minor. With his position thus strengthened he declared Stilicho a public enemy, and he established Alaric as magister militum per Illyricum Alaric thus acquired entitlement to gold and grain for his followers and negotiations were underway for a more permanent settlement. Stilicho's supporters in Milan were outraged at this seeming betrayal; meanwhile, Eutropius was celebrated in 398 by a parade through Constantinople for having achieved victory over the "wolves of the North".}} Alaric's people were relatively quiet for the next couple of years. In 399, Eutropius fell from power. The new Eastern regime now felt that they could dispense with Alaric's services and they nominally transferred Alaric's province to the West. This administrative change removed Alaric's Roman rank and his entitlement to legal provisioning for his men, leaving his army—the only significant force in the ravaged Balkans—as a problem for Stilicho.In search of Western Roman recognition; invading Italy First invasion of Italy ( 401–403)
According to historian Michael Kulikowski, sometime in the spring of 402 Alaric decided to invade Italy, but no sources from antiquity indicate to what purpose.}} Burns suggests that Alaric was probably desperate for provisions. Using Claudian as his source, historian Guy Halsall reports that Alaric's attack actually began in late 401, but since Stilicho was in Raetia "dealing with frontier issues" the two did not first confront one another in Italy until 402. Alaric's entry into Italy followed the route identified in the poetry of Claudian, as he crossed the peninsula's Alpine frontier near the city of Aquileia. For a period of six to nine months, there were reports of Gothic attacks along the northern Italian roads, where Alaric was spotted by Roman townspeople. Along the route on Via Postumia, Alaric first encountered Stilicho.
Two battles were fought. The first was at Pollentia on Easter Sunday, where Stilicho (according to Claudian) achieved an impressive victory, taking Alaric's wife and children prisoner, and more significantly, seizing much of the treasure that Alaric had amassed over the previous five years' worth of plundering.}} Pursuing the retreating forces of Alaric, Stilicho offered to return the prisoners but was refused. The second battle was at Verona, where Alaric was defeated for a second time. Stilicho once again offered Alaric a truce and allowed him to withdraw from Italy. Kulikowski explains this confusing, if not outright conciliatory behavior by stating, "given Stilicho's cold war with Constantinople, it would have been foolish to destroy as biddable and violent a potential weapon as Alaric might well prove to be". Halsall's observations are similar, as he contends that the Roman general's "decision to permit Alaric's withdrawal into Pannonia makes sense if we see Alaric's force entering Stilicho's service, and Stilicho's victory being less total than Claudian would have us believe". Perhaps more revealing is a report from the Greek historian Zosimus—writing a half a century later—that indicates an agreement was concluded between Stilicho and Alaric in 405, which suggests Alaric being in "western service at that point", likely stemming from arrangements made back in 402.}} Between 404 and 405, Alaric remained in one of the four Pannonian provinces, from where he could "play East off against West while potentially threatening both".
Historian A.D. Lee observes, "Alaric's return to the north-west Balkans brought only temporary respite to Italy, for in 405 another substantial body of Goths and other barbarians, this time from outside the empire, crossed the middle Danube and advanced into northern Italy, where they plundered the countryside and besieged cities and towns" under their leader Radagaisus. Although the imperial government was struggling to muster enough troops to contain these barbarian invasions, Stilicho managed to stifle the threat posed by the tribes under Radagaisus, when the latter split his forces into three separate groups. Stilicho cornered Radagaisus near Florence and starved the invaders into submission.}} Meanwhile, Alaric—bestowed with codicils of magister militum by Stilicho and now supplied by the West—awaited for one side or the other to incite him to action as Stilicho faced further difficulties from more barbarians.
Second invasion of Italy, agreement with Western Roman regime
Sometime in 406 and into 407, more large groups of barbarians, consisting primarily of Vandals, Sueves and Alans, crossed the Rhine into Gaul while about the same time a rebellion occurred in Britain. Under a common soldier named Constantine it spread to Gaul. Burdened by so many enemies, Stilicho's position was strained. During this crisis in 407, Alaric again marched on Italy, taking a position in Noricum (modern Austria), where he demanded a sum of 4,000 pounds of gold to buy off another full-scale invasion. The Roman Senate loathed the idea of supporting Alaric; Zosimus observed that one senator famously declaimed Non est ista pax, sed pactio servitutis ("This is not peace, but a pact of servitude"). Stilicho paid Alaric the 4,000 pounds of gold nevertheless. This agreement, sensible in view of the military situation, fatally weakened Stilicho's standing at Honorius's court. Twice Stilicho had allowed Alaric to escape his grasp, and Radagaisus had advanced all the way to the outskirts of Florence.
Renewed hostilities after Western Roman coup
In the East, Arcadius died on 1 May 408 and was replaced by his son Theodosius II; Stilicho seems to have planned to march to Constantinople, and to install there a regime loyal to himself. He may also have intended to give Alaric a senior official position and send him against the rebels in Gaul. Before Stilicho could do so, while he was away at Ticinum at the head of a small detachment, a bloody coup against his supporters took place at Honorius's court. It was led by Honorius's minister, Olympius. Stilicho's small escort of Goths and Huns was commanded by a Goth, Sarus, whose Gothic troops massacred the Hun contingent in their sleep, and then withdrew towards the cities in which their own families were billeted. Stilicho ordered that Sarus's Goths should not be admitted, but, now without an army, he was forced to flee for sanctuary. Agents of Olympius promised Stilicho his life, but instead betrayed and killed him.}}
Alaric was again declared an enemy of the emperor. Olympius's men then massacred the families of the federate troops (as presumed supporters of Stilicho, although they had probably rebelled against him), and the troops defected en masse to Alaric. Many thousands of barbarian auxiliaries, along with their wives and children, joined Alaric in Noricum. The conspirators seem to have let their main army disintegrate and had no policy except hunting down supporters of Stilicho. Italy was left without effective indigenous defence forces thereafter.
As a declared 'enemy of the emperor', Alaric was denied the legitimacy that he needed to collect taxes and hold cities without large garrisons, which he could not afford to detach. He again offered to move his men, this time to Pannonia, in exchange for a modest sum of money and the modest title of Comes, but he was refused because Olympius's regime regarded him as a supporter of Stilicho.First siege of Rome, agreed ransomWhen Alaric was rebuffed, he led his force of around 30,000 men—many newly enlisted and understandably motivated—on a march toward Rome to avenge their murdered families. He moved across the Julian Alps into Italy, probably using the route and supplies arranged for him by Stilicho, bypassing the imperial court in Ravenna which was protected by widespread marshland and had a port, and in September 408 he menaced the city of Rome, imposing a strict blockade. No blood was shed this time; Alaric relied on hunger as his most powerful weapon. When the ambassadors of the Senate, entreating for peace, tried to intimidate him with hints of what the despairing citizens might accomplish, he laughed and gave his celebrated answer: "The thicker the hay, the easier mowed!" After much bargaining, the famine-stricken citizens agreed to pay a ransom of 5,000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pounds of silver, 4,000 silken tunics, 3,000 hides dyed scarlet, and 3,000 pounds of pepper. Alaric also recruited some 40,000 freed Gothic slaves. Thus ended Alaric's first siege of Rome.
by the Visigoths on 24 August 410 by J.-N. Sylvestre (1890)]]
Failed agreement with the Western Romans, Alaric sets up his own emperor
After having provisionally agreed to the terms offered by Alaric for lifting the blockade, Honorius recanted; historian A.D. Lee highlights that one of the points of contention for the emperor was Alaric's expectation of being named head of the Roman Army, a post Honorius was not prepared to grant to Alaric. When this title was not bestowed onto Alaric, he proceeded to not only "besiege Rome again in late 409, but also to proclaim a leading senator, Priscus Attalus, as a rival emperor, from whom Alaric then received the appointment" he desired. Meanwhile, Alaric's newly appointed "emperor" Attalus, who seems not to have understood the limits of his power or his dependence on Alaric, failed to take Alaric's advice and lost the grain supply in Africa to a pro-Honorian comes Africae, Heraclian. Then, sometime in 409, Attalus—accompanied by Alaric—marched on Ravenna and after receiving unprecedented terms and concessions from the legitimate emperor Honorius, refused him and instead demanded that Honorius be deposed and exiled. Fearing for his safety, Honorius made preparations to flee to Ravenna when ships carrying 4,000 troops arrived from Constantinople, restoring his resolve. Now that Honorius no longer felt the need to negotiate, Alaric (regretting his choice of puppet emperor) deposed Attalus, perhaps to re-open negotiations with Ravenna.
Sack of Rome
Negotiations with Honorius might have succeeded had it not been for another intervention by Sarus, of the Amal family, and therefore a hereditary enemy of Alaric and his house. He attacked Alaric's men. Why Sarus, who had been in imperial service for years under Stilicho, acted at this moment remains a mystery, but Alaric interpreted this attack as directed by Ravenna and as bad faith from Honorius. No longer would negotiations suffice for Alaric, as his patience had reached its end, which led him to march on Rome for a third and final time.
On 24 August 410, Alaric and his forces began the sack of Rome, an assault that lasted three days. After hearing reports that Alaric had entered the city—possibly aided by Gothic slaves inside—there were reports that Emperor Honorius (safe in Ravenna) broke into "wailing and lamentation" but quickly calmed once "it was explained to him that it was the city of Rome that had met its end and not 'Roma'," his pet fowl. Writing from Bethlehem, St. Jerome (Letter 127.12, to the lady Principia) lamented: "A dreadful rumour reached us from the West. We heard that Rome was besieged, that the citizens were buying their safety with gold … The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken; nay, it fell by famine before it fell to the sword." Nonetheless, Christian writers also cited how Alaric ordered that anyone who took shelter in a Church was to be spared.}} When liturgical vessels were taken from the basilica of St. Peter and Alaric heard of this, he ordered them returned and had them ceremoniously restored in the church. If the account from the historian Orosius can be seen as accurate, there was even a celebratory recognition of Christian unity by way of a procession through the streets where Romans and barbarians alike "raised a hymn to God in public"; historian Edward James concludes that such stories are likely more political rhetoric of the "noble" barbarians than a reflection of historical reality.
According to historian Patrick Geary, Roman booty was not the focus of Alaric's sack of Rome; he came for needed food supplies.}} Historian Stephen Mitchell asserts that Alaric's followers seemed incapable of feeding themselves and relied on provisions "supplied by the Roman authorities." Whatever Alaric's intentions were cannot be known entirely, but Kulikowski certainly sees the issue of available treasure in a different light, writing that "For three days, Alaric's Goths sacked the city, stripping it of the wealth of centuries." The barbarian invaders were not gentle in their treatment of property as substantial damage was still evident into the sixth century. Certainly the Roman world was shaken by the fall of the Eternal City to barbarian invaders, but as Guy Halsall emphasizes, "Rome's fall had less striking political effects. Alaric, unable to treat with Honorius, remained in the political cold." Kulikowski sees the situation similarly, commenting:
<blockquote>But for Alaric the sack of Rome was an admission of defeat, a catastrophic failure. Everything he had hoped for, had fought for over the course of a decade and a half, went up in flames with the capital of the ancient world. Imperial office, a legitimate place for himself and his followers inside the empire, these were now forever out of reach. He might seize what he wanted, as he had seized Rome, but he would never be given it by right. The sack of Rome solved nothing and when the looting was over Alaric's men still had nowhere to live and fewer future prospects than ever before.</blockquote>
Still, the importance of Alaric cannot be "overestimated" according to Halsall, since he had desired and obtained a Roman command even though he was a barbarian; his real misfortune was being caught between the rivalry of the Eastern and Western empires and their court intrigue. According to historian Peter Brown, when one compares Alaric with other barbarians, "he was almost an Elder Statesman." Nonetheless, Alaric's respect for Roman institutions as a former servant to its highest office did not stay his hand in violently sacking the city that had for centuries exemplified Roman glory, leaving behind physical destruction and social disruption, while Alaric took clerics and even the emperor's sister, Galla Placidia, with him when he left the city. Many other Italian communities beyond the city of Rome itself fell victim to the forces under Alaric, as Procopius (Wars 3.2.11–13) writing in the sixth century later relates:
<blockquote>For they destroyed all the cities which they captured, especially those south of the Ionian Gulf, so completely that nothing has been left to my time to know them by, unless, indeed, it might be one tower or gate or some such thing which chanced to remain. And they killed all the people, as many as came in their way, both old and young alike, sparing neither women nor children. Wherefore even up to the present time Italy is sparsely populated.</blockquote>
Whether Alaric's forces wrought the level of destruction described by Procopius or not cannot be known, but evidence speaks to a significant population decrease, as the number of people on the food dole dropped from 800,000 in 408 to 500,000 by 419. Rome's fall to the barbarians was as much a psychological blow to the empire as anything else, since some Romans citizens saw the collapse as resulting from the conversion to Christianity, while Christian theologians like St.Augustine (writing City of God) responded in turn. Lamenting Rome's capture, famed Christian theologian Jerome, wrote how "day and night" he could not stop thinking of everyone's safety, and moreover, how Alaric had extinguished "the bright light of all the world." Some contemporary Christian observers even saw Alaric—a professed Christian—as God's wrath upon a still pagan Rome.
Move to southern Italy, death from disease
(1895)]]
Not only had Rome's sack been a significant blow to the Roman people's morale, they had also endured two years' worth of trauma brought about by fear, hunger (due to blockades), and illness. However, the Goths were not long in the city of Rome, as only three days after the sack, Alaric marched his men south to Campania, from where he intended to sail to Sicily—probably to obtain grain and other supplies—when a storm destroyed his fleet. During the early months of 411, while on his northward return journey through Italy, Alaric took ill and died at Consentia in Bruttium. His cause of death was likely fever, and his body was, according to legend, buried under the riverbed of the Busento in accordance with the pagan practices of the Visigothic people. The stream was temporarily turned aside from its course while the grave was dug, wherein the Gothic chief and some of his most precious spoils were interred. When the work was finished, the river was turned back into its usual channel and the captives by whose hands the labour had been accomplished were put to death that none might learn their secret., Diccionario biográfico español, Luis Agustín García Moreno, Real Academia de la Historia.}}AftermathAlaric was succeeded in the command of the Gothic army by his brother-in-law, Ataulf, who married Honorius' sister Galla Placidia three years later.
Following in the wake of Alaric's leadership, which Kulikowski claims, had given his people "a sense of community that survived his own death...Alaric's Goths remained together inside the empire, going on to settle in Gaul. There, in the province of Aquitaine, they put down roots and created the first autonomous barbarian kingdom inside the frontiers of the Roman empire." The Goths were able to settle in Aquitaine only after Honorius granted the once Roman province to them, sometime in 418 or 419. Not long after Alaric's exploits in Rome and Athaulf's settlement in Aquitaine, there is a "rapid emergence of Germanic barbarian groups in the West" who begin controlling many western provinces. These barbarian peoples included: Vandals in Spain and Africa, Visigoths in Spain and Aquitaine, Burgundians along the upper Rhine and southern Gaul, and Franks on the lower Rhine and in northern and central Gaul.
Sources
The chief authorities on the career of Alaric are: the historian Orosius and the poet Claudian, both contemporary, neither disinterested; Zosimus, a historian who lived probably about half a century after Alaric's death; and Jordanes, a Goth who wrote the history of his nation in 551, basing his work on Cassiodorus's Gothic History.
See also
* Alaric II
* Gaiseric
* Odoacer
References
Notes
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External links
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20070602165920/http://www.worldhistoryblog.com/2006/08/alaric-i.html Alaric I]
* Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, [https://web.archive.org/web/20040923080132/http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/g/g43d/chapter30.html Chapter 30] and [https://web.archive.org/web/20040914234518/http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/g/g43d/chapter31.html Chapter 31].
* [http://lostfort.blogspot.com/2006/04/legend-of-alarics-burial.html The Legend of Alaric's Burial]
* For a modern-day novel exploring the historical sources relating to Alaric's riverbed grave, see [http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid3194 Alaric's Gold by Robert Fortune]
|-
Category:410s deaths
Category:5th-century Visigothic monarchs
Category:Balt dynasty
Category:People from Tulcea County
Category:5th-century Arian Christians
Category:Ancient Italian history
Category:Gothic warriors
Category:4th-century monarchs in Europe
Category:Year of birth unknown
Category:4th-century Gothic people
Category:390s in the Byzantine Empire | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaric_I | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.170257 |
1571 | Alaric II | August 507
|predecessor = Euric
|successor = Gesalec
|birth_date = 458/466
|death_date = August 507 (aged 41/49)
| spouse = Unknown<br/>Theodegotha
| issue = Gesalec<br/>Amalaric
| father = Euric
| mother = Ragnagild
|religion = Arian Christianity
}}
Alaric II (, , 'ruler of all'; ; – August 507) was the King of the Visigoths from 484 until 507. He succeeded his father Euric as King of the Visigoths in Toulouse on 28 December 484; he was the great-grandson of the more famous Alaric I, who sacked Rome in 410. He established his capital at Aire-sur-l'Adour (Vicus Julii) in Aquitaine. His dominions included not only the majority of Hispania (excluding its northwestern corner) but also Gallia Aquitania and the greater part of an as-yet undivided Gallia Narbonensis.
Reign
Herwig Wolfram opens his chapter on the eighth Visigothic king, "Alaric's reign gets no full treatment in the sources, and the little they do contain is overshadowed by his death in the Battle of Vouillé and the downfall of the Toulosan kingdom." One example is Isidore of Seville's account of Alaric's reign: consisting of a single paragraph, it is primarily about Alaric's death in that battle.
The earliest-documented event in Alaric's reign concerned providing refuge to Syagrius, the former ruler of the Domain of Soissons (in what is now northwestern France) who had been defeated by Clovis I, King of the Franks. According to Gregory of Tours' account, Alaric was intimidated by Clovis into surrendering Syagrius to Clovis; Gregory then adds that "the Goths are a timorous race." The Franks then imprisoned Syagrius, and once his control over Syagrius' former kingdom was secure, Clovis had him beheaded. However, Wolfram points out that at the time "Clovis got no farther than the Seine; only after several more years did the Franks succeed in occupying the rest of the Gallo-Roman buffer state north of the Loire." Any threat of war Clovis could make would only be effective if they were neighbors; "it is nowhere written that Syagrius was handed over in 486 or 487." Then when the Franks attacked the Burgundians in the decade after 500, Alaric assisted the ruling house, and according to Wolfram the victorious Burgundian king Gundobad ceded Avignon to Alaric. By 502 Clovis and Alaric met on an island in the Loire near Amboise for face-to-face talks, which led to a peace treaty.
In 506, the Visigoths captured the city of Dertosa in the Ebro valley. There they captured the Roman usurper Peter and had him executed.
Battle of Vouillé and aftermath
under Alaric II]]
After a few years, however, Clovis violated the peace treaty negotiated in 502. Despite the diplomatic intervention of Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths and father-in-law of Alaric, Clovis led his followers into Visigothic territory. Alaric was forced by his magnates to meet Clovis in the Battle of Vouillé (summer 507) near Poitiers; there the Goths were defeated and Alaric slain, according to Gregory of Tours, by Clovis himself.
The most serious consequence of this battle was not the loss of their possessions in Gaul to the Franks; with Ostrogothic help, much of the Gallic territory was recovered, Wolfram notes, perhaps as far as Toulouse. Nor was it the loss of the royal treasury at Toulouse, which Gregory of Tours writes Clovis took into his possession. Alaric's heirs were his eldest son, the illegitimate Gesalec, and his younger son, the legitimate Amalaric, who was still a child. Gesalec proved incompetent, and in 511 King Theodoric assumed the throne of the kingdom ostensibly on behalf of Amalaric—Heather uses the word "hijacked" to describe his action. Although Amalaric eventually became king in his own right, the political continuity of the Visigothic kingdom was broken; "Amalaric's succession was the result of new power structures, not old ones," as Heather describes it. With Amalaric's death in 531, the Visigothic kingdom entered an extended period of unrest which lasted until Leovigild assumed the throne in 569. Ability as king In religion Alaric was an Arian, like all the early Visigothic nobles, but he greatly mitigated the persecution policy of his father Euric toward the Catholics and authorized them to hold in 506 the council of Agde. He was on uneasy terms with the Catholic bishops of Arelate (modern Arles) as epitomized in the career of the Gallo-Roman Caesarius, bishop of Arles, who was appointed bishop in 503. Caesarius was suspected of conspiring with the Burgundians, whose king had married the sister of Clovis, to assist the Burgundians capture Arles. Alaric exiled him for a year to Bordeaux in Aquitania, then allowed him to return unharmed when the crisis had passed.
Alaric displayed similar wisdom in political affairs by appointing a commission headed by the referendary Anianus to prepare an abstract of the Roman laws and imperial decrees, which would form the authoritative code for his Roman subjects. This is generally known as the Breviarium Alaricianum or Breviary of Alaric. Local rumour has it that he left a vast treasure buried in the caves beneath the mountain.
The (Alaric's Canal) in the Hautes-Pyrénées department is named after him.
References
Further reading
* Edward Gibbon, [https://web.archive.org/web/20040817020717/http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/g/g43d/chapter38.html History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire] Chapter 38
* [http://dbe.rah.es/biografias/5930/alarico-ii Alarico II] , Diccionario biográfico español, Luis Agustín García Moreno, Real Academia de la Historia.
Category:507 deaths
Category:5th-century births
Category:5th-century Visigothic monarchs
Category:6th-century Visigothic monarchs
Category:Ancient child monarchs
Category:Balt dynasty
Category:Monarchs killed in action
Category:Year of birth uncertain
Category:Year of birth unknown | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaric_II | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.175606 |
1573 | Albertus Magnus | | birth_place = Lauingen, Duchy of Bavaria
| death_date = 15 November 1280
| death_place = Cologne, Holy Roman Empire
| venerated_in = Catholic Church
| beatified_date = 1622
| beatified_place = Rome, Papal States
| beatified_by = Pope Gregory XV
| canonized_date = 16 December 1931
| canonized_place = Vatican City
| canonized_by = Pope Pius XI
| major_shrine = St. Andrew's Church, Cologne
| feast_day = 15 November
| attributes = Dominican habit, mitre, book, and quill
| patronage = Those who cultivate the natural sciences, medical technicians, philosophers, and scientists
*Natural science
*Alchemy
*Jurisprudence
*Diplomacy
*Theology
*Natural philosophy
| known_for = Teaching of theology<br /> Pioneering scholar of Aristotle<br /> Systematic study of minerals<br />Discovery of the element arsenic
| alma_mater = University of Padua
| doctoral_advisor = Jordan of Saxony
| module =
*Scholasticism
*Aristotelianism
*Medieval realism
| main_interests =
| notable_students = Thomas Aquinas, Petrus Ferrandi Hispanus
| notable_ideas =
*Natural law
*Aevum
| module = }}}}}}
Albertus Magnus}} ( – 15 November 1280), also known as Saint Albert the Great, Albert of Swabia
or Albert of Cologne, was a German Dominican friar, philosopher, scientist, and bishop, considered one of the greatest medieval philosophers and thinkers.
Canonized in 1931, he was known during his lifetime as Doctor universalis and Doctor expertus; late in his life the sobriquet Magnus was appended to his name. Scholars such as James A. Weisheipl and Joachim R. Söder have referred to him as the greatest German philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages. The Catholic Church distinguishes him as one of the Doctors of the Church.BiographyIt seems likely that Albertus Magnus was born sometime before 1200, given well-attested evidence that he was aged over 80 on his death in 1280.
Albert was probably educated principally at the University of Padua, where he received instruction in Aristotle's writings. A late account by Rudolph de Novamagia refers to Albertus' encounter with the Blessed Virgin Mary, who convinced him to enter Holy Orders. In 1223 (or 1229), he became a member of the Dominican Order, and studied theology at Bologna and elsewhere. Selected to fill the position of lecturer at Cologne, Germany, where the Dominicans had a house, he taught for several years there, as well as in Regensburg, Freiburg, Strasbourg, and Hildesheim. During his first tenure as lecturer at Cologne, Albert wrote his Summa de bono after having a discussion with Philip the Chancellor concerning the transcendental properties of being. In 1245, Albert became master of theology under Guerric of Saint-Quentin, the first German Dominican to achieve this distinction. Following this turn of events, Albert was able to teach theology at the University of Paris as a full-time professor, holding the seat of the Chair of Theology at the College of St. James.
, ]]
Albert was the first to comment on virtually all of the writings of Aristotle, thus making them accessible to wider academic debate. The study of Aristotle brought him to study and comment on the teachings of Muslim academics, notably Avicenna and Averroes, and this would bring him into the heart of academic debate.
In 1254, Albert was made provincial of the Dominican Order Florentius, and Peter (later Pope Innocent V), establishing a ratio studiorum or program of studies for the Dominicans that featured the study of philosophy as an innovation for those not sufficiently trained to study theology. This innovation initiated the tradition of Dominican scholastic philosophy put into practice, for example, in 1265 at the Order's studium provinciale at the convent of Santa Sabina in Rome, out of which would develop the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the "Angelicum".
containing the relics of Albertus Magnus in the crypt of St. Andrew's Church, Cologne, Germany]]
In 1260, Pope Alexander IV made him bishop of Regensburg, an office from which he resigned after three years. During the exercise of his duties he enhanced his reputation for humility by refusing to ride a horse, in accord with the dictates of the Order, instead traversing his huge diocese on foot. In 1263, Pope Urban IV relieved him of the duties of bishop and asked him to preach the eighth Crusade in German-speaking countries. After this, he was especially known for acting as a mediator between conflicting parties. In Cologne, he is known not only for being the founder of Germany's oldest university there, but also for "the big verdict" (der Große Schied) of 1258, which brought an end to the conflict between the citizens of Cologne and the archbishop. Among the last of his labors was the defense of the orthodoxy of his former pupil, Thomas Aquinas, whose death in 1274 grieved Albert (the story that he travelled to Paris in person to defend the teachings of Aquinas can not be confirmed).
Albert was a scientist, philosopher, astrologer, theologian, spiritual writer, ecumenist, and diplomat. Under the auspices of Humbert of Romans, Albert molded the curriculum of studies for all Dominican students, introduced Aristotle to the classroom and probed the work of Neoplatonists, such as Plotinus. Indeed, it was the thirty years of work done by Aquinas and himself that allowed for the inclusion of Aristotelian study in the curriculum of Dominican schools.
After suffering declining health in 1278, he died on 15 November 1280 in the Dominican convent in Cologne, Germany. His relics are located in a Roman sarcophagus in the crypt of the Dominican St. Andrew's Church in Cologne. His body was claimed to be incorrupt during an exhumation three years after his death. However, a later exhumation in 1483 found that only a skeleton remained.
Albert was beatified in 1622. He was canonized and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church on 16 December 1931 by Pope Pius XI and the patron saint of natural scientists in 1941. St. Albert's feast day is November 15.Writings
]]
(1352), Chapter hall of convent of St. Nicholas, Treviso, Italy|thumb|right]]
Albert's writings collected in 1899 went to thirty-eight volumes. These displayed his prolific habits and encyclopedic knowledge of topics such as logic, theology, botany, geography, astronomy, astrology, mineralogy, alchemy, zoology, physiology, phrenology, justice, law, friendship, and love. He digested, interpreted, and systematized the whole of Aristotle's works, gleaned from the Latin translations and notes of the Arabian commentators, in accordance with Church doctrine. Most modern knowledge of Aristotle was preserved and presented by Albert. Furthermore, Albert also effectively invented entire special sciences, where Aristotle has not covered a topic. For example, prior to Albert, there was no systematic study of minerals.Alchemy
Trading Card, 1929]]
In the centuries since his death, many stories arose about Albert as an alchemist and magician. "Much of the modern confusion results from the fact that later works, particularly the alchemical work known as the Secreta Alberti or the Experimenta Alberti, were falsely attributed to Albertus by their authors to increase the prestige of the text through association." On the subject of alchemy and chemistry, many treatises relating to alchemy have been attributed to him, though in his authentic writings he had little to say on the subject, and then mostly through commentary on Aristotle. For example, in his commentary, De mineralibus, he refers to the power of stones, but does not elaborate on what these powers might be. A wide range of Pseudo-Albertine works dealing with alchemy exist, though, showing the belief developed in the generations following Albert's death that he had mastered alchemy, one of the fundamental sciences of the Middle Ages. These include Metals and Materials; the Secrets of Chemistry; the Origin of Metals; the Origins of Compounds, and a Concordance which is a collection of ''Observations on the philosopher's stone; and other alchemy-chemistry topics, collected under the name of Theatrum Chemicum. He is credited with the discovery of the element arsenic and experimented with photosensitive chemicals, including silver nitrate. He did believe that stones had occult properties, as he related in his work De mineralibus. However, there is scant evidence that he personally performed alchemical experiments.
According to legend, Albert is said to have discovered the philosopher's stone and passed it on to his pupil Thomas Aquinas, shortly before his death. Albert does not confirm he discovered the stone in his writings, but he did record that he witnessed the creation of gold by "transmutation." Given that Thomas Aquinas died six years before Albert's death, this legend as stated is unlikely.
Astrology
Albert was deeply interested in astrology, as has been articulated by scholars such as Paola Zambelli and Scott Hendrix. The most comprehensive statement of his astrological beliefs is to be found in two separate works that he authored around 1260, known as the Speculum astronomiae and De Fato. However, details of these beliefs can be found in almost everything he wrote, from his early De natura boni to his last work, the Summa theologiae. His speculum was critiqued by Gerard of Silteo.
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File:Albertus Magnus – De meteoris, 1488 – BEIC 13302626.jpg|De meteoris, 1488
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Tides and the Moon
Albert considered the tides to be influenced by the moon. Based on ancient Greek theories of light and Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi’s astrological explanations, he proposed a mixed theory where the Moon doubly attracts the water by its intrinsic astrological humid nature and by the heat that the moonlight produces.Matter and formAlbert believed that all natural things were compositions of matter and form, to which he referred as quod est and quo est. Albert also believed that God alone is the absolute ruling entity. Albert's version of hylomorphism is very similar to the Aristotelian doctrine.MusicAlbert is known for his commentary on the musical practice of his times. Most of his written musical observations are found in his commentary on Aristotle's Poetics. He rejected the idea of "music of the spheres" as ridiculous: movement of astronomical bodies, he supposed, is incapable of generating sound. He wrote extensively on proportions in music, and on the three different subjective levels on which plainchant could work on the human soul: purging of the impure; illumination leading to contemplation; and nourishing perfection through contemplation. Of particular interest to 20th-century music theorists is the attention he paid to silence as an integral part of music.Metaphysics of moralsBoth of his early treatises, De natura boni and De bono, start with a metaphysical investigation into the concepts of the good in general and the physical good. Albert refers to the physical good as bonum naturae. Albert does this before directly dealing with the moral concepts of metaphysics. In Albert's later works, he says in order to understand human or moral goodness, the individual must first recognize what it means to be good and do good deeds. This procedure reflects Albert's preoccupations with neo-Platonic theories of good as well as the doctrines of Pseudo-Dionysius. Albert's view was highly valued by the Catholic Church and his peers.Natural lawAlbert devoted the last tractatus of De Bono to a theory of justice and natural law. Albert places God as the pinnacle of justice and natural law. God legislates and divine authority is supreme. Up until his time, it was the only work specifically devoted to natural law written by a theologian or philosopher.FriendshipAlbert mentions friendship in his work, De bono, as well as presenting his ideals and morals of friendship in the very beginning of Tractatus II. Later in his life he published Super Ethica. With his development of friendship throughout his work it is evident that friendship ideals and morals took relevance as his life went on. Albert comments on Aristotle's view of friendship with a quote from Cicero, who writes, "friendship is nothing other than the harmony between things divine and human, with goodwill and love". Albert agrees with this commentary but he also adds in harmony or agreement. Albert calls this harmony, consensio, itself a certain kind of movement within the human spirit. Albert fully agrees with Aristotle in the sense that friendship is a virtue. Albert relates the inherent metaphysical contentedness between friendship and moral goodness. Albert describes several levels of goodness; the useful (utile), the pleasurable (delectabile) and the authentic or unqualified good (honestum). Then in turn there are three levels of friendship based on each of those levels, namely friendship based on usefulness (amicitia utilis), friendship based on pleasure (amicitia delectabilis), and friendship rooted in unqualified goodness (amicitia honesti; amicitia quae fundatur super honestum).Cultural references
and archivolts of Strasbourg Cathedral, with iconography inspired by Albertus Magnus]]
The iconography of the tympanum and archivolts of the late 13th-century portal of Strasbourg Cathedral was inspired by Albert's writings. Albert is frequently mentioned by Dante, who made his doctrine of free will the basis of his ethical system. In his Divine Comedy, Dante places Albertus with his pupil Thomas Aquinas among the great lovers of wisdom (Spiriti Sapienti) in the Heaven of the Sun.
In The Concept of Anxiety, Søren Kierkegaard wrote that Albert, "arrogantly boasted of his speculation before the deity and suddenly became stupid." Kierkegaard cites Gotthard Oswald Marbach whom he quotes as saying "Albertus repente ex asino factus philosophus et ex philosopho asinus" [Albert was suddenly transformed from an ass into a philosopher and from a philosopher into an ass].
In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the titular scientist, Victor Frankenstein, studies the works of Albertus Magnus.
Pastor Johann Eduard Erdmann considered Albert greater and more original than his pupil Aquinas.
In Open All Hours, Arkwright invents St Albert's day so Granville can check customers' pockets.
Influence and tribute
, Urbino, c. 1475]]
A number of schools have been named after Albert, including Albertus Magnus High School in Bardonia, New York; Albertus Magnus Lyceum in River Forest, Illinois; and Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut.
Albertus Magnus Science Hall at Thomas Aquinas College, in Santa Paula, California, is named in honor of Albert. The main science buildings at Providence College and Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, are also named after him.
The central square at the campus of the University of Cologne features a statue of Albert and is named after him. Made by Gerhard Marcks around 1950s, this statue is one of four replicas found in different places around the world (along with University of Jena, University of the Andes, and University of Houston).
The Academy for Science and Design in New Hampshire honored Albert by naming one of its four houses Magnus House.
As a tribute to the scholar's contributions to the law, the University of Houston Law Center displays a statue of Albert. It is located on the campus of the University of Houston.
The Albertus-Magnus-Gymnasium is found in Rottweil, Germany.
In Managua, Nicaragua, the Albertus Magnus International Institute, a business and economic development research center, was founded in 2004.
In the Philippines, the Albertus Magnus Building at the University of Santo Tomas that houses the Conservatory of Music, College of Tourism and Hospitality Management, College of Education, and UST Education High School is named in his honor. The Saint Albert the Great Science Academy in San Carlos City, Pangasinan, which offers preschool, elementary and high school education, takes pride in having St. Albert as their patron saint. Its main building was named Albertus Magnus Hall in 2008. San Alberto Magno Academy in Tubao, La Union is also dedicated in his honor. This century-old Catholic high school continues to live on its vision-mission up to this day, offering Senior High school courses.
Due to his contributions to natural philosophy, the bacterium Agrobacterium albertimagni, the plant species Alberta magna, the crustacean Bodigiella albertimagni, the fossil brachiopod Albasphe albertimagni, and the asteroid 20006 Albertus Magnus were named after him.
Numerous Catholic elementary and secondary schools are named for him, including schools in Toronto; Calgary; Cologne; and Dayton, Ohio.
The Albertus typeface is named after him.
At the University of Notre Dame du Lac in Notre Dame, Indiana, the Zahm Hall Chapel is dedicated to St. Albert the Great. Fr. John Zahm, C.S.C., after whom the men's residence hall is named, looked to St. Albert's example of using religion to illumine scientific discovery. Fr. Zahm's work with the Bible and evolution is sometimes seen as a continuation of St. Albert's legacy.
The second largest student's fraternity of the Netherlands, located in the city of Groningen, is named Albertus Magnus, in honor of the saint.
The Colegio Cientifico y Artistico de San Alberto, Hopelawn, New Jersey, USA with a sister school in Nueva Ecija, Philippines was founded in 1986 in honor of him who thought and taught that religion, the sciences and the arts may be advocated as subjects which should not contradict each other but should support one another to achieve wisdom and reason.
The Vosloorus Catholic parish (located in Vosloorus Extension One, Ekurhuleni, Gauteng, South Africa) is named after the saint.
The Catholic parish in Leopoldshafen, near Karlsruhe in Germany is also named after him, too, since Albert is the patron saint of scientists and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has a large research center nearby.
Since the death of King Albert I, the King's Feast is celebrated in Belgium on Albert's feast day.
Edinburgh's Catholic Chaplaincy which serves the city's universities, is named after St Albert.
Sant'Alberto Magno is a titular church in Rome.
Bibliography
Translations
* The Paradise of the Soul: Forty-Two Virtues to Reach Heaven, translated by Fr. Robert Nixon, OSB (Gastonia, NC: TAN Books: 2023) [translation of Paradisus Animae]
* On Fate, translated by D.P. Curtin (Philadelphia, PA: Dalcassian Publishing Company: 2023) [translation of De fato]
* On Resurrection, translated by Irven M. Resnick and Franklin T. Harkins (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press: 2020) [translation of De resurrectione]
* On the Body of the Lord, translated by Sr. Albert Marie Surmanski, OP (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press: 2017) [translation of De corpore Domini]
* On the Causes of the Properties of the Elements, translated by Irven M. Resnick (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010) [translation of Liber de causis proprietatum elementorum]
* ''Questions concerning Aristotle's on Animals, translated by Irven M. Resnick and Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008) [translation of Quaestiones super De animalibus]
* The Cardinal Virtues: Aquinas, Albert, and Philip the Chancellor, translated by R. E. Houser (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediæval Studies, 2004) [contains the translations of Parisian Summa, part six: On the good and Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, book 3, dist. 33 & 36]
* The Commentary of Albertus Magnus on Book 1 of Euclid's Elements of Geometry, edited by Anthony Lo Bello (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003) [translation of Priumus Euclidis cum commento Alberti]
* On Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica, translated by Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) [translation of De animalibus]
* Paola Zambelli, The Speculum Astronomiae and Its Enigma: Astrology, Theology, and Science in Albertus Magnus and His Contemporaries (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992) [includes Latin text and English translation of Speculum astronomiae]
* Albert & Thomas: Selected Writings, translated by , Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1988) [contains translation of Super Dionysii Mysticam theologiam]
* On Union with God, translated by a Benedictine of Princethorpe Priory (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1911) [reprinted as (Felinfach: Llanerch Enterprises, 1991) and (London: Continuum, 2000)] [translation of De adherendo Deo]
See also
* Christian mysticism
* List of Catholic saints
* List of Roman Catholic scientist-clerics
* Saint Albert the Great, patron saint archive
* Science in the Middle Ages
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
* Sighart, Joachim (1876), Albert the Great : his life and scholastic labours: from original documents.
*
Further reading
* Collins, David J. [https://www.academia.edu/10208373/Albertus_Magnus_or_Magus_Magic_Natural_Philosophy_and_Religious_Reform_in_the_Late_Middle_Ages "Albertus, Magnus or Magus? Magic, Natural Philosophy, and Religious Reform in the Late Middle Ages."] Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010): 1–44.
* Collins, David J. [https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09744-2.htmlDisenchanting Albert the Great: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician]. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024.
* Honnefelder, Ludger (ed.) Albertus Magnus and the Beginnings of the Medieval Reception of Aristotle in the Latin West. From Richardus Rufus to Franciscus de Mayronis, (collection of essays in German and English), Münster Aschendorff, 2005.
* Jong, Jonathan. [https://www.theschooloftheology.org/posts/essay/st-albertus-magnus-patron-of-science/ "Albert the Great: Patron Saint of Scientists"], in: St Mary Magdalen School of Theology, Thinking Faithfully.
* Kovach, Francis J. & Shahan, Robert W. Albert the Great. Commemorative Essays, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980.
* Lemay, Helen Rodnite. Women's Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus's De secretis mulierum with Commentaries. SUNY Series in Medieval Studies. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992.
* Miteva, Evelina. , in: Philosophia: E-Journal of Philosophy and Culture, 1/2012. .
* Resnick, Irven (ed.), A Companion to Albert the Great: Theology, Philosophy, and the Sciences, Leiden, Brill, 2013.
* Resnick, Irven e Kitchell Jr, Kenneth (eds.), Albert the Great: A Selective Annotated Bibliography, (1900–2000), Tempe, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004.
* External links
*
*
*
*
*
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* [http://www.albertusmagnus.uwaterloo.ca/ Alberti Magni Works in Latin Online]
* [http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/albertusmagnus.html Albertus Magnus on Astrology & Magic]
* [http://www.skyscript.co.uk/magnus.html "Albertus Magnus & Prognostication by the Stars"]
* , London, 1604, full online version.
* [http://www.saintsbooks.net/books/St.%20Albert%20the%20Great%20-%20On%20Cleaving%20to%20God%20-%20De%20Adhaerendo%20Deo%20-%20Latin%20and%20English%20Edition.html Albertus Magnus – De Adhaerendo Deo – On Cleaving to God]
* [http://hos.ou.edu/galleries/03Medieval/AlbertusMagnus/ Online Galleries, History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries] – High resolution images of works by Albertus Magnus in .jpg and .tiff format.
* [http://roderic.uv.es/handle/10550/2407/browse?valueAlbert%2C+Magne%2C+sant%2C+1193%3F-1280&typeauthor Albertus Magnus works] at [http://roderic.uv.es/handle/10550/43 SOMNI] in the collection of the Duke of Calabria.
** [http://roderic.uv.es/handle/10550/22005 Alberti Magni De laudibus beate Mariae Virginis], Italian digitized codex of 1476 with a completed transcription of his work "Liber de laudibus gloriosissime Dei genitricis Marie"
** [http://roderic.uv.es/uv_ms_0390 Albertus Magnus De mirabili scientia Dei], Italian digitized codex of 1484 with a transcription of the first part of his Summa Theologicae''.
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Category:Year of birth unknown | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertus_Magnus | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.197940 |
1575 | Alboin | Alboin (530s – 28 June 572) was king of the Lombards from about 560 until 572. During his reign the Lombards ended their migrations by settling in Italy, the northern part of which Alboin conquered between 569 and 572. He had a lasting effect on Italy and the Pannonian Basin; in the former, his invasion marked the beginning of centuries of Lombard rule, and in the latter, his defeat of the Gepids and his departure from Pannonia ended the dominance there of the Germanic peoples.
The period of Alboin's reign as king in Pannonia following the death of his father, Audoin, was one of confrontation and conflict between the Lombards and their main neighbours, the Gepids. The Gepids initially gained the upper hand, but in 567, thanks to his alliance with the Avars, Alboin inflicted a decisive defeat on his enemies, whose lands the Avars subsequently occupied. The increasing power of his new neighbours caused Alboin some unease however, and he therefore decided to leave Pannonia for Italy, hoping to take advantage of the Byzantine Empire's vulnerability in defending its territory in the wake of the Gothic War.
After gathering a large coalition of peoples, Alboin crossed the Julian Alps in 568, entering an almost undefended Italy. He rapidly took control of most of Venetia and Liguria. In 569, unopposed, he took northern Italy's main city, Milan. Pavia offered stiff resistance, however, and was taken only after a siege lasting three years. During that time Alboin turned his attention to Tuscany, but signs of factionalism among his supporters and Alboin's diminishing control over his army increasingly began to manifest themselves.
Alboin was assassinated on 28 June 572, in a coup d'état instigated by the Byzantines. It was organized by the king's foster brother, Helmichis, with the support of Alboin's wife, Rosamund, daughter of the Gepid king whom Alboin had killed some years earlier. The coup failed in the face of opposition from a majority of the Lombards, who elected Cleph as Alboin's successor, forcing Helmichis and Rosamund to flee to Ravenna under imperial protection. Alboin's death deprived the Lombards of the only leader who could have kept the newborn Germanic entity together, the last in the line of hero-kings who had led the Lombards through their migrations from the vale of the Elbe to Italy. For many centuries following his death Alboin's heroism and his success in battle were celebrated in Saxon and Bavarian epic poetry.
Etymology
The name Alboin derives from the Proto-Germanic roots *albiz ("elf") and *winiz ("friend"); it is thus cognate with the Old English name Ælfwine. He was known in Latin as Alboinus and in Greek as Ἀλβοΐνος (Alboinos). In modern Italian he is Alboino and in modern Lombard Alboin.
Father's rule
The Lombards under King Wacho had migrated towards the east into Pannonia, taking advantage of the difficulties facing the Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy following the death of its founder, Theodoric, in 526. Wacho's death in about 540 brought his son Walthari to the throne, but, as the latter was still a minor, the kingdom was governed in his stead by Alboin's father, Audoin, of the Gausian clan. Seven years later Walthari died, giving Audoin the opportunity to crown himself and overthrow the reigning Lethings.
Alboin was probably born in the 530s in Pannonia, the son of Audoin and his wife, Rodelinda. She may have been the niece of King Theodoric and betrothed to Audoin through the mediation of Emperor Justinian. Like his father, Alboin was raised a pagan, although Audoin had at one point attempted to gain Byzantine support against his neighbours by professing himself a Christian. Alboin took as his first wife the Christian Chlothsind, daughter of the Frankish King Chlothar. This marriage, which took place soon after the death of the Frankish ruler Theudebald in 555, is thought to reflect Audoin's decision to distance himself from the Byzantines, traditional allies of the Lombards, who had been lukewarm when it came to supporting Audoin against the Gepids. The new Frankish alliance was important because of the Franks' known hostility to the Byzantine empire, providing the Lombards with more than one option. However, the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire interprets events and sources differently, believing that Alboin married Chlothsind when already a king in or shortly before 561, the year of Chlothar's death. After the battle, according to a tradition reported by Paul the Deacon, to be granted the right to sit at his father's table, Alboin had to ask for the hospitality of a foreign king and have him donate his weapons, as was customary. For this initiation, he went to the court of Thurisind, where the Gepid king gave him Turismod's arms. Walter Goffart believes it is probable that in this narrative Paul was making use of an oral tradition, and is sceptical that it can be dismissed as merely a typical topos of an epic poem.
Reign in Pannonia
Alboin came to the throne after the death of his father, sometime between 560 and 565. Shortly, in 565, a new war erupted with the Gepids, now led by Cunimund, Thurisind's son. The cause of the conflict is uncertain, as the sources are divided; the Lombard Paul the Deacon accuses the Gepids, while the Byzantine historian Menander Protector places the blame on Alboin, an interpretation favoured by historian Walter Pohl.
An account of the war by the Byzantine Theophylact Simocatta sentimentalises the reasons behind the conflict, claiming it originated with Alboin's vain courting and subsequent kidnapping of Cunimund's daughter Rosamund, that Alboin proceeded then to marry. The tale is treated with scepticism by Walter Goffart, who observes that it conflicts with the Origo Gentis Langobardorum, where she was captured only after the death of her father. The Gepids obtained the support of the Emperor in exchange for a promise to cede him the region of Sirmium, the seat of the Gepid kings. Thus in 565 or 566 Justinian's successor Justin II sent his son-in-law Baduarius as magister militum (field commander) to lead a Byzantine army against Alboin in support of Cunimund, ending in the Lombards' complete defeat.
Faced with the possibility of annihilation, Alboin made an alliance in 566 with the Avars under Bayan I, at the expense of some tough conditions: the Avars demanded a tenth of the Lombards' cattle, half of the war booty, and on the war's conclusion all of the lands held by the Gepids. The Lombards played on the pre-existing hostility between the Avars and the Byzantines, claiming that the latter were allied with the Gepids. Cunimund, on the other hand, encountered hostility when he once again asked the Emperor for military assistance, as the Byzantines had been angered by the Gepids' failure to cede Sirmium to them, as had been agreed. Moreover, Justin II was moving away from the foreign policy of Justinian, and believed in dealing more strictly with bordering states and peoples. Attempts to mollify Justin II with tributes failed, and as a result the Byzantines kept themselves neutral if not outright supportive of the Avars.
In 567 the allies made their final move against Cunimund, with Alboin invading the Gepids' lands from the northwest while Bayan attacked from the northeast. Cunimund attempted to prevent the two armies from joining up by moving against the Lombards and clashing with Alboin somewhere between the Tibiscus and Danube rivers. The Gepids were defeated in the ensuing battle, their king slain by Alboin, and Cunimund's daughter Rosamund taken captive, according to references in the Origo. The full destruction of the Gepid kingdom was completed by the Avars, who overcame the Gepids in the east. As a result, the Gepids ceased to exist as an independent people and were partly absorbed by the Lombards and the Avars. Sometime before 568, Alboin's first wife Chlothsind died, and after his victory against Cunimund Alboin married Rosamund, to establish a bond with the remaining Gepids. The war also marked a watershed in the geo-political history of the region, as together with the Lombard migration the following year, it signalled the end of six centuries of Germanic dominance in the Pannonian Basin.
Preparations and departure from Pannonia
Despite his success against the Gepids, Alboin had failed to greatly increase his power, and was now faced with a much stronger threat from the Avars. Historians consider this the decisive factor in convincing Alboin to undertake a migration, even though there are indications that before the war with the Gepids a decision was maturing to leave for Italy, a country thousands of Lombards had seen in the 550s when hired by the Byzantines to fight in the Gothic War. Additionally, the Lombards would have known of the weakness of Byzantine Italy, which had endured a number of problems after being retaken from the Goths. In particular the so-called Plague of Justinian had ravaged the region and conflict remained endemic, with the Three-Chapter Controversy sparking religious opposition and administration at a standstill after the able governor of the peninsula, Narses, was recalled. Nevertheless, the Lombards viewed Italy as a rich land which promised great booty, assets Alboin used to gather together a horde which included not only Lombards but many other peoples of the region, including Heruli, Suebi, Gepids, Thuringii, Bulgars, Sarmatians, the remaining Romans and a few Ostrogoths. But the most important group, other than the Lombards, were the Saxons, of whom 20,000 male warriors with their families participated in the trek. These Saxons were tributaries to the Frankish King Sigebert, and their participation indicates that Alboin had the support of the Franks for his venture.
The precise size of the heterogeneous group gathered by Alboin is impossible to know, and many different estimates have been made. Neil Christie considers 150,000 to be a realistic size, a number which would make the Lombards a more numerous force than the Ostrogoths on the eve of their invasion of Italy. Jörg Jarnut proposes 100,000–150,000 as an approximation; Wilfried Menghen in Die Langobarden estimates 150,000 to 200,000; while Stefano Gasparri cautiously judges the peoples united by Alboin to be somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000.
thumb|left|alt=A photo showing a valley and a mountain|The Vipava Valley in Slovenia, through which Alboin led the Lombards into ItalyAs a precautionary move Alboin strengthened his alliance with the Avars, signing what Paul calls a foedus perpetuum ("perpetual treaty") and what is referred to in the 9th-century Historia Langobardorum codicis Gothani as a pactum et foedus amicitiae ("pact and treaty of friendship"), adding that the treaty was put down on paper. By the conditions accepted in the treaty, the Avars were to take possession of Pannonia and the Lombards were promised military support in Italy should the need arise; also, for a period of 200 years, the Lombards were to maintain the right to reclaim their former territories if the plan to conquer Italy failed, thus leaving Alboin with an alternative open. The accord also had the advantage of protecting Alboin's rear, as an Avar-occupied Pannonia would make it difficult for the Byzantines to bring forces to Italy by land. The agreement proved immensely successful, and relations with the Avars were almost uninterruptedly friendly during the lifetime of the Lombard Kingdom.
A further cause of the Lombard migration into Italy may have been an invitation from Narses. According to a controversial tradition reported by several medieval sources, Narses, out of spite for having been removed by Justinian's successor Justin II, called the Lombards to Italy. Often dismissed as an unreliable tradition, it has been studied with attention by modern scholars, in particular Neil Christie, who see in it a possible record of a formal invitation by the Byzantine state to settle in northern Italy as foederati, to help protect the region against the Franks, an arrangement that may have been disowned by Justin II after Narses' removal.
March to Italy
"This Albuin led into Italy the Langobards who were invited by Narses (chief) of the secretaries. And Albuin, king of the Langobards, moved out of Pannonia in the month of April after Easter in the first indiction. In the second indiction, indeed, they began to plunder in Italy, but in the third indiction he became master of Italy." The Origin of the Nation of the Langobards, Chapter V
The Lombard migration started on Easter Monday, 2 April 568. The decision to combine the departure with a Christian celebration can be understood in the context of Alboin's recent conversion to Arian Christianity, as attested by the presence of Arian Gothic missionaries at his court. The conversion is likely to have been motivated mostly by political considerations, and intended to consolidate the migration's cohesion, distinguishing the migrants from the Catholic Romans. It also connected Alboin and his people to the Gothic heritage, and in this way obtained the support of the Ostrogoths serving in the Byzantine army as foederati. It has been speculated that Alboin's migration could have been partly the result of a call from surviving Ostrogoths in Italy. Paul the Deacon Historia Langobardorum, Book II, Ch. 9
The Lombards penetrated into Italy without meeting any resistance from the border troops (milities limitanei). The Byzantine military resources available on the spot were scant and of dubious loyalty, and the border forts may well have been left unmanned. What seems certain is that archaeological excavations have found no sign of violent confrontation in the sites that have been excavated. This agrees with Paul the Deacon's narrative, who speaks of a Lombard takeover in Friuli "without any hindrance".
The first town to fall into the Lombards' hands was Forum Iulii (Cividale del Friuli), the seat of the local magister militum.
Alboin's decision to create a duchy and designate a duke were both important innovations; until then, the Lombards had never had dukes or duchies based on a walled town. The innovation adopted was part of Alboin's borrowing of Roman and Ostrogothic administrative models, as in Late Antiquity the comes civitatis (city count) was the main local authority, with full administrative powers in his region. But the shift from count (comes) to duke (dux) and from county (comitatus) to duchy (ducatus) also signalled the progressive militarization of Italy.
Conquest of Milan
From Forum Iulii, Alboin next reached Aquileia, the most important road junction in the northeast, and the administrative capital of Venetia. The imminent arrival of the Lombards had a considerable impact on the city's population; the Patriarch of Aquileia Paulinus fled with his clergy and flock to the island of Grado in Byzantine-controlled territory.
From Aquileia, Alboin took the Via Postumia and swept through Venetia, taking in rapid succession Tarvisium (Treviso), Vicentia (Vicenza), Verona, Brixia (Brescia) and Bergomum (Bergamo). The Lombards faced difficulties only in taking Opitergium (Oderzo), which Alboin decided to avoid, as he similarly avoided tackling the main Venetian towns closer to the coast on the Via Annia, such as Altinum, Patavium (Padova), Mons Silicis (Monselice), Mantua and Cremona.
Alboin moved west in his march, invading the region of Liguria (north-west Italy) and reaching its capital Mediolanum (Milan) on 3 September 569, only to find it already abandoned by the vicarius Italiae (vicar of Italy), the authority entrusted with the administration of the diocese of Annonarian Italy. Archbishop Honoratus, his clergy, and part of the laity accompanied the vicarius Italiae to find a safe haven in the Byzantine port of Genua (Genoa). Alboin counted the years of his reign from the capture of Milan when he assumed the title of dominus Italiae (Lord of Italy). His success also meant the collapse of Byzantine defences in the northern part of the Po plain, and large movements of refugees to Byzantine areas.
Several explanations have been advanced to explain the swiftness and ease of the initial Lombard advance in northern Italy. It has been suggested that the towns' doors may have been opened by the betrayal of the Gothic auxiliaries in the Byzantine army, but historians generally hold that Lombard's success occurred because Italy was not considered by Byzantium as a vital part of the empire, especially at a time when the empire was imperilled by the attacks of Avars and Slavs in the Balkans and Sassanids in the east. The Byzantine decision not to contest the Lombard invasion reflects the desire of Justinian's successors to reorient the core of the Empire's policies eastward.
Impact of the migration on Annonarian Italy
The impact of the Lombard migration on the Late Roman aristocracy was disruptive, especially in combination with the Gothic War; the latter conflict had finished in the north only in 562, when the last Gothic stronghold, Verona, was taken. Many men of means (Paul's possessores) either lost their lives or their goods, but the exact extent of the despoliation of the Roman aristocracy is a subject of heated debate. The clergy was also greatly affected. The Lombards were mostly pagans and displayed little respect for the clergy and Church property. Many churchmen left their sees to escape from the Lombards, like the two most senior bishops in the north, Honoratus and Paulinus. However, most of the suffragan bishops in the north sought an accommodation with the Lombards, as did in 569 the bishop of Tarvisium, Felix, when he journeyed to the Piave river to parley with Alboin, obtaining respect for the Church and its goods in return for this act of homage. It seems certain that many sees maintained an uninterrupted episcopal succession through the turmoil of the invasion and the following years. The transition was eased by the hostility existing among the northern Italian bishops towards the papacy and the empire due to the religious dispute involving the "Three-Chapter Controversy". In Lombard territory, churchmen were at least sure to avoid imperial religious persecution.
In the view of Pierre Riché, the disappearance of 220 bishops' seats indicates that the Lombard migration was a crippling catastrophe for the Church. Yet according to Walter Pohl the regions directly occupied by Alboin suffered less devastation and had a relatively robust survival rate for towns, whereas the occupation of territory by autonomous military bands interested mainly in raiding and looting had a more severe impact, with the bishoprics in such places rarely surviving.
Siege of Ticinum
thumb|alt=A book illustration with an armed man on a horse in a town, and below the writing "Alboin in Pavia"|A modern rendering of Alboin's entrance into Ticinum
The first attested instance of strong resistance to Alboin's migration took place at the town of Ticinum (Pavia), which he started to besiege in 569 and captured only after three years. The town was of strategic importance, sitting at the confluence of the rivers Po and Ticino and connected by waterways to Ravenna, the capital of Byzantine Italy and the seat of the Praetorian prefecture of Italy. Its fall cut direct communications between the garrisons stationed on the Alpes Maritimae and the Adriatic coast.
Careful to maintain the initiative against the Byzantines, by 570 Alboin had taken their last defences in northern Italy except for the coastal areas of Liguria and Venetia and a few isolated inland centres such as Augusta Praetoria (Aosta), Segusio (Susa), and the island of Amacina in the Larius Lucus (Lake Como). During Alboin's kingship the Lombards crossed the Apennines and plundered Tuscia, but historians are not in full agreement as to whether this took place under his guidance and if this constituted anything more than raiding. According to Herwig Wolfram, it was probably only in 578–579 that Tuscany was conquered, but Jörg Jarnut and others believe this began in some form under Alboin, although it was not completed by the time of his death.
The king's disintegrating authority over his army was also manifested in the invasion of Frankish Burgundy which from 569 or 570 was subject to yearly raids on a major scale. The Lombard attacks were ultimately repelled following Mummolus' victory at Embrun. These attacks had lasting political consequences, souring the previously cordial Lombard-Frankish relations and opening the door to an alliance between the Empire and the Franks against the Lombards, a coalition agreed to by Guntram in about 571. Alboin is generally thought not to have been behind this invasion, but an alternative interpretation of the transalpine raids presented by Gian Piero Bognetti is that Alboin may actually have been involved in the offensive on Guntram as part of an alliance with the Frankish king of Austrasia, Sigebert I. This view is met with scepticism by scholars such as Chris Wickham.
The weakening of royal authority may also have resulted in the conquest of much of southern Italy by the Lombards, in which modern scholars believe Alboin played no role at all, probably taking place in 570 or 571 under the auspices of individual warlords. However it is far from certain that the Lombard takeover occurred during those years, as very little is known of Faroald and Zotto's respective rises to power in Spoletium (Spoleto) and Beneventum (Benevento).
Assassination
Earliest narratives
"When his wife Chlotsinda died, Albin married another wife whose father he had killed a short time before. For this reason, the woman always hated her husband and awaited an opportunity to avenge the wrong done to her father, and so it happened that she fell in love with one of the household slaves and poisoned her husband. When he died she went off with the slave but they were overtaken and put to death together." Gregory of Tours Historia Francorum, Book II, Ch. 41
Ticinum eventually fell to the Lombards in either May or June 572. Alboin had in the meantime chosen Verona as his seat, establishing himself and his treasure in a royal palace built there by Theodoric. This choice may have been another attempt to link himself with the Gothic king. with the connivance of the queen. Helmichis then married the widow, but the two were forced to escape to Byzantine Ravenna, taking with them the royal treasure and part of the army, which hints at the cooperation of Byzantium. Roger Collins describes Marius as an especially reliable source because of his early date and his having lived close to Lombard Italy.
Also contemporary is Gregory of Tours' account presented in the Historia Francorum, and echoed by the later Fredegar. Gregory's account diverges in several respects from most other sources. In his tale it is told how Alboin married the daughter of a man he had slain, and how she waited for a suitable occasion for revenge, eventually poisoning him. She had previously fallen in love with one of her husband's servants, and after the assassination tried to escape with him, but they were captured and killed. However, historians including Walter Goffart place little trust in this narrative. Goffart notes other similar doubtful stories in the Historia and calls its account of Alboin's demise "a suitably ironic tale of the doings of depraved humanity".
Skull cup
Elements present in Marius' account are echoed in Paul's Historia Langobardorum, which also contains distinctive features. One of the best-known aspects unavailable in any other source is that of the skull cup. In Paul, the events that led to Alboin's downfall unfold in Verona. During a great feast, Alboin gets drunk and orders his wife Rosamund to drink from his cup, made from the skull of his father-in-law Cunimund after he had slain him in 567 and married Rosamund. Alboin "invited her to drink merrily with her father". This reignited the queen's determination to avenge her father.
thumb|alt=Painting of a banquet with many participants in which a bearded man points to a woman with a cup while a seated woman looks the scene|The fatal banquet as painted by Peter Paul Rubens in 1615
The tale has been often dismissed as a fable and Paul was conscious of the risk of disbelief. For this reason, he insists that he saw the skull cup personally during the 740s in the royal palace of Ticinum in the hands of king Ratchis. The use of skull cups has been noticed among nomadic peoples and, in particular, among the Lombards' neighbours, the Avars. Skull cups are believed to be part of a shamanistic ritual, where drinking from the cup was considered a way to assume the dead man's powers. In this context, Stefano Gasparri and Wilfried Menghen see in Cunimund's skull cup the sign of nomadic cultural influences on the Lombards: by drinking from his enemy's skull Alboin was taking his vital strength. As for the offering of the skull to Rosamund, that may have been a ritual request of complete submission of the queen and her people to the Lombards, and thus a cause of shame or humiliation. Alternatively, it may have been a rite to appease the dead through the offering of a libation. In the latter interpretation, the queen's answer reveals her determination not to let the wound opened by the killing of her father be healed through a ritual act, thus openly displaying her thirst for revenge. Alboin's remains were allegedly buried beneath the palace steps.
Alboin's death had a lasting impact, as it deprived the Lombards of the only leader they had that could have kept together the newborn Germanic entity. His end also represents the death of the last of the line of hero-kings that had led the Lombards through their migrations from the Elbe to Italy. His fame survived him for many centuries in epic poetry, with Saxons and Bavarians celebrating his prowess in battle, his heroism, and the magical properties of his weapons.
Aftermath
"Helmegis then, upon the death of his king, attempted to usurp his kingdom, but he could not at all do this, because the Langobards, grieving greatly for the king's death, strove to make way with him. And straightway Rosemund sent word to Longinus, prefect of Ravenna, that he should quickly send a ship to fetch them. Longinus, delighted by such a message, speedily sent a ship in which Helmegis with Rosemund his wife embarked, fleeing at night." Paul the Deacon Historia Langobardorum, Book II, Ch. 29
To complete the coup d'état and legitimize his claim to the throne, Helmichis married the queen, whose high standing arose not only from being the king's widow but also from being the most prominent member of the remaining Gepid nation, and as such her support was a guarantee of the Gepids' loyalty to Helmichis. The latter could also count on the support of the Lombard garrison of Verona, where many may have opposed Alboin's aggressive policy and could have cultivated the hope of reaching an entente with the Empire. The Byzantines were almost certainly deeply involved in the plot. It was in their interest to stem the Lombard tide by bringing a pro-Byzantine regime into power in Verona, and possibly, in the long run, break the unity of the Lombards' kingdom, winning over the dukes with honours and emoluments.
The coup ultimately failed, as it met with the resistance of most of the warriors, who were opposed to the king's assassination. As a result, the Lombard garrison in Ticinum proclaimed Duke Cleph the new king, and Helmichis, rather than going to war against overwhelming odds, escaped to Ravenna with Longinus' assistance, taking with him his wife, his troops, the royal treasure and Alboin's daughter Albsuinda. In Ravenna, the two lovers became estranged and killed each other. Subsequently, Longinus sent Albsuinda and the treasure to Constantinople.
The consolidation of Byzantine and Lombard dominions had long-lasting consequences for Italy, as the region was from that moment on fragmented among multiple rulers until Italian unification in 1871.
Cultural references
Alboin, together with other tribal leaders is mentioned in the 10th century Old English poem called Widsith (lines 70–75) :
The historical period also formed the basis of the 1961 Italian adventure film Sword of the Conqueror (Italian: Rosmunda e Alboino, German title Alboin, König der Langobarden), with Jack Palance as Alboin.
There have been several artistic depictions of events from Alboin's life including Peter Paul Rubens' Alboin and Rosamunde (1615); Charles Landseer's Assassination of Alboin, King of the Lombards (1856); and Fortunino Matania's illustration Rosamund captive before King Alboin of the Lombards (1942).
See also
List of kings of the Lombards
Notes
References
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Azzara, Claudio. L'Italia dei barbari. Bologna: il Mulino, 2009, 978-88-15-08812-3.
Bertolini, Paolo. "Alboino, re dei Longobardi", Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. Alberto M. Ghisalberti (ed.). v. 2, Rome: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Treccani, 1960, pp. 34–38.
Christie, Neil. The Lombards: The Ancient Longobards. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995 [1998], .
Collins, Roger. Early Medieval Europe 300–1000. London: Macmillan, 1991, .
Gasparri, Stefano. "I longobardi: alle origini del medioevo italiano". Storia Dossier, (1990) 42, Florence: Giunti. .
Goffart, Walter. The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, .
Gregory of Tours. History of the Franks. Ernest Brehaut (translator). New York: Columbia University Press, 1916.
Humphries, Mark. "Italy, A. D. 425–605", Cambridge Ancient History – Volume XIV: Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors, A. D. 425–600. Averil Cameron, Bryan Ward-Perkins and Michael Whitby (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 525–552. .
Lane, Frederic C.. Storia di Venezia. Turin: Einaudi, 1973 [1991], .
Madden, Thomas F. "Aquileia", Medieval Italy: an encyclopedia. Christopher Kleinhenz (ed.). v. 1, New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 44–45. .
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Ostrogorsky, Georg. Storia dell'impero bizantino. Turin: Einaudi, 1963 [1993], .
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Paul the Deacon. History of the Langobards. William Dudley Foulke (translator). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1907.
Pohl, Walter. "The Empire and the Lombards: treaties and negotiations in the sixth century", Kingdoms of the Empire: the Integration of barbarians in late Antiquity. Walter Pohl (ed.). Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 75–134. .
Richards, Jeffrey. The Popes and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages, 476–752. London: Routledge, 1979, .
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Whitby, Michael. "The successors of Justinian", The Cambridge Ancient History – Volume XIV. pp. 86–112.
Wickham, Chris. Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and Local Society 400–1000. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1981 [1989], .
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External links
Category:530s births
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Category:Year of birth uncertain
Category:6th-century Lombard monarchs
Category:6th-century murdered monarchs
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Category:Gausian dynasty
Category:Regicides
Category:Italian rapists | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alboin | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.268121 |
1576 | Afonso de Albuquerque | | image = File:Retrato de Afonso de Albuquerque (após 1545) - Autor desconhecido.png
| office = 2nd Viceroy of Portuguese India
| term_start = 4 November 1509
| term_end = 8 September 1515
| monarch = Manuel I
| predecessor = Francisco de Almeida
| successor = Lopo Soares de Albergaria
| birth_name = Afonso de Albuquerque
| resting_place = Graça Convent
| birth_date =
| birth_place = Alhandra, Kingdom of Portugal
| death_date
| death_place = Offshore Goa, Portuguese India
| children =
| nationality = Portuguese
| citizenship | occupation Admiral<br />Governor of India
| signature = Afonso de Albuquerque Signature.svg
| battles =
*Moroccan–Portuguese conflicts
**Portuguese conquest of Tangier
**Conquest of Asilah
*War of the Castilian Succession
**Battle of Toro
*Ottoman conquest of Otranto
*Zamorin–Portuguese conflicts
**First Luso-Malabarese War
*Baloch–Portuguese conflicts
*Mamluk–Portuguese conflicts
*Portuguese–Safavid wars
**Capture of Muscat (1507)
**Portuguese conquest of Hormuz
**Portuguese intervention in Hormuz (1514–1515)
*Adil Shahi–Portuguese conflicts
**Portuguese conquest of Goa
**Capture of Banastharim
*Somali–Portuguese conflicts
**Battle of Barawa
*Sack of Angoja
*Battle of Socotra
*Malay–Portuguese conflicts
**Capture of Malacca (1511)
*Siege of Aden
}}
Afonso de Albuquerque, 1st Duke of Goa ( – 16 December 1515), was a Portuguese general, admiral, and statesman. He served as viceroy of Portuguese India from 1509 to 1515, during which he expanded Portuguese influence across the Indian Ocean and built a reputation as a fierce and skilled military commander.
Albuquerque advanced the three-fold Portuguese grand scheme of combating Islam, spreading Christianity, and securing the trade of spices by establishing a Portuguese Asian empire. Among his achievements, Albuquerque managed to conquer Goa and was the first European of the Renaissance to raid the Persian Gulf, and he led the first voyage by a European fleet into the Red Sea. He is generally considered a highly effective military commander, given his successful strategy — he attempted to close all the Indian Ocean naval passages to the Atlantic, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and to the Pacific, transforming it into a Portuguese mare clausum. He was appointed head of the "fleet of the Arabian and Persian sea" in 1506.
Many of the conflicts in which he was directly involved took place in the Indian Ocean, in the Persian Gulf regions for control of the trade routes, and on the coasts of India. His military brilliance in these initial campaigns enabled Portugal to become the first global empire in history. He led the Portuguese forces in numerous battles, including the conquest of Goa in 1510 and the capture of Malacca in 1511.
During the last five years of his life, he turned to administration, where his actions as the second governor of Portuguese India were crucial to the longevity of the Portuguese Empire. He oversaw expeditions that resulted in establishing diplomatic contacts with the Ayutthaya Kingdom through his envoy Duarte Fernandes, with Pegu in Myanmar, and Timor and the Moluccas through a voyage headed by António de Abreu and Francisco Serrão. He laid the path for European trade with Ming China through Rafael Perestrello. He also aided in establishing diplomatic relations with Ethiopia, and established diplomatic ties with Persia during the Safavid dynasty.
Throughout his career, he received epithets such as "the Terrible", "the Great", He was the second son of Gonçalo de Albuquerque, Lord of Vila Verde dos Francos, and Dona Leonor de Menezes. His father held an important position at court and was connected by remote illegitimate descent with the Portuguese monarchy. He was a descendant of King Denis’s illegitimate son, Afonso Sanches, Lord of Albuquerque. He was educated in mathematics and Latin at the court of Afonso V of Portugal, where he befriended Prince John, the future King John II of Portugal.
Early military service, 1471–1509
In 1471, under the command of Afonso V, he was present at the conquest of Tangier and Arzila in Morocco, and he served there as an officer for some years. In 1476, he accompanied Prince John in wars against Castile, including the Battle of Toro. He participated in the campaign on the Italian peninsula in 1480 to assist Ferdinand I of Naples in repelling the Ottoman invasion of Otranto. On his return in 1481, when John was crowned as King John II, Albuquerque was made master of the horse and chief equerry () to the king, a post which he held throughout John's reign. He carried a sealed letter with a secret mission ordered by the king: after fulfilling the first mission, he was to replace the first viceroy of India, Francisco de Almeida, whose term ended two years later. Before departing, he legitimized his son Brás ("Braz" in the old Portuguese spelling), born to a common Portuguese woman named Joana Vicente in 1500.First conquest of Socotra, Muscat and Ormuz, 1507
The fleet left Lisbon on 6 April 1506. Albuquerque piloted his ship himself, having lost his appointed pilot on departure. In Mozambique Channel, they rescued Captain João da Nova, who had encountered difficulties on his return from India; da Nova and his ship, the Flor de la mar, joined da Cunha's fleet. From Malindi, da Cunha sent envoys to Ethiopia, which at the time was thought to be closer to India than it actually is, under the aegis of Albuquerque. After failing to reach Ethiopia, he managed to land the envoys in Filuk. After successful attacks on Arab cities on the East African coast, the expedition conquered the island of Socotra and built a fortress at Suq, hoping to establish a base to stop the Red Sea commerce to the Indian Ocean. However, Socotra was abandoned four years later, as it was eventually realised to be a poor location for a base.
Ormuz was then a tributary state of Shah Ismail I () of Safavid Persia. In a famous episode, shortly after its conquest, Albuquerque was confronted by Persian envoys, who demanded the payment of the due tribute from him instead. He ordered them to be given a stock of cannonballs, arrows and weapons, retorting that "such was the currency struck in Portugal to pay the tribute demanded from the dominions of King Manuel". According to Brás de Albuquerque, it was Shah Ismael who first addressed Albuquerque as "Lion of the seas". on Hormuz Island, engaging his men of all ranks in the work. However, some of his officers, claiming that Afonso was exceeding his orders, revolted against the heavy work and climate and departed for India. With his fleet reduced to two ships and left without supplies, he was unable to maintain his position. In January 1508, he was forced to abandon Ormuz. He raided coastal villages to resupply the settlement of Socotra, returned to Ormuz, and then headed to India.Arrest at Cannanore, 1509Afonso arrived at Cannanore on the Malabar coast in December 1508, where he opened the sealed letter that he had received from the king before the viceroy, Dom Francisco de Almeida, which named him as governor to succeed Almeida.
On 3 February 1509, Almeida fought the naval Battle of Diu against a joint fleet of Mamluks, Ottomans, the Zamorin of Calicut, and the Sultan of Gujarat. His victory was decisive: the Ottomans and Mamluks abandoned the Indian Ocean, easing the way for Portuguese rule there for the next century. In August, after a petition from Afonso's former officers with the support of Diogo Lopes de Sequeira claiming him unfit for governance, Afonso was sent in custody to St. Angelo Fort in Cannanore. There he remained under what he considered as imprisonment.
Governor of Portuguese India, 1509–1515
Afonso was released after three months' confinement, on the arrival at Cannanore of the Marshal of Portugal Fernando Coutinho with a large fleet sent by the king.
On 4 November 1509, Afonso became the second Governor of Portuguese India, a position he would hold until his death. Almeida set off to return to Portugal, but he was killed before he got there in a skirmish with the Khoekhoe. Upon his assuming office, Afonso intended to dominate the Muslim world and control the Spice trade.
Initially, King Manuel I and his council in Lisbon tried to distribute the power by outlining three areas of jurisdiction in the Indian Ocean.
Soon after the failed attack, Afonso assembled a fleet of 23 ships and 1200 men. Contemporary reports state that he wanted to fight the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate fleet in the Red Sea or return to Hormuz. However, he had been informed by Timoji (a privateer in the service of the Hindu Vijayanagara Empire) that it would be easier to fight them in Goa, where they had sheltered after the Battle of Diu, and also of the illness of the Sultan Yusuf Adil Shah, and war between the Deccan sultanates. Afonso regained the support of the Hindu population, although he frustrated the initial expectations of Timoji, who aspired to become governor. Afonso rewarded him by appointing him chief "Aguazil" of the city, an administrator and representative of the Hindu and Muslim people, as a knowledgeable interpreter of the local customs. The new coin, based on the existing local coins, showed a cross on the obverse and an armillary sphere (or "esfera"), King Manuel's badge, on the reverse. Gold cruzados or manueis, silver esferas and alf-esferas, and bronze "leais" were issued.
Albuquerque founded at Goa the Hospital Real de Goa or Royal Hospital of Goa, by the Church of Santa Catarina. Upon hearing that the doctors were extorting the sickly with excessive fees, Albuquerque summoned them, declaring that "You charge a physician's pay and don't know what disease the men who serve our lord the King suffer from. Thus, I want to teach you what is it that they die from" and put them to work building the city walls all day till nightfall before releasing them.
Despite constant attacks, Goa became the center of Portuguese India, with the conquest triggering the compliance of neighbouring kingdoms: the Sultan of Gujarat and the Zamorin of Calicut sent embassies, offering alliances and local grants to fortify.
Afonso then used Goa to secure the spice trade in favor of Portugal and sell Persian horses to Vijayanagara and Hindu princes in return for their assistance. He then sailed to Malacca against orders and despite the protest of Diogo Mendes, who claimed command of the expedition. Afonso eventually centralized the Portuguese government in the Indian Ocean. After the Malaccan conquest, he wrote a letter to the king to explain his disagreement with Diogo Mendes, suggesting that further divisions could be harmful to the Portuguese in India.
(1613)]]
, depicted by Albuquerque's scrivener, Gaspar Correia. ]]
Afonso prepared Malacca's defenses against a Malay counterattack,
He settled the Portuguese administration, reappointing Rui de Araújo as factor, a post assigned before his 1509 arrest, and appointing rich merchant Nina Chatu to replace the previous Bendahara. Besides assisting in the governance of the city and the first Portuguese coinage, he provided the junks for several diplomatic missions. Meanwhile, Afonso arrested and had executed the powerful Javanese merchant Utimuti Raja who, after being appointed to a position in the Portuguese administration as representative of the Javanese population, had maintained contacts with the exiled royal family.Shipwreck on the Flor de la mar, 1511On 20 November 1511 Afonso sailed from Malacca to the coast of Malabar on the old Flor de la Mar carrack that had served to support the conquest of Malacca. Despite its unsound condition, he used it to transport the treasure amassed in the conquest, given its large capacity. and Sumatra, Sumatran kings of Kampar and Indragiri sending emissaries to Afonso accepting the new power, as vassal states of Malacca. Knowing of Siamese ambitions over Malacca, Afonso sent Duarte Fernandes in a diplomatic mission to the Ayutthaya Kingdom (Thailand), returning in a Chinese junk. He was one of the Portuguese who had been arrested in Malacca, having gathered knowledge about the culture of the region. There he was the first European to arrive, establishing amicable relations between the kingdom of Portugal and the court of the king of Siam Ramathibodi II, returning with a Siamese envoy bearing gifts and letters to Afonso and the king of Portugal. Malay sailors were recruited to guide them through Java, the Lesser Sunda Islands and the Ambon Island to Banda Islands, where they arrived in early 1512. There they remained for a month, buying and filling their ships with nutmeg and cloves. António de Abreu then sailed to Amboina whilst Serrão sailed towards the Moluccas, but he was shipwrecked near Seram. Sultan Abu Lais of Ternate heard of their stranding, and, seeing a chance to ally himself with a powerful foreign nation, brought them to Ternate in 1512 where they were permitted to build a fort on the island, the , built in 1522.
Return to Cochin and Goa
Afonso returned from Malacca to Cochin, but could not sail to Goa as it faced a serious revolt headed by the forces of Ismael Adil Shah, the Sultan of Bijapur, commanded by Rasul Khan and his countrymen. During Afonso's absence from Malacca, the Portuguese who opposed the taking of Goa had waived its possession, even writing to the king that it would be best to let it go. Held up by the monsoon and with few forces available, Afonso had to wait for the arrival of reinforcement fleets headed by his nephew D. Garcia de Noronha, and Jorge de Mello Pereira.
While at Cochin, Albuquerque started a school. In a private letter to King Manuel I, he stated that he had found a chest full of books with which to teach the children of married Portuguese settlers (casados) and Christian converts, of which there were about a hundred, to read and write.
On 10 September 1512, Afonso sailed from Cochin to Goa with fourteen ships carrying 1,700 soldiers. Determined to recapture the fortress, he ordered trenches dug and a wall breached. But on the day of the planned final assault, Rasul Khan surrendered. Afonso demanded the fort be handed over with its artillery, ammunition and horses, and the deserters to be given up. Some had joined Rasul Khan when the Portuguese were forced to flee Goa in May 1510, others during the recent siege. Rasul Khan consented, on condition that their lives be spared. Afonso agreed and he left Goa. He did spare the lives of the deserters, but had them horribly mutilated. One such renegade was Fernão Lopes, bound for Portugal in custody, who escaped at the island of Saint Helena and led a 'Robinson Crusoe' life for many years. After such measures the town became the most prosperous Portuguese settlement in India.
Administration and diplomacy, 1512–1515
Ethiopian embassy, 1512
In December 1512 an envoy from Ethiopia arrived at Goa. Mateus was sent by the regent queen Eleni, following the arrival of the Portuguese from Socotra in 1507, as an ambassador for the king of Portugal in search of a coalition to help face growing Muslim influence. He was received in Goa with great honour by Afonso, as a long-sought "Prester John" envoy. His arrival was announced by King Manuel to Pope Leo X in 1513. Although Mateus faced the distrust of Afonso's rivals, who tried to prove he was some impostor or Muslim spy, Afonso sent him to Portugal. The king is described as having wept with joy at their report.
In February 1513, while Mateus was in Portugal, Afonso sailed to the Red Sea with a force of about 1000 Portuguese and 400 Malabaris. He was under orders to secure that channel for Portugal. Socotra had proved ineffective to control the Red Sea entrance and was abandoned, and Afonso's hint that Massawa could be a good Portuguese base might have been influenced by Mateus' reports. Aden was a fortified city, but although he had scaling ladders they broke during the chaotic attack. After half a day of fierce battle, Afonso was forced to retreat. He cruised the Red Sea inside the Bab al-Mandab, with the first European fleet to have sailed this route. He attempted to reach Jeddah, but the winds were unfavourable and so he sheltered at Kamaran island in May, until sickness among the men and lack of fresh water forced him to retreat. In August 1513, after a second attempt to reach Aden, he returned to India with no substantial results. In order to destroy the power of Egypt, he wrote to King Manuel of the idea of diverting the course of the Nile river to render the whole country barren.
Although Albuquerque's expedition failed to reach Suez, such an incursion into the Red Sea by a Christian fleet for the first time in history stunned the Muslim world, and panic spread in Cairo.Submission of Calicut
Albuquerque achieved during his term a favourable end to hostilities between the Portuguese and the Zamorin of Calicut, which had lasted since the massacre of the Portuguese in Calicut in 1502. As naval trade faltered and vassals defected, with no foreseeable solutions to the conflict with the Portuguese, the court of the Zamorin fell to in-fighting. The ruling Zamorin was assassinated and replaced by a rival, under the instigation of Albuquerque, permitting peace talks to commence. The Portuguese were allowed to build a fortress in Calicut itself, and acquired rights to obtain as much pepper and ginger as they wished, at stipulated prices, and half the customs duties of Calicut as yearly tribute. Construction of the fortress began immediately, under the supervision of chief architect Tomás Fernandes.
Goa, 1514
, )]]
With peace concluded, in 1514 Afonso devoted himself to governing Goa and receiving embassies from Indian governors, strengthening the city and encouraging marriages of Portuguese men and local women. At that time, Portuguese women were barred from traveling overseas in order to maintain discipline among the men on board the ships. In 1511 under a policy which Afonso promulgated, the Portuguese government encouraged their explorers to marry local women. To promote settlement, the King of Portugal granted freeman status and exemption from Crown taxes to Portuguese men (known as casados, or "married men") who ventured overseas and married local women. With Afonso's encouragement, mixed marriages flourished, giving birth to Portuguese-Indians or mestiços. He appointed local people for positions in the Portuguese administration and did not interfere with local traditions (except "sati", the practice of immolating widows, which he banned).
In March 1514 King Manuel sent to Pope Leo X a huge and exotic embassy led by Tristão da Cunha, who toured the streets of Rome in an extravagant procession of animals from the colonies and wealth from the Indies. His reputation reached its peak, laying foundations of the Portuguese Empire in the East.
, woodcut (1515)]]In early 1514, Afonso sent ambassadors to Gujarat's Sultan Muzaffar Shah II, ruler of Cambay, to seek permission to build a fort on Diu, India. The mission returned without an agreement, but diplomatic gifts were exchanged, including an Indian rhinoceros. Afonso sent the rhino to King Manuel, making it the first living example of a rhinoceros seen in Europe since the Roman Empire. King Manuel named the rhino Genda after the Gujarat word for ball, and later gifted it to Pope Leo X, but before completing its journey to Italy the boat carrying the rhino sank and the animal drowned. In 1515, German artist Albrecht Dürer created his famous woodcut known as Dürer's Rhinoceros, based on a description from a letter and a brief sketch made by an unknown artist who had seen the actual animal. Dürer's interpretation of the rhino cemented the idea of how a rhino should look like in people's mindsets up until the late-eighteenth century.Conquest of Ormuz and Illness
In 1513, at Cannanore, Afonso was visited by a Persian ambassador from Shah Ismail I, who had sent ambassadors to Gujarat, Ormuz and Bijapur. The shah's ambassador to Bijapur invited Afonso to send back an envoy to Persia. Miguel Ferreira was sent via Ormuz to Tabriz, where he had several interviews with the shah about common goals of defeating the Mamluk sultan.
At the same time, Albuquerque decided to conclude the effective conquest of Hormuz. He had learned that after the Portuguese retreat in 1507, a young king was reigning under the influence of a powerful Persian vizier, Reis Hamed, whom the king greatly feared. At Ormuz in March 1515, Afonso met the king and asked the vizier to be present. He then had him immediately stabbed and killed by his entourage, thus "freeing" the terrified king, so the island in the Persian Gulf yielded to him without resistance and remained a vassal state of the Portuguese Empire. Ormuz itself would not be Persian territory for another century, until an English-Persian alliance finally expelled the Portuguese in 1622. At Ormuz, Afonso met with Miguel Ferreira, returning with rich presents and an ambassador, carrying a letter from the Persian potentate Shah Ismael, inviting Afonso to become a leading lord in Persia. There he remained, engaging in diplomatic efforts, receiving envoys and overseeing the construction of the new fortress, while becoming increasingly ill. His illness was reported as early as September 1515. In November 1515, he embarked on a journey back to Goa.
Death
At this time, his political enemies at the Portuguese court were planning his downfall. They had lost no opportunity in stirring up the jealousy of King Manuel against him, insinuating that Afonso intended to usurp power in Portuguese India. While on his return voyage from Ormuz in the Persian Gulf, near the harbor of Chaul, he received news of a Portuguese fleet arriving from Europe, bearing dispatches announcing that he was to be replaced by his personal foe, Lopo Soares de Albergaria. Realizing the plot that his enemies had moved against him, profoundly disillusioned, he voiced his bitterness: "Grave must be my sins before the King, for I am in ill favor with the King for love of the men, and with the men for love of the King."
Feeling himself near death, he donned the surcoat of the Order of Santiago, of which he was a knight, and drew up his will, appointed the captain and senior officials of Ormuz, and organized a final council with his captains to decide the main matters affecting the Portuguese State of India.
On 16 December 1515, Afonso de Albuquerque died within sight of Goa. As his death was known, in the city "great wailing arose", and many took to the streets to witness his body carried on a chair by his main captains, in a procession lit by torches amidst the crowd. Afonso's body was buried in Goa, according to his will, in the Church of Nossa Senhora da Serra (Our Lady of the Hill), which he had been built in 1513 to thank the Madonna for his escape from Kamaran island. That night, the population of Goa, both Hindu and Portuguese, gathered to mourn his death. which was ruined and rebuilt after the 1755 Great Lisbon earthquake.Legacy
in Lisbon (1902)]]
, in Portugal. Executed by Jaime Martins Barata]]
King Manuel I of Portugal was belatedly convinced of Afonso's loyalty, and endeavoured to atone for his lack of confidence in Afonso by heaping honours upon his son, Brás de Albuquerque (1500–1580), whom he renamed "Afonso" in memory of the father. Afonso de Albuquerque was a prolific writer, having sent numerous letters during his governorship, covering topics from minor issues to major strategies. In 1557 his son published his biography under the title ''Commentarios do Grande Affonso d'Alboquerque''.
In 1572, Afonso's actions were described in The Lusiads, the Portuguese main epic poem by Luís Vaz de Camões (Canto X, strophes 40–49). The poet praises his achievements, but has the muses frown upon the harsh rule of his men, of whom Camões was almost a contemporary fellow. In 1934, Afonso was celebrated by Fernando Pessoa in Mensagem, a symbolist epic. In the first part of this work, called "Brasão" (Coat-of-Arms), he relates Portuguese historical protagonists to each of the fields in the Portuguese coat-of-arms, Afonso being one of the wings of the griffin headed by Henry the Navigator, the other wing being King John II.
A variety of mango, which was created by Portuguese Jesuits in Goa via grafting techniques, was named in his honour.
Numerous homages have been paid to Afonso. He is featured in the Padrão dos Descobrimentos monument. There is a square named after him in Lisbon, which also features a bronze statue, as well as a prominent statue of his enrobed figure in a garden square in Bairro Gomes da Costa in Porto.
Two Portuguese Navy ships have been named in his honour: the sloop NRP Afonso de Albuquerque (1884) and the warship NRP Afonso de Albuquerque.
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
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* Albuquerque, Afonso de, D. Manuel I, António Baião, "[https://openlibrary.org/b/OL6573931M/Cartas_de_Affonso_de_Albuquerque Cartas para el-rei d]". Manuel I", Editora Livraria Sá de Costa (1957)
Primary sources
* External links
* Paul Lunde, [https://web.archive.org/web/20110821054627/http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200504/the.coming.of.the.portuguese.htm The coming of the Portuguese], 2006, Saudi Aramco World
Category:16th-century Portuguese explorers
Category:Explorers of Asia
Category:Explorers of India
Category:Viceroys of Portuguese India
Category:Date of birth unknown
Category:1450s births
Category:1515 deaths
Category:Portuguese admirals
Category:Portuguese generals
Category:Portuguese Renaissance writers
Category:Portuguese Roman Catholics
Category:People from Vila Franca de Xira
Category:Shipwreck survivors
Category:16th-century Portuguese military personnel
Category:16th-century Portuguese nobility | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afonso_de_Albuquerque | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.295087 |
1577 | Alcaeus | , Attic red-figure calathus, c. 470 BC, Staatliche Antikensammlungen (Inv. 2416)]]
Alcaeus of Mytilene (; , Alkaios ho Mutilēnaios; – BC) was a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos who is credited with inventing the Alcaic stanza. He was included in the canonical list of nine lyric poets by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria. He was a contemporary of Sappho, with whom he may have exchanged poems. He was born into the aristocratic governing class of Mytilene, the main city of Lesbos, where he was involved in political disputes and feuds.
Biography
The broad outlines of the poet's life are well known. He was born into the aristocratic, warrior class that dominated Mytilene, the strongest city-state on the island of Lesbos and, by the end of the seventh century BC, the most influential of all the North Aegean Greek cities, with a strong navy and colonies securing its trade-routes in the Hellespont. The city had long been ruled by kings born to the Penthilid clan but, during the poet's life, the Penthilids were a spent force and rival aristocrats and their factions contended with each other for supreme power. Alcaeus and his older brothers were passionately involved in the struggle but experienced little success. Their political adventures can be understood in terms of three tyrants who came and went in succession:
* Melanchrus – he was overthrown sometime between 612 BC and 609 BC by a faction that, in addition to the brothers of Alcaeus, included Pittacus (later renowned as one of the Seven Sages of Greece); Alcaeus at that time was too young to be actively involved;
* Myrsilus – it is not known when he came to power but some verses by Alcaeus (frag. 129) indicate that the poet, his brothers and Pittacus made plans to overthrow him and that Pittacus subsequently betrayed them; Alcaeus and his brothers fled into exile where the poet later wrote a drinking song in celebration of the news of the tyrant's death (frag. 332);
* Pittacus – the dominant political figure of his time, he was voted supreme power by the political assembly of Mytilene and appears to have governed well (590–580 BC), even allowing Alcaeus and his faction to return home in peace.
Sometime before 600 BC, Mytilene fought Athens for control of Sigeion and Alcaeus was old enough to participate in the fighting. According to the historian Herodotus, the poet threw away his shield to make good his escape from the victorious Athenians then celebrated the occasion in a poem that he later sent to his friend, Melanippus. It is thought that Alcaeus travelled widely during his years in exile, including at least one visit to Egypt. His older brother, Antimenidas, appears to have served as a mercenary in the army of Nebuchadnezzar II and probably took part in the conquest of Askelon. Alcaeus wrote verses in celebration of Antimenides's return, including mention of his valour in slaying the larger opponent (frag. 350), and he proudly describes the military hardware that adorned their family home (frag. 357).
by
Lawrence Alma-Tadema. The Walters Art Museum.]]
Alcaeus was a contemporary and a countryman of Sappho and, since both poets composed for the entertainment of Mytilenean friends, they had many opportunities to associate with each other on a quite regular basis, such as at the Kallisteia'', an annual festival celebrating the island's federation under Mytilene, held at the 'Messon' (referred to as temenos in frs. 129 and 130), where Sappho performed publicly with female choirs. Alcaeus's reference to Sappho in terms more typical of a divinity, as holy/pure, honey-smiling Sappho (fr. 384), may owe its inspiration to her performances at the festival. and it was assumed by later Greek critics and during the early centuries of the Christian era that the two poets were in fact lovers, a theme which became a favourite subject in art (as in the urn pictured above).PoetryThe poetic works of Alcaeus were collected into ten books, with elaborate commentaries, by the Alexandrian scholars Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace sometime in the 3rd century BC, and yet his verses today exist only in fragmentary form, varying in size from mere phrases, such as wine, window into a man (fr. 333) to entire groups of verses and stanzas, such as those quoted below (fr. 346). Alexandrian scholars numbered him in their canonic nine (one lyric poet per Muse). Among these, Pindar was held by many ancient critics to be pre-eminent, but some gave precedence to Alcaeus instead. The canonic nine are traditionally divided into two groups, with Alcaeus, Sappho and Anacreon, being 'monodists' or 'solo-singers', with the following characteristics:
* They composed and performed personally for friends and associates on topics of immediate interest to them;
* They wrote in their native dialects (Alcaeus and Sappho in Aeolic dialect, Anacreon in Ionic);
* They preferred quite short, metrically simple stanzas or 'strophes' which they re-used in many poems – hence the 'Alcaic' and 'Sapphic' stanzas, named after the two poets who perfected them or possibly invented them.
The other six of the canonic nine composed verses for public occasions, performed by choruses and professional singers and typically featuring complex metrical arrangements that were never reproduced in other verses. However, this division into two groups is considered by some modern scholars to be too simplistic and often it is practically impossible to know whether a lyric composition was sung or recited, or whether or not it was accompanied by musical instruments and dance. Even the private reflections of Alcaeus, ostensibly sung at dinner parties, still retain a public function.
Critics often seek to understand Alcaeus in comparison with Sappho:
|
Let's drink! Why are we waiting for the lamps? Only an inch of daylight left.
Lift down the large cups, my friends, the painted ones;
for wine was given to men by the son of Semele and Zeus
to help them forget their troubles. Mix one part of water to two of wine,
pour it in up to the brim, and let one cup push the other along...}}
The Greek meter here is relatively simple, comprising the Greater Asclepiad, adroitly used to convey, for example, the rhythm of jostling cups (). The language of the poem is typically direct and concise and comprises short sentences — the first line is in fact a model of condensed meaning, comprising an exhortation ("Let's drink!"), a rhetorical question ("Why are we waiting for the lamps?") and a justifying statement ("Only an inch of daylight left"). The meaning is clear and uncomplicated, the subject is drawn from personal experience, and there is an absence of poetic ornament, such as simile or metaphor. Like many of his poems (e.g., frs. 38, 326, 338, 347, 350), it begins with a verb (in this case "Let's drink!") and it includes a proverbial expression ("Only an inch of daylight left") though it is possible that he coined it himself.
The poem was written in Sapphic stanzas, a verse form popularly associated with his compatriot, Sappho, but in which he too excelled, here paraphrased in English to suggest the same rhythms. There were probably another three stanzas in the original poem but only nine letters of them remain. The 'far-away light' () is a reference to St. Elmo's Fire, an electrical discharge supposed by ancient Greek mariners to be an epiphany of the Dioscuri, but the meaning of the line was obscured by gaps in the papyrus until reconstructed by a modern scholar; such reconstructions are typical of the extant poetry (see Scholars, fragments and sources below). This poem does not begin with a verb but with an adverb (Δευτέ) but still communicates a sense of action. He probably performed his verses at drinking parties for friends and political allies – men for whom loyalty was essential, particularly in such troubled times. In his second book, in an ode composed in Alcaic stanzas on the subject of an almost fatal accident he had on his farm, he imagines meeting Alcaeus and Sappho in Hades:
Scholars, fragments and sources
The story of Alcaeus is partly the story of the scholars who rescued his work from oblivion. His verses have not come down to us through a manuscript tradition – generations of scribes copying an author's collected works, such as delivered intact into the modern age four entire books of Pindar's odes – but haphazardly, in quotes from ancient scholars and commentators whose own works have chanced to survive, and in the tattered remnants of papyri uncovered from an ancient rubbish pile at Oxyrhynchus and other locations in Egypt: sources that modern scholars have studied and correlated exhaustively, adding little by little to the world's store of poetic fragments.
Ancient scholars quoted Alcaeus in support of various arguments. Thus for example Heraclitus "The Allegorist" quoted fr. 326 and part of fr. 6, about ships in a storm, in his study on Homer's use of allegory. The hymn to Hermes, fr308(b), was quoted by Hephaestion and both he and Libanius, the rhetorician, quoted the first two lines of fr. 350, celebrating the return from Babylon of Alcaeus's brother. The rest of fr. 350 was paraphrased in prose by the historian/geographer Strabo. Many fragments were supplied in quotes by Athenaeus, principally on the subject of wine-drinking, but fr. 333, "wine, window into a man", was quoted much later by the Byzantine grammarian, John Tzetzes.
The first 'modern' publication of Alcaeus's verses appeared in a Greek and Latin edition of fragments collected from the canonic nine lyrical poets by Michael Neander, published at Basle in 1556. This was followed by another edition of the nine poets, collected by Henricus Stephanus and published in Paris in 1560. Fulvius Ursinus compiled a fuller collection of Alcaic fragments, including a commentary, which was published at Antwerp in 1568. The first separate edition of Alcaeus was by Christian David Jani and it was published at Halle in 1780. The next separate edition was by August Matthiae, Leipzig 1827.
Some of the fragments quoted by ancient scholars were able to be integrated by scholars in the nineteenth century. Thus for example two separate quotes by Athenaeus were united by Theodor Bergk to form fr. 362. Three separate sources were combined to form fr. 350, as mentioned above, including a prose paraphrase from Strabo that first needed to be restored to its original meter, a synthesis achieved by the united efforts of Otto Hoffmann, Karl Otfried Müller and Franz Heinrich Ludolf Ahrens. The discovery of the Oxyrhynchus papyri towards the end of the nineteenth century dramatically increased the scope of scholarly research. In fact, eight important fragments have now been compiled from papyri – frs. 9, 38A, 42, 45, 34, 129, 130 and most recently S262. These fragments typically feature lacunae or gaps that scholars fill with 'educated guesses', including for example a "brilliant supplement" by Maurice Bowra in fr. 34, a hymn to the Dioscuri that includes a description of St. Elmo's fire in the ship's rigging. Working with only eight letters (; tr. pró...tr...ntes), Bowra conjured up a phrase that develops the meaning and the euphony of the poem (; tr. ''próton' ontréchontes), describing luminescence "running along the forestays".
References
Citations
Sources
* Sappho et Alcaeus. Fragmenta. Eva-Maria Voigt (ed.). Polak and van Gennep, Amsterdam, 1971.
* Greek Lyric Poetry. D.A. Campbell (ed.). Bristol Classical Press, London, 1982.
* Greek Lyric 1: Sappho and Alcaeus. D. A. Campbell (ed.). Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1982.
* Alcée. Fragments. Gauthier Liberman (ed.). Collection Budé, Paris, 1999.
* Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets. Translated by Willis Barnstone. Schoken Books Inc., New York, 1988.
External links
*
*
* [http://www.blackcatpoems.com/a/alcaeus.html Poems by Alcaeus] – English translations
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110514091618/http://mkatz.web.wesleyan.edu/Images2/cciv243.Alcaeus.html A. M. Miller, Greek Lyric'':] – Alcaeus, many fragments
* [http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/alcaeus.asp Alcaeus Bilingual Anthology (in Greek and English, side by side)]
Category:620s BC births
Category:Year of birth unknown
Category:6th-century BC deaths
Category:Year of death unknown
Category:Nine Lyric Poets
Category:Aeolic Greek poets
Category:Ancient Greek political refugees
Category:Ancient Mytileneans
Category:Poets from ancient Lesbos
Category:6th-century BC Greek people
Category:6th-century BC poets | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcaeus | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.323337 |
1578 | Alcamenes | thumb|Herm of Hermes, Roman copy of a late 5th century BC original, the forefront inscription states the herm was made by Alcamenes and dedicated by Pergamios, Istanbul Museums.
Alcamenes () was an ancient Greek sculptor of Lemnos and Athens, who flourished in the 2nd half of the 5th century BC. He was a younger contemporary of Phidias and noted for the delicacy and finish of his works, among which a Hephaestus and an Aphrodite of the Gardens were conspicuous.
Pausanias says that he was the author of one of the pediments of the temple of Zeus at Olympia, but this seems a chronological and stylistic impossibility. also refers to a statue of Ares by Alcamenes that was erected on the Athenian agora, which some have related to the Ares Borghese. However, the temple of Ares to which he refers had only been moved from Acharnes and re-sited in the Agora in Augustus's time, and statues known to derive from Alcamenes' statue show the god in a breastplate, so the identification of Alcamenes' Ares with the Ares Borghese is not secure.
At Pergamum there was discovered in 1903 a Hellenistic copy of the head of the Hermes "Propylaeus" of Alcamenes. As, however, the deity is represented in a Neo-Attic, archaistic and conventional character, this copy cannot be relied on as giving us much information as to the usual style of Alcamenes, who was almost certainly a progressive and original artist.
It is safer to judge him by the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon, in which he must almost certainly have taken a share under the direction of Phidias. He is said to be the most eminent sculptor in Athens after the departure of Phidias for Olympia, but enigmatic in that none of the sculptures associated with his name in classical literature can be securely connected with existing copies.
Notes
References
Julius Sillig, Dictionary of the artists of antiquity; 1837
Andrew Stewart, One hundred Greek Sculptors : Their Careers and Extant Works
Sir Charles Waldstein, Alcamenes and the establishment of the classical type in Greek art; 1926
External links
Scholars Resource: Works by Alkamenes
Perseus Digital Library: Alcamenes
Herma by Alcamenes - Uni Graz
Category:Pergamene sculpture
Category:5th-century BC Greek sculptors
Category:Ancient Athenian sculptors
Category:Ancient Lemnos
Category:Metics in Classical Athens
Category:People from Lemnos
Category:Year of birth unknown
Category:Year of death unknown | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcamenes | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.326370 |
1579 | Alcmene | In Greek mythology, Alcmene ( ; ) or Alcmena ( ; ; ; meaning "strong in wrath") was the wife of Amphitryon, by whom she bore two children, Iphicles and Laonome. She is best known as the mother of Heracles, whose father was the god Zeus. Alcmene was also referred to as Electryone (), a patronymic name as a daughter of Electryon.
Mythology
Background
According to the Bibliotheca, Alcmene was born to Electryon, the son of Perseus and Andromeda, and king of Tiryns and Mycenae or Medea in Argolis. Her mother was Anaxo, daughter of Alcaeus and Astydamia. Other accounts say her mother was Lysidice, the daughter of Pelops and Hippodameia, or Eurydice, the daughter of Pelops. According to Pausanias, the poet Asius made Alcmene the daughter of Amphiaraus and Eriphyle.
Hesiod describes Alcmene as the tallest, most beautiful woman with wisdom surpassed by no person born of mortal parents. It is said that her face and dark eyes were as charming as Aphrodite's, and that she honoured her husband like no woman before her.
Exile to Thebes
According to the Bibliotheca, Alcmene went with Amphitryon to Thebes, where he was purified by Creon for accidentally killing Electryon. Alcmene refused to marry Amphitryon until he had avenged the death of her brothers. During Amphitryon's expedition against the Taphians and Teleboans, when Zeus desired to sleep with Alcmene, he made one night last longer extending it to three, by ordering Helios, the sun god, not to rise for three whole days. He then visited Alcmene disguised as Amphitryon. Zeus persuaded Alcmene that he was her husband. Thus Zeus slept with Alcmene, his great-granddaughter, thereby conceiving Heracles, while recounting Amphitryon's victories against the Teleboans. When Amphitryon finally returned to Thebes, Alcmene told him that he had come the night before and slept with her; he learned from Tiresias what Zeus had done.
Birth of Heracles
Homer
In Homer's Iliad, when Alcmene was about to give birth to Heracles, Zeus announced to all the gods that on that day a child by Zeus himself would be born and rule all those around him. Hera, after requesting Zeus to swear an oath to that effect, descended from Olympus to Argos and made the wife of Sthenelus (son of Perseus) give birth to Eurystheus after only seven months, while at the same time preventing Alcmene from delivering Heracles. This resulted in the fulfillment of Zeus's oath in that it was Eurystheus rather than Heracles.
Ovid
According to Ovid's Metamorphoses, while in labour, Alcmene was having great difficulty giving birth to such a large child. After seven days and nights of agony, Alcmene stretched out her arms and called upon Lucina, the goddess of childbirth (the Roman equivalent of Eileithyia). While Lucina did go to Alcmene, she had been previously instructed by Juno (Hera) to prevent the delivery. With her hands clasped and legs crossed, Lucina muttered charms, thereby preventing Alcmene from giving birth. Alcmene writhed in pain, cursed the heavens, and came close to death. Galanthis, a maid of Alcmene who was nearby, observed Lucina's behaviour and quickly deduced that it was Juno's doing. To put an end to her mistress's suffering, she announced that Alcmene had safely delivered her child, which surprised Lucina so much that she immediately jumped up and unclenched her hands. As soon as Lucina leapt up, Alcmene was released from her spell, and gave birth to Heracles. As punishment for deceiving Lucina, Galanthis was transformed into a weasel; she continued to live with Alcmene.
Pausanias
In Pausanias' recounting, Hera sent witches (as they were called by the Thebans) to hinder Alcmene's delivery of Heracles. The witches were successful in preventing the birth until Historis, daughter of Tiresias, thought of a trick to deceive the witches. Like Galanthis, Historis announced that Alcmene had delivered her child; having been deceived, the witches went away, allowing Alcmene to give birth.
Plautus
In contrast to the depictions of a difficult labor above, an alternative version is presented in Amphitryon, a comedic play by Plautus. Here Alcmene calls upon Jupiter, who performs a miracle allowing her to give birth quickly and without pain. After a crash of thunder and light, the baby arrives without anyone's assistance.
Death
After the death of Amphitryon, Alcmene married Rhadamanthys, son of Zeus, and lived with him in exile at Ocaleae in Boeotia. It is said that after Heracles was apotheosised, Hyllus, having pursued and killed Eurystheus, cut off Eurystheus' head and gave it to Alcmene, who gouged out the eyes with weaving pins. In Metamorphoses, an aging Alcmene recounted the story of the birth of Heracles to Iole. In the second account given by the Thebans, when Alcmene died, she was turned from human form to a stone.
Pausanias indicated that an altar to Alcmene had been built in the Cynosarges in Athens, alongside altars to Heracles, Hebe, and Iolaus. Pausanias also said that Alcmene's tomb is located near the Olympieum at Megara.
Notes
References
Apollodorus. Apollodorus, The Library, with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921.
Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, Oldfather, C. H. (Translator) (1935). Library of History: Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Massachusetts.: Harvard University Press.
Hesiod. The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. "Shield of Heracles". Cambridge, Massachusetts.,Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914.
Homer. The Iliad with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, Ph.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Arthur Golding. London. W. Seres. 1567.
Pausanias. Pausanias Description of Greece with an English Translation by W.H.S. Jones, Litt.D., and H.A. Ormerod, M.A., in 4 Volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1918.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives with an English Translation by Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1914.
Plautus. The Comedies of Plautus. Henry Thomas Riley. London. G. Bell and Sons. 1912.
Smith, William; Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, London (1873). "Alcmene"
Category:Mortal women of Zeus
Category:Princesses in Greek mythology
Category:Perseides
Category:Mythology of Argos, Peloponnese
Category:Mythology of Heracles
Category:Metamorphoses characters
Category:Mythological rape victims
Category:Helios in mythology
Category:Deeds of Hera
Category:Metamorphoses into inanimate objects in Greek mythology
Category:Mythological Mycenaeans
Category:Mythological Tirynthians | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcmene | 2025-04-05T18:25:42.335014 |
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