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Anatomie of Abuses (work by Stubbs)
vigorous Puritan pamphleteer and propagandist for a purer life and straiter devotion whose Anatomie of Abuses (1583), his most popular work, consisted of a devastating attack on English habits in dress, food, drink, games, and especially sex. At first Stubbs was inclined to condemn only excessive concentration on worldly pastimes, but in later works he denounced all forms of them. His......
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Anatomie pathologique du corps humain (work by Cruveilhier)
...was established in 1836. Cruveilhier possessed a broad knowledge of morbid anatomy and published a series of multivolume works on the subject. The greatest of these, an atlas of pathology titled Anatomie pathologique du corps humain, 2 vol. (1829–42; “Pathological Anatomy of the Human Body”), had many coloured illustrations whose beauty remains unrivaled in the histo...
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Anatomist, The (work by Bridie)
...Sunlight Sonata (1928), written under the pseudonym of Mary Henderson, was staged by the Scottish National Players. Three years later Bridie achieved success with his London production of The Anatomist (1931), based on a well-known criminal case. Considered distinctively Scottish in their unexpected twists of fancy and thought-provoking contents, his plays include Jonah and the...
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anatomy (biology)
a field in the biological sciences concerned with the identification and description of the body structures of living things. Gross anatomy involves the study of major body structures by dissection and observation and in its narrowest sense is concerned only with the human body. “Gross anatomy” customarily refers to the study of those body structures large enough to be examined with...
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anatomy (literature)
in literature, the separating or dividing of a topic into parts for detailed examination or analysis. Among the better-known examples are John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The literary critic Northrop Frye, in his book Anatomy of Criticism, narrowed the defin...
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Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, The (work by Rembrandt)
From 1631 to 1635, in Uylenburgh’s workshop, Rembrandt produced a substantial number of portraits (mainly pairs of pendants) and some group portraits, such as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632). He must have conquered the Amsterdam portrait market rapidly. Partly relying on his experience as a history painter, he succeeded in producing much livelier....
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Anatomy Lesson, The (work by Tetley)
...Its success gained Tetley a position as guest artist with the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague. He staged several innovative works with the Dutch company, including The Anatomy Lesson (1964), which was based on the 17th-century Dutch master Rembrandt’s painting Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, and ......
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Anatomy Lesson, The (work by Roth)
...his most lasting achievement may be his later novels built around the misadventures of a controversial Jewish novelist named Zuckerman, especially The Ghost Writer (1979), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and, above all, The Counterlife (1987). Like many of his later works, from My Life as a Man (1974) to Operation Shylock......
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Anatomy of a Murder (film by Preminger)
...debut in the 1959 western The Hanging Tree and was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor for his second film role, that of an unctuous assistant prosecutor in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). So riveting was Scott’s screen presence that many critics thought he stole scenes from star James Stewart by doing nothing but sitting in a chair and foll...
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Anatomy of an Illness (work by Cousins)
Cousins wrote on a variety of subjects, including a biography of Albert Schweitzer and a book of reflections on mankind in the atomic age, Modern Man Is Obsolete (1945). In 1979 Anatomy of an Illness appeared, a book based on Cousins’ own experience with a life-threatening illness and exploring the healing ability of the human mind. Later works include Human Options (19...
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Anatomy of Criticism (work by Frye)
...A Study of William Blake, which was a sweeping and erudite study of Blake’s visionary symbolism and established the groundwork for his engagement with literary theory. In Anatomy of Criticism (1957) he challenged the hegemony of the New Criticism by emphasizing the modes and genres of literary texts. Rather than analyze the language of individual wor...
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Anatomy of Melancholy (work by Burton)
English scholar, writer, and Anglican clergyman whose Anatomy of Melancholy is a masterpiece of style and a valuable index to the philosophical and psychological ideas of the time....
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Anatomy of Plants, The (work by Grew)
Grew’s best and most popular work, The Anatomy of Plants (1682), includes a section on the anatomy of flowers and many excellent wood engravings that represent the three-dimensional, microscopic structure of plant tissue. The book is best remembered for the idea, suggested to Grew by the physician Sir Thomas Millington, that the stamen, with its pollen, is the male sex organ and that...
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Anatomy of the Body of Christ (work by Godfrey of Saint-Victor)
Another treatise, “Anatomy of the Body of Christ,” appended to Fons philosophiae, is a leading example of medieval Christian symbolism. A long poem ascribing to each member and organ of Christ’s body some aspect of man’s natural and supernatural purpose, it assembled texts from the early Church Fathers and helped form medieval devotion to the humanity of Christ. ...
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Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, Exhibited in Figures, The (work by Hunter)
...he was the most successful specialist in this field in Great Britain in his day, becoming physician extraordinary to Queen Charlotte in 1762. He wrote three books, the most important being The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, Exhibited in Figures (1774)....
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Anatomy of Vegetables Begun, The (work by Grew)
...physician, and microscopist, who, with the Italian microscopist Marcello Malpighi, is considered to be among the founders of the science of plant anatomy. Grew’s first book on plant anatomy, The Anatomy of Vegetables Begun (1672), was presented to the Royal Society of London at the same time as Malpighi’s manuscript on the subject....
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Anatosaurus (dinosaur genus)
bipedal duck-billed dinosaurs (hadrosaurs) of the Late Cretaceous Period, commonly found as fossils in North American rocks 70 million to 65 million years old. Related forms such as Edmontosaurus and Shantungosaurus have been found elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere....
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anatta (Buddhism)
in Buddhism, the doctrine that there is in humans no permanent, underlying substance that can be called the soul. Instead, the individual is compounded of five factors (Pali khandha; Sanskrit skandha) that are constantly changing. The concept of anatta, or ...
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Anaukpetlun (king of Burma)
By the end of the 16th century, Ava had been resurrected and the second Ava dynasty established, and by 1613 Bayinnaung’s grandson Anaukpetlun had reunited Myanmar. Anaukpetlun’s successor, Thalun, reestablished the principles of the Myanmar state created half a millennium earlier at Pagan. Heavy religious expenditures, however, weakened Ava politically, much as they had done in Paga...
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Anauni (people)
...of the administration. An impressive series of documents, such as a speech for the admission of Gauls to the Senate recorded on a partly defective inscription at Lugdunum (Lyon), the edict for the Anauni (an Alpine population who had usurped the rights of Roman citizenship and whom Claudius confirmed in these rights), and the aforementioned letter to the city of Alexandria (ad 41)...
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anautogenous fly (insect)
...is laid without a meal of blood, blood is necessary to mature a second batch. Flies that lay one batch of eggs without blood are autogenous; those that cannot lay at all without blood are anautogenous. One species can have both types, possibly as a result of shifting populations or races arising from natural selection. For example, in the far north large populations of biting flies......
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anauxite (mineral)
...occur as minute, sometimes elongated, hexagonal plates in compact or granular masses and in micalike piles. They are natural alteration products of feldspars, feldspathoids, and other silicates. Anauxite, which was previously regarded as a kaolinite-group mineral possessing a higher than usual silica-alumina ratio, is now considered to be kaolinite and free silica (mainly noncrystalline).......
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Anavarza (Turkey)
former city of the ancient province of Cilicia in Anatolia that was important in the Roman and Byzantine periods. It was located in what is now south-central Turkey. The original native settlement was refounded by the Romans in 19 bc, following a visit by Augustus. It rivaled Tarsus, the Cilician capital, in the 3rd century ad, and ...
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Anawrahta (king of Myanmar)
the first king of all of Myanmar, or Burma (reigned 1044–77), who introduced his people to Theravāda Buddhism. His capital at Pagan on the Irrawaddy River became a prominent city of pagodas and temples....
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Anaxagoras (Greek philosopher)
Greek philosopher of nature remembered for his cosmology and for his discovery of the true cause of eclipses. He was associated with the Athenian statesman Pericles....
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Anaxilas (tyrant of Rhegium)
In the early 5th century bc it was occupied by Greek fugitives from Persian-occupied Miletus and Samos. The fugitives were assisted by Anaxilas, tyrant of Rhegium (Reggio di Calabria), who then ruled over Rhegium and Zankle, the name of which he changed to Messene in honour of his native region of Messenia in the Peloponnese. After regaining its independence, the city was destroyed b...
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Anaximander (Greek philosopher)
Greek philosopher often called the founder of astronomy, the first thinker to develop a cosmology, or systematic philosophical view of the world....
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Anaximenes of Miletus (Greek philosopher)
Greek philosopher of nature and one of three thinkers of Miletus traditionally considered to be the first philosophers in the Western world. Of the other two, Thales held that water is the basic building block of all matter, whereas Anaximander chose to call the essential substance “the unlimited.”...
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Anaxyelidae (insect)
The cedar wood wasps, represented in North America by the species Syntexis libocedrii, are found in the Pacific coastal states. Adults are about 8 to 14 mm (0.3 to 0.5 inch) in length. The larva bores into the wood of the incense cedar, Calocedrus decurrens....
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Anaya, Colegio de (building, Salamanca, Spain)
...of the university’s most famous rector, the scholar and writer Miguel de Unamuno (died 1936), with his library and personal effects. To the south of the new cathedral stand the Neoclassical Colegio de Anaya (1760–68), designed by José Mamerto Hermosilla, and the only remaining old residential college, the Colegio de Fonseca (1527–78), generally known as the Colegio d...
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Anaya, Jorge Isaac (Argentine naval commander)
Argentine naval commander who led the failed attempt to invade and control the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) during the 1982 Falkland Islands War with the U.K. The decision to invade the Falklands by Anaya and fellow military junta members Lieut. Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri and Brigadier Basilio Lami Dozo (who were being criticized for economic mismanagement and human rights abuses) was based on th...
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Anaya, Rudolfo A. (American author)
American novelist and educator whose fiction expresses his Mexican American heritage, the tradition of folklore and oral storytelling in Spanish, and the Jungian mythic perspective....
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Anaya, Rudolfo Alfonso (American author)
American novelist and educator whose fiction expresses his Mexican American heritage, the tradition of folklore and oral storytelling in Spanish, and the Jungian mythic perspective....
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Anazarbus (Turkey)
former city of the ancient province of Cilicia in Anatolia that was important in the Roman and Byzantine periods. It was located in what is now south-central Turkey. The original native settlement was refounded by the Romans in 19 bc, following a visit by Augustus. It rivaled Tarsus, the Cilician capital, in the 3rd century ad, and ...
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Anbar (ancient city, Iraq)
ancient Mesopotamian town located on the left bank of the Euphrates River, downstream from modern Ar-Ramādī in central Iraq. Originally called Massice and Fairuz Sapur, it was destroyed by the Roman emperor Julian in ad 363. The town was rebuilt and became known from at least the 6th century as Anbar (“Stores”). Jews from the academy of Pumbedita took refu...
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Anbār, battle of (Mesopotamian history)
...The Roman emperor Gordian III led a large army against Shāpūr I in 243. The Romans retook Harran and Nisibis and defeated the Sāsānians at a battle near Resaina, but at Anbār, renamed Pērōz-Shāpūr (“Victorious Is Shāpūr”), the Sāsānians inflicted a defeat on the Romans, who lost their empero...
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Anbay (Arabian deity)
Among various lesser or local deities, the nature and even the sex of many of whom remain unknown, the better-documented are listed here. In Qatabān, Anbay and Ḥawkam are invoked together as (the gods) “of command and decision(?).” The name Anbay is related to that of the Babylonian god Nabu, while Ḥawkam derives from the root meaning “to be wise.”....
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ANC (political party, South Africa)
South African political party and black nationalist organization. Founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress, it had as its main goal the maintenance of voting rights for Coloureds (persons of mixed race) and black Africans in Cape Province. It was renamed the African National Congress in 1923. From the 1940s it spearheaded the fight to eliminate apartheid, th...
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Ancaeus (Greek mythology)
in Greek mythology, the son of Zeus or Poseidon and Astypalaea (daughter of Phoenix), and king of the Leleges of Samos. In the Argonautic expedition, after the death of Tiphys, the helmsman of the Argo, Ancaeus took his place. According to legend, while planting a vineyard, Ancaeus was told by a seer that he would never drink of its wine. When the grapes were ripe, he squeezed the juice in...
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Ancestor (Australian Aboriginal mythology)
...While the recitation of the song cycles and narratives is to some extent prescribed, it also can incorporate new experience and thus remain applicable—both part of the past (called up by the Ancestors) and part of the present....
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ancestor mask
Rituals, often nocturnal, by members of secret societies wearing ancestor masks are reminders of the ancient sanction of their conduct. In many cultures, these masked ceremonials are intended to prevent miscreant acts and to maintain the circumscribed activities of the tribe. Along the Guinea coast of West Africa, for instance, many highly realistic masks represent ancestors who enjoyed......
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ancestor spirit (religion)
...diagnosis and curing of disease but also for such purposes as success in fishing, control of weather, success in love, and prowess in athletic contests, battle, canoe building, and other pursuits. Ancestral spirits were often contacted in dreams and in the trances of spirit mediums, as were the high gods and other nonhuman spirits. They would give people information about the causes of......
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ancestor worship
Ancestors also serve as mediators by providing access to spiritual guidance and power. Death is not a sufficient condition for becoming an ancestor. Only those who lived a full measure of life, cultivated moral values, and achieved social distinction attain this status. Ancestors are thought to reprimand those who neglect or breach the moral order by troubling the errant descendants with......
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ancestral estate (Anglo-American law)
...within the bloodline through which it came to the decedent. This traditional idea, which was particularly strong with respect to land, had in the field of intestacy resulted in the so-called rule of ancestral estate. In Anglo-American law the doctrine of ancestral estate was part of the Canons of Descent of real estate. It meant that if an intestate died without descendants, property that had.....
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Ancestral Pueblo (people)
...from the Spanish word chaca, which may be a translation of a Navajo word for canyon. The site was an administrative, economic, and ceremonial centre of the Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi) people from ad 850 to 1250. The Ancestral Pueblos were ancestors of the modern Pueblo Indians....
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Ancestral Pueblo culture (North American Indian culture)
prehistoric Native American civilization that existed from approximately ad 100 to 1600, centring generally on the area where the boundaries of what are now the U.S. states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah intersect. The descendents of the Ancestral Pueblo comprise the modern Pueblo tribes, including the Hopi, ...
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Ancestress, The (work by Grillparzer)
...von Castilien (Blanche of Castile), that already embodied the principal idea of several later works—the contrast between a quiet, idyllic existence and a life of action. Die Ahnfrau, written in the trochaic Spanish verse form, has many of the outward features of the then-popular “fate tragedy” (Schicksalsdrama), but the characters are......
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ancestrula (biology)
The colony formed by asexual budding originates from either a primary zooid (the ancestrula) or a statoblast. The ancestrula is formed by the metamorphosis of a sexually produced larva. New zooids bud from the ancestrula to produce colonies of definite shape and growth habit. In the phylactolaemates, the primitive zooids are cylindrical in form, and the budding pattern results in a branched......
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ancestry (kinship)
the system of acknowledged social parentage, which varies from society to society, whereby a person may claim kinship ties with another. If no limitation were placed on the recognition of kinship, everybody would be kin to everyone else; but in most societies some limitation is imposed on the perception of common ancestry, so that a person regards many of his associates as not h...
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Anche le donne hanno perso la guerra (work by Malaparte)
...on the lives of Marcel Proust (Du côté de chez Proust, performed 1948) and Karl Marx (Das Kapital, performed 1949) and on life in Vienna during the Soviet occupation (Anche le donne hanno perso la guerra, performed 1954; “The Women Lost the War Too”). He also wrote the screenplay for a film, Il Cristo proibito (1951) and, in addition to......
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Anchieta, José de (Portuguese author and scholar)
Portuguese Jesuit acclaimed as a poet, dramatist, and scholar. He is considered one of the founders of the national literature of Brazil and is credited with converting more than a million Indians....
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Anchisaurus (dinosaur genus)
...Ellsworth, Jr., while he was digging a well at his homestead in Windsor, Connecticut. At the time, the bones were thought to be human, but much later they were identified as Anchisaurus. Even earlier (1800), large birdlike footprints had been noticed on sandstone slabs in Massachusetts. Pliny Moody, who discovered these tracks, attributed them to “Noah...
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Anchises (Greek mythology)
in Greek legend, member of the junior branch of the royal family of Troy: While he was tending his sheep on Mount Ida, the goddess Aphrodite met him and, enamoured of his beauty, bore him Aeneas. For revealing the name of the child’s mother, Anchises was killed or struck blind by lightning. In later legend and in Virgil’s Aeneid, he was c...
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anchor (nautical device)
device, usually of metal, attached to a ship or boat by a cable or chain and lowered to the seabed to hold the vessel in a particular place by means of a fluke or pointed projection that digs into the sea bottom....
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anchor (computer programming)
HTML documents also contain anchors, which are tags that specify links to other Web pages. An anchor has the form <A HREF= “http://www.britannica.com”> Encyclopædia Britannica</A>, where the quoted string is the URL (universal resource locator) to which the link points (the Web “address”) and the text following it is what appears in a ...
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anchor bend (knot)
...ropes of different sizes. The end of one rope is passed through a loop of the other, is passed around the loop, and under its own standing part. An ordinary fishnet is a series of sheet bends. The fisherman’s, or anchor, bend (J) is an especially strong and simple knot that will not jam or slip under strain and can be untied easily. The knot is used to attach a rope to a ring, hook, anch...
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anchor escapement (device)
...and their speed of oscillating back and forth is controlled by a crossbar at the top (the foliot) with two small weights; moving the weights outward from the shaft slows the oscillations. The anchor escapement, an improvement invented in England in the 17th century, works with a pendulum and allows much smaller arcs of swing than the verge escapement with a pendulum. In the anchor......
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anchor ice
...and then build up large accumulations that act to block the intake. In rivers and streams, frazil particles also may adhere to the bottom and successively build up a loose, porous layer known as anchor ice. Conversely, if the water temperature then rises above the freezing point, the particles will become neutral and will not stick to one another, so that the flow will be merely one of solid......
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Anchor Savings Bank (American corporation)
...officer in 1988. He became chairman and CEO in early 1991 and turned the bank around after a period of financial difficulties, eventually guiding it toward a merger with Anchor Savings Bank to form Dime Bancorp in 1995. In that same year Parsons was recruited as president of Time Warner, whose board he had joined in 1991. His elevation as CEO occurred in 2001, and in 2003 Parsons took the......
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Anchorage (Alaska, United States)
city (municipality), south-central Alaska, U.S. Lying at the base of the Chugach Mountains, it is a port at the head of Cook Inlet (a bay of the Pacific Ocean). In 1835 Russians established a mission across the inlet from the area that constitutes the modern city of Anchorage. After gold was discovered in the late 19th century, the area...
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anchoress (religion)
...society, primarily for religious reasons, and lives in solitude. In Christianity the word (from Greek erēmitēs, “living in the desert”) is used interchangeably with anchorite, although the two were originally distinguished on the basis of location: an anchorite selected a cell attached to a church or near a populous centre, while a hermit retired to the......
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anchorite (religion)
...society, primarily for religious reasons, and lives in solitude. In Christianity the word (from Greek erēmitēs, “living in the desert”) is used interchangeably with anchorite, although the two were originally distinguished on the basis of location: an anchorite selected a cell attached to a church or near a populous centre, while a hermit retired to the......
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Anchors Aweigh (film by Sidney [1945])
...Color: Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegte for Frenchman’s CreekMusic Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture: Miklos Rozsa for SpellboundScoring of a Musical Picture: Georgie Stoll for Anchors AweighSong: “It Might as Well Be Spring” from State Fair; music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein......
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anchoveta (fish)
...are of purely scientific interest; the dominant members of the order, in abundance and therefore in economic importance, are the herrings, sardines, pilchards, menhadens, sprats, anchovies, and anchovetas. Other fish groups formerly included in the Clupeiformes are the tarpons and bonefishes; salmons, trouts, and pikes; and bony tongues and mormyrs....
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anchovy (fish)
any of numerous schooling saltwater fishes of the family Engraulidae (order Clupeiformes) related to the herring and distinguished by a large mouth, almost always extending behind the eye, and by a pointed snout. Most of the more than 100 species live in shallow tropical or warm temperate seas, where they often enter brackish water around river mouths. A few tropical anchovies inhabit freshwater....
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anchovy pear (plant)
(Grias cauliflora), evergreen tree of the family Lecythidaceae, native to the West Indies. The tree is cultivated for its edible fruit. The plant grows to about 15 metres (50 feet) tall and bears spear-shaped, glossy leaves about 90 cm (35 inches) long that are produced in tufts at the ends of the branches. The fragrant yellow flowers are about 5 cm (2 inches) across. The fruit, which conta...
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Anchura (snail)
genus of extinct marine gastropods (snails) found as fossils only in marine deposits of Cretaceous age (between 144 and 66.4 million years old). It is thus a useful guide or index fossil because it is easily recognizable. The shell whorls are globular and ornamented with raised crenulations; the spire is sharply pointed; the body whorl, the final and largest whorl, has a prominently extended oute...
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Anchusa (plant genus)
any plant of the 50 or so mostly Mediterranean species of the genus Anchusa and the closely related Pentaglottis sempervirens, bearing blue, purple, or white forget-me-not–like flower clusters on hairy, herbaceous stems. They belong to the family Boraginaceae. True alkanet (A. officinalis) bears purple flowers in coiled sprays, on narrow-leaved plants, 60 cm (2 feet).....
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Anchusa azurea (plant)
...clusters on hairy, herbaceous stems. They belong to the family Boraginaceae. True alkanet (A. officinalis) bears purple flowers in coiled sprays, on narrow-leaved plants, 60 cm (2 feet) tall. Large blue alkanet (A. azurea), popular as a garden species, reaches 120 cm (4 feet) and has large, bright-blue flowers with a tuft of white hairs in the throats, and narrow leaves. Oval,......
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Anchusa officinalis (plant)
...and the closely related Pentaglottis sempervirens, bearing blue, purple, or white forget-me-not–like flower clusters on hairy, herbaceous stems. They belong to the family Boraginaceae. True alkanet (A. officinalis) bears purple flowers in coiled sprays, on narrow-leaved plants, 60 cm (2 feet) tall. Large blue alkanet (A. azurea), popular as a garden species, reaches....
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ancien régime (French history)
To understand the developments of the 18th century and to follow the scholarly debates, one may begin with a definition of the ancien régime. Its essence lay in the interweaving of the state’s social, political, and economic forms; the term itself, though primarily a political concept, has also always had a clear social and economic resonance....
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Ancien Régime, L’ (work by Taine)
...hostile view. Taine asserted that far from promoting liberty, as most of the French believe, the Revolution merely transferred absolute power to even more illiberal hands. A first volume, on L’Ancien Régime (“The Old Regime”), appeared in 1876, followed by three volumes on the Revolution (1878–85). In 1878 he was also elected to the Académie......
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“Anciens Canadiens, Les” (work by Gaspé)
When he was 76 years old, inspired by a rebirth of Canadian nationalism in the mid-19th century, Gaspé wrote Les Anciens Canadiens (The Canadians of Old). A French Canadian classic, it is a romantic historical novel set in Canada at the time of the British conquest (1760). Its idealization of the “good old days,” the farmer’s loyalty to the soil, and distr...
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Ancient Aiethopia (work by Sun Ra)
...played his own music: an expanded hard bop that included tympani, electric piano, and flute—instruments then rare in jazz. He also was a pioneer of modal jazz settings; among his early works, “Ancient Aiethopia” most successfully unites the diverse strands of his composing....
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Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (fraternal order)
...major circuses toured the United States and Canada, while dozens more—some lasting an entire season, some for only a few weeks or for single engagements sponsored by local groups such as the Shriners—also performed....
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Ancient Architecture of England, The (work by Carter)
...drawings were included. Knowledge was but slowly accumulated, and active, enterprising scholars appeared only toward the end of the 18th century. Foremost of these was John Carter, author of The Ancient Architecture of England (1795 and 1807), in which Gothic details were more faithfully and accurately recorded than in any earlier publication. Thomas Rickman designated the various....
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Ancient Britons, The (work by Blake)
...of 16 watercolours and temperas, held above the Blake family hosiery shop and home on Broad Street from 1809 to 1810. The most ambitious picture in the exhibition, called The Ancient Britons and depicting the last battle of the legendary King Arthur, had been commissioned by the Welsh scholar and enthusiast William Owen Pughe. The painting, now lost, was said......
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Ancient Chinese language
Some scholars divide the history of the Chinese languages into Proto-Sinitic (Proto-Chinese; until 500 bc), Archaic (Old) Chinese (8th to 3rd century bc), Ancient (Middle) Chinese (through ad 907), and Modern Chinese (from c. the 10th century to modern times). The Proto-Sinitic period is the period of the most ancient inscriptions and poetry; most l...
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Ancient Church of the East (Christian sect)
member of a Christian sect originating in Asia Minor and Syria out of the condemnation of Nestorius and his teachings by the councils of Ephesus (ad 431) and Chalcedon (ad 451). Nestorians stressed the independence of the divine and human natures of Christ and, in effect, suggested that they were two persons loosely united. In modern times they are re...
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Ancient Evenings (novel by Mailer)
...(1963) and Cannibals and Christians (1966); The Executioner’s Song (1979), a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel based on the life of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore; Ancient Evenings (1983), a novel set in ancient Egypt, the first volume of an uncompleted trilogy; Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984), a contemporary mystery thriller; and the ...
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Ancient Gneiss Complex (geological region, Swaziland)
...the North China craton; large parts of the Superior province of Canada; the Yilgarn block in Australia; and the Limpopo belt in southern Africa. They may be confined to small areas such as the Ancient Gneiss Complex of Swaziland, the Minnesota River valley and the Beartooth Mountains of the United States, the Peninsular gneisses and Sargur supracrustals of southern India, the English River......
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ancient Greek art
...the temple was not always designed for communal use. In ancient Egypt and India it was considered the residence of the deity, and entrance into the sanctum was prohibited or reserved for priests; in ancient Greece it contained an accessible cult image, but services were held outside the main facade; and in the ancient Near East and in the Mayan and Aztec architecture of ancient Mexico, where th...
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ancient Greek civilization (historical region, Eurasia)
the period following Mycenaean civilization, which ended in about 1200 bc, to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 bc. It was a period of political, philosophical, artistic, and scientific achievements that formed a legacy with unparalleled influence on Western civilization....
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Ancient Greek language
Ancient Greek...
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Ancient Greek literature
Of the literature of ancient Greece only a relatively small proportion survives. Yet it remains important, not only because much of it is of supreme quality but also because until the mid-19th century the greater part of the literature of the Western world was produced by writers who were familiar with the Greek tradition, either directly or through the medium of Latin, who were conscious that......
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ancient Greek Olympic Games
The first “date” in Greek history is 776 bc, the year of the first Olympic Games. It was computed by a 5th-century-bc researcher called Hippias. This man originally came from Elis, a place in the western Peloponnese in whose territory Olympia itself is situated. This date and the list of early victors, transmitted by another literary tradition, are likely ...
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ancient Greek Olympics
The first “date” in Greek history is 776 bc, the year of the first Olympic Games. It was computed by a 5th-century-bc researcher called Hippias. This man originally came from Elis, a place in the western Peloponnese in whose territory Olympia itself is situated. This date and the list of early victors, transmitted by another literary tradition, are likely ...
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ancient language
In studying ancient (dead) languages one is, of course, limited to studying the grammar of their written forms and styles, as their written records alone survive. Such is the case with Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit (Latin lives as a spoken language in very restricted situations, such as the official language of some closed religious communities, but this is not the same sort of Latin as......
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Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (work by Maine)
...professor of civil law at the University of Cambridge (1847–54), Maine also began lecturing on Roman law at the Inns of Court, London. These lectures became the basis of his Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (1861), which influenced both political theory and anthropology, the latter primarily because o...
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ancient lights (law)
in English property law, the right of a building or house owner to the light received from and through his windows. Windows used for light by an owner for 20 years or more could not be obstructed by the erection of an edifice or by any other act by an adjacent landowner. This rule of law originated in England in 1663, based on the theory that a landowner acquired an easement to the light by virtu...
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Ancient Mongolian language (language)
The history of the Mongolian language, both spoken and written, consists of three periods. The divisions of the spoken language are Old, or Ancient, Mongolian (through the 12th century), Middle Mongolian (13th–16th centuries), and New, or Modern, Mongolian (17th century to the present). Old Mongolian is reconstructed from borrowings in other languages and by comparison of the recorded......
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Ancient Monuments Consolidation and Amendment Act (United Kingdom [1913])
The national acquisition of buildings for conservation in Britain has been carried out chiefly under the Ancient Monuments Consolidation and Amendment Act of 1913, by which suitable unoccupied properties can be “taken into guardianship.” A much more rigorous application of the principle is sometimes possible in the United States, whereby the owners of whole groups of buildings held.....
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Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (work by Squier)
...1845 and 1847 he and Davis probed some 200 mounds, studied about 100 earthwork enclosures, and collected a large number of artifacts. Their findings appeared in the beautifully illustrated Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848), the first publication of the Smithsonian Institution. Immediately recognized as a major work of American archaeology, it remains significant to......
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ancient moon pavilion ware (Chinese pottery)
An attempt to imitate the European method of overglaze painting, in which colours were applied in flat washes that partly sank into soft porcelain glazes, can be seen in the “ancient moon pavilion” (ku yüeh hsüan) wares. These will sometimes have a European subject, for example, a Watteau shepherdess, but Chinese subjects were also used....
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Ancient One (prehistoric human)
This issue reached a crisis point with the 1996 discovery of skeletal remains near the town of Kennewick, Wash. Subsequently known as Kennewick Man (among scientists) or the Ancient One (among repatriation activists), this person most probably lived sometime between about 9,000 and 9,500 years ago, certainly before 5,600–6,000 years ago. A number of tribes and a number of scientists laid......
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ancient Rome (ancient state, Europe, Africa, and Asia)
the state centred on the city of Rome. This article discusses the period from the founding of the city and the regal period, which began in 753 bc, through the events leading to the founding of the republic in 509 bc, the establishment of the empire in 27 bc, and the final eclipse of the Empire of the West in the 5th century ad. For later eve...
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Ancient Scandinavian language (language)
...horn). The scantiness of the material (fewer than 300 words) makes it impossible to be sure of the relationship of this language to Germanic and its daughter languages. It is known as Proto-Scandinavian, or Ancient Scandinavian, but shows few distinctively North Germanic features. The earliest inscriptions may reflect a stage, sometimes called Northwest Germanic, prior to the......
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Ancient Society of College Youths (British organization)
...often students, were later joined by ecclesiastics, labourers, and others. Women were excluded, and participation was a mark of social status. The first society, or ringing organization, the Ancient Society of College Youths, was founded in 1637. The earliest treatises on the subject were Fabian Stedman’s Tintinnalogia (1668) and his Campanologia (1677), which introduced......
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Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (work by Morgan)
Morgan’s kinship study led him to develop his theory of cultural evolution, which was set forth in Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877). This was the first major scientific account of the origin and evolution of civilization, with illustrations of developmental stages drawn from various cultures. Morgan.....
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ancient Spanish chant (music)
Latin liturgical chant of the Christian church on the Iberian Peninsula from its beginnings about the 5th century until its suppression at the end of the 11th century in favour of the liturgy and Gregorian chant of the Roman Catholic Church. The term Mozarabic was applied to Christians living under Islamic rule in Iberia after ad 711; the use of ...
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