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Agbatana (ancient city, Iran)
ancient city on the site of which stands the modern city of Hamadān, Iran. Ecbatana was the capital of Media and was subsequently the summer residence of the Achaemenian kings and one of the residences of the Parthian kings. According to ancient Greek writers, the city was founded in about 678 bc by the semilegendary Deioces, who was the first king of the M...
Agca, Mehmet Ali (Turkish assassin)
On May 13, 1981, John Paul was shot and nearly killed by a 23-year-old Turkish man, Mehmet Ali Agca. Meanwhile, the Poles’ other spiritual leader, Primate Cardinal Wyszyński, lay dying of cancer. The sudden prospect of losing both men unsettled the Solidarity movement. Although no conspiracy in the assassination attempt was ever proved in court, the widespread suspicion that the Sovi...
Agdistis (ancient deity)
ancient Oriental and Greco-Roman deity, known by a variety of local names; the name Cybele or Cybebe predominates in Greek and Roman literature from about the 5th century bc onward. Her full official Roman name was Mater Deum Magna Idaea (Great Idaean Mother of the Gods)....
age (physiology and sociology)
physiological changes that take place in the human body leading to senescence, the decline of biological functions and of the ability to adapt to metabolic stress. In humans the physiological developments are normally accompanied by psychological and behavioural changes, and other changes, involving social and economic facto...
age (law)
In order to satisfy the requirement of a voluntary consent to a marriage, a party must have reached an age at which he or she is able to give meaningful consent, and it is also implied that a person may be legally disqualified on mental grounds from having capacity to marry. Marriages of young children, negotiated by their parents, are prohibited in most modern societies. Historically, the......
age (human aging)
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age (life process)
progressive physiological changes in an organism that lead to senescence, or a decline of biological functions and of the organism’s ability to adapt to metabolic stress....
age (time measurement)
By the time the New Testament was written, Jewish apocalyptic writings (symbolic or cryptographic literature portraying God’s dramatic intervention in history and catastrophic dramas at the end of a cosmic epoch) had already produced theories of history that reworked Indo-Iranian notions about the ages of the world, influencing Christian views of time, history, and human destiny. The prophe...
age composition (demography)
in population studies, the proportionate numbers of persons in successive age categories in a given population. Age distributions differ among countries mainly because of differences in the levels and trends of fertility. A population with persistently high fertility, for instance, has a large proportion of children and a small proportion of aged persons. A population, such as t...
age determination (geochronology)
Although relative ages can generally be established on a local scale, the events recorded in rocks from different locations can be integrated into a picture of regional or global scale only if their sequence in time is firmly established. The time that has elapsed since certain minerals formed can now be determined because of the presence of a small amount of natural radioactive atoms in their......
“Age d’homme, L’ ” (work by Leiris)
In 1939 Leiris published the autobiographical L’Âge d’homme (Manhood), which attracted much attention and was reissued in 1946. Self-deprecating and punitive, the work catalogs Leiris’ physical and moral flaws; he introduced the 1946 edition with an essay, “De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie” (1946;...
age differentiation
...began to diversify, and, though inhumation in pits remained the commonest form, it was elaborated in different ways. The position of the body became stretched rather than contracted, and sex and age were not expressed by body position but were reflected through elements such as grave goods or location within the cemetery....
age distribution (demography)
in population studies, the proportionate numbers of persons in successive age categories in a given population. Age distributions differ among countries mainly because of differences in the levels and trends of fertility. A population with persistently high fertility, for instance, has a large proportion of children and a small proportion of aged persons. A population, such as t...
“Age d’or, L’” (film by Buñuel and Dalí)
His next two films—L’Âge d’or (1930; The Golden Age), a radically anticlerical and antibourgeois film made in France, and Las Hurdes (1932; Land Without Bread), a documentary about a particularly wretched region of Spain—asserted his concern with the freedom to dream and to imagine, his revolutionary attitude toward social problems, hi...
age grade (sociology)
...from birth or from a determined age, to a named age set that passed through a series of stages, each of which had a distinctive status or social and political role. Each stage is usually known as an age grade....
Age of Anxiety, The (poetry by Auden)
poem by W.H. Auden, published in 1947. Described as a “baroque eclogue,” the poem was the last of Auden’s long poems; it won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1948....
Age of Assassins (work by Soupault)
...pursuit of liberty. Les Moribonds (1934; “The Dying”) is a semiautobiographical description of a youth’s flight from his bourgeois family. Le Temps des assassins (1945; Age of Assassins), a memoir, details Soupault’s six-month imprisonment by the Vichy government in Tunis, Tunisia, where he worked as a journalist and as director of Radio Tunis. A...
Age of Bronze, The (work by Rodin)
...expression of a vanquished energy aspiring to rebirth. It provoked scandals in the artistic circles of Brussels and again at the Paris Salon, where it was exhibited in 1877 as The Age of Bronze. The realism of the work contrasted so greatly with the statues of Rodin’s contemporaries that he was accused of having formed its mold upon a living person....
age of consent (law)
In order to satisfy the requirement of a voluntary consent to a marriage, a party must have reached an age at which he or she is able to give meaningful consent, and it is also implied that a person may be legally disqualified on mental grounds from having capacity to marry. Marriages of young children, negotiated by their parents, are prohibited in most modern societies. Historically, the......
Age of Consent Act of 1891 (British-Indian legislation)
...British liberal socioreligious reform therefore came to a halt for more than three decades—essentially from the East India Company’s Hindu Widow’s Remarriage Act of 1856 to the crown’s timid Age of Consent Act of 1891, which merely raised the age of statutory rape for “consenting” Indian brides from 10 years to 12....
Age of Constantine the Great, The (work by Burckhardt)
...sites and art treasures of Europe. His first important work, however, like the last, attested to his deep interest in ancient civilization. In Die Zeit Konstantins des Grossen (1853; The Age of Constantine the Great, 1949) Burckhardt presented a picture of a transitional age, unhealthy and immoral but teeming with religious and cultural activity. While he recognized that the......
Age of Empires (computer game franchise)
computer game franchise designed by Ensemble Studios, an American company founded in 1995 and subsequently acquired by the Microsoft Corporation. The original Age of Empires debuted in 1997 to critical acclaim and helped set the bar for the real-time strategy game genre, combining involved play and ...
Age of Fishes (geochronology)
in geologic time, an interval of the Paleozoic Era that follows the Silurian Period and precedes the Carboniferous Period, spanning between about 416 million and 359.2 million years ago. The Devonian Period is sometimes called the “Age of Fish...
Age of Heroes, The (work by Yi)
...Hail to the Emperor!), a jeu d’esprit, is a rambunctious satire on imperial delusions that showcases the author’s incredible erudition. In Yŏngung sidae (1984; The Age of Heroes), Yi imaginatively reconstructed what he imagined his father’s life might have been like after his defection to communist North Korea. In each of the 16...
Age of Innocence, The (novel by Wharton)
novel by Edith Wharton, published in 1920. The work presents a picture of upper-class New York society in the late 19th century. The story is presented as a kind of anthropological study of this society through references to the families and their activities as tribal. In the story, Newland Archer, though engaged to May Welland, a beautiful and proper fellow member of elite soci...
Age of Intelligent Machines, The (work by Kurzweil)
Kurzweil attracted the attention of the general public with his daring prognostications about how technology would shape the future. He explicated an array of prescient theories in The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), which anticipated the explosion in popularity of the Internet. Kurzweil also wrote The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life (1993), which......
Age of Iron (novel by Coetzee)
...Crusoe. Coetzee’s female narrator comes to new conclusions about power and otherness and ultimately concludes that language can enslave as effectively as can chains. In Age of Iron (1990) Coetzee dealt directly with circumstances in contemporary South Africa, but in The Master of Petersburg (1994) he made reference to 19th-ce...
Age of Jackson, The (work by Schlesinger)
...of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, he became a professor of history at Harvard in 1946, teaching there until 1961. In 1946 his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson was published to widespread acclaim. In this book Schlesinger reinterpreted the American era of Jacksonian democracy in terms of its cultural, social, and economic aspects as......
Age of Louis XIV, The (work by Voltaire)
...familiar only to a few advanced minds in France, such as the astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis. At the same time, he continued to pursue his historical studies. He began Le Siècle de Louis XIV, sketched out a universal history of kings, wars, civilization and manners that became the Essai sur les moeurs, and plunged into biblical exegesis. Mme du......
Age of Reason (work by Paine)
While in prison, the first part of Paine’s Age of Reason was published (1794), and it was followed by Part II after his release (1796). Although Paine made it clear that he believed in a Supreme Being and, as a Deist, opposed only organized religion, the work won him a reputation as an atheist among the orthodox. The publication of his last great pamphlet, “Agrarian Justice...
Age of Roosevelt, The (work by Schlesinger)
...reinterpreted the American era of Jacksonian democracy in terms of its cultural, social, and economic aspects as well as its strictly political dimensions. Schlesinger’s major historical work was The Age of Roosevelt, whose three separate volumes were entitled The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (1957), The Coming of the New Deal (1958), and The P...
Age of Spiritual Machines, The (work by Kurzweil)
...of the Internet. Kurzweil also wrote The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life (1993), which details a diet that he had used to help cure himself of diabetes. His book The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) presents a vision of the 21st century as a time when computer technology would have advanced far enough to allow machines to operate on a level equivalent to.....
Age of the Princes (Ethiopian history)
...1730–69), a remarkable woman who ruled jointly with her son and grandson. However, ethnic, regional, and religious factionalism undermined the kingdom and led in 1769 to its collapse. The Zamana Masafent (“Age of the Princes”; 1769–1855), an era of feudal anarchy, had commenced....
Age of the Pussyfoot, The (novel by Pohl)
Pohl’s other novels include The Age of the Pussyfoot (1969); the Nebula Award winner Man Plus (1976); Gateway (1977), which won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award for best novel; Jem (1980), which won the American Book Award; and Chernobyl (1987). The trilogy composed of The Other End of......
age set (sociology)
a formally organized group consisting of every male (or female) of comparable age. In those societies chiefly identified with the practice, a person belonged, either from birth or from a determined age, to a named age set that passed through a series of stages, each of which had a distinctive status or social and political role. Each stage is usually known as an age grade....
Age, The (Australian newspaper)
Australian daily newspaper published in Melbourne and widely considered to provide some of the finest news coverage in the country. It has been highly regarded for its dedication to accuracy....
age-area hypothesis (anthropology)
in anthropology, theory holding that the age of culture traits (elements of a culture) may be determined by examining their distribution over a large geographic area. The hypothesis states that widely distributed traits are older than those more narrowly distributed. It is based on the assumption that traits tend to diffuse outward in a circl...
age-earnings profile (economics)
...actors will make such investments only if the expected stream of future benefits exceeds the short-term costs associated with acquiring the skills. Such investments therefore affect one’s “age-earnings profile,” the trajectory of earnings over one’s lifetime. Those who leave school early, for example, earn market wages for more years on average than those who take ad...
age-related macular degeneration (pathology)
Age-related macular degeneration (ARMD) is a relatively common condition in people over the age of 50. There are two forms of ARMD, known as wet and dry. In wet ARMD new blood vessels form beneath the retina that are very fragile and prone to breakage and bleeding, thereby compromising central vision acuity. As a result, wet ARMD advances more quickly and is more severe than dry ARMD, which is......
age-specific death rate (gerontology)
The viability (survival ability) of a population is characterized in two actuarial functions: the survivorship curve and the age-specific death rate, or Gompertz function. The relation of such factors as aging characteristics, constitutional vigour, physical factors, diet, and exposure to disease-causing organisms to the actuarial functions is complex. There is, nevertheless, no substitute for......
agechi (Japanese history)
...supplies could easily be conveyed to nearby Edo if Edo Bay were blockaded by foreign ships. Plans for the defense of the bay also were formulated. Tadakuni also promulgated a land-requisition (agechi) order to bring daimyo and hatamoto domains surrounding Edo and Ōsaka under direct bakufu control: the stated object of this was the defense of Edo, but it also was......
aged, the
in human beings, the final stage of the normal life span. Definitions of old age are not consistent from the standpoints of biology, demography (conditions of mortality and morbidity), employment and retirement, and sociology. For statistical and public administrative purposes, however, old age is frequently defined as 60 or...
Agee, James (American author)
American poet, novelist, and writer for and about motion pictures. One of the most influential American film critics in the 1930s and ’40s, he applied rigorous intellectual and aesthetic standards to his reviews, which appeared anonymously in Time and signed in The Nation....
Agee, Philip Burnett Franklin (American government official)
July 19, 1935Tacoma Park, Fla.Jan. 7, 2008Havana, CubaAmerican government official who was stripped of his U.S. citizenship (1979) and marked as an international pariah after publishing Inside the Company: A CIA Diary (1975), which divulged his growing disillusionment with the CIA wh...
Agee, Tommie Lee (American baseball player)
American baseball player (b. Aug. 9, 1942, Mobile, Ala.—d. Jan. 22, 2001, New York, N.Y.), helped lead the New York Mets to a World Series championship in 1969. Agee was the ...
ageing (life process)
progressive physiological changes in an organism that lead to senescence, or a decline of biological functions and of the organism’s ability to adapt to metabolic stress....
Agekoyo (people)
Bantu-speaking people who live in the highland area of south-central Kenya, near Mount Kenya. In the late 20th century the Kikuyu numbered more than 4,400,000 and formed the largest ethnic group in Kenya, approximately 20 percent of ...
Ageladas (Greek sculptor)
sculptor said to have been the teacher of Myron, Phidias, and Polyclitus. This tradition testifies to his wide fame but is historically doubtful....
Agelaius phoeniceus (bird)
...refers to cases in which individuals form relatively stable associations with two or more mates. Most such species exhibit polygyny, in which males have multiple partners. Some examples include the red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) and house wren (Troglodytes aedon) in North America and the great reed warbler (Acrocephalus arundinaceus) in Europe. In a few......
Agelena naevia (spider)
...are notable for their funnel-shaped webs; they are a common group with many species that are distributed worldwide. The webs are built in the grass, under boards and rocks, and among debris. Agelena naevia, a common North American species, varies greatly in size and colour. The body of the male may be up to 8 millimetres (about 13 inch) long; the......
agelenid (spider)
any of certain members of the spider family Agelenidae (order Araneida). Agelenids are notable for their funnel-shaped webs; they are a common group with many species that are distributed worldwide. The webs are built in the grass, under boards and rocks, and among debris. Agelena naevia, a common North American species, varies greatly in size and colour. The body of the male may be up to 8...
Agelenidae (spider)
any of certain members of the spider family Agelenidae (order Araneida). Agelenids are notable for their funnel-shaped webs; they are a common group with many species that are distributed worldwide. The webs are built in the grass, under boards and rocks, and among debris. Agelena naevia, a common North American species, varies greatly in size and colour. The body of the male may be up to 8...
Agen (France)
town, capital of Lot-et-Garonne département, Aquitaine région, southwestern France. It lies along the Garonne River at the foot of Ermitage Hill (530 feet [162 metres]), northwest of Toulouse. Menti...
Agena (star)
second brightest star (after Alpha Centauri) in the southern constellation Centaurus and the 10th brightest star in the sky. Beta Centauri is 350 light-years from Earth. It is a system of three B-type stars. The two brightest stars orbit each other every 357 days and form a spectroscop...
Agena (American rocket)
...boosters that were jettisoned after about 2 12 minutes of operation and a sustainer that operated until orbital velocity was attained. The combined Atlas-Agena rocket, featuring an Atlas booster coupled with an Agena upper stage, was used for launching lunar and planetary probes as well as Earth-orbiting satellites, such as Seasat, where the Agena......
Agenais (historical region, France)
former province of France, of which Agen was the centre and to which the modern département of Lot-et-Garonne nearly corresponds....
Agence France-Presse (French news agency)
French cooperative news agency, one of the world’s great wire news services. It is based in Paris, where it was founded under its current name in 1944, but its roots go to the Bureau Havas, which was created in 1832 by Charles-Louis Havas, who translated reports from foreign papers and distributed them to Paris and provincial newspape...
Agence Havas (French news agency)
...Havas, which was created in 1832 by Charles-Louis Havas, who translated reports from foreign papers and distributed them to Paris and provincial newspapers. In 1835 the Bureau Havas became the Agence Havas, the world’s first true news agency. Stressing rapid transmission of the news, Agence Havas established the first telegraph service in France in 1845. Between 1852 and 1919 the agency....
Agence spatiale canadienne (Canadian government organization)
Canadian government organization founded in 1989 that coordinates spaceflight activities. Its headquarters are in Longueuil, Que. The chief executive of the CSA is the president, who is assisted by a senior vice president and the directors of four branches: Space Science, Space Technologies, Space Programs, and General Opera...
Agence Spatiale Européenne (European research organization)
western European space and space-technology research organization founded in 1975 from the merger of the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO) and the European Space Research Organisation (ESRO), both established in 1964. Members include Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, ...
agency (philosophy)
Both feminist social and political philosophy and feminist ethics presuppose a theory of women’s agency—i.e., an account of their capacity for individualized choice and action. The question of women’s agency was salient for feminist philosophers because women’s identities took shape in settings that were in some respects inimical to their interests. A prime motivation f...
agency (law)
in law, the relationship that exists when one person or party (the principal) engages another (the agent) to act for him—e.g., to do his work, to sell his goods, to manage his business. The law of agency thus governs the legal relationship in which the agent deals with a third party on behalf of the principal. The compet...
Agency for National Security Planning (government organization, South Korea)
...martial law in the 1980s. In 1994 legislative oversight of the agency was strengthened, and in the following year it moved to a new headquarters complex under new leadership. The agency, renamed the National Intelligence Service in 1999, collects and coordinates national security intelligence. The Defense Security Command of the Ministry of National Defense and the National Intelligence Service...
agency law (law)
in law, the relationship that exists when one person or party (the principal) engages another (the agent) to act for him—e.g., to do his work, to sell his goods, to manage his business. The law of agency thus governs the legal relationship in which the agent deals with a third party on behalf of the principal. The compet...
agency shop (labour)
...within an “escape period” must remain members of the union for the duration of the agreement; otherwise, they will be dismissed from their jobs. Even more open than the union shop is an agency shop: although employees are required to pay funds equal to union dues, they are not required to join the union. There are many detailed variations of these union arrangements in the United....
agency theory, financial (economics)
in organizational economics, a means of assessing the work being done for a principal (i.e., an employer) by an agent (i.e., an employee). While consistent with the concept of agency traditionally advanced by legal scholars and attorneys, the economic variants of agency theory emphasize the costs and benefits of the principal-agent relationship. While a beneficial agency cost is...
Agenda 21 (international agreement)
...binding targets for emission reductions, however. The Declaration on Environment and Development, or Rio Declaration, laid down 27 broad, nonbinding principles for environmentally sound development. Agenda 21 outlined global strategies for cleaning up the environment and encouraging environmentally sound development. The Statement of Principles on Forests, aimed at preserving the world’s...
agenesis (pathology)
in human physiology, failure of all or part of an organ to develop during embryonic growth. Many forms of agenesis are consistently lethal, as when the entire brain is absent (anencephaly), but agenesis of one of a paired organ may create little disruption of normal function. Agenesis of the kidney, bladder, testicle, ovary, thyroid, and lung are known. Agenesis of the long bon...
Agenois (historical region, France)
former province of France, of which Agen was the centre and to which the modern département of Lot-et-Garonne nearly corresponds....
agent (computer science)
a computer program that performs various actions continuously and autonomously on behalf of an individual or an organization. For example, an agent may archive various computer files or retrieve electronic messages on a regular schedule. Such simple tasks barely begin to tap the potential uses of agents, however. This is bec...
agent (law)
in law, the relationship that exists when one person or party (the principal) engages another (the agent) to act for him—e.g., to do his work, to sell his goods, to manage his business. The law of agency thus governs the legal relationship in which the agent deals with a third party on behalf of the principal. The compet...
Agent 007 (fictional character)
British literary and film character, a peerless spy, notorious womanizer, and masculine icon....
agent, intelligence (intelligence)
Counterintelligence is aimed at protecting and maintaining the secrecy of a country’s intelligence operations. Its purpose is to prevent spies or other agents of a foreign power from penetrating the country’s government, armed services, or intelligence agencies. Counterintelligence also is concerned with protecting advanced technology, deterring terrorism, and combating international...
agent middleman (business)
Unlike merchant wholesalers, agent middlemen do not take legal ownership of the goods they sell; nor do they generally take physical possession of them. The three principal types of agent middlemen are manufacturers’ agents, selling agents, and purchasing agents. Manufacturers’ agents, who represent two or more manufacturers’ complementary lines on a continuous basis, are usua...
Agent Orange (defoliant)
mixture of herbicides that U.S. military forces sprayed in Vietnam from 1962 to 1971 during the Vietnam War for the dual purpose of defoliating forest areas that might conceal Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces and destroying crops that might feed the enemy. The defoliant, sprayed fro...
agent provocateur (espionage)
...by the Maximalists of the Socialist Revolutionary Party against policemen and officials, claimed hundreds of lives in 1905–07. The police felt able to combat it only by infiltrating their agents into the revolutionary parties and particularly into the terrorist detachments of these parties. This use of double agents (or agents provocateurs, as they were often known) did much to......
Agent W (poison)
toxic protein (toxalbumin) occurring in the beanlike seeds of the castor-oil plant (Ricinus communis). Ricin, discovered in 1888 by German scientist Peter Hermann Stillmark, is one of the most toxic substances known. It is of special concern because of its potential use as...
agent-causation theory (philosophy)
Although libertarianism was not popular among 19th-century philosophers, it enjoyed a revival in the mid-20th century. The most influential of the new libertarian accounts were the so-called “agent-causation” theories. First proposed by the American philosopher Roderick Chisholm (1916–99) in his seminal paper Human Freedom and the Self (1964), these....
Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (Italian news agency)
...the Arab News Agency, which provides news for several states in the Middle East. Others are national newspaper cooperatives, such as the Ritzaus Bureau of Denmark, founded in 1866. A few, like the Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata of Italy, have expanded coverage abroad in a limited degree to supplement their domestic service but still depend on Reuters and Agence France-Presse for much of......
Ageo (Japan)
city, Saitama ken (prefecture), Honshu, Japan. Ageo lies on the terrace between the Ara River (west) and the Ayase River (east). A former post town between Tokyo and Maebashi, it was connected to Tokyo (25 miles [40 km] southeast) in 1883. Ageo remained the market centre of the neighbouring agricultural region until 1955, when machinery, rubber, and metallurgy industries ...
Ager Bruttius (region, Italy)
regione, southern Italy, composed of the province of Catanzaro, Cosenza, Crotone, Reggio di Calabria, and Vibo Valentia. Sometimes referred to as the “toe” of the Italian “boot,” Calabria is a peninsula of irregular shape, jutting out in a northeast-southwest direction from the main body of Italy and separating the Tyrrhenian and Ionian ...
ager Campanus (Roman law)
...land came to be concentrated in fewer hands. One of the punishments meted out to disloyal allies after the Second Punic War was confiscation of all or part of their territories. Most of the ager Campanus and part of the Tarentines’ lands—perhaps two million acres in total—became Roman ager publicus (public land), subject to rent. Some of this property remained...
ager publicus (Roman law)
...Punic War was confiscation of all or part of their territories. Most of the ager Campanus and part of the Tarentines’ lands—perhaps two million acres in total—became Roman ager publicus (public land), subject to rent. Some of this property remained in the hands of local peoples, but large tracts in excess of the 500-iugera limit were occupied by wealthy...
Ager, Shana (American journalist and author)
American journalist and author (b. Oct. 6, 1925, New York, N.Y.—d. June 23, 2005, Hermosa Beach, Calif.), battled conservative columnist James Kilpatrick in “Point-Counterpoint,” a political debate segment featured during the 1970s on the television program 60 Minutes. Alexander’s parents were prominent members of Manhattan’s arts community but were emotio...
Ageratum (plant)
any of about 45 species of annual herbs making up the genus Ageratum (family Asteraceae), and native to tropical South America. They have toothed, oval leaves that are opposite each other on the stem; compact clusters of blue, pink, lilac, or white flowers; and small, dry f...
ageratum (plant)
any of about 45 species of annual herbs making up the genus Ageratum (family Asteraceae), and native to tropical South America. They have toothed, oval leaves that are opposite each other on the stem; compact clusters of blue, pink, lilac, or white flowers; and small, dry f...
Ageratum houstonianum (plant)
Dwarf varieties of the common garden ageratum (A. houstonianum) are used as edging plants. Some ageratums are variously known as flossflower and pussy-foot....
Ageröd (Sweden)
...dates of the thaw. The first traces of human life in Sweden, dating from about 9000 bc, were found at Segebro outside Malmö in the extreme southern reaches of Sweden. Finds from the peat at Ageröd in Skåne dated to 6500 bc reveal a typical food-gathering culture with tools of flint and primitive hunting and fishing equipment, such as the bow and ...
Ageronia (insect genus)
...and the pupae of many gossamer-winged butterflies make squeaking or grating sounds when disturbed. The adult death’s head moth (Acherontia atropos) makes a loud chirping sound. Ageronia butterflies, when startled into flight, make a loud clicking sound by means of a structure on the wings. These sounds may have a startling and therefore delaying effect on a predator....
Ages of the World, The (work by Schelling)
...forms the basis of Schelling’s later philosophy, covering the time from 1810 until his death, which is known only through a draft of the unpublished work Die Weltalter (written in 1811; The Ages of the World) and through the manuscripts of his later lectures. In Die Weltalter Schelling wanted to relate the history of God. God, who originally is absorbed in a quiet......
Agesander (Greek sculptor)
Greek sculptor who is credited by the 1st-century-ad Roman writer Pliny as the creator, with Polydorus and Athenodorus, of the group “Laocoön.” Nothing further is known of him except that inscriptions found at Lindus in Rhodes indicate that he was alive between 42 and 21 ......
Agesilaus (regent of Sparta)
Agis was supported by his wealthy mother and grandmother, who surrendered their property; by his uncle Agesilaus; and by Lysander, who was an ephor (magistrate with the duty of limiting the power of the king) in 243. When the rich, led by the other king, Leonidas II, defeated these proposals, Leonidas was deposed. The ephors of 242 tried to restore him to his throne, but they were replaced by a......
Agesilaus II (king of Sparta)
king of Sparta from 399 to 360 who commanded the Spartan army throughout most of the period of Spartan supremacy (404–371) in Greece. An excellent military tactician, he is usually cited as the embodiment of the aggressive Spartan spirit that sought to further Spartan interests at the expense of Hellenic unity....
Agew (people)
an ancient people that settled in the northern and central Ethiopian Plateau; they are associated with the development of agriculture and animal husbandry in the area. The term Agau also refers to any of several contemporaneous groups that are either culturally similar or linked by a Cushitic language base. The Jewish ...
Agfa-Gevaert NV (German-Belgian corporation)
Belgian corporate group established in 1964 in the merger of Agfa AG of Leverkusen, West Germany, and Gevaert Photo-Producten NV of Mortsel, Belgium. The merger established twin operating companies, one German (Agfa-Gevaert AG) and one Belgian (Gevaert-Agfa NV, which in 1971 became Agfa-Gevaert NV). Long known for its develo...
Agfacolor (photography)
In 1936 Germany produced Agfacolor, a single-strip, three-layer negative film and accompanying print stock. After World War II Agfacolor appeared as Sovcolor in the Eastern bloc and as Anscocolor in the United States, where it was initially used for amateur filmmaking. The first serious rival to Technicolor was the single-strip Eastmancolor negative, which was introduced in 1952 by the Eastman......
Agga (king of Kish)
...own time, as well as from later traditions. He was the next-to-last ruler of the first dynasty of Kish. He “despoiled the weapons of the land of Elam,” one inscription asserts. His son, Agga, was the last king of the dynasty, owing to his defeat by Gilgamesh, according to the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh and Agga of Kish....
Aggada (non-legal literature)
in Judaism, those parts of rabbinical, or Talmudic, literature that do not deal directly with the laws incumbent upon Jews in the conduct of their daily life. The contents of Haggada can be broken down into several classes: (1) interpretations and expositions of Biblical stories and chronicles; (2) ethical teachings in the form of homilies, maxims, parables, similes, fables, riddles, and witticism...
Aggadot (non-legal literature)
in Judaism, those parts of rabbinical, or Talmudic, literature that do not deal directly with the laws incumbent upon Jews in the conduct of their daily life. The contents of Haggada can be broken down into several classes: (1) interpretations and expositions of Biblical stories and chronicles; (2) ethical teachings in the form of homilies, maxims, parables, similes, fables, riddles, and witticism...
Agganna Sutta (Buddhist text)
...strata of the cosmos are restored after the eschatological cataclysms that periodically destroy them. According to an influential version of the primary creation myth, found in the Agganna Sutta, certain brahma deities whose abode was above the destruction begin—as the waters that are left from the old cataclysm start to coagulate below them—to savour the....