Berat is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its unique historic downtown characterized by 18th and 19th century Ottoman structures and urban design, but human presence in the area goes back to the 4th/3rd millennium B.C. and there is evidence of an urban settlement in Berat defined by defensive walls dating to the 7th-6th century B.C.
Tropes were additions inserted into established Gregorian chants. They could include new words, new melodies, or a combination of both, expanding the original liturgical piece and sometimes offering additional theological or rhetorical commentary. In many cases, tropes circulated long before they were recorded in writing. Their melodies and texts were transmitted orally for centuries before being preserved in medieval manuscripts, creating a complex web of regional variants across Europe.
UNESCO, the UN's cultural body, has expressed its concern about the cultural heritage sites, saying in a statement that it had 'communicated to all parties concerned the geographical coordinates of sites on the World Heritage List as well as those of national significance, to avoid any potential damage.' 'UNESCO continues to closely monitor the situation of cultural heritage in the country and across the region, with a view to ensuring its protection.'
Writing was created in response to the need to communicate over long distances in trade and, initially, was focused on the purely practical aspects of record-keeping. Scribes in ancient Mesopotamia recorded what commercial goods had been shipped to which destination, their quantity, purpose, and cost.
The Household and Wardrobe Accounts are English records that document the daily needs of the king and his family. This book serves as a guide to these sources, showing how they can be used and what valuable insights they offer into medieval government.
The excavation ultimately unearthed 34 burials, 15 of them belonging to children between two and ten years old when they died. The graves are clustered in groups, probably reflecting family nuclei. Most the grave types are earthen pits covered with roof tiles angled against each other.
The Kletzke Hand Cannon, a small bronze fragment discovered in 2023 during a field survey in northern Germany, represents potentially the earliest portable firearm technology found in Europe. Measuring approximately six centimetres and decorated with ornamental details, the artifact appears to be the front portion of a medieval hand cannon. Archaeologists estimate it dates to around 1390.
The Aubusson Tapestry Museum is situated in an exceptional context shaped by a rich history and a powerful natural environment. The Creuse capital of tapestry has been marked by its history since the royal manufactory of the 14th century.
The street plan of the Valley is 'the street plan of America.' By this, he means that streets in cities across the U.S. offer rectilinear uniformity: 'broad, arrow-straight avenues, regularly spaced and perfectly parallel to one another, are met at fixed intervals by equally straight and parallel streets that intersect them at precise right angles.'
She became a useful tool. She became a saint, you might say, of the Revolution. People felt as though they could feel her fear, feel her death, feel her love for her fiancé. Underlying all of that was the sense that American leaders can't let this happen to white families ever again, this in spite of the fact that white Americans were just as vicious to Native Americans.
The coffins are elaborately painted in vivid polychrome. They were stacked in layers and carefully arranged so the 22 coffins fit into the constricted space. They were placed in 10 horizontal rows and the lids separated from the body of the coffin to maximize the limited space. There are no personal names on most of the coffins, but there are titles. The most common title found in the coffin is Singer of Amun or Chantress of Amun.
Few figures in Byzantine military history have been so harshly condemned in the aftermath of a single defeat as Josef Trachaneiotes, Roussel of Bailleul, and Andronikos Doukas. According to the dominant narrative, the first two disobeyed their emperor by failing to return and support him at a critical moment, while the third allegedly abandoned Romanos on the battlefield, ordering a withdrawal precisely when his intervention was needed to prevent the encirclement and collapse of the imperial line.
By the early 1900s, player pianos had evolved to more fully reproduce a human performance, including subtle dynamics like tempo changes and the introduction of a damper pedal. The human role went from deskilled to fully deprecated as electric motors replaced foot-powered bellows. With the Seeburg Lilliputian Model L, the only job left for humans who wanted to play the piano in the 1920s was to put in a coin.
In the park's center is an eye-catching bronze statue of a larger-than-life Nkrumah, clad in royal kente cloth, with an outstretched hand pointing ahead and one foot in front of the other as if he were advancing forward. Erected on top of a pedestal at the spot where Nkrumah stood to declare Ghana's independence from Britain, it channels the slogan of Nkrumah's political party: 'Forward ever, backward never.'
Cuneiform is a system of writing first developed by the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia circa 3600/3500 BCE. It is considered the most significant among the many cultural contributions of the Sumerians and the greatest among those of the Sumerian city of Uruk, which further developed and advanced cuneiform circa 3200 BCE and allowed for the creation of literature.
Very rare to see this level of tailoring nowadays, even on the wealthy. Even when not attending major sporting events, the king's collars always hug his neck, his lapels are always well-proportioned, the lines of his coat always flow into his trousers, and his four-in-hand always has just the right asymmetry.
In 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court, in United States v. The Amistad, ruled 7-1 in favor of a group of illegally enslaved Africans who were captured off the U.S. coast after seizing control of a Spanish schooner, La Amistad. The justices ruled that the Africans should be set free.
The text, most likely composed circa 2300 BCE, and also known as The Birth Legend of Sargon, describes the king's humble origins and rise to power with the help of the goddess Ishtar and concludes with a challenge to future kings to go where he has gone and do as he has done.
Cacheu, located in present-day Guinea-Bissau, was a small but vital Atlantic port where African, European, and Afro-Portuguese communities interacted daily. It functioned as a hub linking West Africa to Brazil and the wider Atlantic world. Rather than presenting Cacheu as a peripheral outpost of European expansion, Green shows it to be a dynamic society with its own social hierarchies, customs, and systems of authority.
The two socketed axes were discovered last year by a metal detectorist who recognized that their careful positioning could not have been a natural process. He reported the find to the Westphalia-Lippe Regional Association (LWL). The subsequent excavation of the find site revealed a far more complex depositional context. Beneath the axes is a pit carved into the rock.
He was flamboyant, all right. But he was much more than that. He was an extremely colorful personality and a close friend of The Chief (Hearst). His input went beyond that of the builder and overlapped into the interior design and even in the choice of furnishings.
In 1820, President James Monroe signed the Missouri Compromise, which allowed Missouri to join the Union as a slave state and Maine to join as a free state, while banning slavery in the northern portion of the Louisiana Territory.
One tenet of classical idealism is the idea that Roman and Greek statuary embodied an ideal of pure whiteness-a misconception modern sculptors perpetuated for hundreds of years by making busts and statues in polished white marble. But the truth is that both Greek statues and their Roman counterparts were originally brightly painted in riotous color.
In 1836, Apaches raided a remote ranch near Janos, a tiny town on the northern fringes of the state of Chihuahua, in the newly independent republic of Mexico. The Natives absconded with some cattle, as well as with a young widow named Camila. Setting off in pursuit was José María Zuloaga, a taciturn lieutenant colonel in the Mexican army supported by a band of irregulars. Among them: a self-possessed teenager who served as an aide-de-camp, a pair of Yaqui brothers whose permanent address was the town jail, and a sharp-shooting nun named Elvira, who was actually a singer of zarzuelas dressed up in a habit.
The real Führer is always a judge. Out of Führerdom flows judgeship. One who wants to separate the two from each other or puts them in opposition to each other would have the judge be either the leader of the opposition or the tool of the opposition and is trying to unhinge the state with the help of the judiciary.
Seven were the strings of the lyre (unless there happened to be eight or nine), seven were the gates of Thebes, and seven were the "wandering stars" in the night sky (if you count the sun and moon). The identity of the wonders was less important than the length of their list, and indeed, additions and changes were proposed since the beginning.
James B. Hill should be patron saint of Northwest Ohio - or at least patron saint of this story. He invented a machine called the Buckeye Traction Ditcher, and he checks all my boxes. Hill is our hero: His invention drained the swamp in a matter of years, leading to its complete settlement shortly thereafter. He brought the normalcy we see today.