Dongba painting is an ancient art form created by the ancestors of the Naxi people. As a masterpiece of Dongba scroll painting, <i>The Road to Heaven</i>, exemplifies the simplicity and beauty of the primitive Dongba religion and stands as a unique treasure within Naxi painting, possessing significant value for both art and religious research. <i>The Road to Heaven</i> serves as an essential religious ritual artifact in the Dongba religion of the Naxi people. Utilizing the format of a long scroll painting, it depicts the Naxi people’s reflections on the origins of life; the relationships between humans, nature, and society; and the exploration of life’s ultimate destiny, thereby presenting a distinctive worldview. This article constructs a theoretical analysis framework based on an iconographic study of <i>The Road to Heaven</i>, exploring the unique artistic representation, aesthetic spirit, worldview, and religious origins of the Naxi people to gain a deeper understanding of the construction of their spiritual homeland. At the level of pre-iconographic description, this article primarily analyzes the subject matter and contents of <i>The Road to Heaven</i>, the materials employed in the painting, and its artistic features. The iconographic analysis examines the thematic elements of <i>The Road to Heaven</i>; the virtual world structure of the Dongba religion’s imagined realms of gods, humans, and spirits; and its simple, natural, vivid, and imaginative aesthetic style. At the level of iconological interpretation, in this article, the characteristics of the religious beliefs shown in <i>The Road to Heaven</i> and the main factors influencing its aesthetic spirit are analyzed. We reveal that although the Dongba religion intersects and integrates with Tibetan Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, Daoism, and other ideologies and cultures, ancestor worship remains a dominant force guiding Naxi behavior. The unique natural environment, historical migrations, and multicultural exchanges of the Naxi people are the primary factors shaping their aesthetic spirit. By systematically analyzing <i>The Road to Heaven</i> from the perspective of iconology, this study provides evidence of its profound connections with Naxi social history, offering a more comprehensive view of the Naxi people’s aesthetic spirit and cultural connotations while presenting new approaches for researching <i>The Road to Heaven</i>.
The article is devoted to the study of the multilevel structure of the concept of ‘silver’ based on the materials of Buryat epic tales. The complex method expands the boundaries of the problem field of art studies in the area of traditional art, posing and solving issues from a new perspective. Materials from related sciences were used for comparative analysis. In the artistic practice of the Buryats, the basic colours are white and black, which form the universal foundation of the colour picture of the world. The heroic epic Geser is one of the most important sources of the mythopoeic code of folk culture. The white — black opposition forms the plot of epic tales as the personification of the struggle between Good and Evil. The robes and attributes of the positive and negative characters are symbolically contrasted through iconic materials — ‘white silver’ and ‘black iron’. The concepts of ‘luminosity’ and ‘radiance’ are analogous to the category of Beauty and the characteristics of a precious metal. The article notes the frequency of the use of the epithets ‘silver’ and ‘white-silver’ in the descriptions of nature, palaces, furnishing, and household items, and studies the figurative, plastic, and technological properties of the metal used. The storyline of the epic is interpreted in the context of a symbolic reflection of the history of metalwork by Buryat blacksmiths, who mastered ferrous iron from ancient times, and later — precious metals. The concept of ‘silver’ is a key one in the national culture of the Buryats: it accumulates ideas about artistic metal with unique technical characteristics, colour and light, sound; it embodies nobility and health and expresses ethical and aesthetic categories.
Silvia Zottin, Axel De Nardin, Giuseppe Branca
et al.
Text line segmentation is a critical step in handwritten document image analysis. Segmenting text lines in historical handwritten documents, however, presents unique challenges due to irregular handwriting, faded ink, and complex layouts with overlapping lines and non-linear text flow. Furthermore, the scarcity of large annotated datasets renders fully supervised learning approaches impractical for such materials. To address these challenges, we introduce the Few-Shot Text Line Segmentation of Ancient Handwritten Documents (FEST) Competition. Participants are tasked with developing systems capable of segmenting text lines in U-DIADS-TL dataset, using only three annotated images per manuscript for training. The competition dataset features a diverse collection of ancient manuscripts exhibiting a wide range of layouts, degradation levels, and non-standard formatting, closely reflecting real-world conditions. By emphasizing few-shot learning, FEST competition aims to promote the development of robust and adaptable methods that can be employed by humanities scholars with minimal manual annotation effort, thus fostering broader adoption of automated document analysis tools in historical research.
The oracle problem refers to the inability of an agent to know if the information coming from an oracle is authentic and unbiased. In ancient times, philosophers and historians debated on how to evaluate, increase, and secure the reliability of oracle predictions, particularly those from Delphi, which pertained to matters of state. Today, we refer to data carriers for automatic machines as oracles, but establishing a secure channel between these oracles and the real world still represents a challenge. Despite numerous efforts, this problem remains mostly unsolved, and the recent advent of blockchain oracles has added a layer of complexity because of the decentralization of blockchains. This paper conceptually connects Delphic and modern blockchain oracles, developing a comparative framework. Leveraging blockchain oracle taxonomy, lexical analysis is also performed on 167 Delphic queries to shed light on the relationship between oracle answer quality and question type. The presented framework aims first at revealing commonalities between classical and computational oracles and then at enriching the oracle analysis within each field. This study contributes to the computer science literature by proposing strategies to improve the reliability of blockchain oracles based on insights from Delphi and to classical literature by introducing a framework that can also be applied to interpret and classify other ancient oracular mechanisms.
Ancient Chinese text processing presents unique challenges for large language models (LLMs) due to its distinct linguistic features, complex structural constraints, and rich cultural context. While existing benchmarks have primarily focused on evaluating comprehension through multiple-choice questions, there remains a critical gap in assessing models' generative capabilities in classical Chinese. We introduce Fùxì, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates both understanding and generation capabilities across 21 diverse tasks. Our benchmark distinguishes itself through three key contributions: (1) balanced coverage of both comprehension and generation tasks, including novel tasks like poetry composition and couplet completion, (2) specialized evaluation metrics designed specifically for classical Chinese text generation, combining rule-based verification with fine-tuned LLM evaluators, and (3) a systematic assessment framework that considers both linguistic accuracy and cultural authenticity. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs, we reveal significant performance gaps between understanding and generation tasks, with models achieving promising results in comprehension but struggling considerably in generation tasks, particularly those requiring deep cultural knowledge and adherence to classical formats. Our findings highlight the current limitations in ancient Chinese text processing and provide insights for future model development. The benchmark, evaluation toolkit, and baseline results are publicly available to facilitate research in this domain.
S. Yannopoulos, G. Lyberatos, N. Theodossiou
et al.
The evolution of the major achievements in water lifting devices with emphasis on the major technologies over the centuries is presented and discussed. Valuable insights into ancient water lifting technologies with their apparent characteristics of durability, adaptability, and sustainability are provided. A comparison of the relevant technological developments in several early civilizations is carried out. These technologies are the underpinning of modern achievements in water engineering. They represent the best paradigm of probing the past and facing the future. A timeline of the historical development of water pumps worldwide through the last 5500 years of the history of mankind is presented. A chronological order is followed with emphasis on the major civilizations.
Pathogen‒host adaptative interactions and complex population demographical processes, including admixture, drift, and Darwen selection, have considerably shaped the Neolithic-to-Modern Western Eurasian population structure and genetic susceptibility to modern human diseases. However, the genetic footprints of evolutionary events in East Asia remain unknown due to the underrepresentation of genomic diversity and the design of large-scale population studies. We reported one aggregated database of genome-wide SNP variations from 796 Tai-Kadai (TK) genomes, including that of Bouyei first reported here, to explore the genetic history, population structure, and biological adaptative features of TK people from southern China and Southeast Asia. We found geography-related population substructure among TK people using the state-of-the-art population genetic structure reconstruction techniques based on the allele frequency spectrum and haplotype-resolved phased fragments. We found that the northern TK people from Guizhou harbored one TK-dominant ancestry maximized in the Bouyei people, and the southern TK people from Thailand were more influenced by Southeast Asians and indigenous people. We reconstructed fitted admixture models and demographic graphs, which showed that TK people received gene flow from ancient southern rice farmer-related lineages related to the Hmong-Mien and Austroasiatic people and from northern millet farmers associated with the Sino-Tibetan people. Biological adaptation focused on our identified unique TK lineages related to Bouyei, which showed many adaptive signatures conferring Malaria resistance and low-rate lipid metabolism. Further gene enrichment, the allele frequency distribution of derived alleles, and their correlation with the incidence of Malaria further confirmed that CR1 played an essential role in the resistance of Malaria in the ancient ''Baiyue'' tribes.
The natural history of Precambrian life is still unknown because of the rarity of microbial fossils and biomarkers. However, the composition of modern-day genomes may bear imprints of ancient biogeochemical events. Here we use an explicit model of macroevolution including gene birth, transfer, duplication and loss events to map the evolutionary history of 3,983 gene families across the three domains of life onto a geological timeline. Surprisingly, we find that a brief period of genetic innovation during the Archaean eon, which coincides with a rapid diversification of bacterial lineages, gave rise to 27% of major modern gene families. A functional analysis of genes born during this Archaean expansion reveals that they are likely to be involved in electron-transport and respiratory pathways. Genes arising after this expansion show increasing use of molecular oxygen (P = 3.4 × 10−8) and redox-sensitive transition metals and compounds, which is consistent with an increasingly oxygenating biosphere.
From the outbreak of the Second Punic War in 218 to the Social War in 91, the Romans had prolonged debates about the changing nature of warfare, culminating in Rome’s first civil war in 88 BCE. The Second Punic War was a war of survival against Rome’s great enemy, Carthage, but also saw Rome’s subject-allies rebel on a large scale, equalling an internal war within the polity of Rome.
Past societies have used various raw materials for making grinding-milling tools (GMT). These included rhyolite, a hard volcanic rock with a porphyritic texture and pores, which is suitable for grinding. Thus far, no experiments have been carried out involving use-wear analysis on rhyolite grinding stones, and more specifically on Neolithic GMTs made of this raw material. Therefore, in this paper, we present an experimental program designed to investigate the development of wear from the grinding of einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum) on rhyolite GMT replicas. To test the resulting observations, four GMTs found at the Neolithic site of Vchynice were used as a case study. However, the results of the experiments can be used to study these important artefacts in other geographic and cultural areas. The experiment has yielded several important findings relating to the kinematics of the tools and throws new light on their users. The orientation of the tool relative to the user can be distinguished based on the distribution of the use-wear traces. The study of the archaeological assemblage revealed that substances other than einkorn wheat, which was used for our experimental grinding, were processed on the Neolithic GMTs.
This article examines the importance of graphic representations in the social sciences, and particularly in (medieval) history, taking as its starting point a reflection by {É}tienne-Jules Marey, a physiologist and pioneer of 19th-century photography and cinema. Marey believed that the visual should replace language in many fields. Indeed, the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries saw an exponential multiplication of visual media, particularly with the advent of digital technology. However, this ''graphics revolution'' has not affected all disciplines equally. Significant differences remain between scientific fields such as astrophysics, anthropology, chemistry and medieval history, despite their shared commitment to describing dynamic processes and changes of state. Yet, while historians have already digitized a large part of the cultural heritage from Antiquity to the 10th-13th centuries, exploration of this corpus using visualizations remains limited. There is therefore untapped potential in this field.This article begins by outlining a typology and quantification of the past and potential roles of visual representations in medieval history. It examines two distinct intellectual approaches: 1. the use of visuals to support a scientific discourse (majority) and 2. the construction of a historical discourse based on observations made from visual figures with the aim of modeling phenomena invisible to the naked eye. The author thus examines the use of ''images'' in medievalism, focusing on the annual volumes of the Soci{é}t{é} des historiens m{é}di{é}vistes de l'enseignement sup{é}rieur (SHMESP), up to 2006. Two other parts of the text look at the still-rare forms of visual representation in medieval history, particularly those with a ''heuristic vocation'', using iconographic objects, parchments, buildings and digitized texts. The article suggests various visualization techniques, such as network analysis, the creation of ''stemmas 2.0'' and interactive chronologies, which could benefit the discipline. These methods could potentially profoundly change our understanding of ancient societies, by showing the dynamic relationships between different aspects of these societies. One of the most important advances expected from these visual methods is a better understanding of the patterns of development in medieval Europe, which varied from region to region. The hypothesis is that the scarcity of heuristic graphics in medieval history stems from the relationship with ancient documents and the historical method based on narration and exemplarity. The article thus questions the value of ''visual modelling'' in medieval history, and highlights the challenges associated with the widespread adoption of this approach in the humanities and social sciences. Finally, the text invites us to reflect on the nature and functioning of heuristic visual devices, by comparing medieval ''images'' and contemporary scientific visuals. In both cases, the point is to materialize the invisible in order to show something that exists beyond the visual. The author suggests that this way of approaching visuals could play a growing role in the decades to come, particularly in the field of data science.
Emily. W. Wong, Ramon Brasser, Stephanie. C. Werner
et al.
Are Saturn's regular satellites young or old? And how old are Enceladus' cratered plains? To answer these questions we computed model surface ages of the most heavily cratered terrains on Saturn's regular icy satellites using new high-resolution outer Solar System evolution simulations, and coupled with improved estimates of the trans-Neptunian objects populations. The output of the simulations allowed us to construct a model impact chronology onto Saturn which automatically applies to its regular satellites. We used crater densities and our impact chronology onto Saturn to construct model impact-crater isochrons, i.e., the scaling of the satellite crater production function with time. The surface ages derived for the cratered plains on Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione and Rhea range from 4.1 Ga to 4.4 Ga, with the surfaces of Mimas and Enceladus roughly 200 Myr younger than those of the outer three satellites. Uncertainties in these ages are less than 300 Myr. The calculated model surface ages of these satellites are consistent over as much as two orders of magnitude in the observed crater diameter. The similarity of the crater production function amongst all satellites suggests that they were bombarded by a single impactor source. This work supports the idea that Saturn's regular satellites are ancient, and has implications for their formation and their tidal evolution.
During the reign of king Władysław II Jagiełło (1386-1434), the Mazovian Piasts participated actively in all conflagrations between their sovereign and forces of the Teutonic Order: at the beginning of the 1390s; during the so-called great war against the Teutonic Order 1409-1411; in warfare of 1414; in a short-lived military expedition of 1419 (abandoned due to the intervention of Sigismund of Luxembourg’s envoy, Bartholomew de Capra, Archbishop of Milan) and in the war of 1433. In this way, king Władysław II strenghtened his army, provided better supplies for his troops, and prevented the Mazovian Piasts from siding with the Teutonic Order.
The history of the Institute of Physics at the University of Florence is traced from the beginning of the 20th century, with the arrival of Antonio Garbasso as Director (1913), to the 1960s. Thanks to Garbasso's expertise, not only did the Institute gain new premises on Arcetri hill, where the Astronomical Observatory was already located, but it also formed a brilliant group of young physicists made up of Enrico Fermi, Franco Rasetti, Enrico Persico, Bruno Rossi, Gilberto Bernardini, Daria Bocciarelli, Lorenzo Emo Capodilista, Giuseppe Occhialini and Giulio Racah, who were engaged in the emerging fields of Quantum Mechanics and Cosmic Rays. This Arcetri School disintegrated in the late 1930s for the transfer of its protagonists to chairs in other universities, for the environment created by the fascist regime and, to some extent, for the racial laws. After the war, the legacy was taken up by some students of this school who formed research groups in the field of nuclear physics and elementary particle physics. As far as theoretical physics was concerned, after the Fermi and Persico periods these studies enjoyed a new expansion towards the end of the 1950s, with the arrival of Giacomo Morpurgo and above all, that of Raoul Gatto, who created the first real Italian school of Theoretical Physics at Arcetri.
Abstract Interaction between human beings and spirits in the ancient Near East was readily divisible into two unequal parts. Of these, one part, which we might term “religion,” was god‐centered. The other part, by contrast, which we might term “magic,” was man‐centered. Magic came in three types: good magic, bad magic (sorcery), and conditional magic.
Shao-Hsiang Liu, Shao-Hsiang Liu, Po-Sheng Chen
et al.
Over the past decade, the rise of cancer immunotherapy has coincided with a remarkable breakthrough in cancer therapy, which attracted increased interests in public. The scientific community clearly showed that the emergence of immunotherapy is an inevitable outcome of a holistic approach for cancer treatment. It is well established that traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) utilizes the principle of homeostasis and balance to adjust the healthy status of body. TCM treatment toward cancer has a long history, and the diagnosis and treatment of tumors were discussed in the ancient and classical literatures of Chinese medicine, such as the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon. Precious heritage has laid the foundation for the innovation and development of cancer treatment with TCM. The modern study indicated that TCM facilitates the treatment of cancer and enhances the survival rate and life expectancy of patients. However, the pharmacological mechanisms underlying these effects are not yet completely understood. In addition, physicians cannot always explain why the TCM treatment is effective and the mechanism of action cannot be explained in scientific terms. Here, we attempted to provide insights into the development of TCM in the treatment and interpret how TCM practitioners treat cancer through six general principles of TCM by using modern scientific language and terms based on newly discovered evidence.
Igor BIRYUK, Oleh KORYTSKIY, Iryna KUKOVSKA
et al.
The need to
address this problem is due to increased interest in the origins of
traditional national culture and spirituality of our people, growing
interest in authentic culture of the Ukrainian ethnic group, and in
particular its component – the life of wandering elders-singers. The
music of the Ukrainian lyre (kobza) is an organic part of people's
worldviews, their thoughts and aspirations, diverse and rich spiritual
life. One of the important roles in awakening the spirituality of our
people was played by lyre players and kobzars, who carried the fiery
Ukrainian word to the people, called for the struggle for freedom, for
Cossack glory, for the ancient ancestral Orthodox faith. The article
presents an analysis of the formation of lyricism (kobzarism) as a
significant part of the cultural heritage of the Ukrainian population of
Bukovina. The lyricists are portrayed as witnesses of the life and
development of the people in different historical epochs, as well as
their influence on knowledge of history, education of patriotism, love
for the native land and respect for their ancestors. The purpose. Based
on the analysis of literature sources and available historical documents
to trace the peculiarities of the process of formation and reproduction
of the history of lyricism in Bukovina, as part of the historical heritage
of the Ukrainian people. Research methods: retrospective, synthetic
analytical and generalizing methods.
The scientific novelty lies in the generalization of information
about the representatives of Ukrainian epic singing in Bukovina and
Bukovina Hutsul region. Conclusions. The biographies of lyricists of
Bukovyna, recollections about them, features of Hutsul lyre are given.
Lyricism as a unique cultural phenomenon was spread all over Ukraine
and in Hutsul region and Bukovyna as well from XVI century till 30ies
of the twentieth century. As in the territory of Bukovina, as well as in
all Ukraine, industrial production of lyres was not developed - in
comparison with similar tools from other countries such lyres were
much simpler in the design. The lyre in the Bukovynian Hutsul region
had a layer of religiosity, so in addition to the heroic epic, the repertoire
included chants and psalms. Well-known lyricists in Bukovyna were
Yuriy Fedkovych (“Bukovynskyi Solovyi”), from the village of Putyla,
Vasyl Tonievych from the village of Samakova, Petro Dzurak from the
village of Dytynets, Dmytro Hentsar from the village of Ryzha
(Pylypkove hamlet), Vasyl Hrytsko, Ivan Pokhovych (Hnat) from
Sadhora (Chernivtsi).
History of medicine. Medical expeditions, Social Sciences