Scientists still debate whether small groups of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers caused the extinction of large Ice Age animals like prehistoric elephants, giant sloths and cave lions. Beyond paleontology, this question has deep sociological implications and is relevant for how we understand the role of humankind in today’s environmental crisis. A human-driven megafauna extinction has often fostered the idea of a naturalization of human environmental impacts and the belief that all people (modern or ancient, rich or poor, from any part of the world) share responsibility for the current crisis. But is that true? In the review, I discuss whether a long evolutionary history of impacts really makes us inevitably destructive, compelling humanity to accept a devastating anthropocentric dominance as the fateful destiny natural selection built for us. In contrast, I argue that, while our exceptional ability to shape environments has made us a ‘hyper-keystone’ species, benefiting only a few species and humans, this same ability also has the potential to help us restore balance to the world. That requires rejecting anthropocentric supremacy and placing ecosystems at the center stage of our relationship with nonhuman nature. We may have wiped out the mammoths and mastodons, but human destructiveness is not fate.
Ancient inscriptions, as repositories of cultural memory, have suffered from centuries of environmental and human-induced degradation. Restoring their intertwined visual and textual integrity poses one of the most demanding challenges in digital heritage preservation. However, existing AI-based approaches often rely on rigid pipelines, struggling to generalize across such complex and heterogeneous real-world degradations. Inspired by the skill-coordinated workflow of human epigraphers, we propose EpiAgent, an agent-centric system that formulates inscription restoration as a hierarchical planning problem. Following an Observe-Conceive-Execute-Reevaluate paradigm, an LLM-based central planner orchestrates collaboration among multimodal analysis, historical experience, specialized restoration tools, and iterative self-refinement. This agent-centric coordination enables a flexible and adaptive restoration process beyond conventional single-pass methods. Across real-world degraded inscriptions, EpiAgent achieves superior restoration quality and stronger generalization compared to existing methods. Our work marks an important step toward expert-level agent-driven restoration of cultural heritage. The code is available at https://github.com/blackprotoss/EpiAgent.
O presente estudo tem como objetivo buscar as possíveis influências do pensamento histórico de Tucídides na obra de Amiano Marcelino. Na qualidade de um historiador que tenta se inserir em uma tradição clássica, nuançamos no primeiro momento a imagem de Amiano como continuador de Tácito, dando ênfase em sua ligação com a historiografia grega. Depois disso, analisamos a metodologia professada por cada historiador e como ela foi aplicada ao longo das obras. Em seguida, abordamos suas noções de verdade histórica, erro e falsidade narrativa. Por fim, examinamos os objetivos professados por Amiano e Tucídides com a composição de suas obras. A partir disso, concluímos que, apesar de Tucídides ser pouco mencionado diretamente nas Res Gestae, a influência do pensamento histórico tucidideano em Amiano Marcelino ultrapassa a mera familiaridade com preceitos gerais de sua historiografia.
Logan Born, M. Willis Monroe, Kathryn Kelley
et al.
A numeration system encodes abstract numeric quantities as concrete strings of written characters. The numeration systems used by modern scripts tend to be precise and unambiguous, but this was not so for the ancient and partially-deciphered proto-Elamite (PE) script, where written numerals can have up to four distinct readings depending on the system that is used to read them. We consider the task of disambiguating between these readings in order to determine the values of the numeric quantities recorded in this corpus. We algorithmically extract a list of possible readings for each PE numeral notation, and contribute two disambiguation techniques based on structural properties of the original documents and classifiers learned with the bootstrapping algorithm. We also contribute a test set for evaluating disambiguation techniques, as well as a novel approach to cautious rule selection for bootstrapped classifiers. Our analysis confirms existing intuitions about this script and reveals previously-unknown correlations between tablet content and numeral magnitude. This work is crucial to understanding and deciphering PE, as the corpus is heavily accounting-focused and contains many more numeric tokens than tokens of text.
Research in the academic field of Latin and dyslexia is sparse, often outdated, and largely consists of teachers' informal observations, thus lacking empirical evidence. This mixed-methods study aims to address a gap in the literature, exploring the experiences of secondary students with dyslexia learning Latin, French, or Spanish while examining the relationships between dyslexia and examination results in those languages. After purposive sampling, semi-structured interviews with seven dyslexic students, aged 16 to 29, were conducted and 349 GCSE and IB grades, of which 51 were of dyslexic students, were collected from two secondary schools. Reflexive thematic analysis of the interviews revealed seven themes: accessibility, benefits, challenges and barriers, class size, methods and strategies, motivation, and strengths. The results of three chi-square tests showed no significant association for Latin or Spanish, but a significant association between dyslexia and examination results in French. Whereas positive learning experiences for students with dyslexia hinged on the appropriate teaching method and the perceived support rather than the language per se, higher exam achievements were also dependent on the level of orthographic transparency but not on the degree of orality of the language learnt. Future research in the field should explore the experiences and achievements of students at different educational stages and with different learning difficulties doing Latin.
This study aims to compare three methods for translating ancient texts with sparse corpora: (1) the traditional statistical translation method of phrase alignment, (2) in-context LLM learning, and (3) proposed inter methodological approach - statistical machine translation method using sentence piece tokens derived from unified set of source-target corpus. The performance of the proposed approach in this study is 36.71 in BLEU score, surpassing the scores of SOLAR-10.7B context learning and the best existing Seq2Seq model. Further analysis and discussion are presented.
Here, I test the long-held assumption that the ancient Egyptian sky goddess Nut represented the Milky Way by examining Nut's visual depictions on ancient Egyptian coffins. I assemble a catalog of 555 coffin elements, including 118 cosmological vignettes from the 21st/22nd Dynasties, and report several observations. First, the cosmological vignette on the outer coffin of Nesitaudjatakhet bears a unique feature: a thick, undulating black curve that bisects Nut's star-studded body and recalls the Great Rift that cleaves the Milky Way in two. Similar undulating curves bisect the astronomical ceiling in the tomb of Seti I and appear as part of depictions of Nut in the tombs of Ramesses IV, VI, and IX. Moreover, the undulating curve resembles similar features identified as the Milky Way on the bodies of Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni spiritual beings. Hence, I argue that the undulating curve is a visual representation of the Milky Way and that it supports a previously suggested identification of the Winding Waterway as the Galaxy's Egyptian name. However, the rarity of this feature strengthens the conclusion reached by Graur (2024a): Though Nut and the Milky Way are linked, they are not synonymous. Instead of acting as a representation of Nut, the Milky Way is one more celestial phenomenon that, like the Sun and the stars, is associated with Nut in her role as the sky. Second, Nut's body is decorated with stars in only a quarter of the cosmological vignettes, suggesting that the Egyptians of the 21st/22nd Dynasties may have had a marked preference for the day sky over the night sky. Finally, I discuss the interplay between Nut's cosmological vignette and full-length portraits inside coffins from the New Kingdom to the Roman Period in the context of Nut's combined cosmological and eschatological roles as an embodiment of the coffin.
Many languages have vast amounts of handwritten texts, such as ancient scripts about folktale stories and historical narratives or contemporary documents and letters. Digitization of those texts has various applications, such as daily tasks, cultural studies, and historical research. Syriac is an ancient, endangered, and low-resourced language that has not received the attention it requires and deserves. This paper reports on a research project aimed at developing a optical character recognition (OCR) model based on the handwritten Syriac texts as a starting point to build more digital services for this endangered language. A dataset was created, KHAMIS (inspired by the East Syriac poet, Khamis bar Qardahe), which consists of handwritten sentences in the East Syriac script. We used it to fine-tune the Tesseract-OCR engine's pretrained Syriac model on handwritten data. The data was collected from volunteers capable of reading and writing in the language to create KHAMIS. KHAMIS currently consists of 624 handwritten Syriac sentences collected from 31 university students and one professor, and it will be partially available online and the whole dataset available in the near future for development and research purposes. As a result, the handwritten OCR model was able to achieve a character error rate of 1.097-1.610% and 8.963-10.490% on both training and evaluation sets, respectively, and both a character error rate of 18.89-19.71% and a word error rate of 62.83-65.42% when evaluated on the test set, which is twice as better than the default Syriac model of Tesseract.
The designations of death, dying, and the dead have been extensively studied, especially since they are often subject to linguistic taboo and are therefore named through euphemisms and dysphemisms. This contribution will reconstruct the history of the lexical type cadaver, in parallel with corpus (mortuum), from ancient Latin to modern Romance languages: the ‘X-phemic’ model will be discussed, but the study will adopt a semasiological perspective.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Literature (General)
The paper re-examines the principal methodological questions, arising in the debate over the cosmological standard model's postulate of Dark Matter vs. rivalling proposals that modify standard (Newtonian and general-relativistic) gravitational theory, the so-called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and its subsequent extensions. What to make of such seemingly radical challenges of cosmological orthodoxy? In the first part of our paper, we assess MONDian theories through the lens of key ideas of major 20th century philosophers of science (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, and Laudan), thereby rectifying widespread misconceptions and misapplications of these ideas common in the pertinent MOND-related literature. None of these classical methodological frameworks, which render precise and systematise the more intuitive judgements prevalent in the scientific community, yields a favourable verdict on MOND and its successors -- contrary to claims in the MOND-related literature by some of these theories' advocates; the respective theory appraisals are largely damning. Drawing on these insights, the paper's second part zooms in on the most common complaint about MONDian theories, their ad-hocness. We demonstrate how the recent coherentist model of ad-hocness captures, and fleshes out, the underlying -- but too often insufficiently articulated -- hunches underlying this critique. MONDian theories indeed come out as severely ad hoc: they do not cohere well with either theoretical or empirical-factual background knowledge. In fact, as our complementary comparison with the cosmological standard model's Dark Matter postulate shows, with respect to ad-hocness, MONDian theories fare worse than the cosmological standard model.
Mehdi Abbasi, Reza Shajari qasemkheili, Seyed Hassan Shojaee divkalaee
Abstract
The issue of endowment (waqf) is one of the most important issues in the history of Islamic Iran. This importance stems from its impact on various religious, political, social, and economic aspects. Therefore, in the history of Iran, governments have always tried to interfere in the affairs of endowments. The first Pahlavi government also followed the same method. This government made fundamental changes in endowment affairs, as in other areas including political, economic, social, and cultural structures of Iran in the Qajar era. The present study aims to answer the question of: How was the endowment affairs organized in the first Pahlavi era and what were its educational goals? The historical method and archival documents, publications, and other historical sources were used in this study.
The findings show that the Pahlavi government during a ten-year process, through the approval of new laws, was succeeded in organizing endowments and making changes in that area with the aim of quantitatively and qualitatively developing the country’s educational system. This goal was achieved by using endowments and spending the proceeds of endowments in the fields of construction (construction of educational buildings), education (promotion of education and provision of educational resources), and publishing books.
Introduction
The issue of endowment in the history of Iran has been considered since ancient times. With the rise of Islam and its widespread emphasis on endowment and benevolence, its functions and uses increased. The importance and credibility of the endowment institution in Iran are such that some people believe that the correct recognition of the Iranian court is not possible without accurate recognition of the endowment institution. In the Qajar era, with the increase of political and religious influence of the clergy, the power of the clergy in managing the spiritual and financial affairs of the endowments was restored and despite the efforts in the Naseri and constitutional era, the power and influence of the Ulama over endowment affairs remained until the end of this period. So, the first Pahlavi government inherited the structure of the Qajar government in endowment affairs. This structure of the endowment system was not favorable in the first Pahlavi government for various reasons. That's why the Pahlavi government, after consolidating the foundations of its power, sought to organize endowment affairs for its goals. Explaining the evolution of the endowment system and analyzing the educational goals of Reza Shah are the most important concerns of this study.
Materials and Methods
This study aims to answer the question of: How was the endowment affairs organized in the first Pahlavi era and what were its educational goals? To gather the data, the historical method and archival documents, publications, and other historical sources were used in this study.
Discussion of Results and Conclusions
One of the goals of the first Pahlavi government was to achieve political centralization. Creating a bureaucracy and training an efficient bureaucrat was one of the necessary institutions and tools for creating political centralization. According to this principle, bureaucracy and its development as the tools to create political concentration were considered by the first Pahlavi government. The realization of this issue depended on the development of the country's educational system. The development of the educational system also required the provision of financial resources. It was not possible to finance these expenses only through the annual budget of the Ministry of Education. For this reason, the Pahlavi government had to seek other financial resources to cover the expenses of the country's educational system. One of these sources was the income from endowments. Accordingly, the Pahlavi government tried to organize the endowment system of the country and finally succeeded in approving the endowment law in 1313 AH. In this way, it would provide the necessary financial resources to achieve its goals.
However, before approving this law, the Pahlavi government tried to use the revenues of endowments in the development of the country's educational system. This process intensified after approving the Endowment Law. After that, the Pahlavi government organized the endowments in a purposeful manner and sought to use the endowments and their revenues in the field of educational development. Endowment and its revenues were used in three parts including construction, educational expenses, and publishing books. In the construction expenditures part, the Pahlavi government acted in two fields of building schools in endowment fields and constructing schools from endowment revenues. In the field of educational expenditures, endowments and incomes were used in some ways including the provision of teachers' salaries, the provision of tuition, accommodation expenses for students, and the establishment of a preaching institute. In addition, the Pahlavi government published some books and established libraries from endowments revenues. Thus, the first Pahlavi government succeeded in organizing the country's endowment system to take steps towards achieving its goals by using endowment and its revenues in the development of the country's educational system. The most important of these goals was to train the necessary force to create an efficient bureaucratic system in order to create a political concentration in the country.
History (General) and history of Europe, History of Asia
AI engines utilizing deep learning neural networks provide excellent tools for analyzing traditional board games. Here we are interested in gaining new insights into the ancient game of Go. For that purpose, we need to define new numerical measures based on the raw output of the engines. In this paper, we develop a numerical tool for automated move-by-move performance evaluation in a context-sensitive manner and for recognizing game features. We measure the urgency of a move by the cost of passing, which is the score value difference between the current configuration of stones and after a hypothetical pass in the same board position. Here we investigate the properties of this measure and describe some applications.
About fifty years after the work that astronomer Tycho Brahe carried out while living on the island of Hven had made him world famous, King Christian IV of Denmark built the Trinity Buildings in Copenhagen. The Tower observatory was opened in 1642, and it housed the astronomers from the University of Copenhagen until 1861 when a new, modern observatory was built at Østervold in the eastern part of the city. In 1996, all the University astronomers from the observatories at Østervold and the small town of Brorfelde were relocated to the Rockefeller Buildings at Østerbro, and the two observatories were closed. In this paper we focus on the library at the observatory in Østervold, and its subsequent fate following the close-down of that observatory.
As the continent where humans evolved and thus exhibit the greatest genetic diversity, Africa is one of the most attractive places to conduct ancient DNA (aDNA) research. Yet the “aDNA revolution” only recently reached the continent, thanks in part to methodological breakthroughs that make it possible to extract aDNA from poorly preserved materials from hot and/or humid climates. Since the first fully sequenced ancient African human genome was published in 2015, dozens of additional genomes from the continent have illuminated population movements, economic and social transitions, patterns of adaptation, and the timing of our species' evolution. However, sequenced individuals come from archaeological contexts widely separated in space and time and represent only a tiny fraction of ancient human genetic diversity. Many questions and entire regions/time periods have yet to be explored using aDNA. This is also the case for non‐human African aDNA studies, which have been slower to develop in part because of poor preservation. This entry describes the science of aDNA, discusses how the field has revolutionized in the past decade, and explores the history of aDNA research in Africa starting with mummy studies in the 1980s. It concludes with a discussion of the ethical challenges facing African aDNA research, some of which are specific to the continent while others apply to postcolonial contexts more broadly. While there is major work ahead to ensure aDNA studies in Africa and beyond are conducted ethically and equitably, the field is poised to shift knowledge on the African past in the coming years.
AbstractAncient Near Eastern treaties were contractual agreements between two political entities, in most cases between two kings. Numerous treaties survive in written form, and others are known indirectly from other types of source, such as royal inscriptions, historiographic compositions, and letters. They date from the twenty‐fourth until the seventh centurybce, but the best‐preserved and largest group dates to the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1550–1200bce) and was recovered in the archives of Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite kingdom.