Hasil untuk "Ancient history"

Limin Lu, Ling-Feng Mao, Tuo Yang et al.

Kyeongsu Choi, Dong-Hwi Seo, Wei-Bo Su et al.

We prove that any ancient smooth embedded finite-entropy curve shortening flow is one of the following: a static line, a shrinking circle, a paper clip, a translating grim reaper, or a graphical ancient trombone. An ancient trombone is an immersed ancient flow, either compact or non-compact, obtained by gluing together $m$ translating grim reaper curves. For each $m$, there exists a $(2m-1)$-parameter family of graphical ancient trombones, up to rigid motions and time shifts as constructed by Angenent-You. In particular, our result implies that any compact ancient smooth embedded finite-entropy flow is convex. Moreover, any non-compact ancient smooth embedded finite-entropy flow is either a static line or a complete graph over a fixed open interval.

J. Atherton, M. Blaser

Anders Bergström, D. Stanton, Ulrike H. Taron et al.

The grey wolf (Canis lupus) was the first species to give rise to a domestic population, and they remained widespread throughout the last Ice Age when many other large mammal species went extinct. Little is known, however, about the history and possible extinction of past wolf populations or when and where the wolf progenitors of the present-day dog lineage (Canis familiaris) lived1–8. Here we analysed 72 ancient wolf genomes spanning the last 100,000 years from Europe, Siberia and North America. We found that wolf populations were highly connected throughout the Late Pleistocene, with levels of differentiation an order of magnitude lower than they are today. This population connectivity allowed us to detect natural selection across the time series, including rapid fixation of mutations in the gene IFT88 40,000–30,000 years ago. We show that dogs are overall more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia than to those from western Eurasia, suggesting a domestication process in the east. However, we also found that dogs in the Near East and Africa derive up to half of their ancestry from a distinct population related to modern southwest Eurasian wolves, reflecting either an independent domestication process or admixture from local wolves. None of the analysed ancient wolf genomes is a direct match for either of these dog ancestries, meaning that the exact progenitor populations remain to be located. DNA from ancient wolves spanning 100,000 years sheds light on wolves’ evolutionary history and the genomic origin of dogs.

Delcides Marques

O trecho escolhido para análise é a expressão de abertura da resposta de Diomedes a Glauco (Ilíada 6, 215). Um iminente conflito entre esses dois guerreiros é interrompido justamente pelo diálogo que sela uma relação de amizade, hospitalidade e reciprocidade. Para os fins do presente artigo, o fragmento escolhido é a expressão ἦ ῥά νύ que será analisada em termos propriamente linguísticos, tendo em vista compreender nuances elucidativas de aspectos da retórica do guerreiro. Assim, amparado pela bibliografia utilizada na investigação (gramáticas, léxicos, dicionários e outras obras de referência), pôde-se constatar que a correlação entre as partículas é imprescindível para o entendimento de um discurso dessa natureza. Analisar a combinação dos termos utilizados no argumento de Diomedes mostrou-se um procedimento indispensável para a devida compreensão e aprofundamento analítico do argumento do guerreiro. E o trabalho comparativo evidenciou que em outros contextos de uso das mesmas partículas em fórmula poética manteve-se um marcador discursivo de impacto retórico para o enunciado e seu contexto.

Randall C. Thompson, A. Allam, Guido P Lombardi et al.

B. Dasgeb, B. Dasgeb, D. Kornreich et al.

A. Angelakis, T. Asano, A. Bahri et al.

Domestic wastewater (sewage) has been used for irrigation and aquaculture since the Bronze Age (ca. 3,200-1,100 BC) by prehistoric civilizations (e.g. Chinese, Egyptian, Indus Valley, Mesopotamian, and Minoan). In historic times (ca. 1,000 BC-330 AD), wastewater was disposed of or used for irrigation and fertilization purposes by the Greek civilization and later by the Romans in areas surrounding cities (e.g. Athens and Rome). In more recent history, the practice of land application of wastewater for disposal and agricultural use was utilized first in European cities and later in USA. Today, the planning and implementation of water reclamation and reuse projects is occurring throughout the world. Recycled water is now used for almost any purpose including potable use. This paper provides a brief overview of the evolution of water reuse over the last ca. 5,000 years. Understanding the practices and solutions of the past, provides a lens with which to view present and future challenges in a highly-urbanized world.

K. Daly, Pierpaolo Maisano Delser, Victoria E. Mullin et al.

How humans got their goats Little is known regarding the location and mode of the early domestication of animals such as goats for husbandry. To investigate the history of the goat, Daly et al. sequenced mitochondrial and nuclear sequences from ancient specimens ranging from hundreds to thousands of years in age. Multiple wild populations contributed to the origin of modern goats during the Neolithic. Over time, one mitochondrial type spread and became dominant worldwide. However, at the whole-genome level, modern goat populations are a mix of goats from different sources and provide evidence for a multilocus process of domestication in the Near East. Furthermore, the patterns described support the idea of multiple dispersal routes out of the Fertile Crescent region by domesticated animals and their human counterparts. Science, this issue p. 85 Ancient goat genomes elucidate a dispersed domestication process across the Near East. Current genetic data are equivocal as to whether goat domestication occurred multiple times or was a singular process. We generated genomic data from 83 ancient goats (51 with genome-wide coverage) from Paleolithic to Medieval contexts throughout the Near East. Our findings demonstrate that multiple divergent ancient wild goat sources were domesticated in a dispersed process that resulted in genetically and geographically distinct Neolithic goat populations, echoing contemporaneous human divergence across the region. These early goat populations contributed differently to modern goats in Asia, Africa, and Europe. We also detect early selection for pigmentation, stature, reproduction, milking, and response to dietary change, providing 8000-year-old evidence for human agency in molding genome variation within a partner species.

P. Skoglund, I. Mathieson

The first decade of ancient genomics has revolutionized the study of human prehistory and evolution. We review new insights based on prehistoric modern human genomes, including greatly increased resolution of the timing and structure of the out-of-Africa expansion, the diversification of present-day non-African populations, and the earliest expansions of those populations into Eurasia and America. Prehistoric genomes now document population transformations on every inhabited continent-in particular the effect of agricultural expansions in Africa, Europe, and Oceania-and record a history of natural selection that shapes present-day phenotypic diversity. Despite these advances, much remains unknown, in particular about the genomic histories of Asia (the most populous continent) and Africa (the continent that contains the most genetic diversity). Ancient genomes from these and other regions, integrated with a growing understanding of the genomic basis of human phenotypic diversity, will be in focus during the next decade of research in the field.

Nayereh Hassanvand, Hassan Sattari Sarbanqoli

The cultural rituals of any society are the birth certificates of that society’s culture, history, religion, and ethics. These rites and rituals are an important factor in fostering cohesion and unity among the people of a society who gather together in various ceremonies. Mourning ceremonies and rituals vary in different provinces, cities, and villages across the country, particularly during the first decade of Muharram. Iran is considered one of the inheritors of world culture due to its diverse and rich cultural rituals. The purpose of this research is to do a comparative and documented study of Muharram rituals in these two provinces so that by revealing the manifestations of cultural rituals and their differences and similarities, we can reach the deep and rich layers of the culture of these two provinces. This research intends to investigate the differences and similarities between the rituals of the first decade of Muharram and their cultural differences in the two provinces of East Azarbaijan and Khuzestan, using a descriptive-comparative study method. These two provinces have a deep cultural and religious background and an ancient civilization. The results of this research show that despite the great similarity in the performance of Muharram rituals in the two provinces in question, the diversity of mourning rituals is also visible in these two provinces. The varieties and differences are closely related to cultural, climatic, and linguistic differences in these two provinces. These two provinces’ people have chosen to mourn in accordance with their religion, vegetation, culture, and language. The results of this research show that, in addition to these differences, the common points of this cultural ritual in the two provinces are the love of the Prophet’s family and devotion to Ashura culture.

Yegor Grebnev, Lesley Smith

Visually complex texts emerge as a response to complicated cosmological, social, or ontological phenomena in reality, and different pre-modern cultures came up with their own unique ways of re-presenting this reality in textual form. Today, with the help of digital media, it becomes possible to discuss visually complex texts from different cultures in a way that facilitates the exchange of research ideas between specialists working with different regions and languages.

Shijing Si, Siqing Zhou, Le Tang et al.

ChatGPT's proficiency in handling modern standard languages suggests potential for its use in understanding ancient Chinese. This paper explores ChatGPT's capabilities on ancient Chinese via two tasks: translating ancient Chinese to modern Chinese and recognizing ancient Chinese names. A comparison of ChatGPT's output with human translations serves to evaluate its comprehension of ancient Chinese. The findings indicate that: (1.)the proficiency of ancient Chinese by ChatGPT is yet to reach a satisfactory level; (2.) ChatGPT performs the best on ancient-to-modern translation when feeding with three context sentences. To help reproduce our work, we display the python code snippets used in this study.

P. B. Damgaard, Nina Marchi, Simon Rasmussen et al.

Antonio Ignacio Molina

Reseña de B. Antela-Bernárdez, Apología de Olimpia de Épiro: Tres ensayos críticos, Madrid, Ediciones Clásicas, 2021, 136.pp. [ISBN 978-84-7882-872-2].

Clarence Protin

In this essay we examine some aspects of the classical theory of definition as codified in Aristotle's \emph{Topics} and Porphyry's \emph{Eisagogê} in the light of the way definition is carried out in modern mathematical practice. Our goal is to contribute to the understanding of the alleged gap existing between ancient and modern logic and science as well as the reasons behind allegations of inadequacy and lack of sophistication in the ancient theory of definition. Also to investigate the possibility of a co-interpretation between modern mathematical definitional practice and ancient definitional practice in particular in the light of topos theory. We find the ancient definitional practice asks relevant and overlooked questions about modern mathematical practice which apparently have escaped current philosophical and mathematical logical literature. We also present some general considerations about the structure and development of theories as these relate to the theory of definition.

Xiaoyu Yuan, Zhibo Zhang, Yabo Sun et al.

The Houma Alliance Book is one of the national treasures of the Museum in Shanxi Museum Town in China. It has great historical significance in researching ancient history. To date, the research on the Houma Alliance Book has been staying in the identification of paper documents, which is inefficient to identify and difficult to display, study and publicize. Therefore, the digitization of the recognized ancient characters of Houma League can effectively improve the efficiency of recognizing ancient characters and provide more reliable technical support and text data. This paper proposes a new database of Houma Alliance Book ancient handwritten characters and a multi-modal fusion method to recognize ancient handwritten characters. In the database, 297 classes and 3,547 samples of Houma Alliance ancient handwritten characters are collected from the original book collection and by human imitative writing. Furthermore, the decision-level classifier fusion strategy is applied to fuse three well-known deep neural network architectures for ancient handwritten character recognition. Experiments are performed on our new database. The experimental results first provide the baseline result of the new database to the research community and then demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed method.

Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield, J. Prag

Ancient History relies on disciplines such as Epigraphy, the study of ancient inscribed texts, for evidence of the recorded past. However, these texts, “inscriptions”, are often damaged over the centuries, and illegible parts of the text must be restored by specialists, known as epigraphists. This work presents Pythia, the first ancient text restoration model that recovers missing characters from a damaged text input using deep neural networks. Its architecture is carefully designed to handle long-term context information, and deal efficiently with missing or corrupted character and word representations. To train it, we wrote a non-trivial pipeline to convert PHI, the largest digital corpus of ancient Greek inscriptions, to machine actionable text, which we call PHI-ML. On PHI-ML, Pythia’s predictions achieve a 30.1% character error rate, compared to the 57.3% of human epigraphists. Moreover, in 73.5% of cases the ground-truth sequence was among the Top-20 hypotheses of Pythia, which effectively demonstrates the impact of this assistive method on the field of digital epigraphy, and sets the state-of-the-art in ancient text restoration.

Kozlenko M.V.

A density modeling of the north-western shelf of the Black Sea along 31°20’ E was carried out. According to its results, a complex block structure of the area is determined, which is closely connected with the history of its development. Signs of Baikal tectonic activation of the southern edge of the pre-Riphean Eastern European platform, as well as the adjacent part of the Scythian plate have been revealed. Areas formed during the Hercynian and Cimmerian epochs of tectogenesis have been identified within the Scythian plate. At the base of the Karkinit Trough, two areas of reduced crust resulting from riftogenesis with varying degrees of intensity of basification have been established. Two ancient volcanos of ryolite composition were found on the basement surface on the northern slope of the Kalamit swell. It is highly probable that the Gamburtsev uplift is an eastern extension of the Gubkin swell. According to the structure and value of the calculated densities, it is established that the Gamburtsev uplift is a «blind» mud volcano, which was formed during the second stage of the late Cimmerian cycle and was active throughout the Cretaceous period. A detailed analysis of the deep structure and fault tectonics of the local structures of the sedimentary cover in the intersection of the profile and the area of gas seeps was carried out. It was found that the Flangova, Partizanska and Hamburtseva structures are more promising for hydrocarbon accumulation. The hydrocarbon potential of the Ushakov structure (H-41) is questionable, because structurally and tectonically it is analogous to the Delphin structure, which was deemed unproductive based on drilling results. The area of gas seeps was found to be confined to a mantle fault, which separates two blocks with distinctly different structures and Meso-Cenozoic evolution of the Earth’s crust. It is proposed to conduct a detailed seismic survey in this area in order to identify local structures in the sedimentary cover, promising for hydrocarbons.

Ricardo Nobre

Do labor académico de Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira fazem parte diversos estudos sobre a recepção das literaturas antigas na poesia portuguesa de diferentes épocas, sendo especial atenção concedida à obra de poetas contemporâneos como Eugénio de Andrade, Manuel Alegre, Miguel Torga e — pelo menos desde 1981, com o estudo «Motivos clássicos na poesia portuguesa contemporânea: o mito de Orfeu e Eurídice» (recolhido em 1988 nos Novos Ensaios sobre Temas Clássicos na Poesia Portuguesa) — Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, a quem a professora de Coimbra dedicou pelo menos quatro ensaios: «Paisagem real e paisagem espiritual em alguns poetas portugueses contemporâneos», «The classical heritage in contemporary Portuguese poetry: a few examples» e sobretudo «A luz da Grécia» (todos reunidos em 2003 no volume Portugal e a Herança Clássica e Outros Textos). Na interpretação proposta, de exemplar rigor informativo e com um saber imenso, Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira instituiu na obra desses poetas uma linha de leitura que se tornou central na crítica literárias portuguesa, a que não terá ficado alheio o desenvolvimento do tema das presenças clássicas no âmbito da investigação universitária. Assim, sem deixar de mencionar outros trabalhos da crítica sobre o mesmo tema (como a investigação levada a termo por José Ribeiro Ferreira, Fernando J. B. Martinho, Eduardo Lourenço ou Federico Bertolazzi), são o objecto de estudo deste ensaio métodos de análise utilizados por Rocha Pereira ao ler Sophia, a que conclusões chegou sobre a influência dos clássicos na obra da poetisa e como alterou a interpretação da poesia da segunda metade do nosso século xx.