The Engraved Tridacna-Shell Discs

1984 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 15-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baruch Brandl
Keyword(s):  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  

It is now more than 140 years since archaeologists began dealing with the engraved Tridacna shells, whose distribution extended from Vulci in the west to Susa in the east, and from Memphis in the south to Gordion and Vulci in the north. Their number is growing constantly and is now approaching 100. This increase is the result not only of the publication of new finds or old museum material, which until now escaped the scholar's eyes, but also of the reclassification of four items, in the past said to be imitations made of various stones, as authentic Tridacna shells.In this article I want to show that this is true not only with the complete Tridacna shells, but also of a sub-group of Tridacna shells cut into the shape of discs. I will try to prove that the items in this sub-group are indeed Tridacna shells by describing them and discussing their motives and distribution. I will not deal with questions such as the centre of manufacture, distributors, style etc. important as they are. These aspects will be discussed by me in detail in a separate publication which will treat the Tridacna shell group as a whole.

Author(s):  
Viktor Savić ◽  
◽  

According to M. Pešikan, Fol. 10 from the Vukan Gospel (10a.8–10g.21) was almost entirely written by Scribe IV, one of the eight scribes involved in writing out the original book. The greatest part of the manuscript was written by the monk Simeon. Scribe IV was a follower of an ancient, non-calligraphic Cyrillic tradition, older than any other tradition identified in this manuscript. In terms of palaeographic and orthographic features, he was a predecessor of the "Bosnian" codices of the 13th–15th centuries. This confirms that there was a direct link between the Serbian literacy tradition in Bosnia and the earlier literacy tradition in Raška, namely one of its many lines. Further, in the past, this tradition can be traced back to the South Slavic literacy tradition developed in the Byzantine Empire, in the territory of present-day Macedonia. The concept of the "southern line", which has so far been used in explaining the origins of western Serbian, "Bosnian" literary monuments, acquires a different meaning in this light: a crucial hub in spreading literacy from the south to the north were Serbian scriptoria – from northern Macedonia, through Kosovo and Metohija, to Raška – where the Serbian recension was fist-shaped and then spread further to the west, to Bosnia.


1918 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-191
Author(s):  
Simon Litman

From tyrannical autocracy to a most radically socialistic régime, from an empire oppressing subjugated peoples to a country proclaiming the principle of “self-determination of nationalities”—such has been the remarkable record of Russia during the past year. These changes, which have come to many as a surprise, were to those acquainted with the ferment permeating Russian life but the logical outcome of Russia's historic development.In order to be able to interpret the trend of recent events there, events which since the overthrow of Tsarism have been moving with such bewildering rapidity, it is necessary to know what have been the forces that have shaped the life of the country. Russian evolution has come through periods of subjugation, through century long struggles for self-assertion against invaders, through many internal uprisings and through successful wars of expansion. Beginning as a small principality in the interior of a plain, Russia spread to the north and to the south, to the west and to the east until she became a world empire, in area the greatest compact country on the face of the earth, occupying 8,505,000 square miles, or larger in size than all of North America, and having a population of over 175,000,000 people.


1901 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-42
Author(s):  
F. H. Wolley Dod

Calgary (altitude 3,400 ft.) is strictly a prairie city, situate at the junction of the Bow and Elbow rivers, about 40 or 50 miles from the true base of the Rocky Mountains. For several hundred miles to the east, the prairie is, with the exception of a few spots on river bottoms, absolutely void of either timber or scrub. A very few miles to the west the country becomes decidedly hilly, and in places densely covered witli dwarf willows. Still further west the hills increase in height, shrubs become proportionately more abundant, and several species of poplars make their appearance, the north and west sides of the hills being usually densely wooded. By far the greater portion of the material from which this list has been compiled has been taken by myself and Mr. A. Hudson during the past seven seasons amongst these hills (3,600-4,000 ft.) near the head of Pine Creek, about sixteen miles to the south-west of Calgary. This “hill-prairie,” as I will call it, and which may be looked upon as the boundary between the prairie and the foothills, is well watered by numerous creeks, and the valleys and hillsides—where not too steep—are largely grazed and cultivated, but otherwise splendid hunting grounds for the entomologist.


1935 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 1-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. A. Heurtley

Pelikáta hill might best be described as a spur of Mt. Exogé, which lies immediately to the west of it; but it is also joined on the south to the central peak of the island (Mt. Anogé) by a narrow ridge on which stands the main street of Stavrós village. Elsewhere it is detached (Pl. 2), and its sides fall in irregular gradations, broken further by terraces, to Afáles bay on the north, Phríkes bay on the east and Pólis bay on the south. From the summit all three bays are visible and any one of them can be reached in a short half-hour. In addition to its command of the three bays, Pelikáta has to-day, and presumably had in the past, a supply of first-rate drinking-water, reached at a depth of a few metres below the surface; and a small level space on the actual summit.


Author(s):  
A. J. Southward

Previous plankton work at Plymouth is reviewed briefly, and the limitations of the stramin ring trawl as a quantitative sampler discussed. The distribution of certain zooplankton ‘indicator’ species caught in hauls of the 2 and 1 m ring trawl during cruises in 1955 and 1957 is described in comparison with regular 2 m hauls taken throughout the same years at two stations near Plymouth.The results support previous suggestions that ‘western’ water at Plymouth is derived from a region to the south of Ireland, i.e. from the north-west, and is not now in the direct path of the flow of water into the English Channel from the west.An apparent northward spread of the warm-water copepod Euchaeta hebes during the past 50 years may be connected with the rise in sea temperature over the same period. It is suggested that related changes in distribution might be responsible in part for changes in the macroplankton community off Plymouth since the 1920's.


Author(s):  
Esraa Aladdin Noori ◽  
Nasser Zain AlAbidine Ahmed

The Russian-American relations have undergone many stages of conflict and competition over cooperation that have left their mark on the international balance of power in the Middle East. The Iraqi and Syrian crises are a detailed development in the Middle East region. The Middle East region has allowed some regional and international conflicts to intensify, with the expansion of the geopolitical circle, which, if applied strategically to the Middle East region, covers the area between Afghanistan and East Asia, From the north to the Maghreb to the west and to the Sudan and the Greater Sahara to the south, its strategic importance will seem clear. It is the main lifeline of the Western world.


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Brown ◽  
Henry Davis ◽  
Michael Schwan ◽  
Barbara Sennott

Gitksan (git) is an Interior Tsimshianic language spoken in northwestern British Columbia, Canada. It is closely related to Nisga'a, and more distantly related to Coast Tsimshian and Southern Tsimshian. The specific dialect of Gitksan presented here is what can be called Eastern Gitksan, spoken in the villages of Kispiox (Ansbayaxw), Glen Vowell (Sigit'ox), and Hazelton (Git-an'maaxs), which contrasts with the Western dialects, spoken in the villages of Kitwanga (Gitwingax), Gitanyow (Git-anyaaw), and Kitseguecla (Gijigyukwhla). The primary phonological differences between the dialects are a lexical shift in vowels and the presence of stop lenition in the Eastern dialects. While there exists a dialect continuum, the primary cultural and political distinction drawn is between Eastern and Western Gitksan. For reference, Gitksan is bordered on the west by Nisga'a, in the south by Coast Tsimshian and Witsuwit'en, in the east by Dakelh and Sekani, and in the north by Tahltan (the latter four of these being Athabaskan languages).


Antiquity ◽  
1949 ◽  
Vol 23 (91) ◽  
pp. 129-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. G. Childe

Till 1948 the coherent record of farming in Northern Europe began with the neolithic culture represented in the Danish dysser (‘dolmens’) and most readily defined by the funnel-necked beakers, collared flasks and ‘amphorae’ found therein. As early as 1910 Gustav Kossinna had remarked that these distinctive ceramic types, and accordingly the culture they defined, were not confined to the West Baltic coastlands, but recurred in the valleys of the Upper Vistula and Oder to the east, to the south as far as the Upper Elbe and in northwest Germany and Holland too. He saw in this distribution evidence for the first expansion of Urindogermanen from their cradle in the Cimbrian peninsula. In the sequel Åberg filled in the documentation of this expansion with fresh spots on the distribution map and Kossinna himself distinguished typologically four main provinces or geographical groups—the Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western. Finally Jazdrzewski gave a standard account of the whole content of what had come to be called Kultura puharów lejkowatych, Trichterbecherkultur, or Tragtbaegerkulturen. As ‘Funnel-necked-beaker culture’ is a clumsy expression and English terminology is already overloaded with ‘beakers’, I shall use the term ‘First Northern’.The orgin of this vigorous and expansive group of cultivators and herdsmen has always been an enigma. Not even Kossinna imagined that the savages of the Ertebølle shell-mounds spontaneously began cultivating cereals and breeding sheep in Denmark. As dysser were regarded as megalithic tombs and as megaliths are Atlantic phenomena, he supposed that the bases of the neolithic economy were introduced from the West together with the ‘megalithic idea’. But the First Northern Farmers of the South and East groups did not build megalithic tombs. Moreover, in the last ten years an extension of the North group across southern Sweden as far as Södermannland has come to light, and these farmers too, though they used collared flasks and funnel-necked beakers, built no dolmens either. In any case there was nothing Western about the pottery from the Danish dysser, and Western types of arrow-head are conspicuously rare in Denmark.


1963 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 99-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. J. Wainwright

The distribution of Mesolithic sites in Wales is controlled to a great extent by the terrain, for physiographically, Wales is a highland block defined on three sides by the sea and for the greater part of the fourth side by a sharp break of slope. Geologically the Principality is composed almost entirely of Palaeozoic rocks, of which the 600-foot contour encloses more than three quarters of the total area. There are extensive regions above 1,500 feet and 2,000 feet and in the north the peaks of Snowdonia and Cader Idris rise to 3,560 feet and 2,929 feet respectively. Indeed North Wales consists of an inhospitable highland massif, skirted by a lowland plateau and cut deeply by river valleys, providing only limited areas for settlement. The hills and mountains of Snowdonia with their extension at lower altitudes into the Lleyn Peninsula, and the ranges of Moelwyn, Manod Mawr, Arenig Fach and Cader Idris, are discouraging obstacles to penetration, save for a short distance along the river valleys. To the east of these peaks are extensive tracts of upland plateau dissected by rivers, bounded on the west by the vale of the river Conway and cleft by the Vale of Clwyd. To the east of this valley lies the Clwydian Range and further again to the east these uplands descend with milder contours to the Cheshire and Shropshire plains.To the south the district merges into the uplands of Central Wales, which are continuous until they are replaced by the lowland belt of South Wales.


1907 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Tanner Hewlett ◽  
George S. Barton

In view of the importance of a pure milk supply, we considered that it might be of interest to examine chemically, microscopically, and bacteriologically, a number of specimens of milk coming into the Metropolis for which purpose we decided to select samples from the various counties, the milk of which is consigned to London. We found that milk so consigned comes from about twenty-six counties extending from Derby in the North, to Hampshire and Devonshire in the South and South-West, and from Hereford in the West, to Norfolk in the East.


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