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December 30, 2011 - May 25, 2012
Babylonian scientists used a counting system based on the number sixty, which is why minutes have sixty seconds.
After conquering Egypt, Alexander founded the city of Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, one of a dozen cities he named after himself. In Alexandria, the Greeks built a gigantic library to house thousands of parchments. The library burned down a few centuries later, destroying a vast amount of knowledge about the ancient world.
discovered by a peasant on the Greek island of Melos in 1820.
marble from the Greek island of Paros.
subject is Aphrodite,
artist as Alexandros of Antioch of Menander, a colony that was not founded until later,
first is the entirely natural process by which the atmosphere prevents heat from escaping back into space.
expression greenhouse effect also refers to an increase in greenhouse gases over the last century that may be contributing to global warming.
Venus causes a runaway greenhouse effect, a positive feedback cycle of reheating that leaves Venus’s surface hot enough to melt lead. Mars has almost no atmosphere, and hence no greenhouse effect, which is part of the reason it is so cold.
Mass is divided into two sets of rituals:
ordinary consists of six Latin prayers
prayers of the proper,
consist of texts that vary according to seasonal liturgy and local traditions.
troubadours, composed secular songs about love and war.
jongleurs would travel from one royal court to another, singing their own songs and those of the troubadours.
Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) was the earliest known female composer.
Hagia Sophia was built as a Christian cathedral in Constantinople
Hagia Sophia, which means “church of the holy wisdom”
The stone was inscribed in three ancient scripts.
other two inscriptions on the black rock were in different versions of hieroglyphics, the traditional writing of the Egyptians.
French scholar named Jean-Francois Champollion was able to decode the complex Egyptian language after years of study.
first literary works to look critically at the rampant abuses that European imperialism had wreaked in Africa and Asia during the 1800s.
The Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) used a supernova in 1604 to disprove Aristotle’s theory that the universe never changes.
They emphasized a return to the ideals of classical Greece and Rome: love, pleasure, intellect, and the beauty of the human body and emotion.
Canon is a staggered imitation,
The idea of a church hymn began in the Renaissance, and many hymns were composed by Martin Luther.
Aristotle traveled to Athens, where he studied at Plato’s school, the Academy. After Plato’s death, Aristotle founded his own school, the Lyceum.
In Aristotle’s conception, ethics is mostly a matter of good training.
Aristotle believed that the goal of the state is to provide the context for the happy and self-sufficient lives of its citizens. He was partial to democratic government, but he acknowledged that occasionally a monarchy is more appropriate.
Between his time at Plato’s Academy and the founding of his own school, Aristotle was tutor to Alexander the Great,
It is unclear what sins were actually committed by the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Jews believe that they committed the sin of inhospitality.
Conservative Christians, on the other hand, see the sins of Sodom quite differently. When the citizens of Sodom demanded to “know” the angels, it is believed by some that this “knowing” was really a euphemism for sex.
The actual existence of Sodom and Gomorrah is disputed, but some believe they may lie under the Dead Sea.
Emperor Nero ordered the first official persecution of Christians in Rome.
feeding believers to dogs.
As they viewed it, Christians worshipped a criminal crucified by Rome and rejected the divinity of the emperor and the pagan gods.
seeing a vision and converting to Christianity, Emperor Constantine (275–337) issued the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, legalizing Christianity throughout the empire.
In the span of four centuries, Christianity had gone from an outlaw faith embraced by a few Jewish malcontents to an imperial religion.
Roman Catholic Church remains headquartered at Vatican City in Rome, a few blocks from the ruins of the colosseum where ancient Roman authorities once fed Christians to the lions.
Sick of Rome, which he considered an unsuitable capital for his empire, Constantine founded a city at the Hellespont, where Europe meets Asia. It was originally named New Rome but soon came to be known as Constantinople in honor of the emperor. The city is now known as Istanbul, the largest city in modern-day Turkey.
Constantine abolished the gladiatorial games that had amused the Roman masses for centuries,
major innovations was stream-of-consciousness narrative,
Some authors tried to depict the same event or image from multiple perspectives,
virtually all modernists played with the flow of time in their works, discarding linear chronology and jumping abruptly around past, present, and
The term Gothic was coined in Italy and originally carried a negative connotation, associating the architectural style with the Goths
Flying buttresses and external arches were erected to support the weight of the building on the outside. These massive structures allowed more stained glass windows to be cut into the walls, thus making their interiors brighter and more resplendent with color.
In Italy, it faded earlier with the onset of the Renaissance.

