Topic10:
Write a
composition on the scientific achievements of the ancient Indus valley
civilization?
Typical
Essay: From the time of the
Harappans to the time of the
Islamic conquests, Indian scientists and
mathematicians were leaders in many different fields. They
especially stood out in mathematics and engineering.
The
Harappans in 2500
BC had a sewage system at their city of Mohenjo-Daro, and carefully laid
out, straight streets. So even though we can't read their writing, we know that
the Harappans understood a lot of
geometry.
A severe
climate change halted development at Harappa around 2000 BC.
The
Aryan invasion of 1500 BC also seems to have stopped
scientific advances for a while, but it did bring military advances to India in
the form of
horse-drawn war chariots. Around 800 BC, when the Aryans in northern India
learned to smelt
iron from the
Assyrians in West Asia, this gave them another military
advantage.
Around 500 BC, thanks to
Persian influence, the city of Taxila (in modern Pakistan) became a great
scientific center. Atreya, a great botanist (
plant specialist) and doctor, was working at Taxila about this time. Around
the 300's BC, Indian farmers seem to have been using water wheels to lift water
for irrigation - the earliest water wheels in the world.
By 250 or 200 BC, under
Mauryan rule, Indian scientists were the first in the world
to be smelting
iron with carbon to make
steel.
In the 600's
AD, Indian
mathematicians may have been responsible for inventing the
numeral zero, and the
decimal (or place) system (or it is possible that they got this idea from
Chinese mathematicians). This made it a lot easier to
add and
multiply than it had been before. Indian mathematical ideas soon spread to
West Asia and from there to Africa and
Europe.
Indian advances in iron-working led to some
new ideas in the 1000's and 1100's AD. First, Indian architects were the first
to use
iron beams to replace wooden beams for building big
temples. Second, Indian blacksmiths discovered a kind of iron that made a very
strong and flexible kind of
steel, called wootz steel.
Topic11:
Write a
composition on the scientific achievements of the Roman civilization?
Typical
Essay: Roman scientific
achievements are mostly in the areas of
medicine and engineering. The Romans invented a lot of new ways to mine for
metals like
silver and
gold and
lead. They developed water mills as well for grinding
grain. And they were the first people to really use
concrete for major building projects. The use of concrete helped them to develop
the
dome and the
barrel vault and the cross vault. They used their vaults to
build
aqueducts to carry fresh water to towns, and they used
their engineering skills to build
sewage systems to keep their towns clean and healthy.
Roman subjects in Phoenicia also invented
blown
glass, and mold-made pottery and oil lamps were also first made in the Roman
period.
In medicine,
Galen wrote during the
Roman Empire, and he was the first to describe many
symptoms and treatments. His medical textbook was the standard for over a
thousand years. The Romans didn't do
that much work in mathematics, but they did develop their own way of writing
numbers.
Topic12:
Write a
composition on the achievements of the Roman civilization in architecture?
Typical
Essay: One of the things the
Romans are most famous for is their architecture. The Romans brought a lot of
new ideas to
architecture, of which the three most important are the
arch, the
baked brick, and the use of
cement and concrete.
Around 700
BC the
Etruscans brought
West Asian ideas about architecture to Italy, and they
taught these ideas to the Romans. We don't have much
Etruscan architecture left, but a lot of their underground tombs do
survive, and some traces of their temples.
In the
Republican period, the Romans built
temples and
basilicas, but also they made a lot of improvements to
their city:
aqueducts and roads and
sewers. The
Forum began to take shape. Outside of Rome, people began to build stone
amphitheaters for
gladiatorial games.
The first Roman emperor,
Augustus, made more changes: he built a lot of
brick and marble buildings, including a big Altar of Peace and
a big tomb for his family, and a big stone theater for plays. Augustus' stepson
Tiberius rebuilt the
Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman forum. Augustus'
great-great-grandson
Nero also did a lot of building in Rome, including his
Golden House.
Then in 69
AD Vespasian tore down some of the Golden House to build
the
Colosseum. Vespasian's son Titus built a great
triumphal arch, and his other son
Domitian built a great
palace for himself on the Palatine hill.
Even though Domitian was assassinated in 96
AD, later architects continued to use the techniques that had been
developed for his palace, just as later emperors continued to live in
Domitian’s palace. Trajan’s architect used
brick and
concrete arches to build a new forum with a big
column in it and an elaborate
market building that is the source of modern shopping malls.
Trajan also built the first major public
bath building in Rome. It may have been the same architect
who later designed Hadrian’s
Pantheon, a temple to all the gods, which used brick and concrete to build a
huge dome. Nobody would build a bigger dome for more than a thousand years.
[ندعوك للتسجيل في المنتدى أو التعريف بنفسك لمعاينة هذا الرابط] Topic13:
Write a
composition on the ancient Roman system of government.
Typical
Essay: From 500
BC to nearly 1500
AD, for two thousand years, Roman government had more or less the same
system. Of course there were some changes over that time too.
When the
Roman Republic was first set up, in 500 BC, the people in
charge were two men called consuls. The consuls controlled the army, and they
decided whether to start a war and how much taxes to collect and what the laws
were. There were also prefects in Rome, whose job was to run the city – some
heard court cases, some ran the vegetable markets or the meat markets or the
port. Finally, there was also an Assembly of all the men (not women) who were
grownup and free and had Roman citizenship.
Once the Romans began
conquering other places, far away from the city of Rome, they also had
a system of provincial governors – men who took charge of a province of the
Empire, and who heard court cases there. They were also in charge of the army
while it was conquering places.
By about 50 BC, the time of
Julius Caesar, these generals had begun to take over the
government and not pay any attention to the consuls or the Senate anymore, and
just do as they pleased. They could do that, because they had the army with
them.
Augustus, in 31 BC, was one of these generals. But he
realized that people didn’t like this pushing people around, and so he set up a
different system keeping the Senate and the consuls This system kept on going
for the next 1500 years, more or less.
Topic14:
Write a
composition on the scientific achievements of the ancient Chinese civilization.
Typical
Essay: In early and medieval
China, as in the
Roman Empire, science seems to have been oriented mainly
towards
engineering and practical inventions, and not so much
towards
theoretical ideas about how the natural world worked. It
was in
Han Dynasty China that
paper was first invented, and about the same time that the
magnetic compass, for telling north from south, was also invented there. Scientists in
China also invented
gunpowder.
Chinese scholars also conducted scientific
observations of
plants and
animals, and also of
astronomy (the
stars and
planets). The many detailed and careful drawings of
flowers and other plants, and star charts, from China show this interest.
The influence of
Confucius made
China a place where logical thought was also highly valued.
Mathematics was taught in the schools, through the use of
a math textbook called the
Nine Chapters, which may have been written as early as the
Han Dynasty in the 200's
AD (but nobody knows for sure).
By around 850 AD, under the Tang Dynasty,
Chinese printers were experimenting with
block printing, and around the year 1000 they invented
moveable type.
Topic15:
Write a
composition on the ancient Islamic civilization.
Typical
Essay: People first came to the Arabian Peninsula
probably about 150,000 BC, in the Old Stone Age. They were
hunters and
gatherers. By 2000
BC (or possibly earlier)
Semitic-speaking people had moved into the
Arabian Peninsula, also coming from the north. They were
nomads when they arrived, who travelled around with their
sheep and goats pasturing them in different pastures at different
times of year. And they stayed nomads: many of them are nomads today.
In the southern part of the peninsula, on the
other hand, the people were
farmers. Nobody is sure where they came from, but the
Queen of Sheba mentioned in the
Bible may be one of these people.
By the time of
Alexander the Great, we start to know a little more about the
Arabs, because the Greeks were
trading with them. The
Romans also
traded with the Arabs, who got spices and other things from
India and sold them to the Romans for
gold.
In the long war between the
Sassanids and the
Romans, different tribes of Arabs fought on each side. In this Late Antique
period, the kingdom of Saba (Sheba) fell apart.
The Prophet
Mohammed was born in the northern Arabian trading city of Mecca between 570 and
580
AD. When he was forty years old, he heard the angel Gabriel speaking to
him and telling Mohammed that he was a prophet in the line of
Abraham,
Moses, and
Jesus, who would continue the faith those prophets had started. Mohammed's
faith was called
Islam (iz-LAMM). After a slow start, Mohammed made a lot of converts to his
religion, and after he won some military battles, most of the other Arabic
tribes also converted to Islam. After they had done that, Mohammed's
successors attacked first the
Romans and then the
Sassanids to convert them. By 640 (after the death of
Mohammed) the Arabs controlled most of
West Asia, and soon after that, under the rule of the
Umayyad caliphs, they conquered
Egypt. By 711, the Umayyads controlled all of
Western Asia except Turkey (which was still part of the
Roman Empire), and all of the southern Mediterranean:
Egypt, Libya,
Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and most of
Spain.
Topic16:
Write a
composition on the scientific achievements of the ancient Islamic civilization.
Typical
Essay: Because
West Asia was such an
economic crossroads in the medieval Islamic period - because of
the
Silk Road that connected
China and
India in the east to
Europe and
Africa in the West - there were always lots of new
scientific ideas coming through West Asia too.
Educated West Asian scholars were able to make use of these foreign ideas to
develop new scientific theories and approaches.
One example from the East is the use of
"Arabic" numbers, which really came from
India, about 630
AD. The Arabic word for numbers, in fact, is
hindsah, which means
"from India". Arab scientists, especially the Persian Mohammed
Al-Khwarizmi, were able to make use of the new numbers (and possibly the work
of
Greek mathematicians like Diophantus of Alexandria) to develop
algebra around 830 AD (The English word "algorithm" comes from
Al-Khwarizmi). (Ordinary people, however, kept on using the
Greek system of numbers; only mathematicians used Arabic numbers).
In the 800's AD, the great schools at Cordoba
in Spain, under
Umayyad rule, inspired many scholars to investigate new
scientific ideas. Among them was a man of
Berber origin, Ibn Firnas, who designed the first glider, which he
successfully used in 875, when he was 65 years old, to fly down from a cliff
near Cordoba (though he hurt his back when he landed). This was the first
controlled human flight.
A more successful invention also from Islamic
Spain was the glass mirror, invented around 1000 AD. Even earlier, in the
900's, Ibn Sahl and others made curved glass mirrors that concentrated sunlight
to focus heat.
About 1000 AD, West Asian blacksmiths also
learned how to make
steel from India, and then they developed the idea further to produce the
very high quality Damascus steel that was used in fighting the
Crusades.
Another example from the East is the use of
paper, which the Arabs learned from the
Chinese about 750 AD. The
magnetic compass also came to West Asia from
China, about 1100 AD.
From the West, Arabic scholars were able to
read the books of the Greek philosophers
Plato and
Aristotle, and the Roman encyclopedist
Pliny the Elder, and they translated these books into
Arabic. They were especially interested in Aristotle and Pliny's studies of
plants and animals, and produced many new studies like that of their own, often
with beautifully detailed and accurate illustrations. This led to the
classification and description of many new species of plants and animals, and
also to advances in
medicine. All through the Middle Ages, everyone knew that the best doctors, men
like
Ibn Sina or
Maimonides, lived in the Islamic kingdoms.
Topic17:
Write a
composition on the achievements of the Islamic civilization in architecture.
Typical
Essay: The first buildings that were built in the
Islamic Empire were designed by
Greek architects who had already been living in the area when
the
Arabs conquered it. Because of that, these buildings look a lot like earlier
buildings in the area - Late Roman Empire buildings. But because they were now
building Islamic
mosques and not Christian
churches, these Greek architects were able to experiment with some new forms,
developing a new Islamic style. One of the earliest mosques is the
Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, from the 600's
AD. It's octagonal, like Hadrian's
Pantheon, instead of being cross-shaped like a
Christian church. In the late 700's AD, the new Arab rulers of
North Africa marked their new territory by building great mosques like the one
at
Kairouan (modern Tunisia) and the one at
Cordoba in Spain.
In the
Abbasid period, beginning about 800
AD, the capital of the Islamic empire moved further east, to Baghdad, and
so the caliphs needed a lot of new beautiful palaces and
mosques built in Baghdad. Because Baghdad was in the old
Sassanian Empire, the architects who lived there followed
Sassanian architectural traditions, and these buildings, like the
mosque at Samarra, looked very different from the ones built by
the Greek architects.
In the end, though, the Islamic Empire made it
so easy to travel around that all the architects got to know each other's
styles, and there got to be one main style of building all across the Islamic
Empire. As the empire broke down into a lot of smaller kingdoms, the ruler of
each kingdom needed to show how important he was, so he built mosques and
palaces in his own capital. The
Fatimids, for example, built the Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo in the 900's AD. In
Spain in the late 1200's AD, the
Almohads, built their own palace at Granada, the
Alhambra.
The Ottoman sultan built the last great Islamic
building before 1500 AD - his
palace in Istanbul, which he built in the late 1400's AD.
Topic18:
Write a
composition on the achievements of the Islamic civilization in art.
Typical
Essay: For the earliest years of the Islamic Empire,
under the
Umayyad dynasty, we don't have very much art surviving. The
best of it is the elaborate
mosaics on the Dome of the Rock
mosque in Jerusalem and on the Great Mosque in Damascus. These mosaics are
done in a
Roman style, probably by Roman craftsmen.
But already we can see one big difference
between Roman art and Islamic art: the followers of
Islam, like the
Jews, took seriously the idea that you should not make graven images, and
although these mosaics show
plants and buildings they do not show people or animals.
By the
Abbasid period, even plants and buildings were frowned on.
Most of the art was geometric designs. A lot of these designs seem to be from
fabric patterns. The Arabs, because they were
nomadic, had always relied on carpets and hangings for decoration. Now that
they lived in buildings, they used those same familiar patterns only in stone
or tile. They often used
calligraphy (beautiful writing) of verses from the
Koran to decorate buildings,
plates, and vases.
In this period, also, the focus of the Islamic
Empire shifted from Damascus and the old
Roman territory east to Baghdad and the old
Sassanian territory. So the art also became more
Persian and less
Roman.
By about 1000 AD, the
Islamic empire was breaking up into smaller states, and each state developed
its own art style. There are individual styles for
Spain, the Maghreb,
Egypt, the
Ottoman Empire, and Persia.
In some of these places, the
iconoclastic rules against using pictures of things or
people were relaxed as time went on. In Persia (modern Iran), painters made
beautiful little miniature paintings of people at court, and of famous people
from history.
The arrival of
paper from
China in 751 AD let artists do a lot more painting, because paper was so much
cheaper than
papyrus or
parchment.
After the
Mongols conquered Persia and
China in the 1200's AD, many Chinese motifs started to show up in Persian
painting and
vases.
الأربعاء 20 ديسمبر 2017 - 13:34 من طرف 
