Linear A

Examples of Linear A in the following topics:

• The Minoans

  • After c. 1700 BCE, the material culture on the Greek mainland achieved a new level due to Minoan influence.
  • The Egyptian hieroglyphs served as a model for Minoan pictographic writing, from which the famous Linear A and Linear B writing systems later developed.
  • Ceramics from the Early Minoan period are characterized by linear patterns of spirals, triangles, curved lines, crosses, and fishbone motifs.
  • The Minoans seem to have worshiped primarily goddesses, and can be described as a "matriarchal religion."
  • These include a mother goddess of fertility, a mistress of the animals, a protectress of cities, the household, the harvest, and the underworld, to name a few.

• Introduction to the Renaissance

  • As a cultural movement, the Renaissance encompassed the innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch, the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting, and gradual but widespread educational reform.
  • The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and in line with general skepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual culture heroes as "Renaissance men," questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation.
  • Some observers have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity, while social and economic historians, especially of the longue durée (long-term), have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a thousand ties."
  • The Renaissance: Was it a Thing?
  • Florence was a key city to give rise to this artistic and cultural phenomenon.

• Greek Dark Ages

  • The Greek Dark Ages were ushered in by a period of violence and characterized by the disruption of Greek cultural progress.
  • The palace economy of the Aegean Region that had characterized the Late Bronze Age was replaced, after a hiatus, by the isolated village cultures of the Greek Dark Ages, a period that lasted for more than 400 years.
  • The Linear B writing of the Greek language used by Mycenaean bureaucrats ceased, and decorations on Greek pottery after about 1100 BCE lacks the figurative decoration of the Mycenaeans and was restricted to simpler geometric styles.
  • Excavations of Dark Age communities such as Nichoria in the Peloponnese have shown how a Bronze Age town was abandoned in 1150 BCE, but then reemerged as a small village cluster by 1075 BCE.
  • Some remains appears to have been the living quarters for a chieftain.

• Classical Greek Poetry and History

  • Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy (Ilium) by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events surrounding a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles.
  • Additionally, linguistic studies into oral epic traditions in nearby civilizations and the deciphering of Linear B in the 1950s provided further evidence that the Homeric poems could have been derived from oral transmissions of long form tales about a war that actually took place.
  • He was a contemporary of Socrates.
  • For this reason, Herodotus drew criticism from his contemporaries, being touted as a mere storyteller and even a falsifier of information.
  • Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides did not view his historical accounts as a source of moral lessons, but rather as a factual reporting of contemporary political and military events.

• Arts and Sciences

  • At the turn to the Renaissance, Gutenberg’s invention of mechanical printing made possible a dissemination of knowledge to a wider population that would lead to not only a gradually more egalitarian society, but one more able to dominate other cultures, drawing from a vast reserve of knowledge and experience.
  • A precursor to Renaissance art can be seen in the early 14th century works of Giotto.
  • There were several important technical innovations in visual arts, like the principle of linear perspective found in the work of Masaccio and later described by Brunelleschi.
  • William of Ockham, from stained glass window at a church in Surrey.
  • A book is defined as printed matter containing more than 49 pages.

• Toward a German Identity

• A Divided Korea

• The Manor System

  • A serf could grow what crops he saw fit on his lands, although a serf's taxes often had to be paid in wheat.
  • Villeinage was preferable to being a vagabond, a slave, or an un-landed laborer.
  • In the foreground, a farmer plowing a field with a plow pulled by two oxen; man the leader with a long pole.
  • Winemakers prune the vine in a pen and till the soil with a hoe to aerate the soil.
  • On the right, a man leans on a bag, presumably to draw seeds that he will then sow.

• Eva's test atom

• Feudalism

  • A lord was in broad terms a noble who held land, a vassal was a person who was granted possession of the land by the lord, and a fief was what the land was known as.
  • Below the king in the feudal pyramid was a tenant-in-chief (generally in the form of a baron or knight), who was a vassal of the king.
  • Holding from the tenant-in-chief was a mesne tenant—generally a knight or baron who was sometimes a tenant-in-chief in their capacity as holder of other fiefs.
  • Before a lord could grant land (a fief) to someone, he had to make that person a vassal.
  • From a manuscript of a chanson de geste, c. 14th Century.