The Rosetta Stone is a stone with writing on it in two languages (Egyptian and Greek),
using three scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek). The Rosetta Stone is written in three scripts
because when it was written, there were three scripts being used in Egypt. The first was hieroglyphic which was the
script used for important or religious documents. The second was demotic which was the common
script of Egypt. The third was Greek
which was the language of the rulers of Egypt at that time. The Rosetta Stone was carved in 196 B.C., and
found by French soldiers in 1799. The
Rosetta Stone was found in a small village in the Delta called Rosetta
(Rashid). The stone lists all of the
things that the pharaoh has done that are good for the priests and the people
of Egypt. http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/writing/rosetta.html
The Rosetta Stone has been exhibited almost continuously in the British Museum since
June 1802. It was part of a collection
of ancient Egyptian monuments captured from the French expedition, including a sarcophagus of Nectanebo II, the statue of a high priest of Amun ,
and a large granite fist. The objects were soon discovered to
be too heavy for the floors of Montagu House (the
original building of The British Museum), and they were transferred to a new
extension that was built onto the mansion.
The Rosetta Stone was transferred to the sculpture gallery in 1834
shortly after Montagu House was demolished and replaced by the building that
now houses the British Museum. The stone, carved in black granodiorite during the Hellenistic
period, is believed to have
originally been displayed within a temple, possibly at nearby Sais. It was probably moved during
the early
Christian or medieval period, and was eventually used as building material in the
construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. It was
rediscovered there in July 1799 by a French soldier named Pierre-François
Bouchard during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. It was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual
text recovered
in modern times, and it aroused widespread public
interest with its
potential to decipher this previously untranslated hieroglyphic language. British troops defeated the French in Egypt in 1801, and the original
stone came into British possession under the Capitulation of Alexandria and was transported to London. A replica of the Rosetta Stone is now
available in the King's Library of
the British Museum, without a case and free to touch, as it would have appeared
to early 19th-century visitors. The
museum was concerned about heavy
bombing in London towards the end of the First World War in
1917, and the Rosetta Stone was moved to safety, along with other portable
objects of value. The stone spent the
next two years 15 m (50 ft) below ground level in a station of the Postal Tube
Railway at Mount
Pleasant near Holborn. Other than during wartime, the
Rosetta Stone has left the British Museum only once: for one month in October 1972, to be displayed
alongside Champollion's Lettre at
the Louvre in Paris on the 150th anniversary of
the letter's publication. Egypt first requested the return of the Rosetta Stone
in July 2003, on the British Museum's 250th anniversary. Zahi Hawass, the chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities,
asked that the stele be repatriated to Egypt, commenting that it was the "icon of our
Egyptian identity". He repeated the proposal two years
later in Paris, listing the stone as one of several key items belonging to
Egypt's cultural heritage, a list which also included: the iconic bust of Nefertiti in the Egyptian
Museum of Berlin; a statue of the Great
Pyramid architect Hemiunu in the Roemer-und-Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim, Germany; the Dendara Temple Zodiac in the Louvre in Paris; and the bust
of Ankhhaf from the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston. Read much more and see pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
It was during an era much like ours when the public
library became an American institution by
Barbara Fister April 26, 2017 Of all of our cultural institutions,
the public library is remarkable. There
are few tax-supported services that are used by people of all ages, classes,
races, and religions. I can’t think of
any public institutions (except perhaps parks) that are as well-loved and
widely used as libraries. Nobody has
suggested that tax dollars be used for vouchers to support the development of
private libraries or that we shouldn't trust those "government" libraries. Even though the recession following the 2008
crash has led to reduced staff and hours in American libraries, threats of
closure are generally met with vigorous community resistance. Visits and check-outs are up significantly
over the past ten years, though it has decreased a bit in recent years. Reduced funding seems to be a factor, though
the high point was 2009; library use parallels unemployment
figures--low unemployment often means fewer people use public libraries. A for-profit company that claims to run
libraries more cheaply than local governments currently has contracts to
manage only sixteen of over 9,000 public library systems in the U.S. Few public institutions have been so
impervious to privatization. I find it
intriguing that the American public library grew out of an era that has many
similarities to this one--the last quarter of the 19th century, when large
corporations owned by the super-rich had gained the power to shape society and
fundamentally change the lives of ordinary people. It was also a time of new communication technologies,
novel industrial processes, and data-driven management methods that treated
workers as interchangeable cogs in a Tayloristic, efficient machine. Stuff got cheaper and more abundant, but
wages fell and employment was precarious, with mass layoffs common. The financial sector was behaving badly, too,
leading to cyclical panics and depressions.
The gap between rich and poor grew, with unprecedented levels of wealth
concentrated among a tiny percentage of the population. It all sounds strangely
familiar. The changes weren’t all
economic. A wave of immigration, largely
from southern and eastern Europe and from the Far East before the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882, changed national demographics. Teddy Roosevelt warned of “race suicide,”
urging white protestant women to reproduce at the same rate as other groups to
make America Anglo-Saxon again. The
hard-won rights of emancipated African Americans were systematically rolled
back through voter suppression, widespread acts of terror, and the enactment of
Jim Crow laws. Indigenous people faced
broken treaties, seized land, military suppression, and forced
assimilation. How interesting that it
was during this turbulent time of change when the grand idea of the American
public library--a publicly-supported cultural institution that would be open to
all members of the community for their enjoyment and education--emerged.
Taylorism:
Production efficiency methodology that breaks every action, job, or task
into small and simple segments which can be easily analyzed and taught.
Introduced in the early 20th century, Taylorism (1) aims to achieve maximum job
fragmentation to minimize skill requirements and job learning time, (2)
separates execution of work from work-planning, (3) separates direct labor from
indirect labor (4) replaces rule of thumb productivity estimates with precise
measurements, (5) introduces time and motion study for optimum job performance,
cost accounting, tool and work station design, and (6) makes possible
payment-by-result method of wage determination.
Named after the US industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor
(1856-1915) who in his 1911 book 'Principles Of Scientific Management' laid
down the fundamental principles of large-scale manufacturing through
assembly-line factories. He emphasized
gaining maximum efficiency from both machine and worker, and maximization of
profit for the benefit of both workers and management Although rightly criticized for alienating
workers by (indirectly but substantially) treating them as mindless,
emotionless, and easily replicable factors of production, Taylorism was a
critical factor in the unprecedented scale of US factory output that led to
Allied victory in Second World War, and the subsequent US dominance of the
industrial world. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/Taylorism.html
THAT can be
used as a definite article, a conjunction, an adverb, pronoun, and adjective. THEM is
a pronoun. www.partofspeech.org/
BETWEEN
is a preposition. http://www.csi.edu/ip/adc/faculty/bbennett/ps011exp.htm
Firth is a word in the Scots and English languages used to denote various
coastal waters in Scotland and England.
In mainland Scotland, it is used to refer to a large sea bay, or even a strait.
In the Northern Isles, it more usually refers to a
smaller inlet. It is linguistically cognate to fjord which
has a more constrained sense in English.
Bodies of water named "firths" tend to be more common on the
east coast, or in the southwest of the country, although the Firth of Lorn is
an exception to this. The Highland coast
contains numerous estuaries, straits, and inlets of a similar kind, but not
called "firth" (e.g. the Minch and Loch Torridon); instead, these are often
called sea
lochs. A firth is generally
the result of ice age glaciation and is very often associated with a
large river, where erosion caused by the tidal effects of incoming sea water
passing upriver has widened the riverbed into an estuary.
Find a list of firths at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firth
10 Highest-Paid Public Speakers In the World reported April 27, 2010 Donald Trump, $1-1.5 million: 2006 and 2007; Ronald Reagan, $1 million: 1989; Tony Blair, $616,000: On a
lecture by lecture basis, Blair is likely the world’s best paid speaker. In 2009, he made almost $616,000 for two half-hour speeches given in the Philippines, raking in over $10,000
a minute. Read the rest of the list at http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/04/10-highest-paid-public-speakers-in-the-world/
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1702
May 2, 2017 On this date in 1952,
the world's first ever jet airliner, the De Havilland Comet 1
made its maiden flight, from London to Johannesburg.
On this date in 1955, Tennessee Williams won
the Pulitzer Prize for
Drama for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. On this date in 2012, a pastel version
of The Scream,
by Norwegian painter Edvard
Munch, sold for $120 million in a New York City auction, setting a new
world record for a work of art at auction.
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