test please delete

[n5gooner]

Richard has appeared frequently in fiction, as a result of the 'chivalric revival' of the Romantic era. In 1822, he was the subject of Eleanor Anne Porden's epic poem, Cœur de Lion. After Ivanhoe, where he is depicted as initially adopting the pseudonym of Le Noir Fainéant ("The Black Sluggard"), Sir Walter Scott portrayed Richard in The Talisman, a highly fictionalised treatment of the Third Crusade. He is also a major character in James Goldman's play The Lion in Winter, which depicts him as homosexual. He features in Graham Shelby's The Kings of Vain Intent and, more centrally, in The Devil is Loose, Norah Lofts' The Lute-Player, and Jean Plaidy (Eleanor Hibbert)'s The Heart of the Lion. He is portrayed as a merciless Muslim killer in a novel that follows Arn Magnusson in his Crusade Trilogy written by Swedish author Jan Guillou. He is seen as the reluctant husband of Berengaria of Navarre, and as Crusader, in Rachel Bard's Queen Without a Country. He is generally represented in a heroic role in children's fiction, such as Ronald Welch's Knight Crusader.

[Moscow Mule]

Idiomatic use

The term Rosetta Stone has become idiomatic as something that is a critical key to a process of decryption or translation of a difficult problem. For example, "the Rosetta Stone of immunology" [5] and "Arabidopsis, the Rosetta Stone of flowering time (fossils)".[6]

Another example is the Unix rosetta stone[7] which places similar commands from different dialects (and offspring) of Unix side by side. It is very helpful if one has a solid knowledge of one dialect of Unix and needs to quickly find out how a common task is performed on another.

"Rosetta Stoned" is the name of a song on the album "10,000 Days" by American hard rock band "Tool".

[edit] In product names

Rosetta Stone is the title of a computer-based language learning program.

In 2006, Apple Computer bundled a software module called Rosetta with their new Intel-based Macintosh computers; this module is responsible for transparently translating software written and compiled for their older PowerPC-based systems into the object code that the Intel-based hardware can understand.

[edit] See also
* Behistun Inscription

[Troll]

Synopsis in English
“ In the reign of the new king, who was Lord of the diadems, great in glory, the stabilizer of Egypt, and also pious in matters relating to the gods, Superior to his adversaries, rectifier of the life of men, Lord of the thirty-year periods like Hephaestus the Great, King like the Sun, the Great King of the Upper and Lower Lands, offspring of the Parent-loving Gods, whom Hephaestus has approved, to whom the Sun has given victory, living image of Zeus, Son of the Sun, Ptolemy the ever-living, beloved by Ptah;


In the ninth year, when Aëtus, son of Aëtus, was priest of Alexander and of the Savior Gods and the Brother Gods and the Benefactor Gods and the Parent-loving Gods and the God Manifest and Gracious; Pyrrha, the daughter of Philinius, being athlophorus for Bernice Euergetis; Areia, the daughter of Diogenes, being canephorus for Arsinoë Philadelphus; Irene, the daughter of Ptolemy, being priestess of Arsinoë Philopator: on the fourth of the month Xanicus, or according to the Egyptians the eighteenth of Mecheir.

THE DECREE: The high priests and prophets, and those who enter the inner shrine in order to robe the gods, and those who wear the hawks wing, and the sacred scribes, and all the other priests who have assembled at Memphis before the king, from the various temples throughout the country, for the feast of his receiving the kingdom, even that of Ptolemy the ever-living, beloved by Ptah, the God Manifest and Gracious, which he received from his Father, being assembled in the temple in Memphis this day, declared:

Since King Ptolemy, the ever-living, beloved by Ptah, the God Manifest and Gracious, the son of King Ptolemy and Queen Arsinoë, the Parent-loving Gods, has done many benefactions to the temples and to those who dwell in them and also to all those subjects to his rule, being from the beginning a god born of a god and a goddess—like Horus, the son of Isis and Osirus, who came to the help of his Father Osirus—being benevolently disposed toward the gods, has concentrated to the temples revenues both of silver and of grain, and has generously undergone many expenses in order to lead Egypt to prosperity and to establish the temples... the gods have rewarded him with health, victory, power, and all other good things, his sovereignty to continue to him and his children forever.[4]
”

The complete Greek text, in English, [1] is about 1600-1700 words in length, and is about 20 paragraphs long (average 80 words/paragraph).

and this one....

[n5gooner]

Merlin is best known as the wizard featured in Arthurian legend. The standard depiction of the character first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, and is based on an amalgamation of previous historical and legendary figures. Geoffrey combined existing stories of Myrddin Wyllt (Merlinus Caledonensis), a northern madman with no connection to King Arthur, with tales of Aurelius Ambrosius to form the figure he called Merlin Ambrosius.

Geoffrey's version of the character was immediately popular, and later writers expanded the account to produce a fuller image of the wizard. His traditional biography has him born the son of an incubus and a mortal woman who inherits his powers from his strange birth.[1] He grows up to be a sage and engineers the birth of Arthur through magic. Later Merlin serves as the king's advisor until he is bewitched and imprisoned by the Lady of the Lake.

[DS23]

not long now!

[n5gooner]

Geoffrey's composite Merlin is based primarily on Myrddin Wyllt, also called Merlinus Caledonensis, and Aurelius Ambrosius, a highly fictionalized version of the historical war leader Ambrosius Aurelianus. The former had nothing to do with Arthur and flourished after the Arthurian period. Supposedly a bard who went mad after witnessing the horrors of war, he was said to have fled civilization to become a Wildman of the Woods in the late 6th century. Geoffrey had this individual in mind when he wrote his earliest surviving work, the Prophetiae Merlini (Prophecies of Merlin), which he claimed were the actual words of the legendary madman. Medievalist Gaston Paris suggested he altered the name to "Merlinus" rather than the standard romanization "Merdinus" to avoid a resemblance to the obscene French word merde, meaning "excrement".

[Moscow Mule]

Leonardo da Vinci
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Leonardo da Vinci

Self-portrait in red chalk, circa 1512 to 1515.[1]
Birth name Leonardo di Ser Piero
Born April 15, 1452

Flag of Italy Anchiano, Florence, Italy
Died May 2, 1519 (aged 67)
Amboise, Indre-et-Loire, France
Nationality Italian
Field Many and diverse fields of arts and sciences
Movement High Renaissance
Famous works Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, The Vitruvian Man
The Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (pronounciation (help·info), April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was an Italian polymath: scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, musician, and writer.

Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Messer Piero, and a peasant woman, Caterina, Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, "da Vinci" simply meaning "of Vinci": his full birth name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, son of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci."

Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the "Renaissance man", a man whose seemingly infinite curiosity was equalled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.[2]

It is primarily as a painter that Leonardo was and is renowned. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper occupy unique positions as the most famous, the most reproduced and most imitated portrait and religious painting of all time. Their fame is approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also iconic.

As an engineer, Leonardo conceived ideas vastly ahead of his own time, conceptually inventing a helicopter, a tank, the use of concentrated solar power, a calculator, a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics, the double hull, and many others. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were feasible during his lifetime.[3] Some of his smaller inventions such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire entered the world of manufacturing unheralded.

He greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and the study of water. Of his works, perhaps 15 paintings survive,[4] together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and notes.

[DS23]

i'm outta here soon!

[n5gooner]

Geoffrey's Prophetiae do not reveal much about Merlin's background. When he included the prophet in his next work, Historia Regum Britanniae, he supplemented the characterization with stories about Aurelius Ambrosius, taken from Nennius' Historia Brittonum. According to Nennius, Ambrosius was discovered when the British king Vortigern was trying to erect a tower. The tower always collapsed before completion, and his wise men told him the only solution was to sprinkle the foundation with the blood of a "child born without a father". Ambrosius was rumored to be such a child, but when brought before the king, he revealed the real reason for the tower's collapse: below the foundation was a lake containing two dragons who destroyed the tower by fighting.

[Moscow Mule]

Biography

Early life, 1452-1466

Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, at Anchiano, a hamlet near the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence. He was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant. Little is known about his early life, which has been the subject of historical conjecture by Vasari and others. [5] [6]

Leonardo was later to record only two incidents of his childhood. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a hawk dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face.[7]
Leonardo's earliest known drawing, the Arno Valley, 1473.
Leonardo's earliest known drawing, the Arno Valley, 1473.

The second incident occurred while he was exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and recorded his emotions at being, on one hand, terrified that some great monster might lurk there and on the other, driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.

At the age of five, he went to live in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci, where his father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but unfortunately died young.

Vasari, the 16th century biographer of Renaissance painters, tells the story of how a local peasant requested that Ser Piero ask his talented son to paint a picture on a round plaque. Leonardo responded with a painting of snakes spitting fire which was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made a profit, Ser Piero bought a plaque decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow which he gave to the peasant.

Section references: Liana Bortolon,[7]Vasari[8]

Verrocchio's workshop, 1466-76
The Baptism of Christ by Verrocchio and Leonardo
The Baptism of Christ by Verrocchio and Leonardo

In 1466 Leonardo was apprenticed to one of the most proficient artists of his day, Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio. The workshop of this renowned master was at the centre of the intellectual currents of Florence, assuring the young Leonardo of an education in the humanities. Among the painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop and also to become famous, were Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi.

In a Quattrocento workshop such as Verrocchio's, artists were regarded primarily as craftsmen and only a master such as Verrocchio had social standing. The products of a workshop included decorated tournament shields, painted dowry chests, christening platters, votive plaques, small portraits, and devotional pictures. Major commissions included altarpieces for churches and commemorative statues. The largest commissions were fresco cycles for chapels. As a fourteen-year-old apprentice Leonardo would have been trained in all the countless skills that were employed in a traditional workshop.

Although many craftsmen specialised in tasks such as frame-making, gilding and bronze casting, Leonardo would have been exposed to a vast range of technical skills and had the opportunity to learn drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the obvious artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling.

Although Verrocchio appears to have run an efficient and prolific workshop, few paintings can be ascertained as coming from his hand. And on one of those, according to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated.
According to tradition, Leonardo posed for Verrocchio's David.
According to tradition, Leonardo posed for Verrocchio's David.

The painting is the Baptism of Christ. According to Vasari, Leonardo painted the young angel holding Jesus’ robe. Verrocchio, overwhelmed by the sweetness of the angel’s expression, its moist eyes and lustrous curls, put down his brush and never painted again. This is probably an exaggeration. The truth is that on close examination the painting reveals much that has been painted or touched up over the tempera using the new technique of oil paint. The landscape, the rocks that can be seen through the brown mountain stream and much of the figure of Jesus bears witness to the hand of Leonardo.[8]

The other creation of Verrocchio’s which is particularly pertinent to the young Leonardo is the bronze statue of David, now in the Bargello Museum.[9] Apart from the exquisite quality of this work of art, it is significant in holding the claim to be a portrait of the apprentice, Leonardo. If this is the case, then in the figure of David we see Leonardo as a thin muscular boy, quite different to the rounded androgynous figure made by Verrocchio’s teacher, Donatello.[10] It is also suggested that the Archangel Michael in Verrocchio's Tobias and the Angels is a portrait of Leonardo.[9]

When Leonardo was twenty he joined the Guild of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to work with him.

Section references: Bortolon,[7] Vasari,[8] della Chiesa,[9] Martindale[11]

Professional life, 1476-1519
The Adoration of the Magi. This important commission was interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
The Adoration of the Magi. This important commission was interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.

The earliest known dated work of Leonardo's is a drawing done in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on 5 August, 1473.

It is assumed that Leonardo had his own workshop in Florence between 1476 and 1481. He was commissioned in 1478 to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of St Bernard and in 1481 by the Monks at Scopeto for The Adoration of the Magi. In 1482 Leonardo, whom Vasari tells us was a most talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo de’ Medici was so impressed with this that he decided to send both the lyre and its maker to Milan, in order to secure peace with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan [4],. At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.

Between 1482 and 1499, when Louis XII of France occupied Milan, much of Leonardo’s work was in that city. It was here that he was commissioned to paint two of his most famous works, the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. While living in Milan between 1493 and 1495 Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina as among his dependants in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the detailed list of expenditure on her funeral suggests that she was his mother rather than a servant girl.
Study of horse from Leonardo's journals.
Study of horse from Leonardo's journals.

For Ludovico, he worked on many different projects which included the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico’s predecessor. Leonardo modelled a huge horse in clay. Known as the “Gran Cavallo”, seventy tons of metal were set aside for casting it in bronze. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello’s statue of Gattemelata in Padova and Verrocchio’s Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not in the least unusual for Leonardo. Michelangelo rudely implied that he was unable to cast it.[7] In 1495 the bronze was used for cannons to defend the city from invasion under Charles VIII.

The French returned to invade Milan in 1498 under Louis XII and the invading French used the “Gran Cavallo” for target practice.

With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salaino and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice. In Venice he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.

Returning to Florence in 1500, he entered the services of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. In Forlì he met Caterina Sforza, of whom it is speculated by some that the Mona Lisa may be a portrait. At Cesenatico he designed the port. In 1506 he returned to Milan, which was in the hands of Maximilian Sforza after Swiss mercenaries had driven out the French. Many of Leonardo’s most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D'Oggione[12]