Europa (mythology) (yoo-ROH-pa)

Phoenician princess abducted to Crete by Zeus. Europa was gathering wildflowers in a seaside meadow when she came upon a beautiful white bull. This bull was uncommonly gentle and did not inspire fear. Decking its horns with flowers, Europa was at length emboldened to climb upon its back. Whereupon the bull - actually the god Zeus in disguise - took off at a trot and dove into the sea. Europa was carried off to the island of Crete, where she became the mother of King Minos. Europa's brother Cadmus was charged with the duty of finding his sister and securing her return. He consulted the Oracle of Delphi, however, and was told to abandon the search. Instead he was to venture forth until he should meet a cow, to follow this cow wherever it should lead and to found a city upon the spot where it lay down. Such is the foundation legend of the Greek city of Thebes, which goes on to relate how Cadmus and his companions went out to fetch water for their new settlement at a nearby fountain. Here all but Cadmus were slain by a dragon. Cadmus killed the dragon and, at the prompting of the goddess Athena, sowed some of its teeth in the ground. Armed men sprang up from the earth, just as they later would for Jason under similar circumstances - for the teeth that Jason strew upon the fertile soil of distant Colchis came from the very dragon that Cadmus had killed. Using the same trick that would eventually serve Jason, Cadmus caused the sown men to fight amongst themselves until only five were left standing. These five, together with Cadmus, became the original inhabitants of Thebes. Cadmus, their king, is said to have taught them the alphabet and the art of writing. Indeed, the Greek alphabet historically derives from the land of the Phoenicians (in the region of modern Syria, Lebanon and Palestine), mythological home of Cadmus and his sister.

The abduction of Europa.

History of Silk

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(Sogdian silk, 8th century) Sericulture or silk production has a long and colorful history unknown to most people. For centuries the West knew very little about silk and the people who made it. Pliny, the Roman historian, wrote in his Natural History in 70 BC "Silk was obtained by removing the down from the leaves with the help of water…". For more than two thousand years the Chinese kept the secret of silk altogether to themselves. It was the most zealously guarded secret in history. ORIGIN OF SILK - LEGEND OF LADY HSI-LING-SHIH
Chinese legend gives the title Goddess of Silk to Lady Hsi-Ling-Shih, wife of the mythical Yellow Emperor, who was said to have ruled China in about 3000 BC. She is credited with the introduction of silkworm rearing and the invention of the loom. Half a silkworm cocoon unearthed in 1927 from the loess soil astride the Yellow River in Shanxi Province, in northern China, has been dated between 2600 and 2300 BC. Another example is a group of ribbons, threads and woven fragments, dated about 3000 BC, and found at Qianshanyang in Zhejiang province. More recent archeological finds - a small ivory cup carved with a silkworm design and thought to be between 6000 and 7000 years old, and spinning tools, silk thread and fabric fragments from sites along the lower Yangzi River – reveal the origins of sericulture to be even earlier.
SILKWORM AND THE FAMILY
There are many indigenous varieties of wild silk moths found in a number of different countries. The key to understanding the great mystery and magic of silk, and China's domination of its production and promotion, lies with one species: the blind, flightless moth, Bombyx mori. It lays 500 or more eggs in four to six days and dies soon after. The eggs are like pinpoints – one hundred of them weigh only one gram. From one ounce of eggs come about 30,000 worms which eat a ton of mulberry leaves and produce twelve pounds of raw silk. The original wild ancestor of this cultivated species is believed to be Bombyx mandarina Moore, a silk moth living on the white mulberry tree and unique to China. The silkworm of this particular moth produces a thread whose filament is smoother, finer and rounder than that of other silk moths. Over thousands of years, during which the Chinese practiced sericulture utilizing all the different types of silk moths known to them, Bombyx mori evolved into the specialized silk producer it is today; a moth which has lost its power to fly, only capable of mating and producing eggs for the next generation of silk producers.
THE SECRET OF SERICULTURE
Producing silk is a lengthy process and demands constant close attention. To produce high quality silk, there are two conditions which need to be fulfilled – preventing the moth from hatching out and perfecting the diet on which the silkworms should feed. Chinese developed secret ways for both.
* The eggs must be kept at 65 degrees F, increasing gradually to 77 degrees at which point they hatch. After the eggs hatch, the baby worms feed day and night every half hour on fresh, hand-picked and chopped mulberry leaves until they are very fat. Also a fixed temperature has to be maintained throughout. Thousands of feeding worms are kept on trays that are stacked one on top of another. A roomful of munching worms sounds like heavy rain falling on the roof. The newly hatched silkworm multiplies its weight 10,000 times within a month, changing color and shedding its whitish-gray skin several times.
*The silkworms feed until they have stored up enough energy to enter the cocoon stage. While they are growing they have to be protected from loud noises, drafts, strong smells such as those of fish and meat and even the odor of sweat. When it is time to build their cocoons, the worms produce a jelly-like substance in their silk glands, which hardens when it comes into contact with air. Silkworms spend three or four days spinning a cocoon around themselves until they look like puffy, white balls.
*After eight or nine days in a warm, dry place the cocoons are ready to be unwound. First they are steamed or baked to kill the worms, or pupas. The cocoons are then dipped into hot water to loosen the tightly woven filaments. These filaments are unwound onto a spool. Each cocoon is made up of a filament between 600 and 900 meters long! Between five and eight of these super-fine filaments are twisted together to make one thread.
*Finally the silk threads are woven into cloth or used for embroidery work. Clothes made from silk are not only beautiful and lightweight, they are also warm in cool weather and cool in hot weather.
Literary sources such as The Book of History, and The Book of Rites give further information about sericulture. Reeling silk and spinning were always considered household duties for women, while weaving and embroidery were carried out in workshops as well as the home. In every silk-producing province the daughters, mothers and grandmothers of every family devoted a large part of the day for six months in a year to the feeding, tending and supervision of silkworms and to the unraveling, spinning, weaving, dyeing and embroidering of silk. By the fifth century BC, at least six Chinese provinces were producing silk. Each spring, the empress herself inaugurated the silk-raising season, for silk production was the work of women all over China. The technique and process of sericulture were guarded secrets and closely controlled by Chinese authorities. Anyone who revealed the secrets or smuggled the silkworm eggs or cocoons outside of China would be punished by death.
SILK DEVELOPMENT IN CHINA
When silk was first discovered, it was reserved exclusively for the use of the ruler. It was permitted only to the emperor, his close relations and the very highest of his dignitaries. Within the palace, the emperor is believed to have worn a robe of white silk; outside, he, his principal wife, and the heir to the throne wore yellow, the color of the earth.
Gradually the various classes of society began wearing tunics of silk, and silk came into more general use. As well as being used for clothing and decoration, silk was quite quickly put to industrial use by the Chinese. This was something which happened in the West only in modern times. Silk, indeed, rapidly became one of the principal elements of the Chinese economy. Silk was used for musical instruments, fishing-lines, bowstrings, bonds of all kinds, and even rag paper, the word's first luxury paper. Eventually even the common people were able to wear garments of silk.
During the Han Dynasty, silk ceased to be a mere industrial material and became an absolute value in itself. Farmers paid their taxes in grain and silk. Silk began to be used for paying civil servants and rewarding subjects for outstanding services. Values were calculated in lengths of silk as they had been calculated in pounds of gold. Before long it was to become a currency used in trade with foreign countries. This use of silk continued during the Tang as well. It is possible that this added importance was the result of a major increase in production. It found its way so thoroughly into the Chinese language that 230 of the 5,000 most common characters of the mandarin "alphabet" have silk as their "key".
A SECRET OUT TO THE WORLD
In spite of their secrecy, however, the Chinese were destined to lose their monopoly on silk production. Sericulture reached Korea around 200 BC, when waves of Chinese immigrants arrived there. Silk reached the West through a number of different channels. Shortly after AD 300, sericulture traveled westward and the cultivation of the silkworm was established in India.
It is also said that in AD 440, a prince of Khotan ( today's Hetian)--a kingdom on the rim of Taklamakan desert -- courted and won a Chinese princess. The princess smuggled out silkworm eggs by hiding them in her voluminous hairpiece. This was scant solace to the silk-hungry people of the West, for Khotan kept the secret too. Why share it with the westerners and kill a good market?
Then around AD 550, two Nestorian monks appeared at the Byzantine Emperor Justinian's court with silkworm eggs hid in their hollow bamboo staves. Under their supervision the eggs hatched into worms, and the worms spun cocoons. Byzantium was in the silk business at last. The Byzantine church and state created imperial workshops, monopolizing production and keeping the secret to themselves. This allowed a silk industry to be established in the Middle East, undercutting the market for ordinary-grade Chinese silk. However high-quality silk textiles, woven in China especially for the Middle Eastern market, continued to bring high prices in the West, and trade along the Silk Road therefore continued as before. By the sixth century the Persians, too, had mastered the art of silk weaving, developing their own rich patterns and techniques. It was only in the 13th century—the time of the Second Crusades—that Italy began silk production with the introduction of 2000 skilled silk weavers from Constantinople. Eventually silk production became widespread in Europe.
SILK AND ITS TRADE
Silk became a precious commodity highly sought by other countries at a very early time, and it is believed that the silk trade was actually started before the Silk Road was officially opened in the second century BC. An Egyptian female mummy with silk has been discovered in the village of Deir el Medina near Thebes and the Valley of the Kings, dated 1070 BC, which is probably the earliest evidence of the silk trade. During the second century BC, the Chinese emperor, Han Wu Di's ambassadors traveled as far west as Persia and Mesopotamia, bearing gifts including silks. A Han embassy reached Baghdad in AD 97, and important finds of Han silks have been made along the Silk Road. One of the most dramatic finds of Tang silks along the Silk Road was made in 1907 by Aurel Stein. Some time around 1015, Buddhist monks, possibly alarmed by the threat of invasion by a Tibetan people, the Tanguts, sealed more than ten thousand manuscripts and silk paintings, silk banners, and textiles into a room at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas near Dunhuang, a station on the Silk Road in north-west Gansu.
From about the fourth century BC, the Greeks and Romans began talking of Seres, the Kingdom of Silk. Some historians believe the first Romans to set eyes upon the fabulous fabric were the legions of Marcus Licinius Crassus, Governor of Syria. At the fateful battle of Carrhae near the Euphrates River in 53 BC, the soldiers were so startled by the bright silken banners of the Parthian troops that they fled in panic. Within decades Chinese silks became widely worn by the rich and noble families of Rome. The Roman Emperor Heliogabalus (AD 218 - 222) wore nothing but silk. By 380 AD, Marcellinus Ammianus reported, "The use of silk which was once confined to the nobility has now spread to all classes without distinction, even to the lowest." The craving of silk continued to increase over the centuries. The price of silk was very hight in Rome. The best Chinese bark ( a particular kind of silk) cost as much as 300 denarii (a Roman soldier's salary for an entire year!). Many sources quote that Roman citizens' demand for imported silks was so great as to be damaging to the Roman economy.
Silk was even beginning to have a civilizing effect on the barbarians. In 408 AD when Alaric, a Goth, besieged Rome, his price for sparing the city included 5000 pounds of gold, 3000 pounds of pepper, 30,000 pounds of silver and 4000 tunics of silk.
SILK TODAY
World silk production has approximately doubled during the last 30 years in spite of man-made fibers replacing silk for some uses. China and Japan during this period have been the two main producers, together manufacturing more than 50% of the world production each year. During the late 1970's China, the country that first developed sericulture thousands years ago dramatically increased its silk production and has again become the world's leading producer of silk.

Eblaite dictionaries

The State Archives

The State Archives of Early Syrian Ebla, brought to light between 1974 and 1976, have a revolutionary importance, and may be included, for the old age and for the amount of texts, among the most important discoveries of the cuneiform world since the half of the XIXth century. As I.J. Gelb, the most authoritative dean of Assyriological studies of Chicago, maintained, the Italian Expedition, with the Ebla excavations, and the discovery of the Archives, brought to the revelation of a new culture, a new language, and a new history. In fact, until the discovery of the Early Syrian tablets of Ebla, everyone believed that pre-classical Syria did not know writing, until shortly before the age of Hammurabi of Babylon, in the XVIIIth century BC, whence the Royal Archives of Mari date. Mari is a site on the Middle Euphrates, whose culture, however, is prevalently a Mesopotamian one, and was discovered between 1934 and 1936. The texts of the Ugarit Archives, a site on the Mediterranean coast in northern Syria, brought to light starting in 1929, brought to the discovery of the most ancient alphabet in history, and are the other great epigraphic discovery made in Syria between the two world wars, yet they date from the XIVth-XIIIth centuries BC. In 1979, in the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Ugarit excavations, C.F.A. Schaeffer himself, the discoverer of Ugarit, stated that Ebla is a one millennium older Ugarit. The more than 17,000 inventory numbers of cuneiform tablets of the Ebla Royal Archives, discovered in the main Archive Room, and in some smaller deposit of the Royal Palace G, are the result of the fragmentation of the approximately 5,000 original tablets, slightly less than 2,000 of which were intact. These tablets, dating from the years between 2350 and 2300 BC, are a priceless patrimony of information about the economic structure, social stratification, international relations, religious belief, state administration, literary culture, and everyday life. The Archives texts, concerning three kings reigning in succession for approximately fifty years – Igrish-Khalab, Irkab-Damu, Ishar-Damu – are, for the largest amount, economic and administrative documents, analytic and synthetic, also monthly and yearly accounts, which register incomes and outcomes of the Palace: cereals, textiles, metals were delivered to the central administration, in order to be redistributed to the officials and personnel, as rations, or extraordinary gifts in special occasions, like the several ceremonies related to the royal family. Analyzing these documents it was also possible to reconstruct peculiar aspects of the life at Ebla and in its territory, like the fairs and markets, taking place in villages in the Ebla region, or the wars the town fought, particularly against Mari, the powerful and rich town on the middle Euphrates, with which Ebla was in direct concurrence for the dominion over the trade routes. In the State Archives also kings’ letters were preserved, international treaties – the first ones in the history of humankind – a few literary texts of difficult interpretation, from hymns to exorcisms, monolingual and bilingual lexical texts. The latter, which are the oldest dictionaries in history, are of the strongest interest, because they show that at Ebla an advanced scribal school was active, connected with the main schools of Mesopotamia, in particular with those of Mari and Kish, but most of all because they offer for more than 1,500 words the correspondence between Sumerian and Eblaite. The economy of Early Syrian Ebla was based on a strong integration among extensive agriculture, cattle breeding, with special regard for goats, sheep, and cows, and exploitation of the Lebanon mountains, from the Amanus to the Taurus, for timber, copper, and silver. The economic power of the town grew strongly in a few years in the Archives age for the close relations with even quite far away countries, from Egypt to Afghanistan, where the lords of Ebla took, in relevant amounts, respectively the Nubian gold, and the Badakhshan lapis lazuli. Among the many studied, translated, and interpreted texts, one may recall those concerning the Ritual for kingship renewal, a long ceremony, lasting three weeks, during which the king and queen, accompanied by the statues of the main deities, Kura and Barama, went out of Ebla, in order to visit the deified royal ancestors’ burials and to make sacrifices and rites in preparation of their going back to Ebla in Kura’s Temple, where the final consecration of the royal couple took place, and they became an earthly image of the divine couple. The data concerning the Early Syrian society of Ebla reveal, on the one hand, the relevant position of court ladies in general, and of some personage in particular, like queen Dusigu, who possibly reigned for some time during her son’s minor age, and, on the other hand, the division of power between the king and the vizier, the prime minister, who, specially towards the end of the Archives age, passed his function over to his son, and who even became related with the royal family.

DAMASCUS STEEL

 

The world of the smelting began to walk and the man devised molds with which to obtain reproductions of the objects that created. The technique of the smelting was advancing as the talent of the smelter devised new procedures to fuse new objects. To thus the turn arrived them at the knives and swords. Arrived east moment, the smelter had stone molds that the same stature, using itself chisels of other harder stones or fused escoplos of sand bronze previously. Already having smelter of bivalbos stone molds and cooked mud crucibles, the "sword one is born of bronze" in its primitive state, thought by him man like non throw able weapon to fight to very short distance: hand-to-hand. These new swords, are rather short, but later, animated already by the dominion of the matter, the smelters dared to increase the length of the leaves of the swords since the espadero tried prolonging the leaf to distance to the adversary.

The man is handling the office and will be discovering, by means of his work, as much the ideal mixtures for the hardness of the leaf of the sword, like the necessary refuted ones in cold to the edges. The bronze smelting of the whole sword will not be made until last centuries. In their beginnings the leaf and the grip of the sword were fused separately to later unite them by nailed riveting or.

The oldest description of the swords of Damascus dates from year 540 of ours was, but they can long before have been in use, even at the time of Alexander Magno (ca. 323 To C.). The own steel was done in India, in where wootz was denominated. But it was at time of Domiciano when the steel settled in Damascus (capital of Syria), along with a great number of important espaderos that helped to make of the city an important commercial center. That importance of Damascus caused the creation of a procedure of hard and non fragile steel obtaining that tube its origin in Northern India. Which, reached a great importance and recognition in Damascus arriving to name "damascene steel" or "damasked steel", giving these names to the steel treated similarly to this.

Always there were relation between the toledanos espaderos and those of Damascus. But they were moments of necessity to find an improvement of the quality of the swords, so the toledanos espaderos investigated the composition of the steel Damascene, its surfaces grained with precious irisaciones formed by all the gamma of grays and its faculty of fort without becoming broken nor bending. These qualities of the steel would serve as departure point for the forge of the leaf of the toledana sword with "alma de hierro".

When investigating the qualities of the steel Damascene discovered that the grained adornment of the leaves of the swords was the base of its quality, everything had to the mixture, during the forge, of carbon diamond materials different, generally the iron and the steel. But the matters that composed the leaves of the swords had diverse materials; carbon, silicon, sulfur, phosphorus, magnesium, nickel and chromium. But the important thing for the toledanos forjadores was the quality of the hardness and flexibility of the swords, and that obtained with the union by the forge of the iron and the steel.

The steel Damascene obtained by the union of pieces of iron and steel, by means of the called process of weld "a calda". The way commonest of that union of the steel Damascene was to enroscar diverse rods of steel and iron, forging that handful and uniting the rods in a single piece obtaining a solid bar, of which, later, they would forge the dagger or sword blade.

The mixture of the steel Damascene to give to strength and flexibility to the weapon already was obtained, but also it had some failure, the possibility that some point of its edges was made up of an iron vein. The ability of the toledanos espaderos improved the invention, devised the sword with "alma de hierro", that it left from the same principle to mix iron and steel, but guaranteeing that the edges of their swords always were covered with steel, although the final result did not have those irisaciones in the leaves.

"Alma de hierro" it consisted of a hard steel sword that hid in its interior a sweet iron lamina, preventing that the leaf became broken no matter how much this one struck or doubled. Because the iron and the steel have to a certain temperature a high degree of weld ability, being the propitious point to execute the unions in the called swords of iron soul.

Let us remember that to the Tajo river almost miraculous properties have been attributed to him that give quality to the toledanas swords. It has been spoken of the magnificence of his waters to warm up much, not yet verified. But it has been spoken little of sands of the Edge, and is in them where one thinks that it was the key of that quality. Of this form the best swords of the world dreamed up and warmed up in Toledo during centuries XVI and XVII.

These toledanas swords were exported to all parts. But what greater interest woke up in that international market of horsemen of layer and sword, it was a good toledana leaf that it took well visible his mark. Therefore the number of European espaderos was great that acquired the leaves of Toledo to adapt them to their trimmings, or that sent his here cazoletas and sparrow hawks so that they were mounted with toledanas leaves. In Toledo the espaderos were many that often had striker pin with that they marked his production responding with it of the quality of his work, and, besides to punch with his mark, they recorded his name in the leaves sanctioning with it to the sword and its possessor.