Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Sunday, February 22nd, 2015
The structure of the administration of Ur III and some of its administrative initiatives also played a role in avoiding internal rebellions. Many of these features of Ur III were foreshadowed in the structure and administration of the Akkadian empire, but appear to have been much more thorough and perhaps ...
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Thursday, January 15th, 2015
Architecture
Ur-Nammu’s determination to display his piety and to repair the damage done by the Guti (or by neglect in the interregnum) showed itself in reconstruction efforts all over Sumer in the name of his god ad of the local gods of the cities. Most elements of the architecture, such as ...
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Friday, December 26th, 2014
Retention of bindu
In its earliest formulations, hatHa was used to raise and conserve the physical essence of life, identified in men as bindu (semen), which is otherwise constantly dripping downward from a store in the head and being expended. (The female equivalent, mentioned only occasionally in our sources, is rajas, ...
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Friday, December 19th, 2014
The mudras (seals) of the Hathayogapradipika compiled by Svatmaraman about 1450 AD, are not original to that work, but are also to be found in the following works which predate the HYP.
(A1) Amrtasiddhi – 11th C
(D) Dattatreyayogasastra – 13th C
(V) Vivekamartanda – 13th C
(G) Goraksasataka – 13th C
(K) Khecarividya – ...
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Wednesday, December 17th, 2014
The history of the specifically postural yoga that is the root of the yogas that are practiced in the modern West is not well known. We know that most forms of current Western practice can be traced back to the teachers Vivekananda, Yogananda, Sivananda, Kuvalayananda, Hariharananda, Krishnamacharya, and a few ...
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Sunday, November 30th, 2014
I knew that Frazer’s claim in his Golden Bough of a widespread myth of a dying and resurrected god had been heavily discounted amongst later researchers, but I still thought that the general template he presented was applicable to a significant number of myths, and not just around the Mediterranean. ...
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Thursday, November 6th, 2014
Over the course of several centuries beginning in the early 15th (probably) in the South of England (probably) there were a series of regular unconditioned (= not affected by their phonetic environment) vowel changes that affected the long vowels of ME. Those vowels were raised - or if they were ...
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Friday, October 31st, 2014
Proto-Indo-European Origins
It is proposed that Proto-Indo-European had a single original vowel timbre: e (though I've also seen original e and o claimed - by G. Bourcier, for example, in History of the English Language, (Stanley Thornes:Cheltenham, UK:1981, pp. 30ff.)
The three proposed basic vowel timbres of the reconstructed system are ...
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Sunday, October 26th, 2014
The standard reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European stop consonant system is:
voicelessvoicedvoiced aspirated
labialpbbh
dentaltddh
velar, palatovelark, k'g, g'gh, g'h
labiovelarkwgwgwh
The remaining consonants are:
fricative: s
laryngeals: ...
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Sunday, March 16th, 2014
When the Dharma is forgotten in the world another Buddha arises to renew it. The earliest version seems to have 7 buddhas in this age, of whom gOtama is the current. These are mentioned in the Pali canon in the dIghanikAya (ii, pp 5ff) and sa~yuttanikAya (ii, pp. 5f) of ...
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