but why did the Old Chinese postulate five elements, when the Ancient Near East -- which may have initiated the idea that natural elements exerted influence in human life and activities -- recognized only four??

Near Kayenta, Arizona, Jonathan Haas of the Field Museum in Chicago has been studying a group of Ancient Pueblo villages that relocated from the canyons to the high mesa tops during the late 13th century.

It has recently been suggested that the regional decline at the end of the Akkadian period ( and First Intermediary Period of the Ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom ) was associated with rapidly increasing aridity, and failing rainfall in the region of the Ancient Near East, caused by a global centennial-scale drought.

Category: Ancient Near East

* Van de Mieroop, Mark ( 2004 ): A History of the Ancient Near East, Oxford.

* Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East by Theodor Gaster.

At that time, Sloane's collection consisted of around 71, 000 objects of all kinds including some 40, 000 printed books, 7, 000 manuscripts, extensive natural history specimens including 337 volumes of dried plants, prints and drawings including those by Albrecht Dürer and antiquities from Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Ancient Near and Far East and the Americas.

The Ancient Near Eastern collection also had its beginnings in 1825 with the purchase of Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities from the widow of Claudius James Rich.

Formerly the Department of the Ancient Near East, with a collection numbering some 330, 000 works, the British Museum possesses by far the world's largest and most important collection of Mesopotamian antiquities outside Iraq.

File: Carved ivory depicting a woman at a window. jpg | Carved ivory object from the Nimrud Ivories, Phoenician, Nimrud, 9th-8th century BC ( the Nimrud Ivories are widely considered to be one of the Ancient Near East's greatest discoveries )

A total of twenty Ptolemaic constellations are directly continued from the Ancient Near East.

Parallels to the earliest Babylonian ( Sumerian ) star catalogues suggest that the ancient Chinese system did not arise independently from that of the Ancient Near East.

The association of the serpent with a monstrous opponent overcome by a heroic deity has its roots in the mythology of the Ancient Near East, including Canaanite ( Hebrew, Ugaritic ), Hittite and Mesopotamian.

This topos can be traced to the Chaoskampf of the mythology of the Ancient Near East ( e. g. Hadad vs. Yam, Marduk vs. Tiamat, Teshub vs. Illuyanka, etc.

He was a key figure in the Axial Age, the period from 800 BC to 200 BC, during which similarly revolutionary thinking appeared in China, India, Iran, the Near East, and Ancient Greece.

* Ancient Near East

In the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts it is revealed the ancient Egyptians believed Nun ( the Ocean ) was a circular body surrounding nbwt ( a term meaning " dry lands " or " Islands ") and therefore believed in a similar Ancient Near Eastern circular earth cosmography surrounded by water.

While the term grimoire is originally European, and many Europeans throughout history, particularly ceremonial magicians and cunning folk, have made use of grimoires, the historian Owen Davies noted that similar such books can be found all across the world, ranging from Jamaica to Sumatra, and he also noted that the first such grimoires could be found not in Europe but in the Ancient Near East.

This Harifian culture may have adopted the use of pottery from the Isnan culture and Helwan culture of Egypt ( which lasted from 9000-4500 BC ), and subsequently fused with elements from the PPNB culture during the climatic crisis of 6000 BC to form what Juris Zarins calls the Syro-Arabian pastoral technocomplex, which saw the spread of the first Nomadic pastoralists in the Ancient Near East.

* Ancient Near East

* The History of the Ancient Near East

The religion of the Israelites of Iron Age I, like many Ancient Near Eastern religions, was based on the cult of the ancestors and the worship of family gods ( the " gods of the fathers ").

With the emergence of monarchy at the beginning of Iron Age II the king promoted his own family god, Yahweh, as the god of the kingdom, but beyond the royal court religion continued to be both polytheistic and family-centered, as it was also for other societies in the Ancient Near East.

* Ancient Near Eastern religion, Egyptian mythology

An abbot ( from Old English abbod, abbad, from Latin abbas (“ father ”), from Ancient Greek ἀββᾶς ( abbas ), from Aramaic ܐܒܐ / אבא (’ abbā, “ father ”); confer German Abt ; French abbé ) is the head and chief governor of a community of monks, called also in the East hegumen or archimandrite.

It has also been recently suggested that the rapid climatic collapse, marking the Akkadian Dark Age, may have been responsible for the religiously prescribed prohibition against the raising and consumption of pigs that spread through the Ancient Middle East from the end of the third millennium BC.

It was the formulation of Mary as the Theotokos which caused a schism with the Church of the East, now divided between the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East, while the Chaldean Catholic Church entered into full communion with Rome in the 16th century.

The Atharvaveda, a sacred text of Hinduism dating from the Early Iron Age, is the first Indian text dealing with medicine, like the medicine of the Ancient Near East based on concepts of the exorcism of demons and magic.

Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt.

The Ancient Pueblo culture is perhaps best known for the stone and adobe dwellings built along cliff walls, particularly during the Pueblo II and Pueblo III eras.

Throughout the southwest Ancient Puebloan region and at Mesa Verde, the best known site for these large number of well preserved cliff dwellings, housing, defensive and storage complexes were built in shallow caves and under rock overhangs along canyon walls.

The building was burned and looted, along with the Ancient Temple and practically everything else on the rock.

To the Ancient Greeks, Libya was one of the three known continents along with Asia and Europe.

Standardization came with the formation of the National Mah Jongg League ( NMJL ) in 1937, along with the first American mahjong rulebook, Maajh: The American Version of the Ancient Chinese Game.

A pentomino is a polyomino composed of five ( Ancient Greek / pénte ) congruent squares, connected along their edges ( orthogonal connections ).

In Ancient China, soldiers stationed along the Great Wall would alert each other of impending enemy attack by signaling from tower to tower.

The Ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles held that water is one of the four classical elements along with fire, earth and air, and was regarded as the ylem, or basic substance of the universe.

One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, " Tintern Abbey ", was published in the work, along with Coleridge's " The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ".

He, along with Philo of Byzantium, Strabo, Herodotus and Diodoros of Sicily, is attributed with the list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which he described in a poem composed about 140 BC:

In 1996, the Santa Cruz Operation finally authorised the release of the twenty-year-old 6th Edition source code ( along with the source code of other versions of " Ancient UNIX "), and the full code plus the 1977 version of the commentary was published by Peer-To-Peer Communications ( ISBN 1-57398-013-7 ).

The term tuna derives from Latin thunnus and from Ancient Greek θύννος or thunnos, from θύνω or thunō, which means, " I rush, dart along ".

The Indus Valley is one of the world's earliest urban civilizations, along with its contemporaries, Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt.

During these periods, Canaanites profited from their intermediary position between the ancient civilisations of the Middle East — Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia ( Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia ), the Hittites, and Minoan Crete — to become city states of merchant princes along the coast, with small kingdoms specializing in agricultural products in the interior.

* c. 5000 BC – Production of linen cloth in Ancient Egypt, along with other bast fibers including rush, reed, palm, and papyrus.

Caria (; from Luwian: Karuwa, " steep country "; Ancient Greek: Καρία, Karia ) was a region of western Anatolia extending along the coast from mid-Ionia ( Mycale ) south to Lycia and east to Phrygia.

Ancient DNA of 13 Sarmatian remains from Pokrovka kurgan burials in the southern Ural steppes along the Kazakhstan and Russian border was extracted for comparative analysis.

The Iazyges first make their appearance along the Sea of Azov, known to the Ancient Greeks and Romans as the Maeotis.

Silt, deposited by annual floods along the Nile River, created the rich, fertile soil that sustained the Ancient Egyptian civilization.

Ancient cultural explanations of earthquakes were often along the lines of the mythical Japanese Namazu: A giant catfish with the islands of Japan on his back.

According to the jacket notes, her album An Ancient Muse was inspired by travels among and reading about the various cultures along the Silk Road.

The Indus Valley is one of the world's earliest urban civilizations, along with its contemporaries, Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt.