title: Forty acres and a mule

text: After Lincoln's assassination, Andrew Johnson became president. On May 29, 1865, Johnson issued an amnesty proclamation to ordinary Southern citizens who swore loyalty oaths, promising not only political immunity but also return of confiscated property. (Johnson's proclamation excluded Confederate politicians, military officers, and landowners with property worth more than $20,000.) General O. O. Howard, chief of the Freedmen's Bureau, requested an interpretation from Attorney General James Speed regarding how this proclamation would affect the Freedmen's Bureau mandate. Speed replied on June 22, 1865, that the Bureau Commissioner:


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: ... has "authority", under the direction of the President, to set apart for the use of loyal refugees and freedmen the lands in question; and he is "required" to assign to every male of that class of persons, not more than forty acres of such lands.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Howard acted quickly based on the authorization from Speed, ordering an inventory of lands available for redistribution and resisting white Southerners' attempts to reclaim property. At its peak in 1865, the Freedmen's Bureau controlled 800,000–900,000 acres of plantation lands previously belonging to slave owners. This area represented 0.2% of land in the South; ultimately the Johnson proclamation required the Bureau to re-allocate most of it to its former owners.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: On July 28, 1865, Howard issued "Circular no. 13", a directive within the Freedmen's Bureau to issue land to refugees and freedmen. Circular no. 13 explicitly instructed Bureau agents to prioritize the Congressional mandate for land distribution over Johnson's amnesty declaration. Its final section clarified: "The pardon of the President will not be understood to extend to the surrender of abandoned or confiscated property which by law has been 'set apart for Refugees and Freedmen'". With Circular #13, land redistribution was an official policy for the entire South, and understood as such by army officers.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: After issuing Circular 13, however, Howard, seemingly unaware of how significant and controversial his instructions might prove, left Washington for a vacation in Maine. President Johnson and others began to counteract the Circular almost immediately. After Johnson ordered the Bureau to restore the estate of a complaining Tennessee plantation owner, General Joseph S. Fullerton suggested to at least one subordinate that Circular #13 "will not be observed for the present".


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: When Howard returned to Washington, Johnson ordered him to write a new Circular that would respect his policy of land restoration. Johnson rejected Howard's draft and wrote his own version, which he issued on September 12 as Circular #15—including Howard's name. Circular #15 established strict criteria for designating a property as "officially confiscated" and had the effect in many places of ending land redistribution completely.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Especially during the six-week period between Circular #13 and Circular #15, '40 acres and a mule' (along with other supplies necessary for farming) represented a common promise of Freedmen's Bureau agents. Clinton B. Fisk, Assistant Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau for Kentucky and Tennessee, had announced at a black political assembly: "They must not only have freedom but homes of their own, thirty or forty acres, with mules, cottages, and schoolhouses etc."


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: A Bureau administrator in Virginia proposed leasing to each family a 40-acre plot of land, a pair of mules, harnesses, a cart, tools, seeds, and food supplies. The family would pay for these supplies after growing crops and selling them.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Bureau agents encountered legal problems in allocating land to freedpeople as a result of the "Black Codes" passed by Southern legislatures in late 1865 and 1866. Some of the new laws prevented black people from owning or leasing land. The Freedmen's Bureau generally treated the black Codes as invalid, based on federal legislation. However, the Bureau was not always able to enforce its interpretation after the Union Army had substantially demobilized.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: During and after the war, politicians, generals and others envisioned a variety of colonization plans that would have provided real estate to black families. Although the American Colonization Society had been colonizing more people in Liberia and receiving more donations (almost one million dollars in the 1850s), it did not have the means to respond to mass emancipation.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Lincoln had long supported colonization as a plausible solution to the problem of slavery, and pursued colonization plans throughout his presidency. In 1862, Congress approved $600,000 to fund Lincoln's plan for colonizing blacks "in a climate congenial to them", and granted Lincoln broad executive powers to orchestrate colonization. Lincoln immediately created an Emigration Office within the Department of the Interior and instructed the State Department to acquire suitable land. The first major plan considered would have sent employed free blacks as coal miners in Chiriquí Province, Panama (then part of Gran Colombia). Volunteers were promised 40 acres of land and a job in the mines; Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy, whom Lincoln had appointed to oversee the plan, had also purchased mules, yokes, tools, wagons, seeds, and other supplies to support a potential colony. Pomeroy accepted 500 of the 13,700 people who applied for the job. However, the plan was canceled by the end of the year, thanks to a discovery that Chiriquí's coal was of poor quality.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Like Liberia, an independent black nation, Haiti was also considered a good place to colonize freedpeople from the U.S. As the Chiriquí plan was hitting its stride in 1862, Lincoln was developing another plan to colonize the small island of Île à Vache near Haiti. Lincoln struck a deal with businessman Bernard Kock, who had obtained rights to lease the island for cultivation and wood-cutting. A total of 453 Blacks, mostly young men from the Tidewater region around occupied Hampton, Virginia, volunteered to colonize the island. On April 14, 1863, they left Fort Monroe in the "Ocean Ranger". Kock confiscated all of the money possessed by the colonists and did not pay their wages. Initial reports suggested dire conditions, though these were later disputed. A number of colonists died in the first year. 292 survivors from the original group remained on the island and 73 had moved to Aux Cayes; most were restored to the U.S. by a mission of the Navy in February 1864. Congress rescinded Lincoln's colonization authority in July 1863.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Lincoln continued to pursue colonization plans, particularly in the British West Indies, but none came to fruition. The American Colonization Society settled a few hundred people in Liberia during the war, and several thousand more in the five years following.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest had proposed in 1865 before the end of the war to hire black soldiers and freedmen in constructing a railroad for the Memphis and Little Rock Railroad Company, paying them with $1/day and land along the railway line. This proposal later gained the endorsements of Sherman, Howard, Johnson, and Arkansas Governor Isaac Murphy. Howard transported several hundred freedmen from Alabama to Arkansas for work on the line. He appointed Edward Ord to supervise the project and protect the freedmen from Forrest.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: As it became clear that the pool of land available for blacks was rapidly shrinking, the Union discussed various proposals for how blacks might resettle and eventually own their own land. In Virginia, the mass of landless blacks represented a growing crisis—soon to be exacerbated by the return of 10,000 black soldiers from Texas. Concerned about a possible insurrection, Colonel Orlando Brown (head of the Freedmen's Bureau in Virginia) proposed relocating Virginia's blacks to Texas or Florida. Brown proposed that the federal government reserve 500,000 acres in Florida for colonization by the soldiers and 50,000 other free blacks from Virginia. Howard took Brown's proposal to Congress.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: In December 1865, Congress began to debate the "Second Freedmen's Bureau bill", which would have opened three million acres of unoccupied public land in Florida, Mississippi, and Arkansas for homesteading. (An amendment to allow black homesteading on public lands in the North was defeated.) Congress passed the bill in February 1866 but could not override Johnson's veto. (Congress passed a more limited "Second Freedmen's Bureau Bill" in July 1866, and did override Johnson's veto.)


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Howard continued to push for Congress to appropriate land for allocation to freedmen. With support from Thaddeus Stevens and William Fessenden, Congress began to debate a new bill for black settlement of public lands in the South. The result was the Southern Homestead Act, which opened 46,398,544.87 acres of land in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas to homesteading; initially 80-acre parcels (half-quarter section) until June 1868, and thereafter 160-acre parcels (quarter section). Johnson signed this bill and it went into effect on June 21, 1866. Until January 1, 1867, the bill specified, only free blacks and loyal whites would be allowed access to these lands.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Howard, concerned about competition with Confederates that would begin in 1867, ordered Bureau agents to inform free blacks about the Homesteading Act. Local commissioners did not disseminate the information widely, and many freedpeople were unwilling to venture into unknown territory, with insufficient supplies, based only on the promise of land after five years.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Those who did attempt homesteading encountered unreliable bureaucracy that often did not comply with federal law. They also faced extremely harsh conditions, usually on low quality land that had been rejected by white settlers in years past. Nevertheless, free blacks entered about 6,500 claims to homesteads; about 1000 of these eventually resulted in property certificates.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Southern land owners regained control over almost all of the land they had claimed before the war. The national dialogue about land ownership as a key to success for freedpeople gave way (in the sphere of white politics and media) to the implementation of a plantation wage system. Under pressure from Johnson and other pro-capital politicians in the North, and from almost all of white society in the South, the Freedmen's Bureau was transformed from a protector of land rights to an enforcer of wage labor.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Free blacks in the South widely believed that all land would be redistributed to those who had worked on it. They also felt strongly that they had a right to own this land. Many expected this event to occur by Christmas 1865 or New Year's 1866. Although the freedpeople formed this belief in response to the policies of the Freedmen's Bureau and Circular #13, their hopes were soon downplayed as superstition akin to belief in Santa Claus.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Hope for "40 acres and a mule" specifically was prevalent beginning in early 1865. The expectation of "40 acres" came from the explicit terms of Sherman's Field Order and the Freedmen's Bureau bill. The "mule" may have been added simply as an obvious necessity for achieving prosperity through agriculture. ("Forty acres" was a slogan, which though it did appear often in formal declarations, represented a wide variety of different arrangements for land ownership and farming.)


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: A counter-rumor spread among Southern whites that when the land was "not" redistributed on Christmas, angry blacks would launch a violent insurrection. Alabama and Mississippi passed laws forming White paramilitary groups, which violently disarmed free black people.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: According to historian Donald R. Shaffer: The fact was, however, that not all African Americans were enthusiastic about land redistribution. The black elite in the South, which disproportionately consisted of those who had been free before the war and the lightskinned, tended to emphasize suffrage and equal rights over economic issues. Consisting of property owners, or men who realistically aspired to buy property one day, these black men tended to oppose land confiscation and redistribution. They made common cause with white Republicans on this issue, few of whom supported confiscating land from ex-Confederates—even among the Radical Republicans. The fact that members of the elite predominated among black officeholders during Reconstruction also meant they rarely pushed this issue in Congress or state legislatures (not that it had much chance of passing even if they had, due to white majorities in these bodies). Hence, most African Americans during Reconstruction did not achieve the dramatic economic progress comparable to that demonstrated by their race in politics.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Southern farmowners complained that because they were waiting for land, the newly free blacks would not readily sign long-term labor contracts. South Carolina Governor James Lawrence Orr asked Johnson in 1866 to continue pushing his land policy, writing that "complete restoration will restore complete harmony".


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Black hopes for land came to be seen as a major barrier to economic productivity, and forces from both South and North worked hard to dispel them. Southern governments passed "Black Codes" to prevent blacks from owning or leasing land, and to restrict their freedom of movement. Agents of the Freedmen's Bureau now told blacks that redistribution was impossible and that they would need to perform wage labor to survive. If they could not persuade people to sign contracts, they would insist forcefully. Thomas Conway, the Bureau Commissioner in Louisiana, ordered: "Hire them out! Cut wood! Do anything to avoid a state of idleness." Even Rufus Saxton, who campaigned actively for black property in the Sea Islands, issued a Circular instructing his agents to dispel the rumor of redistribution at New Year's 1866. (The unfunded Bureau drew its own finances from profits generated by freedpeople under contract.) Although some Whites continued to press for colonization, most now believed that black labor could be recuperated through the wage system.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: According to many historians, economic negotiations between blacks and whites in the South thus unfolded within the parameters dictated by the Johnson administration. Southern plantation owners pushed blacks toward servitude, while the Republican Congress pushed for free wage labor and civil rights. Eventually, under this framework, sharecropping emerged as the dominant mode of production. Some historians, such as Robert McKenzie, have challenged the prevalence of this "standard scenario" and argued that land ownership fluctuated significantly during the 1870s. Black land ownership did increase across the South.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Many blacks who had settled on property surrounding Hampton were forced to leave by various means. These included Johnson's aggressive restoration policy, Black Codes passed by the Virginia legislature, and with vigilante enforcement by returning Confederates. Union troops also forcefully evicted settlers, sometimes provoking violent standoffs; many blacks came to trust the Freedmen's Bureau no more than they did the Rebels. In 1866 Tidewater's refugee camps were still full, and many of their residents were sick and dying. Relations with Northern and Southern whites had become violently hostile. The whites (military occupiers and local residents) agreed on a plan to deport the freedpeople back to their counties of origin.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: After the turbulence of restoration, land ownership steadily increased. Hampton already had at least some black landowners, such as the family of American Revolutionary War veteran Caesar Tarrant. In 1860, about eight free Negroes owned land in Hampton. By 1870, approximately 121 free Blacks owned land in the area. Those who owned land before the war expanded their holdings.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Some of the blacks in Hampton formed a community land trust called Lincon's Land Association and purchased several hundred acres of surrounding land. Land for the Hampton Institute (later Hampton University), was acquired from 1867 to 1872 with assistance from George Whipple of the American Missionary Association. Whipple also helped to sell 44 individual lots to black owners.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Many freedpeople could not afford to purchase land immediately after the war, but earned money in jobs outside farming such as fishing and oystering. Black land ownership thus increased even faster (though not for everyone) during the 1870s. In Charles City County, three-quarters of black farm workers owned their own farms, with an average size of 36 acres. In York County, 50% owned their farms, which averaged 20 acres. (Statedwide, the number of landowners was high, but the average size of land was only 4 acres.) These relatively small farms, on relatively poor land, did not generate enormous profits. However, they did constitute a base of economic power, and blacks from this region held political office at a high rate.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Survivors of the camps also achieved a high level of land ownership and business success in the town of Hampton itself.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: The May 29 amnesty proclamation did not apply to many Sea Islands landowners; however, most of these had secured special pardons directly from Johnson. General Rufus Saxton was overwhelmed with ownership claims for properties in the "Sherman Reserve". Saxton wrote to Howard on September 5, 1865, asking him to protect black landownership on the Sea Islands:


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Circular no. 15, issued days later, led the land's former owners to increase their efforts. Saxton continued to resist, passing their written requests to Howard with the comment:


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Johnson dispatched Howard to the Islands, with instructions to broker a "mutually satisfactory" settlement. Howard understood that this implied a complete restoration of pre-war ownership. He informed the islanders of Johnson's intention. But (with support from Stanton, who felt comfortable with a literal interpretation of the phrase "mutually satisfactory") appointed a sympathetic captain, Alexander P. Ketchum, to form a commission overseeing the transition. Ketchum and Saxton proceeded to resist resettlement claims by Confederate whites.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: The settlers formed a solidarity network to resist reclamation of their lands, and proved willing to defend their homes with vigorous displays of force. The Sea Island homesteaders also wrote directly to Howard and Johnson, insisting that the government keep its promise and maintain their homesteads.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: However, the prevailing political wind continued to favor the Southern landowners. Saxton and Ketchum lost their positions; Daniel Sickles and Robert K. Scott assumed power. In the winter of 1866–1867, Sickles turned the Union Army on the settlers, evicting all those that could not produce the correct deed. Black settlers retained control over 1,565 titles amounting to 63,000 acres. Scott recounted in his report to Congress: "The officers of these detachments in many instances took from the freedmen their certificates, declared them worthless, and destroyed them in their presence. Upon refusing to accept the contracts offered, the people in several instances were thrust out into the highways, where, being without shelter, many perished from small-pox, which prevailed to an alarming extent among them."


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Soldiers continued to evict settlers and enforce work agreements, leading in 1867 to a large-scale armed standoff between the Army and a group of farmers who would not renew their contract with a plantation owner. General Davis Tillson in Georgia ordered a modification to the title of black landowners "as to give a man holding one, not forty acres, but as much land as he could work "well", say from ten to fifteen acres—and that the balance of the land should be turned over to Messrs. Scuyler and Winchester, who should be allowed to hire the remaining freed people who wish to work for them [...]". 90% of the land on Skidaway Island was confiscated.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: The (second) Second Freedmen's Bureau bill, passed in July 1866 over Johnson's veto, stipulated the freedpeople whose lands had been restored to Confederate owners could pay $1.25 per acre for up to 20 acres of land in St. Luke and St. Helena parishes of Beaufort County, South Carolina. This district was overseen by Major Martin R. Delaney, an abolitionist and advocate of black land ownership. About 1,900 families with land titles resettled in Beaufort County, buying 19,040 acres of land at relatively low rates.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Many people remained on the islands and maintained the Gullah culture of their ancestors. Several hundred thousand Gullah people live on the Sea Islands today. Their claim to the land has been threatened in recent decades by developers seeking to build vacation resorts.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Thomas denied their request and accused Montgomery of having promoted the petition to further his own profits. Montgomery appealed to Joseph Davis, who had returned to Mississippi in October 1865 and was staying in Vicksburg.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Samuel Thomas was eventually removed from his post. Joseph Davis regained control of his plantation in 1867 and promptly sold it to Benjamin Montgomery for $300,000. This price, $75 per acre, was comparatively low. The transaction itself was illegal because the Mississippi Black Codes outlawed sale of property to blacks; Davis and Montgomery therefore conducted the deal in secret.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Montgomery invited free blacks to settle the land and work there. In 1887, led by Benjamin's son Isaiah Montgomery, the group founded a new settlement at Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Mound Bayou remains an autonomous and virtually all-Black community.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner continued to support land reform for freedpeople, but were opposed by a large bloc of politicians who did not want to violate property rights or redistribute capital.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Many radical Northerners withdrew their support for land reform in the years following the war. One reason for the shift in political opinion was fear by the Republicans that land ownership might lead Blacks to align with Democrats for economic reasons. In general, politicians turned their focus to the legal status of freedpeople. In the analysis of W. E. B. Du Bois, black suffrage became more politically palatable precisely as an inexpensive alternative to well-funded agrarian reform.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: According to Henry Louis Gates Jr.: The promise was the first systematic attempt to provide a form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was astonishingly radical for its time, proto-socialist in its implications. In fact, such a policy would be radical in any country today: the federal government's massive confiscation of private propertysome 400,000 acresformerly owned by Confederate land owners, and its methodical redistribution to former black slaves.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: By the 1870s, blacks had abandoned hope of federal land redistribution, but many still saw "forty acres and a mule" as the key to freedom. Black land ownership in the South increased steadily despite the failure of federal Reconstruction. One quarter of black farmers in the South owned their land by 1900. Near the coast, they owned an average of 27 acres; inland, an average of 48 acres. By comparison, 63% of Southern white farmers owned their land. Most of this land was simply bought through private transactions.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: In 1910, black Americans owned 15,000,000 acres of land, most of it in Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina. This figure has since declined to 5,500,000 acres in 1980 and to 2,000,000 acres in 1997. Most of this land is not the area held by black families in 1910; beyond the "Black Belt", it is located in Texas, Oklahoma, and California. The total number of Black farmers has decreased from 925,708 in 1920 to 18,000 in 1997; the number of white farmers has also decreased, but much more slowly. Black American land ownership has diminished more than that of any other ethnic group, while white land ownership has increased. Black families who inherit land across generations without obtaining an explicit title (often resulting in tenancy in common by multiple descendants) may have difficulty gaining government benefits and risk losing their land completely. Outright fraud and lynchings have also been used to strip black people of their land.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: Black landowners are common targets of eminent domain laws invoked to make way for public works projects. At Harris Neck in the Sea Islands, a group of Gullah freedpeople retained 2,681 acres of high-quality land due to the Will of the plantation owner Marg[a]ret Ann Harris. About 100 black farmers continued to live at Harris Neck until 1942, when they were forced off the land because of a plan to build an Air Force base. The land was used freely by local white authorities until 1962, when it was turned over to the federal Fish and Wildlife Service and became Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge. Ownership of the land remains contested.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has long been viewed as a cause for the decline in black agriculture. According to a 1997 report by the USDA's own Civil Rights Action Team:


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: There are some who call the USDA 'the last plantation.' An 'old line' department, USDA was one of the last federal agencies to integrate and perhaps the last to include women and minorities in leadership positions. Considered a stubborn bureaucracy and slow to change, USDA is also perceived as playing a key role in what some see as a conspiracy to force minority and socially disadvantaged farmers off their land through discriminatory loan practices.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: A class action lawsuit has accused the USDA of systematic discrimination against black farmers from 1981 to 1999. In "Pigford v. Glickman" (1999), District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman ruled in favor of the farmers and ordered the USDA to pay financial damages for loss of land and revenue. However, the status of full compensation for affected farmers remains unresolved.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: The phrase "40 acres and a mule" has come to symbolize the broken promise that Reconstruction policies would offer economic justice for African Americans.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: The "40 acres and a mule" promise featured prominently in the class action racial discrimination lawsuit of "Pigford v. Glickman". In his opinion, federal judge Paul L. Friedman ruled that the United States Department of Agriculture had discriminated against African-American farmers, and wrote: "Forty acres and a mule. The government broke that promise to African American farmers. Over one hundred years later, the USDA broke its promise to Mr. James Beverly."


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: In 1989, the U.S. congressional representative for Michigan John Conyers introduced a bill entitled Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act. The bill was later numbered as an allusion to the promise.


title: Forty acres and a mule

text: "40 Acres and a Mule" is often discussed in the context of reparations for slavery. However, strictly speaking, the various policies offering 'forty acres' provided land for political and economic reasons—and with a price tag—and not as unconditional compensation for lifetimes of unpaid labor.


title: Flagellum

text: A flagellum (; ) is a hairlike appendage that protrudes from certain plant and animal sperm cells, and from a wide range of microorganisms to provide motility. Many protists with flagella are termed as flagellates.


title: Flagellum

text: A microorganism may have from one to many flagella. A gram-negative bacterium "Helicobacter pylori" for example uses its multiple flagella to propel itself through the mucus lining to reach the stomach epithelium, where it may cause a gastric ulcer to develop. In some bacteria the flagellum can also function as a sensory organelle, being sensitive to wetness outside the cell.


title: Flagellum

text: Across the three domains of Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryota the flagellum has a different structure, protein composition, and mechanism of propulsion but shares the same function of providing motility. The Latin word means "whip" to describe its lash-like swimming motion. The flagellum in archaea is called the archaellum to note its difference from the bacterial flagellum.


title: Flagellum

text: Eukaryotic flagella and cilia are identical in structure but have different lengths and functions. Prokaryotic fimbriae and pili are smaller, and thinner appendages, with different functions.


title: Flagellum

text: The flagella in eukaryotes have dynein and microtubules that move with a bending mechanism. Bacteria and archaea do not have dynein or microtubules in their flagella, and they move using a rotary mechanism.


title: Flagellum

text: The bacterial flagellum is made up of protein subunits of flagellin. Its shape is a 20-nanometer-thick hollow tube. It is helical and has a sharp bend just outside the outer membrane; this "hook" allows the axis of the helix to point directly away from the cell. A shaft runs between the hook and the basal body, passing through protein rings in the cell's membrane that act as bearings. Gram-positive organisms have two of these basal body rings, one in the peptidoglycan layer and one in the plasma membrane. Gram-negative organisms have four such rings: the L ring associates with the lipopolysaccharides, the P ring associates with peptidoglycan layer, the M ring is embedded in the plasma membrane, and the S ring is directly attached to the plasma membrane. The filament ends with a capping protein.


title: Flagellum

text: The flagellar filament is the long, helical screw that propels the bacterium when rotated by the motor, through the hook. In most bacteria that have been studied, including the Gram-negative "Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhimurium, Caulobacter crescentus", and "Vibrio alginolyticus", the filament is made up of 11 protofilaments approximately parallel to the filament axis. Each protofilament is a series of tandem protein chains. However, "Campylobacter jejuni" has seven protofilaments.


title: Flagellum

text: The basal body has several traits in common with some types of secretory pores, such as the hollow, rod-like "plug" in their centers extending out through the plasma membrane. The similarities between bacterial flagella and bacterial secretory system structures and proteins provide scientific evidence supporting the theory that bacterial flagella evolved from the type-three secretion system.


title: Flagellum

text: The bacterial flagellum is driven by a rotary engine (Mot complex) made up of protein, located at the flagellum's anchor point on the inner cell membrane. The engine is powered by proton-motive force, i.e., by the flow of protons (hydrogen ions) across the bacterial cell membrane due to a concentration gradient set up by the cell's metabolism ("Vibrio" species have two kinds of flagella, lateral and polar, and some are driven by a sodium ion pump rather than a proton pump). The rotor transports protons across the membrane, and is turned in the process. The rotor alone can operate at 6,000 to 17,000 rpm, but with the flagellar filament attached usually only reaches 200 to 1000 rpm. The direction of rotation can be changed by the flagellar motor switch almost instantaneously, caused by a slight change in the position of a protein, FliG, in the rotor. The flagellum is highly energy efficient and uses very little energy. The exact mechanism for torque generation is still poorly understood. Because the flagellar motor has no on-off switch, the protein epsE is used as a mechanical clutch to disengage the motor from the rotor, thus stopping the flagellum and allowing the bacterium to remain in one place.


title: Flagellum

text: The cylindrical shape of flagella is suited to locomotion of microscopic organisms; these organisms operate at a low Reynolds number, where the viscosity of the surrounding water is much more important than its mass or inertia.


title: Flagellum

text: The rotational speed of flagella varies in response to the intensity of the proton-motive force, thereby permitting certain forms of speed control, and also permitting some types of bacteria to attain remarkable speeds in proportion to their size; some achieve roughly 60 cell lengths per second. At such a speed, a bacterium would take about 245 days to cover 1 km; although that may seem slow, the perspective changes when the concept of scale is introduced. In comparison to macroscopic life forms, it is very fast indeed when expressed in terms of number of body lengths per second. A cheetah, for example, only achieves about 25 body lengths per second.


title: Flagellum

text: Through use of their flagella, bacteria are able to move rapidly towards attractants and away from repellents, by means of a biased random walk, with 'runs' and 'tumbles' brought about by rotating its flagellum counterclockwise and clockwise, respectively. The two directions of rotation are not identical (with respect to flagellum movement) and are selected by a molecular switch.


title: Flagellum

text: During flagellar assembly, components of the flagellum pass through the hollow cores of the basal body and the nascent filament. During assembly, protein components are added at the flagellar tip rather than at the base. "In vitro", flagellar filaments assemble spontaneously in a solution containing purified flagellin as the sole protein.


title: Flagellum

text: At least 10 protein components of the bacterial flagellum share homologous proteins with the type three secretion system (T3SS) found in many gram-negative bacteria, hence one likely evolved from the other. Because the T3SS has a similar number of components as a flagellar apparatus (about 25 proteins), which one evolved first is difficult to determine. However, the flagellar system appears to involve more proteins overall, including various regulators and chaperones, hence it has been argued that flagella evolved from a T3SS. However, it has also been suggested that the flagellum may have evolved first or the two structures evolved in parallel. Early single-cell organisms' need for motility (mobility) support that the more mobile flagella would be selected by evolution first, but the T3SS evolving from the flagellum can be seen as 'reductive evolution', and receives no topological support from the phylogenetic trees. The hypothesis that the two structures evolved separately from a common ancestor accounts for the protein similarities between the two structures, as well as their functional diversity.


title: Flagellum

text: Some authors have argued that flagella cannot have evolved, assuming that they can only function properly when all proteins are in place. In other words, the flagellar apparatus is "irreducibly complex". However, many proteins can be deleted or mutated and the flagellum still works, though sometimes at reduced efficiency. Moreover, with many proteins unique to some number across species, diversity of bacterial flagella composition was higher than expected. Hence, the flagellar apparatus is clearly very flexible in evolutionary terms and perfectly able to lose or gain protein components. For instance, a number of mutations have been found that "increase" the motility of "E. coli". Additional evidence for the evolution of bacterial flagella includes the existence of vestigial flagella, intermediate forms of flagella and patterns of similarities among flagellar protein sequences, including the observation that almost all of the core flagellar proteins have known homologies with non-flagellar proteins. Furthermore, several processes have been identified as playing important roles in flagellar evolution, including self-assembly of simple repeating subunits, gene duplication with subsequent divergence, recruitment of elements from other systems ('molecular bricolage') and recombination.


title: Flagellum

text: Different species of bacteria have different numbers and arrangements of flagella, named using the term "tricho", from the Greek "trichos" meaning "hair".


title: Flagellum

text: Counterclockwise rotation of a monotrichous polar flagellum pushes the cell forward with the flagellum trailing behind, much like a corkscrew moving inside cork. Water on the microscopic scale is highly viscous, unlike usual water.


title: Flagellum

text: Spirochetes, in contrast, have flagella called endoflagella arising from opposite poles of the cell, and are located within the periplasmic space as shown by breaking the outer-membrane and also by electron cryotomography microscopy. The rotation of the filaments relative to the cell body causes the entire bacterium to move forward in a corkscrew-like motion, even through material viscous enough to prevent the passage of normally flagellated bacteria.


title: Flagellum

text: In certain large forms of "Selenomonas", more than 30 individual flagella are organized outside the cell body, helically twining about each other to form a thick structure (easily visible with the light microscope) called a "fascicle".


title: Flagellum

text: In some "Vibrio" spp. (particularly "Vibrio parahaemolyticus") and related bacteria such as "Aeromonas", two flagellar systems co-exist, using different sets of genes and different ion gradients for energy. The polar flagella are constitutively expressed and provide motility in bulk fluid, while the lateral flagella are expressed when the polar flagella meet too much resistance to turn. These provide swarming motility on surfaces or in viscous fluids.


title: Flagellum

text: Bundling is an event that can happen in multi-flagellated cells, bundling the flagella together and causing them to rotate in a coordinated manner.


title: Flagellum

text: Flagella are left-handed helices, and when rotated counter-clockwise by their rotors, they can bundle and rotate together. When the rotors reverse direction, thus rotating clockwise, the flagellum unwinds from the bundle. This may cause the cell to stop its forward motion and instead start twitching in place, referred to as "tumbling". Tumbling results in a stochastic reorientation of the cell, causing it to change the direction of its forward swimming.


title: Flagellum

text: It is not known which stimuli drive the switch between bundling and tumbling, but the motor is highly adaptive to different signals. In the model describing chemotaxis ("movement on purpose") the clockwise rotation of a flagellum is suppressed by chemical compounds favorable to the cell (e.g. food). When moving in a favorable direction, the concentration of such chemical attractants increases and therefore tumbles are continually suppressed, allowing forward motion; likewise, when the cell's direction of motion is unfavorable (e.g., away from a chemical attractant), tumbles are no longer suppressed and occur much more often, with the chance that the cell will be thus reoriented in the correct direction.


title: Flagellum

text: Even if all flagella would rotate clockwise, however, they often cannot form a bundle due to geometrical and hydrodynamic reasons.


title: Flagellum

text: Aiming to emphasize the distinction between the bacterial flagella and the eukaryotic cilia and flagella, some authors attempted to replace the name of these two eukaryotic structures with "undulipodia" (e.g., all papers by Margulis since the 1970s) or "cilia" for both (e.g., Hülsmann, 1992; Adl et al., 2012; most papers of Cavalier-Smith), preserving "flagella" for the bacterial structure. However, the discriminative usage of the terms "cilia" and "flagella" for eukaryotes adopted in this article (see below) is still common (e.g., Andersen et al., 1991; Leadbeater et al., 2000).


title: Flagellum

text: The core of a eukaryotic flagellum, known as the axoneme is a bundle of nine fused pairs of microtubules known as "doublets" surrounding two central single microtubules ("singlets"). This 9+2 axoneme is characteristic of the eukaryotic flagellum. At the base of a eukaryotic flagellum is a basal body, "blepharoplast" or kinetosome, which is the microtubule organizing center for flagellar microtubules and is about 500 nanometers long. Basal bodies are structurally identical to centrioles. The flagellum is encased within the cell's plasma membrane, so that the interior of the flagellum is accessible to the cell's cytoplasm.


title: Flagellum

text: Besides the axoneme and basal body, relatively constant in morphology, other internal structures of the flagellar apparatus are the transition zone (where the axoneme and basal body meet) and the root system (microtubular or fibrilar structures that extend from the basal bodies into the cytoplasm), more variable and useful as indicators of phylogenetic relationships of eukaryotes. Other structures, more uncommon, are the paraflagellar (or paraxial, paraxonemal) rod, the R fiber, and the S fiber. For surface structures, see below.


title: Flagellum

text: Each of the outer 9 doublet microtubules extends a pair of dynein arms (an "inner" and an "outer" arm) to the adjacent microtubule; these produce force through ATP hydrolysis. The flagellar axoneme also contains radial spokes, polypeptide complexes extending from each of the outer nine microtubule doublets towards the central pair, with the "head" of the spoke facing inwards. The radial spoke is thought to be involved in the regulation of flagellar motion, although its exact function and method of action are not yet understood.


title: Flagellum

text: The regular beat patterns of eukaryotic cilia and flagella generate motion on a cellular level. Examples range from the propulsion of single cells such as the swimming of spermatozoa to the transport of fluid along a stationary layer of cells such as in the respiratory tract.


title: Flagellum

text: Although eukaryotic cilia and flagella are ultimately the same, they are sometimes classed by their pattern of movement, a tradition from before their structures have been known. In the case of flagella, the motion is often planar and wave-like, whereas the motile cilia often perform a more complicated three-dimensional motion with a power and recovery stroke. Yet another traditional form of distinction is by the number of 9+2 organelles on the cell.


title: Flagellum

text: Intraflagellar transport, the process by which axonemal subunits, transmembrane receptors, and other proteins are moved up and down the length of the flagellum, is essential for proper functioning of the flagellum, in both motility and signal transduction.


title: Flagellum

text: Eukaryotic flagella or cilia, probably an ancestral characteristic, are widespread in almost all groups of eukaryotes, as a relatively perennial condition, or as a flagellated life cycle stage (e.g., zoids, gametes, zoospores, which may be produced continually or not).


title: Flagellum

text: The first situation is found either in specialized cells of multicellular organisms (e.g., the choanocytes of sponges, or the ciliated epithelia of metazoans), as in ciliates and many eukaryotes with a "flagellate condition" (or "monadoid ", see , an artificial group).


title: Flagellum

text: Flagellated lifecycle stages are found in many groups, e.g., many green algae (zoospores and male gametes), bryophytes (male gametes), pteridophytes (male gametes), some gymnosperms (cycads and "Ginkgo", as male gametes), centric diatoms (male gametes), brown algae (zoospores and gametes), oomycetes (assexual zoospores and gametes), hyphochytrids (zoospores), labyrinthulomycetes (zoospores), some apicomplexans (gametes), some radiolarians (probably gametes), foraminiferans (gametes), plasmodiophoromycetes (zoospores and gametes), myxogastrids (zoospores), metazoans (male gametes), and chytrid fungi (zoospores and gametes).


title: Flagellum

text: Flagella or cilia are completely absent in some groups, probably due to a loss rather than being a primitive condition. The loss of cilia occurred in red algae, some green algae (Zygnematophyceae), the gymnosperms except cycads and "Ginkgo", angiosperms, pennate diatoms, some apicomplexans, some amoebozoans, in the sperm of some metazoans, and in fungi (except chytrids).


title: Flagellum

text: A number of terms related to flagella or cilia are used to characterize eukaryotes. According to surface structures present, flagella may be:


title: Flagellum

text: According to the number of flagella, cells may be: (remembering that some authors use "ciliated" instead of "flagellated")


title: Flagellum

text: The archaellum possessed by some species of Archaea is superficially similar to the bacterial flagellum; in the 1980s, they were thought to be homologous on the basis of gross morphology and behavior. Both flagella and archaella consist of filaments extending outside the cell, and rotate to propel the cell. Archaeal flagella have a unique structure which lacks a central channel. Similar to bacterial type IV pilins, the archaeal proteins (archaellins) are made with class 3 signal peptides and they are processed by a type IV prepilin peptidase-like enzyme. The archaellins are typically modified by the addition of N-linked glycans which are necessary for proper assembly or function.


title: Flagellum

text: Discoveries in the 1990s revealed numerous detailed differences between the archaeal and bacterial flagella. These include:


title: Flagellum

text: These differences could mean that the bacterial flagella and archaella could be a classic case of biological analogy, or convergent evolution, rather than homology. However, in comparison to the decades of well-publicized study of bacterial flagella (e.g. by Howard Berg), archaella have only recently begun to garner scientific attention.


title: Master boot record

text: A master boot record (MBR) is a special type of boot sector at the very beginning of partitioned computer mass storage devices like fixed disks or removable drives intended for use with IBM PC-compatible systems and beyond. The concept of MBRs was publicly introduced in 1983 with PC DOS 2.0.


title: Master boot record

text: The MBR holds the information on how the disc's sectors are divided into partitions, each partition notionally containing a file system. The MBR also contains executable code to function as a loader for the installed operating system—usually by passing control over to the loader's second stage, or in conjunction with each partition's volume boot record (VBR). This MBR code is usually referred to as a boot loader.


title: Master boot record

text: The organization of the partition table in the MBR limits the maximum addressable storage space of a partitioned disk to 2 TiB . Approaches to slightly raise this limit assuming 32-bit arithmetics or 4096-byte sectors are not officially supported, as they fatally break compatibility with existing boot loaders and most MBR-compliant operating systems and system tools, and can cause serious data corruption when used outside of narrowly controlled system environments. Therefore, the MBR-based partitioning scheme is in the process of being superseded by the GUID Partition Table (GPT) scheme in new computers. A GPT can coexist with an MBR in order to provide some limited form of backward compatibility for older systems.


title: Master boot record

text: MBRs are not present on non-partitioned media such as floppies, superfloppies or other storage devices configured to behave as such.


title: Master boot record

text: Support for partitioned media, and thereby the master boot record (MBR), was introduced with IBM PC DOS 2.0 in March 1983 in order to support the 10 MB hard disk of the then-new IBM Personal Computer XT, still using the FAT12 file system. The original version of the MBR was written by David Litton of IBM in June 1982. The partition table supported up to four "primary partitions", of which DOS could only use one. This did not change when FAT16 was introduced as a new file system with DOS 3.0. Support for an "extended partition", a special primary partition type used as a container to hold other partitions, was added with DOS 3.2, and nested "logical drives" inside an extended partition came with DOS 3.30. Since MS-DOS, PC DOS, OS/2 and Windows were never enabled to boot off them, the MBR format and boot code remained almost unchanged in functionality, except for in some third-party implementations, throughout the eras of DOS and OS/2 up to 1996.


title: Master boot record

text: In 1996, support for logical block addressing (LBA) was introduced in Windows 95B and DOS 7.10 in order to support disks larger than 8 GB. "Disk timestamps" were also introduced. This also reflected the idea that the MBR is meant to be operating system and file system independent. However, this design rule was partially compromised in more recent Microsoft implementations of the MBR, which enforce CHS access for FAT16B and FAT32 partition types /, whereas LBA is used for /.


title: Master boot record

text: Despite sometimes poor documentation of certain intrinsic details of the MBR format (which occasionally caused compatibility problems), it has been widely adopted as a de facto industry standard, due to the broad popularity of PC-compatible computers and its semi-static nature over decades. This was even to the extent of being supported by computer operating systems for other platforms. Sometimes this was in addition to other pre-existing or cross-platform standards for bootstrapping and partitioning.


title: Master boot record

text: MBR partition entries and the MBR boot code used in commercial operating systems, however, are limited to 32 bits. Therefore, the maximum disk size supported on disks using 512-byte sectors (whether real or emulated) by the MBR partitioning scheme (without 33-bit arithmetic) is limited to 2 TiB. Consequently, a different partitioning scheme must be used for larger disks, as they have become widely available since 2010. The MBR partitioning scheme is therefore in the process of being superseded by the GUID Partition Table (GPT). The official approach does little more than ensuring data integrity by employing a "protective MBR". Specifically, it does not provide backward compatibility with operating systems that do not support the GPT scheme as well. Meanwhile, multiple forms of "hybrid MBRs" have been designed and implemented by third parties in order to maintain partitions located in the first physical 2 TiB of a disk in both partitioning schemes "in parallel" and/or to allow older operating systems to boot off GPT partitions as well. The present non-standard nature of these solutions causes various compatibility problems in certain scenarios.


title: Master boot record

text: IBM PC DOS 2.0 introduced the codice_1 utility to set up and maintain MBR partitions. When a storage device has been partitioned according to this scheme, its MBR contains a partition table describing the locations, sizes, and other attributes of linear regions referred to as partitions.


title: Master boot record

text: The partitions themselves may also contain data to describe more complex partitioning schemes, such as extended boot records (EBRs), BSD disklabels, or Logical Disk Manager metadata partitions.


title: Master boot record

text: The MBR is not located in a partition; it is located at a first sector of the device (physical offset 0), preceding the first partition. (The boot sector present on a non-partitioned device or within an individual partition is called a volume boot record instead.) In cases where the computer is running a DDO BIOS overlay or boot manager, the partition table may be moved to some other physical location on the device; e.g., Ontrack Disk Manager often placed a copy of the original MBR contents in the second sector, then hid itself from any subsequently booted OS or application, so the MBR copy was treated as if it were still residing in the first sector.


title: Master boot record

text: By convention, there are exactly four primary partition table entries in the MBR partition table scheme, although some operating systems and system tools extended this to five (Advanced Active Partitions (AAP) with PTS-DOS 6.60 and DR-DOS 7.07), eight (AST and NEC MS-DOS 3.x as well as Storage Dimensions SpeedStor), or even sixteen entries (with Ontrack Disk Manager).


title: Master boot record

text: An artifact of hard disk technology from the era of the PC XT, the partition table subdivides a storage medium using units of cylinders, heads, and sectors (CHS addressing). These values no longer correspond to their namesakes in modern disk drives, as well as being irrelevant in other devices such as solid-state drives, which do not physically have cylinders or heads.


title: Master boot record

text: In the CHS scheme, sector indices have (almost) always begun with sector 1 rather than sector 0 by convention, and due to an error in all versions of MS-DOS/PC DOS up to including 7.10, the number of heads is generally limited to 255 instead of 256. When a CHS address is too large to fit into these fields, the tuple (1023, 254, 63) is typically used today, although on older systems, and with older disk tools, the cylinder value often wrapped around modulo the CHS barrier near 8 GB, causing ambiguity and risks of data corruption. (If the situation involves a "protective" MBR on a disk with a GPT, Intel's Extensible Firmware Interface specification requires that the tuple (1023, 255, 63) be used.) The 10-bit cylinder value is recorded within two bytes in order to facilitate making calls to the original/legacy INT 13h BIOS disk access routines, where 16 bits were divided into sector and cylinder parts, and not on byte boundaries.


title: Master boot record

text: Due to the limits of CHS addressing, a transition was made to using LBA, or logical block addressing. Both the partition length and partition start address are sector values stored in the partition table entries as 32-bit quantities. The sector size used to be considered fixed at 512 (2) bytes, and a broad range of important components including chipsets, boot sectors, operating systems, database engines, partitioning tools, backup and file system utilities and other software had this value hard-coded. Since the end of 2009, disk drives employing 4096-byte sectors (4Kn or Advanced Format) have been available, although the size of the sector for some of these drives was still reported as 512 bytes to the host system through conversion in the hard-drive firmware and referred to as 512 emulation drives (512e).


title: Master boot record

text: Since block addresses and sizes are stored in the partition table of an MBR using 32 bits, the maximum size, as well as the highest start address, of a partition using drives that have 512-byte sectors (actual or emulated) cannot exceed 2 TiB−512 bytes ( bytes or (2−1) sectors × 512 (2) bytes per sector). Alleviating this capacity limitation was one of the prime motivations for the development of the GPT.


title: Master boot record

text: Since partitioning information is stored in the MBR partition table using a beginning block address and a length, it may in theory be possible to define partitions in such a way that the allocated space for a disk with 512-byte sectors gives a total size approaching 4 TiB, if all but one partition are located below the 2 TiB limit and the last one is assigned as starting at or close to block 2−1 and specify the size as up to 2−1, thereby defining a partition that requires 33 rather than 32 bits for the sector address to be accessed. However, in practice, only certain LBA-48-enabled operating systems, including Linux, FreeBSD and Windows 7 that use 64-bit sector addresses internally actually support this. Due to code space constraints and the nature of the MBR partition table to only support 32 bits, boot sectors, even if enabled to support LBA-48 rather than LBA-28, often use 32-bit calculations, unless they are specifically designed to support the full address range of LBA-48 or are intended to run on 64-bit platforms only. Any boot code or operating system using 32-bit sector addresses internally would cause addresses to wrap around accessing this partition and thereby result in serious data corruption over all partitions.


title: Master boot record

text: For disks that present a sector size other than 512 bytes, such as USB external drives, there are limitations as well. A sector size of 4096 results in an eight-fold increase in the size of a partition that can be defined using MBR, allowing partitions up to 16 TiB (2 × 4096 bytes) in size. Versions of Windows more recent than Windows XP support the larger sector sizes, as well as Mac OS X, and Linux has supported larger sector sizes since 2.6.31 or 2.6.32, but issues with boot loaders, partitioning tools and computer BIOS implementations present certain limitations, since they are often hard-wired to reserve only 512 bytes for sector buffers, causing memory to become overwritten for larger sector sizes. This may cause unpredictable behaviour as well, and therefore should be avoided when compatibility and standard conformity is an issue.


title: Master boot record

text: Where a data storage device has been partitioned with the GPT scheme, the master boot record will still contain a partition table, but its only purpose is to indicate the existence of the GPT and to prevent utility programs that understand only the MBR partition table scheme from creating any partitions in what they would otherwise see as free space on the disk, thereby accidentally erasing the GPT.


title: Master boot record

text: On IBM PC-compatible computers, the bootstrapping firmware (contained within the ROM BIOS) loads and executes the master boot record. The PC/XT (type 5160) used an Intel 8088 microprocessor. In order to remain compatible, all x86 architecture systems start with the microprocessor in an operating mode referred to as real mode. The BIOS reads the MBR from the storage device into physical memory, and then it directs the microprocessor to the start of the boot code. Since the BIOS runs in real mode, the processor is in real mode when the MBR program begins to execute, and so the beginning of the MBR is expected to contain real-mode machine code.


title: Master boot record

text: Since the BIOS bootstrap routine loads and runs exactly one sector from the physical disk, having the partition table in the MBR with the boot code simplifies the design of the MBR program. It contains a small program that loads the Volume Boot Record (VBR) of the targeted partition. Control is then passed to this code, which is responsible for loading the actual operating system. This process is known as chain loading.


title: Master boot record

text: Popular MBR code programs were created for booting PC DOS and MS-DOS, and similar boot code remains in wide use. These boot sectors expect the codice_1 partition table scheme to be in use and scans the list of partitions in the MBR's embedded partition table to find the only one that is marked with the "active flag". It then loads and runs the volume boot record (VBR) of the active partition.


title: Master boot record

text: There are alternative boot code implementations, some of which are installed by boot managers, which operate in a variety of ways. Some MBR code loads additional code for a boot manager from the first track of the disk, which it assumes to be "free" space that is not allocated to any disk partition, and executes it. A MBR program may interact with the user to determine which partition on which drive should boot, and may transfer control to the MBR of a different drive. Other MBR code contains a list of disk locations (often corresponding to the contents of files in a filesystem) of the remainder of the boot manager code to load and to execute. (The first relies on behavior that is not universal across all disk partitioning utilities, most notably those that read and write GPTs. The last requires that the embedded list of disk locations be updated when changes are made that would relocate the remainder of the code.)


title: Master boot record

text: On machines that do not use x86 processors, or on x86 machines with non-BIOS firmware such as Open Firmware or Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) firmware, this design is unsuitable, and the MBR is not used as part of the system bootstrap. EFI firmware is instead capable of directly understanding the GPT partitioning scheme and the FAT filesystem format, and loads and runs programs held as files in the EFI System partition. The MBR will be involved only insofar as it might contain a partition table for compatibility purposes if the GPT partition table scheme has been used.


title: Master boot record

text: There is some MBR replacement code that emulates EFI firmware's bootstrap, which makes non-EFI machines capable of booting from disks using the GPT partitioning scheme. It detects a GPT, places the processor in the correct operating mode, and loads the EFI compatible code from disk to complete this task.


title: Master boot record

text: In addition to the bootstrap code and a partition table, master boot records may contain a disk signature. This is a 32-bit value that is intended to identify uniquely the disk medium (as opposed to the disk unit—the two not necessarily being the same for removable hard disks).


title: Master boot record

text: The disk signature was introduced by Windows NT version 3.5, but it is now used by several operating systems, including the Linux kernel version 2.6 and later. Linux tools can use the NT disk signature to determine which disk the machine booted from.


title: Master boot record

text: Windows NT (and later Microsoft operating systems) uses the disk signature as an index to all the partitions on any disk ever connected to the computer under that OS; these signatures are kept in Windows Registry keys, primarily for storing the persistent mappings between disk partitions and drive letters. It may also be used in Windows NT BOOT.INI files (though most do not), to describe the location of bootable Windows NT (or later) partitions. One key (among many), where NT disk signatures appear in a Windows 2000/XP registry, is:


title: Master boot record

text: If a disk's signature stored in the MBR was (in that order) and its first partition corresponded with logical drive C: under Windows, then the codice_3 data under the key value codice_4 would be:


title: Master boot record

text: The first four bytes are said disk signature. (In other keys, these bytes may appear in reverse order from that found in the MBR sector.) These are followed by eight more bytes, forming a 64-bit integer, in little-endian notation, which are used to locate the byte offset of this partition. In this case, corresponds to the hexadecimal value (). Under the assumption that the drive in question reports a sector size of 512 bytes, then dividing this byte offset by 512 results in 63, which is the physical sector number (or LBA) containing the first sector of the partition (unlike the "sector count" used in the sectors value of CHS tuples, which counts from one, the absolute or LBA sector value starts counting from "zero").


title: Master boot record

text: If this disk had another partition with the values following the disk signature (under, e.g., the key value codice_5), it would begin at byte offset (), which is also the first byte of physical sector .


title: Master boot record

text: Starting with Windows Vista, the disk signature is also stored in the Boot Configuration Data (BCD) store, and the boot process depends on it. If the disk signature changes, cannot be found or has a conflict, Windows is unable to boot. Unless Windows is forced to use the overlapping part of the LBA address of the Advanced Active Partition entry as pseudo-disk signature, Windows' usage is conflictive with the Advanced Active Partition feature of PTS-DOS 7 and DR-DOS 7.07, in particular if their boot code is located outside the first 8 GB of the disk, so that LBA addressing must be used.


title: Master boot record

text: The MBR originated in the PC XT. IBM PC-compatible computers are little-endian, which means the processor stores numeric values spanning two or more bytes in memory least significant byte first. The format of the MBR on media reflects this convention. Thus, the MBR signature will appear in a disk editor as the sequence codice_6.


title: Master boot record

text: The bootstrap sequence in the BIOS will load the first valid MBR that it finds into the computer's physical memory at address :. The last instruction executed in the BIOS code will be a "jump" to that address in order to direct execution to the beginning of the MBR copy. The primary validation for most BIOSes is the signature at offset , although a BIOS implementer may choose to include other checks, such as verifying that the MBR contains a valid partition table without entries referring to sectors beyond the reported capacity of the disk.


title: Master boot record

text: To the BIOS, removable (e.g. floppy) and fixed disks are essentially the same. For either, the BIOS reads the first physical sector of the media into RAM at absolute address , checks the signature in the last two bytes of the loaded sector, and then, if the correct signature is found, transfers control to the first byte of the sector with a jump (JMP) instruction. The only real distinction that the BIOS makes is that (by default, or if the boot order is not configurable) it attempts to boot from the first removable disk before trying to boot from the first fixed disk. From the perspective of the BIOS, the action of the MBR loading a volume boot record into RAM is exactly the same as the action of a floppy disk volume boot record loading the object code of an operating system loader into RAM. In either case, the program that the BIOS loaded is going about the work of chain loading an operating system.


title: Master boot record

text: While the MBR boot sector code expects to be loaded at physical address :, all the memory from physical address : (address : is the last one used by a Phoenix BIOS) to :, later relaxed to : (and sometimes up to :)the end of the first 640 KBis available in real mode. The codice_7 BIOS interrupt call may help in determining how much memory can be allocated safely (by default, it simply reads the base memory size in KB from segment:offset location :, but it may be hooked by other resident pre-boot software like BIOS overlays, RPL code or viruses to reduce the reported amount of available memory in order to keep other boot stage software like boot sectors from overwriting them).


title: Master boot record

text: The last 66 bytes of the 512-byte MBR are reserved for the partition table and other information, so the MBR boot sector program must be small enough to fit within 446 bytes of memory or less.


title: Master boot record

text: The MBR code examines the partition table, selects a suitable partition and loads the program that will perform the next stage of the boot process, usually by making use of INT 13h BIOS calls. The MBR bootstrap code loads and runs (a boot loader- or operating system-dependent) volume boot record code that is located at the beginning of the "active" partition. The volume boot record will fit within a 512-byte sector, but it is safe for the MBR code to load additional sectors to accommodate boot loaders longer than one sector, provided they do not make any assumptions on what the sector size is. In fact, at least 1 KB of RAM is available at address in every IBM XT- and AT-class machine, so a 1 KB sector could be used with no problem. Like the MBR, a volume boot record normally expects to be loaded at address :. This derives from the fact that the volume boot record design originated on unpartitioned media, where a volume boot record would be directly loaded by the BIOS boot procedure; as mentioned above, the BIOS treats MBRs and volume boot records (VBRs) exactly alike. Since this is the same location where the MBR is loaded, one of the first tasks of an MBR is to relocate itself somewhere else in memory. The relocation address is determined by the MBR, but it is most often : (for MS-DOS/PC DOS, OS/2 and Windows MBR code) or : (most DR-DOS MBRs). (Even though both of these segmented addresses resolve to the same physical memory address in real mode, for Apple Darwin to boot, the MBR must be relocated to : instead of :, since the code depends on the DS:SI pointer to the partition entry provided by the MBR, but it erroneously refers to it via :SI only.) It is important not to relocate to other addresses in memory because many VBRs will assume a certain standard memory layout when loading their boot file.


title: Master boot record

text: The "Status" field in a partition table record is used to indicate an active partition. Standard-conformant MBRs will allow only one partition marked active and use this as part of a sanity-check to determine the existence of a valid partition table. They will display an error message, if more than one partition has been marked active. Some non-standard MBRs will not treat this as an error condition and just use the first marked partition in the row.


title: Master boot record

text: Traditionally, values other than (not active) and (active) were invalid and the bootstrap program would display an error message upon encountering them. However, the Plug and Play BIOS Specification and BIOS Boot Specification (BBS) allowed other devices to become bootable as well since 1994. Consequently, with the introduction of MS-DOS 7.10 (Windows 95B) and higher, the MBR started to treat a set bit 7 as active flag and showed an error message for values .. only. It continued to treat the entry as physical drive unit to be used when loading the corresponding partition's VBR later on, thereby now also accepting other boot drives than as valid, however, MS-DOS did not make use of this extension by itself. Storing the actual physical drive number in the partition table does not normally cause backward compatibility problems, since the value will differ from "only" on drives other than the first one (which have not been bootable before, anyway). However, even with systems enabled to boot off other drives, the extension may still not work universally, for example, after the BIOS assignment of physical drives has changed when drives are removed, added or swapped. Therefore, per the BIOS Boot Specification (BBS), it is best practice for a modern MBR accepting bit 7 as active flag to pass on the DL value originally provided by the BIOS instead of using the entry in the partition table.


title: Master boot record

text: The MBR is loaded at memory location : and with the following CPU registers set up when the prior bootstrap loader (normally the IPL in the BIOS) passes execution to it by jumping to : in the CPU's real mode.


title: Master boot record

text: By convention, a standard conformant MBR passes execution to a successfully loaded VBR, loaded at memory location :, by jumping to : in the CPU's real mode with the following registers maintained or specifically set up:


title: Master boot record

text: Under DR-DOS 7.07 an extended interface may be optionally provided by the extended MBR and in conjunction with LOADER:


title: Master boot record

text: In conjunction with GPT, an "Enhanced Disk Drive Specification" (EDD) 4 Hybrid MBR proposal recommends another extension to the interface:


title: Master boot record

text: Though it is possible to manipulate the bytes in the MBR sector directly using various disk editors, there are tools to write fixed sets of functioning code to the MBR. Since MS-DOS 5.0, the program codice_1 has included the switch codice_19, which will rewrite the MBR code. Under Windows 2000 and Windows XP, the Recovery Console can be used to write new MBR code to a storage device using its codice_20 command. Under Windows Vista and Windows 7, the Recovery Environment can be used to write new MBR code using the codice_21 command.


title: Master boot record

text: Some third-party utilities may also be used for directly editing the contents of partition tables (without requiring any knowledge of hexadecimal or disk/sector editors), such as MBRWizard.


title: Master boot record

text: codice_22 is a POSIX command commonly used to read or write any location on a storage device, MBR included. In Linux, ms-sys may be used to install a Windows MBR. The GRUB and LILO projects have tools for writing code to the MBR sector, namely codice_23 and codice_24. The GRUB Legacy interactive console can write to the MBR, using the codice_25 and codice_26 commands, but GRUB2 currently requires codice_23 to be run from within an operating system.


title: Master boot record

text: Various programs are able to create a "backup" of both the primary partition table and the logical partitions in the extended partition.


title: Master boot record

text: Linux codice_28 (on a SystemRescueCD) is able to save a backup of the primary and extended partition table. It creates a file that can be read in a text editor, or this file can be used by sfdisk to restore the primary/extended partition table. An example command to back up the partition table is codice_29 and to restore is codice_30. It is possible to copy the partition table from one disk to another this way, useful for setting up mirroring, but sfdisk executes the command without prompting/warnings using codice_31.


title: Diadem

text: A diadem is a type of crown, specifically an ornamental headband worn by monarchs and others as a badge of royalty.


title: Diadem

text: The word derives from the Greek διάδημα "diádēma", "band" or "fillet", from διαδέω "diadéō", "I bind round", or "I fasten". The term originally referred to the embroidered white silk ribbon, ending in a knot and two fringed strips often draped over the shoulders, that surrounded the head of the king to denote his authority. Such ribbons were also used to crown victorious athletes in important sports games in antiquity. It was later applied to a metal crown, generally in a circular or "fillet" shape. For example, the crown worn by Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was a diadem, as was that of a baron later (in some countries surmounted by three globes). The ancient Celts were believed to have used a thin, semioval gold plate called a "mind" (Old Irish) as a diadem. Some of the earliest examples of these types of crowns can be found in ancient Egypt, from the simple fabric type to the more elaborate metallic type, and in the Aegean world.


title: Diadem

text: A diadem is also a jewelled ornament in the shape of a half crown, worn by women and placed over the forehead (in this sense, also called tiara). In some societies, it may be a wreath worn around the head. The ancient Persians wore a high and erect royal tiara encircled with a diadem. Hera, queen of the Greek gods, wore a golden crown called the diadem.


title: Diadem

text: The "Priest King" statue made by the Indus Valley civilization (c. 3300 – c. 1300 BCE) wore a headband that is possibly a diadem.


title: Diadem

text: By extension, "diadem" can be used generally for an emblem of regal power or dignity. The head regalia worn by Roman emperors, from the time of Diocletian onwards, is described as a diadem in the original sources. It was this object that the Foederatus general Odoacer returned to Emperor Zeno (the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire) after his expulsion of the usurper Romulus Augustus from Rome in 476 AD.


title: Tanvi Azmi

text: Azmi portrayed a troubled doctor in the tele-series, "Jeevanrekha" and as a young widow in telefilm "Rao Saheb" (1986) directed by Vijaya Mehta. She also acted in the Malayalam language film "Vidheyan" (1993), directed by Adoor Gopalakrishnan.


title: Tanvi Azmi

text: She received a nomination for Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in film "Akele Hum Akele Tum" (1995).


title: Tanvi Azmi

text: In 2014, she appeared in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's film "Bajirao Mastani" playing the role of Radhabai, mother of Bajirao I. She had to go bald for her role in the movie. She got the National Film Award for Best Supporting Actress for her outstanding performance in the film Bajirao Mastani. In 2017, she acted in And TV’s Vani Rani


title: Tanvi Azmi

text: Tanvi Azmi in her upcoming project 'Tribhanga: Tedhi Medhi Crazy' a Netflix original film directed by Renuka Shahane. The movie also stars Kajol and Mithila Palkar.


title: Tanvi Azmi

text: Azmi is married to Baba Azmi, cinematographer and brother of Shabana Azmi, thus connected with the Akhtar-Azmi film family.


title: Castle (season 8)

text: The eighth and final season of American crime-comedy-drama television series "Castle" was ordered on May 7, 2015, by ABC. The season premiered on September 21, 2015, in the United States on ABC, and the finale aired on May 16, 2016. The season consisted of 22 episodes.


title: Castle (season 8)

text: On April 18, 2016, ABC and ABC Productions announced that Stana Katic and Tamala Jones would not return for "Castle"s ninth season, should it be renewed. Despite several other cast members having signed on for a ninth season, on May 12, 2016, it was announced that the show would be cancelled instead; the final episode aired on May 16, 2016.


title: Castle (season 8)

text: Richard Castle (Fillion) is a famous mystery novelist who has killed off the main character in his popular book series and has writer's block. He is brought in by the NYPD for questioning regarding a copy-cat murder based on one of his novels. He is intrigued by this new window into crime and murder, and uses his connection with the mayor to charm his way into shadowing Detective Kate Beckett (Katic). Castle decides to use Beckett as his muse for Nikki Heat, the main character of his next book series. Beckett, an avid reader of Castle's books, initially disapproves of having Castle shadow her work, but later warms up and recognizes Castle as a useful resource in her team's investigations.


title: Castle (season 8)

text: "Castle" was renewed for an eighth season on May 7, 2015. Following the seventh season, David Amann stepped down as showrunner, and writer Terence Paul Winter and Alexi Haley were hired as the new showrunners for the eighth season. "TVLine" announced on July 7, 2015, that Toks Olagundoye had been added as a series regular for the eighth season, playing former Scotland Yard police officer Hayley Vargas. Filming for the eighth season started on July 17, 2015, and ended in April 2016. A promotional poster was released on August 10, 2015, by ABC.


title: Castle (season 8)

text: The eighth season was speculated as being the final season of "Castle". After the seventh season, both Nathan Fillion's and Stana Katic's contracts expired, and new contract negotiations began before the seventh season ended. It was reported on April 16, 2015, that Fillion renewed his contract for an eighth season, while Katic renewed hers on May 12, 2015. However, in January 2016, speculation began that the series might move on without Fillion and Katic as their contracts were due to expire again after the eighth season. After March 3, 2016, when ABC renewed most of their shows, "Castle" was one of the few shows excluded, adding to the rumors. It was also rumored that if the show were to be renewed for a ninth season, it was only going to be renewed for 13 episodes by ABC and would most likely not premiere until mid-season in 2017 and would only have 6 cast members, with the departure of Katic and Jones, despite the show usually having 8 cast members. "TVLine" reported on April 5, 2016, that the producers were filming multiple endings for the season in case the show was cancelled. Co-showrunner Alexi Hawley commented on the report saying "There’s stuff up in the air, so we are trying to leave it in a very dynamic way which leaves open the possibility that maybe the show won’t come back in the same form next season — although, again, we really hope that it does."


title: Castle (season 8)

text: Two days later, "Deadline" announced that Stana Katic would not return for a potential ninth season, as well as Tamala Jones, who had been on the show since the first season. The reason given was due to budgetary decisions made by ABC. On May 5, 2016, "TVLine" reported that Fillion had signed up for a potential ninth season. A few days later, it was announced that Seamus Dever had signed up for a ninth season, while co-stars Jon Huertas, Molly Quinn, Susan Sullivan and Toks Olagundoye were in finalizing deals with their contracts. Huertas was announced to have renewed his contract on May 11, 2016. Despite lead actor Fillion and other cast members signing on for a potential ninth season, "Castle" was cancelled on May 12, 2016.


title: Prehistoric art

text: In the history of art, prehistoric art is all art produced in preliterate, prehistorical cultures beginning somewhere in very late geological history, and generally continuing until that culture either develops writing or other methods of record-keeping, or makes significant contact with another culture that has, and that makes some record of major historical events. At this point ancient art begins, for the older literate cultures. The end-date for what is covered by the term thus varies greatly between different parts of the world.


title: Prehistoric art

text: The earliest human artifacts showing evidence of workmanship with an artistic purpose are the subject of some debate. It is clear that such workmanship existed by 40,000 years ago in the Upper Paleolithic era, although it is quite possible that it began earlier. In September 2018, scientists reported the discovery of the earliest known drawing by "Homo sapiens", which is estimated to be 73,000 years old, much earlier than the 43,000 years old artifacts understood to be the earliest known modern human drawings found previously.


title: Prehistoric art

text: Engraved shells created by "Homo erectus" dating as far back as 500,000 years ago have been found, although experts disagree on whether these engravings can be properly classified as 'art'. From the Upper Paleolithic through to the Mesolithic, cave paintings and portable art such as figurines and beads predominated, with decorative figured workings also seen on some utilitarian objects. In the Neolithic evidence of early pottery appeared, as did sculpture and the construction of megaliths. Early rock art also first appeared during this period. The advent of metalworking in the Bronze Age brought additional media available for use in making art, an increase in stylistic diversity, and the creation of objects that did not have any obvious function other than art. It also saw the development in some areas of artisans, a class of people specializing in the production of art, as well as early writing systems. By the Iron Age, civilizations with writing had arisen from Ancient Egypt to Ancient China.


title: Prehistoric art

text: Many indigenous peoples from around the world continued to produce artistic works distinctive to their geographic area and culture, until exploration and commerce brought record-keeping methods to them. Some cultures, notably the Maya civilization, independently developed writing during the time they flourished, which was then later lost. These cultures may be classified as prehistoric, especially if their writing systems have not been deciphered.


title: Prehistoric art

text: The earliest undisputed art originated with the "Homo sapiens" Aurignacian archaeological culture in the Upper Paleolithic. However, there is some evidence that the preference for the aesthetic emerged in the Middle Paleolithic, from 100,000 to 50,000 years ago. Some archaeologists have interpreted certain Middle Paleolithic artifacts as early examples of artistic expression.


title: Prehistoric art

text: The symmetry of artifacts, evidence of attention to the detail of tool shape, has led some investigators to conceive of Acheulean hand axes and especially laurel points as having been produced with a degree of artistic expression.


title: Prehistoric art

text: Similarly, a zigzag engraving supposedly made with a shark tooth on a freshwater Pseudodon shell DUB1006-fL around 500,000 years ago (i.e. well into the Lower Paleolithic), associated with "Homo erectus", could be the earliest evidence of artistic activity, but the actual intent behind this geometric ornament is not known.


title: Prehistoric art

text: There are other claims of Middle Paleolithic sculpture, dubbed the "Venus of Tan-Tan" (before 300 kya) and the "Venus of Berekhat Ram" (250 kya). In 2002 in Blombos cave, situated in South Africa, stones were discovered engraved with grid or cross-hatch patterns, dated to some 70,000 years ago. This suggested to some researchers that early "Homo sapiens" were capable of abstraction and production of abstract art or symbolic art. Several archaeologists including Richard Klein are hesitant to accept the Blombos caves as the first example of actual art.


title: Prehistoric art

text: In September 2018 the discovery in South Africa of the earliest known drawing by "Homo sapiens" was announced, which is estimated to be 73,000 years old, much earlier than the 43,000 years old artifacts understood to be the earliest known modern human drawings found previously. The drawing shows a crosshatched pattern made up of nine fine lines. The sudden termination of all of the lines on the fragment edges indicate that the pattern originally extended over a larger surface. It is also estimated that the pattern was most likely more complex and structured in its entirety than shown on the discovered area. Initially, when this drawing was found, there was much debate. To prove that this drawing was created by Homo Sapiens, French team members who specialized in chemical analysis of pigments, reproduced the same lines using a variety of techniques. They concluded that the lines making up the drawing were intentional and were most likely made with ocher. This discovery adds further dimensions to understanding the behavior and cognition of early homo sapiens.


title: Prehistoric art

text: Neanderthals may have made art. Painted designs in the caves of La Pasiega (Cantabria), a hand stencil in Maltravieso (Extremadura), and red-painted speleothems in Ardales (Andalusia) are dated to 64,800 years ago, predating by at least 20,000 years the arrival of modern humans in Europe. In July 2021, scientists reported the discovery of a bone carving, one of the world's oldest works of art, made by Neanderthals about 51,000 years ago.


title: Prehistoric art

text: In November 2018, scientists reported the discovery of the oldest known figurative art painting, over 40,000 (perhaps as old as 52,000) years old, of an unknown animal, in the cave of Lubang Jeriji Saléh on the Indonesian island of Borneo, while in 2020 a Megaloceros bone was found in the Harz mountains in Germany, on which specimens of "Homo neanderthalensis" carved ornaments 51,000 years ago.


title: Prehistoric art

text: The oldest undisputed works of figurative art were found in the Schwäbische Alb, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The earliest of these, the Venus figurine known as the Venus of Hohle Fels and the Lion-man figurine, date to some 40,000 years ago.


title: Prehistoric art

text: Further depictional art from the Upper Palaeolithic period (broadly 40,000 to 10,000 years ago) includes cave painting (e.g., those at Chauvet, Altamira, Pech Merle, Arcy-sur-Cure and Lascaux) and portable art: Venus figurines like the Venus of Willendorf, as well as animal carvings like the Swimming Reindeer, Wolverine pendant of Les Eyzies, and several of the objects known as bâtons de commandement.


title: Prehistoric art

text: Paintings in Pettakere cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are up to 40,000 years old, a similar date to the oldest European cave art, which may suggest an older common origin for this type of art, perhaps in Africa.


title: Prehistoric art

text: Monumental open-air art in Europe from this period includes the rock-art at Côa Valley and Mazouco in Portugal, Domingo García and Siega Verde in Spain, and in France.


title: Prehistoric art

text: A cave at Turobong in South Korea containing human remains has been found to contain carved deer bones and depictions of deer that may be as much as 40,000 years old. Petroglyphs of deer or reindeer found at Sokchang-ri may also date to the Upper Paleolithic. Potsherds in a style reminiscent of early Japanese work have been found at Kosan-ri on Jeju island, which, due to lower sea levels at the time, would have been accessible from Japan.


title: Prehistoric art

text: The oldest petroglyphs are dated to approximately the Mesolithic and late Upper Paleolithic boundary, about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.


title: Prehistoric art

text: The earliest undisputed African rock art dates back about 10,000 years. The first naturalistic paintings of humans found in Africa date back about 8,000 years apparently originating in the Nile River valley, spread as far west as Mali about 10,000 years ago.


title: Prehistoric art

text: Noted sites containing early art include Tassili n'Ajjer in southern Algeria, Tadrart Acacus in Libya (A Unesco World Heritage site), and the Tibesti Mountains in northern Chad. Rock carvings at the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa have been dated to this age. Contentious dates as far back as 29,000 years have been obtained at a site in Tanzania. A site at the Apollo 11 Cave complex in Namibia has been dated to 27,000 years.


title: Prehistoric art

text: Göbekli Tepe in Turkey has circles of massive T-shaped stone pillars dating back to the 10th–8th millennium BCE; the world's oldest known megaliths. Many of the pillars are decorated with abstract, enigmatic pictograms and carved animal reliefs.


title: Prehistoric art

text: Asia was the cradle for several significant civilizations, most notably those of China and South Asia. The prehistory of eastern Asia is especially interesting, as the relatively early introduction of writing and historical record-keeping in China has a notable impact on the immediately surrounding cultures and geographic areas. Little of the very rich traditions of the art of Mesopotamia counts as prehistoric, as writing was introduced so early there, but neighbouring cultures such as Urartu, Luristan and Persia had significant and complex artistic traditions.


title: Prehistoric art

text: The earliest Indian paintings were the rock paintings of prehistoric times, the petroglyphs as found in places like the Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka, and some of them are dated to circa 8,000 BC. The Indus Valley civilization produced fine small stamp seals and sculptures, and may have been literate, but after its collapse there are relatively few artistic remains until the literate period, probably as perishable materials were used.


title: Prehistoric art

text: The Gobustan National Park reserve located at the south-east of the Greater Caucasus Mountains in Azerbaijan, 60 km away from Baku date back more than 12 thousand years ago. The reserve has more than 6,000 rock carvings depicting mostly hunting scenes, human and animal figures. There are also longship illustrations similar to Viking ships. Gobustan is also characterized by its natural musical stone called Gavaldash (tambourine stone).


title: Prehistoric art

text: Prehistoric artwork such as painted pottery in Neolithic China can be traced back to the Yangshao culture and Longshan culture of the Yellow River valley. During China's Bronze Age, Chinese of the ancient Shang Dynasty and Zhou Dynasty produced multitudes of Chinese ritual bronzes, which are elaborate versions of ordinary vessels and other objects used in rituals of ancestor veneration, decorated with "taotie" motifs and by the late Shang Chinese bronze inscriptions. Discoveries in 1987 in Sanxingdui in central China revealed a previously unknown pre-literate Bronze Age culture whose artefacts included spectacular very large bronze figures (example left), and which appeared culturally very different from the contemporary late Shang, which has always formed part of the account of the continuous tradition of Chinese culture.


title: Prehistoric art

text: According to archeological evidence, the Jōmon people in ancient Japan were among the first to develop pottery, dated from the 11th millennium BCE. With growing sophistication, the Jōmon created patterns by impressing the wet clay with braided or unbraided cord and sticks.


title: Prehistoric art

text: The earliest examples of Korean art consist of Stone Age works dating from 3000 BCE. These mainly consist of votive sculptures, although petroglyphs have also been recently rediscovered. Rock arts, elaborate stone tools, and potteries were also prevalent.


title: Prehistoric art

text: This early period was followed by the art styles of various Korean kingdoms and dynasties. In these periods, artists often adopted Chinese style in their artworks. However, Koreans not only adopted but also modified Chinese culture with a native preference for simple elegance, purity of nature and spontaneity. This filtering of Chinese styles later influenced Japanese artistic traditions, due to cultural and geographical circumstances.


title: Prehistoric art

text: The prehistory of Korea ends with the founding of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, which are documented in the Samguk Sagi, a 12th-century CE text written in Classical Chinese (the written language of the literati in traditional Korea), as beginning in the 1st century BCE; some mention of earlier history is also made in Chinese texts, like the 3rd-century CE Sanguo Zhi.


title: Prehistoric art

text: Clearer evidence of culture emerges in the late Neolithic, known in Korea as the Jeulmun pottery period, with pottery similar to that found in the adjacent regions of China, decorated with Z-shaped patterns. The earliest Neolithic sites with pottery remains, for example Osan-ri, date to 6000–4500 BCE. This pottery is characterized by comb patterning, with the pot frequently having a pointed base. Ornaments from this time include masks made of shell, with notable finds at Tongsam-dong, Osan-ri, and Sinam-ri. Hand-shaped clay figurines have been found at Nongpo-dong.


title: Prehistoric art

text: During the Mumun pottery period, roughly between 1500 BCE and 300 BCE, agriculture expanded, and evidence of larger-scale political structures became apparent, as villages grew and some burials became more elaborate. Megalithic tombs and dolmens throughout Korea date to this time. The pottery of the time is in a distinctive undecorated style. Many of these changes in style may have occurred due to immigration of new peoples from the north, although this is a subject of debate. At a number of sites in southern Korea there are rock art panels that are thought to date from this period, mainly for stylistic reasons.


title: Prehistoric art

text: While the exact date of the introduction of bronzework into Korea is also a matter of debate, it is clear that bronze was being worked by about 700 BCE. Finds include stylistically distinctive daggers, mirrors, and belt buckles, with evidence by the 1st century BCE of a widespread, locally distinctive, bronzeworking culture.


title: Prehistoric art

text: The time between 300 BCE and the founding and stabilization of the Three Kingdoms around 300 CE is characterized artistically and archaeologically by increasing trade with China and Japan, something that Chinese histories of the time corroborate. The expansionist Chinese invaded and established commanderies in northern Korea as early as the 1st century BCE; they were driven out by the 4th century CE. The remains of some of these, especially that of Lelang, near modern Pyongyang, have yielded many artifacts in a typical Han style.


title: Prehistoric art

text: Chinese histories also record the beginnings of iron works in Korea in the 1st century BCE. Stoneware and kiln-fired pottery also appears to date from this time, although there is controversy over the dates. Pottery of distinctly Japanese origin is found in Korea, and metalwork of Korean origin is found in northeastern China.


title: Prehistoric art

text: Superb samples of Steppes art – mostly golden jewellery and trappings for horse – are found over a vast expanses of land stretching from Hungary to Mongolia. Dating from the period between the 7th and 3rd centuries BCE, the objects are usually diminutive, as may be expected from nomadic people always on the move. Art of the steppes is primarily an animal art, i.e., combat scenes involving several animals (real or imaginary) or single animal figures (such as golden stags) predominate. The best known of the various peoples involved are the Scythians, at the European end of the steppe, who were especially likely to bury gold items.


title: Prehistoric art

text: Among the most famous finds was made in 1947, when the Soviet archaeologist Sergei Rudenko discovered a royal burial at Pazyryk, Altay Mountains, which featured – among many other important objects – the most ancient extant pile rug, probably made in Persia. Unusually for prehistoric burials, those in the northern parts of the area may preserve organic materials such as wood and textiles that normally would decay. Steppes people both gave and took influences from neighbouring cultures from Europe to China, and later Scythian pieces are heavily influenced by ancient Greek style, and probably often made by Greeks in Scythia.