title: Ancient Greek art

text: In particular copies of specific wall-paintings have been confidently identified in the Alexander Mosaic and Villa Boscoreale. There is a large group of much later Greco-Roman archaeological survivals from the dry conditions of Egypt, the Fayum mummy portraits, together with the similar Severan Tondo, and a small group of painted portrait miniatures in gold glass. Byzantine icons are also derived from the encaustic panel painting tradition, and Byzantine illuminated manuscripts sometimes continued a Greek illusionistic style for centuries.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: The tradition of wall painting in Greece goes back at least to the Minoan and Mycenaean Bronze Age, with the lavish fresco decoration of sites like Knossos, Tiryns and Mycenae. It is not clear, whether there is any continuity between these antecedents and later Greek wall paintings.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Wall paintings are frequently described in Pausanias, and many appear to have been produced in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Due to the lack of architecture surviving intact, not many are preserved. The most notable examples are a monumental Archaic 7th-century BC scene of hoplite combat from inside a temple at Kalapodi (near Thebes), and the elaborate frescoes from the 4th-century "Grave of Phillipp" and the "Tomb of Persephone" at Vergina in Macedonia, or the tomb at Agios Athanasios, Thessaloniki, sometimes suggested to be closely linked to the high-quality panel paintings mentioned above. The unusual survival of the Tomb of the Palmettes (3rd-century BC, excavated in 1971) with painting in good condition includes portraits of the couple buried inside on the tympanum.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Greek wall painting tradition is also reflected in contemporary grave decorations in the Greek colonies in Italy, e.g. the famous Tomb of the Diver at Paestum. Some scholars suggest that the celebrated Roman frescoes at sites like Pompeii are the direct descendants of Greek tradition, and that some of them copy famous panel paintings.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Much of the figural or architectural sculpture of ancient Greece was painted colourfully. This aspect of Greek stonework is described as polychrome (from Greek "πολυχρωμία", "πολύ" = many and "χρώμα" = colour). Due to intensive weathering, polychromy on sculpture and architecture has substantially or totally faded in most cases.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Although the word "polychrome" is created from the combining of two Greek words, it was not used in ancient Greece. The term was coined in the early nineteenth century by Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Painting was also used to enhance the visual aspects of architecture. Certain parts of the superstructure of Greek temples were habitually painted since the Archaic period. Such architectural polychromy could take the form of bright colours directly applied to the stone (evidenced e.g. on the Parthenon, or of elaborate patterns, frequently architectural members made of terracotta (Archaic examples at Olympia and Delphi). Sometimes, the terracottas also depicted figural scenes, as do the 7th-century BC terracotta metopes from Thermon.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Most Greek sculptures were painted in strong and bright colors; this is called "polychromy". The paint was frequently limited to parts depicting clothing, hair, and so on, with the skin left in the natural color of the stone or bronze, but it could also cover sculptures in their totality; female skin in marble tended to be uncoloured, while male skin might be a light brown. The painting of Greek sculpture should not merely be seen as an enhancement of their sculpted form, but has the characteristics of a distinct style of art.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: For example, the pedimental sculptures from the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina have recently been demonstrated to have been painted with bold and elaborate patterns, depicting, amongst other details, patterned clothing. The polychromy of stone statues was paralleled by the use of different materials to distinguish skin, clothing and other details in chryselephantine sculptures, and by the use of different metals to depict lips, fingernails, etc. on high-quality bronzes like the Riace bronzes.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: The most copious evidence of ancient Greek painting survives in the form of vase paintings. These are described in the "pottery" section above. They give at least some sense of the aesthetics of Greek painting. The techniques involved, however, were very different from those used in large-format painting. The same probably applies to the subject matter depicted. Vase painters appear to have usually been specialists within a pottery workshop, neither painters in other media nor potters. It should also be kept in mind that vase painting, albeit by far the most conspicuous surviving source on ancient Greek painting, was not held in the highest regard in antiquity, and is never mentioned in Classical literature.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Mosaics were initially made with rounded pebbles, and later glass with tesserae which gave more colour and a flat surface. They were popular in the Hellenistic period, at first as decoration for the floors of palaces, but eventually for private homes. Often a central "emblema" picture in a central panel was completed in much finer work than the surrounding decoration. Xenia motifs, where a house showed examples of the variety of foods guests might expect to enjoy, provide most of the surviving specimens of Greek still-life. In general mosaic must be considered as a secondary medium copying painting, often very directly, as in the Alexander Mosaic.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: The "Unswept Floor" by Sosus of Pergamon (c. 200 BC) was an original and famous "trompe-l'œil" piece, known from many Greco-Roman copies. According to John Boardman, Sosus is the only mosaic artist whose name has survived; his "Doves" are also mentioned in literature and copied. However, Katherine M. D. Dunbabin asserts that two different mosaic artists left their signatures on mosaics of Delos. The artist of the 4th-century BC Stag Hunt Mosaic perhaps also left his signature as Gnosis, although this word may be a reference to the abstract concept of knowledge.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Mosaics are a significant element of surviving Macedonian art, with a large number of examples preserved in the ruins of Pella, the ancient Macedonian capital, in today's Central Macedonia. Mosaics such as the "Stag Hunt Mosaic and Lion Hunt" mosaic demonstrate illusionist and three dimensional qualities generally found in Hellenistic paintings, although the rustic Macedonian pursuit of hunting is markedly more pronounced than other themes. The 2nd-century-BC mosaics of Delos, Greece were judged by François Chamoux as representing the pinnacle of Hellenistic mosaic art, with similar styles that continued throughout the Roman period and perhaps laid the foundations for the widespread use of mosaics in the Western world through to the Middle Ages.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: The engraved gem was a luxury art with high prestige; Pompey and Julius Caesar were among later collectors. The technique has an ancient tradition in the Near East, and cylinder seals, whose design only appears when rolled over damp clay, from which the flat ring type developed, spread to the Minoan world, including parts of Greece and Cyprus. The Greek tradition emerged under Minoan influence on mainland Helladic culture, and reached an apogee of subtlety and refinement in the Hellenistic period.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Round or oval Greek gems (along with similar objects in bone and ivory) are found from the 8th and 7th centuries BC, usually with animals in energetic geometric poses, often with a border marked by dots or a rim. Early examples are mostly in softer stones. Gems of the 6th century are more often oval, with a scarab back (in the past this type was called a "scarabaeus"), and human or divine figures as well as animals; the scarab form was apparently adopted from Phoenicia.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: The forms are sophisticated for the period, despite the usually small size of the gems. In the 5th century gems became somewhat larger, but still only 2–3 centimetres tall. Despite this, very fine detail is shown, including the eyelashes on one male head, perhaps a portrait. Four gems signed by Dexamenos of Chios are the finest of the period, two showing herons.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Relief carving became common in 5th century BC Greece, and gradually most of the spectacular carved gems were in relief. Generally a relief image is more impressive than an intaglio one; in the earlier form the recipient of a document saw this in the impressed sealing wax, while in the later reliefs it was the owner of the seal who kept it for himself, probably marking the emergence of gems meant to be collected or worn as jewellery pendants in necklaces and the like, rather than used as seals – later ones are sometimes rather large to use to seal letters. However inscriptions are usually still in reverse ("mirror-writing") so they only read correctly on impressions (or by viewing from behind with transparent stones). This aspect also partly explains the collecting of impressions in plaster or wax from gems, which may be easier to appreciate than the original.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Larger hardstone carvings and cameos, which are rare in intaglio form, seem to have reached Greece around the 3rd century; the Farnese Tazza is the only major surviving Hellenistic example (depending on the dates assigned to the Gonzaga Cameo and the Cup of the Ptolemies), but other glass-paste imitations with portraits suggest that gem-type cameos were made in this period. The conquests of Alexander had opened up new trade routes to the Greek world and increased the range of gemstones available.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: The synthesis in the Archaic period of the native repertoire of simple geometric motifs with imported, mostly plant-based, motifs from further east created a sizeable vocabulary of ornament, which artists and craftsmen used with confidence and fluency. Today this vocabulary is seen above all in the large corpus of painted pottery, as well as in architectural remains, but it would have originally been used in a wide range of media, as a later version of it is used in European Neoclassicism.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Elements in this vocabulary include the geometrical meander or "Greek key", egg-and-dart, bead and reel, Vitruvian scroll, guilloche, and from the plant world the stylized acanthus leaves, volute, palmette and half-palmette, plant scrolls of various kinds, rosette, lotus flower, and papyrus flower. Originally used prominently on Archaic vases, as figurative painting developed these were usually relegated to serve as borders demarcating edges of the vase or different zones of decoration. Greek architecture was notable for developing sophisticated conventions for using mouldings and other architectural ornamental elements, which used these motifs in a harmoniously integrated whole.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Even before the Classical period, this vocabulary had influenced Celtic art, and the expansion of the Greek world after Alexander, and the export of Greek objects still further afield, exposed much of Eurasia to it, including the regions in the north of the Indian subcontinent where Buddhism was expanding, and creating Greco-Buddhist art. As Buddhism spread across Central Asia to China and the rest of East Asia, in a form that made great use of religious art, versions of this vocabulary were taken with it and used to surround images of buddhas and other religious images, often with a size and emphasis that would have seemed excessive to the ancient Greeks. The vocabulary was absorbed into the ornament of India, China, Persia and other Asian countries, as well as developing further in Byzantine art. The Romans took over the vocabulary more or less in its entirety, and although much altered, it can be traced throughout European medieval art, especially in plant-based ornament.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Islamic art, where ornament largely replaces figuration, developed the Byzantine plant scroll into the full, endless arabesque, and especially from the Mongol conquests of the 14th century received new influences from China, including the descendants of the Greek vocabulary. From the Renaissance onwards, several of these Asian styles were represented on textiles, porcelain and other goods imported into Europe, and influenced ornament there, a process that still continues.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Although glass was made in Cyprus by the 9th century BC, and was considerably developed by the end of the period, there are only a few survivals of glasswork from before the Greco-Roman period that show the artistic quality of the best work. Most survivals are small perfume bottles, in fancy coloured "feathered" styles similar to other Mediterranean glass. Hellenistic glass became cheaper and accessible to a wider population.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: No Greek furniture has survived, but there are many images of it on vases and memorial reliefs, for example that to Hegeso. It was evidently often very elegant, as were the styles derived from it from the 18th century onwards. Some pieces of carved ivory that were used as inlays have survived, as at Vergina, and a few ivory carvings; this was a luxury art that could be of very fine quality.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: It is clear from vase paintings that the Greeks often wore elaborately patterned clothes, and skill at weaving was the mark of the respectable woman. Two luxurious pieces of cloth survive, from the tomb of Philip of Macedon. There are numerous references to decorative hangings for both homes and temples, but none of these have survived.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Ancient Greek art has exercised considerable influence on the culture of many countries all over the world, above all in its treatment of the human figure. In the West Greek architecture was also hugely influential, and in both East and West the influence of Greek decoration can be traced to the modern day. Etruscan and Roman art were largely and directly derived from Greek models, and Greek objects and influence reached into Celtic art north of the Alps, as well as all around the Mediterranean world and into Persia.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: In the East, Alexander the Great's conquests initiated several centuries of exchange between Greek, Central Asian and Indian cultures, which was greatly aided by the spread of Buddhism, which early on picked up many Greek traits and motifs in Greco-Buddhist art, which were then transmitted as part of a cultural package to East Asia, even as far as Japan, among artists who were no doubt completely unaware of the origin of the motifs and styles they used.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: Following the Renaissance in Europe, the humanist aesthetic and the high technical standards of Greek art inspired generations of European artists, with a major revival in the movement of Neoclassicism which began in the mid-18th century, coinciding with easier access from Western Europe to Greece itself, and a renewed importation of Greek originals, most notoriously the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon. Well into the 19th century, the classical tradition derived from Greece dominated the art of the western world.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: The Hellenized Roman upper classes of the Late Republic and Early Empire generally accepted Greek superiority in the arts without many quibbles, though the praise of Pliny for the sculpture and painting of pre-Hellenistic artists may be based on earlier Greek writings rather than much personal knowledge. Pliny and other classical authors were known in the Renaissance, and this assumption of Greek superiority was again generally accepted. However critics in the Renaissance and much later were unclear which works were actually Greek.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: As a part of the Ottoman Empire, Greece itself could only be reached by a very few western Europeans until the mid-18th century. Not only the Greek vases found in the Etruscan cemeteries, but also (more controversially) the Greek temples of Paestum were taken to be Etruscan, or otherwise Italic, until the late 18th century and beyond, a misconception prolonged by Italian nationalist sentiment.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: The writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, especially his books "Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture" (1750) and "Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums" ("History of Ancient Art", 1764) were the first to distinguish sharply between ancient Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art, and define periods within Greek art, tracing a trajectory from growth to maturity and then imitation or decadence that continues to have influence to the present day.


title: Ancient Greek art

text: The full disentangling of Greek statues from their later Roman copies, and a better understanding of the balance between Greekness and Roman-ness in Greco-Roman art was to take much longer, and perhaps still continues. Greek art, especially sculpture, continued to enjoy an enormous reputation, and studying and copying it was a large part of the training of artists, until the downfall of Academic art in the late 19th century. During this period, the actual known corpus of Greek art, and to a lesser extent architecture, has greatly expanded. The study of vases developed an enormous literature in the late 19th and 20th centuries, much based on the identification of the hands of individual artists, with Sir John Beazley the leading figure. This literature generally assumed that vase-painting represented the development of an independent medium, only in general terms drawing from stylistic development in other artistic media. This assumption has been increasingly challenged in recent decades, and some scholars now see it as a secondary medium, largely representing cheap copies of now lost metalwork, and much of it made, not for ordinary use, but to deposit in burials.


title: Clayton Fountain

text: Clayton Anthony Fountain (September 12, 1955 – July 12, 2004) was an American federal prisoner, member of the Aryan Brotherhood, and convicted murderer.


title: Clayton Fountain

text: Clayton was born on September 12, 1955, at the U.S. Army Hospital in Fort Benning, Georgia. He was the oldest of six children, having one brother and four sisters, and was named after his father, Clayton Raleigh Fountain. The family moved every 1½ to 2 years. While his father served combat tours in Korea and Vietnam and his mother was working, Clayton, as the oldest child in family, became a surrogate for both parents when he was very young. He recalled maternal responsibilities for cooking, ironing, serving, cleaning, and caring for his young siblings.


title: Clayton Fountain

text: While serving in the Marines, he was convicted of murdering his staff sergeant in 1974, while stationed in the Philippines. He stole and disassembled a pistol from the ship's armory, brought it ashore, and used it to rob a Filipino guard of his shotgun. He then used the shotgun to murder his staff sergeant. No words were exchanged as Fountain shot him once in the chest, and after a brief walk he took five hostages. Fountain had been written up recently by Staff Sergeant Wrin for wearing PT gear on the mess deck in the mess hall. Fountain later had two years added to his sentence for aggravated assault and attempted escape.


title: Clayton Fountain

text: Fountain was sentenced to life imprisonment, and was ultimately sent to the United States Penitentiary, Marion, which was at the time the highest-security prison in the United States. Fountain murdered three prisoners and one correctional officer with a shiv while serving time at Marion, and was labeled the "Most Dangerous Prisoner" in the federal system. Fountain and another inmate, Hugh Colomb, who was serving a 25-year sentence for armed bank robbery, were convicted of voluntary manslaughter and conveying a weapon in prison and had 15 years added to their sentences. Colomb was released from prison in 2015. Columb died on June 21, 2016, at the age of 62.


title: Clayton Fountain

text: On October 22, 1983, Fountain stabbed Correction Officer Robert L. Hoffmann to death, hours after Fountain's friend and fellow Aryan Brotherhood member Thomas Silverstein stabbed another correction officer, Merle Clutts, to death at the same facility. The incidents resulted in a 23-year lockdown at Marion, and contributed to the creation of the federal supermax prison, United States Penitentiary, Florence ADX.


title: Clayton Fountain

text: Fountain was moved to the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. He was housed in a specially constructed confinement unit, and was allowed contact only with authorized personnel. Fountain converted to Catholicism, and completed several educational courses on theology during the twenty years he spent in virtual isolation. He remotely earned an associate's degree in business and a bachelor's degree in philosophy and business from Ohio University, and earned a Catholic Catechetical Diploma and began a Master of Arts in Religious Studies from Catholic Distance University. He developed ties with an order of Trappist monks, and was accepted posthumously as a lay brother after his death from a heart attack in 2004. The book "A Different Kind of Cell: The Story of a Murderer Who Became a Monk" is based on his life and religious conversion. The foreword was written by Sister Helen Prejean.


title: Sarong

text: A sarong or sarung () is a large tube or length of fabric, often wrapped around the waist, worn in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Western Asia, Northern Africa, East Africa, West Africa, and on many Pacific islands. The fabric often has woven plaid or checkered patterns, or may be brightly colored by means of batik or ikat dyeing. Many modern sarongs have printed designs, often depicting animals or plants. Different types of sarongs are worn in different places in the world, notably the lungi in the Indian subcontinent and the izaar in the Arabian Peninsula.


title: Sarong

text: The term "sarong" () is an English loanword of Malay origin meaning 'to cover' or 'to sheath'. It was first used in 1834 referring to the skirt-like garment of the Malay. "Sarong" is also the colloquial and old spelling of the Indonesian and Malay word for , while in formal Indonesian it is known as ().


title: Sarong

text: In West Africa, the word "srong" or "sorong" is found in the Akan language, and this word means "the highest point", in reference to the garment being fastened at the very top in order to secure it.


title: Sarong

text: "Sarong" or "sarung" denotes the lower garment worn by Southeast Asian men and women. This consists of a length of fabric about a yard (0.91 m) wide and two-and-a-half yards (2.3 m) long. In the center of this sheet, across the narrower width, a panel of contrasting color or pattern about one foot wide is woven or dyed into the fabric, which is known as the or "head" of the sarong. This sheet is stitched at the narrower edges to form a tube. One steps into this tube, brings the upper edge above the level of the navel (the hem should be level with the ankles), positions the at the center of the back, and folds in the excess fabric from both sides to the front center, where they overlap and secures the sarong by rolling the upper hem down over itself. Malay men wear sarongs woven in a check pattern, while women wear sarongs dyed in the batik method. However, in Javanese culture, the wearing of batik sarongs is common and not restricted to a particular gender; sometimes they are also worn on formal occasions such as weddings.


title: Sarong

text: The sarong is common wear for women in formal settings with a blouse. Malay men wear sarongs in public only when attending Friday prayers at the mosque, but sarongs remain very common casual wear at home for men of all ethnicities and religions in Brunei, Indonesia, Philippines, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and much of the Indian subcontinent. (In the Indian subcontinent, excluding Sri Lanka, sarongs are sometimes known as "mundu" or "lungi".)


title: Sarong

text: Sarongs known under a variety of local names are traditionally worn by the people of Yemen and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula. Local names for the garment include , "izaar", and (pl. ). In Hadhramawt sarongs are called in the interior and in the coastal region. In Oman, sarongs are called and are often white in color, similar to the Keralan "mundu" of the Indian subcontinent and it is usually worn under the Thawb. In Saudi Arabia, sarongs are known as "izaar". Designs can be checkered or striped as well floral or arabesque, but double plaid (i.e., a vertical section of the with a different plaid pattern) designs from Indonesia are also very popular. In southwestern Saudi Arabia, tribal groups have their own style of unstitched , which is locally woven. This is also worn in northern Yemen. However, the tribal groups in Yemen each have their own design for their , the latter of which may include tassels and fringes. It is thought that this tribal resembles the original as worn on the Arabian Peninsula since pre-Islamic times such as the Shendyt. They are generally worn open and unstitched in such a way that the garment does not reach over one's ankles. Other , often imported from Bangladesh, are the traditional clothing of Arab fishermen of the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. It was the traditional garment for men before the introduction of pant-like pajamas and kaftans during the Turkish and European colonial periods. Tube-stitched, as well as open sarongs, are both worn, even informal dishdasha-wearing countries, as casual sleepwear and at home.


title: Sarong

text: Sarongs, very similar to those of South-East Asia and completely different from the Indian subcontinent (excluding Sri Lanka) are widespread – in the state of Manipur, where they are called and "mekhela" in Assam which are very similar to traditional attire of other South-East Asian nations. In the South Indian states of Kerala, they are called "mundu" (if fully white or fully black) and "lungi" or "kaili" if coloured, and in Tamil Nadu, they are called "kaili" or "saaram" or "vetti" or "lungi" and are usually worn at home. A standard lungi measures 2.12 by 1.2 metres.


title: Sarong

text: Unlike the brightly colored Southeast Asian sarongs, the Kerala variety (the "mundu") is more often plain white and is worn for ceremonial or religious purposes. In Kerala, the brightly coloured sarongs are called "kaily" and the white ones are called "mundu". The more formal, all-white dhoti is worn for formal and religious occasions. While there are dresses based on the "mundu" which can be worn by women, they more commonly wear the sari.


title: Sarong

text: Sarongs are very common in Sri Lanka and worn only by men. (A similar garment is worn by women. However, the women's garment is called "redda", which is a wrap-around skirt.) It is the standard garment for most men in rural and even some urban communities. However, most men of upper social classes (whose public attire is usually trousers) wear the sarong only for ceremonial purposes, as a convenient night garment or only within the confines of the house. The Tamil-speaking communities, the Sri Lankan Tamils and the Sri Lankan Moors people also call it or .


title: Sarong

text: Statistically, the number of people wearing sarong as their primary public attire is on the decline in Sri Lanka, the reason being that the sarong carries the stigma of being the attire for less-educated lower social classes. However, there is a trend toward adopting the sarong as a fashionable garment or as a formal garment worn with national pride, only on special occasions. Political and social leaders of Sri Lanka who want to portray their humility and closeness to the common person and their nationalism, choose a variation of the sarong nicknamed the "national" as their public attire.


title: Sarong

text: Sarongs are ubiquitous in Somalia and the Muslim-inhabited areas of the Horn of Africa. Although nomadic and urban Somali men have worn them for centuries in the form of a plain white skirt, the colorful "macawiis" (ma'awiis) sarong, which is the most popular form of the garment in the region. Before the 1940s, most "macawiis" were made of cotton. However, since the industrialization of the market, they now come in many fabrics and combinations thereof, including polyester, nylon and silk.


title: Sarong

text: Designs vary greatly and range from checkered square motifs with watermarked diamonds and plaid to simple geometric lines. The one constant is that they tend to be quite colorful; black "macawiis" are rare. "Macawiis" in Somalia are worn around the waist and folded several times over to secure their position. They are typically sold pre-sewn as one long circular stretch of cloth, though some vendors offer to sew them as a value-added service.


title: Sarong

text: In Indonesia the sarong is generally known as a ('sarong cloth') except for in Bali where it carries the name , possibly etymologically related to "kemben" (Javanese torso wrap). The sarung or sarong is often described as an Indonesian skirt; it is a large tube or length of fabric, often wrapped around the waist and worn by men and women throughout much of the Indonesian archipelago. The sarong is also commonly described as a unisex tubular skirt.


title: Sarong

text: The most common design of the Indonesian sarong is woven cloth with checkered motifs, usually used by


title: Sarong

text: Muslim men for salah prayer. This kind of sarong cloth is stitched together to create a tubular skirt-like lower garment. In Bali, sarongs are not stitched together as a tube, but remain as a piece of cloth to wrap around the waist and secured with a knot.


title: Sarong

text: Other than common checkered motifs, other woven or print methods might be employed, such as batik, ikat, songket, and other kinds of tenun traditional woven clothes. Sarongs are used by various ethnic groups in Indonesia. They are made from a variety of materials such as cotton, polyester or silk. Indonesian women wear traditional costumes called "kebaya" as upper garments, while for lower garments they wear sarongs dyed in the batik method, with flower motifs and in brighter colors. However, in Javanese culture, the wearing of batik sarungs is not restricted to women on formal occasions such as weddings.


title: Sarong

text: In 2019, in an effort to promote and popularize the sarong among its people, the government encouraged Indonesians to wear the sarong in public at least once a month. President Joko Widodo said the sarong is a significant element of Indonesian culture and that wearing it will be a sign of appreciation for sarong craftsmen.


title: Sarong

text: In Malaysia, the sarong is known as a . The word is paired with specific words to specify its type and function such as (a type of sarong with a simple stripe and box pattern), , (woven sarong), (sarong with batik motifs and design, normally worn by women and paired with a kebaya or Baju Kurung) or or (specialized sarong worn by men with Baju Melayu). In the Malaysian state of Sarawak, it is called (for men) and (for women).


title: Sarong

text: Sarong from the Philippines are generally known as "tapis" in Luzon, "alampay" in the Cordilleran highlands, "patadyong" in the islands of Visayas and Sulu, and "malong" in Mindanao. They are worn by both men and women and can be rectangular or tube-like. They can be knee-length or ankle-length and come in various colors that are usually unique to the specific ethnic group that wove them. Among men, the skirt is usually drawn up and tied at the waist (like a "dhoti"), forming a trouser-like clothing known as a "salawal". They can also serve as shawls or blankets. They were paired with close-fitting shirts or jackets known as "baro" or "bayu".


title: Sarong

text: Among the Maranao people, the "malong" is featured in the folk dance "kapa malong malong" which shows the various ways that the "malong" can be utilized.


title: Sarong

text: During the Spanish colonial era, the "tapis" was worn over a longer skirt ("saya" or "falda") due to the shortness of the "tapis" being deemed too immodest by the Spanish clergy to be worn alone. It evolved over time to become part of the traditional Filipino dress for women, the "baro't saya".


title: Sarong

text: In North and South America as well as Europe, hip wraps are worn as beach wear or as a cover-up over swimwear. The wrap is often made of a thin, light fabric, often rayon, and may feature decorative fringing on both sides. They may have ties, which are long thin straps of fabric which the wearer can tie together to prevent the wrap from falling down. These wraps are mostly worn by women as beach cover-ups and do not usually resemble traditional Asian or African sarongs in size, pattern or design. Western men who wear male sarongs are influenced by the Scottish kilt or lavalava within the Polynesian or Samoan culture. Typically sarongs are worn by men when they are at home, the beach, by the pool, or on a cruise.


title: Sarong

text: Numerous tying methods exist to hold a sarong to the wearer's body. In some cases, these techniques customarily differ according to the sex of wearer. If a sarong has ties, they may be used to hold it in place. Sarong ties give the wearer a little extra hold and security. If no ties exist, a pin may be used, the fabric may be tightly tucked under itself in layers, the corners of the main sheet may be around the body and knotted, or a belt may be used to hold the sarong in place.


title: Sarong

text: The basic garment known in English most often as a "sarong", sewn or unsewn, has analogs in many regions, where it shows variations in style and is known by different names.


title: Sarong

text: The American public is most familiar with the sarong for the dozens of films set in the South Seas, most of them romantic dramas made in the 1930s and 1940s. Dorothy Lamour is by far the actress most linked with the garment, which was designed by Edith Head. Lamour starred in multiple films of this genre, starting with "The Hurricane" in 1937. In fact, Lamour was nicknamed "The Sarong Girl" by the press and even wore a sarong on occasion in more traditional films. Among the other actresses to don the sarong for film roles are Maria Montez, Gilda Gray, Myrna Loy, Gene Tierney, Frances Farmer and Movita. Male stars who wore the manly sarongs on film include Jon Hall, Ray Milland, Tyrone Power, Robert Preston and Sabu Dastagir, as well as Ralph Fiennes in "The Constant Gardener" and Pierce Brosnan in "The Thomas Crown Affair".


title: Sarong

text: The 2005 documentary film "Soldiers in Sarong", directed by Lokendra Arambam, depicts the women's resistance movement in Manipur, North-East India. The 2020 Indonesian film "" depicts a martial arts tradition where combatants are joined together by the garment.


title: Sarong

text: In Singapore, the term "Sarong Party Girl" refers to a local single Singaporean woman especially of Chinese ethnicity who favor socializing and having relationships with expatriate Caucasian men rather than the local ones.


title: Katie Stevens

text: Katherine Mari Stevens (born December 8, 1992) is an American actress and singer, known for finishing in eighth place on the ninth season of "American Idol" and starring as Karma Ashcroft in "Faking It" and Jane Sloan in "The Bold Type".


title: Katie Stevens

text: Stevens grew up in Middlebury, Connecticut, the daughter of Mark and Clara (née Francisco) Stevens. She graduated from Pomperaug High School in Southbury in June 2010. She was named the 2009 Westbury Outstanding Teen at the Greater Watertown Scholarship Pageant.


title: Katie Stevens

text: Stevens is of Portuguese descent on her mother's side and speaks Portuguese. She was instrumental in the creation of the Evan Gagnon Memorial Scholarship Fund, which gives college scholarships to the seniors of Pomperaug High School (Evan Gagnon, who died in January 2009 at the age of two, was the son of Stevens' Spanish teacher.) She was a member of Pomperaug High School's varsity swim team for four years. Stevens first performed for an audience at the age of five years, when she sang the national anthem at a party for a politician in her hometown.


title: Katie Stevens

text: When she was seven years old, she sang "From This Moment On" at an aunt's wedding. She has long been active in her local theater community. She played Dorothy in both BSS Children's Theater and Main Street Theater's production of "The Wizard of Oz". At Main Street Theater Stevens also played the role of Sharpay in "High School Musical" and "The Cat" in "Honk". She played Nellie Forbush in Pomperaug High School's "South Pacific" alongside Gary Dwyer as Emile DeBeque. She performed at Carnegie Hall at the age of 13.


title: Katie Stevens

text: On August 13, 2009, she auditioned for "American Idol" in Boston, Massachusetts and sang "At Last", where all four judges (including guest judge Victoria Beckham) advanced her to Hollywood. At the Boston audition, judge Kara DioGuardi called her one of the most talented 16-year-olds she had ever seen. In Hollywood, DioGuardi made the prediction, "You could be the potential winner." On March 24, 2010, Stevens landed in the bottom 3 during elimination night, along with Paige Miles and Tim Urban. She was proclaimed safe, giving her a spot on the "American Idol" summer tour.


title: Katie Stevens

text: Most of the critiques the judges gave her had been with regard to her pitch, age, and song choice. In her performance of "Chain of Fools", DioGuardi told her she had found where she belonged: R&B-pop, but she needed to work on being younger. She landed in the bottom three the following night but was declared safe, putting her into the Top 9.


title: Katie Stevens

text: In her Top 9 performance of "Let It Be", all of the judges thought it was a huge improvement. Ellen stated that she wouldn't be in the bottom 3 after that performance. Simon said that she had done what she was told by being Country, while Kara and Randy disagreed, opining that she has more of an R&B sensibility. Nonetheless, her performance secured her a position in the Top 8. However, the Top 9 remained intact for another week due to the judges' save of Michael Lynche. She was eliminated from "American Idol" the following week on April 14, along with Andrew Garcia. Her elimination came second on the double elimination night. From July 1 to August 31, 2010, Stevens toured with the American Idols LIVE! Tour 2010. On tour, she sang "Here We Go Again" and "Fighter".


title: Katie Stevens

text: After her elimination, Stevens made several appearances on talk shows. On April 16, 2010, she appeared on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" where she performed "Over the Rainbow". Stevens also appeared on the "Late Show with David Letterman" along with Andrew Garcia, where they sang "Superhuman" by Chris Brown and Keri Hilson. She and Garcia appeared on the "Wendy Williams Show" where she performed "Big Girls Don't Cry".


title: Katie Stevens

text: As of early November 2010, she has written 9 songs. Stevens was a guest performer on "Ídolos Portugal" on December 12, 2010, where she sang "All I Want for Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey. In June 2012, Stevens played the title role in Todrick Hall's YouTube sensation "Beauty and the Beat".


title: Katie Stevens

text: She won the role of Karma Ashcroft in "Faking It", which premiered on April 22, 2014. In 2015, Stevens was cast as Lindsey Willows in the CSI finale movie "Immortality".


title: Katie Stevens

text: In 2015, Stevens originated the role of Kathryn Merteuil (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar in the film) in "" in Los Angeles.


title: Katie Stevens

text: In 2016, Stevens was cast as Jane Sloan in "The Bold Type" which premiered on June 20, 2017, and ran for five seasons.


title: Katie Stevens

text: In October 2019, Stevens married musician Paul DiGiovanni after four years of dating. The couple resides in Nashville, Tennessee. In November 2022, they announced that they are expecting their first child.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: DOA: Dead or Alive is a 2006 martial arts action film based on the Tecmo/Team Ninja fighting video game franchise "Dead or Alive". It is directed by Corey Yuen and written by J. F. Lawton and Adam and Seth Gross.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: In the film, fighters are invited to "Dead or Alive", an invitational martial arts contest. The four female fighters begin as rivals, but work together to uncover the secret that the organizer of the tournament is trying to hide. It features an ensemble cast and has various appearances from characters of the franchise, led by Kasumi (Devon Aoki), Christie Allen (Holly Valance) and Tina Armstrong (Jaime Pressly).


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: Principal photography took place from May to July 2005 in Bangkok, Guilin, Hengdian, and Hong Kong. It is an international co-production between Germany, United States and the United Kingdom.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: "DOA: Dead or Alive" was first released on September 7, 2006, in Australia. It was later released in the United Kingdom on September 15 by United International Pictures, and in Germany on October 19, 2006, by Constantin Film. The film was a critical and commercial failure, grossing only $7.7 million worldwide against a $30 million budget, making it a box-office bomb. Due to the film's poor performance, the United States release was delayed and the film was eventually given a limited release on June 15, 2007, by The Weinstein Company under Dimension Films.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: A group of martial arts and combat masters are invited to a fighting contest, "Dead or Alive", on an isolated island within an advanced complex, with the ultimate prize of $10 million. Among the competitors are Kasumi, a shinobi ninja-princess looking for her brother Hayate (who was competing in the last tournament), Tina, a professional wrestler setting out to prove she has more potential (complicated by her father Bass being one of the contenders), Christie, a master thief and assassin, her treacherous partner Maximillian 'Max' Marsh, and Hayabusa, a friend of Kasumi and Hayate who follows Kasumi to keep her safe. A final competitor is Helena Douglas, daughter of the tournament's late founder. When they arrive, they are monitored by the island's supervisor, Dr. Victor Donovan, who, aided by egghead Weatherby, is gathering data (using injected nano-sensors) from the fights for some mysterious project. During the tournament, Max and Christie plan to steal the fortune stowed away inside a hidden vault. To add to the situation, an assassin from Kasumi's colony, named Ayane, has followed Kasumi to kill her and wipe away the disgrace the princess has caused to the clan.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: The contest plays out, with multiple contestants fighting and being defeated (including Gen Fu, Bayman, Leon, and Zack), until only Kasumi, Christie, Hayabusa and Tina are left, with Helena being defeated by Christie. During her fight, Christie sees that the key to finding and unlocking the vault is a tattoo on the back of Helena's neck. Meanwhile, Kasumi begins to suspect Donovan of lying about her brother being killed in the previous tournament, and Hayabusa, infiltrating the main facility to find the truth, is captured. She is more than once confronted and nearly killed by Ayane, who Kasumi tries to convince that Hayate is alive (since it is eventually clear that Ayane loves Hayate). Also, Weatherby begins to fall for Helena, and in the end tells her about what he knows of the mystery project, and that before Helena's father could shut the project down, he died (indicating that he was murdered).


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: On the final day of the tournament, wondering where Hayabusa is, Kasumi, Christie and Tina look for him and discover a secret entrance to the main complex, where they find Hayabusa unconscious. They are then gassed and captured. Meanwhile, Helena resolves to stop the mystery project, and has to fight the armed staff of the island, sent to kill her and Weatherby by Donovan. They are followed inside by Max, who finds his way to the vault, and is then knocked out by Bayman, who is working for Donovan. Inside the main complex, Donovan shows the four semifinalists the project he has been developing; an advanced form of neural interface that allows him and others to use the fighters' combined skills to become the ultimate fighter. After 'downloading' the data into the device (shaped like a pair of sunglasses), he reveals that he kept Hayate alive and in peak condition to test the technology. He challenges Hayate to fight and win, if the others are to survive. Hayate accepts and is defeated, then thrown through a wall to die. Hayate is saved by Ayane, and the two of them apparently accept each other.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: With the successful demonstration, Donovan prepares to sell the technology around the world, and begins "downloading" it to the watching buyers. Weatherby stops the broadcast and alerts the CIA, which provokes Donovan to head for them. Helena keeps Donovan back while Weatherby frees the others, but both are defeated and Donovan activates a self-destruct sequence which will obliterate the base. Kasumi, Helena, Christie, Tina, Ayane, and Hayate launch a combined attack on Donovan, while Hayabusa and Weatherby find Max and escape with him, despite Max's urge to go back for the money. During the fight, Donovan's 'glasses' are knocked off and he is easily paralyzed by Hayate and Kasumi. The fighters then all escape as the base explodes and Donovan is consumed by the flames. They take a boat from a group of pirates.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: Finally, Helena, Ayane, Christie, Tina, and Kasumi stand together again in Kasumi's palace preparing to fight an army of ninjas.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: Additionally, Silvio Simac play Leon, an Italian mercenary, while Derek Boyer appear as Bayman, a Russian soldier. Chad McCord plays the detective who tries to arrest Christie in Hong Kong, Martin Crewes plays Tina's butler and Robin Shou appear as the pirate's chief. Several characters from the game series appear in minor roles played by stuntmen, include: Song Lin as Brad Wong, Fang Liu as Gen Fu, Hung Lin as Hitomi and Ying Wang as Leifang.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: Principal photography commenced on May 4, 2005, and concluded on July 19, 2005. Filming locations include Bangkok, Guilin, Hengdian, and Hong Kong. The production budget was estimated to be $30 million. The film was the first Western production shot largely in China's Hengdian World Studios, where Hero and House of Flying Daggers had shot.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: The actors trained together for three months before going to China, and trained for another month in China. Training included wu shu and kung fu, as well as wire training. The heat and humidity made the fight scenes particularly challenging. Another challenge was translation, on set people were speaking English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and the regional dialect of whatever area they were shooting in at the time.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: Pressly had some previous experience with martial arts, training with her own trainer for nine years, and she had a recurring role in the .


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: Valance had trained in muay thai since her teens, and found it made it more difficult to learn kung-fu as there were a lot of things she had to relearn.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: Pressly praised the tireless work of director Corey Yuen and the crew, saying the crew worked two units, 17 hours a day, getting fours hours of sleep, and getting back up and doing it again.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: The film was released first in a number of markets during September 2006 including the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines. The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) rated it 15, Irish Film Censor's Office (IFCO) 15A, Office of Film and Literature Classification (Australia) (OFLC) M (unrestricted, unlike the MA-15+ rating), all Canadian provinces gave it a PG except for Quebec which gave it a G with warning, and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) PG-13. The film was released in North America on June 15, 2007, without press screenings. The Weinstein Company delayed the US release of the film by almost a year.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: In non-North American markets, the film brought in over $7 million at the international box office, with almost $1 million in both the UK and Australia. In the US, the film made $260,713 in its opening weekend. It was released into 505 theaters, and spent 21 days in theaters, closing on July 5 with a domestic gross of $480,813 (about 6.4% of the worldwide gross at the time). The film grossed $7.7 million worldwide.


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: Reviews were generally negative. On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of based on reviews, with an average rating of . The site's critics consensus reads, "With a ridiculous plot and comical acting, checking one's brain at the door is required before watching "DOA: Dead or Alive"." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 38 out of 100 based on 8 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: Joe Leydon of "Variety" called it a "whirring blur of hot babes and cool fights" but complained the film is insubstantial and not enough even to appeal to genre fans with lowered expectations, suggesting it belongs in the video store and on late night television. He described the film as "a caffeinated mash-up" of "Enter the Dragon", "Mortal Kombat", "Charlie's Angels" and a few other films, but did praise Yuen for his show-stopping spectacles and compared an outdoor sword fight saying it "looks like a collaboration between Gene Kelly and Bruce Lee". Jack Mathews of the "New York Daily News" gave the film 1 out of 5 stars, calling it "laughably silly". He said the action was curiously bloodless, and the choreography not that good. Josh Rosenblatt of the "Austin Chronicle" panned the film, saying "the most glaring problem with DOA: not that it goes too far but that it doesn't go far enough" and called the film: "A piece of garbage and the best argument for reading books since the first pop-up appeared."


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: "L.A. Weekly" gave the film a favorable review comparing it to "Charlie's Angels" and praising the director for providing "one of the year's purest entertainments" and "pretty much nonstop fighting, mostly in very little clothing, with the flair you expect from a master choreographer like Yuen. It's awesome." Entertainment Weekly's Gregory Kirschling gave it a grade "B" and wrote: "If you only ever see one bad movie about warrior chicks who meet on a tropical isle for a fight contest, make it DOA: Dead or Alive." Michael Ferraro from "Film Threat" credited the film with the unusual accomplishment of following the plot of the game series it is based on, even including a volleyball sequence, although he is critical there is not all that much plot. He described the acting and dialog as atrocious, and is bored by the action and fighting but calls the result hilarious, and suggested it as the kind of film you might watch with a group of drunken friends, adding your own commentary track. Kim Newman of "The Times" gave the film a positive review: "This is the best film yet adapted from a computer game — it doesn't even try to add depth and simply delivers what the fans expect (plenty of ninja babes) with as few trimmings as possible." In 2011 in the book "Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s" Newman wrote: "If I had to pick a game-based 'guilty pleasure', it would be DOA: Dead or Alive".


title: DOA: Dead or Alive

text: A DVD of "DOA: Dead or Alive" was released on September 11, 2007. In the first week, 68,578 units were sold in the United States, earning $1,370,874 and a #12 ranking on the week's DVD sales. In the United States and Canada, the DVD earned $1.9 million in domestic video sales.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: Hoop Dreams is a 1994 American documentary film directed by Steve James, and produced by Frederick Marx, James, and Peter Gilbert, with Kartemquin Films. It follows the story of two African-American high school students, William Gates and Arthur Agee, in Chicago and their dream of becoming professional basketball players.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: "Hoop Dreams" was originally intended to be a 30-minute short film produced for PBS; the filming of the special led to five years of filming and 250 hours of footage. "Hoop Dreams" premiered at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for Best Documentary. It won numerous other awards in the 1994 season, although it was not nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Despite its length (171 minutes) and unlikely commercial genre, it received high critical and popular acclaim, and grossed over $11 million worldwide.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: "Hoop Dreams" was ranked #1 on the Current TV special "50 Documentaries to See Before You Die". In 2005, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


title: Hoop Dreams

text: In 1987, William Gates and Arthur Agee, two African-American teenagers, are recruited by a scout from St. Joseph High School in Westchester, Illinois, a predominantly white high school with an outstanding basketball program. The team is led by Gene Pingatore, who coached National Basketball Association (NBA) Hall of Fame player Isiah Thomas when Thomas played at St. Joseph. Agee and Gates are both from poor African-American neighborhoods in Chicago, Illinois: Gates lives in the Cabrini–Green projects, while Agee and his family reside in West Garfield Park. Both boys face 90-minute commutes to the school each way.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: In their freshman year, Gates starts on the varsity team at St. Joseph and helps them win the sectional title, earning a mention from "The Sportswriters on TV" as possibly "the next Isiah Thomas", although St. Joseph is eliminated in the super-sectionals in a narrow loss to St. Francis de Sales High School. Meanwhile, Agee plays on the freshman team and struggles both on the court and in the classroom.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: At the end of the year, Agee is kicked out of St. Joseph as his family is unable to pay his tuition; Gates's fees are covered by his sponsor, the president of Encyclopedia Britannica, who also helps him find a white collar summer job. Agee's rejection from St. Joseph damages his self-confidence, and he plays poorly for his public-school team at John Marshall High School, coached by Luther Bedford. In his sophomore year, Gates again starts on the varsity team. St. Joseph is eliminated by Gordon Tech in the sectional finals, and Gates struggles with the weight of expectations from his brother, Curtis, who was a talented player in his own right but never made it to the pros and has now transferred his unfulfilled aspirations onto his younger brother.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: In their junior year, both boys face challenges. Gates suffers a knee injury that requires surgery and months of rehabilitation, while Arthur's mother, Sheila, loses her job and the family goes on welfare as Arthur's father, Bo, has walked out and become addicted to drugs. Bo later gives up drugs and returns to the family, and Sheila earns a nursing degree. During this time, the Agee household takes in Arthur's close friend, Shannon, who is escaping an abusive household.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: On the court, Agee and John Marshall improve on their poor sophomore year record, including winning an upset victory over Dunbar Vocational High School. St. Joseph makes it to the sectional finals, where they once again face Gordon Tech. Gates plays timidly because of his injury. At the end of the fourth quarter, with seconds on the clock and trailing by one, St. Joseph wins two free throws. Gates—normally a clutch free throw shooter—steps up to take them, but he misses both and St. Joseph are knocked out of the play-offs.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: Despite his injury, Gates is courted by many college basketball programs, especially Marquette University, and attends the Nike All-America summer camp at Princeton before his senior year (where Dick Vitale and Spike Lee make appearances). After returning from camp, Gates signs a letter of intent with Marquette, though he struggles to meet the minimum ACT test score to be eligible for an athletic scholarship. Meanwhile, Arthur, still playing in the public-school league, attracts far less attention from college recruiters, although a couple of junior colleges show interest in him.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: In Gates's senior year, St. Joseph's season concludes early in a second-round play-off loss against Nazareth Academy, ending his hopes of "going downstate" for the state championship. Gates had been benched by Coach Pingatore at the start of the game for arriving late. John Marshall goes on an unlikely run through the city championship, largely thanks to Agee's excellent play. The team makes it to the state championship in Champaign, finishing third in the state after a semi-final loss to Manual High School.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: At the end of the film, Gates has entered Marquette, and Agee is attending Mineral Area College in Missouri and still hoping to play for the NBA.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: The initial idea for "a film about the culture of basketball in the black community" came to director Steve James, an amateur basketball player himself, in 1985 while watching basketball at the recreation center at Southern Illinois University. James reached out to his friend Frederick Marx, then in China teaching English, who liked the idea. The two agreed that both of them would produce the film, James would direct, and Marx would edit. James thought of the title "Hoop Dreams" very early in the development process; they also briefly considered calling it "Hoopin".


title: Hoop Dreams

text: In 1987, James received a $2,000 fellowship grant from the Illinois Arts Council to work on the film. James and Marx then pitched their idea to Gordon Quinn of Kartemquin Films. Initially, they planned to focus on a single playground for a 30-minute documentary they hoped would be aired on PBS. Quinn liked the idea and agreed to take the project on. Unable to raise any money besides James's grant, the pair decided to shoot on video instead of film (an unusual choice for the time), and they hired Peter Gilbert to do cinematography as he had his own gear.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: The filmmakers contacted coach Gene Pingatore of St. Joseph High School as he had coached Chicago native Isiah Thomas in high school. Pingatore introduced them to "Big Earl" Smith, a talent scout who was familiar with the inner-city playgrounds that the filmmakers wanted to shoot on. Smith brought them to several playgrounds, and at one of them he spotted a young Arthur Agee as a promising player. Agee agreed to be part of the film, and Smith helped arrange for him to attend Coach Pingatore's summer camp, where Thomas would be making an appearance.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: When the filmmakers interviewed Pingatore about Agee, he said it was too early to tell about him, but mentioned that another kid, William Gates, could be "the next Isiah Thomas". James, Marx, and Gilbert decided to include Gates in their film as well, and began to consider expanding the scope of their original vision.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: For two years, the three filmmakers continued to shoot intermittently and send demos out without raising any additional money. KCTA, a public television channel in Minnesota, heard about the film, and pledged $60,000, plus another $70,000 from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to fund an hour-long film. While continuing to search for more funds, the filmmakers considered other ideas, including a segment on a female high school player and a comedy sketch starring Tim Meadows.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: With limited financial backing, James, Marx, and Gilbert could only manage 22 days of filming for the entire first two years, and each of the filmmakers worked on other projects at times during the filming of "Hoop Dreams". By continuing to include Agee even after he was dropped from St. Joseph, they won the trust of him and his family, and the filmmakers began to delve deeper into the personal lives of the boys. At one point, the electricity was turned off in the Agee home; the filmmakers continued filming and (off-camera) provided money for the lights to be turned back on.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: The filmmakers shot another 40 days during the boys' junior year. James was able to leverage a relationship with the vice president of the MacArthur Foundation into a $250,000 grant for the film, which allowed them to shoot 100 days from the end of junior year to the end of the film. By the end of filming, they had captured 250 hours of footage.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: "Hoop Dreams" spent three years in editing, during which it was cut down from a first assemblage of more than 10 hours, to a six-hour version, to a rough cut that they showed the boys, their families, and coach Pingatore. Per their original agreement, Marx handled the editing, but after two years he asked James and William Haugse to step in to help him. James and Haugse spent another year and a half editing. By the spring of 1993, they had a cut ready and began to consider releasing it in theaters.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: "Hoop Dreams" premiered at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for Best Documentary. It ran on the closing night of the 1994 New York Film Festival, the first time a documentary film had ever closed the festival. The filmmakers had previously had to turn down an appearance at the 1993 edition of the festival as the film was not yet ready. Its appearance at Sundance helped it secure a distribution deal with Fine Line Features, and the film opened nationwide on October 21, 1994. It grossed $7.8 million domestically and $4 million internationally, for a worldwide total of $11.8 million.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: The film was universally acclaimed by critics. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film "Two Thumbs Up" on their show, with both critics naming "Hoop Dreams" the best film of 1994. Ebert in his initial television review proclaimed "This is one of the best films about American life that I have "ever" seen", and later called it the best film of the decade and "one of the great moviegoing experiences of my lifetime." In 2004, "The New York Times" placed the film on its "Best 1000 Movies Ever" list. The film has a 98% approval rating from Rotten Tomatoes, based on 60 reviews with an average rating of 8.8/10. The website's critical consensus states, "One of the most critically acclaimed documentaries of all time, "Hoop Dreams" is a rich, complex, heartbreaking, and ultimately deeply rewarding film that uses high school hoops as a jumping-off point to explore issues of race, class, and education in modern America."


title: Hoop Dreams

text: The film was ranked #1 on the International Documentary Association's Top 25 Documentaries list, based on polling of members in 2007. It was also ranked #1 on the Current TV special "50 Documentaries to See Before You Die". In 2005, "Hoop Dreams" was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and recommended for preservation.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: Ira Deutchman, who helped distribute the film with Fine Line, advocated for the film to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. When the film, along with the equally acclaimed "Crumb" a year later, was not nominated in either the Best Picture or the Best Documentary categories, public outcry led to a revised nomination process in the category, led by Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple. According to an angry Roger Ebert, reliable sources said members of the Academy's documentary nomination committee had a system in which one would wave a flashlight on screen when they gave up on the film. When a majority of the lights flashed, the film was turned off. "Hoop Dreams" did not even make it to 20 minutes. Siskel, while also objecting to "Hoop Dreams" being passed by for the nomination, said that it led to more widespread media coverage of the film.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: In response to the controversy, Bruce Davis, the Academy's executive director, asked accounting firm Price Waterhouse to turn over the voting results, in which each voter had given a rating from zero to ten to each of the eligible documentaries. According to Davis, "a small group of members gave zeros to every single film except the five they wanted to see nominated. And they gave tens to those five, which completely skewed the voting... There was one film that received more scores of ten than any other, but it was not nominated. It also got zeros from those few voters, and that was enough to push it to sixth place."


title: Hoop Dreams

text: Neither Agee nor Gates were drafted into the NBA. Nonetheless, both young men were able to turn the film's success and their subsequent fame into a better life for themselves and their families. Gates played three seasons of college basketball at Marquette University before quitting the program, but he graduated from the university in 1999 with a communications degree. Agee went on to play at Arkansas State and later in the United States Basketball League and the International Basketball Association. The producers gave both Gates and Agee almost $200,000 in royalties from the film, although they were barred from accepting the money until after college due to National Collegiate Athletic Association rules. In 2001, Gates practiced with Michael Jordan ahead of a try-out for the Washington Wizards, but he fractured his foot and decided to retire from basketball permanently.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: Agee, the younger of the two basketball players, launched a foundation promoting higher education for inner-city youth and began the "Hoop Dreams" sportswear line in 2006. Gates became the senior pastor at Living Faith Community Center in Cabrini–Green, where he worked at the Kids' Club. The families of both men have experienced losses since the release of the film. Agee's half-brother DeAntonio was killed on Thanksgiving morning 1994, and Gates's older brother, Curtis, was shot to death in Chicago Lawn in September 2001. Agee's father, Bo, was murdered in 2004.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: An unofficial sequel not made by the original filmmakers, Hoop Reality (2007), explores what happened during the decade after "Hoop Dreams". Patrick Beverley from Chicago's hardscrabble West Side appears as a struggling potential star also at John Marshall Metropolitan High School and is mentored by Agee and basketball coach Lamont Bryant. Beverley entered the 2009 NBA draft, and was selected with the 42nd overall pick by the Los Angeles Lakers.


title: Hoop Dreams

text: A digital restoration of the film, created by a partnership of the Sundance Institute, UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Academy Film Archive and Kartemquin Films, premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival for the film's 20th anniversary. The restoration used the original analog video masters to create a high-definition digital master that was higher-quality than the cropped and transferred version that was released commercially. The Criterion Collection released the restored "Hoop Dreams" Blu-ray on March 31, 2015.


title: Islam in Africa

text: Islam in Africa is the continent's second most widely professed faith behind Christianity. Africa was the first continent into which Islam spread from Southwest Asia, during the early 7th century CE. Almost one-third of the world's Muslim population resides in Africa. Muslims crossed current Djibouti and Somalia to seek refuge in present-day Eritrea and Ethiopia during the "Hijrah" (, 'Migration') to the Christian Kingdom of Aksum. Like the vast majority (90%) of Muslims in the world, most Muslims in Africa are also Sunni Muslims; the complexity of Islam in Africa is revealed in the various schools of thought, traditions, and voices in many African countries. Many African ethnicities, mostly in North, West and East Africa consider Islam their Traditional religion. The practice of Islam on the continent is not static and is constantly being reshaped by prevalent social, economic, and political conditions. Generally Islam in Africa often adapted to African cultural contexts and belief systems forming Africa's own orthodoxies.


title: Islam in Africa

text: It was estimated in 2002 that Muslims constituted 40% of the population of Africa, a fraction which has slightly decreased in the meantime due to high birth rates in predominantly Christian Sub-Saharan Africa. Islam is the main religion of North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Sahel, the Swahili Coast, and West Africa, with minority immigrant populations in South Africa.


title: Islam in Africa

text: The presence of Islam in Africa can be traced to the 7th century CE, when in Rajab 8 BH, or May 614 CE, Muhammad advised a number of his early disciples, who were facing persecution by the polytheistic inhabitants of the Mecca, to seek refuge across the Red Sea in Axum. In the Muslim tradition, this event is known as the first hijrah, or migration. Twenty-three Muslims migrated to Abyssinia where they were protected by its king, Armah "An-Najāshī" (), who later accepted Islam. They were followed by 101 Muslims later in the same year. Most of those Muslims returned to Medina in 7 AH / 628 CE but some settled in the neighboring Zeila (current day Somalia ) which was at that time part of "Bilād al-Barbar" (, "Land of the Berber(s)"). Once in Zeila, they built the "Masjid al-Qiblaṫayn" (, "Mosque of the two Qiblahs") in 627 CE. This mosque has two Qiblas because it was built before the Prophet switched the Qiblah from Jerusalem to Mecca. They also reportedly built Africa's oldest mosque, that is the Mosque of the Companions in the Eritrean city of Massawa. This qibla of this mosque in Massawa points towards Jerusalem as well, though now defunct, occasional prayers are still held in this mosque with qibla correction towards Mecca.


title: Islam in Africa

text: In 20 H / 641 CE, during the reign of Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, Muslim troops took over current Egypt and conquered current Libya the following year. Muslims then expanded to current Tunisia in 27 H / 647 CE, during the reign of the third Muslim Caliph Uthman Ibn Affan. The conquest of North Africa continued under the Umayyad dynasty, which annexed parts of Algeria around 61 H/680 CE and Morocco the following year. From the latter Muslim troops crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Europe in 92 H/711 CE. Islam gained momentum during the 10th century in West Africa with the start of the Almoravid dynasty movement on the Senegal River and as rulers and kings embraced Islam. Islam then spread slowly in much of the continent through trade and preaching. During this period these Muslims from North and West Africa came to be known by Europeans at large as Moors . By the 9th century, Muslim Sultanates started being established in the Horn of Africa, and by the 12th century, the Kilwa Sultanate had spread as far south as Mozambique. Islam only crossed deeper into Malawi and Congo in the second half of the 19th century under the Zanzibar Sultanate. Then the British brought their labor force from India, including some Muslim-Indian nationals, to their colonies in Africa towards the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.


title: Islam in Africa

text: Islam was introduced to the northern Somali coast early on from the Arabian peninsula, shortly after the hijra. Zeila's two-mihrab Masjid al-Qiblatayn dates to the 7th century, and is the oldest mosque in the city. In the late 9th century, Al-Yaqubi wrote that Muslims were living along the northern Somali seaboard. He also mentioned that the Adal kingdom had its capital in the city, suggesting that the Adal Sultanate with Zeila as its headquarters dates back to at least the 9th or 10th century. According to I.M. Lewis, the polity was governed by local dynasties, who also ruled over the similarly-established Sultanate of Mogadishu in the littoral Benadir region to the south. Adal's history from this founding period forth would be characterized by a succession of battles with neighboring Abyssinia.


title: Islam in Africa

text: In the following centuries, the consolidation of Muslim trading networks, connected by lineage, trade, and Sufi brotherhoods, had reached a peak in West Africa, enabling Muslims to wield tremendous political influence and power. During the reign of Umar II, the then governor of Africa, Ismail ibn Abdullah, was said to have won the Berbers to Islam by his just administration. Other early notable missionaries include Abdallah ibn Yasin, who started a movement which caused thousands of Berbers to accept Islam.


title: Islam in Africa

text: The History of Islam in Africa and accounts of how the religion spread, especially in North and the Horn of Africa, has always been contentious. Head of Awqaf Africa London, Sheikh Dr. Abu-Abdullah Adelabu has written in his Movements of Islam in face of the Empires and Kingdoms in Yorubaland claims about the early arrival of Islam in southwestern Nigeria. He seconded the Arab anthropologist Abduhu Badawi on the argument that the early Muslim missionaries had benefited their works from the fall of Kush in northern Sudan and the prosperity of the politically multicultural Abbasid period in the continent which, according to him, had created several streams of migration, moving west in the mid-9th century into Sub-Saharan Africa. Adelabu pointed at the popularity and influences of the Abbasid Dynasty (750–1258), the second great dynasty with the rulers carrying the title of 'Caliph' as fostering peaceful and prosperous migration of the intercultural Muslims from the Nile Valley to Niger as well as of the Arab traders from the desert to Benue. Adelabu's claim seems to be in line with the conventional historical view that the conquest of North Africa by the Umayyad Caliphate between AD 647–709 effectively ended Christianity in Africa for several centuries. Some argue that adoption of Islam was motivated by the desire to enhance trade, as Islam provided a moral code of conduct to regulate commercial activities, especially with respect to credit and security.


title: Islam in Africa

text: Similarly, in the Swahili coast, Islam made its way inland – spreading at the expense of traditional African religions. This expansion of Islam in Africa not only led to the formation of new communities in Africa, but it also reconfigured existing African communities and empires to be based on Islamic models. Indeed, in the middle of the 11th century, the Kanem Empire, whose influence extended into Sudan, converted to Islam. At the same time but more toward West Africa, the reigning ruler of the Bornu Empire embraced Islam. As these kingdoms adopted Islam, their subjects thereafter followed suit. In praising the Africans' zealousness to Islam, the 14th-century explorer Ibn Battuta stated that mosques were so crowded on Fridays, that unless one went very early, it was impossible to find a place to sit.


title: Islam in Africa

text: In the 16th century, the Ouaddai Empire and the Kingdom of Kano embraced Islam, and later toward the 18th century, the Nigeria based Sokoto Caliphate led by Usman dan Fodio exerted considerable effort in spreading Islam.


title: Islam in Africa

text: Today, Islam is the predominant religion of the northern half of Africa, mainly concentrated in North Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, as well as West Africa.


title: Islam in Africa

text: Islam has been in Africa for so long, since its emergence on the Arabian peninsula, that some scholars have argued that it is a traditional African religion.


title: Islam in Africa

text: Although the majority of Muslims in Africa are non-denominational Muslims, Sunni or Sufi, the complexity of Islam in Africa is revealed in the various schools of thought, traditions, and voices that constantly contend for dominance in many African countries. Islam in Africa is not static and is constantly being reshaped by prevalent social, economic and political conditions.


title: Islam in Africa

text: Islam in Africa is often adapted to local cultural contexts and belief systems, thereby forming the continent's own orthodoxies. Different societies in Africa have generally appropriated Islam in both more inclusive ways, or in the more radical ways, as with the Almoravid movement in the Maghreb and Sahara.


title: Islam in Africa

text: Additionally, Islam in Africa has both local and global dimensions. On the local level, experts assert that Muslims (including African Muslims) operate with considerable autonomy and do not have an international organization that regulates their religious practices. This fact accounts for the differences and varieties in Islamic practices throughout the African continent. On the global level, Muslims in Africa are also part of the "Ummah" (, Islamic community worldwide), and follow global issues and current events that affect the Muslim world with keen interest. With globalization and new initiatives in information technology, Muslims in Africa have developed and maintained close connections with the wider Muslim world.


title: Islam in Africa

text: Analysts argue that Muslims in Africa, like other Muslims in Asia, the Middle East and the rest of the world, seem to be locked into an intense struggle regarding the future direction of Islam. At core of the struggle are questions about the way in which Muslims should practice their faith. The scholars assert that the majority seems to prefer to remain on the moderate, tolerant course that Islam has historically followed. However, a relatively small, but growing group would like to establish a stricter form of the religion, one that informs and controls all aspects of society.


title: Islam in Africa

text: The "Sharīʿah" () of Islam broadly influences the legal code in most Islamic countries, but the extent of which its impact varies widely. In Africa, most states limit the use of Sharia to "personal-status law" for issues such as marriage, divorce, inheritance and child custody. With the exception of northern Nigeria in West Africa, secularism does not seem to face any serious threat in Africa, even though the new Islamic revival is having a great impact upon segments of Muslim populations. Cohabitation or coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims remains, for the most part, peaceful.


title: Islam in Africa

text: Nigeria is home to Africa's largest Muslim population. In 1999, Nigeria's northern states adopted the Sharia penal code, but punishments have been rare. In fact, dozens of women convicted of adultery and sentenced to stoning to death have later been freed. Egypt, one of the largest Muslim states in Africa, claims Sharia as the main source of its legislation, yet its penal and civil codes are based largely on French law.


title: Islam in Africa

text: Muslims in Africa mostly adhere to the Sunni Islam, with sizable Ibadi adherents. In addition, Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam, has a very big presence. The Maliki madh'hab is the dominant school of jurisprudence amongst most of the continent's Sunni communities, while the Shafi'i madh'hab is prevalent in the Horn of Africa, eastern Egypt, and the Swahili Coast. The Hanafi fiqh is also followed in western Egypt.


title: Islam in Africa

text: Quranism is an umbrella term denoting a strand within Islam that endorses a Quran-oriented form of Islam and often eschews hadiths. There are many forms of Quranism and they may not all agree on practical tenets.


title: Islam in Africa

text: According to a survey by Pew, there are thirteen countries in Africa wherein at least twenty percent of the Muslim population adheres to a non-denominational form of Islam, i.e. are non-denominational Muslims. These countries, as well as the percentages of the Muslim populations who fall under this bracket include, Mali (55%), Nigeria (42%), Cameroon (40%), Tunisia (40%), Guinea Bissau (36%), Uganda (33%), Morocco (30%), Senegal (27%), Chad (23%), Ethiopia (23%), Liberia (22%), Niger (20%), and Tanzania (20%).


title: Islam in Africa

text: Sufism, which focuses on the mystical elements of Islam, has many orders as well as followers in West Africa and Sudan, and, like other orders, strives to know God through meditation and emotion. Sufis may be nondenominational Muslim, Sunni or Shi’ite, and their ceremonies may involve chanting, music, dancing, and meditation.


title: Islam in Africa

text: Many Sufis in Africa are syncretic where they practise Sufism with traditional folklore beliefs. Salafis criticize the folklorists Sufis, who they claim have incorporated "un-Islamic" beliefs into their practices, such as celebrating the several events, visiting the shrines of "Islamic saints", dancing during prayer (the whirling dervishes).


title: Islam in Africa

text: West Africa and Sudan have various Sufi orders regarded skeptically by the more doctrinally strict branches of Islam in the Middle East. Most orders in West Africa emphasize the role of a spiritual guide, marabout or possessing supernatural power, regarded as an Africanization of Islam. In Senegal and Gambia, Mouridism Sufis claim to have several million adherents and have drawn criticism for their veneration of Mouridism's founder Amadou Bamba. The Tijani is the most popular Sufi order in West Africa, with a large following in Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Gambia.


title: Islam in Africa

text: Recently, Salafism has begun spreading in Africa, as a result of many Muslim Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) such as the World Muslim League, the World Assembly for Muslim Youth, and the Federation of Mab and Islamic Schools primarily funded by Salafi governments in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. These Salafist organizations, often based out of Saudi Arabia, promote a form of conservative reformism and regard Sufism as "heterodox" and contrary to their interpretation of traditional Islam. Such NGOs have built Salafi-dominated mosques and Islamic centers in Africa, and many are staffed by puritanical African Muslims, often trained in the Middle East. Academic scholarships to study in Islamic universities in the Middle East are also offered to further Salafism.


title: Islam in Africa

text: On the other hand, Africanist scholars trace the popularity of Salafi ideals to local cultural factors and the social efforts of prominent African Salafi scholars, reformists, organisations and intellectuals and their religious ties with various Islamic scholars across the Muslim World.


title: Islam in Africa

text: According to the Pew Research Center, three of the ten countries with the largest Muslim populations in 2015 were in Africa: Nigeria (where there were an estimated 90.02 million Muslims, accounting for 50% of the total population), Egypt (83.87 million; 95.1%) and Algeria (37.21 million; 97.9%).


title: Caitlin McGee

text: Caitlin Cole McGee (born January 9, 1988) is an American actress. She is best known for her role as attorney Sydney Strait on the legal drama "Bluff City Law". She is currently a regular on the ABC comedy "Home Economics".


title: Caitlin McGee

text: McGee has appeared in minor roles on shows such as "Blue Bloods", "Chicago Med", "Grey's Anatomy", and "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel".


title: Caitlin McGee

text: McGee was cast in the NBC legal drama "Bluff City Law" in 2019 as Sydney Strait, the daughter of an accomplished litigator and an accomplished corporate attorney herself. She was named the grand marshal of the AAA Texas 500 in 2019 as a part of a promotion for "Bluff City Law".


title: Caitlin McGee

text: In October 2019, McGee played Emma, the love interest of Dev Patel’s Joshua, in the Season One episode of Amazon Prime Video’s anthology series "Modern Love" titled “When Cupid is a Prying Journalist.”


title: Caitlin McGee

text: McGee grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, where she attended Newton North High School, graduating in 2006. She is a graduate of Wagner College with a Bachelor's degree in Theatre Performance and Speech.


title: Caitlin McGee

text: McGee started dating actor Patrick Woodall in 2014, and got married in 2021. Their first child, a daughter, was born on September 27, 2022.


title: Saiga antelope

text: The saiga antelope (, Saiga tatarica), or saiga, is a critically endangered antelope which during antiquity inhabited a vast area of the Eurasian steppe spanning the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in the northwest and Caucasus in the southwest into Mongolia in the northeast and Dzungaria in the southeast. During the Pleistocene, they also occurred in Beringian North America and the British Isles. Today, the dominant subspecies ("S. t. tatarica") is only found in one region in Russia (in the Republic of Kalmykia and Astrakhan Oblast) and three areas in Kazakhstan (the Ural, Ustiurt, and Betpak-Dala populations). A portion of the Ustiurt population migrates south to Uzbekistan and occasionally Turkmenistan in winter. It is extirpated from China, Ukraine, and southwestern Mongolia. The Mongolian subspecies ("S. t. mongolica") is found only in western Mongolia.


title: Saiga antelope

text: The scientific name "Capra tatarica" was coined by Carl Linnaeus in 1766 in the 12th edition of "Systema Naturae". It was reclassified as "Saiga tatarica" and is the sole living member of the genus "Saiga". Two subspecies are recognised:


title: Saiga antelope

text: In 1945, American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson classified both in the tribe Saigini under the same subfamily, Caprinae. Subsequent authors were not certain about the relationship between the two, until phylogenetic studies in the 1990s revealed that though morphologically similar, the Tibetan antelope is closer to the Caprinae while the saiga is closer to the Antilopinae.


title: Saiga antelope

text: In a revision of the phylogeny of the tribe Antilopini on the basis of nuclear and mitochondrial data in 2013, Eva Verena Bärmann (of the University of Cambridge) and colleagues showed that the saiga is sister to the clade formed by the springbok ("Antidorcas marsupialis") and the gerenuk ("Litocranius walleri"). The study noted that the saiga and the springbok could be considerably different from the rest of the antilopines; a 2007 phylogenetic study suggested that the two form a clade sister to the gerenuk. The cladogram below is based on the 2013 study.


title: Saiga antelope

text: Fossils of saiga, concentrated mainly in central and northern Eurasia, date to as early as the late Pleistocene (nearly 0.1 Mya). Several species of extinct "Saiga" from the Pleistocene of Eurasia and Alaska have been named, including "S. borealis", "S. prisca", "S. binagadensis" and "S. ricei", although more recent studies suggest that these prehistoric representatives were merely geographical variants of the extant species that was formerly much more widespread. Fossils excavated from the Buran Kaya III site (Crimea) date back to the transition from Pleistocene to Holocene. The morphology of saiga does not seem to have changed significantly since prehistoric times.


title: Saiga antelope

text: Before the Holocene, the saiga ranged from as far west as modern-day England and France to as far east as northern Siberia, Alaska, and probably Canada. The antelope gradually entered the Urals, though it did not colonise southern Europe. A 2010 study revealed that a steep decline has occurred in the genetic variability of the saiga since the late Pleistocene-Holocene, probably due to a population bottleneck.


title: Saiga antelope

text: The saiga stands at the shoulder, and weighs . The head-and-body length is typically between . A prominent feature of the saiga is the pair of closely spaced, bloated nostrils directed downward. Other facial features include the dark markings on the cheeks and the nose, and the long ears. During summer migrations, a saiga's nose helps filter out dust kicked up by the herd and cools the animal's blood. In the winter, it heats up the frigid air before it is taken to the lungs.


title: Saiga antelope

text: The coat shows seasonal changes. In summer, the coat appears yellow to red, fading toward the flanks. The Mongolian saiga can develop a sandy colour. The coat develops a pale, grayish-brown colour in winter, with a hint of brown on the belly and the neck. The ventral parts are generally white. The hairs, that measure long in summer, can grow as long as in winter. This forms a mane on the neck. Two distinct moults can be observed in a year, one in spring (April to May) and another in autumn (late September or early October to late November or early December). The tail measures .


title: Saiga antelope

text: Only males possess horns. These horns, thick and slightly translucent, are wax-coloured and show 12 to 20 pronounced rings. With a base diameter of , the horns of the Russian saiga measure in length; the horns of the Mongolian saiga, however, reach a maximum length of .


title: Saiga antelope

text: Saigas form very large herds that graze in semideserts, steppes, grasslands, and possibly open woodlands, eating several species of plants, including some that are poisonous to other animals. They can cover long distances and swim across rivers, but they avoid steep or rugged areas. The mating season starts in November, when stags fight for the acceptance of females. The winner leads a herd of five to ten females (occasionally up to 50). In springtime, mothers come together in mass to give birth. Two-thirds of births are twins; the remaining third of births are single calves.


title: Saiga antelope

text: Saigas, like the Mongolian gazelles, are known for their extensive migrations across the steppes that allow them to escape natural calamities.


title: Saiga antelope

text: Saigas are highly vulnerable to wolves. Juveniles are targeted by foxes, steppe eagles, golden eagles, dogs, and ravens.


title: Saiga antelope

text: During the last glacial period, the saigas ranged from the British Isles through Central Asia and the Bering Strait into Alaska and Canada's Yukon and Northwest Territories. By the classical age, they were apparently considered a characteristic animal of Scythia, judging from the historian Strabo's description of an animal called the "kolos" that was "between the deer and ram in size" and was wrongly believed to drink through its nose.


title: Saiga antelope

text: Considerable evidence shows the importance of the antelope to Andronovo culture settlements. Illustrations of saiga antelopes can be found among the cave paintings that were dated back to seventh to fifth century BC. Moreover, saiga bones were found among the remains of other wild animals near the human settlements.


title: Saiga antelope

text: The fragmented information shows an abundance of saigas on the territory of modern Kazakhstan in the 14th-16th centuries. The migratory routes ranged throughout the country's area, especially the region between the Volga and Ural Rivers was heavily populated. The population's size remained high until the second half of the 19th century, when excessive horn export began. The high price and demand for horns drove radical hunting. The number of animals decreased in all regions and the migratory routes shifted southward. Populations in Ukraine were driven to extirpation in the 18th century.


title: Saiga antelope

text: After a rapid decline, they were nearly completely exterminated in the 1920s, but they were able to recover. By 1950, two million of them were found in the steppes of the USSR. Their population fell drastically following the collapse of the USSR due to uncontrolled hunting and demand for horns in Chinese medicine. At one point, some conservation groups, such as the World Wildlife Fund, encouraged the hunting of this species, as its horn was presented as an alternative to that of a rhinoceros.


title: Saiga antelope

text: Today, the populations have again shrunk enormously – as much as 95% in 15 years. The saiga is classified as critically endangered by the IUCN. An estimated total number of 50,000 saigas survive today in Kalmykia, three areas of Kazakhstan, and in two isolated areas of Mongolia. Another small population in the Pre-Caspian region of Russia remains under extreme threat.


title: Saiga antelope

text: Cherny Zemli Nature Reserve was created in Russia's Kalmykia Republic in the 1990s to protect the local saiga population. Kalmykia's president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov announced 2010 as the Year of Saiga in Kalmykia. In Kazakhstan, the number of saigas was found to be increasing, from around 21,000 at the beginning of this millennium to around 81,000 in January 2010. However, in May 2010, an estimated 12,000 of the 26,000 saiga population in the Ural region of Kazakhstan have been found dead. Although the deaths are currently being ascribed to pasteurellosis, an infectious disease that strikes the lungs and intestines, the underlying trigger remains to be identified. In May 2015, what may be the same disease broke out in three northern regions of the country. As of 28 May 2015, more than 120,000 saigas have been confirmed dead in the Betpak-Dala population in central Kazakhstan, representing more than a third of the global population. By April 2016, the saigas appear to be making a comeback, with an increase of population from 31,000 to 36,000 in the Betpak-Dala area. In April 2021 a survey in Kazakhstan found that the saiga population had risen from an estimated 334,000 to 842,000. The population increase was partially attributed to the government crackdown on poaching and the establishment of conservation areas. UK charity RSPB reported in 2022 that, partly due to their conservation efforts, as well as the designation of the Bokey Orda-Ashiozek protected area by the Kazakhstan government, the population had now risen to a peak of 1.32 million.


title: Saiga antelope

text: The Mongolian saiga ("S. t. mongolica") is found in a small area in western Mongolia around the Sharga and Mankhan Nature Reserves.


title: Saiga antelope

text: The horn of the saiga antelope is used in traditional Chinese medicine and can sell for as much as US$150. Demand for the horns drives poaching and smuggling, which has wiped out the population in China, where the saiga antelope is a class I protected species. The saiga's decline is one of the fastest population collapses of large mammals recently observed, and the MoU aims to reduce current exploitation levels and restore the population status of these nomads of the Central Asian steppes.


title: Saiga antelope

text: In June 2014, Chinese customs at the Kazakh border uncovered 66 cases containing 2,351 saiga antelope horns, estimated to be worth over Y70.5 million (US$11 million).


title: Saiga antelope

text: In June 2015, E. J. Milner-Gulland (chair of Saiga Conservation Alliance) said: "Antipoaching needs to be a top priority for the Russian and Kazakh governments."


title: Saiga antelope

text: Saigas have been a target of hunting since prehistoric ages, when hunting was an essential means to acquire food. Saigas' horns, meat, and skin have commercial value and are exported from Kazakhstan.


title: Saiga antelope

text: Saiga horn, known as , is one of the main ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine that is used as an extract or powder additive to the elixirs, ointments, and drinks. Saiga horn's value is equal to rhinoceros horn, whose trade was banned in 1993. is thought to be a cheaper substitute of rare rhino horn in most TCM recipes. Although the hunting and trade is considered illegal, the horn products still can be found sold publicly and openly in a great variety of venues and businesses.


title: Saiga antelope

text: In the period from 1955 to 1989, over 87 thousand tonnes of meat were collected in Kazakhstan by killing more than five million saiga.


title: Saiga antelope

text: Saiga meat is compared to lamb, considered to be nutritious and delicious. Numerous recipes for cooking the antelope's meat can be found. Both meat and byproducts are sold in the country and outside of it. About 45–80 dm of skin can be harvested from one individual depending on its age and sex. The skin is used to produce suede and box calf.


title: Saiga antelope

text: Agricultural advancement and human settlements have been shrinking habitat areas of the saigas since the 20th century. Occupants limited saiga's passage to water resources and the winter and summer habitats. The ever-changing face of steppe requires saigas to search for new routes to their habitual lands. Currently, saiga populations' migratory routes pass five countries and different man-made constructions, such as railways, trenches, mining sites, and pipelines. These physical barriers limit movement of the antelopes. Cases of saiga herds being trapped within fenced areas and starving to death have been reported. Starting in 2011, Kazakhstan has built more than 150 km of wire fence at the border with Uzbekistan. This fence limits seasonal migration of saigas and other smaller animals. Although concerns have been stated, the fences are still being built.


title: Saiga antelope

text: Saigas are dependent on weather and affected by climate fluctuations to a great extent due to their migratory nature. Harsh winters with strong winds or high snow coverage prevent them from feeding on the underlying grass. Population size usually dramatically decreases after severe cold months. Recent trends in climate change have increased the aridity of the steppe region, leading an estimated 14% or more of available pastureland to be considered degraded and useless. Concurrently, small steppe rivers dry faster, limiting water resources to large lakes and rivers, which are usually populated by human settlements. Moreover, high temperatures in the steppe region lead to springtime floods, in which saiga calves can drown.