title: Homologous recombination

text: Natural bacterial transformation involves the transfer of DNA from a donor bacterium to a recipient bacterium, where both donor and recipient are ordinarily of the same species. Transformation, unlike bacterial conjugation and transduction, depends on numerous bacterial gene products that specifically interact to perform this process. Thus transformation is clearly a bacterial adaptation for DNA transfer. In order for a bacterium to bind, take up and integrate donor DNA into its resident chromosome by homologous recombination, it must first enter a special physiological state termed competence. The "RecA"/"Rad51"/"DMC1" gene family plays a central role in homologous recombination during bacterial transformation as it does during eukaryotic meiosis and mitosis. For instance, the RecA protein is essential for transformation in "Bacillus subtilis" and "Streptococcus pneumoniae", and expression of the RecA gene is induced during the development of competence for transformation in these organisms.


title: Homologous recombination

text: As part of the transformation process, the RecA protein interacts with entering single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) to form RecA/ssDNA nucleofilaments that scan the resident chromosome for regions of homology and bring the entering ssDNA to the corresponding region, where strand exchange and homologous recombination occur. Thus the process of homologous recombination during bacterial transformation has fundamental similarities to homologous recombination during meiosis.


title: Homologous recombination

text: Homologous recombination occurs in several groups of viruses. In DNA viruses such as herpesvirus, recombination occurs through a break-and-rejoin mechanism like in bacteria and eukaryotes. There is also evidence for recombination in some RNA viruses, specifically positive-sense ssRNA viruses like retroviruses, picornaviruses, and coronaviruses. There is controversy over whether homologous recombination occurs in negative-sense ssRNA viruses like influenza.


title: Homologous recombination

text: In RNA viruses, homologous recombination can be either precise or imprecise. In the precise type of RNA-RNA recombination, there is no difference between the two parental RNA sequences and the resulting crossover RNA region. Because of this, it is often difficult to determine the location of crossover events between two recombining RNA sequences. In imprecise RNA homologous recombination, the crossover region has some difference with the parental RNA sequences – caused by either addition, deletion, or other modification of nucleotides. The level of precision in crossover is controlled by the sequence context of the two recombining strands of RNA: sequences rich in adenine and uracil decrease crossover precision.


title: Homologous recombination

text: Homologous recombination is important in facilitating viral evolution. For example, if the genomes of two viruses with different disadvantageous mutations undergo recombination, then they may be able to regenerate a fully functional genome. Alternatively, if two similar viruses have infected the same host cell, homologous recombination can allow those two viruses to swap genes and thereby evolve more potent variations of themselves.


title: Homologous recombination

text: Homologous recombination is the proposed mechanism whereby the DNA virus "human herpesvirus-6" integrates into human telomeres.


title: Homologous recombination

text: When two or more viruses, each containing lethal genomic damage, infect the same host cell, the virus genomes can often pair with each other and undergo homologous recombinational repair to produce viable progeny. This process, known as multiplicity reactivation, has been studied in several bacteriophages, including phage T4. Enzymes employed in recombinational repair in phage T4 are functionally homologous to enzymes employed in bacterial and eukaryotic recombinational repair. In particular, with regard to a gene necessary for the strand exchange reaction, a key step in homologous recombinational repair, there is functional homology from viruses to humans (i. e. "uvsX" in phage T4; "recA" in E. coli and other bacteria, and "rad51" and "dmc1" in yeast and other eukaryotes, including humans). Multiplicity reactivation has also been demonstrated in numerous pathogenic viruses.


title: Homologous recombination

text: Coronaviruses are capable of genetic recombination when at least two viral genomes are present in the same infected cell. RNA recombination appears to be a major driving force in determining (1) genetic variability within a CoV species, (2) the capability of a CoV species to jump from one host to another, and (3) infrequently, the emergence of novel CoVs. The mechanism of recombination in CoVs likely involves template switching during genome replication. Recombination in RNA viruses appears to be an adaptation for coping with genome damage.


title: Homologous recombination

text: The pandemic SARS-CoV-2's entire receptor binding motif appears to have been introduced through recombination from coronaviruses of pangolins. Such a recombination event may have been a critical step in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2's capability to infect humans. Recombination events are likely key steps in the evolutionary process that leads to the emergence of new human coronaviruses.


title: Homologous recombination

text: During COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, many genomic sequences of Australian SARS‐CoV‐2 isolates have deletions or mutations (29742G>A or 29742G>U; "G19A" or "G19U")in the Coronavirus 3′ stem-loop II-like motif (s2m), an RNA motif in 3' untranslated region of viral genome, suggesting that RNA recombination events may have occurred in s2m of SARS-CoV-2. Based on computational analysis of 1319 Australia SARS‐CoV‐2 sequences using Recco algorithm (https://recco.bioinf.mpi-inf.mpg.de/), 29742G("G19"), 29744G("G21"), and 29751G("G28") were predicted as recombination hotspots.


title: Homologous recombination

text: The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in Diamond Princess cruise most likely originated from either a single person infected with a virus variant identical to the Wuhan WIV04 isolates, or simultaneously with another primary case infected with a virus containing the 11083G > T mutation. Linkage disequilibrium analysis confirmed that RNA recombination with the 11083G > T mutation also contributed to the increase of mutations among the viral progeny. The findings indicate that the 11083G > T mutation of SARS-CoV-2 spread during shipboard quarantine and arose through de novo RNA recombination under positive selection pressure. In addition, in three patients in this cruise, two mutations 29736G > T and 29751G > T ("G13" and "G28") were also located in Coronavirus 3′ stem-loop II-like motif (s2m), as "G28" was predicted as recombination hotspots in Australian SARS-CoV-2 mutants. Although s2m is considered an RNA motif highly conserved among many coronavirus species, this result also suggests that s2m of SARS-CoV-2 is rather a RNA recombination/mutation hotspot.


title: Homologous recombination

text: Without proper homologous recombination, chromosomes often incorrectly align for the first phase of cell division in meiosis. This causes chromosomes to fail to properly segregate in a process called nondisjunction. In turn, nondisjunction can cause sperm and ova to have too few or too many chromosomes. Down's syndrome, which is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21, is one of many abnormalities that result from such a failure of homologous recombination in meiosis.


title: Homologous recombination

text: Deficiencies in homologous recombination have been strongly linked to cancer formation in humans. For example, each of the cancer-related diseases Bloom syndrome, Werner syndrome and Rothmund–Thomson syndrome are caused by malfunctioning copies of RecQ helicase genes involved in the regulation of homologous recombination: "BLM", "WRN" and "RECQL4", respectively. In the cells of Bloom's syndrome patients, who lack a working copy of the BLM protein, there is an elevated rate of homologous recombination. Experiments in mice deficient in BLM have suggested that the mutation gives rise to cancer through a loss of heterozygosity caused by increased homologous recombination. A loss in heterozygosity refers to the loss of one of two versions—or alleles—of a gene. If one of the lost alleles helps to suppress tumors, like the gene for the retinoblastoma protein for example, then the loss of heterozygosity can lead to cancer.


title: Homologous recombination

text: Decreased rates of homologous recombination cause inefficient DNA repair, which can also lead to cancer. This is the case with BRCA1 and BRCA2, two similar tumor suppressor genes whose malfunctioning has been linked with considerably increased risk for breast and ovarian cancer. Cells missing BRCA1 and BRCA2 have a decreased rate of homologous recombination and increased sensitivity to ionizing radiation, suggesting that decreased homologous recombination leads to increased susceptibility to cancer. Because the only known function of BRCA2 is to help initiate homologous recombination, researchers have speculated that more detailed knowledge of BRCA2's role in homologous recombination may be the key to understanding the causes of breast and ovarian cancer.


title: Homologous recombination

text: Tumours with a homologous recombination deficiency (including BRCA defects) are described as HRD-positive.


title: Homologous recombination

text: While the pathways can mechanistically vary, the ability of organisms to perform homologous recombination is universally conserved across all domains of life. Based on the similarity of their amino acid sequences, homologs of a number of proteins can be found in multiple domains of life indicating that they evolved a long time ago, and have since diverged from common ancestral proteins.


title: Homologous recombination

text: RecA recombinase family members are found in almost all organisms with RecA in bacteria, Rad51 and DMC1 in eukaryotes, RadA in archaea, and UvsX in T4 phage.


title: Homologous recombination

text: Related single stranded binding proteins that are important for homologous recombination, and many other processes, are also found in all domains of life.


title: Homologous recombination

text: The proteins of the RecA recombinase family of proteins are thought to be descended from a common ancestral recombinase. The RecA recombinase family contains RecA protein from bacteria, the Rad51 and Dmc1 proteins from eukaryotes, and RadA from archaea, and the recombinase paralog proteins. Studies modeling the evolutionary relationships between the Rad51, Dmc1 and RadA proteins indicate that they are monophyletic, or that they share a common molecular ancestor. Within this protein family, Rad51 and Dmc1 are grouped together in a separate clade from RadA. One of the reasons for grouping these three proteins together is that they all possess a modified helix-turn-helix motif, which helps the proteins bind to DNA, toward their N-terminal ends. An ancient gene duplication event of a eukaryotic RecA gene and subsequent mutation has been proposed as a likely origin of the modern RAD51 and DMC1 genes.


title: Homologous recombination

text: The proteins generally share a long conserved region known as the RecA/Rad51 domain. Within this protein domain are two sequence motifs, Walker A motif and Walker B motif. The Walker A and B motifs allow members of the RecA/Rad51 protein family to engage in ATP binding and ATP hydrolysis.


title: Homologous recombination

text: The discovery of Dmc1 in several species of "Giardia", one of the earliest protists to diverge as a eukaryote, suggests that meiotic homologous recombination—and thus meiosis itself—emerged very early in eukaryotic evolution. In addition to research on Dmc1, studies on the Spo11 protein have provided information on the origins of meiotic recombination. Spo11, a type II topoisomerase, can initiate homologous recombination in meiosis by making targeted double-strand breaks in DNA. Phylogenetic trees based on the sequence of genes similar to SPO11 in animals, fungi, plants, protists and archaea have led scientists to believe that the version Spo11 currently in eukaryotes emerged in the last common ancestor of eukaryotes and archaea.


title: Homologous recombination

text: Many methods for introducing DNA sequences into organisms to create recombinant DNA and genetically modified organisms use the process of homologous recombination. Also called gene targeting, the method is especially common in yeast and mouse genetics. The gene targeting method in knockout mice uses mouse embryonic stem cells to deliver artificial genetic material (mostly of therapeutic interest), which represses the target gene of the mouse by the principle of homologous recombination. The mouse thereby acts as a working model to understand the effects of a specific mammalian gene. In recognition of their discovery of how homologous recombination can be used to introduce genetic modifications in mice through embryonic stem cells, Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies were awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.


title: Homologous recombination

text: Advances in gene targeting technologies which hijack the homologous recombination mechanics of cells are now leading to the development of a new wave of more accurate, isogenic human disease models. These engineered human cell models are thought to more accurately reflect the genetics of human diseases than their mouse model predecessors. This is largely because mutations of interest are introduced into endogenous genes, just as they occur in the real patients, and because they are based on human genomes rather than rat genomes. Furthermore, certain technologies enable the knock-in of a particular mutation rather than just knock-outs associated with older gene targeting technologies.


title: Homologous recombination

text: Protein engineering with homologous recombination develops chimeric proteins by swapping fragments between two parental proteins. These techniques exploit the fact that recombination can introduce a high degree of sequence diversity while preserving a protein's ability to fold into its tertiary structure, or three-dimensional shape. This stands in contrast to other protein engineering techniques, like random point mutagenesis, in which the probability of maintaining protein function declines exponentially with increasing amino acid substitutions. The chimeras produced by recombination techniques are able to maintain their ability to fold because their swapped parental fragments are structurally and evolutionarily conserved. These recombinable "building blocks" preserve structurally important interactions like points of physical contact between different amino acids in the protein's structure. Computational methods like SCHEMA and statistical coupling analysis can be used to identify structural subunits suitable for recombination.


title: Homologous recombination

text: Techniques that rely on homologous recombination have been used to engineer new proteins. In a study published in 2007, researchers were able to create chimeras of two enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of isoprenoids, a diverse class of compounds including hormones, visual pigments and certain pheromones. The chimeric proteins acquired an ability to catalyze an essential reaction in isoprenoid biosynthesis—one of the most diverse pathways of biosynthesis found in nature—that was absent in the parent proteins. Protein engineering through recombination has also produced chimeric enzymes with new function in members of a group of proteins known as the cytochrome P450 family, which in humans is involved in detoxifying foreign compounds like drugs, food additives and preservatives.


title: Homologous recombination

text: Homologous recombination proficient (HRP) cancer cells are able to repair the DNA damage, which is caused by chemotherapy such as cisplatin. Thus, HRP cancers are difficult to treat. Studies suggest that homologous recombination can be targeted via c-Abl inhibition. Cancer cells with BRCA mutations have deficiencies in homologous recombination, and drugs to exploit those deficiencies have been developed and used successfully in clinical trials. Olaparib, a PARP1 inhibitor, shrunk or stopped the growth of tumors from breast, ovarian and prostate cancers caused by mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, which are necessary for HR. When BRCA1 or BRCA2 is absent, other types of DNA repair mechanisms must compensate for the deficiency of HR, such as base-excision repair (BER) for stalled replication forks or non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) for double strand breaks. By inhibiting BER in an HR-deficient cell, olaparib applies the concept of synthetic lethality to specifically target cancer cells. While PARP1 inhibitors represent a novel approach to cancer therapy, researchers have cautioned that they may prove insufficient for treating late-stage metastatic cancers. Cancer cells can become resistant to a PARP1 inhibitor if they undergo deletions of mutations in BRCA2, undermining the drug's synthetic lethality by restoring cancer cells' ability to repair DNA by HR.


title: Cecily Adams

text: Cecily April Adams (February 6, 1958 – March 3, 2004) was an American actress, casting director, and lyricist.


title: Cecily Adams

text: Adams was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, the daughter of comic actor Don Adams and singer Adelaide Efantis. Her siblings included her brother Sean, and her sisters Carolyn Steele, Christine Adams, Cathy Metchik, Paramount TV executive Stacey Adams and Beige Adams. She attended Beverly Hills High School, where she participated in acting, an activity she continued at the University of California at Irvine.


title: Cecily Adams

text: Adams studied improvisational comedy at the Groundlings and was a member of the Acme Comedy Theater in Los Angeles. She was also an acting coach.


title: Cecily Adams

text: Adams portrayed the recurring character of Ishka (also known as "Moogie"), mother of the Ferengi brothers Rom and Quark, in four of her five appearances in the television series "", replacing Andrea Martin. Adams was, in fact, nine years younger than Armin Shimerman, who played Quark, despite playing his mother.


title: Cecily Adams

text: She appeared in guest roles on a variety of television series, including "Just Shoot Me!", "Murphy Brown", and "Party of Five", and with her father in his television series "Check It Out!" and television movie "Get Smart Again". Adams played a lead role in the 1991 independent feature film "Little Secrets".


title: Cecily Adams

text: Adams was also a lyricist, and with her collaborator, David Burke wrote pop songs and commercial jingles and television theme songs.


title: Cecily Adams

text: Adams worked in casting TV series such as "3rd Rock From the Sun" and "Eerie, Indiana", and features including "American Heart" (1992) and "Home Room" (2002). Until her death, she served as casting director for "That '70s Show".


title: Cecily Adams

text: Adams married actor/writer Jim Beaver in 1989; their daughter was born in 2001. Adams, though a non-smoker, died of lung cancer on March 3, 2004, at the age of 46, in Los Angeles, California. Her husband's memoir, "Life's That Way", details her last few months. She was cremated and her ashes scattered at Fern Canyon in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, California, and at Franklin Canyon Park in Beverly Hills, California.


title: Big W

text: Big W (stylized as BIG W) is an Australian chain of discount department stores, which was founded in regional New South Wales in 1964. The company is a division of Woolworths Group and as at 2019 operated 176 stores, with around 22,000 employees mainly in Australia. BIG W stocks clothing, health and beauty, garden, pet items, books, DVDs, CDs, some furniture items, snack food and small electrical household appliances.


title: Big W

text: The first BIG W store opened in 1964 at the Jesmond shopping centre in Newcastle. The original stores were full line department stores similar to a Myer and David Jones. At that time Woolworths still operated several hundred Woolworths Variety stores, which were the original Woolworths stores and carried a small range of general merchandise products.


title: Big W

text: In 1970 the BIG W name ceased to be used and the stores were converted to what were then known as Woolworth Family centres that had "a very large range of general merchandise as well as a supermarket food range". These stores were ultimately converted to supermarkets in the 1980s.


title: Big W

text: The BIG W name was resurrected with a new store in Tamworth in 1976, which was the first BIG W discount department store to open, with the successful discount department store format that continues today.


title: Big W

text: Woolworths Limited developed the BIG W brand to provide Australian shoppers with a broad range of general merchandise products in a dedicated one-stop-shop. BIG W's name reflects the complementary relationship it has with Woolworths Supermarkets and the W stands for Woolworths.


title: Big W

text: The separation of BIG W and Woolworths supermarkets was largely completed by 1989, although a few Woolworths Variety stores continued to operate into the 90s (such as the one in Rundle Mall, Adelaide).


title: Big W

text: In 2007, BIG W began trialling optometry services in South Australia and since then, these services have been added to selected stores in Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory. In May 2019, BIG W announced the closure of all 41 BIG W Optometry stores, along with 175 job losses. This would not affect the BIG W store that housed the optometry department, and that the last optometry sessions could be held in late July. As of August 2019, all optometry stores have closed, leaving separate stores to be leased or stores within the BIG W store to be used as space for another department.


title: Big W

text: Ever since its modern format stores in 1976, BIG W stores featured Garden Centres similar to Kmart Australia and Target Australia. These facilities continued to be added throughout its store portfolio throughout the 1980s and early 2000s until they started being added to only a select few stores in the mid-late 2000s, until being retired completely in the late 2010s. However, unlike its competition, BIG W still keeps their Garden Centres active to most of their stores built with them.


title: Big W

text: BIG W were the second company in Australia to use self-checkouts, which were introduced in 2003 on a trial basis in two of Sydney's major stores and began expanding throughout Australia in late 2005.


title: Big W

text: In August 2014, BIG W launched its first party store at Rouse Hill Town Centre in New South Wales and its second at the newly refurbished Macquarie Centre, also in New South Wales. There are currently 176 stores across Australia.


title: Pytheas

text: Pytheas of Massalia (; Ancient Greek: Πυθέας ὁ Μασσαλιώτης "Pythéas ho Massaliōtēs"; Latin: "Pytheas Massiliensis"; born 350 BC, 320–306 BC) was a Greek geographer, explorer and astronomer from the Greek colony of Massalia (modern-day Marseille, France). He made a voyage of exploration to northwestern Europe in about 325 BC, but his account of it, known widely in Antiquity, has not survived and is now known only through the writings of others.


title: Pytheas

text: On this voyage, he circumnavigated and visited a considerable part of modern-day Great Britain and Ireland. He was the first known scientific visitor to see and describe the Arctic, polar ice, and the Celtic and Germanic tribes. He is also the first person on record to describe the midnight sun. The theoretical existence of some Northern phenomena that he described, such as a frigid zone, and temperate zones where the nights are very short in summer and the sun does not set at the summer solstice, was already known. Similarly, reports of a country of perpetual snow and darkness (the country of the Hyperboreans) had reached the Mediterranean some centuries before.


title: Pytheas

text: Pytheas introduced the idea of distant Thule to the geographic imagination, and his account of the tides is the earliest one known that suggests the moon as their cause.


title: Pytheas

text: Much of what is known about Pytheas comes from commentary written by historians during the classical period hundreds of years after Pytheas's journeys occurred. Pliny said that Timaeus (born about 350 BC) believed Pytheas' story of the discovery of amber. First century BC Strabo said that Dicaearchus (died about 285 BC) did not trust the stories of Pytheas. That is all the information that survives concerning the date of Pytheas' voyage. Henry Fanshawe Tozer wrote that Pytheas' voyage was about 330 BC, derived from three main sources.


title: Pytheas

text: Pytheas described his travels in a work that has not survived; only excerpts remain, quoted or paraphrased by later authors, most familiarly in Strabo's "Geographica", Pliny's "Natural History" and passages in Diodorus of Sicily's history. Most of the ancients, including the first two just mentioned, refer to his work by his name: "Pytheas says …" Two late writers give titles: the astronomical author Geminus of Rhodes mentions ("ta peri tou Okeanou"), literally "things about the Ocean", sometimes translated as "Description of the Ocean", "On the Ocean" or "Ocean"; Marcianus, the scholiast on Apollonius of Rhodes, mentions ("periodos gēs"), a "trip around the earth" or περίπλους ("periplous"), "sail around".


title: Pytheas

text: Scholars of the 19th century tended to interpret these titles as the names of distinct works covering separate voyages; for example, Smith's "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology" hypothesizes a voyage to Britain and Thule written about in "Ocean" and another from Cadiz to the river Don, written about in "Sail Around". As is common with ancient texts, multiple titles may represent a single source, for example, if a title refers to a section rather than the whole. Presently, periplus is recognized as a genre of navigational literature. Mainstream consensus is that there was only one work, "on the Ocean", which was based on a periplus.


title: Pytheas

text: Diodorus did not mention Pytheas by name. The association is made as follows: Pliny reported that "Timaeus says there is an island named Mictis … where tin is found, and to which the Britons cross." Diodorus said that tin was brought to the island of Ictis, where there was an emporium. The last link was supplied by Strabo, who said that an emporium on the island of Corbulo in the mouth of the river Loire was associated with the Britain of Pytheas by Polybius. Assuming that Ictis, Mictis and Corbulo are the same, Diodorus appears to have read Timaeus, who must have read Pytheas, whom Polybius also read.


title: Pytheas

text: The start of Pytheas's voyage is unknown. The Carthaginians had closed the Strait of Gibraltar to all ships from other nations. Some historians, mainly of the late 19th century and before, therefore speculated that he must have traveled overland to the mouth of the Loire or the Garonne. Others believed that, to avoid the Carthaginian blockade, he may have stayed close to land and sailed only at night, or taken advantage of a temporary lapse in the blockade.


title: Pytheas

text: An alternate theory is that by the 4th century BC, the western Greeks, especially the Massaliotes, were on amicable terms with Carthage. In 348 BC, Carthage and Rome came to terms over the Sicilian Wars with a treaty defining their mutual interests. Rome could use Sicilian markets, Carthage could buy and sell goods at Rome, and slaves taken by Carthage from allies of Rome were to be set free. Rome was to stay out of the western Mediterranean, but these terms did not apply to Massalia, which had its own treaty. During the second half of the 4th century BC, the time of Pytheas' voyage, Massaliotes were presumably free to operate as they pleased; there is, at least, no evidence of conflict with Carthage in any of the sources that mention the voyage.


title: Pytheas

text: The early part of Pytheas' voyage was outlined by statements of Eratosthenes that Strabo said are false because taken from Pytheas. Apparently, Pytheas said that tides ended at the "sacred promontory" ("Hieron akrōtērion", or Sagres Point), and from there to Gades is said to be 5 days' sail. Strabo complained about this distance, and about Pytheas' portrayal of the exact location of Tartessos. Mention of these places in a journal of the voyage indicates that Pytheas passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and sailed north along the coast of Portugal.


title: Pytheas

text: Strabo reported that Pytheas said he "travelled over the whole of Britain that was accessible". Because there are scant first hand sources available regarding Pytheas's journey, historians have looked at the etymology for clues about the route he took up the north Atlantic. The word "epelthein", at root "come upon", does not imply any specific method, and Pytheas did not elaborate.


title: Pytheas

text: He did use the word "whole" and he stated a "perimetros" ("perimeter") of more than 40,000 stadia. Using Herodotus' standard of for one stadium gives ; however, there is no way to tell which standard foot was in effect. The English foot is an approximation. Strabo wanted to discredit Pytheas on the grounds that 40,000 stadia is outrageously high and cannot be real.


title: Pytheas

text: Diodorus Siculus gave a similar number: 42,500 stadia, about , and explains that it is the perimeter of a triangle around Britain. The consensus has been that he probably took his information from Pytheas through Timaeaus. Pliny gave the "circuitus" reported by Pytheas as 4,875 Roman miles.


title: Pytheas

text: The explorer Fridtjof Nansen explained this apparent fantasy of Pytheas as a mistake of Timaeus. Strabo and Diodorus Siculus never saw Pytheas' work, says Nansen, but they and others read of him in Timaeus. Pytheas reported only days' sail. Timaeus converted days to stadia at the rate of 1,000 per day, a standard figure of the times. However, Pytheas only sailed 560 stadia per day for a total of 23,800, which in Nansen's view is consistent with 700 stadia per degree.


title: Pytheas

text: Nansen later states that Pytheas must have stopped to obtain astronomical data. Presumably, the extra time was spent ashore. Using the stadia of Diodorus Siculus, one obtains 42.5 days for the time that would be spent in circumnavigating Britain. (It may have been a virtual circumnavigation; see under Thule below.)


title: Pytheas

text: The perimeter, according to Nansen based on the 23,800 stadia, was . This number is in the neighborhood of what a triangular perimeter ought to be, but it cannot be verified against anything Pytheas may have said, nor was Diodorus Siculus very precise about the locations of the legs. The "perimeter" is often translated as "coastline", but this translation is misleading. The coastline, following all the bays and inlets, is (see Geography of the United Kingdom). Pytheas could have travelled any perimeter between that number and Diodorus'. Polybius added that Pytheas said he traversed the whole of Britain on foot, of which he, Polybius, was skeptical. Despite Strabo's conviction of a lie, the perimeter said to have been given by Pytheas is not evidence of it. The issue of what he did say can never be settled until more fragments of Pytheas's writings are found.


title: Pytheas

text: The first known written use of the word Britain was an ancient Greek transliteration of the original P-Celtic term. It is believed to have appeared within a periplus by Pytheas, but no copies of this work survive. The earliest existing records of the word are quotations of the periplus by later authors, such as those within Strabo's "Geographica", Pliny's "Natural History" and Diodorus of Sicily's "Bibliotheca historica". According to Strabo, Pytheas referred to Britain as "Bretannikē", which is treated a feminine noun.


title: Pytheas

text: This etymology suggests Pytheas most likely did not have much interaction with the Irish as their language was Q-Celtic. Rather, Pytheas brought back the P-Celtic form from more geographically accessible regions where Welsh or Breton are spoken presently. Furthermore, some proto-Celtic was spoken over all of Greater Britain, and this particular spelling is prototypical of those more populous regions.


title: Pytheas

text: Diodorus based on Pytheas reported that Britain is cold and subject to frosts, being "too much subject to the Bear", and not "under the Arctic pole", as some translations say.


title: Pytheas

text: The numerous population of natives, he says, live in thatched cottages, store their grain in subterranean caches and bake bread from it. They are "of simple manners" ("ēthesin haplous") and are content with plain fare. They are ruled by many kings and princes who live in peace with each other. Their troops fight from chariots, as did the Greeks in the Trojan War.


title: Pytheas

text: Opposite Europe in Diodorus is the promontory ("akrōtērion") of "Kantion" (Kent), 100 stadia, about , from the land, but the text is ambiguous: "the land" could be either Britain or the continent. Four days' sail beyond that is another promontory, "Belerion", which can only be Cornwall, as Diodorus is describing the triangular perimeter and the third point is "Orkas", presumably the main island of the Orkney Islands.


title: Pytheas

text: The inhabitants of Cornwall were involved in the manufacture of tin ingots. They mined the ore, smelted it and then worked it into pieces in the shape of knuckle-bones, after which it was transported to the island of Ictis by wagon, which could be done at low tide. Merchants that purchased it there packed it on horses for 30 days to the river Rhône, where it was carried down to the mouth. Diodorus said that the inhabitants of Cornwall were civilized in manner and especially hospitable to strangers because of their dealings with foreign merchants.


title: Pytheas

text: The first written reference to Scotland was in 320 BC by Pytheas, who called the northern tip of Britain "Orcas", the source of the name of the Orkney islands.


title: Pytheas

text: Strabo related, taking his text from Polybius, that "Pytheas asserts that he explored in person the whole northern region of Europe as far as the ends of the world." Strabo did not believe it but he explained what Pytheas meant by the ends of the world. "Thoulē", he said (now spelled Thule; Pliny the Elder uses "Tyle"; Vergil references "ultima Thule" in Georgic I, Line 30, where the "ultima" refer to the end of the world) is the most northerly of the British Isles. There the circle of the summer tropic is the same as the Arctic Circle (see below on Arctic Circle). Moreover, said Strabo, none of the other authors mention Thule, a fact which he used to discredit Pytheas, but which to moderns indicates Pytheas was the first explorer to arrive there and tell of it.


title: Pytheas

text: Thule was described as an island six days' sailing north of Britain, near the frozen sea ("pepēguia thalatta", "solidified sea"). Pliny added that it had no nights at midsummer when the sun was passing through the sign of the Crab (at the summer solstice), a reaffirmation that it is on the Arctic Circle. He added that the crossing to Thule started at the island of "Berrice", "the largest of all", which may be Lewis in the outer Hebrides. If "Berrice" was in the outer Hebrides, the crossing would have brought Pytheas to the coast of Møre og Romsdal or Trøndelag, Norway, explaining how he managed to miss the Skagerrak. If this is his route, in all likelihood he did not actually circumnavigate Britain, but returned along the coast of Germany, accounting for his somewhat larger perimeter.


title: Pytheas

text: Concerning the location of Thule, a discrepancy in data caused subsequent geographers some problems, and may be responsible for Ptolemy's distortion of Scotland. Strabo reported that Eratosthenes places Thule at a parallel 11500 stadia (1305 miles, or 16.4°) north of the mouth of the Borysthenes. The parallel running through that mouth also passes through Celtica and is Pytheas' base line. Using 3700 or 3800 stadia (approximately 420–430 miles or 5.3°–5.4°) north of Marseille for a base line obtains a latitude of 64.8° or 64.9° for Thule, well short of the Arctic Circle. It is in fact the latitude of Trondheim, where Pytheas may have reached land.


title: Pytheas

text: ... the Barbarians showed us the place where the sun goes to rest. For it was the case that in these parts the nights were very short, in some places two, in others three hours long, so that the sun rose again a short time after it had set.


title: Pytheas

text: Nansen claimed that according to this statement, Pytheas was there in person and that the 21- and 22-hour days must be the customary statement of latitude by length of longest day. He calculates the latitudes to be 64° 32′ and 65° 31′, partially confirming Hipparchus' statement of the latitude of Thule. And yet Strabo said:


title: Pytheas

text: Pytheas of Massalia tells us that Thule ... is farthest north, and that there the circle of the summer tropic is the same as the Arctic Circle.


title: Pytheas

text: Eratosthenes extended the latitudinal distance from Massalia to Celtica to 5000 stadia (7.1°), placing the base line in Normandy. The northernmost location cited in Britain at the Firth of Clyde is now northern Scotland. To get this country south of Britain to conform to Strabo's interpretation of Pytheas, Ptolemy has to rotate Scotland by 90°.


title: Pytheas

text: The 5000 stadia must be discounted: it crosses the Borysthenes upriver near Kyiv rather than at the mouth. It does place Pytheas on the Arctic Circle, which in Norway is south of the Lofoten islands. It seems that Eratosthenes altered the base line to pass through the northern extreme of Celtica. Pytheas, as related by Hipparchus, probably cited the place in Celtica where he first made land. If he used the same practice in Norway, Thule is at least somewhere on the entire northwest coast of Norway from Møre og Romsdal to the Lofoten Islands.


title: Pytheas

text: The explorer Richard Francis Burton in his study of Thule stated that it had had many definitions over the centuries. Many more authors have written about it than remembered Pytheas. The question of the location of Pytheas' Thule remains. The latitudes given by the ancient authors can be reconciled. The missing datum required to fix the location is longitude: "Manifestly we cannot rely upon the longitude."


title: Pytheas

text: Pytheas crossed the waters northward from Berrice, in the north of the British Isles, but whether to starboard, larboard, or straight ahead is not known. From the time of the Roman Empire all the possibilities were suggested repeatedly by each generation of writers: Iceland, Shetland, the Faroe Islands, Norway and later Greenland. A manuscript variant of a name in Pliny has abetted the Iceland theory: "Nerigon" instead of "Berrice", which sounds like Norway. If one sails west from Norway one encounters Iceland. Burton himself espoused this theory.


title: Pytheas

text: The standard texts have "Berrice" presently, as well as "Bergos" for "Vergos" in the same list of islands. The "Scandiae" islands are more of a problem, as they could be Scandinavia, but other islands had that name as well. Moreover, Procopius says ("De Bello Gothico", Chapter 15) that the earlier name of Scandinavia was Thule and that it was the home of the Goths. The fact that Pytheas returned from the vicinity of the Baltic favors Procopius's opinion. The fact that Pytheas lived centuries before the colonization of Iceland and Greenland by European agriculturalists makes them less likely candidates, as he stated that Thule was populated and its soil was tilled.


title: Pytheas

text: ... he might possibly seem to have made adequate use of the facts as regards the people who live close to the frozen zone, when he says that, ... the people live on millet and other herbs, and on fruits and roots; and where there are grain and honey, the people get their beverage, also, from them. As for the grain, he says, – since they have no pure sunshine – they pound it out in large storehouses, after first gathering in the ears thither; for the threshing floors become useless because of this lack of sunshine and because of the rains.


title: Pytheas

text: What he seems to be describing is an agricultural country that used barns for threshing grain rather than the Mediterranean outside floor of sun-baked mud and manufactures a drink, possibly mead.


title: Pytheas

text: After mentioning the crossing ("navigatio") from "Berrice" to "Tyle", Pliny made a brief statement that:


title: Pytheas

text: The "mare concretum" appears to match Strabo's "pepēguia thalatta" and is probably the same as the "topoi" ("places") mentioned in Strabo's apparent description of spring drift ice, which would have stopped his voyage further north and was for him the ultimate limit of the world. Strabo says:


title: Pytheas

text: Pytheas also spoke of the waters around Thule and of those places where land properly speaking no longer exists, nor sea nor air, but a mixture of these things, like a "marine lung", in which it was said that earth and water and all things are in suspension as if this something was a link between all these elements, on which one can neither walk nor sail.


title: Pytheas

text: The term used for "marine lung" ("pleumōn thalattios") appears to refer to jellyfish of the type the ancients called sea-lung. The latter are mentioned by Aristotle in "On the Parts of Animals" as being free-floating and insensate. They are not further identifiable from what Aristotle says but some "pulmones" appear in Pliny as a class of insensate sea animal; specifically the "halipleumon" ("salt-water lung"). William Ogle, a major translator and annotator of Aristotle, attributes the name sea-lung to the lung-like expansion and contraction of the Medusae, a kind of Cnidaria, during locomotion. The ice resembled floating circles in the water. The modern English term for this phenomenon is pancake ice.


title: Pytheas

text: The association of Pytheas' observations with drift ice has long been standard in navigational literature, including Nathaniel Bowditch's "American Practical Navigator", which begins Chapter 33, "Ice Navigation", with Pytheas. At its edge, sea, slush, and ice mix, surrounded by fog.


title: Pytheas

text: Strabo said that Pytheas gave an account of "what is beyond the Rhine as far as Scythia", which he, Strabo, thought was false. In the geographers of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, such as Ptolemy, Scythia stretched eastward from the mouth of the river Vistula; thus Pytheas must have described the Germanic coast of the Baltic Sea; if the statement is true, there are no other possibilities. As to whether he explored it in person, he said that he explored the entire north in person (see under Thule above). As the periplus was a sort of ship's log, he probably did reach the Vistula.


title: Pytheas

text: Pytheas said that the Gutones, a people of Germany, inhabited the shores of an estuary of the Ocean called Mentonomon, their territory extending a distance of six thousand stadia; that, at one day's sail from this territory, is the Isle of Abalus, upon the shores of which, amber is thrown up by the waves in spring, it being an excretion of the sea in a concrete form; as, also, that the inhabitants use this amber by way of fuel, and sell it to their neighbours, the Teutones.


title: Pytheas

text: The "Gutones" is a simplification of two manuscript variants, "Guttonibus" and "Guionibus", which would be in the nominative case "Guttones" or "Guiones", the Goths in the main opinion. The second major manuscript variant is either "Mentonomon" (nominative case) or "Metuonidis" (genitive case). A number of etymologies have been proposed but none very well accepted. Amber is not actually named. It is termed the "concreti maris purgamentum", the "frozen sea's leavings" after the springtime melt. Diodorus used "ēlektron", the Greek word for amber, the object that gave its name to electricity through its ability to acquire a charge. Pliny presented an archaic opinion, as in his time amber was a precious stone brought from the Baltic at great expense, but the Germans, he said, used it for firewood, according to Pytheas.


title: Pytheas

text: "Mentonomon" is unambiguously stated to be an "aestuarium" or "estuary" of 6000 stadia, which using the Herodotean standard of per stadium is . That number happens to be the distance from the mouth of the Skagerrak to the mouth of the Vistula, but no source says explicitly where the figure was taken. Competing views, however, usually have to reinterpret "estuary" to mean something other than an estuary, as the west of the Baltic Sea is the only body of estuarial water of sufficient length in the region.


title: Pytheas

text: Earlier Pliny said that a large island of three days' sail from the Scythian coast called Balcia by Xenophon of Lampsacus is called Basilia by Pytheas. It is generally understood to be the same as Abalus. Based on the amber, the island could have been Heligoland, Zealand, the shores of Bay of Gdansk, Sambia or the Curonian Lagoon, which were historically the richest sources of amber in northern Europe. This is the earliest use of "Germania".


title: Pytheas

text: Pytheas claimed to have explored the entire north; however, he turned back at the mouth of the Vistula, the border with Scythia. If he had gone on he would have discovered the ancestral Balts. They occupied the lands to the east of the Vistula. In the west they began with the people living around Frisches Haff, Lithuanian Aismarės, "sea of the Aistians", who in that vicinity became the Baltic Prussians. On the east Herodotus called them the "Neuri", a name related to Old Prussian "narus", "the deep", in the sense of water country. Later Lithuanians would be "the people of the shore". The Vistula was the traditional limit of Greater Germany. Place names featuring *"ner"- or *"nar"- are wide-ranging over the vast Proto-Baltic homeland, occupying western Russia before the Slavs.


title: Pytheas

text: Herodotus said that the Neuri had Scythian customs, but they were at first not considered Scythian. During the war between the Scythians and the Persian Empire, the Scythians came to dominate the Neuri. Strabo denied that any knowledge of the shores of the eastern Baltic existed. He had heard of the Sauromatai, but had no idea where to place them.


title: Pytheas

text: Herodotus had mentioned these Sauromatai as a distinct people living near the Neuri. Pliny the Elder, however, was much better informed. The island of Baunonia (Bornholm), he said lies a days' sail off Scythia, where amber is collected. To him the limit of Germany was the Vistula. In contrast to Strabo, he knew that the Goths live around the Vistula, but these were definitely Germans.


title: Pytheas

text: By the time of Tacitus, the Aestii had emerged. The former Scythia was now entirely Sarmatia. Evidently the Sarmatians conquered westward to the Vistula. The Goths moved to the south. That the Balts lived east of the Vistula from remote prehistoric times is unquestioned. The Baltic languages, however, are only known from the 2nd millennium AD. They are known to have developed in tribal contexts, as they were originally tribal. The first mention of any tribes is in Ptolemy's description of European Sarmatia, where the main Prussian tribes are mentioned for the first time.


title: Pytheas

text: In Tacitus, only the language of the Aestii is mentioned. Strabo distinguished the Venedi, who were likely Slavs. From these few references, which are the only surviving evidence apart from glottochronology and place name analysis, it would seem that the Balts of Pytheas' time were well past the Common Balto-Slavic stage, and likely spoke a number of related dialects. By turning back at what he thought was the limit of Germany, he not only missed the Balts, but did not discover that more Germans, the Goths, had moved into the Baltic area.


title: Pytheas

text: Polybius related: "... on his return thence (from the north), he traversed the whole of the coast of Europe from Gades to the Tanais." Some authors consider this leg a second voyage, as it does not seem likely he would pass by Marseille without refitting and refreshing the crew. It is striking that he encountered the border of Scythia, turned around, and went around Europe counter-clockwise until he came to the southern side of Scythia on the Black Sea. It is possible to speculate that he may have hoped to circumnavigate Europe, but the sources do not say. In other, even more speculative interpretations, Pytheas returned north and the Tanais is not the Don but is a northern river, such as the Elbe.


title: Pytheas

text: In discussing the work of Pytheas, Strabo typically used direct discourse: "Pytheas says ..." In presenting his astronomical observations, he changed to indirect discourse: "Hipparchus said that Pytheas says ..." either because he never read Pytheas' manuscript (because it was not available to him) or in deference to Hipparchus, who appears to have been the first to apply the Babylonian system of representing the sphere of the Earth by 360°.


title: Pytheas

text: Strabo used the degrees, based on Hipparchus. Neither say that Pytheas did. Nevertheless, Pytheas did obtain latitudes, which, according to Strabo, he expressed in proportions of the gnōmōn ("index"), or trigonometric tangents of angles of elevation to celestial bodies. They were measured on the gnōmōn, the vertical leg of a right triangle, and the flat leg of the triangle. The imaginary hypotenuse looked along the line of sight to the celestial body or marked the edge of a shadow cast by the vertical leg on the horizontal leg.


title: Pytheas

text: Pytheas took the altitude of the Sun at Massalia at noon on the longest day of the year and found that the tangent was the proportion of 120 (the length of the gnōmōn) to 1/5 less than 42 (the length of the shadow). Hipparchus, relying on the authority of Pytheas (says Strabo), states that the ratio is the same as for Byzantium and that the two therefore are on the same parallel. Nansen and others prefer to give the cotangent 209/600, which is the inverse of the tangent, but the angle is greater than 45° and it is the tangent that Strabo states. His number system did not permit him to express it as a decimal but the tangent is about 2.87.


title: Pytheas

text: It is unlikely that any of the geographers could compute the arctangent, or angle of that tangent. Moderns look it up in a table. Hipparchos is said to have had a table of some angles. The altitude, or angle of elevation, is 70° 47′ 50″ but that is not the latitude.


title: Pytheas

text: At noon on the longest day the plane of longitude passing through Marseille is exactly on edge to the Sun. If the Earth's axis were not tilted toward the Sun, a vertical rod at the equator would have no shadow. A rod further north would have a north–south shadow, and as an elevation of 90° would be a zero latitude, the complement of the elevation gives the latitude. The Sun is even higher in the sky due to the tilt. The angle added to the elevation by the tilt is known as the obliquity of the ecliptic and at that time was 23° 44′ 40″. The complement of the elevation less the obliquity is 43° 13′, only 5′ in error from Marseille's latitude, 43° 18′.


title: Pytheas

text: A second method of determining the latitude of the observer measures the angle of elevation of a celestial pole, north in the northern hemisphere. Seen from zero latitude the north pole's elevation is zero; that is, it is a point on the horizon. The declination of the observer's zenith also is zero and therefore so is their latitude.


title: Pytheas

text: As the observer's latitude increases (traveling north) so does the declination. The pole rises over the horizon by an angle of the same amount. The elevation at the terrestrial North Pole is 90° (straight up) and the celestial pole has a declination of the same value. The latitude also is 90.


title: Pytheas

text: Moderns have Polaris to mark the approximate location of the North celestial pole, which it does nearly exactly, but this position of Polaris was not available in Pytheas' time, due to changes in the positions of the stars. Pytheas reported that the pole was an empty space at the corner of a quadrangle, the other three sides of which were marked by stars. Their identity has not survived but based on calculations these are believed to have been α and κ in Draco and β in Ursa Minor.


title: Pytheas

text: Pytheas sailed northward with the intent of locating the Arctic Circle and exploring the "frigid zone" to the north of it at the extreme of the Earth. He did not know the latitude of the circle in degrees. All he had to go by was the definition of the frigid zone as the latitudes north of the line where the celestial arctic circle was equal to the celestial Tropic of Cancer, the "tropikos kuklos" (refer to the next subsection). Strabo's angular report of this line as being at 24° may well be based on a tangent known to Pytheas, but he did not say that. In whatever mathematical form Pytheas knew the location, he could only have determined when he was there by taking periodic readings of the elevation of the pole ("eksarma tou polou" in Strabo and others).


title: Pytheas

text: Today the elevation can be obtained easily on ship with a quadrant. Electronic navigational systems have made even this simple measure unnecessary. Longitude was beyond Pytheas and his peers, but it was not of as great a consequence, because ships seldom strayed out of sight of land. East–west distance was a matter of contention to the geographers; they are one of Strabo's most frequent topics. Because of the gnōmōn north–south distances were accurate often to within a degree.


title: Pytheas

text: It is unlikely that any gnōmōn could be read accurately on the pitching deck of a small vessel at night. Pytheas must have made frequent overnight stops to use his gnōmōn and talk to the natives, which would have required interpreters, probably acquired along the way. The few fragments that have survived indicate that this material was a significant part of the "periplus", possibly kept as the ship's log. There is little hint of native hostility; the Celts and the Germans appear to have helped him, which suggests that the expedition was put forward as purely scientific. In any case all voyages required stops for food, water and repairs; the treatment of voyagers fell under the special "guest" ethic for visitors.


title: Pytheas

text: The ancient Greek view of the heavenly bodies on which their navigation was based was imported from Babylonia by the Ionian Greeks, who used it to become a seafaring nation of merchants and colonists during the Archaic period in Greece. Massalia was an Ionian colony. The first Ionian philosopher, Thales, was known for his ability to measure the distance of a ship at sea from a cliff by the very method Pytheas used to determine the latitude of Massalia, the trigonometric ratios.


title: Pytheas

text: The astronomic model on which ancient Greek navigation was based, which is still in place today, was already extant in the time of Pytheas, the concept of the degrees only being missing. The model divided the universe into a celestial and an earthly sphere pierced by the same poles. Each of the spheres were divided into zones ("zonai") by circles ("kukloi") in planes at right angles to the poles. The zones of the celestial sphere repeated on a larger scale those of the terrestrial sphere.


title: Pytheas

text: The basis for division into zones was the two distinct paths of the heavenly bodies: that of the stars and that of the Sun and Moon. Astronomers know today that the Earth revolving around the Sun is tilted on its axis, bringing each hemisphere now closer to the Sun, now further away. The Greeks had the opposite model, that the stars and the Sun rotated around the Earth. The stars moved in fixed circles around the poles. The Sun moved at an oblique angle to the circles, which obliquity brought it now to the north, now to the south. The circle of the Sun was the ecliptic. It was the center of a band called the zodiac on which various constellations were located.


title: Pytheas

text: The shadow cast by a vertical rod at noon was the basis for defining zonation. The intersection of the northernmost or southernmost points of the ecliptic defined the axial circles passing through those points as the two tropics ("tropikoi kukloi", "circles at the turning points") later named for the zodiacal constellations found there, Cancer and Capricorn. During noon of the summer solstice (therinē tropē) rods there cast no shadow. The latitudes between the tropics were called the torrid zone ("diakekaumenē", "burned up").


title: Pytheas

text: Based on their experience of the Torrid Zone south of Egypt and Libya, the Greek geographers judged it uninhabitable. Symmetry requires that there be an uninhabitable Frigid Zone ("katepsugmenē", "frozen") to the north and reports from there since the time of Homer seemed to confirm it. The edge of the Frigid Zone ought to be as far south from the North Pole in latitude as the Summer Tropic is from the Equator. Strabo gives it as 24°, which may be based on a previous tangent of Pytheas, but he does not say. The Arctic Circle would then be at 66°, accurate to within a degree.


title: Pytheas

text: Seen from the equator the celestial North Pole ("boreios polos") is a point on the horizon. As the observer moves northward the pole rises and the circumpolar stars appear, now unblocked by the Earth. At the Tropic of Cancer the radius of the circumpolar stars reaches 24°. The edge stands on the horizon. The constellation of "mikra arktos" (Ursa Minor, "little bear") was entirely contained within the circumpolar region. The latitude was therefore called the "arktikos kuklos", "circle of the bear". The terrestrial Arctic Circle was regarded as fixed at this latitude. The celestial Arctic Circle was regarded as identical to the circumference of the circumpolar stars and therefore a variable.


title: Pytheas

text: When the observer is on the terrestrial Arctic Circle and the radius of the circumpolar stars is 66° the celestial Arctic Circle is identical to the celestial Tropic of Cancer. That is what Pytheas means when he says that Thule is located at the place where the Arctic Circle is identical to the Tropic of Cancer. At that point, on the day of the Summer Solstice, the vertical rod of the gnōmōn casts a shadow extending in theory to the horizon over 360° as the Sun does not set. Under the pole the Arctic Circle is identical to the Equator and the Sun never sets but rises and falls on the horizon. The shadow of the gnōmōn winds perpetually around it.


title: Pytheas

text: Strabo used the astronomical cubit ("pēchus", the length of the forearm from the elbow to the tip of the little finger) as a measure of the elevation of the sun. The term "cubit" in this context is obscure; it has nothing to do with distance along either a straight line or an arc, does not apply to celestial distances, and has nothing to do with the gnōmōn. Hipparchus borrowed this term from Babylonia, where it meant 2°. They in turn took it from ancient Sumer so long ago that if the connection between cubits and degrees was known in either Babylonia or Ionia it did not survive. Strabo stated degrees in either cubits or as a proportion of a great circle. The Greeks also used the length of day at the summer solstice as a measure of latitude. It is stated in equinoctial hours ("hōrai isēmerinai"), one being 1/12 of the time between sunrise and sunset on an equinox.


title: Pytheas

text: Based partly on data taken from Pytheas, Hipparchus correlated cubits of the Sun's elevation at noon on the winter solstice, latitudes in hours of a day on the summer solstice, and distances between latitudes in stadia for some locations. Pytheas had proved that Marseille and Byzantium were on the same parallel (see above). Hipparchus, through Strabo, added that Byzantium and the mouth of the Borysthenes, today's Dnieper, were on the same meridian and were separated by 3700 stadia, 5.3° at Strabo's 700 stadia per a degree of meridian arc. As the parallel through the river-mouth also crossed the coast of "Celtica", the distance due north from Marseille to Celtica was 3700 stadia, a baseline from which Pytheas seems to have calculated latitude and distance.


title: Pytheas

text: Strabo said that Ierne (written Ἰέρνη, meaning Ireland) is under 5000 stadia (7.1°) north of this line. These figures place Celtica around the mouth of the Loire, an emporium for the trading of British tin. The part of Ireland referenced is the vicinity of Belfast. Pytheas then would either have crossed the Bay of Biscay from the coast of Spain to the mouth of the Loire, or reached it along the coast, crossed the English channel from the vicinity of Brest, France to Cornwall, and traversed the Irish Sea to reach the Orkney Islands. A statement of Eratosthenes attributed by Strabo to Pytheas, that the north of the Iberian Peninsula was an easier passage to Celtica than across the Ocean, is somewhat ambiguous: apparently he knew or knew of both routes, but he does not say which he took.


title: Pytheas

text: At noon on the winter solstice the Sun stands at 9 cubits and the longest day on the summer solstice is 16 hours at the baseline through Celtica. At 2500 stadia, approximately 283 miles, or 3.6°, north of Celtica, are a people Hipparchus called Celtic, but whom Strabo thought were the British, a discrepancy he might not have noted if he had known that the British were also Celtic. The location is Cornwall. The Sun stands at 6 cubits and the longest day is 17 hours. At 9100 stadia, approximately 1032 miles, north of Marseille, 5400 or 7.7° north of Celtica, the elevation is 4 cubits and the longest day is 18 hours. This location is in the vicinity of the Firth of Clyde.


title: Pytheas

text: Here Strabo launched another quibble. Hipparchus, relying on Pytheas, according to Strabo, placed this area south of Britain, but he, Strabo, calculated that it was north of Ireland (Ierne/Ἰέρνη). Pytheas, however, rightly knew what is now Scotland as part of Britain, land of the Picts, even though north of Ireland/Ierne. North of southern Scotland the longest day is 19 hours. Strabo, based on theory alone, states that Ierne is so cold that any lands north of it must be uninhabited. In the hindsight given to moderns Pytheas, in relying on observation in the field, appears more scientific than Strabo, who discounted the findings of others merely because of their strangeness to him. The ultimate cause of his skepticism is simply that he did not believe Scandinavia could exist. This disbelief may also be the cause of alteration of Pytheas' data.


title: Pytheas

text: Pliny reported that "Pytheas of Massalia informs us, that in Britain the tide rises 80 cubits." The passage does not give enough information to determine which cubit Pliny meant; however, any cubit gives the same general result. If he was reading an early source, the cubit may have been the Cyrenaic cubit, an early Greek cubit, of 463.1 mm, in which case the distance was . This number far exceeds any modern known tides. The National Oceanography Centre, which records tides at tidal gauges placed in about 55 ports of the UK Tide Gauge Network on an ongoing basis, records the highest mean tidal change between 1987 and 2007 at Avonmouth in the Severn Estuary of .


title: Pytheas

text: The highest predicted spring tide between 2008 and 2026 at that location will be on 29 September 2015. Even allowing for geologic and climate change, Pytheas' 80 cubits far exceeds any known tides around Britain. One well-circulated but unevidenced answer to the paradox is that Pytheas was referring to a storm surge. Despite the modern arguments, the fact remains that Pytheas experienced tides that exceeded by far the usual tides in the Mediterranean, and particularly those at Massilia.


title: Pytheas

text: Matching fragments of Aëtius in pseudo-Plutarch and Stobaeus attribute the flood tides ( "plēmmurai") to the "filling of the moon" ( "plērōsis tēs sēlēnēs") and the ebb tides ( "ampōtides") to the "lessening" ( "meiōsis"). The words are too ambiguous to make an exact determination of Pytheas' meaning, whether diurnal or are meant, or whether full and new moons or the half-cycles in which they occur. Different translators take different views.


title: Pytheas

text: That daily tides should be caused by full moons and new moons is manifestly wrong, which would be a surprising view in a Greek astronomer and mathematician of the times. He could have meant that spring and neap tides were caused by new and full moons, which is partially correct in that spring tides occur at those times. A gravitational theory (objects fall to the center) existed at the time but Pytheas appears to have meant that the phases themselves were the causes (αἰτίαι "aitiai"). However imperfect or imperfectly related the viewpoint, Pytheas was the first to associate the tides to the phases of the moon.


title: Pytheas

text: Pytheas was a central source of information on the North Sea and the subarctic regions of western Europe to later periods, and possibly the only source. The only ancient authors we know by name who certainly saw Pytheas' original text were Dicaearchus, Timaeus, Eratosthenes, Crates of Mallus, Hipparchus, Polybius, Artemidorus and Posidonius. Notably the list does not include Strabo or Tacitus, though Strabo discussed him and Tacitus may likely have known about his work. Either of the two could have known him through other writers or have read his work in the original.


title: Pytheas

text: Strabo, citing Polybius, accused Pytheas of promulgating a fictitious journey he could never have funded, as he was a private individual ("idiōtēs") and a poor man ("penēs"). Markham proposes a possible answer to the funding question: seeing that Pytheas was known as a professional geographer and that north Europe was as yet a question mark to Massalian merchants, he suggests that "the enterprise was a government expedition of which Pytheas was placed in command." In another suggestion the merchants of Marseille sent him out to find northern markets. These theories are speculative but perhaps less so than Strabo's contention that Pytheas was a charlatan just because a professional geographer doubted him.


title: Pytheas

text: Strabo did explain his reasons for doubting Pytheas' veracity. Citing numerous instances of Pytheas apparently being far off the mark on details concerning known regions, he said: "however, any man who has told such great falsehoods about the known regions would hardly, I imagine, be able to tell the truth about places that are not known to anybody." As an example he mentioned that Pytheas says Kent is several days' sail from Celtica when it is visible from Gaul across the channel. If Pytheas had visited the place he should have verified it personally.


title: Pytheas

text: The objection although partially true is itself flawed. Strabo interjected his own view of the location of Celtica, that it was opposite to Britain, end to end. Pytheas, however, places it further south, around the mouth of the Loire (see above), from which it might justifiably be several days' sail. The people across from Britain in Caesar's time were the Germani in the north and the Belgae in the south. Still, some of the Celtic lands were on the channel and were visible from it, which Pytheas should have mentioned but Strabo implies he did not.


title: Pytheas

text: Strabo's other objections are similarly flawed or else completely wrong. He simply did not believe the earth was inhabited north of Ierne. Pytheas however could not then answer for himself, or protect his own work from loss or alteration, so most of the questions concerning his voyage remain unresolved, to be worked over by every generation. To some he was a daring adventurer and discoverer; to others, a semi-legendary blunderer or prevaricator.


title: Pytheas

text: The logical outcome of this tendency is the historical novel with Pytheas as the main character and the celebration of Pytheas in poetry beginning as far back as Virgil. The process continues into modern times; for example, Pytheas is a key theme in Charles Olson's "Maximus Poems". Details of Pytheas' voyage also serve as the backdrop for Chapter I of Poul Anderson's science fiction novel, "The Boat of a Million Years". The Stone Stories trilogy by Mandy Haggith (The Walrus Mutterer, 2018; The Amber Seeker, 2019; The Lyre Dancers, 2020) revolve around Pytheas of Massalia's journeys.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: William Lawrence Boyd (June 5, 1895 – September 12, 1972) was an American film actor who is known for portraying the cowboy hero Hopalong Cassidy.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: Boyd was born in Hendrysburg, Ohio, and reared in Cambridge, Ohio and Tulsa, Oklahoma, living in Tulsa from 1909 to 1913. He was the son of a day laborer, Charles William Boyd, and his wife, the former Lida Wilkens (aka Lyda). Following his father's death, he moved to California and worked as an orange picker, surveyor, tool dresser and auto salesman.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: In Hollywood, he found work as an extra in "Why Change Your Wife?" and other films. During World War I, he enlisted in the army but was exempt from military service because of a "weak heart". More prominent film roles followed, including his breakout role as Jack Moreland in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Road to Yesterday" (1925) which starred also Joseph Schildkraut, Jetta Goudal, and Vera Reynolds. Boyd's performance in the film was praised by critics, while movie-goers were equally impressed by his easy charm, charisma, and intense good-looks. Due to Boyd's growing popularity, DeMille soon cast him as the leading man in the highly acclaimed silent drama film, "The Volga Boatman". Boyd's role as Feodor impressed critics, and with Boyd now firmly established as a matinee idol and romantic leading man, he began earning an annual salary of $100,000. He acted in DeMille's extravaganza "The King of Kings" (in which he played Simon of Cyrene, helping Jesus carry the cross) and DeMille's "Skyscraper" (1928). He then appeared in D.W. Griffith's "Lady of the Pavements" (1929).


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: Radio Pictures ended Boyd's contract in 1931 when his picture was mistakenly run in a newspaper story about the arrest of another actor, William "Stage" Boyd, on gambling and liquor charges. Although the newspaper apologized, explaining the mistake in the following day's newspaper, Boyd said, "The damage was already done." William "Stage" Boyd died in 1935, the same year William L. Boyd became Hopalong Cassidy, the role that led to his enduring fame. But at the time in 1931, Boyd was virtually broke and without a job, and for a few years he was credited in films as "Bill Boyd" to prevent being mistaken for the other William Boyd.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: In 1935, Boyd was offered the supporting role of Red Connors in the movie "Hop-Along Cassidy", but he asked to be considered for the title role and won it. The original character of Hopalong Cassidy, written by Clarence E. Mulford for pulp magazines, was changed from a hard-drinking, rough-living red-headed wrangler to a cowboy hero who did not smoke, swear, or drink alcohol (his drink of choice being sarsaparilla) and who always let the bad guy start the fight. Although Boyd "never branded a cow or mended a fence, cannot bulldog a steer" and disliked Western music, he became indelibly associated with the Hopalong character and, like the cowboy stars Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, gained lasting fame in the Western film genre.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: Boyd estimated in 1940 that he had starred in 28 outdoor films in which he fired 30,000 shots and killed at least 100 "varmints". He wore out 12 costumes and 60 ten-gallon hats, rode his horse Topper more than 2000 miles and rode herd on 5000 head of cattle. A score or more of heroines had been saved, but were never kissed.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: The films were more polished and impressive than the usual low-budget "program westerns". The Hopalong Cassidy adventures usually boasted superior outdoor photography of scenic locations and name supporting players familiar from major Hollywood films. Big-city theaters, which usually wouldn't play Westerns, noticed the high quality of the productions and gave the series more exposure than other cowboy films could hope for. Paramount Pictures released the films through 1941. United Artists produced them from 1943.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: The producer Harry "Pop" Sherman wanted to make more ambitious epics and abandoned the Hopalong Cassidy franchise. Boyd, determined to keep it alive, produced the last 12 Cassidy features himself on noticeably lower budgets. By this time, interest in the character had waned, and with far fewer theaters still showing the films, the series ended in 1948.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: Boyd insisted on buying the rights to all of the Hopalong Cassidy films. Harry Sherman no longer cared about the property—he thought both the films and the star were played out—and regarded Boyd's all-consuming interest with skepticism. Boyd was so single-minded about his mission that he sold or mortgaged almost everything he owned to meet Sherman's price of $350,000 for the rights and the film backlog.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: In 1948 Boyd, now regarded as a washed-up cowboy star and with his fortunes at their lowest ebb, brought a print of one of his older pictures to the local NBC television station and offered it at a nominal rental, hoping for new exposure. The film was received so well that NBC asked for more, and within months Boyd released the entire library to the national network. They became extremely popular and began the long-running genre of Westerns on television. Boyd's desperate gamble paid off, making him the first national TV star and restoring his personal fortune. Like Rogers and Autry, Boyd licensed much merchandise, including such products as Hopalong Cassidy watches, trash cans, cups, dishes, Topps trading cards, a comic strip, comic books, cowboy outfits, home-movie digests of his Paramount releases via Castle Films, and a new "Hopalong Cassidy" radio show, which ran from 1948 to 1952.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: The actor identified with his character, often dressing as a cowboy in public. Although Boyd's portrayal of Hopalong made him very wealthy, he believed that it was his duty to help strengthen his "friends"—America's youth. The actor refused to license his name for products he viewed as unsuitable or dangerous and turned down personal appearances at which his "friends" would be charged admission. Boyd also lent his likeness to "diplomas" issued by a children's horse-riding 'academy' at the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, AZ. He made at least one personal appearance at the dude ranch dressed as Hopalong, in December 1959.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: Boyd appeared as Hopalong Cassidy on the cover of numerous national magazines, including "Look" (August 29, 1950) and "Time" (November 27, 1950). For Thanksgiving in 1950, he led the Carolinas' Carrousel Parade in Charlotte, North Carolina, and drew an estimated crowd of 500,000 persons, the largest in the parade's history.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: Boyd had a cameo role as himself in Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 circus epic, "The Greatest Show on Earth". DeMille reportedly asked Boyd to take the role of Moses in his remake of "The Ten Commandments", but Boyd felt his identification with the Cassidy character would make it impossible for audiences to accept him as Moses.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: Boyd was married five times, first to wealthy heiress Laura Maynard, then to the actresses Ruth Miller, Elinor Fair, Dorothy Sebastian and Grace Bradley. His only son, William Wallace Boyd, whose mother was Boyd's second wife, Ruth Miller, died of pneumonia at age 9 months. After his retirement from the screen, Boyd invested both time and money in real estate and moved to Palm Desert, California. He refused interviews and photographs in later years, preferring not to disillusion his millions of fans who remembered him as a screen idol.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: Boyd was a lifelong Republican and supported the campaign of Dwight Eisenhower during the 1952 presidential election.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: For his contributions to the film industry, Boyd has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1734 Vine Street. In 1995, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.


title: William Boyd (actor)

text: In 1972, Boyd died from complications related to Parkinson's disease and congestive heart failure. He was survived by his fifth wife, the actress Grace Bradley Boyd, who died on September 21, 2010 on her 97th birthday. He is buried in the Sanctuary of Guiding Love alcove in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale).


title: Helmand Province

text: Helmand (Pashto/Dari: ; ), also known as Hillmand, in ancient times, as Hermand and Hethumand, is one of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan, in the south of the country. It is the largest province by area, covering area. The province contains 13 districts, encompassing over 1,000 villages, and roughly 1,446,230 settled people. Lashkargah serves as the provincial capital. Helmand was part of the "Greater Kandahar" region until made into a separate province by the Afghan government in the 20th century.


title: Helmand Province

text: The Helmand River flows through the mainly desert region of the province, providing water used for irrigation. The Kajaki Dam, which is one of Afghanistan's major reservoirs, is located in the Kajaki district. Helmand is believed to be one of the world's largest opium producing regions, responsible for around 42% of the world's total production. This is believed to be more than the whole of Myanmar, which is the second-largest producing nation after Afghanistan. The region also produces tobacco, sugar beets, cotton, sesame, wheat, mung beans, maize, nuts, sunflowers, onions, potato, tomato, cauliflower, peanut, apricot, grape, and melon. The province has a domestic airport (Bost Airport), in the city of Lashkargah that was heavily used by NATO-led forces. The former British Camp Bastion and the U.S. Camp Leatherneck is a short distance southwest of Lashkargah.


title: Helmand Province

text: Throughout the 2001-2021 war in Afghanistan, Helmand was a hotbed of insurgent activities and was often considered at the time to be Afghanistan's "most dangerous" province. The province also witnessed some of the heaviest fighting during the war, where at its peak hundreds of civilians were being killed monthly. Its suitable climate for the cultivation of a wide range of crops also contributed greatly to the Taliban's finances. Additionally, Helmand is considered to be one of Afghanistan's most socially conservative areas.


title: Helmand Province

text: Helmand culture of western Afghanistan was a Bronze Age culture of the 3rd millennium BC. It is exemplified by such major sites as Shahr-i Sokhta, Mundigak, and Bampur.


title: Helmand Province

text: The term "Helmand civilization" was proposed by M. Tosi. This civilization flourished between 2500 BC and 1900 BC and may have coincided with the great flourishing of the Indus Valley civilisation. This was also the final phase of Periods III and IV of Shahr-i Sokhta, and the last part of Mundigak Period IV.


title: Helmand Province

text: There were also links between Shahr-i Sokhta I, II, and III periods, and Mundigak III and IV periods, and between the sites of Balochistan and the Indus valley at the end of the 4th millennium, as well as in the first half of the 3rd millennium BC.


title: Helmand Province

text: The Jiroft culture is closely related to the Helmand culture. The Jiroft culture flourished in eastern Iran, and the Helmand culture in western Afghanistan at the same time. They may represent the same cultural area. The Mehrgarh culture, on the other hand, is far earlier.


title: Helmand Province

text: Helmand was inhabited by ancient peoples and governed by the Medes before falling to the Achaemenids.


title: Helmand Province

text: Later, the area was part of the ancient Arachosia polity, and a frequent target for conquest because of its strategic location in Asia, which connects Southern, Central and Southwest Asia.


title: Helmand Province

text: The Helmand river valley is mentioned by name in the Avesta (Fargard 1:13) as "Haetumant", one of the early centers or origins of the Zoroastrian faith, in pre-Islamic Afghan history. However, owing to the presence of non-Zoroastrians even though Zoroastrians being dominant before the Islamization of Afghanistan – particularly Buddhist.


title: Helmand Province

text: Some Vedic scholars (e.g. Kochhar 1999) also believe the Helmand river corresponds to the Sarasvati river mentioned in the "Rig Veda" as the homeland of the Aryan tribes before migrating into the Indian Subcontinent, ca. 1500 BCE.


title: Helmand Province

text: It was invaded in 330 BC by Alexander the Great and became part of the Seleucid Empire. Later, it came under the rule of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who erected a pillar there with a bilingual inscription in Greek and Aramaic. The territory was referred to as part of Zabulistan and ruled by the sun-worshipping Zunbils before the Muslim Arabs arrived in the 7th century, who were led by Abdur Rahman bin Samara. It later fell to the Saffarids of Zaranj and saw the first Muslim rule. Mahmud of Ghazni made it part of the Ghaznavids in the 10th century, who were replaced by the Ghurids.


title: Helmand Province

text: After the destructions caused by Genghis Khan and his Mongol army in the 13th century, the Timurids established rule and began rebuilding Afghan cities. From about 1383 until his death in 1407, it was governed by Pir Muhammad, a grandson of Timur. By the early 16th century, it fell to Babur. However, the area was often contested by the Shia Safavids and Sunni Mughals until the rise of Mir Wais Hotak in 1709. He defeated the Safavids and established the Hotaki dynasty. The Hotakis ruled it until 1738 when the Afsharids defeated Shah Hussain Hotaki at what is now Old Kandahar.


title: Helmand Province

text: When Ahmad Shah Durrani came to power in 1747, after Nader Shah was assassinated, he began redistributing land grants that had been given by his predecessor. At that time, the area of what is now Helmand province was part of Kandahar Province (which continued until it was split off into the new Farah Province during the reign of Sher Ali Khan), and it was known as "Pusht-e Rud", or "across the river", reflecting how the region was viewed from Kandahar, which was Ahmad Shah's capital. Pusht-e Rud traditionally consisted into four districts: Zamindawar, Now Zad, Pusht-e Rud proper, and Garmsir. Ahmad Shah's land redistribution legitimized existing Alizai influence in Zamindawar, while the powerful Barakzai received Pusht-e Rud proper, and the district of Garmsir in the south was granted to the Noorzai to protect against Baluch raids. Now Zad was divided between the Noorzai and the Ishaqzai. This arrangement has survived, with a few exceptions, until the present day.


title: Helmand Province

text: Then, as now, relatively few members of the Popolzai tribe (to which Ahmad Shah Durrani belonged) lived in Helmand. The Durrani monarchs were thus ambivalent towards the area's tribes and didn't favor any one tribe over the others. Rather, they treated the tribes according to their relative power. Thus, the powerful Barakzai tribe received a hereditary position as ministers to the crown, as well as some of the most valuable land in Helmand: the alluvial plains around present-day Malgir, Babaji, and Spin Masjid, as well as the strategically important Gereshk.


title: Helmand Province

text: That changed in 1826, when Dost Mohammad Khan, himself a Barakzai, seized power. Dost Mohammad increased taxes on non-Barakzai tribes in Helmand, especially the Alizai of Zamindawar. When the Alizai didn't pay taxes, a Barakzai punitive expedition was sent to Zamindawar, and in Alizai clan chiefs were executed. During this period, the Alizai began to view the Barakzai as enemies, creating the Alizai-Barakzai dynamic that still heavily influences Helmand politics.


title: Helmand Province

text: At this time, the area around Garmsir was effectively independent, and ignored by the monarchy in Kabul.


title: Helmand Province

text: In 1839, the British deposed Dost Mohammad Khan in favor of the Popolzai Shah Shujah Durrani. In doing so, they hoped to limit Russian influence in Afghanistan. Hoping to secure the loyalty of Helmandi tribal leaders, Shah Shujah reinstated the titles they had previously enjoyed under Popolzai rule, and he also held off on taxing them until his position was stronger. However, he kept the Barakzai tax collectors in office, and they resumed collection in 1840. When a Barakzai tax collector was killed at Sarwan Qala that year, the British sent in troops to enforce collection, a political blunder leading to open rebellion by the Alizai. It is not known if the British were aware of the political ramifications of Shah Shujah's decision to retain the Barakzai tax collectors, but they were completely bewildered by the ensuing rebellion, reflecting a clear lack of understanding of local dynamics on their part.


title: Helmand Province

text: The leader of the rebellion was Aktur Khan, who had risen to prominence during this dispute. His invocations of Alizai honor and appeals to group identity had resulted in him attaining chieftainship of the Alizai. After some skirmishes, the British offered to remove the Barakzai tax collectors in return for the dispersal of Aktur Khan's 1,300 followers. This soon broke down, and by May 1841, Aktur Khan led a force of 3,000 men to capture Gereshk. The British retook Gereshk at the beginning of June and then led punitive expeditions into Zamindawar, and eventually the rebellion was defeated and Aktur Khan fled to Herat.


title: Helmand Province

text: British-backed Barakzai horsemen were sent to reinforce Gereshk in November 1841. The Alizai repeatedly tried to capture it, but the Barakzai were able to maintain control until August 1842 because the other Barakzai who lived there kept them well-supplied.


title: Helmand Province

text: Dost Mohammad Khan was reinstalled for a second reign when the British withdrew from Afghanistan, but he ran into financial difficulties and sought a subsidy from the British in 1857. He distributed money from this subsidy unevenly among Helmandi tribes, favoring the Barakzai over the others, which upset the balance of power between the tribes. The subsidy also divided Afghanistan into British and Russian spheres of influence, with Gereshk and the Helmand river being on the border between them, increasing the area's strategic importance. The subsidy ended in 1862 when Dost Mohammad died and a succession crisis broke out between his sons. Helmandis fought as mercenaries on the side of one of them, Sher Ali Khan, playing a role in his eventual victory. The deciding battle was fought at Gereshk in 1868.


title: Helmand Province

text: Indebted to the Helmandi tribes for their contributions during the war, Sher Ali scaled back tax collection in the area and reduced the allowances to the Barakzai khans. Because of this, the Alizai did not rebel during his reign. Another key development for Helmand (Pusht-e Rud) during Sher Ali's reign was that he moved its four traditional districts into the newly created Farah Province, moving it out of Kandahar's sphere of influence and meaning that he could influence the Pusht-e Rud area without going through a relative in Kandahar.


title: Helmand Province

text: In November 1878, the British invaded Afghanistan again. They occupied Gereshk until February 1879; an Alizai force of 1500 attacked them as they withdrew. Sher Ali died soon after, however, and the British wanted to again occupy Gereshk as a forward outpost against Sher Ali's son Ayub Khan. Perhaps realizing that the presence of their troops garrisoning Helmandi forts upset locals, the British sent a proxy Barakzai force to occupy Gereshk.


title: Helmand Province

text: Ayub Khan found ample support from Helmandis in his subsequent campaign against the British: three or four thousand Alizai tribesmen, led by a man named Abu Bakr, had joined his army by October, as did a smaller contingent of Noorzai. Doubting the Barakzai's loyalty, the British sent some of their own troops to reinforce Gereshk in July 1880, led by George Burrows. The Barakzai promptly mutinied and went over to Ayub Khan's side — a rare Barakzai-Alizai alliance, joining against a common enemy. The British withdrew and Ayub Khan's army pursued, leading to a major Afghan victory at the Battle of Maiwand on 27 July. Having achieved their main goal of defeating the British, the Alizai then left and returned to Zamindawar.


title: Helmand Province

text: The British later defeated Ayub Khan, but they ended up withdrawing from Afghanistan altogether, installing Abdur Rahman Khan as the new ruler and giving him a subsidy. Abdur Rahman Khan was a strong and intelligent state-builder who used the subsidy to finance a professional army. He defeated Abu Bakr of the Alizai and had him exiled, after which the Alizai cooperated with paying taxes. He used a combination of incentives and force to move the Ishaqzai and Noorzai to the northwestern part of Afghanistan, away from the lands along the Helmand they had been granted by Nader Shah. Their relocation was a disaster and many ended up returning to the Helmand area.


title: Helmand Province

text: When they came back, however, they were only given scattered, less-productive lands. This dramatically changed the power dynamic of the Helmand area, marking the beginning of Ishaqzai and (to a lesser degree) Noorzai disenfranchisement from government that has continued into the 21st century. The Noorzai would occupy marginal lands until the late 20th century, and the Ishaqzai population remains dispersed and scattered throughout Helmand today.


title: Helmand Province

text: The weakening of Helmand's non-Barakzai tribes, combined with a policy of non-interference with the tribes, led to stability in the region throughout Abdur Rahman's reign. This continued during the rule of his son Habibullah, who died in 1919.


title: Helmand Province

text: An important development was the re-construction of the Nahr-e Saraj canal, beginning in 1910. Newly irrigated areas that had previously been desert were now populated with ethnic and tribal groups who were not originally from Helmand, including refugees from Central Asia fleeing Soviet rule. Many of the villages along the canal therefore are named after these groups, such as Uzbek, Turkmen, and Popolzai. The government had originally planned to continue developing the Helmand area during the 1920s, but ended up shelving that project due to unrest over Amanullah's social reforms. In 1936, after the Musahiban dynasty had come to power, the government began construction of another canal in Helmand, the Nahr-e Bughra. The Afghan government originally sought out US financial and technical assistance, but the US refused, so instead it was the Germans and Japanese who contributed. The Nahr-e Bughra project employed up to 7,000 workers, and there were also other small-scale development projects in the area at the same time. Roads, bridges, and telephone wires were built to connect the major settlements. This was the first externally supervised development project in Helmand. However, when World War II broke out, the British requested that the German and Japanese engineers be expelled from Afghanistan, and the government had to continue on its own.


title: Helmand Province

text: Helmand was the center of the USAID program in the 1960s to develop the Helmand and Arghandab Valley Authority (HAVA) – it became known locally as "little America". The program laid out tree-lined streets in Lashkargah, built a network of irrigation canals and constructed a large hydroelectric dam. The development program was abandoned when pro-Soviet Union forces seized power in 1978, although much of the province is still irrigated by the HAVA.


title: Helmand Province

text: Thanks in part to the irrigation projects, the Pusht-e Rud area had become more important, and the government recognized this by splitting it off from Farah Province to create a new "Gereshk Province" in 1960. Gereshk was made the capital to reflect the historical importance of the Barakzai, which had been diluted by the influx of outside settlers in the province. The US, however, cared more that the HVA headquarters was in Lashkar Gah, and they successfully lobbied the Afghan government to relocate the provincial capital there. This happened in 1964, and the province was renamed "Helmand Province".


title: Helmand Province

text: For the first time since 1826, the Helmandi Barakzai were no longer dominant in the region. To compensate for this, the government completelty redrew the district boundaries in Helmand. The four traditional districts were abolished and replaced new districts. These new districts, greater in number than the traditional ones, were each assigned an "order", which determined how much resources would be allocated to each district. Additionally, since the 1964 constitution introduced voting, the new districts were drawn in a way allowing the government to maintain influence and control.


title: Helmand Province

text: The former Barakzai-dominated district of Pusht-e Rud proper, or Gereshk, was split into Nahr-e Seraj (the only 1st order district in the province), Nawa (4th order), and Lashkar Gah (which, as the capital, had its own resourcing protocol). Lashkar Gah district was gerrymandered to give the Barakzai a majority over the mixed tribes in the urban area: a slice of Barakzai-dominated Babaji was included, and the boundary with Nad-e Ali district was drawn on the border of Barakzai territory in Bolan. This way, the Barakzai central government was able to retain control of even the new capital of Helmand.


title: Helmand Province

text: Meanwhile, the Alizai district of Zamindawar was split into Musa Qala (2nd order), Baghran (4th order), and Kajaki (sub-district status). Now Zad, with its mixed Noorzai and Ishaqzai population, was split into Now Zad (2nd order) and Washir (sub-district status). Garmsir district was the only one of the traditional districts to remain intact; it was given 3rd-order status. The 37 different tribes and ethnicities who had immigrated to Nad-e Ali and Marjah were lumped into a single 3rd-order district. Finally, the sub-district of Sangin was created to separate the Alikozai tribe, closely related to the Barakzai, from the Alizai.


title: Helmand Province

text: During Operation Enduring Freedom, the United States Agency for International Development program contributed to a counter-narcotics initiative called the Alternative Livelihoods Program (ALP) in the province. It paid communities to work to improve their environment and economic infrastructure as an alternative to opium poppy farming. The project undertook drainage and canal rehabilitation projects. In 2005 and 2006, there were problems in getting promised finance to communities and this was a source of considerable tension between the farmers and the Coalition forces.


title: Helmand Province

text: After it was decided to deploy British troops to the Province, PJHQ tasked 22 SAS to conduct a reconnaissance of the province. The review was led by Mark Carleton-Smith, who found the province largely at peace due to the brutal rule of Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, and a booming opium-fuelled economy that benefited the pro-government warlords. In June he reported back to the MoD warning them not to remove Akhundzada and against the deployment of a large British force which would likely cause conflict where none existed.


title: Helmand Province

text: It was announced in January 2006 in the British Parliament that International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) would replace the U.S. troops in the province as part of Operation Herrick. The British 16 Air Assault Brigade would be the core of the force in Helmand Province. British bases were located in the districts of Sangin, Lashkargah and Grishk. British forces were replaced in Sangin by elements of the United States Marine Corps I Marine Expeditionary Force Forward.


title: Helmand Province

text: In summer 2006, Helmand was one of the provinces involved in Operation Mountain Thrust, a combined NATO-Afghan mission targeted at Taliban fighters in the south of the country. In July 2006, this offensive mission essentially stalled in Helmand as NATO, primarily British, and Afghan troops were forced to take increasingly defensive positions under heavy insurgent pressure. In response, British troop levels in the province were increased, and new encampments were established in Sangin and Grishk. Fighting was particularly heavy in the districts of Sangin, Naway, Nawzad and Garmsir. There were reports that the Taliban saw Helmand province as a key testing area for their ability to take and hold Afghan territory from NATO-led Afghan National Security Forces. Commanders on the ground described the situation as the most brutal conflict the British Army had been involved in since the Korean War.


title: Helmand Province

text: In Autumn 2006, British troops started to reach "cessation of hostilities" agreements with local Taliban forces around the district centers where they had been stationed earlier in the summer. Under the terms of the agreement, both sets of forces were to withdraw from the conflict zone. This agreement from the British forces implied that the strategy of holding key bases in the district, as requested by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was essentially untenable with the levels of British troop deployment. The agreement was also a setback for Taliban fighters, who were desperate to consolidate their gains in the province, but were under heavy pressure from various NATO offensives.