title: Michelle Krusiec

text: Krusiec was recruited to be one of six globe-trotting travel reporters for the Discovery Channel series "Travelers" in 1996. Along with Barbara Alvarez, Robin Kipp, Pearce Bunting, Patrick Michael, Foster Soloman, and later Lisa Clark, she traveled to over 50 different locations on the show. Krusiec played the 18-year-old Molly O'Brien in the "" episode "Time's Orphan". She co-starred in the NBC Saturday morning sitcom "One World" and played the role of Exquisite Woo on "Popular". She played Mei-Ling Hwa Darling, one of the Darling family's daughters-in-law, in ABC's dramedy, "Dirty Sexy Money". She appeared in "The Mind of the Married Man" as Sachiko, a massage parlor employee. She had a recurring role as "Nadine Park" on Season 4 of Fox's "Fringe", and has also appeared on TV shows such as NBC's "Community" as "Wu Mei", a love interest of Chevy Chase's character, Pierce Hawthorne, "General Hospital" as Attorney Grace Yang, "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" as Emily, "Touch" as Lanny Cheong, "Nip/Tuck" as Mei, "" as Susan Lee, "" as Lisa Kim, "NCIS", "Grey's Anatomy", "Weeds", "Without a Trace", "Cold Case" as Kara, "Monk" as Maria, "ER" as Tong-Ye, and "Titus" as recurring character Nancy.


title: Michelle Krusiec

text: Krusiec provided various voices for multiple episodes of Seth MacFarlane's animated series "American Dad!".


title: Michelle Krusiec

text: Krusiec was a Best Actress nominee in the Golden Horse Film Festival for her performance in a U.S. independent film "Saving Face" (2005), written and directed by Alice Wu, in which she plays a Chinese American surgeon named Wilhelmina Pang ("Wil") juggling the demands of her girlfriend, Vivian Shing (played by Lynn Chen) and pregnant mother (played by Joan Chen). Krusiec appeared in a number of feature films including "Knife Fight" as Shannon, "Sunset Stories" as Nova, "Relative Insanity" as Marsha, "Far North" as Anja, the daughter of Michelle Yeoh's character, "What Happens in Vegas" as Chong, Cameron Diaz's character's competitive co-worker, "Dumb and Dumberer" as Cindy, "The River Murders" as Sung Li opposite Ray Liotta, Christian Slater, and Ving Rhames, "Daddy Day Care" as the English teacher, "Take Me Home" as Suzanne, "Shuffle" as Kevin's Mother, and independent film projects including Tanuj Chopra's "Nice Girls Crew" alongside Lynn Chen and Sheetal Sheth, Shawn Chou's "Tomato and Eggs" opposite Keiko Agena and Sab Shimono, and Erin Li's "L.A. Coffin School" opposite Elizabeth Sung and Megan Lee.


title: Michelle Krusiec

text: Krusiec wrote, directed, and performed a one-woman show entitled "Made in Taiwan" that premiered in Los Angeles and in New York at the New York International Fringe Festival of Theater, among other venues. She has received funding from Visual Communications to develop the play into a feature film.


title: Michelle Krusiec

text: Krusiec toured with the cast of David Henry Hwang's play, "Chinglish", in the role of Xi Yian. The first stop of the play was at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and then the South Coast Repertory (as the play is a joint production between the two theaters), and then to the Hong Kong Arts Festival in Hong Kong. The production of the play is directed by two-time Obie winner Leigh Silverman.


title: Michelle Krusiec

text: In 2018, Krusiec starred in The Public Theatre's production of Hansol Jung's play "Wild Goose Dreams," in the co-leading role of Yoo Nanhee.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The art of Mesopotamia has survived in the record from early hunter-gatherer societies (8th millennium BC) on to the Bronze Age cultures of the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian empires. These empires were later replaced in the Iron Age by the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires. Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia brought significant cultural developments, including the oldest examples of writing.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The art of Mesopotamia rivalled that of Ancient Egypt as the most grand, sophisticated and elaborate in western Eurasia from the 4th millennium BC until the Persian Achaemenid Empire conquered the region in the 6th century BC. The main emphasis was on various, very durable, forms of sculpture in stone and clay; little painting has survived, but what has suggests that, with some exceptions, painting was mainly used for geometrical and plant-based decorative schemes, though most sculptures were also painted. Cylinder seals have survived in large numbers, many including complex and detailed scenes despite their small size.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Mesopotamian art survives in a number of forms: cylinder seals, relatively small figures in the round, and reliefs of various sizes, including cheap plaques of moulded pottery for the home, some religious and some apparently not. Favourite subjects include deities, alone or with worshippers, and animals in several types of scenes: repeated in rows, single, fighting each other or a human, confronted animals by themselves or flanking a human or god in the Master of Animals motif, or a Tree of Life.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Stone stelae, votive offerings, or ones probably commemorating victories and showing feasts, are also found from temples, which unlike more official ones lack inscriptions that would explain them; the fragmentary Stele of the Vultures is an early example of the inscribed type, and the Assyrian Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III a large and well preserved late one.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The highland regions of Mesopotamia were occupied since the Neanderthal times, for example at the site of Shanidar Cave (65,000–35,000 years ago), but with no known artistic creation. The first artistic productions of Mesopotamia appear in the area of Upper Mesopotamia only, at the end of the Neolithic during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period, with simple representations of humans and animals as well as megaliths (9,500–8,000 BC). This succeeds an earlier period of development in the Levant, as in the Hayonim Cave, were carvings of animals such as horses are known from the earliest dates of the Upper Paleolithic, with dates ranging from 40,000 to 18,500 BP.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: In Prehistoric and Ancient Mesopotamia, the climate was cooler than in Egypt or the Indus Valley, meaning that the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were very different from the deserts of today; in the highlands there were bands of forest interspersed with steppes and savannas rich in flora and abounding with goats, boars, deers, and fox. After the invention of agriculture, farmers worked in the valley, but the community lived in the more easily fortifiable hills. Unlike in China and the Indus Valley civilization, the villages had two economic orientations, downhill to the fields of grain and uphill into the mountains of Anatolia with their rich mines of gold and copper. Mesopotamian cultures were thus continually in a state of flux, which had its own advantages and difficulties.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Following the Epipalaeolithic period in the Near East, several Pre-Pottery Neolithic A sites are known from the areas of Upper Mesopotamia and the northern mountainous fringes of Mesopotamia, marked by the appearance around 9000 BC on the banks of the Upper Euphrates of the world's oldest known megaliths at Göbekli Tepe, and the first known use of agriculture around the same time at Tell Abu Hureyra, a site from the preceding Natufian culture.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Numerous realistic reliefs and a few sculptures of animals, as well as fragments of reliefs of humans or deities, are known from Göbekli Tepe and dated to circa 9000 BC. The Urfa Man found in another site nearby is dated to the period of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic circa 9000 BC, and is considered as "the oldest naturalistic life-sized sculpture of a human". Slightly later, early human statuettes in stone and fired clay have been found in other Upper Mesopotamia sites such as Mureybet, dated to 8500–8000 BC.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Around 8000 BC, during the following period of Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, still before the invention of pottery, several early settlements became experts in crafting beautiful and highly sophisticated containers from stone, using materials such as alabaster or granite, and employing sand to shape and polish. Artisans used the veins in the material to maximum visual effect. Such object have been found in abundance on the upper Euphrates river, in what is today eastern Syria, especially at the site of Bouqras.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: In northeastern Mesopotamia, the Jarmo culture (7500 BC), centered on the site of Jarmo (Qal'at Jarmo) is a prehistoric archeological site located in modern Iraq on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. Excavations revealed that Jarmo was an agricultural community, dating back to 7500 BC, based on irrigation through natural rainfall. It preceded the human expansion towards the alluvial plains of central Mesopotamia. It was broadly contemporary with such other important Neolithic sites such as Jericho in the southern Levant, Çatalhöyük in Anatolia or Tell Sabi Abyad in northern Syria. Some fragments of stone vessels and alabaster jars have also been found in Jarmo, dating to circa 7500 BC, before the c.7000 BC invention of pottery.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The northern Mesopotamian sites of Tell Hassuna and Jarmo are some of the oldest sites in the Near-East where pottery has been found, appearing in the most recent levels of excavation, which dates it to the 7th millennium BC. This pottery is handmade, of simple design and with thick sides, and treated with a vegetable solvent. There are clay figures, zoomorphic or anthropomorphic, including figures of pregnant women which are taken to be fertility goddesses, similar to the Mother Goddess of later Neolithic cultures in the same region.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Pottery was decorated with abstract geometric patterns and ornaments, especially in the Halaf culture, also known for its clay fertility figurines, painted with lines. Clay was all around and the main material; often modelled figures were painted with black decoration. Carefully crafted and dyed pots, especially jugs and bowls, were traded. As dyes, iron oxide containing clays were diluted in different degrees or various minerals were mixed to produce different colours.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The Halaf culture saw the earliest known appearance of stamp seals. They featured essentially geometric patterns.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Female fertility figurines in painted clay, possibly goddesses, also appear in this period, circa 6000–5100 BC.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The Hassuna culture is a Neolithic archaeological culture in northern Mesopotamia dating to the early sixth millennium BC. It is named after the type site of Tell Hassuna in Iraq. Other sites where Hassuna material has been found include Tell Shemshara. The decoration of pottery essentially consists in geometrical shapes, and a few ibex designs.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The Samarra culture is a Chalcolithic archaeological culture in northern Mesopotamia that is roughly dated to 5500–4800 BCE. It partially overlaps with the Hassuna and early Ubaid.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The Ubaid period (c. 6500–3800 BC) is a prehistoric period of Mesopotamia. The name derives from Tell al-'Ubaid in Southern Mesopotamia, where the earliest large excavation of Ubaid period material was conducted initially by Henry Hall and later by Leonard Woolley.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: In South Mesopotamia the period is the earliest known period on the alluvial plain although it is likely earlier periods exist obscured under the alluvium. In the south it has a very long duration between about 6500 and 3800 BC when it is replaced by the Uruk period.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: In North Mesopotamia, Ubaid culture expanded during the period between about 5300 and 4300 BC. It is preceded by the Halaf period and the Halaf-Ubaid Transitional period and succeeded by the Late Chalcolithic period. The new period is named Northern Ubaid to distinguish it from the proper Ubaid in southern Mesopotamia.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: With Ubaid 3 (circa 4500 BC) numerous examples of Ubaid pottery have been found along the Persian Gulf, as far as Dilmun, where Indus Valley civilization pottery has also been found.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Stamps seals start to depict animals in stylistic fashion, and also bear the first known depiction of the Master of Animals at the end of the period, circa 4000 BC.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The rise of the non-Semitic-speaking Sumerian culture spans a period of about two millennia, and saw the development of sophisticated artistic traditions, as well as the invention of writing, first through pictographic signs, and then through cuneiforms.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The Protoliterate or Uruk period, named after the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia, (ca. 4000 to 3100 BC) existed from the protohistoric Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age period, following the Ubaid period and succeeded by the Jemdet Nasr period generally dated to 3100–2900 BC. It saw the emergence of urban life in Mesopotamia, and the beginnings of Sumerian civilization, and also the first "great creative age" of Mesopotamian art. Slightly earlier, the northern city of Tell Brak, today in Syria, also saw urbanization, and the development of a temple with regional significance. This is called the Eye Temple after the many "eye idols", in fact votive offerings, found there, a type distinctive to this site. The stone Tell Brak Head, 7 inches high, shows a simplified face; similar heads are in gypsum. These were evidently fitted to bodies that have not survived, probably of wood. Like temples further south, the Eye Temple was decorated with cone mosaics made up of clay cylinders some four inches long, differently coloured to create simple patterns.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Significant works from the southern cities in Sumer proper are the Warka Vase and Uruk Trough, with complex multi-figured scenes of humans and animals, and the Mask of Warka. This is a more realistic head than the Tell Brak examples, like them made to top a wooden body; what survives of this is only the basic framework, to which coloured inlays, gold leaf hair, paint and jewellery were added. It could depict a temple goddess. Shells may have served as the whites of the eyes, and the lapis lazuli, a beautiful, blue semi-precious gemstone, may have formed the pupils. The Guennol Lioness is an exceptionally powerful small figurine of a lion-headed monster, perhaps from the start of the next period.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: There are a number of stone or alabaster vessels carved in deep relief, and stone friezes of animals, both designed for temples, where the vessels held offerings. Cylinder seals are already complex and very finely executed and, as later, seem to have been an influence on larger works. Animals shown are often representations of the gods, another continuing feature of Mesopotamian art. The end of the period, despite being a time of considerable economic expansion, saw a decline in the quality of art, perhaps as demand outstripped the supply of artists.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Egypt–Mesopotamia relations seem to have developed from the 4th millennium BCE, starting in the Uruk period for Mesopotamia and the Gerzean culture of pre-literate Prehistoric Egypt (circa 3500–3200 BC). Influences can be seen in the Pre-Dynastic Art of Ancient Egypt, in imported products, and also in the possible transfer of writing from Mesopotamia to Egypt, and generated "deep-seated" parallels in the early stages of both cultures.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Distinctly Mesopotamian objects and art forms entered Egypt during this period, indicating exchanges and contacts. The designs that were emulated by Egyptian artists are numerous: the Uruk "priest-king" with his tunique and brimmed hat in the posture of the Master of animals, the serpopards or sepo-felines, winged griffins, snakes around rosettes, boats with high prows, all characteristic of Mesopotamian art of the Late Uruk (Uruk IV, c. 3350–3200 BC) period. The same "Priest-King" in visible in several Mesopotamian works of art of the end of the Uruk period, such as the Blau Monuments, cylinder seals and statues.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The Jemdet Nasr Period covers the period from 3100 to 2900 BC. It is named after the type site Tell Jemdet Nasr, where the assemblage typical for this period was first recognized. Its geographical distribution is limited to south-central Iraq. The culture of the proto-historical Jemdet Nasr period is a local development out of the preceding Uruk period and continues into the Early Dynastic I period. The period is characterized by splendidly painted monochrome and polychrome pottery, as well as the appearance of large proto-cuneiform tablets, clearly going beyond the initial pictographic writing.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The earliest type of dress attested in early Sumerian art is not the "kaunakes", but rather a sort of kilt or "net dress" which is quite closely fitting the lower body, while the upper body remains bare. This early type of net dress looks much more similar to standard textile then the later "kaunakes", which looks more like sheepskin with ample bell-shaped volume around the waist and the legs.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The Early Dynastic Period is generally dated to 2900–2350 BC. While continuing many earlier trends, its art is marked by an emphasis on figures of worshippers and priests making offerings, and social scenes of worship, war and court life. Copper becomes a significant medium for sculpture, probably despite most works having later being recycled for their metal. Few if any copper sculptures are as large as the Tell al-'Ubaid Lintel, which is 2.59 metres wide and 1.07 metres high.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Many masterpieces have also been found at the Royal Cemetery at Ur (c. 2650 BC), including the two figures of a "Ram in a Thicket", the "Copper Bull" and a bull's head on one of the Lyres of Ur. The so-called Standard of Ur, actually an inlaid box or set of panels of uncertain function, is finely inlaid with partly figurative designs.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: A group of 12 temple statues known as the Tell Asmar Hoard, now split up, show gods, priests and donor worshippers at different sizes, but all in the same highly simplified style. All have greatly enlarged inlaid eyes, but the tallest figure, the main cult image depicting the local god, has enormous eyes that give it a "fierce power". Later in the period this geometric style was replaced by a strongly contrasting one giving "a detailed rendering of the physical peculiarities of the subject"; "Instead of sharply contrasting, clearly articulated masses, we see fluid transitions and infinitely modulated surfaces".


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The Akkadian Empire was the first to control not only all Mesopotamia, but other territories in the Levant, from about 2271 to 2154 BC. The Akkadians were not Sumerian, and spoke a Semitic language. In art there was a great emphasis on the kings of the dynasty, alongside much that continued earlier Sumerian art. In large works and small ones such as seals, the degree of realism was considerably increased, but the seals show a "grim world of cruel conflict, of danger and uncertainty, a world in which man is subjected without appeal to the incomprehensible acts of distant and fearful divinities who he must serve but cannot love. This sombre mood ... remained characteristic of Mesopotamian art..."


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: King Naram-Sin's famous Victory Stele depicts him as a god-king (symbolized by his horned helmet) climbing a mountain above his soldiers, and his enemies, the defeated Lullubi. Although the stele was broken off at the top when it was stolen and carried off by the Elamite forces of Shutruk-Nakhunte, it still strikingly reveals the pride, glory, and divinity of Naram-Sin. The stele seems to break from tradition by using successive diagonal tiers to communicate the story to viewers, however, the more traditional horizontal frames are visible on smaller broken pieces. It is six feet and seven inches tall, and made from pink sandstone. From the same reign, the bare legs and lower torso of the copper Bassetki Statue show an unprecedented level of realism, as does the imposing bronze head of a bearded ruler (Louvre).


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The Louvre head is a life-size, bronze bust found in Nineveh. The intricate curling and patterning of the beard and the complex hairstyle suggests royalty, power, and wealth from an ideal male in society. Aside from its aesthetic traits, this piece is spectacular because it is the earliest hollow-cast sculpture item known to use the lost-wax casting process. There is deliberate damage on the left side of the face and eye, indicating that the bust was intentionally slashed at a later period to demonstrate political iconoclasm.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: After the fall of the Akkadian Empire, a local dynasty emerged in Lagash. Gudea, ruler of Lagash (reign ca. 2144 to 2124 BC), was a great patron of new temples early in the period, and an unprecedented 26 statues of Gudea, mostly rather small, have survived from temples, beautifully executed, mostly in "costly and very hard diorite" stone. These exude a confident serenity.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The northern Royal Palace of Mari produced a number of important objects from before about 1800 BC, including the Statue of Iddi-Ilum, and the most extensive remains of Mesopotamian palace frescos.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The Neo-Sumerian art of the Third Dynasty of Ur reached new heights, especially in terms of realism and fine craftmanship.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The political history of this period of nearly 1000 years is complicated, marked by the rise of Semitic-speaking polities originating in northwestern Mesopotamia. The period includes the Amorites Isin-Larsa Period and the First Babylonian Dynasty or Old Babylonian period (c.1830–1531 BC), an interlude under the rule of the Kassites (c. 1531–1155 BC) followed by invasions of the Elamite, while the Middle Assyrian Empire (1392–934 BC) developed in the northern part of Mesopotamia. The period ended with the decisive advent of the Neo-Assyrian Empire under Adad-nirari II, whose reign began in 911 BC.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The Isin-Larsa period is a period of turmoil, marked by the rise of the influence of the Amorites for the northwest of Mesopotamia. Life was often unstable, and non-Sumerian invasions a recurring theme.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: From the 18th century BC, Hammurabi (1792 BC to 1750 BC), the Amorite ruler of Babylon, turned Babylon into a major power and eventually conquered Mesopotamia and beyond. He is famous for his law code and conquests, but he is also famous due to the large amount of records that exist from the period of his reign. During the period Babylon became a great city, which was often the seat of the dominant power. The period was not one of great artistic development, these invaders failing to bring new artistic impetus, and much religious art was rather self-consciously conservative, perhaps in a deliberate assertion of Sumerian values. The quality of execution is often lower than in preceding and later periods. Some "popular" works of art displayed realism and mouvement, such as the from Ishchali, attributed to the period between 2000–1600 BC.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The Burney Relief is an unusual, elaborate, and relatively large (20×15 inches) terracotta plaque of a naked winged goddess with the feet of a bird of prey, and attendant owls and lions. It comes from the 18th or 19th century BC, and may also be moulded. Similar pieces, small statues or reliefs of deities, were made for altars in homes or small wayside shrines, and small moulded terracotta ones were probably available as souvenirs from temples.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The "Investiture of Zimri-Lim", now in the Louvre, is a large palace fresco that is the outstanding survival of Mesopotamian wall-painting, although comparable schemes were probably common in palaces.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: After the death of Hammurabi, the first Babylonian dynasty lasted for another century and a half, but his empire quickly unravelled, and Babylon once more became a small state. The Amorite dynasty ended in 1595 BC, when Babylonia fell to the Hittite king Mursilis, after which the Kassites took control.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The original homeland of the Kassites is not well-known, but appears to have been located in the Zagros Mountains, in what is now the Lorestan Province of Iran. This was generally not a period of the highest quality for cylinder seal images; at different times the inscription took prominence over the image, and the variety of scenes shown reduced, with the "presentation scene" of a king before a god, or an official before a seated king, becoming the norm at times. Especially from the Kassite period several stone kudurru stelae survive, mostly taken up with inscriptions recording grants of land, boundary lines, and other official records, but often with figures and emblems of the gods or the king as well; a land grant by Meli-Shipak II is an example.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: An Assyrian artistic style distinct from that of Babylonian art, which was the dominant contemporary art in Mesopotamia, began to emerge c. 1500 BC, well before their empire included Sumer, and lasted until the fall of Nineveh in 612 BC.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The conquest of the whole of Mesopotamia and much surrounding territory by the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–609 BC) created a larger and wealthier state than the region had known before, and very grandiose art in palaces and public places, no doubt partly intended to match the splendour of the art of the neighbouring Egyptian empire. From around 879 BC the Assyrians developed a style of extremely large schemes of very finely detailed narrative low reliefs in stone or gypsum alabaster, originally painted, for palaces. The precisely delineated reliefs concern royal affairs, chiefly hunting and war making. Predominance is given to animal forms, particularly horses and lions, which are magnificently represented in great detail.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Human figures are comparatively rigid and static but are also minutely detailed, as in triumphal scenes of sieges, battles, and individual combat. Among the best known Assyrian reliefs are the famous "Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal" scenes in alabaster, and the Lachish reliefs showing a war campaign in Palestine, both of which are of the 7th century BC, from Nineveh and now in the British Museum. Reliefs were also carved into rock faces, as at Shikaft-e Gulgul, a style which the Persians continued.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The Assyrians produced relatively little sculpture in the round, with the partial exception of colossal human-headed "lamassu" guardian figures, with the bodies of lions or bulls, which are sculpted in high relief on two sides of a rectangular block, with the heads effectively in the round (and often also five legs, so that both views seem complete). These marked fortified royal gateways, an architectural form common throughout Asia Minor. A single statue of a nude female is known. The Assyrian form of the winged genie, winged spirits with bearded human heads seen in reliefs, influenced Ancient Greek art, which in its "orientalizing period" added various winged mythological beasts including the Chimera, griffin and winged horses (Pegasus) and men (Talos). Many carry the bucket and cone.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Even before dominating the region the Assyrians had continued the cylinder seal tradition with designs which are often exceptionally energetic and refined. At Nimrud the carved Nimrud ivories and bronze bowls were found that are decorated in the Assyrian style but were produced in several parts of the Near East including many by Phoenician and Aramaean artisans.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The famous Ishtar Gate, part of which is now reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, was the main entrance into Babylon, built in about 575 BC by Nebuchadnezzar II, the king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, who exiled the Jews; the empire lasted from 626 BC to 539 BC. The walls surrounding the entrance way are decorated with rows of large relief animals in glazed brick, which has therefore retained its colours. Lions, dragons and bulls are represented. The gate was part of a much larger scheme for a processional way into the city, from which there are sections in many other museums. Large wooden gates throughout the period were strengthened and decorated with large horizontal metal bands, often decorated with reliefs, several of which have survived, such as the various Balawat Gates.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Other traditional types of art continued to be produced, and the Neo-Babylonians were very keen to stress their ancient heritage. Many sophisticated and finely carved seals survive. After Mesopotamia fell to the Persian Achaemenid Empire, which had much simpler artistic traditions, Mesopotamian art was, with Ancient Greek art, the main influence on the cosmopolitan Achaemenid style that emerged, and many ancient elements were retained in the area even in the Hellenistic art that succeeded the conquest of the region by Alexander the Great.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: One fundamental intention of Mesopotamian art was to honour the gods and goddesses who ruled over different aspects of nature and important life events. The central place of worship was the "ziggurat", a stepped pyramid with stairs leading to an altar where worshipers would elevate themselves closer to the heavens. Much like the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians believed that their rulers had a direct link to their gods, and many artworks depict rulers shown in a glorified manner.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: As in other ancient civilizations, the sculptures, mostly rather small, are the main type of artwork to survive. In the late period Assyrian sculpture for palaces was often very large. Most of the Sumerian and Akkadian statues of figures are in a position of prayer. The main types of stone used are limestone and alabaster.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Ancient Mesopotamia is most noted for its construction of mud brick buildings and the construction of ziggurats, occupying a prominent place in each city and consisting of an artificial mound, often rising in huge steps, surmounted by a temple. The mound was no doubt to elevate the temple to a commanding position in what was otherwise a flat river valley. The great city of Uruk had a number of religious precincts, containing many temples larger and more ambitious than any buildings previously known.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The word "ziggurat" is an anglicized form of the Akkadian word "ziqqurratum", the name given to the solid stepped towers of mud brick. It derives from the verb "zaqaru", ("to be high"). The buildings are described as being like mountains linking Earth and heaven. The Ziggurat of Ur, excavated by Leonard Woolley, is 64 by 46 meters at base and originally some 12 meters in height with three stories. It was built under Ur-Nammu (circa 2100 B.C.) and rebuilt under Nabonidus (555–539 B.C.), when it was increased in height to probably seven stories.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Assyrian palaces had a large public court with a suite of apartments on the east side and a series of large banqueting halls on the south side. This was to become the traditional plan of Assyrian palaces, built and adorned for the glorification of the king. Massive amounts of ivory furniture pieces were found in some palaces.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: The preferred jewellery designs used in Mesopotamia were natural and geometric motifs such as leaves, cones, spirals, and bunches of grapes. Sumerian and Akkadian jewellery was created from gold and silver leaf and set with many semiprecious stones (mostly agate, carnelian, jasper, lapis lazuli and chalcedony). A number of documents have been found that relate to the trade and production of jewellery from Sumerian sites.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Later Mesopotamian jewellers and craftsmen employed metalworking techniques such as cloisonné, engraving, granulation, and filigree. The large variety and size of necklaces, bracelets, anklets, pendants, and pins found may be due to the fact that jewellery was worn by both men and women, and perhaps even children.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: By some margin, the most important collections are those of (in no particular order) the Louvre Museum, the Vorderasiatisches Museum (Berlin, Germany), the British Museum (London), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City), and the National Museum of Iraq (Baghdad). The last was extensively looted after the breakdown of law and order following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but the most important objects have largely been recovered.


title: Art of Mesopotamia

text: Several other museums have good collections, especially of the very numerous cylinder seals. Syrian museums have important collections from sites in modern Syria. Other museums with important collections of Mesopotamian art are: the Oriental Institute of Chicago, İstanbul Archaeology Museums (Istanbul, Turkey), University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (Leiden, the Netherlands) and the Israel Museum (Jerusalem). The reconstructed "Ishtar Gate" in Pergamon Museum (Berlin) is arguably the most spectacular single work in a museum.


title: Mickey J. Meyer

text: Mickey J. Meyer is an Indian music composer and singer known for his works predominantly in Telugu Cinema. He has received two Filmfare Awards South, and three state Nandi Awards for the Best Music Direction. An alumnus of Trinity College of Music, Meyer started his career in 2005 and composed music for films such as "Kotha Bangaru Lokam" (2008) and "A Aa" (2016).


title: History of manga

text: Manga, in the sense of narrative multi-panel cartoons made in Japan, originated from Euro-American-style cartoons featured in late 19th-century Japanese publications. The form of manga as speech-balloon-based comics more specifically originated from translations of American comic strips in the 1920s, with several early such manga read left-to-right and the longest-running pre-1945 manga being the Japanese translation of the American comic strip "Bringing Up Father". The word manga first came into usage in the late 18th century, though it only came to refer to various forms of cartooning in the 1890s and did not become a common word until around 1920.


title: History of manga

text: Historians and writers on manga history have described two broad and complementary processes shaping modern manga. Their views differ in the relative importance they attribute to the role of cultural and historical events following World War II versus the role of pre-war, Meiji, and pre-Meiji Japanese culture and art: One view, represented by other writers such as Frederik L. Schodt; Kinko Ito; and Adam L. Kern; stresses continuity of Japanese cultural and aesthetic traditions, including pre-war, Meiji, and pre-Meiji;The other view states that, during and after the occupation of Japan by the allies (1945–1952), manga was strongly shaped by the Americans' cultural influences, including comics brought to Japan by the GIs, and by images and themes from US television, film, and cartoons (especially Disney). According to Sharon Kinsella, the booming Japanese publishing industry helped create a consumer-oriented society in which publishing giants like Kodansha could shape popular taste.


title: History of manga

text: Manga is said to originate from "emakimono" (scrolls) dating back to the 12th and 13th centuries. During the Edo period (1603-1867), another book of drawings, "Toba Ehon", embedded the concept of manga. The word first came into common usage in the late 18th century with the publication of such works as Santō Kyōden's picturebook "Shiji no yukikai" (1798), and in the early 19th century with such works as Aikawa Minwa's "Manga hyakujo" (1814) and the celebrated "Hokusai Manga" books (1814–1834) containing assorted drawings from the sketchbooks of the famous ukiyo-e artist Hokusai who lived from 1760–1849. Rakuten Kitazawa (1876–1955) first used the word "manga" in the modern sense. Another example of the first half of the 18th century might be "Dehōdai mucharon" of 1822 with prints of Hiroshige, who illustrated several books of this kind between 1820 and 1837.


title: History of manga

text: Writers stress continuity of Japanese cultural and aesthetic traditions as central to the history of manga. They include Frederik L. Schodt, Kinko Ito, Adam L. Kern, and Eric Peter Nash. Schodt points to the existence in the 13th century of illustrated picture scrolls like Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga that told stories in sequential images with humor and wit. Schodt also stresses continuities of aesthetic style and vision between ukiyo-e and shunga woodblock prints and modern manga (all three fulfill Eisner's criteria for sequential art). While there are disputes over whether Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga or Shigisan-engi was the first manga, both scrolls date back to about the same time period. However, others like Isao Takahata, Studio Ghibli co-founder and director, contends there is no linkage with the scrolls and modern manga.


title: History of manga

text: Schodt and Nash also see a particularly significant role for "kamishibai", a form of street theater where itinerant artists displayed pictures in a lightbox while narrating the story to audiences in the street. Torrance has pointed to similarities between modern manga and the Osaka popular novel between the 1890s and 1940 and argues that the development of widespread literacy in Meiji and post-Meiji Japan helped create audiences for stories told in words and pictures. Kinko Ito also roots manga historically in aesthetic continuity with pre-Meiji art, but she sees its post-WWII history as driven in part by consumer enthusiasm for the rich imagery and narrative of the newly developing manga tradition. Ito describes how this tradition has steadily produced new genres and markets, e.g., for girls' ("shōjo") manga in the late 1960s and for Ladies Comics ("redisu") in the 1980s.


title: History of manga

text: Even though Eastern comics are generally held separate from the evolution of Western comics and Western comic art probably originated in 17th Italy, Kern has suggested that "kibyoshi", picture books from the late 18th century, may have been the world's first comic books. These graphic narratives share with modern manga humorous, satirical, and romantic themes. Although Kern does not believe that "kibyoshi" were a direct forerunner of manga, for Kern the existence of "kibyoshi" nonetheless points to a Japanese willingness to mix words and pictures in a popular story-telling medium. The first recorded use of the term "manga" to mean "whimsical or impromptu pictures" comes from this tradition in 1798, which, Kern points out, predates Katsushika Hokusai's better known "Hokusai Manga" usage by several decades.


title: History of manga

text: Illustrated magazines for Western expatriates introduced Western-style satirical cartoons to Japan in the late 19th century. New publications in both the Western and Japanese styles became popular. At the end of the 1890s, American-style newspaper comics supplements began to appear in Japan, as well as some American comic strips. 1900 saw the debut of the "Jiji Manga" in the "Jiji Shinpō" newspaper—the first use of the word "manga" in its modern sense, and where, in 1902, Rakuten Kitazawa began the first modern Japanese comic strip. By the 1930s, comic strips were serialized in large-circulation monthly girls' and boys' magazine and collected into hardback volumes.


title: History of manga

text: Similarly, Inoue sees manga as a mixture of image- and word-centered elements, each pre-dating the Allied occupation of Japan. In his view, Japanese image-centered or "pictocentric" art ultimately derives from Japan's long history of engagement with Chinese graphic art, whereas word-centered or "logocentric" art, like the novel, was stimulated by social and economic needs of Meiji and pre-war Japanese nationalism for a populace unified by a common written language. Both fuse in what Inoue sees as a symbiosis in manga.


title: History of manga

text: The roots of the wide-eyed look commonly associated with manga dates back to "shōjo" magazine illustrations during the late 19th to early 20th centuries. The most important illustrators associated with this style at the time were Yumeji Takehisa and particularly Jun'ichi Nakahara, who, influenced by his work as a doll creator, frequently drew female characters with big eyes in the early 20th century. This had a significant influence on early manga, particularly shōjo manga, evident in the work of influential manga artists such as Macoto Takahashi and Riyoko Ikeda.


title: History of manga

text: However, other writers such as Takashi Murakami have stressed events after WWII. Still, Murakami sees Japan's surrender and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as having created long-lasting scars on the Japanese artistic psyche, which, in this view, lost its previously virile confidence in itself and sought solace in harmless and cute ("kawaii") images. However, Takayumi Tatsumi sees a special role for a transpacific economic and cultural transnationalism that created a postmodern and shared international youth culture of cartooning, film, television, music, and related popular arts, which was, for Tatsumi the crucible in which modern manga have developed, along with Norakuro


title: History of manga

text: For Murakami and Tatsumi, trans-nationalism (or globalization) refers specifically to the flow of cultural and subcultural material from one nation to another. In their usage, the term does not refer to international corporate expansion, nor to international tourism, nor to cross-border international personal friendships, but to ways in which artistic, aesthetic, and intellectual traditions influence each other across national boundaries. An example of cultural trans-nationalism is the creation of "Star Wars" films in the US, their transformation into manga by Japanese artists, and the marketing of "Star Wars" manga to the US. Another example is the transfer of hip-hop culture from the US to Japan. Wong also sees a major role for trans-nationalism in the recent history of manga.


title: History of manga

text: Thus, these scholars see the history of manga as involving historical continuities and discontinuities between the aesthetic and cultural past as it interacts with post-WWII innovation and trans-nationalism.


title: History of manga

text: After World War II, Japanese artists subsequently gave life to their own style during the occupation (1945–1952) and post-occupation years (1952-early 1960s), when a previously militaristic and ultranationalist Japan was rebuilding its political and economic infrastructure. Although Allied occupation censorship policies specifically prohibited art and writing that glorified war and Japanese militarism, those policies did not prevent the publication of other kinds of material, including manga. Furthermore, the 1947 Japanese Constitution (Article 21) prohibited all forms of censorship. One result was the growth of artistic creativity in this period.


title: History of manga

text: In the forefront of this period are two manga series and characters that influenced much of the future history of manga. These are Osamu Tezuka's "Mighty Atom" ("Astro Boy" in the United States; begun in 1951) and Machiko Hasegawa's "Sazae-san" (begun in 1946).


title: History of manga

text: Astro Boy was both a superpowered robot and a naive little boy. Tezuka never explained why Astro Boy had such a highly developed social conscience nor what kind of robot programming could make him so deeply affiliative. Both seem innate to Astro Boy, and represent a Japanese sociality and community-oriented masculinity differing very much from the Emperor-worship and militaristic obedience enforced during the previous period of Japanese imperialism. "Astro Boy" quickly became (and remains) immensely popular in Japan and elsewhere as an icon and hero of a new world of peace and the renunciation of war, as also seen in Article 9 of the Japanese constitution. Similar themes occur in Tezuka's "New World" and "Metropolis".


title: History of manga

text: By contrast, "Sazae-san" (meaning "Ms. Sazae") was drawn starting in 1946 by Machiko Hasegawa, a young woman artist who made her heroine a stand-in for millions of Japanese men and especially women rendered homeless by the war. Sazae-san does not face an easy or simple life, but, like Astro Boy, she too is highly affiliative and is deeply involved with her immediate and extended family. She is also a very strong character, in striking contrast to the officially sanctioned Neo-Confucianist principles of feminine meekness and obedience to the "good wife, wise mother" (, ) ideal taught by the previous military regime. Sazae-san faces the world with cheerful resilience, what Hayao Kawai calls a "woman of endurance." "Sazae-san" sold more than 62 million copies over the next half century.


title: History of manga

text: Tezuka and Hasegawa were also both stylistic innovators. In Tezuka's "cinematographic" technique, the panels are like a motion picture that reveals details of action bordering on slow motion as well as rapid zooms from distance to close-up shots. More critically, Tezuka synchronised the placement of the panel with the reader's viewing speed to simulate moving pictures. Hence in manga production, as in film production, the person who decides the allocation of panels (Komawari) is credited as the author, while most drawings are done by assistants. This kind of visual dynamism was widely adopted by later manga artists. Hasegawa's focus on daily life and women's experience also came to characterize later shōjo manga.


title: History of manga

text: Between 1950 and 1969, increasingly large audiences for manga emerged in Japan with the solidification of its two main marketing genres, "shōnen" manga aimed at boys and "shōjo" manga aimed at girls. Up to 1969, "shōjo" manga was drawn primarily by adult men for young female readers.


title: History of manga

text: Two very popular and influential male-authored manga for girls from this period were Tezuka's 1953-1956 "Ribon no Kishi" ("Princess Knight" or "Knight in Ribbons") and Mitsuteru Yokoyama 1966 "Mahōtsukai Sarii" ("Little Witch Sally"). "Ribon no Kishi" dealt with the adventures of Princess Sapphire of a fantasy kingdom who had been born with male and female souls, and whose sword-swinging battles and romances blurred the boundaries of otherwise rigid gender roles. Sarii, the pre-teen princess heroine of "Mahōtsukai Sarii," came from her home in the magical lands to live on Earth, go to school, and perform a variety of magical good deeds for her friends and schoolmates. Yokoyama's "Mahōtsukai Sarii" was influenced by the US TV sitcom "Bewitched", but unlike Samantha, the main character of "Bewitched", a married woman with her own daughter, Sarii is a pre-teenager who faces the problems of growing up and mastering the responsibilities of forthcoming adulthood. "Mahōtsukai Sarii" helped create the now very popular "mahō shōjo" or "magical girl" subgenre of later manga. Both series were and still are very popular.


title: History of manga

text: In 1969, a group of women manga artists later called the "Year 24 Group" (also known as "Magnificent 24s") made their "shōjo" manga debut (year 24 comes from the Japanese name for 1949, when many of these artists were born). The group included Hagio Moto, Riyoko Ikeda, Yumiko Ōshima, Keiko Takemiya, and Ryoko Yamagishi and they marked the first major entry of women artists into manga. Thereafter, "shōjo" manga would be drawn primarily by women artists for an audience of girls and young women.


title: History of manga

text: In 1971, Ikeda began her immensely popular "shōjo" manga "Berusaiyu no Bara" ("The Rose of Versailles"), a story of Oscar François de Jarjayes, a cross-dressing woman who was a Captain in Marie Antoinette's Palace Guards in pre-Revolutionary France. In the end, Oscar dies as a revolutionary leading a charge of her troops against the Bastille. Likewise, Hagio Moto's work challenged Neo-Confucianist limits on women's roles and activities as in her 1975 "They Were Eleven", a "shōjo" science fiction story about a young woman cadet in a future space academy.


title: History of manga

text: These women artists also created considerable stylistic innovations. In its focus on the heroine's inner experiences and feelings, "shōjo" manga are "picture poems" with delicate and complex designs that often eliminate panel borders completely to create prolonged, non-narrative extensions of time. All of these innovations – strong and independent female characters, intense emotionality, and complex design – remain characteristic of "shōjo" manga up to the present day.


title: History of manga

text: In the following decades (1975–present), "shōjo" manga continued to develop stylistically while simultaneously evolving different but overlapping subgenres. Major subgenres have included romance, superheroines, and "Ladies Comics" (in Japanese, "redisu" レディース, "redikomi" レディコミ, and "josei" 女性 じょせい), whose boundaries are sometimes indistinguishable from each other and from "shōnen" manga.


title: History of manga

text: In modern "shōjo" manga romance, love is a major theme set into emotionally intense narratives of self-realization. Japanese manga/anime critic Eri Izawa defines romance as symbolizing "the emotional, the grand, the epic; the taste of heroism, fantastic adventure, and the melancholy; passionate love, personal struggle, and eternal longing" set into imaginative, individualistic, and passionate narrative frameworks. These romances are sometimes long narratives that can deal with distinguishing between false and true love, coping with sexual intercourse, and growing up in an ambivalent world, themes inherited by subsequent animated versions of the story. These "coming of age" or "Bildungsroman" themes occur in both "shōjo" and "shōnen" manga.


title: History of manga

text: In the "Bildungsroman", the protagonist must deal with adversity and conflict, and examples in "shōjo" manga of romantic conflict are common. They include Miwa Ueda's "Peach Girl",


title: History of manga

text: Fuyumi Soryo's "Mars", and, for older readers, Moyoco Anno's "Happy Mania", Yayoi Ogawa's "Tramps Like Us", and Ai Yazawa's "Nana". In another "shōjo" manga "Bildungsroman" narrative device, the young heroine is transported to an alien place or time where she meets strangers and must survive on her own (including Hagio Moto's "They Were Eleven", Kyoko Hikawa's "From Far Away", Yû Watase's "", and Chiho Saito's "The World Exists For Me").


title: History of manga

text: Yet another such device involves meeting unusual or strange people and beings, for example, Natsuki Takaya's "Fruits Basket"—one of the most popular "shōjo" manga in the United States—whose orphaned heroine Tohru must survive living in the woods in a house filled with people who can transform into the animals of the Chinese zodiac. In Harako Iida's "Crescent Moon", heroine Mahiru meets a group of supernatural beings, finally to discover that she herself too has a supernatural ancestry when she and a young tengu demon fall in love.


title: History of manga

text: With the superheroines, "shōjo" manga continued to break away from neo-Confucianist norms of female meekness and obedience. Naoko Takeuchi's "Sailor Moon" ("Bishōjo Senshi Sēramūn": "Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon") is a sustained, 18-volume narrative about a group of young heroines simultaneously heroic and introspective, active and emotional, dutiful and ambitious. The combination proved extremely successful, and "Sailor Moon" became internationally popular in both manga and anime formats. Another example is CLAMP's "Magic Knight Rayearth," whose three young heroines, Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu, are magically transported to the world of Cefiro to become armed magical warriors in the service of saving Cefiro from internal and external enemies.


title: History of manga

text: The superheroine subgenre also extensively developed the notion of teams ("sentai") of girls working together, like the "Sailor Senshi" in "Sailor Moon", the Magic Knights in "Magic Knight Rayearth", and the Mew Mew girls from Mia Ikumi's "Tokyo Mew Mew". By today, the superheroine narrative template has been widely used and parodied within the "shōjo" manga tradition (e.g., Nao Yazawa's "Wedding Peach" and "Hyper Rune" by Tamayo Akiyama) and outside that tradition, e.g., in "bishōjo" comedies like Kanan's "Galaxy Angel".


title: History of manga

text: In the mid-1980s and after that, as girls who had read "shōjo" manga as teenagers matured and entered the job market, "shōjo" manga elaborated subgenres directed at women in their 20s and 30s. This "Ladies Comic" or "redisu"-"josei" subgenre has dealt with themes of young adulthood: jobs, the emotions and problems of sexual intercourse, and friendships or love among women.


title: History of manga

text: Redisu manga retains many of the narrative stylistics of "shōjo" manga but has been drawn by and written for adult women. Redisu manga and art has often been, though not always, sexually explicit, but the content has characteristically been set into thematic narratives of pleasure and erotic arousal combined with emotional risk. Examples include Ryō Ramiya's "Luminous Girls", Masako Watanabe's "Kinpeibai" and the work of Shungicu Uchida Another subgenre of "shōjo"-"redisu" manga deals with emotional and sexual relationships among women ("akogare" and "yuri"), in work by Erica Sakurazawa, Ebine Yamaji, and Chiho Saito. Other subgenres of "shōjo"-"redisu" manga have also developed, e.g., fashion ("oshare") manga, like Ai Yazawa's "Paradise Kiss" and horror-vampire-gothic manga, like Matsuri Hino's "Vampire Knight", Kaori Yuki's "Cain Saga", and Mitsukazu Mihara's "DOLL", which interact with street fashions, costume play ("cosplay"), J-Pop music, and goth subcultures in various ways.


title: History of manga

text: By the start of the 21st century, manga for women and girls thus represented a broad spectrum of material for pre- and early teenagers to material for adult women.


title: History of manga

text: Manga for male readers can be characterized in different ways. One is by the age of its intended audience: boys up to 18 years old ("shōnen" manga) and young men 18 to 30 years old ("seinen" manga). Another approach is by content, including action-adventure often involving male heroes, slapstick humor, themes of honor, and sometimes explicit sex. Japanese uses different kanji for two closely allied meanings of "seinen"—青年 for "youth, young man" and 成年 for "adult, majority"—the second referring to pornographic manga aimed at grown men, also called "seijin" ("adult," 成人) manga. "Shōnen", "seinen", and "seijin" manga share a number of features in common.


title: History of manga

text: Boys and young men were among the earliest readers of manga after World War II. From the 1950s on, "shōnen" manga focused on topics thought to interest the archetypical boy: sci-tech subjects like robots and space travel, and heroic action-adventure. Early sh"ōnen" and "seinen" manga narratives often portrayed challenges to the protagonist’s abilities, skills, and maturity, stressing self-perfection, austere self-discipline, sacrifice in the cause of duty, and honorable service to society, community, family, and friends.


title: History of manga

text: Manga with solitary costumed superheroes like Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man did not become popular as a "shōnen" genre. An exception is Kia Asamiya's "", released in the US by DC Comics and in Japan by Kodansha. However, lone antiheroes occur in Takao Saito's "Golgo 13" and Koike and Kojima's "Lone Wolf and Cub". "Golgo 13" is about an assassin who puts his skills to the service of world peace and other social goals, and Ogami Itto, the swordsman-hero of "Lone Wolf and Cub", is a widower caring for his son Daigoro while he seeks vengeance against his wife's murderers. However, Golgo and Itto remain men throughout, and neither of them ever displays superpowers. Instead, these stories "journey into the hearts and minds of men" by remaining on the plane of human psychology and motivation.


title: History of manga

text: Many "shōnen" manga have science fiction and technology themes. Early examples in the robot subgenre included Tezuka’s "Astro Boy" (see above) and Fujiko F. Fujio's 1969 "Doraemon", about a robot cat and the boy he lives with, which was aimed at younger boys. The robot theme evolved extensively, from Mitsuteru Yokoyama's 1956 "Tetsujin 28-go" to later, more complex stories where the protagonist must not only defeat enemies, but learn to master himself and cooperate with the mecha he controls. Thus, in "Neon Genesis Evangelion" by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, Shinji struggles against the enemy and his father, and in "Vision of Escaflowne" by Katsu Aki, Van not only makes war against Dornkirk’s empire but must deal with his complex feelings for Hitomi, the heroine.


title: History of manga

text: Sports themes are also popular in manga for male readers. These stories stress self-discipline, depicting not only the excitement of sports competition but also character traits the hero needs to transcend his limitations and to triumph. Examples include boxing (Tetsuya Chiba's 1968-1973 "Tomorrow's Joe" and Rumiko Takahashi's 1987 "One-Pound Gospel") and basketball (Takehiko Inoue’s 1990 "Slam Dunk").


title: History of manga

text: Supernatural settings have been another source of action-adventure plots in shōnen and some shōjo manga in which the hero must master challenges. Sometimes the protagonist fails, as in Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's "Death Note", where protagonist Light Yagami receives a notebook from a Death God ("shinigami") that kills anyone whose name is written in it, and, in a "shōjo" manga example, Hakase Mizuki's "The Demon Ororon", whose protagonist abandons his demonic kingship of Hell to live and die on earth. Sometimes the protagonist himself is supernatural, like Kohta Hirano's "Hellsing", whose vampire hero Alucard battles reborn Nazis hellbent on conquering England, but the hero may also be (or was) human, battling an ever-escalating series of supernatural enemies (Hiromu Arakawa's "Fullmetal Alchemist", Nobuyuki Anzai's "Flame of Recca", and Tite Kubo's "Bleach").


title: History of manga

text: Military action-adventure stories set in the modern world, for example, about WWII, remained under suspicion of glorifying Japan’s Imperial history and have not become a significant part of the "shōnen" manga repertoire. Nonetheless, stories about fantasy or historical military adventure were not stigmatized, and manga about heroic warriors and martial artists have been extremely popular. Some are serious dramas, like Sanpei Shirato's "The Legend of Kamui" and "Rurouni Kenshin" by Nobuhiro Watsuki, but others contain strongly humorous elements, like Akira Toriyama's "Dragon Ball".


title: History of manga

text: Although stories about modern war and its weapons do exist, they deal as much or more with the psychological and moral problems of war as they do with sheer shoot-'em-up adventure. Examples include Seiho Takizawa's "Who Fighter", a retelling of Joseph Conrad's story "Heart of Darkness" about a renegade Japanese colonel set in WWII Burma, Kaiji Kawaguchi's "The Silent Service", about a Japanese nuclear submarine, and Motofumi Kobayashi's "Apocalypse Meow", about the Vietnam War told in talking animal format. Other battle and fight-oriented manga sometimes focus on criminal and espionage conspiracies to be overcome by the protagonist, such as in "Crying Freeman" by Kazuo Koike and Ryoichi Ikegami, "City Hunter" by Hojo Tsukasa, and the "shōjo" series "From Eroica with Love" by Yasuko Aoike, a long-running crime-espionage story combining adventure, action, and humor (and another example of how these themes occur across demographics).


title: History of manga

text: For manga critics Koji Aihara and Kentaro Takekuma, such battle stories endlessly repeat the same mindless themes of violence, which they sardonically label the "Shonen Manga Plot Shish Kebob", where fights follow fights like meat skewered on a stick. Other commentators suggest that fight sequences and violence in comics serve as a social outlet for otherwise dangerous impulses. Shōnen manga and its extreme warriorship have been parodied, for example, in Mine Yoshizaki's screwball comedy "Sgt. Frog" ("Keroro Gunso"), about a platoon of slacker alien frogs who invade the Earth and end up free-loading off the Hinata family in Tokyo.


title: History of manga

text: In early "shōnen" manga, men and boys played all the major roles, with women and girls having only auxiliary places as sisters, mothers, and occasionally girlfriends. Of the nine cyborgs in Shotaro Ishinomori's 1964 "Cyborg 009", only one is female, and she soon vanishes from the action. Some somewhat recent "shōnen" manga virtually omit women, e.g., the martial arts story "Baki the Grappler" by Itagaki Keisuke and the supernatural fantasy "Sand Land" by Akira Toriyama. However, by the 1980s, girls and women began to play increasingly important roles in "shōnen" manga, for example, Toriyama's 1980 "Dr. Slump", whose main character is the mischievous and powerful girl robot Arale Norimaki.


title: History of manga

text: The role of girls and women in manga for male readers has evolved considerably since Arale. One class is the pretty girl ("bishōjo"). Sometimes the woman is unattainable, but she is generally an object of the hero's emotional and sexual interest, like Belldandy from "Oh My Goddess!" by Kōsuke Fujishima and Shao-lin from "Guardian Angel Getten" by Minene Sakurano. In other stories, the hero is surrounded by such girls and women, as in "" by Ken Akamatsu and "Hanaukyo Maid Team" by Morishige. The male protagonist does not always succeed in forming a relationship with the woman, for example when Bright Honda and Aimi Komori fail to bond in "Shadow Lady" by Masakazu Katsura. In other cases, a successful couple's sexual activities are depicted or implied, like "Outlanders" by Johji Manabe. Other stories feature an initially naive hero subsequently learning how to deal and live with women emotionally and sexually, like Yota in "Video Girl Ai" by Masakazu Katsura, Train Man in "" by Hidenori Hara, and Makoto in "Futari Ecchi" by Katsu Aki. In erotic manga ("seijin" manga), often called "hentai" manga in the US, a sexual relationship is taken for granted and depicted explicitly, as in work by Toshiki Yui and in "Were-Slut" by Jiro Chiba and "Slut Girl" by Isutoshi. The result is a range of depictions of boys and men from naive to very sexually accustomed.


title: History of manga

text: Heavily armed female warriors ("sentō bishōjo") represent another class of girls and women in manga for male readers. Some "sentō bishōjo" are battle cyborgs, like Alita from "Battle Angel Alita" by Yukito Kishiro, Motoko Kusanagi from Masamune Shirow's "Ghost in the Shell", and Chise from Shin Takahashi's "Saikano". Others are human, like Attim M-Zak from Hiroyuki Utatane's "Seraphic Feather", Johji Manabe's Karula Olzen from "Drakuun", and Alita Forland (Falis) from Sekihiko Inui's "Murder Princess".


title: History of manga

text: As of 2013, national censorship laws and local ordinances remain in Japan. The public response to the publication of manga with sexual content or the depiction of nudity has been mixed. Series have an audience and sell well, but their publication also encounters opposition. In the early 1990s, the opposition resulted in the creation of "Harmful manga" lists and a shift in the publishing industry. By this time, large publishers had created a general manga demand. Still, the result is that they were also susceptible to public opinion in their markets. Faced with criticism from certain segments of the population and under pressure from industry groups to self-regulate, major publishing houses discontinued series, such as "Angel" and "1+2=Paradise", while smaller publication companies, not as susceptible to these forces, were able to fill the void.


title: History of manga

text: With the relaxation of censorship in Japan after the early 1990s, various forms of graphically drawn sexual content appeared in manga intended for male readers that correspondingly occurred in English translations. These depictions ranged from partial to total nudity through implied and explicit sexual intercourse through sadomasochism (SM), incest, rape, and sometimes zoophilia (bestiality). In some cases, rape and lust-murder themes came to the forefront, as in "Urotsukidōji" by Toshio Maeda and "Blue Catalyst" from 1994 by Kei Taniguchi, but these extreme elements are not commonplace in either untranslated or translated manga.


title: History of manga

text: "Gekiga" literally means "drama pictures" and refers to a form of "aesthetic realism" in manga. Gekiga style storytelling tends to be emotionally dark, adult-oriented, and sometimes deeply violent, focusing on the day-in, day-out realities of life, often drawn in gritty fashion. Gekiga arose in the late 1950s and 1960s partly from left-wing student and working class political activism and partly from the aesthetic dissatisfaction of young manga artists like Yoshihiro Tatsumi with existing manga. Examples include Sanpei Shirato's 1959–1962 "Chronicles of a Ninja's Military Accomplishments" ("Ninja Bugeichō"), the story of Kagemaru, the leader of a peasant rebellion in the 16th century, which dealt directly with oppression and class struggle, and Hiroshi Hirata's "Satsuma Gishiden", about uprisings against the Tokugawa shogunate.


title: History of manga

text: Gekiga can be seen as the Japanese equivalent of the graphic novel culture happening in Europe (Hugo Pratt, Didier Comes, Jacques Tardi) and in the U.S. (Will Eisners "A Contract with God", Art Spiegelmans Maus, Robert Crumbs autobiographical works) and in South America (Alberto Breccia, Hector Oesterheld). For that reason, typical graphic novel publishers such as Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics started publishing many English versions of Japanese Gekiga highlights in more recent years.


title: History of manga

text: As the social protest of these early years waned, gekiga shifted in meaning towards socially conscious, mature drama and towards the avant-garde. Examples include Koike and Kojima's "Lone Wolf and Cub" and "Akira", an apocalyptic tale of motorcycle gangs, street war, and inexplicable transformations of the children of a future Tokyo. Another example is Osamu Tezuka's 1976 manga "MW", a bitter story of the aftermath of the storage and possibly deliberate release of poison gas by U.S. armed forces based in Okinawa years after World War II. Gekiga and the social consciousness it embodies remain alive in modern-day manga. An example is "Ikebukuro West Gate Park" from 2001 by Ira Ishida and Sena Aritou, a story of street thugs, rape, and vengeance set on the social margins of the wealthy Ikebukuro district of Tokyo.


title: Docudrama

text: Docudrama (or documentary drama) is a genre of television and film, which features dramatized re-enactments of actual events. It is described as a hybrid of documentary and drama and "a fact-based representation of real event".


title: Docudrama

text: Docudramas typically strive to adhere to known historical facts, while allowing some degree of dramatic license in peripheral details, such as when there are gaps in the historical record. Dialogue may, or may not, include the actual words of real-life people, as recorded in historical documents. Docudrama producers sometimes choose to film their reconstructed events in the actual locations in which the historical events occurred.


title: Docudrama

text: A docudrama, in which historical fidelity is the keynote, is generally distinguished from a film merely "based on true events", a term which implies a greater degree of dramatic license; and from the concept of "historical drama", a broader category which may also encompass entirely fictionalized action taking place in historical settings or against the backdrop of historical events.


title: Docudrama

text: As a portmanteau, "docudrama" is sometimes confused with "docufiction". However, unlike docufiction—which is essentially a documentary filmed in real time, incorporating some fictional elements—docudrama is filmed at a time subsequent to the events portrayed.


title: Docudrama

text: The docudrama genre is a reenactment of actual historical events. However it makes no promise of being entirely accurate in its interpretation. It blends fact and fiction for its recreation and its quality depends on factors like budget and production time. The filmmaker Leslie Woodhead presents the docudrama dilemma in the following manner:


title: Docudrama

text: Docudramas producers use literary and narrative techniques to flesh out the bare facts of an event in history to tell a story. Some degree of license is often taken with minor historical facts for the sake of enhancing the drama. Docudramas are distinct from historical fiction, in which the historical setting is a mere backdrop for a plot involving fictional characters.


title: Docudrama

text: The scholar Steven N. Lipkin considers docudrama as a form of performance through recollection which in turn shapes our collective memory of past events. It is a mode of representation. Educator Benicia D’sa maintained that docudramas are heavily impacted by filmmakers’ own perspectives and understanding of history.


title: Docudrama

text: The impulse to incorporate historical material into literary texts has been an intermittent feature of literature in the west since its earliest days. Aristotle's theory of art is based on the use of putatively historical events and characters. Especially after the development of modern mass-produced literature, there have been genres that relied on history or then-current events for material. English Renaissance drama, for example, developed subgenres specifically devoted to dramatizing recent murders and notorious cases of witchcraft.


title: Docudrama

text: However, docudrama as a separate category belongs to the second half of the twentieth century. Louis de Rochemont, creator of "The March of Time", became a producer at 20th Century Fox in 1943. There he brought the newsreel aesthetic to films, producing a series of movies based upon real events using a realistic style that became known as semidocumentary. The films ("The House on 92nd Street", "Boomerang", "13 Rue Madeleine") were imitated, and the style soon became used even for completely-fictional stories, such as "The Naked City". Perhaps the most significant of the semidocumentary films was "He Walked by Night" (1948), based upon an actual case. Jack Webb had a supporting role in the movie and struck up a friendship with the LAPD consultant, Sergeant Marty Wynn. The film and his relationship with Wynn inspired Webb to create "Dragnet", one of the most famous docudramas in history.


title: Docudrama

text: The particular portmanteau term "docudrama" was coined in 1957 by Philip C. Lewis (1904-1979), of Tenafly, New Jersey, a former vaudevillian and stage actor turned playwright and author, in connection with a production he wrote, in response to the defeat of a local school-funding referendum, for the Tenafly Citizens' Education Council addressing "the development of education and its significance in American life." Lewis trademarked the term "DocuDrama" in 1967 (expired, 1992) for a production company of the same name.


title: Docudrama

text: The influence of New Journalism tended to create a license for authors to treat with literary techniques material that might in an earlier age have been approached in a purely journalistic way. Both Truman Capote and Norman Mailer were influenced by this movement, and Capote's "In Cold Blood" is arguably the most famous example of the genre.


title: Docudrama

text: Some docudrama examples for American television include "Brian's Song" (1971), and "Roots" (1977). "Brian's Song" is the biography of Brian Piccolo, a Chicago Bears football player who died at a young age after battling cancer. "Roots" depicts the life of a slave and his family.


title: Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke

text: Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke () is a 1993 Indian romantic comedy-drama film, directed by Mahesh Bhatt and produced by Tahir Hussain, with screenplay written by Aamir Khan and Robin Bhatt, and with a musical score by Nadeem-Shravan. It stars Aamir Khan and Juhi Chawla in the lead roles, with Sharokh Bharucha and Kunal Khemu in supporting roles. Upon release, the film received positive reviews from critics, with particular praise directed towards Chawla's performance, for which she won the Filmfare Award for Best Actress at the 39th Filmfare Awards. The film has also garnered the National Film Award – Special Jury Award / Special Mention (Feature Film), and the Filmfare Award for Best Film. The film's plot is heavily inspired by the 1958 film "House Boat". The film was remade in Telugu as "Bhale Maavayya" starring Suman.


title: Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke

text: Rahul Malhotra is the caretaker of a garment company that has a pending order of one lakh shirts to Mr Bijlani. Rahul is also the guardian of his deceased sister's mischievous kids: Sunny, Munni, and Vicky. He finds it hard to control the kids, as he is new to this. When the kids cause trouble, Rahul punishes them by locking them in their room. However, the children escape and head for a carnival in town.


title: Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke

text: Vyjayanti is the bubbly daughter of a South Indian businessman and music-lover. Her father wants her to marry Natarajan, a South Indian music legend, who is somewhat creepy. Vyjayanti refuses to marry him; as punishment, she is also locked up and escapes. She meets the three kids at the carnival and they become friends. Vyjayanti explains that she has no home so the children invite her to stay with them.


title: Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke

text: The children go to great lengths to hide Vyjayanti from Rahul. In a row of hilarious sequences, they are always one step ahead of Rahul before he can discover Vyjayanti. Two nights later however, Vyjayanti is revealed. Initially angry, Rahul sees that the children love her so he gives her a job as the children's governess. Vyjayanti begins to live with Rahul and the kids and slowly falls in love with him.


title: Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke

text: And then there enters seductive, glitzy Maya, Bijlani's daughter, who is obsessed with Rahul. She wants to marry Rahul, and Rahul approves, deciding that it would benefit the children. When Vyjayanti and the children find out about Maya and Rahul's upcoming engagement ceremony, Vyjayanti is heartbroken and the kids are upset, as they dislike Maya. On the day of the engagement, Vyjayanti explains to the kids that she loves Rahul and wants to marry him. The kids come up with a plan to stop the engagement. They crash the party with a dramatic act, which successfully postpones the engagement but angers Rahul. Back home, he scolds Vyjayanti and she admits that she loves him, shocking him.


title: Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke

text: The next morning, Bijlani comes with Maya to offer Rahul a second chance. Rahul defends Vyjayanti against their insults, thereby expressing his own love for her. The mischievous kids chase Bijlani and Maya out of the house with rotten eggs and tomatoes. As revenge, Bijlani and Maya set on auctioning Rahul's house. Rahul asks his workers to work overtime to make up for the shirt orders, which the supportive workers agree to. A successful two lakh shirts are made and loaded onto a truck to be delivered to Bijlani. Bijlani hires some thugs to ensure that the truck doesn't arrive on time. Much to their distaste, Rahul arrives on time with the order, and Bijlani and Maya are arrested.


title: Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke

text: Vyjayanti is reunited with her father, who disapproves of her marrying anyone outside the Iyer clan. All the factory workers, Rahul's colleagues, and the children ask him to allow Rahul and Vyjayanti to marry. With so much persistence, he accepts and Vyjayanti and Rahul are married in a South Indian ceremony.


title: Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke

text: The soundtrack of the movie was composed by the music duo Nadeem Sharvan and lyrics were contributed by Sameer. Songs like 'Ghunghat Ki Aad Se', 'Kaash Koi Ladka Mujhe Pyaar Karta', 'Woh Meri Neend Mera Chain Mujhe' and 'Bombai Se Gayi Poona' became extremely popular. The song "Yunhi Kat Jaayega Safar Saath" is based on "Endhan Nenjil" from "Kalaignan".


title: Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke

text: "Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke" was a 'superhit' at the box office. It was also one of the biggest hits of 1993. The performances of Juhi Chawla and Aamir Khan were critically acclaimed. Juhi Chawla became the box office queen of 1993, with multiple consecutive hit films like Lootere, Aaina, Shatranj, Izzat ki Roti & Darr becoming big box office successes, thus solidifying her career as the top actress of the 1990s.


title: Mad Dog (TV series)

text: It aired on KBS2, from October 11, 2017 to November 30, 2017 on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 22:00 (KST) for 16 episodes.


title: Mad Dog (TV series)

text: Choi Kang-woo is a former police and leader of Taeyang Insurance's investigators team, decides to create his own investigation team, Mad Dog, after an airplane crash that took the life of his wife and son. Two years later, he meets Kim Min-joon, a genius former swindler who is the younger brother of Kim Beom-joon, the co-pilot of the crashed JH 801 airplane, who was touted of crashing the aircraft on purpose in a suicide attempt.


title: Adam Delimkhanov

text: Adam Sultanovich Delimkhanov (; born 25 September 1969) is a Russian politician of Chechen ethnicity, who has been member of the Russian State Duma since 2007. He is a member of the United Russia. He heads the Chechen branch of Rosgvardia.


title: Adam Delimkhanov

text: A close associate and cousin of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, Delimkhanov headed the police division that protected Chechen oil facilities from 2003 to 2006. He was appointed deputy prime minister overseeing security forces in 2006. The next year he was elected to the Russian State Duma on a Vladimir Putin-led United Russia party ticket.


title: Adam Delimkhanov

text: A Chechen exile, Umar Israilov, murdered in Vienna in January 2009, had accused Delimkhanov of beating him in Kadyrov's presence. Delimkhanov declined requests for comment on the allegation. In April 2009, the Dubai police blamed Delimkhanov for having ordered the assassination of the former Chechen warlord and Russian military commander Sulim Yamadayev. Delimkhanov denied the accusation, saying it was a provocation directed to destabilize Chechnya and that he is preparing to sue Dubai police for libel.


title: Adam Delimkhanov

text: As of April 2009, Delimkhanov—along with six other Russian citizens—is wanted by Dubai, one of the emirates of the UAE, in connection with the murder of Sulim Yamadayev, via Interpol.


title: Adam Delimkhanov

text: In July 2014, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Delimkhanov. These sanctions include freezing of assets in the United States and a ban on commercial transactions.


title: Adam Delimkhanov

text: On 1 February, 2022, Delimkhanov shared a video on Instagram threatening human rights lawyer Abubakar Yangulbaev and his family with death. "We will pursue you until we cut off your heads and kill you," he said in the video that was denounced by Amnesty International. In January, Yangulbaev's mother was abducted by Kadyrov's forces.


title: Adam Delimkhanov

text: According to Kadyrov, Delimkhanov participated in the Siege of Mariupol during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine as commander of the Chechen forces in the engagement. On the 26th of April 2022, it was announced by Kadyrov that Delimkhanov has received the Hero of the Russian Federation honorary award by decree of the President, Vladimir Putin.


title: Adam Delimkhanov

text: In the ranking of 500 Russian billionaires compiled by "Finans." magazine in early 2011, Adam Delimkhanov took 314th place. His capital was estimated at 300 million dollars or 9.1 billion rubles. According to official figures for 2011, Delimkhanov received an income of 1.9 million rubles, and his wife 187 thousand rubles.<ref name="Old.duma.gov.ru/structure/deputies/131490/_2020-07-16"></ref>


title: Eurasian wren

text: The Eurasian wren (Troglodytes troglodytes) or northern wren is a very small insectivorous bird, and the only member of the wren family Troglodytidae found in Eurasia and Africa (Maghreb). In Anglophone Europe, it is commonly known simply as the wren. It has a very short tail which is often held erect, a short neck and a relative long thin bill. It is russet brown above, paler buff-brown below and has a cream buff supercilium. The sexes are alike.


title: Eurasian wren

text: The species was once lumped with "Troglodytes hiemalis" of eastern North America and "Troglodytes pacificus" of western North America as the winter wren. The Eurasian wren occurs in Europe and across the Palearctic – including a belt of Asia from northern Iran and Afghanistan across to Japan. It is migratory in only the northern parts of its range. It is also highly polygynous, an unusual mating system for passerines.


title: Eurasian wren

text: The scientific name is taken from the Greek word "troglodytes" (from τρώγλη "hole", and δῠ́ειν , "creep"), meaning "hole-dweller", and refers to its habit of disappearing into cavities or crevices whilst hunting arthropods or to roost. The taxonomy of the genus "Troglodytes" is currently unresolved, as recent molecular studies have suggested that "Cistothorus" spp. and "Thryorchilus" spp. are within the clade currently defined by "Troglodytes".


title: Eurasian wren

text: The Eurasian wren was described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his "Systema Naturae" under the binomial name "Motacilla troglodytes". The specific epithet is from the Ancient Greek "" meaning "cave-dweller". In 1555 the German naturalist Conrad Gessner had used the Latin name "Passer troglodyte" for the Eurasian wren in his "Historiae animalium". The species is now placed in the genus "Troglodytes" that was introduced by the French ornithologist Louis Pierre Vieillot in 1809.


title: Eurasian wren

text: The Eurasian wren was formerly considered conspecific with two North American species: the winter wren ("Troglodytes hiemalis") and the Pacific wren ("Troglodytes pacificus"). Some ornithologists place the Eurasian wren, the winter wren and the Pacific wren in a separate genus "Nannus" that was introduced by the Swedish naturalist Gustaf Johan Billberg in 1828 with the Eurasian wren as the type species.


title: Eurasian wren

text: It was estimated that "Troglodytes pacificus" and "Troglodytes troglodytes" last shared a common ancestor approximately 4.3 million years ago, long before the glacial cycles of the Pleistocene, thought to have promoted speciation in many avian lineages inhabiting the boreal forest of North America.


title: Eurasian wren

text: There are 28 recognised subspecies of this taxonomically complex bird. The disputed subspecies "T. t. ", the Daito wren, became extinct around 1940 – if it was indeed a valid taxon and not merely based on an anomaly. Thus in Scotland, in addition to the typical bird "T. t. indigenus", there are three distinct insular subspecies: one, "T. t. hirtensis", is confined to the island of St Kilda; another, "T. t. zetlandicus", to the Shetland Islands; and the third, "T. t. fridariensis", to Fair Isle. The St Kilda wren is greyer above, whiter beneath, with more abundant bars on the back; the Shetland wren and Fair Isle wren are darker.


title: Eurasian wren

text: The Eurasian wren is a plump, sturdy bird with rounded wings and a short tail, which is usually held cocked up. The adult bird is in length and has a wingspan of . It weighs around . It is rufous brown above, greyer beneath, and indistinctly barred with darker brown and grey, even on the wings and tail. The bill is dark brown and the legs are pale brown, the feet having strong claws and a large hind toe. Young birds are less distinctly barred and have mottled underparts. The plumage is subject to considerable variation, and where populations have been isolated, the variation has become fixed in one minor form or another.


title: Eurasian wren

text: The most common call is a sharp, repeated "tic-tic-tic", similar but faster and with less isolated notes compared to that of a robin. When the bird is annoyed or excited, its call runs into an emphatic "", not unlike clockwork running down. The song is a gushing burst of sweet music, clear, shrill and emphatic. The male has remarkably long and complex vocalizations, with a series of tinkling trills one after the other for seconds on end. The bird has an enormous voice for its size, ten times louder, weight for weight, than a cockerel. The song begins with a few preliminary notes, then runs into a trill, slightly ascending, and ends in full clear notes or another trill. At any season the song may be heard, though it is most noticeable during spring. Despite its generally mouse-like behaviour, the male may sing from an exposed low perch as its whole body quivers from the effort. Its song may sometimes be confused with that of the dunnock, which has a warble that is shorter and weaker. The wren's song also incorporates repeated trill sounds while the dunnock's does not.


title: Eurasian wren

text: The Eurasian wren is a Palearctic species. The nominate race breeds in Europe as far north as 67°N in Norway and 64°N in Sweden, Finland and Russia. The bird's southern limit is northern Spain, southern France, Italy, Sicily and southern Russia. It also breeds in Western Asia as far east as Syria. It is replaced by other races in Iceland, the Faroe Islands, the Shetlands, the Hebrides, and St Kilda, and further south in northwestern Africa, Spain and Portugal, the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, Crete and Cyprus. Other races also occur in southern Russia and Japan.


title: Eurasian wren

text: It occupies a great variety of habitats, typically any kind of cultivated or uncultivated area with bushes and low ground cover; gardens, hedgerows, thickets, plantations, woodland and reed beds. It inhabits more open locations with clumps of brambles or gorse, rough pasture, moorland, boulder-strewn slopes, rocky coasts and sea cliffs.


title: Eurasian wren

text: The wren is an ever-active bird, constantly on the move foraging for insects, in the open or among thick vegetation. It moves with quick jerks, probing into crevices, examining old masonry, hopping onto fallen logs and delving down among them. It sometimes moves higher in the canopy, but for the most part stays near the ground, often being flushed from under overhangs on banks. Sometimes it hops up the lower part of tree trunks, behaving like a miniature nuthatch. Occasionally it flits away, its short flights swift and direct but not sustained, its tiny round wings whirring as it flies.


title: Eurasian wren

text: This small, stump-tailed wren is almost as familiar in Europe as the robin. It is mouse-like, easily lost sight of when it is hunting for food, but is found everywhere from the tops of the highest moors to the sea coast.


title: Eurasian wren

text: It is a bird of the uplands even in winter, vanishing into the heather when snow lies thick above, a troglodyte indeed. It frequents gardens and farms, but it is quite as abundant in thick woods and in reed-beds.


title: Eurasian wren

text: At night, usually in winter, it often roosts, true to its scientific name, in dark retreats, snug holes and even old nests. In hard weather, it may do so in parties, consisting of either the family or of many individuals gathered together for warmth.


title: Eurasian wren

text: In most of northern Europe and Asia, it nests mostly in coniferous forests, where it is often identified by its long and exuberant song. Although it is an insectivore, it can remain in moderately cold and even snowy climates by foraging for insects on substrates such as bark and fallen logs. The male wren builds several nests in his territory; these are called "cock nests" but are never lined until the female chooses one to use. The number of nests on a territory influences the female's choice of mate; she preferentially mates with a male that had constructed numerous nests. Courtship includes display and posturing by the male. He sings with wings and tail half open, or with them drooping, sometimes with one wing extended, or the wings may be raised and lowered several times in quick succession.


title: Eurasian wren

text: The neatly-domed nest has a side entrance and is built of grass, moss, lichen and dead leaves, whatever is available locally. It is often tucked into a hole in a wall or tree trunk or a crack in a rock, but it is often built in brambles, a bush or a hedge, among ivy on a bank, in thatch, or in abandoned bird's nests such as those of the house sparrow, swallow, house martin and dipper. On making her selection, the female wren lines the nest generously with feathers.


title: Eurasian wren

text: A clutch of five or six (range three to eleven) eggs are laid from April onwards. These average and are white with variable amounts of reddish-brown speckles, mostly on the broad end. The female alone incubates these, and they hatch after 14 to 15 days. The young are fed on insects, spiders and other small invertebrates; there is no record of the male feeding the young in the nest, but he does do so after they have fledged, which happens after about 16 days. There are usually two broods.


title: Eurasian wren

text: Wrens are highly polygamous, that is to say a male can have, at any one time, more than one female with an active nest on his territory. An active nest is one in which there are eggs or nestlings. A male has been recorded with four females breeding on his territory. Bigamy and trigamy are the most common forms of polygamy.


title: Eurasian wren

text: Insects form the bulk of the diet; these are chiefly the larvae of butterflies and moths, such as geometer moths and owlet moths, as well as beetle larvae, fly larvae, caddisfly larvae and aphids. Other dietary items include spiders, and some seeds are also taken. The young are largely fed on moth larvae, with caterpillars of the cabbage moth and crane fly larvae having been identified.


title: Eurasian wren

text: In European folklore, the wren is the king of the birds, according to a fable attributed to Aesop by Plutarch, when the eagle and the wren strove to fly the highest, the wren rested on the eagle's back, and when the eagle tired, the wren flew out above him. Thus, Plutarch implied, the wren proved that cleverness is better than strength. The wren's majesty is recognized in such stories as the Grimm Brothers' "The Willow-Wren and the Bear". Aristotle and Plutarch called the wren (king) and (little king). In German, the wren is called "Zaunkönig" (king of the fence). An old German name was “Schneekönig” (snow king), and in Dutch, it is “winterkoning” (winter king), which all refer to "king". In Japan, the wren is labelled king of the winds, and the myth of "The Wren Among the Hawks" sees the wren successfully hunt a boar that the hawks could not, by flying into its ear and driving it mad.


title: Eurasian wren

text: It was a sacred bird to the Druids, who considered it "king of all birds", and used its musical notes for divination. The shape-shifting Fairy Queen took the form of a wren, known as "Jenny Wren" in nursery rhymes. A wren's feather was thought to be a charm against disaster or drowning.


title: Eurasian wren

text: The wren also features in the legend of Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who supposedly was betrayed by the noisy bird as he attempted to hide from his enemies. Traditionally, St. Stephen's Day (26 December) has been commemorated by "Hunting the Wren", wherein young wrenboys would catch the bird and then ritually parade it around town, as described in the traditional "Wren Song". "The Wren, the Wren, the king of all birds, St. Stephen's day was caught in the furze. Although he is little, his family's great, I pray you, good landlady, give us a treat". The tradition, and the significance of the wren as a symbol and sacrifice of the old year, is discussed in Sir James Frazer's "The Golden Bough".


title: Eurasian wren

text: According to Suetonius, the assassination of Julius Caesar was foretold by an unfortunate wren. On the day before the Ides of March, a wren was seen being pursued in a frenzy by various other birds. With a conspicuous sprig of laurel clamped in its beak, the wren flew desperately into the Roman Senate, but there its pursuers overtook it and tore it to pieces.


title: Entry of women to Sabarimala

text: Sabarimala is a temple dedicated to Shasta in Pathanamthitta District, Kerala, India. Women and girls of reproductive age were traditionally not permitted to worship there, as Shasta is a celibate deity. A Kerala high court provided a legal justification for this tradition, and from 1991 on, women were legally forbidden to enter the temple.


title: Entry of women to Sabarimala

text: In September 2018, a judgement of the Supreme Court of India ruled that all Hindu pilgrims, regardless of gender, could enter the temple. The Constitution bench of the Supreme Court held that "any exception placed on women because of biological differences violates the Constitution." Specifically, the court held that the ban violated the right to equality under Article 14 and the right to freedom of religion under Article 25.


title: Entry of women to Sabarimala

text: This verdict led to protests by millions of Ayyappan devotees who opposed the verdict. A month later, about ten female activists attempted to enter the temple despite threats of physical assault. They were unsuccessful. In the early hours of 2 January 2019, two women activists entered the temple through the rear gate in defiance of ongoing protest. When they heard that women had entered Sabarimala, the temple priests and authorities closed the temple for purification rituals.


title: Entry of women to Sabarimala

text: One legend concerns Ayyappan, the celibate deity of Sabarimala Temple, and the evil demoness Mahushasuri whom he defeated in battle. Mahushasuri had been cursed to live the life of a demoness until the child born to Shiva and Vishnu defeated her in a battle. Ayyappan, the abandoned son of Shiva and Mohini (an incarnation of Vishnu), could therefore set her free after defeating her. She transformed into a beautiful woman after her defeat. After the battle, the young woman proposed marriage to Ayyappan. However, he refused, explaining that he had been ordained to go to the forest, live the life of a brahmachari and answer the prayers of devotees. However, the young woman was persistent, so Ayyappan promised to marry her the day "kanni-swamis" , or new devotees, stopped visiting Sabarimala Temple. Sabarimala was visited by kanni-swamis every year, and she was not able to marry Ayyappan. The woman is worshipped as the goddess Malikappurathamma at a neighbouring temple.


title: Entry of women to Sabarimala

text: According to the "Memoir of the Survey of the Travancore and Cochin States", women of reproductive age had been denied entry to the Sabarimala temple since at least the 19th century. Lieutenants Benjamin Swain Ward and Peter Eyre Conner, who completed the survey at the end of 1820, reported that, at the time, "Old women and young girls may approach the temple, but those who have attained the age of puberty and to a certain time in life are forbidden to approach, as all sexual intercourse in that vicinity is averse to this deity (Lord Ayyappa)."


title: Entry of women to Sabarimala

text: Before 1991, when the Kerala High Court forbade the entry of women to Sabarimala, various women had visited the temple, although mostly for non-religious reasons. There are records of women pilgrims visiting the temple to conduct the first rice-feeding ceremony of their children (called Chorounu) at the temple premises. On 13 May 1940, even the Maharani of Thiruvithamkoor visited the temple. In 1986, when young actresses Jayashree, Sudha Chandran, Anu, Vadivukkarasi and Manorama danced near the deity at the "pathinettam padi" (18 steps) for the Tamil movie "Nambinar Keduvathillai", a fine of Rs. 1000 each was imposed on the actresses and the director. The Devaswom Board, which maintains the temple and premises, was also fined Rs. 7500, because it had given the director permission to film at Sabarimala. Former Karnataka minister Jayamala has also claimed to have entered Sabarimala and touched the idol in 1986, when she was a young woman.


title: Entry of women to Sabarimala

text: In 1990, the rice feeding ceremony for the granddaughter of a former Devaswom commissioner was held at Sabarimala in the presence of female relatives. Following a court case in connection with this event, the high court of Kerala prohibited women and girls between 10 and 50 from entering Sabarimala. In 1995, the district collector Valsala Kumari, aged 42, visited the Sabarimala shrine (although she did not climb the "pathinettam padi", or 18 steps, to the inner sanctum) under special permission. Her goal was to obtain first-hand information about the conditions at the temple in connection with her official duties. In doing so, she was the first woman recognised as legitimate by the temple's authorities. In the same year, the local press reported that two young women, possibly wives of VIPs, had entered the shrine despite police oversight. In January 2018, temple authorities made it mandatory for female devotees to provide proof of their age when visiting Sabarimala.