title: Dominic Keating

text: Keating had success on the UK stage before working as a television and film actor. He originated the roles of Cosmo in Philip Ridley's "The Pitchfork Disney", and Bryan in Michael Wall's "Amongst Barbarians", for which he won a Mobil Award. He has also done stage work in the UK and Los Angeles, including the one-man play "The Christian Brothers" at King's Cross, "The Best Years of Your Life" at the Man in the Moon Theatre, "Screamers" at the Edinburgh Playhouse Festival, and "Alfie" at the Tiffany Theater.


title: Dominic Keating

text: Keating first received major attention in the UK with a semi-regular role as Tony in the Channel 4 sitcom "Desmond's" (1989–95). He went on to a role in "Inspector Morse", and other guest-starring roles.


title: Dominic Keating

text: After moving to the US, he gained the role of the demonic warrior Mallos on the short-lived 2000 series "The Immortal", and starred in the Zalman King series "chromiumblue.com". He also made guest appearances on "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", "G vs E" and "Special Unit 2", and several other series before landing a major television role as Lieutenant Malcolm Reed on "," which ran for four seasons. Since then, he has had guest roles on the series "Las Vegas", "Holby City" and the "" episode "Uncertainty Rules".


title: Dominic Keating

text: Keating joined the cast of the hit show "Heroes" for its second season, playing an Irish mobster in a four-episode arc. He also guest-starred for three episodes on the Fox TV series "Prison Break," and in 2010 guest-starred on the FX original series "Sons of Anarchy".


title: Dominic Keating

text: Keating has appeared in films including "The Hollywood Sign" and "The Auteur Theory," and will be seen in the upcoming "Certifiably Jonathan" and "Hollywood Kills," and heard in Robert Zemeckis' animated version of "Beowulf". At a Star Trek convention in Sacramento, California on 9 September 2006, he announced he had been cast as an Australian scientist in the "Species" sequel "Species IV". He has also recently appeared in several short films, including Tim Russ's "Plugged" (2007), a satire on modern advertising. He also appears as Sherlock Holmes's brother in the film "Sherlock Holmes" (2010) by the Asylum, and provided a voice-over in the Ricky Gervais film "The Invention of Lying" (2009).


title: Dominic Keating

text: Keating had a commercial voiceover role in an early 1990s Vidal Sassoon commercial, where his British pronunciation of "salon" resulted in a spoof on "Saturday Night Live". He has recorded audiobooks, and voiced (uncredited) the minor character 'Mouse' in BioWare's "". He recently appeared in commercials for Sprint/Nextel as fictitious British rock star Ian Westbury.


title: Dominic Keating

text: Keating has been confirmed as the voice of "Kormac the Templar" in the PC game "Diablo 3" by Blizzard Entertainment. He was the voice of Gremlin Prescott in "," having provided Prescott's vocal effects in the previous game.


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: The 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup was the nineteenth edition of the FIFA U-20 World Cup, since its inception in 1977 as the FIFA World Youth Championship. It ran from 21 June to 13 July 2013. At the FIFA Executive Meeting in Zürich on 3 March 2011, Turkey beat other bids to host the series games, from host competition by the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan. In its bid, Turkey suggested the use of thirteen stadiums in ten of its cities, before deciding in February 2012, that seven cities would play host to games.


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: This tournament marked the first time in its history that neither Argentina nor Brazil (the most successful teams in the competition) qualified. It was also only the second time that Brazil had not taken part (the first time was the 1979 edition).


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: France won the tournament and their first U-20 World Cup, and thus became the first nation to win all five FIFA 11-a-side men's titles (FIFA World Cup, FIFA Confederations Cup, FIFA U-20 World Cup, FIFA U-17 World Cup, and Olympic gold medal).


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: At the deadline date of 17 January 2011, three member associations confirmed they would be bidding for the event. Neither Turkey nor Uzbekistan had ever been hosts to a FIFA competition, while the United Arab Emirates were hosts of the U-20s in 2003.


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: To mark the one year countdown date to the competition, FIFA, as well as members of the Turkish FA, announced that the emblem would be presented to the media on 25 June 2012 at Ciragan Palace Mabeyn Hall in Istanbul. Details of the ticketing access were made publicly available on 30 November 2012.


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: Host city logos for each participating stadium were shown to the general public on 20 March 2013, with each taking inspiration from their surroundings. The official logo included an Evil Eye protector, worn or hung inside Turkish homes to bring luck.


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: The official theme song for the tournament was "Yıldızlar Buradan Yükseliyor", which is translated as "Building Bridges for Rising Stars", performed by Turkish rock band Gece.


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: On 12 February 2013, FIFA announced the procedure of the draw. The 24 teams were divided into four differing pots:


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: Turkey was assigned to position C1, and Spain was assigned to Group A. As a basic principle, teams from the same confederation could not be drawn against each other at the group stage, except in Group A where there were two teams from UEFA.


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: As the CAF U-20 Championship was not completed at the time of the draw, a separate draw took place at the tournament's conclusion on 30 March in Oran, Algeria to determine the groups where the second, third and fourth-placed CAF teams would play in. As the OFC U-20 Championship was realize after at time of the draw, New Zealand appared in Pot 1 as OFC Champion.


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: Teams had to name a 21-man squad (three of whom had to be goalkeepers) by the FIFA deadline. The squads were announced by FIFA on 14 June 2013.


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: The winners and runners-up from each group, as well as the best four third-placed teams, qualified for the first round of the knockout stage (round of 16).


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: If two or more teams were equal on the basis of the above three criteria, their rankings were determined as follows:


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: In the knockout stages, if a match was level at the end of normal playing time, extra time was played (two periods of fifteen minutes each) and followed, if necessary, by a penalty shoot-out to determine the winner, except for the play-off for third place, where no extra time would be played as the match was played directly before the final.


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: The winners were the first team to receive an updated version of the trophy, with Rebecca Cusack and Thomas R. Fattorini of Thomas Fattorini Ltd, Birmingham taking over from Sawaya & Moroni as suppliers of FIFA competitions.


title: 2013 FIFA U-20 World Cup

text: A “vanishing spray” made its FIFA debut (versions were already in use in CONCACAF and CONMEBOL competitions) during this tournament, with referees using it to denote the ten-yard mark for an opposing defence at time of free kicks.


title: Ceasefire

text: A ceasefire (also known as a truce or armistice), also spelled cease fire (the antonym of 'open fire'), is a temporary stoppage of a war in which each side agrees with the other to suspend aggressive actions. Ceasefires may be between state actors or involve non-state actors.


title: Ceasefire

text: Ceasefires may be declared as part of a formal treaty, but also as part of an informal understanding between opposing forces. They may occur via mediation or otherwise as part of a peace process or be imposed by United Nations Security Council resolutions via Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.


title: Ceasefire

text: The immediate goal of a ceasefire is to stop violence, but the underlying purposes of ceasefires vary. Ceasefires may be intended to meet short-term limited needs (such as providing humanitarian aid), manage a conflict to make it less devastating, or advance efforts to peacefully resolve a dispute. An actor may not always intend for a ceasefire to advance the peaceful resolution of a conflict, but instead give the actor an upper hand in the conflict (for example, by re-arming and reposition forces or attacking an unsuspecting adversary), which creates bargaining problems that may make ceasefires less likely to be implemented and less likely to be durable if implemented.


title: Ceasefire

text: The durability of ceasefire agreements is affected by several factors, such as demilitarized zones, withdrawal of troops and third-party guarantees and monitoring (e.g. peacekeeping). Ceasefire agreements are more likely to be durable when they reduce incentives to attack, reduce uncertainty about the adversary's intentions, and when mechanisms are put in place to prevent and control accidents from developing into conflict.


title: Ceasefire

text: Ceasefire agreements are more likely to be reached when the costs of conflict are high and when the actors in a conflict have lower audience costs. Scholars emphasize that war termination is more likely to occur when actors have more information about each other, when actors can make credible commitments, and when the domestic political situation makes it possible for leaders to make war termination agreements without incurring domestic punishment.


title: Ceasefire

text: By one estimate, there were at least 2202 ceasefires across 66 countries in 109 civil conflicts over the period 1989–2020.


title: Ceasefire

text: Historically, the concept of a ceasefire existed at least by the time of the Middle Ages, when it was known as a 'truce of God'.


title: Ceasefire

text: During World War I, on December 24, 1914, there was an unofficial ceasefire on the Western Front as France, the United Kingdom, and Germany observed Christmas. There are accounts that claimed the unofficial ceasefire took place throughout the week leading to Christmas, and that British and German troops exchanged seasonal greetings and songs between their trenches. The ceasefire was brief but spontaneous. Beginning when German soldiers lit Christmas trees, it quickly spread up and down the Western Front. One account described the development in the following words:


title: Ceasefire

text: It was good to see the human spirit prevailed amongst all sides at the front, the sharing and fraternity. All was well until the higher echelons of command got to hear about the effect of the ceasefire, whereby their wrath ensured a return to hostilities.


title: Ceasefire

text: The Karachi Agreement of 1949 was signed by the military representatives of India and Pakistan, supervised by the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan, establishing a cease-fire line in Kashmir following the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947.


title: Ceasefire

text: On November 29, 1952, the US president-elect, Dwight D. Eisenhower, went to Korea to see how to end the Korean War. With the UN's acceptance of India's proposed armistice, the ceasefire of the Korean People's Army (KPA), the People's Volunteer Army (PVA), and the UN Command had the battle line approximately at the 38th parallel north. These parties signed the Korean Armistice Agreement on July 27, 1953, to end the fighting. South Korean President Syngman Rhee attacked the peace proceedings and did not sign the armistice. Upon agreeing to the ceasefire agreement, which called upon the governments of South Korea, North Korea, China, and the United States to participate in continued peace talks. The principal belligerents established the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which has since been patrolled by the KPA and the joint Republic of Korea Army, US, and UN Command. The war is considered to have ended at that point even though there still is no peace treaty.


title: Ceasefire

text: On New Years Day, 1968, Pope Paul VI convinced South Vietnam and the United States to declare a 24-hour-truce. However, the Viet Cong and North Vietnam did not adhere to the truce, and ambushed the 2nd Battalion, Republic of Vietnam Marine Division, 10 minutes after midnight in Mỹ Tho. The Viet Cong would also attack a U.S. Army fire support base near Saigon, causing more casualties.


title: Ceasefire

text: On January 15, 1973, US President Richard Nixon ordered a ceasefire of the aerial bombings in North Vietnam. The decision came after Henry Kissinger, the National Security Advisor to the President, returned to Washington, DC, from Paris, France, with a draft peace proposal. Combat missions continued in South Vietnam. By January 27, 1973, all parties of the Vietnam War signed a ceasefire as a prelude to the Paris Peace Accord.


title: Ceasefire

text: After Iraq was driven out of Kuwait by US-led coalition forces during Operation Desert Storm, Iraq and the UN Security Council signed a ceasefire agreement on March 3, 1991. Subsequently, throughout the 1990s, the U.N. Security Council passed numerous resolutions calling for Iraq to disarm its weapons of mass destruction unconditionally and immediately. Because no peace treaty was signed after the Gulf War, the war still remained in effect, including an alleged assassination attempt of former US President George H. W. Bush by Iraqi agents while on a visit to Kuwait; Iraq being bombed in June 1993 as a response, Iraqi forces firing on coalition aircraft patrolling the Iraqi no-fly zones, US President Bill Clinton's bombing of Baghdad in 1998 during Operation Desert Fox, and an earlier 1996 bombing of Iraq by the US during Operation Desert Strike. The war remained in effect until 2003, when US and UK forces invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein's regime from power.


title: Ceasefire

text: A UN-mediated ceasefire was agreed between India and Pakistan, on 1 January 1949, ending the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 (also called the 1947 Kashmir War). Fighting broke out between the two newly independent countries in Kashmir in October 1947, with India intervening on behalf of the princely ruler of Kashmir, who had joined India, and Pakistan supporting the rebels. The fighting was limited to Kashmir, but, apprehensive that it might develop into a full-scale international war, India referred the matter to the UN Security Council under Article 35 of the UN Charter, which addresses situations "likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace". The Security Council set up the dedicated United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan, which mediated for an entire year as the fighting continued. After several UN resolutions outlining a procedure for resolving the dispute via a plebiscite, a ceasefire agreement was reached between the countries towards the end of December 1948, which came into effect in the New Year. The Security Council set up the United Nations Military Observer Group for India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) to monitor the ceasefire line. India declared a ceasefire in Kashmir Valley during Ramadan in 2018.


title: Ceasefire

text: The Irish Republican Army held several Christmas ceasefires (usually referred to as truces) during the Northern Ireland conflict.


title: Ceasefire

text: An example of a ceasefire in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was announced between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority on February 8, 2005. When announced, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat publicly defined the ceasefire as follows: "We have agreed that today President Mahmoud Abbas will declare a full cessation of violence against Israelis anywhere and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will declare a full cessation of violence and military activities against Palestinians anywhere."


title: Ceasefire

text: The 2020 global ceasefire was a response to a formal appeal by United Nations Secretary-General António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres on March 23 for a global ceasefire as part of the United Nations' response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. On 24 June, 2020, 170 UN Member States and Observers signed a non-binding statement in support of the appeal, rising to 172 on 25 June, 2020, and on 1 July 2020, the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding a general and immediate global cessation of hostilities for at least 90 days.


title: Vigesimal

text: A vigesimal () or base-20 (base-score) numeral system is based on twenty (in the same way in which the decimal numeral system is based on ten). "Vigesimal" is derived from the Latin adjective "vicesimus", meaning 'twentieth'.


title: Vigesimal

text: In a vigesimal place system, twenty individual numerals (or digit symbols) are used, ten more than in the usual decimal system. One modern method of finding the extra needed symbols is to write ten as the letter (the means base ), to write nineteen as , and the numbers between with the corresponding letters of the alphabet. This is similar to the common computer-science practice of writing hexadecimal numerals over 9 with the letters "A–F". Another less common method skips over the letter "I", in order to avoid confusion between I as eighteen and one, so that the number eighteen is written as J, and nineteen is written as K. The number twenty is written as .


title: Vigesimal

text: In the rest of this article below, numbers are expressed in decimal notation, unless specified otherwise. For example, 10 means ten, 20 means twenty. Numbers in vigesimal notation use the convention that I means eighteen and J means nineteen.


title: Vigesimal

text: As 20 is divisible by two and five and is adjacent to 21, the product of three and seven, thus covering the first four prime numbers, many vigesimal fractions have simple representations, whether terminating or recurring (although thirds are more complicated than in decimal, repeating two digits instead of one). In decimal, dividing by three twice (ninths) only gives one digit periods ( = 0.1111... for instance) because 9 is the number below ten. 21, however, the number adjacent to 20 that is divisible by 3, is not divisible by 9. Ninths in vigesimal have six-digit periods. As 20 has the same prime factors as 10 (two and five), a fraction will terminate in decimal if and only if it terminates in vigesimal.


title: Vigesimal

text: The prime factorization of twenty is 2 × 5, so it is not a perfect power. However, its squarefree part, 5, is congruent to 1 (mod 4). Thus, according to Artin's conjecture on primitive roots, vigesimal has infinitely many cyclic primes, but the fraction of primes that are cyclic is not necessarily ~37.395%. An UnrealScript program that computes the lengths of recurring periods of various fractions in a given set of bases found that, of the first 15,456 primes, ~39.344% are cyclic in vigesimal.


title: Vigesimal

text: In many European languages, 20 is used as a base, at least with respect to the linguistic structure of the names of certain numbers (though a thoroughgoing consistent vigesimal system, based on the powers 20, 400, 8000 etc., is not generally used).


title: Vigesimal

text: Vigesimal systems are common in Africa, for example in Yoruba. While the Yoruba number system may be regarded as a vigesimal system, it is complex.


title: Vigesimal

text: There is some evidence of base-20 usage in the Māori language of New Zealand as seen in the terms "Te Hokowhitu a Tu" referring to a war party (literally "the seven 20s of Tu") and "Tama-hokotahi", referring to a great warrior ("the one man equal to 20").


title: Vigesimal

text: Open Location Code uses a word-safe version of base 20 for its geocodes. The characters in this alphabet were chosen to avoid accidentally forming words. The developers scored all possible sets of 20 letters in 30 different languages for likelihood of forming words, and chose a set that formed as few recognizable words as possible. The alphabet also is intended to reduce typographical errors by avoiding visually similar digits, and is case-insensitive.


title: Vigesimal

text: This table shows the Maya numerals and the number names in Yucatec Maya, Nahuatl in modern orthography and in Classical Nahuatl.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: The study of Jesus in comparative mythology is the examination of the narratives of the life of Jesus in the Christian gospels, traditions and theology, as they relate to Christianity and other religions. Although the vast majority of New Testament scholars and historians of the ancient Near East agree that Jesus existed as a historical figure, most secular historians also agree that the gospels contain large quantities of ahistorical legendary details mixed in with historical information about Jesus's life. The Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke are heavily shaped by Jewish tradition, with the Gospel of Matthew deliberately portraying Jesus as a "new Moses". Although it is highly unlikely that the authors of the Synoptic Gospels directly based any of their stories on pagan mythology, it is possible that they may have subtly shaped their accounts of Jesus's healing miracles to resemble familiar Greek stories about miracles associated with Asclepius, the god of healing and medicine. The birth narratives of Matthew and Luke are usually seen by secular historians as legends designed to fulfill Jewish expectations about the Messiah.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: The Gospel of John bears indirect influences from Platonism, via earlier Jewish deuterocanonical texts, and may also have been influenced in less obvious ways by the cult of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, though this possibility is still disputed. Later Christian traditions about Jesus were probably influenced by Greco-Roman religion and mythology. Much of Jesus's traditional iconography is apparently derived from Mediterranean deities such as Hermes, Asclepius, Serapis, and Zeus and his traditional birthdate on 25 December, which was not declared as such until the fifth century, was at one point named a holiday in honor of the Roman sun god Sol Invictus. At around the same time Christianity was expanding in the second and third centuries, the Mithraic Cult was also flourishing. Though the relationship between the two religions is still under dispute, Christian apologists at the time noted similarities between them, which some scholars have taken as evidence of borrowing, but which are more likely a result of shared cultural environment. More general comparisons have also been made between the stories about Jesus's birth and resurrection and stories of other divine or heroic figures from across the Mediterranean world, including supposed "dying-and-rising gods" such as Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, and Osiris, although the concept of "dying-and-rising gods" itself has received scholarly criticism.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: The majority of New Testament scholars and historians of the ancient Near East agree that Jesus existed as a historical figure. While some scholars have criticized Jesus scholarship for religious bias and lack of methodological soundness, with very few exceptions such critics generally do support the historicity of Jesus and reject the Christ myth theory that Jesus never existed. There is widespread disagreement among scholars about the accuracy of details of Jesus's life as it is described in the gospel narratives, and on the meaning of his teachings, and the only two events subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and that he was crucified under the orders of the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate. It is also generally, although not universally, accepted that Jesus was a Galilean Jew who called disciples and whose activities were confined to Galilee and Judea, that he had a controversy in the Temple, and that, after his crucifixion, his ministry was continued by a group of his disciples, several of whom were persecuted.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Nonetheless, most secular scholars generally agree that the gospels contain large amounts of material that is not historically accurate and is better categorized as legend. In a discussion of genuinely legendary episodes from the gospels, New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman mentions the birth narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and the release of Barabbas. He points out, however, that, just because these stories are not true does not mean that Jesus himself did not exist. According to theologians Paul R. Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd, there is no evidence that the portrayal of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels (the three earliest gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke) was directly influenced by pagan mythology in any significant way. The earliest followers of Jesus were devout Palestinian Jews who abhorred paganism and would have therefore been extremely unlikely to model stories about their founder on pagan myths.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Despite this, several scholars have noticed that some of the healing miracles of Jesus recorded in the Synoptic Gospels bear similarities to Greek stories of miracles associated with Asclepius, the god of healing and medicine. Brennan R. Hill states that Jesus's miracles are, for the most part, clearly told in the context of the Jewish belief in the healing power of Yahweh, but notes that the authors of the Synoptic Gospels may have subtly borrowed from Greek literary models. He states that Jesus's healing miracles chiefly differ from those of Asclepius by the fact that Jesus's are attributed to a human being on earth; whereas Asclepius's miracles are performed by a distant god. According to classical historians Emma J. Edelstein and Ludwig Edelstein, the most obvious difference between Jesus and Asclepius is that Jesus extended his healing to "sinners and publicans"; whereas Asclepius, as a god, refused to heal those who were ritually impure and confined his healing solely to those who thought pure thoughts. Scholars disagree whether the parable of the rich man and Lazarus recorded in originates with Jesus or if it is a later Christian invention, but the story bears strong resemblances to various folktales told throughout the Near East.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: It is, however, widely agreed that the portrayal of Jesus in the gospels is deeply influenced by Jewish tradition. According to E. P. Sanders, a leading scholar on the historical Jesus, the Synoptic Gospels contain many episodes in which Jesus's described actions clearly emulate those of the prophets in the Hebrew Bible. Sanders states that, in some of these cases, it is impossible to know for certain whether these parallels originate from the historical Jesus himself having deliberately imitated the Hebrew prophets, or from later Christians inventing mythological stories in order to portray Jesus as one of them, but, in many other instances, the parallels are clearly the work of the gospel-writers. The author of the Gospel of Matthew in particular intentionally seeks to portray Jesus as a "new Moses". Matthew's account of Herod's attempt to kill the infant Jesus, Jesus's family's flight into Egypt, and their subsequent return to Judaea is a mythical narrative based on the account of the Exodus in the Torah. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus delivers his first public sermon on a mountain in imitation of the giving of the Law of Moses atop Mount Sinai. According to New Testament scholars Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, the teachings preserved in the sermon are statements that Jesus himself really said on different occasions that were originally recorded without context, but the author of the Gospel of Matthew compiled them into an organized lecture and invented context for them in order to fit his portrayal of Jesus as a "new Moses".


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: According to Sanders, the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke are the clearest examples of legends in the Synoptic Gospels. Both accounts have Jesus born in Bethlehem, in accordance with Jewish salvation history, and both have him growing up in Nazareth, but they present two different explanations for how that happened. The accounts of the Annunciation of Jesus's conception found in and are both modeled on the stories of the annunciations of Ishmael, Isaac, and Samson in the Old Testament. Matthew quotes from the Septuagint translation of to support his account of the virgin birth of Jesus. The Hebrew text of this verse states "Behold, the young woman ["ha‘almāh"] is with child and about to bear a son and she will call him Immanuel." The Septuagint, however, translates the Hebrew word "‘almāh", which literally means "young woman", as the Greek word παρθένος ("parthenos"), which means "virgin". Most secular historians therefore generally see the two separate accounts of the virgin birth from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as independent legendary inventions designed to fulfill the mistranslated passage from Isaiah. Sanders clarifies that the birth narratives are "an extreme case" resulting from the gospel authors' lack of knowledge about Jesus's birth and childhood; no other part of the gospels relies so heavily on Old Testament parallels. Sanders also notes that, despite the clearly intentional parallels, the "striking differences" between Jesus and the prophets of the Old Testament are also highly significant and the gospels' accounts of Jesus's life on the whole do not closely resemble the lives of any of the figures in the Hebrew Bible.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Although Jesus's crucifixion is one of the few events in his life that virtually all scholars of all different backgrounds agree really happened, historians of religion have also compared it to Greek and Roman stories in order to gain a better understanding of how non-Christians would have perceived stories of Jesus's crucifixion. The German historian of religion Martin Hengel notes that the Hellenized Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata ("the Voltaire of antiquity"), in his comic dialogue "Prometheus", written in the second century AD (about two hundred years after Jesus), describes the god Prometheus being fastened to two rocks in the Caucasus Mountains using all the terminology of a Roman crucifixion: he is nailed through the hands in such a manner as to produce "a most serviceable cross" ("ἐπικαιρότατος... ὁ σταυρος"). The gods Hermes and Hephaestus, who perform the binding, are shown as slaves whose brutal master Zeus threatens with the same punishment if they weaken. Unlike the crucifixion of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels, Lucian's crucifixion of Prometheus is a deliberate, angry mockery of the gods, intended to show Zeus as a cruel and capricious tyrant undeserving of praise or adoration. This is the only instance from all of classical literature in which a god is apparently crucified and the fact that the Greeks and Romans could only conceive of a god being crucified as a form of "malicious parody" demonstrates the kind of horror with which they would have regarded Christian stories of Jesus's crucifixion.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: American theologian Dennis R. MacDonald has argued that the Gospel of Mark is, in fact, a Jewish retelling of the "Odyssey", with its ending derived from the "Iliad", that uses Jesus as its central character in the place of Odysseus. According to MacDonald, the gospels are primarily intended to show Jesus as superior to Greek heroes and, although Jesus himself was a real historical figure, the gospels should be read as works of historical fiction centered on a real protagonist, not as accurate accounts of Jesus's life. MacDonald's thesis that the gospels are modeled on the Homeric Epics has been met with intense skepticism in scholarly circles due to its almost complete reliance on extremely vague and subjective parallels. Other scholars state that his argument is also undermined by the fact that the Gospel of Mark never directly quotes from either of the Homeric Epics and uses completely dissimilar language. Pheme Perkins also notes that many of the incidents in the Gospel of Mark that MacDonald claims are derived from the "Odyssey" have much closer parallels in the Old Testament. MacDonald's argument, in a misunderstood form, has nonetheless become popular in non-scholarly circles, mostly on the internet, where it is used to support the Christ Myth theory. MacDonald himself rejects this interpretation as too drastic.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: The Gospel of John, the latest of the four canonical gospels, possesses ideas that originated in Platonism and Greek philosophy, where the "Logos" described in John's prologue was devised by the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and adapted to Judaism by the Jewish Middle Platonist Philo of Alexandria. However, the author of the Gospel of John was not personally familiar with any Greek philosophy and probably did not borrow the Logos theology from Platonic texts directly; instead, this philosophy probably influenced earlier Jewish deuterocanonical texts, which John inherited and expanded his own Logos theology from. In Platonic terminology, Logos was a universal force that represented the rationality and intelligibility of the world. On the other hand, as adapted into Judaism, Logos becomes a mediating divine figure between God and man and mostly owed influence from Wisdom literature and biblical traditions, and by the time it was transmitted into Judaism, seems to have only retained the concept of the universality of the Platonic logos. Davies and Finkelstein write "This primeval and universal Wisdom had, at God's command, found itself a home on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. This mediatorial figure, which in its universality can be compared with the Platonic 'world-soul' or the Stoic 'logos', is here exclusively connected with Israel, God's chosen people, and with his sanctuary."


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Scholars have long suspected that the Gospel of John may have also been influenced by symbolism associated with the cult of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. The issue of whether the Gospel of John was truly influenced by the cult of Dionysus is hotly disputed, with reputable scholars passionately defending both sides of the argument. Dionysus was one of the best-known Greek deities; he was worshipped throughout most of the Greco-Roman world and his cult is attested in Palestine, Asia Minor, and Italy. At the same time, other scholars have argued that it is highly implausible that the devout Christian author of the Gospel of John would have deliberately incorporated Dionysian imagery into his account and instead argue that the symbolism of wine in the Gospel of John is much more likely to be based on the many references to wine found throughout the Old Testament. In response to this objection, proponents of Dionysian influence have argued that it is possible that the author of the Gospel of John may have used Dionysian imagery in effort to show Jesus as "superior" to Dionysus.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: The first instance of possible Dionysian influence is Jesus's miracle of turning water into wine at the Marriage at Cana in . The story bears some resemblance to a number of stories that were told about Dionysus. Dionysus's close associations with wine are attested as early as the writings of Plato and the second-century AD Greek geographer Pausanias describes a ritual in which Dionysus was said to fill empty barrels that had been left locked inside a temple overnight with wine. In the Greek novel "Leucippe and Clitophon" by Achilles Tatius, written in the first or second century AD, a herdsman takes Dionysus into his home and offers him a meal, but he can only offer him the same thing to drink as his oxen. Miraculously, Dionysus turns the drink into wine. The account of turning water into wine does not occur in any of the Synoptic Gospels and is only found in the Gospel of John, indicating that the author of the fourth gospel may have invented it. A second occurrence of possible Dionysian influence is the allegory found in , in which Jesus declares himself to be the "True Vine", a title reminiscent of Dionysus, who was said to have discovered the first grape vine.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Mark W. G. Stibbe has argued that the Gospel of John also contains parallels with "The Bacchae", a tragedy written by the Athenian playwright Euripides that was first performed in 405 BC and involves Dionysus as a central character. In both works, the central figure is portrayed as an incarnate deity who arrives in a country where he should be known and worshipped, but, because he is disguised as a mortal, the deity is not recognized and is instead persecuted by the ruling party. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is portrayed as elusive, intentionally making ambiguous statements to evade capture, much like Dionysus in Euripides's "Bacchae". In both works, the deity is supported by a group of female followers. Both works end with the violent death of one of the central figures; in John's gospel it is Jesus himself, but in "The Bacchae" it is Dionysus's cousin and adversary Pentheus, the king of Thebes.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Stibbe emphasizes that two accounts are also radically different, but states that they share similar themes. One of the most obvious differences is that, in "The Bacchae", Dionysus has come to advocate a philosophy of wine and hedonism; whereas Jesus in the Gospel of John has come to offer his followers salvation from sin. Euripides portrays Dionysus as aggressive and violent; whereas the Gospel of John shows Jesus as peaceful and full of mercy. Furthermore, "The Bacchae" is set within an explicitly polytheistic world, but the Gospel of John admits the existence of only two gods: Jesus himself and his Father in Heaven.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a short apocryphal gospel, probably written in the second century AD, describing Jesus's childhood. It is unique as the only purported account of Jesus's childhood to survive from early Christian times. It describes a variety of miracles attributed to the young Jesus. It remained continuously in popular use throughout the Middle Ages up until the time of the Reformation. Reidar Aasgaard has argued that the Infancy Gospel may have been partially intended for children and discusses how the stories in the gospel fit the genre of Greco-Roman fairy tales. J. R. C. Cousland argues that the Infancy Gospel may have been originally written for a primarily pagan audience, noting that the Greeks and Romans told stories about their gods' miraculous doings as children and that miracle stories were often instrumental in converting pagans to Christianity.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Around the same time that Christianity was expanding, the cult of the god Mithras was also spreading throughout the Roman Empire. Very little is known for certain about the Mithraic cult because it was a "Mystery Cult", meaning its members were forbidden from disclosing the cult's beliefs to outsiders. No Mithraic sacred texts have survived, if any such writings ever existed. Consequently, it is disputed how much influence Christianity and Mithraism may have had on each other. Michael Patella states that the similarities between Christianity and Mithraism are more likely a result of their shared cultural environment rather than direct borrowing from one to the other. Christianity and Mithraism were both of Oriental origin and their practices and respective savior figures were both shaped by the social conditions in the Roman Empire during the time period.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Most of what is known about the legendary life of Mithras comes from archaeological excavation of Mithraea, underground Mithraic sanctuaries of worship, which were found all across the Roman world. Like Jesus, Mithras was seen as a divine savior, but, unlike Jesus, Mithras was not believed to have brought his salvation by suffering and dying. Mithras was believed to have been born fully-grown from a rock, a belief which is confirmed by a vast number of surviving sculptures showing him rising from the rock nude except for a Phrygian cap, clutching a sword in his right hand and a torch in his left. In many depictions, the rock is also encircled by a snake. In Mithraic cults primarily from the Rhine-Danube region, there are also representations of a myth in which Mithras shoots an arrow at a rock face, causing water to gush forth. This myth is one of the closest parallels between Mithras and Jesus. Both Christians and Mithraists used water as a symbol for their respective saviors. In the New Testament, Jesus is referred to as the "water of life" and a votive altar to Mithras from Poetovio proclaims him as the "fons perennis" ("the ever-flowing stream").


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: In the center of every Mithraeum was a "tauroctony", a painting or sculpture showing Mithras as a young man, usually wearing a cape and Phrygian cap, plunging a knife into the neck or shoulder of a bull as he turns its head towards him, simultaneously turning his own head away. A dog laps up the blood pouring from the bull's wound, from which emerges an ear of corn, as a scorpion stings the bull's scrotum. Human torchbearers stand on either side of the scene, one holding his torch upright and other upside-down. A serpent is also present. The exact interpretation of this scene is unclear, but the image certainly depicts a narrative central to Mithraism and the figures in it appear to correspond to the signs of the zodiac. The closest parallel between Jesus and Mithras is the use of a ritual meal. After slaying the bull, Mithras was believed to have shared the bull's meat with the sun-god Sol Invictus, a meal which is shown in Mithraic iconography and which was ritually reenacted by Mithraists as part of their liturgy. Manfred Clauss, a scholar of the Mithraic cult, speculates that the similarities between Christianity and Mithraism may have made it easier for members of the Mithraic cult to convert to Christianity without having to give up their ritual meal, sun-imagery, candles, incense, or bells, a trend which might explain why, as late as the sixth century, the Christian Church was still trying to stamp out the "stulti homines" who still paid obeisance to the sun every morning on the steps of the church itself.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: A few Christian apologists from the second and third centuries, who had never been members of the Mithraic cult and had never spoken to its members, claimed that the practices of the Mithraic cult were copied off Christianity. The second-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr writes in his "First Apology", after describing the Christian Eucharist, that "...the wicked devils have imitated [this] in the mysteries of Mithras, commanding the same thing to be done. For, that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one who is being initiated, you either know or can learn." The later apologist Tertullian writes in his "De praescriptione haereticorum":


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: The devil (is the inspirer of the heretics) whose work it is to pervert the truth, who with idolatrous mysteries endeavours to imitate the realities of the divine sacraments. Some he himself sprinkles as though in token of faith and loyalty; he promises forgiveness of sins through baptism; and if my memory does not fail me marks his own soldiers with the sign of Mithra on their foreheads, commemorates an offering of bread, introduces a mock resurrection, and with the sword opens the way to the crown. Moreover has he not forbidden a second marriage to the supreme priest? He maintains also his virgins and his celibates.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: According to Ehrman, these writers were ideologically motivated to portray Christianity and Mithraism as similar because they wanted to persuade pagan officials that Christianity was not so different from other religious traditions, so that these officials would realize that there was no reason to single Christians out for persecution. These apologists therefore intentionally exaggerated similarities between Christianity and Mithraism to support their arguments. Scholars are generally wary of trusting anything these sources have to say about the Mithraic cult's alleged practices.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: In late antiquity, early Christians frequently adapted pagan iconography to suit Christian purposes. This does not in any way indicate that Christianity itself was derived from paganism, only that early Christians made use of the pre-existing symbols that were readily available in their society. Sometimes Christians deliberately used pagan iconography in conscious effort to show Jesus as superior to the pagan gods. In classical iconography, the god Hermes was sometimes shown as a "kriophoros", a handsome, beardless youth bearing a ram or sheep over his shoulders. In late antiquity, this image developed a generic association with philanthropy. Early Christians adapted images of this kind as representations of Jesus in his role of as the "Good Shepherd".


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Early Christians also identified Jesus with the Greek hero Orpheus, who was said to have tamed wild beasts with the music of his lyre. The Church Father Clement of Alexandria writes that Orpheus and Jesus are similar in that they have both been subject to admiration on account of their "songs", but insists that Orpheus misused his gift of eloquence by persuading people to worship idols and "tie themselves to temporal things"; whereas Jesus, the singer of the "New Song" brings peace to men and frees them from the bonds of the flesh. The later Christian historian Eusebius, drawing on Clement, also compares Orpheus to Jesus for having both brought peace to men. One unusual possible instance of identification between Jesus and Orpheus is a hematite gem inscribed with the image of a crucified man identified as ΟΡΦΕΩΣ ΒΑΚΧΙΚΟΣ ("Orpheos Bacchikos"). The gem has long been suspected to be a forgery created in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, but, if authentic, it may date to the late second or early third century AD. If authentic, the gem would represent a remarkable instance of pagans adopting Christian iconography, rather than "vice versa" as is generally more common. The gem was formerly housed at the Altes Museum in Berlin, but was lost or destroyed during World War II.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Early Christians found it hard to criticize Asclepius because, while their usual tactics were to denounce the absurdity of believing in gods who were merely personifications of nature and to accuse pagan gods of being immoral, neither of these could be applied to Asclepius, who was never portrayed as a personification of nature and whose stories were inscrutably moral. The early Christian apologist Justin Martyr argued that believing in Jesus's divinity should not be hard for pagans, since it was no different from believing in the divinity of Asclepius. Eventually, Christians adapted much of the iconography of Asclepius to suit the miracles of Jesus. Images of Jesus as a healer replaced images of Asclepius and Hippocrates as the ideal physician. Jesus, who was originally shown as clean-shaven, may have first been shown as bearded as a result of this syncretism with Asclepius, as well as other bearded deities such as Zeus and Serapis. A second-century AD head of Asclepius was discovered underneath a fourth-century AD Christian church in Gerasa, Jordan.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: In some depictions from late antiquity, Jesus was shown with the halo of the sun god Sol Invictus. Images of "Christ in Majesty" seated upon a throne were inspired by classical depictions of Zeus and other chief deities. By the fourth century AD, the recognizable image of Jesus as long-haired, bearded, and clad in long, baggy-sleeved clothing had fully emerged. This widespread adaptation of pagan iconography to suit Jesus did not sit well with many Christians. A fragment of a lost work by Theodor Lector preserves a miracle story dated to around 465 AD in which the bishop Gennadius of Constantinople was said to have healed an artist who had lost all strength in his hand after painting an image of Christ showing him with long, curly hair, parted in the same manner as traditional representations of Zeus.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Christians also may have adapted the iconography of the Egyptian goddess Isis nursing her son Horus and applied it to the Virgin Mary nursing her son Jesus. Some Christians also may have conflated stories about the Egyptian god Osiris with the resurrection of Jesus. The title of "kosmokrateros" ("Ruler of the Cosmos"), which was eventually applied to Jesus, had previously been borne by Serapis. The Church Father Jerome records in a letter dated to the year 395 AD that "Bethlehem... belonging now to us... was overshadowed by a grove of Tammuz, that is to say, Adonis, and in the cave where once the infant Christ cried, the lover of Venus was lamented." This same cave later became the site of the Church of the Nativity. The church historian Eusebius, however, does not mention pagans having ever worshipped in the cave, nor do any other early Christian writers. Peter Welten has argued that the cave was never dedicated to Tammuz and that Jerome misinterpreted Christian mourning over the Massacre of the Innocents as a pagan ritual over Tammuz's death. Joan E. Taylor has countered this argument by arguing that Jerome, as an educated man, could not have been so naïve as to mistake Christian mourning over the Massacre of the Innocents as a pagan ritual for Tammuz. During the sixth century AD, some Christians in the Middle East borrowed elements from poems of Tammuz's wife Ishtar mourning over her husband's death into their own retellings of the Virgin Mary mourning over the death of her son Jesus. The Syrian writers Jacob of Serugh and Romanos the Melodist both wrote laments in which the Virgin Mary describes her compassion for her son at the foot of the cross in deeply personal terms closely resembling Ishtar's laments over the death of Tammuz.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: The Bible never states when Jesus was born, but, by late antiquity, Christians had begun celebrating his birth on 25 December. In 274 AD, the Roman emperor Aurelian had declared 25 December the birthdate of Sol Invictus, a sun god of Syrian origin whose cult had been vigorously promoted by the earlier emperor Elagabalus. Christians may have thought that they could attract more converts to Christianity by allowing them to continue to celebrate on the same day. 25 December also falls around the same time as the Roman festival of Saturnalia, which was much older and more widely celebrated. Many of the customs originally associated with Saturnalia eventually became associated with Christmas. Early Christians may have also been influenced by the idea that Jesus had died on the anniversary of his conception; because Jesus died during Passover and, in the third century AD, Passover was celebrated on 25 March, they may have assumed that Jesus's birthday must have come nine months later, on 25 December.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Aspects of Jesus's life as recorded in the gospels bear some similarities to various other figures, both historical and mythological. Proponents of the Christ Myth theory frequently exaggerate these similarities as part of their efforts to claim that Jesus never existed as a historical figure. Maurice Casey, the late Emeritus Professor of New Testament Languages and Literature at the University of Nottingham, writes that these parallels do not in any way indicate that Jesus was invented based on pagan "divine men", but rather that he was simply not as perfectly unique as many evangelical Christians frequently claim he was.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Classical mythology is filled with stories of miraculous births of various kinds, but, in most cases of divine offspring from classical mythology, the father is a god who engages in literal sexual intercourse with the mother, a mortal woman, causing her to give birth to a son who is literally half god and half man. A possible pagan precursor to the Christian story of the virgin birth of Jesus is an Athenian legend recounted by the mythographer Pseudo-Apollodorus. According to this account, Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths, once attempted to rape Athena, the virgin goddess of wisdom, but she pushed him away, causing him to ejaculate on her thigh. Athena wiped the semen off using a tuft of wool, which she tossed into the dust, impregnating Gaia and causing her to give birth to Erichthonius, whom Athena adopted as her own child. Thus, Athena was able to produce a "son" without her losing her virginity. The Roman mythographer Hyginus records a similar story in which Hephaestus demanded Zeus to let him marry Athena since he was the one who had smashed open Zeus's skull, allowing Athena to be born. Zeus agreed to this and Hephaestus and Athena were married, but, when Hephaestus was about to consummate the union, Athena vanished from the bridal bed, causing him to ejaculate on the floor, thus impregnating Gaia with Erichthonius.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Another comparable story from Greek mythology describes the conception of the hero Perseus. According to the myth, Zeus came to Perseus's mother Danaë in the form of a shower of gold and impregnated her. Although no surviving Greek text ever describes this as a "virgin birth", the early Christian apologist Justin Martyr has his Jewish speaker Trypho refer to it as such in his "Dialogue with Trypho". Scholars have also compared the story of the virgin birth to the complex narratives revolving around the birth of Dionysus. In most versions of the conception of Dionysus, Zeus was said to have come to the mortal woman Semele disguised as a mortal and had sex with her. Zeus's wife Hera disguised herself as Semele's nurse and persuaded her to ask Zeus to show her his true, divine form. Zeus eventually agreed, but, upon revealing his divine form, Semele was instantly incinerated by his lightning. Zeus rescued the unborn infant Dionysus and sewed him inside his own thigh, giving birth to him himself when it was time. In an alternative version of the story told by the Roman mythographer Hyginus, Dionysus was actually the son of Zeus and Persephone, who was torn apart by the Titans. Zeus rescued Dionysus's heart, ground it up, and mixed it into a potion, which he gave to Semele to drink, causing her to become pregnant with the infant who had been killed.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: According to M. David Litwa, the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke consciously attempt to avoid portraying Jesus's conception as anything resembling pagan accounts of divine parentage; the author of the Gospel of Luke tells a similar story about the conception of John the Baptist in effort to emphasize the Jewish character of Jesus's birth. Nonetheless, Litwe argues that the accounts are unconsciously influenced by pagan stories of divine men, despite their authors' efforts to avert this. Other stories of virgin births similar to Jesus's are referenced by later Christian writers. The third-century AD Christian theologian Origen retells a legend that Plato's mother Perictione had virginally conceived him after the god Apollo had appeared to her husband Ariston and told him not to consummate his marriage with his wife, a scene closely paralleling the account of the Annunciation to Joseph from the Gospel of Matthew. Origen interpreted this story and others like it as prefiguring the reality made manifest by Jesus's virginal conception. In the fourth century, the bishop Epiphanius of Salamis protested that, in Alexandria, at the temple of Kore-Persephone, the pagans enacted a "hideous mockery" of the Christian Epiphany in which they claimed that "Today at this hour Kore, that is the virgin, has given birth to Aion."


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Folklorist Alan Dundes has argued that Jesus fits all but five of the twenty-two narrative patterns in the Rank-Raglan mythotype, and therefore more closely matches the archetype than many of the heroes traditionally cited to support it, such as Jason, Bellerophon, Pelops, Asclepius, Joseph, Elijah, and Siegfried. Dundes sees Jesus as a historical "miracle-worker" or "religious teacher", stories of whose life were told and retold through oral tradition so many times that they became legend. Dundes states that analyzing Jesus in the context of folklore helps explain some of the anomalies of the gospels, such as the fact that none of them give any information about Jesus’s childhood and adolescence, which Dundes explains by the fact that this is "precisely the case for almost all heroes of tradition". Other scholars have strongly criticized Dundes's application of the Rank-Raglan mythotype to Jesus, pointing out that Dundes draws the narrative patterns from different texts written centuries apart, without taking care to differentiate between them. Dundes's application has also been criticized due to the Rank-Raglan mythotype's artificial nature and its lack of specificity to Hellenistic culture. Nonetheless, Lawrence M. Wills states that the "hero paradigm "in some form" does apply to the earliest lives of Jesus", albeit not to the extreme extent that Dundes has argued.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: The late nineteenth-century Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer wrote extensively about the existence of a "dying-and rising god" archetype in his monumental study of comparative religion "The Golden Bough" (the first edition of which was published in 1890) as well as in later works. Frazer's main intention was to prove that all religions were fundamentally the same and that all the essential features of Christianity could be found in earlier religions. Although Frazer himself did not explicitly claim that Jesus was a "dying-and-rising god" of the supposedly typical Near Eastern variety, he strongly implied it. Frazer's claims became widely influential in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholarship of religion, but are now mostly rejected by modern scholars.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: The main examples of "dying-and-rising gods" discussed by Frazer were the Mesopotamian god Dumuzid/Tammuz, his Greek equivalent Adonis, the Phrygian god Attis, and the Egyptian god Osiris. Dumuzid/Tammuz was a god of Sumerian origin associated with vegetation and fertility who eventually came to be worshipped across the Near East. Dumuzid was associated with springtime agricultural fertility and, when the crops withered during the hot summer months, women would mourn over his death. Tammuz's categorization as a "dying-and-rising god" was based on the abbreviated Akkadian redaction of "Inanna's Descent into the Underworld", which was missing the ending. Since numerous lamentations over the death of Dumuzid had already been translated, scholars filled in the missing ending by assuming that the reason for Ishtar's descent was because she was going to resurrect Dumuzid and that the text could therefore be assumed to end with Tammuz's resurrection.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Then, in the middle of the twentieth century, the complete, unabridged, original Sumerian text of "Inanna's Descent" was finally translated, revealing that, instead of ending with Dumuzid's resurrection as had long been assumed, the text actually ended with Dumuzid's "death". The discovery of the "Return of Dumuzid" in 1963 briefly revived hopes that Dumuzid might once again be able to be categorized as a "dying-and-rising god", but the text ultimately proved disappointing in this regard because it does not describe a triumph over death (as would be necessary for a true Frazerian "resurrection myth") and instead does precisely the opposite and affirms the "inalterable power of the realm of the dead" by the fact that Dumuzid can only leave the Underworld when his sister takes his place.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: Frazer and others also saw Tammuz's Greek equivalent Adonis as a "dying-and-rising god", despite the fact that he is never described as rising from the dead in any extant Greco-Roman writings and the only possible allusions to his supposed resurrection come from late, highly ambiguous statements made by Christian authors. Attis is never described as being resurrected either; although many myths surround his death, none of them ever claim that he was resurrected. Osiris was never truly resurrected either; in Egyptian myth, Osiris's brother Set was said to have murdered him, chopped his body into pieces, and scattered them across the land. Osiris's devoted wife Isis collected his dismembered limbs and reassembled them, allowing her to revive Osiris in the Duat, the Egyptian afterlife, where he became the king of the dead.


title: Jesus in comparative mythology

text: In the late twentieth century, scholars began to severely criticize the designation of "dying-and-rising god" altogether. In 1987, Jonathan Z. Smith concluded in Mircea Eliade's "Encyclopedia of Religion" that "The category of dying and rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must now be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts." He further argued that the deities previously referred to as "dying-and-rising" would be better termed separately as "dying gods" and "disappearing gods", asserting that before Christianity, the two categories were distinct and gods who "died" did not return, and those who returned never truly "died". By the end of the twentieth century, most scholars had come to agree that the notion of a "dying-and-rising god" was an invention and that the term was not a useful scholarly designation.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing. Using a printing press, the process allows many copies to be produced by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against sheets or a continuous roll of paper. A worker composes and locks movable type into the "bed" or "chase" of a press, inks it, and presses paper against it to transfer the ink from the type, which creates an impression on the paper.


title: Letterpress printing

text: In practice, letterpress also includes other forms of relief printing with printing presses, such as wood engravings, photo-etched zinc "cuts" (plates), and linoleum blocks, which can be used alongside metal type, or wood type in a single operation, as well as stereotypes and electrotypes of type and blocks. With certain letterpress units, it is also possible to join movable type with slugs cast using hot metal typesetting. In theory, anything that is "type high" and so forms a layer exactly 0.918 in. thick between the bed and the paper can be printed using letterpress.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Letterpress printing was the normal form of printing text from its invention by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century to the 19th century and remained in wide use for books and other uses until the second half of the 20th century. Letterpress printing remained the primary means of printing and distributing information until the 20th century, when offset printing was developed, which largely supplanted its role in printing books and newspapers. More recently, letterpress printing has seen a revival in an artisanal form.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Movable type was first invented in China using ceramic type in 1040 AD during the Northern Song Dynasty by the inventor Bi Sheng (990–1051).


title: Letterpress printing

text: Johannes Gutenberg is credited with the development in the western hemisphere, in about 1440, of modern movable type printing from individually cast, reusable letters set together in a "forme" (frame or chase). Gutenberg also invented a wooden printing press, based on the extant wine press, where the type surface was inked with leather-covered ink balls and paper laid carefully on top by hand, then slid under a padded surface and pressure applied from above by a large threaded screw. It was Gutenberg's "screw press" or hand press that was used to print 180 copies of the Bible. At 1,282 pages, it took him and his staff of 20 almost 3 years to complete. 48 copies remain intact today. This form of presswork gradually replaced the hand-copied manuscripts of scribes and illuminators as the most prevalent form of printing. Printers' workshops, previously unknown in Europe before the mid-15th century, were found in every important metropolis by 1500. Later metal presses used a knuckle and lever arrangement instead of the screw, but the principle was the same. Ink rollers made of composition made inking faster and paved the way for further automation.


title: Letterpress printing

text: With the advent of industrial mechanisation, inking was carried out by rollers that passed over the face of the type, then moved out of the way onto an ink plate to pick up a fresh film of ink for the next sheet. Meanwhile, a sheet of paper slid against a hinged platen (see image), which then rapidly pressed onto the type and swung back again as the sheet was removed and the next sheet inserted. As the fresh sheet of paper replaced the printed paper, the now freshly inked rollers ran over the type again. Fully automated 20th-century presses, such as the Kluge and "Original" Heidelberg Platen (the "Windmill"), incorporated pneumatic sheet feed and delivery.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Rotary presses were used for high-speed work. In the oscillating press, the forme slid under a drum around which each sheet of paper was wrapped for the impression, sliding back under the inking rollers while the paper was removed and a new sheet inserted. In a newspaper press, a papier-mâché mixture called a flong was used to make a mould of the entire form of type, then dried and bent, and a curved metal stereotype plate cast against it. The plates were clipped to a rotating drum and could print against a continuous reel of paper at the enormously high speeds required for overnight newspaper production.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Letterpress printing was introduced in Canada in 1752 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, by John Bushell in the newspaper format. This paper was named the Halifax Gazette and became Canada's first newspaper. Bushell apprenticed under Bartholomew Green in Boston. Green moved to Halifax in 1751 in hopes of starting a newspaper, as it did not exist in the area. Two weeks and a day after the press he was going to use for this new project arrived in Halifax, Green died. Upon receiving word about what happened, Bushell moved to Halifax and continued what Green had started. "The Halifax Gazette" was first published on March 23, 1752, making Bushell the first letterpress printer in Halifax, and eventually Canada. There is only one known surviving copy of the first number, which was found in the Massachusetts Historical Society.


title: Letterpress printing

text: One of the first forms of letterpress printing in the United States was Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick started by Benjamin Harris. This was the first form of a newspaper with multiple pages in the Americas. The first publication of Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick was September 25, 1690.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Letterpress started to become largely out-of-date in the 1970s because of the rise of computers and new self-publishing print and publish methods. Many printing establishments went out of business from the 1980s to 1990s and sold their equipment after computers replaced letterpress's abilities more efficiently. These commercial print shops discarded presses, making them affordable and available to artisans throughout the country. Popular presses include, in particular, Vandercook cylinder proof presses and Chandler & Price platen presses. In the UK there is particular affection for the Arab press, built by Josiah Wade in Halifax.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Letterpress recently has had a rebirth in popularity because of the "allure of hand-set type" and the differences today between traditional letterpress and computerized printed text. Letterpress is unique and different from standard printing formats that we are currently used to. Letterpress commonly features a relief impression of the type, although this was considered bad printing in traditional letterpress. Letterpress's goal before the recent revival of letterpress was to not show any impression. The type touched the paper slightly to leave a transfer of ink, but did not leave an impression. This is often referred to as "the kiss". An example of this former technique would be newspapers. Some letterpress practitioners today have the distinct goal of showing the impression of type, to distinctly note that it is letterpress, but many printers choose to maintain the integrity of the traditional methods. Printing with too much impression is destructive to both the machines and to the type. Since its revival letterpress has largely been used for fine art and stationery as its traditional use for newspaper printing is no longer relevant for use.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Letterpress is considered a craft as it involves using a skill and is done by hand. Fine letterpress work is crisper than offset litho because of its impression into the paper, giving greater visual definition to the type and artwork, although it is not what letterpress traditionally was meant for. Today, many of these small letterpress shops survive by printing fine editions of books or by printing upscale invitations, stationery, and greeting cards. These methods often use presses that require the press operator to feed paper one sheet at a time by hand. Today, the juxtaposition of this technique and offbeat humor for greeting cards has been proven by letterpress shops to be marketable to independent boutiques and gift shops. Some of these printmakers are just as likely to use new printing methods as old, for instance by printing using photopolymer plates on restored vintage presses.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Evidence of the range and strength of contemporary letterpress printing across North America was documented in "The Itinerant Printer", a 320-page book with 1,500 color photos by Christopher Fritton. From 2015 - 2017 Fritton, a poet, printer, and artist, crisscrossed the United States and Canada traveling 47,000 miles as a “tramp printer” visiting 137 presses, recording his impressions of each studio and documenting the proprietors and their work. A full set of prints and postcards from his travels while researching the book is in the collection of the Library of Congress. Included in many libraries, the book was the subject of Fritton’s talks at a Buffalo, New York TED_(conference), at the Library of Congress, and at the Los Angeles Printers Fair 2018.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Letterpress publishing has recently undergone a revival in the US, Canada, and the UK, under the general banner of the "Small Press Movement". Renewed interest in letterpress was fueled by Martha Stewart Weddings magazine, which began using pictures of letterpress invitations in the 1990s. In 2004 they state "Great care is taken in choosing the perfect wedding stationery – couples ponder details from the level of formality to the flourishes of the typeface. The method of printing should be no less important, as it can enliven the design exquisitely. That is certainly the case with letterpress." In regards to having printed letterpress invitations, the beauty and texture became appealing to couples who began wanting letterpress invitations instead of engraved, thermographed, or offset-printed invitations.


title: Letterpress printing

text: The movement has been helped by the emergence of a number of organizations that teach letterpress such as Columbia College Chicago's Center for Book and Paper Arts, Art Center College of Design and Armory Center for the Arts both in Pasadena, Calif., New York's Center for Book Arts, Studio on the Square and The Arm NYC, the Wells College Book Arts Center in Aurora, New York, the San Francisco Center for the Book, Bookworks, Seattle's School of Visual Concepts, Olympia's The Evergreen State College, Black Rock Press, North Carolina State University, Washington D.C's Corcoran College of Art and Design, Penland School of Crafts, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, the International Printing Museum in Carson, CA, Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA, Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA, and the Bowehouse Press at VCU in Richmond, VA.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Affordable copper, magnesium and photopolymer platemakers and milled aluminum bases have allowed letterpress printers to produce type and images derived from digital artwork, fonts and scans. Economical plates have encouraged the rise of "digital letterpress" in the 21st century, allowing a small number of firms to flourish commercially and enabling a larger number of boutique and hobby printers to avoid the limitations and complications of acquiring and composing metal type. At the same time there has been a renaissance in small-scale type foundries to produce new metal type on Monotype equipment, Thompson casters and the original American Type Founders machines.


title: Letterpress printing

text: The process of letterpress printing consists of several stages: composition, imposition and lock-up, and printing. In a small shop, all would occur in a single room, whereas in larger printing plants, such as with urban newspapers and magazines, each might form a distinct department with its own room, or even floor.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Composition, or typesetting, is the stage where pieces of movable type are assembled to form the desired text. The person charged with composition is called a "compositor" or "typesetter", setting letter by letter and line by line.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Traditionally, as in manual composition, it involves selecting the individual type letters from a type case, placing them in a composing stick, which holds several lines, then transferring those to a larger type galley. By this method the compositor gradually builds out the text of an individual page letter by letter. In mechanical typesetting, it may involve using a keyboard to select the type, or even cast the desired type on the spot, as in hot metal typesetting, which are then added to a galley designed for the product of that process. The first keyboard-actuated typesetting machines to be widely accepted, the Linotype and the Monotype, were introduced in the 1890s.


title: Letterpress printing

text: The Ludlow Typograph Machine, for casting of type-high slugs from hand-gathered brass matrices, was first manufactured in Chicago in 1912 and was widely used until the 1980s. Many are still in use and although no longer manufactured, service and parts are still available for them.


title: Letterpress printing

text: After a galley is assembled to fill a page's worth of type, the type is tied together into a single unit so that it may be transported without falling apart. From this bundle a galley proof is made, which is inspected by a proof-reader to make sure that the particular page is accurate.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Broadly, imposition or imposing is the process by which the tied assemblages of type are converted into a form (or forme) ready to use on the press. A person charged with imposition is a stoneman or stonehand, doing their work on a large, flat imposition stone (though some later ones were instead made of iron).


title: Letterpress printing

text: In the more specific modern sense, imposition is the technique of arranging the various pages of type with respect to one another. Depending on page size and the sheet of paper used, several pages may be printed at once on a single sheet. After printing, these are cut and trimmed before folding or binding. In these steps, the imposition process ensures that the pages face the right direction and in the right order with the correct margins.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Low-height pieces of wood or metal furniture are added to make up the blank areas of a page. The printer uses a mallet to strike a wooden block, which ensures tops (and only the tops) of the raised type blocks are all aligned so they will contact a flat sheet of paper simultaneously.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Lock-up is the final step before printing. The printer removes the cords that hold the type together, and expands the quoins with a key or lever to lock the entire complex of type, blocks, furniture, and chase (frame) into place. This creates the final forme, which the printer takes to the printing press. In a newspaper setting, each page needs a truck to be transported – 2 pages need 2 trucks hence the term "double truck". The first copy is proofed again for errors before starting the printing run.


title: Letterpress printing

text: The working of the printing process depends on the type of press used, as well as any of its associated technologies (which varied by time period).


title: Letterpress printing

text: Hand presses generally required two people to operate them: one to ink the type, the other to work the press. Later mechanized jobbing presses require a single operator to feed and remove the paper, as the inking and pressing are done automatically.


title: Letterpress printing

text: The completed sheets are then taken to dry and for finishing, depending on the variety of printed matter being produced. With newspapers, they are taken to a folding machine. Sheets for books are sent for bookbinding.


title: Letterpress printing

text: You can distinguish traditional letterpress from a digital printer by its debossed lettering or imagery. A traditional letterpress printer made a heavy impression into the stock and producing any indentation at all into the paper would have resulted in the print run being rejected. Part of the skill of operating a traditional letterpress printer was to adjust the machine pressures just right so that the type just kissed the paper, transferring the minimum amount of ink to create the crispest print with no indentation. This was very important as when the print exited the machine and was stacked having too much wet ink and an indentation would have increased the risk of set-off (ink passing from the front of one sheet onto the back of the next sheet on the stack).


title: Letterpress printing

text: The letterpress printing process remained virtually unchanged until the 1950s when it was replaced with the more efficient and commercially viable offset printing process. The labor-intensive nature of the typesetting and need to store vast amounts of lead or wooden type resulted in the letterpress printing process falling out of favour.


title: Letterpress printing

text: In the 1980s dedicated letterpress practitioners revived the old craft by embracing a new manufacturing method which allowed them to create raised surface printing plates from a negative and a photopolymer plate.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Photopolymer plates are light sensitive. On one side the surface is cured when it is exposed to ultraviolet light and the other side is a metal or plastic backing that can be mounted on a base. The relief printing surface is created by placing a negative of the piece to be printed on the photosensitive side of the plate; the light passing through the clear regions of the negative causes the photopolymer to harden. The unexposed areas remain soft and can be washed away with water.


title: Letterpress printing

text: With these new printing plates, designers were no longer inhibited by the limitations of handset wooden or lead type. New design possibilities emerged and the letterpress printing process experienced a revival. Today it is in high demand for wedding stationery however there are limitations to what can be printed and designers must adhere to some design for letterpress principles.


title: Letterpress printing

text: The invention of ultra-violet curing inks has helped keep the rotary letterpress alive in areas like self-adhesive labels. There is also still a large amount of flexographic printing, a similar process, which uses rubber plates to print on curved or awkward surfaces, and a lesser amount of relief printing from huge wooden letters for lower-quality poster work.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Rotary letterpress machines are still used on a wide scale for printing self-adhesive and non-self-adhesive labels, tube laminate, cup stock, etc. The printing quality achieved by a modern letterpress machine with UV curing is on par with flexo presses. It is more convenient and user friendly than a flexo press. It uses water-wash photopolymer plates, which are as good as any solvent-washed flexo plate. Today even CtP (computer-to-plate) plates are available making it a full-fledged, modern printing process. Because there is no anilox roller in the process, the make-ready time also goes down when compared to a flexo press. Inking is controlled by keys very much similar to an offset press. UV inks for letterpress are in paste form, unlike flexo. Various manufacturers produce UV rotary letterpress machines, viz. Dashen, Nickel, Taiyo Kikai, KoPack, Gallus, etc. – and offer hot/cold foil stamping, rotary die cutting, flatbed die cutting, sheeting, rotary screen printing, adhesive side printing, and inkjet numbering. Central impression presses are more popular than inline presses due to their ease of registration and simple design. Printing of up to nine colours plus varnish is possible with various online converting processes. But as the letterpress machines are the same like a decade before, they can furthermore only be used with one colour of choice simultaneously. If there are more colours needed, they have to be exchanged one after the other.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Letterpress can produce work of high quality at high speed, but it requires much time to adjust the press for varying thicknesses of type, engravings, and plates called makeready. The process requires a high degree of craftsmanship, but in the right hands, letterpress excels at fine typography. It is used by many small presses that produce fine, handmade, limited-edition books, artists' books, and high-end ephemera such as greeting cards and broadsides. Because of the time needed to make letterpress plates and to prepare the press, setting type by hand has become less common with the invention of the photopolymer plate, a photosensitive plastic sheet that can be mounted on metal to bring it up to type high.


title: Letterpress printing

text: To bring out the best attributes of letterpress, printers must understand the capabilities and advantages of what can be a very unforgiving medium. For instance, since most letterpress equipment prints only one color at a time, printing multiple colors requires a separate press run in register with the preceding color. When offset printing arrived in the 1950s, it cost less, and made the color process easier. The inking system on letterpress equipment is the same as offset presses, posing problems for some graphics. Detailed, white (or "knocked out") areas, such as small, serif type, or very fine halftone surrounded by fields of color can fill in with ink and lose definition if rollers are not adjusted correctly. However, a skilled printer overcomes most of these problems. However, a letterpress provides the option of a wider range of paper, including handmade, organic, and tree-free. Letterpress printing provides a wide range of production choices. The classic feel and finish of letterpress papers takes printing back to an era of quality and craftsmanship. Even the smell of the ink, more apparent on a letterpress-printed page than with offset, may appeal to collectors.


title: Letterpress printing

text: While less common in contemporary letterpress printing, it is possible to print halftone photographs, via photopolymer plates. However, letterpress printing's strengths are crisp lines, patterns, and typography.


title: Letterpress printing

text: Several dozen colleges and universities around the United States have either begun or re-activated programs teaching letterpress printing in fully equipped facilities. In many cases these letterpress shops are affiliated with the college's library or art department, and in others they are independent, student-run operations or extracurricular activities sponsored by the college. The College & University Letterpress Printers' Association (CULPA) was founded in 2006 by Abigail Uhteg at the Maryland Institute College of Art to help these schools stay connected and share resources. Many universities offer degree programs such as: Oregon College of Art and Craft, Southwest School of Art, Middle Tennessee State University, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Indiana University, Miami University, Corcoran College of Art and Design, and Rochester Institute of Technology.


title: Letterpress printing

text: The current renaissance of letterpress printing has created a crop of hobby press shops that are owner-operated and driven by a love of the craft. Several larger printers have added an environmental component to the venerable art by using only wind-generated electricity to drive their presses and plant equipment.


title: Letterpress printing

text: In Berkeley, California, letterpress printer and lithographer David Lance Goines maintains a studio with a variety of platen and cylinder letterpresses as well as lithography presses. He has drawn attention both from commercial printers and fine artists for his wide knowledge and meticulous skill with letterpress printing. He collaborated with restaurateur and free speech activist Alice Waters, the owner of Chez Panisse, on her book "30 Recipes Suitable for Framing". He has created strikingly colorful large posters for such Bay Area businesses and institutions as Acme Bread and UC Berkeley. Another Berkeley letterpress printer is Peter Rutledge Koch, who focuses on artist books and small published books.


title: Letterpress printing

text: In London, St Bride Library houses a large collection of letterpress information in its collection of 50,000 books: all the classic works on printing technique, visual style, typography, graphic design, calligraphy and more. This is one of the world's foremost collections and is located off Fleet Street in the heart of London's old printing and publishing district. In addition, regular talks, conferences, exhibitions and demonstrations take place.


title: Letterpress printing

text: The St Bride Institute, Edinburgh College of Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, The Arts University Bournemouth, Plymouth University, University for the Creative Arts Farnham, London College of Communication and Camberwell College of the Arts London run short courses in letterpress as well as offering these facilities as part of their Graphic Design Degree Courses.


title: Letterpress printing

text: The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, houses one of the largest collections of wood type and wood cuts in the world inside one of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company's factory buildings. Also included are presses and vintage prints. The museum holds many workshops and conferences throughout the year and regularly welcomes groups of students from universities from across the United States.


title: Letterpress printing

text: In 2011 John Bonadies, and Jeff Adams, and Molly Poganski created a virtual letterpress that runs on an iPad (and later the Mac) and replicates each step of the letterpress process. LetterMpress was funded from a Kickstarter campaign enabling the developers to collect and digitize wood type from around the world. The app's press is modeled after a Vandercook SP-15 (considered to be a top-of-the-line proof press in its time, and coveted by artists and designers today).


title: Kunashir Island

text: Kunashir Island (; ; ), possibly meaning "Black Island" or "Grass Island" in Ainu, is the southernmost island of the Kuril Islands archipelago. The island has been under Russian administration since the end of World War II, when Soviet forces took possession of the Kurils. It is claimed by Japan (see Kuril Islands dispute).


title: Kunashir Island

text: Kunashir lies between the straits of Kunashir Island, Catherine, Izmena, and South Kuril. Kunashir Island is visible from the nearby Japanese island of Hokkaido, from which it is separated by the Nemuro Strait.


title: Kunashir Island

text: Kunashir Island is formed by four volcanoes which were separate islands but have since joined together by low-lying areas with lakes and hot springs. All these volcanoes are still active: Tyatya (), Smirnov, Mendeleev (Rausu-yama), and Golovnin (Tomari-yama). The island is made up of volcanic and crystalline rocks.


title: Kunashir Island

text: The climate is humid continental with very heavy precipitation especially in the autumn and a strong seasonal lag with maximum temperatures in August and September. The vegetation mostly consists of spruce, pine, fir, and mixed deciduous forests with lianas and Kuril bamboo underbrush. The mountains are covered with birch and Siberian Dwarf Pine scrub, herbaceous flowers or bare rocks. Tree cores of century-old oaks "(Quercus crispula)" were found in July 2001 on Kunashiri Island.


title: Kunashir Island

text: Kunashir, along with the neighbouring Lesser Kuril Chain of smaller islands, has been recognised as an Important Bird Area (IBA) by BirdLife International as the island supports populations of various threatened bird species, including many waterbirds, seabirds and waders.


title: Kunashir Island

text: The Ainu are the original natives of the island until the Yamato Japanese colonists expanded northward, with Matsumae clan established Kunashir fishery and trading site (国後場所,"Kunashiri-basho") in 1754. Administration office of the fishery and trading site located in Tomari (now Golovnino). Area of Kunashir fishery and trading site was consisted of Kunashir, Iturup and Urup islands.


title: Kunashir Island

text: In 1789 Kunashir Island was one of the settings of the Menashi-Kunashiri Battle in which native Ainu revolted against Yamato Japanese tradespeople and colonists.


title: Kunashir Island

text: Russian navigator Vasily Golovnin attempted to map and explore the island in 1811, but was apprehended by Japanese authorities and spent two years in prison.


title: Kunashir Island

text: On September 1, 1945, or one day before the surrender documents of World War II were signed on September 2, 1945, in accordance with understandings reached at the Yalta Conference, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied the Kuril Islands. This occurred after the Soviet Union renounced the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact signed in April 1941, and declared war on Japan on August 9, 1945 (formally, the pact itself remained in effect until April 13, 1946). Although Japan agreed after deliberations to cede its claims to "the Kurile Islands" as part of the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951, the Japanese government has claimed since the mid-1950s that the southern islands were not part of the ceded Kuril Islands.


title: Kunashir Island

text: The largest settlement on Kunashir Island is Yuzhno-Kurilsk, administrative center of Yuzhno-Kurilsky District.


title: Kunashir Island

text: The primary economic activity is fishing. The island has a port next to Yuzhno-Kurilsk. Kunashir Island enjoys a Mendeleevskaya GeoPP geothermal power plant with the capacity of 1.8 MW.


title: Kunashir Island

text: After the 1994 earthquake, about one-third of Kunashir Island's population left and did not return. By 2002, the island's population was approximately 7,800. The total population of the disputed Kuril islands at that time was approximately 17,000.


title: Mick Harvey

text: Michael John Harvey (born 29 August 1958) is an Australian musician, singer-songwriter, composer, arranger and record producer. A multi-instrumentalist, he is best known for his long-term collaborations with Nick Cave, with whom he formed The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.


title: Mick Harvey

text: Born in Rochester, Victoria, Australia, Harvey moved to the suburbs of Melbourne in his childhood. His father was a Church of England vicar, and the family lived adjacent to the father's church; first in Ormond and later in Ashburton. Harvey sang in the church choir from an early age.


title: Mick Harvey

text: Harvey, his elder brother Philip, and younger brother Sebastian all attended the private boys' school Caulfield Grammar School. It was at school in the early 1970s that Harvey met fellow students Nick Cave and Phill Calvert, as well as Tracy Pew. A rock group was formed with Cave (vocals), Harvey (guitar), Calvert (drums), and other students on guitar, bass and saxophone. The band played at parties and school functions, with a repertoire of Lou Reed, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Alice Cooper and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, among others. Harvey was also a member of the school choir (conducted by actor Norman Kaye), and took extracurricular lessons from Bruce Clarke, the jazz guitarist.


title: Mick Harvey

text: After their final school year in 1975, the band decided to continue with Pew as bassist. Greatly influenced by the punk explosion of 1976, which saw Australian bands The Saints and Radio Birdman make their first recordings and tours, The Boys Next Door, as Harvey's band was now called, began performing fast, original new wave material. Harvey's guitar style was influenced by James Williamson of The Stooges and Paul Weller of The Jam. The Boys Next Door regularly played at Melbourne pubs between 1977 and 1980. Rowland S. Howard joined the band in 1978, bringing with him a chaotic feedback guitar style.


title: Mick Harvey

text: After extensive touring, recordings, and moderate success in Australia, the Boys Next Door relocated to London, England in 1980, and changed their name to The Birthday Party. Harvey's girlfriend Katy Beale followed the band to London. This period was defined by innovative and aggressive music composition, underpinned by Harvey's guitar playing. The band moved to West Berlin, Germany in 1982, but without Calvert; Harvey transitioned from guitar to drums.


title: Mick Harvey

text: After the breakup of The Birthday Party while initiating the early recordings of what would become The Bad Seeds with Nick Cave, Harvey contacted his friend Simon Bonney, with whom he reformed Bonney's old Australian band Crime & the City Solution. Rowland S. Howard, Harry Howard (bass) and Epic Soundtracks (drums), all of whom a few years later would form the basis of These Immortal Souls, also participated. This line-up of the band found its peak and demise with its appearance in the Wim Wenders film "Wings of Desire". Bonney then stayed in Berlin and formed the next line-up of the band with his partner Bronwyn Adams, Harvey (drums), Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten (guitar), Chrislo Haas of Liaisons Dangereuses and D.A.F. (synthesiser), and Thomas Stern (bass). This line-up made three studio albums and toured until 1991.


title: Mick Harvey

text: Harvey and Cave formed Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds in 1983. Harvey was principally the drummer on the first 2 albums before line-up changes saw him move to the bass until the arrival of Martyn P. Casey in 1990 when he moved back to guitar, his original instrument.


title: Mick Harvey

text: Throughout the '80s and '90s Harvey was the band member charged with the responsibility for the production of the recordings along with Cave. His arrangement skills also saw him putting together most of the band’s string arrangements during this time and led to the perception of him as a kind of musical director. He also managed much of the band’s business affairs right up until his departure. Harvey remained with the Bad Seeds for 25 years until his last show in Perth, Australia on 20 January 2009, when he cited both professional and personal factors as reasons for leaving. Regarding Cave, Harvey informed the media:


title: Mick Harvey

text: I'm confident Nick [Cave] will continue to be a creative force and that this is the right time to pass on my artistic and managerial role to what has become a tremendous group of people who can support him in his endeavours, both musically and organisationally.


title: Mick Harvey

text: In 2010, Harvey explained further that his frustration with song arrangements strained his relationship with Cave; and a desire to spend time with family was also a significant reason for his decision. The split marked the end of a 36-year-long collaboration between Harvey and Cave.


title: Mick Harvey

text: Harvey worked extensively with Nick Cave’s muse and partner of many years on two albums - "Dirty Pearl" (1993) and "Sex O’Clock" (2001).


title: Mick Harvey

text: In 2007, the Spanish label Bang! Records released a four-track EP by Harvey's retro rock band The Wallbangers, called "Kick the Drugs" featuring songs written by Harvey alone, and songs he co-wote with Tex Perkins and Loene Carmen. Harvey sings and plays guitars.


title: Mick Harvey

text: After Bonney left Crime & the City Solution for a solo career in the United States, Harvey recorded two solo albums of Serge Gainsbourg songs, translated from French into English: "Intoxicated Man" (1995) and "Pink Elephants" (1997). He has also collaborated with UK rock musician PJ Harvey (no relation), and produced for other Australian artists, including Anita Lane, Robert Forster, Conway Savage and Rowland S. Howard. Harvey's third solo release, "One Man's Treasure", was issued in September 2005.


title: Mick Harvey

text: He undertook his first solo tours of Europe and Australia in 2006, accompanied by fellow Bad Seeds Thomas Wydler and James Johnston, as well as Melbourne-based double bassist Rosie Westbrook. His next solo record, 2007's "Two of Diamonds", was recorded with this group, as was the 2008 live album "Three Sisters – Live at Bush Hall".