OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Oeta

See also Mount Oeta on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​OETA (mod. Kotavothra), a mountain to the south of Thessaly, in Greece, forming a boundary between the valleys of the Spercheius and the Boeotian Cephissus. It is an offshoot of the Pindus range, 7080 ft. high. In its eastern portion, called Callidromus, it comes close to the sea, leaving only a narrow passage known as the famous pass of Thermopylae (q.v.). There was also a high pass to the west of Callidromus leading over into the upper Cephissus valley. In mythology Oeta is chiefly celebrated as the scene of the funeral pyre on which Heracles burnt himself before his admission to Olympus.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Offa

See also Offa of Angel on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​OFFA, the most famous hero of the early Angli. He is said by the Anglo-Saxon poem Widsith to have ruled over Angel, and the poem refers briefly to his victorious single combat, a story which is related at length by the Danish historians Saxo and Svend Aagesen. Offa (Uffo) is said to have been dumb or silent during his early years, and to have only recovered his speech when his aged father Wermund was threatened by the Saxons, who insolently demanded the cession of his kingdom. Offa undertook to fight against both the Saxon king’s son and a chosen champion at once. The combat took place at Rendsburg on an island in the Eider, and Offa succeeded in killing both his opponents. According to Widsith Offa’s opponents belonged to a tribe or dynasty called Myrgingas, but both accounts state that he won a great kingdom as the result of his victory. A somewhat corrupt version of the same story is preserved in the Vitae duorum Offarum, where, however, the scene is transferred to England. It is very probable that the Offa whose marriage with a lady of murderous disposition is mentioned in Beowulf is the same person; and this story also appears in the Vitae duorum Offarum, though it is erroneously told of a later Offa, the famous king of Mercia. Offa of Mercia, however, was a descendant in the 12th generation of Offa, king of Angel. It is probable from this and other considerations that the early Offa lived in the latter part of the 4th century.
See H. M. Chadwick, Origin of the English Nation (Cambridge, 1907), where references to the original authorities will be found.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Offa, king of Mercia

See also Offa of Mercia on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​OFFA (d. 796), king of Mercia, obtained that kingdom in A.D. 757, after driving out Beornred, who had succeeded a few months earlier on the murder of Æthelbald. He traced his descent from Pybba, the father of Penda, through Eowa, brother of that king, his own father’s name being Thingferth. In 779 he was at war with Cynewulf of Wessex from whom he wrested Bensington. It is not unlikely that the Thames became the boundary of the two kingdoms about this time. In 787 the power of Offa was displayed in a synod held at a place called Cealchyth. He deprived Tænberht, archbishop of Canterbury, of several of his suffragan sees, and assigned them to Lichfield, which, with the leave of the pope, he constituted as a separate archbishopric under Hygeberht. He also took advantage of this meeting to have his son Ecgferth consecrated as his colleague, and that prince subsequently signed charters as Rex Merciorum. In 789 Offa secured the alliance of Berhtric of Wessex by giving him his daughter Eadburg in marriage. In 794 he appears to have caused the death of Æthelberht of East Anglia, though some accounts ascribe the murder to Cynethryth, the wife of Offa. In 796 Offa died after a reign of thirty-nine years and was succeeded by his son Ecgferth. It is customary to ascribe to Offa a policy of limited scope, namely the establishment of Mercia in a position equal to that of Wessex and of Northumbria. This is supposed to be illustrated by his measures with regard to the see of Lichfield. It cannot be doubted, however, that at this time Mercia was a much more formidable power than Wessex. Offa, like most of his predecessors, probably held a kind of supremacy over all kingdoms south of the Humber. He seems, however, not to have been contented with this position, and to have entertained the design of putting an end to the dependent kingdoms. At all events we hear of no kings of the Hwicce after about 780, and the kings of Sussex seem to have given up the royal title about the same time. Further, there is no evidence for any kings in Kent from 784 until after Offa’s death. To Offa is ascribed by Asser, in his life of Alfred, the great fortifications against the Welsh which is still known as “Offa’s dike.” It stretched from sea to sea and consisted of a wall and a rampart. An account of his Welsh campaigns is given in the Vitae duorum Offorum, but it is difficult to determine how far the stories there given have an historical basis.
See Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. J. Earle and C. Plummer (Oxford, 1899), s.a. 755, 777, 785, 787, 792, 794, 796, 836; W. de G. Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum (London, 1885–1893), vol. i.; Asser, Life of Alfred, cd. W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1904); Vitae duorum Offarum (in works of Matthew Paris, ed. W. Wats, London, 1640).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hanukkah

See also Hanukkah on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​HANUKKAH, a Jewish festival, the “Feast of Dedication” (cf. John x. 22) or the “Feast of the Maccabees,” beginning on the 25th day of the ninth month Kislev (December), of the Hebrew ecclesiastical year, and lasting eight days. It was instituted in 165 B.C. in commemoration of, and thanksgiving for, the purification of the temple at Jerusalem on this day by Judas Maccabaeus after its pollution by Antiochus Epiphanes, king of Syria, who in 168 B.C. set up a pagan altar to Zeus Olympius. The Talmudic sources say that when the perpetual lamp of the temple was to be relighted only one flask of holy oil sufficient for the day remained, but this miraculously lasted for the eight days (cf. the legend in 2 Macc. i. 18). In memory of this the Jews burn both in synagogues and in houses on the first night of the festival one light, on the second two, and so on to the end (so the Hillelites), or vice versa eight lights on the first, and one less on each succeeding night (so the Shammaites). From the prominence of the lights the festival is also known as the “Festival of Lights” or “Illumination” (Talmud). It is said that the day chosen by Judas for the setting up of the new altar was the anniversary of that on which Antiochus had set up the pagan altar; hence it is suggested (e.g. by Wellhausen) that the 25th of Kislev was an old pagan festival, perhaps the day of the winter solstice.
For further details and illustrations of Ḥanukkah lamps see Jewish Encyc., s.v.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hanway, Jonas

See also Jonas Hanway on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​HANWAY, JONAS (1712–1786), English traveller and philanthropist, was born at Portsmouth in 1712. While still a child, his father, a victualler, died, and the family moved to London. In 1729 Jonas was apprenticed to a merchant in Lisbon. In 1743, after he had been some time in business for himself in London, he became a partner with Mr Dingley, a merchant in St Petersburg, and in this way was led to travel in Russia and Persia. Leaving St Petersburg on the 10th of September 1743, and passing south by Moscow, Tsaritsyn and Astrakhan, he embarked on the Caspian on the 22nd of November, and arrived at Astrabad on the 18th of December. Here his goods were seized by Mohammed Hassan Beg, and it was only after great privations that he reached the camp of Nadir Shah, under whose protection he recovered most (85%) of his property. His return journey was embarrassed by sickness (at Resht), by attacks from pirates, and by six weeks’ quarantine; and he only reappeared at St Petersburg on the 1st of January 1745. He again left the Russian capital on the 9th of July 1750 and travelled through Germany and Holland to England (28th of October). The rest of his life was mostly spent in London, where the narrative of his travels (published in 1753) soon made him a man of note, and where he devoted himself to philanthropy and good citizenship. In 1756 he founded the Marine Society, to keep up the supply of British seamen; in 1758 he became a governor of the Foundling, and established the Magdalen, hospital; in 1761 he procured a better system of parochial birth-registration in London; and in 1762 he was appointed a commissioner for victualling the navy (10th of July); this office he held till October 1783. He died, unmarried, on the 5th of September 1786. He was the first Londoner, it is said, to carry an umbrella, and he lived to triumph over all the hackney coachmen who tried to hoot and hustle him down. He attacked “vail-giving,” or tipping, with some temporary success; by his onslaught upon tea-drinking he became involved in controversy with Johnson and Goldsmith. His last efforts were on behalf of little chimney-sweeps. His advocacy of solitary confinement for prisoners and opposition to Jewish naturalization were more questionable instances of his activity in social matters.
Hanway left seventy-four printed works, mostly pamphlets; the only one of literary importance is the Historical Account of British Trade over the Caspian Sea, with a Journal of Travels, &c. (London, 1753). On his life, see also Pugh, Remarkable Occurrences in the Life of Jonas Hanway (London, 1787); Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. xxxii. p. 342; vol. lvi. pt. ii. pp. 812-814, 1090, 1143-1144; vol. lxv. pt. ii. pp. 721-722, 834-835; Notes and Queries, 1st series, i. 436, ii. 25; 3rd series, vii. 311; 4th series, viii. 416.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hansteen, Christopher

See also Christopher Hansteen on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​HANSTEEN, CHRISTOPHER (1784–1873), Norwegian astronomer and physicist, was born at Christiania, on the 26th of September 1784. From the cathedral school he went to the university at Copenhagen, where first law and afterwards mathematics formed his main study. In 1806 he taught mathematics in the gymnasium of Frederiksborg, Zeeland, and in the following year he began the inquiries in terrestrial magnetism with which his name is especially associated. He took in 1812 the prize of the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences for his reply to a question on the magnetic axes. Appointed lecturer in 1814, he was in 1816 raised to the chair of astronomy and applied mathematics in the university of Christiania. In 1819 he published a volume of researches on terrestrial magnetism, which was translated into German by P. T. Hanson, under the title of Untersuchungen über den Magnetismus der Erde, with a supplement containing Beobachtungen der Abweichung und Neigung der Magnetnadel and an atlas. By the rules there framed for the observation of magnetical phenomena Hansteen hoped to accumulate analyses for determining the number and position of the magnetic poles of the earth. In prosecution of his researches he travelled over Finland and the greater part of his own country; and in 1828–1830 he undertook, in company with G. A. Erman, and with the co-operation of Russia, a government mission to Western Siberia. A narrative of the expedition soon appeared (Reise-Erinnerungen aus Sibirien, 1854; Souvenirs ​d’un voyage en Sibérie, 1857); but the chief work was not issued till 1863 (Resultate magnetischer Beobachtungen, &c.). Shortly after the return of the mission, an observatory was erected in the park of Christiania (1833), and Hansteen was appointed director. On his representation a magnetic observatory was added in 1839. In 1835–1838 he published text-books on geometry and mechanics; and in 1842 he wrote his Disquisitiones de mutationibus quas patitur momentum acus magneticae, &c. He also contributed various papers to different scientific journals, especially the Magazin for Naturvidenskaberne, of which he became joint-editor in 1823. He superintended the trigonometrical and topographical survey of Norway, begun in 1837. In 1861 he retired from active work, but still pursued his studies, his Observations de l’inclination magnétique and Sur les variations séculaires du magnétisme appearing in 1865. He died at Christiania on the 11th of April 1873.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hansen, Peter Andreas

See also Peter Andreas Hansen on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​HANSEN, PETER ANDREAS (1795–1874), Danish astronomer, was born on the 8th of December 1795, at Tondern, in the duchy of Schleswig. The son of a goldsmith, he learned the trade of a watchmaker at Flensburg, and exercised it at Berlin and Tondern, 1818–1820. He had, however, long been a student of science; and Dr Dircks, a physician practising at Tondern, prevailed with his father to send him in 1820 to Copenhagen, where he won the patronage of H. C. Schumacher, and attracted the personal notice of King Frederick VI. The Danish survey was then in progress, and he acted as Schumacher’s assistant in work connected with it, chiefly at the new observatory of Altona, 1821–1825. Thence he passed on to Gotha as director of the Seeberg observatory; nor could he be tempted to relinquish the post by successive invitations to replace F. G. W. Struve at Dorpat in 1829, and F. W. Bessel at Königsberg in 1847. The problems of gravitational astronomy engaged the chief part of Hansen’s attention. A research into the mutual perturbations of Jupiter and Saturn secured for him the prize of the Berlin Academy in 1830, and a memoir on cometary disturbances was crowned by the Paris Academy in 1850. In 1838 he published a revision of the lunar theory, entitled Fundamenta nova investigationis, &c., and the improved Tables of the Moon based upon it were printed in 1857, at the expense of the British government, their merit being further recognized by a grant of £1000, and by their immediate adoption in the Nautical Almanac, and other Ephemerides. A theoretical discussion of the disturbances embodied in them (still familiarly known to lunar experts as the Darlegung) appeared in the Abhandlungen of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in 1862–1864. Hansen twice visited England and was twice (in 1842 and 1860) the recipient of the Royal Astronomical Society’s gold medal. He communicated to that society in 1847 an able paper on a long-period lunar inequality (Memoirs Roy. Astr. Society, xvi. 465), and in 1854 one on the moon’s figure, advocating the mistaken hypothesis of its deformation by a huge elevation directed towards the earth (Ib. xxiv. 29). He was awarded the Copley medal by the Royal Society in 1850, and his Solar Tables, compiled with the assistance of Christian Olufsen, appeared in 1854. Hansen gave in 1854 the first intimation that the accepted distance of the sun was too great by some millions of miles (Month. Notices Roy. Astr. Soc. xv. 9), the error of J. F. Encke’s result having been rendered evident through his investigation of a lunar inequality. He died on the 28th of March 1874, at the new observatory in the town of Gotha, erected under his care in 1857.
See Vierteljahrsschrift astr. Gesellschaft, x. 133; Month. Notices Roy. Astr. Society, xxxv. 168; Proc. Roy. Society, xxv. p. v.; R. Wolf, Geschichte der Astronomie, p. 526; Wochenschrift für Astronomie, xvii. 207 (account of early years by E. Heis); Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (C. Bruhns). (A. M. C.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hansi

See also Hansi on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​HANSI, a town of British India, in the Hissar district of the Punjab, on a branch of the Western Jumna canal, with a station on the Rewari-Ferozepore railway, 16 m. E. of Hissar. Pop. (1901) 16,523. Hansi is one of the most ancient towns in northern India, the former capital of the tract called Hariana. At the end of the 18th century it was the headquarters of the famous Irish adventurer George Thomas; from 1803 to 1857 it was a British cantonment, and it became the scene of a murderous outbreak during the Mutiny. A ruined fort overlooks the town, which is still surrounded by a high brick wall, with bastions and loop holes. It is a centre of local trade, with factories for ginning and pressing cotton.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hansom, Joseph Aloysius

See also Joseph Hansom on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​HANSOM, JOSEPH ALOYSIUS (1803–1882), English architect and inventor, was born in York on the 26th of October 1803. Showing an aptitude for designing and construction, he was taken from his father’s joinery shop and apprenticed to an architect in York, and, by 1831, his designs for the Birmingham town hall were accepted and followed—to his financial undoing, as he had become bond for the builders. In 1834 he registered the design of a “Patent Safety Cab,” and subsequently sold the patent to a company for £10,000, which, however, owing to the company’s financial difficulties, was never paid. The hansom cab as improved by subsequent alterations, nevertheless, took and held the fancy of the public. There was no back seat for the driver in the original design, and there is little beside the suspended axle and large wheels in the modern hansom to recall the early ones. In 1834 Hansom founded the Builder newspaper, but was compelled to retire from this enterprise owing to insufficient capital. Between 1854 and 1879 he devoted himself to architecture, designing and erecting a great number of important buildings, private and public, including churches, schools and convents for the Roman Catholic church to which he belonged. Buildings from his designs are scattered all over the United Kingdom, and were even erected in Australia and South America. He died in London on the 29th of June 1882.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hanthawaddy

See also Bago, Myanmar on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​HANTHAWADDY, a district in the Pegu division of Lower Burma, the home district of Rangoon, from which the town was detached to make a separate district in 1880. It has an area of 3023 sq. m., with a population in 1901 of 484,811, showing an increase of 22% in the decade. Hanthawaddy and Henzada are the two most densely populated districts in the province. It consists of a vast plain stretching up from the sea between the To or China Bakir mouth of the Irrawaddy and the Pegu Yomas. Except the tract lying between the Pegu Yomas on the east and the Hlaing river, the country is intersected by numerous tidal creeks, many navigable by large boats and some by steamers. The headquarters of the district are in Rangoon, which is also the sub-divisional headquarters. The second sub-division has its headquarters at Insein, where there are large railway works. Cultivation is almost wholly confined to rice, but there are many vegetable and fruit gardens.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hanuman

See also Hanuman on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​HANUMAN, in Hindu mythology, a monkey-god, who forms a central figure in the Ramayana. He was the child of a nymph by the god of the wind. His exploits, as the ally of Rama (incarnation of Vishnu) in the latter’s recovery of his wife Sita from the clutches of the demon Ravana, include the bridging of the straits between India and Ceylon with huge boulders carried away from the Himalayas. He is the leader of a host of monkeys who aid in these supernatural deeds. Temples in his honour are frequent throughout India.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hanson, Sir Richard Davies

See also Richard Hanson (Australian politician) on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​HANSON, SIR RICHARD DAVIES (1805–1876), chief justice of South Australia, was born in London on the 6th of December 1805. Admitted a solicitor in 1828, he practised for some time in London. In 1838 he went with Lord Durham to Canada as assistant-commissioner of inquiry into crown lands and immigration. In 1840, on the death of Lord Durham, whose private secretary he had been, he settled in Wellington, New Zealand. He there acted as crown prosecutor, but in 1846 removed to South Australia. In 1851 he was appointed advocate-general of that colony and took an active share in the passing of many important measures, such as the first Education Act, the District Councils Act of 1852, and the Act of 1856 which granted constitutional government to the colony. In 1856 and again from 1857 to 1860 he was attorney-general and leader of the government. In 1861 he was appointed chief justice of the supreme court of South Australia and was knighted in 1869. He died in Australia on the 4th of March 1876.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Meerane

See also Meerane on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​MEERANE, a town in the kingdom of Saxony, 9 m. N. of Zwickau and 37 S. of Leipzig by rail. Pop. (1905), 26,005. It contains a fine medieval church (Evangelical). It is one of the most important industrial centres of Germany for the manufacture of woollen and mixed cloths, and in these products has a large export trade, especially to America and the Far East. There are also extensive dyeworks, tanneries and machine factories.
See Leopold, Chronik und Beschreibung der Fabrik- und Handelstadt Meerane (1863).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Megara Hyblaea

See also Megara Hyblaea on Wikipedia; and our 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica disclaimer.
​MEGARA HYBLAEA (perhaps identical with Hybla Major), an ancient city of Sicily, on the E. coast, 12 m. N.N.W. of Syracuse, founded in 728 B.C. by Megarean colonists, who had previously settled successively at Trotilon, Leontini and Thapsus. A hundred years later it founded Selinus, apparently because it had no room for development. It never seems to have been a town of great importance, and had no advantages of position. It was destroyed by Gelon about 481 B.C., and its walls seem to have been razed to the ground. In the Athenian expedition against Syracuse (415–413) Lamachus proposed (it being then deserted) to make it the Athenian base of operations; but his advice was not taken, and in the next spring the Syracusans fortified it. In 309 it was still fortified; but, after Marcellus captured it, in 214, we hear little more of it. Excavations carried on in 1891 led to the discovery of the ​northern portion of the western town wall, which in one section served at the same time as an embankment against floods (it was apparently more conspicuous in the time of P. Cluver, Sicilia, p. 133), of an extensive necropolis, about 1000 tombs of which have been explored, and of a deposit of votive objects from a temple. The harbour lay to the north of the town.
See P. Orsi in Monumenti dei Lincei (1891), i. 689–950; and Atti del congresso delle scienze storiche, v. 181 (Rome, 1904).  (T. As.)