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

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​ARTHUR I. (1187–1203), duke of Brittany, was the posthumous son of Geoffrey, the fourth son of Henry II. of England, and Constance, heiress of Conan IV., duke of Brittany. The Bretons hoped that their young prince would uphold their independence, which was threatened by the English. Henry II. tried to seize Brittany, and in 1187 forced Constance to marry one of his favourites, Randulph de Blundevill, earl of Chester (d. 1232). Henry, however, died soon afterwards (1189). The new king of England, Richard Cœur de Lion, claimed the guardianship of the young Arthur, but in 1190 Richard left for the Crusade. Constance profited by his absence by governing the duchy, and in 1194 she had Arthur proclaimed duke of Brittany by an assembly of barons and bishops. Richard invaded Brittany in 1196, but was defeated in 1197 and became reconciled to Constance. On his death in 1189, the nobles of Anjou, Maine and Touraine refused to recognize John of England, and did homage to Arthur, who declared himself the vassal of Philip Augustus. In 1202 war was resumed between the king of England and the king of France. The king of France recognized Arthur’s right to Brittany, Anjou, Maine and Poitou. While Philip Augustus was invading Normandy, Arthur tried to seize Poitou. But, surprised at Mirebeau, he fell into the hands of John, who sent him prisoner to Falaise. In the following year he was transferred to Rouen, and disappeared suddenly. It is thought that John killed him with his own hand. After this murder John was condemned by the court of peers of France, and stripped of the fiefs which he possessed in France.
See Ralph of Coggeshall, “Chronicon Anglicanum,” in the Monumenta Britanniae historica; Dom Lobineau, Histoire de Bretagne (1702); Dom Morice, Histoire de Bretagne (1742–1756); A. de la Borderie, Histoire de Bretagne, vol. iii. (1899); Bémont, “De la condamnation de Jean-sans-Terre par la Cour des Pairs de France,” in the Revue historique (1886), vol. xxxii.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Artichoke

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​ARTICHOKE. The common artichoke, Cynara, scolymus, is a plant belonging to the natural order Compositae, having some resemblance to a large thistle. It has long been esteemed as a culinary vegetable; the parts chiefly employed being the immature receptacle or floret disk, with the lower part of the surrounding leaf-scales, which are known as “artichoke bottoms.” In Italy the receptacles, dried, are largely used in soups; those of the cultivated plant as Carciofo domestico, and of the wild variety as Carciofo spinoso.
The Jerusalem artichoke, Helianthus tuberosus, is a distinct plant belonging to the same order, cultivated for its tubers. It closely resembles the sunflower, and its popular name is a corruption of the Italian Girasole Articiocco, the sunflower artichoke. It is a native of Canada and the north-eastern United States, and was cultivated by the aborigines. The tubers are rich in the carbohydrate inulin and in sugar.
The name is derived from the northern Italian articiocco, or arciciocco, modern carciofo; these words come, through the Spanish, from the Arabic al-kharshūf. False etymology has corrupted the word in many languages: it has been derived in English from “choke,” and “heart,” or the Latin hortus, a garden; and in French, the form artichaut has been connected with chaud, hot, and chou, a cabbage.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Article

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​ARTICLE (from Lat. articulus, a joint), a term primarily for that which connects two parts together, and so transferred to the parts thus joined; thus the word is used of the separate clauses or heads in contracts, treaties or statutes and the like; of a literary composition on some specific subject in a periodical; or of particular commodities, as in “articles of trade and commerce.” It appears also in the phrase “in the article of death” to translate in articulo mortis, at the moment of death. In grammar the term is used of the adjectives which state the extension of a substantive, i.e. the number of individuals to which a name applies; the indefinite article denoting one or any of a particular class, the definite denoting a particular member of a class.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Assus

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​ASSUS [mod. Behram], an ancient Greek city of the Troad, on the Adramyttian Gulf. The situation is one of the most magnificent in all the Greek lands. The natural cleavage of the trachyte into joint planes had already scarped out shelves which it was comparatively easy for human labour to shape; and so, high up this cone of trachyte, the Greek town of Assus was built, tier above tier, the summit of the crag being crowned with a Doric temple of Athena. The view from the summit is very beautiful and of great historical interest. In front is Lesbos, one of whose towns, Methymna, is said to have sent forth the founders of Assus, as early, perhaps, as 1000 or 900 B.C. The whole south coast-line of the Troad is seen, and in the south-east the ancient territory of Pergamum, from whose masters the possession of Assus passed to Rome by the bequest of Attalus III. (133 B.C.). The great heights of Ida rise in the east. Northward the Tuzla is seen winding through a rich valley. This valley was traversed by the road which St Paul must have followed when he came overland from Alexandria Troas to Assus, leaving his fellow-travellers to proceed by sea. The north-west gateway, to which this road led, is still flanked by two massive towers, of Hellenic work. On the shore below, the ancient mole can still be traced by large blocks under the clear water. Assus affords the only harbour on the 50 m. of coast between Cape Lectum and the east end of the Adramyttian Gulf; hence it must always have been the chief shipping-place for the exports of the southern Troad. The great natural strength of the site protected it against petty assailants; but, like other towns in that region, it has known many masters—Lydians, Persians, the kings of Pergamum, Romans and Ottoman Turks. From the Persian wars to about 350 B.C. Assus enjoyed at least partial independence. It was about 348–345 B.C. that Aristotle spent three years at Assus with Hermeas, an ex-slave who had succeeded his former master Eubulus as despot of Assus and Atarneus. Aristotle has left some verses from an invocation to Arete (Virtue), commemorating the worth of Hermeas, who had been seized by Persian treachery and put to death.
Under its Turkish name of Behram, Assus is still the commercial port of the southern Troad, being the place to which loads of valonia are conveyed by camels from all parts of the country. Explorations were conducted at Assus in 1881–1883 by Mr J. T. Clarke for the Archaeological Institute of America. The main object was to clear the Doric temple of Athena, built about 470 B.C. This temple is remarkable for a sculptured architrave which took the place of the ordinary frieze. The scenes are partly mythological (labours of Heracles), partly purely heraldic. Eighteen panels were transported to the Louvre in 1838; other fragments rewarded the Americans, and a scientific ground-plan was drawn. The well-preserved Hellenistic walls were also studied.
See J. T. Clarke, Assos, 2 vols., 1882 and 1898 (Papers of Arch. Inst. of America, i. ii.); and authorities under Troad. (D. G. H.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Assyria

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​ASSYRIA. The two great empires, Assyria and Babylon, which grew up on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, can be separated as little historically as geographically. From the beginning their history is closely intertwined; and the power of the one is a measure of the weakness of the other. This interdependence of Assyrian and Babylonian history was recognized by ancient writers, and has been confirmed by modern discovery. But whereas Assyria takes the first place in the classical accounts to the exclusion of Babylonia, the decipherment of the inscriptions has proved that the converse was really the case, and that, with the exception of some seven or eight centuries, Assyria might be described as a province or dependency of Babylon. Not only was Babylonia the mother country, as the tenth chapter of Genesis explicitly states, but the religion and culture, the literature and the characters in which it was contained, the arts and the sciences of the Assyrians were derived from their southern neighbours. They were similar in race and language. (See Babylonia and Assyria.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ast, Georg Anton Friedrich

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​AST, GEORG ANTON FRIEDRICH (1778–1841), German philosopher and philologist, was born at Gotha. Educated there and at the university of Jena, he became privat-docent at Jena in 1802. In 1805 he became professor of classical literature in the university of Landshut, where he remained till 1826, when it was transferred to Munich. There he lived till his death on the 31st of October 1841. In recognition of his work he was made an aulic councillor and a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. He is known principally for his work during the last twenty-five years of his life on the dialogues of Plato. His Platon’s Leben und Schriften (1816) was the first of those critical inquiries into the life and works of Plato which originated in the Introductions of Schleiermacher and the historical scepticism of Niebuhr and Wolf. Distrusting tradition, he took a few of the finest dialogues as his standard, and from internal evidence denounced as spurious not only those which are generally admitted to be so (Epinomis, Minos, Theages, Arastae, Clitophon, Hipparchus, Eryxias, Letters and Definitions), but also the Meno, Euthydemus, Charmides, Lysis, Laches, First and Second Alcibiades, Hippias Major and Minor, Ion, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and even (against Aristotle’s explicit assertion) The Laws. The genuine dialogues he divides into three series:—(1) the earliest, marked chiefly by the poetical and dramatic element, i.e. Protagoras, Phaedrus, Gorgias, Phaedo; (2) the second, marked by dialectic subtlety, i.e. Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Parmenides, Cratylus; (3) the third group, combining both qualities harmoniously, i.e. the Philebus, Symposium, Republic, Timaeus, Critias. The work was followed by a complete edition of Plato’s works (11 vols., 1819–1832) with a Latin translation and commentary. His last work was the Lexicon Platonicum (3 vols., 1834–1839), which is both valuable and comprehensive. In his works on aesthetics he combined the views of Schelling with those of Winckelmann, Lessing, Kant, Herder, Schiller and others. His histories of philosophy are marked more by critical scholarship than by originality of thought, though they are interesting as asserting the now familiar principle that the history of philosophy is not the history of opinions, but of reason as a whole; he was among the first to attempt to formulate a principle of the development of thought. Beside his works on Plato, he wrote, on aesthetics, System der Kunstlehre (1805) and Grundriss der Aesthetik (1807); on the history of philosophy, Grundlinien der Philosophie (1807, republished 1809, but soon forgotten), Grundriss einer Geschichte der Philosophie (1807 and 1825), and Hauptmomente der Geschichte der Philosophie (1829); in philology, Grundlinien der Philologie (1808), and Grundlinien der Grammatik, Hermeneutik und Kritik (1808).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Astarabad

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​ASTARABAD, a province of Persia bounded N. by the Caspian Sea and Russian Transcaspian, S. by the Elburz Mountains, W. by Mazandaran, and E. by Khorasan. The country, mountainous in its southern portion, possesses extensive forests, fertile valleys, producing rice, wheat and other grains in abundance, and rich pasturages. The soil, even with little culture, is exceedingly productive, owing to the abundance of water which irrigates and fertilizes it. But while the province in many parts presents a landscape of luxuriant beauty, it is a prey to the ravages of disease, principally malarial fevers due to the extensive swamps formed by waters stagnating in the forests, and to the frequent incursions of the Goklan and Yomut Turkomans, who have their camping-grounds in the northern part of the province, and until about 1890 plundered caravans sometimes at the very gates of Astarabad city, and carried people off into slavery and bondage. The province has a population of about 100,000 and pays a yearly revenue of about £30,000. The inhabitants, notwithstanding the unhealthiness of their climate, are a strong and athletic race, belying their yellow and sickly appearance. The province has the following bulúk (administrative divisions):—(1) Astarabad town; (2) Astarabad rustak (villages); (3) Sadan rustak; (4). Anazan; (5) Katúl; (6) Findarisk, with Kuhsar and Nodeh; (7) Shahkuh Sávar.
​Astarabad, the capital of the province, is situated on the Astar, a small tributary of the Kara Su (Black river), which flows into the Caspian Sea 20 m. W. of the city, and about 18 m. S. of the Gurgan river, in 36° 51′ N. lat. and 54° 26′ E. long. It is surrounded by a mud wall about 30 ft. in height and about 31/2 m. in circuit, but much of the enclosed space is occupied by gardens, mounds of refuse, and ruins. At one time of greater size, it was reduced by Nadir Shah within its present limits. Astarabad owes its origin to Yazid ibn Mohallab, who occupied the province early in the 8th century for Suleiman, the seventh of the Omayyad caliphs (715–717), and was destroyed by Timur (Tamerlane) in 1384. Jonas Hanway, the philanthropist (d. 1786), visited the place in 1744, and attempted to open a direct trade through it between Europe and central Asia. Owing to the noxious exhalations of the surrounding forests the town is so extremely unhealthy during the hot weather as to have acquired the title of the “Abode of the Plague.” It has post and telegraph offices, and a population of about 10,000. Since 1890 the Turkomans who impeded trade by their perpetual raids have been kept more in check, and with the decrease of insecurity the commercial activity of Astarabad has increased considerably.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Assur (city)

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​ASSUR, the primitive capital of Assyria, now represented by the mounds of Kaleh Sherghat (Qal’at Shergat) on the west bank of the Tigris, nearly midway between the Upper and Lower Zab. It is still doubtful (see discussion on the name in the preceding article) whether the national god of Assyria took his name from that of the city or whether the converse was the case. It is most probable, however, that it was the city which was deified (see Sayce, Religion of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 1902, pp. 366, 367). Sir A. H. Layard, through his assistant Hormuzd Rassam, devoted two or three days to excavating on the site, but owing to the want of pasturage and the fear of Bedouin attacks he left the spot after finding a broken clay cylinder containing the annals of Tiglath-Pileser I., and for many years no subsequent efforts were made to explore it. In 1904, however, a German expedition under Dr W. Andrae began systematic excavations, which have led to important results. The city originally grew up round the great temple of the god Assur, the foundation of which was ascribed to the High-priest Uspia. For many centuries Assur and the surrounding district, which came accordingly to be called the land of Assur (Assyria), were governed by high-priests under the suzerainty of Babylonia. With the decay of the Babylonian power the high-priests succeeded in making themselves independent kings, and Assur became the capital of an important kingdom. It was already surrounded by a wall of crude brick, which rested on stone foundations and was strengthened at certain points by courses of burnt brick. A deep moat was dug outside it by Tukulti-Inaristi or Tukulti-Masu (about 1270 B.C.), and it was further defended on the land side by a salkhu or outwork. In the 15th century B.C. it was considerably extended to the south in order to include a “new town” which had grown up there. The wall was pierced by “the gate of Assur,” “the gate of the Sun-god,” “the gate of the Tigris,” &c., and on the river side was a quay of burnt brick and limestone cemented with bitumen. The temples were in the northern part of the city, together with their lofty towers, one of which has been excavated. Besides the temple of Assur there was another great temple dedicated to Anu and Hadad, as well as the smaller sanctuaries of Bel, Ishtar, Merodach and other deities. After the rise of the kingdom, palaces were erected separate from the temples; the sites of those of Hadad-nirari I., Shalmaneser I., and Assur-nazir-pal have been discovered by the German excavators, and about a dozen more are referred to in the inscriptions. Even after the rise of Nineveh as the capital of the kingdom and the seat of the civil power, Assur continued to be the religious centre of the country, where the king was called on to reside when performing his priestly functions. The city survived the fall of Assyria, and extensive buildings as well as tombs of the Parthian age have been found upon the site.
See Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft (1904–1906). (A. H. S.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Astara

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​ASTARA, a port of Russian Transcaucasia, government of Baku, on the Caspian, in 38° 27′ N. lat. and 48° 53′ E. long., on the river of the same name, which forms the frontier between Persia and Russia. Russian merchandize is landed there and forwarded to Azerbáiján and Tabriz via Ardebil.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Athanaric

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​ATHANARIC (d. 381), a ruler of the Visigoths from about 366 to 380. He bore the title not of king but of judge, a title which may be compared with that of ealdorman among the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain. Athanaric waged, from 367 to 369, an unsuccessful war with the emperor Valens, and the peace by which the war was ended was ratified by the Roman and Gothic rulers meeting on a barge in mid-stream of the Danube. Athanaric was a harsh and obstinate heathen, and his short reign was chiefly famous for his brutal persecution of his Christian fellow-countrymen. In 376 he was utterly defeated by the Huns, who a few years before had burst into Europe. The bulk of the Visigothic people sought refuge within the Empire in the region now known as Bulgaria, but Athanaric seems to have fled into Transylvania. Being attacked there by two Ostrogothic chiefs he also, in 381, sought the protection of the Roman emperor. Theodosius I. received him courteously, and he was profoundly impressed by the glories of Constantinople, but on the fifteenth day after his arrival he died, and was honoured by the emperor with a magnificent funeral.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Ath

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​ATH, or Aath, an ancient town of the province of Hainaut, Belgium, situated on the left bank of the Dender. Pop. (1890) 9868; (1904) 11,201. Formerly it was fortified, but after the change in the defensive system of Belgium in 1858 the fortress was dismantled and its ramparts superseded by boulevards. Owing to a fire caused by lightning its fine church of St Julien, dating from the 14th century, which had escaped serious injury during many wars, was destroyed in 1817 (since rebuilt). This left the Tour Burbant as its sole relic of the middle ages. This tower formed part of the donjon of the fortress erected by Baldwin IV., count of Hainaut, about the year 1150. Near Ath is the fine castle of Beloeil, the ancient seat of the princely family of Ligne. Ath is famous for its gild of archers, whose butts are erected on the plain of the Esplanade in the centre of the town. The town militia has the privilege of being armed with bows and crossbows. Ath is also well known in Hainaut for its annual fête called le jour de ducasse—ducasse being the Walloon word for kermesse (fête). On this occasion a procession escorting figures of two giants, Goliath, called locally Goyasse, and Samson, forms the chief feature of the celebration. The emperor Joseph II. stopped it for its “idolatrous” character, but this act was one of the causes of the Brabant revolution of 1789. The procession, revived in 1790, was again stopped by the French republicans five years later, but was revived under the Empire, and has flourished ever since.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Athalaric

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​ATHALARIC (516–534), king of the Ostrogoths, grandson of Theodoric, became king of the Ostrogoths in Italy on his grandfather’s death (526). As he was only ten years old, the regency was assumed by his mother Amalasuntha (q.v.). The murmurs of the Gothic nobles procured for their young sovereign too early emancipation from the schoolroom. He drank heavily, and indulged in vicious excesses which ruined his constitution. He died on the 2nd of October 534.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Athanagild

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​ATHANAGILD (d. 547) became king of the Visigoths (in Spain) in 534, having invoked the aid of the emperor Justinian for his revolt against his predecessor Agila. Athanagild, when himself king, vainly tried to oust his late allies from the footing which they had gained in Spain, nor were the Greeks finally expelled from Spain till seventy years later. Athanagild himself is chiefly remembered for the tragic fortunes of his daughters Brunechildis and Gavleswintha, who married two Frankish brother kings, Sigebert and Chilperic. Athanagild died (“peacefully,” as the annalist remarks) in 547.