Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was a British philosopher. He was born in Riga, Latvia, which at the time was a part of the Russian Empire. He was Jewish, and was the first Jew to win the prize of a fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford University.
Isaiah Berlin was an important person of the 20th century. People see him as an important thinker of Liberalist ideas. He was made a member of the Order of Merit and was a professor at the University of Oxford. He made a distinction between positive liberty and negative liberty. His most famous work is probably "Two Concepts of Liberty" (where he introduced this distinction.) He died 5 November 1997.
Guru Granth Sahib
The Guru Granth Sahib , also called Adi Granth, is the holy book of the religion Sikhism. It contains prayers, and hymns of Sikh religion. Sikhs believe the Guru Granth Sahib to be a living Guru, hence the Guru Granth Sahib has its own place also commonly known as 'Sach Khand' (the Heaven).
The name of the book is made up of three words. The first word is Guru, and a Guru in Sanskrit language means a teacher. Granth is a word of Hindi, and this means a book. The third word Sahib is a word of Urdu language and it means master. Thus, the Guru Granth Sahib means "a Master Book by the Teacher". The Guru Granth Sahib, is a collection of hymns of the first five "Sikh Gurus", the "Ninth Guru", and various saints, or "bhagats" Sikhs and others such as Baba Farid.
But what makes it so significant is that it has the solution to every problem in the World. The Granth teaches us how we should live, and promotes a modern ideology. This is why it makes it so important to Sikhs.
The book is usually placed in the centre of the temple, high up under a roof.
It is written in the language called Gurmukhi. The first composition in the Guru Granth Sahib is Mool mantar by Guru Nanak Dev Ji.
Zeno of Elea
Zeno of Elea was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of southern Italy. He was born about 490 BC and died about 430 BC: the exact dates are not known.
Zeno a member of the Eleatic School founded by Parmenides. Aristotle called him the inventor of dialectic. He is best known for his paradoxes, which Bertrand Russell has described as "immeasurably subtle and profound".
Although many ancient writers refer to the writings of Zeno, none of his writings survive intact.
Plato says that Zeno's writings were "brought to Athens for the first time on the occasion of" the visit of Zeno and Parmenides
According to Proclus in his "Commentary on Plato's Parmenides", Zeno produced "not less than forty arguments revealing contradictions", but only nine are now known.
Zeno's arguments are perhaps the first examples of a method of proof called "reductio ad absurdum", literally meaning "to reduce to the absurd". This destructive method of argument was used by him to such an extent that he became famous for it.
Zeno of Citium
Zeno of Citium (sometimes called Zeno Apathea) (333 BC264 BC) was a Syrian philosopher. He was the student of Carates of Thebes, who was the most famous cynic at that time. He started the Stoic school of philosophy.
Iron Curtain
The Iron Curtain is a term related to the Cold War. It means the border between the states that were members of the Warsaw Pact (in Eastern Europe), and those that were not (then called "The West").
This border was between East Germany and West Germany, between Czechoslovakia and Austria, and between Hungary and Austria.
At the end of World War II Austria, Germany and Berlin were divided into four zones. In 1955, a treaty was signed. The treaty said that the Allied forces must leave Austria. In return, the Austrian government promised to do certain things, like not form a territorial union with Germany and recognise certain minorities, amongst others. The whole of Europe was separated into a Soviet Union zone in the East and a neutral or US-dominated zone in the West. The splitting of Europe, Germany and especially Berlin into two political blocks was part of the Cold War between the United States of America and other western countries on one side and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other. The wartime Allied Forces split after their common enemy, Nazi Germany, was defeated in May 1945.
The idea of the Iron Curtain was referring to the separation of the communist Europe compared to the democratic west, it was the idea that what was happening in the "satellite states" and in Russia was secret to the rest of the world. Satellite state refers to a country being controlled by another, in this case Russia was controlling countries such as Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and others which were previously controlled by Germany in WW2.
The idea of the Iron Curtain was first made public by Winston Churchill, a famous Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during WW2, when invited to speak at American University by Harry S. Truman (the American president at the time). Churchill's speech was seen by Nikita Khrushchev; leader of the USSR from 1958 until 1964 as a declaration of war, as Churchill urged a struggle against the Soviet Union.
Indus Valley civilization
The Indus Valley civilization was a Bronze Age civilization(3300–1300 BC; mature period 2700-1700 BC)
The civilization was in the subcontinent. It was discovered by archaeologists in the 1880s.
It developed along the Indus River and the Ghaggar-Hakra River and even that areas are now in modern Pakistan, north-west India and Afghanistan. The civilization started during the Bronze Age and the height of its development was between 2500 BC and 1500 BC. Including the civilizations directly before and after, it may have lasted from the 33rd to the 14th century BC.
The Indus Valley civilization covered a large area from Balochistan (Pakistan) to Gujarat (Republic of India). The first city to be discovered by excavation (digging up) was Harappa and therefore this civilization is also known as 'Harappan Civilization'.
They were good builders. The ruins of the site shows skillful design. Their buildings had two or sometimes more stories. The bathrooms were attached to the rooms. One of the unique features of the city was its elaborate drainage system. A brick-lined drainage channel flowed alongside every street. Removable bricks were placed at regular intervals for easy cleaning and inspection.
The harappan traders used seals on the knots of the sacks to be transported to make sure that they were not opened during the journey. Nobody knows how to read their writing system.
In 1842 Charles Masson wrote a book that mentioned the sites of Indus Valley Civilisation. Few people paid attention. Later, in 1921-22, John Marshall organised the first archaeological dig at Harappa.
Sumer
Sumer is the earliest known civilization in southern Mesopotamia (in modern-day southern Iraq). They may have been one of the first civilizations in the world, as were Ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley.
Sumer started around 3500 BC. The Sumerian civilization grew along the Tigris and Euphrates. This land was good for growing food. Sumerian culture is famous for its written cuneiform script - where letters were formed by pressing a triangle shaped reed into wet-clay tiles. They are also credited with creating the wheel, and dividing a day into 24 hours, and each hour into 60 minutes.
The earliest texts come from the cities of Uruk and Jemdet Nasr and date back to 3300 BC. Early cuneiform script writing emerged in 3000 BC.
Sumerian communities were organized into city-states, each ruled by a priest or king, until Akkad conquered them in the third millennium BC. One of the most famous Sumerian cities was Ur (not the same city as Uruk, but near it).
During the 3rd millennium BC, a close cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians, who spoke a language isolate, and Akkadian-speakers, which included widespread bilingualism.
The Sumerian city of Eridu, on the coast of the Persian Gulf, may have been the world's first city.