Amenhotep II

Amenhotep II (Amun is Satisfied) was the seventh Pharaoh of the 18th dynasty of Egypt. Amenhotep inherited a vast kingdom from his father Thutmose III.  His reign is usually dated from 1427 to 1401 BC.

Museo Egizio Torino

Kongorikishi

"Kongōrikishi (金剛力士) or Niō (仁王) are two wrath-filled and muscular guardians of the Buddha, standing today at the entrance of many Buddhist temples all across Asia including China, Japan and Korea in the form of frightening wrestler-like statues.
They are manifestations of the Bodhisattva Vajrapāṇi protector deity and the oldest and most powerful of the Mahayana pantheon. According to Japanese tradition, they travelled with the historical Buddha to protect him and there are references to this in the Theravada Scriptures as well as the Ambatta Sutta. Within the generally pacifist tradition of   Buddhism, stories of Niō guardians like Kongōrikishi justified the use of  physical force to protect cherished values and beliefs against evil. Nio-Vajrapani is also seen as a manifestation of Mahasthamaprapta or the Bodhisattva of Power that flanks Amida in the Pure Land Tradition and as Vajrasattva, the Dharmapala of the Tibetan tradition...

...Kongōrikishi are a possible case of the transmission of the image of the Greek hero Heracles to East Asia along the Silk Road.  Heracles was used in Greco-Buddhist art to represent Vajrapani, the protector of the Buddha (See also Image), and his representation
was then used in China and Japan to depict the protector gods of Buddhist temples. This transmission is part of the wider Greco-Buddhist syncretic phenomenon, where Buddhism interacted with the Hellenistic  culture of Central Asia from the 4th century BC to the 4th century AD.[4]

Source: Wikipedia

See also http://stretchingtheboundaries.blogspot.it/2011/04/kongo-rikishi.html

Solar orientation of Ales Stenar

Ales Stenar and the direction of the sun during the day as given by sollumis.com, on the Winter and Summer solstices. The image shows a good agreement with the solar orientation suggested in

Andrew M. Kobos, January/February, 2001. Ales Stenar: When? Who? What for?,

http://www.zwoje-scrolls.com/as/aleseng.html

More 

On the solar orientation of Ales Stenar site, A.C. Sparavigna

PORTO, POLITO, http://porto.polito.it/2507517/

and also
http://stretchingtheboundaries.blogspot.it/2012/04/ales-stone-boat.html

UPDATE AND UPGRADE (2016)

To see Ales Stenar and its orientaton to the MOON see this:

http://stretchingtheboundaries.blogspot.it/2016/09/ales-stenar-and-moon.html

Monumentum anacyranum

Index rerum a se gestarum: sive Monumentum anacyranum. Ex reliquiis Graecae interpretationis

The name Monumentum Ancyranum refers to the Temple of Augustus and Rome in Ancyra (modern Ankara, Turkey), or to the inscription Res Gestae Divi Augusti, a text recounting the deeds of the first Roman emperor Augustus, the most intact copy of which is preserved on the walls of this temple.

The Roman Centuriation in the Middlesex District

The Roman Centuriation in the Middlesex District. (Brentford Printing and » 20 Jun 1908 » The Spectator Archive

The Roman Centuriation in the Middlesex District.
(Brentford Printing and Publishing Company. 3s. 6&)—

This is an addendum to Mr. Montagu Sharpe'e "Antiquities of Middlesex" A centuria was a square plot of land containing fifty iugera, equivalent to thirty-one and a quarter acres. This was the measure used in dividing the land of a conquered country. Each Roman citizen had four centuriac ; part was restored to the natives ; odd bits and unoccupied lands were leased out; forests, &c., were dealt with on the same principles. Mr. Sharpe writes about the details of this division—boundaries, landmarks, &c.—and applies his deductions to the Middlesex region, with some portions of the adjoining counties. He makes out eight territories (named "Break- spear's," "Colne," "Pontes "—these are in the west—" Ridge," "Sulloniacae," " Harrow," " Home," "Lea "). We cannot discuss the details, but we may point out a highly interesting list of landmarks as related to the road system given on p. 14.

More at
http://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/repubs/sharpe_middx/pages/ehr.html

"Evidence that this area had been settled by a Romano-British agricultural population was obtained in this way. For some time past it had been noticed that many fragments of its ancient rural ways ran in parallel lines, and were crossed at right angles by similar ones, which in the several districts of the county were distinguished by a different orientation. Thus in the northeastern division the direction of the cardinal ways was from north to south: in the southern portion between the Brent and the Lea rivers, and into Essex, they pointed south-south-east. Over the south-western area and beyond the Colne into Buckinghamshire the course was south by west, and in the north-western district they were again south-south-east. Passing into that part of the Middlesaxon province lying south of the upper Colne and Lea, but now in Hertfordshire, the two orientations were {490} respectively south-east by south, and south by east. A further feature was that many crossways occurred at equal intervals, and along one road five in succession were found at distances of 120 Roman poles or 388 yards, two being roads, two foot paths, and the other an ancient field boundary, presumed to have been formerly a plough balk or a footway.

It was manifest that this laying out of land amounting to 181,000 acres could not have been the result of chance, but must have been carried out at a time when the soil was mostly in its primitive condition, by a conquering race who had seized it, and who were accompanied by skilled land measurers. All this pointed unmistakably to the Romans and their corps of agrimensores, trained in applied geometry and using scientific instruments. The writings of the Gromatici Veteres were next consulted for information as to the manner in which Roman lands were surveyed and laid out, and it is worthy of note that one of the most eminent of these writers was Sextus Frontinus, Propraetor over Britain from a. d. 74. Among the more enduring bench or land marks used by Roman surveyors were mounds of earth (up to the size of a small haystack), stones, and trenches, and in these three respects important discoveries have been made in the county. A mound (botontinus) is to be seen both in Cranford and in Syon parks, also at Hampstead, Stanmore, Hadley—where there are two—and just out of the county at Salthill, Slough. Two others have not long ago been levelled, one by Bushy Park and the other at Hillingdon, while local names apparently preserve the sites of half a dozen more. Four stones are still in situ; two marked on old maps no longer exist, and the former positions of several others can be located. Two trenches are still to be seen.

A map showed that these boundary marks and the remnants of the oriented ways were naturally co-related, that each district had been of nearly equal area, rectangular in form, and contained by a boundary line, the course of which was disclosed by the botontini and stones. It was also seen that these districts or pagi were in general identical in area with those of the later hundreds of the Saxon period, as set forth in Domesday. From the orientation of the pagi, the territorium of the Londinium canton appeared to extend from the foot of the Chiltern hills across Middlesex and into Essex; the pagi had been laid out by lines (quintarii) crossing one another at right angles, and so forming possessae, each of which according to the text-book, and in fact, contained 1,300 jugera equal to 810 statute acres. These in turn could be divided into 25 laterculi or small centuriae of 50 jugera lying in rows of five, plus an area equal to a centuria distributable over a possessa for lanes and paths. This provision, equal to one-{491}twenty-fifth of a surveyed area, was later on found to have an important bearing when comparing the total acreage of the Roman and Domesday surveys of the county, for the latter did not include road surface. A side of this square centuria measured 120 Roman poles or 388 yards, and five of them lining the face of a possessa accounted for those five successive equal intervals formed by crossways which were noticed upon a Middlesex road between Greenford and Ealing as above mentioned."

http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/content/XXXIII/CXXXII/489.citation

http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/dha_0755-7256_1990_num_16_2_1489

http://www.uea.ac.uk/~jwmp/NAHRG04.pdf

On Ancient Chinese Towns

Sculpture of lion with three cubs from Dadu, discovered underneath the Ming era city wall, now on display in the Beijing Stone Carving Museum

Courtesy: Shizhao, Wikipedia    

Khanbaliq or Dadu  refers to a city which is the core of Beijing.   Dadu or Ta-Tu (大都, pinyin: Dàdū, Wade-Giles: Ta-tu), means "great capital" or "grand capital" in Chinese, the name for the capital of the Yuan Dynasty founded by Kublai Khan in China, and was called Daidu by the Mongols, which was a transliteration directly from the Chinese. It is known as Khanbaliq (汗八里), also spelled as Khanbalikh in Turkic languages, meaning "Great residence of the Khan", and Marco Polo wrote of it as Cambaluc.

On Khanbalik and other Chinese Towns, see please:

A possible role of sunrise/sunset azimuth in the planning of ancient Chinese towns by  A.C. Sparavigna,
PORTO POLITO, http://porto.polito.it/2519296/

Nosce te ipsum

"Il Gnôr Grassiadiô e il Gnôr Côlômbô erano due amici-nemici che, secondo la leggenda, abitarono per tempo immemorabile a fronte a fronte, sui due lati di uno stretto vicolo della città di Moncalvo. Il Gnôr Grassiadiô era massone e ricchissimo: si vergognava un poco di essere ebreo, ed aveva sposato una gôià, e cioè una cristiana, dai capelli biondi lunghi fino al suolo, che gli metteva le corna. Questa gôià, benché appunto gôià, si chiamava Magna Ausilia, il che indica un certo grado di accettazione da parte degli epigoni; era figlia di un capitano di mare, che aveva regalato al Gnôr Grassiadiô un grosso pappagallo di tutti i colori che veniva dalle Guyane, e diceva in latino "Conosci te stesso". Il Gnôr Côlômbò era povero e mazziniano: quando arrivò il pappagallo, si era comperata una cornacchia tutta spelacchiata e le aveva insegnato a parlare. Quando il pappagallo diceva "Nosce te ipsum" la cornacchia rispondeva "Fate furb", "fatti furbo"."
da Il Sistema Periodico, di Primo Levi
http://areeweb.polito.it/strutture/cemed/sistemaperiodico/s16/e16_1_02.html

Gnôr Grassiadiô and Gnôr Côlômbô were two friendly enemies who, according to the legend, had lived from time immemorial face to face on the two sides of an alleyway in the town of Moncalvo. Gnôr Grassiadiô was a Mason and very rich. He was a bit ashamed of being a Jew and had married a goyà, that is, a Christian, with blond hair so long it touched the ground, who cuckolded him. This goyà, although really a goyà, was called Magna Ausilia, which indicates a certain degree of acceptance on the part of the epigones; she was the daughter of a sea captain who had presented Gnôr Grassiadiô with a large, varicolored parrot which came from Guyana and would say in Latin, “Know thyself.” Gnôr Côlômbô was poor and a Mazzinian. When the parrot arrived he bought a crow without a feather on its back and taught it to speak. When the parrot croaked, “Nosce te ipsum,” the crow answered, “Wise up.“
Primo Levi - The Periodic Table
Translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal

The Remarkable Properties of Mythological Social Networks | MIT Technology Review

"Today,  P J Miranda at the Federal Technological University of Paraná in Brazil and a couple of pals study the social network between characters in Homer’s ancient Greek poem, the Odyssey. Their conclusion is that this social network bears remarkable similarities to Facebook, Twitter and the like and that this may offer an important clue about the origin of this ancient story."
The Remarkable Properties of Mythological Social Networks | MIT Technology Review

Festival Beethoven

Dal 24 al 30 giugno 2013, Piazza San Carlo

Le 9 Sinfonie con l’Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI e il Coro del Teatro Regio. I Concerti con l’Orchestra Filarmonica di Torino e grandi interpreti.

Tutte le sere, ore 21, Ingresso libero

Immagine non-photorealistic rendering; vedi A.C. Sparavigna, B Montrucchio,  

Non-photorealistic image rendering with a labyrinthine tiling, http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0609084

FESTIVAL BEETHOVEN

From 24th to 30th June in Piazza San Carlo, seven evenings of free classical music by the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI (RAI National Symphonic Orchestra) and Torino Philharmonic Orchestra.

Festival Beethoven. The RAI National Symphonic Orchestra will perform Beethoven’s Nine symphonies and Torino Philharmonic Orchestra, with young talents already nationally affirmed, four of five Concerts for the Piano, the Concert for Orchestra and Violins and the Triple Concert.

http://www.comune.torino.it/torinoplus/english/comingsoon/festival-beethoven.shtml

Ancient trading

"Joakim Wehlin of the University of Gothenburg and Gotland University has examined Bronze Age stone monuments that sit along Sweden’s Baltic Sea coasts. It had been thought that the monuments, which resemble stone ships, were used primarily as grave sites. Wehlin, however, thinks that they were used by maritime groups trading in metal objects. “It seems like the whole body was typically not buried in the ship, and some stone ships don’t even have graves in them. Instead, they sometimes show remains of other types of activities. So with the absence of the dead, the traces of the survivors tend to appear,” he explained. The monuments may have been used to mark ports, waterways leading inland, and potential meeting places." From http://www.archaeology.org/news/690-130322-sweden-stone-ships-bronze-age

https://sites.google.com/site/stoneships/