Category: historic site

Tribute Bearer

Tribute Bearer, Bas Relief, 710-705 BC, Assyrian Empire

This sculptured head of a man comes from a bas relief of tribute bearers in a procession. The turban on his head and style of his hair and beard identify him as being fron the western part of the Assyrian Empire, probably the Syrian Coast or Turkey. The relief was on a wall in the Palace of Sargon II, located in Khorsabad, Iraq.

Sargon II, a son of Tigiath-Pileser III, came to power late in his life, by ursurping the throne of his brother in a coup. Sargon II suppressed rebellions, conquered the Kingdom of Israel, and in 710 BC conquered the Kingdom of Babylon. He reunited Assyria with its southern rival, Babylonia, which had been seperated for the last thousand years.

In 705 BC, five years after taking Babylon, Sargon II was killed while leading a campaign to Tabal, which had rebelled against Assyrian rule seven years prior. His body was never recovered; his son Sennacherib became the new king.

Charles Sheeler

Charles Sheeler, “Criss-Crossed Converyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company”, 1927, Gelatin Silver Print, Metropolitan Museum of Art

A realistic painter as well as a photographer, Charles Sheeler rarely failed to uncover harmonious coherence in the forms of indigenous American architecture. His series of photographs of the Ford plant near Detroit was commissioned by the automobile company through an advertising agency. Widely reproduced in Europe and America in the 1920s, this commanding image of technological utopia became a monument to the transcendent power of industrial production in the early modern age.

Sheeler was one of the founders of American modernism, developing a syle of painting known as Percisionism. He attended the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial art from 1900 to 1903. Sheeler later attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where he studied under William Merritt Chase, who later established the Parsons School of Design.

Realizing he could not make a living with Modernist painting, Sheeler focused in 1910 on commercial photography, particularly on  architectual subjects. He was a self-taught photographer, leaning his trade on a five-dollar Brownie made by Eastman Kodak. The theme of machinery and technology featured prominently in Sheeler’s photographic work, which continued the linear precision of his paintings.

Jacopo Sansovno

Jacopo Sansovno, “Mars”, Doges Palace, Venice, Italy

In 1485, the Great Council in Venice decided that a ceremonial staircase should be built within the courtyard of the Doges Palace. The design envisaged a straight axis with the rounded Foscari Arch, with alternate bands of Istrian stone and red Verona marble, linking the staircase to the Porta della Carta, and thus producing one single monumental approach from the Piazza into the heart of the building. Since 1567, the Giants’ Staircase is guarded by Jacopo Sansovno’s two colossal statues of “Mars” and “Neptune”,  which represents Venice’s power by land and by sea, and therefore the reason for its name.

Calendar: July 15

A Year: Day to Day Men: 15th of July

Sunflowers in Blue Vase

On July 15, 1799, French Captain Pierre-Francois Bouchard finds the Rosetta Stone.

The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele, inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using the Hieroglyphic script and the Demotic script, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. As the decree had only minor differences between the three versions, the Rosetta Stone proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger stele; no additional fragments were found in later searches. Owing to its damaged state, none of the three texts is absolutely complete. This fragment of the stele is 3 feet 8 inches high at its highest point, 2 feet 6 inches wide and 11 inches thick. It weighs approximately 1,680 pounds. The front surface is polished smooth with the incised text; the sides are smooth; and the back is only roughly worked as this would not have been visible when erected.

The stone, carved in black granodiorite, similar to granite, is believed to have been originally in a temple, possibly at nearby Sais. It was moved during the medieval period, and was eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid in the Nile Delta. During the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt, Pierre-Francois Bouchard discovered the stone and was immediately convinced of its importance. It was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times; it aroused widespread interest with its potential to decipher previously untranslated hieroglyphic language.

Study of the decree was already under way when the first full translation of the Greek text appeared in 1803. It took another 20 years, however, before the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts was announced by Jean-Francois Champollion in Paris in 1822.  It took longer still before scholars were able to read the Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and literature confidently.

The major advances in the decoding of the Rosetta Stone were: The recognition in 1799 that the stone offered three versions of the same text; It became known in 1802 that the demotic text used phonetic characters to spell foreign names; Thomas Young recognized in 1814 that the hieroglyphic text did so as well, and had pervasive similarities to the demotic text; Champollion saw in his 1822-1824 studies that. in addition to being used for foreign names,  the phonetic characters were also used to spell native Egyptian words.

Calendar: June 30

A Year: Day to Day Men: 30th of June

Beauty in a Form

June 30, 1908 is the date of the Tunguska Event in Siberia.

The Tunguska event was a large explosion that occurred near the Stony Tunguska River In Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia on the morning of June 30, 1908. This event is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history. The explosion over the Easter Siberian tiaga, a very large ecoregion of forests and wildlife, flattened 770 square miles of forest, yet caused no known human casualties.

The explosion is generally attributed to the air burst of a meteoroid, It is classified as an impact event, though no impact crater has been found. The object is thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of 3 to 6 miles rather than to have hit the Earth’s surface. Studies have yielded estimates of the meteoroid’s size from 200 to 600 feet. Estimates of the energy of the downward airburst range from three to five megatons of TNT (three to five million tons). The explosion knocked down some 80 million trees over the affected area.

Natives and Russian settlers in the hills north-west of Lake Baikal observed a column of bluish light, nearly as bright as the sun, moving across the sky. About ten minutes later, there was a flash and a sound similar to artillery fire. Eyewitnesses closer to the explosion site reported the sound moved from the east to the north. The sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of miles away.

The explosion registered at seismic stations across Euroasia; in some places, the shock wave registered equivalent to an earthquake of 5.0 magnitude. Fluctuations in atmospheric pressure were detected in Great Britain. Over the next few days, night skies in Asia and Europe glowed. The theory for this was light passing through high-altitude ice particles that had formed at extremely low temperatures. Suspended dust particles caused a month-long decrease in atmospheric transparency, according to observers at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles County, California.

It is believed that the passage of the asteroid through the atmosphere caused pressures and temperatures to build up to a point where the asteroid abruptly disintegrated in a huge explosion. The destruction would have to have been so complete that no remnants of substantial size survived, and the material scattered into the upper atmosphere during the explosion would have caused the glowing skies.

Calendar: June 21

A Year: Day to Day Men: 21st of June

Pastel Study in Blues and Pinks

The original Ferris wheel opened to the public on June 21, 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition.

George Washington Gate Ferris Jr. was a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Pittsburgh bridge-builder. He began his career in the railroad industry and then pursued an interest in bridge building. Ferris understood the growing need for structural steel and founded G.W.G. Ferris & Co. in Pittsburgh, a firm that tested and inspected metals for railroads and bridge builders.

The buttressed steel wheel that Ferris designed was truly original—so much so that the structure’s design had to be derived from basic assumptions because no one actually had experience constructing a machine of this size. By the winter of 1892, Ferris had the acquired the $600,000 in funding he needed but had just four months of the coldest winter in living memory to complete construction before the expo opened. To meet the deadline, Ferris split the wheel’s construction among several local machine shops and constructed individual component sets congruently and assembled everything on-site.

Construction crews first struggled with laying the wheel’s foundation. The site’s soil was frozen solid three feet deep overlaying another 20 feet of sand that exhibited liquefaction whenever crews attempted to drive piles. To counter the effects of the sand, engineers continually pumped steam into the ground to thaw it, then drove piles 32 feet deep into the bedrock to lay steel beams and poured eight concrete and masonry piers measuring 20 x 20 x 35 feet.

These pylons would support the twin 140-foot towers upon which the wheel’s central 45-ton, 45-foot-long, 33-inch-wide axle would rest. The wheel section measured 250 feet across, 825 feet around, and supported thirty-six enclosed wooden cars that each held up to sixty riders. Ten-inch steam pipes fed a pair of one thousand horsepower engines—a primary and a reserve—that powered the wheel’s movement. Three thousand of Edison’s new-fangled light bulbs lit up the wheel’s supports.

The Ferris Wheel opened on June 21, 1893 on the first day of the Exposition and ran until November 6th of that year. A fifty cent fare entitled the rider to an initial six-stop revolution as the passengers filled the cars and then a nine-minute continuous revolution with views across Lake Michigan and parts of four states. The attraction was a success, earning $726,805 during the Exposition. By 1906, after operating for thirteen years in three locations, the original Ferris Wheel had fallen into disrepair and was slated for demolition. It required three hundred pounds of dynamite to completely level the wheel and shatter its foundations.

Odile Decq

Odile Decq, Fangshan Tangshan National Geopark Museum, Nanjing, China

The Fangshan Tangshan National Geopark, near the city of Nanjing, is a geological and paleo-archaeological museum. This geological museum can be found in the beautiful valley between Tangshan and Fangshan, two volcanic mountains. Not only does the museum reveal a 700-million-year slice of earth’s geological history, but the discovery of ancient hominid remains in a cave here in the 1950s sparked worldwide speculation about the early origins of mankind.

The architect of the project was Odile Decq, the founder of Studio Odile Decq. She is an award-winning French architect, urban planner and academic. She graduated in 1978 from Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture de Paris- La Villette with a diploma in Urban Planning. Okile Decq was awarded the Golden Lion of Architecture during the Venice Biennale in 1996.

Since 1992, Odile Decq has been a professor at the Ecole Soeciale d’Architecture in Paris where she was elected head of the Department of Architecture in 2007. She left in 2012, opeining her own school, the Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture, in Lyon, France. The Institute, cofounded with architect Matteo Cainer, opened in 2014.