title: Frank Thomas (designated hitter)

text: On June 24, 2017, Thomas gave a live speech during Mark Buehrle's White Sox #56 retirement ceremony about Buehrle's career and his time being his teammate.


title: Frank Thomas (designated hitter)

text: Currently, Frank Thomas serves as CEO and Founder of W2W Records, a record label based in Las Vegas, Nevada. He also co-founded the record label Liger Enterprises with former Priority Records executive Ron Spaulding. The first project released under the company was Kenny Lattimore's 2017 album, "Vulnerable".


title: Frank Thomas (designated hitter)

text: Thomas brews his own microbrew, Big Hurt Beer, sold at the Chicago-area liquor store chain Binny's Beverage Depot.


title: Frank Thomas (designated hitter)

text: In 2014, Thomas opened a brewpub, Big Hurt Brewhouse, in the Chicago suburb of Berwyn, Illinois. The establishment closed in 2016 but reopened the next year under a new name (35 Sports Bar and Grill). 35 Sports Bar & Grill closed its doors as of February 5, 2018, and a Mexican restaurant now operates in its place.


title: Frank Thomas (designated hitter)

text: In 2018, Thomas was named spokesperson for Guaranteed Rate, a Chicago-based mortgage lender, who also own the naming rights to the White Sox home stadium, Guaranteed Rate Field.


title: Frank Thomas (designated hitter)

text: On September 30, 2021, Go The Distance Baseball announced in a press release that Thomas purchased a controlling interest in Go The Distance Baseball LLC, owner of Field of Dreams in Iowa.


title: Lauda Air

text: Lauda Air Luftfahrt GmbH, branded as Lauda Air, was an Austrian airline headquartered at Vienna International Airport in Schwechat. It was owned by Niki Lauda (1949–2019) during much of its existence, later becoming a charter airline subsidiary for leisure operations of Austrian Airlines. On 6 April 2013, Lauda Air ceased to exist and was replaced by "Austrian myHoliday", a new brand name that is used for flights and leisure offers provided by Austrian Airlines.


title: Lauda Air

text: Lauda Air was established in April 1979 by former Formula One world motor racing champion Niki Lauda and started operations in 1985, initially operating as a charter and air taxi service. One of the first jetliner types used by Lauda Air was the British Aircraft Corporation BAC One-Eleven series 500, with these aircraft being leased from the Romanian airline TAROM. It opened its headquarters in the Lauda Air Building in Schwechat, Austria. Scheduled operations were licensed and initiated in 1987, and in 1990 licences for international flights were obtained.


title: Lauda Air

text: In 1989 Lauda started its first long-haul flights from Vienna to Sydney and Melbourne via Bangkok. In the 1990s, it started to fly its Sydney and Melbourne flights via Kuala Lumpur and Bali. Daily flights to Dubai, Cuba, and Miami via Munich followed.


title: Lauda Air

text: Lauda Air became a wholly owned subsidiary of Austrian Airlines in December 2000 and employed thirty-five people as of March 2007. In 2005 the flight operation merged with Austrian Airlines, and the label "Lauda Air" operated charter flights within the Austrian Airlines Group.


title: Lauda Air

text: At an AAG board meeting in November 2006, plans were approved to retire the Airbus wide-bodied fleet by mid-2007 and to operate with just a Boeing 767 and Boeing 777 fleet. As a result of subsequent fleet cuts, Austrian Airlines suspended some long-haul services and Lauda Air withdrew from the long-haul charter market over the next year. This led to a refocus on the short/medium-haul market and led to the addition of a 737-800 to take over most of the charter routes. Lauda Air also had an Italian subsidiary, Lauda Air S.p.A., which ended its operations in 2007.


title: Lauda Air

text: Lauda Air was officially merged into Austrian Airlines on 1 July 2012. All aircraft within the group were transferred to Austrian Airlines on 1 July 2012, to be able to take advantage of Austrian Airlines structure. There are still Lauda liverys in use to this day.


title: Lauda Air

text: The brand was retired at the start of the summer flight schedule on 31 March 2013, and was replaced by "Austrian myHoliday". It is no longer an airline but a branding that is used to sell Austrian Airlines' own leisure offers.


title: Lauda Air

text: Austrian Airlines regularly served, among others, the following destinations under the Lauda Air brand until March 2013:


title: Lauda Air

text: The following destinations were served by Lauda Air as an independent airline prior to their merger into Austrian Airlines:


title: Lauda Air

text: Lauda Air also operated a fleet of three small jets, a Cessna Citation II (9 seats), a Bombardier Lear 60 (7 seats), and a Dassault Falcon 20 (12 seats). These were available for private charter flights.


title: Shamrock

text: A shamrock is a young sprig, used as a symbol of Ireland. Saint Patrick, Ireland's patron saint, is said to have used it as a metaphor for the Christian Holy Trinity. The name "shamrock" comes from Irish (), which is the diminutive of the Irish word and simply means "young clover".


title: Shamrock

text: At most times", Shamrock" refers to either the species (lesser clover, Irish: ) or (white clover, Irish: ). However, other three-leaved plants—such as , , and —are sometimes called shamrocks. The shamrock was traditionally used for its medicinal properties and was a popular motif in Victorian times.


title: Shamrock

text: There is still not a consensus over the precise botanical species of clover that is the "true" shamrock. John Gerard in his herbal of 1597 defined the shamrock as "Trifolium pratense" or "Trifolium pratense flore albo", meaning red or white clover. He described the plant in English as "Three leaved grasse" or "Medow Trefoile", "which are called in Irish "Shamrockes"". The Irish botanist Caleb Threlkeld, writing in 1726 in his work entitled "Synopsis Stirpium Hibernicarum" or "A Treatise on Native Irish Plants" followed Gerard in identifying the shamrock as "Trifolium pratense", calling it White Field Clover.


title: Shamrock

text: The botanist Carl Linnaeus in his 1737 work "Flora Lapponica" identifies the shamrock as "Trifolium pratense", mentioning it by name as "Chambroch", with the following curious remark: ""Hiberni suo Chambroch, quod est Trifolium pratense purpureum, aluntur, celeres & promtissimi roburis"" (The Irish call it shamrock, which is purple field clover, and which they eat to make them speedy and of nimble strength).


title: Shamrock

text: Linnaeus based his information that the Irish ate shamrock on the comments of English Elizabethan authors such as Edmund Spenser who remarked that the shamrock used to be eaten by the Irish, especially in times of hardship and famine. It has since been argued however, that the Elizabethans were confused by the similarity between the Irish (Gaelic) name for young clover "seamróg", and the name for wood sorrel "seamsóg".


title: Shamrock

text: The situation regarding the identity of the shamrock was further confused by a London botanist James Ebenezer Bicheno, who proclaimed in a dissertation in 1830 that the real shamrock was "Oxalis acetosella", a species of wood sorrel. Bichino falsely claimed that clover was not a native Irish plant and had only been introduced into Ireland in the middle of the 17th century, and based his argument on the same comments by Elizabethan authors that shamrock had been eaten. Bicheno argued that this fitted the wood sorrel better than clover, as wood sorrel was often eaten as a green and used to flavour food. Bicheno's argument has not been generally accepted however, as the weight of evidence favours a species of clover.


title: Shamrock

text: A more scientific approach was taken by English botanists James Britten and Robert Holland, who stated in their "Dictionary of English Plant Names" published in 1878, that their investigations had revealed that "Trifolium dubium" was the species sold most frequently in Covent Garden as shamrock on St. Patrick's Day, and that it was worn in at least 13 counties in Ireland.


title: Shamrock

text: Finally, detailed investigations to settle the matter were carried out in two separate botanical surveys in Ireland, one in 1893 and the other in 1988. The 1893 survey was carried out by Nathaniel Colgan, an amateur naturalist working as a clerk in Dublin; while the 1988 survey was carried out by E. Charles Nelson, Director of the Irish National Botanic Gardens. Both surveys involved asking people from all across Ireland to send in examples of shamrock, which were then planted and allowed to flower, so that their botanical species could be identified. The results of both surveys were very similar, showing that the conception of the shamrock in Ireland had changed little in almost a hundred years. The results of the surveys are shown in the table below.


title: Shamrock

text: The results show that there is no one "true" species of shamrock, but that "Trifolium dubium" (lesser clover) is considered to be the shamrock by roughly half of Irish people, and "Trifolium repens" (white clover) by another third, with the remaining sixth split between "Trifolium pratense" (red clover), "Medicago lupulina" (black medick), "Oxalis acetosella" (wood sorrel), and various other species of "Trifolium" and "Oxalis". None of the species in the survey are unique to Ireland, and all are common European species, so there is no botanical basis for the belief that the shamrock is a unique species of plant that only grows in Ireland.


title: Shamrock

text: The word shamrock derives from "seamair óg" or young clover, and references to "semair" or clover appear in early Irish literature, generally as a description of a flowering clovered plain. For example, in the series of medieval metrical poems about various Irish places called the Metrical Dindshenchus, a poem about Tailtiu or Teltown in Co. Meath describes it as a plain blossoming with flowering clover ("mag scothach scothshemrach"). Similarly, another story tells of how St. Brigid decided to stay in Co. Kildare when she saw the delightful plain covered in clover blossom ("scoth-shemrach"). However, the literature in Irish makes no distinction between clover and shamrock, and it is only in English that shamrock emerges as a distinct word.


title: Shamrock

text: The first mention of shamrock in the English language occurs in 1571 in the work of the English Elizabethan scholar Edmund Campion. In his work "Boke of the Histories of Irelande", Campion describes the habits of the "wild Irish" and states that the Irish ate shamrock: "Shamrotes, watercresses, rootes, and other herbes they feed upon". The statement that the Irish ate shamrock was widely repeated in later works and seems to be a confusion with the Irish word "seamsóg" or wood sorrel (Oxalis). There is no evidence from any Irish source that the Irish ate clover, but there is evidence that the Irish ate wood sorrel. For example, in the medieval Irish work "Buile Shuibhne" ("The Frenzy of Sweeney"), the king Sweeney, who has gone mad and is living in the woods as a hermit, lists wood sorrel among the plants he feeds upon.


title: Shamrock

text: The English Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, writing soon after in 1596, described his observations of war-torn Munster after the Desmond Rebellion in his work "A View of the Present State of Ireland". Here shamrock is described as a food eaten as a last resort by starving people desperate for any nourishment during a post-war famine: Anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts, crying out of theire graves; they did eat of the carrions ... and if they found a plott of water cresses or shamrockes theyr they flocked as to a feast for the time, yett not able long to contynewe therewithall.The idea that the Irish ate shamrock is repeated in the writing of Fynes Moryson, one-time secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland. In his 1617 work "An itinerary thorow Twelve Dominions", Moryson describes the "wild Irish", and in this case their supposed habit of eating shamrock is a result of their marginal hand-to-mouth existence as bandits. Moryson claims that the Irish "willingly eat the herbe Schamrock being of a sharpe taste which as they run and are chased to and fro they snatch like beasts out of the ditches." The reference to a sharp taste is suggestive of the bitter taste of wood sorrel.


title: Shamrock

text: What is clear is that by the end of the sixteenth century the shamrock had become known to English writers as a plant particularly associated with the Irish, but only with a confused notion that the shamrock was a plant eaten by them. To a herbalist like Gerard it is clear that the shamrock is clover, but other English writers do not appear to know the botanical identity of the shamrock. This is not surprising, as they probably received their information at second or third hand. It is notable that there is no mention anywhere in these writings of St. Patrick or the legend of his using the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity. However, there are two possible references to the custom of "drowning the shamrock" in "usquebagh" or whiskey. In 1607, the playwright Edward Sharpham in his play "The Fleire" included a reference to "Maister Oscabath the Irishman ... and Maister Shamrough his lackey". Later, a 1630 work entitled "Sir Gregory Nonsence" by the poet John Taylor contains the lines: "Whilste all the Hibernian Kernes in multitudes, /Did feast with shamerags steeved in Usquebagh."


title: Shamrock

text: Traditionally, shamrock is said to have been used by Saint Patrick to illustrate the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity when Christianising Ireland in the 5th century. The first evidence of a link between St Patrick and the shamrock appears in 1675 on the St Patrick's Coppers or Halpennies. These appear to show a figure of St Patrick preaching to a crowd while holding a shamrock, presumably to explain the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. When Saint Patrick arrived in Ireland in 431, he used the shamrock to teach pagans the Holy Trinity. In pagan Ireland, three was a significant number and the Irish had many triple deities, which could have aided St Patrick in his evangelisation efforts. Patricia Monaghan states that "There is no evidence that the clover or wood sorrel (both of which are called shamrocks) were sacred to the Celts". However, Jack Santino speculates that "The shamrock was probably associated with the earth and assumed by the druids to be symbolic of the regenerative powers of nature ... Nevertheless, the shamrock, whatever its history as a folk symbol, today has its meaning in a Christian context. Pictures of Saint Patrick depict him driving the snakes out of Ireland with a cross in one hand and a sprig of shamrocks in the other." Roger Homan writes, "We can perhaps see St Patrick drawing upon the visual concept of the "triskele" when he uses the shamrock to explain the Trinity". Why the Celts to whom St Patrick was preaching would have needed an explanation of the concept of a triple deity is not clear (two separate triple goddesses are known to have been worshipped in pagan Ireland).


title: Shamrock

text: The first written mention of the link does not appear until 1681, in the account of Thomas Dineley, an English traveller to Ireland. Dineley writes:The 17th day of March yeerly is St Patricks, an immoveable feast, when ye Irish of all stations and condicions were crosses in their hatts, some of pinns, some of green ribbon, and the vulgar superstitiously wear shamroges, 3 leav'd grass, which they likewise eat (they say) to cause a sweet breath.There is nothing in Dineley's account of the legend of St. Patrick using the shamrock to teach the mystery of the Holy Trinity, and this story does not appear in writing anywhere until a 1726 work by the botanist Caleb Threlkeld. Threlkeld identifies the shamrock as White Field Clover ("Trifolium pratense album" ) and comments rather acerbically on St. Patrick's Day customs including the wearing of shamrocks:This plant is worn by the people in their hats upon the 17. Day of March yearly, (which is called St. Patrick's Day.) It being a current tradition, that by this Three Leafed Grass, he emblematically set forth to them the Mystery of the Holy Trinity. However that be, when they wet their Seamar-oge, they often commit excess in liquor, which is not a right keeping of a day to the Lord; error generally leading to debauchery.The Rev Threlkeld's remarks on liquor undoubtedly refer to the custom of toasting St. Patrick's memory with "St. Patrick's Pot", or "drowning the shamrock" as it is otherwise known. After mass on St. Patrick's Day the traditional custom of the menfolk was to lift the usual fasting restrictions of Lent and repair to the nearest tavern to mark the occasion with as many St. Patrick's Pots as they deemed necessary. The drowning of the shamrock was accompanied by a certain amount of ritual as one account explains:


title: Shamrock

text: "The drowning of the shamrock" by no means implies it was necessary to get drunk in doing so. At the end of the day the shamrock which has been worn in the coat or the hat is removed and put into the final glass of grog or tumbler of punch; and when the health has been drunk or the toast honoured, the shamrock should be picked out from the bottom of the glass and thrown over the left shoulder.The shamrock is still chiefly associated with Saint Patrick's Day, which has become the Irish national holiday, and is observed with parades and celebrations worldwide. The custom of wearing shamrock on the day is still observed and depictions of shamrocks are habitually seen during the celebrations.


title: Shamrock

text: As St. Patrick is Ireland's patron saint, the shamrock has been used as a symbol of Ireland since the 18th century, in a similar way to how a rose is used for England, a thistle for Scotland and a daffodil for Wales. The shamrock first began to evolve from a symbol purely associated with St. Patrick to an Irish national symbol when it was taken up as an emblem by rival militias during the turbulent politics of the late eighteenth century. On one side were the Volunteers (also known as the Irish Volunteers), who were local militias in late 18th century Ireland, raised to defend Ireland from the threat of French and Spanish invasion when regular British soldiers were withdrawn from Ireland to fight during the American Revolutionary War. On the other side were revolutionary nationalist groups, such as the United Irishmen.


title: Shamrock

text: Among the Volunteers, examples of the use of the shamrock include its appearance on the guidon of the Royal Glin Hussars formed in July 1779 by the Knight of Glin, and its appearance on the flags of the Limerick Volunteers, the Castle Ray Fencibles and the Braid Volunteers. The United Irishmen adopted green as their revolutionary colour and wore green uniforms or ribbons in their hats, and the green concerned was often associated with the shamrock. The song "The Wearing of the Green" commemorated their exploits and various versions exist which mention the shamrock. The Erin go bragh flag was used as their standard and was often depicted accompanied by shamrocks, and in 1799 a revolutionary journal entitled "The Shamroc" briefly appeared in which the aims of the rebellion were supported.


title: Shamrock

text: Since the 1800 Acts of Union between Britain and Ireland the shamrock was incorporated into the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom, depicted growing from a single stem alongside the rose of England, and the thistle of Scotland to symbolise the unity of the three kingdoms. Since then, the shamrock has regularly appeared alongside the rose, thistle and (sometimes) leek for Wales in British coins such as the two shilling and crown, and in stamps. The rose, thistle and shamrock motif also appears regularly on British public buildings such as Buckingham Palace.


title: Shamrock

text: Throughout the nineteenth century the popularity of the shamrock as a symbol of Ireland grew, and it was depicted in many illustrations on items such as book covers and St. Patrick's Day postcards. It was also mentioned in many songs and ballads of the time. For example, a popular ballad called "The Shamrock Shore" lamented the state of Ireland in the nineteenth century. Another typical example of such a ballad appears in the works of Thomas Moore whose "Oh the Shamrock" embodies the Victorian spirit of sentimentality. It was immensely popular and contributed to raising the profile of the shamrock as an image of Ireland:


title: Shamrock

text: Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the shamrock continued to appear in a variety of settings. For example, the shamrock appeared on many buildings in Ireland as a decorative motif, such as on the facade of the Kildare Street Club building in Dublin, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh, and the Harp and Lion Bar in Listowel, Co. Kerry. It also appears on street furniture, such as old lamp standards like those in Mountjoy Square in Dublin, and on monuments like the Parnell Monument, and the O'Connell Monument, both in O'Connell Street, Dublin. Shamrocks also appeared on decorative items such as glass, china, jewellery, poplin and Irish lace. Belleek Pottery in Co. Fermanagh, for example, regularly features shamrock motifs.


title: Shamrock

text: The shamrock is used in the emblems of many state organisations, both in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Some of these are all-Ireland bodies, (such as Tourism Ireland) as well as organisations specific to the Republic of Ireland (such as IDA Ireland) and Northern Ireland (such as Police Service of Northern Ireland). The Irish Postal Service An Post, regularly features the shamrock on its series of stamps. The airline Aer Lingus uses the emblem in its logos, and its air traffic control call sign is "SHAMROCK".


title: Shamrock

text: The shamrock has been registered as a trademark by the Government of Ireland. In the early 1980s, Ireland defended its right to use the shamrock as its national symbol in a German trademark case, which included high-level representation from Taoiseach Charles Haughey. Having originally lost, Ireland won on appeal to the German Supreme Court in 1985.


title: Shamrock

text: It has become a tradition for the Irish Taoiseach to present a bowl of shamrocks in a special Waterford Crystal bowl featuring a shamrock design to the President of the United States in the White House every St. Patrick's Day.


title: Shamrock

text: Shamrock is also used in emblems of UK organisations with an association with Ireland, such as the Irish Guards. Soldiers of the Royal Irish Regiment of the British Army use the shamrock as their emblem, and wear a sprig of shamrock on Saint Patrick's Day. Shamrock are exported to wherever the regiment is stationed throughout the world. Queen Victoria decreed over a hundred years ago that soldiers from Ireland should wear a sprig of shamrock in recognition of fellow Irish soldiers who had fought bravely in the Boer War, a tradition continued by British army soldiers from both the north and the south of Ireland following partition in 1921. The coat of arms on the flag of the Royal Ulster Constabulary George Cross Foundation was cradled in a wreath of shamrock.


title: Shamrock

text: The shamrock also appears in the emblems of a wide range of voluntary and non-state organisations in Ireland, such as the Irish Farmers Association, the Boy Scouts of Ireland association, Scouting Ireland Irish Girl Guides, and the Irish Kidney Donors Association. In addition many sporting organisations representing Ireland use the shamrock in their logos and emblems. Examples include the Irish Football Association (Northern Ireland), Irish Rugby Football Union, Swim Ireland, Cricket Ireland, and the Olympic Council of Ireland. A sprig of shamrock represents the Lough Derg Yacht Club Tipperary, (est. 1836). The shamrock is the official emblem of Irish football club Shamrock Rovers.


title: Shamrock

text: Shamrock commonly appears as part of the emblem of many organisations in countries overseas with communities of Irish descent. Outside Ireland, various organisations, businesses and places also use the symbol to advertise a connection with the island. These uses include:


title: Scorpions discography

text: The following is a comprehensive discography of Scorpions, a German rock band. The band have released 19 studio albums, six live albums, 13 video albums, 29 compilation albums, one cover album, 92 singles and 43 music videos. They have sold between 75 and 100 million records worldwide.


title: Scorpions discography

text: "In France compilation albums are not listed on the Top 200 Albums Chart, but instead on a separate chart for compilation albums only. The French chart positions here for the compilation albums are their peak positions on the French Compilation Albums Chart."


title: TV Asahi

text: JOEX-DTV (channel 5), branded as (also known as EX and and stylized as TV asahi), is a television station that is owned and operated by the subsidiary of certified broadcasting holding company , itself controlled by The Asahi Shimbun Company. The station serves as the flagship of the All-Nippon News Network and its studios are located in Roppongi, Minato, Tokyo.


title: TV Asahi

text: In 2003, the company headquarters moved to a new building designed by Fumihiko Maki currently located at 6-9-1 Roppongi, Minato, Tokyo, Japan.Some of TV Asahi's departments and subsidiaries, such as TV Asahi Productions and Take Systems, are still located at "TV Asahi Center", the company's former headquarters from 1986 to 2003. It is located at Ark Hills, not far from its headquarters.


title: TV Asahi

text: TV Asahi's current branding were created by UK design collective Tomato (some members work as the electronic music group Underworld) along with TV Asahi's in-house design department in 2003. It comprises a set of computer-generated "sticks" in white background, which changes in colour and movement along with the background music that accompanies the idents. TV Asahi also uses a brief eyecatch of its sticks animation at the top-left of the screen after commercial breaks. The background music used for TV Asahi's sign-on and sign-off videos are Underworld's "Born Slippy .NUXX 2003" and "Rez". TV Asahi later updated its sign-on and sign-off video in 2008 with a revised version of computer-generated "sticks" animation and new background music. TV Asahi's slogan "New Air, On Air" appears at the top of its name. It can be seen on TV Asahi's YouTube channel, which in 2011–12, was replaced by its mascot, Go-Chan.


title: TV Asahi

text: The company writes its name in lower-case letters, "tv asahi", in its logo and public-image materials. Normally, the station branding on-screen appears as either "/tv asahi" or "tv asahi\". The station's watermark appearance is the stick at the top with the station's name at the bottom. The fonts used by TV Asahi for the written parts are Akzidenz Grotesk Bold (English) and Hiragino Kaku Gothic W8 (Japanese).


title: TV Asahi

text: From 1991 to 2001, TV Asahi was unique among the national television networks for its English language theme song, "Join Us", which was used for both the startup and closedown sequences. Before that, from 1977 to 1987, another song was used for these (instrumental only from 1978, formerly with vocals).


title: TV Asahi

text: After NHK and Nippon TV were launched in 1953, TV has become an important medium in Japan.However, most of the programs that were aired at that time were vulgar which caused well-known critic Sōichi Ōya to mention in a TV program that TV made people in Japan as "total idiots"; those criticisms already gave birth to the idea of opening an education-focused TV station.On February 17, 1956, the Ministry of Posts issued frequency allocations, and the Kanto Region obtained three licenses in total. Among the three, one of them is used by NHK Educational TV, while the other two were open for private bidding. Among those bidders are film production companies Toho and Toei Company, radio broadcasters Nippon Cultural Broadcasting and Nippon Broadcasting System, and educational publishing group .On July 4, 1957, the Ministry of Posts later decided to unify those applications into Tokyo Educational Television (as its tentative name) which was later obtained on July 8.


title: TV Asahi

text: On October 10, 1957, Tokyo Educational Television held its first shareholders meeting and changed its company name to Nippon Educational Television Co., Ltd. (NET). In November 1 of the same year, the broadcaster was later established.After Fuji TV obtained their broadcast licenses, they set an official start date of broadcast on March 1, 1959. NET advanced their start date of broadcast a month earlier (February 1, 1959).In Christmas Eve of 1958, NET began to have test signal transmissions.On January 9 of the following year, their broadcast license was approved, and test signal transmissions continued every night throughout the month.


title: TV Asahi

text: At 9:55am on February 1, 1959, NET signed on, airing at least 6.5 hours of programming per day.By April, this figure was extended to 10 hours.With the launch of the Mainichi Broadcasting System and Kyushu Asahi Broadcasting on March 1, 1960, NET programming started airing on those mentioned broadcasters. Shortly after the start of broadcasts, NET broadcast their first live program, which is the wedding of Crown Prince (now Emperor Emeritus) Akihito and Empress Michiko held on April 10 of the same year.


title: TV Asahi

text: At the time, its broadcasting license dictated that the network was required to devote at least 50% of its airtime to educational programming, and at least 30% of its airtime to children's educational programming. However, the for-profit educational television model eventually proved to be a failure. In July 1959, average ratings of the network was less than 5%.


title: TV Asahi

text: In 1960, NET began its transformation into a general-purpose television station. It began to broadcast anime and foreign movies. So as not to run afoul of the educational TV license requirements, NET justified the airing of these programs under the pretext of and . In December 1960, NET also changed its common name from Nippon Educational Television to NET TV (NETテレビ).The change also made its ratings to reach about 10% after 1963. Although it still ranks at the bottom rank of other rival broadcasters, it has greatly narrowed the gap between it and the other three.


title: TV Asahi

text: Since April 1961, the station began adding nighttime programming. Two years later, NET announced its arrival into the anime race with the Toei produced "Wolf Boy Ken". The first of many Toei Animation productions, its premiere began a long line of animated cartoons and series that the station has aired until today.


title: TV Asahi

text: In November 1963, NET joined forces with NHK General TV for the first live via satellite telecast in Japanese TV history.


title: TV Asahi

text: The switch to general programming also led to an infighting among the management. In contrast to the then-president of NET TV, Hiroshi Ogawa (from Toei), who was actively promoting entertainment programs, Yoshio Akao (from Obunsha) thought that too many entertainment programs were against the original purpose of the educational TV station and was strongly dissatisfied with the vulgar programs that filled NET TV's program schedule at that time.In November 1964, Akao, together with shareholders other than Toei and Nikkei, Inc., succeeded in its major reorganization, forcing Ogawa to resign from the presidency.Since then, Toei's influence in NET TV has been gradually replaced by Asahi Shimbun.The following year, the Asahi Shimbun appointed to the post of station director Koshiji Miura (former Deputy Minister of Political Affairs).


title: TV Asahi

text: In the 1960s, NET TV also started airing foreign films as part of its schedule.The NET TV premiere of "The Morning Show" in 1964 created a trend for a news-talk format on daytime Japanese TV, causing other networks to follow suit, it was the first Japanese morning program in its format.Hyōten, NET TV's drama in 1966, had a 42.7% ratings in its finale.The success of the drama made the network to adjust its target audiences to single and married females.Despite heavily focusing on entertainment programs, they continued to broadcast educational programs, albeit on a limited number of hours every morning. In 1967, NET TV launched the Minkyokyo to strengthen the production of educational programs.In April 1967, they started to broadcast in color TV, and by 1969, all of its programs were broadcast in color.After 1968, many regional broadcasters in Japan began to pop up. This led to the broadcaster launching the All-Nippon News Network on April 1, 1970, the country's 4th national network, with NET producing national news and other nationally produced programming for the regional channels that had joined the network.With the continuous network expansion, NET TV shifted its focus on its target audience again, this time from females, to being family oriented similar to the US PBS.


title: TV Asahi

text: But the best was yet to come. One year after ANN was launched, the ground-breaking series "Kamen Rider", created by Shotaro Ishinomori and produced by Toei, made its national premiere in April 1971 on NET TV and the ANN network. This program ended the long-standing tokusatsu duopoly TBS Television and Fuji TV then had with the then hit "Ultra Series" franchise almost half a decade ago on TBS and the fact that since 1958, these two were the only Japanese TV stations to air tokusatsu productions so far, TBS the first and Fuji the second. With its hit premiere, a rivalry was beginning to start between the three, with TBS seeing NET's toku programming as a threat. Toei's decision to successfully pitch the series to NET was seen by its staff as revenge for the removal of Hiroshi Ogawa from the NET TV presidency in 1964.


title: TV Asahi

text: In November 1973, the Ministry of Posts revised its plans on how TV broadcasters would operate, which already includes abolishing education-focused TV broadcasting. Therefore, NET's transformation into a general-purpose television station was complete by that same month, when NET, along with educational channel "Tokyo Channel 12" (now TV Tokyo) in Tokyo applied and received a general purpose television station license. On March of the following year, both ended their broadcasts of educational programming, completing the transition.Japan's major newspapers are also sorting out their holdings in TV stations. Nikkei Newspaper transferred its ownership of NET TV to The Asahi Shimbun, making the latter the largest shareholder of NET TV. On April 1, 1975, the ANN affiliation in the Kansai Region changed hands, from Mainichi Broadcasting System, Asahi Broadcasting Corporation assumed the network affiliation slot. Days later, the channel debuted another Ishinomori creation, "Himitsu Sentai Gorenger", yet another Toei production, and it would be a stunning success (this was the same month when Kamen Rider jumped ship to rival TBS with the season premiere of "Kamen Rider Stronger", the franchise would return to what is now TV Asahi in 2000). The series marked the beginning of the "Super Sentai" franchise and established NET as a force to be reckoned with when it came to toku productions and anime.


title: TV Asahi

text: On April 1, 1977, the corporate name of NET TV was changed to Asahi National Broadcasting Co., Ltd, with the name of its channel changed into TV Asahi.This also symbolizes that the Asahi Shimbun has the right to operate TV Asahi both in name and in essence.Since December 17, 1978, TV Asahi had been broadcasting programs with stereo audio. The corporation also started entering into different ventures such as publishing in the late 70s to gain revenue other than advertising.


title: TV Asahi

text: In 1977, thanks to his close relationship with Ivan Ivanovich, head of the Japanese Section of the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Koshiji Miura was able to meet with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and help TV Asahi obtain exclusive broadcasting rights for the 1980 Moscow Olympics in Japan. This was the first time that a private TV station in Japan was exclusively granted the broadcasting rights of the Olympic Games, but this was controversial as rival broadcasters including NHK opposed the move.Japan followed the Western countries in boycotting the 1980 Summer Olympics.As a result, TV Asahi only aired high-profile Olympic events and the broadcaster had significant loses in its revenue.


title: TV Asahi

text: As the broadcaster expands its business, its HQ was running out of space. Since its HQ was located in a residential area, it became difficult to expand its existing infrastructure.TV Asahi collaborated with property development firm Mori Building Company to redevelop the Roppongi area. While the new HQ was under development, TV Asahi temporarily moved to the newly built studios in Ark Hills. In 1985, the Ark Broadcasting Center was officially completed.As Japan entered into the Economic bubble era, local residents around the Roppongi area had a negative perception towards the redevelopment of the said area, which resulted into delaying the redevelopment plan.The old headquarters was demolished in 2000. Prior to the new headquarters being rebuilt on the site, offices of TV Asahi were located in multiple locations around Tokyo, including the studios in Ark Hills.


title: TV Asahi

text: The launch of the evening news program "News Station" in 1985 helped TV Asahi establish its viewership advantage at 10pm on weekdays, strengthening its position in news programs.In 1987, All-Nippon News Network had a total of 14 regional affiliated stations, much smaller than the other 3 networks (Japan News Network and Fuji News Network had 25 each & Nippon News Network had 27). However, affected by the economic bubble at that time, Kikuo Tashiro (then president of TV Asahi), announced that it wouldn't open more regional stations which resulted in protest from the existing stations. As a result, the decision was reverted and decided to open 10 more stations.In response to the arrival of satellite TV, TV Asahi established TV Asahi Satellite Corporation in 1991.


title: TV Asahi

text: After Iwate Asahi Television started broadcasting in 1996, the number of ANN stations reached 26, announcing that the broadcaster has already completed the establishment of its national network.In June of the same year, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and investor Masayoshi Son planned to buy a large stake of TV Asahi, jeopardizing the status of Asahi Shimbun as the major shareholder.In this regard, Toshitada Nakae personally went to the US to meet Murdoch and asked not to increase his shareholding to TV Asahi.By the following year, Asahi Shimbun purchased the shares of Asahi TV held by Murdoch and Son.TV Asahi is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange since October 3, 2000.Multiple changes happened since 2000 after TV Asahi had been staying in the same 4th place for 10 consecutive years in TV ratings.In April 2000, major changes in its schedules, such as starting its programs a few minutes before the top of the hour and improving its entertainment programming at late-night. TV Asahi launched BS Asahi in December 2000, the satellite version of its main terrestrial channel.


title: TV Asahi

text: On September 29, 2003, TV Asahi moved back its head office from its Ark Hills Studio to Roppongi Hills. And on October 1 of the same year, the station was renamed TV Asahi Corporation, with the name presented as TV asahi on-screen.As part of digital broadcasting, TV Asahi started to broadcast on digital TV, being designated to channel 5. In 2004, TV Asahi's ratings reached 7.5% ranking third among the commercial broadcasters in the Kanto Region after a lapse of 32 years.The ratings would further improve by the following year, ranking first in late-night TV ratings.However, in 2008, affected by the global recession, TV Asahi recorded its first annual loss of revenue.In 2009, Hiroshi Hayakawa became the president of the broadcaster, being the first president of TV Asahi who had been serving the broadcaster since its inauguration. Between April and June 2012, TV Asahi won in the Triple Crown ratings for the first time with 12.3% in primetime, 12.7% in evening time, and 7.9% for whole day.


title: TV Asahi

text: The transmission of international aquatics competitions, World Cup football matches, and creation of popular late-night TV programs contributed to a rise in ratings for TV Asahi, and lifted the TV station from its popularly ridiculed "perpetual fourth place" finish into second place, right behind Fuji TV, by 2005.


title: TV Asahi

text: The station also launched its own mascot, , also known as Gō-chan is currently seen on TV Asahi's opening sign-on ID.


title: TV Asahi

text: TV Asahi contains not only original anime, but also in particular foreign cartoons, some shows dubbed in Japanese language (like "Police Academy", "The Smurfs", "Adventures of the Gummi Bears", "CatDog") and some shows in original and subtitled (like "Bonkers", "Freakazoid!", "Iznogoud").


title: Whiskey Myers

text: Whiskey Myers is an American Southern rock/country group from Palestine, Texas composed of Cody Cannon (lead vocals and acoustic guitar), John Jeffers (lead guitar, slide guitar, lap steel guitar, vocals), Cody Tate (lead and rhythm guitar, vocals), Jeff Hogg (drums), Tony Kent (percussion/drums), and Jamey Gleaves (bass). They have released six albums, the latest being "Tornillo" released in July 2022.


title: Whiskey Myers

text: In 2008, the band released their debut album, "Road of Life". Their second album, "Firewater", was released by Wiggy Thump in 2011 and debuted in the Top 30 on the "Billboard" Top Country Albums chart, largely thanks to the single "Ballad of a Southern Man". On February 4, 2014, the album, "Early Morning Shakes", was released and received mostly positive reviews. In September 2016, their fourth album "Mud" was released. The band's latest self-titled album was released on September 27, 2019.


title: Whiskey Myers

text: The band started when friends Cody Cannon and John Jeffers began learning guitar together, inspired by the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Hank Williams Jr., Waylon Jennings, amongst many other artists. After being joined by Cannon's co-worker and friend Cody Tate, they began calling themselves Lucky Southern. After playing together for a while, the three decided to start a more serious band. They enlisted friend Jeff Hogg to play drums, and asked Cannon's cousin Gary Brown to play bass (although he did not know how to play the instrument at the time). They began playing shows around their hometown and native state of Texas, slowly starting to build a following on the Texas/Red Dirt scene.


title: Whiskey Myers

text: In 2018, the band was featured in four episodes of the Kevin Costner Paramount Network series "Yellowstone". Shortly afterwards, the band's three available albums moved into the top 10 iTunes country chart. Their most recent album at the time, "Mud", reached No. 1 on the charts, and its song "Stone" reached No. 9 in all genres.


title: Whiskey Myers

text: On September 27, 2019, the band released the self-titled album, "Whiskey Myers". It debuted at No. 1 on "Billboard" Country, No. 2 on "Billboard" active rock, and No. 6 on the "Billboard" 200.


title: Gauge theory

text: In physics, a gauge theory is a type of field theory in which the Lagrangian (and hence the dynamics of the system itself) does not change (is invariant) under local transformations according to certain smooth families of operations (Lie groups).


title: Gauge theory

text: The term "gauge" refers to any specific mathematical formalism to regulate redundant degrees of freedom in the Lagrangian of a physical system. The transformations between possible gauges, called "gauge transformations", form a Lie group—referred to as the "symmetry group" or the "gauge group" of the theory. Associated with any Lie group is the Lie algebra of group generators. For each group generator there necessarily arises a corresponding field (usually a vector field) called the "gauge field". Gauge fields are included in the Lagrangian to ensure its invariance under the local group transformations (called "gauge invariance"). When such a theory is quantized, the quanta of the gauge fields are called "gauge bosons". If the symmetry group is non-commutative, then the gauge theory is referred to as non-abelian gauge theory, the usual example being the Yang–Mills theory.


title: Gauge theory

text: Many powerful theories in physics are described by Lagrangians that are invariant under some symmetry transformation groups. When they are invariant under a transformation identically performed at "every" point in the spacetime in which the physical processes occur, they are said to have a global symmetry. Local symmetry, the cornerstone of gauge theories, is a stronger constraint. In fact, a global symmetry is just a local symmetry whose group's parameters are fixed in spacetime (the same way a constant value can be understood as a function of a certain parameter, the output of which is always the same).


title: Gauge theory

text: Gauge theories are important as the successful field theories explaining the dynamics of elementary particles. Quantum electrodynamics is an abelian gauge theory with the symmetry group U(1) and has one gauge field, the electromagnetic four-potential, with the photon being the gauge boson. The Standard Model is a non-abelian gauge theory with the symmetry group U(1) × SU(2) × SU(3) and has a total of twelve gauge bosons: the photon, three weak bosons and eight gluons.


title: Gauge theory

text: Gauge theories are also important in explaining gravitation in the theory of general relativity. Its case is somewhat unusual in that the gauge field is a tensor, the Lanczos tensor. Theories of quantum gravity, beginning with gauge gravitation theory, also postulate the existence of a gauge boson known as the graviton. Gauge symmetries can be viewed as analogues of the principle of general covariance of general relativity in which the coordinate system can be chosen freely under arbitrary diffeomorphisms of spacetime. Both gauge invariance and diffeomorphism invariance reflect a redundancy in the description of the system. An alternative theory of gravitation, gauge theory gravity, replaces the principle of general covariance with a true gauge principle with new gauge fields.


title: Gauge theory

text: Historically, these ideas were first stated in the context of classical electromagnetism and later in general relativity. However, the modern importance of gauge symmetries appeared first in the relativistic quantum mechanics of electronsquantum electrodynamics, elaborated on below. Today, gauge theories are useful in condensed matter, nuclear and high energy physics among other subfields.


title: Gauge theory

text: The earliest field theory having a gauge symmetry was Maxwell's formulation, in 1864–65, of electrodynamics ("A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field") which stated that any vector field whose curl vanishes—and can therefore normally be written as a gradient of a function—could be added to the vector potential without affecting the magnetic field. The importance of this symmetry remained unnoticed in the earliest formulations. Similarly unnoticed, Hilbert had derived the Einstein field equations by postulating the invariance of the action under a general coordinate transformation. Later Hermann Weyl, in an attempt to unify general relativity and electromagnetism, conjectured that "Eichinvarianz" or invariance under the change of scale (or "gauge") might also be a local symmetry of general relativity. After the development of quantum mechanics, Weyl, Vladimir Fock and Fritz London modified gauge by replacing the scale factor with a complex quantity and turned the scale transformation into a change of phase, which is a U(1) gauge symmetry. This explained the electromagnetic field effect on the wave function of a charged quantum mechanical particle. This was the first widely recognised gauge theory, popularised by Pauli in 1941.


title: Gauge theory

text: In 1954, attempting to resolve some of the great confusion in elementary particle physics, Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills introduced non-abelian gauge theories as models to understand the strong interaction holding together nucleons in atomic nuclei. (Ronald Shaw, working under Abdus Salam, independently introduced the same notion in his doctoral thesis.) Generalizing the gauge invariance of electromagnetism, they attempted to construct a theory based on the action of the (non-abelian) SU(2) symmetry group on the isospin doublet of protons and neutrons. This is similar to the action of the U(1) group on the spinor fields of quantum electrodynamics. In particle physics the emphasis was on using quantized gauge theories.


title: Gauge theory

text: This idea later found application in the quantum field theory of the weak force, and its unification with electromagnetism in the electroweak theory. Gauge theories became even more attractive when it was realized that non-abelian gauge theories reproduced a feature called asymptotic freedom. Asymptotic freedom was believed to be an important characteristic of strong interactions. This motivated searching for a strong force gauge theory. This theory, now known as quantum chromodynamics, is a gauge theory with the action of the SU(3) group on the color triplet of quarks. The Standard Model unifies the description of electromagnetism, weak interactions and strong interactions in the language of gauge theory.


title: Gauge theory

text: In the 1970s, Michael Atiyah began studying the mathematics of solutions to the classical Yang–Mills equations. In 1983, Atiyah's student Simon Donaldson built on this work to show that the differentiable classification of smooth 4-manifolds is very different from their classification up to homeomorphism. Michael Freedman used Donaldson's work to exhibit exotic Rs, that is, exotic differentiable structures on Euclidean 4-dimensional space. This led to an increasing interest in gauge theory for its own sake, independent of its successes in fundamental physics. In 1994, Edward Witten and Nathan Seiberg invented gauge-theoretic techniques based on supersymmetry that enabled the calculation of certain topological invariants (the Seiberg–Witten invariants). These contributions to mathematics from gauge theory have led to a renewed interest in this area.


title: Gauge theory

text: The importance of gauge theories in physics is exemplified in the tremendous success of the mathematical formalism in providing a unified framework to describe the quantum field theories of electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force. This theory, known as the Standard Model, accurately describes experimental predictions regarding three of the four fundamental forces of nature, and is a gauge theory with the gauge group SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1). Modern theories like string theory, as well as general relativity, are, in one way or another, gauge theories.


title: Gauge theory

text: In physics, the mathematical description of any physical situation usually contains excess degrees of freedom; the same physical situation is equally well described by many equivalent mathematical configurations. For instance, in Newtonian dynamics, if two configurations are related by a Galilean transformation (an inertial change of reference frame) they represent the same physical situation. These transformations form a group of "symmetries" of the theory, and a physical situation corresponds not to an individual mathematical configuration but to a class of configurations related to one another by this symmetry group.


title: Gauge theory

text: This idea can be generalized to include local as well as global symmetries, analogous to much more abstract "changes of coordinates" in a situation where there is no preferred "inertial" coordinate system that covers the entire physical system. A gauge theory is a mathematical model that has symmetries of this kind, together with a set of techniques for making physical predictions consistent with the symmetries of the model.


title: Gauge theory

text: When a quantity occurring in the mathematical configuration is not just a number but has some geometrical significance, such as a velocity or an axis of rotation, its representation as numbers arranged in a vector or matrix is also changed by a coordinate transformation. For instance, if one description of a pattern of fluid flow states that the fluid velocity in the neighborhood of ("x"=1, "y"=0) is 1 m/s in the positive "x" direction, then a description of the same situation in which the coordinate system has been rotated clockwise by 90 degrees states that the fluid velocity in the neighborhood of ("x"=0, "y"=-1) is 1 m/s in the negative "y" direction. The coordinate transformation has affected both the coordinate system used to identify the "location" of the measurement and the basis in which its "value" is expressed. As long as this transformation is performed globally (affecting the coordinate basis in the same way at every point), the effect on values that represent the "rate of change" of some quantity along some path in space and time as it passes through point "P" is the same as the effect on values that are truly local to "P".


title: Gauge theory

text: In order to adequately describe physical situations in more complex theories, it is often necessary to introduce a "coordinate basis" for some of the objects of the theory that do not have this simple relationship to the coordinates used to label points in space and time. (In mathematical terms, the theory involves a fiber bundle in which the fiber at each point of the base space consists of possible coordinate bases for use when describing the values of objects at that point.) In order to spell out a mathematical configuration, one must choose a particular coordinate basis at each point (a "local section" of the fiber bundle) and express the values of the objects of the theory (usually "fields" in the physicist's sense) using this basis. Two such mathematical configurations are equivalent (describe the same physical situation) if they are related by a transformation of this abstract coordinate basis (a change of local section, or "gauge transformation").


title: Gauge theory

text: In most gauge theories, the set of possible transformations of the abstract gauge basis at an individual point in space and time is a finite-dimensional Lie group. The simplest such group is U(1), which appears in the modern formulation of quantum electrodynamics (QED) via its use of complex numbers. QED is generally regarded as the first, and simplest, physical gauge theory. The set of possible gauge transformations of the entire configuration of a given gauge theory also forms a group, the "gauge group" of the theory. An element of the gauge group can be parameterized by a smoothly varying function from the points of spacetime to the (finite-dimensional) Lie group, such that the value of the function and its derivatives at each point represents the action of the gauge transformation on the fiber over that point.


title: Gauge theory

text: A gauge transformation with constant parameter at every point in space and time is analogous to a rigid rotation of the geometric coordinate system; it represents a global symmetry of the gauge representation. As in the case of a rigid rotation, this gauge transformation affects expressions that represent the rate of change along a path of some gauge-dependent quantity in the same way as those that represent a truly local quantity. A gauge transformation whose parameter is "not" a constant function is referred to as a local symmetry; its effect on expressions that involve a derivative is qualitatively different from that on expressions that don't. (This is analogous to a non-inertial change of reference frame, which can produce a Coriolis effect.)


title: Gauge theory

text: The "gauge covariant" version of a gauge theory accounts for this effect by introducing a "gauge field" (in mathematical language, an Ehresmann connection) and formulating all rates of change in terms of the covariant derivative with respect to this connection. The gauge field becomes an essential part of the description of a mathematical configuration. A configuration in which the gauge field can be eliminated by a gauge transformation has the property that its field strength (in mathematical language, its curvature) is zero everywhere; a gauge theory is "not" limited to these configurations. In other words, the distinguishing characteristic of a gauge theory is that the gauge field does not merely compensate for a poor choice of coordinate system; there is generally no gauge transformation that makes the gauge field vanish.


title: Gauge theory

text: When analyzing the dynamics of a gauge theory, the gauge field must be treated as a dynamical variable, similar to other objects in the description of a physical situation. In addition to its interaction with other objects via the covariant derivative, the gauge field typically contributes energy in the form of a "self-energy" term. One can obtain the equations for the gauge theory by:


title: Gauge theory

text: This is the sense in which a gauge theory "extends" a global symmetry to a local symmetry, and closely resembles the historical development of the gauge theory of gravity known as general relativity.


title: Gauge theory

text: We cannot express the mathematical descriptions of the "setup information" and the "possible measurement outcomes", or the "boundary conditions" of the experiment, without reference to a particular coordinate system, including a choice of gauge. One assumes an adequate experiment isolated from "external" influence that is itself a gauge-dependent statement. Mishandling gauge dependence calculations in boundary conditions is a frequent source of anomalies, and approaches to anomaly avoidance classifies gauge theories.


title: Gauge theory

text: The two gauge theories mentioned above, continuum electrodynamics and general relativity, are continuum field theories. The techniques of calculation in a continuum theory implicitly assume that:


title: Gauge theory

text: These assumptions have enough validity across a wide range of energy scales and experimental conditions to allow these theories to make accurate predictions about almost all of the phenomena encountered in daily life: light, heat, and electricity, eclipses, spaceflight, etc. They fail only at the smallest and largest scales due to omissions in the theories themselves, and when the mathematical techniques themselves break down, most notably in the case of turbulence and other chaotic phenomena.


title: Gauge theory

text: Other than these classical continuum field theories, the most widely known gauge theories are quantum field theories, including quantum electrodynamics and the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. The starting point of a quantum field theory is much like that of its continuum analog: a gauge-covariant action integral that characterizes "allowable" physical situations according to the principle of least action. However, continuum and quantum theories differ significantly in how they handle the excess degrees of freedom represented by gauge transformations. Continuum theories, and most pedagogical treatments of the simplest quantum field theories, use a gauge fixing prescription to reduce the orbit of mathematical configurations that represent a given physical situation to a smaller orbit related by a smaller gauge group (the global symmetry group, or perhaps even the trivial group).


title: Gauge theory

text: More sophisticated quantum field theories, in particular those that involve a non-abelian gauge group, break the gauge symmetry within the techniques of perturbation theory by introducing additional fields (the Faddeev–Popov ghosts) and counterterms motivated by anomaly cancellation, in an approach known as BRST quantization. While these concerns are in one sense highly technical, they are also closely related to the nature of measurement, the limits on knowledge of a physical situation, and the interactions between incompletely specified experimental conditions and incompletely understood physical theory. The mathematical techniques that have been developed in order to make gauge theories tractable have found many other applications, from solid-state physics and crystallography to low-dimensional topology.


title: Gauge theory

text: Historically, the first example of gauge symmetry discovered was classical electromagnetism. In electrostatics, one can either discuss the electric field, E, or its corresponding electric potential, "V". Knowledge of one makes it possible to find the other, except that potentials differing by a constant, formula_1, correspond to the same electric field. This is because the electric field relates to "changes" in the potential from one point in space to another, and the constant "C" would cancel out when subtracting to find the change in potential. In terms of vector calculus, the electric field is the gradient of the potential, formula_2. Generalizing from static electricity to electromagnetism, we have a second potential, the vector potential A, with


title: Gauge theory

text: where "f" is any twice continuously differentiable function that depends on position and time. The fields remain the same under the gauge transformation, and therefore Maxwell's equations are still satisfied. That is, Maxwell's equations have a gauge symmetry.


title: Gauge theory

text: The following illustrates how local gauge invariance can be "motivated" heuristically starting from global symmetry properties, and how it leads to an interaction between originally non-interacting fields.


title: Gauge theory

text: Consider a set of "n" non-interacting real scalar fields, with equal masses "m". This system is described by an action that is the sum of the (usual) action for each scalar field formula_6


title: Gauge theory

text: whenever "G" is a "constant" matrix belonging to the "n"-by-"n" orthogonal group O("n"). This is seen to preserve the Lagrangian, since the derivative of formula_14 transforms identically to formula_11 and both quantities appear inside dot products in the Lagrangian (orthogonal transformations preserve the dot product).


title: Gauge theory

text: This characterizes the "global" symmetry of this particular Lagrangian, and the symmetry group is often called the gauge group; the mathematical term is structure group, especially in the theory of G-structures. Incidentally, Noether's theorem implies that invariance under this group of transformations leads to the conservation of the "currents"


title: Gauge theory

text: where the "T" matrices are generators of the SO("n") group. There is one conserved current for every generator.


title: Gauge theory

text: Now, demanding that this Lagrangian should have "local" O("n")-invariance requires that the "G" matrices (which were earlier constant) should be allowed to become functions of the space-time coordinates "x".


title: Gauge theory

text: The failure of the derivative to commute with "G" introduces an additional term (in keeping with the product rule), which spoils the invariance of the Lagrangian. In order to rectify this we define a new derivative operator such that the derivative of formula_14 again transforms identically with formula_11


title: Gauge theory

text: Pauli uses the term "gauge transformation of the first type" to mean the transformation of formula_11, while the compensating transformation in formula_27 is called a "gauge transformation of the second type".


title: Gauge theory

text: The difference between this Lagrangian and the original "globally gauge-invariant" Lagrangian is seen to be the interaction Lagrangian


title: Gauge theory

text: This term introduces interactions between the "n" scalar fields just as a consequence of the demand for local gauge invariance. However, to make this interaction physical and not completely arbitrary, the mediator "A"("x") needs to propagate in space. That is dealt with in the next section by adding yet another term, formula_29, to the Lagrangian. In the quantized version of the obtained classical field theory, the quanta of the gauge field "A"("x") are called gauge bosons. The interpretation of the interaction Lagrangian in quantum field theory is of scalar bosons interacting by the exchange of these gauge bosons.


title: Gauge theory

text: The picture of a classical gauge theory developed in the previous section is almost complete, except for the fact that to define the covariant derivatives "D", one needs to know the value of the gauge field formula_30 at all space-time points. Instead of manually specifying the values of this field, it can be given as the solution to a field equation. Further requiring that the Lagrangian that generates this field equation is locally gauge invariant as well, one possible form for the gauge field Lagrangian is


title: Gauge theory

text: and the formula_36 are the structure constants of the Lie algebra of the generators of the gauge group. This formulation of the Lagrangian is called a Yang–Mills action. Other gauge invariant actions also exist (e.g., nonlinear electrodynamics, Born–Infeld action, Chern–Simons model, theta term, etc.).


title: Gauge theory

text: In this Lagrangian term there is no field whose transformation counterweighs the one of formula_27. Invariance of this term under gauge transformations is a particular case of "a priori" classical (geometrical) symmetry. This symmetry must be restricted in order to perform quantization, the procedure being denominated gauge fixing, but even after restriction, gauge transformations may be possible.


title: Gauge theory

text: As a simple application of the formalism developed in the previous sections, consider the case of electrodynamics, with only the electron field. The bare-bones action that generates the electron field's Dirac equation is


title: Gauge theory

text: The gauge group here is U(1), just rotations of the phase angle of the field, with the particular rotation determined by the constant .


title: Gauge theory

text: "Localising" this symmetry implies the replacement of by . An appropriate covariant derivative is then


title: Gauge theory

text: Identifying the "charge" (not to be confused with the mathematical constant e in the symmetry description) with the usual electric charge (this is the origin of the usage of the term in gauge theories), and the gauge field with the four-vector potential of the electromagnetic field results in an interaction Lagrangian


title: Gauge theory

text: where formula_43 is the electric current four vector in the Dirac field. The gauge principle is therefore seen to naturally introduce the so-called minimal coupling of the electromagnetic field to the electron field.


title: Gauge theory

text: Adding a Lagrangian for the gauge field formula_44 in terms of the field strength tensor exactly as in electrodynamics, one obtains the Lagrangian used as the starting point in quantum electrodynamics.


title: Gauge theory

text: Gauge theories are usually discussed in the language of differential geometry. Mathematically, a "gauge" is just a choice of a (local) section of some principal bundle. A gauge transformation is just a transformation between two such sections.


title: Gauge theory

text: Although gauge theory is dominated by the study of connections (primarily because it's mainly studied by high-energy physicists), the idea of a connection is not central to gauge theory in general. In fact, a result in general gauge theory shows that affine representations (i.e., affine modules) of the gauge transformations can be classified as sections of a jet bundle satisfying certain properties. There are representations that transform covariantly pointwise (called by physicists gauge transformations of the first kind), representations that transform as a connection form (called by physicists gauge transformations of the second kind, an affine representation)—and other more general representations, such as the B field in BF theory. There are more general nonlinear representations (realizations), but these are extremely complicated. Still, nonlinear sigma models transform nonlinearly, so there are applications.


title: Gauge theory

text: If there is a principal bundle "P" whose base space is space or spacetime and structure group is a Lie group, then the sections of "P" form a principal homogeneous space of the group of gauge transformations.


title: Gauge theory

text: Connections (gauge connection) define this principal bundle, yielding a covariant derivative ∇ in each associated vector bundle. If a local frame is chosen (a local basis of sections), then this covariant derivative is represented by the connection form "A", a Lie algebra-valued 1-form, which is called the gauge potential in physics. This is evidently not an intrinsic but a frame-dependent quantity. The curvature form "F", a Lie algebra-valued 2-form that is an intrinsic quantity, is constructed from a connection form by


title: Gauge theory

text: where d stands for the exterior derivative and formula_47 stands for the wedge product. (formula_48 is an element of the vector space spanned by the generators formula_49, and so the components of formula_48 do not commute with one another. Hence the wedge product formula_51 does not vanish.)


title: Gauge theory

text: Infinitesimal gauge transformations form a Lie algebra, which is characterized by a smooth Lie-algebra-valued scalar, ε. Under such an infinitesimal gauge transformation,


title: Gauge theory

text: Not all gauge transformations can be generated by infinitesimal gauge transformations in general. An example is when the base manifold is a compact manifold without boundary such that the homotopy class of mappings from that manifold to the Lie group is nontrivial. See instanton for an example.


title: Gauge theory

text: A quantity which is gauge-invariant (i.e., invariant under gauge transformations) is the Wilson loop, which is defined over any closed path, γ, as follows:


title: Gauge theory

text: where χ is the character of a complex representation ρ and formula_61 represents the path-ordered operator.


title: Gauge theory

text: The formalism of gauge theory carries over to a general setting. For example, it is sufficient to ask that a vector bundle have a metric connection; when one does so, one finds that the metric connection satisfies the Yang–Mills equations of motion.


title: Gauge theory

text: Gauge theories may be quantized by specialization of methods which are applicable to any quantum field theory. However, because of the subtleties imposed by the gauge constraints (see section on Mathematical formalism, above) there are many technical problems to be solved which do not arise in other field theories. At the same time, the richer structure of gauge theories allows simplification of some computations: for example Ward identities connect different renormalization constants.


title: Gauge theory

text: The first gauge theory quantized was quantum electrodynamics (QED). The first methods developed for this involved gauge fixing and then applying canonical quantization. The Gupta–Bleuler method was also developed to handle this problem. Non-abelian gauge theories are now handled by a variety of means. Methods for quantization are covered in the article on quantization.


title: Gauge theory

text: The main point to quantization is to be able to compute quantum amplitudes for various processes allowed by the theory. Technically, they reduce to the computations of certain correlation functions in the vacuum state. This involves a renormalization of the theory.


title: Gauge theory

text: When the running coupling of the theory is small enough, then all required quantities may be computed in perturbation theory. Quantization schemes intended to simplify such computations (such as canonical quantization) may be called perturbative quantization schemes. At present some of these methods lead to the most precise experimental tests of gauge theories.


title: Gauge theory

text: However, in most gauge theories, there are many interesting questions which are non-perturbative. Quantization schemes suited to these problems (such as lattice gauge theory) may be called non-perturbative quantization schemes. Precise computations in such schemes often require supercomputing, and are therefore less well-developed currently than other schemes.


title: Gauge theory

text: Some of the symmetries of the classical theory are then seen not to hold in the quantum theory; a phenomenon called an anomaly. Among the most well known are:


title: Gauge theory

text: A pure gauge is the set of field configurations obtained by a gauge transformation on the null-field configuration, i.e., a gauge-transform of zero. So it is a particular "gauge orbit" in the field configuration's space.


title: Gauge theory

text: Thus, in the abelian case, where formula_62, the pure gauge is just the set of field configurations formula_63 for all .


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Mesopotamian religion refers to the religious beliefs and practices of the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, particularly Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia between circa 6000 BC and 400 AD, after which they largely gave way to Syriac Christianity practiced by today's Assyrians. The religious development of Mesopotamia and Mesopotamian culture in general, especially in the south, was not particularly influenced by the movements of the various peoples into and throughout the area. Rather, Mesopotamian religion was a consistent and coherent tradition which adapted to the internal needs of its adherents over millennia of development.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: The earliest undercurrents of Mesopotamian religious thought are believed to have developed in Mesopotamia in the sixth millennium BC, coinciding with the region beginning to be permanently settled. The earliest evidence of Mesopotamian religion date to the mid-fourth millennium BC, coinciding with the invention of writing, and involved the worship of forces of nature as providers of sustenance. In the 3rd millennium BC objects of worship were personified and became an expansive cast of divinities with particular functions. The last stages of Mesopotamian polytheism, which developed in the 2nd and 1st millenniums BC, introduced greater emphasis on personal religion and structured the gods into a monarchical hierarchy with the national god being the head of the pantheon. Mesopotamian religion finally declined with the spread of Iranian religions during the Achaemenid Empire and with the Christianization of Mesopotamia.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: The very earliest undercurrents of Mesopotamian religious thought are believed to have developed in the first half of the sixth millennium BC, at the time people first began to permanently settle in Mesopotamia owing to improved irrigation. The early religious developments of the region are unknown since they preceded the invention of writing. The first evidence for what is recogniseably Mesopotamian religion can be seen with the invention in Mesopotamia of writing circa 3500 BC.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: The people of Mesopotamia originally consisted of two groups, East Semitic Akkadian speakers (later divided into the Assyrians and Babylonians) and the people of Sumer, who spoke Sumerian, a language isolate. These peoples were members of various city-states and small kingdoms. The Sumerians left the first records, and are believed to have been the founders of the civilization of the Ubaid period (6500 BC to 3800 BC) in Upper Mesopotamia. By historical times they resided in southern Mesopotamia, which was known as Sumer (and much later, Babylonia), and had considerable influence on the Akkadian speakers and their culture. The Akkadian-speaking Semites are believed to have entered the region at some point between 3500 BC and 3000 BC, with Akkadian names first appearing in the regnal lists of these states c. 29th century BC.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: The Sumerians were advanced: as well as inventing writing, early forms of mathematics, early wheeled vehicles/chariots, astronomy, astrology, written code of law, organised medicine, advanced agriculture and architecture, and the calendar. They created the first city-states such as Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Isin, Kish, Umma, Eridu, Adab, Akshak, Sippar, Nippur and Larsa, each of them ruled by an "ensí". The Sumerians remained largely dominant in this synthesised culture, however, until the rise of the Akkadian Empire under Sargon of Akkad circa 2335 BC, which united all of Mesopotamia under one ruler.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: There was increasing syncretism between the Sumerian and Akkadian cultures and deities, with the Akkadians typically preferring to worship fewer deities but elevating them to greater positions of power. Circa 2335 BC, Sargon of Akkad conquered all of Mesopotamia, uniting its inhabitants into the world's first empire and spreading its domination into ancient Iran, the Levant, Anatolia, Canaan and the Arabian Peninsula. The Akkadian Empire endured for two centuries before collapsing due to economic decline, internal strife and attacks from the north east by the Gutian people.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Following a brief Sumerian revival with the Third Dynasty of Ur or Neo-Sumerian Empire, Mesopotamia broke up into a number of Akkadian states. Assyria had evolved during the 25th century BC, and asserted itself in the north circa 2100 BC in the Old Assyrian Empire and southern Mesopotamia fragmented into a number of kingdoms, the largest being Isin, Larsa and Eshnunna.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: In 1894 BC the initially minor city-state of Babylon was founded in the south by invading West Semitic-speaking Amorites. It was rarely ruled by native dynasties throughout its history.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Some time after this period, the Sumerians disappeared, becoming wholly absorbed into the Akkadian-speaking population.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Assyrian kings are attested from the late 25th century BC and dominated northern Mesopotamia and parts of eastern Anatolia and northeast Syria.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Circa 1750 BC, the Amorite ruler of Babylon, King Hammurabi, conquered much of Mesopotamia, but this empire collapsed after his death, and Babylonia was reduced to the small state it had been upon its founding. The Amorite dynasty was deposed in 1595 BC after attacks from mountain-dwelling people known as the Kassites from the Zagros Mountains, who went on to rule Babylon for over 500 years.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Assyria, having been the dominant power in the region with the Old Assyrian Empire between the 20th and 18th centuries BC before the rise of Hammurabi, once more became a major power with the Middle Assyrian Empire (1391–1050 BC). Assyria defeated the Hittites and Mitanni, and its growing power forced the New Kingdom of Egypt to withdraw from the Near East. The Middle Assyrian Empire at its height stretched from the Caucasus to modern Bahrain and from Cyprus to western Iran.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: The Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–605 BC) was the most dominant power on earth and the largest empire the world had yet seen between the 10th century BC and the late 7th century BC, with an empire stretching from Cyprus in the west to central Iran in the east, and from the Caucasus in the north to Nubia, Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula in the south, facilitating the spread of Mesopotamian culture and religion far and wide under emperors such as Ashurbanipal, Tukulti-Ninurta II, Tiglath-Pileser III, Shalmaneser IV, Sargon II, Sennacherib and Esarhaddon. During the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Mesopotamian Aramaic became the lingua franca of the empire, and also Mesopotamia proper. The last written records in Akkadian were astrological texts dating from 78 CE discovered in Assyria.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: The empire fell between 612 BC and 599 BC after a period of severe internal civil war in Assyria which soon spread to Babylonia, leaving Mesopotamia in a state of chaos. A weakened Assyria was then subject to combined attacks by a coalition of hitherto vassals, in the form of the Babylonians, Chaldeans, Medes, Scythians, Persians, Sagartians and Cimmerians beginning in 616 BC. These were led by Nabopolassar of Babylon and Cyaxares of Media and Persia. Nineveh was sacked in 612 BC, Harran fell in 608 BC, Carchemish in 605 BC, and final traces of Assyrian imperial administration disappeared from Dūr-Katlimmu by 599 BC.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Babylon had a brief late flowering of power and influence, initially under the Chaldean dynasty, which took over much of the empire formerly held by their northern kinsmen. However, the last king of Babylonia, Nabonidus, an Assyrian, paid little attention to politics, preferring to worship the lunar deity Sin, leaving day-to-day rule to his son Belshazzar. This and the fact that the Persians and Medes to the east were growing in power now that the might of Assyria that had held them in vassalage for centuries was gone, spelt the death knell for native Mesopotamian power. The Achaemenid Empire conquered the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 BC, after which the Chaldeans disappeared from history, although Mesopotamian people, culture and religion continued to endure after this.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Like many nations in Mesopotamian history, Assyria was originally, to a great extent, an oligarchy rather than a monarchy. Authority was considered to lie with "the city", and the polity had three main centres of power—an assembly of elders, a hereditary ruler, and an eponym. The ruler presided over the assembly and carried out its decisions. He was not referred to with the usual Akkadian term for "king", "šarrum"; that was instead reserved for the city's patron deity Ashur, of whom the ruler was the high priest. The ruler himself was only designated as "steward of Assur" ("iššiak Assur"), where the term for steward is a borrowing from Sumerian "ensí". The third centre of power was the eponym ("limmum"), who gave the year his name, similarly to the eponymous archon and Roman consuls of classical antiquity. He was annually elected by lot and was responsible for the economic administration of the city, which included the power to detain people and confiscate property. The institution of the eponym as well as the formula "iššiak Assur" lingered on as ceremonial vestiges of this early system throughout the history of the Assyrian monarchy.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: The religion of the Neo-Assyrian Empire centered around the Assyrian king as the king of their lands as well. However, kingship at the time was linked very closely with the idea of divine mandate. The Assyrian king, while not being a god himself, was acknowledged as the chief servant of the chief god, Ashur. In this manner, the king's authority was seen as absolute so long as the high priest reassured the peoples that the gods, or in the case of the henotheistic Assyrians, the god, was pleased with the current ruler. For the Assyrians who lived in Assur and the surrounding lands, this system was the norm. For the conquered peoples, however, it was novel, particularly to the people of smaller city-states. In time, Ashur was promoted from being the local deity of Assur to the overlord of the vast Assyrian domain, which spread from the Caucasus and Armenia in the north to Egypt, Nubia and the Arabian Peninsula in the south, and from Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean Sea in the west to central Iran in the east. Assur, the patron deity of the city of Assur from the late Bronze Age, was in constant rivalry with the patron deity of Babylon, Marduk. Worship was conducted in his name throughout the lands dominated by the Assyrians. With the worship of Assur across much of the Fertile Crescent, the Assyrian king could command the loyalty of his fellow servants of Assur.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: In 539 BC, Mesopotamia was conquered by the Achaemenid Empire (539–332 BC), then ruled by Cyrus the Great. This brought to an end over 3,000 years of Semitic Mesopotamian dominance of the Near East. The Persians maintained and did not interfere in the native culture and religion and Assyria and Babylon continued to exist as entities (although Chaldea and the Chaldeans disappeared), and Assyria was strong enough to launch major rebellions against Persia in 522 and 482 BC. During this period the Syriac language and Syriac script evolved in Assyria among the Assyrian people, and were centuries later to be the vehicle for the spread of Syriac Christianity throughout the near east.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Then, two centuries later in 330 BC the Macedonian emperor Alexander the Great overthrew the Persians and took control of Mesopotamia itself. After Alexander's death increased Hellenistic influence was brought to the region by the Seleucid Empire. Assyria and Babylonia later became provinces under the Parthian Empire (Athura and province of Babylonia), Rome (province of Assyria) and Sassanid Empire (province of Asuristan). Babylonia was dissolved as an entity during the Parthian Empire, though Assyria endured as a geo-political entity until the 7th century AD Arab Islamic conquest, while the Assyrians are still present today.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: During the Parthian Empire there was a major revival in Assyria (known as Athura and Assuristan) between the 2nd century BC and 4th century CE, with temples once more being dedicated to gods such as Ashur, Sin, Shamash, Hadad and Ishtar in various Parthian vassal states in Mesopotamia. Despite this period of revival, from the first century AD onwards, Christianity spread through Mesopotamia, with much of the populace converting to Eastern Rite Christianity in the form of the Church of the East and Syriac Orthodox Church, as well as Judaism. Gnostic religions such as Mandaeism also became popular, though native religions, in decline, still coexisted alongside these new monotheistic religions among the native populace; gods such as Ashur and Sin were still largely worshiped until the 4th century CE in Assyria; even up til the 10th century AD in Harran (the "Sabians" of Harran), the last capital of an independent Assyria, and the 18th century AD in Mardin (the "Shamsīyah"). In the 3rd century CE, another native Mesopotamian religion flourished, Manicheanism, which incorporated elements of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, as well as local Mesopotamian elements.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: There are no specific written records explaining Mesopotamian religious cosmology that survive today. Nonetheless, modern scholars have examined various accounts, and created what is believed to be an at least partially accurate depiction of Mesopotamian cosmology. In the "Epic of Creation", dated to 1200 BC, it explains that the god Marduk killed the mother goddess Tiamat and used half her body to create the earth, and the other half to create both the paradise of "šamû" and the netherworld of "irṣitu". A document from a similar period stated that the universe was a spheroid, with three levels of "šamû", where the gods dwelt, and where the stars existed, above the three levels of earth below it.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Mesopotamian religion was polytheistic, thereby accepting the existence of many different deities, both male and female, though it was also henotheistic, with certain gods being viewed as superior to others by their specific devotees. These devotees were often from a particular city or city-state that held that deity as its patron deity; for instance, the god Enki was often associated with the city of Eridu in Sumer, the god Ashur with Assur and Assyria, Enlil with the Sumerian city of Nippur, Ishtar with the Assyrian city of Arbela, and the god Marduk with Babylon. Though the full number of gods and goddesses found in Mesopotamia is not known, K. Tallqvist, in his "Akkadische Götterepitheta" (1938) counted around 2,400 that scholars know, most of which had Sumerian names. In the Sumerian language, the gods were referred to as "dingir", while in the Akkadian language they were known as "ilu" and it seems that there was syncreticism between the gods worshipped by the two groups, adopting one another's deities.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: The Mesopotamian gods bore many similarities with humans, and were anthropomorphic, thereby having humanoid form. Similarly, they often acted like humans, requiring food and drink, as well as drinking alcohol and subsequently suffering the effects of drunkenness, but were thought to have a higher degree of perfection than common men. They were thought to be more powerful, all-seeing and all-knowing, unfathomable, and, above all, immortal. One of their prominent features was a terrifying brightness ("melammu") which surrounded them, producing an immediate reaction of awe and reverence among men. In many cases, the various deities were family relations of one another, a trait found in many other polytheistic religions. The historian J. Bottéro was of the opinion that the gods were not viewed mystically, but were instead seen as high-up masters who had to be obeyed and feared, as opposed to loved and adored. Nonetheless, many Mesopotamians, of all classes, often had names that were devoted to a certain deity; this practice appeared to have begun in the third millennium BC among the Sumerians, but also was later adopted by the Akkadians, Assyrians and Babylonians as well.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Initially, the pantheon was not ordered, but later Mesopotamian theologians came up with the concept of ranking the deities in order of importance. A Sumerian list of around 560 deities that did this was uncovered at Farm and Tell Abû Ṣalābīkh and dated to circa 2600 BC, ranking five primary deities as being of particular importance.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: One of the most important of these early Mesopotamian deities was the god Enlil, who was originally a Sumerian divinity viewed as a king of the gods and a controller of the world, who was later adopted by the Akkadians. Another was the Sumerian god An, who served a similar role to Enlil and became known as Anu among the Akkadians. The Sumerian god Enki was later also adopted by the Akkadians, initially under his original name, and later as Éa. Similarly the Sumerian moon god Nanna became the Akkadian Sîn while the Sumerian sun god Utu became the Akkadian Shamash. One of the most notable goddesses was the Sumerian sex and war deity Inanna. With the later rise to power of the Babylonians in the 18th century BC, the king, Hammurabi, declared Marduk, a deity who before then had not been of significant importance, to a position of supremacy alongside Anu and Enlil in southern Mesopotamia.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Perhaps the most significant legend to survive from Mesopotamian religion is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which tells the story of the heroic king Gilgamesh and his wild friend Enkidu, and the former's search for immortality which is entwined with all the gods and their approval. It also contains the earliest reference to The Great Flood.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: In March 2020, archaeologists announced the discovery of a 5,000-year-old cultic area filled with more than 300 broken ceremonial ceramic cups, bowls, jars, animal bones and ritual processions dedicated to Ningirsu at the site of Girsu. One of the remains was a duck-shaped bronze figurine with eyes made from bark which is thought to be dedicated to Nanshe.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Each Mesopotamian city was home to a deity, and each of the prominent deities was the patron of a city, and all known temples were located in cities, though there may have been shrines in the suburbs. The temple itself was constructed of mud brick in the form of a ziggurat, which rose to the sky in a series of stairstep stages. Its significance and symbolism have been the subject of much discussion, but most regard the tower as a kind of staircase or ladder for the god to descend from and ascend to the heavens, though there are signs which point towards an actual cult having been practiced in the upper temple, so the entire temple may have been regarded as a giant altar. Other theories treat the tower as an image of the cosmic mountain where a dying and rising god "lay buried." Some temples, such as the temple of Enki in Eridu contained a holy tree ("kiskanu") in a holy grove, which was the central point of various rites performed by the king, who functioned as a "master gardener."


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Mesopotamian temples were originally built to serve as dwelling places for the god, who was thought to reside and hold court on earth for the good of the city and kingdom. His presence was symbolized by an image of the god in a separate room. The god's presence within the image seems to have been thought of in a very concrete way, as instruments for the presence of the deity." This is evident from the poem "How Erra Wrecked the World", in which Erra deceived the god Marduk into leaving his cult statue. Once constructed, idols were consecrated through special nocturnal rituals where they were given "life", and their mouth "was opened" ("pet pî") and washed ("mes pî") so they could see and eat. If the deity approved, it would accept the image and agree to "inhabit" it. These images were also entertained, and sometime escorted on hunting expeditions. In order to service the gods, the temple was equipped with a household with kitchens and kitchenware, sleeping rooms with beds and side rooms for the deity's family, as well as a courtyard with a basin and water for cleansing visitors, as well as a stable for the god's chariot and draft animals.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Generally, the god's well-being was maintained through service, or work ("dullu"). The image was dressed and served banquets twice a day. It is not known how the god was thought to consume the food, but a curtain was drawn before the table while he or she "ate", just as the king himself was not allowed to be seen by the masses while he ate. Occasionally, the king shared in these meals, and the priests may have had some share in the offerings as well. Incense was also burned before the image, because it was thought that the gods enjoyed the smell. Sacrificial meals were also set out regularly, with a sacrificial animal seen as a replacement ("pūhu") or substitute ("dinānu") for a man, and it was considered that the anger of the gods or demons was then directed towards the sacrificial animal. Additionally, certain days required extra sacrifices and ceremonies for certain gods, and every day was sacred to a particular god.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: The king was thought, in theory, to be the religious leader ("enu" or "šangū") of the cult and exercised a large number of duties within the temple, with a large number of specialists whose task was to mediate between men and gods: a supervising or "watchman" priest ("šešgallu"), priests for individual purification against demons and magicians ("āšipu"), priests for the purification of the temple ("mašmašu"), priests to appease the wrath of the gods with song and music ("kalū"), as well as female singers ("nāru"), male singers ("zammeru"), craftsmen ("mārē ummāni"), swordbearers ("nāš paṭri"), masters of divination ("bārû"), penitents ("šā'ilu"), and others.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: Besides the worship of the gods at public rituals, individuals also paid homage to a personal deity. As with other deities, the personal gods changed over time and little is known about early practice as they are rarely named or described. In the mid-third millennium BC, some rulers regarded a particular god or gods as being their personal protector. In the second millennium BC, personal gods began to function more on behalf of the common man, with whom he had a close, personal relationship, maintained through prayer and maintenance of his god's statue. A number of written prayers have survived from ancient Mesopotamia, each of which typically exalt the god that they are describing above all others. The historian J. Bottéro stated that these poems display "extreme reverence, profound devotion, [and] the unarguable emotion that the supernatural evoked in the hearts of those ancient believers" but that they showed a people who were scared of their gods rather than openly celebrating them. They were thought to offer good luck, success, and protection from disease and demons, and one's place and success in society was thought to depend on his personal deity, including the development of his certain talents and even his personality. This was even taken to the point that everything he experienced was considered a reflection of what was happening to his personal god. When a man neglected his god, it was assumed that the demons were free to inflict him, and when he revered his god, that god was like a shepherd who seeks food for him.


title: Ancient Mesopotamian religion

text: There was a strong belief in demons in Mesopotamia, and private individuals, like the temple priests, also participated in incantations (šiptu) to ward them off. Although there was no collective term for these beings either in Sumerian or Akkadian, they were merely described as harmful or dangerous beings or forces, and they were used as a logical way to explain the existence of evil in the world. They were thought to be countless in number, and were thought to even attack the gods as well. Besides demons, there were also spirits of the dead, (etimmu) who could also cause mischief. Amulets were occasionally used, and sometimes a special priest or exorcist (āšipu or mašmašu) was required. Incantations and ceremonies were also used to cure diseases which were also thought to be associated with demonic activity, sometimes making use of sympathetic magic. Sometimes an attempt was made to capture a demon by making an image of it, placing it above the head of a sick person, then destroying the image, which the demon was somehow likely to inhabit. Images of protecting spirits were also made and placed at gates to ward off disaster.