title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: After his death, the patriarchal office was made hereditary, and Patriarchs of this line continued to use the name "Shimun", thus creating the Shimun line. Hereditary succession was not acceptable to Rome, and during the tenure of the next Patriarch Shimun X Eliyah (1600–1638) ties with the Catholic Church were loosened again. In 1616, Shimun X signed a traditional profession of faith that was not accepted by the Pope, leaving the Patriarch without Rome's confirmation. His successor Shimun XI Eshuyow (1638–1656) restored communion with the Catholic Church as late as 1653, eventually receiving confirmation from the Pope. By that time, the movement towards full commitment to the traditional faith was constantly growing stronger within the Shimun line. When the next Patriarch Shimun XII Yoalaha decided to send his profession of faith to the Pope, he was deposed by his bishops because of his pro-Catholic attitude. The Pope tried to intervene on his behalf, but without success.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: Final resolution of conflicts within the Shimun line occurred under the next Patriarch Shimun XIII Dinkha (1662–1700), who definitively broke communion with the Catholic Church. In 1670, he gave a traditionalist reply to an approach that was made from the Pope, and by 1672 all connections with the Catholic Church were terminated. At the same time, Patriarch Shimun XIII moved his seat from Amid to Qochanis. After the final return to the traditional faith, Patriarchs of the Shimun line decided to keep their independence and after that time there were two independent lines of traditional patriarchs: the senior Eliya line in Alqosh and the junior Shimun line in Qochanis.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: Such division was additionally caused by the complex structure of local Assyrian communities, traditionally organized as tribal confederations with each tribe being headed by a local lord ("malik"), while each "malik" was ultimately subject to the patriarch, who mediated between Christian Assyrians and the Ottoman authorities.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: In 1780, at the beginning of the patriarchal tenure of Eliya XII (XIII) (1778–1804), a group seceded from the Eliya line in Alqosh and elected Yohannan Hormizd, who entered full communion with the Catholic Church and was officially appointed Archbishop of Mosul and patriarchal administrator of the Chaldean Catholic Church, in 1783. Only after the death in 1827 of the last representative of the Josephite line, Joseph V Augustine Hindi, was Yohannan recognized as the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch by the Pope, in 1830. By this official appointment, the final merger of various factions committed to the union with the Catholic Church was achieved, thus forming the modern Chaldean Catholic Church.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: At the same time, the long coexistence and rivalry between two traditionalist patriarchal branches — the senior Eliya line of Alqosh and the junior Shimun line of Qochanis — ended in 1804 when the last primate of the Eliya line, Patriarch Eliya XII (XIII) died and was buried in the ancient Rabban Hormizd Monastery. His branch decided not to elect a new patriarch, thus enabling the remaining patriarch Shimun XVI Yohannan (1780–1820) of the Shimun line to become the sole primate of both Assyrian traditionalist branches. Consolidated after 1804, the reunited traditionalist Church led by patriarchs of the Shimun line became widely known as the "Assyrian Church of the East". Still based in Qodchanis, Assyrian Patriarch Shimun XVI Yohannan was not able to secure control over the traditional seat of the former Eliya line in the ancient Rabban Hormizd Monastery; and around 1808 that venerated monastic institution passed to the Chaldean Catholics.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: The next Assyrian Patriarch Shimun XVII Abraham (1820–1861) also governed his church from Qodshanis. During years marked by political turbulence, he tried to maintain good relations with the local Ottoman authorities. In 1843, he was faced with renewed hostilities from Kurdish warlords, who attacked and looted many Christian villages, killing 10,000 Christian men and taking away women and children as captives. The patriarch himself was forced to take temporary refuge in Mosul. He was succeeded by Patriarch Shimun XVIII Rubil (1861–1903) who also resided in Qodshanis. In 1869, he received an open invitation from the Vatican to visit Rome to attend the First Vatican Council as an observer, but he did not accept the invitation, In following years, he also rejected other initiatives for union with the Catholic Church.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: By the end of the 19th century, the Assyrian Church of the East consolidated itself as the sole representative of all traditionalist Assyrians. It also managed to secure a certain level of autonomy within the highly complex system of Ottoman local governance in the bordering regions. On several occasions, Assyrian patriarchs refused to enter communion with the Catholic Church or merge with the Chaldean Catholic Church. On the other hand, by the end of the 19th century some of its communities were converted to Protestantism by various western missionaries, while other communities were drawn to Eastern Orthodoxy. That movement was led by Assyrian Bishop Mar Yonan of Supurghan in the region of Urmia who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in 1898, through the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Urmia.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: Among all the tragedies and schisms which thinned the church out, no other was as severe as the Assyrian genocide. At that point the Assyrian Church of the East was based in the mountains of Hakkari, as it had been since 1681. In 1915, The Young Turks invaded the region — despite the Assyrians' plea of neutrality during the Caucasus campaign by Russia and their Armenian allies — out of fear of an Assyrian independence movement. In response to this, Assyrians of all denominations (the Assyrian Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church and Assyrian Protestants) entered into a war of independence and allied themselves with the United Kingdom, the Russian Empire and the Armenians against the Ottomans and their Islamic Kurdish, Iranian and Arab allies. Despite the odds, the Assyrians fought successfully against the Ottomans and their allies for three years throughout southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran and northeastern Syria. Eventually, however, they were abandoned by their allies, the Russian Empire and the First Republic of Armenia, due to the Russian Revolution and the collapse of the Armenian defense, leaving the Assyrians vastly outnumbered, surrounded, and cut off from supplies of ammunition and food. During this period, their See at Qodchanis was completely destroyed and the Turks and their Islamic allies massacred all of the Assyrians in the Hakkari Mountains. Those who survived fled into Iran with what remained of the Assyrian defense under Agha Petros, but they were pursued into Iranian territory despite the fact they were fleeing. Later, in 1918, after the murder of their "de facto" leader and Patriarch Shimun XIX Benyamin and 150 of his followers during a negotiation, fearing further massacres at the hands of the Turks and Kurds, most of the survivors fled by train from Iran into what was to become Iraq. They sought protection under the British mandate there, and joined the already existing indigenous Assyrian communities of both Eastern Orthodox and Catholic rites in the north, where they formed communities in Baghdad, Basra, and other areas.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: In the aftermath of World War I, the British-educated Patriarch Shimun XXI Eshai, born into the line of patriarchs at Qodchanis, had agitated for an independent Assyrian state. Following the end of the British mandate in 1933 and a massacre of Assyrian civilians at Simele by the Iraqi Army, the patriarch was forced to take refuge in Cyprus. There, Shimun petitioned the League of Nations regarding his people's fate, but to little avail, and he was consequently barred from entering Syria and Iraq. He traveled through Europe before moving to Chicago in 1940 to join the growing Assyrian diaspora community there.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: Due to the church's and the general Assyrian community's disorganized state as a result of the conflicts of the 20th century, Patriarch Shimun XXI Eshai was forced to reorganize the church's structure in the United States. He transferred his residence to San Francisco in 1954, and was able to travel to Iran, Lebanon, Kuwait, and India, where he worked to strengthen the church.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: In 1964, the patriarch decreed a number of changes to the church, including liturgical reform, the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, and the shortening of Lent. These changes, combined with Shimun's long absence from Iraq, caused a rift in the community there, which led to another schism. In 1968, traditionalists within the church elected Thoma Darmo as a rival patriarch to Shimun XXI Eshai, forming the independent Ancient Church of the East, based in Baghdad, Iraq.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: In 1972, Shimun decided to step down as patriarch, and the following year he got married, in contravention to longstanding church custom. This led to a synod in 1973 in which further reforms were introduced, the most significant of which included the permanent abolition of hereditary succession — a practice introduced in the middle of the fifteenth century by Patriarch Shemon IV Basidi (who had died in 1497) — and it was also decided that Shimun should be reinstated. The second matter was supposed to be settled at another synod in 1975; however, Shimun was assassinated in November 1975 by an estranged relative before this could take place.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: Almost a year after the death of Shimun, Mar Khnanya Dinkha, Metropolitan of Tehran, convened a synod of seven Assyrian bishops which took place at St Paul’s Abbey, Alton, in England, from 12 to 17 October 1976. They were joined by two Church of England bishops, representing the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, and elected Dinkha as the 120th Catholicos-Patriarch of the Church of the East. On 17 October he was consecrated as Dinkha IV at St Barnabas Church, Ealing, in an area where many Assyrians lived.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: Dinkha, who was then aged 33, operated his see at Tehran until the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–1988, when he went into exile in the United States and transferred the Patriarchal See to Chicago. Much of his patriarchate had been concerned with tending to the Assyrian diaspora community and with ecumenical efforts to strengthen relations with other churches. On 26 March 2015, Dinkha IV died in the United States, leaving the Assyrian Church of the East in a period of "sede vacante" until 18 September 2015. During that time, Aprem Mooken served as the custodian of the Patriarchate of Seleucia-Ctesiphon.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: On 18 September 2015, the Holy Synod of the Assyrian Church of the East elected the Metropolitan of Iraq, Jordan, and Russia, Warda Sliwa, to succeed the late Dinkha IV as Catholicos-Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East. On 27 September 2015, he was consecrated as Catholicos-Patriarch in the Cathedral Church of St. John the Baptist, in Erbil, Iraq. Upon his consecration, he assumed the ecclesiastical name Gewargis III.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: There have also been talks of reunification. In the Common Christological Declaration Between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East in 1994, the two churches recognized the legitimacy and rightness of each other's titles for Mary.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: In 2005, the Assyrian Church of the East had about 380,000 members, mostly living in the United States, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: On 6 September 2021, Mar Gewargis III formally stepped down as Catholicos-Patriarch during an Extraordinary Session of the Holy Synod of the Assyrian Church of the East, leaving the Patriarchal See vacant. On 8 September 2021, the Holy Synod elected Mar Awa Royel, Bishop of California and Secretary of the Holy Synod, to succeed Mar Gewargis III as the 122nd Catholicos-Patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East. He was Consecrated and Enthroned as Catholicos-Patriarch on 13 September 2021, on the Feast of the Holy Cross, in the Cathedral Church of St. John the Baptist in Erbil, Iraq, and assumed the ecclesiastical name Mar Awa III.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: Following doctrinal traditions of the ancient Church of the East, the modern Assyrian Church of the East recognizes the first two ecumenical councils: the First Council of Nicaea (325), and the First Council of Constantinople (381). The Assyrian Church follows trinitarian doctrines, expressed in the Nicene Creed, and professes the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: Theologically, the Assyrian Church of the East does not accept doctrinal definitions that were adopted at the Council of Ephesus (431) and the Council of Chalcedon (451), and still adheres to the Church of the East's traditional Christology, that is often labeled as Nestorian. The use and exact meaning of that term has been the subject of many debates, not only throughout history but also in modern times, since the Assyrian Church of the East has distinctive views on several Christological questions and claims that its theological doctrines and traditions are essentially Orthodox, while admitting the need for further inter-Christian dialogue that would resolve various questions in the field of comparative Christological terminology.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: The Nestorian nature of Assyrian Christianity remains a matter of contention. Elements of Nestorian doctrine were explicitly repudiated by Patriarch Dinkha IV on the occasion of his accession in 1976.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: The Christology of the Church of the East has its roots in the Antiochene theological tradition of the early church. The founders of Assyrian theology are Diodorus of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, both of whom taught at Antioch. "Antiochene" is a modern designation given to the style of theology associated with the early church at Antioch, as contrasted with the theology of the Church of Alexandria.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: Antiochene theology emphasizes Christ's humanity and the reality of the moral choices he faced. In order to preserve the impassibility of Christ's Divine Nature, the unity of his person is defined in a looser fashion than in the Alexandrian tradition. The normative Christology of the Church of the East was written by Babai the Great (d. 628) during the controversy that followed the 431 Council of Ephesus. Babai held that within Christ there exist two "qnome" (Syriac: ܩܢܘܡܐ / "qnômâ", a complex term, equivalent for Greek term hypostasis), unmingled, but everlastingly united in the one prosopon (person) of Christ.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: The precise Christological teachings of Nestorius are shrouded in obscurity. Wary of monophysitism, Nestorius rejected Cyril's theory of a hypostatic union, proposing instead a much looser concept of prosopic union. Nestorianism has come to mean radical dyophysitism, in which Christ's two natures are eternally separate, though it is doubtful whether Nestorius ever taught such a doctrine. Nestorius' rejection of the term Theotokos ('God-bearer', or 'Mother of God') has traditionally been held as evidence that he asserted the existence of two persons (dyoprosopism) — not merely two natures — in Jesus Christ, but there exists no evidence that Nestorius denied Christ's oneness. In the controversy that followed the Council of Ephesus, the term "Nestorian" was applied to all doctrine upholding a strictly Antiochene Christology. In consequence, the Church of the East was labelled Nestorian, though its official Christology was in fact defined by Babai the Great, at the council that was held in 612.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: The church employs the Syriac dialect of Eastern Aramaic in its liturgy, the East Syriac Rite, which includes three anaphoras, attributed to Addai of Edessa and Mari, Theodore of Mopsuestia and later also Nestorius.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: In their homes, Christians belonging to the Assyrian Church of the East hang a Christian Cross (without the corpus) on the eastern wall of the main room.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: The Assyrian Church of the East does not currently make use of icons and the interior of its houses of worship are simple. Iconography has been present in the Church of the East's history; opposition to religious images eventually became the norm due to the spread of Islam in the region, which forbade any type of depictions of saints and biblical prophets. As such, the church was forced to get rid of her icons.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: A Nestorian Peshitta Gospel book written in Estrangela, from the 13th century, currently resided at the State Library of Berlin. This illustrated manuscript from Upper Mesopotamia or Tur Abdin proves that in the 13th century the church was not yet aniconic. Another Nestorian Gospel manuscript preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which contains an illustration that depicts Jesus Christ (not a crucifix) in the circle of a ringed cross (in the form of celtic cross) surrounded by four angels.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: Three Syriac manuscripts from the early 19th century and earlier—they were edited into a compilation titled "The Book of Protection" by Hermann Gollancz—containing a number of illustrations which are more or less crude. These manuscripts prove the continuous use of images. Moreover, a life-size male stucco figure was discovered in a church of Seleucia-Ctesiphon from the late 6th century. Beneath this church were found the remains of an earlier church. Although it cannot be determined which Nestorian Church was involved, the discovery nevertheless proves that the Church of the East also used figurative representations.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: The Assyrian Church of the East is governed by an episcopal polity, the same as other apostolic churches. The church maintains a system of geographical parishes organized into dioceses and archdioceses. The Catholicos-Patriarch is the head of the church. Its synod is composed of bishops who oversee individual dioceses and metropolitans who oversee episcopal dioceses in their territorial jurisdiction.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: The Chaldean Syrian Church, which encompasses India and the Persian Gulf, is the largest diocese of the church. Its history goes back to the Church of the East that established a presence in Kerala, but the two communities maintained only a sporadic connection for several centuries, and consistent relations were only established with the arrival of the Portuguese in India around 1500. The church is represented by the Assyrian Church of the East and is in communion with it.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: Membership is estimated to 385,000 adherents, although some sources say as high as 500,000. According to scholar James Minahan around 19% of the Assyrian people belong to the Assyrian Church of the East. In its own 2018 Report on Religious Freedom, the United States Department of State put the Assyrian Church of the East adherents at approximately 20% of the Christians in Iraq.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: The patriarchal seat was moved several times throughout history. Up to the 1804, patriarchs of the senior Eliya line resided in the ancient Rabban Hormizd Monastery, while patriarchs of the junior Shimun line resided in the Cathedral Church of Mar Shallita, in the village of Qudshanis in the Hakkari Mountains of the Ottoman Empire, and continued to do so up to the First World War. After the beginning of conflict in 1915, the patriarchs temporarily resided between Urmia and Salmas, and after 1918 the patriarchs resided in Mosul. After the Simele massacre of 1933, the then Patriarch Shimun XXI Eshai was exiled to Cyprus due to his agitation for independence. In 1940, he was welcomed to the United States where he set up his residence in Chicago, and administered the United States and Canada as his patriarchal province. The patriarchate was then moved to Modesto, California in 1954, and finally to San Francisco in 1958 due to health issues. After the assassination of the patriarch and the election of Dinkha IV in 1976, the patriarchate was temporarily located in Tehran, where the new patriarch was living at the time. After the Iran–Iraq War and the Iranian Revolution, the patriarchate again returned to Chicago, where it remained until 2015, when it reestablished itself in the Middle East by organizing in Erbil's Ankawa district in Iraq after Gewargis III was installed as Catholicos-Patriarch. The Diocese of Eastern United States served as the patriarch's province from 1994 until 2012.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: Due to the unstable political, religious and economic situation in the church's historical homeland of the Middle East, many of the church members now reside in Western countries. Churches and dioceses have been established throughout Europe, America, and Oceania. The largest expatriate concentration of church members is in the United States, mainly situated in Illinois and California.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: On November 11, 1994, a historic meeting between Patriarch Dinkha IV and Pope John Paul II took place in Rome. The two patriarchs signed a document titled "Common Christological Declaration Between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East". One side effect of this meeting was that the Assyrian Church of the East's relationship with the fellow Chaldean Catholic Church began to improve.


title: Assyrian Church of the East

text: The lack of a coherent institution narrative in the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, which dates to apostolic times, has caused many Western Christians, and especially Roman Catholics, to doubt the validity of this anaphora, used extensively by the Assyrian Church of the East, as a prayer of consecration of the eucharistic elements. In 2001, after a study of this issue, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, promulgated a declaration approved by Pope John Paul II stating that this is a valid anaphora. This declaration opened the door to a joint synodal decree officially implementing the present "Guidelines for Admission to the Eucharist between the Chaldean Church and the Assyrian Church of the East".


title: Starset

text: Starset is an American rock band from Columbus, Ohio, formed by Dustin Bates in 2013. They released their debut album, "Transmissions", in 2014 and their second album, "Vessels", on January 20, 2017. The band has found success in expanding the ideas of their concept albums through social media and YouTube, with the band generating over $230,000 in revenue from views from the latter as of November 2016. Their single "My Demons" had accumulated over 280 million YouTube views in the same time period. Their most commercially successful song, "Monster", peaked at number 2 on the US "Billboard" Mainstream Rock chart in May 2017. A third studio album, "Divisions", was released on September 13, 2019, with their fourth studio album, "Horizons", released on October 22, 2021.


title: Starset

text: Starset was formed in 2013 by Downplay vocalist Dustin Bates, who is also the band's lead singer, songwriter, and keyboardist. Bates' interest in astronomy was first fueled when acquiring his master's in electrical engineering as he studied at Ohio University. He completed research for the US Air Force and also taught at the International Space University. Bates created the fictional backstory for the band that forms the thematic basis for their music and multimedia. In the backstory, Starset was formed as part of a public outreach initiative by The Starset Society. The Society's aims were to alert the public about the contents of "the Message" the society obtained from a mysterious signal from space. Starset treats their backstory and The Starset Society as real in interviews, with few exceptions.


title: Starset

text: The band released their debut album "Transmissions" on July 8, 2014. The release debuted at number 49 on the US "Billboard" 200 charts, making it one of the highest debut albums for a rock band in 2014, and as of 2016, had sold over 79,000 copies. Three singles were released in promotion of the album; "My Demons", "Carnivore", and "Halo." They also performed well in the charts, reaching fifth, sixteenth, and sixteenth respectively on the "Billboard" US Mainstream Rock charts. The band later released an accompanying novel, "The Prox Transmissions," further detailing Bates' fictional back-history of the Starset Society story.


title: Starset

text: Rob Graves, who produced "Transmissions," announced on January 26, 2016, that the making of Starset's second record has "officially commenced". Along with the announcement of European tour dates supporting Breaking Benjamin, Starset announced their second album, which Bates said would be more stylistically diverse than the previous, ranging in genre from metal to pop. On October 4, 2016, Starset posted to their social media an image from a graphic novel produced by Marvel Comics as a tie-in to "The Prox Transmissions." The 88-page graphic novel was co-written by Dustin Bates and Peter David, illustrated by Mirko Colak, and released in September 2017.


title: Starset

text: The album's first single, "Monster" was released on October 28, 2016. On November 4, 2016, Starset announced their upcoming album "Vessels", which was released on January 20, 2017. The album debuted at number 11 on the "Billboard 200" albums chart. The band spent much of 2017 touring in support of the album. The band toured with Black Satellite in the first half of 2017. In July 2017, the band performed at Seether's Shaun Morgan's "Rise Above Fest", alongside Shinedown and Halestorm. A second single from the album, "Satellite", was released in August 2017, peaking at number 12 on the "Billboard" Mainstream Rock Chart.


title: Starset

text: The band would continue touring through the first half of 2018, though Bates said he would likely take a break before pursuing a third album with the band. Instead, he was planning on releasing music under a different project name - MNQN - which would be far more electronic-based. Bates stated that he also had been working on some progressive rock styled music that he intends to release as well, though he did not disclose when, or if, it would be released under the Starset name. In April 2018, the band announced they had signed to Fearless Records, and released a music video for the "Vessels" track "Ricochet". An alternate acoustic recording of the song was also released shortly after.


title: Starset

text: In August 2018, the band released a second version of the "Vessels" track "Bringing it Down", along with announcing a deluxe edition of the album, titled "Vessels 2.0". Nine new tracks appeared on "Vessels 2.0", consisting of "reimagined", acoustic, and remixed versions of songs from the original "Vessels" along with a cover of "Love You to Death" by Type O Negative. The album was released on September 28, 2018. The press release for "Vessels 2.0" also stated that the band had plans to release their third studio album in 2019. MNQN's self-titled debut album released on April 4, 2019, and a live date at of the Wonderbus Music and Arts Festival in Columbus, Ohio, on August 18, 2019, was announced. Much like Starset, the MNQN project features a fictional backstory, based on the titular artificial intelligence created by the Sentience Corp.


title: Starset

text: On May 13, 2019, Starset announced the third album would be released on September 13, 2019, along with fall tour dates for the United States. Spring 2020 tour dates for Europe and the UK were announced on July 2, 2019. The album's name "Divisions", was announced in August 2019, alongside the release of its first single, "Manifest". The album was released on September 13, 2019. By 2020, the band had received two billion streams worldwide.


title: Starset

text: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, most of Starset's tours were first postponed and later cancelled. However, Starset released the reimagined version of the single "TRIALS" and the remix version of "WAKING UP" in August 2020 and December 2020.


title: Starset

text: In April 2021, Starset released a cover of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" exclusively for Amazon Music, and a new song, "Infected", to celebrate the two year anniversary of the video game "Arknights". In May 2021, the band made their first demonstration announcement since the pandemic, saying that they will give a performance on LouderThanLife (September 2021) and Rockville (November 2021). In June, Starset announced that they will hold a series of "AE01 Acoustic Event" during the next two months across America, in which the band will give totally acoustic performances and interact intimately with the audience. The upcoming tour of the United States and Europe, which will start in November 2021 and February 2022 respectively, were subsequently announced. On September 10, 2021, the band announced that their fourth studio album, "Horizons", was scheduled for release on October 22, 2021. They also released a music video for a new song from the album, named "The Breach", and released the track listing for the album, revealing that the previously released song, "Infected", would also be on the album. On September 23, 2021, they released a lyric video for "Leaving This World Behind", and on October 7 of the same year, they released a lyric video for "Earthrise". On August 19, 2022, Starset released a collaboration with Breaking Benjamin for "Waiting on the Sky to Change", a reworking of a song from Bates's previous band, Downplay.


title: Starset

text: Starset's musical style has been described as hard rock, electronic rock, alternative rock, and progressive rock. Due to the large number of styles, instruments, and influences of the band's work, many outlets, including AllMusic, "Billboard", and "Revolver" all commonly label the band as "rock" or as a "rock band". Bates informally describes the music as "cinematic rock". He elaborated further as to what he means by the self-prescribed label, saying it's "as if a hard rock band did the soundtrack to an epic blockbuster movie ... we're blending symphonics with electronics with riff-driven, baritone guitar hard rock." Bates explained the evolution of sound with the band's second album, "Vessels": "Whereas ["Transmissions"] was centered in the hard rock lane before, now it goes more metal at times, and the guitar work borrows from djent stylings, and it gets more ambient at times, using electronics at a more deeply integrated level. Whereas the strings were more cinematic, there was more of a quartet before, on this record it’s more of an orchestration." Bates also stated he implemented some elements of EDM into the second album. Dave Richards "Erie Times-News"' described the band's sound as "blending the progressive aspirations of Muse with the openhearted approach of emotional and muscular power of bands like Breaking Benjamin." Bates also includes a notable amount of harsh vocals as well as both raw and pitch corrected clean vocals for many different effects.


title: Starset

text: Influences of Starset include Hans Zimmer, Nine Inch Nails, Sigur Ros, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Deftones, Linkin Park and Breaking Benjamin.


title: Meat Is Murder

text: Meat Is Murder is the second studio album by English rock band the Smiths, released on 11 February 1985 by Rough Trade Records. It became the band's only studio album to reach number one on the UK Albums Chart, and stayed on the chart for 13 weeks. The album was an international success: it spent 11 weeks in the European Top 100 Albums chart, peaking at number 29. It also reached number 110 on the US "Billboard" 200, in the United States.


title: Meat Is Murder

text: After the band's 1984 debut studio album, lead vocalist Morrissey and guitarist Johnny Marr produced the album themselves, assisted only by engineer Stephen Street. They had first met Stephen Street on the session for "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" and requested his contact number. Officially, the record's production is credited to "The Smiths".


title: Meat Is Murder

text: To build the album's soundscape, Morrissey provided Marr and Street with his personal copies of BBC sound effects records from which to source samples. Morrissey would continue this practice on future Smiths singles and albums.


title: Meat Is Murder

text: "Meat Is Murder" was more strident and political than its predecessor, including the pro-vegetarian title track (Morrissey forbade the rest of the band from being photographed eating meat), and the anti-corporal punishment "The Headmaster Ritual". Musically, the band had grown more adventurous, with Marr and Rourke channelling rockabilly and funk influences in "Rusholme Ruffians" and "Barbarism Begins at Home", respectively. "Rusholme Ruffians" interpolates the Victoria Wood song "Fourteen Again". Author John King has suggested that the title track was inspired by the 1983 song "Meat Means Murder" by the anarcho-punk band Conflict, which deals with the same topic and also opens at a slow pace.


title: Meat Is Murder

text: Morrissey also brought a political stance to many of his interviews. Among his targets were the Thatcher administration, the monarchy, and his musical contemporaries. When asked about Band Aid, which was being strongly promoted in the UK media at the time, he quipped, "One can have great concern for the people of Ethiopia, but it's another thing to inflict daily torture on the people of England". Similarly, he began to promote vegetarianism in live shows and interviews, on one occasion convincing a Scottish TV show to air footage of slaughterhouses during the dinner hour.


title: Meat Is Murder

text: The album's sleeve uses a 1967 photograph of an American marine, Cpl. Michael Wynn, in Vietnam, though with the wording on his helmet changed from "Make War Not Love" to "Meat Is Murder". The original image was used for Emile de Antonio's 1968 Oscar-nominated documentary "In the Year of the Pig". Wynn stated in 2019 that he was never asked permission for the use of the photo, and that he "wasn’t real happy" that the wording on the helmet was changed.


title: Meat Is Murder

text: In 2003, "Meat Is Murder" was ranked number 295 on "Rolling Stone" magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and 296 in a 2012 revised list. The album was also included in the book "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die" (2005).


title: Meat Is Murder

text: In 2016, animal rights advocacy group PETA released a video game titled "This Beautiful Creature Must Die", based on the song "Meat Is Murder". The game, which featured a chiptune rendition of the song, tasked players with clicking on their screens before different kinds of animals get chopped up in a death spiral.


title: Puzzle

text: A puzzle is a game, problem, or toy that tests a person's ingenuity or knowledge. In a puzzle, the solver is expected to put pieces together (or take them apart) in a logical way, in order to arrive at the correct or fun solution of the puzzle. There are different genres of puzzles, such as crossword puzzles, word-search puzzles, number puzzles, relational puzzles, and logic puzzles. The academic study of puzzles is called enigmatology.


title: Puzzle

text: Puzzles are often created to be a form of entertainment but they can also arise from serious mathematical or logical problems. In such cases, their solution may be a significant contribution to mathematical research.


title: Puzzle

text: The "Oxford English Dictionary" dates the word "puzzle" (as a verb) to the end of the 16th century. Its earliest use documented in the "OED" was in a book titled "The Voyage of Robert Dudley...to the West Indies, 1594–95, narrated by Capt. Wyatt, by himself, and by Abram Kendall, master" (published circa 1595). The word later came to be used as a noun, first as an abstract noun meaning 'the state or condition of being puzzled', and later developing the meaning of 'a perplexing problem'. The "OED"s earliest clear citation in the sense of 'a toy that tests the player's ingenuity' is from Sir Walter Scott's 1814 novel "Waverley", referring to a toy known as a "reel in a bottle".


title: Puzzle

text: The etymology of the verb "puzzle" is described by "OED" as "unknown"; unproven hypotheses regarding its origin include an Old English verb "puslian" meaning 'pick out', and a derivation of the verb "pose".


title: Puzzle

text: Solutions of puzzles often require the recognition of patterns and the adherence to a particular kind of ordering. People with a high level of inductive reasoning aptitude may be better at solving such puzzles than others. But puzzles based upon inquiry and discovery may be solved more easily by those with good deduction skills. Deductive reasoning improves with practice. Mathematical puzzles often involve BODMAS. BODMAS is an acronym and it stands for Bracket, Of, Division, Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction. In certain regions, PEMDAS (Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition and Subtraction) is the synonym of BODMAS. It explains the order of operations to solve an expression. Some mathematical puzzles require Top to Bottom convention to avoid the ambiguity in the order of operations. It is an elegantly simple idea that relies, as sudoku does, on the requirement that numbers appear only once starting from top to bottom as coming along.


title: Puzzle

text: Puzzle makers are people who make puzzles. In general terms of occupation, a "puzzler" is someone who composes and/or solves puzzles.


title: Puzzle

text: Jigsaw puzzles are perhaps the most popular form of puzzle. Jigsaw puzzles were invented around 1760, when John Spilsbury, a British engraver and cartographer, mounted a map on a sheet of wood, which he then sawed around the outline of each individual country on the map. He then used the resulting pieces as an aid for the teaching of geography.


title: Puzzle

text: After becoming popular among the public, this kind of teaching aid remained the primary use of jigsaw puzzles until about 1820.


title: Puzzle

text: The largest puzzle (40,320 pieces) is made by German game company Ravensburger. The smallest puzzle ever made was created at LaserZentrum Hannover. It is only five square millimeters, the size of a sand grain.


title: Puzzle

text: The puzzles that were first documented are riddles. In Europe, Greek mythology produced riddles like the riddle of the Sphinx. Many riddles were produced during the Middle Ages, as well.


title: Puzzle

text: By the early 20th century, magazines and newspapers found that they could increase their readership by publishing puzzle contests, beginning with crosswords and in modern days sudoku.


title: Experiment

text: An experiment is a procedure carried out to support or refute a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of something previously untried. Experiments provide insight into cause-and-effect by demonstrating what outcome occurs when a particular factor is manipulated. Experiments vary greatly in goal and scale but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results. There also exist natural experimental studies.


title: Experiment

text: A child may carry out basic experiments to understand how things fall to the ground, while teams of scientists may take years of systematic investigation to advance their understanding of a phenomenon. Experiments and other types of hands-on activities are very important to student learning in the science classroom. Experiments can raise test scores and help a student become more engaged and interested in the material they are learning, especially when used over time. Experiments can vary from personal and informal natural comparisons (e.g. tasting a range of chocolates to find a favorite), to highly controlled (e.g. tests requiring complex apparatus overseen by many scientists that hope to discover information about subatomic particles). Uses of experiments vary considerably between the natural and human sciences.


title: Experiment

text: Experiments typically include controls, which are designed to minimize the effects of variables other than the single independent variable. This increases the reliability of the results, often through a comparison between control measurements and the other measurements. Scientific controls are a part of the scientific method. Ideally, all variables in an experiment are controlled (accounted for by the control measurements) and none are uncontrolled. In such an experiment, if all controls work as expected, it is possible to conclude that the experiment works as intended, and that results are due to the effect of the tested variables.


title: Experiment

text: In the scientific method, an experiment is an empirical procedure that arbitrates competing models or hypotheses. Researchers also use experimentation to test existing theories or new hypotheses to support or disprove them.


title: Experiment

text: An experiment usually tests a hypothesis, which is an expectation about how a particular process or phenomenon works. However, an experiment may also aim to answer a "what-if" question, without a specific expectation about what the experiment reveals, or to confirm prior results. If an experiment is carefully conducted, the results usually either support or disprove the hypothesis. According to some philosophies of science, an experiment can never "prove" a hypothesis, it can only add support. On the other hand, an experiment that provides a counterexample can disprove a theory or hypothesis, but a theory can always be salvaged by appropriate ad hoc modifications at the expense of simplicity.


title: Experiment

text: An experiment must also control the possible confounding factors—any factors that would mar the accuracy or repeatability of the experiment or the ability to interpret the results. Confounding is commonly eliminated through scientific controls and/or, in randomized experiments, through random assignment.


title: Experiment

text: In engineering and the physical sciences, experiments are a primary component of the scientific method. They are used to test theories and hypotheses about how physical processes work under particular conditions (e.g., whether a particular engineering process can produce a desired chemical compound). Typically, experiments in these fields focus on replication of identical procedures in hopes of producing identical results in each replication. Random assignment is uncommon.


title: Experiment

text: In medicine and the social sciences, the prevalence of experimental research varies widely across disciplines. When used, however, experiments typically follow the form of the clinical trial, where experimental units (usually individual human beings) are randomly assigned to a treatment or control condition where one or more outcomes are assessed. In contrast to norms in the physical sciences, the focus is typically on the average treatment effect (the difference in outcomes between the treatment and control groups) or another test statistic produced by the experiment. A single study typically does not involve replications of the experiment, but separate studies may be aggregated through systematic review and meta-analysis.


title: Experiment

text: There are various differences in experimental practice in each of the branches of science. For example, agricultural research frequently uses randomized experiments (e.g., to test the comparative effectiveness of different fertilizers), while experimental economics often involves experimental tests of theorized human behaviors without relying on random assignment of individuals to treatment and control conditions.


title: Experiment

text: One of the first methodical approaches to experiments in the modern sense is visible in the works of the Arab mathematician and scholar Ibn al-Haytham. He conducted his experiments in the field of optics—going back to optical and mathematical problems in the works of Ptolemy—by controlling his experiments due to factors such as self-criticality, reliance on visible results of the experiments as well as a criticality in terms of earlier results. He was one of the first scholars to use an inductive-experimental method for achieving results. In his "Book of Optics" he describes the fundamentally new approach to knowledge and research in an experimental sense:


title: Experiment

text: ""We should, that is, recommence the inquiry into its principles and premisses, beginning our investigation with an inspection of the things that exist and a survey of the conditions of visible objects. We should distinguish the properties of particulars, and gather by induction what pertains to the eye when vision takes place and what is found in the manner of sensation to be uniform, unchanging, manifest and not subject to doubt. After which we should ascend in our inquiry and reasonings, gradually and orderly, criticizing premisses and exercising caution in regard to conclusions—our aim in all that we make subject to inspection and review being to employ justice, not to follow prejudice, and to take care in all that we judge and criticize that we seek the truth and not to be swayed by opinion. We may in this way eventually come to the truth that gratifies the heart and gradually and carefully reach the end at which certainty appears; while through criticism and caution we may seize the truth that dispels disagreement and resolves doubtful matters. For all that, we are not free from that human turbidity which is in the nature of man; but we must do our best with what we possess of human power. From God we derive support in all things.""


title: Experiment

text: According to his explanation, a strictly controlled test execution with a sensibility for the subjectivity and susceptibility of outcomes due to the nature of man is necessary. Furthermore, a critical view on the results and outcomes of earlier scholars is necessary:


title: Experiment

text: Thus, a comparison of earlier results with the experimental results is necessary for an objective experiment—the visible results being more important. In the end, this may mean that an experimental researcher must find enough courage to discard traditional opinions or results, especially if these results are not experimental but results from a logical/ mental derivation. In this process of critical consideration, the man himself should not forget that he tends to subjective opinions—through "prejudices" and "leniency"—and thus has to be critical about his own way of building hypotheses.


title: Experiment

text: Francis Bacon (1561–1626), an English philosopher and scientist active in the 17th century, became an influential supporter of experimental science in the English renaissance. He disagreed with the method of answering scientific questions by deduction—similar to Ibn al-Haytham—and described it as follows: "Having first determined the question according to his will, man then resorts to experience, and bending her to conformity with his placets, leads her about like a captive in a procession." Bacon wanted a method that relied on repeatable observations, or experiments. Notably, he first ordered the scientific method as we understand it today.


title: Experiment

text: In the centuries that followed, people who applied the scientific method in different areas made important advances and discoveries. For example, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) accurately measured time and experimented to make accurate measurements and conclusions about the speed of a falling body. Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794), a French chemist, used experiment to describe new areas, such as combustion and biochemistry and to develop the theory of conservation of mass (matter). Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) used the scientific method to disprove the prevailing theory of spontaneous generation and to develop the germ theory of disease. Because of the importance of controlling potentially confounding variables, the use of well-designed laboratory experiments is preferred when possible.


title: Experiment

text: A considerable amount of progress on the design and analysis of experiments occurred in the early 20th century, with contributions from statisticians such as Ronald Fisher (1890–1962), Jerzy Neyman (1894–1981), Oscar Kempthorne (1919–2000), Gertrude Mary Cox (1900–1978), and William Gemmell Cochran (1909–1980), among others.


title: Experiment

text: Experiments might be categorized according to a number of dimensions, depending upon professional norms and standards in different fields of study.


title: Experiment

text: In some disciplines (e.g., psychology or political science), a 'true experiment' is a method of social research in which there are two kinds of variables. The independent variable is manipulated by the experimenter, and the dependent variable is measured. The signifying characteristic of a true experiment is that it randomly allocates the subjects to neutralize experimenter bias, and ensures, over a large number of iterations of the experiment, that it controls for all confounding factors.


title: Experiment

text: Depending on the discipline, experiments can be conducted to accomplish different but not mutually exclusive goals: test theories, search for and document phenomena, develop theories, or advise policymakers. These goals also relate differently to validity concerns.


title: Experiment

text: A controlled experiment often compares the results obtained from experimental samples against "control" samples, which are practically identical to the experimental sample except for the one aspect whose effect is being tested (the independent variable). A good example would be a drug trial. The sample or group receiving the drug would be the experimental group (treatment group); and the one receiving the placebo or regular treatment would be the control one. In many laboratory experiments it is good practice to have several replicate samples for the test being performed and have both a positive control and a negative control. The results from replicate samples can often be averaged, or if one of the replicates is obviously inconsistent with the results from the other samples, it can be discarded as being the result of an experimental error (some step of the test procedure may have been mistakenly omitted for that sample). Most often, tests are done in duplicate or triplicate. A positive control is a procedure similar to the actual experimental test but is known from previous experience to give a positive result. A negative control is known to give a negative result. The positive control confirms that the basic conditions of the experiment were able to produce a positive result, even if none of the actual experimental samples produce a positive result. The negative control demonstrates the base-line result obtained when a test does not produce a measurable positive result. Most often the value of the negative control is treated as a "background" value to subtract from the test sample results. Sometimes the positive control takes the quadrant of a standard curve.


title: Experiment

text: An example that is often used in teaching laboratories is a controlled protein assay. Students might be given a fluid sample containing an unknown (to the student) amount of protein. It is their job to correctly perform a controlled experiment in which they determine the concentration of protein in the fluid sample (usually called the "unknown sample"). The teaching lab would be equipped with a protein standard solution with a known protein concentration. Students could make several positive control samples containing various dilutions of the protein standard. Negative control samples would contain all of the reagents for the protein assay but no protein. In this example, all samples are performed in duplicate. The assay is a colorimetric assay in which a spectrophotometer can measure the amount of protein in samples by detecting a colored complex formed by the interaction of protein molecules and molecules of an added dye. In the illustration, the results for the diluted test samples can be compared to the results of the standard curve (the blue line in the illustration) to estimate the amount of protein in the unknown sample.


title: Experiment

text: Controlled experiments can be performed when it is difficult to exactly control all the conditions in an experiment. In this case, the experiment begins by creating two or more sample groups that are "probabilistically equivalent," which means that measurements of traits should be similar among the groups and that the groups should respond in the same manner if given the same treatment. This equivalency is determined by statistical methods that take into account the amount of variation between individuals and the number of individuals in each group. In fields such as microbiology and chemistry, where there is very little variation between individuals and the group size is easily in the millions, these statistical methods are often bypassed and simply splitting a solution into equal parts is assumed to produce identical sample groups.


title: Experiment

text: Once equivalent groups have been formed, the experimenter tries to treat them identically except for the one "variable" that he or she wishes to isolate. Human experimentation requires special safeguards against outside variables such as the "placebo effect". Such experiments are generally "double blind", meaning that neither the volunteer nor the researcher knows which individuals are in the control group or the experimental group until after all of the data have been collected. This ensures that any effects on the volunteer are due to the treatment itself and are not a response to the knowledge that he is being treated.


title: Experiment

text: In human experiments, researchers may give a subject (person) a stimulus that the subject responds to. The goal of the experiment is to measure the response to the stimulus by a test method.


title: Experiment

text: In the design of experiments, two or more "treatments" are applied to estimate the difference between the mean responses for the treatments. For example, an experiment on baking bread could estimate the difference in the responses associated with quantitative variables, such as the ratio of water to flour, and with qualitative variables, such as strains of yeast. Experimentation is the step in the scientific method that helps people decide between two or more competing explanations—or hypotheses. These hypotheses suggest reasons to explain a phenomenon or predict the results of an action. An example might be the hypothesis that "if I release this ball, it will fall to the floor": this suggestion can then be tested by carrying out the experiment of letting go of the ball, and observing the results. Formally, a hypothesis is compared against its opposite or null hypothesis ("if I release this ball, it will not fall to the floor"). The null hypothesis is that there is no explanation or predictive power of the phenomenon through the reasoning that is being investigated. Once hypotheses are defined, an experiment can be carried out and the results analysed to confirm, refute, or define the accuracy of the hypotheses.


title: Experiment

text: The term "experiment" usually implies a controlled experiment, but sometimes controlled experiments are prohibitively difficult or impossible. In this case researchers resort to "natural experiments" or "quasi-experiments." Natural experiments rely solely on observations of the variables of the system under study, rather than manipulation of just one or a few variables as occurs in controlled experiments. To the degree possible, they attempt to collect data for the system in such a way that contribution from all variables can be determined, and where the effects of variation in certain variables remain approximately constant so that the effects of other variables can be discerned. The degree to which this is possible depends on the observed correlation between explanatory variables in the observed data. When these variables are "not" well correlated, natural experiments can approach the power of controlled experiments. Usually, however, there is some correlation between these variables, which reduces the reliability of natural experiments relative to what could be concluded if a controlled experiment were performed. Also, because natural experiments usually take place in uncontrolled environments, variables from undetected sources are neither measured nor held constant, and these may produce illusory correlations in variables under study.


title: Experiment

text: Much research in several science disciplines, including economics, human geography, archaeology, sociology, cultural anthropology, geology, paleontology, ecology, meteorology, and astronomy, relies on quasi-experiments. For example, in astronomy it is clearly impossible, when testing the hypothesis "Stars are collapsed clouds of hydrogen", to start out with a giant cloud of hydrogen, and then perform the experiment of waiting a few billion years for it to form a star. However, by observing various clouds of hydrogen in various states of collapse, and other implications of the hypothesis (for example, the presence of various spectral emissions from the light of stars), we can collect data we require to support the hypothesis. An early example of this type of experiment was the first verification in the 17th century that light does not travel from place to place instantaneously, but instead has a measurable speed. Observation of the appearance of the moons of Jupiter were slightly delayed when Jupiter was farther from Earth, as opposed to when Jupiter was closer to Earth; and this phenomenon was used to demonstrate that the difference in the time of appearance of the moons was consistent with a measurable speed.


title: Experiment

text: Field experiments are so named to distinguish them from laboratory experiments, which enforce scientific control by testing a hypothesis in the artificial and highly controlled setting of a laboratory. Often used in the social sciences, and especially in economic analyses of education and health interventions, field experiments have the advantage that outcomes are observed in a natural setting rather than in a contrived laboratory environment. For this reason, field experiments are sometimes seen as having higher external validity than laboratory experiments. However, like natural experiments, field experiments suffer from the possibility of contamination: experimental conditions can be controlled with more precision and certainty in the lab. Yet some phenomena (e.g., voter turnout in an election) cannot be easily studied in a laboratory.


title: Experiment

text: An observational study is used when it is impractical, unethical, cost-prohibitive (or otherwise inefficient) to fit a physical or social system into a laboratory setting, to completely control confounding factors, or to apply random assignment. It can also be used when confounding factors are either limited or known well enough to analyze the data in light of them (though this may be rare when social phenomena are under examination). For an observational science to be valid, the experimenter must know and account for confounding factors. In these situations, observational studies have value because they often suggest hypotheses that can be tested with randomized experiments or by collecting fresh data.


title: Experiment

text: Fundamentally, however, observational studies are not experiments. By definition, observational studies lack the manipulation required for Baconian experiments. In addition, observational studies (e.g., in biological or social systems) often involve variables that are difficult to quantify or control. Observational studies are limited because they lack the statistical properties of randomized experiments. In a randomized experiment, the method of randomization specified in the experimental protocol guides the statistical analysis, which is usually specified also by the experimental protocol. Without a statistical model that reflects an objective randomization, the statistical analysis relies on a subjective model. Inferences from subjective models are unreliable in theory and practice. In fact, there are several cases where carefully conducted observational studies consistently give wrong results, that is, where the results of the observational studies are inconsistent and also differ from the results of experiments. For example, epidemiological studies of colon cancer consistently show beneficial correlations with broccoli consumption, while experiments find no benefit.


title: Experiment

text: A particular problem with observational studies involving human subjects is the great difficulty attaining fair comparisons between treatments (or exposures), because such studies are prone to selection bias, and groups receiving different treatments (exposures) may differ greatly according to their covariates (age, height, weight, medications, exercise, nutritional status, ethnicity, family medical history, etc.). In contrast, randomization implies that for each covariate, the mean for each group is expected to be the same. For any randomized trial, some variation from the mean is expected, of course, but the randomization ensures that the experimental groups have mean values that are close, due to the central limit theorem and Markov's inequality. With inadequate randomization or low sample size, the systematic variation in covariates between the treatment groups (or exposure groups) makes it difficult to separate the effect of the treatment (exposure) from the effects of the other covariates, most of which have not been measured. The mathematical models used to analyze such data must consider each differing covariate (if measured), and results are not meaningful if a covariate is neither randomized nor included in the model.


title: Experiment

text: To avoid conditions that render an experiment far less useful, physicians conducting medical trials—say for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval—quantify and randomize the covariates that can be identified. Researchers attempt to reduce the biases of observational studies with matching methods such as propensity score matching, which require large populations of subjects and extensive information on covariates. However, propensity score matching is no longer recommended as a technique because it can increase, rather than decrease, bias. Outcomes are also quantified when possible (bone density, the amount of some cell or substance in the blood, physical strength or endurance, etc.) and not based on a subject's or a professional observer's opinion. In this way, the design of an observational study can render the results more objective and therefore, more convincing.


title: Experiment

text: By placing the distribution of the independent variable(s) under the control of the researcher, an experiment—particularly when it involves human subjects—introduces potential ethical considerations, such as balancing benefit and harm, fairly distributing interventions (e.g., treatments for a disease), and informed consent. For example, in psychology or health care, it is unethical to provide a substandard treatment to patients. Therefore, ethical review boards are supposed to stop clinical trials and other experiments unless a new treatment is believed to offer benefits as good as current best practice. It is also generally unethical (and often illegal) to conduct randomized experiments on the effects of substandard or harmful treatments, such as the effects of ingesting arsenic on human health. To understand the effects of such exposures, scientists sometimes use observational studies to understand the effects of those factors.


title: Experiment

text: Even when experimental research does not directly involve human subjects, it may still present ethical concerns. For example, the nuclear bomb experiments conducted by the Manhattan Project implied the use of nuclear reactions to harm human beings even though the experiments did not directly involve any human subjects.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is a novel by Lew Wallace, published by Harper and Brothers on November 12, 1880, and considered "the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century". It became a best-selling American novel, surpassing Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852) in sales. The book also inspired other novels with biblical settings and was adapted for the stage and motion picture productions. "Ben-Hur" remained at the top of the U.S. all-time bestseller list until the 1936 publication of Margaret Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind". The 1959 MGM film adaptation of "Ben-Hur" is considered one of the greatest films ever made and was seen by tens of millions, going on to win a record 11 Academy Awards in 1960, after which the book's sales increased and it surpassed "Gone with the Wind". It was blessed by Pope Leo XIII, the first novel ever to receive such an honour. The success of the novel and its stage and film adaptations also helped it to become a popular cultural icon that was used to promote numerous commercial products.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: The story recounts the adventures of Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish prince from Jerusalem, who is enslaved by the Romans at the beginning of the first century and becomes a charioteer and a Christian. Running in parallel with Judah's narrative is the unfolding story of Jesus, from the same region and around the same age. The novel reflects themes of betrayal, conviction, and redemption, with a revenge plot that leads to a story of love and compassion.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: "Ben-Hur" is a story of a fictional hero named Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish nobleman who was falsely accused and convicted of an attempted assassination of the Roman governor of Judaea and consequently enslaved by the Romans. He becomes a successful charioteer. The story's revenge plot becomes a story of compassion and forgiveness.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: The novel is divided into eight books, or parts, each with its own subchapters. Book one opens with the story of the three magi, who arrive in Bethlehem to hear the news of Christ's birth. Readers meet the fictional character of Judah for the first time in book two, when his childhood friend Messala, also a fictional character, returns to Jerusalem as an ambitious commanding officer of the Roman legions. The teen-aged boys come to realize that they have changed and hold very different views and aspirations. When a loose tile is accidentally dislodged from the roof of Judah's house during a military parade and strikes the Roman governor, knocking him from his horse, Messala falsely accuses Judah of attempted assassination. Although Judah is not guilty and receives no trial, he is sent to the Roman galleys for life, his mother and sister are imprisoned in a Roman jail where they contract leprosy, and all the family property is confiscated. Judah first encounters Jesus, who offers him a drink of water and encouragement, as Judah is being marched to a galley to be a slave. Their lives continue to intersect as the story unfolds.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: In book three, Judah survives his ordeal as a galley slave through good fortune, which includes befriending and saving the commander of his ship, who later adopts him. Judah goes on to become a trained soldier and charioteer. In books four and five, Judah returns home to Jerusalem to seek revenge and redemption for his family.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: After witnessing the Crucifixion, Judah recognizes that Christ's life stands for a goal quite different from revenge. Judah becomes Christian, inspired by love and the talk of keys to a kingdom greater than any on Earth. The novel concludes with Judah's decision to finance the Catacomb of San Calixto in Rome, where Christian martyrs are to be buried and venerated.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Three magi have come from the East. Balthasar, an Egyptian, sets up a tent in the desert, where he is joined by Melchior, a Hindu, and Gaspar, a Greek. They discover they have been brought together by their common goal. They see a bright star shining over the region, and take it as a sign to leave, following it through the desert toward the province of Judaea.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: At the Joppa Gate in Jerusalem, Mary and Joseph pass through on their way from Nazareth to Bethlehem. They stop at the inn at the entrance to the city, but it has no room. Mary is pregnant and, as labor begins, they head to a cave on a nearby hillside, where Jesus is born. In the pastures outside the city, a group of seven shepherds watches their flocks. Angels announce the Christ's birth. The shepherds hurry towards the city and enter the cave on the hillside to worship the Christ. They spread the news of the Christ's birth and many come to see him.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: The magi arrive in Jerusalem and inquire for news of the Christ. Herod the Great is angry to hear of another king challenging his rule and asks the Sanhedrin to find information for him. The Sanhedrin delivers a prophecy written by Micah, telling of a ruler to come from Bethlehem Ephrathah, which they interpret to signify the Christ's birthplace.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Judah Ben-Hur, son of Ithamar, is a prince descended from a royal family of Judaea. Messala, his closest childhood friend and the son of a Roman tax collector, leaves home for five years of education in Rome. He returns as a proud Roman. He mocks Judah and his religion and the two become enemies. As a result, Judah decides to go to Rome for military training to use his acquired skills to fight the Roman Empire.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Valerius Gratus, the fourth Roman prefect of Judaea, passes by Judah's house. As Judah watches the procession from his rooftop, a loose roof tile happens to fall and hit the governor. Messala betrays Judah, who is quickly captured and accused of attempting to murder Gratus. No trial is held; Judah's entire family is secretly imprisoned in the Antonia Fortress and all their property is seized. As he is taken away, Judah vows vengeance against the Romans. He is sent as a slave to work aboard a Roman warship. On the journey to the ship, he meets a young carpenter named Jesus, who offers him water, which deeply moves Judah and strengthens his resolve to survive.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: In Italy, Greek pirate ships have been looting Roman vessels in the Aegean Sea. The prefect Sejanus orders the Roman Quintus Arrius to take warships to combat the pirates. Chained on one of the warships, Judah has survived three hard years as a Roman slave, kept alive by his passion for vengeance. Arrius is impressed by Judah and decides to question him about his life and his story. He is stunned to learn of Judah's former status as a son of Hur. Arrius tells the slave-master not to lock Judah's shackles. In battle, the ship is damaged and starts to sink. Judah saves the Roman from drowning. They share a plank as a makeshift raft until being rescued by a Roman ship, whereupon they learn that the Romans were victorious in the battle; Arrius is lauded as a hero. They return to Misenum, where Arrius adopts Judah as his son, making him a freedman and a Roman citizen.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Judah Ben-Hur trains in wrestling for five years in the Palaestra in Rome before becoming the heir of Arrius after his death. While traveling to Antioch on state business, Judah learns that his real father's chief servant, the slave Simonides, lives in a house in this city, and has the trust of Judah's father's possessions, which he has invested so well that he is now wealthy. Judah visits Simonides, who listens to his story, but demands more proof of his identity. Ben-Hur says he has no proof, but asks if Simonides knows of the fate of Judah's mother and sister. He says he knows nothing and Judah leaves the house. Simonides sends his servant Malluch to spy on Judah to see if his story is true and to learn more about him. Shortly afterwards, Malluch meets and befriends Judah in the Grove of Daphne, and they go to the games stadium together. There, Ben-Hur finds his old rival Messala racing one of the chariots, preparing for a tournament.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: The Sheik Ilderim announces that he is looking for a chariot driver to race his team in the coming tournament. Judah, wanting revenge, offers to drive the sheik's chariot, as he intends to defeat Messala and humiliate him before the Roman Empire. Balthasar and his daughter Iras are sitting at a fountain in the stadium. Messala's chariot nearly hits them, but Judah intervenes. Balthasar thanks Ben-Hur and presents him with a gift. Judah heads to Sheik Ilderim's tent. The servant Malluch accompanies him, and they talk about the Christ; Malluch relates Balthasar's story of the magi. They realize that Judah saved the man who saw the Christ soon after his birth.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Simonides, his daughter Esther, and Malluch talk together, and conclude that Judah is who he claims to be, and that he is on their side in the fight against Rome. Messala realizes that Judah Ben-Hur has been adopted into a Roman home and his honor has been restored. He threatens to take revenge. Meanwhile, Balthasar and his daughter Iras arrive at the Sheik's tent. With Judah they discuss how the Christ, approaching the age of 30, is ready to enter public leadership. Judah takes increasing interest in the beautiful Iras.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Messala sends a letter to Valerius Gratus about his discovery of Judah, but Sheik Ilderim intercepts the letter and shares it with Judah. He discovers that his mother and sister were imprisoned in a cell at the Antonia Fortress, and Messala has been spying on him. Meanwhile, Ilderim is deeply impressed with Judah's skills with his racing horses and accepts him as his charioteer.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Simonides comes to Judah and offers him the accumulated fortune of the Hur family business, of which the merchant has been steward. Judah Ben-Hur accepts only the original amount of money, leaving the property and the rest to the loyal merchant. They each agree to do their part to fight for the Christ, whom they believe to be a political savior from Roman authority.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: A day before the race, Ilderim prepares his horses. Judah appoints Malluch to organize his support campaign for him. Meanwhile, Messala organizes his own huge campaign, revealing Judah Ben-Hur's former identity to the community as an outcast and convict. Malluch challenges Messala and his cronies to a large wager, which, if the Roman loses, would bankrupt him.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: The day of the race comes. During the race, Messala and Judah become clear leaders. Messala deliberately scrapes his chariot wheel against Judah's and Messala's chariot breaks apart, causing him to be trampled by other racers' horses. Judah is crowned the winner and showered with prizes, claiming his first strike against Rome. Messala is left with a broken body and the loss of his wealth.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: After the race, Judah Ben-Hur receives a letter from Iras asking him to go to the Roman palace of Idernee. When he arrives, he sees that he has been tricked. Thord, a Saxon hired by Messala, comes to kill Judah. They duel, and Ben-Hur offers Thord 4000 sestertii to let him live. Thord returns to Messala claiming to have killed Judah, so he collects money from them both. Supposedly dead, Judah Ben-Hur goes to the desert with Ilderim to plan a secret campaign.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: For Ben-Hur, Simonides bribes Sejanus to remove the prefect Valerius Gratus from his post; Valerius is succeeded by Pontius Pilate. Ben-Hur sets out for Jerusalem to find his mother and sister. Pilate's review of the prison records reveals great injustice, and he notes Gratus concealed a walled-up cell. Pilate's troops reopen the cell to find two women, Judah's long-lost mother and sister, have developed leprosy. Pilate releases them, and they go to the old Hur house, which is vacant. Finding Judah asleep on the steps, they give thanks to God that he is alive, but do not wake him. As lepers, they are considered less than human. Banished from the city, they leave in the morning.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Amrah, the Egyptian maid who once served the Hur house, discovers Ben-Hur and wakes him. She reveals that she has stayed in the Hur house for all these years. Keeping touch with Simonides, she discouraged many potential buyers of the house by acting as a ghost. They pledge to find out more about the lost family. Judah discovers an official Roman report about the release of two leprous women. Amrah hears rumors of the mother and sister's fate.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Romans make plans to use funds from the corban treasury, of the Temple in Jerusalem, to build a new aqueduct. The Jewish people petition Pilate to veto the plan. Pilate sends his soldiers in disguise to mingle with the crowd, who at an appointed time, begin to massacre the protesters. Judah kills a Roman guard in a duel, and becomes a hero in the eyes of a group of Galilean protesters.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: At a meeting in Bethany, Ben-Hur and his Galilean followers organize a resistance force to revolt against Rome. Gaining help from Simonides and Ilderim, he sets up a training base in Ilderim's territory in the desert. After some time, Malluch writes announcing the appearance of a prophet believed to be a herald for the Christ. Judah journeys to the Jordan to see the prophet, meeting Balthasar and Iras traveling for the same purpose. They reach Bethabara, where a group has gathered to hear John the Baptist preach. A man walks up to John, and asks to be baptized. Judah recognizes Him as the man who gave him water at the well in Nazareth many years before. Balthasar worships Him as the Christ.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: During the next three years, that Man, Jesus, preaches his gospel around Galilee, and Ben-Hur becomes one of his followers. He notices that Jesus chooses fishermen, farmers, and similar people, considered "lowly", as apostles. Judah has seen Jesus perform miracles, and is now convinced that the Christ really had come.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: During this time, Malluch has bought the old Hur house and renovated it. He invites Simonides and Balthasar, with their daughters, to live in the house with him. Judah Ben-Hur seldom visits, but the day before Jesus plans to enter Jerusalem and proclaim himself, Judah returns. He tells all who are in the house of what he has learned while following Jesus. Amrah realizes that Judah's mother and sister could be healed, and brings them from a cave where they are living. The next day, the three await Jesus by the side of a road and seek his healing. Amid the celebration of his Triumphal Entry, Jesus heals the women. When they are cured, they reunite with Judah.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Several days later, Iras talks with Judah, saying he has trusted in a false hope, for Jesus had not started the expected revolution. She says that it is all over between them, saying she loves Messala. Ben-Hur remembers the "invitation of Iras" that led to the incident with Thord, and accuses Iras of betraying him. That night, he resolves to go to Esther.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: While lost in thought, he notices a parade in the street and falls in with it. He notices that Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus' disciples, is leading the parade, and many of the temple priests and Roman soldiers are marching together. They go to the olive grove of Gethsemane, and he sees Jesus walking out to meet the crowd. Understanding the betrayal, Ben-Hur is spotted by a priest who tries to take him into custody; he breaks away and flees. When morning comes, Ben-Hur learns that the Jewish priests have tried Jesus before Pilate. Although originally acquitted, Jesus has been sentenced to crucifixion at the crowd's demand. Ben-Hur is shocked at how his supporters have deserted Christ in his time of need. They head to Calvary, and Ben-Hur resigns himself to watch the crucifixion of Jesus. The sky darkens. Ben-Hur offers Jesus wine vinegar to return Jesus' favor to him, and soon after that Jesus utters his last cry. Judah and his friends commit their lives to Jesus, realizing He was not an earthly king, but a heavenly King and a Savior of mankind.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Five years after the crucifixion, Ben-Hur and Esther have married and had children. The family lives in Misenum. Iras visits Esther and tells her she has killed Messala, discovering that the Romans were brutes. She also implies that she will attempt suicide. After Esther tells Ben-Hur of the visit, he tries unsuccessfully to find Iras. A Samaritan uprising in Judaea is harshly suppressed by Pontius Pilate, and he is ordered back to Rome a decade after authorizing the crucifixion of Jesus.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: In the 10th year of Emperor Nero's reign, Ben-Hur is staying with Simonides, whose business has been extremely successful. With Ben-Hur, the two men have given most of the fortunes to the church of Antioch. Now, as an old man, Simonides has sold all his ships but one, and that one has returned for probably its final voyage. Learning that the Christians in Rome are suffering at the hands of Emperor Nero, Ben-Hur and his friends decide to help. Ben-Hur, Esther, and Malluch sail to Rome, where they decided to build an underground church. It will survive through the ages and comes to be known as the Catacomb of Callixtus.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: "Ben-Hur" is a tale of vengeance and spiritual forgiveness that includes themes of Christian redemption and God's benevolence through the compassion of strangers. A popular theme with readers during Gilded Age America, when the novel was first published, was the idea of achieving prosperity through piety. In "Ben-Hur", this is portrayed through Judah's rise from poverty to great wealth, the challenges he faces to his virtuous nature, and the rich rewards he receives, both materially and spiritually, for his efforts.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Wallace's adventure story is told from the perspective of Judah Ben-Hur. On occasion, the author speaks directly to his readers. Wallace understood that Christians would be skeptical of a fictional story on Christ's life, so he was careful not to offend them in his writing. "Ben-Hur" "maintains a respect for the underlying principles of Judaism and Christianity". In his memoirs, Wallace wrote:


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Wallace only used dialogue from the King James Bible for Jesus's words. He also created realistic scenes involving Jesus and the main fictional character of Judah, and included a detailed physical description of the Christ, which was not typical of 19th-century biblical fiction. In Wallace's story, Judah "saw a face he never forgot ... the face of a boy about his own age, shaded by locks of yellowish bright chestnut hair; a face lighted by dark-blue eyes, at the time so soft, so appealing, so full of love and holy purpose, that they had all the power of command and will."


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: The historical novel is filled with romantic and heroic action, including meticulously detailed and realistic descriptions of its landscapes and characters. Wallace strove for accuracy in his descriptions, including several memorable action scenes, the most famous of which was the chariot race at Antioch. Wallace devoted four pages of the novel to a detailed description of the Antioch arena. Wallace's novel depicts Judah as the aggressive competitor who wrecks Messala's chariot from behind and leaves him to be trampled by horses, in contrast to the 1959 film adaptation of "Ben-Hur", where Messala is a villain who cheats by adding spikes to the wheels of his chariot. Wallace's novel explains that the crowd "had not seen the cunning touch of the reins by which, turning a little to the left, he caught Messala's wheel with the iron-shod point of his axle, and crushed it".


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: By the time of "Ben-Hur"s publication in 1880, Wallace had already published his first novel, "The Fair God; or, The Last of the 'Tzins" (1873), and "Commodus: An Historical Play" (1876) that was never produced. He went on to publish several more novels and biographies, including "The Prince of India; or, Why Constantinople Fell" (1893), a biography of President Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and "The Wooing of Malkatoon" (1898), but "Ben-Hur" remained his most significant work and best-known novel. "Humanities" editor Amy Lifson named "Ben-Hur" as the most influential Christian book of the 19th century, while others have identified it as one of the best-selling novels of all time. Carl Van Doren wrote that "Ben-Hur" was, along with "Uncle Tom's Cabin", the first fiction many Americans read. Wallace's original plan was to write a story of the biblical magi as a magazine serial, which he began in 1873, but he had changed its focus by 1874. "Ben-Hur" begins with the story of the magi, but the remainder of the novel connects the story of Christ with the adventures of Wallace's fictional character, Judah Ben-Hur.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Wallace cited one inspiration for "Ben-Hur", recounting his life-changing journey and talk with Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, a well-known agnostic and public speaker, whom he met on a train when the two were bound for Indianapolis on September 19, 1876. Ingersoll invited Wallace to join him in his railroad compartment during the trip. The two men debated religious ideology, and Wallace left the discussion realizing how little he knew about Christianity. He became determined to do his own research to write about the history of Christ. Wallace explained: "I was ashamed of myself, and make haste now to declare that the mortification of pride I then endured… ended in a resolution to study the whole matter, if only for the gratification there might be in having convictions of one kind or another." When Wallace decided to write a novel based on the life of Christ is not known for certain, but he had already written the manuscript for a magazine serial about the three magi at least two years before his discussions with Ingersoll. Researching and writing about Christianity helped Wallace become clear about his own ideas and beliefs. He developed the novel from his own exploration of the subject.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: "Ben-Hur" was also inspired in part by Wallace's love of romantic novels, including those written by Sir Walter Scott and Jane Porter, and "The Count of Monte Cristo" (1846) by Alexandre Dumas, père. The Dumas novel was based on the memoirs of an early 19th-century French shoemaker who was unjustly imprisoned and spent the rest of his life seeking revenge. Wallace could relate to the character's isolation of imprisonment. He explained in his autobiography that, while he was writing "Ben-Hur", "the Count of Monte Cristo in his dungeon of stone was not more lost to the world."


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Other writers have viewed "Ben-Hur" within the context of Wallace's own life. Historian Victor Davis Hanson argues that the novel drew from Wallace's experiences as a division commander during the American Civil War under General Ulysses S. Grant. Hanson compares Wallace's real-life experience in battle, battle tactics, combat leadership, and jealousies among American Civil War military commanders to those of Wallace's fictional character of Judah, whose unintentional injury to a high-ranking military commander leads to further tragedy and suffering for the Ben-Hur family. Wallace made some controversial command decisions, and he delayed in arriving on the battlefield during the first day of the battle of Shiloh, when Grant's Union army sustained heavy casualties. This created a furor in the North, damaged Wallace's military reputation, and drew accusations of incompetence.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: John Swansburg, deputy editor of "Slate", suggests that the chariot race between the characters of Judah and Messala may have been based on a horse race which Wallace reportedly ran and won against Grant some time after the battle of Shiloh. The Judah character's superior horsemanship helped him beat Messala in a chariot race that earned Judah great wealth. F. Farrand Tuttle Jr., a Wallace family friend, reported the story of the horse race between Grant and Wallace in the "Denver News" on February 19, 1905, but Wallace never wrote about it. The event may have been a Wallace family legend, but the novel which includes the action-packed chariot race made Wallace a wealthy man and established his reputation as a famous author and sought-after speaker.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Wallace was determined to make the novel historically accurate and did extensive research on the Middle East that related to the time period covered in his novel. However, he did not travel to Rome or the Holy Land until after its publication. Wallace began research for the story in 1873 at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and made several additional research trips to Washington, Boston, and New York.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: To establish an authentic background for his story, Wallace gathered references on Roman history, as well as the geography, culture, language, customs, architecture, and daily life in the ancient world from libraries across the United States. He also studied the Bible. Wallace intended to identify the plants, birds, names, architectural practices, and other details. He later wrote: "I examined catalogues of books and maps, and sent for everything likely to be useful. I wrote with a chart always before my eyes—a German publication showing the towns and villages, all sacred places, the heights, the depressions, the passes, trails, and distances." Wallace also recounted traveling to Boston and Washington, DC, to research the exact proportions for the oars of a Roman "trireme". Wallace found that his estimations were accurate in the mid-1880s, during a visit to the Holy Land after "Ben-Hur" was published, and that he could "find no reason for making a single change in the text of the book."


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: An example of Wallace's attention to detail is his description of the fictional chariot race and its setting at the arena in Antioch. Using a literary style that addressed his audience directly, Wallace wrote:


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: It is ironic that an acclaimed biblical novel, one that would rival the Bible in popularity during the Gilded Age, was inspired by a discussion with a noted agnostic and written by an author who was never a member of any church. Its publication prompted speculation about Wallace's faith. Wallace claimed that when he began writing "Ben-Hur", he was not "in the least influenced by religious sentiment" and "had no convictions about God or Christ", but he was fascinated by the biblical story of the three magi's journey to find Jesus, king of the Jews. After extensive studies of the Bible and the Holy Land, and well before he had completed the novel, Wallace became a believer in God and Christ. In his autobiography, Wallace acknowledged:


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Most of the book was written during Wallace's spare time in the evening, while traveling, and at home in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where he often wrote outdoors during the summer, sitting under a favorite beech tree near his home. (The tree has since that time been called the Ben-Hur Beech.) Wallace moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico after his appointment as governor of the New Mexico Territory, where he served from August 1878 to March 1881. He completed "Ben-Hur" in 1880 at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. Wallace wrote mostly at night after his formal duties had concluded, in a room in the palace that was once described in tours as the birthplace of "Ben-Hur". In his memoirs, Wallace recalled how he composed the climactic scenes of the Crucifixion by lantern light: "The ghosts, if they were about, did not disturb me; yet in the midst of that gloomy harborage I beheld the Crucifixion, and strove to write what I beheld."


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: In March 1880, Wallace copied the final manuscript of "Ben-Hur" in purple ink as a tribute to the Christian season of Lent. He took a leave of absence from his post as New Mexico's territorial governor and traveled to New York City to deliver it to his publisher. On April 20, Wallace personally presented the manuscript to Joseph Henry Harper of Harper and Brothers, who accepted it for publication.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: At the time of "Ben-Hur"s publication, the idea of presenting Christ and the Crucifixion in a fictional novel was a sensitive issue. Wallace's depiction of Christ could have been considered by some as blasphemy, but the quality of his manuscript and his assurances that he had not intended to offend Christians with his writing overcame the publisher's reservations. Harper praised it as "the most beautiful manuscript that has ever come into this house. A bold experiment to make Christ a hero that has been often tried and always failed." Harper and Brothers offered Wallace a contract that would earn him 10% in royalties, and published "Ben-Hur" on November 12, 1880. It initially sold for $1.50 per copy, an expensive price when compared to other popular novels published at the time.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: When Lew Wallace's "Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ" first appeared in 1880, it was bound in a cadet blue-gray cloth with floral decorations on the front cover, spine, and back cover.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: It was copyrighted October 12, 1880, and published November 12 (as noted in a letter to Wallace from Harper dated November 13, 1880). The earliest autographed copy noted bears Wallace's inscription dated November 17, 1880, in the collection of the Indiana Historical Society Library. The first printed review appeared in "The New York Times", November 14, 1880, and noted that it is "printed and in the hands of book dealers."


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: According to Russo and Sullivan, Mrs. Wallace objected to the floral decorative cloth. She wrote to Harper on January 3, 1885, in answer to a question about the true first edition: "I incline to the belief that the volume seen was one of the first issue of "Ben-Hur", which would explain the gay binding." (Original letter is in the Eagle Crest Library.) Further, the Harpers Literary Gossip printed an article, "How the First 'Ben-Hur' Was Bound": "Inquiries have reached the Harpers concerning the binding of the first edition of Ben-Hur, which appeared in 1880. The first edition was issued in a series which the Harpers were then publishing. It was 16mo form, bound in cadet-blue cloth, and decorated with clusters of flowers in red, blue, and green on the front cover and a vase of flowers in the same colors on the back cover. The lettering on the cover is black." (Excerpt in the Eagle Crest Library.)


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Harpers apparently retaliated at Susan Wallace's objections over the binding. In the next two binding states (all first editions), the text was bound in drab, brown mesh cloth (seen occasionally today as a faded gray) over beveled boards [Binding State 2] and brown pebbled cloth over beveled boards [Binding State 3].


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: The book is dedicated "To the Wife of My Youth". This dedication appears in the first printing run of about 5,000 copies, all either in the first edition, first state binding, or in two alternate bindings. In an 1887 printing of "Ben-Hur" at the Rare Books Department of the Cincinnati Public Library, Lew Wallace wrote to Alexander Hill: "My Dear Friend Hill—When "Ben-Hur" was finished, I told my wife it was to be dedicated to her, and that she must furnish the inscription. She wrote 'To the Wife of My Youth' / The book became popular; then I began to receive letters of sympathy and enquiries as to when and of what poor Mrs. Wallace died. I laughed at first, but the condolences multiplied until finally I told the good woman that having got me into the trouble she must now get me out, which she did by adding the words--'Who still abides with me.' / The device was perfect." Wallace apparently also received many marriage proposals due to the misunderstanding.


title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

text: Initial sales of "Ben-Hur" were slow; only 2,800 copies were sold in the first seven months, but within two years, the book had become popular among readers. At the beginning of its third year, 750 copies were sold each month, and by 1885, the monthly average was 1,200 copies. By 1886, the book was earning Wallace about $11,000 in annual royalties, a substantial amount at the time, and began to sell, on average, an estimated 50,000 copies per year. By 1889, Harper and Brothers had sold 400,000 copies. Ten years after its initial publication, the book had reached sustained sales of 4,500 per month. A study conducted in 1893 of American public library book loans found that "Ben-Hur" had the highest percentage (83%) of loans among contemporary novels. In addition to the publication of the complete novel, two parts were published as separate volumes: "The First Christmas" (1899) and "The Chariot Race" (1912).