title: Fall of the Fascist regime in Italy

text: Without firing a shot, Mussolini and the Fascist party that dominated Italy for the last 21 years fell. As the Italian intellectual, Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, wrote in his diary at the time: "Behind the façade there was nothing. The first actor took his large cardboard head off and his idiot servants could be sent home with a cuff".


title: Fall of the Fascist regime in Italy

text: The Germans received news about Mussolini's arrest around 7:30 PM and informed Berlin immediately. The Führer was infuriated. Farinacci went to the German embassy, where Kesselring suggested that he join the armored Division "M", a group of devoted Fascists. They were encamped at Monterotondo where it could have been possible to march on Rome and free the Duce. Farinacci refused and asked to be brought to Germany. He left Italy by plane from Frascati and landed in Munich.


title: Fall of the Fascist regime in Italy

text: Units of the 44th Infantry Division and of the 36th Mountain Brigade of the German Army broke through the Brenner, Reschen and Toblach passes, occupying South Tyrol. Other German units also penetrated Italy from the Julian and Piedmontese borders. The trains transporting the troops were covered in praise for and images of Mussolini. From 26 July until 8 August, eight German divisions and one brigade were moved without Italian consent to northern and central Italy: the same troops that Hitler denied to Mussolini two weeks before in Feltre.


title: Fall of the Fascist regime in Italy

text: The forty-six days from the arrest of Mussolini on 25 July to the public notification on 8 September of the Armistice of Cassibile (signed 3 September, kept secret from the Italian people and from Italy's Nazi German allies) would set in motion numerous actions in Italy. The last sentence of the communiqué of 25 July ("The war goes on. Italy will be true to its word"), while puzzling to the Allies, did not deceive Hitler, who immediately understood that the change of regime would very likely lead to an Italian defection, which would endanger the German forces fighting in Southern Italy and the entire Wehrmacht presence in Southern Europe. However, the Badoglio government initially made no attempt to establish contact with the Anglo-Americans, while making alternating requests for help and obstructionism towards incoming German forces and requests to deploy German divisions in the South, on the frontline against the Allies. Germany increased troop movements into Italy, ostensibly done to support Italy against Allied troop movements from Southern Italy. The new foreign minister, Guariglia, was ambassador to Turkey, and time was lost while waiting for his return from Ankara. The King, after his activism on 25 July, was inactive, delegating the political action to d'Acquarone and Badoglio.


title: Fall of the Fascist regime in Italy

text: After letting the populace celebrate on 25 July, the Badoglio government proclaimed a state of siege and a curfew on 26 July. On 27 July, the first council of ministers under Badoglio took place. In this meeting, it was decided to move Mussolini ("The State prisoner") to an island and to dissolve the Fascist Party, the Grand Council, the Chamber of Fasci and Corporations, and the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State. The reconstitution of all political parties was also forbidden. Despite this prohibition, representatives of the political parties met on 26 July in Milan and on 27 July in Rome under the direction of Ivanoe Bonomi. They met again in Rome on 2 August. Members of Christian Democracy, the Italian Liberal Party, the Italian Socialist Party, the Action Party, and the Italian Communist Party started to organize a common action against the government; at the same time, several demonstrations against Badoglio resulted in 83 deaths and several hundreds wounded around the country.


title: Fall of the Fascist regime in Italy

text: Grandi transmitted an account of the 2 August meeting to the foreign press representative on Sunday morning, but he knew it was blocked. Grandi understood that the new government wanted to let the Fascist contribution to the fall of Mussolini fade away. He convoked the ambassadors of Spain and Switzerland, who were eager to get a first-hand account, to his office in Montecitorio under the sole request that his account be published in the press. After the publication of the meeting in the Swiss press the next day, he met with Duke d'Acquarone, with whom he had an argument. Grandi later met the King, Badoglio and the Pope, proposing to be secretly sent to Madrid where he could meet his old friend Samuel Hoare, the British ambassador in Spain. He wanted to talk about Italy's surrender. The Germans were informed about his visit to Pius XII, and the Gestapo was tracing him. On 31 July, he met the new foreign minister, Guariglia, but Guariglia was not in a hurry to send him to Madrid.


title: Fall of the Fascist regime in Italy

text: The conflicting actions of the Badoglio government over the forty-six days would bring about the national catastrophe of 8 September: the meltdown of the armed forces in the face of Nazi Germany's attack (occupying all of central and northern Italy by 19 September); the 9 September missing defense of Rome and flight of the royal family and the government; the 12 September freeing of Mussolini; the 23 September establishment of the Italian Social Republic; and the commencement of the Italian Civil War.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: Our Lady of Mount Carmel, or Virgin of Carmel, is the title given to the Blessed Virgin Mary in her role as patroness of the Carmelite Order, particularly within the Catholic Church. The first Carmelites were Christian hermits living on Mount Carmel in the Holy Land during the late 12th and early to mid-13th century. They built in the midst of their hermitages a chapel which they dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, whom they conceived of in chivalric terms as the "Lady of the place." Our Lady of Mount Carmel was adopted in the 19th century as the patron saint of Chile.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: Since the 15th century, popular devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel has centered on the Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, also known as the Brown Scapular. Traditionally, Mary is said to have given the Scapular to an early Carmelite named Simon Stock (1165–1265). The liturgical feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is celebrated on 16 July.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: The solemn liturgical feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel was probably first celebrated in England in the later part of the 14th century. Its object was thanksgiving to Mary, the patroness of the Carmelite Order, for the benefits she had accorded to it through its difficult early years. The institution of the feast may have come in the wake of the vindication of their title "Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary" at Cambridge, England, in 1374. The date chosen was 17 July; on the European mainland this date conflicted with the feast of Saint Alexis, requiring a shift to 16 July, which remains the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on the Roman Calendar of the Catholic Church. The Latin poem ""Flos Carmeli"" (meaning "Flower of Carmel") first appears as the sequence for this Mass.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: The Carmelite Order was the only religious order to be started in the Crusader States. In the 13th century, some of its people migrated west to England, setting up a chapter and being documented there about 1241–1242. A tradition first attested to in the late 14th century says that Simon Stock, believed to be an early English prior general of the Carmelite Order soon after its migration to England, had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary in which she gave him the Brown Scapular. This formed part of the Carmelite habit after 1287. In Stock's vision, Mary promised that those who died wearing the scapular would be saved. This is a devotional sacramental signifying the wearer's consecration to Mary and affiliation with the Carmelite order. It symbolizes her special protection and calls the wearers to consecrate themselves to her in a special way.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: In 1642, a Carmelite named John Cheron published a document which he said was a 13th-century letter written by Simon Stock's secretary, Peter Swanington. Since the early 20th century, historians have concluded that this letter was forged, likely by Cheron himself.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: But Stock's vision was long embraced by many promoters of the scapular devotion. The forged Swanington letter claimed that 16 July 1251 was the date of the vision (16 July being the date of the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel), which led for centuries to a strong association between this feast day and the scapular devotion. Based on available historical documentation, the liturgical feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel did not originally have a specific association with the Brown Scapular or the tradition of Stock's vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This tradition grew gradually, as did the liturgical cult of Saint Simon. The latter has been documented in Bordeaux, where Stock died, from the year 1435; in Ireland and England, from 1458; and in the rest of the Order, from 1564. Historians have long questioned whether Stock had the vision of Mary and the scapular. Although Simon Stock was never officially canonized, his feast day was celebrated in the church. The Carmelite convent of Aylesford, England, was restored and a relic of Saint Simon Stock was placed there in 1951. The saint's feast is celebrated in the places dedicated to him.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: Also associated with Our Lady of Carmel was a papal bull saying that there was a "Sabbatine privilege" associated with devotion to the saint; that is, until the late 1970s, the Catholic liturgy for that day mentioned the scapular devotion. Vatican II resulted in scrutiny of the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, as well as that of Simon Stock, because of the historical uncertainties about the origins. The liturgies were revised and, in the 21st century, neither, even in the Carmelite proper, makes reference to the scapular.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: In Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries, there has been particular devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, who has been adopted as a patron saint of several places, as she has been in other Catholic-majority countries. In addition, Carmen and María del Carmen have been popular given names for girls in Spanish-speaking countries. An annual festival, known as "Mamacha Carmen," is held in the highland Paucartambo District, Peru, featuring a procession with the Virgin and traditional dancers. Veneration of the Virgen del Carmen (often also associated with the Stella Maris) is particularly strong in coastal towns of Spain.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: The feast day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is celebrated for ten days each July in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where an approximately sixty-five foot tall "giglio" – a tower with a statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel affixed atop it – is lifted and paraded on multiple dates during the festival. The festival culminates with the celebration of the liturgical feast of Our Lady on July 16.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: The Carmelites consider the Blessed Virgin Mary to be a perfect model of the interior life of prayer and contemplation to which Carmelites aspire, as well as a model of virtue, in the person who was closest in life to Jesus Christ. She is seen as the one who points Christians most surely to Christ. As she says to the servants at the wedding at Cana, "Do whatever he [Jesus] tells you." Carmelites look to the Virgin Mary as a Spiritual Mother. The Stella Maris Monastery (Star of the Sea) on Mount Carmel, named after a traditional title of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is considered the spiritual headquarters of the order.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi, a revered authority on Carmelite spirituality, wrote that devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel means:


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: A 1996 doctrinal statement approved by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments states that


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: Devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel is bound to the history and spiritual values of the Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel and is expressed through the scapular. Thus, whoever receives the scapular becomes a member of the order and pledges him/herself to live according to its spirituality in accordance with the characteristics of his/her state in life.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: The scapular is a Marian habit or garment. It is both a sign and pledge. A sign of belonging to Mary; a pledge of her motherly protection, not only in this life but after death. As a sign, it is a conventional sign signifying three elements strictly joined: first, belonging to a religious family particularly devoted to Mary, especially dear to Mary, the Carmelite Order; second, consecration to Mary, devotion to and trust in her Immaculate Heart; third, an urge to become like Mary by imitating her virtues, above all her humility, chastity, and spirit of prayer.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: Since the Middle Ages, Our Lady of Mount Carmel has been related to purgatory and purgation from sins after death. In some images, she is portrayed as accompanied with angels and persons wearing Brown Scapulars, who plead for her mediation. In 1613, the Church forbade images to be made of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel descending into purgatory, due to errors being preached about certain privileges associated with the Brown Scapular (known as "the Sabbatine Privilege").


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: That privilege appears in the noted Decree of the Holy Office (1613). It was inserted in its entirety (except for the words forbidding the painting of the pictures) into the list of the indulgences and privileges of the Confraternity of the Scapular of Mount Carmel. In the 21st century, the Carmelites do not promote the Sabbatine Privilege. They encourage a belief in Mary's general aid and prayerful assistance for persons beyond death, especially her aid to those who devoutly wear the Brown Scapular, and commend devotion to Mary especially on Saturdays, which are dedicated to her.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: There is today a small sanctuary at Acquafondata, Italy, where the Virgin of Mount Carmel reportedly appeared on 16 July 1841. The visionaries of Our Lady of Fátima in 1917 reported Our Lady of Mount Carmel as among the titles claimed by Mary. She is said to have appeared to Simon Stock to whom she gave the Brown Scapular. The Garabandal apparitions in Spain (1961–65) were reported to be images of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: In Palmi, Italy, the anniversary of the earthquake of 1894 is observed annually on 16 November. The earthquake had its epicenter in the city. An associated event has been classified as the "miracle of Our Lady of Mount Carmel." For 17 days preceding this earthquake, many of the faithful had reported strange eye movements and changes in the coloring of the face in a statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The local and national press reported these occurrences.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: In the evening of 16 November, the faithful improvised a procession carrying the statue of the Virgin of Carmel on their shoulders through the streets. When the procession reached the end of the city, a violent earthquake shook the whole district of Palmi, ruining most of the old houses along the way. But, only nine people died out of a population of about 15,000 inhabitants, as almost all of the population had been on the street to watch the procession and were not trapped inside the destroyed buildings. Therefore, the city commemorates the 1894 procession each year, accompanied by firecrackers, lights, and festive stalls.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: The Catholic Church has officially recognized the miracle. On 16 November 1896, the statue of the Virgin was crowned, based on the decree issued 22 September 1895, by the Vatican Chapter.


title: Our Lady of Mount Carmel

text: The first atomic bomb was exploded in the United States at the Trinity test site on 16 July 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The Catholic anti-war movement has built on the coincidence between this date and the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. In 1990 the Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, a priest of the Eastern Rite (Byzantine-Melkite) of the Catholic Church, initiated the "16 July Twenty-Four Hours Day of Prayer," for forgiveness and protection from Our Lady of Mount Carmel, at Trinity Site in the New Mexico desert. Each year on 16 July, a prayer vigil is conducted at the Trinity site to pray for peace and the elimination of nuclear weapons.


title: Honey Bruce

text: Honey Bruce Friedman (born Harriett Jolliff; August 15, 1927 – September 12, 2005), also known by her professional name Honey Harlow, was an American stripper and showgirl who was married to stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce.


title: Honey Bruce

text: Friedman was born Harriett Jolliff in Manila, Arkansas, the daughter of unmarried teenage parents Mabel Layson and Murl Jolliff. She never knew her father, who died in a tuberculosis sanitarium. She was named after her paternal grandmother, Harriett Joliff (1877–1941), but as a child her nickname was Poochie.


title: Honey Bruce

text: Her mother, Mabel, moved her and her sister Virginia to Detroit, Michigan, in search of work. Finding work at nightclubs, Mabel married a local hustler who often was in trouble with the law. While ostensibly owning a bookshop, in reality he was operating an illegal business from their attic.


title: Honey Bruce

text: Young Harriet's mother and step-father enforced strict Catholic rules on her, and reportedly the home was an abusive environment. Harriet dreamed of leaving home for a career in show business, and she intently studied Hollywood movie stars like Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth.


title: Honey Bruce

text: Harriet's unstable home life led to rebellion, and she started skipping school and staying away from home. Eventually she ran away from home with a female friend and two boys to nearby Toledo, Ohio, and from there, the four teenagers went to Florida. The boys hot-wired cars to steal transportation, and soon they arrived in Miami where they rented a room. To earn money to support themselves, the girls answered an ad in the paper for showgirls; Harriet was hired to be a topless dancer, but her friend was deemed not pretty enough and so was given a job as a cigarette girl.


title: Honey Bruce

text: Once Harriet had earned enough money for the group to continue on their journey, she quit the dancing job, and the group planned to move from Miami Beach to Palm Beach. The two boys she was with had enlisted in the army and were "sowing some oats" before heading to basic training for World War II. One of the boys raped Harriet while she was sleeping, which she shrugged off as "the way things were." Harriet's friend left the group and went home to Detroit.


title: Honey Bruce

text: With Harriet and the two boys in need of more money, they decided to break into a vending machine. They broke out the glass and managed to get cigarettes, candy, and cash into their pockets and escaped on foot into a nearby orange grove, but were caught by police. Once in custody, it was established that the group was responsible for several cars being stolen in addition to the theft, and Harriet was sentenced to one year incarceration at Florida State Prison.


title: Honey Bruce

text: On June 15, 1951, she married comedian Lenny Bruce after meeting him in Baltimore. Bruce tried to become her manager and make her a legitimate star, but she fought against this. She sometimes performed with her husband on stage, including an act based on the "Bride of Frankenstein".


title: Honey Bruce

text: As an actress she appeared in the 1953 indie film "Dance Hall Racket", which also starred Lenny Bruce.


title: Honey Bruce

text: They divorced on January 21, 1957, after having a daughter, Kitty. The two fought a custody battle over their daughter.


title: Honey Bruce

text: Harlow successfully lobbied New York Governor George Pataki to pardon Bruce posthumously for the obscenity conviction resulting from his performance and arrest at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village in 1964. Lenny Bruce died of a drug overdose in 1966, and she continued to promote his legacy.


title: Honey Bruce

text: She married Jeffrey Friedman in 1984, and they remained married and lived in Hawaii until her death. She had legally changed her name to Honey Bruce Friedman.


title: Honey Bruce

text: She was portrayed by Valerie Perrine in the 1974 biopic "Lenny", for which Perrine was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: Manmadhan () (spelt onscreen as Maanmathaun) is 2004 Indian Tamil-language romantic thriller film directed and written by Silambarasan & He played dual roles for the first time in his career while Jyothika did the main female lead with, Sindhu Tolani, Santhanam, Atul Kulkarni, and Goundamani played the supporting roles. The film's score and soundtrack are composed by Yuvan Shankar Raja.


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: "Manmadhan" received highly positive reviews for its concept, direction, screenplay, soundtrack & performances (especially of Silambarasan’s) and had a blockbuster run at the box office for over 150 days at the time of its release. The film’s success made Silambarasan, an established and most sought actor in Tamil film industry at that time. It was dubbed into Telugu as "Manmadha" and released on May 27, 2005. It was remade in Kannada as "Madana" and in Bengali Bangladesh as "Baje Chele - The Loafer".


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: Madhan Kumar (Silambarasan) is an auditor by profession, who lives in Chennai and also learns music part-time in a college. Mythili (Jyothika), a naive woman, also learns music from the same college. She gets scared upon seeing Madhan Kumar one day because she happens to witness a dream of her getting raped by him. Later on, she realizes his kind nature and they both become friends.


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: However, Madhan Kumar also has an arrogant and psychotic personality under the pseudonym Manmadhan, through which he hunts and kills morally corrupt girls in the city by seducing them before rendering them unconscious using chloroform. He burns the girls' corpses and stores their ashes in bottles with their respective names. Whenever he intends to kill a girl by seducing her, he suffers a nosebleed. The media attention turns towards the case of missing girls, and Chennai's new ACP Deva (Atul Kulkarni) takes the charge to find the person behind the crimes.


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: One day, Mythili finds Madhan Kumar riding a bike with a girl as pillion. On the next day, Mythili gets shocked to see the news that the girl whom she spotted with Madhan Kumar has gone missing. Mythili thinks that Madhan Kumar is behind the crimes in the city and informs Deva about Madhan Kumar's whereabouts. Thus, Madhan Kumar gets arrested.


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: During the investigation, Madhan Kumar reveals that it was none other than his younger twin Madhan Raj (also Silambarasan) responsible for killing erotic and corrupt girls under the pseudonym Manmadhan. The story then moves to a flashback where Madhan Raj and Madhan Kumar were affectionate with each other. They lived with their maternal uncle Puncture Pandiyan (Goundamani) in Madhampatty in the outskirts of Coimbatore district, as both of their parents had died years ago. While Madhan Kumar was brave, intelligent and practical, Madhan Raj was innocent and sentimental. While Madhan Kumar went to study for auditorship in Chennai, Madhan Raj moved to Coimbatore to study in an engineering college. There, he became very close and friendly with his hostel roommate Bobby (Santhanam), and fell in love with his classmate Vaishnavi (Sindhu Tolani), who also reciprocated his feelings upon seeing his good nature. However, Madhan Raj's senior friend Ravi informed him that Vaishnavi was having an illicit affair with her relative Seenu, who also studied in the same college. He did not trust him and in anger he beat Ravi. When Madhan Raj confronted Vaishnavi, she got angry and thought that he did not trust her.


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: Madhan Raj realised his mistake and went to Vaishnavi's house to apologize, only to find her having sex with Seenu and enjoying the moment. He realized that Ravi was correct right from the beginning. Raj also heard Vaishnavi's conversation with Seenu that she pretended to love him and would like to marry him so that she could take advantage of his innocence and sincere love, which would help her lead life the way she wanted, and have Madhan Raj as a slave for her. Furious, Madhan Raj killed both Vaishnavi and Seenu. He returned to Chennai and arrogantly narrated the whole incident to Kumar. Madhan Raj decided to change his appearance and set out in search of girls cheating in the name of love to kill them and warned Madhan Kumar that if he informed the police of his whereabouts, he would kill him too.


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: Coming back to the present, the police investigate about Madhan Raj and get solid evidences against him. Madhan Kumar, with the help of Pandiyan, is released from the case. Mythili apologizes to Madhan Kumar and also proposes to him, which he rejects, saying that he does not love her and had treated her as friend. Mythili leaves the place saying that she will wait for Madhan Kumar, believing that he will accept her love someday.


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: The story again moves to a flashback, where it is shown only to the audience that Madhan Kumar was indeed the real Manmadhan, and Madhan Raj was innocent of the crimes. After killing Seenu and Vaishnavi, Madhan Raj actually met Madhan Kumar but didn't fight him and felt that he regretted killing them and he did it only because he was triggered due to what they were doing and committed suicide in front of Madhan Kumar's eyes, despite the latter's pleas. Madhan Kumar hence decided to avenge Madhan Raj's death by killing girls who cheat in the name of love, under the pseudonym Manmadhan and developed his "nosebleed" from then on. Madhan Kumar has hidden his brother Madhan Raj's death, thereby using his identity as a scapegoat so that he could escape if caught.


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: It is shown that Madhan Kumar indeed loves Mythili for her innocence and good demeanour, but cannot and will not express his feelings for her. He also exclaims that if his brother had loved a girl like her, he would also have lived happily and he would have married Mythili and be happy. Hence, Madhan Kumar concludes that avenging his brother's death is more important, and only God can judge his actions. The film ends with a message that even if Manmadhan has escaped the clutches of the police, he would answer for his actions before the law someday.


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: Though the story of the film was credited to Silambarasan, it was actually written by A. J. Murugan, himself which is inspired from


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: Director Bharati raja's cult psychological thriller movie "Sigappu Rojakkal" and Jamie Blank's film "Valentine" (2001). "Everything is driven by fate, he is the cupid that steals the hearts of young women, but there is a beast inside him". Seeing the visual aesthetic of the poster, Ajith was impressed and gave his nod for the film.


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: He asked Murugan to wait till the completion of "Kandukondain Kandukondain". In between, Murugan got an opportunity do a film with Simbhu. He met him and narrated a love story. Instead of that story, Simbhu asked him for the narration of "Manmadhan". He was impressed with Murugan after he saw the concept poster of it in the hands of Murugan. As he was a huge fan of Ajith Kumar at the time, as per the "gentlemen agreement", along with three years of friendship, Murugan narrated the story of Manmadhan to Simbhu. He liked it and requested him that he wanted to do the film. That moment prompted Murugan to do the film with Simbhu, instead of Ajith, as he took a no-objection letter from him. He committed the script for Simbhu. Because of lack of support from the film industry, and to start his debut film, Murugan was forced to sign an agreement, mentioning that the story and screenplay, were written by Simbhu.


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: After Manmadhan, he did not make his second film till now, as he voluntarily retired from the industry, unable to bare the humiliation of Simbhu and the industry, back then. Simbhu experienced difficulties with Murugan, during the making of the film and was widely reported by the media to have "ghost-directed" the project. Murugan was later demoted and worked in Silambarasan's directorial venture, "Vallavan" (2006) as an associate director, and was consequently critical of the actor's insistence on interfering with the director's role.


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: The soundtrack, composed by Yuvan Shankar Raja, was released on 1 July 2004 and features 6 songs. The lyrics were penned by Vaali, Snehan, Pa. Vijay and Na. Muthukumar. The singers include the film's lead actor Silambarasan, Anushka Manchanda from the girl-pop group Viva! and rapper Blaaze, who all sung for the first time under Yuvan's direction. After the release of the film, several bonus tracks, that featured in the film, but not in the soundtrack, were released again as a soundtrack, which includes pieces of the film score and the earlier released songs. All the tracks were composed by Yuvan Shankar Raja. "En Aasai Mythiliye" sung by Silambarasan is remixed from his father's original song in Mythili Ennai Kaathali.


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: Though made on a high budget of 5 crore, "Manmadhan" was sold at a deficit to distributors. However, the film opened with 140 prints and emerged successful despite facing competition from veterans on Deepavali weekend - Ajith's "Attagasam", Vijayakanth's "Neranja Manasu", and Sarathkumar's "Chatrapathy".


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: The film's collection reports from Chennai, Coimbatore and Salem distribution territories indicated that "Manmadhan" surged ahead of "Attagasam" in its second week "with the help of strong reviews in the media, music and excellent word of mouth".


title: Manmadhan (film)

text: The movie's satellite rights were sold to SUN TV on December' 2007 and this version carried a V/U Certificate.


title: Szeged

text: Szeged ( , ; ) is the third largest city of Hungary, the largest city and regional centre of the Southern Great Plain and the county seat of Csongrád-Csanád county. The University of Szeged is one of the most distinguished universities in Hungary.


title: Szeged

text: The Szeged Open Air (Theatre) Festival (first held in 1931) is one of the main attractions, held every summer and celebrated as the Day of the City on 21 May.


title: Szeged

text: The name "Szeged" might come from an old Hungarian word for 'corner' (), pointing to the turn of the river Tisza that flows through the city. Others say it derives from the Hungarian word which means 'island'. Others still contend that means 'dark blond' () – a reference to the color of the water where the rivers Tisza and Maros merge.


title: Szeged

text: The city has its own name in a number of foreign languages, usually by adding a suffix "-in" to the Hungarian name: Romanian ; German or ; Serbo-Croatian /; Greek ("Partiskon"); Italian ; Latin ; Latvian ; Lithuanian ; Polish ; Slovak and Czech ; Turkish .


title: Szeged

text: Szeged and its area have been inhabited since ancient times. Ptolemy mentions the oldest known name of the city: "Partiscum" (Ancient Greek: Πάρτισκον)"." It is possible that Attila, king of the Huns had his seat somewhere in this area. The name Szeged was first mentioned in 1183, in a document of King Béla III.


title: Szeged

text: In the second century AD there was a Roman trading post established on an island in the Tisza, and the foundations of the Szeged castle suggest that the structure may have been built over an even earlier fort. Today only one corner of the castle still remains standing.


title: Szeged

text: During the Mongol invasion the town was destroyed and its inhabitants fled to the nearby swamps, but they soon returned and rebuilt their town. In the 14th century, during the reign of Louis the Great, Szeged became the most important town of Southern Hungary, and – as the Turkish armies got closer to Hungary – the strategic importance of Szeged grew. King Sigismund of Luxembourg had a wall built around the town. Szeged was raised to free royal town status in 1498.


title: Szeged

text: Szeged was first pillaged by the Ottoman Army on 28 September 1526, but was occupied only in 1543, and became an administrative centre of the Ottomans (see Ottoman Hungary). The town was a sanjak centre first in Budin Eyaleti (1543–1596), after in Eğri Eyaleti. The town was freed from Turkish rule on 23 October 1686, and regained the free royal town status in 1715. In 1719, Szeged received its coat of arms (still used today) from Charles III. During the next several years, Szeged grew and prospered. Piarist monks arrived in Szeged in 1719 and opened a new grammar school in 1721. Szeged also held scientific lectures and theatrical plays. These years brought not only prosperity but also enlightenment. Between 1728 and 1744 witch trials were frequent in the town, with the Szeged witch trials of 1728–29 perhaps being the largest. The witch trials were instigated by the authorities, who decided on this measure to remove the problem of the public complaints about the drought and its consequences of famine and epidemics by laying the responsibility on people among them, which had fraternized with the Devil. In 1720, the ethnic Hungarian population of the town numbered about 13000 to 16000, while the number of the Serb inhabitants was 1300.


title: Szeged

text: Szeged is known as the home of paprika, a spice made from dried, powdered capsicum fruits. Paprika arrived in Hungary in the second half of the 16th century as an ornamental plant. About 100 years later the plant was cultivated as an herb, and paprika as we know it. Szeged is also famous for their szekelygulyas, a goulash made with pork, sauerkraut and sour cream. And also famous for their halászlé, fish soup made of carp and catfish.


title: Szeged

text: The citizens of Szeged played an important part in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Lajos Kossuth delivered his famous speech here. Szeged was the last seat of the revolutionary government in July 1849. The Habsburg rulers punished the leaders of the town, but later Szeged began to prosper again; the railway reached it in 1854, and the town got its free royal town status back in 1860. Mark Pick's shop – the predecessor of today's Pick Salami Factory – was opened in 1869.


title: Szeged

text: Today the inner city of Szeged has wide avenues. This is mainly due to the great flood of 1879, which wiped away the whole town (only 265 of the 5723 houses remained and 165 people died). Emperor Franz Joseph visited the town and promised that "Szeged will be more beautiful than it used to be". He kept his promise, and during the next years a new, modern city emerged from the ruins, with palaces and wide streets.


title: Szeged

text: After the First World War Hungary lost its southern territories to Serbia, as a result Szeged became a city close to the border, and its importance lessened, but as it took over roles that formerly belonged to the now lost cities, it slowly recovered. Following the Loss of Transylvania to Romania, University of Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca), moved to Szeged in 1921 (see University of Szeged). In 1923 Szeged took over the role of episcopal seat from Temesvár (now Timișoara, Romania). It was briefly occupied by the Romanian army during Hungarian-Romanian War in 1919. It also became a center for right-wing forces which would install Miklós Horthy as the country's new leader after the overthrow of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. During the 1920s the Jewish population of Szeged grew and reached its zenith.


title: Szeged

text: Szeged suffered heavily during World War II. 6,000 inhabitants of the city were killed, In 1941, there were 4,161 Jews living in Szeged. After, March 19, 1944 German occupation, they were confined to a ghetto together with the Jews from surrounding villages. In June, 1944, the ghetto was liquidated. The Nazis murdered the larger part of the 8,500 and some were forced into forced labor in Strasshof Labor camp, Austria. Szeged was captured by Soviet troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front on 11 October 1944 in the course of the Battle of Debrecen. During the communist era, Szeged became a centre of light industry and food industry. In 1965, oil was found near the city.


title: Szeged

text: In 1962, Szeged became the county seat of Csongrád. Whole new districts were built, and many nearby villages (e.g. Tápé, Szőreg, Kiskundorozsma, Szentmihálytelek, Gyálarét) were annexed to the city in 1973 (as was a tendency during the Communist era).


title: Szeged

text: The Szeged Symphony Orchestra (Szegedi Szimfonikus Zenekar) gives regular concerts at the Szegedi Nemzeti Színház.


title: Szeged

text: Szeged is situated near the southern border of Hungary, just to the south of the mouth of the Maros River, on both banks of the Tisza River, nearly in the centre of the Carpathian Basin. The Hungarian frontier with Serbia is just outside the town.


title: Szeged

text: Szeged's climate is transitional between oceanic Köppen "" (Marine West Coast Climate/Oceanic climate) and continental (Köppen "Dfb"), with cold winters, hot summers, and fairly low precipitation. Due to the high hours of sunlight reported annually, Szeged is often called "City of Sunshine" (). On 23 July 2022, a maximum temperature of was registered in Szeged.


title: Szeged

text: The city of Szeged has 62 kindergartens, 32 elementary schools and 18 high schools. The two most prominent high schools ("Ságvári Endre Gyakorló Gimnázium" and "Radnóti Miklós Kísérleti Gimnázium") are in the top fifteen in the country.


title: Szeged

text: Szeged is the higher education centre of the Southern Great Plain and has built quite a reputation for itself. Thousands of students study here, many of whom are foreigners. The University of Szeged is according to the number of students the second largest and the 4th oldest university of Hungary being established in 1581. Ranked as the top university of the country on Academic Ranking of World Universities – 2005, and in the top 100 in Europe, it offers several programs on different fields of study.


title: Szeged

text: The "Biological Research Centre" of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which was built with the help of UNESCO funds, has also been a considerable source of advanced research. Scientists at this laboratory were first in the world to produce "artificial heredity material" in the year 2000. The building has served as a home to many well known conferences and continues to make contributions to the world of science.


title: Szeged

text: The "Szent-Györgyi Albert Agóra" is a cultural scientific centre of Szeged which gives home to laboratories of the Biological Research Centre and to exhibitions of the John von Neumann Computer Society especially their IT historical exposition.


title: Szeged

text: In 2018 the new scientific institution, the "ELI Attosecond Light Pulse Source" (ELI-ALPS) opened in Szeged establishing a unique facility which provides light sources within an extremely broad frequency range in the form of ultrashort pulses with high repetition rate which is needed for different kinds of physical experiments especially in the field of attosecond physics.


title: Szeged

text: It is also one of the main options for medical students who come from all around Europe to study Medicine in their recognized international campus.


title: Szeged

text: Szeged is one of the centres of food industry in Hungary, especially known for its paprika and companies like Pick Szeged, Sole-Mizo, Bonafarm etc. Other notable companies having their headquarters in Szeged are AMSY International, RRE – Szeged, Optiwella, Generál Printing House, RotaPack, Sanex Pro, Agroplanta, Karotin, Florin, Quadrotex and SZEPLAST.


title: Szeged

text: Others, like ContiTech, Duna-Dráva Cement, Szatmári Malom and Europe Match, are not based in the city, but have production facilities there.


title: Szeged

text: Szeged is the most important transportation hub in the Southern Great Plain. Two motorways, M5 and M43, lie along the city border. Through the M5 Motorway Szeged is connected to Kecskemét, Kiskunfélegyháza and Budapest to the north and to Subotica, Novi Sad and Belgrade in Serbia to the south. The M43 Motorway – which splits from the M5 Motorway near Szeged – connects the city via Makó to Arad and Timișoara in Romania. In addition, there are other roads running from the city to Makó and Nagylak (main road 43), to Röszke (main road 5), to Kiskunfélegyháza (main road 5), to Ásotthalom and Baja (main road 55) and to Hódmezővásárhely, Orosháza and Békéscsaba (main road 47).


title: Szeged

text: The Budapest-Szeged-rail line is an important rail connection, as well as the railway lines 121 (to Makó), 135 (to Hódmezővásárhely), 136 (to Röszke) and 140 (to Kiskunfélegyháza).


title: Szeged

text: A tram-train system was constructed and inaugurated in November 2021, connecting Szeged with the neighbouring Hódmezővásárhely, thus creating the second most populous urban agglomeration in the country, after the capital. There was a proposal for its extension, even through the Serbian border, to Subotica.


title: Szeged

text: As of May 2018 Szeged had 39 local bus lines – 15 in the city centre and 24 in the suburbs. There are also 5 tram lines.


title: Szeged

text: The most popular sport in the city is handball. The city has one well-known club the 2013–14 EHF Cup-winner SC Pick Szeged playing in the Nemzeti Bajnokság I.


title: Szeged

text: The second most popular sport is football in the city. Szeged had several clubs playing in the top level Hungarian league, the Nemzeti Bajnokság I. These are Szegedi AK, Szegedi Honvéd SE. The only currently operating club, Szeged 2011 play in the Nemzeti Bajnokság II.


title: Szeged

text: The local Municipal Assembly, elected at the 2019 local government elections, is made up of 33 members (1 Mayor, 23 Individual constituencies MEPs and 9 Compensation List MEPs) divided into this political parties and alliances:


title: Szeged

text: The city offers a wide range of media – television and radio stations, and print and online newspapers.


title: Moon rock

text: Moon rock or lunar rock is rock originating from Earth's Moon. This includes lunar material collected during the course of human exploration of the Moon, and rock that has been ejected naturally from the Moon's surface and landed on Earth as meteorites.


title: Moon rock

text: Moon rocks on Earth come from four sources: those collected by six United States Apollo program crewed lunar landings from 1969 to 1972; those collected by three Soviet uncrewed Luna probes in the 1970s; those collected by the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program's uncrewed probes; and rocks that were ejected naturally from the lunar surface before falling to Earth as lunar meteorites.


title: Moon rock

text: Six Apollo missions collected 2,200 samples of material weighing , processed into more than 110,000 individually cataloged samples.


title: Moon rock

text: The Soviet Union abandoned its attempts at a crewed lunar program in the 1970s, but succeeded in landing three robotic Luna spacecraft with the capability to collect and return small samples to Earth. A combined total of less than half a kilogram of material was returned.


title: Moon rock

text: In 1993, three small rock fragments from Luna 16, weighing 200 mg, were sold for US$ 442,500 at Sotheby's (). In 2018, the same three Luna 16 rock fragments sold for US$ 855,000 at Sotheby's.


title: Moon rock

text: Chang'e 5, the fifth lunar exploration mission of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program returned with ~ of samples.


title: Moon rock

text: More than 370 lunar meteorites have been collected on Earth, representing more than 30 different meteorite finds (no falls), with a total mass of over . Some were discovered by scientific teams (such as ANSMET) searching for meteorites in Antarctica, with most of the remainder discovered by collectors in the desert regions of northern Africa and Oman. A Moon rock known as "NWA 12691", which weighs , was found in the Sahara Desert at the Algerian and Mauritanian borders in January 2017, and later went on sale for $2.5 million in 2020.


title: Moon rock

text: Rocks from the Moon have been measured by radiometric dating techniques. They range in age from about 3.16 billion years old for the basaltic samples derived from the lunar maria, up to about 4.44 billion years old for rocks derived from the highlands. Based on the age-dating technique of "crater counting," the youngest basaltic eruptions are believed to have occurred about 1.2 billion years ago, but scientists do not possess samples of these lavas. In contrast, the oldest ages of rocks from the Earth are between 3.8 and 4.28 billion years old.


title: Moon rock

text: Moon rocks fall into two main categories: those found in the lunar highlands (terrae), and those in the maria. The terrae consist dominantly of mafic plutonic rocks. Regolith breccias with similar protoliths are also common. Mare basalts come in three distinct series in direct relation to their titanium content: "high-Ti basalts, low-Ti basalts", and "Very Low-Ti (VLT) basalts".


title: Moon rock

text: Almost all lunar rocks are depleted in volatiles and are completely lacking in hydrated minerals common in Earth rocks. In some regards, lunar rocks are closely related to Earth's rocks in their isotopic composition of the element oxygen. The Apollo Moon rocks were collected using a variety of tools, including hammers, rakes, scoops, tongs, and core tubes. Most were photographed prior to collection to record the condition in which they were found. They were placed inside sample bags and then a "Special Environmental Sample Container" for return to the Earth to protect them from contamination. In contrast to the Earth, large portions of the lunar crust appear to be composed of rocks with high concentrations of the mineral anorthite. The mare basalts have relatively high iron values. Furthermore, some of the mare basalts have very high levels of titanium (in the form of ilmenite).


title: Moon rock

text: Primary igneous rocks in the lunar highlands compose three distinct groups: the ferroan anorthosite suite, the magnesian suite, and the alkali suite.


title: Moon rock

text: Lunar breccias, formed largely by the immense basin-forming impacts, are dominantly composed of highland lithologies because most mare basalts post-date basin formation (and largely fill these impact basins).


title: Moon rock

text: "Mare basalts" are named as such because they frequently constitute large portions of the lunar maria. These typically contain 18–21 percent FeO by weight, and 1–13 percent TiO. They are similar to terrestrial basalts, but have many important differences; for example, mare basalts show a large negative europium anomaly. The type location is Mare Crisium sampled by Luna 24.


title: Moon rock

text: The main repository for the Apollo Moon rocks is the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. For safekeeping, there is also a smaller collection stored at White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Most of the rocks are stored in nitrogen to keep them free of moisture. They are handled only indirectly, using special tools.


title: Moon rock

text: Some Moon rocks from the Apollo missions are displayed in museums, and a few allow visitors to touch them. One of these, called the "Touch Rock", is displayed in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The idea of having touchable Moon rocks at a museum was suggested by Apollo scientist Farouk El-Baz, who was inspired by his childhood pilgrimage to Mecca where he touched the Black Stone (which in Islam is believed to be sent down from the heavens).


title: Moon rock

text: Moon rocks collected during the course of lunar exploration are currently considered priceless. In 2002, a safe was stolen from the Lunar Sample Building that contained minute samples of lunar and Martian material. The samples were recovered, and NASA estimated their value during the ensuing court case at about $1 million for of material.


title: Moon rock

text: Naturally transported Moon rocks in the form of lunar meteorites are sold and traded among private collectors.


title: Moon rock

text: Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt picked up a rock "composed of many fragments, of many sizes, and many shapes, probably from all parts of the Moon". This rock was later labeled sample 70017. President Nixon ordered that fragments of that rock should be distributed in 1973 to all 50 US states and 135 foreign heads of state. The fragments were presented encased in an acrylic sphere, mounted on a wood plaque which included the recipients' flag which had also flown aboard Apollo 17. Many of the presentation Moon rocks are now unaccounted for, having been stolen or lost.


title: Moon rock

text: Three minerals were discovered from the Moon: armalcolite, tranquillityite, and pyroxferroite. Armalcolite was named for the three astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission: Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins.


title: Moon rock

text: Because of their rarity on Earth, and the difficulty of obtaining more, Moon rocks have been frequent targets of theft and vandalism, and many have gone missing or were stolen.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Jean-François Champollion (), also known as Champollion "le jeune" ('the Younger'; 23 December 17904 March 1832), was a French philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology. Partially raised by his brother, the scholar Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac, Champollion was a child prodigy in philology, giving his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic in his mid-teens. As a young man he was renowned in scientific circles, and spoke Coptic, Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: During the early 19th century, French culture experienced a period of 'Egyptomania', brought on by Napoleon's discoveries in Egypt during his campaign there (1798–1801) which also brought to light the trilingual Rosetta Stone. Scholars debated the age of Egyptian civilization and the function and nature of hieroglyphic script, which language if any it recorded, and the degree to which the signs were phonetic (representing speech sounds) or ideographic (recording semantic concepts directly). Many thought that the script was only used for sacred and ritual functions, and that as such it was unlikely to be decipherable since it was tied to esoteric and philosophical ideas, and did not record historical information. The significance of Champollion's decipherment was that he showed these assumptions to be wrong, and made it possible to begin to retrieve many kinds of information recorded by the ancient Egyptians.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Champollion lived in a period of political turmoil in France which continuously threatened to disrupt his research in various ways. During the Napoleonic Wars, he was able to avoid conscription, but his Napoleonic allegiances meant that he was considered suspect by the subsequent Royalist regime. His own actions, sometimes brash and reckless, did not help his case. His relations with important political and scientific figures of the time, such as Joseph Fourier and Silvestre de Sacy helped him, although in some periods he lived exiled from the scientific community.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: In 1820, Champollion embarked in earnest on the project of decipherment of hieroglyphic script, soon overshadowing the achievements of British polymath Thomas Young who had made the first advances in decipherment before 1819. In 1822, Champollion published his first breakthrough in the decipherment of the Rosetta hieroglyphs, showing that the Egyptian writing system was a combination of phonetic and ideographic signs – the first such script discovered. In 1824, he published a "Précis" in which he detailed a decipherment of the hieroglyphic script demonstrating the values of its phonetic and ideographic signs. In 1829, he traveled to Egypt where he was able to read many hieroglyphic texts that had never before been studied, and brought home a large body of new drawings of hieroglyphic inscriptions. Home again he was given a professorship in Egyptology, but only lectured a few times before his health, ruined by the hardships of the Egyptian journey, forced him to give up teaching. He died in Paris in 1832, 41 years old. His grammar of Ancient Egyptian was published posthumously.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: During his life as well as long after his death, intense discussions over the merits of his decipherment were carried out among Egyptologists. Some faulted him for not having given sufficient credit to the early discoveries of Young, accusing him of plagiarism, and others long disputed the accuracy of his decipherments. But subsequent findings and confirmations of his readings by scholars building on his results gradually led to the general acceptance of his work. Although some still argue that he should have acknowledged the contributions of Young, his decipherment is now universally accepted and has been the basis for all further developments in the field. Consequently, he is regarded as the "Founder and Father of Egyptology".


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Jean-François Champollion was born on 23 December 1790, the last of seven children (two of whom had died prior). He was raised in humble circumstances; his father Jacques Champollion was a book trader from Valjouffrey near Grenoble who had settled in the small town of Figeac in the Department of Lot. His father was a notorious drunk, and his mother, Jeanne-Françoise Gualieu, seems to have been largely an absent figure in the life of young Champollion, who was mostly raised by his older brother Jacques-Joseph. One biographer, Andrew Robinson, even speculated that Champollion was not in fact the son of Jacques Champollion's wife but the result of an extramarital affair.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Towards the end of March 1801, Jean-François left Figeac for Grenoble, which he reached on 27 March, and where Jacques-Joseph lived in a two-room flat on the rue Neuve. Jacques-Joseph was then working as an assistant in the import-export company Chatel, Champollion and Rif, yet taught his brother to read, and supported his education. His brother also may have been part of the source of Champollion's interest in Egypt, since as a young man he wanted to join Napoleon's Egyptian expedition, and often regretted not being able to go.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Often known as the younger brother of better known Jacques-Joseph, Jean-François was often called Champollion "le Jeune" (the young). Later when his brother became the more famous of the two, Jacques added the town of his birth as a second surname and hence is often referred to as Champollion-Figeac, in contrast to his brother Champollion. Although studious and largely self-educated, Jacques did not have Jean-François' genius for language; however, he was talented at earning a living and supported Jean-François for most of his life.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Given the difficulty of the task of educating his brother while earning a living, Jacques-Joseph decided to send his younger brother to the well-regarded school of the Abbé Dussert in November 1802, where Champollion would stay until the summer of 1804. During this period, his gift for languages first became evident: he started out learning Latin and Greek, but quickly progressed to Hebrew and other Semitic languages such as Ethiopic, Arabic, Syriac and Chaldean. It was while a student here that he took up an interest in Ancient Egypt, likely encouraged in this direction by Dussert and his brother, both orientalists.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: At age 11, he came to the attention of the prefect of Grenoble, Joseph Fourier, who had accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte on the Egyptian expedition which had discovered the Rosetta Stone. An accomplished scholar in addition to a well known mathematical physicist, Fourier had been entrusted by Napoleon with the publication of the results of the expedition in the monumental series of publications titled "Description de l'Égypte". One biographer has stated that Fourier invited the 11-year-old Champollion to his home and showed him his collection of Ancient Egyptian artifacts and documents. Champollion was enthralled, and upon seeing the hieroglyphs and hearing that they were unintelligible, he declared that he would be the one to succeed in reading them. Whether or not the report of this visit is true, Fourier did go on to become one of Champollion's most important allies and supporters, and surely had an important role in instilling his interest in Ancient Egypt.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: From 1804, Champollion studied at a "lycée" in Grenoble but hated its strict curriculum which only allowed him to study oriental languages one day per week, and he begged his brother to move him to a different school. Nonetheless, at the "lycée" he took up the study of Coptic, which would become his main linguistic interest for years to come and prove crucial in his approach to decipherment of the hieroglyphs. He had a chance to practice his Coptic when he met Dom Raphaël de Monachis, a former Coptic Christian monk and Arabic translator to Napoleon, who visited Grenoble in 1805. By 1806, Jacques-Joseph was making preparations to bring his younger brother to Paris to study at the University. Jean-François had by then already developed a strong interest for Ancient Egypt, as he wrote in a letter to his parents dated to January 1806:


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: "I want to make a profound and continuous study of this ancient nation. The enthusiasm brought me by the study of their monuments, their power and knowledge filling me with admiration, all of this will grow further as I acquire new notions. Of all the people that I prefer, I shall say that none is as important to my heart as the Egyptians."


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: To continue his studies, Champollion wanted to go to Paris, Grenoble offering few possibilities for such specialized subjects as ancient languages. His brother thus stayed in Paris from August to September that same year, so as to seek his admission in a specialized school. Before leaving however Champollion presented, on 1 September 1807, his "Essay on the Geographical Description of Egypt before the Conquest of Cambyses" before the Academy of Grenoble whose members were so impressed that they admitted him to the Academy six months later.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: From 1807 to 1809, Champollion studied in Paris, under Silvestre de Sacy, the first Frenchman to attempt to read the Rosetta stone, and with orientalist Louis-Mathieu Langlès, and with Raphaël de Monachis who was now in Paris. Here he perfected his Arabic and Persian, in addition to the languages that he had already acquired. He was so immersed in his studies that he took up the habit of dressing in Arab clothing and calling himself "Al Seghir", the Arab translation of "le jeune". He divided his time between the College of France, the Special School of Oriental Languages, the National Library where his brother was a librarian and the Commission of Egypt, the institution in charge of publishing the findings of the Egyptian expedition. In 1808, he first began studying the Rosetta stone, working from a copy made by the Abbé de Tersan. Working independently he was able to confirm some of the readings of the demotic previously made by Johan David Åkerblad in 1802, finally identifying the Coptic equivalents of fifteen demotic signs present on the Rosetta stone.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: In 1810, he returned to Grenoble to take up a seat as joint professor of Ancient History at the newly reopened Grenoble University. His salary as an assistant professor at Grenoble was fixed at 750 francs, a quarter of the salary received by full professors.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Never well off and struggling to make ends meet, he also suffered since youth from chronically bad health, including gout and tinnitus. His health first began to deteriorate during his time in Paris, where the dank climate and unsanitary environment did not agree with him.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: During the Napoleonic Wars, Champollion was a young bachelor and thus liable to compulsory military service, which would have put him in great danger due to the extremely high mortality of soldiers in Napoleon's armies. Through the assistance of his brother and the prefect of Grenoble Joseph Fourier, who was also an Egyptologist, he successfully avoided the draft by arguing that his work on deciphering the Egyptian script was too important to interrupt. First skeptical of the Napoleonic regime, after the fall of Napoleon in 1813 and the institution of the royalist regime under Louis XVIII, Champollion came to consider the Napoleonic state the lesser of two evils. Anonymously he composed and circulated songs ridiculing and criticizing the royal regime – songs that became highly popular among the people of Grenoble. In 1815 Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from his exile on Elba and landed with an army at the Côte d'Azur and marched directly on Grenoble where he was received as a liberator. Here he met with Champollion, whose many requests for exemption from the draft he remembered, and he asked him how his important work was progressing. Champollion replied, that he had just finished his Coptic grammar and dictionary. Napoleon requested that he send the manuscripts to Paris for publication. His brother Jacques joined the Napoleonic cause, putting both of the brothers in danger at the end of the Hundred Days when Napoleon was finally defeated, Grenoble being the last city to resist the royalist advances. In spite of the risk to themselves, having been put under Royalist surveillance, the Champollion brothers nonetheless aided the Napoleonic general Drouet d'Erlon who had been sentenced to death for his participation in the Battle of Waterloo, giving him shelter and helping him escape to Munich. The brothers were condemned to internal exile in Figeac, and Champollion was removed from his university post in Grenoble and the faculty closed.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Under the new Royalist regime, the Champollion brothers invested much of their time and efforts in establishing Lancaster schools, in an effort to provide the general population with education. This was considered a revolutionary undertaking by the Ultra-royalists, who did not believe that education should be made accessible for the lower classes. In 1821 Champollion even led an uprising, in which he and a band of Grenobleans stormed the citadel and hoisted the tricolore instead of the Bourbon Royalist flag. He was charged with treason and went into hiding but was eventually pardoned.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Champollion first declared his love for Pauline Berriat in 1807. Pauline was Zoé's sister, and thus his sister-in-law. His love was not reciprocated, so Champollion instead had an affair with a married woman named Louise Deschamps that lasted until around 1809. In 1811, Louise remarried and Pauline died in 1813.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: It was around this time that Champollion met Rosine Blanc (1794–1871), whom he married in 1818, after four years of engagement. They had one daughter, Zoraïde Chéronnet-Champollion (1824–1889). Rosine was the daughter of a well-to-do family of Grenoblean glovemakers. At first, her father did not approve of the match, since Champollion was a mere assistant professor when they first met, but with his increasing reputation, he eventually agreed. Originally, Jacques-Joseph was opposed to his brother's marriage, too, finding Rosine too dull-witted, and he did not attend the wedding, but later he grew fond of his sister in-law. Although a happy family man, especially adoring his daughter, Champollion was frequently away for months or even years at a time, as he was traveling to Paris, to Italy, and to Egypt, while his family remained in Zoé and Jacques-Joseph's property in Vif, near Grenoble. While in Livorno, Champollion developed an infatuation with an Italian poet, Angelica Palli. She presented an ode to Champollion's work at a celebration in his honor, and the two exchanged letters over the period 1826–1829 revealing the poor state of Champollion's marriage, yet an affair never developed.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: The Egyptian hieroglyphs had been well known to scholars of the ancient world for centuries, but few had made any attempts to understand them. Many based their speculations about the script in the writings of Horapollon who considered the symbols to be ideographic, not representing any specific spoken language. Athanasius Kircher for example had stated that the hieroglyphs were symbols that "cannot be translated by words, but expressed only by marks, characters and figures", meaning that the script was in essence impossible to ever decipher. Others considered that the use of the hieroglyphs in Egyptian society was limited to the religious sphere and that they represented esoteric concepts within a universe of religious meaning that was now lost. But Kircher had been the first to suggest that modern Coptic was a degenerate form of the language found in the Egyptian demotic script, and he had correctly suggested the phonetic value of one hieroglyph – that of "mu," the Coptic word for water. With the onset of Egyptomania in France in the early 19th century, scholars began approaching the question of the hieroglyphs with renewed interest, but still without a basic idea about whether the script was phonetic or ideographic, and whether the texts represented profane topics or sacred mysticism. This early work was mostly speculative, with no methodology for how to corroborate suggested readings. The first methodological advances were Joseph de Guignes' discovery that cartouches identified the names of rulers, and George Zoëga's compilation of a catalogue of hieroglyphs, and discovery that the direction of reading depended on the direction in which the glyphs were facing.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Champollion's interest in Egyptian history and the hieroglyphic script developed at an early age. At the age of sixteen, he gave a lecture before the Grenoble Academy in which he argued that the language spoken by the ancient Egyptians, in which they wrote the Hieroglyphic texts, was closely related to Coptic. This view proved crucial in becoming able to read the texts, and the correctness of his proposed relation between Coptic and Ancient Egyptian has been confirmed by history. This enabled him to propose that the demotic script represented the Coptic language.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Already in 1806, he wrote to his brother about his decision to become the one to decipher the Egyptian script:


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: In 1808, Champollion received a scare when French Archeologist Alexandre Lenoir published the first of his four volumes on "Nouvelles Explications des Hieroglyphes", making the young scholar fear that his budding work had already been surpassed. But he was relieved to find that Lenoir still operated under the assumption that the hieroglyphs were mystic symbols and not a literary system expressing language. This experience made him even more determined to be the first to decipher the language and he began dedicating himself even more to the study of Coptic, writing in 1809 to his brother: "I give myself up entirely to Coptic ... I wish to know Egyptian like my French, because on that language will be based my great work on the Egyptian papyri." That same year, he was appointed to his first academic post, in history and politics at the University of Grenoble.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: In 1811, Champollion was embroiled in controversy, as Étienne Marc Quatremère, like Champollion a student of Silvestre de Sacy, published his "Mémoires géographiques et historiques sur l'Égypte ... sur quelques contrées voisines". Champollion saw himself forced to publish as a stand-alone paper the "Introduction" to his work in progress "L'Egypte sous les pharaons ou recherches sur la géographie, la langue, les écritures et l'histoire de l'Egypte avant l'invasion de Cambyse" (1814). Because of the similarities in the topic matter, and the fact that Champollion's work was published after Quatremère's, allegations arose that Champollion had plagiarized the work of Quatremère. Even Silvestre de Sacy, the mentor of both authors, considered the possibility, to Champollion's great chagrin.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: British polymath Thomas Young was one of the first to attempt decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, basing his own work on the investigations of Swedish diplomat Johan David Åkerblad. Young and Champollion first became aware of each other's work in 1814 when Champollion wrote to the Royal Society of which Young was the secretary, requesting better transcriptions of the Rosetta stone, to Young's irritation, arrogantly implying that he would be able to quickly decipher the script if he only had better copies. Young had at that time spent several months working unsuccessfully on the Rosetta text using Åkerblad's decipherments. In 1815, Young replied in the negative, arguing that the French transcriptions were equally good as the British ones, and added that "I do not doubt that the collective efforts of savants, such as M. Åkerblad and yourself, Monsieur, who have so much deepened the study of the Coptic language, might have already succeeded in giving a more perfect translation than my own, which is drawn almost entirely from a very laborious comparison of its different parts and with the Greek translation". This was the first Champollion had heard of Young's research, and realizing that he also had a competitor in London was not to Champollion's liking.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: In his work on the Rosetta stone, Young proceeded mathematically without identifying the language of the text. For example, comparing the number of times a word appeared in the Greek text with the Egyptian text, he was able to point out which glyphs spelled the word "king", but he was unable to read the word. Using Åkerblad's decipherment of the demotic letters "p" and "t", he realized that there were phonetic elements in the writing of the name Ptolemy. He correctly read the signs for "p", "t","m", "i", and "s", but rejected several other signs as "inessential" and misread others, due to the lack of a systematic approach. Young called the Demotic script ""enchorial"", and resented Champollion's term ""demotic"" considering it bad form that he had invented a new name for it instead of using Young's. Young corresponded with Sacy, now no longer Champollion's mentor but his rival, who advised Young not to share his work with Champollion and described Champollion as a charlatan. Consequently, for several years Young kept key texts from Champollion and shared little of his data and notes.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: When Champollion submitted his Coptic grammar and dictionary for publication in 1815, it was blocked by Silvestre de Sacy, who in addition to his personal animosity and envy towards Champollion also resented his Napoleonic affinities. During his exile in Figeac, Champollion spent his time revising the grammar and doing local archeological work, being for a time cut off from being able to continue his research.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: In 1817, Champollion read a review of his ""Égypte sous les pharaons"", published by an anonymous Englishman, which was largely favorable and encouraged Champollion to return to his former research. Champollion's biographers have suggested that the review was written by Young, who often published anonymously, but Robinson, who wrote biographies of both Young and Champollion, considers it unlikely, since Young elsewhere had been highly critical of that particular work. Soon Champollion returned to Grenoble to seek employment again at the university, which was in the process of reopening the faculty of Philosophy and Letters. He succeeded, obtaining a chair in history and geography, and used his time to visit the Egyptian collections in Italian museums. Nonetheless, most of his time in the following years was consumed by his teaching work.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Meanwhile, Young kept working on the Rosetta stone, and in 1819, he published a major article on "Egypt" in the "Encyclopædia Britannica" claiming that he had discovered the principle behind the script. He had correctly identified only a small number of phonetic values for glyphs, but also made some eighty approximations of correspondences between Hieroglyphic and demotic. Young had also correctly identified several logographs, and the grammatical principle of pluralization, distinguishing correctly between the singular, dual and plural forms of nouns. Young nonetheless considered the hieroglyphic, linear or cursive hieroglyphs (which he called hieratic) and a third script which he called epistolographic or enchorial, to belong to different historical periods and to represent different evolutionary stages of the script with increasing phoneticism. He failed to distinguish between hieratic and demotic, considering them a single script. Young was also able to identify correctly the hieroglyphic form of the name of Ptolemy V, whose name had been identified by Åkerblad in the demotic script only. Nonetheless, he only assigned the correct phonetic values to some of the signs in the name, incorrectly dismissing one glyph, the one for "o", as unnecessary, and assigning partially correct values to the signs for "m", "l", and "s". He also read the name of Berenice, but here only managed to correctly identify the letter "n". Young was furthermore convinced that only in the late period had some foreign names been written entirely in phonetic signs, whereas he believed that native Egyptian names and all texts from the earlier period were written in ideographic signs. Several scholars have suggested that Young's true contribution to Egyptology was his decipherment of the Demotic script, in which he made the first major advances, correctly identifying it as being composed of both ideographic and phonetic signs. Nevertheless, for some reason Young never considered that the same might be the case with the hieroglyphs.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Later the British Egyptologist Sir Peter Le Page Renouf summed up Young's method: 'He worked mechanically, like the schoolboy who finding in a translation that "Arma virumque" means 'Arms and the man," reads "Arma" "arms," "virum" "and", "que" "the man." He is sometimes right, but very much oftener wrong, and no one is able to distinguish between his right and his wrong results until the right method has been discovered.' Nonetheless, at the time it was clear that Young's work superseded everything Champollion had by then published on the script.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Although dismissive of Young's work even before he had read it, Champollion obtained a copy of the Encyclopedia article. Even though he was suffering from failing health, and the chicanery of the Ultras kept him struggling to maintain his job, it motivated him to return in earnest to the study of the hieroglyphs. When he was eventually removed from his professorship by the Royalist faction, he finally had the time to work on it exclusively. While he awaited trial for treason, he produced a short manuscript, "De l'écriture hiératique des anciens Égyptiens", in which he argued that the hieratic script was simply a modified form of hieroglyphic writing. Young had already anonymously published an argument to the same effect several years earlier in an obscure journal, but Champollion, having been cut off from academia, had probably not read it. In addition Champollion made the fatal error of claiming that the hieratic script was entirely ideographic. Champollion himself was never proud of this work and reportedly actively tried to suppress it by buying the copies and destroying them.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: These errors were finally corrected later that year when Champollion correctly identified the hieratic script as being based on the hieroglyphic script, but used exclusively on papyrus, whereas the hieroglyphic script was used on stone, and demotic used by the people. Previously, it had been questioned whether the three scripts even represented the same language; and hieroglyphic had been considered a purely ideographic script, whereas hieratic and demotic were considered alphabetic. Young, in 1815, had been the first to suggest that the demotic was not alphabetic, but rather a mixture of "imitations of hieroglyphics" and "alphabetic" signs. Champollion on the other hand correctly considered the scripts to coincide almost entirely, being in essence different formal versions of the same script.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: In the same year, he identified the hieroglyphic script on the Rosetta stone as being written in a mixture of ideograms and phonetic signs, just as Young had argued for Demotic. He reasoned that if the script was entirely ideographic the hieroglyphic text would require as many separate signs as there were separate words in the Greek text. But there were in fact fewer, suggesting that the script mixed ideographic and phonetic signs. This realization finally made it possible for him to detach himself from the idea that the different scripts had to be either fully ideographic or fully phonetic, and he recognized it as being much more complex mixture of sign types. This realization gave him a distinct advantage.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Using the fact that it was known that names of rulers appeared in cartouches, he focused on reading names of rulers as Young had initially tried. Champollion managed to isolate a number of sound values for signs, by comparing the Greek and Hieroglyphic versions of the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra – correcting Young's readings in several instances.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: In 1822 Champollion received transcriptions of the text on the recently discovered Philae obelisk, which enabled him to double check his readings of the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra from the Rosetta stone. The name "Cleopatra" had already been identified on the Philae obelisk by William John Bankes, who scribbled the identification in the margin of the plate though without any actual reading of the individual glyphs. Young and others would later use the fact that the Cleopatra cartouche had been identified by Bankes to claim that Champollion had plagiarized his work. It remains unknown whether Champollion saw Bankes' margin note identifying the cartouche or whether he identified it by himself. All in all, using this method he managed to determine the phonetic value of 12 signs (A, AI, E, K, L, M, O, P, R, S, and T). By applying these to the decipherment of further sounds he soon read dozens of other names.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Astronomer Jean-Baptiste Biot published a proposed decipherment of the controversial Dendera zodiac, arguing that the small stars following certain signs referred to constellations. Champollion published a response in the "Revue encyclopédique", demonstrating that they were in fact grammatical signs, which he called "signs of the type", today called "determinatives". Young had identified the first determinative "divine female", but Champollion now identified several others. He presented the progress before the academy where it was well received, and even his former mentor-turned-archenemy, de Sacy, praised it warmly, leading to a reconciliation between the two.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: The main breakthrough in his decipherment was when he was also able to read the verb MIS related to birth, by comparing the Coptic verb for birth with the phonetic signs MS and the appearance of references to birthday celebrations in the Greek text. It was on 14 September 1822, while comparing his readings to a set of new texts from Abu Simbel that he made the realization. Running down the street to find his brother he yelled ""Je tiens mon affaire!"" (I've got it!) but collapsed from the excitement. Champollion subsequently spent the short period from 14 to 22 September writing up his results.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: While the name Thutmose had also been identified (but not read) by Young who realized that the first syllable was spelled with a depiction of an ibis representing Thoth, Champollion was able to read the phonetic spelling of the second part of the word, and check it against the mentioning of births in the Rosetta stone. This finally confirmed to Champollion that the ancient texts as well as the recent ones used the same writing system, and that it was a system that mixed logographic and phonetic principles.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: A week later on 27 September 1822, he published some of his findings in his "Lettre à M. Dacier", addressed to Bon-Joseph Dacier, secretary of the Paris "Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres". The handwritten letter was originally addressed to De Sacy, but Champollion crossed out the letter of his mentor turned adversary, substituting the name of Dacier, who had faithfully supported his efforts. Champollion read the letter before the assembled "Académie". All his main rivals and supporters were present at the reading, including Young who happened to be visiting Paris. This was the first meeting between the two. The presentation did not go into details regarding the script and in fact was surprisingly cautious in its suggestions. Although he must have been already certain of this, Champollion merely suggested that the script was phonetic already from the earliest available texts, which would mean that the Egyptians had developed writing independently of the other civilizations around the Mediterranean. The paper also still contained confusions regarding the relative role of ideographic and phonetic signs, still arguing that also hieratic and demotic were primarily ideographic.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Scholars have speculated that there had simply not been sufficient time between his breakthrough and collapse to fully incorporate the discovery into his thinking. But the paper presented many new phonetic readings of names of rulers, demonstrating clearly that he had made a major advance in deciphering the phonetic script. And it finally settled the question of the dating of the Dendera zodiac, by reading the cartouche that had been erroneously read as "Arsinoë" by Young, in its correct reading ""autocrator"" (Emperor in Greek).


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: He was congratulated by the amazed audience including de Sacy and Young. Young and Champollion became acquainted over the next days, Champollion sharing many of his notes with Young and inviting him to visit at his house, and the two parted on friendly terms.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: At first Young was appreciative of Champollion's success, writing in a letter to his friend that "If he [Champollion] did borrow an English key, the lock was so dreadfully rusty that no common arm would have had strength enough to turn it. ... .You will easily believe that were I ever so much the victim of the bad passions, I should feel nothing but exultation at Mr. Champollion's success: my life seems indeed to be lengthened by the accession of a junior coadjutor in my researches, and of a person too, who is so much more versed in the different dialects of the Egyptian language than myself."


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Nonetheless, the relation between them quickly deteriorated, as Young began to feel that he was being denied due credit for his own "first steps" in the decipherment. Also, because of the tense political climate between England and France in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, there was little inclination to accept Champollion's decipherments as valid among the English. When Young later read the published copy of the "lettre" he was offended that he himself was mentioned only twice, and one of those times being harshly critiqued for his failure in deciphering the name "Berenice". Young was further disheartened because Champollion at no point recognized his work as having provided the platform from which decipherment had finally been reached. He grew increasingly angry with Champollion, and shared his feelings with his friends who encouraged him to rebut with a new publication. When by a stroke of luck a Greek translation of a well-known demotic papyrus came into his possession later that year, he did not share that important finding with Champollion. In an anonymous review of the "lettre" Young attributed the discovery of the hieratic as a form of hieroglyphs to de Sacy and described Champollion's decipherments merely as an extension of Åkerblad and Young's work. Champollion recognized that Young was the author, and sent him a rebuttal of the review, while maintaining the charade of the anonymous review. Furthermore, Young, in his 1823 "An Account of Some Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphical Literature and Egyptian Antiquities, including the author's original alphabet, as extended by Mr. Champollion", he complained that "however Mr Champollion may have arrived at his conclusions, I admit them, with the greatest pleasure and gratitude, not by any means as superseding my system, but as fully confirming and extending it."(p. 146).


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: In France, Champollion's success also produced enemies. Edmé-Francois Jomard was chief among them, and he spared no occasion to belittle Champollion's achievements behind his back, pointing out that Champollion had never been to Egypt and suggesting that really his "lettre" represented no major progress from Young's work. Jomard had been insulted by Champollion's demonstration of the young age of the Dendera zodiac, which he had himself proposed was as old as 15,000 years. This exact finding had also brought Champollion in the good graces of many priests of the Catholic Church who had been antagonized by the claims that Egyptian civilization might be older than their accepted chronology, according to which the earth was only 6,000 years old.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Young's claims that the new decipherments were merely a corroboration of his own method, meant that Champollion would have to publish more of his data to make clear the degree to which his own progress built on a systematicity that was not found in Young's work. He realized that he would have to make it apparent to all that his was a total system of decipherment, whereas Young had merely deciphered a few words. Over the next year he published a series of booklets about the Egyptian gods, including some decipherments of their names.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Building on his progress, Champollion now began to study other texts in addition to the Rosetta stone, studying a series of much older inscriptions from Abu Simbel. During 1822, he succeeded in identifying the names of pharaohs Ramesses and Thutmose written in cartouches in these ancient texts. With the help of a new acquaintance, the Duke de Blacas in 1824, Champollion finally published the "Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens Égyptiens" dedicated to and funded by King Louis XVIII. Here he presented the first correct translation of the hieroglyphs and the key to the Egyptian grammatical system.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: In the "Précis", Champollion referred to Young's 1819 claim of having deciphered the script when he wrote that:


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: This task was exactly what Champollion set out to accomplish in the Précis, and the entire framing of the argument was as a rebuttal to "M. le docteur Young", and the translation in his 1819 article which Champollion brushed off as "a conjectural translation".


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: Champollion never admitted any debt to Young's work, although in 1828, a year before his death, Young was appointed to the French Academy of Sciences, with Champollion's support.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: The "Précis", which comprised over 450 ancient Egyptian words and hieroglyphics groupings, cemented Champollion as having the main claim to the decipherment of the hieroglyphs. In 1825, his former teacher and enemy Silvestre de Sacy reviewed his work positively stating that it was already well "beyond the need for confirmation". In the same year, Henry Salt put Champollion's decipherment to the test, successfully using it to read further inscriptions. He published a corroboration of Champollion's system, in which he also criticized Champollion for not acknowledging his dependence on Young's work.


title: Jean-François Champollion

text: With his work on the "Précis", Champollion realized that in order to advance further he needed more texts, and transcriptions of better quality. This caused him to spend the next years visiting collections and monuments in Italy, where he realized that many of the transcriptions from which he had been working had been inaccurate – hindering the decipherment; he made a point of making his own copies of as many texts as possible. During his time in Italy, he met the Pope, who congratulated him on having done a "great service to the Church," by which he was referring to the counter arguments he had provided against the challengers to the Biblical chronology. Champollion was ambivalent, but the Pope's support helped him in his efforts to secure funds for an expedition.


title: Tenrec

text: A tenrec is any species of mammal within the afrotherian family Tenrecidae endemic to Madagascar. Tenrecs are wildly diverse; as a result of convergent evolution some resemble hedgehogs, shrews, opossums, rats, and mice. They occupy aquatic, arboreal, terrestrial and fossorial environments. Some of these species, including the greater hedgehog tenrec, can be found in the Madagascar dry deciduous forests. However, the speciation rate in this group has been higher in humid forests.


title: Tenrec

text: All tenrecs are believed to descend from a common ancestor that lived 29–37 million years (Ma) ago after rafting over from Africa. The split from their closest relatives, African otter shrews, is estimated to have occurred about 47–53 Ma ago.


title: Tenrec

text: The word "tenrec" is borrowed, via French, from the Malagasy word (variant of ), which refers to the Tailless tenrec ("Tenrec ecaudatus"); the Malagasy word is related to .


title: Tenrec

text: Tenrecs are believed to have evolved from a single species that colonized Madagascar between 42 and 25 million years ago. The question of how this family reached Madagascar is still unclear, but the leading hypothesis suggests a small number of individuals may have found themselves on floating vegetation and crossed the Mozambique Channel, which separates Madagascar from southeastern Africa. The family Tenrecidae is one of only four extant terrestrial mammal lineages to have colonized and diversified on Madagascar.


title: Tenrec

text: Once established on Madagascar, tenrecs diversified to occupy various niches on the island. Many evolved resemblances to familiar but unrelated mammals that are not found on Madagascar. For example, the two species of hedgehog tenrec possess coats of hardened spines and the ability to roll into a ball when threatened; characteristics similar to those of true hedgehogs. This example, along with others, demonstrates convergent evolution, and has provided evolutionary biologists with opportunities to study adaptation over evolutionary timescales.


title: Tenrec

text: Tenrecs are small mammals of variable body form. The smallest species are the size of shrews, with a body length of around , and weighing just , while the largest, the common or tailless tenrec, is in length, and can weigh over . Although they may resemble shrews, hedgehogs, or opossums, they are not closely related to any of these groups, their closest relatives being the otter shrews, and after that, other African insectivorous mammals, such as golden moles and elephant shrews. The common ancestry of these animals, in the group Afrotheria, was not recognized until the late 1990s. Continuing work on the molecular and morphological diversity of afrotherian mammals has provided ever increasing support for their common ancestry.


title: Tenrec

text: Unusually among placental mammals, the anus and urogenital tracts of tenrecs share a common opening, or cloaca, a feature more commonly seen in birds, reptiles, and amphibians. They have a low body temperature, sufficiently so that they do not require a scrotum to cool their sperm as do most other mammals.


title: Tenrec

text: All species appear to be at least somewhat omnivorous, with invertebrates forming the largest part of their diets. One species, "Microgale mergulus", is semiaquatic (similar to the lifestyle of their closest relatives, the otter shrews). All of the species, semiaquatic or not, appear to have evolved from a single, common ancestor, with the otter shrews comprising the next, most-closely related mammalian species. While the fossil record of tenrecs is scarce, at least some specimens from the early Miocene of Kenya show close affinities to living species from Madagascar, such as "Geogale aurita".


title: Tenrec

text: Most species are nocturnal and have poor eyesight. Their other senses are well developed, however, and they have especially sensitive whiskers. As with many of their other features, the dental formula of tenrecs varies greatly between species; they can have from 32 to 42 teeth in total. Unusual for mammals, the permanent dentition in tenrecs tends not to completely erupt until well after adult body size has been reached. This is one of several anatomical features shared by elephants, hyraxes, sengis, and golden moles (but apparently not aardvarks), consistent with their descent from a common ancestor.


title: Tenrec

text: Tenrecs have a gestation period of 50 to 64 days, and give birth to a number of relatively undeveloped young. While the otter shrews have just two young per litter, the tailless tenrec can have as many as 32, and females possess up to 29 teats, more than any other mammal. At least some tenrec species are social, living in multigenerational family groups with over a dozen individuals.


title: Tenrec

text: In the island nation of Mauritius, and also on the Comoran island of Mayotte, some of the inhabitants eat tenrec meat, though it is difficult to obtain (as it is not sold in shops or markets) and difficult to prepare correctly.


title: Tenrec

text: The lesser hedgehog tenrec ("Echinops telfairi") is one of 16 mammalian species that will have its genome sequenced as part of the Mammalian Genome Project. It is increasingly popular in the pet trade, and in the future may serve as an important model organism in biomedicine, as it is only distantly related to the mice, rats, guinea pigs, and rhesus macaques that comprise the most common research animals.


title: Tenrec

text: Of the 31 species assessed, 24 (77%) are categorized by the IUCN Red List as Least Concern, 1 species as Data Deficient, 4 species as Vulnerable, and 2 species as Endangered.


title: Tenrec

text: The conservation status of many tenrec species is of concern due to an increase of threats within the last 50 years. The main threats facing tenrecs include habitat loss due to deforestation, fragmentation and degradation, hunting, incidental capture, and climate change. Slash-and-burn agriculture, as well as commercial logging and mining of metals is negatively affecting tenrec species that inhabit forests. Five of the six threatened Tenrec species are dependent on forest habitats.


title: Tenrec

text: As of 2022, conservation of the tenrec population is not being prioritized. Because most tenrecs are dependent on forest habitats, conservation efforts would need to include a focus on reduction in deforestation on Madagascar as well as habitat restoration. Current conservation efforts include that of the Madagascar Ankizy Fund, started by a paleontological team from Stony Brook University to improve access to health care and education facilities for villagers in remote areas of Madagascar. A healthy and educated local human population will, in the long term, benefit the Malagasy fauna, such as tenrecs.


title: XM2001 Crusader

text: The XM2001 Crusader was to be the United States Army's next-generation self-propelled howitzer (SPH), designed to improve the survivability, lethality, mobility, and effectiveness of the artillery as well as the overall force. It was initially scheduled for fielding by 2008. United Defense was the prime contractor; General Dynamics the major subcontractor. In early May 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld cancelled the US$11 billion program because he considered it neither mobile nor precise enough. The prototype SPH vehicle is on display at the cannon park at Fort Sill.


title: XM2001 Crusader

text: The Crusader was conceived as the Advanced Field Artillery System (AFAS), part of a family of vehicles built around a common chassis in the Armored Systems Modernization program. In October 1992, the Army canceled Armored Systems Modernization due to changing budgetary priorities caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union.