My Science School

During his 13-year reign as the king of Macedonia, Alexander created one of the largest empires of the ancient world, stretching from Greece to northwestern India.  

Alexander was born in 356 B.C.E. in Pella, Macedonia, to King Philip II. As a young boy, Alexander was taught to read, write, and play the lyre. He developed a life-long love of reading and music. When Alexander was a teenager, his father hired Aristotle to be his private tutor. He studied with Aristotle for three years and from Aristotle’s teachings, Alexander developed a love of science, particularly of medicine and botany. Alexander included botanists and scientists in his army to study the lands he conquered.

Alexander built many new cities in the lands he conquered, including Alexandria in Egypt. He went on to conquer the lands of the Persian Empire, establishing more cities, and like Alexandria, often naming them after himself. His conquest continued through Asia until he reached the shores of the Ganga (Ganges) River in India. At this point, his army refused to continue further into India, exhausted and discouraged by heavy rains.

 

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In July of 64 A.D., a great fire ravaged Rome for six days, destroying 70 percent of the city and leaving half its population homeless. According to a well-known expression, Rome’s emperor at the time, the decadent and unpopular Nero, “fiddled while Rome burned.” The expression has a double meaning: Not only did Nero play music while his people suffered, but he was an ineffectual leader in a time of crisis. 

It’s been pretty easy to cast blame on Nero, who had many enemies and is remembered as one of history’s most sadistic and cruelest leaders—but there are a couple of problems with this story.

When the Great Fire broke out, Nero was at his villa at Antium, some 35 miles from Rome. Though he immediately returned and began relief measures, people still didn’t trust him. Some even believed he had ordered the fire started, especially after he used land cleared by the fire to build his Golden Palace and its surrounding pleasure gardens. 

 

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The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815, near Waterloo in Belgium, part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands at the time. A French army under the command of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by two of the armies of the Seventh Coalition, a British-led coalition consisting of units from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Hanover, Brunswick and Nassau, under the command of the Duke of Wellington, referred to by many authors as the Anglo-allied army or Wellington's army, and a Prussian army under the command of Field Marshal von Blücher, referred also as Blücher's army. The battle marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Waterloo was the decisive engagement of the Waterloo Campaign and Napoleon's last. According to Wellington, the battle was "the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life". Napoleon abdicated four days later, and coalition forces entered Paris on 7 July. The defeat at Waterloo ended Napoleon's rule as Emperor of the French and marked the end of his Hundred Days return from exile. This ended the First French Empire and set a chronological milestone between serial European wars and decades of relative peace, often referred to as the Pax Britannica. The battlefield is located in the Belgian municipalities of Braine-l'Alleud and Lasne, about 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) south of Brussels, and about 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the town of Waterloo. The site of the battlefield today is dominated by the monument of the Lion's Mound, a large artificial hill constructed from earth taken from the battlefield itself; the topography of the battlefield near the mound has not been preserved.

 

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1. Largest religious monument

Angkor Wat spread over 160 hectares, is considered to be the largest religious monument in the world by land area. The temple complex in Cambodia was built by Khmer King Suryavarman II in the early 12th Century. The complex was initially constructed as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu. However, it gradually transformed into a Buddhist temple towards the end of the 12th Century. Today, it is described by many as a Hindu-Buddhist temple.

2. A national symbol

Angkor Wat features on the national flag of Cambodia. It is one among a handful of monuments that feature on the national flags of their respective countries. The only other Asian country with a monument on the flag is Afghanistan.

3. Represents Mount Meru

The temple's design is said to represent Mount Menu, the home of the Gods, according to Hindu mythology. The five towers of the temple are intended to recreate the five peaks of Mount Meru, while the walls and the moat below honour the surrounding mountain ranges and the sea.

4. Oriented to the West

While most Hindu temples are oriented to the East, Angkor Wat is oriented to the West. While there is no conclusive evidence of why this is so, many researchers believe that Suryavarman intended Angkor Wat to serve as his funerary temple.

5. An underground city?

A forensic aerial mapping of Angkor conducted by archaeologists Damian Evans and Jean-Baptiste Chevance, using ground-sensing radar, discovered the lost city of 'Mahendraparvata', located nearly 40 km from the Angkor Wat, in 2012. This city is believed to be the template of Angkor and its great temple. Since its discovery, the lost city has proved to be even bigger than what the archaeologists had expected.

 

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The Little Mermaid (Danish: Den lille Havfrue) is a bronze statue by Edvard Eriksen, depicting a mermaid becoming human. The sculpture is displayed on a rock by the waterside at the Langelinie promenade in Copenhagen, Denmark. It is 1.25 metres (4.1 ft) tall and weighs 175 kilograms (385 lb).

Based on the 1837 fairy tale of the same name by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, the small and unimposing statue is a Copenhagen icon and has been a major tourist attraction since its unveiling in 1913. In recent decades it has become a popular target for defacement by vandals and political activists.

The statue was commissioned in 1909 by Carl Jacobsen, son of the founder of Carlsberg, who had been fascinated by a ballet about the fairytale in Copenhagen's Royal Theatre and asked the ballerina, Ellen Price, to model for the statue. The sculptor Edvard Eriksen created the bronze statue, which was unveiled on August 23, 1913. The statue's head was modelled after Price, but as the ballerina did not agree to model in the nude, the sculptor's wife, Eline Eriksen, was used for the body.

The Copenhagen City Council arranged to move the statue to Shanghai at the Danish Pavilion for the duration of the Expo 2010 (May to October), the first time it had been moved officially from its perch since it was installed almost a century earlier. While the statue was away in Shanghai an authorised copy was displayed on a rock in the lake in Copenhagen's nearby Tivoli Gardens. Copenhagen officials have considered moving the statue several meters out into the harbour to discourage vandalism and to prevent tourists from climbing onto it, but as of May 2014 the statue remains on dry land at the water side at Langelinie.

 

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The Thiruvalluvar Statue, or the Valluvar Statue, is a 41-metre-tall (133 ft) stone sculpture of the Tamil poet and philosopher Valluvar, author of the Tirukkural, an ancient Tamil work on Dharmic and morality. It is located atop a small island near the town of Kanyakumari on the southernmost point of the Indian peninsula on the Coromandel Coast, where two seas (the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea) and an ocean (the Indian Ocean) meet. The statue was sculpted by the Indian sculptor V. Ganapati Sthapati, who also created the Iraivan Temple, and was unveiled on the millennium day of 1 January 2000 by the then Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi. It is currently the 25th tallest statue in India.

The combined height of the statue and pedestal is 133 feet (41 metres), denoting the 133 chapters of the Tirukkural. This includes 95 feet (29 metres) sculpture of Valluvar standing upon a 38 feet (12 metres) pedestal that represents the 38 chapters of Virtue, the first of the three books of the Kural text. The statue itself represents the second and third books of the Kural text, namely, Wealth and Love. The whole design signifies that wealth and love be earned and enjoyed on the foundation of solid virtue. The right hand of the statue with three fingers pointing skywards signifies the three cantos of the Kural text, namely, Aram, Porul, and Inbam (Virtue, Wealth, and Love, respectively), combined. The head of the statue stands at a height of 61 metres (200 ft) above the sea level.

To prevent the statue from corrosion due to sea breeze, the statue is chemically treated once in four years. The salty deposits in every joint are removed and replaced with new cement mixture. Paper pulp is then applied on the whole of the statue. As the paper pulp coating dries, it absorbs the salty deposits completely, after which it is removed.

The statue has been thus treated three times since its unveiling. The fourth treatment began on 17 April 2017 and is completed by 15 October 2017.

 

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The Thinker, French Le Penseur, sculpture of a pensive nude male by French artist Auguste Rodin, one of his most well-known works. Many marble and bronze editions in several sizes were executed in Rodin’s lifetime and after, but the most famous version is the 6-foot (1.8-metre) bronze statue (commonly called a monumental) cast in 1904 that sits in the gardens of the Rodin Museum in Paris. The large muscular figure has captivated audiences for decades in his moment of concentrated introspection.

The Thinker has been cast in multiple versions and is found around the world, but the history of the progression from models to castings is still not entirely clear. About 28 monumental-sized bronze casts are in museums and public places. In addition, there are sculptures of different study-sized scales and plaster versions (often painted bronze) in both monumental and study sizes. Some newer castings have been produced posthumously and are not considered part of the original production.

Rodin made the first small plaster version around 1881. The first full-scale model was presented at the Salon des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1904. A public subscription financed a bronze casting in 1906, which became the property of the City of Paris, and was put in front of the Panthéon. In 1922, it was moved to the Hôtel Biron, which had been transformed into the Rodin Museum.

A bronze cast of the sculpture can be found in front of Grawemeyer Hall on the University of Louisville Belknap Campus in Louisville, Kentucky. It was made in Paris and was first displayed at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, then given to the city. This sculpture was the only cast created by the lost-wax casting method.

 

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Easter Island is famous for its stone statues of human figures, known as moai (meaning “statue”). The island is known to its inhabitants as Rapa Nui. The moai were probably carved to commemorate important ancestors and were made from around 1000 C.E. until the second half of the seventeenth century. Over a few hundred years the inhabitants of this remote island quarried, carved and erected around 887 moai. The size and complexity of the moai increased over time, and it is believed that Hoa Hakananai'a (below) dates to around 1200 C.E. It is one of only fourteen moai made from basalt, the rest are carved from the island’s softer volcanic tuff. With the adoption of Christianity in the 1860s, the remaining standing moai were toppled.

The production and transportation of the more than 900 statues is considered a remarkable creative and physical feat. The tallest mo?ai erected, called Paro, was almost 10 metres (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tonnes (80.7 tons). The heaviest mo?ai erected was a shorter but squatter mo?ai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing 86 tonnes (84.6 tons). One unfinished sculpture, if completed, would have been approximately 21 m (69 ft) tall, with a weight of about 145–165 tons. The mo?ai were toppled in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, possibly as a result of European contact or internecine tribal wars.

 

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One of the most mysterious and powerful women in ancient Egypt, Nefertiti was queen alongside Pharaoh Akhenaten from 1353 to 1336 B.C. and may have ruled the New Kingdom outright after her husband’s death. Her reign was a time of tremendous cultural upheaval, as Akhenaten reoriented Egypt’s religious and political structure around the worship of the sun god Aten. Nefertiti is best known for her painted sandstone bust, which was rediscovered in 1913 and became a global icon of feminine beauty and power.

Nefertiti may have been the daughter of Ay, a top adviser who would go on to become pharaoh after King Tut’s death in 1323 B.C. On the walls of tombs and temples built during Akhenaten’s reign Nefertiti is depicted alongside her husband with a frequency seen for no other Egyptian queen. In many cases she is shown in positions of power and authority—leading worship of Aten, driving a chariot or smiting an enemy.

After Nefertiti had given birth to six daughters, her husband began taking other wives, including his own sister, with whom he fathered the future King Tut (Tutankhamen). Nefertiti’s third daughter Ankhesenpaaten would eventually become her half-brother Tutankhamen’s queen.

On December 6, 1913, a team led by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt discovered a sculpture buried upside-down in the sandy rubble on the floor of the excavated workshop of the royal sculptor Thutmose in Amarna. The painted figure featured a slender neck, gracefully proportioned face and a curious blue cylindrical headpiece of a style only seen in images of Nefertiti. Borchardt’s team had an agreement to split its artifacts with the Egyptian government, so the bust was shipped as part of Germany’s portion. A single, poor photograph was published in an archaeological journal and the bust was given to the expedition’s funder, Jacques Simon, who displayed it for the next 11 years in his private residence.

In 1922 British Egyptologist Howard Carter discovered King Tut’s tomb. A flurry of international attention followed, and the image of Tut’s solid gold funerary mask was soon a global symbol of beauty, wealth and power.

 

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The Statue of Liberty was a gift from the French people commemorating the alliance of France and the United States during the American Revolution. Yet, it represented much more to those individuals who proposed the gift.

Apart from being the most famous monument in the world and not just in the United States, the statue also represents the friendship between France and the United States, who were allies when the Americans were fighting for freedom against the British. The statue is said to be America's most prized gift even today because of the message that it echoes across the world and helps portray the US as a beacon of freedom and liberty. The 134-year-old statue was a gift from the people of France to the United States and was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and engineer Gustave Eiffel, the maker of the Eiffel tower in Paris.

The project was announced by French political thinker Laboulaye following the war with Prussia in order to cement deeper ties with the US. At the start, the statue was given the name Liberty Enlightening the World, and a fundraising arm was set up in order to raise funds for the completion of the statue. The project faced a lot of setbacks but after several fundraising efforts, including one by Joseph Pulitzer, whose name is best known for the Pulitzer Prizes, the statue was completed and was installed at Liberty Island Manhattan, where it stands tall even today.  

 

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Venus of Willendorf, also called Woman of Willendorf or Nude Woman, Upper Paleolithic female figurine found in 1908 at Willendorf, Austria, that is perhaps the most familiar of some 40 small portable human figures (mostly female) that had been found intact or nearly so by the early 21st century. 

Very little is known about the Venus' origin, method of creation, or cultural significance; however, it is one of numerous "Venus figurines" surviving from Paleolithic Europe. The purpose of the carving is the subject of much speculation. Like other similar sculptures, it probably never had feet, and would not have stood on its own, although it might have been pegged into soft ground. Parts of the body associated with fertility and childbearing have been emphasized, leading some researchers to believe that the Venus of Willendorf and similar figurines may have been used as fertility fetishes. The figure has no visible face, her head being covered with circular horizontal bands of what might be rows of plaited hair, or perhaps a type of headdress.

Catherine McCoid and LeRoy McDermott hypothesize that the figurines may have been created as self-portraits by women. This theory stems from the correlation of the proportions of the statues to how the proportions of women's bodies would seem if they were looking down at themselves, which would have been the only way to view their bodies during this period. They speculate that the complete lack of facial features could be accounted for by the fact that sculptors did not own mirrors. This reasoning has been criticized by Michael S. Bisson, who notes that water pools and puddles would have been readily available natural mirrors for Paleolithic humans.

 

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Great Buddha Dordenma is a gigantic Shakyamuni Buddha statue in the mountains of Bhutan celebrating the 60th anniversary of fourth king Jigme Singye Wangchuck. The statue houses over one hundred thousand smaller Buddha statues, each of which, like the Great Buddha Dordenma itself, are made of bronze and gilded in gold. The Great Buddha Dordenma is sited amidst the ruins of Kuensel Phodrang, the palace of Sherab Wangchuk, the thirteenth Druk Desi, overlooking the southern approach to Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan. Construction began in 2006 and was planned to finish in October 2010, however construction did not conclude until 25 September 2015. The completed work is one of the largest Buddha rupas in the world, at 169 feet (52 m) and contains 100,000 8-inch-tall and 25,000 12-inch-tall gilded bronze Buddhas

Like the large Buddha, these thousands of miniature Buddhas are also gilded and made of bronze, a major reason that the statue cost almost $100 million to build when it was constructed in 2015 to honor the 60th birthday of Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the fourth king of Bhutan.

The statue also fulfils two prophecies. The first, foreseen by yogi Sonam Sangpo, is that a Buddhist statue would be built in the region to “bestow blessings, peace, and happiness to the whole world.” In addition, the statue is said to have been mentioned by Guru Padmasambhava, widely referred to as the “second Buddha,” in the eighth century. This statue kills two birds with one stone by fulfilling both prophecies in glimmering fashion.

 

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The 2001 destruction of the two giant Buddhas in Bamiyan is, by far, the most spectacular attack against the historical and cultural heritage of Afghanistan committed during the country’s recent period of turmoil.

The statues represented a later evolution of the classic blended style of Gandhara art. The statues consisted of the male Salsal ("light shines through the universe") and the (smaller) female Shamama ("Queen Mother"), as they were called by the locals. The main bodies were hewn directly from the sandstone cliffs, but details were modeled in mud mixed with straw, coated with stucco. This coating, practically all of which wore away long ago, was painted to enhance the expressions of the faces, hands, and folds of the robes; the larger one was painted carmine red and the smaller one was painted multiple colors. The lower parts of the statues' arms were constructed from the same mud-straw mix supported on wooden armatures. It is believed that the upper parts of their faces were made from great wooden masks or casts. The rows of holes that can be seen in photographs held wooden pegs that stabilized the outer stucco.

The Buddhas are surrounded by numerous caves and surfaces decorated with paintings. It is thought that the period of florescence was from the 6th to 8th century CE, until the onset of Islamic invasions. These works of art are considered as an artistic synthesis of Buddhist art and Gupta art from India, with influences from the Sasanian Empire and the Byzantine Empire, as well as the country of Tokharistan.

The statues were blown up and destroyed in March 2001 by the Taliban, on orders from leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, after the Taliban government declared that they were idols. International and local opinion strongly condemned the destruction of the Buddhas.

 

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The Lion Man is a masterpiece. Sculpted with great originality, virtuosity and technical skill from mammoth ivory, this 40,000-year-old image is 31 centimetres tall. It has the head of a cave lion with a partly human body. He stands upright, perhaps on tiptoes, legs apart and arms to the sides of a slender, cat-like body with strong shoulders like the hips and thighs of a lion. His gaze, like his stance, is powerful and directed at the viewer. The details of his face show he is attentive, he is watching and he is listening. He is powerful, mysterious and from a world beyond ordinary nature. He is the oldest known representation of a being that does not exist in physical form but symbolises ideas about the supernatural.

Stadel Cave, where the Lion Man was found, is different. It faces north and does not get the sun. It is cold and the density of debris accumulated by human activities is much less than at other sites. This was not a good place to live. Lion Man was found in a dark inner chamber, carefully put away in the darkness with only a few perforated arctic fox teeth and a cache of reindeer antlers nearby. These characteristics suggest that Stadel Cave was only used occasionally as a place where people would come together around a fire to share a particular understanding of the world articulated through beliefs, symbolised in sculpture and acted out in rituals.

 

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The land of the rhinoceros

1. The British connection

One of the oldest national parks in Assam, Kaziranga owes its existence to Mary Curzon and Lord Curzon, the then Viceroy of India. Back in 1904, Mary Curzon visited the area after having heard about the population of rhinos there. However, she was unable to spot a single rhino there was a sharp decline in numbers due to hunting and poaching. She persuaded Lord Curzon to take urgent measures to protect the species and the area. He obliged, and on June 1, 1907, the Kaziranga Proposed Reserve Forest was created with an area of 232 sq km. In 1908, Kaziranga was designated a ‘Reserve Forest’.

2. Find the largest population of…

The Kaziranga National Park takes credit for being home to the world’s largest population of the greater one-horned rhinoceros, wild Asiatic Buffalo and eastern, swamp deer. The rhinoceros, which has become synonymous with the park, has been hunted over the years for its horn. However, thanks to the efforts of the park, the Indian rhinoceros, which was earlier categorized as ‘endangered’, is now categorized as ‘vulnerable’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. According to the Union’s last assessment in December 2018, the population of the rhino is steadily increasing.

3. Did you spot a tiger?

While the park is famous because of the rhinos, it is also home to many large cats, including the tiger. Kaziranga has one of the highest densities of tigers in the world, and was declared a Tiger Reserve in 2006. It approximately has a population of 118 tigers, with a density of one per five sq km.

The park is also one of the few breeding sites outside Africa for large cats such as leopards and Bengal tigers.

4. Important bird area

Apart from mammals, one can find a variety of migratory birds, scavengers, game birds and water birds in Kaziranga. The park has been identified by Birdlife International as an Important Bird Area. Some birds such as the lesser white-fronted goose, ferruginous duck, Baer’s pochard duck and lesser adjacent migrate to the park from Central Asia during winter. Water birds in the park include Blyth’s kingfisher, white-bellied heron, and spot-billed pelican. When it comes to birds of prey, one can spot the rare eastern imperial eagle and lesser kestrel among others. The park was once home to seven species of vultures. However, the population reached near extinction due to feeding on carcasses containing the drug Diclofenac. Today, one can only find the Indian vulture, slender-billed vulture, and Indian white-rumped vulture in the park.

5. Water, water everywhere

The park is known for flooding during the monsoon season, Kaziranga experiences three seasons-summer, monsoon and winter. The monsoon, usually lasts from June to September and is responsible for most of the rainfall in the region. However, during the peak monsoon months of July and August, nearly three-fourths of the western, region of the park is submerged due to the rising water levels of the Brahmaputra River. Flooding of the park has now become common, with many animals migrating to elevated and forested regions outside the southern border of the park. The flooding has led to the death of several animals in the park over the years.

 

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