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89-547: The Wisconsin Blue Book is a biennial publication of the Wisconsin's Legislative Reference Bureau. The Blue Book is an almanac containing information on the government, economics, demographics, geography and history of the state of Wisconsin . It was published annually from 1879 to 1883, and then biennially since 1885 to the present day. It is currently published in the fall of every odd-numbered year, corresponding to

178-470: A European Power was a probable event. The threat that caused Gordon, diplomat and military officer, to publish the article was resumption of work on a railway from Russia to the Persian Gulf. Gordon, a published author, had not used the term previously, but he was to use it from then on. A second strategic personality from American diplomatic and military circles, Alfred Thayer Mahan , concerned about

267-505: A field, village or shire. There was a linguistic predisposition to use such terms. The Romans had used them in near Gaul / far Gaul, near Spain / far Spain and others. Before them the Greeks had the habit, which appears in Linear B , the oldest known script of Europe, referring to the near province and the far province of the kingdom of Pylos . Usually these terms were given with reference to

356-474: A fourth was about to fall to revolution, and two more, the British and French, were forced to yield in revolutions started under the aegis of their own ideologies. By 1916, when millions of Europeans were becoming casualties of imperial war in the trenches of eastern and western Europe over "the eastern question", Arnold J. Toynbee , Hegelesque historian of civilization at large, was becoming metaphysical about

445-565: A geographic feature, such as a mountain range or a river. Ptolemy 's Geography divided Asia on a similar basis. In the north is "Scythia this side of the Himalayas" and "Scythia beyond the Himalayas". To the south is "India on this side of the Ganges" and "India beyond the Ganges". Asia began on the coast of Anatolia ("land of the rising Sun"). Beyond the Ganges and Himalayas (including

534-490: A phrase containing a noun, East, qualified by an adjective, far, could be at any location in the "far east" of the speaker's home territory. The Ottoman Empire, for example, was the far East as much as the East Indies. The Crimean War brought a change in vocabulary with the introduction of terms more familiar to the late 19th century. The Russian Empire had entered a more aggressive phase, becoming militarily active against

623-707: A series of almanacs for the years of 1792 to 1797. Currently published almanacs such as Whitaker's Almanack have expanded their scope and contents beyond that of their historical counterparts. Modern almanacs include a comprehensive presentation of statistical and descriptive data covering the entire world. Contents also include discussions of topical developments and a summary of recent historical events. Other currently published almanacs (ca. 2006) include TIME Almanac with Information Please , World Almanac and Book of Facts , The Farmer's Almanac and The Old Farmer's Almanac and The Almanac for Farmers & City Folk. The Inverness Almanac , an almanac/literary journal,

712-401: A similar goal as the ancient Babylonian almanac, to find celestial bodies. " Almanac ". New International Encyclopedia . 1905. " Almanac ". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). 1911. " Almanacs ". The New Student's Reference Work . 1914. " Almanac ". Encyclopedia Americana . 1920. Near East The Near East is a transcontinental region around

801-608: A time, Near East often included the Balkans. Robert Hichens' 1913 book The Near East is subtitled "Dalmatia, Greece and Constantinople". The change is evident in the reports of influential British travelers to the Balkans. In 1894, Sir Henry Norman, 1st Baronet , a journalist, traveled to the Far East, afterwards writing a book called The Peoples and Politics of the Far East , which came out in 1895. By "Far East" he meant Siberia , China , Japan , Korea , Siam and Malaya . As

890-597: A variation soon developed among the scholars and the men of the cloth and their associates: the Nearer East , reverting to the classical and then more scholarly distinction of nearer and farther . They undoubtedly saw a need to separate the biblical lands from the terrain of the Ottoman Empire. The Christians saw the country as the land of the Old and New Testaments, where Christianity had developed. The scholars in

979-490: Is a parapegma , a list of dates of seasonally regular weather changes, first appearances and last appearances of stars or constellations at sunrise or sunset, and solar events such as solstices , all organized according to the solar year. With the astronomical computations were expected weather phenomena, composed as a digest of observations made by various authorities of the past. Parapegmata had been composed for centuries. Ptolemy believed that astronomical phenomena caused

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1068-515: Is a term of current fashion for a region which our grandfathers were content to call simply The East. Its area is generally understood to coincide with those classic lands, historically the most interesting on the surface of the globe, which lie about the eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea; but few probably could say offhand where should be the limits and why. Hogarth then proceeds to say where and why in some detail, but no more mention

1157-476: Is made of the classics. His analysis is geopolitical . His map delineates the Nearer East with regular lines as though surveyed. They include Iran, the Balkans, but not the Danube lands, Egypt, but not the rest of North Africa. Except for the Balkans, the region matches the later Middle East. It differs from the Ottoman Empire of the times in including Greece and Iran. Hogarth gives no evidence of being familiar with

1246-457: Is not an Arabic word....The word remains a puzzle." Walter William Skeat concludes that the construction of an Arabic origin is "not satisfactory". The Oxford English Dictionary similarly says "the word has no etymon in Arabic" but indirect circumstantial evidence "points to a Spanish Arabic al-manākh ". The reason why the proposed Arabic word is speculatively spelled al-manākh is that

1335-481: Is the so-called Babylonian Almanac , which lists favorable and unfavorable days with advice on what to do on each of them. Successive variants and versions aimed at different readership have been found. Egyptian lists of good and bad moments, three times each day, have also been found. Many of these prognostics were connected with celestial events. The flooding of the Nile valley, a most important event in ancient Egypt,

1424-577: The Middle East and the Far East (China and beyond), together known as the "three Easts"; it was a separate term from the Middle East during earlier times and official British usage. Both terms are used interchangeably to refer to the same region. Near East and Middle East are both Eurocentric terms. According to National Geographic , the terms Near East and Middle East denote

1513-664: The Battle Hymn of the Republic , leapt into the war of words and joined the Red Cross . Relations of minorities within the Ottoman Empire and the disposition of former Ottoman lands became known as the " Eastern question ", as the Ottomans were on the east of Europe. It now became relevant to define the east of the eastern question. In about the middle of the nineteenth century, Near East came into use to describe that part of

1602-660: The East Mediterranean encompassing parts of West Asia , the Balkans , and North Africa ; it also includes the historical Fertile Crescent , the Levant , Anatolia , East Thrace and Egypt . The term was invented by modern Western geographers and was originally applied to the Ottoman Empire , but today has varying definitions within different academic circles. The term Near East was used in conjunction with

1691-476: The Near East because Old Persian cuneiform had been found there. This usage did not sit well with the diplomats; India was left in an equivocal state. They needed a regional term. The use of the term Middle East as a region of international affairs apparently began in British and American diplomatic circles quite independently of each other over concern for the security of the same country: Iran, then known to

1780-599: The Near East , the Ottoman Empire, and the Far East , the East Indies. The two terms were now compound nouns often shown hyphenated. In 1855, a reprint of a letter earlier sent to The Times appeared in Littell's Living Age . Its author, an "official Chinese interpreter of 10 years' active service" and a member of the Oriental Club , Thomas Taylor Meadows, was replying to the suggestion by another interpreter that

1869-572: The North-American Almanack , published annually from 1771 to 1784, as well as the first American nautical almanac, The Navigator's Kalendar, or Nautical Almanack, for 1783 . Andrew Ellicott of Ellicott's Upper Mills , Maryland , authored a series of almanacs, The United States Almanack , the earliest known copy of which bears the date of 1782. Benjamin Banneker , a free African American living near Ellicott's Mills, composed

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1958-613: The Ottoman Porte (government of the Ottoman Empire) at Constantinople . Compared to Anatolia, Levant also means "land of the rising sun", but where Anatolia always only meant the projection of land currently occupied by the Republic of Turkey, Levant meant anywhere in the domain ruled by the Ottoman Porte. The East India Company (Originally charted as the "Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into

2047-609: The Tien Shan ) were Serica and Serae (sections of China ) and some other identifiable far eastern locations known to the voyagers and geographers but not to the general European public. By the time of John Seller's Atlas Maritima of 1670, "India Beyond the Ganges" had become "the East Indies " including China, Korea, southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific in a map that was every bit as distorted as Ptolemy's, despite

2136-652: The Wapsipinicon Almanac , and the Calendari dels Pagesos , a Catalan-language almanac published in Catalonia since 1861. The GPS almanac , as part of the data transmitted by each GPS satellite, contains coarse orbit and status information for all satellites in the constellation, an ionospheric model, and information to relate GPS derived time to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Hence the GPS almanac provides

2225-554: The Wisconsin Department of Administration 's "Document Sales and Distribution Unit". This Wisconsin -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Almanac The etymology of the word is unclear. The earliest documented use of the word in something like its current sense is in Latin in 1267. Roger Bacon used it to mean a set of tables detailing movements of heavenly bodies including

2314-633: The imperial period , each month was headed with illustrations of its chief astrological signs , matching Roman geoponical tracts that often combined guidance for the proper conditions for different activities with the stars present during that period rather than using the civil calendar . The origins of the almanac can be connected to ancient Babylonian astronomy , when tables of planetary periods were produced in order to predict lunar and planetary phenomena. Similar treatises called Zij were later composed in medieval Islamic astronomy . The modern almanac differs from Babylonian, Ptolemaic and Zij tables in

2403-652: The "collective wisdom" of Europe, and introducing a concept to arise many times in the decades to follow under chilling circumstances: "... no final solution of the difficulty has yet been found." Miller's final pronouncements on the topic could not be ignored by either the British or the Ottoman governments: It remains then to consider whether the Great Powers can solve the Eastern Question ;... Foreigners find it extremely difficult to understand

2492-720: The 17th century, English almanacs were bestsellers, second only to the Bible; by the middle of the century, 400,000 almanacs were being produced annually (a complete listing can be found in the English Short Title Catalogue ). Until its deregulation in 1775, the Stationers' Company maintained a lucrative monopoly over almanac publication in England. Richard Allestree (not to be confused with Richard Allestree (1621/22–1681), provost of Eton College) wrote one of

2581-418: The Balkans. Apart from the fact that he attended Oxford and played Rugby , not many biographical details have been promulgated. He was, in effect (whatever his formal associations if any), a point man of British Near Eastern intelligence. In Miller's view, the Ottoman officials were unfit to rule: The plain fact is that it is as hard for an Ottoman official to be honest as it is for a camel to enter through

2670-524: The British Empire was wasting its resources on a false threat from Russia against China. Toward the end of the letter he said: To support the "sick man" in the Near East is an arduous and costly affair; let England, France and America too, beware how they create a "sick giant" in the Far East, for they may rest assured that, if Turkey is [a] European necessity, China is a world necessity. Much of

2759-483: The East-Indies") was chartered in 1600 for trade to the East Indies. It has pleased western historians to write of a decline of the Ottoman Empire as though a stable and uncontested polity of that name once existed. The borders did expand and contract but they were always dynamic and always in "question" right from the beginning. The Ottoman Empire was created from the lands of the former eastern Roman Empire on

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2848-513: The Latin writer Pseudo-Geber wrote under an Arabic pseudonym. (The later alchemical word alkahest is known to be pseudo-Arabic.) The earlier texts considered to be almanacs have been found in the Near East , dating back to the middle of the second millennium BC. They have been called generally hemerologies, from the Greek word hēmerologion , "calendar" (from hēmera , meaning "day"). Among them

2937-488: The Mediterranean ;..." The regions in their inventory were Assyria, Chaldea, Mesopotamia, Persia, Armenia, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Ancient Israel, Ethiopia, Caucasus, Libya, Anatolia and Abyssinia. Explicitly excluded is India. No mention is made of the Balkans. The British archaeologist D. G. Hogarth published The Nearer East in 1902, in which he stated his view of the Near East : The Nearer East

3026-531: The Moon. It has been suggested that the word almanac derives from a Greek word meaning calendar . However, that word appears only once in antiquity, by Eusebius who quotes Porphyry as to the Coptic Egyptian use of astrological charts ( almenichiaká ). The earliest almanacs were calendars that included agricultural, astronomical, or meteorological data. But it is highly unlikely Roger Bacon received

3115-468: The Near East. Geography alone was not a sufficient explanation of the terms, he believed. If the Ottoman Empire had been a sick man, then: There has been something pathological about the history of this Near Eastern World. It has had an undue share of political misfortunes, and had lain for centuries in a kind of spiritual paralysis between East and West—belonging to neither, partaking paradoxically of both, and wholly unable to rally itself decidedly to one or

3204-542: The Near Eastern frontiers up to the desert belt of the Sahara, Nefud and Kevir. From the death of the Near East, new nations were able to rise from the ashes, notably the Republic of Turkey. Paradoxically it now aligned itself with the west rather than with the east. Mustafa Kemal , its founder, a former Ottoman high-ranking officer, was insistent on this social revolution, which, among other changes, liberated women from

3293-565: The Ottoman Empire and also against China, with territorial aggrandizement explicitly in mind. Rethinking its policy the British government decided that the two polities under attack were necessary for the balance of power. It therefore undertook to oppose the Russians in both places, one result being the Crimean War. During that war the administration of the British Empire began promulgating a new vocabulary, giving specific regional meaning to

3382-487: The Ottoman Empire. Some regions beyond the Ottoman Porte were included. One was North Africa west of Egypt. It was occupied by piratical kingdoms of the Barbary Coast , de facto -independent since the eighteenth century, formerly part of the empire at its apogee. Iran was included because it could not easily be reached except through the Ottoman Empire or neighboring Russia. In the 1890s the term tended to focus on

3471-490: The Ottomans retained a band of territory including Albania , Macedonia and the Adrianople Vilayet , which were lost in the two Balkan Wars of 1912–13. The Ottoman Empire, believed to be about to collapse, was portrayed in the press as the " sick man of Europe ". The Balkan states, with the partial exception of Bosnia and Albania , were primarily Christian, as was the majority of Lebanon . Starting in 1894,

3560-594: The Ottomans struck at the Armenians and Assyrians on the explicit grounds that they were non-Muslim peoples and as such were a potential threat to the Muslim empire within which they lived. The Hamidian Massacres , Adana Massacres and Massacres of Badr Khan targeting Assyrians and Armenians aroused the indignation of the entire Christian world. In the United States, the then aging Julia Ward Howe , author of

3649-747: The Slavic Balkan states began to question the very existence of the Ottoman Empire. The result was the Crimean War , 1853–1856, in which the British Empire and the French Empire supported the Ottoman Empire in its struggle against the incursions of the Russian Empire. Eventually, the Ottoman Empire lost control of the Balkan region. Until about 1855, the terms Near East and Far East did not refer to any particular region. The Far East,

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3738-755: The Turks against Russia. If the British Empire was now going to side with the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire had no choice but to cultivate a relationship with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was supported by the German Empire. In a few years these alignments became the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance (already formed in 1882), which were in part a cause of World War I . By its end in 1918 three empires were gone,

3827-402: The United States. The innovation of the term Near East to mean the holdings of the Ottoman Empire as early as the Crimean War had left a geographical gap. The East Indies, or "Far East", derived ultimately from Ptolemy 's "India Beyond the Ganges." The Ottoman Empire ended at the eastern border of Iraq. "India This Side of the Ganges" and Iran had been omitted. The archaeologists counted Iran as

3916-460: The aforementioned regions were in actuality "politically one region – in spite of the divisions into which it is academically divided." In The Conflict of Colour , Simpson argued that what united these regions was their skin color and the fact that they were all under European colonial rule . The work included a "color chart" of the world, dividing it into a spectrum of ' black ', 'brown', ' yellow ' and ' white ' races. Simpson also modified

4005-419: The book was a big success, he was off to the Balkan states with his wife in 1896 to develop detail for a sequel, The People and Politics of the Near East , which Scribners planned to publish in 1897. Mrs. Norman, a writer herself, wrote glowing letters of the home and person of Mme. Zakki, "the wife of a Turkish cabinet minister," who, she said, was a cultivated woman living in a country home full of books. As for

4094-449: The changes in seasonal weather; his explanation of why there was not an exact correlation of these events was that the physical influences of other heavenly bodies also came into play. Hence for him, weather prediction was a special division of astrology . Surviving Roman menologia rustica combined schedules of solar information and agricultural activities throughout the year with the months' tutelary deities and major festivals . By

4183-648: The colonial administration belonged to this club, which had been formed by the Duke of Wellington . Meadows' terminology must represent usage by that administration. If not the first use of the terms, the letter to the Times was certainly one of the earliest presentations of this vocabulary to the general public. They became immediately popular, supplanting "Levant" and "East Indies", which gradually receded to minor usages and then began to change meaning. Near East remained popular in diplomatic, trade and journalistic circles, but

4272-562: The conflicts in the Balkan states and Armenia. The demise of "the sick man of Europe" left considerable confusion as to what was to be meant by Near East . It is now generally used only in historical contexts, to describe the countries of West Asia from the Mediterranean to (or including) Iran . There is, in short, no universally-understood fixed inventory of nations, languages or historical assets defined to be in it. The geographical terms Near East and Far East refer to areas of

4361-527: The contemporaneous initial concept of the Middle East. In the last years of the 19th century, the term Near East acquired considerable disrepute in eyes of the English-speaking public as did the Ottoman Empire itself. The cause of the onus was the religiously motivated Hamidian Massacres of Christian Armenians , but it seemed to spill over into the protracted conflicts of the Balkans. For

4450-527: The countries where "the eastern question" applied; that is, to all of the Balkans . The countries and regions mentioned are Greece , Bulgaria , Serbia , Bosnia-Herzegovina (which was Muslim and needed, in his view, to be suppressed), Macedonia , Montenegro , Albania , Romania . The rest of the Ottoman domain is demoted to just "the East". If Norman was apparently attempting to change British policy, it

4539-471: The days of the month were indicated by movable pegs inserted into bored holes, hence the name. There were also written texts and according to Diogenes Laërtius , Parapegma was the title of a book by Democritus . Ptolemy , the Alexandrian astronomer (2nd century) wrote a treatise, Phaseis —"phases of fixed stars and collection of weather-changes" is the translation of its full title—the core of which

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4628-476: The east closest to Europe. The term Far East appeared contemporaneously meaning Japan , China , Korea , Indonesia and Vietnam . Near East applied to what had been mainly known as the Levant , which was in the jurisdiction of the Ottoman Porte , or government. Europeans could not set foot on most of the shores of the southern and central Mediterranean from the Gulf of Sidra to Albania without permits from

4717-531: The east, collaborated with English merchants to form the first trading companies to the far-flung regions, using their own jargon. Their goals were to obtain trading concessions by treaty. The queen chartered the Company of Merchants of the Levant, shortened to Levant Company , and soon known also as The Turkey Company, in 1581. In 1582, the ship The Great Susan transported the first ambassador, William Harebone, to

4806-399: The eye of a needle. It is not so much the fault of the men as the fault of the system, which is thoroughly bad from top to bottom... Turkish administration is synonymous with corruption, inefficiency, and sloth. These were fighting words to be coming from a country that once insisted Europe needed Turkey and was willing to spill blood over it. For his authority Miller invokes the people, citing

4895-653: The eyes of Western commentators. Bertram Lenox Simpson , a journalist who served for a period as an officer for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service , combined both terms in his 1910 work The Conflict of Colour: The Threatened Upheaval Throughout the World as "the Near and Middle East." According to Simpson, the combined region consisted of " India , Afghanistan , Persia , Arabistan , Asia Minor , and last, but not least, Egypt ", explaining that

4984-524: The facility to concentrate in force, if occasion arise, about Aden, India, and the Gulf. Apparently the sailor did not connect with the soldier, as Mahan believed he was innovating the term Middle East . It was, however, already there to be seen. Until the interwar period following the First World War , the terms Near East and Middle East co-existed, but they were not always seen as distinct in

5073-412: The field of studies that eventually became biblical archaeology attempted to define it on the basis of archaeology. For example, The London Review of 1861 (Telford and Barber, unsigned) in reviewing several works by Rawlinson , Layard and others, defined themselves as making: "... an imperfect conspectus of the arrow-headed writings of the nearer east; writings which cover nearly the whole period of

5162-706: The first center in the colonies for the annual publication of almanacs, to be followed by Philadelphia during the first half of the eighteenth century. Nathaniel Ames of Dedham, Massachusetts , issued his popular Astronomical Diary and Almanack in 1725 and annually after c.  1732 . James Franklin published The Rhode Island Almanack by "Poor Robin" for each year from 1728 to 1735. James' brother, Benjamin Franklin , published his annual Poor Richard's Almanack in Philadelphia from 1732 to 1758. Samuel Stearns of Paxton, Massachusetts , issued

5251-422: The first modern examples. Copies of 12th century almanacs are found in the British Museum, and in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In 1300, Petrus de Dacia created an almanac (Savilian Library, Oxford) the same year Roger Bacon, OFM, produced his own. In 1327 Walter de Elvendene created an almanac and later on John Somers of Oxford, in 1380. In 1386 Nicholas de Lynne, Oxford produced an almanac. In 1457

5340-520: The first printed almanac was published at Mainz, by Gutenberg (eight years before the famous Bible). Regio-Montanus produced an almanac in 1472 (Nuremberg, 1472), which continued in print for several centuries. In 1497 the Sheapheard's Kalendar , translated from French ( Richard Pynson ) became the first almanac to be printed in English. By the second half of the 16th century, yearly almanacs were being produced in England by authors such as Anthony Askham, Thomas Buckminster, John Dade and Gabriel Frende. In

5429-413: The foreign, and especially the Eastern policy of Great Britain, and we cannot wonder at their difficulty, for it seems a mass of contradictions to Englishmen themselves ... At one moment we are bringing about the independence of Greece by sending the Turkish fleet to the bottom of the bay of Navarino. Twenty-seven years later we are spending immense sums and wasting thousands of lives in order to protect

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5518-461: The future in the divination sense. Early almanacs therefore contained general horoscopes , as well as natural information. An example is the folded almanac Western MS.8932 (Wellcome Collection, London), produced in England between 1387 and 1405, is a calendar with astrological tables and diagrams used by medical practitioners to harness astrological information relating to health. In 1150 Solomon Jarchus created such an almanac considered to be among

5607-408: The globe in or contiguous to the former British Empire and the neighboring colonies of the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and Germans. They fit together as a pair based on the opposites of far and near, suggesting that they were innovated together. They appear together in the journals of the mid-19th century. Both terms were used before then with local British and American meanings: the near or far east of

5696-413: The lands of ancient Greece, but could not gain Constantinople. The Ottoman Porte was continuously under attack from some quarter in its empire, primarily the Balkans. Also, on a number of occasions in the early 19th century, American and British warships had to attack the Barbary pirates to stop their piracy and recover thousands of enslaved Europeans and Americans. In 1853 the Russian Empire on behalf of

5785-427: The lapse of approximately 1,500 years. That "east" in turn was only an English translation of Latin Oriens and Orientalis , "the land of the rising Sun", used since Roman times for "east". The world map of Jodocus Hondius of 1590 labels all of Asia from the Caspian to the Pacific as India Orientalis , shortly to appear in translation as the East Indies. Elizabeth I of England , primarily interested in trade with

5874-430: The more popular English almanacs, producing yearly volumes from 1617 to 1643, but his is by no means the earliest or the longest-running almanac. Works that satirized this type of publication appeared in the late 1500s. During the next century, a writer using the pseudonym of "Poor Richard, Knight of the Burnt Island" began to publish a series of such parodies that were entitled Poor Robin's Almanack . The 1664 issue of

5963-437: The name of freedom with the expectation of being rescued by the intervention of Christian Europe , he states "but her hope was vain." England had "turned her back." Norman concluded his exhortation with "In the Balkans, one learns to hate the Turk." Norman made sure that Gladstone read the article. Prince Nicolas of Montenegro wrote a letter thanking him for his article. Throughout this article, Norman uses "Near East" to mean

6052-403: The natives of the Balkans, they were "a semi-civilized people". The planned book was never published, however Norman published the gist of the book, mixed with vituperation against the Ottoman Empire, in an article in June 1896, in Scribner's Magazine. The empire had descended from an enlightened civilization ruling over barbarians for their own good to something considerably less. The difference

6141-532: The naval vulnerability of the trade routes in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean , commented in 1902: The middle East, if I may adopt a term which I have not seen, will some day need its Malta, as well as its Gibraltar; it does not follow that either will be in the Gulf. Naval force has the quality of mobility which carries with it the privilege of temporary absences; but it needs to find on every scene of operation established bases of refit, of supply, and, in case of disaster, of security. The British Navy should have

6230-431: The nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire included all of the Balkans , north to the southern edge of the Great Hungarian Plain . But by 1914, the empire had lost all of its territories except Constantinople and Eastern Thrace to the rise of nationalist Balkan states , which saw the independence of the Kingdom of Greece , Kingdom of Serbia , the Danubian Principalities , and the Kingdom of Bulgaria . Up until 1912,

6319-527: The occasion of the latter's violent demise. The last Roman emperor died fighting hand-to-hand in the streets of his capital, Constantinople, overwhelmed by the Ottoman military, in May 1453. The victors inherited his remaining territory in the Balkans. The Hungarian lands under Turkish rule had become part of the Habsburg monarchy by 1688. in the Great Turkish War . The Serbian Revolution , 1804–1833. created modern Serbia. The Greek War of Independence , 1821–1832, created modern Greece, which recovered most of

6408-502: The other. Having supposed that it was sick, he kills it off: "The Near East has never been more true to itself than in its lurid dissolution; past and present are fused together in the flare." To Toynbee the Near East was a spiritual being of a " Janus -character", connected to both east and west: The limits of the Near East are not easy to define. On the north-west, Vienna is the most conspicuous boundary-mark, but one might almost equally well single out Trieste or Lvov or even Prag. Towards

6497-584: The postdiluvian Old Testament history ..." By arrow-headed writings they meant cuneiform texts. In defense of the Bible as history they said: "The primeval nations, that piled their glorious homes on the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Nile, are among us again with their archives in their hands; ..." They further defined the nations as "... the countries lying between the Caspian, the Persian Gulf, and

6586-637: The region that is in Asia (ie., not including Egypt , the Balkans , and Thrace ) is "now commonly referred to as West Asia ." Later on in 2012, the FAO defined the Near East as a subregion of the Middle East. The Near East included Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syrian Arab Republic, and Turkey while the Middle East included the Arabian Peninsula, the Caucasus, and Iran. At the beginning of

6675-601: The same territories and are "generally accepted as comprising the countries of the Arabian Peninsula , Cyprus , Egypt , Iraq , Iran , Israel , Jordan , Lebanon , Palestinian territories , Syria , and Turkey ". Also, Afghanistan is often included. In 1997, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations defined the region similarly, but also included Afghanistan . The part of

6764-532: The sense that "the entries found in the almanacs give directly the positions of the celestial bodies and need no further computation", in contrast to the more common "auxiliary astronomical tables" based on Ptolemy's Almagest . The earliest known almanac in this modern sense is the Almanac of Azarqueil written in 1088 by Abū Ishāq Ibrāhīm al-Zarqālī (Latinized as Arzachel) in Toledo , al-Andalus . The work provided

6853-769: The series stated: "This month we may expect to hear of the Death of some Man, Woman, or Child, either in Kent or Christendom." The first almanac printed in the Thirteen Colonies of British America was William Pierce's 1639 An Almanac Calculated for New England . The almanac was the first in a series of such publications that Stephen Daye , or Day, printed each year until 1649 in Cambridge, Massachusetts . The Cambridge/ Boston area in Massachusetts soon became

6942-529: The southeast, the boundaries are even more shadowy. It is perhaps best to equate them with the frontiers of the Arabic language, yet the genius of the Near East overrides linguistic barriers, and encroaches on the Arabicspeaking world on the one side as well as on the German-speaking world on the other. Syria is essentially a Near Eastern country, and a physical geographer would undoubtedly carry

7031-405: The spelling occurred as "almanach", as well as almanac (and Roger Bacon used both spellings). The earliest use of the word was in the context of astronomy calendars. The Arabic word المناخ al-munākh has different meanings in contemporary Arabic than in classical Arabic usage. The word originally meant "the place where camels kneel [so riders and baggage can disembark]". In contemporary Arabic,

7120-515: The start of each new biennium of the Wisconsin state government. Since 1995, the Blue Book has been available free in electronic form. Many editions also provide a special article of substantial length, focusing on either a natural feature or some social aspect about the state. Hardcover editions of the book may be obtained for no cost by Wisconsin residents by contacting their State Representative or State Senator . It can also be ordered from

7209-418: The strait rules still in effect in most Arabic-speaking countries. The demise of the political Near East now left a gap where it had been, into which stepped the Middle East. The term Middle East as a noun and adjective was common in the 19th century in nearly every context except diplomacy and archaeology. An uncountable number of places appear to have had their middle easts from gardens to regions, including

7298-526: The true daily positions of the sun, moon and planets for four years from 1088 to 1092, as well as many other related tables. A Latin translation and adaptation of the work appeared as the Tables of Toledo in the 12th century and the Alfonsine tables in the 13th century. After almanacs were devised, people still saw little difference between predicting the movements of the stars and tides, and predicting

7387-463: The west as Persia. In 1900 Thomas Edward Gordon published an article, The Problem of the Middle East , which began: It may be assumed that the most sensitive part of our external policy in the Middle East is the preservation of the independence and integrity of Persia and Afghanistan. Our active interest in Persia began with the present century, and was due to the belief that the invasion of India by

7476-815: The word from this etymology: "Notwithstanding the suggestive sound and use of this word (of which however the real form is very uncertain), the difficulties of connecting it historically either with the Spanish Arabic manākh, or with Medieval Latin almanach without Arabic intermediation, seem insurmountable." One etymology report says "The ultimate source of the word is obscure. Its first syllable, al-, and its general relevance to medieval science and technology, strongly suggest an Arabic origin, but no convincing candidate has been found". Ernest Weekley similarly states of almanac : "First seen in Roger Bacon. Apparently from Spanish Arabic, al-manakh , but this

7565-550: The word means "climate". The prestige of the Tables of Toledo and other medieval Arabic astronomy works at the time of the word's emergence in the West, together with the absence of the word in Arabic, suggest it may have been invented in the West and is pseudo-Arabic. At that time in the West, it would have been prestigious to attach an Arabic appellation to a set of astronomical tables. Also around that time, prompted by that motive,

7654-416: Was expected to occur at the summer solstice, but as the civil calendar had exactly 365 days, over the centuries, the date was drifting in the calendar. The first heliacal rising of Sirius was used for its prediction and this practice, the observation of some star and its connecting to some event apparently spread. The Greek almanac, known as parapegma, has existed in the form of an inscribed stone on which

7743-584: Was perhaps William Miller (1864–1945), journalist and expert on the Near East, who did the most in that direction. In essence, he signed the death warrant, so to speak, of the Age of Empires. The fall of the Ottoman Empire ultimately enmeshed all the others as well. In the Travel and Politics in the Near East , 1898, Miller claimed to have made four trips to the Balkans, 1894, 1896, 1897 and 1898, and to be, in essence, an expert on "the Near East", by which he primarily meant

7832-938: Was published in West Marin, California, from 2015 to 2016. In 2007, Harrowsmith Country Life Magazine launched a Canadian Almanac, written in Canada, with all-Canadian content. The nonprofit agrarian organization the Greenhorns currently publishes The New Farmer's Almanac as a resource for young farmers. Major topics covered by almanacs (reflected by their tables of contents) include: geography , government , demographics , agriculture , economics and business , health and medicine , religion , mass media , transportation , science and technology , sport , and awards / prizes . Other examples include The Almanac of American Politics published by Columbia Books & Information Services , The Almanac of British Politics ,

7921-609: Was the Hamidian Massacres , which were being conducted even as the couple traveled the Balkans. According to Norman now, the empire had been established by "the Moslem horde" from Asia , which was stopped by "intrepid Hungary ." Furthermore, "Greece shook off the turbaned destroyer of her people" and so on. The Russians were suddenly liberators of oppressed Balkan states. Having portrayed the Armenians as revolutionaries in

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