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Early Christian art and architecture

(Encyclopedia)Early Christian art and architecture, works of art exhibiting Christian themes and structures designed for Christian worship created relatively soon after the death of Jesus. Most date from the 4th to...

Arabic languages

(Encyclopedia)Arabic languages, members of the West Semitic group of the Semitic subdivision of the Afroasiatic family of languages (see Afroasiatic languages). The Arabic languages comprise North Arabic (or simply...

weights and measures

(Encyclopedia)CE5 weights and measures, units and standards for expressing the amount of some quantity, such as length, capacity, or weight; the science of measurement standards and methods is known as metrology...

Western Sahara

(Encyclopedia)CE5 Western Sahara, territory (2015 est. pop. 526,000), 102,703 sq mi (266,000 sq km), NW Africa, occupied by Morocco. It borders on the Atlantic Ocean in the west, on Morocco in the north, on Alge...

Birmingham, city, England

(Encyclopedia)Birmingham bûrˈmĭngəm [key], city and metropolitan borough (2021 city pop. 2,606,374; met...

life

(Encyclopedia)life, although there is no universal agreement as to a definition of life, its biological manifestations are generally considered to be organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, adaptation, and ...

Rubens, Peter Paul

(Encyclopedia)Rubens, Peter Paul, 1577–1640, foremost Flemish painter of the 17th cent., b. Siegen, Westphalia, where his family had gone into exile because of his father's Calvinist beliefs. Almost every princ...

conservation laws

(Encyclopedia)conservation laws, in physics, basic laws that together determine which processes can or cannot occur in nature; each law maintains that the total value of the quantity governed by that law, e.g., mas...

Greek music

(Encyclopedia)Greek music, the music of the ancient and modern inhabitants of Greece. Dormant for nearly two thousand years, Greek music underwent a musical rebirth in the 19th cent. with the works of the opera c...

Mesopotamia

(Encyclopedia)Mesopotamia mĕsˌəpətāˈmēə [key] [Gr.,=between rivers], ancient region of Asia, the territory about the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, included in modern Iraq. The region extends from the Persian...