PYRAMID OF GIZA HOUSES

BUILDING OF THE GREAT PYRAMID

        Khufu's monument is the only one of the seven Wonders of the Ancient world to survive today. built in 2575 B.C.E., it house of the tomb of king Khufu, who for twenty-three years had been King of  Upper ad Lower Egypt. Few records survive from his reign, but inscriptions suggest the campaigned both in Nubia to the south and Canaan to the north. Despite this paucity of information,  his reputation has endured for millennia. Khufu is remembered as a cruel ruler, determined to achieve two great goals: to ensure the survival of the dynasty beyond his son Khephren; and to ensure hi own immortality, through the building of the great Pyramid, the largest monument of the Ancient World. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus, writing some 2,000 years later, claimed Khufu forced his daughter to work as a prostitute to raise funds for his pyramid.
        The logistics of constructing such a massive object, 480 feet (146 m) and comprising some 2.3 million blocks of stone, in a relatively short period were astounding. Yet they were obviously overcome. The building simple design, unusual Egypt for not being covered with inscriptions or prayers, has fascinated observers for millennia. In recent years exploration of the structures narrow passageways using robot-mounted cameras has suggested that the Pyramid was aligned with the star Orion in order to allow the King's soul to travel to the stars.
         Beside the pyramid was a 141-foot-long (43 m) funeral boat in which the King was carried to his final resting place, and smaller tombs for members of his household - an unprecedented sight at the time.  

NELSON MANDELA WAS FREED TODAY AFTER 26 YEARS IN JAIL

NELSON MANDELA WAS FREED TODAY AFTER 26 YEARS IN JAIL

         On this day in 1990 Nelson Mandela was freed today after 26 years in jail for his opposition to South Africa's white racist regime. President E.W. de Klerk unconditionally revoked the 72 year old black leader's life sentence for treason and sabotage. Met at the prison by his wife Winnie and a crowd of supporters, Mandela set off to a jubilant crowd in front of Cape Town's city hall. His message was one of  ''peace, democracy and freedom'' - but he also endorsed the African National Congress's ''armed struggle''. In jail, he had refused offers of freedom in exchange of renouncing violence. Mandela, a lawyer, became an ANC leader in 1949, working under Noble peace  Prize-winner Albert Luthuli. The ANC, founded in 1912, was committed to peaceful resistance for 48 years, in spite of the brutal official response to black protest. But when white people massacred black protesters Sharpeville in 1960, Mandela started a sabotage campaign. In jail he become the symbol of freedom in the black struggle that has no forced de Klerk's government to renounce apartheid. 

DEATH OF SOCRATES, the famous Philosopher

SOCRATES IS FOUND GUILTY 

         The Athenians needed a scapegoat. Politically, the city's fortunes were at a low ebb in 399 B.C.E. after  a humiliating defeat, five years before, at the hands of its traditional enemy, Sparta. There was one man in Athens who had made himself a reputation for being awkward- the great Philosopher  Socrates. He liked to ask difficult and irritating questions; he mocked those in power and spent his time debating ideas with a band of devoted pupils. He was also known as an associate of some of Athens's discredited leaders. So Socrates was put on trial, charged with not believing in the gods and with corrupting the young men of Athens. Socrates 's famous pupil Plato left an account of his trial, in which he states that Socrates could have saved himself by paying a fine, but instead refuse to answer the charges against him, claiming he had done nothing wrong. He was found guilty and was sentenced to death by drinking poison hemlock, a toxic herb that paralyzes the nervous system. Still debating questions such as the immortality of the soul with the friends who had gathered around him, Socrates took the poison calmly from the executioner and drunk it in one swallow. Death followed quickly.
         Socrates was one of the most significant thinkers in the course of history and, with Plato and Aristotle, was largely responsible for founding Western philosophy. He was interested in the values that make people act as they do, yet left no writings of his own. Most of what we do know of his teachings comes from the Dialogues of Plato. 

THE PUMP,CIRCULATING THE BLOOD AROUND THE BODY

HARVEY'S DISCOVERY,the pump,circulating the blood around the body.

        We take the function of heart so much for granted that it is difficult to grasp the magnitude of William Harvey's discovery, published   in his work Exercitatio Anatomica Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animal ) , that it is a pump, circulating the blood around the body and back to the heart.
         Born in 1578 in Folkestone, Kent, Harvey had studied medicine at the University of Padua, reputed to have best Medical school in Europe (Italy was regarded as the center of anatomical study), Where he had sat at the feet of Hieronymus Fabricius (Girolamo Fabrici), the leading anatomist of the day. On returning to England in 1602, he married the  daughter of  a physician to the royal household, and it may have been through her family's influence that he obtained the post of physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London.
         Harvey's great passion was for anatomy. Determined to discover how blood passes through the heart, he dissected every kind of creature from earthworms and insect to animals, eventually arriving at a correct description of  the circulatory system. His book made him famous throughout Europe, although traditionalists, especially in France, ridiculed his findings, which contradicted the long established writings of Galen (c.129-216). A few years after Harvey's death in 1657, Marcello Malpighi was able to confirm with a microscope that he had correctly assumed the existence of capillaries, too small to be identified with the human eye, linking the arterial to the venous system. 

EARLY FORM OF DEMOCRACY

EARLY FORM OF DEMOCRACY

     The man who created the structure of the world's first and most influential democracy, Cleisthenes, spent a large part of his life fighting for the rights of his own prominent family against other  noble factions in Athens, which included several decades in enforced exile. Eventually he achieved power by siding with the common people and seeking to implement the spirit of the reforms of the lawgiver Solon, who had attempted to balance the interests of the different communities of the city.
      Clesthenes therefore abolished the traditional forms of political organization based on family and clan, replacing it with that of ten ''tribes'' based on villages or demes, and set up a legislative council (''bouble'') on which the member were chosen by lot from among the entire citizenry, with quotas of representatives of each deme among its 500 members, Thee was strict rules about who was eligible and how long they could serve on the council, and the law courts and the military command were organized in a similar manner. In doing so, Cleisthenes ensured that political participation was greatly widened and that it would be difficult for cliques to dominate the state and rule only in their own interests. The years of tyranny ere over.
        Although this is often seen as the beginning of direct democracy in which all citizens participated equally, Cleisthenes himself did not call this system democracy ( meaning ''rule by the people''), but rather isnomia, or equal rights for all. In many ways he left much of the traditional culture of Athens intact, but his reforms are seen as the begging of the golden age of Athens, during which democracy is grew and culture flourished.   

AFTER SPENDING FOUR YEARS ALONE ON A DESERT ISLAND

AFTER SPENDING FOUR YEARS ALONE ON A DESERT ISLAND 

      In 1709 a castaway sailor has been rescued after spending more than four years alone on a desert island. Alexander Selkrik could hardly speak English when Capt. Woodes Rogers found him on one of the uninhabited Juan Fernandez Island of coast of Chile in South America. He had survived with the aid of a musket, a hatchet, a knife  and a flint to strike a flame, improvising all his other needs. Selkrikt had been left on the Island after an argument with master of his buccaneer ship, the Cinque-Ports. As Captain Rogers described it in his ship's log today, the longboat brought on board ''a man cloth'd in goat-skins, who look'd wilder than the first owners of them. For the first eight month he had ado to bear up against melancholy and the terror of being left alone in such a desolate place''. Rogers has appointed him ship's mate. He plans to help Selkrik publish a report of solitary sojourn. The story could interest the London writer Daniel Defore, who has been exploring the use of real events as the basis for his tales of fiction.

INDIA'S FIRST NEWS PAPER

BENGAL GAZETTE

       In 1780 Hicky's Bengal Gazette was published today in Calcutta,India. It was established by the Irishman James Augustus Hicky and is the first major English newspaper published India. The English lawyer William Hickey, no relation to the aforementioned Irishman, commented on the newspaper and its creator, saying: "There never having been a press in Calcutta.... it occurred to Hicky that great benefit might arise from setting on foot a public newspaper, nothing of that kind ever having appeared... every person read it, and was delighted. Possessing a fund of low wit, his paper abounded with proof of that talent. He had also a happy knack at applying appropriate nicknames and relating satirical anecdotes.''

IMAGE WAS SENT TO A SMALL SCREEN

FLICKERING THREAT TO SMALL SCREEN

  In 1926 Members of the Royal Institution in London today peered at crude and flickering images of a ventriloquist's doll as electrical engineer and inventor John Logic Bird's unveiled his new ''television''  machine. Baird's home-made equipment successfully transmitted a radio signal from a camera that is partly mechanical and partly electrical. The resulting image was sent electrically to a small screen. Two years ago Baird was able to transmit the outline of shapes, and he has progressed from there. The Scottish inventor's far-fetched idea is that his device could one day provide every home with a substitute for the cinema.

BIRTH OF THE INDEPENDENT REPUBLIC OF INDIA

BIRTH OF THE INDEPENDENT REPUBLIC OF INDIA

1950 200 years of British rule has officially come to an end, with the birth of the independent republic of India. A public holiday was declared across the nation and millions of people flocked to the streets celebrating with processions and ceremonies to hoist the new flag of India for the first time. Though the Government of India has been handling its own affairs since 15 August 1947, today's ceremonies mark the severing of India's last ties with Britain. India's first president, Dr Rajendra Prasad, has been officially sworn in and the new Constitution of India has been ratified.

THE DEATH DAY OF BADSHAH SHAH JAHAN , The great Mughal Emperor

THE DEATH DAY OF BADSHAH SHAH JAHAN
         On this day in 1966 Shah Jahan, the mighty Mughal Emperor of India who built the Taj Mahal  as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal, died today in the fort where his son, Aurangzeb, imprisoned him eight years ago. he was 74.
He is to be entombed in the Taj Mahal beside his wife. Aurangzeb had fought and killed his brothers to seize the throne, as Shah Jahan had done before him in 1628. Aurangzeb confined his father to his harem in the fort at Agra, from where the old man could gaze at the magnificent white marble mausoleum in which his empress lay. He was a direct descendant of both Genghis Khan and Timur. 

INDIA'S FIRST WOMAN PM

INDIA'S FIRST WOMAN PM
      In 1966 Today, Indira Gandhi become India's first woman Prime Minister. She follows in the footsteps of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was India's first Prime Minister . Mrs Gandhi, a widow, is not related to Mahatma Gandhi. She was sworn into power today following the sudden death last week of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri  as he was signing a peace pact with Pakistan. She has been president of the ruling National Congress Party since 1959. She follow's Sri Lanka's Mrs Srimavo Bandaranaike, who took office as the world's first woman Prime Minister in 1960.