If the ancients’ identification of Nergal with the planet Mars has a rational basis, it will provide us with an invaluable foundation upon which to launch a comparative analysis of ancient mythology. Nearly every ancient culture of which we have sufficient record has preserved traditions of a great war-god whose primary functions included leading the battle-charge and defending the kingdom agai...

Since ancient times, people have cut and joined together plants of different varieties or species so they would grow as a single plant - a process known as grafting (Figures 1 and 2). References to grafting appear in the Bible, ancient Greek and ancient Chinese texts, indicating that grafting was practised in Europe, the Middle East and Asia by at least the 5(th) century BCE. It is unknown wher...

We propose a computational model of text reuse tailored for ancient literary texts, available to us often only in small and noisy samples. The model takes into account source alternation patterns, so as to be able to align even sentences with low surface similarity. We demonstrate its ability to characterize text reuse in the Greek New Testament.

Children in the United States come to distinguish historical from fictional story figures between the ages of 3 and 5 years, guided by the plausibility of the story events surrounding the figure (Corriveau, Kim, Schwalen, & Harris, 2009; Woolley & Cox, 2007). However, U.S. children vary in their reactions to stories that include fantastical events. Secular children with no religious education t...

Over seven decades ago, as the result of endeavors of a group of leading literary and scientific figures the Farhangestan-e-Awwal (First Academy of Iran) was established in May 1935 and its activity continued until 1953. Presented here is a brief historical account of the establishment of the First Academy of Iran as well as a look at the biographical sketches of physicians at the academy.

Rhetorical figures, which are frequently applied in advertisements, can add literary flavor to the texts, gratify audiences’ aesthetic needs, and deepen their impression. In advertisement translation, it is very common that the rhetorical figures applied in the original text are replaced with new ones in the translation. This research focuses on rhetorical figures’ function of enhancing audienc...

literary criticism is one of the most challenging courses, if not the most problematic course, to teach on the curriculum of literature in iranian universities. this course has in fact been designed to familiarise students with a variety of critical approaches to literature. as such, faculty members who teach this course are required to cover a range of theories that often negate or dialectical...

The present quasi-experimental study mainly investigates the role of literature as input for reading comprehension in Iranian EFL classrooms. To be more exact, it investigates the effects of authentic and simplified literary texts on the reading comprehension of Iranian advanced EFL learners. The participants were 35 male and female Iranian EFL learners who were at advanced level, studying in a...