text:
Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith is a 2005 American epic space opera film that is the sequel to The Phantom Menace (1999) and Attack of the Clones (2002). It is the sixth film in the Star Wars film series, the third installment in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, and third chronological chapter of the "Skywalker Saga". It is written and directed by George Lucas, who also served as executive producer. The film stars Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid, Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Lee, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, and Frank Oz.

Revenge of the Sith is set three years after the onset of the Clone Wars as established in Attack of the Clones. The Jedi are spread across the galaxy in a full-scale war against the Separatists. The Jedi Council dispatches Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi on a mission to defeat General Grievous, the head of the Separatist army and Count Dooku's former apprentice, to put an end to the war. Meanwhile, after having visions of his wife Padmé Amidala dying in childbirth, Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker is tasked by the Council to spy on Palpatine, the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic and, secretly, the Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Sidious. Sidious manipulates Anakin into turning to the dark side of the Force and becoming his apprentice, Darth Vader, with wide-ranging consequences for the galaxy.

Lucas began writing the script before production of Attack of the Clones ended, citing that he wanted the end of the trilogy to have similar aspects to a romantic tragedy, thus building into Darth Vader's state at the beginning of the next film. Production of Revenge of the Sith started in June 2003, and filming took place in Australia with additional locations in Thailand, Switzerland, China, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

Revenge of the Sith premiered on May 15, 2005, at the Cannes Film Festival, then released worldwide on May 19, 2005. The film received generally positive reviews from critics, with most regarding it as the best film of the trilogy, although some criticism was reserved for Lucas's screenplay and Christensen's performance. It broke several box office records during its opening week and went on to earn $868.4 million worldwide, making it the second-highest-grossing film in the Star Wars franchise at the time. It was the highest-grossing film in the U.S. and the second-highest-grossing film worldwide in 2005. It also holds the record for the highest opening-day gross on a Thursday, making $50 million. It is also the final Star Wars film to be distributed by Fox, although it would be also acquired by Disney five years after it acquired Lucasfilm.

Plot
Orbiting above Coruscant, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker lead a mission to rescue Supreme Chancellor Palpatine from the cyborg Separatist commander General Grievous. After infiltrating Grievous' flagship, Obi-Wan and Anakin battle the Sith Lord Count Dooku, whom Anakin decapitates at Palpatine's insistence. Grievous escapes the damaged ship before Obi-Wan and Anakin crash-land it on Coruscant. There, Anakin reunites with his wife Padmé Amidala, who tells him that she is pregnant. Soon after, Anakin has visions of Padmé dying in childbirth.

Palpatine appoints Anakin to the Jedi Council as his own personal representative. Distrusting Palpatine, the Council agrees but refuses to make Anakin a Jedi Master. They instead instruct him to spy on Palpatine, diminishing Anakin's faith in the Jedi. Meanwhile, on Utapau, Grievous relocates the Separatist leaders to the volcanic planet Mustafar. Obi-Wan travels to Utapau where he confronts and kills Grievous, while Yoda travels to the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk to defend it from the Separatist droid attack on the Wookiees.

Palpatine tempts Anakin with the dark side of the Force, promising it can save Padmé. Anakin deduces that Palpatine is the Sith Lord behind the Clone Wars and reports his treachery to Mace Windu, who confronts and subdues Palpatine, leaving the latter disfigured. Desperate to save Padmé, Anakin prevents Windu from killing Palpatine by slicing his right hand off. Palpatine then sends Windu falling to his death. Anakin pledges himself to the Sith, and Palpatine knights him as Darth Vader. Palpatine issues Order 66, which commands the clone troopers to kill their commanding Jedi generals across the galaxy, while Vader and a battalion of clone troopers kill the remaining Jedi in the Jedi Temple. Vader then travels to Mustafar to assassinate the Separatist leaders, while Palpatine declares himself Emperor before the Galactic Senate, transforming the Republic into the Galactic Empire. He denounces the Jedi as traitors.

Obi-Wan and Yoda return to Coruscant and learn that Anakin has turned to the dark side. Yoda instructs Obi-Wan to confront Vader while he faces Palpatine. Obi-Wan seeks out Padmé to discover Vader's whereabouts and reveals his treachery. Padmé travels to Mustafarunaware Obi-Wan has stowed aboard her shipand pleads with Vader to abandon the dark side. When Obi-Wan emerges, an enraged Vader believes Padmé has betrayed him and strangles her. Obi-Wan and Vader engage in a lightsaber duel, which ends with Obi-Wan severing Vader's left arm and both legs. Vader is then burned alive by a nearby lava flow as Obi-Wan retrieves Vader's lightsaber before leaving him for dead.

Meanwhile, Yoda battles Palpatine on Coruscant, culminating in a stalemate. Yoda flees with Senator Bail Organa and regroups with Obi-Wan and Padmé on the planetoid Polis Massa. Padmé gives birth to twins, whom she names Luke and Leia. She dies soon after, still believing there is good in Anakin. Palpatine recovers a barely alive Vader. On Coruscant, Vader's mutilated body is treated and encased in a black, armored life-support suit. When he asks about Padmé, Palpatine says Vader killed her out of rage, leaving Vader devastated.

Obi-Wan and Yoda conceal the twins' birth from the Sith and retreat into exile until the Empire can be challenged. As Padmé's funeral is underway on Naboo, Palpatine and Vader supervise the construction of the Death Star. Bail takes Leia to Alderaan to raise her as his daughter. Obi-Wan delivers Luke to his step-uncle and step-aunt, Owen and Beru Lars, on Tatooine. Obi-Wan settles nearby as a recluse while watching over young Luke.

Cast

 * Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi, a Jedi Master, general of the Galactic Republic and Anakin Skywalker's best friend and mentor.
 * Natalie Portman as Padmé Amidala, a senator of Naboo who is secretly Anakin's wife and pregnant with their children.
 * Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader, a Jedi Knight, hero of the Clone Wars and former Padawan of Obi-Wan and Padmé's secret husband who turns to the dark side of the Force and becomes a Sith Lord. Christensen also plays Vader in his suit. James Earl Jones reprises his role as the voice of Vader from previous Star Wars media in an uncredited cameo.
 * Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine / Darth Sidious, the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic who is secretly a Sith Lord, and later the Emperor of the Galactic Empire. He takes advantage of Anakin's distrust of the Jedi and fear of Padmé dying to turn him towards the dark side, becoming Vader's master.
 * Samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu, a Jedi Master and senior member of the Jedi Council.
 * Jimmy Smits as Bail Organa, a senator from Alderaan.
 * Christopher Lee as Count Dooku / Darth Tyranus, Sidious' Sith apprentice and the leader of the Separatists. He is decapitated by Anakin on the orders of his master.
 * Anthony Daniels as C-3PO, Anakin and Padmé's personal protocol droid that Anakin created as a child.
 * Kenny Baker as R2-D2, Anakin's astromech droid.
 * Frank Oz as Yoda, a Jedi Grandmaster and the leader of the Jedi Council.

Peter Mayhew, Oliver Ford Davies, Ahmed Best, and Silas Carson reprise their roles as Chewbacca, Sio Bibble, Jar Jar Binks, and Nute Gunray and Ki-Adi-Mundi, respectively, from the previous films. Joel Edgerton and Bonnie Piesse also make cameo appearances, reprising their roles as Owen and Beru Lars respectively from Attack of the Clones. Sound engineer Matthew Wood provides the voice of General Grievous, the fearsome cyborg commander of the Separatists' droid army, who had been trained in wielding a lightsaber by Count Dooku. Wood took over the role, after Gary Oldman was originally cast in the role, but had to drop out of the production due to scheduling conflicts; Oldman had completed some voice-over work. Temuera Morrison portrays Commander Cody and the rest of the clone troopers. Bruce Spence portrays Tion Medon, local administrator of Utapau. Jeremy Bulloch (who played Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) appears as Captain Colton, the pilot of the CR70 corvette Tantive III. Genevieve O'Reilly portrays senator Mon Mothma, though her speaking scene was ultimately cut. Rohan Nichol portrays Captain Raymus Antilles.

Wayne Pygram appears as a young Wilhuff Tarkin, and stunt coordinator Nick Gillard appears as a Jedi named Cin Drallig (his name spelled backward, without the 'k'). Editor Roger Barton's son Aidan Barton portrays Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa as infants.

Director and Star Wars creator George Lucas has a cameo as Baron Papanoida, a blue-faced alien in attendance at the Coruscant opera house. Lucas' son Jett portrays Zett Jukassa, a young Jedi-in-training. One of Lucas' daughters, Amanda, appears as Terr Taneel, seen in a security hologram, while his other daughter Katie plays a blue-skinned Pantoran named Chi Eekway, visible when Palpatine arrives at the Senate after being saved by the Jedi and talking to Baron Papanoida at the opera house. Christian Simpson appeared as a stunt double for Hayden Christensen.

Writing
George Lucas said he conceived the Star Wars saga's story in the form of a plot outline in 1973. However, he later clarified that, at the time of the saga's conception, he had not fully realized the details—only major plot points. The film's climactic duel has its basis in the Return of the Jedi novelization, in which Obi-Wan recounts his battle with Vader that ended with the latter falling "into a molten pit". Lucas began working on the screenplay for Episode III before the previous film, Attack of the Clones, was released, proposing to concept artists that the film would open with a montage of seven battles on seven planets. In The Secret History of Star Wars, Michael Kaminski surmises that Lucas found flaws with Anakin's fall to the dark side and radically reorganized the plot. For example, instead of opening the film with a montage of Clone War battles, Lucas decided to focus on Anakin, ending the first act with him killing Count Dooku, an action that signals his turn to the dark side.

A significant number of fans speculated online about the episode title for the film with rumored titles including Rise of the Empire, The Creeping Fear (which was also named as the film's title on the official website on April Fool's 2004), and Birth of the Empire. Eventually, Revenge of the Sith also became a title guessed by fans that George Lucas would indirectly confirm. The title is a reference to Revenge of the Jedi, the original title of Return of the Jedi; Lucas changed the title scant weeks before the premiere of Return of the Jedi, declaring that a true Jedi could never seek revenge.

Lucas had originally planned to include even more ties to the original trilogy, and wrote early drafts of the script in which a 10-year-old Han Solo appeared on Kashyyyk, but the role was not cast or shot. He also wrote a scene in which Palpatine reveals to Anakin that he created him from midichlorians, and is thus his "father", a clear parallel to Vader's revelation to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, but later scrapped this scene as well. Another planned scene by Lucas that was written during the early development of the film was a conversation between Master Yoda and the ghostly Qui-Gon Jinn, with Liam Neeson reprising his role as Jinn (he also hinted his possible appearance in the film). However, the scene was never filmed and Neeson was never recorded, although the scene was present in the film's novelization.

After principal photography was complete in 2003, Lucas made even more changes to Anakin's character, rewriting his turn to the dark side. Lucas accomplished this through editing the principal footage and filming new scenes during pickups in London in 2004. In the previous versions, Anakin had several reasons for turning to the dark side, one of which was his sincere belief that the Jedi were plotting to take over the Republic. Although this is still intact in the finished film, by revising and refilming many scenes, Lucas emphasized Anakin's desire to save Padmé from death. Thus, in the version that made it to theaters, Anakin falls to the dark side primarily to save Padmé.

Art design
For the Kashyyyk environment, the art department turned to the Star Wars Holiday Special for inspiration. Over a period of months, Lucas would approve hundreds of designs that would eventually appear in the film. He would later rewrite entire scenes and action sequences to correspond to certain designs he had chosen. The designs were then shipped to the pre-visualization department to create moving CGI versions known as animatics. Ben Burtt would edit these scenes with Lucas in order to pre-visualize what the film would look like before the scenes were filmed. The pre-visualization footage featured a basic raw CGI environment with equally unprocessed character models performing a scene, typically for action sequences. Steven Spielberg was brought in as a "guest director" for the film's climax, overseeing the pre-visualization of an unused version of the Utapau chase scene and making art-design suggestions for the Order 66 assassinations as well as the Mustafar duel. The pre-visualization and art department designs were sent to the production department to begin building sets, props and costumes.

Filming
Although the first scene filmed was the final scene to appear in the film (shot during the filming of Attack of the Clones in 2000), the first bulk of principal photography on the film occurred from June 30, 2003, to September 17, 2003, with additional photography at Shepperton Studios in Surrey and Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire from August 2004 to January 31, 2005. The initial filming took place on sound stages at Fox Studios Australia in Sydney, although practical environments were shot as background footage later to be composited into the film. These included the limestone mountains depicting Kashyyyk, which were filmed in Phuket, Thailand. The production company was also fortunate enough to be shooting at the same time that Mount Etna erupted in Italy. Camera crews were sent to the location to shoot several angles of the volcano that were later spliced into the background of the animatics and the final film version of the planet Mustafar.

While shooting key dramatic scenes, Lucas would often use an "A camera" and "B camera", or the "V technique", a process that involves shooting with two or more cameras at the same time in order to gain several angles of the same performance. Using the HD technology developed for the film, the filmmakers were able to send footage to the editors the same day it was shot, a process that would require a full 24 hours had it been shot on film. Footage featuring the planet Mustafar was given to editor Roger Barton, who was on location in Sydney cutting the climactic duel.

Hayden Christensen said Lucas asked him "to bulk up and physically show the maturity that had taken place between the two films." The actor explained that he worked out with a trainer in Sydney for three months and ate "six meals a day and on every protein, weight gain supplement that man has created" to go from 160 lb to 185 lb.

Christensen and Ewan McGregor began rehearsing their climactic lightsaber duel long before Lucas would shoot it. They trained extensively with stunt coordinator Nick Gillard to memorize and perform their duel together. As in the previous prequel film, McGregor and Christensen performed their own lightsaber fighting scenes without the use of stunt doubles. The speed at which Vader and Obi-Wan engage in their duel is mostly the speed at which it was filmed, although there are instances where single frames were removed to increase the velocity of particular strikes. An example of this occurs as Obi-Wan strikes down on Vader after applying an armlock in the duel's first half.

Revenge of the Sith was the first Star Wars film in which Anakin Skywalker and the suited Darth Vader were played by the same actor in the same film. As Christensen recounted, it was originally intended to simply have a "tall guy" in the Darth Vader costume, but, after "begging and pleading", Christensen persuaded Lucas to have the Vader costume used in the film created specifically to fit him. The new costume featured shoe lifts and a muscle suit. It also required Christensen (who is 6 ft tall) to look through the helmet's mouthpiece.

In 2004, Gary Oldman was originally approached to provide the voice of General Grievous; however, complications arose during contract negotiations after Oldman learned the film was to be made outside of the Screen Actors Guild, of which he is a member. He backed out of the role rather than violate the union's rules. Matthew Wood, who voiced Grievous, disputed this story at Celebration III, held in Indianapolis. According to him, Oldman is a friend of producer Rick McCallum, and thus recorded an audition as a favor to him, but was not chosen. Wood, who was also the supervising sound editor, was in charge of the auditions and submitted his audition anonymously in the midst of 30 others, under the initials "A.S." for Alan Smithee. Days later, he received a phone call asking for the full name to the initials "A.S."

Visual effects
The post-production department (handled by Industrial Light & Magic) began work during filming and continued until weeks before the film was released in 2005. Special effects were created using almost all formats, including model work, CGI and practical effects. The same department later composited all such work into the filmed scenes—both processes taking nearly two years to complete. Revenge of the Sith has 2,151 shots that use special effects, a world record.

The film required 910 artists and 70,441 man-hours to create 49 seconds of footage for the Mustafar duel alone. Members of Hyperspace, the Official Star Wars Fan Club, received a special look into the production. Benefits included not only special articles, but they also received access to a webcam that transmitted a new image every 20 seconds during the time it was operating in Fox Studios Australia. Many times the stars, and Lucas himself, were spotted on the webcam.

Deleted scenes
Lucas excised all scenes of a group of Senators, including Padmé, Bail Organa, and Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), organizing an alliance to prevent Palpatine from usurping any more emergency powers. Though this is essentially the birth of the Rebel Alliance, the scenes were discarded to achieve more focus on Anakin's story. The scene where Yoda arrives on Dagobah to begin his self-imposed exile was also removed, but is featured as an extended scene in the DVD release, although McCallum stated he hoped Lucas would have added it to the new cut as part of a six-episode DVD box set.

Bai Ling filmed minor scenes for the film playing a senator, but her role was cut during editing. She claimed this was because she appeared in a nude pictorial for the June 2005 issue of Playboy, whose appearance on newsstands coincided with the film's May release. Lucas denied this, stating that the cut had been made more than a year earlier, and that he had cut his own daughter's scenes as well. The bonus features show an additional removed scene in which Jedi Master Shaak Ti is killed by General Grievous in front of Obi-Wan and Anakin. The bonus features also show Obi-Wan and Anakin running through Grievous' ship, escaping droids through a fuel tunnel, and arguing over what R2-D2 is saying.

Music
The music was composed and conducted by John Williams, who has composed and conducted the score for every episode in the Star Wars saga, and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and London Voices in February 2005. The film's soundtrack was released by Sony Pictures Classical Records on May 3, 2005, more than two weeks before the film's release. A music video titled A Hero Falls was created for the film's theme, "Battle of the Heroes", featuring footage from the film and was also available on the DVD.

The soundtrack also came with a collectors' DVD hosted by McDiarmid, titled Star Wars: A Musical Journey, which features 16 music videos set to remastered selections of music from all six film scores, set chronologically through the saga.

Marketing
The first trailer for Revenge of the Sith premiered in theaters on November 5, 2004, with the release of The Incredibles. It was also attached to the screenings of The Polar Express, National Treasure, Alexander, Ocean's Twelve, Meet the Fockers, Flight of the Phoenix and other films. At the same time, the trailer became available on the Internet. Just four months later, another trailer was unveiled on March 10, 2005, debuting with The O.C.'s "The Mallpisode" during the second season (Lucas himself would appear in a later episode) and in theaters with the release of Robots the next day on March 11. On March 14, it would then premiere on the official Star Wars website. Three days later on March 17, George Lucas revealed a preview of the film at the ShoWest Convention in Las Vegas, saying "It's not like the old Star Wars. This one's a little bit emotional. We like to describe it as Titanic in space. It's a tearjerker."

Theatrical
Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith charity premieres took place in Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., Boston, Denver, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Miami on Thursday, May 12, 2005; and on May 13, 2005, there were two additional charity premiere screenings in George Lucas's hometown of Modesto, California. The official premiere was at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival (out of competition) on May 16. Its theatrical release in most other countries took place on May 19 to coincide with the 1999 release of The Phantom Menace (the 1977 release of A New Hope and the 1983 release of Return of the Jedi were also released on the same day and month, six years apart). The global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas claimed one week before the premiere that it may have cost the U.S. economy approximately US$627 million in lost productivity because of employees who took a day off or reported in sick. Grauman's Chinese Theatre, a traditional venue for the Star Wars films, did not show it. However, a line of people stood there for more than a month hoping to convince someone to change this. Most of them took advantage of an offer to see the film at a nearby cinema, ArcLight Cinemas (formerly the "Cinerama Dome"). On May 16, the Empire Cinema in London's Leicester Square hosted a day-long Star Wars marathon showing of all six films; an army of Imperial stormtroopers "guarded" the area, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra gave a free concert of Star Wars music.

Leaked workprint
A copy of the film leaked onto peer-to-peer file sharing networks just hours after opening in theaters. The film was a time-stamped workprint, suggesting it may have come from within the industry rather than from someone who videotaped an advance screening. Eight people were later charged with copyright infringement and distributing material illegally. Documents filed by the Los Angeles District Attorney allege that a copy of the film was taken from an unnamed Californian post-production office by an employee, who later pleaded guilty to his charges. The illegal copy was passed among seven people until reaching an eighth party, who also pleaded guilty to uploading to an unnamed P2P network.

Rating
Revenge of the Sith is the first Star Wars film to receive a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), officially for "sci-fi violence and some intense images", namely for the scene in which Darth Vader is set aflame by lava. Lucas had stated months before the MPAA's decision that he felt the film should receive a PG-13 rating, because of Anakin's final moments and the film's content being the darkest and most intense of all six films. Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper later opined that children would be able to handle the film as long as they had parental guidance. All previously released films in the series were rated PG.

Home media
Revenge of the Sith was released on DVD and VHS on October 31, 2005, in the UK and Ireland; on November 1, 2005, it was released in the United States and Canada on DVD; and on November 3, 2005, it was released in Australia. It was also released in most major territories on or near the same day. The DVD release consists of widescreen and pan and scan full-screen versions and is THX certified. This two-disc set contains one disc with the film and the other one with bonus features. The first disc features three randomized selected menus, which are Coruscant, Utapau and Mustafar. There is an Easter egg in the options menu. When the THX Optimizer is highlighted, the viewer can press 1-1-3-8. By doing this, a hip hop music video with Yoda and some clone troopers will play.

The DVD includes a number of documentaries including a new full-length documentary as well as two featurettes, one which explores the prophecy of Anakin Skywalker as the Chosen One, the other looking at the film's stunts and a of web-documentaries from the official web site. Like the other DVD releases, included is an audio commentary track featuring Lucas, producer Rick McCallum, animation director Rob Coleman, and ILM visual effects supervisors John Knoll and Roger Guyett. were included with introductions from Lucas and McCallum.

This release is notable because, due to marketing issues, it was the first Star Wars film never to be released on VHS in the United States. However, the film was released on VHS in Australia, the UK and other countries.

The DVD was re-released in a prequel trilogy box set on November 4, 2008.

The six Star Wars films were released by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment on Blu-ray on September 16, 2011, in three different editions.

On April 7, 2015, Walt Disney Studios, 20th Century Fox, and Lucasfilm jointly announced the digital releases of the six released Star Wars films. Revenge of the Sith was released through the iTunes Store, Amazon Video, Vudu, Google Play, and Disney Movies Anywhere on April 10, 2015.

Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment reissued Revenge of the Sith on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital download on September 22, 2019. Additionally, all six films were available for 4K HDR and Dolby Atmos streaming on Disney+ upon the service's launch on November 12, 2019. This version of the film was released by Disney on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray on March 31, 2020, whilst being re-released on Blu-ray and DVD. All 20th Century Fox Fanfare and logo sequences on the first six films have been restored following the completion of Disney's acquisition of that studio in 2019 having been removed for the initial digital releases, except for A New Hope, which Fox had asked to retain all rights for prior to the sale of the studio to Disney.

3D re-release
On September 28, 2010, it was announced that all six films in the series were to be stereo-converted to 3D. The films would be re-released in chronological order beginning with The Phantom Menace on February 10, 2012. Revenge of the Sith was originally scheduled to be re-released in 3D on October 11, 2013. However, on January 28, 2013, Lucasfilm announced that it was postponing the 3D release of episodes II and III in order to "focus 100 percent of our efforts on Star Wars: The Force Awakens" and that further information about 3D release plans would be issued at a later date. The premiere of the 3D version was shown on April 17, 2015, at Star Wars Celebration Anaheim.

Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of based on  reviews, with an average rating of. The site's critical consensus reads, "With Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, George Lucas brings his second Star Wars trilogy to a suitably thrilling and often poignant – if still a bit uneven – conclusion." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 68 out of 100, based on 40 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale, the same score as the previous two films.

Most critics have considered the film to be the best of the prequel trilogy. A. O. Scott of The New York Times concluded that it was "the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed", and equal to The Empire Strikes Back as "the richest and most challenging movie in the cycle". J.R. Jones, a Chicago Reader critic who disliked The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, gave the film a positive review, saying that it had a "relatively thoughtful story". Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars, writing "If [Lucas] got bogged down in solemnity and theory in Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the Force is in a jollier mood this time, and Revenge of the Sith is a great entertainment", but he noted that "the dialogue throughout the movie is once again its weakest point".

Though many critics and fans viewed Revenge of the Sith as the strongest of the three prequels, some viewers thought it was more or less on par with the previous two episodes. Much of the criticism was directed towards the dialogue, particularly the film's romantic scenes; critics claimed this demonstrated Lucas's weakness as a writer of dialogue, a subject with which Lucas openly agreed when receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. Some film critics and fans criticized Hayden Christensen's acting, calling it "wooden". A retrospective review by Time felt that Christensen's maligned performance was in part affected by the screenwriting.

Other responses
Some American conservatives criticized the film, claiming it had a liberal bias and was a commentary on the George W. Bush administration and Iraq War. Some websites went so far as to propose a boycott of the film. Lucas defended the film, stating that the film's storyline was written during the Vietnam War and was influenced by that conflict rather than the war in Iraq. Lucas also said "The parallels between Vietnam and what we're doing in Iraq now are unbelievable".

Art critic Camille Paglia praised the film as an essential example of the modern digital art movement due to its "overwhelming operatic power and yes, seriousness", and arguing that its finale has "more inherent artistic value, emotional power, and global impact" than the work of some contemporary artists.

During the late 2010s, the film amassed a cult following on social media among some young fans who were children when the film was released, using the film's dialogue to create Internet memes.

Box office
The film was released in 115 countries. Its worldwide gross eventually reached $849 million—making it the second-highest-grossing film of 2005, behind Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The film earned an estimated $16.91 million from 2,900 midnight screenings in North America upon its release. In total, it earned a record $50 million on its opening day, marking the record for the highest opening-day gross on a Thursday. It was surpassed the following year by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which earned $55.5 million on its opening day.

With only the May 19 earnings, the film broke four box office records: midnight screenings gross (previously held by The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, $8 million), opening day gross (Spider-Man 2, with $40.4 million), single day gross (Shrek 2 with $44.8 million) and Thursday gross (The Matrix Reloaded with $37.5 million). Its single day and opening day gross records were later surpassed by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest on July 7, 2006, when that movie grossed $55.5 million on its opening day, and its midnight screening gross was broken by The Dark Knight on July 18, 2008, with $18.5 million. With a total gross of $108.4 million, Revenge of the Sith would go on to hold the record for having the biggest opening weekend for any 20th Century Fox film for a decade until it was taken by Deadpool in 2016. The year prior, Minions had already surpassed Revenge of the Sith for having the largest opening weekend for a prequel.

According to box office analysis sites, the film set American records for highest gross in a given number of days for each of its first 12 days of release except for the seventh and eighth, where the record is narrowly held by Spider-Man 2. Within three days, Revenge of the Sith surpassed Spider-Man for having the highest three-day gross of any film, scoring a total of $124.7 million. On its fifth day, it became the highest-grossing film of 2005, surpassing Hitch ($177.6 million). The film earned $158.5 million in its first four-day period, surpassing the previous four-day record held by The Matrix Reloaded ($134.3 million), and joining the latter film, Spider-Man, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as one of the only four films to make $100 million in their first three days. In eight days, it reached the $200 million mark (a record tied with Spider-Man 2) and by its 17th day, the film had passed $300 million (surpassing the record of 18 days of Shrek 2). It was eventually the third-fastest film (after Shrek 2 and Spider-Man) to reach $350 million. Revenge of the Sith earned a total of $55.2 million during its second weekend, making it the fourth-highest-grossing second weekend of all time, behind Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Spider-Man and Shrek 2. The film then earned $70 million in just four days, becoming the seventh-highest Memorial Day weekend gross of any film, trailing only behind Shrek 2, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, The Day After Tomorrow, Bruce Almighty, Pearl Harbor and Mission: Impossible 2.

The film ended its run in American theaters on October 20, 2005, finishing with a total gross of $380,270,577. It ranks 29th in all-time domestic grosses and is the highest-grossing U.S. of 2005, out-grossing second-place The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by nearly $90 million. The film sold an estimated 59,324,600 tickets in the US. It topped the domestic box office for two consecutive weekends before being overtaken by Madagascar and The Longest Yard (which were in their second weekend).

International grosses that exceeded $460 million include those Australia ($27.2 million), France and Algeria ($56.9 million), Germany ($47.3 million), Italy ($11.3 million), Japan ($82.7 million), Mexico ($15.3 million), South Korea ($10.3 million), Spain ($23.8 million), and the United Kingdom and Ireland ($72.8 million). The total worldwide opening of Revenge of the Sith for each country was $254 million, combined with $304 million from its four-day weekend. It would go on to hold this record for two years before Spider-Man 3 took it in 2007.

Accolades
Following the release of Revenge of the Sith—the completion of the original and prequel Star Wars series—on June 9, 2005, George Lucas was presented with the 33rd American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award. The institute honored his "astonishing contributions to the art and technology of filmmaking, as well as the impact of the epic Star Wars series".

Despite being the prequel trilogy's best reviewed and received film, it received fewer award nominations than the previous films. It became the only Star Wars film not to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects; it was nominated for Best Makeup (Dave Elsey and Nikki Gooley), losing to The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It also won "Favorite Motion Picture" and "Favorite Dramatic Motion Picture" awards at the People's Choice Awards, "Hollywood Movie of the Year" award at the Hollywood Film Festival, Empire Awards for Sci-Fi/Fantasy Film and Scene of the Year (The birth of Vader), and the Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie – Action.

As did every film of the original trilogy, the film won the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film. Williams also won Best Music. The film was nominated for ten Saturn Awards overall, including Best Director and Best Writing for Lucas, Best Actor for Christensen, Best Actress for Natalie Portman, and Best Supporting Actor for Ian McDiarmid.

Of the three Star Wars prequels, the film received the fewest Golden Raspberry Awards nominations: only one, for Christensen as Worst Supporting Actor, which he won. (The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones received seven nominations each, with one and two wins, respectively.) It is the only Star Wars prequel not to receive a Razzie nomination for Worst Picture. Christensen further won the "Best Villain" award at the MTV Movie Awards. The film also received the fewest nominations (and no wins) at the 2005 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards: Worst Screenplay for a Film Grossing More Than $100M, and Worst On-Screen Couple (Christensen and Portman).

Themes
Throughout Revenge of the Sith, Lucas refers to a wide range of films and other sources, drawing on political, military, and mythological motifs to enhance his story's impact. The most media coverage was likely given to an exchange between Anakin and Obi-Wan, leading to the aforementioned conflict: "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy", Anakin declares. Despite Lucas' insistence to the contrary, The Seattle Times concluded, "Without naming Bush or the Patriot Act, it's all unmistakable no matter what your own politics may be."

McDiarmid, Lucas, and others have also called Anakin's journey to the dark side Faustian in the sense of making a "pact with the devil" for short-term gain, with the fiery volcano planet Mustafar representing hell. Midway through the film, Lucas intercuts between Anakin and Padmé by themselves, thinking about one another in the Jedi Temple and their apartment, respectively, during sunset. The sequence is without dialogue and complemented by a moody, synthesized soundtrack. Lucas' coverage of the exterior cityscapes, skylines and interior isolation in the so-called "Ruminations" sequence is similar to the cinematography and mise-en-scène of Rosemary's Baby, a film in which a husband makes a literal pact with the devil.

Novelization
The film's novelization was written by Matthew Stover. It has more dialogue than the film, and certain story elements were expanded upon in the novelization including Anakin and Palpatine's relationship and Palpatine's apprenticeship to Darth Plagueis.

Video game
A video game based on the film was released on May 5, 2005, two weeks before the film. The game generally followed the film's storyline, integrating scenes from the film. However, many sections of the game featured scenes cut from the film, or entirely new scenes for the game. The style of the game was mostly lightsaber combat and fighting as Obi-Wan or Anakin. It also has a form of multiplayer mode, which includes both "VS" and "Cooperative" mode. In the first mode, two players fight with characters of their choice against each other in a lightsaber duel to the death. In the latter mode, two players team up to combat increasingly difficult waves of enemies.

The Clone Wars
The 2008 animated film and subsequent television series fill the three-year gap between the events of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. A number of plot threads initially developed for inclusion in Revenge of the Sith were instead incorporated into The Clone Wars. These include Boba Fett's revenge plot against Mace Windu for his father Jango's death, and the solving of the mystery behind deceased Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas which was introduced in Attack of the Clones. The final four episodes of the series take place concurrently with Revenge of the Sith. Several scenes from the film were recreated and expanded for these episodes in order to showcase the whereabouts of Anakin Skywalker's former Padawan Ahsoka Tano during the events of the film. While Ahsoka was a major character in The Clone Wars, she is not referenced in Revenge of the Sith as the character had not yet been created at the time that the film was written.

The Bad Batch
Several scenes from Revenge of the Sith were recreated in the first episode Aftermath. This episode also takes place concurrently with the film and the following episodes deal with the aftermath of Order 66 and the Clone Wars.

Obi-Wan Kenobi
The 2022 miniseries takes place ten years after Revenge of the Sith (and approximately nine years before A New Hope), and features flashbacks taking place prior and during the events of the film, with some of the latter via archive footage. McGregor, Christensen, Earl Jones, Edgerton, Piesse, Smits, McDiarmid, and Daniels reprise their roles from the film.

Backstroke of the West
In 2016, a fandub of Revenge of the Sith was released titled Star War [sic] the Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West. The script used in the fandub originated from the English subtitles of a Mandarin Chinese bootleg DVD of the film that had been purchased by an American in Shanghai. The subtitles, almost entirely filled with errors and mistranslations, stemmed from a bootlegger first having listened to the film in English, writing down what they believed to have heard and occasionally making things up, which was then converted into Mandarin and back into English via inaccurate machine translation, resulting in nonsensical Chinglish.

The dub became an Internet meme and a viral video and received praise from multiple news outlets. Patrick Shanley from The Hollywood Reporter described it as "a fan-made masterpiece", while Julia Alexander from Polygon called the dub "hilarious". Derrick Rossignol from Nerdist went so far as to say that the fandub was "way better" than the original film.


text:
Talk:Egyptian language

Hieroglyphs in lead
The first sentence of the lead currently includes the following string of hieroglyphs: 𓂋𓏺𓈖 𓆎𓅓𓏏𓊖 all in a line, one after another. This is not correct. They should display like this:  (as appears in the infobox at right). Precisely because of this issue with display, we usually avoid giving hieroglyphs in running text (and make use of wikihiero and Template:Hiero) I see no advantage to displaying incorrect hieroglyphs when we have correctly displaying ones right next to them, but, when I removed the incorrect ones, User:Florian Blaschke reverted the change claiming that the display issue was "Probably a problem on your end". Furius (talk) 20:30, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

 * This is excessive perfectionism, IMO. The vertical placement of some hieroglyph combinations is a predictable, non-distinctive and superficial feature; a string of hieroglyphs still gives you all the information about the spelling that you need to reconstruct the authentic appearance as long as you know a couple of rules, whereas a romanisation does not, and while it may not look exactly the way it would in an authentic inscription, it's still far more similar to it than a romanisation. The wikihiero things are effectively displayed as images, as they are impossible to search for, copy and type unless you enter the source code. This seems to me a much greater drawback than some cosmetic feature of arrangement.--62.73.69.121 (talk) 08:27, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

is Facebook is open 2023+20.30 1.
from 123 241 135 139 to 7 139.135.241.183 (talk) 07:18, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

 * to April 2036 139.135.241.123 (talk) 07:22, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

Egyptian as a Branch
Made some edits to the intro of the article. With how it was written one could get the impression that Ancient Egyptian was a single monolithic language. I added clarifying information that Egyptian is a full fledged branch of Afro-Asiatic with sub-languages and dialects NisutBity (talk) 14:08, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

The contrast between two stop series
As early as Late Egyptian, we're told, 'the phonemes d ḏ g gradually merge with their counterparts t ṯ k.' This sentence creates the impression that the contrast between the two stop series is eventually lost. Yet nevertheless in Demotic, according to the article, it is still the case that 'stops may be either aspirated or tenuis (unaspirated), although there is evidence that aspirates merged with their tenuis counterparts in certain environments.' And finally, in Coptic, it turns out that 'earlier *d ḏ g q are preserved as ejective t' c' k' k' before vowels', so the contrast is preserved even there. If there was no merger of the phonemes in all positions but just changes of d ḏ g into t ṯ k in some positions, then it would be appropriate to at least say that the ejectives in Coptic originate from those tenues that hadn't merged with the aspirates in Demotic and Late Egyptian. And also the initial wording about Late Egyptian shouldn't create the impression of an eventual merger.

A further interesting question is how we know that the Coptic reflexes of Early Egyptian d ḏ g q are ejectives, when the only thing Bohairic spelling shows is that they are unaspirated. Loans into neighbouring languages with ejectives, perhaps? I'd expect Akkadian transcriptions from Early and Late Egyptian to show that, too. 62.73.69.121 (talk) 08:52, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Contradiction
The table of consonant reflexes claims that Coptic ϫ stands for /t͡ʃ/ and originates from Demotic ṯ (*/t͡ʃʰ/) and d (*/t͡ʃ/), while ϭ stands for /c/ and originates from Demotic k (*/cʰ/), g and q (*/c/). So the difference would be between an affricate and a palatal stop. However, the table of Coptic consonants claims that Coptic ϫ stands for /c/ or /cʼ/, while ϭ stands for /cʰ/. Then the difference would be between an unaspirated (and ejective) palatal stop and an aspirated palatal stop. Which is it? 62.73.69.121 (talk) 22:40, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Egyptian language


text:
Bertha von Suttner

Bertha Sophie Felicitas Freifrau von Suttner (9 June 1843 – 21 June 1914) was an Austro-Bohemian noblewoman, pacifist and novelist. In 1905, she became the second female Nobel laureate (after Marie Curie in 1903), the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first Austrian and Czech laureate.

Early life
Bertha Kinský was born on 9 June 1843 at Kinský Palace in the Obecní dvůr (cz) district of Prague. Her parents were the Austrian Lieutenant general (Feldmarschall-Leutnant) Franz Michael de Paula Josef Graf Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau (1769–1843), then recently deceased at the age of 75, and his young wife Sophie Wilhelmine von Körner (1815–1884), who was almost fifty years his junior.

Her father was a member of the illustrious House of Kinsky via descent from Count Wilhelm Kinsky (1574–1634), being younger son of Count Franz Ferdinand Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau (1738–1806) and his wife, Princess Maria Christina Anna von und zu Liechtenstein (1741–1819), daughter of Prince Emanuel of Liechtenstein. Bertha's mother came from a family that belonged to untitled nobility of significantly lower status, being the daughter of her husband's comrade, Joseph von Körner (a captain of the cavalry in the Imperial Army), a distant relative of the poet Theodor Körner. Through her mother, Bertha was also related to Theodor Körner, Edler von Siegringen, namesake and great-nephew of the poet, who later served as the 4th President of Austria.

For the rest of her life, Bertha faced exclusion from the Austrian high nobility due to her "mixed" descent; for instance, only those with an unblemished aristocratic pedigree back to their great-great-grandparents were eligible for presentation at the imperial court. She was additionally disadvantaged because her father, as a third son, had no great estates or other financial resources to bequeath. Bertha was baptised at Prague's Church of Our Lady of the Snows – not a traditional choice for the aristocracy.

Soon after her birth, Bertha's mother moved to live in Brno near Bertha's guardian, Landgrave Friedrich Michael zu Fürstenberg-Taikowitz (1793–1866). Her older brother, Count Arthur Franz Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau (1827–1906), was sent to a military school at the age of six and subsequently had little contact with the family. In 1855, Bertha's maternal aunt Charlotte (Lotte) Büschel, née von Körner (de) (also a widow), and her daughter Elvira joined the household. Elvira, whose father was a private scholar and whose official guardian, after the death of her father, became Count Johann Carl August von Huyn (de), was of a similar age to Bertha and interested in intellectual pursuits, introducing her cousin to literature and philosophy. Beyond her reading, Bertha gained proficiency in French, Italian and English as an adolescent, under the supervision of a succession of private tutors; she also became an accomplished amateur pianist and singer.

Bertha's mother and aunt, regarding themselves as clairvoyant, went to gamble at Wiesbaden in the summer of 1856, hoping to return with a fortune. Their losses proved so heavy that they were forced to move to Vienna. During this trip, Bertha received a marriage proposal from Prince Philipp zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg (1836–1858), third son of Prince August Ludwig zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg (de) (Minister of State of the Duchy of Nassau) and his wife, Franziska Allesina genannt von Schweitzer (1802–1878), which was declined due to her young age. The family returned to Wiesbaden in 1859; the second trip proved similarly unsuccessful, and they had to relocate to a small property in Klosterneuburg. Shortly after this, Bertha wrote her first published work, the novella Erdenträume im Monde, which appeared in Die Deutsche Frau. Continuing poor financial circumstances led Bertha to a brief engagement to the wealthy Gustav, Baron Heine von Geldern, 31 years her senior and a member of the banking Heine family (de), whom she came to find unattractive and rejected; her memoirs record her disgusted response to the older man's attempt to kiss her.

In 1864, the family spent the summer at Bad Homburg, a fashionable gambling-destination among the aristocracy of the era. Bertha befriended the Georgian aristocrat Ekaterine Dadiani, Princess of Mingrelia, and met Tsar Alexander II, to whom she was very distantly related. Seeking a career as an opera singer as an alternative to marrying into money, she undertook an intensive course of lessons, working on her voice for over four hours a day. Despite tuition from the eminent Gilbert Duprez in Paris in 1867, and from Pauline Viardot in Baden-Baden in 1868, she never secured a professional engagement. She suffered from stage fright and was unable to project well in performance. In the summer of 1872, she became engaged to Prince Adolf zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein (1839–1872), son of Prince Alexander zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein (1801–1874) and Countess Amalie Luise von Bentheim-Tecklenburg-Rheda (1802–1887). Prince Adolf died at sea that October while travelling to America to escape his debts.

Tutor in the Suttner household, life in Georgia
Bertha's guardian (Landgrave Friedrich zu Fürstenberg) and her cousin Elvira both died in 1866, and she (now above the typical age of marriage) felt increasingly constrained by her mother's eccentricity and the family's poor financial circumstances. In 1873, she found employment as a tutor and companion to the four daughters of Karl, Freiherr von Suttner, who were aged between 15 and 20. The Suttner family (de) lived in the Innere Stadt of Vienna three seasons of the year, and spent the summer at Castle Harmannsdorf (de) in Lower Austria. She had an affectionate relationship with her four young students, who nicknamed her "Boulotte" (fatty) due to her size, a name she would later adopt as a literary pseudonym in the form "B. Oulot".

She soon fell in love with the girls' elder brother, Baron Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner (1850–1902), younger son of Karl Gundaccar Freiherr von Suttner (1819–1898) and his wife, Karola Knolz (b. 1822), who was seven years her junior. They were engaged but unable to marry due to his parents' disapproval. In 1876, with the encouragement of her employers, she answered a newspaper advertisement which led to her briefly becoming secretary and housekeeper to Alfred Nobel in Paris. In the few weeks of her employment, she and Nobel developed a friendship, and Nobel may have made romantic overtures. However, she remained committed to Arthur and returned shortly to Vienna to marry him in secrecy, in the church of St. Aegyd in Gumpendorf.

The newlywed couple eloped to Mingrelia in western Georgia, Russian Empire, near the Black Sea, where she hoped to make use of her connection to the former ruling House of Dadiani. On their arrival, they were entertained by Prince Niko. The couple settled in Kutaisi, where they found work teaching languages and music to the children of the local aristocracy. However, they experienced considerable hardship despite their social connections, living in a simple three-roomed wooden house. Their situation worsened in 1877 on the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War, although Arthur worked as a reporter on the conflict for the Neue Freie Presse. Suttner also wrote frequently for the Austrian press in this period and worked on her early novels, including Es Löwos, a romanticised account of her life with Arthur. In the aftermath of the war, Arthur attempted to set up a timber business, but it was unsuccessful.

Arthur and Bertha von Suttner
Arthur and Bertha von Suttner were largely socially isolated in Georgia; their poverty restricted their engagement with high society, and neither ever became fluent speakers of Mingrelian or Georgian. To support themselves, both began writing as a career. While Arthur's writing during this period is dominated by local themes, Suttner's was not similarly influenced by Georgian culture.

In August 1882, Ekaterine Dadiani died. Soon afterwards, the couple decided to move to Tbilisi. There, Arthur took whatever work he could (in accounting, construction and wallpaper design), while Suttner largely concentrated on her writing. She became a correspondent of Michael Georg Conrad, eventually contributing an article to the 1885 edition of his publication Die Gesellschaft. The piece, entitled "Truth and Lies", is a polemic in favour of the naturalism of Émile Zola. Her first significant political work, Inventarium einer Seele ("Inventory of the Soul"), was published in Leipzig in 1883. In this work, Suttner takes a pro-disarmament, progressive stance, arguing for the inevitability of world peace due to technological advancement; a possibility also considered by her friend Nobel due to the increasingly deterrent effect of more powerful weapons.

In 1884, Suttner's mother died, leaving the couple with further debts. Arthur had befriended a Georgian journalist in Tbilisi, M, and the couple agreed to collaborate with him on a translation of the Georgian epic The Knight in the Panther Skin. Suttner was to improve M.'s literal translation of the Georgian to French, and Arthur to translate the French to German. This method proved arduous, and they worked for few hours each day due to the distraction of the Mingrelian countryside around M.'s home. Arthur published several articles on the work in the Georgian press, and Mihály Zichy prepared some illustrations for the publication, but M. failed to make the expected payment, and after the Bulgarian Crisis began in 1885 the couple felt increasingly unsafe in Georgian society, which was becoming more hostile to Austrians due to Russian influence. They finally reconciled with Arthur's family and in May 1885 could return to Austria, where the couple lived at Harmannsdorf Castle in Lower Austria.

Bertha found refuge in her marriage with Arthur, of which she remarked that "the third field of my feelings and moods lay within our married happiness. In this was my peculiarly inalienable home, my refuge for all possible conditions of life, […] and so the leaves of my diary are full not only of political domestic records of all kinds, but also of memoranda of our gay little jokes, our confidential enjoyable walks, our uplifting reading, our hours of music together, and our evening games of chess. To us personally nothing could happen. We had each other – that was everything."

Peace activism
After their return to Austria, Suttner continued her journalism and concentrated on peace and war issues, corresponding with the French philosopher Ernest Renan and influenced by the International Arbitration and Peace Association founded by Hodgson Pratt in 1880. In 1889, Suttner became a leading figure in the peace movement with the publication of her pacifist novel, Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!), which made her one of the leading figures of the Austrian peace movement. The book was published in 37 editions and translated into 12 languages. She witnessed the foundation of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and called for the establishment of the Austrian Gesellschaft der Friedensfreunde pacifist organisation in an 1891 Neue Freie Presse editorial. Suttner became chairwoman and also founded the German Peace Society the next year. She became known internationally as the editor of the international pacifist journal Die Waffen nieder!, named after her book, from 1892 to 1899. In 1897, she presented Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria with a list of signatures urging the establishment of an International Court of Justice and took part in the First Hague Convention in 1899 with the help of Theodor Herzl, who paid for her trip as a correspondent of the Zionist newspaper, Die Welt.

Upon her husband's death in 1902, Suttner had to sell Harmannsdorf Castle and moved back to Vienna. In 1904 she addressed the International Congress of Women in Berlin and for seven months travelled around the United States, attending a universal peace congress in Boston and meeting President Theodore Roosevelt.

Though her personal contact with Alfred Nobel had been brief, she corresponded with him until his death in 1896, and it is believed that Von Suttner was a major influence on his decision to include a peace prize among those prizes provided in his will. Bertha von Suttner was awarded the Nobel Peace Price in the fifth term on 10 December 1905, together with her comrade, the legal scholar Tobias Asser (1838–1913) for their help in developing an international order based on peace rather than war. The presentation took place on 18 April 1906 in Kristiania.

In 1907, Von Suttner was the only woman to attend the Second Hague Peace Conference, which mainly pertained to the law of war. Von Suttner was actually highly critical of the 1907 conference, and warned of a war to come. When accepting her Nobel Peace prize, she said: "(…) whether our Europe will become a showpiece of ruins and failure, or whether we can avoid this danger and so enter sooner the coming era of secure peace and law in which a civilisation of unimagined glory will develop. The many aspects of this question are what the second Hague Conference should be discussing rather than the proposed topics concerning the laws and practices of war at sea, the bombardment of ports, towns, and villages, the laying of mines, and so on. The contents of this agenda demonstrate that, although the supporters of the existing structure of society, which accepts war, come to a peace conference prepared to modify the nature of war, they are basically trying to keep the present system intact".

Around this time, she also crossed paths with Anna Bernhardine Eckstein, another German champion of world peace, who influenced the agenda of the Second Hague Peace Conference. A year later she attended the International Peace Congress in London, where she first met Caroline Playne, an English anti-war activist who would later write the first biography of Suttner.

In the run-up to World War I, Suttner continued to campaign against international armament. In 1911 she became a member of the advisory council of the Carnegie Peace Foundation. In the last months of her life, while suffering from cancer, she helped organise the next Peace Conference, intended to take place in September 1914. However, the conference never took place, as she died of cancer on 21 June 1914, and seven days later the heir to her nation's throne, Franz Ferdinand was killed, triggering World War I.

Suttner's pacifism was influenced by the writings of Immanuel Kant, Henry Thomas Buckle, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin and Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy praised Die Waffen nieder!) conceiving peace as a natural state impaired by the human aberrances of war and militarism. As a result, she argued that a right to peace could be demanded under international law and was necessary in the context of an evolutionary Darwinist conception of history. Suttner was a respected journalist, with one historian describing her as "a most perceptive and adept political commentator".

Writing
As a career writer, Suttner often had to write novels and novellas that she did not believe in or really want to write, to support herself. However, even in those novels there are traces of her political ideals; often, the romantic heroes would fall in love upon realising they were both fighting for the same ideals, usually peace and tolerance.

To promote her writing career and ideals, she used her connections in aristocracy and friendships with wealthy individuals, such as Alfred Nobel, to gain access to international heads of state, and also to gain popularity for her writing. To increase the financial success of her writing, she used a male pseudonym early in her career. In addition, Suttner often worked as a journalist to publicise her message or promote her own books, events, and causes.

As Tolstoy noted and others have since agreed, there is a strong similarity between Suttner and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Both Beecher Stowe and Suttner "were neither simply writers of popular entertainment nor authors of tendentious propaganda.... [They] used entertainment for idealistic purposes." For Suttner, peace and acceptance of all individuals and all peoples was the greatest ideal and theme.

Suttner also wrote about other issues and ideals. Two common issues in her work, apart from pacifism, are religion and gender.

Religion
There are two main issues with religion that Suttner often wrote about. She had a disdain for the spectacle and pomp of some religious practices. In a scene in Lay Down Your Arms she highlighted the odd theatricality of some religious practices. In the scene, the emperor and empress are washing the feet of normal citizens to show they are as humble as Jesus, but they invite everyone to witness their show of humility and enter the hall in a dramatic fashion. The protagonist Martha remarks that it was "indeed a sham washing."

Another issue prominent in much of her writing is the idea that war is righteously for God, and leaders often use religion as a pretext for war. Suttner criticised this reasoning on the grounds that it placed the state as the important entity to God rather than the individual, thereby making dying in battle more glorious than other forms of death or surviving a war. Much of Lay Down Your Arms discusses this topic.

This type of religious thinking also leads to segregation and fighting based on religious differences, which Bertha and Arthur von Suttner refused to accept. As a devout Christian, Arthur founded the League Against Anti-Semitism in response to the pogroms in Eastern Europe and the growing antisemitism across Europe. The Suttner family called for acceptance of all people and all faiths, with Suttner writing in her memoirs that "religion was neighbourly love, not neighbourly hatred. Any kind of hatred, against other nations or against other creeds, detracted from the humaneness of humanity."

Gender
Suttner is often considered a leader in the women's liberation movement.

Von Suttner broke through gender barriers by her work as a writer and activist. She was an outspoken leader in a society in which women were to be seen, not be heard. But she did not actively participate in the movements for women’s suffrage, for instance, which she explained due to a lack of time. She instead focused on reaching out to other women in the international peace movement, though she kept close contact to the women’s suffrage movement. As a sign of joint solidarity, for instance, Von Suttner was a prominent participant of the 1904 ‘International Women’s Conference’ (‘Internationale Frauen-Kongress’) in Berlin. Von Suttner knew, though, that conflict can only be avoided if both men and women together struggle for peace, which required an absolute belief in gender equality. "The tasks involved in mankind's continuing ennoblement are such that they can only be fulfilled through fair and equal cooperation between the sexes", she wrote.

In Lay Down Your Arms, the protagonist Martha often clashes with her father on this issue. Martha does not want her son to play with toy soldiers and be indoctrinated to the masculine ideas of war. Martha's father attempts to put Martha back in the female gendered box by suggesting that the son will not need to ask for approval from a woman, and also states that Martha should marry again because women her age should not be alone.

This was not simply because she insisted that women are equal to men, but that she was able to tease out how sexism affects both men and women. Like Martha being placed in a female structured gender box, the character of Tilling is also placed in the male stereotyped box and affected by that. The character even discusses it, saying, "we men have to repress the instinct of self-preservation. Soldiers have also to repress the compassion, the sympathy for the gigantic trouble which invades both friend and foe; for next to cowardice, what is most disgraceful to us is all sentimentality, all that is emotional."

Legacy
Although Suttner was not financially successful during her lifetime, her work has remained influential for those involved in the peace movement. She has also been commemorated on several coins and stamps:
 * She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905
 * She was selected as a main motif for a high value collectors' coin: the 2008 Europe Taler, which featured important people in the history of Europe. Also depicted in the coin are Martin Luther, Antonio Vivaldi, and James Watt.
 * A commemorative silver 10 euro coin was issued in Germany in honor of the centennial of her Nobel Prize.
 * She is depicted on the Austrian 2 euro coin, and was pictured on the old Austrian 1,000 schilling bank note.
 * She was commemorated on a 1965 Austrian postage stamp and a 2005 German postage stamp.
 * On 10 December 2019, Google celebrated her with a Google Doodle.
 * There is a statue in her honor in Vienna and one in Graz.

On film

 * Die Waffen nieder, by Holger Madsen and Carl Theodor Dreyer. Released by Nordisk Films Kompagni in 1914.
 * No Greater Love (Herz der Welt), a 1952 film has Bertha as the main character.

TV

 * Madame Nobel (Eine Liebe für den Frieden – Bertha von Suttner und Alfred Nobel), TV biopic, ORF/Degeto/BR 2014, after the play Mr. & Mrs. Nobel by Esther Vilar.

title: Bertha von Suttner


text:
Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway, (born 5 April 1942) is a British film director, screenwriter and artist. His films are noted for the distinct influence of Renaissance and Baroque painting, and Mannerism painting in particular. Common traits in his films are the scenic composition and illumination and the contrasts of costume and nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and people, sexual pleasure and painful death.

Early life
Greenaway was born in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, to a teacher mother and a builder's merchant father. Greenaway's family had relocated to Wales prior to his birth to escape the Nazi bombings of London. They returned to the London area at the end of World War II and settled in Woodford, then part of Essex. He attended Churchfields Junior School and later Forest School in nearby Walthamstow.

At an early age Greenaway decided on becoming a painter. He became interested in European cinema, focusing first on the films of Ingmar Bergman, and then on the French nouvelle vague filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and, most especially, Alain Resnais. Greenaway has said that Resnais's Last Year in Marienbad (1961) had been the most important influence upon his own filmmaking (and he himself established a close working relationship with that film's cinematographer Sacha Vierny). He now lives in Amsterdam.

1962–1999
In 1962, Greenaway began studies at Walthamstow College of Art, where a fellow student was musician Ian Dury (later cast in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover). Greenaway trained as a muralist for three years; he made his first film, Death of Sentiment, a churchyard furniture essay filmed in four large London cemeteries. In 1965, he joined the Central Office of Information (COI), where he went on to work for fifteen years as a film editor and director. In that time he made a series of experimental films, starting with Train (1966), footage of the last steam trains at Waterloo station (situated behind the COI), edited to a musique concrète composition. Tree (1966) is a homage to the embattled tree growing in concrete outside the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. In the late 1970s, he made Vertical Features Remake and A Walk Through H. The former is an examination of various arithmetical editing structures, and the latter is a journey through the maps of a fictitious country.

In 1980, Greenaway delivered The Falls (his first feature-length film) – a mammoth, fantastical, absurdist encyclopaedia of flight-associated material all relating to ninety-two victims of what is referred to as the Violent Unknown Event (VUE). In the 1980s his cinema flowered in his best-known films, The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), The Belly of an Architect (1987), Drowning by Numbers (1988), and his most successful film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). Greenaway's most familiar musical collaborator during this period is composer Michael Nyman, who has scored several films.

In 1989, Greenaway collaborated with artist Tom Phillips on a television serial A TV Dante, dramatising the first few cantos of Dante's Inferno. In the 1990s he presented Prospero's Books (1991), the controversial The Baby of Mâcon (1993), The Pillow Book (1996), and 8½ Women (1999).

In the early 1990s Greenaway wrote ten opera libretti known as the Death of a Composer series, dealing with the commonalities of the deaths of ten composers from Anton Webern to John Lennon; however, the other composers are fictitious, and one is a character from The Falls. In 1995, Louis Andriessen completed the sixth libretto, Rosa – A Horse Drama. He is currently professor of cinema studies at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

2000–present
Greenaway presented the ambitious The Tulse Luper Suitcases, a multimedia project that resulted in three films, a website, two books, a touring exhibition, and a shorter feature which reworked the material of the first three films.

He also contributed to Visions of Europe, a short film collection by different European Union directors; his British entry is The European Showerbath. Nightwatching and Rembrandt's J'Accuse are two films on Rembrandt, released respectively in 2007 and 2008. Nightwatching is the first feature in the series "Dutch Masters", with the second project titled as Goltzius and the Pelican Company.

On 17 June 2005, Greenaway appeared for his first VJ performance during an art club evening in Amsterdam, Netherlands, with music by DJ Serge Dodwell (aka Radar), as a backdrop, 'VJ' Greenaway used for his set a special system consisting of a large plasma screen with laser controlled touchscreen to project the ninety-two Tulse Luper stories on the twelve screens of "Club 11", mixing the images live. This was later reprised at the Optronica festival, London.

On 12 October 2007, he created the multimedia installation Peopling the Palaces at Venaria Reale at the Royal Palace of Venaria, which animated the Palace with 100 videoprojectors.

Greenaway was interviewed for Clive Meyer's Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice (2011), and voiced strong criticisms of film theory as distinct from discussions of other media: "Are you sufficiently happy with cinema as a thinking medium if you are only talking to one person?"

On 3 May 2016, he received a Honoris Causa doctorate from the University of San Martín, Argentina.

Nine Classical Paintings Revisited
In 2006, Greenaway began a series of digital video installations, Nine Classical Paintings Revisited, with his exploration of Rembrandt's Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. On 30 June 2008, after much negotiation, Greenaway staged a one-night performance 'remixing' da Vinci's The Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan to a select audience of dignitaries. The performance consisted of superimposing digital imagery and projections onto the painting with music from the composer Marco Robino.

Greenaway exhibited his digital exploration of The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese as part of the 2009 Venice Biennial. An arts writer for The New York Times called it "possibly the best unmanned art history lecture you'll ever experience," while acknowledging that some viewers might respond to it as "mediocre art, Disneyfied kitsch or a flamboyant denigration of site-specific video installation." The 50-minute presentation, set to a soundtrack, incorporates closeup images of faces from the painting along with animated diagrams revealing compositional relations among the figures. These images are projected onto and around the replica of the painting that now stands at the original site, within the Palladian architecture of the Benedictine refectory on San Giorgio Maggiore. The soundtrack features music and imagined dialogue scripted by Greenaway for the 126 "wedding guests, servants, onlookers and wedding crashers" depicted in the painting, consisting of small talk and banal chatter that culminates in reaction to the miraculous transformation of water to wine, according to the Gospels the first miracle performed by Jesus. Picasso's Guernica, Seurat's Grande Jatte, works by Jackson Pollock and Claude Monet, Velázquez's Las Meninas and Michelangelo's The Last Judgment are possible series subjects.

Features

 * The Falls (1980)
 * The Draughtsman's Contract (1982)
 * A Zed & Two Noughts (1985)
 * The Belly of an Architect (1987)
 * Drowning by Numbers (1988)
 * The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
 * Prospero's Books (1991)
 * The Baby of Mâcon (1993)
 * The Pillow Book (1996)
 * 8½ Women (1999)
 * The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story (2003)
 * The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 2: Vaux to the Sea (2004)
 * The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark to the Finish (2004)
 * A Life in Suitcases (edited version of The Tulse Luper Suitcases series) (2005)
 * Nightwatching (2007)
 * Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012)
 * Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015)
 * Walking to Paris (upcoming)
 * Lucca Mortis (upcoming)

Shorts

 * Death of Sentiment (1962)
 * Tree (1966)
 * Train (1966)
 * Revolution (1967)
 * 5 Postcards from Capital Cities (1967)
 * Intervals (1969)
 * Erosion (1971)
 * H Is for House (1973)
 * Windows (1975)
 * Water Wrackets (1975)
 * Water (1975)
 * Goole by Numbers (1976)
 * Dear Phone (1978)
 * Vertical Features Remake (1978)
 * A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978)
 * 1–100 (1978)
 * Making a Splash (1984)
 * Inside Rooms: 26 Bathrooms, London & Oxfordshire (1985)
 * Hubert Bals Handshake (1989)
 * Rosa: La monnaie de munt (1992)
 * Peter Greenaway (1995) - segment of Lumière and Company
 * The Bridge Celebration (1997)
 * The Man in the Bath (2001)
 * European Showerbath (2004) - segment of Visions of Europe
 * Castle Amerongen (2011)
 * Just in Time (2013) - segment of 3x3D

Documentaries and mockumentaries

 * Eddie Kid (1978)
 * Cut Above the Rest (1978)
 * Zandra Rhodes (1979)
 * Women Artists (1979)
 * Leeds Castle (1979)
 * Lacock Village (1980)
 * Country Diary (1980)
 * Terence Conran (1981)
 * Four American Composers (1983)
 * The Coastline (also known as The Sea in their Blood) (1983)
 * Fear of Drowning (1988)
 * The Reitdiep Journeys (2001)
 * Rembrandt's J'Accuse (2008)
 * The Marriage (2009)
 * Atomic Bombs on the Planet Earth (2011)
 * Luther and His Legacy (2017)

Television

 * Act of God (1980)
 * Death in the Seine (French TV, 1988)
 * A TV Dante (mini-series, 1989)
 * M Is for Man, Music, Mozart (1991)
 * A Walk Through Prospero's Library (1992)
 * Darwin (French TV, 1993)
 * The Death of a Composer: Rosa, a Horse Drama (1999)

Exhibitions

 * The Physical Self, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1991)
 * Le bruit des nuages (as curator), Louvre Museum, Paris (1992)
 * 100 Objects to represent the World (1992) at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Hofburg Imperial Palace Vienna.
 * Stairs 1 Geneva (1995)
 * Flyga över vatten/Flying over water, Malmö Konsthall (16/9 2000 – 14/1 2001)
 * Peopling the Palaces at Venaria Reale, Palace of Venaria (2007)
 * Heavy Water, Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv (2011)
 * Sex & The Sea, Maritiem Museum, Rotterdam (2013)
 * The Towers/Lucca Hubris, Lucca (2013)

title: Peter Greenaway


text:
User:Ben-Zin~enwiki

de:Benutzer:Ben-Zin

title: User:Ben-Zin~enwiki


text:
Coptic script

The Coptic script is the script used for writing the Coptic language, the most recent development of Egyptian. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the uncial Greek alphabet, augmented by letters borrowed from the Egyptian Demotic. It was the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language. There are several Coptic alphabets, as the script varies greatly among the various dialects and eras of the Coptic language.

History

The Coptic script has a long history going back to the Ptolemaic Kingdom, when the Greek alphabet was used to transcribe Demotic texts, with the aim of recording the correct pronunciation of Demotic. As early as the sixth century BC and as late as the second century AD, an entire series of pre-Christian religious texts were written in what scholars term Old Coptic, Egyptian language texts written in the Greek alphabet.

In contrast to Old Coptic, seven additional Coptic letters were derived from Demotic, and many of these (though not all) are used in “true” form of Coptic writing. Coptic texts are associated with Christianity, Gnosticism, and Manichaeism.

With the spread of early Christianity in Egypt, knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphs was lost by the late third century, as well as Demotic script slightly later, making way for a writing system more closely associated with the Coptic Orthodox Church. By the fourth century, the Coptic script was "standardized", particularly for the Sahidic dialect. (There are a number of differences between the alphabets as used in the various dialects in Coptic).

Coptic is not generally used today except by the members of the Coptic Orthodox Church to write their religious texts. All the Gnostic codices found at Nag Hammadi used the Coptic script.

The Old Nubian alphabet—used to write Old Nubian, a Nilo-Saharan language—is an uncial variant of the Coptic script, with additional characters borrowed from the Greek and Meroitic scripts.

Form
The Coptic script was the first Egyptian writing system to indicate vowels, making Coptic documents invaluable for the interpretation of earlier Egyptian texts. Some Egyptian syllables had sonorants but no vowels; in Sahidic, these were written in Coptic with a line above the entire syllable. Various scribal schools made limited use of diacritics: some used an apostrophe as a word divider and to mark clitics, a function of determinatives in logographic Egyptian; others used diereses over and  to show that these started a new syllable, others a circumflex over any vowel for the same purpose.

The Coptic script's glyphs are largely based on the Greek alphabet, another help in interpreting older Egyptian texts, with 24 letters of Greek origin; 6 or 7 more were retained from Demotic, depending on the dialect (6 in Sahidic, another each in Bohairic and Akhmimic). In addition to the alphabetic letters, the letter ϯ stood for the syllable or.

As the Coptic script is simply a typeface of the Greek alphabet, with a few added letters, it can be used to write Greek without any transliteration schemes. Latin equivalents would include the Icelandic alphabet (which likewise has added letters), or the Fraktur alphabet (which has distinctive forms). While initially unified with the Greek alphabet by Unicode, a proposal was later accepted to separate it, with the proposal noting that Coptic is never written using modern Greek letter-forms (unlike German, which may be written with Fraktur or Roman Antiqua letter-forms), and that the Coptic letter-forms have closer mutual legibility with the Greek-based letters incorporated into the separately encoded Cyrillic alphabet than with the forms used in modern Greek. Because Coptic lowercases are usually small-caps forms of the capitals, a Greek would have little trouble reading Coptic letters, but Copts would struggle more with many of the Greek letters.

Letters
These are the letters that are used for writing the Coptic language. The distinction between capital and lowercase is a modern invention.

Letters derived from Demotic
In Old Coptic, there were a large number of Demotic Egyptian characters, including some logograms. They were soon reduced to half a dozen, for sounds not covered by the Greek alphabet. The following letters remained:

Numerals
Coptic numerals are an alphabetic numeral system in which numbers are indicated with letters of the alphabet, such as for 500. The numerical value of the letters is based on Greek numerals. Sometimes numerical use is distinguished from text with a continuous overline above the letters, as with Greek and Cyrillic numerals.

Unicode
In Unicode, most Coptic letters formerly shared codepoints with similar Greek letters, but a disunification was accepted for version 4.1, which appeared in 2005. The new Coptic block is U+2C80 to U+2CFF. Most fonts contained in mainstream operating systems use a distinctive Byzantine style for this block. The Greek block includes seven Coptic letters (U+03E2–U+03EF highlighted below) derived from Demotic, and these need to be included in any complete implementation of Coptic.

Diacritics and punctuation
These are also included in the Unicode specification.

Punctuation

 * Latin alphabet punctuation (comma, period, question mark, semicolon, colon, hyphen) uses the regular Unicode codepoints for punctuation
 * Dicolon: standard colon U+003A
 * Middle dot: U+00B7
 * En dash: U+2013
 * Em dash: U+2014
 * Slanted double hyphen: U+2E17

Combining diacritics
These are codepoints applied after that of the character they modify.

 * Combining overstroke: U+0305 (= supralinear stroke)
 * Combining character-joining overstroke (from middle of one character to middle of the next): U+035E
 * Combining dot under a letter: U+0323
 * Combining dot over a letter: U+0307
 * Combining overstroke: U+0323
 * Combining dot below: U+0323
 * Combining acute accent: U+0301
 * Combining grave accent: U+0300
 * Combining circumflex accent (caret shaped): U+0302
 * Combining circumflex (curved shape) or inverted breve above: U+0311
 * Combining circumflex as wide inverted breve above joining two letters: U+0361
 * Combining diaeresis: U+0308

Macrons and overlines
Coptic uses to indicate syllabic consonants, for example.

Coptic abbreviations use to draw a continuous line across the remaining letters of an abbreviated word. It extends from the left edge of the first letter to the right edge of the last letter. For example,, a common abbreviation for 'spirit'.

A different kind of overline uses, , and to distinguish the spelling of certain common words or to highlight proper names of divinities and heroes. For this the line begins in the middle of the first letter and continues to the middle of the last letter. A few examples:, ,.

Sometimes numerical use of letters is indicated with a continuous line above them using as in  for 1,888 (where "" is 1,000 and "" is 888). Multiples of  1,000 can be indicated by a continuous double line above using  as in  for 1,000.

title: Coptic script


text:
10th millennium BC

The 10th millennium BC spanned the years 10,000 BC to 9001 BC (c. 12 ka to c. 11 ka). It marks the beginning of the transition from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic via the interim Mesolithic (Northern Europe and Western Europe) and Epipaleolithic (Levant and Near East) periods, which together form the first part of the Holocene epoch that is generally believed to have begun c. 9700 BC (c. 11.7 ka) and is the current geological epoch. It is impossible to precisely date events that happened around the time of this millennium, and all dates mentioned here are estimates mostly based on geological analysis, anthropological analysis, and radiometric dating.

Holocene epoch
The main characteristic of the Holocene has been the worldwide abundance of Homo sapiens sapiens (humankind). The epoch began in the wake of the Würm glaciation, generally known as the Last Ice Age, which began 109 ka and ended 14 ka when Homo sapiens sapiens was in the Palaeolithic (Old Stone) Age. Following the Late Glacial Interstadial from 14 ka to 12.9 ka, during which global temperatures rose significantly, the Younger Dryas began. This was a temporary reversal of climatic warming to glacial conditions in the Northern Hemisphere and coincided with the end of the Upper Palaeolithic. The Younger Dryas ceased c. 9700 BC, marking the cutover from Pleistocene to Holocene.

In the geologic time scale, there are three (tentatively four) stratigraphic stages of the Holocene beginning c. 9700 BC with the "Greenlandian" (to c. 6236 BC). The starting point for the Greenlandian is the Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) sample from the North Greenland Ice Core Project, which has been correlated with the Younger Dryas. The Greenlandian was succeeded by the "Northgrippian" (to c. 2250 BC) and the "Meghalayan". All three stages were officially ratified by the International Commission on Stratigraphy in July 2018. It has been proposed that the Meghalayan should be terminated c. 1950 and succeeded by a new stage provisionally called "Anthropocene".

In the Holocene's first millennium, the Palaeolithic began to be superseded by the Neolithic (New Stone) Age which lasted about 6,000 years, depending on location. The gradual transition period is sometimes termed Mesolithic (northern and western Europe) or Epipalaeolithic (Levant and Near East). The glaciers retreated as the world climate became warmer and that inspired an agricultural revolution, though at first, the dog was probably the only domesticated animal. This was accompanied by a social revolution in that humans gained from agriculture the impetus to settle. Settlement is the key precursor to civilisation, which cannot be achieved by a nomadic lifestyle.

The world population, c. 10,000 BC, is believed to have been more or less stable. It has been estimated that there were some five million people at the time of the Last Glacial Maximum, growing to forty million by 5000 BC and 100 million by 1600 BC, which is an average growth rate of 0.027% p.a. from the Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age. Around 10,000 BC, most people lived in hunter-gatherer communities scattered across all continents except Antarctica and Zealandia. As the Würm/Wisconsin ended, settlement of northern regions was again possible.

Beginnings of agriculture
Agriculture developed in different parts of the world at different times. In many places, people learned how to cultivate without outside help; elsewhere, as in western Europe, the skills were imported. A decrease in human height accompanied the rise of agriculture near the start of the Holocene period (10,000 BC) and was later correlated with urban population density.

The Natufian culture prevailed in the Levant through the 10th millennium and was unusual in that it supported a sedentary or semi-sedentary population even before the introduction of agriculture. An early example is 'Ain Mallaha, which may have been the first village in which people were wholly sedentary. The Natufian people are believed to have founded another early settlement on the site of Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) where there is evidence of building between 9600 BC and 8200 BC. Dates for the Natufian are indeterminate and range broadly from c. 13,050 BC to c. 7550 BC. It is possible that the early cultivation of figs began in the Jordan River valley sometime after the middle of the 10th millennium. Besides the fig trees, the people may have begun cultivation of wild plants such as barley and pistachio; and they possibly began herding goats, pigs and cattle.

Agriculture began to be developed by the various communities of the Fertile Crescent, which included the Levant, but it would not be widely practised for another 2,000 years by which time Neolithic culture was becoming well established in many parts of the Near East. Among the earliest cultivated plants were forms of millet and rice grown in the Middle East, possibly in this millennium but more likely after 9000 BC. By about 9500 BC, people in south-eastern Anatolia were harvesting wild grasses and grains. The earliest evidence of sheep herding has been found in northern Iraq, dated before 9000 BC.

Pottery
Prehistoric chronology is almost entirely reliant upon the dating of material objects of which pottery is by far the most widespread and the most resistant to decay. All locations and generations developed their own shapes, sizes and styles of pottery, including methods and styles of decoration, but there was consistency among stratified deposits and even shards can be classified by time and place. Pottery is believed to have been discovered independently in various places, beginning with China c. 18,000 BC, and was probably created accidentally by fires lit on clay soil. The main discovery of pottery dated to the 10th millennium has been at Bosumpra Cave (early tenth-millennium cal. BC) on the Kwahu Plateau in southeastern Ghana and Ounjougou (c.9400 BC) in Central Mali, providing evidence of an independent invention of pottery in Sub-Saharan Africa in different climatic zones.

The first chronological pottery system was the Early, Middle and Late Minoan framework devised in the early 20th century by Sir Arthur Evans for his findings at Knossos. This covered the Bronze Age in twelve phases from c. 2800 BC to c. 1050 BC and the principle was later extended to mainland Greece (Helladic) and the Aegean islands (Cycladic). Dame Kathleen Kenyon was the principal archaeologist at Tell es-Sultan (ancient Jericho) and she discovered that there was no pottery there. The potter's wheel had not yet been invented and, where pottery as such was made, it was still hand-built, often by means of coiling, and pit fired.

Kenyon discovered vessels such as bowls, cups, and plates at Jericho which were made from stone. She reasonably surmised that others made from wood or vegetable fibres would have long since decayed. Using Evans' system as a benchmark, Kenyon divided the Near East Neolithic into phases called Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), from c. 10,000 BC to c. 8800 BC; Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), from c. 8800 BC to c. 6500 BC; and then Pottery Neolithic (PN), which had varied start-points from c. 6500 BC until the beginnings of the Bronze Age towards the end of the 4th millennium. In the 10th millennium, the Natufian culture co-existed with the PPNA which prevailed in the Levantine and upper Mesopotamian areas of the Fertile Crescent.

Africa
In North Africa, Saharan rock art engravings in what is known as the Bubalus (Large Wild Fauna) period have been dated to between 10,000 BC and 7000 BC. Wall paintings found in Ethiopia and Eritrea depict human activity; some of the older paintings are thought to date back to around 10,000 BC. In Prehistoric Egypt, a culture of hunter-gatherers replaced a grain grinding culture in 10,000 BC. The Abu Madi tel mounds in the Sinai Peninsula have been dated c. 9660 to c. 9180 BC.

Americas
The Clovis culture was widely distributed throughout North America. The people were hunter-gatherers and the culture's duration is believed to have been from c.9050 BC to c.8800 BC. There is evidence of increasing use of Clovis point tool technology for hunting.

Elsewhere in North America, the Petroglyphs at Winnemucca Lake, in what is today northwest Nevada, were carved by this time, possibly as early as 12.8 ka or as late as 10 ka.

Eurasia
The sites at Göbekli Tepe, which is home to megalithic structures, Hallan Çemi Tepesi, both in south-eastern Anatolia, and at Tell Qaramel, in north-west Syria, may have been occupied during this millennium. It was found out that gastronomy first emerged in Göbekli Tepe in this millennium. This most important discovery shedding light on the beginning of gastronomy in Anatolia consists of religious places in which feasts were held in this millennium that were found in the archaeological excavations conducted in Göbekli Tepe in Urfa province which is called the zero point of time. As a result of the investigations carried out in Göbekli Tepe which is dated to this millennium, it was determined that the people created cult structures and had a culture for religious purposes during the early Neolithic period and that they held feasts in which they offered foods while performing these cultures. The Sassi di Matera in southern Italy is believed to have been the site of human settlement since the Paleolithic period in this millennium, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in history. At the Hasankeyf Mound in Turkey, Europe, almost all archaeological data date to this millennium. In Great Britain, which was not then an island, the Star Carr site in North Yorkshire is believed to have been inhabited by Maglemosian peoples for about 800 years from c. 9335 BC to c. 8525 BC.

Environmental changes
In the southern hemisphere, rising sea levels had gradually formed Bass Strait, separating Tasmania from mainland Australia. This process is believed to have been complete by about the beginning of the 10th millennium. Bass Strait had been a plain populated by indigenous people who are thought to have first arrived around 40,000 years ago.

The Wisconsin glaciation had sheeted much of North America and, as it retreated, its meltwaters created an immense proglacial lake now known as Lake Agassiz. Sometime after 10,000 BC, the retreating glaciers created the rock formation on Cannon Mountain in present-day New Hampshire that was known as the Old Man of the Mountain until its collapse in 2003.

Chronological method
The ongoing Quaternary System/Period represents the last 2.58 million years since the end of the Neogene and is officially divided into the Pleistocene and Holocene Series/Epochs. The Holocene has been assigned an age of 11,700 calendar years before 2000 CE which means it began c. 9700 BC in the 10th millennium. It is preceded in the geological time scale by the Late Pleistocene sub-epoch, also known as the Tarantian Stage/Age, which awaits formal ratification by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) and tentatively spans the time from c. 126,000 BC to c. 9700 BC. Preceding the Late Pleistocene is the Middle Pleistocene sub-epoch, or Chibanian Stage/Age, which also awaits ratification and tentatively spans the time from c. 773,000 BC to c. 126,000 BC. The Early Pleistocene from c. 2,580,000 BC until c. 773,000 is sub-divided into two Stages/Ages which have been officially defined: the Gelasian (until c. 1,800,000 BC) and the Calabrian.

The Holocene calendar, devised by Cesare Emiliani in 1993, places its epoch at 10,000 BC (with the year 2024 being rendered as 12024 HE). The Human Era calendar attempts to simplify the calculation of time spans across the BC-CE divide by designating a more universally relevant epoch date: the start of human settlements (instead of the birth of Jesus Christ). CE dates can be converted by adding 10,000 years; converting BC dates requires subtraction from 10,001 (since the Gregorian calendar lacks a year zero).

title: 10th millennium BC