Hi, this is Nasko from Hist 134 and I am going to talk about the small presentation that we have to do for Wednesday. I tryed to find the techniques that ancient people used to tell the future, but I still haven’t found what I am looking for. If someone has any suggestions about what culture I should research you can leave me back a message. I was thinking of doing the Egyptions or the Maya people.
Thanks.
The class project that we are doing in Hist 134 about Genghis Khan will be very fun to present. The part that me and J.J are doing is about the famous battles that this conqueror had. We are also going to talk about the different people that had clashes with the Mongols. I only know one battle so far in detail. I haven’t look into much detail on the battles or information on the people that fougth with Genghis. I have found many books on the subject but I still haven’t really searched what information that these books can offer. i’ve read some information from them and they are goingt to be my major resource for information. If anyone has any suggestions you can leave comments on this post. Any suggestions and information will help me a lot. This is Nasko by the way.
Out of all the things that I could have chosen about this famous leader and warrior to do at the end I have decided to talk about his conquering through the wars that he fought with other tribes. I have interest in this for a couple of reasons one is because the early Mongols at the time of Genghis Khan’s birth were just simple nomads that lived in tribes consisting of tribal leaders and their subjects the rest of the people living within the tribes. Genghis’s life starts with an unusual sign because in the tradition of the Mongols if a child was born with a clot in his hand he was chosen to be a great leader some day. Now a days I haven’t heard of too many children that are born with this clot in their hands. Genghis wasn’t like the other Mongols’ and he showed that from an early age. He showed the characteristic of a warrior and a hunter when he killed his step brother because he had stolen the fish that he originally had caught. This is a pretty extreme example. Other reason’s why I chose this topic is because I wanted to find out the different strategies and weapons that other cultures had used against the Mongols. I will also talk about the only defeat that the Mongols had against the Volga Bulgars in the Battle of the Samara Bend in 1223. The Volga Bulgars are the ancesters of today’s Bulgarians who originally have crossed from Asia to the present location. In the past the Bulgars had formed three separate countries one by the Caspian Sea another right on the far end of the Black Sea. And the third one was located by the river Volga. The people who lived there became the only ones to have defeated Genghis Khan. After the defeat of the 50,000 people army and the escape of 4000 of them Genghis decided to dend a bigger army and he destroyed the Volga Bulgars in 1236. After this defeat Volga Bulgaria became part of the Mongol Empire and later part of the Golden Horde. This was interesting to me to find out because this was part of the history of the Bulgarian which I did not know before. By the way if someone is interested in finding more information you can check out the Battle of Samara Bend.
In today’s class we discussed all of the dates all the way to the end of the semester. This to me was helpful in a way because it showed me the dates when all of the major projects were due. And this will allow me to space my projects accordingly. I am doing pretty well with the ten page paper so far ,and I also found a lot of information on Genghis Khan. The way that people should try to search is through the library network because it gives you all of the material that is available in libraries all around the area. That is the way that I found information about conqueror. By the way after watching a documentary on Genghis Khan that was shown on the history channel a while back said that the way it showed be pronounced is Chinghis Khan the reason is that the British and the rest of the world pronounce it with a G in the front. But a Mongolian historian said on the TV program that this was the incorrect way of pronouncing it. If anyone knows how I can find more information on famous battles that Genghis fougth pleace comment on this post it will help me. So far all I have found is general information about this period in history.
I want to use this time to reflect on the discussion that we did last week in the Vista Tech Center. I liked the way that we discussed what we wanted to do amongst our tables and our choices were all good. At the end my table chose Genghis Khan because all of us thought that he would be the most interesting to talk about. He held together the longest continuing empire in the history of the world. I’ve researched him before when we each had to choose a topic to talk about in the paper. I am thinking that currently I will probably look more closely at the major battles that Genghis had to face as a military leader. The people that decided to go with the food in this class presentation made a good choice but finding the foods from the period would be a lot of work to find that information out. The food would be a great exhibit because everyone is interested in tasting something new and especially when they hear that it has to do with Genghis Khan. I found out on Monday that finding books on the Mongol Empire is not that easy because there aren’t many around. Most of the information has to be located on-line threw articles and databases.
The creation story of how the world came to exist begins with two animals Tango the parrot and Eva the hamster. These animals are my family’s pets so I decided to use them to tell my creation story. Stories like this were used by many different cultures to explain how the world came to be. People didn’t know what science was yet or how to explain natural phenomenon so they created stories instead.
The story begins with Tango, he was very lonely flying all day without a place to stop and rest. The only thing that he could see was water in every direction he looked in. One day as Tango was flying around he stumbled upon a hamster on a tiny island. The hamster asked him what he was doing here and the parrot answered that he was resting from his long flight. The hamster tolled him that she needed more ground to dig in because this island was too small for her to live on. So the two creators decided to make more land for the creatures that they were going to create later. Eva the hamster decided that she was going to use her talent of digging to dig up more dirt from beneath the island so that she could spread it around to make more land. The parrot’s job in the creation was to create animals for the new Earth. Tango plucked a few feathers from his wings and as soon as they touched the ground they turned into camels. The reason why tango had created camels as the first animals to populate the earth was because there wasn’t any vegetation and camels could go a long time without drinking. The second thing that Tango created was the date palm because it could survive the hot sun and provide food. This is why today the best way to travel through the dessert is on a camel’s back eating dates. In another part of the world Eva decided to create grass for the grazing animals that Tango was going to create later. Eva took seeds from her underground hole and placed them in her cheek pouches. Next she begun to spit out the seeds and as soon as they touched the soil they turned into grass. Later that day Tango came by and he begun to drop leafs from a date tree, these turned into cows, horses, sheep and goats. The next task that Tango had to do was to build mountains he did this by piling rocks with his beak until they towered above all the land in large piles. Evas job on the other hand was to create day and night on Earth. It was easy for this creator because she was nocturnal so she turned everything around and night was like day for her but all the other creatures slept instead. Tango created wind on the earth by flapping his wings very fast because he wanted to extinguish a fire that had started to burn a forest. At the very end Tango wanted to create the keepers of this land which were the humans. Eva helped in this creation because she gathered wood chips together and than Tango shot at them with his nails, this gave people their feet and than he stretched out peaces of the woodchips to create arms for these beings. The creaters had finally done it Tango wouldn’t be bored anymore because now he had company and Eva had all the land that she could ever want.
THE END
Today I watched 10,000 B.C. and I liked the movie. In the beginning it tolled the story of a group of hunters that relied on mammoths as their main food source. An older women was shown as the future teller and in the movie the narrator said that she was the last of her kind and she could foretell what the future would bring. I thought that the mammoths were created very realistic in the movie. The last hunt of this mountainous tribe was full of action and suspense. D’Leh proved that he was a worthy hunter by almost killing a mammoth completely alone after this hunt he was given a white spear which symbolized the leader in the tribe. The future teller had tolled D’Leh and his people that after this last hunt four legged monsters would come to kill them all. That day came when an evil warlord and his subjects came on horses and killed off some of the tribe by took most of them as slaves. I liked the part where D’Leh freed the drowning saber-tooth cat. Later this proved to be useful because he was saved by the same saber-tooth cat when a tribe was about to capture them. Rigth at that moment the big cat came and after it saw D’Leh there it left the scene after a few growls. The other tribe accepted this as a sign that this young man was chosen to lead them. It was foretold in their own prophecy. The only inaccuracy that I saw in the movie was when an advanced civilization was shown building pyramids in the dessert. Later in the movie I found out that these were people that had saved themselves just before Atlantis had presumable sank into the sea. I’ve searched about this civilization and have found that it was based upon the sinking of the island of Santorini close by mainland Greece in 1600 B.C. after the volcano there erupted. It is a movie so I don’t mind some movie magic. The people living on this island were part of the Minoan civilization. In the beginning of the movie D’Leh made a promise to Evolet that he wouldn’t leave her alone ever again. Evolet was alone because both her parents had past away. The ending was good too because all of the tribe people that were used as salves for the pyramids were freed. This was the result of D’Lehs leader ability to unite all the tribes affected.
I like the way that the videos that we watched today in class explained the creation of the Earth. I liked the way that the Apache Indians have an interesting way of describing how the world came about. The creation story that was presented as the cartoon was pretty funny and had a silly tone to it. It still spread the message of creation but a lot of things were repeated and they shouldn’t have bin repeated that many times. I like what Mr. Berg said today in class about how creation myths that are tolled in their native languages could lose some of their original meaning when they are translated to a different language. Translations from one language to another isn’t very accurate most of the time. I currently speak two languages ,so I’ve seen how a meaning in a native language changes when it is translated to a different language the text doesn’t sound the same. Also some things can’t be translated from one language to another because there is no meaning for something in a different language.
Currently I am working on figuring out a possible topic for my ten page essay. I am divided right now between a few possible topics that I can write about. The three topics that I am currently deciding amongst are as fallow;
1) Alexander the Great
2) The Persian Empire (Achievements)
3) Byzantine Empire (Continuation of Rome)
I’ve currently seen some movies on the Persians, and also about Alexander the Great. There were also some very interesting movies about the Byzantine Empire. If anyone has any suggestion about any of my topics, please feel free to write me a comment.
I wanted to take this opportunity to write a blog entry that includes my questions about the presentation from last Wednesday. Overall I thought that this presentation was made in an interesting way. Something interesting that I found out about Anca Vlasopolis was that she originally came from Romania and this country is neighbor with Bulgaria, from which I originally came from. I thougth her book was very good because it engaged the reader and kept up the interest of the story line. Usually most people think of book presentations as boring but to me this presentation wasn’t like that at all. I like everything that has to do with nature so I was surprised by the fact that the Short Tailed Albatross was nearly extinct. Before this presentation I didn’t know that this species existed. I learned also some new things about Japan before the coming of the 20th century. And now I am going to post my questions.
1) When was Japan officially opened to the rest of the world?
2) How threatened is the short -tailed albatross currently?
3) Did Anca Vlasopolis find Japanese people a little unusual in how they do some things differently there?
4) Did samurai actually accompany fishing ships on their journeys?
5) What interesting wildlife did the author see while in Japan?
