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Showing posts from February, 2011

The Greatest Battles of All-Time

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You can't resist the list. There is too much on the line for you to just gloss over this. Way too epic. I promise I'll get back to the Battle of Vienna afterwords. What do I mean by greatest battles? First of all it is a battle , not a campaign . It is a single confrontation that is a defining moment in history. But honestly I don't always hold to that. The Battle of Britain was a sort of a campaign, but ya gotta include it, right? Now the defining moment could be many things: changing the course of history (cliche, I know, but you know what I mean), winning against unsurmountable odds, sparking a shift in cultural thought, brilliant leadership and strategies, HUGE AND EPIC, the end or beginning of an era, the stuff of legend, and so on. It does get a little tricky when you have an several important battles that are linked together such as Thermopylae, Platae and Salamis. The success of one is dependent on the other(s). I usually just pick one. The same goes for the Americ

Copts

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In light of the recent events in Egypt, I wanted to talk about the ethnoreligious group in Egypt known as the Copts. "If you come to a Coptic person and tell him that he’s an Arab, that’s offensive. We are not Arabs, we are Egyptians... When we hear the word "Copt", that doesn’t only mean "Christian", it means "Egyptian"." –Bishop Thomas of Cusae and Meir, a Copt. HISTORY You may or may not know much about Egyptian history after the pharaohs. I will bring us up to speed. For most of their ancient history, the people in Egypt were ethnic Egyptians and they did the Egyptian thing–pyramids, embalming, and senet . In 434 B.C., the Persians took it over for a wee-bit. A hundred years later along came Alexander, who the Egyptians viewed as a liberator, and following his early death, the Hellenistic (Greek civilization outside of Greece) Ptolemaic Kingdom reigned along the Nile. The capital moved from Memphis to newly established Alexandria. Hellenizati