Caracas, Transportation

Caracas is linked directly with other major urban centres of the world by air and ocean transport. Maiquetía Airport, located 10 miles by road from Caracas on the coast, provides international connections as well as domestic flights to all parts of the republic. Two smaller airports, La Carlota and Francisco de Miranda, also serve the city. La Guaira and, to a lesser extent,

Rebec

Bowed, stringed musical instrument of European medieval and early Renaissance music. It was originally called a rubebe, developed about the 11th century from the similar Arab rabab, and was carried to Spain with Muslim culture. Like the rabab, the rebec had a shallow, pear-shaped body, but on the rebec the rabab's skin belly was replaced by wood and a fingerboard was added. The

Roubiliac, Louis-françois

Roubiliac was apprenticed to a sculptor of ivory and porcelain, Balthasar Permoser, and later became assistant to Nicolas Coustou, a French Baroque sculptor. He moved to London about 1732. His first independent commission was a statue of Handel for Vauxhall Gardens in 1737. A year

Encyclopaedia, The Arab world

The early encyclopaedias written in Arabic can be roughly divided into two classes: those designed for people who wished to be well informed and to make full use of their cultural heritage, and those for the rapidly growing number of official administrators. The latter type of encyclopaedia originated when the Arabs established their rule through so many parts

Malabar Coast

Name long applied to the southern part of India's western coast, approximately from Goa southward, which is bordered on the east by the Western Ghats range. The name has sometimes encompassed the entire western coast of peninsular India. It now includes most of Kerala state and the coastal region of Karnataka state. The coast consists of a continuous belt of sand dunes.

Cultural Evolution

The development of a culture from simpler to more complex forms, by a continuous process. The subject may be viewed unilinearly, tracing the evolution of humankind as a whole; or it may be viewed multilinearly, treating the evolution of each culture or society (or of given parts of a culture or society) individually. Cultural evolution was an important concept in the

Cambodia

Khmer  Kampuchea,  French  Cambodge,  formerly (to 1970)  Kingdom of Cambodia,  (1970–76)  Khmer Republic,  (1976–79)  Democratic Kampuchea,  or  (1979–89)  People's Republic of Kampuchea,   country lying in the southwestern Indochinese Peninsula in Southeast Asia. Covering a land area of 70,238 square miles (181,916 square kilometres), it is bordered on the west and northwest by Thailand, on the northeast by Laos, on the east and southeast by Vietnam, and on the southwest by the Gulf of Thailand. The capital is Phnom Penh.

Berat

Located strategically between the ancient regions of Illyria and Epirus, Berat was the

Wellhausen, Julius

Wellhausen studied at the University of Göttingen and taught there briefly before becoming professor of the Old Testament at Greifswald in 1872, a position he resigned 10 years later because of conflicts with his academic

Bessel, Friedrich Wilhelm

Bessel was born in Westphalia, the son of a poor government employee. At the age of 15, he entered an export-import firm. During his apprenticeship, dreaming of travel, he studied languages, geography, the habits of distant peoples, and the principles of navigation, which led him to astronomy and mathematics. Working at night, in 1804 he wrote a paper on Halley's Comet in which he

Ava

Ancient capital of central Myanmar (Burma), on the left bank of the Irrawaddy River at the Myitnge confluence. It is linked by a road and rail bridge, 5,894 feet (1,796 m) long, to the town of Sagaing; this is the only place where the Irrawaddy is bridged. Its name is a corruption of the Burmese Inwa, meaning “entrance to the lake.” The site was chosen in 1364 by the Shans who succeeded the Pagan dynasty.