South Korea came into being as the result of the partition of what had been, prior to the early twentieth century, the ancient kingdom of Chosun.1 This partition into a communist North and a noncommunist South occurred shortly after the defeat of Japan in World War II in late 1945. Korea had been involuntarily absorbed into Japan in 1910, following more than a decade of Japanese domination afte...

This article aims to describe the training and medical licensing system (uieop) for becoming a physician officer (uigwan) during Korea's Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392). In the Goryeo Dynasty, although no license was necessary to provide medical services to the common people, there was a licensing examination to become a physician officer. No other national licensing system for healthcare professiona...

At the turn of the century scholars of Egyptian art were startled by the appearance of life-size portrait heads in excavations at Gizeh, the site of a large necropolis of the Old Kingdom. Until their discovery it was considered an almost invariable rule that private sculpture of the period represented types, not individuals. The Sheikh el Beled and several other representations of individuals w...

Attributing the coins of the Eastern Gangas is a difficult task because the coins do not name the ruler, but only are dated in what are thought to be regnal years. Many authors in the past have tended to attribute the coins to the most prominent king of the dynasty, Anantavarman Chodaganga (1078-1147) (hereafter AC), but without any real justification. 2 In a recent paper, I proposed a method o...

Empress Dowager Cixi, birth mother of the Qing Dynasty Emperor Tongzhi, lived in the late 19 Century and the early 20 Century, and was the actual ruler of the Qing Dynasty from 1861 to 1908. Under her administration, her great support of Westernization during the earlier period promoted modernized revolution of Chinese society, whereas her objection to the political reform during the late perio...

Mummification salts and mummified bones were assayed for borate. In two samples of mummification salt one from Deir el-Bahari (26th Dynasty, 700Ð600 BC) and salt from the embalming material of Tutankhamen (18th Dynasty, 1370Ð1335 BC) 3.9 and 2.1 μMol borate/ gram were found, respectively. Six mummified bone fragments from the Old Kingdom contained up to 1.2 μMol/gram. It is suggested that borat...

In this paper, we are discussing the effect of the use of magnetic compasses on the orientation of ancient Chinese architectonical complexes. As Czech researchers proposed in 2011, assuming these complexes ideally oriented by the ancient architects along north-south direction, in the case that the surveys were made by means of magnetic compasses, we can find the axes of the complexes deviating ...

the geographical scope of a dynasty and the selection of a capital as the center of its power can be considered as the essential factors in the establishment of a regime and its continuity; this matter seems to be neglected in the political structure of khwarazmshahi dynasty (598-628/1202-1231). the khwarazmshahi which were supposed to change into one of the greatest medieval dynasties led the ...