title: Inspector Gadget

text: His voice was played in the original series by Frank Welker, Maurice LaMarche in "Gadget and the Gadgetinis", and Scott McCord in the 2015 series. Lee Tockar voiced him in "Inspector Gadget's Biggest Caper Ever". In the first live action film he is voiced by Don Adams. In the sequel he is voiced by Jeff Bennett. In the Australian KFC commercials he was voiced by Keith Scott.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: Chief Quimby is Gadget's boss and the chief of the metro city police (Roverton Police Department In The Live Action Disney films). He usually pops up near the beginning of each episode to give Gadget a sheet of paper describing his mission. Once Gadget finishes reading them, the paper self-destructs and blows up in Quimby's face in a parody of "". He appears at the end to congratulate Gadget and give him full credit for stopping Dr. Claw. He is unaware that Penny did all the work, even though she always calls him. In "Gadget and the Gadgetinis", he has become an agent for the CIA. In the 2015 series, he is given glasses, and his hair is blonde instead of brown. He was mentioned by Gadget in some episodes of "Inspector Gadget's Field Trip".


title: Inspector Gadget

text: His voice in the original series was provided by John Stephenson in the pilot, Dan Hennessey in the first season, and Maurice LaMarche for the second season and the 1992 Christmas Special. Jim Byrnes voiced him in "Inspector Gadget's Last Case". He is voiced by Derek McGrath in the 2015 series. In the first live action film he is portrayed by Dabney Coleman. Mark Mitchell portrays him in the sequel.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: The original animated television series in the franchise, "Inspector Gadget", debuted in 1983 and introduced audiences to the adventures of a clumsy, simple-witted bionic detective named Inspector Gadget – a human being with various bionic gadgets built into his body. Gadget's nemesis is Dr. Claw, the leader of an evil organization, known as "M.A.D."


title: Inspector Gadget

text: "Inspector Gadget" was the first TV series from DiC Entertainment to be produced directly for syndication. Its two seasons originally ran from 1983 to 1986 and remained in syndication into the late 1990s.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: In 1992, DiC produced an animated Christmas special based on the series, "Inspector Gadget Saves Christmas." In the special, Dr. Claw has locked up Santa Claus at the North Pole and hypnotized his elves, forcing them to break all toys that are being produced. Inspector Gadget, Penny, and Brain travel to the North Pole in an attempt to stop Dr. Claw and save Christmas. This special was nominated for an Emmy. Don Adams, Frank Welker, Erica Horn and Maurice LaMarche provide the voices for the characters.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: The 1995 "Gadget Boy and Heather" series was a spinoff from the original show. The series is about a younger version of Gadget, "Gadget Boy" (also voiced by Don Adams). Instead of Penny and Brain the Dog, Gadget Boy was assisted by the resourceful Heather (voiced by Tara Strong). Just as maladroit as his adult self is, Gadget Boy was usually bailed out of situations by the more practical Heather, though he was also helped greatly by his myriad of high-tech gadgets and extendable arms and legs. In this series, traditional nemesis Dr. Claw was replaced by the villainess Spydra. In addition, the chief, Strombolli had a "fax tie" that exploded after the mission was read, continuing the running gag from the original series in which Chief Quimby would get blown up by an exploding message.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: Two years later, in 1997, "Gadget Boy & Heather" spawned an educational spinoff, "Gadget Boy's Adventures in History", which aired on The History Channel. This series marked the last time Don Adams would perform a voice role for an animated Gadget series two years before his retirement from voicing an animated Gadget in 1999 and eight years before his death in 2005.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: In 1996, Gadget took students around the world in this series of 50 field trips, mainly created to market to stations to fulfill the FCC E/I requirements. The show put an animated Inspector Gadget on top of live-action filming of the locations that Gadget guided viewers through. Don Adams returned as Gadget's voice while Penny, Brain, Chief Quimby (although mentioned by Gadget in some episodes), Capeman and Dr. Claw are entirely absent.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: In 2002, the French studio SIP Animation (Saban International Paris), in cooperation with DiC, produced 52 episodes of the then-new TV series "Gadget and the Gadgetinis." The series debuted on Channel 5 in the UK in August 2002, followed by French channel M6 in September 2002 and then on Fox Kids channels across Europe from 2003. It was planned to air in the United States on Fox Family, but after the Channel was acquired by Disney in 2001 it never did and so it has never aired in the United States.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: Inspector Gadget (again voiced by Maurice LaMarche) is now a member of an organization called "WOMP" (World Organization of Mega Powers) and is now, Lieutenant Gadget. He is still aided in his work by Penny (who is now twelve years old), as well as the new robot characters Digit and Fidget, the titular Gadgetinis invented by Penny, due to Brain running away. It follows the same plot as the original series, with the dim-witted Gadget attempting to fight crime on his own, while Penny and her helpers secretly do all the work. Dr. Claw, now with the first name George, returns as the main villain, with his relatives introduced in some episodes. In some stories, he is replaced by other villains.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: The production values of this series were higher than any of the previous revivals and spinoff series. Also, the original creators of "Inspector Gadget" were all involved: Andy Heyward was one of the executive producers; Jean Chalopin wrote or co-wrote all the episodes, in addition to being credited as the new show's creator; whereas Bruno Bianchi directed and produced the series.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: A new computer-animated "Inspector Gadget" TV series had been in development since at least the start of 2012, possibly earlier. It was commissioned by Teletoon Canada, which aired the show, and put into preproduction by The Cookie Jar Company. In January 2012, the then-in-development show was mentioned by Ray Sharma, the CEO of XMG Studio, which produced the hit mobile game "Inspector Gadget: M.A.D. Dash". Sharma described how the success of the game had resulted in a new TV series having been in the making: "We did 1 million downloads in a week, and it's reinvigorated the TV brand with a new TV series in production."


title: Inspector Gadget

text: In September 2012, Cookie Jar issued a short press release about the then-upcoming series, as part of the advertising for it during the MIPCOM market that October, stating: "Cookie Jar Entertainment is celebrating Inspector Gadget’s 30th anniversary with the launch of a brand-new series with its Canadian broadcast partner TELETOON. The series will again revolve around the iconic bionic bumbling detective." On June 9, 2013, Teletoon officially announced the reboot show with two press pictures of Gadget's new look as well as a press release: "MAD Agents, look out! Criminals, beware! Bystanders … take cover! Inspector Gadget is back to battle Dr. Claw with all-new gadgets – and all-new gadget-related chaos. But the loveable, bumbling, accidentally-destructive Inspector is not alone in the fight to take down MAD. His ever trusty police-dog, Brain, is still by his side and he's getting extra crime-fighting help from his new partner, Inspector-in-training Penny (voiced by Tara Strong). With MAD more powerful than ever and with the arrival of Dr. Claw's evil-genius (and totally crush-worthy) nephew, Penny and Brain will need to use every ounce of their training to keep the world safe from Dr. Claw … and Gadget."


title: Inspector Gadget

text: Unlike the other shows, Penny is more of the protagonist and Dr. Claw is as incompetent and useless as Gadget (if not more so). The series was produced by DHX Media, which purchased Cookie Jar in 2012. According to a DHX Media distribution catalogue released as a PDF on January 15, 2014, the show premiered in 2015 on Netflix.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: On December 4, 2014, it was announced that the series has 26 episodes and that it would air on Boomerang's international channels in 2015. The series premiered on Boomerang in Australia on January 5, 2015.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: "Inspector Gadget" was adapted into a 1999 live action film by Walt Disney Pictures, starring Matthew Broderick as the title character and Rupert Everett as Dr. Claw. As opposed to the animated series, where Gadget is bumbling and clueless and Dr. Claw's face is never shown, Gadget appears to be more reliable and competent in detective work and Dr. Claw's face appears many times in the film. In addition, Gadget and Dr. Claw were also given civilian names; Jonathan "John" Brown and Sanford Scolex, respectively.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: A second film, "Inspector Gadget 2" featured many changes from the first one, such as Doctor Bradford no longer assisting Gadget or being his romantic interest, instead being replaced by a well-meaning and upbeat scientist named Baxter and a new romantic interest named G2 and Gadget and Claw's civilian names are no longer mentioned. Being a year later in the movie's timeline, Gadget had begun displaying his cartoon namesake's glitches by receiving the wrong gadget when he calls out a specific device. He falls in love with his intended replacement: the fully robotic G2. Furthermore, none of the cast from the first film returned to their roles except D.L. Hughley.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: In May 2015, it was announced that a new film with a rebooted version of the character is in the works. Like the live-action films, it will be done by Disney, with Dan Lin producing it. In October 2019, Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell were hired to write the film.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: Released on VHS by Buena Vista Home Video in March 2000 to coincide with Disney's live action theatrical film, "Inspector Gadget: Gadget's Greatest Gadgets" takes the format of a clip show in which Gadget has a flashback to his past adventures in the original TV series, using footage from the episodes "The Capeman Cometh", "Prince of the Gypsies", and "Gadget's Gadgets"; as well as some stock footage from "Inspector Gadget's Field Trip" for the present-day segments. Maurice LaMarche did Inspector Gadget's voice in the modern segments, marking his first cartoon voice appearance as Gadget, who had previously been voiced by Don Adams. Original series actors Cree Summer and Frank Welker reprised their roles as Penny, Brain and Dr. Claw in the modern segments.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: In 2002, as part of the "DIC Movie Toons" series of movies, DIC released a full-length animated television film called "Inspector Gadget's Last Case", directed by Michael Maliani. It premiered on television on October 6, 2002, on Nickelodeon and was released on DVD and VHS shortly afterward by MGM Home Entertainment.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: The film is about Inspector Gadget giving up his beloved but aging Gadgetmobile, while his archenemy Dr. Claw uses a competing crime fighter to discredit Gadget and cost him his badge. Penny and Brain make appearances as minor supporting characters. In this, Gadget is more competent, yet he is still bumbling, similar to his persona in the pilot episode and his Mathew Broderick counterpart. Even though the film uses the same character designs as the concurrent "Gadget & The Gadgetinis" TV series, SIP Animation wasn't involved with the production of this movie. Maurice LaMarche reprised the role of Gadget in this film and Jaleel White voiced the Gadgetmobile. In most European regions, the movie aired on Disney Channel or Toon Disney. In Germany, the film aired on Cartoon Network.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: 2005's "Inspector Gadget's Biggest Caper Ever" was the first "Inspector Gadget" animated production to be completely rendered using 3D computer animation. It returned Gadget to his familiar trenchcoat from the original series. Brain is also back in his old role, while Penny is now 16 years old. Gadget is again voiced by Maurice LaMarche and Penny and Claw are once again voiced by Tegan Moss and Brian Drummond, while Bernie Mac voices the Gadgetmobile. The plot features Dr. Claw breaking out of jail with the help of a specially hired Scottish agent named Bombaboy. He and Bombaboy seek out a prehistoric dragon-like creature to get revenge on his captors and launch yet another scheme to conquer the world. Production on the film was announced in May 2004, under the working title "Inspector Gadget Saves the Day... Maybe", and the film was released on September 6, 2005, by Lions Gate Home Entertainment.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: In November 1992, DIC announced they would be developing a spin-off titled "Gadget Girl", featuring a female protagonist. During the development of fellow Gadget spin-off "Gadget Boy", it was confirmed by staff that "Gadget Girl" didn't work out the way DIC wanted it to.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: In 1999, DIC announced they would be co-producing a new "Inspector Gadget" series to cash-in on the success of the live-action movie tentatively titled "GI Gadget", which would be co-produced with French-animation studio Arles Animation. "GI Gadget" have featured the titular character joining an elite army commando unit. The series was planned to start with a TV Movie in 2000 and the full series in 2001, but nothing else was mentioned of the series and was silently canceled not long after. Arles Animation would later be purchased by BKN International in June of that year.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: In April 2008, a new "Inspector Gadget" series was announced to premiere in Spring 2009 to celebrate the franchise's 25th anniversary. The series would have taken a darker tone than the other "Inspector Gadget" series, featuring a 2D/3D animesque art style with cinematic camera angles and dramatic musical cues, as well as new villains alongside Dr. Claw. The series was never produced, and was canceled likely due to DIC's purchase by Cookie Jar Entertainment in July 2008.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: The first game developed based on the series was "Inspector Gadget and the Circus of Fear" developed by Beam Software and scheduled for release by Melbourne House in the UK in 1987 for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. It resembled the arcade title Metro-Cross and was a left-to-right scrolling racing/jumping game with a quasi-isometric forced 3d perspective. Although the game was completed, and preview copies were reviewed (unfavourably) in the computing press, it was scrapped on the verge of release. The game featured a cameo by the titular character from the Horace series of games. An adventure game based on the series, "" was eventually released on the PC in 1990 by a company called Azeroth.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: An NES game was planned for release by Hudson Soft, but was quietly cancelled. Instead, Hudson released an SNES game in 1993 simply called "Inspector Gadget". The game features a rare glimpse of Dr. Claw's face.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: In March 2000, it was announced that Ubi Soft had teamed with Light & Shadow Production to release an "Inspector Gadget" game for the PlayStation. That game was revealed as "", with a Game Boy Color title "", following as well.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: After this partnership, Light and Shadow Production released three "Inspector Gadget" titles on their own - "" for Game Boy Advance (Published by DreamCatcher Interactive in the United States) and two European-exclusive titles - "" for the PlayStation 2 and "Inspector Gadget Racing" for the Game Boy Advance.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: After Light & Shadow Production was purchased by Hip Games, the latter company released "Gadget & Gadgetinis" for the PlayStation 2 and PC in Europe.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: "Inspector Gadget's MAD Dash" was released for iOS devices, iPhone and iPod Touch, by XMG Studio in 2010. It features Shuki Levy's original theme music and also includes original voices from the show. In the same game, Doctor Claw reveals his face and is once again given the first name George.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: The original "Inspector Gadget" theme song was composed by American composer Shuki Levy (who also wrote the themes for "Power Rangers" and "Digimon"), and was based on Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King".


title: Inspector Gadget

text: Several early rap records sampling the "Inspector Gadget" theme song were released in 1985. The Kartoon Krew also released "Inspector Gadget" on ZYX Music, which contains vocal samples and quotes from the popular cartoon series, reenacted by the rap group for the song. East New York rap group Bad Boys & K-Love released a record on Starlite Records, "Bad Boys", featured on the UK hip hop compilation "Street Sounds Electro 9". Following the trend, Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh used samples from the "Inspector Gadget" theme song on their single "The Show". The theme song has been heavily sampled in the years since then. California-based punk band Lagwagon recorded a short instrumental cover of the theme song on their 1992 album "Duh".


title: Inspector Gadget

text: The new (2015) theme was composed by Canadian film and TV composers Stephen Skratt and Asher Lenz, "once again using "In the Hall of the Mountain King" as inspiration".


title: Inspector Gadget

text: A new "Inspector Gadget" comic book, based on the original 1983 TV series, was launched in the U.S. by Viper Comics in 2011. A preview issue was published as part of Free Comic Book Day on May 7, 2011; the entire story was then released officially in August as a 48-page comic book titled "Inspector Gadget: Gadget on the Orient Express". The comic book was written by Dale Mettam and illustrated by José Cobá. No follow-up issues have been released to date.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: On a 1989 episode of "The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!", another DiC production, a live-action bumper segment titled ""Defective Gadgetry"" had a guest appearance by Inspector Gadget, in which he came to the Mario Bros. for help in repairing him. This was his first live-action appearance predating the 1999 live action film that was released ten years later. Maurice LaMarche (who would assume the voice role in ""Inspector Gadget: Gadget's Greatest Gadgets"" ten years later) plays Gadget in this segment. A second live-action segment, ""Treasure of the Sierra Brooklyn"" had Gadget returning to help the Mario Bros. find a lost treasure.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: The "Robot Chicken" episode "Adoption's an Option" featured a sketch featuring the "Inspector Gadget" characters in a parody of "The Terminator". In this sketch, Gadget replaces a faulty part with a Cyberdyne part, only to be turned into an unstoppable killing machine when Skynet goes online. The sketch goes on to revolve around Penny and Brain trying to avoid being killed by the now-evil Gadget, eventually killing him in a factory. Meanwhile, Mad Cat dies of leukemia; at the end of the show, Dr. Claw blames Gadget for Mad Cat's death. Ironically, Dr. Claw claims that he somehow found out it was Penny and Brain who were behind all of Gadget's successful missions, and planned to gain control of Inspector Gadget via Skynet, and use him to kill them using the Cyberdyne technology that gained control of him. (Penny is voiced by Cree Summer and Brain & Dr. Claw by Frank Welker, who were the original voice actors for the characters.)


title: Inspector Gadget

text: The 2019 video game "Tales of the Neon Sea" features a reference to Inspector Gadget in the form of a character called "Detective Gadget of Starlight City", who joined the police force on the 6th of September 2117 and was killed in action on August 5, 2126, protecting civilians.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: In 2022, Gadget and Brain made a brief cameo appearance in a Renault Clio commercial made for France and Spain, featuring "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles.


title: Inspector Gadget

text: Inspector Gadget has been the subject of internet memes parodying a 2012 Cinemassacre YouTube video by internet personality Mike Matei, titled "Minecraft with Gadget", where Inspector Gadget features as a co-host to Matei's review of Minecraft. Notable quotes, voiced by Matei, include "brown bricks" and "Minecrap", both of which have been referenced in the video game Deltarune.


title: Galactic Center

text: The Galactic Center or Galactic Centre is the rotational center, the barycenter, of the Milky Way galaxy. Its central massive object is a supermassive black hole of about 4 million solar masses, which is called Sagittarius A*, a compact radio source which is almost exactly at the galactic rotational center. The Galactic Center is approximately away from Earth in the direction of the constellations Sagittarius, Ophiuchus, and Scorpius, where the Milky Way appears brightest, visually close to the Butterfly Cluster (M6) or the star Shaula, south to the Pipe Nebula.


title: Galactic Center

text: There are around 10 million stars within one parsec of the Galactic Center, dominated by red giants, with a significant population of massive supergiants and Wolf–Rayet stars from star formation in the region around 1 million years ago. The core stars are a small part within the much wider galactic bulge.


title: Galactic Center

text: Because of interstellar dust along the line of sight, the Galactic Center cannot be studied at visible, ultraviolet, or soft (low-energy) X-ray wavelengths. The available information about the Galactic Center comes from observations at gamma ray, hard (high-energy) X-ray, infrared, submillimetre, and radio wavelengths.


title: Galactic Center

text: Immanuel Kant stated in "Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens" (1755) that a large star was at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and that Sirius might be the star. Harlow Shapley stated in 1918 that the halo of globular clusters surrounding the Milky Way seemed to be centered on the star swarms in the constellation of Sagittarius, but the dark molecular clouds in the area blocked the view for optical astronomy. In the early 1940s Walter Baade at Mount Wilson Observatory took advantage of wartime blackout conditions in nearby Los Angeles to conduct a search for the center with the Hooker Telescope. He found that near the star Alnasl (Gamma Sagittarii) there is a one-degree-wide void in the interstellar dust lanes, which provides a relatively clear view of the swarms of stars around the nucleus of the Milky Way Galaxy. This gap has been known as Baade's Window ever since.


title: Galactic Center

text: At Dover Heights in Sydney, Australia, a team of radio astronomers from the Division of Radiophysics at the CSIRO, led by Joseph Lade Pawsey, used 'sea interferometry' to discover some of the first interstellar and intergalactic radio sources, including Taurus A, Virgo A and Centaurus A. By 1954 they had built an fixed dish antenna and used it to make a detailed study of an extended, extremely powerful belt of radio emission that was detected in Sagittarius. They named an intense point-source near the center of this belt Sagittarius A, and realised that it was located at the very center of the Galaxy, despite being some 32 degrees south-west of the conjectured galactic center of the time.


title: Galactic Center

text: In 1958 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided to adopt the position of Sagittarius A as the true zero coordinate point for the system of galactic latitude and longitude. In the equatorial coordinate system the location is: RA , Dec (J2000 epoch).


title: Galactic Center

text: In July 2022, astronomers reported the discovery of massive amounts of s, including some associated with RNA, in the Galactic Center of the Milky Way Galaxy.


title: Galactic Center

text: The exact distance between the Solar System and the Galactic Center is not certain, although estimates since 2000 have remained within the range . The latest estimates from geometric-based methods and standard candles yield the following distances to the Galactic Center:


title: Galactic Center

text: An accurate determination of the distance to the Galactic Center as established from variable stars (e.g. RR Lyrae variables) or standard candles (e.g. red-clump stars) is hindered by numerous effects, which include: an ambiguous reddening law; a bias for smaller values of the distance to the Galactic Center because of a preferential sampling of stars toward the near side of the Galactic bulge owing to interstellar extinction; and an uncertainty in characterizing how a mean distance to a group of variable stars found in the direction of the Galactic bulge relates to the distance to the Galactic Center.


title: Galactic Center

text: The nature of the Milky Way's bar, which extends across the Galactic Center, is also actively debated, with estimates for its half-length and orientation spanning between 1–5 kpc (short or a long bar) and 10–50°. Certain authors advocate that the Milky Way features two distinct bars, one nestled within the other. The bar is delineated by red-clump stars (see also red giant); however, RR Lyrae variables do not trace a prominent Galactic bar. The bar may be surrounded by a ring called the "5-kpc ring" that contains a large fraction of the molecular hydrogen present in the Milky Way, and most of the Milky Way's star formation activity. Viewed from the Andromeda Galaxy, it would be the brightest feature of the Milky Way.


title: Galactic Center

text: The complex astronomical radio source Sagittarius A appears to be located almost exactly at the Galactic Center and contains an intense compact radio source, Sagittarius A*, which coincides with a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Accretion of gas onto the black hole, probably involving an accretion disk around it, would release energy to power the radio source, itself much larger than the black hole.


title: Galactic Center

text: A study in 2008 which linked radio telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona and California (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) measured the diameter of Sagittarius A* to be 44 million kilometers (0.3 AU). For comparison, the radius of Earth's orbit around the Sun is about 150 million kilometers (1.0 AU), whereas the distance of Mercury from the Sun at closest approach (perihelion) is 46 million kilometers (0.3 AU). Thus, the diameter of the radio source is slightly less than the distance from Mercury to the Sun.


title: Galactic Center

text: Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany using Chilean telescopes have confirmed the existence of a supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center, on the order of 4.3 million solar masses. Later studies have estimated a mass of 3.7 million or 4.1 million solar masses.


title: Galactic Center

text: On 5 January 2015, NASA reported observing an X-ray flare 400 times brighter than usual, a record-breaker, from Sagittarius A*. The unusual event may have been caused by the breaking apart of an asteroid falling into the black hole or by the entanglement of magnetic field lines within gas flowing into Sagittarius A*, according to astronomers.


title: Galactic Center

text: In November 2010, it was announced that two large elliptical lobe structures of energetic plasma, termed "bubbles", which emit gamma- and X-rays, were detected astride the Milky Way galaxy's core. Termed "Fermi" or "eRosita" bubbles, they extend up to about 25,000 light years above and below the Galactic Center. The galaxy's diffuse gamma-ray fog hampered prior observations, but the discovery team led by D. Finkbeiner, building on research by G. Dobler, worked around this problem. The 2014 Bruno Rossi Prize went to Tracy Slatyer, Douglas Finkbeiner, and Meng Su "for their discovery, in gamma rays, of the large unanticipated Galactic structure called the "Fermi bubbles"".


title: Galactic Center

text: The origin of the bubbles is being researched. The bubbles are connected and seemingly coupled, via energy transport, to the galactic core by columnar structures of energetic plasma termed "chimneys". In 2020, for the first time, the lobes were seen in visible light and optical measurements were made. By 2022, detailed computer simulations further confirmed that the bubbles were caused by the Sagittarius A* black hole.


title: Galactic Center

text: The central cubic parsec around Sagittarius A* contains around 10 million stars. Although most of them are old red giant stars, the Galactic Center is also rich in massive stars. More than 100 OB and Wolf–Rayet stars have been identified there so far. They seem to have all been formed in a single star formation event a few million years ago. The existence of these relatively young stars was a surprise to experts, who expected the tidal forces from the central black hole to prevent their formation. This "paradox of youth" is even stronger for stars that are on very tight orbits around Sagittarius A*, such as S2 and S0-102. The scenarios invoked to explain this formation involve either star formation in a massive star cluster offset from the Galactic Center that would have migrated to its current location once formed, or star formation within a massive, compact gas accretion disk around the central black-hole. Current evidence favors the latter theory, as formation through a large accretion disk is more likely to lead to the observed discrete edge of the young stellar cluster at roughly 0.5 parsec. Most of these 100 young, massive stars seem to be concentrated within one or two disks, rather than randomly distributed within the central parsec. This observation however does not allow definite conclusions to be drawn at this point.


title: Galactic Center

text: Star formation does not seem to be occurring currently at the Galactic Center, although the Circumnuclear Disk of molecular gas that orbits the Galactic Center at two parsecs seems a fairly favorable site for star formation. Work presented in 2002 by Antony Stark and Chris Martin mapping the gas density in a 400-light-year region around the Galactic Center has revealed an accumulating ring with a mass several million times that of the Sun and near the critical density for star formation. They predict that in approximately 200 million years there will be an episode of starburst in the Galactic Center, with many stars forming rapidly and undergoing supernovae at a hundred times the current rate. This starburst may also be accompanied by the formation of galactic relativistic jets as matter falls into the central black hole. It is thought that the Milky Way undergoes a starburst of this sort every 500 million years.


title: Galactic Center

text: In addition to the paradox of youth, there is also a "conundrum of old age" associated with the distribution of the old stars at the Galactic Center. Theoretical models had predicted that the old stars—which far outnumber young stars—should have a steeply-rising density near the black hole, a so-called Bahcall–Wolf cusp. Instead, it was discovered in 2009 that the density of the old stars peaks at a distance of roughly 0.5 parsec from Sgr A*, then falls inward: instead of a dense cluster, there is a "hole", or core, around the black hole. Several suggestions have been put forward to explain this puzzling observation, but none is completely satisfactory. For instance, although the black hole would eat stars near it, creating a region of low density, this region would be much smaller than a parsec. Because the observed stars are a fraction of the total number, it is theoretically possible that the overall stellar distribution is different from what is observed, although no plausible models of this sort have been proposed yet.


title: Galactic Center

text: In May 2021 NASA published new images of the Galactic Center, based on surveys from Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes. Images are about 2.2 degrees (1,000 light years) across and 4.2 degrees (2,000 light years) long.


title: The Anarchist Cookbook

text: The Anarchist Cookbook, first published in 1971, is a book containing instructions for the manufacture of explosives, rudimentary telecommunications phreaking devices, and related weapons, as well as instructions for the home manufacture of illicit drugs, including LSD. It was written by William Powell at the apex of the counterculture era to protest against United States's involvement in the Vietnam War. Powell converted to Anglicanism in 1976 and later attempted to have the book removed from circulation. However, the copyright belonged to the publisher, who continued circulation until the company was acquired in 1991. Its legality has been questioned in several jurisdictions.


title: The Anarchist Cookbook

text: "The Anarchist Cookbook" was written by William Powell as a teenager and first published in 1971 at the apex of the counterculture era to protest against United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Powell gained inspiration for his text from his experiences with Vietnam veterans throughout his time living in New York City, during which, the pacifist movements of the 1960s began to take a more violent turn, having been responsible for over 100 politically inspired bombings. Powell began plans to become a writer but decided upon a political course when he was drafted to the Vietnam war, which inspired him to write "recipes" and later compile them into a "cookbook". The initial vision of "The Anarchist Cookbook" was to post instructional flyers in New York City, including how to properly throw a Molotov cocktail and how to make LSD. These "recipes" were eventually adapted to make up an entire book. From 1968 to 1970, Powell began researching in the "U.S. Combat Bookshelf" at the New York Public Library, including external texts such as "The Boy Scout Handbook", "Fuck the System" by Abbie Hoffman, and other anarchist texts. The initial manuscript was sent to Lyle Stuart in 1970.


title: The Anarchist Cookbook

text: Powell stated "The Anarchist Cookbook" was initially designed as a book meant to provide education towards "the silent majority" of the American population. He described that the book was not intended for extant political fringe organizations; rather it was designed to galvanize a great societal change by inciting the general population. The ultimate goal of the text was to provide the general population with the skills and capabilities to organize against fascist, capitalist, and communist threats that he perceived. Powell stated: "The central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change," a sentiment that he would renounce later in life.


title: The Anarchist Cookbook

text: After writing the book as a teenager, Powell converted to Anglicanism in 1976, and later attempted to have the book removed from circulation. In 1979, Powell left the United States, traveling to the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia. There he worked as a faculty member for international schools backed by the United States. During this time, he began writing about pedagogy and conflict resolution. This led him to renounce his book and instead campaign for its withdrawal from publication. He was unable to legally stop publication of "The Anarchist's Cookbook" because the copyright had been issued to the original publisher (Lyle Stuart), and subsequent publishers that purchased the rights have kept the title in print. Powell publicly renounced his book in a 2013 piece calling for the book to "quickly and quietly go out of print". Having written the book, Powell had difficulty finding employment throughout his life, having described the book as "a youthful indiscretion or mistake that can haunt someone during their early years or even longer." In 2011, Powell and his wife, Ochan Kusuma-Powell, founded Next Frontier: Inclusion, a nonprofit serving children with developmental and learning disabilities, describing it as a means to atone for writing the text. William Powell died of cardiac arrest on 11 July 2016.


title: The Anarchist Cookbook

text: Powell originally sent the manuscript to over 30 publishers until Lyle Stuart bought the book and its copyright. Powell received royalties for the book, approximately $35,000, until he split with the company in 1976. Despite Powell's protest against the continued publication of the text, the copyright of the book never belonged to its author, but to its publisher Lyle Stuart. The publisher Lyle Stuart Inc agreed to publish the text as an attempt to defy efforts by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to obtain lists of people who checked out books that were deemed subversive. Stuart kept publishing the book until the company was bought in 1991 by Steven Schragis, who decided to drop it. Out of the 2,000 books published by the company, it was the only one that Schragis decided to stop publishing. Schragis said publishers have a responsibility to the public, and the book had no positive social purpose that could justify keeping it in print. The copyright was bought in 2002 by Delta Press (aka Ozark Press) an Arkansas-based publisher that specializes in controversial books, where the title is their "most-asked-for volume". As of 2016, over two million copies of the book have been sold.


title: The Anarchist Cookbook

text: "The Anarchist Cookbook" begins with a Foreword section, detailing the author's intentions for the text. At the time of writing, Powell believed that the United States was slowly declining towards communism, thus he found it necessary to write a book that guided people on revolution against this transition. He championed the idea of "bringing America back to where she was two hundred years ago", believing his revolutionary ideals to be reactionary, rather than proactive. Powell begins with his vision for the book in how it is intended to educate and galvanize the public to make tangible change in their home countries. Powell states that fringe political organizations, such The Minutemen and The Weathermen, are not the intended audience, rather it is written for "the silent majority". Powell envisioned the United States people rebelling against what he deemed to be oppressive capitalistic ideals, and to a lesser extent, against fascist and communist movements.


title: The Anarchist Cookbook

text: Powell begins the content of his book discussing anarchy and anarchist theory. Anarchy, by his definition, is a wide scale mass uprising by the people, similar to that of civil disobedience through violence. He believed that anarchy was the innate state of all individuals, and therefore human nature would drive people to participate in such practices. Powell believed that current expressions of politics, arts, music, and education all contained innate principles of anarchist ideals, thereby equating anarchism to individualism. This principle drives Powell's argumentation as he believed that the current political climate and Vietnam war had undermined human values, therefore revolution based upon his perception of human dignity and freedom was what drove him to write the piece. He ends his introduction by warning of the seriousness that these recipes may have deadly consequences if used improperly. The chapters of "The Anarchist Cookbook" include descriptions and detailed instructions in hand-to-hand combat, explosives, booby traps, drugs, tear gas, sabotage and demolition, surveillance, improvised weapons and other topics related to anarchism.


title: The Anarchist Cookbook

text: At the time of its publication, one FBI memo described "The Anarchist Cookbook" as "one of the crudest, low-brow, paranoiac writing efforts ever attempted". The book was reviewed by the Department of Justice, the White House, the FBI, and by both John Dean and Mark Felt, Richard Nixon's lawyer and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's associate director respectively. While having concerns about the text, the FBI concluded that it could not be regulated as it was published through mass media. Furthermore, the FBI ruled that "The Anarchist Cookbook" does not incite "forcible resistance to any law of the United States" and is therefore protected under the First Amendment. While much of the text was deemed to be inaccurate, the FBI concluded that the chapter on explosives "appears to be accurate in most respects". Since its conception, the FBI has kept records of the book, releasing the bulk of its investigation file in 2010.


title: The Anarchist Cookbook

text: The anarchist collective CrimethInc., which published the book "Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook" in response, denounces the earlier book, saying it was "not composed or released by anarchists, not derived from anarchist practice, not intended to promote freedom and autonomy or challenge repressive power – and was barely a cookbook, as most of the recipes in it are notoriously unreliable".


title: The Anarchist Cookbook

text: Much of the publication was copied and made available as text documents online through Usenet and FTP sites hosted in academic institutions in the early 1990s, and has been made available via web browsers from their inception in the mid-1990s to the present day. The name varies slightly from "Anarchist Cookbook" to "Anarchy Cookbook" and the topics have expanded vastly in the intervening decades. Many of the articles were attributed to an anonymous author called "The Jolly Roger".


title: The Anarchist Cookbook

text: Knowledge of the book, or copied online publications of it, increased along with the increase in public access to the Internet throughout the mid-1990s. Newspapers ran stories about how easy the text was to get hold of, and the influence it may have had with terrorists, criminals, and experimenting teenagers.


title: The Anarchist Cookbook

text: The book served as a central element of the 2002 romantic comedy "The Anarchist Cookbook". Repercussions from the book's publication, and the author's subsequent disavowal of its content, were the subject of the 2016 documentary film "American Anarchist" by Charlie Siskel. In the film, William Powell explains in depth his thoughts on the book and the consequences it had in his life. It further explores the themes of responsibility and repercussions that decision can have on one's life. Powell's death in 2016 received little media coverage until the release of "American Anarchist", which was released a few months after his death.


title: Cease and desist

text: A cease and desist letter is a document sent to an individual or business to stop alleged illegal activity. The phrase "cease and desist" is a legal doublet, made up of two near-synonyms. The letter may warn that, if the recipient does not discontinue specified conduct, or take certain actions, by deadlines set in the letter, that party, i.e. the letter's recipient, may be sued. When issued by a public authority, a cease and desist letter, being "a warning of impending judicial enforcement", is most appropriately called a "cease and desist order".


title: Cease and desist

text: Although cease and desist letters are not exclusively used in the area of intellectual property, particularly in regards to copyright infringement, such letters "are frequently utilized in disputes concerning intellectual property and represent an important feature of the intellectual property law landscape". The holder of an intellectual property right such as a copyrighted work, a trademark, or a patent, may send the cease and desist letter to inform a third party "of the right holders' rights, identity, and intentions to enforce the rights". The letter may merely contain a licensing offer or may be an explicit threat of a lawsuit. A cease and desist letter often triggers licensing negotiations, and is a frequent first step towards litigation.


title: Cease and desist

text: Receiving numerous cease and desist letters may be very costly for the recipient. Each claim in the letters must be evaluated, and it should be decided whether to respond to the letters, "whether or not to obtain an attorney's opinion letter, prepare for a lawsuit, and perhaps initiate [in case of letters regarding a potential patent infringement] a search for alternatives and the development of design-around technologies".


title: Cease and desist

text: Cease and desist letters are sometimes used to intimidate recipients and can be "an effective tool used by corporations to chill the critical speech of gripe sites operators". A company owning a trademark may send such letter to a gripe site operator alleging a trademark infringement, although the actual use of the trademark by the gripe site operator may fall under a fair use exception (in compliance with, in the U.S., the protection of free speech under the First Amendment).


title: Cease and desist

text: Author Patrick Wensink used Jack Daniel's famous branding without licensing as a cover for his 2012 book "Broken Piano for President". Jack Daniel's requested only future printing of the book to have the cover changed and offered compensation.


title: Cease and desist

text: In 2017, a cease and desist letter sent by Netflix for an unauthorized "Stranger Things"-related bar event was noted by news outlets such as "Fortune" and "Quartz" for its humorous wording.


title: Cease and desist

text: The Philippine National Telecommunications Commission issued a cease and desist letter ordering ABS-CBN to stop broadcasting on May 5, 2020 after its franchise expired the day before (May 4, 2020). At 7:52 pm (PHT), ABS-CBN stopped its broadcast in compliance with the NTC's letter, signing off all of its free TV and radio stations across the country (ABS-CBN Channel 2, S+A Channel 23, DZMM 630, and MOR 101.9). The said agency also gave ABS-CBN ten days to explain why its assigned frequencies should not be recalled. On June 30, 2020, considering that Channel 43 was also included in the May 5, 2020 shutdown order issued by the NTC against ABS-CBN (although ABS-CBN CEO Carlo Katigbak insisted that it is part of their blocktime agreement with AMCARA Broadcasting Network), the NTC and Solicitor General Jose Calida released two alias shutdown orders against Channel 43 on digital receiver ABS-CBN TV Plus and Sky Cable's nationwide satellite service Sky Direct.


title: Cease and desist

text: Donald Trump sent a cease and desist letter to CNN asking them to retract a poll that showed him being 14 percentage points behind his opponent Joe Biden during the presidential election, prompting "The Atlantic" to warn about attacks on the media.


title: Cease and desist

text: In 2021, Google's platform YouTube issued a significant number of cease and desist notices to the creators of various music bots on Discord. Some of the most notable bots to be sent this notice were and Groovy, at the time, the two most popular bots on the platform. These music bots allowed users to request songs and have the bot create a queue. This was done by pulling the audio stream from various streaming and video platforms, including YouTube, and then played that audio on the Discord voice channel. Because such music bots did not play any of the advertisements included on the video-hosting site, the company alleged missing revenue for itself and the content uploaders. A spokesperson for Google told The Verge that Groovy violated YouTube's terms of service for "modifying the service and using it for commercial purposes". The makers of Groovy had decided to comply with Google's request by shutting down the bot on August 30, 2021. According to estimations, the bot had more than 250 million users.


title: Cease and desist

text: In 2022, Disney issued a letter of cease and desist to the creators of "Club Penguin Rewritten", a game that was created as a remake of "Club Penguin" after its shutdown on March 31, 2017.


title: Cease and desist

text: Google issued a letter of cease and desist to the creators of YouTube Vanced in 2022. The modded app has since March 13, 2022 been discontinued, with all links being removed and, with no updates, will shut down for good in the next few years.


title: Akan people

text: The Akan () people live primarily in present-day Ghana and Ivory Coast in West Africa. The Akan language (also known as "Twi/Fante") are a group of dialects within the Central Tano branch of the Potou–Tano subfamily of the Niger–Congo family. Subgroups of the Akan people include: the Agona, Akuapem, Akwamu, Akyem, Ashanti, Bono, Fante, Kwahu, Wassa, and Ahanta. The Akan subgroups all have cultural attributes in common; most notably the tracing of matrilineal descent, inheritance of property, and succession to high political office.


title: Akan people

text: Akan people are believed to have migrated to their current location from the Sahara desert and Sahel regions of Africa into the forest region around the 11th century. Many Akans tell their history as it started in the eastern region of Africa as this is where the ethnogenesis of the Akan as we know them today happened. Oral traditions relate that Akans originated from ancient Ghana. They migrated from the north, they went through Egypt and settled in Nubia (Sudan). Around 500 AD (5th century), due to the pressure exerted on Nubia by the Axumite kingdom of Ethiopia, Nubia was shattered, and the Akan people moved west and established small trading kingdoms. These kingdoms grew, and around 750 AD the Ghana Empire was formed. The Empire lasted from 750 AD to 1200 AD and collapsed as a result of the introduction of Islam in the Western Sudan, and the zeal of the Muslims to impose their religion, their ancestors eventually left for Kong (i.e. present day Ivory Coast). From Kong they moved to Wam and then to Dormaa (both located in present-day Bono Region). The movement from Kong was necessitated by the desire of the people to find suitable savannah conditions since they were not used to forest life. Around the 14th century, some of them moved from Dormaa South Eastwards to Twifo-Hemang, North West Cape Coast and to other Akan states. This move was commercially motivated.


title: Akan people

text: The kingdom of Bonoman (or Brong-Ahafo) was established as early as the 12th century. Between the 12th and 13th centuries a gold boom in the area brought wealth to numerous Akans. During different phases of the Kingdom of Bonoman, groups of Akans migrated out of the area to create numerous states based predominantly on gold mining and trading of cash crops. This brought wealth to numerous Akan states such as the Akwamu Empire (1550–1650), and ultimately led to the rise of the well known Akan empire, the Empire of Ashanti (1700–1900), the most dominant of the Akan states. From the 15th century to the 19th century, the Akan people dominated gold mining and trading in the region; throughout this period they were among the most powerful groups in Africa. The Akan goldfields, according to Peter Bakewell, were the "highly auriferous area in the forest country between the Komoe and Volta rivers." The Akan goldfield was one of three principal goldfields in the region, along with the Bambuk goldfield, and the Bure goldfield.


title: Akan people

text: This wealth in gold attracted European traders. Initially, the Europeans were Portuguese, soon joined by the Dutch and the British in their quest for Akan gold. The Akan waged war on neighboring states in their geographic area to capture people and sell them as slaves to Europeans (Portuguese) who subsequently sold the enslaved people along with guns to the Akan in exchange for Akan gold. Akan gold was also used to purchase slaves from further up north via the Trans-Saharan route. The Akan purchased slaves to help clear the dense forests within Ashanti. About a third of the population of many Akan states were indentured servants (i.e. Non-Akan peoples). The Akan went from buyers of slaves to selling slaves as the dynamics in the Gold Coast and the New World changed. Thus, the Akan people played a role in supplying Europeans with indentured servants, who were later enslaved for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In 2006 Ghana apologized to the descendants of slaves for the role the Ashantis had played in the slave trade. Akan people, especially the Ashanti people, fought against European colonialists and defeated them on several occasions to maintain autonomy. This occurred during the Anglo-Ashanti wars: the War of the Golden Stool and other similar battles. By the early 1900s, Ghana was a colony or protectorate of Great Britain, while the lands in the Ivory Coast were under the French. On 6 March 1957, following the decolonization from Great Britain under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, the Gold Coast was united with British Togoland and the Northern Region, Upper East Region, and Upper West Region of the Gold Coast to form Ghana. Ivory Coast gained independence on 7 August 1960.


title: Akan people

text: Many people across the Americas can trace their lineage to the Akan people due to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Some notable Akan descendants include the Coromantees in Jamaica, the Akwamu in St. John, and Coffy, who was the leader of the 1763 Berbice slave uprising in Guyana. According to one estimate, roughly ten percent of all slave ships that embarked from the coast of West Africa contained Akan people. Although gold was the primary source of wealth in their economy, the capture and sale of Akan people peaked during the Fante and Ashanti conflicts, resulting in a high number of military captives being sold into slavery. Coromantee soldiers and other Akan captives were known for various slave revolts and plantation resistance tactics. Their legacy is evident within groups such as the Maroons of the Caribbean and South America.


title: Akan people

text: The Akans consider themselves one nation. Akan means first, foremost, indicating the enlightened and civilized. While traditionally matrilineal, they are also united philosophically through 12 patrilineal spirit groups called the Ntoro"." Within the Akan nation are branches based on many dialects, widest and possibly the oldest one being used is Twi. Each branch subsequently holds a collection of states and stemming from city-states. The state or "Aman" are typically ruled by several kings known as "Amanhene" or "Ahemfo." The state is the basic unit of Akan polity. Several states and city-states can band together to form a confederacy or an empire regardless of clan or abusua they belong to, while those outsides of the Akan tribe or the abusua were usually conquered or annexed via war or mutual agreement. For example, the Guan state of Larteh and the Akyem state of Akropong joined together to form the Akwapim Kingdom to avoid the Akwamu, who the Guan deemed as oppressive. Under the State there are Divisions and under these Divisions are towns and villages.


title: Akan people

text: Akan kings are ranked according to their jurisdiction. The head of an inter-clan Confederacy is usually considered a King, as in the Kings of Ashanti, Fante, Akyem and the Akwapim. Under these are the heads of the constituent states who equates an Emperor that only heads an Empire (e.g. Asante Empire and the Denkyira). In Asante's case, as an Empire, the Asantehene reigned over the non-Oyoko clan city-states and ruled over the kings of those states as an Imperial head or Emperor (a hardly used but an equivalent term for Emperor or "the king of kings"). Next there are divisional Chiefs, they are primarily arranged according to the five divisions of an Akan army. The Fante army or Asafo formation resembles a cross or an airplane. The battle formation has the Frontline, the West Flank, an East Flank, the main body and the Vanguard. There are, therefore, five divisional chiefs in each Paramountcy. These are followed in rank by the Kings of the city and then the Kings of the town and then king of the suburbs.


title: Akan people

text: The Akan tribe mostly has seven Abusua (Matrilineal clans) in each state. They do not have the same names in each state but each has an equivalent clan (e.g. in Fante areas along the coast, the Asante clan of Oyoko is referred to as Dehyena or Yokofo). The clans are assigned States which they rule by their status as founders of that jurisdiction. The Ashanti Kingdom is ruled by the Oyoko Clan. However, the Bretuo or Twidanfo (in Fante), as well as other clans, rule States, Divisions, Towns, and Villages within the Kingdom. The Fante-speaking tribes usually have the Asona Clan ruling most of their States (like Mankessim). Certain sub-clans or lineages have exclusive rights to some stools within Akanland such as the lineage of Afia Kobi in the Oyoko Clan who alone sits on the Golden Stool of Asante.


title: Akan people

text: The Akans are traditionally a Matrilineal people of the African continent. Matrilineal inheritance makes it easier to trace the line of succession. Within each lineage or House are the branches. The chief of a family is called an "Abusuapanyin" (or family-elder). Ranking above a family chief (a family's Abusuapanin) is the clan's chief (or clan's Abusuapanyin). These branches are called Jaase or Kitchens. Each Kitchen takes its turn to present a candidate for the stool to the kingmakers of the lineage. Once accepted their candidate rules till death. This means until all the Jaase have presented their candidates they have to wait their turn.


title: Akan people

text: Akan Kings of whatever rank have other noblemen who serve them as sub-chiefs. These sub-chiefs do not have hereditary titles and therefore do not have black stools. Besides, each King has a female co-ruler known as the Queen-mother. The Queen-mother is more like a figurehead representing the King's or Emperor's eldest sister and hence the mother of the next King or Emperor, she could rule as a King if she wishes (e.g. queen-mothers mainly from the House of Asona clan: Nana Abena Boaa who ruled Offinso 1610–1640, Nana Afia Dokuaa who ruled Akyem Abuakwa 1817–1835, and Nana Yaa Asantewaa who ruled Edweso 1896–1900). They present the candidate for consideration as King. An assistant king does not have a Queen-mother as his title is not hereditary.


title: Akan people

text: A Prince or Daakyehen(Fante)(lit "Future-king") is any of the members of the lineage eligible to sit on a stool. However, not all noblemen or noblewomen are Princes as some may be ineligible. A prince is not necessarily the son of a King but rather the former King's nephew on the mother's side. As such, nobles strive to achieve the position of a prince in their families or for their children.


title: Akan people

text: A sub-chief does not, however, need to be a nobleman. He only has to be suitable for the position he is to occupy. Some sub-chieftaincy positions can be abolished at will. They include the heads of the ruling house or Mankrado, the Linquist, the Chief Kingmaker or Jaasehen, the Supi or General of the Army, the Captains of the Army or Asafohen(Fante) among others. The way Akans ruled their nation fascinated the tribes of other West African nations and as the Akans conquered or formed alliances with these nations, parts of it were transmitted to them. The British particularly felt the Akan system was highly efficient and tried to establish it throughout their dominions in West Africa using the Indirect Rule System. The Ewes and the Ga-Adangmes with their close affinity to the Akans have modified certain aspects of it to fit their societies.


title: Akan people

text: In Ghana and other modern states where the Akan tribe is located, the Kings, Assistant Kings, Princes, and Noblemen of the Akans serve mostly a symbolic role. Modern politics has side-lined them in national politics although it is common to find that an elected or appointed official to be of Akan royalty. And, especially in the villages and poor areas, traditional Kings are still very important for organizing development, social services and keeping the peace. Some Kings have decided to push ahead with the leadership of their Kingdoms and States in a non-political fashion. The Asantehen and okyehen have emphasized Education and Environmental Sustainability respectively. Others push the national government and its agents to fulfill promises to their people.


title: Akan people

text: In modern Ghana, a quasi-legislative/judicial body known as the House of "Chiefs"(a colonial term to belittle African Kings because of the racist belief to not equate an African King with a European King in rank) has been established to oversee "chieftaincy" and the Government of Ghana as the British Government once did certifies the Chiefs and gazettes them. Several Akan Kings sit at the various levels of the National House of "Chiefs". Each Paramountcy has a Traditional Council, then there is the Regional House of "Chiefs" and lastly the National House of "Chiefs". Akan Kings who once warred with each other and Kings of other nations within Ghana now sit with them to build peace and advocate development for their nations.


title: Akan people

text: The Akan word "ɔman" ("plural Aman") which forms the second element in this expression has a meaning much of "community, town, nation, state". has been translated as "Akanland".


title: Akan people

text: Akan refers to the language of the Akan ethnolinguistic group and the Akan language which was and is the most widely spoken and used indigenous language in the Akan tribes. Each tribe having its own dialect Akan is officially recognized for literacy in the Akan-majority regions, at the primary and elementary educational stage (Primary 1–3) K–12 (education) level, and studied at university as a bachelor's degree or master's degree program. The Akan language is spoken as the predominant language in the Western, Central, Ashanti, Eastern, Brong Ahafo regions of the akan clan. A language with some Akan influence called Ndyuka is also spoken in South America (Suriname and French Guiana), with the Akan language coming to these South American and Caribbean places through the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Akan names and folktales are still used in these South American and Caribbean countries (another example can be seen in the Maroons of Jamaica and their influence with Akan culture and loanwords specifically from the Fante dialect of the Central Region of Ghana) in the language of Jamaican Maroon Creole or Kromanti. With the present state of technology, one can listen to live radio broadcasts in Akan from numerous radio stations and receive mass media and public broadcasts in Akan from numerous multimedia and media broadcasting. Akan is studied in major universities in North America and the United States, including Ohio University, Ohio State University, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Harvard University, Boston University, Indiana University, University of Michigan, and the University of Florida. The Akan language has been a regular language of study in the annual Summer Cooperative African Languages Institute (SCALI) program and the Akan language is regulated and administered by the Akan Orthography Committee (AOC). Some of Akan's language characteristic features include tone, vowel harmony, and nasalization.


title: Akan people

text: Akan culture is one of the traditional matrilineal cultures of Africa. Akan art is wide-ranging and renowned, especially for the tradition of crafting bronze gold weights, using the lost-wax casting method. The Akan culture reached South America, the Caribbean, and North America.


title: Akan people

text: Some of their most important mythological stories are called "anansesem", literally meaning "the spider story", but in a figurative sense also meaning "traveler's tales". These "spider stories" are sometimes also referred to as "nyankomsem": "words of a sky god". The stories generally, but not always, revolve around Kwaku Ananse, a trickster spirit, often depicted as a spider, human, or a combination thereof.


title: Akan people

text: Many but not all of the Akan still practice their traditional matrilineal customs, living in their traditional extended family households. The traditional Akan economic and political organization is based on matrilineal "lineages", which are the basis of inheritance and succession. A "lineage" is defined as all those related by matrilineal descent from a particular ancestress. Several lineages are grouped into a political unit headed by a council of elders, each of whom is the elected head of a lineage – which itself may include multiple extended-family households.


title: Akan people

text: Public offices are, thus, vested in the lineage, as are land tenure and other lineage property. In other words, lineage property is inherited only by matrilineal kin. Each lineage controls the lineage land farmed by its members, functions together in the veneration of its ancestors, supervises marriages of its members, and settles internal disputes among its members.


title: Akan people

text: The political units above are likewise grouped (into traditionally seven) but as of today, eight larger groups called "abusua": Aduana, Agona, Asakyiri, Asenie, Asona, Bretuo, Ekuona, and Oyoko. The members of each such "abusua" are united by their belief that they are all descended from the same ancient ancestress – so marriage between members of the same group (or "abusua") is forbidden, a taboo on marriage. One inherits or is a lifelong member of, the lineage, the political unit and the "abusua" of one's mother, regardless of one's gender or marriage. Members and their spouses thus belong to different "abusuas", with mother and children living and working in one household, and their husband/father living and working in a different household.


title: Akan people

text: According to one source of information about the Akan, "A man is strongly related to his mother's brother (wɔfa) but only weakly related to his father's brother. This is perhaps viewed in the context of a polygamous society in which the mother/child bond is likely to be much stronger than the father/child bond. As a result, in inheritance, a man's nephew (his sister's son) (wɔfase) will have priority over his own son. Uncle-nephew relationships, therefore, assume a dominant position."


title: Akan people

text: "The principles governing inheritance, generation, and age – that is to say, men come before women and seniors before juniors."... When a woman's brothers are available, a consideration of generational seniority stipulates that the line of brothers be exhausted before the right to inherit lineage property passes down to the next senior genealogical generation of sisters' sons. Finally, "it is when all possible male heirs have been exhausted that the females" may inherit.


title: Akan people

text: Certain other aspects of the Akan culture are determined patrilineally rather than matrilineally. There are ancestrally 12 patrilineal "Ntoro" (spirit) groups, and everyone belongs to his or her father's "Ntoro" group, but not to his family lineage and "abusua". Each "Ntoro" group has its own surnames, taboos, ritual purifications, and forms of etiquette. A person thus inherits one's "Ntoro" from one's father but does not belong to his family.


title: Akan people

text: A recent (2001) book provides an update on the Akan, stating that some families are changing from the above "abusua" structure to the nuclear family. Housing, childcare, education, daily work, and elder care, etc. are then handled by that individual family, rather than by the "abusua" or clan, especially in the city. The above taboo on marriage within one's "abusua" is sometimes ignored, but "clan membership" is still important, with many people still living in the "abusua" framework presented above.


title: Chelsea Field

text: Field started her career as a Solid Gold Dancer, and one of her first television roles was on "Airwolf". She also played Teela in the 1987 film adaptation of "Masters of the Universe". She began portraying attorney on "" during the program's third season. The character was changed from recurring to regular effective with the seventh season.


title: Chelsea Field

text: Field is married to actor Scott Bakula, and she has appeared on several episodes of "", in which he stars. According to a December 2010 Tyler 'n Todd radio interview with Bakula, he and Field had been together for "16 years, almost" but married for only "a year".


title: Church of the East

text: The Church of the East () or the East Syriac Church, also called the Church of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the Persian Church, the Assyrian Church, the Babylonian Church or the Nestorian Church, was an Eastern Christian church of the East Syriac Rite, based in Mesopotamia. It was one of three major branches of Eastern Christianity that arose from the Christological controversies of the 5th and 6th centuries, alongside the Oriental Orthodox Churches and the Chalcedonian Church. During the early modern period, a series of schisms gave rise to rival patriarchates, sometimes two, sometimes three. Since the latter half of the 20th century, three churches in Iraq claim the heritage of the Church of the East. Meanwhile, the East Syriac churches in India claim the heritage of the Church of the East in India.


title: Church of the East

text: The Church of the East organized itself in 410 as the national church of the Sasanian Empire through the Council of Seleucia-Ctesiphon. In 424 it declared itself independent of the state church of the Roman Empire. The Church of the East was headed by the Catholicose of the East seated in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, continuing a line that, according to its tradition, stretched back to the Apostolic Age. According to its tradition, the Church of the East was established by Thomas the Apostle in the first century. Its liturgical rite was the East Syrian rite that employs the Divine Liturgy of Saints Addai and Mari.


title: Church of the East

text: The Church of the East, which was part of the Great Church, shared communion with those in the Roman Empire until the Council of Ephesus condemned Nestorius in 431. Supporters of Nestorius took refuge in Sasanian Persia, where the Church refused to condemn Nestorius and became accused of Nestorianism, a heresy incorrectly attributed to Nestorius. It was therefore called the Nestorian Church by all the other Eastern churches, both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian, and by the Western Church. Politically the Sassanian and Roman empires were at war with each other, which forced the Church of the East to distance itself from the churches within Roman territory. More recently, the "Nestorian" appellation has been called "a lamentable misnomer", and theologically incorrect by scholars. However, the Church of the East started to call itself Nestorian, it anathematized the Council of Ephesus, and in its liturgy Nestorius was mentioned as a saint. In 544, the general Council of the Church of the East approved the Council of Chalcedon at the Synod of Mar Aba I in 544.


title: Church of the East

text: Continuing as a "dhimmi" community under the Sunni Caliphate after the Muslim conquest of Persia (633–654), the Church of the East played a major role in the history of Christianity in Asia. Between the 9th and 14th centuries, it represented the world's largest Christian denomination in terms of geographical extent. It established dioceses and communities stretching from the Mediterranean Sea and today's Iraq and Iran, to India (the Saint Thomas Syrian Christians of Kerala), the Mongol kingdoms in Central Asia, and China during the Tang dynasty (7th–9th centuries). In the 13th and 14th centuries, the church experienced a final period of expansion under the Mongol Empire, where influential Church of the East clergy sat in the Mongol court.


title: Church of the East

text: Even before the Church of the East underwent a rapid decline in its field of expansion in Central Asia in the 14th century, it had already lost ground in its home territory. The decline is indicated by the shrinking list of active dioceses. Around the year 1000, there were more than sixty dioceses throughout the Near East, but by the middle of the 13th century there were about twenty, and after Timur Leng the number was further reduced to seven only. In the aftermath of the division of the Mongol Empire, the rising Chinese and Islamic Mongol leaderships pushed out and nearly eradicated the Church of the East and its followers. Thereafter, Church of the East dioceses remained largely confined to Upper Mesopotamia and to the Saint Thomas Syrian Christians in the Malabar Coast (modern-day Kerala, India).


title: Church of the East

text: Divisions occurred within the church itself, but by 1830 two unified patriarchates and distinct churches remained: the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church (an Eastern Catholic Church in communion with the Holy See). The Ancient Church of the East split from the Assyrian Church of the East in 1968. In 2017, the Chaldean Catholic Church had approximately 628,405 members and the Assyrian Church of the East had 323,300 to 380,000, while the Ancient Church of the East had 100,000.


title: Church of the East

text: The Church of the East's declaration in 424 of the independence of its head, the Patriarch of the East, preceded by seven years the 431 Council of Ephesus, which condemned Nestorius and declared that Mary, mother of Jesus, can be described as Mother of God. Two of the generally accepted ecumenical councils were held earlier: the First Council of Nicaea, in which a Persian bishop took part, in 325, and the First Council of Constantinople in 381. The Church of the East accepted the teaching of these two councils, but ignored the 431 Council and those that followed, seeing them as concerning only the patriarchates of the Roman Empire (Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem), all of which were for it ""Western" Christianity".


title: Church of the East

text: Theologically, the Church of the East adopted dyophysite doctrine of Theodore of Mopsuestia that emphasised the "distinctiveness" of the divine and the human natures of Jesus. But this doctrine was misleadingly labelled as 'Nestorian' by its theological opponents.


title: Church of the East

text: In the 6th century and thereafter, the Church of the East expanded greatly, establishing communities in India (the Saint Thomas Syrian Christians), among the Mongols in Central Asia, and in China, which became home to a thriving community under the Tang dynasty from the 7th to the 9th century. At its height, between the 9th and 14th centuries, the Church of the East was the world's largest Christian church in geographical extent, with dioceses stretching from its heartland in Upper Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean Sea and as far afield as China, Mongolia, Central Asia, Anatolia, the Arabian Peninsula and India.


title: Church of the East

text: From its peak of geographical extent, the church entered a period of rapid decline that began in the 14th century, due largely to outside influences. The Chinese Ming dynasty overthrew the Mongols (1368) and ejected Christians and other foreign influences from China, and many Mongols in Central Asia converted to Islam. The Muslim Turco-Mongol leader Timur (1336–1405) nearly eradicated the remaining Christians in the Middle East. Nestorian Christianity remained largely confined to communities in Upper Mesopotamia and the Saint Thomas Syrian Christians of the Malabar Coast in the Indian subcontinent.


title: Church of the East

text: In the early modern period, the schism of 1552 led to a series of internal divisions and ultimately to its branching into three separate churches: the Chaldean Catholic Church, in full communion with the Holy See, and the independent Assyrian Church of the East and Ancient Church of the East.


title: Church of the East

text: Nestorianism is a Christological doctrine that emphasises the distinction between the human and divine natures of Jesus. It was attributed to Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople from 428 to 431, whose doctrine represented the culmination of a philosophical current developed by scholars at the School of Antioch, most notably Nestorius's mentor Theodore of Mopsuestia, and stirred controversy when Nestorius publicly challenged the use of the title "Theotokos" (literally, "Bearer of God") for Mary, mother of Jesus, suggesting that the title denied Christ's full humanity. He argued that Jesus had two loosely joined natures, the divine Logos and the human Jesus, and proposed "Christotokos" (literally, "Bearer of the Christ") as a more suitable alternative title. His statements drew criticism from other prominent churchmen, particularly from Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, who had a leading part in the Council of Ephesus of 431, which condemned Nestorius for heresy and deposed him as Patriarch.


title: Church of the East

text: After 431, the state authorities in the Roman Empire suppressed Nestorianism, a reason for Christians under Persian rule to favour it and so allay suspicion that their loyalty lay with the hostile Christian-ruled empire.


title: Church of the East

text: It was in the aftermath of the slightly later Council of Chalcedon (451), that the Church of the East formulated a distinctive theology. The first such formulation was adopted at the Synod of Beth Lapat in 484. This was developed further in the early seventh century, when in an at first successful war against the Byzantine Empire the Sasanid Persian Empire incorporated broad territories populated by West Syrians, many of whom were supporters of the miaphysite theology of Oriental Orthodoxy which its opponents term "Monophysitism" (Eutychianism), the theological view most opposed to Nestorianism. They received support from Khosrow II, influenced by his wife Shirin. Shirin was a member of the Church of East, but later joined the miaphysite church of Antioch.


title: Church of the East

text: Drawing inspiration from Theodore of Mopsuestia, Babai the Great (551−628) expounded, especially in his "Book of Union", what became the normative Christology of the Church of the East. He affirmed that the two (a Syriac term, plural of "qnoma", not corresponding precisely to Greek φύσις or οὐσία or ὑπόστασις) of Christ are unmixed but eternally united in his single (from Greek πρόσωπον "prosopon" "mask, character, person"). As happened also with the Greek terms φύσις ("physis") and ὐπόστασις ("hypostasis"), these Syriac words were sometimes taken to mean something other than what was intended; in particular "two " was interpreted as "two individuals". Previously, the Church of the East accepted a certain fluidity of expressions, always within a dyophysite theology, but with Babai's assembly of 612, which canonically sanctioned the "two in Christ" formula, a final christological distinction was created between the Church of the East and the "western" Chalcedonian churches.


title: Church of the East

text: The justice of imputing Nestorianism to Nestorius, whom the Church of the East venerated as a saint, is disputed. David Wilmshurst states that for centuries "the word 'Nestorian' was used both as a term of abuse by those who disapproved of the traditional East Syrian theology, as a term of pride by many of its defenders [...] and as a neutral and convenient descriptive term by others. Nowadays it is generally felt that the term carries a stigma". Sebastian P. Brock says: "The association between the Church of the East and Nestorius is of a very tenuous nature, and to continue to call that church 'Nestorian' is, from a historical point of view, totally misleading and incorrect – quite apart from being highly offensive and a breach of ecumenical good manners".


title: Church of the East

text: Apart from its religious meaning, the word "Nestorian" has also been used in an ethnic sense, as shown by the phrase "Catholic Nestorians".


title: Church of the East

text: In his 1996 article, "The 'Nestorian' Church: a lamentable misnomer", published in the "Bulletin of the John Rylands Library", Sebastian Brock, a Fellow of the British Academy, lamented the fact that "the term 'Nestorian Church' has become the standard designation for the ancient oriental church which in the past called itself 'The Church of the East', but which today prefers a fuller title 'The Assyrian Church of the East'. Such a designation is not only discourteous to modern members of this venerable church, but also − as this paper aims to show − both inappropriate and misleading".


title: Church of the East

text: At the Council of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 410, the Church of the East was declared to have at its head the bishop of the Persian capital Seleucia-Ctesiphon, who in the acts of the council was referred to as the Grand or Major Metropolitan, and who soon afterward was called the Catholicos of the East. Later, the title of Patriarch was used.


title: Church of the East

text: The Church of the East had, like other churches, an ordained clergy in the three traditional orders of bishop, priest (or presbyter), and deacon. Also like other churches, it had an episcopal polity: organisation by dioceses, each headed by a bishop and made up of several individual parish communities overseen by priests. Dioceses were organised into provinces under the authority of a metropolitan bishop. The office of metropolitan bishop was an important one, coming with additional duties and powers; canonically, only metropolitans could consecrate a patriarch. The Patriarch also has the charge of the Province of the Patriarch.


title: Church of the East

text: For most of its history the church had six or so Interior Provinces. In 410, these were listed in the hierarchical order of: Seleucia-Ctesiphon (central Iraq), Beth Lapat (western Iran), Nisibis (on the border between Turkey and Iraq), Prat de Maishan (Basra, southern Iraq), Arbela (Erbil, Kurdistan region of Iraq), and Karka de Beth Slokh (Kirkuk, northeastern Iraq). In addition it had an increasing number of Exterior Provinces further afield within the Sasanian Empire and soon also beyond the empire's borders. By the 10th century, the church had between 20 and 30 metropolitan provinces. According to John Foster, in the 9th century there were 25 metropolitans including those in China and India. The Chinese provinces were lost in the 11th century, and in the subsequent centuries other exterior provinces went into decline as well. However, in the 13th century, during the Mongol Empire, the church added two new metropolitan provinces in North China, Tangut and Katai and Ong.


title: Church of the East

text: The Peshitta, in some cases lightly revised and with missing books added, is the standard Syriac Bible for churches in the Syriac tradition: the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Syrian Catholic Church, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Ancient Church of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Maronites, the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church and the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church.


title: Church of the East

text: The Old Testament of the Peshitta was translated from Hebrew, although the date and circumstances of this are not entirely clear. The translators may have been Syriac-speaking Jews or early Jewish converts to Christianity. The translation may have been done separately for different texts, and the whole work was probably done by the second century. Most of the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament are found in the Syriac, and the Wisdom of Sirach is held to have been translated from the Hebrew and not from the Septuagint.


title: Church of the East

text: The New Testament of the Peshitta, which originally excluded certain disputed books (Second Epistle of Peter, Second Epistle of John, Third Epistle of John, Epistle of Jude, Book of Revelation), had become the standard by the early 5th century.


title: Church of the East

text: It was often said in the 19th century that the Church of the East was opposed to religious images of any kind. The cult of the image was never as strong in the Syriac churches as it was in the Byzantine Church, but they were indeed present in the tradition of the Church of the East. Opposition to religious images eventually became the norm due to the rise of Islam in the region, which forbade any type of depictions of Saints and biblical prophets. As such, the Church was forced to get rid of icons.


title: Church of the East

text: There is both literary and archaeological evidence for the presence of images in the church. Writing in 1248 from Samarkand, an Armenian official records visiting a local church and seeing an image of Christ and the Magi. John of Cora (), Latin bishop of Sultaniya in Persia, writing about 1330 of the East Syrians in Khanbaliq says that they had 'very beautiful and orderly churches with crosses and images in honour of God and of the saints'. Apart from the references, there is a painting of a Christian figure which was discovered by Aurel Stein at the Library Cave of the Mo-kao Caves in 1908, which is probably an image of Christ.


title: Church of the East

text: An illustrated 13th-century Nestorian Peshitta Gospel book written in Estrangela from northern Mesopotamia or Tur Abdin, currently in the State Library of Berlin, proves that in the 13th century the Church of the East was not yet aniconic. Another Nestorian Gospel manuscript preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France contains an illustration that depicts Jesus Christ in the circle of a ringed cross surrounded by four angels. Three Syriac manuscripts from early 19th century or earlier—they were published in a compilation titled "The Book of Protection" by Hermann Gollancz in 1912—contain some illustrations of no great artistic worth that show that use of images continued.


title: Church of the East

text: A life-size male stucco figure discovered in a late-6th-century church in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, beneath which were found the remains of an earlier church, also shows that the Church of the East used figurative representations.


title: Church of the East

text: Although the Nestorian community traced their history to the 1st century AD, the Church of the East first achieved official state recognition from the Sasanian Empire in the 4th century with the accession of Yazdegerd I (reigned 399–420) to the throne of the Sasanian Empire. In 410 the Synod of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, held at the Sasanian capital, allowed the church's leading bishops to elect a formal Catholicos (leader). Catholicos Isaac was required both to lead the Assyrian Christian community and to answer on its behalf to the Sasanian emperor.


title: Church of the East

text: Under pressure from the Sasanian Emperor, the Church of the East sought to increasingly distance itself from the Pentarchy (at the time being known as the church of the Eastern Roman Empire). Therefore, in 424, the bishops of the Sasanian Empire met in council under the leadership of Catholicos Dadishoʿ (421–456) and determined that they would not, henceforth, refer disciplinary or theological problems to any external power, and especially not to any bishop or church council in the Roman Empire.


title: Church of the East

text: Thus, the Mesopotamian churches did not send representatives to the various church councils attended by representatives of the "Western Church". Accordingly, the leaders of the Church of the East did not feel bound by any decisions of what came to be regarded as Roman Imperial Councils. Despite this, the Creed and Canons of the First Council of Nicaea of 325, affirming the full divinity of Christ, were formally accepted at the Council of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 410. The church's understanding of the term hypostasis differs from the definition of the term offered at the Council of Chalcedon of 451. For this reason, the Assyrian Church has never approved the Chalcedonian definition.


title: Church of the East

text: The theological controversy that followed the Council of Ephesus in 431 proved a turning point in the Christian Church's history. The Council condemned as heretical the Christology of Nestorius, whose reluctance to accord the Virgin Mary the title "Theotokos" "God-bearer, Mother of God" was taken as evidence that he believed two separate persons (as opposed to two united natures) to be present within Christ.


title: Church of the East

text: The Sasanian Emperor, hostile to the Byzantines, saw the opportunity to ensure the loyalty of his Christian subjects and lent support to the Nestorian Schism. The Emperor took steps to cement the primacy of the Nestorian party within the Assyrian Church of the East, granting its members his protection, and executing the pro-Roman Catholicos Babowai in 484, replacing him with the Nestorian Bishop of Nisibis, Barsauma. The Catholicos-Patriarch Babai (497–503) confirmed the association of the Assyrian Church with Nestorianism.


title: Church of the East

text: Christians were already forming communities in Mesopotamia as early as the 1st century under the Parthian Empire. In 266, the area was annexed by the Sasanian Empire (becoming the province of Asōristān), and there were significant Christian communities in Upper Mesopotamia, Elam, and Fars. The Church of the East traced its origins ultimately to the evangelical activity of Thaddeus of Edessa, Mari and Thomas the Apostle. Leadership and structure remained disorganised until 315 when Papa bar Aggai (310–329), bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, imposed the primacy of his see over the other Mesopotamian and Persian bishoprics which were grouped together under the Catholicate of Seleucia-Ctesiphon; Papa took the title of Catholicos, or universal leader. This position received an additional title in 410, becoming Catholicos and Patriarch of the East.


title: Church of the East

text: These early Christian communities in Mesopotamia, Elam, and Fars were reinforced in the 4th and 5th centuries by large-scale deportations of Christians from the eastern Roman Empire. However, the Persian Church faced several severe persecutions, notably during the reign of Shapur II (339–79), from the Zoroastrian majority who accused it of Roman leanings. Shapur II attempted to dismantle the catholicate's structure and put to death some of the clergy including the catholicoi Simeon bar Sabba'e (341), Shahdost (342), and Barba'shmin (346). Afterward, the office of Catholicos lay vacant nearly 20 years (346–363). In 363, under the terms of a peace treaty, Nisibis was ceded to the Persians, causing Ephrem the Syrian, accompanied by a number of teachers, to leave the School of Nisibis for Edessa still in Roman territory. The church grew considerably during the Sasanian period, but the pressure of persecution led the Catholicos Dadisho I in 424 to convene the Synod of Markabta at Seleucia and declare the Catholicate independent from "the western Fathers".


title: Church of the East

text: Meanwhile, in the Roman Empire, the Nestorian Schism had led many of Nestorius' supporters to relocate to the Sasanian Empire, mainly around the theological School of Nisibis. The Persian Church increasingly aligned itself with the Dyophisites, a measure encouraged by the Zoroastrian ruling class. The church became increasingly Dyophisite in doctrine over the next decades, furthering the divide between Roman and Persian Christianity. In 484 the Metropolitan of Nisibis, Barsauma, convened the Synod of Beth Lapat where he publicly accepted Nestorius' mentor, Theodore of Mopsuestia, as a spiritual authority. In 489, when the School of Edessa in Mesopotamia was closed by Byzantine Emperor Zeno for its Nestorian teachings, the school relocated to its original home of Nisibis, becoming again the School of Nisibis, leading to a wave of Nestorian immigration into the Sasanian Empire. The Patriarch of the East Mar Babai I (497–502) reiterated and expanded upon his predecessors' esteem for Theodore, solidifying the church's adoption of Dyophisitism.


title: Church of the East

text: Now firmly established in the Persian Empire, with centres in Nisibis, Ctesiphon, and Gundeshapur, and several metropolitan sees, the Church of the East began to branch out beyond the Sasanian Empire. However, through the 6th century the church was frequently beset with internal strife and persecution from the Zoroastrians. The infighting led to a schism, which lasted from 521 until around 539, when the issues were resolved. However, immediately afterward Byzantine-Persian conflict led to a renewed persecution of the church by the Sasanian emperor Khosrau I; this ended in 545. The church survived these trials under the guidance of Patriarch Aba I, who had converted to Christianity from Zoroastrianism.


title: Church of the East

text: By the end of the 5th century and the middle of the 6th, the area occupied by the Church of the East included "all the countries to the east and those immediately to the west of the Euphrates", including the Sasanian Empire, the Arabian Peninsula, Socotra, Mesopotamia, Media, Bactria, Hyrcania, and India; and possibly also to places called Calliana, Male, and Sielediva (Ceylon). Beneath the Patriarch in the hierarchy were nine metropolitans, and clergy were recorded among the Huns, in Persarmenia, Media, and the island of Dioscoris in the Indian Ocean.


title: Church of the East

text: The Church of the East also flourished in the kingdom of the Lakhmids until the Islamic conquest, particularly after the ruler al-Nu'man III ibn al-Mundhir officially converted in c. 592.


title: Church of the East

text: After the Sasanian Empire was conquered by Muslim Arabs in 644, the newly established Rashidun Caliphate designated the Church of the East as an official "dhimmi" minority group headed by the Patriarch of the East. As with all other Christian and Jewish groups given the same status, the church was restricted within the Caliphate, but also given a degree of protection. Nestorians were not permitted to proselytise or attempt to convert Muslims, but their missionaries were otherwise given a free hand, and they increased missionary efforts farther afield. Missionaries established dioceses in India (the Saint Thomas Christians). They made some advances in Egypt, despite the strong Monophysite presence there, and they entered Central Asia, where they had significant success converting local Tartars. Nestorian missionaries were firmly established in China during the early part of the Tang dynasty (618–907); the Chinese source known as the Nestorian Stele describes a mission under a proselyte named Alopen as introducing Nestorian Christianity to China in 635. In the 7th century, the church had grown to have two Nestorian archbishops, and over 20 bishops east of the Iranian border of the Oxus River.


title: Church of the East

text: Patriarch Timothy I (780–823), a contemporary of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid, took a particularly keen interest in the missionary expansion of the Church of the East. He is known to have consecrated metropolitans for Damascus, for Armenia, for Dailam and Gilan in Azerbaijan, for Rai in Tabaristan, for Sarbaz in Segestan, for the Turks of Central Asia, for China, and possibly also for Tibet. He also detached India from the metropolitan province of Fars and made it a separate metropolitan province, known as India. By the 10th century the Church of the East had a number of dioceses stretching from across the Caliphate's territories to India and China.


title: Church of the East

text: Nestorian Christians made substantial contributions to the Islamic Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, particularly in translating the works of the ancient Greek philosophers to Syriac and Arabic. Nestorians made their own contributions to philosophy, science (such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Qusta ibn Luqa, Masawaiyh, Patriarch Eutychius, Jabril ibn Bukhtishu) and theology (such as Tatian, Bar Daisan, Babai the Great, Nestorius, Toma bar Yacoub). The personal physicians of the Abbasid Caliphs were often Assyrian Christians such as the long serving Bukhtishu dynasty.


title: Church of the East

text: After the split with the Western World and synthesis with Nestorianism, the Church of the East expanded rapidly due to missionary works during the medieval period. During the period between 500 and 1400 the geographical horizon of the Church of the East extended well beyond its heartland in present-day northern Iraq, north eastern Syria and south eastern Turkey. Communities sprang up throughout Central Asia, and missionaries from Assyria and Mesopotamia took the Christian faith as far as China, with a primary indicator of their missionary work being the Nestorian Stele, a Christian tablet written in Chinese script found in China dating to 781 AD. Their most important conversion, however, was of the Saint Thomas Christians of the Malabar Coast in India, who alone escaped the destruction of the church by Timur at the end of the 14th century, and the majority of whom today constitute the largest group who now use the liturgy of the Church of the East, with around 4 million followers in their homeland, in spite of the 17th-century defection to the West Syriac Rite of the Syriac Orthodox Church. The St Thomas Christians were believed by tradition to have been converted by St Thomas, and were in communion with the Church of the East until the end of the medieval period.


title: Church of the East

text: The Saint Thomas Christian community of Kerala, India, who according to tradition trace their origins to the evangelizing efforts of Thomas the Apostle, had a long association with the Church of the East. The earliest known organised Christian presence in Kerala dates to 295/300 when Christian settlers and missionaries from Persia headed by Bishop David of Basra settled in the region. The Saint Thomas Christians traditionally credit the mission of Thomas of Cana, a Nestorian from the Middle East, with the further expansion of their community. From at least the early 4th century, the Patriarch of the Church of the East provided the Saint Thomas Christians with clergy, holy texts, and ecclesiastical infrastructure. And around 650 Patriarch Ishoyahb III solidified the church's jurisdiction in India. In the 8th century Patriarch Timothy I organised the community as the Ecclesiastical Province of India, one of the church's Provinces of the Exterior. After this point the Province of India was headed by a metropolitan bishop, provided from Persia, who oversaw a varying number of bishops as well as a native Archdeacon, who had authority over the clergy and also wielded a great amount of secular power. The metropolitan see was probably in Cranganore, or (perhaps nominally) in Mylapore, where the Shrine of Thomas was located.