title: The Exorcist III

text: The next morning, Kinderman is called to find the body of Thomas Kintry, a Black youth. The fingerprints at the crime scenes do not match, indicating a different person was responsible for each murder. Kinderman reveals to the hospital staff that the murders fit the modus operandi of James Venamun (Brad Dourif), or "The Gemini Killer", a serial killer who was executed fifteen years prior.


title: The Exorcist III

text: Kinderman visits the head of a psychiatric ward, Dr. Temple (Scott Wilson), who relates the history of one of his patients. The patient was found wandering aimlessly fifteen years previously with amnesia. He was locked up, catatonic until he became violent and claimed to be the Gemini Killer. Kinderman sees that the patient is his old friend Damien Karras (Jason Miller). Karras' form appears to briefly change into that of the Gemini Killer. He expresses ignorance of Karras but boasts of killing Fr. Dyer.


title: The Exorcist III

text: That night, a nurse is murdered and Dr. Temple commits suicide. Kinderman returns to see Karras, who once again changes into the Gemini Killer. The Gemini explains that he is being aided by a "Master" – the same entity who had previously possessed Regan MacNeil. The "Master" was furious at being exorcised by Karras, and is exacting its revenge by using Karras' body as a conduit for the Gemini to continue his killing spree. Each evening, the soul of the Gemini leaves the body of Karras and possesses the other patients elsewhere in the hospital, using them to commit the murders. The Gemini also reveals he had forced Dr. Temple to bring Kinderman to him.


title: The Exorcist III

text: The Gemini possesses an old woman and attempts to murder Kinderman and his family at their home, but the attack abruptly ends when Fr. Paul Morning (Nicol Williamson) arrives at the hospital and begins to perform an exorcism on Karras. The "Master" intervenes, taking over Karras' body, and Morning is severely mutilated. Kinderman rushes back to the hospital and attempts to euthanize Karras. The possessed Karras then torments and attempts to kill Kinderman. Morning manages to regain consciousness and tells Karras to fight. Karras regains his free will briefly and cries to Kinderman to shoot, killing Karras and freeing him from both the Gemini and his "Master". Later, Kinderman watches Karras' funeral. The year of Karras' death is listed as 1975 on his tombstone.


title: The Exorcist III

text: William Peter Blatty, who wrote the original "Exorcist" novel and the screenplay for its film adaptation, initially had no desire to write a sequel. However, he eventually came up with a story titled "Legion", featuring Lieutenant Kinderman, a prominent character in the original "Exorcist" novel (though he played a minor role in the eventual film), as the protagonist. Blatty conceived "Legion" as a feature film with William Friedkin, director of "The Exorcist", attached to direct. Despite the critical and commercial failure of the previous sequel, Warner Bros. was keen to proceed with Blatty and Friedkin's plans for another "Exorcist" film. Blatty said that "everybody wanted "Exorcist III"… I hadn't written the script, but I had the story in my head… and Billy [Friedkin] loved it". Friedkin, however, soon left the project due to conflicting opinions between him and Blatty on the film.


title: The Exorcist III

text: The project went into development hell, and Blatty wrote "Legion" as a novel instead, published in 1983. It was a bestseller. Blatty then decided to turn the book back into a screenplay. Film companies Morgan Creek and Carolco both wanted to make the film; Blatty decided upon Morgan Creek after Carolco suggested the idea of a grown-up Regan MacNeil giving birth to possessed twins. Blatty offered directorial responsibilities to John Carpenter, who liked his script; however, Carpenter backed out when it became clear that Blatty wanted to direct the movie himself and also because of creative differences regarding the ending of the movie. Despite this, they remained friends. As per the stipulations for his deal with Morgan Creek, Blatty was to direct the movie himself, and it was to be filmed on location in Georgetown.


title: The Exorcist III

text: The central role of Lt. Kinderman had to be recast, as Lee J. Cobb, who played the part in "The Exorcist", had died in 1976. Oscar-winner George C. Scott signed up for the role, impressed by Blatty's screenplay: "It's a horror film and much more… It's a real drama, intricately crafted, with offbeat interesting characters… and that's what makes it genuinely frightening".


title: The Exorcist III

text: Several cast members from Blatty's previous film "The Ninth Configuration" (1980) appear in "The Exorcist III": Jason Miller, reprising the role of Father Damien Karras from "The Exorcist" (billed only as "Patient X" in the end credits); Ed Flanders, taking on the role of Father Dyer (previously played by William O'Malley); Nicol Williamson and Scott Wilson.


title: The Exorcist III

text: There are also cameo appearances by basketball players Patrick Ewing, John Thompson, model Fabio, ex-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, television host Larry King, and an early appearance by Samuel L. Jackson in a dream sequence.


title: The Exorcist III

text: Zohra Lampert, who plays Kinderman's wife, is remembered for her lead role in another horror film, 1971's "Let's Scare Jessica to Death".


title: The Exorcist III

text: With an $11 million budget, the tentatively-titled "Exorcist: Legion" was shot on location in Georgetown for eight weeks in mid-1989. Additional interior filming took place in DEG Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina. Blatty completed principal photography of the film on time, and only slightly over budget. However, four months later, Morgan Creek informed Blatty that a new ending had to be shot. Blatty said that "James Robinson, the owner of the company, his secretary had insisted to him that this has nothing to do with "The Exorcist". There had to be an exorcism". 20th Century Fox put up an additional $4-million in post-production to film an effects-laden exorcism sequence featuring Nicol Williamson as Father Morning, a character added just for the new climax. Blatty had to make the best of it in the narrative while racing to complete the film. Blatty confirmed that when the possessed Karras speaks in an asexual voice, saying, "I must save my son, the Gemini", that this is, in fact, either a returned Pazuzu or, as Blatty put it, "Old Scratch himself" taking control. This ties into the revelation earlier in the film that the Gemini was sent into Karras' body as revenge for the Regan MacNeil exorcism. The altered voice in the climax is deliberately similar to that of Mercedes McCambridge, who did the uncredited voice of the demon in "The Exorcist", and the role is essayed in "The Exorcist III" by Colleen Dewhurst, who was uncredited (actress Dewhurst was twice married to, and twice divorced from, actor George C. Scott).


title: The Exorcist III

text: One scene missing from the re-filmed climax, but which appears in the trailer, shows Karras/the Gemini "morphing" through a variety of faces. It was left out of the film because Blatty was not happy with the special effects work.


title: The Exorcist III

text: On the climactic exorcism scene, Blatty later said: "It's all right, but it's utterly unnecessary and it changes the character of the piece". Although at the time, Blatty told the press that he was happy to re-shoot the film's ending and have the story climax with a frenzy of special effects, apparently this compromise was forced on Blatty against his wishes:


title: The Exorcist III

text: The original story that I sold [Morgan Creek] (and that I shot) ended with Kinderman blowing away Patient X. There was no exorcism. But it was a Mexican stand-off between me and the studio. I was entitled to one preview, then they could go and do what they wanted with the picture. They gave me a preview but it was the lowest end preview audience I have ever seen in my life. They dragged in zombies from Haiti to watch this film. It was unbelievable. But I decided, better I should do it than anyone else. I foolishly thought: I can do a good exorcism, I'll turn this pig's ear into a silk purse. So I did it.


title: The Exorcist III

text: Working on the film, Brad Dourif recalled: "We all felt really bad about it. But Blatty tried to do his best under very difficult circumstances. And I remember George C. Scott saying that the folks would only be satisfied if Madonna came out and sang a song at the end!" Dourif feels that "the original version was a hell of a lot purer and I liked it much more. As it stands now, it's a mediocre film. There are parts that have no right to be there".


title: The Exorcist III

text: The execution-style ending that Blatty pitched to the studio - which was in the shooting script and actually filmed - differs radically from the ending of both the novel and the first screenplay adaption developed from the novel. The novel ends with the Gemini Killer summoning Kinderman to his cell for a final speech and then willingly dropping dead after his alcoholic, abusive father, a Christian evangelist, dies a natural death from a heart attack. As his motive for the killing was always to shame his father, the Gemini's purpose for remaining on Earth no longer exists and he kills Karras in order to leave his host body. In Blatty's original screenplay adaptation, the ending is similar to the novel except that the Gemini's death is not self-induced but forced supernaturally and suddenly by the death of his father. In both novel and early screenplay, the Gemini's motives for his murders are also given further context via a long series of flashbacks that portray his and his brother's childhood and their relationship with their father.


title: The Exorcist III

text: "The Exorcist III" was first released in October 1989 in the European MIFED Film Market and then opened in 1,288 theaters in the United States on August 17, 1990. Unlike its predecessors, it was distributed by 20th Century Fox instead of Warner Bros. (though some distribution rights would later revert to WB). The film was released only a month before the "Exorcist" parody "Repossessed", starring Linda Blair and Leslie Nielsen. Blair claimed that "Exorcist III" was rush-released ahead of "Repossessed", hijacking the latter's publicity and forcing the comedy to be released a month later than was originally intended.


title: The Exorcist III

text: , review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 58% of critics gave the film positive write-ups based on 43 reviews, with a rating of 5.70/10. The critical consensus reads: ""The Exorcist III" is a talky, literary sequel with some scary moments that rival anything from the original".


title: The Exorcist III

text: British film critic Mark Kermode called it "a restrained, haunting chiller which stimulates the adrenaline and intellect alike", and "New York Times" reviewer Vincent Canby said ""The Exorcist III" is a better and funnier (intentionally) movie than either of its predecessors".


title: The Exorcist III

text: Critic Brian McKay of efilmcritic.com remarked that the movie is "not quite as chilling as the first story" yet "is at least a quality sequel", being worth watching but suffering from many "uneven" aspects.


title: The Exorcist III

text: "People" writer Ralph Novak began his review with, "as a movie writer-director, William Peter Blatty is like David Lynch's good twin: he is eccentric, original, funny and daring, but he also has a sense of taste, pace, and restraint - which is by way of saying that this is one of the shrewdest, wittiest, most intense and most satisfying horror movies ever made".


title: The Exorcist III

text: Owen Gleiberman of "Entertainment Weekly" wrote: "If Part II sequels are generally disappointing, Part IIIs are often much, much worse. It can seem as if nothing is going on in them except dim murmurings about the original movie — murmurings that mostly remind you of what isn't being delivered". He additionally labeled "The Exorcist III" "an ash-gray disaster [that] has the feel of a nightmare catechism lesson, or a horror movie made by a depressed monk".


title: The Exorcist III

text: In the British magazine "Empire", film critic Kim Newman claimed that "the major fault in "Exorcist III" is the house-of-cards plot that is constantly collapsing".


title: The Exorcist III

text: Kevin Thomas of the "Los Angeles Times" called "The Exorcist III" "a handsome, classy art film" that "doesn't completely work but offers much more than countless, less ambitious films".


title: The Exorcist III

text: "The Exorcist III" opened in first place in its opening weekend, earning $9,312,219 in the United States and Canada. It grossed a total of $26,098,824 in the United States and Canada and $18 million internationally for a total of $44 million worldwide. Blatty attributed its poor box office performance to the title imposed by Morgan Creek, having always intended for the film to retain the title of the novel. During development and production, the film went under various titles, including "The Exorcist: 1990". Morgan Creek and Fox insisted on including the word "Exorcist" in the title, which producer Carter DeHaven and Blatty protested against:


title: The Exorcist III

text: I begged them when they were considering titles not to name it "Exorcist" anything -- because "Exorcist II" was a disaster beyond imagination. You can't call it "Exorcist III", because people will shun the box office. But they went and named it "Exorcist III". Then they called me after the third week when we were beginning to fade at the box office and they said 'We'll tell you the reason: it's gonna hurt, you're not gonna like this – the reason is "Exorcist II"'. I couldn't believe it! They had total amnesia about my warnings!


title: The Exorcist III

text: In 1991, the film won a Saturn Award from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA, for Best Writing (William Peter Blatty) and was nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Brad Dourif) and Best Horror Film. George C. Scott was also nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actor but lost to Andrew Dice Clay for "The Adventures of Ford Fairlane".


title: The Exorcist III

text: Despite his misgivings about the studio-imposed reshoots, Blatty remarked on his pride in the finished version of "Exorcist III": "It's still a superior film. And in my opinion, and excuse me if I utter heresy here, but for me… it's a more frightening film than "The Exorcist"". Blatty hoped to recover the deleted footage from the Morgan Creek vaults so that he might re-assemble the original cut of the film which he said was "rather different" from what was released, and a version of the film which fans of the "Exorcist" series have been clamouring for. In 2007, Blatty's wife reported on a fan site that "my husband tells me that it is Morgan Creek's claim that they have lost all the footage, including an alternative opening scene, in which Kinderman views the body of Karras in the morgue, right after his fall down the steps". However, film critic Mark Kermode has stated that the search for the missing footage is "ongoing".


title: The Exorcist III

text: Some pictures (lobby cards, stills) show a few deleted scenes from Blatty's original cut of the film:


title: The Exorcist III

text: In March 2011, a fan edit called ""Legion"" appeared on the Internet, credited to a fan using the pseudonym Spicediver, which removed all exorcism elements and recreated the main story arc of the director's cut without the use of any lost footage. In 2012, cast member Dourif agreed to present a screening of the fan edit at the Mad Monster Party horror convention held in Charlotte, North Carolina, on March 25. Dourif introduced the film, and did a Q&A session with the audience afterwards.


title: The Exorcist III

text: In December 2015, Morgan Creek began hinting via its Twitter feed that the Director's Cut was discovered and would eventually be released. Blatty later wrote on his website: "[Morgan Creek] are planning a new Blu Ray of 'my cut'".


title: The Exorcist III

text: On October 25, 2016, Scream Factory released a two-disc Collector's Edition of the film, including the supposedly lost footage. The website states: "We know that the biggest question you might have is: Will there be a "Director's Cut" of the film? The answer is yes—but with some caveats. We are working on putting together a version that will be close to Blatty's original script using a mixture of various film and videotape sources that we have been provided with".


title: The Exorcist III

text: In speaking to the process of creating the Legion Director's cut, Blu-ray producer Cliff MacMillan explains further as to the journey to get there and the outcome: "We conducted an exhaustive search through a pallet of film assets from the original shoot to re-create William Peter Blatty's intended vision. Unfortunately, that footage has been lost to time. To that end, we turned to VHS tapes of the film's dailies to assemble the director's cut. However, even some of that footage was incomplete, so scenes from the theatrical re-shoot were used to fill in the gaps. This director's cut is a composite of varying footage quality from the best available sources".


title: The Exorcist III

text: The film became a focal point of the trial of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Detectives testified that Dahmer claimed to identify with the Gemini Killer and would play the film for some of his victims before killing them. Dahmer's final attempted victim, Tracy Edwards, testified that Dahmer would rock back and forth while chanting at various times and that he especially enjoyed a sequence with a possessed Karras. Dahmer went so far as to purchase yellow contact lenses to more resemble Miller, as well as to emulate another film character he admired, Emperor Palpatine from "Return of the Jedi".


title: The Exorcist III

text: The book titled "The Evolution of William Peter Blatty's "The Exorcist III": From Concept to Novel to Screen" by author Erik Kristopher Myers reveals the whole story behind the film's development, and has never-before-seen images, the original script, studio notes, various drafts of the story as it has evolved, and interviews with Blatty, Dourif, Kermode, Carpenter and many others associated with the film. Myers in an interview said that "The Exorcist III" "has sort of turned into horror genre's equivalent to Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons", in that it was originally a very classy film that the studio hacked apart and turned into a commercial piece […] I'm basically trying to chronicle how a film can get away from the auteur and be transformed into a purely commercial product".


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets are orthopteran insects which are related to bush crickets, and, more distantly, to grasshoppers. In older literature, such as Imms, "crickets" were placed at the family level ("i.e." Gryllidae), but contemporary authorities including Otte now place them in the superfamily Grylloidea. The word has been used in combination to describe more distantly related taxa in the suborder Ensifera, such as king crickets and mole crickets.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets have mainly cylindrically-shaped bodies, round heads, and long antennae. Behind the head is a smooth, robust pronotum. The abdomen ends in a pair of long cerci; females have a long, cylindrical ovipositor. Diagnostic features include legs with 3-segmented tarsi; as with many Orthoptera, the hind legs have enlarged femora, providing power for jumping. The front wings are adapted as tough, leathery elytra, and some crickets chirp by rubbing parts of these together. The hind wings are membranous and folded when not in use for flight; many species, however, are flightless. The largest members of the family are the bull crickets, "Brachytrupes", which are up to long.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets are distributed all around the world except at latitudes 55° or higher, with the greatest diversity being in the tropics. They occur in varied habitats from grassland, bushes, and forests to marshes, beaches, and caves. Crickets are mainly nocturnal, and are best known for the loud, persistent, chirping song of males trying to attract females, although some species are mute. The singing species have good hearing, via the tympana on the tibiae of the front legs.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets often appear as characters in literature. The Talking Cricket features in Carlo Collodi's 1883 children's book, "The Adventures of Pinocchio", and in films based on the book. The insect is central to Charles Dickens's 1845 "The Cricket on the Hearth" and George Selden's 1960 "The Cricket in Times Square". Crickets are celebrated in poems by William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Du Fu. They are kept as pets in countries from China to Europe, sometimes for cricket fighting. Crickets are efficient at converting their food into body mass, making them a candidate for food production. They are used as human food in Southeast Asia, where they are sold deep-fried in markets as snacks. They are also used to feed carnivorous pets and zoo animals. In Brazilian folklore, crickets feature as omens of various events.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets are small to medium-sized insects with mostly cylindrical, somewhat vertically flattened bodies. The head is spherical with long slender antennae arising from cone-shaped scapes (first segments) and just behind these are two large compound eyes. On the forehead are three ocelli (simple eyes). The pronotum (first thoracic segment) is trapezoidal in shape, robust, and well-sclerotinized. It is smooth and has neither dorsal nor lateral keels (ridges).


title: Cricket (insect)

text: At the tip of the abdomen is a pair of long cerci (paired appendages on rearmost segment), and in females, the ovipositor is cylindrical, long and narrow, smooth and shiny. The femora (third segments) of the back pair of legs are greatly enlarged for jumping. The tibiae (fourth segments) of the hind legs are armed with a number of moveable spurs, the arrangement of which is characteristic of each species. The tibiae of the front legs bear one or more tympani which are used for the reception of sound.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: The wings lie flat on the body and are very variable in size between species, being reduced in size in some crickets and missing in others. The fore wings are elytra made of tough chitin, acting as a protective shield for the soft parts of the body and in males, bear the stridulatory organs for the production of sound. The hind pair is membranous, folding fan-wise under the fore wings. In many species, the wings are not adapted for flight.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: The largest members of the family are the -long bull crickets ("Brachytrupes") which excavate burrows a metre or more deep. The tree crickets (Oecanthinae) are delicate white or pale green insects with transparent fore wings, while the field crickets (Gryllinae) are robust brown or black insects.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets have a cosmopolitan distribution, being found in all parts of the world with the exception of cold regions at latitudes higher than about 55° North and South. They have colonised many large and small islands, sometimes flying over the sea to reach these locations, or perhaps conveyed on floating timber or by human activity. The greatest diversity occurs in tropical locations, such as in Malaysia, where 88 species were heard chirping from a single location near Kuala Lumpur. A greater number than this could have been present because some species are mute.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets are found in many habitats. Members of several subfamilies are found in the upper tree canopy, in bushes, and among grasses and herbs. They also occur on the ground and in caves, and some are subterranean, excavating shallow or deep burrows. Some make home in rotting wood, and certain beach-dwelling species can run and jump over the surface of water.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets are relatively defenceless, soft-bodied insects. Most species are nocturnal and spend the day hidden in cracks, under bark, inside curling leaves, under stones or fallen logs, in leaf litter, or in the cracks in the ground that develop in dry weather. Some excavate their own shallow holes in rotting wood or underground and fold in their antennae to conceal their presence. Some of these burrows are temporary shelters, used for a single day, but others serve as more permanent residences and places for mating and laying eggs. Crickets burrow by loosening the soil with the mandibles and then carrying it with the limbs, flicking it backwards with the hind legs or pushing it with the head.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Other defensive strategies are the use of camouflage, fleeing, and aggression. Some species have adopted colourings, shapes, and patterns that make it difficult for predators that hunt by sight to detect them. They tend to be dull shades of brown, grey, and green that blend into their background, and desert species tend to be pale. Some species can fly, but the mode of flight tends to be clumsy, so the most usual response to danger is to scuttle away to find a hiding place. While some crickets have a weak bite, a member of the Gryllacrididae or raspy crickets from Australia were found to have the strongest bite of any insect.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Most male crickets make a loud chirping sound by stridulation (scraping two specially textured body parts together). The stridulatory organ is located on the tegmen, or fore wing, which is leathery in texture. A large vein runs along the centre of each tegmen, with comb-like serrations on its edge forming a file-like structure, and at the rear edge of the tegmen is a scraper. The tegmina are held at an angle to the body and rhythmically raised and lowered which causes the scraper on one wing to rasp on the file on the other. The central part of the tegmen contains the "harp", an area of thick, sclerotinized membrane which resonates and amplifies the volume of sound, as does the pocket of air between the tegmina and the body wall. Most female crickets lack the necessary adaptations to stridulate, so make no sound.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Several types of cricket songs are in the repertoire of some species. The calling song attracts females and repels other males, and is fairly loud. The courting song is used when a female cricket is near and encourages her to mate with the caller. A triumphal song is produced for a brief period after a successful mating and may reinforce the mating bond to encourage the female to lay some eggs rather than find another male. An aggressive song is triggered by contact chemoreceptors on the antennae that detect the presence of another male cricket.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets chirp at different rates depending on their species and the temperature of their environment. Most species chirp at higher rates the higher the temperature is (about 62 chirps a minute at in one common species; each species has its own rate). The relationship between temperature and the rate of chirping is known as Dolbear's law. According to this law, counting the number of chirps produced in 14 seconds by the snowy tree cricket, common in the United States, and adding 40 will approximate the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: In 1975, Dr. William H. Cade discovered that the parasitic tachinid fly "Ormia ochracea" is attracted to the song of the cricket, and uses it to locate the male to deposit her larvae on him. It was the first known example of a natural enemy that locates its host or prey using the mating signal. Since then, many species of crickets have been found to be carrying the same parasitic fly, or related species. In response to this selective pressure, a mutation leaving males unable to chirp was observed amongst a population of "Teleogryllus oceanicus" on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, enabling these crickets to elude their parasitoid predators. A different mutation with the same effect was also discovered on the neighboring island of Oahu (ca. away). Recently, new "purring" males of the same species in Hawaii are able to produce a novel auditory sexual signal that can be used to attract females while greatly reducing the likelihood of parasitoid attack from the fly.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Some species, such as the ground crickets (Nemobiinae), are wingless; others have small fore wings and no hind wings ("Copholandrevus"), others lack hind wings and have shortened fore wings in females only, while others are macropterous, with the hind wings longer than the fore wings. In "Teleogryllus", the proportion of macropterous individuals varies from very low to 100%. Probably, most species with hind wings longer than fore wings engage in flight.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Some species, such as "Gryllus assimilis", take off, fly, and land efficiently and well, while other species are clumsy fliers. In some species, the hind wings are shed, leaving wing stumps, usually after dispersal of the insect by flight. In other species, they may be pulled off and consumed by the cricket itself or by another individual, probably providing a nutritional boost.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: "Gryllus firmus" exhibits wing polymorphism; some individuals have fully functional, long hind wings and others have short wings and cannot fly. The short-winged females have smaller flight muscles, greater ovarian development, and produce more eggs, so the polymorphism adapts the cricket for either dispersal or reproduction. In some long-winged individuals, the flight muscles deteriorate during adulthood and the insect's reproductive capabilities improve.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Captive crickets are omnivorous; when deprived of their natural diet, they accept a wide range of organic foodstuffs. Some species are completely herbivorous, feeding on flowers, fruit, and leaves, with ground-based species consuming seedlings, grasses, pieces of leaf, and the shoots of young plants. Others are more predatory and include in their diet invertebrate eggs, larvae, pupae, moulting insects, scale insects, and aphids. Many are scavengers and consume various organic remains, decaying plants, seedlings, and fungi. In captivity, many species have been successfully raised on a diet of ground, commercial dry dog food, supplemented with lettuce and aphids.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Male crickets establish their dominance over each other by aggression. They start by lashing each other with their antennae and flaring their mandibles. Unless one retreats at this stage, they resort to grappling, at the same time each emitting calls that are quite unlike those uttered in other circumstances. When one achieves dominance, it sings loudly, while the loser remains silent.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Females are generally attracted to males by their calls, though in nonstridulatory species, some other mechanism must be involved. After the pair has made antennal contact, a courtship period may occur during which the character of the call changes. The female mounts the male and a single spermatophore is transferred to the external genitalia of the female. Sperm flows from this into the female's oviduct over a period of a few minutes or up to an hour, depending on species. After copulation, the female may remove or eat the spermatophore; males may attempt to prevent this with various ritualised behaviours. The female may mate on several occasions with different males.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Most crickets lay their eggs in the soil or inside the stems of plants, and to do this, female crickets have a long, needle-like or sabre-like egg-laying organ called an ovipositor. Some ground-dwelling species have dispensed with this, either depositing their eggs in an underground chamber or pushing them into the wall of a burrow. The short-tailed cricket ("Anurogryllus") excavates a burrow with chambers and a defecating area, lays its eggs in a pile on a chamber floor, and after the eggs have hatched, feeds the juveniles for about a month.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets are hemimetabolic insects, whose lifecycle consists of an egg stage, a larval or nymph stage that increasingly resembles the adult form as the nymph grows, and an adult stage. The egg hatches into a nymph about the size of a fruit fly. This passes through about 10 larval stages, and with each successive moult, it becomes more like an adult. After the final moult, the genitalia and wings are fully developed, but a period of maturation is needed before the cricket is ready to breed.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Some species of cricket are polyandrous. In "Gryllus bimaculatus", the females select and mate with multiple viable sperm donors, preferring novel mates. Female "Teleogryllus oceanicus" crickets from natural populations similarly mate and store sperm from multiple males. Female crickets exert a postcopulatory fertilization bias in favour of unrelated males to avoid the genetic consequences of inbreeding. Fertilization bias depends on the control of sperm transport to the sperm storage organs. The inhibition of sperm storage by female crickets can act as a form of cryptic female choice to avoid the severe negative effects of inbreeding. Controlled-breeding experiments with the cricket "Gryllus firmus" demonstrated inbreeding depression, as nymphal weight and early fecundity declined substantially over the generations' this was caused as expected by an increased frequency of homozygous combinations of deleterious recessive alleles.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets have many natural enemies and are subject to various pathogens and parasites. They are eaten by large numbers of vertebrate and invertebrate predators and their hard parts are often found during the examination of animal intestines. Mediterranean house geckos ("Hemidactylus turcicus") have learned that although a calling decorated cricket ("Gryllodes supplicans") may be safely positioned in an out-of-reach burrow, female crickets attracted to the call can be intercepted and eaten.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: The entomopathogenic fungus "Metarhizium anisopliae" attacks and kills crickets and has been used as the basis of control in pest populations. The insects are also affected by the cricket paralysis virus, which has caused high levels of fatalities in cricket-rearing facilities. Other fatal diseases that have been identified in mass-rearing establishments include "Rickettsia" and three further viruses. The diseases may spread more rapidly if the crickets become cannibalistic and eat the corpses.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Red parasitic mites sometimes attach themselves to the dorsal region of crickets and may greatly affect them. The horsehair worm "Paragordius varius" is an internal parasite and can control the behaviour of its cricket host and cause it to enter water, where the parasite continues its lifecycle and the cricket likely drowns. The larvae of the sarcophagid fly "Sarcophaga kellyi" develop inside the body cavity of field crickets. Female parasitic wasps of "Rhopalosoma" lay their eggs on crickets, and their developing larvae gradually devour their hosts. Other wasps in the family Scelionidae are egg parasitoids, seeking out batches of eggs laid by crickets in plant tissues in which to insert their eggs.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: The fly "Ormia ochracea" has very acute hearing and targets calling male crickets. It locates its prey by ear and then lays its eggs nearby. The developing larvae burrow inside any crickets with which they come in contact and in the course of a week or so, devour what remains of the host before pupating. In Florida, the parasitic flies were only present in the autumn, and at that time of year, the males sang less but for longer periods. A trade-off exists for the male between attracting females and being parasitized.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: The phylogenetic relationships of the Gryllidae, summarized by Darryl Gwynne in 1995 from his own work (using mainly anatomical characteristics) and that of earlier authors, are shown in the following cladogram, with the Orthoptera divided into two main groups, Ensifera (crickets "sensu lato") and Caelifera (grasshoppers). Fossil Ensifera are found from the late Carboniferous period (300 Mya) onwards, and the true crickets, Gryllidae, from the Triassic period (250 to 200 Mya).


title: Cricket (insect)

text: A phylogenetic study by Jost & Shaw in 2006 using sequences from 18S, 28S, and 16S rRNA supported the monophyly of Ensifera. Most ensiferan families were also found to be monophyletic, and the superfamily Gryllacridoidea was found to include Stenopelmatidae, Anostostomatidae, Gryllacrididae and Lezina. Schizodactylidae and Grylloidea were shown to be sister taxa, and Rhaphidophoridae and Tettigoniidae were found to be more closely related to Grylloidea than had previously been thought. The authors stated that "a high degree of conflict exists between the molecular and morphological data, possibly indicating that much homoplasy is present in Ensifera, particularly in acoustic structures." They considered that tegmen stridulation and tibial tympanae are ancestral to Ensifera and have been lost on multiple occasions, especially within the Gryllidae.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: The folklore and mythology surrounding crickets is extensive. The singing of crickets in the folklore of Brazil and elsewhere is sometimes taken to be a sign of impending rain, or of a financial windfall. In Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's chronicles of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the sudden chirping of a cricket heralded the sighting of land for his crew, just as their water supply had run out. In Caraguatatuba, Brazil, a black cricket in a room is said to portend illness; a grey one, money; and a green one, hope. In Alagoas state, northeast Brazil, a cricket announces death, thus it is killed if it chirps in a house. In Barbados, a loud cricket means money is coming in; hence, a cricket must not be killed or evicted if it chirps inside a house. However, another type of cricket that is less noisy forebodes illness or death.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets feature as major characters in novels and children's books. Charles Dickens's 1845 novella "The Cricket on the Hearth", divided into sections called "Chirps", tells the story of a cricket which chirps on the hearth and acts as a guardian angel to a family. Carlo Collodi's 1883 children's book "Le avventure di Pinocchio" ("The Adventures of Pinocchio") featured "Il Grillo Parlante" (The Talking Cricket) as one of its characters. George Selden's 1960 children's book "The Cricket in Times Square" tells the story of Chester the cricket from Connecticut who joins a family and their other animals, and is taken to see Times Square in New York. The story, which won the Newbery Honor, came to Selden on hearing a real cricket chirp in Times Square.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: "Souvenirs entomologiques", a book written by the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre, devotes a whole chapter to the cricket, discussing its construction of a burrow and its song-making. The account is mainly of the field cricket, but also mentions the Italian cricket.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets have from time to time appeared in poetry. William Wordsworth's 1805 poem "The Cottager to Her Infant" includes the couplet "The kitten sleeps upon the hearth, The crickets long have ceased their mirth". John Keats's 1819 poem "Ode to Autumn" includes the lines "Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft / The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft". The Chinese Tang dynasty poet Du Fu (712–770) wrote a poem that in the translation by J. P. Seaton begins "House cricket ... Trifling thing. And yet how his mournful song moves us. Out in the grass his cry was a tremble, But now, he trills beneath our bed, to share his sorrow."


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets are kept as pets and are considered good luck in some countries; in China, they are sometimes kept in cages or in hollowed-out gourds specially created in novel shapes. The practice was common in Japan for thousands of years; it peaked in the 19th century, though crickets are still sold at pet shops. It is also common to have them as caged pets in some European countries, particularly in the Iberian Peninsula. Cricket fighting is a traditional Chinese pastime that dates back to the Tang dynasty (618–907). Originally an indulgence of emperors, cricket fighting later became popular among commoners. The dominance and fighting ability of males does not depend on strength alone; it has been found that they become more aggressive after certain pre-fight experiences such as isolation, or when defending a refuge. Crickets forced to fly for a short while will afterwards fight for two to three times longer than they otherwise would.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: In the southern part of Asia including Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, crickets commonly are eaten as a snack, prepared by deep frying soaked and cleaned insects. In Thailand, there are 20,000 farmers rearing crickets, with an estimated production of 7,500 tons per year and United Nation's FAO has implemented a project in Laos to improve cricket farming and, consequently, food security. The food conversion efficiency of house crickets ("Acheta domesticus") is 1.7, some five times higher than that for beef cattle, and if their fecundity is taken into account, 15 to 20 times higher.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Cricket flour may be used as an additive to consumer foods such as pasta, bread, crackers, and cookies. The cricket flour is being used in protein bars, pet foods, livestock feed, nutraceuticals, and other industrial uses. The United Nations says the use of insect protein, such as cricket flour, could be critical in feeding the growing population of the planet while being less damaging to the environment.


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Crickets are also raised as food for carnivorous zoo animals, laboratory animals, and pets. They may be "gut loaded" with additional minerals, such as calcium, to provide a balanced diet for predators such as tree frogs (Hylidae).


title: Cricket (insect)

text: By the 19th century "cricket" and "crickets" were in use as euphemisms for using Christ as an interjection. The addition of "Jiminy" (a variation of "Gemini"), sometimes shortened to "Jimmy" created the expressions "Jiminy Cricket!" or "Jimmy Crickets!" as less blasphemous alternatives to exclaiming "Jesus Christ!"


title: Cricket (insect)

text: By the end of the 20th century the sound of chirping crickets came to represent quietude in literature, theatre and film. From this sentiment arose expressions equating "crickets" with silence altogether, particularly when a group of assembled people makes no noise. These expressions have grown from the more descriptive, "so quiet that you can hear crickets," to simply saying, "crickets" as shorthand for "complete silence."


title: Cricket (insect)

text: Cricket characters feature in the Walt Disney animated movies "Pinocchio" (1940), where Jiminy Cricket becomes the title character's conscience, and in "Mulan" (1998), where Cri-Kee is carried in a cage as a symbol of luck, in the Asian manner. The Crickets was the name of Buddy Holly's rock and roll band; Holly's home town baseball team in the 1990s was called the Lubbock Crickets. "Cricket" is the name of a US children's literary magazine founded in 1973; it uses a cast of insect characters. The sound of crickets is often used in media to emphasize silence, often for comic effect after an awkward joke, in a similar manner to tumbleweed.


title: Frat Pack

text: The Frat Pack is a nickname given to a group of American comedy actors who have appeared together in many of the highest-grossing comedy movies since the mid-1990s. The group is usually considered to include Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, Jack Black, Paul Rudd, and Vince Vaughn.


title: Frat Pack

text: The term was used by "USA Today" in a June 2004 story and was soon picked up by other media outlets. Before "USA Today" dubbed this group the "Frat Pack", "Entertainment Weekly" had referred to them as the "Slacker Pack", having earlier coined the term "Frat Pack" to describe actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Edward Norton, who have acted together in dramas. By 2005, "Entertainment Weekly" had dropped the "Slacker Pack" term and followed suit, referring to the aforementioned crop of actors as the "Frat Pack".


title: Frat Pack

text: The name is an allusion to the Rat Pack (and the later Brat Pack), combined with a reference to the group's popular fraternity-related film "Old School," and the sophomoric style of humor employed in many of their films. Ben Stiller has decried the use of the term, saying, "I think the whole thing about the Frat Pack group is completely fabricated anyway."


title: Frat Pack

text: Initially, the core members included Jack Black, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, and brothers Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson, all of whom were recognized by "USA Today" in an early feature. Later, John C. Reilly, David Koechner, and Steve Carell were also included in the Pack. The previous year, "USA Today" had listed Carell, Paul Rudd, David Koechner, and Leslie Mann as the Frat Pack's "Junior Varsity". While hosting "Saturday Night Live" in September 2005, Carell indirectly claimed membership by mentioning Stiller, Vaughn, Ferrell, Owen Wilson, and Black, and saying he was "one of those guys now".


title: Frat Pack

text: In 2005, "Details Magazine" called Judd Apatow, Adam McKay, and Todd Phillips "The Frat Packagers". A year later, Paul Rudd was called a Frat Pack member by the "New York Post" and other publications. Asked by an interviewer with "The Advocate" whether "Knocked Up" would usher him into the Frat Pack, Rudd said he was a "pledge" that hasn't "been initiated yet into the brotherhood".


title: Frat Pack

text: Years later, in a 2011 interview, Rudd acknowledged his association with the group by saying, "As far as the Frat Pack concept goes, I'm happy to be included. I think the elder statesmen in it are really talented, and I'm a fan of all of them." In a 2008 interview with Moviefone's "Unscripted", Jack Black jokingly initiated Robert Downey Jr. into the Frat Pack, due to his starring role in "Tropic Thunder" with Black and Ben Stiller.


title: Frat Pack

text: The members of the Frat Pack have worked regularly with certain directors. Wes Anderson is a college friend of the Wilsons and directed them in both "Bottle Rocket" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" (which also starred Stiller). Todd Phillips directed "Old School" and "Starsky & Hutch". Adam McKay directed "", "", and "Step Brothers", which included John C. Reilly in a lead role. Judd Apatow is the writer/producer of several Frat Pack comedies, including "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy". He made his directorial debut with "The 40-Year-Old Virgin", starring Steve Carell, and followed up with "Knocked Up", starring Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd, with a cameo by Carell. Apatow was also a co-creator of "The Ben Stiller Show". "Wedding Crashers" director David Dobkin worked again with Vince Vaughn for the Christmas comedy "Fred Claus" (2007).


title: Frat Pack

text: The Farrelly Brothers have directed Frat Pack members Ben Stiller in "There's Something About Mary" and "The Heartbreak Kid", Jack Black in "Shallow Hal" and Owen Wilson in "Hall Pass".


title: Frat Pack

text: After "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," there has been a consensus for branding a "Team Apatow" or the "Apatow Mafia," which takes its name from the director/producer Judd Apatow. This group of actors, consisting of Seth Rogen, Danny McBride, Jay Baruchel, Paul Rudd, Michael Cera, Jason Segel, Jonah Hill, James Franco, Craig Robinson, Joe Lo Truglio, Martin Starr, Bill Hader, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, David Krumholtz, and Evan Goldberg, in addition to appearing frequently in films of the Frat Pack, frequently collaborate with each other. Many fans also consider them as integral members of the Frat Pack.


title: Frat Pack

text: All members of the Frat Pack have never appeared in a single movie together; they have come closest in "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy", which featured all but Owen Wilson (chiefly in minor roles and cameos). Also, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, and David Koechner have all been cast members on "Saturday Night Live", and all members have hosted "Saturday Night Live". Will Ferrell, David Koechner, and Jack Black have made guest appearances on "The Office" with Steve Carell. They have also all presented during the Academy Awards. However, Owen Wilson and Steve Carell are the only members to be nominated for an Academy Award, with Wilson nominated for Best Original Screenplay for co-writing "The Royal Tenenbaums" and Carell nominated for Best Actor for his performance in "Foxcatcher".


title: Frat Pack

text: Also, just because a film/TV show etc. is considered to be synonymous with the Frat Pack, it doesn't innately mean it has to be comedic in nature, but should contain at least "one" comedic element, usually comic relief. For example, "Permanent Midnight", despite being a drama rather than a comedy, is still a Frat Pack film due to the presences of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, and also because it involves the protagonist being a comedy writer.


title: Lauren Tom

text: Lauren Tom (born August 4, 1961) is an American actress. Her roles include Lena St. Clair in "The Joy Luck Club", Julie in the NBC sitcom "Friends", Dot in the final season of "Grace Under Fire", and the voices for Amy Wong in "Futurama", Dana Tan in "Batman Beyond", Jinx and Gizmo in "Teen Titans" and "Teen Titans Go!", Minh and Connie Souphanousinphone in "King of the Hill", and Numbuh 3 in "". She portrayed Celia Mack in the Disney Channel series "Andi Mack" and also played Mrs. Tran in the CW series "Supernatural".


title: Lauren Tom

text: Tom was born in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois, the daughter of Nancy (née Dare) and Chan Tom, Jr. She has a brother named Chip. Their parents were born in Chicago, and their grandparents came from Kaiping, Guangdong, China.


title: Lauren Tom

text: At the age of 17, Tom landed a spot with a touring company of "A Chorus Line" and was cast in the Broadway production of the show less than a year later in the role of Connie. She won an Obie Award for her Off-Broadway acting and was cast in the Broadway shows "Hurlyburly" and "". In Chicago she starred in the Goodman Theater's production of "'Tis Pity She's a Whore".


title: Lauren Tom

text: Tom had several small roles in movies including "Nothing Lasts Forever", "Wall Street", "See No Evil, Hear No Evil", and "Blue Steel". Her biggest role up until that point was as a waitress in the Robin Williams/Tim Robbins film "Cadillac Man". This role led to being a guest on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson".


title: Lauren Tom

text: Tom landed a lead role in the film "The Joy Luck Club" in 1993, which led to roles in other films such as "When a Man Loves a Woman" and "North".


title: Lauren Tom

text: Since the mid-1990s, Tom has focused primarily on voiceover roles. She has appeared in a few live-action films, including the 2003 comedy "Bad Santa" and the critically acclaimed 2004 film "In Good Company".


title: Lauren Tom

text: Lauren Tom's first role in television was that of Miko Wakamatsu on "The Facts of Life". She subsequently appeared on "The Equalizer", "Catfish With Black Bean Sauce", "thirtysomething", "Quantum Leap", "Chicago Hope", "", "Grace Under Fire", "Friends", "The Nanny", "The Middle", "DAG", "The Division", "Monk", "My Wife and Kids", "", "Grey's Anatomy", "The Closer", and "Men in Trees". She also had a supporting role on the 8th and 9th season of the drama series "Supernatural" as prophet Kevin Tran's mother, Linda Tran. In 2018, she appeared in the second season of the Amazon Prime drama series "Goliath".


title: Lauren Tom

text: Tom began vocal work in the animated series "" playing Angela Chen. From there on, she voiced Dana Tan in "Batman Beyond" and had minor roles on "Pinky and the Brain", "Extreme Ghostbusters", and "The Zeta Project" before landing her regular roles on "King of the Hill", where she voiced Minh and Connie Souphanousinphone and later "Futurama", where she voices Amy and Inez Wong.


title: Lauren Tom

text: Since first playing the character on stage in the 1983 Doonesbury musical, Tom has periodically voiced the character Honey Huan in media related to Doonesbury, most notably in a series of animated shorts satirizing the 2000 U.S. presidential election.


title: Lauren Tom

text: She has also lent her voice to "All Grown Up!", "Rocket Power", "Max Steel", "Handy Manny" as Mrs. Lee and Nelson, "Samurai Jack", "Johnny Bravo", "Justice League Unlimited", "Kim Possible", and "Legion of Super Heroes".


title: Lauren Tom

text: She has also voiced the villains Gizmo and Jinx on "Teen Titans", Yan Lin, Susan, Alchemy on "W.I.T.C.H.", Tasumi on "The Replacements", Jake's mom, Counselor Chang on "", and as Joo Dee on "". She also guest-starred in "The Penguins of Madagascar" as Chuck Charles's co-anchor, Bonnie Chang, in "Gator Watch" and "All Tied Up With a Boa".


title: Lauren Tom

text: In 2010, she did the voice of Song, Bai Li, and Ming on the animated series, "" and also played the role of Jessica in the animated film, "Scooby-Doo! Camp Scare".


title: Lauren Tom

text: Other animated movies Tom has voiced include "Mulan II", "", "", "Kung Fu Panda 2", "", and the four "Futurama" movies: "", "", "", and "".


title: Lauren Tom

text: Tom was previously married to Glenn Lau-Kee. She has since remarried actor Curt Kaplan. Tom and Kaplan have two sons.


title: Naked Attraction

text: Naked Attraction is a British television dating game show, broadcast on Channel 4. A clothed person is faced with six naked people who are initially hidden in booths. Their bodies and faces are gradually revealed through successive rounds, from the feet up. At each round, the chooser eliminates one naked person until only two are left, when the chooser also takes off their clothes to make the final choice. The chooser then decides which person they wish to go out with, and the two (or, occasionally, three) then go for a fully clothed date. The programme then presents their feedback after the date. It premiered on 25 July 2016 and is presented by Anna Richardson.


title: Naked Attraction

text: Numerous complaints about the programme were made by viewers to the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom due to the full-frontal nudity that is featured in the programme. Ofcom chose not to investigate as there was nothing that breached their rules: the show was purely a dating show and did not contain any sexual activity, and was shown after the watershed.


title: Naked Attraction

text: One contestant reported that each episode can take up to twelve hours to film, although the contestant choosing a date only has to disrobe for fifteen minutes. The resultant date takes place at 9 a.m. the next day. The picker has to have someone with them at all times to make sure they do not accidentally bump into one of the contestants, and if one of the contestants needs a toilet break, they must be escorted out by a member of staff so the picker does not see them leave their coloured booth.


title: Naked Attraction

text: Contestants do not receive payment for participating, but standby contestants are given £75 for being in the room.


title: Naked Attraction

text: The TV format was exported to Germany, Denmark, Italy, Finland, Norway, Poland, Russia, and Sweden which have made their own versions of the show. The Netherlands had a similar show, called "Undress for love", which has changes in format, but the premise is similar. It ran for six episodes in 2018.


title: Chaldea

text: Chaldea () was a small country that existed between the late 10th or early 9th and mid-6th centuries BCE, after which the country and its people were absorbed and assimilated into the indigenous population of Babylonia. Semitic-speaking, it was located in the marshy land of the far southeastern corner of Mesopotamia and briefly came to rule Babylon. The Hebrew Bible uses the term ("Kaśdim") and this is translated as "Chaldaeans" in the Greek Old Testament, although there is some dispute as to whether "Kasdim" in fact means "Chaldean" or refers to the south Mesopotamian "Kaldu".


title: Chaldea

text: During a period of weakness in the East Semitic-speaking kingdom of Babylonia, new tribes of West Semitic-speaking migrants arrived in the region from the Levant between the 11th and 9th centuries BCE. The earliest waves consisted of Suteans and Arameans, followed a century or so later by the Kaldu, a group who became known later as the Chaldeans or the Chaldees. These migrations did not affect the powerful kingdom and empire of Assyria in Upper Mesopotamia, which repelled these incursions.


title: Chaldea

text: These nomadic Chaldeans settled in the far southeastern portion of Babylonia, chiefly on the left bank of the Euphrates. Though for a short time the name commonly referred to the whole of southern Mesopotamia in Hebraic literature, this was a geographical and historical misnomer as Chaldea proper was in fact only the plain in the far southeast formed by the deposits of the Euphrates and the Tigris, extending about along the course of these rivers and averaging about in width.


title: Chaldea

text: The name "Chaldaea" is a latinization of the Greek ' (), a hellenization of Akkadian ' or '. The name appears in Hebrew in the Bible as ' () and in Aramaic as "" ().


title: Chaldea

text: The Hebrew word possibly appears in the Bible (Book of Genesis 22:22) in the name "Kesed"(כשד), the singular form of "Kasdim"(כַּשְׂדִּים), meaning Chaldeans. Kesed is identified as son of Abraham's brother Nahor (and brother of Kemuel the father of Aram), residing in Aram Naharaim. Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37 – c. 100) also links Arphaxad and Chaldaea, in his Antiquities of the Jews, stating, “Arphaxad named the Arphaxadites, who are now called Chaldeans.”


title: Chaldea

text: In the early period, between the early 9th century and late 7th century BCE, "mat Kaldi" was the name of a small sporadically independent migrant-founded territory under the domination of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–605 BCE) in southeastern Babylonia, extending to the western shores of the Persian Gulf.


title: Chaldea

text: The expression " mat Bit Yâkin" is also used, apparently synonymously. "Bit Yâkin" was the name of the largest and most powerful of the five tribes of the Chaldeans, or equivalently, their territory.


title: Chaldea

text: The original extension of "Bit Yâkin" is not known precisely, but it extended from the lower Tigris into the Arabian Peninsula. Sargon II mentions it as extending as far as Dilmun or "sea-land" (littoral Eastern Arabia). "Chaldea" or "mat Kaldi" generally referred to the low, marshy, alluvial land around the estuaries of the Tigris and Euphrates, which at the time discharged their waters through separate mouths into the sea.


title: Chaldea

text: The king of Chaldea was also called the king of Bit Yakin, just as the kings of Babylonia and Assyria were regularly styled simply king of Babylon or Assur, the capital city in each case. In the same way, what is now known as the Persian Gulf was sometimes called "the Sea of Bit Yakin", and sometimes "the Sea of the Land of Chaldea".


title: Chaldea

text: "Chaldea" came to be used in a wider sense, of Mesopotamia in general, following the ascendancy of the Chaldeans during 608–557 BCE. This is especially the case in the Hebrew Bible, which


title: Chaldea

text: was substantially composed during this period (roughly corresponding to the period of Babylonian captivity). The Book of Jeremiah makes frequent reference to the Chaldeans (King James Version "Chaldees" following LXX ; in Biblical Hebrew as "Kasdîm" ).


title: Chaldea

text: Book of Habakkuk 1:6 calls them "that bitter and hasty nation" (). Book of Isaiah 23:13 DRB states, “Behold the land of the Chaldeans, there was not such a people, the Assyrian founded it: they have led away the strong ones thereof into captivity, they have destroyed the houses thereof, they have brought it to ruin.”


title: Chaldea

text: Unlike the East Semitic Akkadian-speaking Akkadians, Assyrians and Babylonians, whose ancestors had been established in Mesopotamia since at least the 30th century BCE, the Chaldeans were not a native Mesopotamian people, but were late 10th or early 9th century BCE West Semitic Levantine migrants to the southeastern corner of the region, who had played no part in the previous 3,000 years or so of Sumero-Akkadian and Assyro-Babylonian Mesopotamian civilization and history.


title: Chaldea

text: The ancient Chaldeans seem to have migrated into Mesopotamia sometime between c. 940–860 BCE, a century or so after other new Semitic arrivals, the Arameans and the Suteans, appeared in Babylonia, c. 1100 BCE. They first appear in written record in the annals of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III during the 850s BCE. This was a period of weakness in Babylonia, and its ineffectual native kings were unable to prevent new waves of semi-nomadic foreign peoples from invading and settling in the land.


title: Chaldea

text: Though belonging to the same West Semitic speaking ethnic group and migrating from the same Levantine regions as the earlier arriving Aramaeans, they are to be differentiated; the Assyrian king Sennacherib, for example, carefully distinguishes them in his inscriptions.


title: Chaldea

text: The Chaldeans were able to keep their identity despite the dominant Assyro-Babylonian (Akkadian-derived) culture although some were not able to, as was the case for the earlier Amorites, Kassites and Suteans before them by the time Babylon fell in 539 BCE.


title: Chaldea

text: In the Hebrew Bible, "Ur of the Chaldees" (Ur Kaśdim) is cited as the starting point of the patriarch Abraham's journey to Canaan.


title: Chaldea

text: Ancient Chaldeans originally spoke a West Semitic language similar to ancient Aramaic language. During the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III introduced an Eastern Aramaic dialect as the lingua franca of his empire in the mid-8th century BCE. As a result of this innovation, in late periods both the Babylonian and Assyrian dialects of Akkadian became marginalized, and Mesopotamian Aramaic took its place across Mesopotamia, including among the Chaldeans, and later, also the Levant. One form of this once widespread Aramaic language was used in some books of the Hebrew Bible (the Book of Daniel and the Book of Ezra). The use of the name "Chaldean" (Chaldaic, Chaldee) to describe it, first introduced by Jerome of Stridon (d. 420), became common in early Aramaic studies, but that misnomer was later corrected, when modern scholars concluded that the Aramaic dialect used in the Hebrew Bible was not related to the ancient Chaldeans and their language.


title: Chaldea

text: The region that the Chaldeans eventually made their homeland was in relatively poor southeastern Mesopotamia, at the head of the Persian Gulf. They appear to have migrated into southern Babylonia from the Levant at some unknown point between the end of the reign of Ninurta-kudurri-usur II (a contemporary of Tiglath-Pileser II) circa 940 BCE, and the start of the reign of Marduk-zakir-shumi I in 855 BCE, although there is no historical proof of their existence prior to the late 850s BCE.


title: Chaldea

text: For perhaps a century or so after settling in the area, these semi-nomadic migrant Chaldean tribes had no impact on the pages of history, seemingly remaining subjugated by the native Akkadian speaking kings of Babylon or by perhaps regionally influential Aramean tribes. The main players in southern Mesopotamia during this period were Babylonia and Assyria, together with Elam to the east and the Aramaeans, who had already settled in the region a century or so prior to the arrival of the Chaldeans.


title: Chaldea

text: The very first "written historical attestation" of the existence of Chaldeans occurs in 852 BCE, in the annals of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, who mentions invading the southeastern extremes of Babylonia and subjugating one Mushallim-Marduk, the chief of the Amukani tribe and overall leader of the Kaldu tribes, together with capturing the town of Baqani, extracting tribute from Adini, chief of the Bet-Dakkuri, another Chaldean tribe.


title: Chaldea

text: Shalmaneser III had invaded Babylonia at the request of its own king, Marduk-zakir-shumi I, who, being threatened by his own rebellious relations, together with powerful Aramean tribes pleaded with the more powerful Assyrian king for help. The subjugation of the Chaldean tribes by the Assyrian king appears to have been an aside, as they were not at that time a powerful force or a threat to the native Babylonian king.


title: Chaldea

text: Important Kaldu tribes and their regions in southeastern Babylonia were Bit-Yâkin (the original area the Chaldeans settled in on the Persian Gulf), Bet-Dakuri, Bet-Adini, Bet-Amukkani, and Bet-Shilani.


title: Chaldea

text: Chaldean leaders had by this time already adopted Assyro-Babylonian names, religion, language, and customs, indicating that they had become Akkadianized to a great degree.


title: Chaldea

text: The Chaldeans remained quietly ruled by the native Babylonians (who were in turn subjugated by their Assyrian relations) for the next seventy-two years, only coming to historical prominence for the first time in Babylonia in 780 BCE, when a previously unknown Chaldean named Marduk-apla-usur usurped the throne from the native Babylonian king Marduk-bel-zeri (790–780 BCE). The latter was a vassal of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser IV (783–773 BCE), who was otherwise occupied quelling a civil war in Assyria at the time.


title: Chaldea

text: This was to set a precedent for all future Chaldean aspirations on Babylon during the Neo-Assyrian Empire; always too weak to confront a strong Assyria alone and directly, the Chaldeans awaited periods when Assyrian kings were distracted elsewhere in their vast empire, or engaged in internal conflicts, then, in alliance with other powers stronger than themselves (usually Elam), they made a bid for control over Babylonia.


title: Chaldea

text: Shalmaneser IV attacked and defeated Marduk-apla-user, retaking northern Babylonia and forcing on him a border treaty in Assyria's favour. The Assyrians allowed him to remain on the throne, although subject to Assyria. Eriba-Marduk, another Chaldean, succeeded him in 769 BCE and his son, Nabu-shuma-ishkun in 761 BCE, with both being dominated by the new Assyrian king Ashur-Dan III (772–755 BCE). Babylonia appears to have been in a state of chaos during this time, with the north occupied by Assyria, its throne occupied by foreign Chaldeans, and continual civil unrest throughout the land.


title: Chaldea

text: The Chaldean rule proved short-lived. A native Babylonian king named Nabonassar (748–734 BCE) defeated and overthrew the Chaldean usurpers in 748 BCE, restored indigenous rule, and successfully stabilised Babylonia. The Chaldeans once more faded into obscurity for the next three decades. During this time both the Babylonians and the Chaldean and Aramean migrant groups who had settled in the land once more fell completely under the yoke of the powerful Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III (745–727 BCE), a ruler who introduced Imperial Aramaic as the lingua franca of the empire. The Assyrian king at first made Nabonassar and his successor native Babylonian kings Nabu-nadin-zeri, Nabu-suma-ukin II and Nabu-mukin-zeri his subjects, but decided to rule Babylonia directly from 729 BCE. He was followed by Shalmaneser V (727–722 BCE), who also ruled Babylon in person.


title: Chaldea

text: When Sargon II (722–705 BCE) ascended the throne of the Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE after the death of Shalmaneser V, he was forced to launch a major campaign in his subject states of Persia, Mannea and Media in Ancient Iran to defend his territories there. He defeated and drove out the Scythians and Cimmerians who had attacked Assyria's Persian and Median vassal colonies in the region. At the same time, Egypt began encouraging and supporting the rebellion against Assyria in Israel and Canaan, forcing the Assyrians to send troops to deal with the Egyptians.


title: Chaldea

text: These events allowed the Chaldeans to once more attempt to assert themselves. While the Assyrian king was otherwise occupied defending his Iranian colonies from the Scythians and Cimmerians and driving the Egyptians from Canaan, Marduk-apla-iddina II (the Biblical Merodach-Baladan) of Bit-Yâkin, allied himself with the powerful Elamite kingdom and the native Babylonians, briefly seizing control of Babylon between 721 and 710 BCE. With the Scythians and Cimmerians vanquished, the Medes and Persians pledging loyalty, and the Egyptians defeated and ejected from southern Canaan, Sargon II was free at last to deal with the Chaldeans, Babylonians, and Elamites. He attacked and deposed Marduk-apla-adding II in 710 BCE, also defeating his Elamite allies in the process. After defeat by the Assyrians, Merodach-Baladan fled to his protectors in Elam


title: Chaldea

text: In 703, Merodach-Baladan very briefly regained the throne from a native Akkadian-Babylonian ruler Marduk-zakir-shumi II, who was a puppet of the new Assyrian king, Sennacherib (705–681 BCE). He was once more soundly defeated at Kish, and once again fled to Elam where he died in exile after one final failed attempt to raise a revolt against Assyria in 700 BCE, this time not in Babylon, but in the Chaldean tribal land of Bit-Yâkin. A native Babylonian king named Bel-ibni (703–701 BCE) was placed on the throne as a puppet of Assyria.


title: Chaldea

text: The next challenge to Assyrian domination came from the Elamites in 694 BCE, with Nergal-ushezib deposing and murdering Ashur-nadin-shumi (700–694 BCE), the Assyrian prince who was king of Babylon and son of Sennacherib. The Chaldeans and Babylonians again allied with their more powerful Elamite neighbors in this endeavour. This prompted the enraged Assyrian king Sennacherib to invade and subjugate Elam and Chaldea and to sack Babylon, laying waste to and largely destroying the city. Babylon was regarded as a sacred city by all Mesopotamians, including the Assyrians, and this act eventually resulted in Sennacherib's being murdered by his own sons while he was praying to the god Nisroch in Nineveh.


title: Chaldea

text: Esarhaddon (681–669 BCE) succeeded Sennacherib as ruler of the Assyrian Empire. He completely rebuilt Babylon and brought peace to the region. He conquered Egypt, Nubia and Libya and entrenched his mastery over the Persians, Medes, Parthians, Scythians, Cimmerians, Arameans, Israelites, Phoenicians, Canaanites, Urartians, Pontic Greeks, Cilicians, Phrygians, Lydians, Manneans and Arabs. For the next 60 or so years, Babylon and Chaldea remained peacefully under direct Assyrian control. The Chaldeans remained subjugated and quiet during this period, and the next major revolt in Babylon against the Assyrian empire was fermented not by a Chaldean, Babylonian or Elamite, but by Shamash-shum-ukin, who was an Assyrian king of Babylon, and elder brother of Ashurbanipal (668–627 BCE), the new ruler of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.


title: Chaldea

text: Shamash-shum-ukin (668–648 BCE) had become infused with Babylonian nationalism after sixteen years peacefully subject to his brother, and despite being Assyrian himself, declared that the city of Babylon and not Nineveh or Assur should be the seat of the empire.


title: Chaldea

text: In 652 BCE, he raised a powerful coalition of peoples resentful of their subjugation to Assyria against his own brother Ashurbanipal. The alliance included the Babylonians, Persians, Chaldeans, Medes, Elamites, Sultans, Arameans, Israelites, Arabs and Canaanites, together with some disaffected elements among the Assyrians themselves. After a bitter struggle lasting five years, the Assyrian king triumphed over his rebellious brother in 648 BCE, Elam was utterly destroyed, and the Babylonians, Persians, Medes, Chaldeans, Arabs, and others were savagely punished. An Assyrian governor named Kandalanu was then placed on the throne of Babylon to rule on behalf of Ashurbanipal. The next 22 years were peaceful, and neither the Babylonians nor Chaldeans posed a threat to the dominance of Ashurbanipal.


title: Chaldea

text: However, after the death of the mighty Ashurbanipal (and Kandalanu) in 627 BCE, the Neo-Assyrian Empire descended into a series of bitter internal dynastic civil wars that were to be the cause of its downfall.


title: Chaldea

text: Ashur-etil-ilani (626–623 BCE) ascended to the throne of the empire in 626 BCE but was immediately engulfed in a torrent of fierce rebellions instigated by rival claimants. He was deposed in 623 BCE by an Assyrian general ("turtanu") named Sin-shumu-lishir (623–622 BCE), who was also declared king of Babylon. Sin-shar-ishkun (622–612 BCE), the brother of Ashur-etil-ilani, took back the throne of empire from Sin-shumu-lishir in 622 BCE, but was then himself faced with unremitting rebellion against his rule by his own people. Continual conflict among the Assyrians led to a myriad of subject peoples, from Cyprus to Persia and The Caucasus to Egypt, quietly reasserting their independence and ceasing to pay tribute to Assyria.


title: Chaldea

text: Nabopolassar, a previously obscure and unknown Chaldean chieftain, followed the opportunistic tactics laid down by previous Chaldean leaders to take advantage of the chaos and anarchy gripping Assyria and Babylonia and seized the city of Babylon in 620 BCE with the help of its native Babylonian inhabitants.


title: Chaldea

text: Sin-shar-ishkun amassed a powerful army and marched into Babylon to regain control of the region. Nabopolassar was saved from likely destruction because yet another massive Assyrian rebellion broke out in Assyria proper, including the capital Nineveh, which forced the Assyrian king to turn back in order to quell the revolt. Nabopolassar took advantage of this situation, seizing the ancient city of Nippur in 619 BCE, a mainstay of pro-Assyrianism in Babylonia, and thus Babylonia as a whole.


title: Chaldea

text: However, his position was still far from secure, and bitter fighting continued in the Babylonian heartlands from 620 to 615 BCE, with Assyrian forces encamped in Babylonia in an attempt to eject Nabopolassar. Nabopolassar attempted a counterattack, marched his army into Assyria proper in 616 BCE, and tried to besiege Assur and Arrapha (modern Kirkuk), but was defeated by Sin-shar-ishkun and chased back into Babylonia after being driven from Idiqlat (modern Tikrit) at the southernmost end of Assyria. A stalemate seemed to have ensued, with Nabopolassar unable to make any inroads into Assyria despite its greatly weakened state, and Sin-shar-ishkun unable to eject Nabopolassar from Babylonia due to constant rebellions and civil war among his own people.


title: Chaldea

text: Nabopolassar's position, and the fate of the Assyrian empire, was sealed when he entered into an alliance with another of Assyria's former vassals, the Medes, the now dominant people of what was to become Persia. The Median Cyaxares had also recently taken advantage of the anarchy in the Assyrian Empire, while officially still a vassal of Assyria, he took the opportunity to meld the Iranian peoples; the Medes, Persians, Sagartians and Parthians, into a large and powerful Median-dominated force. The Medes, Persians, Parthians, Chaldeans and Babylonians formed an alliance that also included the Scythians and Cimmerians to the north.


title: Chaldea

text: While Sin-shar-ishkun was fighting both the rebels in Assyria and the Chaldeans and Babylonians in southern Mesopotamia, Cyaxares (hitherto a vassal of Assyria), in alliance with the Scythians and Cimmerians launched a surprise attack on civil-war-beleaguered Assyria in 615 BCE, sacking Kalhu (the Biblical Calah/Nimrud) and taking Arrapkha (modern Kirkuk). Nabopolassar, still pinned down in southern Mesopotamia, was not involved in this major breakthrough against Assyria. From this point however, the alliance of Medes, Persians, Chaldeans, Babylonians, Sagartians, Scythians and Cimmerians fought in unison against Assyria.


title: Chaldea

text: Despite the sorely depleted state of Assyria, bitter fighting ensued. Throughout 614 BCE the alliance of powers continued to make inroads into Assyria itself, although in 613 BCE the Assyrians somehow rallied to score a number of counterattacking victories over the Medes-Persians, Babylonians-Chaldeans and Scythians-Cimmerians. This led to a coalition of forces ranged against it to unite and launch a massive combined attack in 612 BCE, finally besieging and sacking Nineveh in late 612 BC, killing Sin-shar-ishkun in the process.


title: Chaldea

text: A new Assyrian king, Ashur-uballit II (612–605 BCE), took the crown amidst the house-to-house fighting in Nineveh, and refused a request to bow in vassalage to the rulers of the alliance. He managed to fight his way out of Nineveh and reach the northern Assyrian city of Harran, where he founded a new capital. Assyria resisted for another seven years until 605 BCE, when the remnants of the Assyrian army and the army of the Egyptians, whose 26th Dynasty had formed a brief allied coalition with the Assyrians, were defeated at Karchemish. Nabopolassar and his Median, Scythian and Cimmerian allies were now in possession of much of the huge Neo-Assyrian Empire. The Egyptians had belatedly come to the aid of Assyria, which they would have hoped to support as a secure buffer between Egypt and the new powers of Babylon, Medes and Persians, having already been raided by the Scythians.


title: Chaldea

text: The Chaldean king of Babylon now ruled all of southern Mesopotamia (Assyria in the north was ruled by the Medes), and the former Assyrian possessions of Aram (Syria), Phoenicia, Israel, Cyprus, Edom, Philistia, and parts of Arabia, while the Medes took control of the former Assyrian colonies in Ancient Iran, Asia Minor and the Caucasus.


title: Chaldea

text: Nabopolassar was not able to enjoy his success for long, dying in 604 BCE, only one year after the victory at Karchemish. He was succeeded by his son, who took the name Nebuchadnezzar II, after the unrelated 12th century BCE native Akkadian-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar I, indicating the extent to which the migrant Chaldeans had become infused with native Mesopotamian culture.


title: Chaldea

text: Nebuchadnezzar II and his allies may well have been forced to deal with remnants of Assyrian resistance based in and around Dur-Katlimmu, as Assyrian imperial records continue to be dated in this region between 604 and 599 BCE. In addition, the Egyptians remained in the region an attempt to revive the Asian colonies of the ancient Egyptian Empire.


title: Chaldea

text: Nebuchadnezzar II was to prove himself to be the greatest of the Chaldean rulers, rivaling another non-native ruler, the 18th century BCE Amorite king Hammurabi, as the greatest king of Babylon. He was a patron of the cities and a spectacular builder, rebuilding all of Babylonia's major cities on a lavish scale. His building activity at Babylon, expanding on the earlier major and impressive rebuilding of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, helped to turn it into the immense and beautiful city of legend. Babylon covered more than , surrounded by moats and ringed by a double circuit of walls. The Euphrates flowed through the center of the city, spanned by a beautiful stone bridge. At the center of the city rose the giant ziggurat called Etemenanki, "House of the Frontier Between Heaven and Earth," which lay next to the Temple of Marduk. He is also believed by many historians to have built The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (although others believe these gardens were built much earlier by an Assyrian king in Nineveh) for his wife, a Median princess from the green mountains, so that she would feel at home.


title: Chaldea

text: A capable leader, Nebuchadnezzar II conducted successful military campaigns; cities like Tyre, Sidon and Damascus were subjugated. He also conducted numerous campaigns in Asia Minor against the Scythians, Cimmerians, and Lydians. Like their Assyrian relations, the Babylonians had to campaign yearly in order to control their colonies.


title: Chaldea

text: In 601 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar II was involved in a major but inconclusive battle against the Egyptians. In 599 BCE, he invaded Arabia and routed the Arabs at Qedar. In 597 BCE, he invaded Judah, captured Jerusalem after the siege of Jerusalem (597 BCE) and deposed its king Jehoiachin, carrying the Israelites into captivity in Babylon. Egyptian and Babylonian armies fought each other for control of the Near East throughout much of Nebuchadnezzar's reign, and this encouraged king Zedekiah of Judah to revolt. After an eighteen-month siege, Jerusalem was captured in 587 BCE, thousands of Jews were deported to Babylon, and Solomon's Temple was razed to the ground.


title: Chaldea

text: Nebuchadnezzar successfully fought the Pharaohs Psammetichus II and Apries throughout his reign, and during the reign of Pharaoh Amasis in 568 BCE it is rumoured that he may have briefly invaded Egypt itself.


title: Chaldea

text: By 572, Nebuchadnezzar was in full control of Babylonia, Chaldea, Aramea (Syria), Phonecia, Israel, Judah, Philistia, Samarra, Jordan, northern Arabia, and parts of Asia Minor. Nebuchadnezzar died of illness in 562 BCE after a one-year co-reign with his son, Amel-Marduk, who was deposed in 560 BCE after a reign of only two years.


title: Chaldea

text: Neriglissar succeeded Amel-Marduk. It is unclear as to whether he was in fact an ethnic Chaldean or a native Babylonian nobleman, as he was not related by blood to Nabopolassar's descendants, having married into the ruling family. He conducted successful military campaigns against the Hellenic inhabitants of Cilicia, which had threatened Babylonian interests. Neriglissar reigned for only four years and was succeeded by the youthful Labashi-Marduk in 556 BCE. Again, it is unclear whether he was a Chaldean or a native Babylonian.


title: Chaldea

text: Labashi-Marduk reigned only for a matter of months, being deposed by Nabonidus in late 556 BCE. Nabonidus was certainly not a Chaldean, but an Assyrian from Harran, the last capital of Assyria, and proved to be the final native Mesopotamian king of Babylon. He and his son, the regent Belshazzar, were deposed by the Persians under Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE.


title: Chaldea

text: When the Babylonian Empire was absorbed into the Persian Achaemenid Empire, the name "Chaldean" lost its meaning in reference to a particular ethnicity or land, but lingered for a while as a term solely and explicitly used to describe a societal class of astrologers and astronomers in southern Mesopotamia. The original Chaldean tribe had long ago became Akkadianized, adopting Akkadian culture, religion, language and customs, blending into the majority native population, and eventually wholly disappearing as a distinct race of people, as had been the case with other preceding migrant peoples, such as the Amorites, Kassites, Suteans and Arameans of Babylonia.


title: Chaldea

text: The Persians considered this "Chaldean societal class" to be masters of reading and writing, and especially versed in all forms of incantation, sorcery, witchcraft, and the magical arts. They spoke of astrologists and astronomers as "Chaldeans", and it is used with this specific meaning in the Book of Daniel (Dan. i. 4, ii. 2 et seq.) and by classical writers, such as Strabo.


title: Chaldea

text: The disappearance of the Chaldeans as an ethnicity and Chaldea as a land is evidenced by the fact that the Persian rulers of the Achaemenid Empire (539–330 BCE) did not retain a province called "Chaldea", nor did they refer to "Chaldeans" as a race of people in their written annals. This is in contrast to Assyria, and for a time Babylonia also, where the Persians retained the names Assyria and Babylonia as designations for distinct geo-political entities within the Achaemenid Empire. In the case of the Assyrians in particular, Achaemenid records show Assyrians holding important positions within the empire, particularly with regards to military and civil administration.


title: Chaldea

text: The terms Chaldee and Chaldean were henceforth found in Hebraic and Biblical sources dating from the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, and referring specifically to the period of the Chaldean Dynasty of Babylon.


title: Chaldea

text: This absence of Chaldeans from the historical record continues throughout the Macedonian Empire, Seleucid Empire, Parthian Empire, Roman Empire, Sassanid Empire, Byzantine Empire and after the Arab Islamic conquest and Mongol Empire.


title: Chaldea

text: The term Chaldean was still in use at the time of Cicero (106–43 BCE) long after the Chaldeans had disappeared, who in one of his speeches mentions "Chaldean astrologers", and speaks of them more than once in his "De Divinatione". Other classical Latin writers who speak of them as distinguished for their knowledge of astronomy and astrology are Pliny the Elder, Valerius Maximus, Aulus Gellius, Cato the Elder, Lucretius, and Juvenal. Horace in his "Carpe diem" ode speaks of the "Babylonian calculations" ("Babylonii numeri"), the horoscopes of astrologers consulted regarding the future.


title: Chaldea

text: In the late antiquity, a variant of Aramaic language that was used in some books of the Bible was misnamed as "Chaldean" by Jerome of Stridon. That inaccurate usage continued down the centuries in Western Europe, and it was still customary during the nineteenth century, until the misnomer was corrected by scholars. In West Asian, Greek and Hebraic sources however the term for the language spoken in Mesopotamia was commonly "Assyrian" and later also "Syriac". Accordingly, in the earliest recorded "Western" mentions of the Christians of what is now Iraq and nearby countries the term is used with reference to their language. In 1220/1, Jacques de Vitry wrote that "they denied that Mary was the Mother of God and claimed that Christ existed in two persons. They consecrated leavened bread and used the 'Chaldean' (Syriac) language". In the fifteenth century the term "Chaldeans" was first applied specifically to Assyrians living in Cyprus who entered a short-lived union with Rome, and no longer merely with reference to their language but the name of a new church.


title: Chaldea

text: The common ethnic term for the Aramaic speaking inhabitants of Northern Mesopotamia used by the people themselves and their Persian, Armenian, Arab, Greek, Georgian and Kurdish neighbours both before and after the advent of Christianity in Iraq, Northeast Syria, Southeast Turkey and Northwest Iran, however, was always "Assyrian", and also "Syrian" (a later derivation of "Assyrian"), the Assyrian continuity in these regions being well documented.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: Contemporary slavery, also sometimes known as modern slavery or neo-slavery, refers to institutional slavery that continues to occur in present-day society. Estimates of the number of enslaved people today range from around 38 million to 46 million, depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used. The estimated number of enslaved people is debated, as there is no universally agreed definition of modern slavery; those in slavery are often difficult to identify, and adequate statistics are often not available. The International Labour Organization estimates that, by their definitions, over 40 million people are in some form of slavery today. 24.9 million people are in forced labor, of whom 16 million people are exploited in the private sector such as domestic work, construction or agriculture; 4.8 million persons in forced sexual exploitation, and 4 million persons in forced labour imposed by state authorities. An additional 15.4 million people are in forced marriages.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: The Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, an agency of the United States Department of State, says that modern slavery', 'trafficking in persons', and 'human trafficking' have been used as umbrella terms for the act of recruiting, harbouring, transporting, providing or obtaining a person for compelled labour or commercial sex acts through the use of force, fraud, or coercion". Besides these, a number of different terms are used in the US federal Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 and the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, including "involuntary servitude", "slavery" or "practices similar to slavery", "debt bondage", and "forced labor".


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: According to American professor Kevin Bales, co-founder and former president of the non-governmental organization and advocacy group Free the Slaves, modern slavery occurs "when a person is under the control of another person who applies violence and force to maintain that control, and the goal of that control is exploitation". The impact of slavery is expanded when targeted at vulnerable groups such as children. According to this definition, research from the Walk Free Foundation based on its Global Slavery Index 2018 estimated that there were about 40.3 million slaves around the world. In another estimate that suggests the number is around 45.8 million, it is estimated that around 10 million of these contemporary slaves are children. Bales warned that, because slavery is officially abolished everywhere, the practice is illegal, and thus more hidden from the public and authorities. This makes it impossible to obtain exact figures from primary sources. The best that can be done is to estimate based on secondary sources, such as UN investigations, newspaper articles, government reports, and figures from NGOs. Modern slavery persists for many of the same reasons older variations did: it is an economically beneficial practice despite the ethical concerns. The problem has been able to escalate in recent years due to the "disposability" of slaves and the fact that the cost of slaves has dropped significantly.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: Since slavery has been officially abolished, enslavement no longer revolves around legal ownership, but around illegal control. Two fundamental changes are the move away from the forward purchase of slave labour, and the existence of slaves as an employment category. While the statistics suggest that the 'market' for exploitative labour is booming, the notion that humans are purposefully sold and bought from an existing pool is outdated. While such basic transactions do still occur, in contemporary cases people become trapped in slavery-like conditions in various ways.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: Modern slavery is often seen as a by-product of poverty. In countries that lack education and the rule of law, poor societal structure can create an environment that fosters the acceptance and propagation of slavery. Slavery is most prevalent in impoverished countries and those with vulnerable minority communities, though it also exists in developed countries. Tens of thousands toil in slave-like conditions in industries such as mining, farming, and factories, producing goods for domestic consumption or export to more prosperous nations.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: In the older form of slavery, slave-owners spent more on getting slaves. It was more difficult for them to be disposed of. The cost of keeping them healthy was considered a better investment than getting another slave to replace them. In modern slavery people are easier to get at a lower price so replacing them when exploiters run into problems becomes easier. Slaves are then used in areas where they could easily be hidden while also creating a profit for the exploiter. Slaves are more attractive for unpleasant work, and less for pleasant work.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: Modern slavery can be quite profitable, and corrupt governments tacitly allow it, despite its being outlawed by international treaties such as Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery and local laws. Total annual revenues of traffickers were estimated in 2014 to over $150 billion, though profits are substantially lower. American slaves in 1809 were sold for around the equivalent of US$40,000 in today's money. Today, a slave can be bought for $90–$100.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: Bales explains, “This is an economic crime ... People do not enslave people to be mean to them; they do it to make a profit.”


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: Slavery by descent, also called chattel slavery, is the form most often associated with the word "slavery". In chattel slavery, the enslaved person is considered the personal property (chattel) of someone else, and can usually be bought and sold. It stems historically either from conquest, where a conquered person is enslaved, as in the Roman Empire or Ottoman Empire, or from slave trading, as in the Atlantic slave trade.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: Since the 2014 Civil War in Libya, and the subsequent breakdown of law and order, there have been reports of enslaved migrants being sold in public, including open slave markets in the country.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: Mauritania has a long history with slavery. Chattel slavery was formally made illegal in the country but the laws against it have gone largely unenforced. It is estimated that around 90,000 people (over 2% of Mauritania's population) are slaves.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: Those trapped in the system of sexual slavery in the modern world are often effectively chattel, especially when they are forced into prostitution.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: Government-forced labor, also known as "state-sponsored labor," is defined by the International Labour Organization as events "which persons are coerced to work through the use of violence or intimidation, or by more subtle means such as accumulated debt, retention of identity papers or threats of denunciation to immigration authorities." When the threats come from the government the threats can be much different. Many governments that participate in forced labor shut down their connections with the surrounding countries to prevent citizens from leaving.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: In North Korea, the government forces many people to work for the state, both inside and outside North Korea itself, sometimes for many years. The 2018 Global Slavery Index estimated that 2.8 million people were slaves in the country. The value of all the labor done by North Koreans for the government is estimated at US$975 million, with "dulgyeokdae" (youth workers) forced to do dangerous construction work, and "inminban" (women and girl workers) forced to make clothing in sweatshops. The workers are often unpaid. Additionally, North Korea's army of 1.2 million conscripted soldiers is often made to work on construction projects unrelated to defense, including building private villas for the elite. The government has had as many as 100,000 workers abroad.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: In Eritrea, an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 people are in an indefinite military service program which amounts to mass slavery, according to UN investigators. Their report also found sexual slavery and other forced labor.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: About 35–40 countries are currently enforcing military conscription of some sort, even if it is only temporary service.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: Government-forced labor comes in different forms, as governments have also been known to participate in forced-labor practices that do not include military service. In Uzbekistan, for example, the government coerces students and state workers to harvest cotton, of which the country is a main exporter, every year, forcing them to abandon their other responsibilities in the process. In this example the use of students, including those in primary, secondary, and higher education, means that child labor is also prominent. Uzbekistan's government has worked to reduce the forced labor in recent years, and in March of 2022 a major boycott of Uzbek cotton was lifted, upon reports that coerced labor had been almost completely eliminated.


title: Slavery in the 21st century

text: In 1865, the United States ratified the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which banned slavery and involuntary servitude "except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted", providing a legal basis for slavery, now referred to as penal labor, to continue in the country. Historically, this lead to the system of convict leasing which still primarily affects African-Americans. The Prison Policy Initiative, an American criminal justice think tank, cites the 2020 US prison population at being 2.3 million individuals, and nearly all able-bodied inmates work in some fashion. In Texas, Georgia, Alabama and Arkansas, prisoners are not paid at all for their work. In other states, prisoners are paid between $0.12 and $1.15 per hour. Federal Prison Industries paid inmates an average of $0.90 per hour in 2017. Inmates that refuse to work may be indefinitely remanded into solitary confinement, or have family visitation revoked. From 2010 to 2015 and again in 2016 and in 2018, some prisoners in the US refused to work, protesting for better pay, better conditions, and for the end of forced labor. Strike leaders were punished with indefinite solitary confinement. Forced prison labor occurs in both public/government-run prisons and private prisons. CoreCivic and GEO Group constitute half of the market share of private prisons, and they made a combined revenue of $3.5 billion in 2015. The value of all the labor done by inmates in the United States is estimated to be in the billions. In California, 2,500 incarcerated workers are fighting wildfires for only $1 per hour through the CDCR's Conservation Camp Program, which saves the state as much as $100 million a year.