LOrigine The Origin (Avventure Stellari Vol. 1) (Italian Edition)

Some scholars now believe, however, that the mythical Menes may have been the pharaoh Narmer, who is depicted wearing royal regalia on the ceremonial Narmer Palette, in a symbolic act of unification. In the Early Dynastic Period about BC, the first of the Dynastic pharaohs solidified control over lower Egypt by establishing a capital at Memphis, from which he could control the labour force and agriculture of the fertile delta region, as well as the lucrative and critical trade routes to the Levant.

The increasing power and wealth of the pharaohs during the early dynastic period was reflected in their elaborate mastaba tombs and mortuary cult structures at Abydos, which were used to celebrate the deified pharaoh after his death. The strong institution of kingship developed by the pharaohs served to legitimize state control over the land, labour, and resources that were essential to the survival and growth of ancient Egyptian civilization. Old Kingdom BC Major advances in architecture, art, and technology were made during the Old Kingdom, fueled by the increased agricultural productivity and resulting population, made possible by a well-developed central administration.

Some of ancient Egypt's crowning achievements, the Giza pyramids and Great Sphinx, were constructed during the Old Kingdom. Under the direction of the vizier, state officials collected taxes, coordinated irrigation projects to improve crop yield, drafted peasants to work on construction projects, and established a justice system to maintain peace and order. Along with the rising importance of a central administration arose a new class of educated scribes and officials who were granted estates by the pharaoh in payment for their services. Pharaohs also made land grants to their mortuary cults and local temples, to ensure that these institutions had the resources to worship the pharaoh after his death.

Scholars believe that five centuries of these practices slowly eroded the economic power of the pharaoh, and that the economy could no longer afford to support a large centralized administration. As the power of the pharaoh diminished, regional governors called nomarchs began to challenge the supremacy of the pharaoh.

This, coupled with severe droughts between and BC, is assumed to have caused the country to enter the year period of famine and strife known as the First Intermediate Period. First Intermediate Period BC After Egypt's central government collapsed at the end of the Old Kingdom, the administration could no longer support or stabilize the country's economy. Regional governors could not rely on the king for help in times of crisis, and the ensuing food shortages and political disputes escalated into famines and small-scale civil wars.

Yet despite difficult problems, local leaders, owing no tribute to the pharaoh, used their new-found independence to establish a thriving culture in the provinces. Once in control of their own resources, the provinces became economically richer-which was demonstrated by larger and better burials among all social classes.

In bursts of creativity, provincial artisans adopted and adapted cultural motifs formerly restricted to the royalty of the Old Kingdom, and scribes developed literary styles that expressed the optimism and originality of the period. Free from their loyalties to the pharaoh, local rulers began competing with each other for territorial control and political power.

By BC, rulers in Herakleopolis controlled Lower Egypt in the north, while a rival clan based in Thebes, the Intef family, took control of Upper Egypt in the south. As the Intefs grew in power and expanded their control northward, a clash between the two rival dynasties became inevitable. They inaugurated a period of economic and cultural renaissance known as the Middle Kingdom. Middle Kingdom BC The pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom restored the country's prosperity and stability, thereby stimulating a resurgence of art, literature, and monumental building projects.

Mentuhotep II and his Eleventh Dynasty successors ruled from Thebes, but the vizier Amenemhat I, upon assuming kingship at the beginning of the Twelfth Dynasty around BC, shifted the nation's capital to the city of Itjtawy, located in Faiyum. From Itjtawy, the pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty undertook a far-sighted land reclamation and irrigation scheme to increase agricultural output in the region.

Moreover, the military reconquered territory in Nubia that was rich in quarries and gold mines, while laborers built a defensive structure in the Eastern Delta, called the " Walls-of-the-Ruler ", to defend against foreign attack. With the pharaohs' having secured military and political security and vast agricultural and mineral wealth, the nation's population, arts, and religion flourished.

In contrast to elitist Old Kingdom attitudes towards the gods, the Middle Kingdom experienced an increase in expressions of personal piety and what could be called a democratization of the afterlife, in which all people possessed a soul and could be welcomed into the company of the gods after death. Middle Kingdom literature featured sophisticated themes and characters written in a confident, eloquent style.

The relief and portrait sculpture of the period captured subtle, individual details that reached new heights of technical perfection. The last great ruler of the Middle Kingdom, Amenemhat III, allowed Semitic-speaking Canaanite settlers from the Near East into the delta region to provide a sufficient labour force for his especially active mining and building campaigns. These ambitious building and mining activities, however, combined with severe Nile floods later in his reign, strained the economy and precipitated the slow decline into the Second Intermediate Period during the later Thirteenth and Fourteenth dynasties.

During this decline, the Canaanite settlers began to seize control of the delta region, eventually coming to power in Egypt as the Hyksos. The pharaoh was treated as a vassal and expected to pay tribute. The Hyksos " foreign rulers " retained Egyptian models of government and identified as pharaohs, thus integrating Egyptian elements into their culture.

They and other invaders introduced new tools of warfare into Egypt, most notably the composite bow and the horse-drawn chariot. After their retreat, the native Theban kings found themselves trapped between the Canaanite Hyksos ruling the north and the Hyksos' Nubian allies, the Kushites, to the south of Egypt. After years of vassalage, Thebes gathered enough strength to challenge the Hyksos in a conflict that lasted more than 30 years, until BC. That task fell to Kamose's successor, Ahmose I, who successfully waged a series of campaigns that permanently eradicated the Hyksos' presence in Egypt.

He established a new dynasty. In the New Kingdom that followed, the military became a central priority for the pharaohs seeking to expand Egypt's borders and attempting to gain mastery of the Near East. New Kingdom BC The New Kingdom pharaohs established a period of unprecedented prosperity by securing their borders and strengthening diplomatic ties with their neighbours, including the Mitanni Empire, Assyria, and Canaan.

Military campaigns waged under Tuthmosis I and his grandson Tuthmosis III extended the influence of the pharaohs to the largest empire Egypt had ever seen. Between their reigns, Hatshepsut generally promoted peace and restored trade routes lost during the Hyksos occupation, as well as expanding to new regions. When Tuthmosis III died in BC, Egypt had an empire extending from Niya in north west Syria to the fourth waterfall of the Nile in Nubia, cementing loyalties and opening access to critical imports such as bronze and wood.

The New Kingdom pharaohs began a large-scale building campaign to promote the god Amun, whose growing cult was based in Karnak. They also constructed monuments to glorify their own achievements, both real and imagined. The Karnak temple is the largest Egyptian temple ever built. The pharaoh Hatshepsut used such hyperbole and grandeur during her reign of almost twenty-two years. Her reign was very successful, marked by an extended period of peace and wealth-building, trading expeditions to Punt, restoration of foreign trade networks, and great building projects, including an elegant mortuary temple that rivaled the Greek architecture of a thousand years later, a colossal pair of obelisks, and a chapel at Karnak.

Despite her achievements, Amenhotep II, the heir to Hatshepsut's nephew-stepson Tuthmosis III, sought to erase her legacy near the end of his father's reign and throughout his, touting many of her accomplishments as his. He also tried to change many established traditions that had developed over the centuries, which some suggest was a futile attempt to prevent other women from becoming pharaoh and to curb their influence in the kingdom.

Around BC, the stability of the New Kingdom seemed threatened further when Amenhotep IV ascended the throne and instituted a series of radical and chaotic reforms. Changing his name to Akhenaten, he touted the previously obscure sun deity Aten as the supreme deity, suppressed the worship of most other deities, and attacked the power of the temple that had become dominated by the priests of Amun in Thebes, whom he saw as corrupt. Moving the capital to the new city of Akhetaten modern-day Amarna , Akhenaten turned a deaf ear to events in the Near East where the Hittites, Mitanni, and Assyrians were vying for control.

He was devoted to his new religion and artistic style. After his death, the cult of the Aten was quickly abandoned, the priests of Amun soon regained power and returned the capital to Thebes. Under their influence the subsequent pharaohs Tutankhamun, Ay, and Horemheb worked to erase all mention of Akhenaten's heresy, now known as the Amarna Period. Around BC, Ramesses II, also known as Ramesses the Great, ascended the throne, and went on to build more temples, erect more statues and obelisks, and sire more children than any other pharaoh in history.

A bold military leader, Ramesses II led his army against the Hittites in the Battle of Kadesh in modern Syria and, after fighting to a stalemate, finally agreed to the first recorded peace treaty, around BC. With both the Egyptians and Hittite Empire proving unable to gain the upper hand over one another, and both powers also fearful of the expanding Middle Assyrian Empire, Egypt withdrew from much of the Near East. The Hittites were thus left to compete unsuccessfully with the powerful Assyrians and the newly arrived Phrygians.

Egypt's wealth, however, made it a tempting target for invasion, particularly by the Libyan Berbers to the west, and the Sea Peoples, a conjectured confederation of seafarers from the Aegean Sea. Initially, the military was able to repel these invasions, but Egypt eventually lost control of its remaining territories in southern Caanan, much of it falling to the Assyrians. The effects of external threats were exacerbated by internal problems such as corruption, tomb robbery, and civil unrest.

After regaining their power, the high priests at the temple of Amun in Thebes accumulated vast tracts of land and wealth, and their expanded power splintered the country during the Third Intermediate Period. The south was effectively controlled by the High Priests of Amun at Thebes, who recognized Smendes in name only. During this time, Berber tribes from what was later to be called Libya had been settling in the western delta, and the chieftains of these settlers began increasing their autonomy.

Libyan princes took control of the delta under Shoshenq I in BC, founding the Libyan Berber, or Bubastite, dynasty that ruled for some years. Shoshenq also gained control of southern Egypt by placing his family members in important priestly positions. In the mid-ninth century BC, Egypt made a failed attempt to once more gain a foothold in Western Asia. However, this coalition of powers failed and the Neo Assyrian Empire continued to dominate Western Asia. Libyan Berber control began to erode as a rival native dynasty in the delta arose under Leontopolis.

Also, the Nubians of the Kushites threatened Egypt from the lands to the south. Drawing on millennia of interaction trade, acculturation, occupation, assimilation, and war with Egypt, the Kushite king Piye left his Nubian capital of Napata and invaded Egypt around BC. Piye easily seized control of Thebes and eventually the Nile Delta. He recorded the episode on his stela of victory.

Piye set the stage for subsequent Twenty-fifth dynasty pharaohs, such as Taharqa, to reunite the " Two lands " of Northern and Southern Egypt. The Nile valley empire was as large as it had been since the New Kingdom. The Twenty-fifth dynasty ushered in a renaissance period for ancient Egypt.

Religion, the arts, and architecture were restored to their glorious Old, Middle, and New Kingdom forms. Pharaohs, such as Taharqa, built or restored temples and monuments throughout the Nile valley, including at Memphis, Karnak, Kawa, Jebel Barkal, etc. It was during the Twenty-fifth dynasty that there was the first widespread construction of pyramids many in modern Sudan in the Nile Valley since the Middle Kingdom. Piye made various unsuccessful attempts to extend Egyptian influence in the Near East, then controlled by Assyria. In BC, he sent an army in support of a rebellion against Assyria, which was taking place in Philistia and Gaza.

However, Piye was defeated by Sargon II and the rebellion failed. Subsequently, Piye was forced from the Near East. From the 10th century BC onwards, Assyria fought for control of the southern Levant. Frequently, cities and kingdoms of the southern Levant appealed to Egypt for aid in their struggles against the powerful Assyrian army.

Taharqa enjoyed some initial success in his attempts to regain a foothold in the Near East.

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Scholars disagree on the primary reason for Assyria's abandonment of their siege on Jerusalem. Some argue that disease was the primary reason for failing to actually take the city; however, Senacherib's annals claim Judah was forced into tribute regardless. Sennacherib had been murdered by his own sons for destroying the rebellious city of Babylon, a city sacred to all Mesopotamians, the Assyrians included. In BC Esarhaddon launched a preliminary incursion into Egypt; however, this attempt was repelled by Taharqa.

However, in BC, Esarhaddon launched a full-scale invasion. Part of his army stayed behind to deal with rebellions in Phoenicia, and Israel. The remainder went south to Rapihu, then crossed the Sinai, and entered Egypt. Esarhaddon decisively defeated Taharqa, took Memphis, Thebes and all the major cities of Egypt, and Taharqa was chased back to his Nubian homeland.

Esarhaddon now called himself " king of Egypt, Patros, and Kush ", and returned with rich booty from the cities of the delta; he erected a victory stele at this time, and paraded the captive Prince Ushankhuru, the son of Taharqa in Nineveh. He installed native Egyptian princes throughout the land to rule on his behalf. The conquest by Esarhaddon effectively marked the end of the short lived Kushite Empire. However, the native Egyptian rulers installed by Esarhaddon were unable to retain full control of the whole country for long. Two years later, Taharqa returned from Nubia and seized control of a section of southern Egypt as far north as Memphis.

Esarhaddon prepared to return to Egypt and once more eject Taharqa; however, he fell ill and died in his capital, Nineveh, before he left Assyria. His successor, Ashurbanipal, sent an Assyrian general named Sha-Nabu-shu with a small, but well trained army, which conclusively defeated Taharqa at Memphis and once more drove him from Egypt.

Taharqa died in Nubia two years later. His successor, Tanutamun, also made a failed attempt to regain Egypt for Nubia. He successfully defeated Necho, the native Egyptian puppet ruler installed by Ashurbanipal, taking Thebes in the process. The Assyrians then sent a large army southwards. Tantamani Tanutamun was heavily routed and fled back to Nubia. The Assyrian army sacked Thebes to such an extent it never truly recovered.

A native ruler, Psammetichus I was placed on the throne, as a vassal of Ashurbanipal, and the Nubians were never again to pose a threat to either Assyria or Egypt. Late Period BC With no permanent plans for conquest, the Assyrians left control of Egypt to a series of vassals who became known as the Saite kings of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. By BC, the Saite king Psamtik I taking advantage of the fact that Assyria was involved in a fierce war conquering Elam and that few Assyrian troops were stationed in Egypt was able to free Egypt relatively peacefully from Assyrian vassalage with the help of Lydian and Greek mercenaries, the latter of whom were recruited to form Egypt's first navy.

Psamtik and his successors however were careful to maintain peaceful relations with Assyria. Greek influence expanded greatly as the city of Naukratis became the home of Greeks in the delta. In BC Necho II went to war with Babylonia, the Chaldeans, the Medians and the Scythians in an attempt to save Assyria, which after a brutal civil war was being overrun by this coalition of powers.

However, the attempt to save Egypt's former masters failed. The Egyptians delayed intervening too long, and Nineveh had already fallen and King Sin-shar-ishkun was dead by the time Necho II sent his armies northwards. The Egyptians remained in the area for some decades, struggling with the Babylonian kings Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar II for control of portions of the former Assyrian Empire in The Levant. The Saite kings based in the new capital of Sais witnessed a brief but spirited resurgence in the economy and culture, but in BC, the powerful Persians, led by Cambyses II, began their conquest of Egypt, eventually capturing the pharaoh Psamtik III at the battle of Pelusium.

Cambyses II then assumed the formal title of pharaoh, but ruled Egypt from his home of Susa in Persia modern Iran , leaving Egypt under the control of a satrapy. A few temporarily successful revolts against the Persians marked the fifth century BC, but Egypt was never able to permanently overthrow the Persians. This first period of Persian rule over Egypt, also known as the Twenty-seventh dynasty, ended after more than one-hundred years in BC, and from to BC the Thirtieth Dynasty ruled as the last native royal house of dynastic Egypt, which ended with the kingship of Nectanebo II.

The administration established by Alexander's successors, the Macedonian Ptolemaic Kingdom, was based on an Egyptian model and based in the new capital city of Alexandria. The city showcased the power and prestige of Hellenistic rule, and became a seat of learning and culture, centered at the famous Library of Alexandria.

The Lighthouse of Alexandria lit the way for the many ships that kept trade flowing through the city-as the Ptolemies made commerce and revenue-generating enterprises, such as papyrus manufacturing, their top priority. Hellenistic culture did not supplant native Egyptian culture, as the Ptolemies supported time-honored traditions in an effort to secure the loyalty of the populace. They built new temples in Egyptian style, supported traditional cults, and portrayed themselves as pharaohs.

Some traditions merged, as Greek and Egyptian gods were syncretized into composite deities, such as Serapis, and classical Greek forms of sculpture influenced traditional Egyptian motifs. Despite their efforts to appease the Egyptians, the Ptolemies were challenged by native rebellion, bitter family rivalries, and the powerful mob of Alexandria that formed after the death of Ptolemy IV.

In addition, as Rome relied more heavily on imports of grain from Egypt, the Romans took great interest in the political situation in the country. Continued Egyptian revolts, ambitious politicians, and powerful Syriac opponents from the Near East made this situation unstable, leading Rome to send forces to secure the country as a province of its empire. The Romans relied heavily on grain shipments from Egypt, and the Roman army, under the control of a prefect appointed by the Emperor, quelled rebellions, strictly enforced the collection of heavy taxes, and prevented attacks by bandits, which had become a notorious problem during the period.

Alexandria became an increasingly important center on the trade route with the orient, as exotic luxuries were in high demand in Rome. Although the Romans had a more hostile attitude than the Greeks towards the Egyptians, some traditions such as mummification and worship of the traditional gods continued.

The art of mummy portraiture flourished, and some Roman emperors had themselves depicted as pharaohs, though not to the extent that the Ptolemies had. The former lived outside Egypt and did not perform the ceremonial functions of Egyptian kingship. Local administration became Roman in style and closed to native Egyptians. From the mid-first century AD, Christianity took root in Egypt and it was originally seen as another cult that could be accepted. However, it was an uncompromising religion that sought to win converts from Egyptian Religion and Greco-Roman religion and threatened popular religious traditions.

This led to the persecution of converts to Christianity, culminating in the great purges of Diocletian starting in , but eventually Christianity won out. In the Christian Emperor Theodosius introduced legislation that banned pagan rites and closed temples. Alexandria became the scene of great anti-pagan riots with public and private religious imagery destroyed.

As a consequence, Egypt's native religious culture was continually in decline. While the native population certainly continued to speak their language, the ability to read hieroglyphic writing slowly disappeared as the role of the Egyptian temple priests and priestesses diminished. The temples themselves were sometimes converted to churches or abandoned to the desert.

Government and economy Administration and commerce The pharaoh was the absolute monarch of the country and, at least in theory, wielded complete control of the land and its resources. The king was the supreme military commander and head of the government, who relied on a bureaucracy of officials to manage his affairs. In charge of the administration was his second in command, the vizier, who acted as the king's representative and coordinated land surveys, the treasury, building projects, the legal system, and the archives.

At a regional level, the country was divided into as many as 42 administrative regions called nomes each governed by a nomarch, who was accountable to the vizier for his jurisdiction. The temples formed the backbone of the economy. Not only were they houses of worship, but were also responsible for collecting and storing the nation's wealth in a system of granaries and treasuries administered by overseers, who redistributed grain and goods.

Much of the economy was centrally organized and strictly controlled. Although the ancient Egyptians did not use coinage until the Late period, they did use a type of money-barter system, with standard sacks of grain and the deben, a weight of roughly 91 grams 3 oz of copper or silver, forming a common denominator. Prices were fixed across the country and recorded in lists to facilitate trading; for example a shirt cost five copper deben, while a cow cost deben. Grain could be traded for other goods, according to the fixed price list. During the fifth century BC coined money was introduced into Egypt from abroad.

At first the coins were used as standardized pieces of precious metal rather than true money, but in the following centuries international traders came to rely on coinage. Social status Egyptian society was highly stratified, and social status was expressly displayed. Farmers made up the bulk of the population, but agricultural produce was owned directly by the state, temple, or noble family that owned the land. Artists and craftsmen were of higher status than farmers, but they were also under state control, working in the shops attached to the temples and paid directly from the state treasury.

Scribes and officials formed the upper class in ancient Egypt, known as the " white kilt class " in reference to the bleached linen garments that served as a mark of their rank. The upper class prominently displayed their social status in art and literature. Below the nobility were the priests, physicians, and engineers with specialized training in their field. Slavery was known in ancient Egypt, but the extent and prevalence of its practice are unclear.

The ancient Egyptians viewed men and women, including people from all social classes except slaves, as essentially equal under the law, and even the lowliest peasant was entitled to petition the vizier and his court for redress. Although, slaves were mostly used as indentured servants. They were able to buy and sell, or work their way to freedom or nobility, and usually were treated by doctors in the workplace. Both men and women had the right to own and sell property, make contracts, marry and divorce, receive inheritance, and pursue legal disputes in court.

Married couples could own property jointly and protect themselves from divorce by agreeing to marriage contracts, which stipulated the financial obligations of the husband to his wife and children should the marriage end. Compared with their counterparts in ancient Greece, Rome, and even more modern places around the world, ancient Egyptian women had a greater range of personal choices and opportunities for achievement. Despite these freedoms, ancient Egyptian women did not often take part in official roles in the administration, served only secondary roles in the temples, and were not as likely to be as educated as men.

Legal system The head of the legal system was officially the pharaoh, who was responsible for enacting laws, delivering justice, and maintaining law and order, a concept the ancient Egyptians referred to as Ma'at. Although no legal codes from ancient Egypt survive, court documents show that Egyptian law was based on a common-sense view of right and wrong that emphasized reaching agreements and resolving conflicts rather than strictly adhering to a complicated set of statutes. Local councils of elders, known as Kenbet in the New Kingdom, were responsible for ruling in court cases involving small claims and minor disputes.

More serious cases involving murder, major land transactions, and tomb robbery were referred to the Great Kenbet, over which the vizier or pharaoh presided. Plaintiffs and defendants were expected to represent themselves and were required to swear an oath that they had told the truth. In some cases, the state took on both the role of prosecutor and judge, and it could torture the accused with beatings to obtain a confession and the names of any co-conspirators.

Whether the charges were trivial or serious, court scribes documented the complaint, testimony, and verdict of the case for future reference. Punishment for minor crimes involved either imposition of fines, beatings, facial mutilation, or exile, depending on the severity of the offense.

Serious crimes such as murder and tomb robbery were punished by execution, carried out by decapitation, drowning, or impaling the criminal on a stake. Punishment could also be extended to the criminal's family. Beginning in the New Kingdom, oracles played a major role in the legal system, dispensing justice in both civil and criminal cases.

The procedure was to ask the god a " yes " or " no " question concerning the right or wrong of an issue. The god, carried by a number of priests, rendered judgment by choosing one or the other, moving forward or backward, or pointing to one of the answers written on a piece of papyrus or an ostracon. Agriculture A combination of favorable geographical features contributed to the success of ancient Egyptian culture, the most important of which was the rich fertile soil resulting from annual inundations of the Nile River.

The ancient Egyptians were thus able to produce an abundance of food, allowing the population to devote more time and resources to cultural, technological, and artistic pursuits. Land management was crucial in ancient Egypt because taxes were assessed based on the amount of land a person owned. Farming in Egypt was dependent on the cycle of the Nile River. The Egyptians recognized three seasons: Akhet flooding , Peret planting , and Shemu harvesting. The flooding season lasted from June to September, depositing on the river's banks a layer of mineral-rich silt ideal for growing crops.

After the floodwaters had receded, the growing season lasted from October to February. Farmers plowed and planted seeds in the fields, which were irrigated with ditches and canals. Egypt received little rainfall, so farmers relied on the Nile to water their crops. From March to May, farmers used sickles to harvest their crops, which were then threshed with a flail to separate the straw from the grain.

Winnowing removed the chaff from the grain, and the grain was then ground into flour, brewed to make beer, or stored for later use. The ancient Egyptians cultivated emmer and barley, and several other cereal grains, all of which were used to make the two main food staples of bread and beer. Flax plants, uprooted before they started flowering, were grown for the fibers of their stems.

These fibers were split along their length and spun into thread, which was used to weave sheets of linen and to make clothing. Papyrus growing on the banks of the Nile River was used to make paper. Vegetables and fruits were grown in garden plots, close to habitations and on higher ground, and had to be watered by hand. Vegetables included leeks, garlic, melons, squashes, pulses, lettuce, and other crops, in addition to grapes that were made into wine.

Animals The Egyptians believed that a balanced relationship between people and animals was an essential element of the cosmic order; thus humans, animals and plants were believed to be members of a single whole. Animals, both domesticated and wild, were therefore a critical source of spirituality, companionship, and sustenance to the ancient Egyptians.

Cattle were the most important livestock; the administration collected taxes on livestock in regular censuses, and the size of a herd reflected the prestige and importance of the estate or temple that owned them. In addition to cattle, the ancient Egyptians kept sheep, goats, and pigs. Poultry such as ducks, geese, and pigeons were captured in nets and bred on farms, where they were force-fed with dough to fatten them. The Nile provided a plentiful source of fish. Bees were also domesticated from at least the Old Kingdom, and they provided both honey and wax.

The ancient Egyptians used donkeys and oxen as beasts of burden, and they were responsible for plowing the fields and trampling seed into the soil. The slaughter of a fattened ox was also a central part of an offering ritual. Horses were introduced by the Hyksos in the Second Intermediate Period, and the camel, although known from the New Kingdom, was not used as a beast of burden until the Late Period. There is also evidence to suggest that elephants were briefly utilized in the Late Period, but largely abandoned due to lack of grazing land. Dogs, cats and monkeys were common family pets, while more exotic pets imported from the heart of Africa, such as lions, were reserved for royalty.

Herodotus observed that the Egyptians were the only people to keep their animals with them in their houses. During the Predynastic and Late periods, the worship of the gods in their animal form was extremely popular, such as the cat goddess Bastet and the ibis god Thoth, and these animals were bred in large numbers on farms for the purpose of ritual sacrifice. Natural resources Egypt is rich in building and decorative stone, copper and lead ores, gold, and semiprecious stones.

These natural resources allowed the ancient Egyptians to build monuments, sculpt statues, make tools, and fashion jewelry. Embalmers used salts from the Wadi Natrun for mummification, which also provided the gypsum needed to make plaster. Ore-bearing rock formations were found in distant, inhospitable wadis in the eastern desert and the Sinai, requiring large, state-controlled expeditions to obtain natural resources found there. There were extensive gold mines in Nubia, and one of the first maps known is of a gold mine in this region.

The Wadi Hammamat was a notable source of granite, greywacke, and gold. Flint was the first mineral collected and used to make tools, and flint handaxes are the earliest pieces of evidence of habitation in the Nile valley. Nodules of the mineral were carefully flaked to make blades and arrowheads of moderate hardness and durability even after copper was adopted for this purpose. Ancient Egyptians were among the first to use minerals such as sulfur as cosmetic substances. The Egyptians worked deposits of the lead ore galena at Gebel Rosas to make net sinkers, plumb bobs, and small figurines.

Copper was the most important metal for toolmaking in ancient Egypt and was smelted in furnaces from malachite ore mined in the Sinai. Workers collected gold by washing the nuggets out of sediment in alluvial deposits, or by the more labor-intensive process of grinding and washing gold-bearing quartzite.

Iron deposits found in upper Egypt were utilized in the Late Period. High-quality building stones were abundant in Egypt; the ancient Egyptians quarried limestone all along the Nile valley, granite from Aswan, and basalt and sandstone from the wadis of the eastern desert. Deposits of decorative stones such as porphyry, greywacke, alabaster, and carnelian dotted the eastern desert and were collected even before the First Dynasty. Trade The ancient Egyptians engaged in trade with their foreign neighbors to obtain rare, exotic goods not found in Egypt.

In the Predynastic Period, they established trade with Nubia to obtain gold and incense. They also established trade with Palestine, as evidenced by Palestinian-style oil jugs found in the burials of the First Dynasty pharaohs. An Egyptian colony stationed in southern Canaan dates to slightly before the First Dynasty.

Narmer had Egyptian pottery produced in Canaan and exported back to Egypt. By the Second Dynasty at latest, ancient Egyptian trade with Byblos yielded a critical source of quality timber not found in Egypt. By the Fifth Dynasty, trade with Punt provided gold, aromatic resins, ebony, ivory, and wild animals such as monkeys and baboons. Egypt relied on trade with Anatolia for essential quantities of tin as well as supplementary supplies of copper, both metals being necessary for the manufacture of bronze. The ancient Egyptians prized the blue stone lapis lazuli, which had to be imported from far-away Afghanistan.

Egypt's Mediterranean trade partners also included Greece and Crete, which provided, among other goods, supplies of olive oil. In exchange for its luxury imports and raw materials, Egypt mainly exported grain, gold, linen, and papyrus, in addition to other finished goods including glass and stone objects. Language - Historical development The Egyptian language is a northern Afro-Asiatic language closely related to the Berber and Semitic languages. It has the second longest history of any language after Sumerian , having been written from c. Egyptian writings do not show dialect differences before Coptic, but it was probably spoken in regional dialects around Memphis and later Thebes.

Ancient Egyptian was a synthetic language, but it became more analytic later on. Late Egyptian develops prefixal definite and indefinite articles, which replace the older inflectional suffixes. There is a change from the older verb-subject-object word order to subject-verb-object. The Egyptian hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic scripts were eventually replaced by the more phonetic Coptic alphabet.

Coptic is still used in the liturgy of the Egyptian Orthodox Church, and traces of it are found in modern Egyptian Arabic. Sounds and grammar Ancient Egyptian has 25 consonants similar to those of other Afro-Asiatic languages. These include pharyngeal and emphatic consonants, voiced and voiceless stops, voiceless fricatives and voiced and voiceless affricates.

It has three long and three short vowels, which expanded in Later Egyptian to about nine. The basic word in Egyptian, similar to Semitic and Berber, is a triliteral or biliteral root of consonants and semiconsonants. Suffixes are added to form words. The verb conjugation corresponds to the person. If the subject is a noun, suffixes are not added to the verb: Adjectives are derived from nouns through a process that Egyptologists call nisbation because of its similarity with Arabic. The word order is predicate-subject in verbal and adjectival sentences, and subject-predicate in nominal and adverbial sentences.

The subject can be moved to the beginning of sentences if it is long and is followed by a resumptive pronoun. Verbs and nouns are negated by the particle n, but nn is used for adverbial and adjectival sentences. Writing Hieroglyphic writing dates from c. A hieroglyph can represent a word, a sound, or a silent determinative; and the same symbol can serve different purposes in different contexts.

Hieroglyphs were a formal script, used on stone monuments and in tombs, that could be as detailed as individual works of art. In day-to-day writing, scribes used a cursive form of writing, called hieratic, which was quicker and easier. While formal hieroglyphs may be read in rows or columns in either direction though typically written from right to left , hieratic was always written from right to left, usually in horizontal rows. A new form of writing, Demotic, became the prevalent writing style, and it is this form of writing-along with formal hieroglyphs-that accompany the Greek text on the Rosetta Stone.

Around the first century AD, the Coptic alphabet started to be used alongside the Demotic script. Coptic is a modified Greek alphabet with the addition of some Demotic signs. Although formal hieroglyphs were used in a ceremonial role until the fourth century, towards the end only a small handful of priests could still read them. As the traditional religious establishments were disbanded, knowledge of hieroglyphic writing was mostly lost.

Literature Writing first appeared in association with kingship on labels and tags for items found in royal tombs. It was primarily an occupation of the scribes, who worked out of the Per Ankh institution or the House of Life. The latter comprised offices, libraries called House of Books , laboratories and observatories.

Some of the best-known pieces of ancient Egyptian literature, such as the Pyramid and Coffin Texts, were written in Classical Egyptian, which continued to be the language of writing until about BC. Later Egyptian was spoken from the New Kingdom onward and is represented in Ramesside administrative documents, love poetry and tales, as well as in Demotic and Coptic texts. During this period, the tradition of writing had evolved into the tomb autobiography, such as those of Harkhuf and Weni. The genre known as Sebayt " instructions " was developed to communicate teachings and guidance from famous nobles; the Ipuwer papyrus, a poem of lamentations describing natural disasters and social upheaval, is a famous example.

Also written at this time was the Westcar Papyrus, a set of stories told to Khufu by his sons relating the marvels performed by priests. The Instruction of Amenemope is considered a masterpiece of near-eastern literature. Towards the end of the New Kingdom, the vernacular language was more often employed to write popular pieces like the Story of Wenamun and the Instruction of Any. The former tells the story of a noble who is robbed on his way to buy cedar from Lebanon and of his struggle to return to Egypt.

From about BC, narrative stories and instructions, such as the popular Instructions of Onchsheshonqy, as well as personal and business documents were written in the demotic script and phase of Egyptian. Many stories written in demotic during the Greco-Roman period were set in previous historical eras, when Egypt was an independent nation ruled by great pharaohs such as Ramesses II.

Culture - Daily life Most ancient Egyptians were farmers tied to the land. Their dwellings were restricted to immediate family members, and were constructed of mud-brick designed to remain cool in the heat of the day. Each home had a kitchen with an open roof, which contained a grindstone for milling grain and a small oven for baking the bread. Walls were painted white and could be covered with dyed linen wall hangings. Floors were covered with reed mats, while wooden stools, beds raised from the floor and individual tables comprised the furniture.

The ancient Egyptians placed a great value on hygiene and appearance. Most bathed in the Nile and used a pasty soap made from animal fat and chalk. Men shaved their entire bodies for cleanliness; perfumes and aromatic ointments covered bad odors and soothed skin. Clothing was made from simple linen sheets that were bleached white, and both men and women of the upper classes wore wigs, jewelry, and cosmetics. Children went without clothing until maturity, at about age 12, and at this age males were circumcised and had their heads shaved. Mothers were responsible for taking care of the children, while the father provided the family's income.

Music and dance were popular entertainments for those who could afford them. Early instruments included flutes and harps, while instruments similar to trumpets, oboes, and pipes developed later and became popular. In the New Kingdom, the Egyptians played on bells, cymbals, tambourines, drums, and imported lutes and lyres from Asia. The sistrum was a rattle-like musical instrument that was especially important in religious ceremonies. The ancient Egyptians enjoyed a variety of leisure activities, including games and music.

Senet, a board game where pieces moved according to random chance, was particularly popular from the earliest times; another similar game was mehen, which had a circular gaming board. Juggling and ball games were popular with children, and wrestling is also documented in a tomb at Beni Hasan. The wealthy members of ancient Egyptian society enjoyed hunting and boating as well.

The excavation of the workers' village of Deir el-Madinah has resulted in one of the most thoroughly documented accounts of community life in the ancient world that spans almost four hundred years. There is no comparable site in which the organisation, social interactions, working and living conditions of a community were studied in such detail. Cuisine Egyptian cuisine remained remarkably stable over time; indeed, the cuisine of modern Egypt retains some striking similarities to the cuisine of the ancients.

The staple diet consisted of bread and beer, supplemented with vegetables such as onions and garlic, and fruit such as dates and figs. Wine and meat were enjoyed by all on feast days while the upper classes indulged on a more regular basis. Fish, meat, and fowl could be salted or dried, and could be cooked in stews or roasted on a grill. Architecture The architecture of ancient Egypt includes some of the most famous structures in the world: Building projects were organized and funded by the state for religious and commemorative purposes, but also to reinforce the power of the pharaoh. The ancient Egyptians were skilled builders; using simple but effective tools and sighting instruments, architects could build large stone structures with accuracy and precision.

The domestic dwellings of elite and ordinary Egyptians alike were constructed from perishable materials such as mud bricks and wood, and have not survived. Peasants lived in simple homes, while the palaces of the elite were more elaborate structures. A few surviving New Kingdom palaces, such as those in Malkata and Amarna, show richly decorated walls and floors with scenes of people, birds, water pools, deities and geometric designs. Important structures such as temples and tombs that were intended to last forever were constructed of stone instead of bricks.

The architectural elements used in the world's first large-scale stone building, Djoser's mortuary complex, include post and lintel supports in the papyrus and lotus motif. The earliest preserved ancient Egyptian temples, such as those at Giza, consist of single, enclosed halls with roof slabs supported by columns.

In the New Kingdom, architects added the pylon, the open courtyard, and the enclosed hypostyle hall to the front of the temple's sanctuary, a style that was standard until the Greco-Roman period.

IL RISVEGLIO DEL CADUCEO DORMIENTE: la vera genesi dell'Homo sapiens

The earliest and most popular tomb architecture in the Old Kingdom was the mastaba, a flat-roofed rectangular structure of mudbrick or stone built over an underground burial chamber. The step pyramid of Djoser is a series of stone mastabas stacked on top of each other.

Pyramids were built during the Old and Middle Kingdoms, but most later rulers abandoned them in favor of less conspicuous rock-cut tombs. The Twenty-fifth dynasty was a notable exception, as all Twenty-fifth dynasty pharaohs constructed pyramids. Art The ancient Egyptians produced art to serve functional purposes. For over years, artists adhered to artistic forms and iconography that were developed during the Old Kingdom, following a strict set of principles that resisted foreign influence and internal change. These artistic standards-simple lines, shapes, and flat areas of color combined with the characteristic flat projection of figures with no indication of spatial depth-created a sense of order and balance within a composition.

Images and text were intimately interwoven on tomb and temple walls, coffins, stelae, and even statues. The Narmer Palette, for example, displays figures that can also be read as hieroglyphs Because of the rigid rules that governed its highly stylized and symbolic appearance, ancient Egyptian art served its political and religious purposes with precision and clarity.

Ancient Egyptian artisans used stone to carve statues and fine reliefs, but used wood as a cheap and easily carved substitute. Paints were obtained from minerals such as iron ores red and yellow ochres , copper ores blue and green , soot or charcoal black , and limestone white.

Paints could be mixed with gum arabic as a binder and pressed into cakes, which could be moistened with water when needed. Pharaohs used reliefs to record victories in battle, royal decrees, and religious scenes. Common citizens had access to pieces of funerary art, such as shabti statues and books of the dead, which they believed would protect them in the afterlife. During the Middle Kingdom, wooden or clay models depicting scenes from everyday life became popular additions to the tomb. In an attempt to duplicate the activities of the living in the afterlife, these models show laborers, houses, boats, and even military formations that are scale representations of the ideal ancient Egyptian afterlife.

Despite the homogeneity of ancient Egyptian art, the styles of particular times and places sometimes reflected changing cultural or political attitudes. The most striking example of a politically driven change in artistic forms comes from the Amarna period, where figures were radically altered to conform to Akhenaten's revolutionary religious ideas. This style, known as Amarna art, was quickly and thoroughly erased after Akhenaten's death and replaced by the traditional forms.

Religious beliefs Beliefs in the divine and in the afterlife were ingrained in ancient Egyptian civilization from its inception; pharaonic rule was based on the divine right of kings. The Egyptian pantheon was populated by gods who had supernatural powers and were called on for help or protection. However, the gods were not always viewed as benevolent, and Egyptians believed they had to be appeased with offerings and prayers. The structure of this pantheon changed continually as new deities were promoted in the hierarchy, but priests made no effort to organize the diverse and sometimes conflicting myths and stories into a coherent system.

These various conceptions of divinity were not considered contradictory but rather layers in the multiple facets of reality. Gods were worshiped in cult temples administered by priests acting on the king's behalf. At the center of the temple was the cult statue in a shrine. Temples were not places of public worship or congregation, and only on select feast days and celebrations was a shrine carrying the statue of the god brought out for public worship.

Normally, the god's domain was sealed off from the outside world and was only accessible to temple officials. Common citizens could worship private statues in their homes, and amulets offered protection against the forces of chaos. After the New Kingdom, the pharaoh's role as a spiritual intermediary was de-emphasized as religious customs shifted to direct worship of the gods. As a result, priests developed a system of oracles to communicate the will of the gods directly to the people.

The Egyptians believed that every human being was composed of physical and spiritual parts or aspects. The heart, rather than the brain, was considered the seat of thoughts and emotions. After death, the spiritual aspects were released from the body and could move at will, but they required the physical remains or a substitute, such as a statue as a permanent home. The ultimate goal of the deceased was to rejoin his ka and ba and become one of the " blessed dead ", living on as an akh, or " effective one ".

For this to happen, the deceased had to be judged worthy in a trial, in which the heart was weighed against a " feather of truth ". If deemed worthy, the deceased could continue their existence on earth in spiritual form. Burial customs The ancient Egyptians maintained an elaborate set of burial customs that they believed were necessary to ensure immortality after death.

These customs involved preserving the body by mummification, performing burial ceremonies, and interring with the body goods the deceased would use in the afterlife. Before the Old Kingdom, bodies buried in desert pits were naturally preserved by desiccation. The arid, desert conditions were a boon throughout the history of ancient Egypt for burials of the poor, who could not afford the elaborate burial preparations available to the elite.

Wealthier Egyptians began to bury their dead in stone tombs and use artificial mummification, which involved removing the internal organs, wrapping the body in linen, and burying it in a rectangular stone sarcophagus or wooden coffin. Beginning in the Fourth Dynasty, some parts were preserved separately in canopic jars. By the New Kingdom, the ancient Egyptians had perfected the art of mummification; the best technique took 70 days and involved removing the internal organs, removing the brain through the nose, and desiccating the body in a mixture of salts called natron.

The body was then wrapped in linen with protective amulets inserted between layers and placed in a decorated anthropoid coffin. Mummies of the Late Period were also placed in painted cartonnage mummy cases. Actual preservation practices declined during the Ptolemaic and Roman eras, while greater emphasis was placed on the outer appearance of the mummy, which was decorated. Wealthy Egyptians were buried with larger quantities of luxury items, but all burials, regardless of social status, included goods for the deceased.

Beginning in the New Kingdom, books of the dead were included in the grave, along with shabti statues that were believed to perform manual labor for them in the afterlife. Rituals in which the deceased was magically re-animated accompanied burials. After burial, living relatives were expected to occasionally bring food to the tomb and recite prayers on behalf of the deceased. Military The ancient Egyptian military was responsible for defending Egypt against foreign invasion, and for maintaining Egypt's domination in the ancient Near East.

The military protected mining expeditions to the Sinai during the Old Kingdom and fought civil wars during the First and Second Intermediate Periods. The military was responsible for maintaining fortifications along important trade routes, such as those found at the city of Buhen on the way to Nubia. Forts also were constructed to serve as military bases, such as the fortress at Sile, which was a base of operations for expeditions to the Levant.

In the New Kingdom, a series of pharaohs used the standing Egyptian army to attack and conquer Kush and parts of the Levant. The history of Italian translation practice has its own peculiarities that contribute to create a multifaceted reality which makes it hard sometimes to try and fit all the details within the framework of a smooth, unequivocal interpretation. In Italy, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti , the founder of the artistic 40 and social movement of Futurism, began a campaign against translations in the s, during the fascist government, attacking publishers who imported foreign literature in newspaper articles and regional conferences.

In January , Gherardo Casini, Director General for the Italian press at the Minculpop Ministry of Popular Culture sent a telegram to publishers requiring them to send him, as a matter of urgency, a list of their foreign works in print and those planned for the future ibid. A census of translations had begun. All proposals for translation now had to be given explicit approval by officials from Minculpop. The two-volume anthology was due to be published by Bompiani in as part of a series of world literature, but the then Minister of Culture, Alessandro Pavolini, decided against it.

As he explains in a letter to Valentino Bompiani in Talbot I remain however of the opinion that the publication at this time, of the American anthology is inopportune. The United States are a potential enemy. The attitude of their president towards the Italian people is well known. It is not the time for courtesies towards America, not even literary ones. Furthermore, the anthology would only refocus the excessive enthusiasm for recent American literature, which is a fashion to be discouraged.

The anthology was eventually published in after the suppression of all the footnotes and was published in its restored form only in But alongside this reality, it is worth noting other episodes. Ironically, the same book could not be published in democratic Britain until the s. US authorities burned copies of Ulysses on the dockside in , while Antonio Pizzuto, an Italian 8 This linguistic operation, promoted by the fascist government, is more thoroughly dealt with in section 3.

The cultural censorship of the fascist state was certainly more open to Modernism and experimentation than that of the Catholic Church or of the Nazi government. It is in this context that we should examine the complexities of the relationship between fascism and censorship, a relationship which can be traced to the birth of the audiovisual industry in Italy and which has left a legacy in shaping the practice of dubbing in Italy to this day.

THE TRANSLATION OF CULTURAL REFERENCES IN THE

Both had a very long history in the country. Preventive censorship had been practised extensively by the Catholic Church, especially from the Council of Trent onwards. On one hand, it showed an attitude of strict refusal to accept cinema in particular and entertainment shows in general, as occasions and places of vice and immorality. This attitude was particularly diffused at the intermediate level of the church hierarchies, for example that of suburban parochial press.

So it is for man. On the other hand, religious authorities could be more open and tolerant provided that films were inspired by moral principles Brunetta Pope Pius XI in his encycliclal of 21st December , Divini illius magistri, warned about the dangers of, among others, cinema shows, but also encouraged the possibility to act through these new media to educate people and give them moral guidance by producing morally edifying theatre and cinema shows Pio XI In the 20th century, the first legislative measures on censorship arrived shortly after the circulation of the first audiovisual products.

In , a disposition of the Ministero degli Interni [Home Affairs] gave the prefects the faculty of authorising or rejecting public screenings. A few years later, on the 20th February , a memorandum from the Prime Minister, Giovanni Giolitti,10 gave the prefects the necessary details on the criteria to use in granting or refusing the authorisations for films to be screened. This text is very important because it is the first that gives explicit indications on the nature of the prohibitions, and it is remarkable because it already contains two fundamental principles of the type of control which was going to be exerted from then on: It is equally interesting to note that the provisions perceived that, unlike other modes 10 Giovanni Giolitti was the Prime Minister of Italy for five times until At the end of his last mandate Giolitti tolerated the actions of the fascist squadre, private armies engaged in brutal repression and violence, believing that their violence would finally be reabsorbed by the democratic system.

A few months after the Giolitti memorandum, censorship was given a proper legislative organisation. It carried out an operation of cleansing the films it examined, a task which contributed to conditioning the evolution of the Italian language from the very beginning of cinema see section 3. The Law of the 25th June , n. This way, it was the Ministero degli Interni which censored films.

A Regio Decreto-Legge of the 9th October , n. The Regio Decreto-Legge of the 22nd April , n. This was to be composed not only of public security officers which went from 4 to 2 members but also of a judge, a mother of children, an expert in artistic and literary matters, a publicist, and a member to be chosen from among educators or representatives of humanitarian associations for the moral protection of people, young people in particular.

For the first time, policemen became a minority on the board and, even if all the other members were to be nominated by the Ministero degli Interni, censorship showed a sign of opening up, in a slightly more liberal sense, to artistic demands. This evolution towards a more liberal system would be brutally interrupted by fascism. When, in October , fascism came to power, it inherited a sufficiently repressive body of legislation. Nonetheless, the new government felt the need to make it stricter and it was the Prime Minister himself, Benito Mussolini, who proposed the adoption of new bills.

The Regio Decreto-Legge of the 24th September 44 , n. The document reiterated the existence of a double censorship — on screenplays and on finished films — and the obligation to submit a project for censorship revision before and after the film was shot. Censorship was always based on ethical criteria on one hand, and on political criteria on the other.

What was completely different now was the way in which censorship actually worked and how the control commission was composed. In fact, the latter continued to exist only in the case of appeals. In ordinary practice, screenplays and films were to be revised by individual executives and officers of the Ministero degli Interni, thus essentially by public security people.

This was a very significant change. The mildly liberal turn taken by the former government in choosing people who were not politicians or policemen was then nullified Gili After the fundamental change, the alterations made in the following years were more limited and concerned mainly the composition of the control commission.

Following the protests from various sectors of society — cinema professionals, intellectuals, and catholics from whose ranks the mother and the member belonging to the world of education and the humanitarian organisations usually came —, the first degree commission for the control of screenplays and films was restored in , after only one year of having been abolished. And though it became stricter and more repressive through each successive stage of legislation, its oscillations also reveal interesting tendencies and the two souls of the fascist government: The modifications of the Law of 24th June , n.

On the other hand, it clearly sought to give itself a better professional base by nominating representatives of the Istituto Luce,11 of Enac Ente Nazionale per la Cinematografia [National Board for Cinematography] and two people who were competent in cinematographic matters. The professional turn, though, was soon abandoned, and the following laws, until , were all in the direction of a more thorough politicisation of the commission and thus of the practice of censorship.

With the Law of 10th January , n. It later became a fiction film production and distribution company. As well as keeping up with these activities, it is today an important historical archive of audiovisual materials. To sum up, the legislation on censorship mainly evolved in only one direction. From to , the various Decreti-Legge [law decrees] gave more and more power to censors who were recruited from the ranks of officers of some Ministries, and to the representatives of organisms directly linked to the regime, like the Fascist Party and the Fascist University Groups.

Cinema enjoyed very little freedom and, as argued by Gili As always, actual practice reveals a more multi-faceted reality than the formal, written legislation might suggest. It is first of all necessary to make a distinction between the period in which Ministero degli Interni dealt directly with censorship issues and the period when they were ruled by the Ministero di Cultura Popolare [Ministry of Popular Culture], namely between and This distinction is very important because the State changed its attitude from Whilst the censors were controlled by the Ministero degli Interni, the negative side of censorship dominated; but with the creation of the Sottosegretariato di Stato per la Stampa e la Propaganda [State Undersecretariat for Press and Propaganda], the idea of a form of censorship which would not only control and prohibit once the film was finished but which could also propose, encourage, shape and give a precise direction, started to circulate.

Luigi Freddi, who was nominated Direttore Generale per la Cinematografia [General Director for Cinematography] in , was the champion of such a policy. This practice was criticised by Freddi as too tolerant. He saw the advantages of a full preventive censorship from the very 12 Luigi Freddi is a leading figure in the history of Italian cinema. He was a journalist and had been connected to the movement of Futurism. From until he was the first General Director for Cinematography. After September he moved to Venice where he continued his relentless activity as an organiser of cinema productions.

After the war, in , he wrote a book of memoirs in two volumes, Il Cinema, including various official documents, which is an invaluable source for the history of cinematography. Even if he had great respect and admiration for the Hays code,13 what Freddi had in mind was especially the German system, because it privileged the political aspect of censorship, as he thought censorship was essentially a political institution.

The content of these first fiction films was generally based on classical works of literature, the words of explanation or dialogue in the intertitles were limited to just a few and the attention of public and reviewers seemed very much captured by the music played by the orchestras in the background Quargnolo With the arrival of sound films, also known as talkies, in in the USA and in in Italy, the situation changed. The mainstay of the Italian fascist political economy was its drive for autarchy, that is, for an economic self-sufficiency and independence from foreign cultural influence.

The answer of the authorities to the threat of the possible penetration of films spoken in foreign languages was a total prohibition on screening them in Italy. From to the absence or the purely experimental character of dubbing gave way to incredible solutions and many sound films were actually muted and screened without sound.

According to Gili The problem was finally solved when dubbing became technically viable in The films were then dubbed into Italian either in their original country, normally the USA, or in Italy. But the government was quick to react and the Regio Decreto-Legge of 5th October , n. The government could, from then on, exert without difficulty a linguistic control which aimed first of all at the disappearance of Italian dialects, regionalisms and accents in the final dubbed version.

US films — the majority of the films imported — were to be dubbed in an abstract Italian, thus contributing to the effort of cultural homogenisation and regional uprooting which was one of the aims of fascism. From this point of view, as pointed out by Gili This system was ideological in design because it enacted an ongoing imperative of fascist cultural policy, i. Indeed, dubbing attempted to protect the Italian public from exposure to foreign influence through the manipulation of language and images, and in this respect it can be seen as the cinematic equivalent to the central goal of the Istituto Nazionale Fascista di Cultura [Fascist National Institute of Culture], founded in The ideological character of the state-mandated dubbing cannot be overstated.

Such was the force of the purification campaign that even in the face of extreme technical limitations the dubbing requirement always remained in place. Once the technical infrastructure was set up, dubbing became a very effective vehicle for mediating between the ideological mandates of fascism and the commercial interests of the film industry.

The case of The Adventures of Marco Polo Archie Mayo, illustrates the balance between political and economic imperatives. When Luigi Freddi, after a long disagreement with the Minister of Popular Culture, left his position as General Director for Cinema in , cultural transformations were also beginning to affect the general debate on censorship. There was a new generation of artists and intellectuals, even within the fascist structures, whom the regime had difficulty keeping under control. The industry journals Cinema and Bianco e Nero published articles which questioned the conformism of Italian film production, and a slow evolution of censorship policies in a more liberal sense was soon under way Gili This new turn was favoured by political events such as Italy being at war and Mussolini approaching his fall and being thus weaker and less alert.

It is worth mentioning here the different but parallel situations in the other two large European countries under dictatorship, united by similar protectionist and linguistic preoccupations: Its main goal was to reduce the pernicious influence that foreign and national cinema could exert on the education and thought of the masses. And, as in Italy, dubbing had to be carried out by firms based on Spanish territory and by Spanish nationals.

In this country too, the law aimed at the homogenisation of the Castillian national language by not only prohibiting foreign languages on screen but also by eliminating virtually any expression in Catalan, Galician or Basque. On the 31st December , following the general discontent of intellectuals against dubbing and in an attempt to highlight the intention of the government, after the defeat of European fascism, to be seen as detaching itself from any link to authoritarian regimes, dubbing ceased to be compulsory.

Nevertheless, a general public taste had been formed and dubbing continues to this day to be preferred by Spanish audiences, despite a recent surge in subtitling provision. With the arrival of democracy, censorship was abolished in The Nazi law on cinema of 16th February submitted all films — and all screenplays before them — to a strict censorship control concerned with linguistic purity and especially content.

Cinema as art and entertainment - Cinema as an industry For more than a century, images of America have exerted their charisma on Italian imagination. It was initially brought to Italy in the form of news and letters from the over four million immigrants who arrived in the United States between and Its preeminence within the Italian society remains strong to the present day and is immediately recognisable by the dominance of American audiovisual programmes in both Italian cinemas and television channels. Fascist cultural practices and the pervasive presence of American culture were then two of the most visibile components of the social lexicon available to audiences during the fascist ventennio.

The state, Mussolini and Hollywood were the paradigmatic authorities for both cultural production and cultural reading in the period Ricci As pointed out by Talbot Newspapers were then advised not to publish articles about Hollywood because, in the words of Gaetano Polverelli in Tranfaglia There was no national film industry. In this general atmosphere, public taste turned most naturally to Hollywood. American films flooded into the country, introducing a thrill of modernisation which crossed all class and regional divisions.

American film distribution networks expanded rapidly in the s attracting investment and loans from American banks. The Fox Corporation was the first to set up offices in Italy, in MGM followed, establishing a distribution office in Rome in , thus facilitating the penetration of American films into the Italian marketplace. Italian production companies became dependent on American technology, especially once the talkies arrived in The American studios were able to increase the foreign market share by using domestic revenue to subsidise overseas sales.

All this, 16 It is one of the customary ways in which historians refer to the period Italy was ruled by the fascist government of Mussolini, which lasted roughly twenty years, between and He went on to become Minister for Popular Culture in The first move of the fascist state was the nationalisation of the Istituto Luce in November , which had the task of producing news, propaganda, education and culture for the home market. This was quite different from the traditional strategy of focusing on film production as entertainment. The support made available to production companies was modest and, with isolated exceptions, at the beginning there was little or no interest shown by the fascist hierarchy in cinema.

Certainly, there was no strategic plan. Unlike the early grasp of other cultural industries, such as books and newspapers,18 more than a decade would pass before the fascist state took any significant control over the production and distribution of fiction films, as focus in the early years was centred on non-fiction and newsreels. A number of recent studies have analysed the apparently anomalous relationship between this totalitarian regime and cinema. Even though fascism intended to tackle the problem since the mids, it could not create a fascist art which could break away from the forms of tradition.

Besides, in the early years, the need to consolidate power meant that the government neglected the intellectual and artistic fields. The censorial apparatus was managed and controlled almost personally by Mussolini and all cultural activities were sidelined, priority being given to the establishment of order and the reinforcement of power. In a way one could say that, in history, the policeman preceded the teacher, because when the arm is not provided with a pair of safe manacles, laws remain just dead and cowardly words.

Six months later it called for the establishment of an Italian Academy. In , the Federazione Italiana delle Biblioteche Popolari — the sprawling network of left-leaning local libraries — was placed under direct fascist control. In the same year, a special commission on fascist education banned of the history textbooks that were being used in Italian classrooms. And, by the end of , all major non-fascist newspapers had been totally suppressed.

Fascism started to get interested in cinema in a systematic and important way after the period of squadrism of the s,19 when it sought the support of a few intellectuals. These helped to project a new, interclassist image of fascism and sought the middle classes as privileged interlocutors.

It was at this moment that fascism started to intervene in cinema with a series of provisions and aids to the industry, provisions which were quite useful to give credit to the open and tolerant image that the regime assumed in those years, and which somehow were in contrast with the repressive legislation on censorship which, as discussed above, was being developed. In the preceding years, the political and cultural landscape was quite varied and it is not possible to judge it uniformly Brunetta The creation of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia marked a turning point in the transformation of the attitude of the regime towards cinema.

The fundamental need was to create, through a directly controlled structure, its own cadres, able to respond to the necessities of a political cinema and to answer to the demands of the highest echelons of government, in an attempt to mirror the model of contemporary Nazi cinema operating since the beginning of its coming to power in Luigi Chiarini was the first director of the Centro and, in spite of being a member of the party, he showed an extraordinary openness from the beginning, nominating teachers who had different political views from those of fascism.

In spite of the efforts of the regime, young talents used the tools provided by the new structure as a weapon for the construction of an opposition to the regime itself. It was one of the few moments in the Italian cultural life which saw the formation of a homogeneous group of intellectuals since the work of the Centro was founded most 19 See note Italian on film The passage from silent to sound movies can be considered a revolution both from a sociolinguistic standpoint and from the point of view of the power of cinema to influence and to represent a dominant linguistic model for the language of the Italian people.

When the industry took the first steps in sound cinema at the end of the s, a fifth of the Italian population was illiterate. And for twenty years afterwards dialect would be, for four Italians out of five, the normal form of communication. As discussed by Brunetta The language used in the translations of American films started to create the reference model for spoken Italian.

It is thanks to the cinema, and to dubbing in particular, that a certain way of speaking and communicating became common in language, losing gradually its direct affiliation to the more formal language of theatre and literature. According to data presented by De Mauro For a large portion of the Southern population, sound cinema was then the first source for learning the national language. Radio and television show the same characteristics, but their percentages are even higher: The problem of linguistic correctness started to be felt with the arrival of an industrially and culturally significant cinema, that is, with the passage from short to medium and long feature films, in the s.

As films became longer, intertitles were also longer and more frequent, sometimes ridden with linguistic mistakes. These are for example the words of a reader of La Grande Italia, a weekly magazine, who in perfectly anticipates the linguistic xenophobia of the fascist ventennio. So we see that dear police [in English in the text] popping up everywhere in capital letters, and those signs, those notices written in any language but ours in Raffaelli They usually rejected dialectal solutions as a way to translate the linguistic varieties of the original works.

Freddi , for example, had an early phobia of dialects and vehemently opposed regionalisms and foreign words in favour of a more standard Italian. The suppression of accent and dialect in the Italian cinema during the s provides an essential background to understanding why the national cinema of neorealism, developed between the s and the s, was considered a radical break from the past. The attitude of the fascist government was matched by other political and sociocultural pressures.

One has only to remember the press campaign against foreignisms and dialects, which started in and went on until the years of the Second World War. Another linguistic target of the fascist government were address forms. As documented by Raffaelli ibid. The polite pronoun lei was banned from use on 11th April , a provision which concerned all state employees; from June of the same year the prohibition was extended to the cinema, so lei started to be excluded from both national and foreign productions.

Another law from 9th June prohibited children from being given foreign names, which led to the preoccupation of Italianising the names of characters in films. In April , Bianco e nero published a long article by Ettore Allodoli on Italian language in cinema. His judgement is generally positive regarding Italian films but is quite critical of the dubbing of foreign films. This position was completely reversed in an article written the following year.

In April , on La lettura, the monthly magazine of the Corriere della sera, an article by Ettore Allodoli The opportune official dispositions on the abolition of lei and on the use of voi and of tu have concluded an interesting debate where the three famous monosyllables have each stepped forward to say, to defend, to demonstrate their verbal personality. Lei has been defeated, and rightly so, and its disappearance is an affirmation of cameratismo [fascist comradeship] and of sharing of a faith which binds together in the expressions of speech and writing so many millions of Italians.

In the period between the two articles, as the author himself remembers, one of the most important linguistic attacks of fascism had taken place. It all started on 15th January , when an article by Bruno Cicognani appeared in the Corriere della sera. Fascist Italy was encouraged to abandon the use of lei, considered a testimony of 56 centuries of slavery and abjection, and to go back to the Roman and Christian tu, and to the voi as a mark of respect and acknowledgement of hierarchy.

While it is doubtful that this new habit was actually followed in the daily use of Italian, the cinema was quick to react and eliminated immediately this criticised form, even though it was not the object of direct provisions on this particular theme. From then on only voi could be heard on the screens. In , the critic Giacomo Debenedetti in Briareo and Debenedetti On the other hand Alberto Savinio in Raffaelli There is the impression that dubbing has been minimally influenced, from the post-war years till recently, by 20 As Migliorini has demonstrated, the influence of Spanish actually reinforced, but did not originate, the use of the polite lei.

They dubbed and acted their lines in various languages, including Italian, as in Pardon Us by James Parrot, their first long-length feature film. Their Italian was of course mispronounced to say the least. The original Italian cinema has indeed experimented over the decades with various linguistic solutions: Nonetheless, Italian dubbing remained virtually unaltered, both in the cinema and on television until the beginning of the s. Only then can we register a remarkable turning point in dubbing, when dialects started to appear in the translation of the big American productions.

So, since , the linguistic gap between national productions and foreign imported productions has not been as wide as in the previous decades As documented by Raffaelli, this general outline of dubbing in Italy has its twists and turns: Sometimes, art house films distributed by minor distribution companies also resorted to this linguistic strategy Il trono di sangue [Throne of Blood], Akira Kurosawa, ; in the same way as some coproductions, like the French-Italian La pila della Peppa Le Magot de Josefa, Claude Autant-Lara, , which is set in France and where Anna Magnani speaks with a Roman accent ibid.: A notable example of these temporary digressions into non-standard forms of Italian is the following: But this is an animation film, so the impact was far less shocking than that exerted by the realistic setting and characters of The Godfather.

Augusto, who dubs James Stewart in the film, speaks a remarkably exotic Italian, the language of someone who has lived in the United States all his life. The effect is definitely foreign, but as the story is set in Budapest, the exoticism is not disturbing and is somehow in the nature of the film. And yet, the examples above are only a handful of exceptions in the history of dubbing in Italy prior to the seventies.

THE TRANSLATION OF CULTURAL REFERENCES IN THE

Overall, dialects and less formal linguistic expressions gained ground only after the s and are sometimes used today especially in comedy but also in dramatic films for the cinema as well as in television series. Although it can be considered a practice similar to voiceover in the sense that the original soundtrack is affected in the process, dubbing is, however, different from voiceover in two respects. First, because the original soundtrack containing the dialogue is totally erased and substituted by a new one in the target language TL. As in other forms of AVT — namely subtitling, surtitling, voiceover, interpreting and audio description — dubbing texts present an interrelation of two main different codes, the visual and the auditory, which in turn give rise to four communicative dimensions that need to be considered when translating: What changes in comparison with other forms of AVT is the type of relationship established among the different codes.

Lip sync is generally regarded as one of the strongest constraints for dubbing translators: Another important type of synchrony is the kinesic or body movement synchrony which seeks to come up with a translation that is in tune with the movements of the actors ibid.: Similarly, in his analysis of five dubbed films into French, Goris finds considerable variation in the behaviour of adapters concerning lip sync. On the whole, close phonetic lip sync occured in variable percentages, which are often very low.

Over the years, dubbing for cinema in Italy has changed substantially in the area which Chaume In this respect, dubbing practice has developed a marked tendency to imitate the vocal properties of the original voices, a feature which was not present in the early decades of this professional practice. Although this aspect has not been discussed in depth in the relevant literature, this evolution is, in my opinion, a fundamental dividing line between films that were dubbed before and after roughly the s.

More importantly, this dubbing trend has given rise to a schism between dubbing for cinema and dubbing for television, in the sense that mimicking the vocal qualities of the original actors does not seem to be a translational priority on TV. Birignao makes voices sound artificial, affected and only mockingly elegant. It is a dubbing mannerism which has still many aficionados among film lovers but is now out of fashion. The current trend in cinema today, and for many years now, has been to choose dubbing actors who are even physically close to the original actors in order to reproduce their tone of voice as faithfully as possible.

Such is the case, for example, of the unique voice adopted by Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump Robert Zemekis, , whose typical mannerisms and tone were seamlessly reproduced by Francesco Pannofino. In the particular case of dubbing, this perception is also mirrored in the way the professional practice is conducted, with the dichotomy between the figures of the translator and the dialogue writers or adapters.

The former are the first to tackle the language transfer of the dialogue and generally have a tendency to stick to a more semantic translation, while the latter are traditionally perceived — by the general public and even by themselves — as freer from the constraints of semantics and, at the same time, more bound by the technical constraints and synchronies of dubbing. The result is that adapters often change greatly the text of the translations provided by the translators.

Translation for dubbing, as well as for subtitling, has always been the work of a team and the individual role played by any of the professionals involved is generally difficult to ascertain. On many occasions, the researcher can only guess what the individual contributions may have been. Outside inner professional circles and apart from occasional interviews, little is known about who the actual translators of the films are in Italy, how many there are and how the translation work is distributed among them. This invisibility of the translators makes it difficult to embark on a potentially interesting line of research, that is, one which would compare the actual translation carried out by the translator with the final version the audience hears on the screen Adaptation is generally perceived by some professionals in the dubbing industry as a more prestigious task than translation, to the point that many Italian adapters often refuse to be considered translators and prefer to emphasise the artistic, creative and, to some extent, the most glamorous aspects of their professional activity ibid.: This is generally an attitude taken by adapters who are not 26 Outside Italy, this topic has been explored by Richart Marset Such 27 62 translators and may have a limited knowledge of the source language, which in Italy happens to be the case most of the time.

Pavesi and Perego ibid.: The case of Tonino Accolla, one of the most prestigious Italian adapters, and one who would be on top of the hierarchical structure of dubbing professionals that Pavesi and Perego ibid.: As well as being one of the most popular dubbing actors, having lent his voice to actors such as Jim Carrey, Eddie Murphy, Mickey Rourke, Kenneth Branagh and Homer Simpson, to name but a few of his impersonations, he is also in great demand as a dubbing director and adapter. His credits as a dialogue writer of Italian dubbed films are not limited to blockbusters and include for example a Shakespearean production such as Looking for Richard Riccardo III — Un uomo, un re, Al Pacino, In a personal communication, Tonino Accolla May acknowledges that he has never studied English formally, that his knowledge of the language has been acquired over the years and cannot be defined as proficient, and that he uses a pool of translators and advisers to translate the scripts that he later adapts.

It is evident that the adaptation process in Italy is traditionally associated with a creative work which enjoys great freedom. A quotation from the cited study by Pavesi and Perego The peculiarity of this profession is evident also in its history: Back in Italy after the Second World War, they were among the very few people capable of dealing with a foreign language and with foreign American producers Paolinelli and Di Fortunato, Furthermore, they were the right people in the right place: Although the authors go on to state that the family-business nature of the professional field of adapters was apparent especially in the past ibid.: The situation may be more varied today, especially in the case of dubbing for television, with smaller companies springing up every day, but it still remains closed, as most of the dubbing directors and adapters in charge of these companies are professionals often also dubbing actors who have worked in the field for years.

One of the goals of this work is to detect any technical or ideological manipulation which some of the strategies used by the adapters might reveal. The legislation which rules its activities fundamentally dates back to , the year in which law on the revision of films and plays was approved. Censorship is mainly concerned with the protection of minors and after its verdict distributors have twenty days to make an appeal or make the necessary cuts to the film. Television policies on the other hand are not so overtly and uniformly regulated and, because of this, censorship and manipulation in this medium are slippery notions.

By looking into the different translation strategies applied, the task ahead will be to detect whether these may reflect some type of technical or ideological manipulation in varying contexts. Web 21 see also Mereu Source culture references Intercultural references Third culture references Target culture references Overt intertextual allusions Covert intertextual allusions Intertextual macroallusions Nonverbal cultural references Asynchronous references Strategies for the translation of culture specific references 4.

In what follows, an overview is offered of the most relevant academic approaches to these cultural elements, which have been referred to using a vast array of terms: Culture specific or, interchangeably, culture-bound is the preferred definition of this kind of elements in this work, although the more general term of cultural references may occasionally be used. One of the earliest scholars who attempted to pinpoint the characteristics of CS terms and expressions is Finkel Only a few years later, Vlahov and Florin Thus, this apparently straightforward definition is actually problematic.

Every language has words denoting concepts and things that another language has not considered worth mentioning, or that are absent from the life or consciousness of the other nation. The reasons are differences in the ways of life, traditions, beliefs, historical developments — in one word, the cultures of the nations. Also, differences can be observed on conceptual level. Different languages often nominate concepts from different viewpoints, and they also tend to classify them slightly differently. Although Leemets focuses more generally on all lexical gaps between two languages, her emphasis on culture makes the quotation perfectly suitable to culture-bound material.

This definition is particularly useful because, by referring to the degree of opacity, Mailhac emphasises how the interpretation of cultural references is characterised by a varying degree of subjectivity. His mention of the distance between TC and SC indicates the relativity of the concept, which is the main cause of the difficulty in finding univocal and unambiguous strategies for the translation of these references.

It can also be safely stated that the understanding of these particular elements may constitute a problem even for a part of the SA or readership since not all people from a given country or community will necessarily know the meaning of a given reference, even if it is supposed to belong to their own culture. His definition clearly states how the translation problems may stem from two different situations: The latter situation is relative as the intertextual status keeps shifting and varying, because the relationship between two cultures can change in a very short period of time.

Hence, the translation strategies used at some point in time may not be appropriate at other time. The problems of translating CSRs are also underlined by the influential scholar Leppihalme The author goes on to state that her focus is less on allusions as a literary phenomenon and more on them as a translation problem requiring the use of appropriate translation strategies.

The great quantity of examples she provides shows that what Leppihalme means by allusions is a wide range of possibilities from simple quotations which may or may not be obscure to the TC or even the SC to more oblique hints. Since the s, the growing interest of researchers in audience reception and in the role of the reader has made this a particular relevant point Leppihalme Readers who recognise a creative allusion, i.

It is often a kind of appeal to a reader to share some experience with the writer […]. For her part, Ruokonen On the whole, it seems that the overlap between the three concepts of allusion, quotation and culture-specific item is more of [sic] a question of delimitation keeping the material manageable than of definition establishing essential differences between the concepts. Although, as we have seen, Leppihalme awards the term allusion a wide scope, making it coincide in fact with CSRs, it is also true that the focus of her study appears to be limited to literary references.

The definition by Cuddon quoted above also supports the view that the term allusion is privileged when made in connection with literary or, more broadly, artistic works. Without theoretically excluding other objects i. Allusions create two kinds of links in the extratextual world: She goes on to write that cultural elements are: One of the downsides is that the groupings she proposes are quite generic.

However, her analysis becomes far more interesting when she underlines the importance of the 70 context in understanding these elements and when she draws our attention to the references which are shared by the SC and the TC, which makes them less exclusively rooted in the SC ibid.: She also contends that the cultural power that some cultures exert on others — for example the ubiquitous USA culture on the rest of the world — may contribute to reducing the cultural gap between two given cultures.

In chapter 3, I discussed the historic pervasiveness of the US culture in Italy and witin the field of cinema in particular. Always in the field of audiovisuals but in reference to subtitling, Santamaria Guinot Although the focus of this definition is on elements created within a given culture, the author also calls the attention to the fact that all cultural references should be taken into account when conducting an analysis, and not only those which can diverge between the SC and the TC ibid.: In the discussion of these items, and again in a study on subtitling, Pedersen Extralinguistic Culture-bound Reference ECR is defined as reference that is attempted by means of any culture-bound linguistic expression, which refers to an extralinguistic entity or process, and which is assumed to have a discourse referent that is identifiable to relevant audience as this referent is within the encyclopedic knowledge of this audience.

The term extralinguistic would in fact exclude not only the linguistic features mentioned by the author but also expressions relative to concepts and customs — i. The difference which does exist between this kind of intertextual — but intralinguistic — references and the other types of CSRs will be discussed more thoroughly in the following sections of this chapter.

These items create networks of associations which are specific to the culture in which they are rooted. The fruition of cultural elements is based on shared experiences and this is the first reason for the difficulties encountered when translating them. Besides, seeing that cultures are dynamic systems, the complexity of the translation process is emphasised by the fact that these networks of semantic and intertextual associations are continually changing ibid.: CSRs are entities that are typical of one particular culture, and that culture alone, and they can be either exclusively or predominantly visual an image of a local or national figure, a local dance, pet funerals, baby showers , exclusively verbal or else both visual and verbal in nature.

This definition is important as she is one of the few scholars to address explicitly the visual, and not exclusively verbal, nature of some CSRs; a concept which has been somehow taken for granted by AVT scholars in their definitions of these elements. In the late s and s, it became essential thanks to the work of culturalist scholars who stressed how there is always a context in which a translation occurs, 72 Pym mainly refers, films are the product of a specific context and this is evident not only in the verbal language used but also in the components that make part of the image: Thus the concept of belonging refers to a complex network of relations which links the original film to its context of production.

This raises the issue of cultural specificity and of its transfer into another sociocultural universe. The privileged relationship between author and SA allows the latter to understand all or almost all of the signs contained in the text. Nonetheless, the problems linked to the necessity of blending harmoniously the different communication channels and the different filmic codes Chaume are still highly relevant and can be considered to be most peculiar of AVT when compared to other types of translation.

Vocabulary is a very sensitive index of the culture of a people and changes of the meaning, loss of old words, the creation and borrowing of new ones are all dependent on the history of culture itself. Languages differ widely in the nature of their vocabularies. Distinctions which seem inevitable to us may be ignored in languages which reflect an entirely different type of culture, while these in turn insist on distinctions which are all but intelligible to us. Thus, every language has different semantic ranges and different ways of grouping objects and concepts.

If this is true for the general vocabulary, it is even truer for culture specific vocabulary which carries with it a whole world of concepts and associations. Some of the leading scholars who have dealt with the study of CSRs always a history from which a text emerges and into which a text is transposed Bassnett and Lefevere From a translational perspective, taxonomies of CSRs have also been put forward by various scholars, including some of the ones whose definitions have been discussed in the previous section.

The cultural categories proposed by Newmark They are based on various lexical fields associated to a culture specific lexicon: Other authors provide even more general lists divided into various categories. For example, Bugarski Geographical references - Objects from physical geography: Endemic animal and plant species: Ethnografic references - Objects from daily life: References to art and culture: Socio-political references - References to administrative or territorial units: References to socio-cultural life: Ku Klux Klan, Prohibition, landed gentry.

References to military institutions and objects: A less systematic list is included in Pedersen He goes on to foreground ibid.: Weights and measures Proper names divided into Personal names; Geographical names; Institutional names; and Brand names 3. Food and beverages 5.

For instance, why are only professional titles considered and not other forms of allocutions? Why literature and not the visual arts? Nonetheless, it is important when he emphasises that although these categories overlap to a certain extent and thus compiling an exhaustive taxonomy is probably utopian and futile, domains are still useful if employed more generally to explain subtitling behaviour ibid.: In other words, taxonomies cannot be used to determine without ambiguity whether a given element belongs to one particular category or another, but they can be very useful to analyse the nature of CSRs.

That is the case of references which today can be considered universally known. The second parameter proposed by Pedersen ibid.: It refers to references which either on a macro or micro level, or both, are central to the text, i. This centrality obviously influences the choices of the translators. The four following parameters proposed by Pedersen ibid.: In dubbing, intersemiotic redundancy is rarely an influencing parameter as theoretically all the verbal information can be translated. In dubbing, all redundancies are theoretically translated and any manipulation or elimination are due to considerations which are in fact the object of the present analysis.

This parameter, however, may also be applied to dubbing in the form of lip sync and isochrony see section 3. The final parameter quoted by Pedersen ibid.: TTaudience related issues such as age groups, familiarity of the audience with the main theme of the programmes, and so on; broadcasting-related issues such as the nature of the broadcaster, the time of programming, and so on; and issues related to pragmatic matters such as deadlines and remuneration of the translators.

Interestingly, Chiaro considers three macro-categories of which only the first one directly refers to CSRs. However, the third one, the areas of overlap between language and culture, is also related to cultural elements. To my knowledge, she is the first scholar in AVT to tackle the problem, however in passing, of the difficult categorisation of some cultural elements due to their linguistic nature, and not, as they are customarily defined, extra-linguistic nature.

In an earlier study quoted in Chiaro , Antonini and Chiaro Institutions including judiciary, police, military: Supreme Court, Grand Jury, Court, etc. Two ounces of meat, pounds, twenty yards, etc. Dollars, soldes, pounds, etc. National sports and pastimes: American football, baseball, basketball teams: The Nicks, Boston, Brooklyn Dodgers, etc. Books, films and TV programmes: As with Pedersen above, abstract taxonomies are replaced by more practical tools for analysis. The need for a functional division into domains that might help define the nature of the CSRs analysed in the present corpus has also guided my attempts to find a suitable classification, which will be discussed in the next section.

Moreover, although most scholars stress that culture-specificity depends on the relationship between SC and TC, the relative nature of this relationship does not 78 appear to be reflected in their lists, which consider the elements as specific of a single culture and objectively problematic. The taxonomy proposed in this thesis is mainly concerned with conceptual rather than lexical groupings and, as in the cases of Pedersen and Chiaro above, is meant to be used as a practical tool for analysis.

It is an attempt to account for frequent overlappings between categories and has been primarily conceived by taking the point of view of the TA in its relationship with the SC text.