Analysis of 2012 Presidential Campaign Adverstising Research Paper

Investigation of 2012 Presidential Campaign Adverstising - Research Paper Example The 2012 world of politics was a strained one with Obama and Romney attempting to paint the different as an inappropriate man for the American administration. While Obama concentrated following right after him record which was truly great to show the American voter that he was the most ideal possibility for the activity, he utilized Romney’s Wall Street record and job in the 2008 world downturn to toss mud unto his rival . His position was a fragile one since, however he had figured out how to see to the end of the vast majority of America's issues, he had tossed his nation into its most prominent obligation ever. It was a fragile adjusting of influence that necessary him to persuade the American voter that even with the colossal obligation he had made for the nation; he required more cash to reduce a large portion of the populace from the issues it looked in its day by day jobs. His battle adverts along these lines concentrated following right after him record and guarantee f or better days ahead. Then again, Mitt Romney had a harder errand before him regarding persuading the American voter that he couldn't just exceed Obama however he could change the authority of the nation and allow the normal American to make riches for themselves. His crusade adverts in this manner concentrated on the business part of America and Obama's shortcomings. The adverts by Romney's group along these lines took each word that Obama articulated and utilized it against the then officeholder president. The two candidates’ crusade adverts consequently had various subjects however their focal message was an incredible bettering . 3. Obama’s Adverts ‘Always’ The advert by Obama's crusade group named â€Å"Always† has the up-and-comer being referred to explaining an announcement he had said before on that on the off chance that somebody had assembled a business, it wasn’t from their sole endeavors however from the help of different Americans who endeavored to see to their fantasies. Romney’s group had deciphered that to imply that each American who claimed a business reserved no option to it. The fact of the matter was that Obama’s words implied that the American dream must be acknowledged by the solidarity and unity of direction that the residents have consistently appeared. It depicted him as a competitor whose focus on the American large number was a persevering and prosperous country portrayed by difficult work and paying special mind to one another4. ‘Firms’ This is an advert focused on Romney's record on Wall Street to the extent his private val ue firm and riches are concerned. Romney had not uncovered his riches and in this manner the battle intended to paint him as an adversary of the individuals who had individual points rather than Obama's open and real to life nature. The advert asserted that Romney had concealed riches in Bermuda, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. He was additionally blamed for having sent occupations to India when he was a senator for Massachusetts. These ‘hidden’ properties are supposedly intended to diminish the measure of assessment the American government gets from them. The voter hence has the thought that Romney is the adversary and not the companion since while they make good on charges; he shrouds his fortune in another nation and sends occupations abroad while the residents he

Male Dominance free essay sample

We live in a keeps an eye on world. Male commanded and controlled social orders. It may be the case that it has been a social custom, the man was given an all the more remarkable and powerful job in the network than ladies and it requires some investment for conventions to wear out. Or on the other hand it could be the topic of sexual orientation inclination, the conviction that man is more grounded and more astute, in this manner the undeniable decision for a pioneer. In â€Å"Girls at War† by Chinua Achebe and â€Å"The Collector of Treasures† by Bessie Head, the ruinous idea of a male centric culture is investigated through the story voice and the utilization of incongruity. In â€Å"Girls at War†, Achebe utilizes a third-individual and heterodiegetic storyteller. However, the voice is from a male viewpoint. The account centers around the character Reginald Nwankwo and his considerations and activities. This point of view doesnt straightforwardly tell about the damage of male strength, rather it is dependent upon the peruser to decipher the content and notice the destructions. We will compose a custom article test on Male Dominance or on the other hand any comparative subject explicitly for you Don't WasteYour Time Recruit WRITER Just 13.90/page Reginald Nwankwo looks at female association in the war to kids professing to be warriors. â€Å"He didnt question that the young ladies and ladies paid attention to themselves, they clearly did. Be that as it may, so did the little children who walked all over the boulevards at the time boring with sticks and wearing their moms soup bowls for steel caps. † (2-3). The ladies in this story are scrutinized by the men for being basic and for being what men have made them into, for their own pleasure. Nwankwo unmistakably shows his uncertainty around there when he muses that, â€Å"He may very well too laid down with a whore It was clear as sunshine to him since she was kept by some military official. What a horrendous change † (9). He thinks about the issue without the understanding his part in it. The issues with man centric society are plainly examined in Bessie Heads, â€Å"The Collector of Treasures†. This short story is additionally from a third-individual, heterodiegetic point of view, yet the account voice is female and straightforwardly goes up against the issue. The character, Dikeledi, voices her conclusion about the sort of male that spins out of control in their general public. One that, â€Å"created such hopelessness and tumult that he could be extensively cursed as evil† (162). Dikeledis spouse Garesego Mokopi is an ideal model a maltreatment of intensity and control. He doesnt care for his significant other yet cant handle the idea, â€Å"that another man had a stake in his hen-pen† (169), when he discovers that Dikeledis neighbor, Paul, has been exchanging family unit merchandise for her administrations, just accepting that Paul would just do as such, â€Å"for ladies they fuck† (169). These accounts are the two instances of how a male overwhelmed relationship or society dismisses the requirements of the ladies. Incongruity is utilized abundantly in both, â€Å"The Collector of Treasures† by Bessie Head and â€Å"Girls at War† by Chinua Achebe, to uncover the issues that emerge in a male ruled society. In â€Å"Girls at War†, ironicly Nwankwo is the one to make due toward the end while Gladys is murdered. Being a pioneer Nwankwo just attempted to secure himself, while Gladys courageously attempted to spare the youngster officer. There is a bounty of incongruity in the way that Nwankwo transparently condemns young ladies and their looking for, â€Å"shoes, wigs, pants, bras, beautifying agents and what have you †(7), yet it is actually what he anticipates that ladies should do. He needs Gladys to become, â€Å"the young lady in khaki pants that looked through him at the checkpoint..â † (7), however when he sees her made up in a, â€Å"high-tinted wig and an over the top expensive skirt and a low profile pullover. † (4), he considers her a, â€Å"beauty queen† (4). The situational incongruity in, â€Å"The Collector of Treasures†, is unmistakably appeared through how Dikeledi, â€Å"found gold in the midst of the ash† (161) and opportunity in jail however when she was legitimately free she felt limited by her significant other, Garesego. In jail, she is not, at this point a captive to men, rather, â€Å"male detainees gave every lady a plate of porridge and a cup of dark teaâ † (159), getting served by men. Taking everything into account, the risks of male strength are unmistakably represented in Bessie Heads, â€Å"The Collector of Treasures† and Chinua Achebes, â€Å"Girls at War†, using the story voice and incongruity. The two writings show the disappointment of the two people in a male centric culture and the breakdown of relationship it carries with it. The battle for equity, love and reason for existing is unmistakably appeared through the ladies in the accounts, while the men are appeared as childish and shallow in their predominance.

From Collecting Dots to Connecting Dots Using Mind Maps to Improve Memory and Learning

From Collecting Dots to Connecting Dots Using Mind Maps to Improve Memory and Learning Mind maps can improve memory and learning by helping students transition from collecting dots to connecting dots.  This postâ€"which was adapted from a talk given by Toni Krasnic at Biggerplate Unplugged 2016â€"examines the importance of learning how to learn. It provides a short overview of principles of memory and learning and effective learning techniques, and demonstrates how students can use mind maps to become more effective learners. You can watch the original talk on YouTube, view it as a mind map presentation, or simply keep reading: The Importance of Learning How to Learn The traditional education paradigm is focused on what students need to learn. Little emphasis, if any, is on training students how to learn. As a result, students focus on  memorizing information (collecting dots), and not on processing information, thinking critically, understanding, and meaningful learning (connecting dots). In a recent publication by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, the  authors examined whether students are really learning in college. Their study showed: 45% of college students made no significant improvement in critical thinking, reasoning or written communication skills during their first two years of college. After 4 years, 36% still showed no significant gains in these so-called higher order thinking skills. Key take-away: Teaching students how to learn is as important as teaching content (what to learn) in promoting lifelong learning. Learning and Memory Why do we remember some things and forget others? Memory is a very complex topic, and multiple different models have been developed to explain it. What seems almost certain, though, is that our ability to remember information  indefinitely has a lot to do with how we process that information. According to the well-known  information processing model  there are three key stages of memory: The first stage is sensory memory,  which is the split second encoding of all sensory information. Most of the information, however, is not encoded at all. Only what we pay attention to gets encoded. The second stage is short-term memory (or working memory), which is everything you’re thinking right now. Short-term is limited to around 7 bits of information (which, interestingly, is why phone numbers have 7 digits). It  usually fades within 30 seconds. Long-term memory, the third stage,  is limitless and relatively permanent, although it can also fade over time. To move information to long-term memory, information must be deeply processed (elaborate processing) through meaningful learning. If information is simply repeated (collecting dots), that information is only shallowly processed into memory. On the other hand, if information is given meaning while learning (new information is connected with existing knowledge, which requires thinking), then it is  deeply (elaborately) processed  into long-term memory. Key take-away: To achieve long-term memory, students need to focus on deep processing of information through meaningful learning. Discover online mind mapping! Learning Strategies that  Improve Memory and Learning In a recent study by Dunlosky et al., the authors reviewed the efficacy of 10 different learning strategies, some of which were already popular with students (such as highlighting and rereading texts) and others  which werent but had some initial evidence of effectiveness. The study found that the most effective learning strategies were practice testing and distributed practice, techniques rarely used by students. Interleaved practice, elaborate interrogation, and self-explanation also showed promise as effective learning strategies, whereas the least effective strategies turned out to be highlighting and rereading. Key take-away: Students need to focus  on effective learning techniques to improve memory and learning. Using Mind Maps to Improve  Memory and Learning Mind maps are diagrams that visually organize and connect concepts. They  provide a number of  key benefits for  learners: Visible thinking: your mind map provides insight into your thinking. Filtering of key information:  it lets you separate key concepts from fluff. Connections, not just concepts: notes are just ramblings until they are connected! Scaffolding of knowledge: breadth and depth. Big picture and details: forest and trees. Analysis and synthesis: breaking down information into parts and combining into a new whole. Individual and collaborative: learn by yourself  or in teams. Flexible: freehand or electronic. These properties  make  the mind map format  ideal as a basis for putting effective study  techniques into practice and thus improve memory and learning. Mind Mapping Best Practices To make use of effective learning techniques with mind maps, consider the following best practices: Connect new information with existing knowledge: this makes use of elaborative interrogation and self-explanation. Connect different types of information, such as textbook, lectures, and practice exams: this makes use of interleaved practice. Build your mind maps over time, such as before class, during class, and after class: this makes use of distributed practice. Test your knowledge by recreating mind maps, hiding branches, and adding notes and attachments: this makes use of practice testing. As you study using mind maps, also consider: Self-assessment to identify gaps (what you don’t know) and correct any false knowledge. Self-reflection on your learning process and mind mapping process. Adjust your learning process and mind mapping process to improve your learning. Key take-away: mind mapping + effective learning techniques = improved memory and learning Getting Started with Mind Maps For a successful start with the mind mapping technique follow these four steps: 1. Begin by exploring some mind maps that others have created. You can find great mind map examples in  MindMeisters public map library, on  Biggerplate (over 120,000 members), and in the  Google+ Mind Mapping Community (over 3,000 members). 2. Next, choose a mind map program  that fits your needs. There are many tools  available, including some that are free. The mind map presentation used in this talk was done in MindMeister. 3. Try mind mapping! Pick a class topic, work project, or even a book, and create your first mind map. You can work alone or in teams with others. 4. Stay motivated and keep mind mapping! Hopefully you’ll find value from mind mapping demonstrated in your improved memory and learning, and grades and performance, which will provide motivation to continue mind mapping. As with everything else, the more you practice mind mapping, the better you’ll become. Learn from others in your mind mapping journey and share your experiences with them! 5. Check out this mind map created by Toni Krasnic that provides an overview of the most effective learning strategies. Mind maps and the mind mapping process can help students significantly improve memory and learning. Give mind mapping a try â€" I’m sure you’ll be glad you did. Improve Memory and Learning

Stetson University Acceptance Rate, SAT/ACT Scores, GPA

Stetson University is a private university with an acceptance rate of 68%. Founded in 1883, Stetsons main campus in DeLand, Florida is on the National Register of Historic Places. Three additional campuses are located in Celebration, Tampa, and Gulfport, Florida. Stetson has a 13-to-1  student / faculty ratio, and students can choose from 59 undergraduate majors. Business fields are the most popular among undergraduates, but Stetsons strengths in the liberal arts and sciences earned the school a chapter of the prestigious  Phi Beta Kappa  Honor Society. On the athletic front, the Stetson  Hatters  compete in the NCAA Division I  Atlantic Sun Conference. Considering applying to Stetson University? Here are the admissions statistics you should know, including average SAT/ACT scores and GPAs of admitted students. Acceptance Rate During the 2017-18 admissions cycle, Stetson University had an acceptance rate of 68%. This means that for every 100 students who applied, 68 students were admitted, making Stetsons admissions process somewhat competitive. Admissions Statistics (2017-18) Number of Applicants 13,330 Percent Admitted 68% Percent Admitted Who Enrolled (Yield) 10% SAT Scores and Requirements Stetson University has a test-optional standardized testing policy. Applicants to Stetson may submit SAT or ACT scores to the school, but they are not required.  During the 2017-18 admissions cycle, 59% of admitted students submitted SAT scores. SAT Range (Admitted Students) Section 25th Percentile 75th Percentile ERW 570 660 Math 550 640 ERW=Evidence-Based Reading and Writing This admissions data tells us that of those students who submitted scores during the 2017-18 admissions cycle, most of  Stetsons admitted students fall within the  top 35% nationally  on the SAT. For the evidence-based reading and writing section, 50% of students admitted to Stetson scored between 570 and 660, while 25% scored below 570 and 25% scored above 660. On the math section, 50% of admitted students scored between 550 and 640, while 25% scored below 550 and 25% scored above 640. While the SAT is not required, this data tells us that a composite SAT score of 1300 or higher is competitive for Stetson University. Requirements Stetson University does not require SAT scores for admission. For students who choose to submit scores, note that Stetson participates in the scorechoice program, meaning that the admissions office will consider your highest score from each individual section across all SAT test dates. Stetson does not require the essay portion of the SAT. ACT Scores and Requirements Stetson has a test-optional standardized testing policy. Applicants may submit SAT or ACT scores to the school, but they are not required. During the 2017-18 admissions cycle, 37% of admitted students submitted ACT scores. ACT Range (Admitted Students) Section 25th Percentile 75th Percentile English 23 29 Math 22 27 Composite 23 29 This admissions data tells us that of those who submitted scores during the 2017-18 admissions cycle, most of Stetsons admitted students fall within the  top 31% nationally  on the ACT. The middle 50% of students admitted to Stetson received a composite ACT score between 23 and 29, while 25% scored above 29 and 25% scored below 23. Requirements Note that Stetson does not require ACT scores for admission. For students who choose to submit scores, Stetson does not superscore the ACT; your highest composite ACT score will be considered. Stetson does not require the ACT writing section. GPA In 2018, the average high school GPA of Stetson Universitys incoming freshmen class was 3.84, and 57% of incoming students had GPAs of 3.75 and above. These results suggest that most successful applicants to Stetson University have primarily A grades. Self-Reported GPA/SAT/ACT Graph Stetson University Applicants Self-Reported GPA/SAT/ACT Graph. Data courtesy of Cappex. The admissions data in the graph is self-reported by applicants to Stetson University. GPAs are unweighted. Find out how you compare to accepted students, see the real-time graph, and calculate your chances of getting in  with a free Cappex account. Admissions Chances Stetson University, which accepts over two-thirds of applicants, has a somewhat selective admissions process. If your SAT/ACT scores and GPA fall within the schools average ranges, you have a strong chance of being accepted. Keep in mind, however, that Stetson also has a  holistic admissions  process and is test-optional, and admissions decisions are based on much more than numbers. A strong  application essay  and  glowing letters of recommendation  can strengthen your application, as can participation in meaningful  extracurricular activities  and a  rigorous course schedule. The college is looking for students who will contribute to the campus community in meaningful ways, not just students who show promise in the classroom. Students with particularly compelling stories or achievements can still receive serious consideration even if their grades and scores are outside of Stetsons average range. In the graph above, the blue and green dots represent accepted students. The data show that most admitted students had high school averages of B or higher, combined SAT scores of about 1000 or higher (ERWM), and ACT composite scores of 20 or better. A significant number of applicants had GPAs in the A range. If your test scores are below the ideal range, Stetson has test-optional admissions, so you can apply without submitting test scores. If You Like Stetson, You May also Like These Other Top Florida Colleges Flagler CollegeFlorida International UniversityFlorida State UniversityNew College of FloridaUniversity of Central FloridaUniversity of FloridaUniversity of MiamiUniversity of South Florida All admissions data has been sourced from the National Center for Education Statistics and Stetson University Undergraduate Admissions Office.

Analysis Of Jane Austen s Emma - 2163 Words

Jane Austen’s Emma follows the life of an overindulged, upper class young woman who, after enduring a crisis brought on by her own pride, is transformed from callow and vain, to a state of mental and emotional maturity. On first reading, the audience may perceive Emma’s actions as a repression of feelings, but upon closer inspection one can see that she is not suppressing her emotions but simply does not have the level of self-awareness that would allow her to clarify the difference between right and wrong. It is important to bring to light the connections between self and society, which Austen has embedded into narrative, as they raise the question of who is to blame for Emma’s harmful conduct. She struggles with shedding her arrogance, and the fear she has of facing her feelings causes her to misunderstand those around her, wreaking havoc in the lives of others. Her immaturity is not confined to contextual milieu – Austen’s examination of characte r and society has universality in its comment on our sense of self and culture, and is as relevant today as it was in the 19th century. The novel opens by introducing the main character, Emma, who has been endowed with â€Å"some of the best blessings of existence†p3. It is suggested that this is a character flaw of such significance that it is revealed in the opening chapter, and foreshadows the novel’s structure - â€Å"The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition toShow MoreRelatedAnalysis Of Emma s Appropriation Of Jane Austen s 19thc Emma1262 Words   |  6 PagesComparisons of Emma and Clueless pose critical explorations into the importance of context and its role in shaping social values. 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Significance of ingot Free Essays

To look into the significance of metal bar during the Bronze Age within the Mediterranean trade industry. Chapter I: Introduction The significance of the metal bars in the Bronze Age has long been recognized in the development of metallurgical engineering, societal organisation and the primary focal point of this research, the Mediterranean trade industry. The metal metal bars, peculiarly those made from Cu and Sn became an of import facet in the Bronze Age trade, as they were the majority of the ship ‘s lading. We will write a custom essay sample on Significance of ingot or any similar topic only for you Order Now Furthermore the location of these metal ores occur in geographically localized countries, which would hold limited entree of prehistoric communities to metals, which hence encouraged long distance trade between them. ( Jones, 2007, 1 ) Copper was particularly an of import natural stuff as it was used for doing tools, arms and status-enhancing luxury goods. Furthermore, Cu was the chief constituent within the sea trade. Evidence found on Mesopotamia and Dilmun, Egypt, Levant, the Aegean and subsequently the cardinal Mediterranean suggests ladings were much easier to transport by sea than by overland. The shipwrecks at Uluburun ( c.1300B.C ) and Cape Gelidonya ( c.1200B.C ) provide direct grounds for the conveyance of Cu metal bars by sea. This has hence influenced Mediterranean civilizations to increase nautical trade and established interregional contacts for Cu and Sn entree. This besides applies for metals such as gold, Ag and led which besides played a function in long-distance t rade, thought non in the same measures as Cu. There have been many arguments for the exact nature of this trade. Muhly references that the metal metal bars would supply us â€Å" a proper apprehension of the nature and the range of this trade. † ( 1977, 73 ) However, we can non establish our hypothesis on understanding Bronze Age trade on the metal metal bars entirely as â€Å" The metals trade would hold differed considerable in volume and organisation in different parts, depending on locally available resources, geographics, established trade paths, local metallurgical engineering, and assorted societal and political factors. † ( Jones, 2007, 3 ) The most direct grounds for an analysis of early trade comes from Tell el Amarna. The three-hundred-eighty-two clay tabular arraies found within the metropolis, where records of elusive communicating with foreign powers. These clay tablets provide grounds that the function of the metal metal bars in the development of long-distance trade in metals varied over clip. Howev er they provide no grounds for the beginnings of Sn and Cu which suggest that they must hold been imported from states such as Cyprus. Cyprus is by and large known for its laterality within the Cu production. â€Å" This historical state of affairs is well-known among Cypriot and Mediterranean archeologists, and the Cu ingots represent the terminal merchandise of a complex procedure affecting the excavation, smelting and casting of Cu. â€Å" ( Knapp, Kassianidou, Donnelly, 2001, 204 ) However this ‘historical state of affairs ‘ was really complex and ill understood. Nevertheless the grounds shows that the Cypriots played a dominant function within the Cu industry. Sites, such as the Troodos Mountains in western and cardinal Cyprus, contained the largest measure of Cu ore in the Mediterranean ; therefore becomes an of import beginning within the Cu metallurgy in the Late Cypriot societies. Other sites in Cyprus were besides important in understanding the Cu metallurgy. By the Late Cypriot period ( c.1400-1100B.C. ) many sites became affluent regional Centres ; sites such as Enkomi, Hala Sultan Tekke, Kition and several other colonies. These metropoliss were of import in understanding trade, due to their part in Cu production and export. These metropoliss nevertheless, did non bring forth any paperss affecting trade like the castles ; a few Bronze Age letterings found called ‘Cypro-Minoan ‘ . These were undeciphered syllabic books which have been suggested to incorporate economic texts, votive letterings, or for case the clay balls from Enkomi and Kition contained short fables. However a figure of archeologists believe that the map of these books is yet to be known. Nonetheless epigraphers suggested that these texts show marks from a Cypro-Minoan alphabet, which may be identified on trade points such as the Cypriot and Mycenaean clayware and a assortment of oxhide metal bars. This connexion between the books and the goods has late been well-established. Equally of import as Cyprus was within the Cu production, archaeologists struggled to bring out grounds for Bronze Age smelting activities. Virtually all the scoria sedimentations discovered on the excavation countries dated to periods after the Bronze Age. â€Å" While more grounds for Middle and Late Cypriot Cu excavation and metallurgical production is available today, unluckily this grounds is by and large fragmental and hard to construe. † ( Jones, 2007, 6 ) However, the led isotope analysis proved to be really successful and accurate, as it measured the stable isotopes of lead utilizing a mass spectrometer in order to qualify peculiar samples. This method severally measured the samples ‘ radioactive concentration harmonizing to the geological age of the lead ores. This analysis would supply archeologists with near-conclusive grounds that Cypriot Cu was exported on a important graduated table. The chemical and metallographic analysis show high measures of pre Cu within the oxhide metal bars. This analysis suggests a high demand and production for Cu in the Bronze Age. Another of import facet of Bronze Age trade were the shipwreck finds, particularly those found at Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya. Each of these shipwrecks provide of import information for the nature and organisation of the Cu trade within the period of 1300-1200B.C. The Uluburun and Cape Gelidonya ladings contained the largest measures of Cu metal bars, particularly Uluburun which about contained over 10 dozenss of Cu and one ton of Sn metal bars. The three-hundred and 54 metal bars found within this lading exceed old ladings found on land and on submerged sites. Other important goods found within the Uluburun lading include a big figure of glass metal bars, about one ton of terebinth rosin in Canaanite jars, Cypriot clayware in several pithoi, and a broad assortment of luxury goods plus other points such as the personal ownerships of the crew and riders which bordered the ship. These goods were besides notable as they are an indicant for directional trade ; points such as the Nefertit i Scarabaeus sacer. On the other manus the Cape Gelidonya ship is significantly different. This complete digging contained in its vessel 34 complete Cu oxhide ingots every bit good as other ingot types. The Cape Gelidonya ship seems to hold a lower position that the Uluburun ship as it was a great trade smaller in size that the Uluburun ship and the goods it contained and transported have a lower value. These shipwrecks raise a figure of theories which are of import in understanding Bronze Age trade. How important was the position of the goods found within the ladings? Are the smaller ladings, for case the one found at Cape Gelidonya, more typical that the larger 1s? How common was the transit of the Cu and Sn metal bars? How does this alter our position on the Bronze Age trade? This inquiry besides applies to land-based transit. The most appropriate would be that the production and circulation of metals occurred in several different ways to one another. However this response is really by and large used, as there are a figure of possibilities to differences between Cu and Sn metal bars. However the most dominant accounts are the fluctuations of trade mechanisms, the geological and geographical factors, the societal organisation of societies involved and the utilizations to which the metals were employed. These are a few of the accounts used to assist us associate Cu and Sn metal bar s to Bronze Age trade and let us to understand the differences between each metal bar. Furthermore we could now do the theory that by analyzing these metal bars in deepness would let us to acknowledge the trade paths within the Mediterranean. There are a scope of grounds which describe the trade and production of Cu, Sn and other metals in the Bronze Age. The most common are the textual grounds of Tell el Amarna, Mesopotamia, Aegean, Syria-Palestine and Anatolia. However the iconographic grounds is besides of equal importance as several civilizations such as the Egyptians, Cypriots and Mycenaean ‘s represented their oxhide metal bars in pictural signifiers. These â€Å" Representations of oxhide metal bars demonstrate a cultural group ‘s acquaintance with Cu metal bars in this signifier and therefore their entree to interregional trade paths connected with the beginning or beginnings of Cu used to do oxhide metal bars. † ( Jones, 2007, 9 ) Iconographic grounds such as the pictures and reliefs found at Sahure ‘s burial temple represent the ships ‘ crews. This provides information on the ship ‘s beginning and information on the different foreign groups involved within the Mediterranean t rade. How to cite Significance of ingot, Essay examples

Chisholm Trail Essay Example For Students

Chisholm Trail Essay Chisholm TrailWhen the railroads moved west to the Great Plains, the Cattle Boombegan. Southern Texas became a major ranching area with the raising of longhorncattle from Mexico. Cattle was branded by the rawhides who guarded them onhorseback on the ranges. Before the Civil War, small herds of Texas cattle were driven by thecowboys to New Orleans, some as far west as California, and some to the northover the Shawnee Trail. This trail passed through Dallas and near the IndianTerritory, ending in Sedalia, Missouri. In 1866, the Shawnee Trail presentedsome major problems for the cattle drivers Farmers along the route did not liketheir fields being trampled. They also objected to the spread of tick fever. Longhorns carried the ticks but were immune to the fever. A few farmers were soangry, they armed themselves with shotguns to convince the cattle ranchers tofind another trail north. There was a large increase icattle by the end of the Civil War. Over1,000,000 cattle roamed the open range. At this time, people in the northhad money to buy beef and cattle which was in great demand. A cow that cost 4to5 dollars a head in Texas was going for 40 to 50 dollars a head in the east. Ranchers hired cowboys for the cattle drives north, realizing the greatopportunity for a large profit if they could reach the railroads in Abilene,Kansas. Joseph McCoy, a stock dealer from Springfield, Illinois, decided a newtrail was necessary west of the farms. In 1867, he chose a route that wouldreach Abilene and the railroads with the least amount of problems. This routewas to become well-known as the Chisholm Trail. Jesse Chisholm was a half-breed, a Scotch Cherokee Indian trader, who in1866 drove a wagon through the Indian territory, known now as Oklahoma, to theWichita, Kansas, where he had a trading post. Cattlemen use the same trail inthe years to come, following Chisholms wagon ruts to Abilene, Kansas, and therailroads. The trail began below San Antonio, Texas, and stretched north forabout 1,000 miles. The main course then passed through Austin, Fort Worth, TheIndian Territory, and Wichita to Abilene. Side trails fed into the ChisholmTrail. The cattle fed on grass along the trail. Cattlemen moved about 1,500,000 cattle over the trail during a threeyear span. The biggest year was in 1871, when 5,000 cowboys drove over 700,000head of cattle along the trail from Texas to Abilene. The Chisholm Trail wasthe most popular route because of the good terrain. There were no hills orwoods to impede to cowboys progress, nor where there towns or farmers along theway. The cattle trail route moved westward as the railroads across the plainsmoved west, and settlers soon followed. Ellsworth and Newton, Kansas, on theAtchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe Railroad became the end of the trail forcattle drives between 1872 and 1875. Here were the chief cattle markets forseveral years. There cowtowns, as they were called, consisted of gamblinghalls, saloons and brothels. It was a good place for cowboys to spend there payat the end of a long drive. In time the railroad moved even further west. Farmers homesteaded theland and put up fences, barring cattle herds. The Chisholm Trail soon ceased tobe used by 1890, but will be remembered in western stories and songs. Thistrail was very important to Texas. It helped the state recover from the economicblows of the Civil War. It also helped stock new ranches to the north and itmet the nations demand for beef. It is responsible in part for the rise ofChicago and Kansas as packing centers. It also led to the expansion of westernrailroads and the development of refrigerator cars. .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c , .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c .postImageUrl , .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c .centered-text-area { min-height: 80px; position: relative; } .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c , .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c:hover , .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c:visited , .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c:active { border:0!important; } .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c .clearfix:after { content: ""; display: table; clear: both; } .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #95A5A6; } .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c:active , .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #2C3E50; } .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c .centered-text-area { width: 100%; position: relative ; } .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #2980B9; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline; } .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c .postTitle { color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 100%; } .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c .ctaButton { background-color: #7F8C8D!important; color: #2980B9; border: none; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: none; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 26px; moz-border-radius: 3px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: none; width: 80px; min-height: 80px; background: url(https://artscolumbia.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts/assets/images/simple-arrow.png)no-repeat; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c:hover .ctaButton { background-color: #34495E!important; } .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c .centered-text { display: table; height: 80px; padding-left : 18px; top: 0; } .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0; padding-right: 108px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .u0ff3fb635f1249458e699a411ff5639c:after { content: ""; display: block; clear: both; } READ: The Scarlet Ibis EssayAlthough Jesse Chisholms role in the Cattle Boom is veryinsignificant, the trail named for him played a major role in American History.

10 Interesting Fluorine Facts

10 Interesting Fluorine Facts Fluorine (F) is an element you encounter daily, most often as fluoride in water and toothpaste. Here are 10 interesting facts about this important element. You can get more detailed information about chemical and physical properties on the fluorine facts page. Fast Facts: Fluorine Element Name: FluorineElement Symbol: FAtomic Number: 9Atomic Weight: 18.9984Group: Group 17 (Halogens)Category: NonmetalElectron Configuration: [He]2s2sp5 Fluorine is the most reactive and most electronegative of all the chemical elements. The only elements it doesnt vigorously react with are oxygen, helium, neon, and argon. It is one of the few elements that will form compounds with noble gases xenon, krypton, and radon.Fluorine is the lightest halogen, with atomic number 9. Its standard atomic weight is 18.9984 and is based on its single natural isotope, fluorine-19.George Gore managed to isolate fluorine using an  electrolytic process in 1869, but the experiment ended in disaster when fluorine reacted explosively with hydrogen gas.  Henri Moisson was awarded the 1906 Nobel Memorial Prize in Chemistry for isolating fluorine in 1886. He also used electrolysis to obtain the element but kept the fluorine gas separate from the hydrogen gas.  Although he was the first to successfully obtain pure fluorine, Moissons work was interrupted multiple times when he was poisoned by the reactive element. Moisson was also the first person to m ake artificial diamonds, by compressing charcoal. The 13th most abundant element in the Earths crust is fluorine. It is so reactive that it is not found naturally in pure form but only in compounds. The element is found in minerals, including fluorite, topaz, and feldspar.Fluorine has many uses. It is found as fluoride in toothpaste and drinking water, in Teflon (polytetrafluoroethylene), drugs including the chemotherapeutic drug  5-fluorouracil, and etchant hydrofluoric acid. It is used in refrigerants (chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs), propellants, and for the enrichment of uranium by UF6 gas. Fluorine is not an essential element in human or animal nutrition. Topical fluoride application, as from toothpaste or mouthwash, was once believed to be effective for a conversion of tooth enamel hydroxyapatite into stronger fluorapatite, but more recent studies indicate fluoride aids enamel regrowth. Trace dietary fluorine levels may impact bone strength. While fluorine compounds are not found in animals, there are natural organofluorines in plants, which typically act as defenses against herbivores. Because it is so reactive, fluorine is difficult to store. Hydrofluoric acid (HF), for example, is so corrosive it will dissolve glass. Even so, HF is safer and easier to transport and handle than pure fluorine. Hydrogen fluoride is considered to be a weak acid at low concentrations, but it acts as a strong acid at high concentrations.Although fluorine is relatively common on Earth, it is rare in the universe, believed to be found at concentrations of about 400 parts per billion. While fluorine forms in stars,  nuclear fusion with hydrogen produces helium and oxygen, or fusion with helium makes neon and hydrogen.Fluorine is one of the few elements that can attack diamond.The pure non-metallic element is a gas at room temperature and pressure. Fluorine changes from an extremely pale yellow diatomic gas (F2) into a bright yellow liquid at -188 C (-307 F). Fluorine resembles another halogen, chlorine. The solid has two allotropes. The alpha form is soft and transparent, while the beta form is hard and opaque. Fluorine has a characteristic pungent odor that can be smelled at a concentration as low as 20 parts per billion. There is only one stable isotope of fluorine, F-19. Fluorine-19 is highly sensitive to magnetic fields, so it is used in magnetic resonance imaging. Another 17 radioisotopes of fluorine have been synthesized, ranging in mass number from 14 to 31. The most stable is fluorine-17, which has a half-life just of under 110 minutes. Two metastable isomers are also known.  The isomer 18mF has a half-life of about 1600 nanoseconds, while 26mF has a half-life of 2.2 milliseconds. Sources Banks, R. E. (1986). Isolation of Fluorine by Moissan: Setting the Scene.  Journal of Fluorine Chemistry.  33  (1–4): 3–26.Bà ©guà ©, Jean-Pierre; Bonnet-Delpon, Danià ¨le (2008). Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry of Fluorine. Hoboken: John Wiley Sons. ISBN 978-0-470-27830-7.Lide, David R. (2004). Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (84th ed.). Boca Raton: CRC Press. ISBN 0-8493-0566-7.

NeoConservatism essays

NeoConservatism essays There are two inter-related spheres, which this paper will explore. The first one asks what the relative appeal of Neo-conservatism was in Britain and Germany. The second determines the extent to which Neo-conservative policies were successfully implemented in the two respective countries. The perspectives chosen here try to explain Neo-conservatism with theories of social and cultural change to provide examples of its effects. The New Right is "conceptualized as populist Neo-conservative reactions to fundamental change in culture and values in a society. Neo-conservatism reflects a new cleavage based on value change." Neo-conservatism still fell within the confines of traditional conservative ideologies, for example, opposition to the welfare state and the redistribution of income. In this paper the comparison between Britain, a country with long-standing democratic traditions and a civil society, and Germany, which has had strong non-democratic traditions, a fascist past and the recent establishment of a civil society will help to determine to what extent they has been 'socialized'. Neo-conservative governments came to power in Britain prior to 1979, and in West Germany to 1982. Prior to their victory, there was great discontent with certain aspects of the existing social democratic politics over issues of state-influenced and state intervening economic policy. Polls taken in Britain prior to the 1979 election likewise showed "a massive 75% of respondents in favour of a reduction in state spending." Similarly, "the fall of the West German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the 1982 coincided with a dramatic collapse of public confidence in the Schmidt administration's handling of the economy. Only 17% of voters considered the SPD the party that guaranteed job security." The lack of faith in government to solve such economic crises reflected a more general loss of faith in the political system. This lack of faith was also ev...

Self Concept in International Students Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Self Concept in International Students - Essay Example In order to understand how the change in self image is engineered we need to analyze the factors that create a persons self identity. The premise can be tested by the how social reforms have been brought which were first initiated by one or more than one philanthropist and then that idea gained currency after a period of tireless struggle. Women were not granted voting rights in past .Many individual women rights activist started an agitation and they achieved their objective. Soon society accepted not only the voting rights of women but also became more acceptable towards the issues of the equality of women. There are many approaches to understanding the society that permeates the environment that is inhabited by the self .One such approach is called the situational approach where the society is viewed as something which is constant mode of evolution. Nothing is permanent and flux is the by word of the world that we inhabit. This perspective gives a very subjective view of society which in turn is governing identity of members of a society. The other point of view with regards to self and society is called the structural approach According to This perspective society is constitutes of certain fixed paradigms that guide members of a society to act in particular fashion. The "patterned regularities that characterize most human action" (Stryker, 1980, p. 65) Individual selves are a microcosm of a society. Each self can be added up to get the whole picture of the society. The members of a society exist within these social structures. The actions of the people are governed by the concepts of who they are and to which social structure they belong. Social identity is the ideas thoughts processes and evaluation of oneself. These deductions are based upon what others think and expect out of us. Cooley Refers to this as "The looking glass self" (Cooley, 1902). The evaluation of the self identity is largely self esteem which has two component one deals with the worthiness and the other deals with the confidence and the acumen of the individual. Identity is governed by what role one is playing in the society .Since each member of society has multiple roles therefore he has multiple identities. The very same person has a different persona when he becomes a spouse a sibling an offspring or a friend. The overlapping social structures like religion race ethnicity geographical region and profession defines the concept of self .The identity are further dependent on the role that an individual is playing and what others expect out of him. It has been researched that strength of an identity is dependent on the number of people connected with that individual. The higher the number of people linked with an individual, more strong are the notions regarding the identity of selves The question arises who are international students .Those individuals who have left their countries of origin to study abroad due to various reasons come in contact with society which is alien to him .The self identity is

Wk 3 Several areas where trafficking has continued to flourish Essay

Wk 3 Several areas where trafficking has continued to flourish - Essay Example rengthened the All-China Women’s Federation to work in partnership with the International Labor Organization [ILO] to sustain the anti-trafficking awareness and prevention campaigns. The success of this move by the Beijing Administration is exemplified by the fact that three million people were reached (Yik-yi Chu, 40-42). Nigeria has also concerted a lot of effort to carry out awareness and educational campaigns through an array of awareness programs, by liaising with NGOs such as Action-Aid International Nigeria, Access to Education for Children, Alliances for Africa and The African Project Foundation. However, like its counterpart China, Nigeria has realized stunted success in this quest. This is partly because the awareness programs have failed to specifically target specific populations that are most vulnerable. To effectively fight human trafficking in China, it is important that the Beijing Administration empowers rural areas where poverty is more profound, yet poverty goes hand-in-hand with human trafficking. The government also needs to make legislation that clearly defines human trafficking and prescribes the legal penalty that an offender should serve. Nigeria needs to also make legislation which clearly defines human trafficking and the legal penalty that should accompany it. It is also expedient that Nigeria: fights at eradicating its poverty levels; strengthens its institutions [especially Nigeria’s criminal justice system]; and reconsiders its anti-trafficking awareness and educational campaigns so as to reach proper target

Socio Political Factors Affecting The Students Education Essay

Socio Political Factors Affecting The Students Education Essay Education sector in India is a growing field that plays a pivotal role in improving the living status. The economic status or the rise of a country depends on the improved education system. According to statistical survey, India after Independence gave more importance to primary education and expanded literacy rate to two thirds of its population. There are several efforts made by the government to improve the literacy rate in India. Despite the educations sector growth, 25% of its population are still illiterate and the number of enrolment of students to higher education is still in decline. Data mining deals with the process in which we identify and extract all the hidden information from data bases. Educational data mining plays a very important role in identifying, analyzing and visualizing the data to predict students performance, their academic achievements, providing feedback for supporting instructors and so on. There are so many factors that affect students enrolment to post secondary education. So, the main aim of this research is to identify those factors using data mining techniques which will help the educational institutions, academic heads and also the policy makers of the government schools to take necessary action. 3. INTRODUCTION A.DATA MINING: Data mining [6] [7] is the emerging field of applying statistical and artificial intelligence techniques to the problem of finding novel, useful, and non-trivial patterns from large databases. Data Mining is often defined as finding hidden information in a database[8]. Data mining provides many tasks that could help to study the students performance[9]. Different data mining techniques are used in various fields of life such as medicine, statistical analysis, engineering, education, banking, marketing, sale, etc (MacLennan. 2005). B.EDUCATIONAL DATA MINING (EDM) Educational Data Mining is an emerging discipline, concerned with developing methods for exploring the unique types of data that come from educational settings, and using those methods to better understand students, and the settings which they learn in.[1]. Day by day the growth of the data is very rapid and that data need to transformed and converted into an useful information [2]. Educational data mining (EDM) tends to focus on new tools and techniques for discovering patterns in the data. It also gains popularity in the new research areas in higher education. Recent research findings in educational data mining helps the students, institutions and government for improving the quality of education. Inspite of the rapid growth in the education sector , 25% of its population is still illiterate , 15% of the students reach high school, and only 7% graduate[3]. Statistics says according to the year 2011,out of 74% of the literacy rate, only 47% have attained the diploma and post diploma courses[4].Post secondary education plays a vital role in countrys development. But the statistical data proves still major population in India are school dropouts. There are so many factors which affect the students enrolment to post secondary education such as family background, school infrastructure and facilities and their psychological behaviours and so on. The main aim of this paper is to identify the reasons for poor enrolment to post secondary education and the result will help the students, management and policy makers to give a better solution. Data mining techniques particularly classification helps to analyze the input data and to develop a model describing important data classes or to predict future data trends. 4. LITERATURE SURVEY In[11], the author uses the data mining processes, particularly classification to help in enhancing the quality of the higher educational system by evaluating student data to study the main attributes that may affect the students performance in courses. Ayesha et.al [12] used clustering techniques in data mining to analyze students learning behaviour which helped the teachers to identify the drop out ratio to a significant level and improve the performance of the students. Liu Kan [13] designed a course management system on the basis of data mining methods such as classification, association rules and clustering. In [14], the author used different classification algorithms to get useful information to decision-making out of customers transaction behaviours. In [15], the author applies four different classification methods for classifying students based on their final grade obtained in their courses. Dr. Surabh paul[16], in his research used classification to evaluate previous years s tudent dropout data using Bayesian classification method. 5. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM This minor research aims to study the socio-political factors affecting the students enrolment to post secondary education using data mining techniques. These attributes consist of 1)personal information such as age, gender, occupation of the parents, family income, highest educational qualification of the parents, stay, family size.2)institution related information such as type of learning, usage of teaching aids, exposure to ICT, faculty qualification etc 3)psychological information such as social status, illness, disability etc are considered. These attributes were used to predict the students enrolment to post secondary education. 6. CONCEPTUAL AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK To build the classification, CRISP methodology is adopted. The proposed methodology is to build the classification model that tests the factors which affect the students enrolment to post secondary education. DATA MINING PROCESS Knowing the reasons for not continuing their post secondary education can help the teachers and administrators to take necessary actions so that enrolment rate can be improved. Predicting the reason for students not enrolling to post secondary education needs a lot of parameters to be considered. Prediction models that include all personal, social, psychological and other environmental variables are necessitated for the effective prediction and decisions to be made. A.BUSINESS UNDERSTANDING Business understanding focuses on the understanding of the project objective and requirements from business perspective then converting it into a data mining problem definition and a plan is designed to accomplish those objectives. B.DATA UNDERSTANDING Data set is to get familiar with the data and to identify the problem to discover useful information out of it. Data understanding also helps to examine the quality of data in addressing the questions Is the data complete? or any missing values?. The data set used in this study was obtained from the Gottigere Government High School, Karnataka. Initially size of the data is 110. C.DATA PREPARATION Data Preparation takes usually 90% of the time to collect, assess, clean and select the data required to construct, integrate and format the data. Identify data sources based on the data available to solve an identified business problem or objective. From the selected data sources, the actual data to be used must be determined [20]. D.BUILDING THE CLASSIFICATION MODEL The collected attributes may have some irrelevant attributes that may degrade the performance of the classification model; a feature selection approach is used to select the most appropriate set of features. Classification techniques are supervised learning techniques that classify data item into predefined class label [19]. This technique in data mining is very useful from a data set to build the classification model that is used to predict future data trends. With classification, the generated model will be able to predict a class for given data depending on previously learned information from historical data. To explore knowledge discovery decision tree to produce a model with rules in human readable way. The tree has the advantages of easy interpretation and understanding for decision makers to compare with their domain knowledge for validation and justify their decision [19]. Some of decision tree classifiers are C4.5/C5.0/J4.8,ID3 and others. Generating the Classification rule by applying ID3 algorithm The classifier identified to implement this model is ID3 algorithm. The decision tree building algorithm ID3 determines the classification of objects by testing the values of the their attributes. It builds the tree in a top down fashion, starting from a set of objects and a specification of properties. At each node of the tree, a property is tested and the results are used to partition the object set. This process is recursively done till the set in a given sub tree is homogeneous with respect to the classification criteria in other words it contains objects belonging to the same category. This process then becomes a leaf node. At each node, the property to test is chosen based on information theoretic criteria that seek to maximize information gain and minimize entropy. In simpler terms, that property is tested which divides the candidate set in the most homogeneous subsets[17]. For this purpose the WEKA toolkit is used and the attributes are ranked and then the ranked attributes are eliminated by the feature selection approach. E. EVALUATION: Evaluation is to check whether we correctly built the model and determines how to proceed and whether to finish the project and move on to deployment phase. Evaluating the results assess the degree to which the model meets the business objectives and also unveils additional challenges, information or hints for future directions. Choosing the proper data mining method is a critical and difficult task in KDD process. To implement this model WEKA Toolkit is used which has a collection of machine learning algorithms for solving data mining problems implemented in Java. Weka has tools for data processing, classification, regression and association, clustering and visualization. It is an open source toolkit for machine learning. F.DEPLOYMENT: Deployment phase is to determine how the evaluated results need to be utilized. The knowledge gained has to be organized and presented in the way it is applicable to the end user. This phase may be a final and comprehensive presentation of the data mining results. This CRISP provides a uniform framework for experimenting, analyzing, evaluating and predicting the result 7. SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES: There are few objectives stated below: 1. This project is a preliminary attempt to help supporting the decision makers of the institution to improve their teaching methodology, and teaching aids and all other infrastructure facilities that they lack. 2. The result evaluated out of this project will motivate the parents of BPL (Below poverty line) towards the values of post secondary education. 3. This project will help the policy makers of our Indian government to help the children studying in government schools in a much better way towards their post secondary education. 4. The model proposed as an academician can be useful to build a software model to provide a solution by formulating the result.

Idi Amin

Born in 1925, Idi Amin was unquestionably one of the most significant leaders since 1971 to 1980. He had achieved a great deal and had had an extremely negative impact on his people, his country and the international community. During his reign, Idi Amin had managed to gain total control of Uganda and murder a ridiculous amount of people who opposed or challenged his view. Further, he used lies and deceit to get into power and then abuse the trust of his people. Finally, his actions in supporting Britain caused a famine in his country.Essentially, Idi Amin was a significant leader; however it was for all the wrong reasons. Throughout Idi Amin’s time as leader, he was able to commit a number of heinous acts towards his society and against the rights of humanity. One particular event of which was most significant during his time as leader was a mass murder of over 250,000 people in his country, which he holds responsible for. The mass murder primarily involved anyone in Uganda t hat opposed against his views and the expulsion of Asians. In 1975 the body of one of his four wives was delivered to Mulago hospital.It had been chopped into pieces by Idi Amin himself for reasons being that she had been impregnated by another man. This proves that Idi Amin will not stand by any person in his life that resists against his wishes and establishes the brutality from within his character. Amin was able to manipulate a large majority of his people to secure his place for leader of Uganda, only then to abuse the trust of his people once elected. These actions soon lead on to further corrupt movements that had a negative impact on the people of Uganda.When Idi Amin presented himself as the opposition leader for Uganda, he announced to the people that if he were selected as president he would turn their country into a democracy. This false statement had given him much popularity from his people, which then resulted in him becoming leader. Once in power Amin abused this tru st by cancelling elections and turning the country into a dictatorship. These events highlight that he was a negative ruler, but signify his importance. A further demonstration of his negative rule, Amin, through his relationship with Britain brought about a famine. Before Idi Amin became leader, Uganda as a part of the British colony. Idi Amin had never gotten a proper education, though was able to gain a name in society due to joining the British army and getting promoted to colonel after a short period of time. He had gained a very good reputation in the army and was seen to have excellent leadership qualities; for example, When Britain was going through a recession that later on lead to an extreme food shortage for their people, Idi Amin had collected a very large quantity of Uganda’s farm crops to support Britain during their hardship despite the fact that starvation was still a major concern for his people at the time.Idi Amin believed that putting aside the health of h is country In order to develop a good relationship with the leaders of Great Britain was much more vital at the time. The great challenges Amin had face during his lifetime such as the time he spent in the army and the difficulties he faced as leader of Uganda, eventually lead to his destructive behaviour towards his people, his country and the international community. Amin's rule was characterised by gross human rights abuse, political repression, corruption, and gross economic mismanagement, each of which all had an extremely negative influence towards his society during his reign.

The Knights Templar vs. the Davinci Code

The Knights Templar have been a topic of speculation since 1119, nearly ten years after they banded together to protect pilgrims visiting the Holy Land. Questions arose about their origins just as soon as they were recognized by King Baldwin II of Jerusalem as a military order.It is not only their mystery that intrigues us but also who and what they were that titillate our curiosity. During their period of influence the Templars became the second most powerful entity in the known world; surpassed only by the Catholic Church and the papacy itself. It is their acquired power in such a short amount of time that is fascinating. The DaVinci Code[1] is the most popular work of fiction in all history (other than the Bible) and so Dan Brown’s use of the Knights Templar in this novel has brought them to the forefront of our awareness once again.Many readers of The DaVinci Code were introduced to the Knights Templar for the first time. Dan Brown portrayed the Templars as powerful guardi ans of a secret treasure that would destroy the image of the Catholic Church. His novel made many assertions regarding the Templars’ power. I will reiterate those claims and then compare them with factual knowledge from various sources. Through research, actual facts regarding the power behind the Templars will be disclosed. This paper will also explore how and why the Knights Templar lost that power.Ultimately, we will see where the real power of the Templars came from versus the claims made in The DaVinci Code and why this enigmatic group holds our attention nearly one thousand years after they became a recognized order of the Catholic Church. I argue against Brown’s claim that the Knights were controlled by a secret society called the Priory of Sion and that their power came from guarding the Holy Grail; defined in the novel as the sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene and the documentation of her descendents with Jesus of Nazareth.THE NON-EXISTENT SECRET SOCIETY AND THE MY STERY DOCUMENTS In the front of The DaVinci Code, before the novel begins, Dan Brown stipulates as â€Å"Fact† that the Priory of Sion was a secret society that was founded over 900 years ago: â€Å"The Priory of Sion – a European secret society founded in 1099 – is a real organization. † (Brown, page 1) Brown generates the following dialogue as back up to his initial claim of â€Å"Fact†: â€Å"The Priory of Sion,† he [Robert Langdon] began, â€Å"was founded in Jerusalem in 1099 by a French king named Godefroi de Bouillon, immediately after he had conquered the city. â€Å"King Godefroi was allegedly the possessor of a powerful secret – a secret that had been in his family since the time of Christ. Fearing his secret might be lost when he died, he founded a secret brotherhood – the Priory of Sion – charged them with protecting his secret by quietly passing it on from generation to generation. During their years in Je rusalem, the Priory learned of a stash of hidden documents buried beneath the ruins of Herod’s temple, which had been built atop the earlier ruins of Solomon’s Temple.These documents, they believed, corroborated Godefroi’s powerful secret and were so explosive in nature that the Church would stop at nothing to get them. † â€Å"The Priory vowed that no matter how long it took, these documents must be recovered from the rubble beneath the temple and protected forever, so the truth would never die. In order to retrieve the documents from within the ruins, the Priory created a military arm – a group of nine knights called the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and Temple of Solomon. † Langdon paused. â€Å"More commonly known as the Knights Templar. (Brown, page 171) So, according to Brown the Knights Templar acquired their very existence, as well as their power, exclusively from an organization known as the Priory of Sion that was established in 1099; however, research has revealed that there was no such organization from that time in history. There were two entities so named but they were created hundreds of years later: 1. ) â€Å"There was a medieval monastic order known as the Priory of Sion, but it died out and all its assets were absorbed by the Jesuits (Society of Jesus) in 1617. [2] 2. )†On May 7, 1956 Pierre Plantard legally incorporated in Annemasse, a municipality in France that lies on the Swiss border, an esoteric and political order known as the Priory of Sion – C. I. R. C. U. I. T. (Chivalry of Catholic Rule and Institution and of Independent Traditionalist Union). The politics of the Priory of Sion were quite modest and focused on supporting politicians determined to build low-cost houses for the working classes of Annemasse.By 1964, however, Plantard was ready to try again his luck with the Priory of Sion, this time through the version which eventually inspired The DaVinci Code. Plantard h ad come across the curious story of the parish church of a small French village of less than one hundred inhabitants in the Aude region, at the foot of the eastern Pyrenees Mountains, Rennes-le-Chateau, where a hidden treasure had been supposedly discovered in 1897 by the local parish priest, Berenger Sauniere (1852-1917) while renovating his church in Rennes-le-Chateau.There were those who claimed that the treasure consisted not of gold or antiques but of secret documents which enabled the parish priest to come into contact with the esoteric and political milieu of the time and become incredibly wealthy. †[3] It is these false documents that connected the Knights Templar to the Priory of Sion in The DaVinci Code: â€Å"Their [the Knights Templar’s] true goal in the Holy Land was to retrieve the documents from beneath the ruins of the temple. † â€Å"And did they find them? † Langdon grinned. Nobody knows for sure, but the one thing on which all academics agree is this: The Knights discovered something down there in the ruins †¦ something that made them wealthy and powerful beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. † (Brown, page 172) â€Å"The Templars’ potent treasure trove of documents, which had apparently been their source of power, was Clement’s true objective, but it slipped through his fingers. The documents had long since been entrusted to the Templars’ shadowy architects, the Priory of Sion, whose veil of secrecy had kept them safely out of range of the Vatican’s onslaught.As the Vatican closed in, the Priory smuggled their documents from a Paris preceptory by night onto Templar ships in La Rochelle. † (Brown, page 174) These parchments were known as the Les Dossiers Secrets and were actually produced in the twentieth century by Philippe de Cherisey, a friend and coconspirator of Plantard’s. [4] The name of Pierre Plantard’s original 1956 group, The Priory of Sio n, undoubtedly gave Plantard the subsequent idea to claim that his organization had been historically founded in Jerusalem during the Crusades (good thing that hill in Annemasse, France was named Sion).Plantard made up a fake pedigree of the Priory of Sion claiming that his order was the subsidiary of the Order of Sion (aka: Abbey de Notre Dame du Mont Sion) which had been founded in the Kingdom of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. Plantard manipulated Sauniere's activities at Rennes-le-Chateau in order to make the parchments appear valid and, thus, substantiate his claims regarding his Priory of Sion.During the 1960s, Plantard and de Cherisey then deposited the so-called Dossiers Secrets at the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris so that people who set out to research the Priory of Sion would come across these fake documents and further corroborate Plantard’s claims. It was the goal of Pierre Plantard that these documents act as independent sources revealing the surv ival of a Merovingian line of Frankish kings and connecting him directly to the French throne. Henry Lincoln, one of the Holy Blood / Holy Grail[5] authors, would oblige.We should note here that Pierre Plantard had some help with his ruse from an original story written by Noel Corbu (1912-1968), the restaurant owner and one-time detective fiction writer who acquired property in 1953 from Sauniere's housekeeper Marie Denarnaud. Mr. Corbu, in an attempt to generate a little extra income, wrote a story about a priest who lived in a little out of the way place known as Rennes-le-Chateau and found a secret treasure while renovating his church; an embellishment of a lie originally told by the priest to cover up ill-gotten gains (he was accused of trafficking in masses or simony in 1915). 6] It is upon this foundation that Plantard wove his connections to the 1956 Priory of Sion and then to the Knights Templar. Thus, the Knights Templar could not have originated from a secret society known as the Priory of Sion since no such entity co-existed at the time of the order. We can deduce further that the power and purpose behind the Templars was in no way connected to this non-existent organization. Having debunked this claim made in The DaVinci Code, let us now research the historical account of the power behind the Knights of the Temple.POWER BEGETS POWER The DaVinci Code informs us that the Knights Templar did not protect pilgrims: Sophie already looked troubled. â€Å"You’re saying the Knights Templar were founded by the Priory of Sion to retrieve a collection of secret documents? I thought the Templars were created to protect the Holy Land. † â€Å"A common misconception. The idea of protection of pilgrims was the guise under which the Templars ran their mission. Their true goal in the Holy Land was to retrieve the documents from beneath the ruins of the temple. (Brown, page 171-172) Jonathan Riley-Smith tells us in his book The Oxford Illustrated Histo ry of the Crusades that the first Crusade ended in 1099 with the Christian acquisition of Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch, and Acre; however, there were some other cities nearby that had not been conquered thus the roads between the occupied cities were basically still in the hands of the Muslims. [7] The taking of the Holy Land saw an influx of many Christian pilgrims but their journeys, and excursions to and from Jordan, were treacherous at best.A small group of religious men took up arms and set out to protect these pilgrims. The fact that these men were legitimate protectors of pilgrims and a group of religious men who wished to devote their military skill to defend the Holy Land made a huge difference in the eyes of King Baldwin II. John J. Robinson explains that it was a new paradigm for a knight to take on the same triple vow that was common only to monastic orders; poverty, chastity, and obedience. 8] These three pledges directly contrasted the life goals of secular medieval kni ghts. The service of protecting pilgrims was greatly needed. It had been twenty years since the taking of Jerusalem and the number of pilgrims had grown to the point that they had become a substantial source of revenue. The pilgrims spent their money on travel, tolls, gifts, and tithes to the church; thus, the greatest danger to those growing proceeds was the threat to the pilgrims’ life and property.All the lands between the Christian cities were subject to marauders, Muslim zealots, slave traders, rapists, and murderers; all of which kept those revenues from getting to the Holy Land. King Baldwin II must have been ecstatic when he heard the vows of that small group of knights who would fight to restore and maintain the flow of revenue; power begets power. The DaVinci Code continues with its own history of the Knights’ origins:Langdon quickly gave Sophie the standard academic sketch of the accepted Knights Templar history, explaining how the Knights were in the Holy L and during the Second Crusade and told King Baldwin II that they were there to protect Christian pilgrims on the roadways. Although unpaid and sworn to poverty, the Knights told the king they required basic shelter and requested his permission to take up residence in the stables under the ruins of the temple. King Baldwin granted the soldiers’ request, and Knights took up their meager residence inside the devastated shrine.The odd choice of lodging, Langdon explained, had been anything but random. The Knights believed the documents the Priory sought were buried deep under the ruins – beneath the Holy of Holies, a sacred chamber where God Himself was believed to reside. Literally, the very center of the Jewish faith. For almost a decade, the nine Knights lived in the ruins, excavating in total secrecy through solid rock. (Brown, page 172) Some of this depiction is true. The Knights received their secular military order, circa 1119, and were given shelter at King Baldwin ’s palace; specifically in the al-Aqsa Mosque (not just the stables).During the construction of the al-Aqsa Mosque in the 7th century, â€Å"†¦ contemporary Muslim and Jewish sources record that the site was covered with garbage dumped there by Byzantine Christians, and that the two communities participated in cleaning it up as Umar watched on, until the rock upon which the Temples of Jerusalem [Solomon’s Temple] were said to have been erected was revealed. †[9] So The Knights of the Temple, aka the Knights Templar, were so named. In the year 1128, Bernard of Clairvaux, the Abbot of Clairvaux and cousin to Hugues de Payens, assisted at the Council of Troyes.The purpose of this council was to settle certain disputes of the bishops of Paris, and regulate other matters of the Church of France. It was at this council that Bernard traced the outlines of the Rule of the Knights Templar and where the order was given papal recognition. [10] A letter from Saint Bern ard was written to Hugues de Payens and entitled De Laudibus Novae Militiae translated as In Praise of the New Knighthood. [11] It was this letter that propelled the Templars forward more then any other single event. The powerful association with the papacy and the Catholic Church started here; power begets power again.Once the Knights received official recognition from the papacy, Pope Honorius II, they set out with their Templar Rule to recruit more members and acquire donations to support their cause. The order owed its rapid growth in popularity to the fact that it combined the two great passions of the middle ages, religious fervor and martial prowess, into one entity. [12] This appealed to thousands of people who were willing to take up the cause, live by the Rule, and donate all their wealth. There is power behind wealth and in numbers of people; the Knights Templar attained both in unfathomable quantity.Dan Brown tells us in The DaVinci Code that it was the Catholic Church t hat was being blackmailed by the Knights of the Temple: â€Å"For almost a decade, the nine Knights lived in the ruins, excavating in total secrecy through solid rock. † Sophie looked over. â€Å"And you said they discovered something? † â€Å"They certainly did,† Langdon said, explaining how it had taken nine years, â€Å"but the Knights had finally found what they had been searching for. They took the treasure from the temple and traveled to Europe, where their influence seemed to solidify overnight.Nobody was certain whether the Knights had blackmailed the Vatican or whether the Church simply tried to buy the Knights’ silence, but Pope Innocent II immediately issued an unprecedented papal bull that afforded the Knights Templar limitless power and declared them ‘a law unto themselves’ – an autonomous army independent of all interference from kings and prelates, both religious and political. With their new carte blanche from the Vati can, the Knights Templar expanded at a staggering rate, both in numbers and political force, amassing vast estates in over a dozen countries.They began extending credit to bankrupt royals and charging interest in return, †¦. † (Brown, pages 172 – 173) Within ten years of their recognition by the Catholic Church that Pope Innocent II issued the bull Omne datum optimum (Every Great Gift) on the Templar order. This bull did exempt the Templars from all authority on earth, secular or temporal, except that of the pope. This enabled the Knights Templar to collect tithes but they didn’t have to pay any. No one could ask a Templar to swear an oath or demand any change in their Rule.No monarch could impose his own civil law; one result was that they didn’t have to pay taxes. No bishop, archbishop, or cardinal could give them an order or interfere with their activities. Templars even had the power to abolish priests that didn’t suit them. [13] This was a level of power unheard of before their time so the blackmailing scenario is feasible but not very probable. The Knights Templar were exempt from paying tithes and taxes because all their funds were used to fight for Christ. Building and maintaining fortifications required a stream of money and the Templars were ingenious in keeping it flowing.Regular income was generated from the much needed service of money-changing in the Holy Land. However, an order of the Catholic Church was not allowed to loan money and collect interest, so the Templars invented, or at least popularized, the concept of interest deducted in advance; give a man ten dollars but create a document that says he is to pay back eleven dollars. [14] Voila, they charged no interest and generated lots of wealth. The DaVinci Code says: â€Å"The Templars invented the concept of modern banking. For European nobility, traveling with gold was perilous, so the Templars allowed nobles o deposit gold in their nearest Temple Ch urch and then draw it from any other Temple Church across Europe. All they needed was proper documentation. † (Brown, page 375) The Knights Templar’s military strength, acuity, and perseverance really did make it possible to collect, store, and transport gold and other valuables to and from Europe and the Holy Land successfully. Kings, noblemen, and pilgrims used the Knights Templar as a kind of bank or armored truck; the concept of safe deposit boxes and travelers checks originated in these activities. 15] They did not, however, invent modern style banking; we have to give that credit to the Jews. The most obvious source of the Templars power was their fierce might and tenacity. â€Å"Knighthood, as known in Europe, was characterized by two elements, feudalism and service as a mounted combatant. Both arose under the reign of the Frankish emperor Charlemagne, from which the knighthood of the Middle Ages can be seen to have had its genesis. †[16] These men were wa rrior monks who fought courageously during the crusades.Malcolm Barber, a recognized Templar scholar, illustrates that the Knights Templar were extremely zealous and had a creed to never flee a battlefield[17] – this depiction leads many people to believe they were quite possibly insane. Fear is a powerful weapon to wield and in the Middle Ages, fear was key to control and domination in every aspect of life. To tell a ranking official that you were not afraid of them was considered in insult. [18] The DaVinci Code tells us that the Knights Templar were powerful due to their connection with the Holy Grail (as defined by Brown) which the following citations reveal: The Templars’ potent treasure trove of documents, which had apparently been their source of power, was Clement’s true objective, but it slipped through his fingers. The documents had long since been entrusted to the Templars’ shadowy architects, the Priory of Sion, whose veil of secrecy had kept them safely out of range of the Vatican’s onslaught. As the Vatican closed in, the Priory smuggled their documents from a Paris preceptory by night onto Templar ships in La Rochelle. † [Emphasis added] â€Å"Where did the documents go? † â€Å"The entire collection of documents, its power, and the secret it eveals have become known by a single name – Sangreal. † â€Å"The legend is complicated, but the important thing to remember is that the Priory guards the proof, and is purportedly awaiting the right moment in history to review the truth. † â€Å"What truth? What secret could possibly be that powerful? † â€Å"Sophie, the word Sangreal is an ancient word. It has evolved over the years into another term †¦ a more modern name. † â€Å"†¦ ‘Holy Grail’. † â€Å"†¦ but the Sangreal documents are only half of the Holy Grail treasure. They are buried with the Grail itself †¦ and reveal its tr ue meaning.The documents gave the Knights Templar so much power because the pages revealed the true nature of the Grail. † (Brown, pages 174 – 175) Sophie quickly outlined what Langdon had explained earlier – the Priory of Sion, the Knights Templar, the Sangreal documents, and the Holy Grail, which many claimed was not a cup †¦ but rather something far more powerful. (Brown, page 248) â€Å"The Holy Grail is not a thing. It is, in fact †¦ a person. † (Brown, page 256) â€Å"Legends of chivalric quests for the lost Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests for the lost sacred feminine.Knights who claimed to be ‘searching for the chalice’ were speaking in code as a way to protect themselves from a Church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned nonbelievers, and forbidden the pagan reverence for the sacred feminine. † (Brown, page 259) The Holy Grail is Mary Magdalene †¦ the mother of the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ. Sophie tilted her head and scanned the list of titles: THE TEMPLAR REVELATION: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (Brown, page 273) Sophie was silent for a long moment. And these four chests of documents were the treasure that the Knights Templar found under Solomon’s Temple? † â€Å"Exactly. The documents that made the Knights so powerful. The documents that have been the object of countless Grail quests throughout history. † â€Å"But you said the Holy Grail was Mary Magdalene. If people are searching for documents, why would you call it a search for the Holy Grail? † Teabing eyed her, his expression softening. â€Å"Because the hiding place of the Holy Grail includes a sarcophagus. â€Å"The quest for the Holy Grail is literally the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene. A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one, the lost sacred feminine. † (Brown, page 277) Sophie felt an unexpected wonder. â₠¬Å"The hiding place of the Holy Grail is actually †¦ a tomb? † Teabing’s hazel eyes got misty. â€Å"It is. A tomb containing the body of Mary Magdalene and the documents that tell the true story of her life. At its heart, the quest for the Holy Grail has always been a quest for Magdalene – the wronged Queen, entombed with the proof of her family’s rightful claim to power. (Brown, page 278) †¦ [Godefroi de Bouillon, descendant in the Merovingian bloodline and founder of the Priory of Sion] â€Å"ordered the Knights Templar to recover the Sangreal documents from beneath Solomon’s Temple and thus provide the Merovingians proof of their hereditary ties to Jesus Christ† [through Christ’s marriage to and subsequent children with Mary Magdalene]. (Brown, page 279) This personification of the Knights Templar by Dan Brown is simply not true; he created it to further his plot and keep the readers enthralled. Mission accomplished.As p reviously illustrated, the Knights Templar were powerful in their own right and not because they were created to protect the holy grail for a secret society known as the Priory of Sion. The things that actually made the Knights Templar powerful were as follows: 1. ) the papacy and their association with the Catholic Church; 2. ) the view the masses had of them as good, righteous, and true; 3. ) the trust that the nobles and lay peoples put in them; 4. ) their wealth and ingenuity in creating and sustaining that wealth; 5. ) their own righteous attitude, tenacity, and fervor; 6. the fear they invoked – including fear on the battlefield; and 7. ) the secrecy that they were determined to sustain. CONCLUSION / HYPOTHESIS The enigmatic Knights Templar would have probably faded into history if it had not been for the mention of knights (secular or devout) in the popular literary works of the Templar’s time. The unfinished poem of Chretien de Troyes, regarded by many as the o ldest known Grail romance, tells of the adventures of a knight named Perceval, also the name of his poem. Another name for the same poem is Conte del Graal translated as The Story of the Grail (c. 190). [19] Chretien died before he revealed exactly what the grail was; however, the knights did not cease to exist in the written word. Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170-1220) continued the thread with his grail romance poem known as Parzival. Wolfram’s character, Parzival, is the representation of the slow and stumbling progress of an honorable man reaching toward the highest earthly responsibilities. In parallel incidents, it tells of a knight’s adventures that have already been recognized by his peers as unmatched by any other knight. 20] Even though the Knights Templar were not named specifically they are assumed to be the basis for the character since the Templars coexisted with the authors. Here is where the connection between the Holy Grail and the Knights Templar begins; in poems and other fictional writings that made people feel good. In many of these grail romances it was discerned that the grail was a plate or a vessel that Christ was believed to have ate off of or drank out of at the last supper. This item was then used to catch droplets of his blood while he hung from the cross, dying.So, from a vessel holding the blood of Christ we don’t have to jump very far to get to a pregnant woman carrying Jesus’ baby (still a vessel holding the blood of Christ). Mary Magdalene was merely a logical choice as the notorious vessel. Referencing the Templars as the guardian of the Holy Grail was also a logical choice; they had been depicted in literature doing just that for hundreds of years. I must say that Dan Brown’s idea of having Mary Magdalene’s physical remains as the actual object was a bit gruesome. Writers still find it easy to use the Templars in their tales because the Knights were a secretive order.The Knights Templar Encyclopedia tells us that the Templars’ central archives were shipped to Cyprus while the Saracens were taking Acre in August of 1291. After the Templars were suppressed in 1312 all of their records were passed on to their rivals, the Knights Hospitallars who were also residing on Cyprus. It is believed that when the Turks took Cyprus in 1571 most of these archives were destroyed;[21] however, it is through the Hospitallars’, and a few other sources such as the chronicles of William of Tyre, that we still have some records today, a few of which still await translation.These facts are not only enlightening but assist our understanding of why there is so much myth and mystery surrounding the order. The fact that the Knights Templar have remained in the forefront of our thoughts all these years is simply amazing. The Templars continue to be used by everyday writers in all kinds of genre and forums which touch the varying aspects of individual interests and personalities. Yes, all of their efforts keep us coming back for more. Dan Brown’s novel The DaVinci Code entertained readers everywhere.Sony Pictures’ movie of his story spread the tale to an even wider audience. New video games rose up everywhere and in all different languages. The Knights Templar were introduced to new generations for the first time and this is why we remain fascinated with them. Whether they are depicted as bad guys or good guys they were once a real order of warrior monks and that fact gives at least a little credence to all new manifestations. It is from this research that I hypothesize the true power behind the Knights Templar comes from the universal psychology of the masses.We, as human beings, have basic needs that must be met (food, shelter, and security) and when we find a safe source to fulfill any of those needs, we latch on to it. Initially the Templars came to us in a manner that provided protection of our physical well being, enabling us to seek spi ritual fulfillment. As our protectors of faith they took on an even stronger idealistic role that helped them to become ‘established’ within the universal psyche. Once fully accepted by the people of the day to be their protectors, the people supported them without question. This is where the true power lies, in the minds and actions of the masses.Any entity with the ability to control the perception of the majority is a powerful entity indeed. BIBLIOGRAPHY Baigent, Michael, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. Holy Blood Holy Grail. New York: Dell Publishing, 1982. I actually bought this book for my research. It was used to establish an understanding of where Dan Brown came up with his crazy facts. de Troyes, Chretien. Perceval, Or, The Story of The Grail. New York: Pergamon Press, 1983. This is the version I referenced for the noted source. The actual unfinished work was circa 1190 and is not listed in the Library of Congress. Barber, Malcolm. â€Å"The Knights Templar. Slate, April 20, 2006, http://www. slate. com/id/2140307/? nav=tap3 (accessed October 26, 2008). This was a good place to start. It established a basic scholarly overview of my topic by a renowned and trusted source. Barber, Malcolm. The New Knighthood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Malcolm Barber is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Reading. This was my bible. I was able to use this book as noted in this paper and to verify or throw out information from other sources. Barber, Malcolm, and Keith Bate. The Templars: Selected Sources. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Reprint, New York: Palgrave, 2002. Malcolm Barber is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Reading. This book was translated and Annotated by Malcolm Barber and Keith Bate and it comprises a substantial collection of translated material illustrative of its history. I used it only for the noted referenced. Bernard of Clairvaux; translated by M. Conrad Greenia. In Praise o f The New Knighthood: A Treatise On The Knights Templar and The Holy Places of Jerusalem. Kalamazoo, Mich. : Cistercian Publications, 2000. Very important document; without it, there may never have been a Catholic order called the Knights of the Temple.Bold, Kevin. â€Å"Baphomet: A â€Å"Mystery† Solved At Last? ,† 1995. Stephen Dafoe. http://www. templarhistory. com/solved. html. Interesting article, I did not use it in this paper. Boudicca, Laura. â€Å"Knights Templar Page,† April 10, 2008. Church of Y Dynion Mwyn. http://www. tylwythteg. com/templar. html. Interesting article, I did not use it in this paper. Brown, Dan. The Davinci Code. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. I liked this book and the creativity of those who were responsible for its basis; Baigent, Michael, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (especially Lincoln). Not to forget Noel Corbu and Pierre Plantard.If you take out the FACT page it is an entertaining work of fiction without as much controversy . Fodor's Guide to The Davinci Code: On The Trail to The Best-Selling Novel. Edited by Jennifer Paull, and Christopher Culwell. First ed. New York: Fodor's Travel / Random House, 2006. This book was okay; however, I did not find it very useful in my research. I am glad I bought it though; it is fun to see the pictures of the actual places. Charbonnel, Josaephe Chartrou. (From Old Catalog). Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1928. This source was translated by Malcolm Barber. I used it only for the noted reference.Correll, Larry, and Susan Correll. â€Å"Priory of Sion,† Timothy Ministries. http://timothyministries. org/theologicaldictionary/default. aspx? theword=priory%20of%20sion This is merely one definition of the Priory of Sion; short and to the point. The Vatican Publishing House. â€Å"THE PARCHMENT OF CHINON – Chinon, Diocese of Tours, 1308 August 17th – 20th,† Unknown. The Vatican Publishing House. http://asv. vatican. va/en/doc/1308. h tm#top. I used this source only for the noted reference. This website appears to be the official website of the Vatican – it says it is the Holy See. Dafoe, Stephen. Baphomet: The Pentagram Connection,† Stephen Dafoe. http://www. templarhistory. com/pentagram. html. TemplarHistory. com is an online resource of information on the history, mystery, myth and legacy of the Knights Templar that was started by Templar author Stephen Dafoe in the fall of 1997. Interesting article, I did not use it in this paper. Dafoe, Stephen. â€Å"The Templar Hierarchy,† Stephen Dafoe. http://www. templarhistory. com/hierarchy. html. TemplarHistory. com is an online resource of information on the history, mystery, myth and legacy of the Knights Templar that was started by Templar author Stephen Dafoe in the fall of 1997.Interesting article, it was my first resource regarding the structure of the order. I received the same information in several other sources; however, the Templar hie rarchy was not used in this paper. Dafoe, Stephen. â€Å"Who Were The Knights Templar? ,† Stephen Dafoe. http://www. templarhistory. com/who. html. TemplarHistory. com is an online resource of information on the history, mystery, myth and legacy of the Knights Templar that was started by Templar author Stephen Dafoe in the fall of 1997. An overview. de Sede, Gerard;. The Accursed Treasure of Rennes-le-chateau. Translated by Bill Kersey. Worcester Park: DEK, 2001.Gerard de Sede was a surrealist writer. This book reveals a plausible explanation of the source of Sauniere's wealth and untangles the astounding hoax which includes false genealogies and international conspiracies. Gerard de Sede wrote a magazine article about Gisors, which in turn was responsible for his acquainting himself with Pierre Plantard and soon a collaboration developed between them that inspired Gerard de Sede's 1962 book, Les Templiers sont parmi nous, ou, L'Enigme de Gisors (â€Å"The Templars are Among st Us, or The Enigma of Gisors†), which also paved the way for the introduction of the mythical Priory of Sion.Pretty interesting stuff these collaborations. Editee pour la premiere fois et traduite en fran? cais par J. -B. Chabot. Chronique De Michel Le Syrien, Patriarche Jacobite D'antioche (1166-1199). 4 vols. Bruxelles: Culture et Civilisation, 1963. This source was translated by Malcolm Barber. I used it only for the noted reference. Gonen, Rivka. Contested Holiness: Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Perspectives On The Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Jersey City, NJ: KTAV Pub. House, 2003. Rivka Gonen is the former Senior Curator of the Department of Jewish Ethnography at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and a participant in the Temple Mount Excavations.The book is a straightforward survey and history enhanced with modern-day perspectives on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. I used it only for the noted reference. Griffith-Jones, Robin. The Da Vinci Code and The Secrets of The Temple. Grand Rapids, Mich. : William B. Eerdmans Pub. , 2006. Robin Griffith-Jones works at the Temple Church in England and this book is the accumulation of what her presents to visitors. Parchments known as the Les Dossiers Secrets which were actually produced by Philippe de Cherisey is hat I pulled from an excerpt of this source, although it is common knowledge and found in many sources. GNU Free Documentation License. â€Å"Origins of medieval knighthood,† Last updated 10-18-2008: 22:50. The Wikimedia Foundation. http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Knight. This provided me with the definition of secular knight. I could then compare it with the definition of a Knights Templar. Haag, Michael, Veronica Haag, and James McConnachie. The Rough Guide to The Davinci Code. Edited by Mark Ellingham. rev. ed. N. p. : Rough Guides Ltd. , 2006. This was a somewhat useful source.Some of the websites no longer work but we needed it for class and it was handy to look up other peoples topics. Hindley , Geoffrey. The Crusades: A History of Armed Pilgrimage and Holy War. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003. This work chronicles the numerous expeditions to recover Jerusalem for Christendom. It was useful in my research. Geoffrey Hindley is a lecturer/writer educated at University College, Oxford. This was a useful and reliable source. Housley, Norman. The Avignon Papacy and The Crusades, 1305-1378. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.While focusing on the relationship between the papacy and the 14th-century crusades, this study illuminates other fields of activity in Avignon, such as papal taxation and interaction with Byzantium. Housley analyzes the Curia's approach to related issues such as peacemaking between warring Christian powers, the work of Military Orders, and western attempts to maintain a trade embargo on Mamluk, Egypt. I used it only for the noted reference. Housley, Norman, ed. Knighthoods of Christ: Essays On The History of The Crusades and The Knights Templar, Presented to Malcolm Barber. Aldershot, England. Reprint, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.Technically the essay I pulled this from was called â€Å"The Military Orders and the East, 1149-1291 written by Jonathan Riley-Smith which begins on page 137 of the collection edited by Norman Housley. It provide the information I needed and was a good source. Introvigne, Massimo. â€Å"Beyond The Da Vinci Code: History and Myth of the Priory of Sion,† June, 2005. CESNUR Center for Studies On New Religions. http://www. cesnur. org/2005/pa_introvigne. htm. Massimo Introvigne is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements.Introvigne is the author of numerous books and hundreds of articles in the field of sociology of religion. Finding a scholarly source on this topic was not easy. I was grateful to find this work by him and gave it to Emil y to use in their research. Very important to my research on this topic. Jones, Greg. Beyond Da Vinci. New York: Seabury Books, 2004. This book is short, concise, and understandable. Greg Jones presents the facts openly and shows the flaws when they are there in a way that is simply debatable. I used it only for the noted reference. Moore, Malcolm. â€Å"Vatican paper set to clear Knights Templar,† October 7, 2007.Telegraph Media Group Limited 2008. http://www. telegraph. co. uk/news/worldnews/1565252/Vatican-paper-set-to-clear-Knights-Templar. html. Article was printed verbatim under the CHINON PARCHMENT. Very useful. Riley-Smith, Jonathan, ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of The Crusades, Oxford ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Jonathan Riley-Smith is Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Cambridge. This was a great source that I referenced it often. Malcolm Barber also references his work. Ruth Mazo Karras, Joel Kaye, William Kenan, a nd E. Ann Matter, eds.Law and The Illicit in Medieval Europe. Middle Ages series. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Ruth Mazo Karras is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. Joel Kaye is Professor of History at Barnard College. William R. Kenan is Jr. Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. E. Ann Matter is Associate Dean for Arts and Letters in the School of Arts and Sciences. Various scholars make the case that the development of law is deeply implicated in the growth of medieval theology and Christian doctrine. I used it only for the noted reference.Schein, Sylvia. Fideles Crucis: The Papacy, The West, and The Recovery of The Holy Land, 1274-1314. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Schein is a PhD who challenges the view that the fall of Acre in 1291 was a watershed dividing the â€Å"classical age† of the crusade from the late Middle Ages, when the ideal had become ste rile, the obsessive dream of a handful of individuals. She shows instead that the desire to recover the Holy Land remained powerful and pervasive, and was an important consideration in the policy-making of European rulers.She uses an enormous range of sources consulted and collated: papal bulls, chronicles, prophecies, apocalyptic treatises and letters. Very useful source. Strayer, Joseph R. The Reign of Philip The Fair. Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, 1980. Strayer (1904-1987) taught at Princeton University and was chair of their History Department from 1941-1961. I wasn’t able to get my hands on this book, only the noted reference. Newman, Sharan. The Real History Behind The Templars, 10th ed. New York: Penguin Group, 2007. Sharan Newman was a PhD candidate at UC Santa Barbara, CA at the time this book was published.She is also a longtime member of the Medieval Academy and has served on the advisory board for the Medieval Association of the Pacific. I bought this book for my research and found it very useful in collaborating less scholarly sources as well as the noted reference. Nicholson, Helen, and David Nicolle. God's Warriors: Knights Templar, Saracens and The Battle for Jerusalem, Pbk ed. New York, NY, USA: Osprey Pub. , 2006. This is a good source for information about the battle of Hattin in 1187 and â€Å"rival military elites†. Helen Nicholson actually wrote about the Knights Templar.I used it only for the noted reference. Phillips, Jonathan. Defenders of The Holy Land: Relations Between The Latin East and The West, 1119-1187. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. I used this source only for the noted reference; however, I also viewed various clips on you-tube with this author in them. I took notes because he was very good. The author has his doctorate. Ralls, Karen. Knights Templar Encyclopedia. Edited by Gina Talucci. New Jersey: The Career Press, Inc. , 2007. The author is a Ph. D. medieval historian and religious studies scholar.I bought this one for my research and used to confirm or debunk various other sources. Robinson, John J. Dungeon, Fire, and Sword: The Knights Templar in The Crusades. New York: M. Evans & Co. , 1991. The author is a member of the Medieval Academy of America, the Organization of American Historians, and Royal Overseas League of London. This was the most enjoyable research book of them all. I lost many hours just because I couldn’t stop reading it. The context is not dry but flows more like novel. Valletta, Malta. â€Å"The â€Å"Priory of Sion† Hoax / Part 1: A Barkeeper's Myth,† MalGo Media Services Ltd. http://www. avinci-the-movie. com/priory-of-sion-1. html. Part one: This was a good site for getting the explanation in chronological order with a lot more detail. I also verified information found in Massimo Introvigne’s site. There is no author listed on site so it was very suspect until verified. Valle tta, Malta. â€Å"The â€Å"Priory of Sion† Hoax / Part 2: The rich, poor Priest,† MalGo Media Services Ltd. http://www. davinci-the-movie. com/priory-of-sion-2. html. Part two: This was a good site for getting the explanation in chronological order with a lot more detail. I also verified information found in Massimo Introvigne’s site.There is no author listed on site so it was very suspect until verified. Valletta, Malta. â€Å"The â€Å"Priory of Sion† Hoax / Part 3: BCC is taken by,† MalGo Media Services Ltd. http://www. davinci-the-movie. com/priory-of-sion-3. html. Part three: This was a good site for getting the explanation in chronological order with a lot more detail. I also verified information found in Massimo Introvigne’s site. There is no author listed on site so it was very suspect until verified. von Eschenbach, Wolfram. Parzival. Harmondsworth, Eng. Reprint, New York, N. Y. : Penguin Books, 1980. This is the version I referenc ed for the noted source.The actual works were written between 1200 and 1210 and are not listed in the Library of Congress. William Chester Jordan. The French Monarchy and The Jews: From Philip Augustus to The Last Capetians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. I used this source only for the noted reference. APPENDIX – THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR CITATIONS IN THE DAVINCI CODE Pages 171 – 173 {prelude citation in this instance will be important to my research. } â€Å"The Priory of Sion,† he began, â€Å"was founded in Jerusalem in 1099 by a French king named Godefori de Bouillon, immediately after he had conquered the city. â€Å"King Godefroi was allegedly the possessor of a powerful secret – a secret that had been in his family since the time of Christ. Fearing his secret might be lost when he died, he founded a secret brotherhood – the Priory of Sion – charged them with protecting his secret by quietly passing it on from gener ation to generation. During their years in Jerusalem, the Priory learned of stash of hidden documents buried beneath the ruins of Herod’s temple, which had been built atop the earlier ruins of Solomon’s Temple.These documents, they believed, corroborated Godefroi’s powerful secret and were so explosive in nature that the Church would stop at nothing to get them. † â€Å"The Priory vowed that no matter how long it took, these documents must be recovered from the rubble beneath the temple and protected forever, so the truth would never die. In order to retrieve the documents from within the ruins, the Priory created a military arm – a group of nine knights called the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and Temple of Solomon. † Langdon paused. â€Å"More commonly known as the Knights Templar. †Langdon had lectured often enough on the Knights Templar to know that almost everyone on earth had heard of them, at least abstractedly. For academ ics, the Templars’ history was a precarious world where fact, lore, and misinformation had become so intertwined that extracting a pristine truth was almost impossible. Nowadays, Langdon hesitated even to mention the Knights Templar while lecturing because it invariably led to a barrage of convoluted inquiries into assorted conspiracy theories. Sophie already looked troubled. â€Å"You’re saying the Knights Templar were founded by the Priory of Sion to retrieve a collection of secret documents?I thought the Templars were created to protect the Holy Land. † â€Å"A common misconception. The idea of protection of pilgrims was the guise under which the Templars ran their mission. Their true goal in the Holy Land was to retrieve the documents from beneath the ruins of the temple. † â€Å"And did they find them? † Langdon grinned. â€Å"Nobody knows for sure, but the one thing on which all academics agree is this: The Knights discovered something down there in the ruins †¦ something that made them wealthy and powerful beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. † {Emphasis added}Langdon quickly gave Sophie the standard academic sketch of the accepted Knights Templar history, explaining how the Knights were in the Holy Land during the Second Crusade and told King Baldwin II that they were there to protect Christian pilgrims on the roadways. Although unpaid and sworn to poverty, the Knights told the king they required basic shelter and requested his permission to take up residence in the stables under the ruins of the temple. King Baldwin granted the soldiers’ request, and Knights took up their meager residence inside the devastated shrine.The odd choice of lodging, Langdon explained, had been anything but random. The Knights believed the documents the Priory sought were buried deep under the ruins – beneath the Holy of Holies, a sacred chamber where God Himself was believed to reside. Literally, the very c enter of the Jewish faith. For almost a decade, the nine Knights lived in the ruins, excavating in total secrecy through solid rock. Sophie looked over. â€Å"And you said they discovered something? † â€Å"They certainly did,† Langdon said, explaining how it had taken nine years, but the Knights had finally found what they had been searching for.They took the treasure from the temple and traveled to Europe, where their influence seemed to solidify overnight. Nobody was certain whether the Knights had blackmailed the Vatican or whether the Church simply tried to buy the Knights’ silence, but Pope Innocent II immediately issued an unprecedented papal bull that afforded the Knights Templar limitless power and declared them ‘a law unto themselves’ – an autonomous army independent of all interference from kings and prelates, both religious and political. {Emphasis added}With their new carte blanche from the Vatican, the Knights Templar expanded a t a staggering rate, both in numbers and political force, amassing vast estates in over a dozen countries. The began extending credit to bankrupt royals and charging interest in return, thereby establish modern banking and broadening their wealth and influence still further. {After the citation above Brown begins to talk about the fall of the Knights, where they went, and states that they still exist under other names and â€Å"fraternities†. } Pages 174 – 175 The Templars’ potent treasure trove of documents, which had apparently been their source of power, was Clement’s true objective, but it slipped through his fingers. The documents had long since been entrusted to the Templars’ shadowy architects, the Priory of Sion, whose veil of secrecy had kept them safely out of range of the Vatican’s onslaught. As the Vatican closed in, the Priory smuggled their documents from a Paris preceptory by night onto Templar ships in La Rochelle. † {E mphasis added} â€Å"Where did the documents go? â€Å"The entire collection of documents, its power, and the secret it reveals have become known by a single name – Sangreal. † {Emphasis added} â€Å"The legend is complicated, but the important thing to remember is that the Priory guards the proof, and is purportedly awaiting the right moment in history to review the truth. † â€Å"What truth? What secret could possibly be that powerful? † â€Å"Sophie, the word Sangreal is an ancient word. It has evolved over the years into another term †¦ a more modern name. † â€Å"†¦ ‘Holy Grail’. † †¦ but the Sangreal documents are only half of the Holy Grail treasure. They are buried with the Grail itself †¦ and reveal its true meaning. The documents gave the Knights Templar so much power because the pages revealed the true nature of the Grail. † {Emphasis added} Pages 182 – 183 {Langdon and Sophie are in the taxi on the way to 24 Rue Haxo – also known as the Depository Bank of Zurich. My point, the Knights initiation of international banking as a source of power. } â€Å"Langdon pulled the heavy key from his pocket †¦ Earlier, while tellingSophie about the Knights Templar, Langdon had realized that this key, in addition to having the Priory seal embossed on it, possessed a more subtle tie to the Priory of Sion. The equal-armed cruciform was symbolic of the balance and harmony but also of the Knights Templar. Everyone had seen the paintings of Knights Templar wearing white tunics emblazoned with the red equal-armed crosses. Granted, the arms of the Templar cross were slightly flared at the ends, but they were still of equal length. A square cross. Just like the one on this key.The Grail was believed to be somewhere in England, buried in a hidden chamber beneath one of the many Templar churches, where it had been hidden since at least 1500. Page 185 â€Å"Is it possible, † Sophie asked, â€Å"that the key you’re holding unlocks the hiding place of the Holy Grail? † â€Å"We have an extremely secure key, stamped with the Priory of Sion seal, delivered to us by a member of the Priory of Sion – a brotherhood which, you just told me, are guardians of the Holy Grail. † Pages 186 – 187 †¦ Langdon had entirely forgotten that the peaceful, equal-armed cross had been adopted as the perfect symbol for the flag of neutral Switzerland.At least the mystery was solved. Sophie and Langdon were holding the key to a Swiss bank deposit box. Page 248 Sophie quickly outlined what Langdon had explained earlier – the Priory of Sion, the Knights Templar, the Sangreal documents, and the Holy Grail, which many claimed was not a cup †¦ but rather something far more powerful. {Emphasis added} {These next citations identify the novel’s description of the ‘thing’ that gave the documents that the Knigh ts Templar guarded, their power. } Page 253 â€Å"It was all about power,† Teabing continued. Christ as Messiah was critical to the functioning of Church and state. Many scholars claim that the early Church literally stole Jesus from His original followers, hijacking His human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using it to expand their own power. † {Emphasis added} Page 256 â€Å"The Holy Grail is not a thing. It is, in fact †¦ a person. † Page 258 â€Å"The Grail is literally the ancient symbol for womanhood, and the Holy Grail represents the sacred feminine and the goddess, which of course has now been lost, virtually eliminated by the Church.The power of the female and her ability to produce life was once very sacred, but it posed a threat to the rise of the predominantly male Church †¦Ã¢â‚¬  Page 259 â€Å"Legends of chivalric quests for the lost Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests for the lost sacred femin ine. Knights who claimed to be ‘searching for the chalice’ were speaking in code as a way to protect themselves from a Church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned nonbelievers, and forbidden the pagan reverence for the sacred feminine. Page 273 The Holy Grail is Mary Magdalene †¦ the mother of the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ. Sophie tilted her head and scanned the list of titles: THE TEMPLAR REVELATION: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ Page 277 â€Å"The Sangreal documents simply tell the other side of the Christ story. In the end, which side of the story you believe becomes a matter of faith and personal exploration, but at least the information has survived. The Sangreal documents include tens of thousands of pages of information.Eyewitness accounts of the Sangreal treasure describe it as being carried in four enormous trunks. In those trunks are reputed to be the Purist Documents – thousands of pages of unaltered, pr e-Constantine documents, written by the early followers of Jesus, revering Him as a wholly human teacher and prophet. Also rumored to be part of the treasure is the legendary â€Å"Q† Documents – a manuscript that even the Vatican admits they believe exists. Allegedly, it is a book of Jesus’ teachings, possibly written in His own hand. † Sophie was silent for a long moment. And these four chests of documents were the treasure that the Knights Templar found under Solomon’s Temple? † â€Å"Exactly. The documents that made the Knights so powerful. The documents that have been the object of countless Grail quests throughout history. † {Emphasis added} â€Å"But you said the Holy Grail was Mary Magdalene. If people are searching for documents, why would you call it a search for the Holy Grail? † Teabing eyed her, his expression softening. â€Å"Because the hiding place of the Holy Grail includes a sarcophagus. † The quest for t he Holy Grail is literally the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene. A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one, the lost sacred feminine. † Page 278 Sophie felt an unexpected wonder.â€Å"The hiding place of the Holy Grail is actually †¦ a tomb? † Teabing’s hazel eyes got misty. â€Å"It is. A tomb containing the body of Mary Magdalene and the documents that tell the true story of her life. At its heart, the quest for the Holy Grail has always been a quest for Magdalene – the wronged Queen, entombed with the proof of her family’s rightful claim to power. {Emphasis added} Page 279 â€Å"†¦ {Godefroi de Bouillon, descendant in the Merovingian bloodline and founder of the Priory of Sion} ordered the Knights Templar to recover the Sangreal documents from beneath Solomon’s Temple and thus provide the Merovingians proof of their hereditary ties to Jesus Christ [through Christ’s marriage to and subsequent child ren with Mary Magdalene]. Pages 328 – 329 An ancient word of wisdom frees this scroll †¦ and helps us keep her scatter’d family whole †¦ a headstone praised by templars is the key †¦ and atbash will reveal the truth to thee. This poem,† Teabing gushed, â€Å"references not only the Grail, but the Knights Templar and scattered family of Mary Magdalene! What more could we ask for? † Page 366 â€Å"Robert, for heaven’s sake! The church built in London by the Priory’s military arm – the Knights Templar themselves! † â€Å"The Temple Church? † Once the epicenter of all Templar/Priory activities in the United Kingdom, the Temple Church had been so named in honor of Solomon’s Temple, from which the Knights Templar had extracted theirs own title, as well as the Sangreal documents that gave them all their influence in Rome.Tales abounded of knights performing strange, secretive rituals within the Temple Churc h’s unusual sanctuary. Page 375 â€Å"The Knights Templar were warriors,† Teabing reminded †¦ â€Å"A religio-military society. Their churches were their strongholds and their banks. † â€Å"Banks? † Sophie asked, glancing at Leigh. â€Å"Heavens, yes. The Templars invented the concept of modern banking. For European nobility, traveling with gold was perilous, so the Templars allowed nobles to deposit gold in their nearest Temple Church and the draw it from any other Temple Church across Europe. All they needed was proper documentation. † Alanus Marcel†, Teabing said, â€Å"The master of the Temple in the early twelve hundreds. He and his successors actually held the Parliamentary chair of Primus Baro Angiae. † Langdon was surprised. â€Å"First Baron of the Realm? † Teabing nodded.â€Å"The Master of the Temple, some claim, held more influence than the king himself. † {Emphasis added} â€Å"You know,† Teabing whispered to Sophie, â€Å"the Holy Grail is said to once have been stored in this church overnight while the Templars moved it from one hiding place to another. Can you imagine the four chests of Sangreal documents sitting right here with Mary Magdalene’s sarcophagus? Pages 466 – 467 The Knights Templar had designed Rosslyn Chapel as an exact architectural blueprint of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem – compete with a west wall, a narrow rectangular sanctuary, and a subterranean vault like the Holy of Holies, in which the original nine knights had first unearthed their priceless treasure. Langdon had to admit, there existed an intriguing symmetry in the idea of the Templars building a modern Grail repository that echoed of the Grail’s original hiding place.