User:Andrewacockburn

Indo-European Languages
Last year, I took an extremely interesting class from the Linguistics Department on languages of the world. For an assignment, I had to write a 5 page paper on the history of the Indo European language family. I chose this topic because the Indo European language family is the largest language family in the world and is comprised of languages spoken by over 3 billion people worldwide.

Islamic Golden Age
When I was in high school, I took a class on Islam, which got me interested in the subject. After reading a few books about it, I decided to do my 30 page senior thesis on the Golden Age of Islam and specifically the contributions that Muslims made to today's society.

Arabic
I've been pretty interested in Arabic ever since I was interested in Islam. Arabic is not only the 4th most spoken language in the world, but also the liturgical language of Islam. What piqued my interest in it was how beautiful the language sounds and the visually stunning script it's written in. Last year, I wrote a ten page paper on the history of the Arabic language for a Linguistics class I took. That class furthered my interest, which helped me decide to take a self study class in Arabic. After I was finished with that class, I still wanted to continue learning it. Now I'm in Arabic 103 and learning more each day.

Pimping
In high school, for an english class, I read a required book on pimping. I had heard all about pimping from popular culture in film and music, particularly hip hop and rap. I was especially interested in how much pop culture had glorified pimping and how much the hard reality of being a pimp differed from pop culture's depiction of it. Since then, I've watched 4 or 5 documentaries and read two other books on the subject.

Syria
If you haven't noticed, there is a recurring theme in my interests: the Middle East. To me, there something exotic and foreign about the region. The Middle East is often referred to as the cradle of civilization, perhaps because people have been inhabiting the region for millennia. The area gave birth to the ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Anatolian civilizations as well as many major religions, including Christianity, Islam, Baha'i, Judaism and Zoroastrianism. Smack dab in the middle of the Middle East is Syria, a country that I've made three powerpoint presentations about. In addition, I've read two books specific to the history of Syria and four that were about the Middle East as a whole.

Islamic Golden Age
This article outlines significant scientific, philosophic and artistic advances made by Muslims in the 'Golden Age of Islam', a period from the 8th to the 13th centuries. Although the article mentions a cornucopia of Islamic advances and contributions to the world at this time, it neglects to include anything about Muslim advances in engineering. Due to the arid desert environment of the Middle East and North Africa that they inhabited, Muslim engineers from the time period are especially renowned for their work with hydraulics, creating complex irrigation systems, dams, reservoirs, and waterwheels.

Irrigation Systems
In order to make the desert fertile so it could be farmed, engineers built complex irrigation systems fed by neighboring bodies of water, often dams. These irrigation systems increased farming efficiency and allowed crops that didn't naturally grow in the desert to thrive. To create reservoirs that fed irrigation canals, Muslim engineers constructed dams. Because they were so well constructed, many of the irrigation canals, dams and reservoirs built during the Golden Age of Islam are still used today. Below is the link to an irrigation canal on the Nile River in Egypt that is still in use today (I tried but couldn't figure out how to post a picture on here).

|Nile Nile River canal in Egypt

Waterwheels
Although waterwheel technology was invented by the Romans, Muslim engineers improved upon the design and employed it throughout the empire, using waterwheels to perform a variety of tasks. The noria, a type of waterwheel designed to lift water, was used to bring water from the surface of a river and deposit in an aqueduct, which were also commonplace during that time. Waterwheels were also utilized to power steel mills, flour mills, sugar mills, and saw mills to name a few of the industrial applications. Below is the link to a picture of a noria still in use today on the Orontes River in Syria.

| Noria in Syria