Energy Consulting Network (Denmark)

This dataset presents Palmyra’s public inscriptions from the first four centuries CE, a period of time during which the city flourished. The Palmyrene elite used inscriptions to advertise their contributions to public and private building projects, and commemorate the dead. These stone carved inscriptions were written in all the major languages of the region: Palmyrene Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. A total of 1134 public inscriptions have been compiled and digitized by researchers, thus constituting the most comprehensive dataset of the public inscriptions from Palmyra to date. As such, it is a unique source of information about building activities, elite patronage, and the evolution of Palmyrene social structures.

The ancient literary tradition, together with piecemeal archaeological evidence, has conventionally served as a basis for investigating the origin of the city of Rome. This study aims to counterbalance earlier studies by using archaeological evidence as the main data of the examination, particularly new archaeological discoveries and scientific studies. The archaeological record from early Rome shows that urbanization was a gradual process taking place over several centuries. However, from the wide range of archaeological material studied in this article, it is evident that an intense wave of urbanization emerged in Rome in the archaic period. Certain features conventionally attributed to cities, such as population growth, monumental architecture, urban planning, networks, public inscriptions, and craft specialization, are visible in the archaeological material from the sixth and early fifth centuries bc.

Reported here is the use of the focused beam of an infrared ultrashort pulse laser (150 femtoseconds pulse width, 200 kHz repetition rate, 800 nm wavelength, and 100 μm/s scanning speed) to increase the refractive index of a germanium-doped silica-glass planar waveguide. The increase obtained, Δn, itself increases in proportion to increases in the laser intensity of the surface irradiation, and it saturates to 1.6 ∼ 1.8 × 10-3 at 2.2 TW/cm2, without producing any increase in insertion loss and birefringence. Further, no decay in the refractive index change is observed after annealing at 200 °C for 10 hours. Results show that ultrashort pulse lasers are more suitable than UV lasers as light sources for highly stable adjustment of the optical lengths of waveguide devices.