Tuesday, May 17, 2011

The Mysterious Fall of Rome

The exact reasons for the fall of Rome were never exact.  Many conflicts arose shaking the empires stability.  The well known conflict was the raising of taxes.  Raising their taxes caused so many people to go into dept and not be able to pay their taxes.  Not paying taxes sent the citizens of Rome to prison.  Some people blamed the merchants for the raised prices and overall high prices. Sometimes, taxes were so high that people would sell their children to pay them off! The merchants being, basically, the only wealthy citizens.  Another reason for the fall, the laziness of people. Large numbers of the population stopped working; the unfortunate group of people spent much of their days doing nothing productive.  These people usually spent their days at bars, drunk, and even in the backs of theatres.  Followed by the fact that Rome's military was collapsing.  They were so pathetic that they could barely protect themselves.  Leading to the attack from Germany. The Germanic tribes may have been one of the main causes for the fall of Rome because they tore apart the city, making it worse because the Romans could not even defend themselves.  Some believe that the fall was caused because of little communication. The emperor did not do his job well; therefore, he never spoke with the village.  When he should have had town agreements with everyone, or voting’s, he just choice what he wanted.  Causing many people to rebel because some may have been against the emperor’s rules.  Another reason could be that Constantine converted to Christianity.  This threw off the whole town, causing sickness, resulting in many deaths.  Overall, historians do not know for sure exactly, what took down the Roman Empire to this day.  Yet, the story may have sounded very negative but possibly the whole dramatic down fall lead Rome to something better, as of today.  Today Rome stands tall and strong, still being known as the "Queen of the Earth", a very well respected place.



Wednesday, May 4, 2011

The Astronemer & Mathematics

Astonemy was huge for the Muslims, they made it big.  Muslims had many uses for astronemy, like compasses and astrolobes were used to locate direction, mostly of Makkah.  These helped those who were praying to pray in the correct direction.  Ramadan figured exact times for prayer.  Eventually, they realized that the Earth rotated.  many also questioned the fact that the Earth was the center of the universe.  Soon they found the Earth travels around the sun.




The Muslims also enhanced mathematics.  Basing things off of ideas from India and Greece.  One scholar, Al-Khwarizmi, was a mathematician and astronemer was best known as "the father of algebra".  The word algebra comes from the title of one of his books.  Alegbra was used to solve problems with unknown numbers.  Al's book on algebra was translated into Latin in the 12th century, being the most important mathematic text in the European universities.Muslims learned fractions, decimals from Indian scholars.  To this day we still use Arabic numerals.