Ancient Egypt

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File:The seated scribe.jpg

This is the Seated Scribe which dates back to 2450- 2325 BCE. The Seated Scribe was found near the tomb of Kai which was placed near the Pharaoh so that he could become the scribe for the Pharaoh in the afterlife. The statue is very naturalistic and lifelike, the face and body are very defined and almost look real. The face on the statue looks old and wise, the statue looks very attentive as if it is listening intently on what you have to say. The body looks well fed and lacks muscle which indicates power and wealth as well as a life free from hard labor. The pupils are offset in the iris which give them an illusion of being in motion. The fact that the statue is a scribe means that he is literate and was important because he could read and write.

This painting is called Ti Watching a Hippopotamus Hunt which dates back to 2450 to 2325 BCE. The painting is painted on limestone and is about 45 inches in height. The lines on the limestone are supposed to give the impression that you are watching through the reeds on the Nile. Ti was a court official whose job it was to oversee the hunt. On the painting he looks bigger then everyone else and is drawn in composite view which emphasizes his importance. Seth, the god of darkness was thought to have manifested himself into a hippo. The symbolic meaning of killing the hippo is ridding the afterlife of chaos which is why this was found in the tomb Ti. The men in the boat are just regular commoners and are shown in actions to show there lower status.

Ancient Near East

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The two pieces of art I chose are the Female head and Iassamu.

Female Head (of goddess Inanna?)

The Female Head most likely comes from Uruk, Iraq in 3200 to 3000 BCE. The statue is only about 8 inches tall and is made up of marble. The eye sockets do not have eyes in them but the face is very realistic. The nose is damaged which could be just damage over time or it could be from people desecrating the statue. This statue head was made in the image of Inanna who was an important female deity known as the goddess of love and war (Kleiner). The chunks taken out of the head were believed to be used for wigs that researches believe to have been made out of gold leaf (Kleiner).

Lamassu is a 10 foot 2 inch statue of a winged lion with a human head found in Nimrud, Iraq between 883 and 859 BCE. From the front of the statue it looks like the statue is just standing in place, but if you look at it from the side it appears as if the statue is walking forward. The face of the man on the statue is very detailed, all the features on the face are very realistic. These giant statues were meant to guard the gates that lead to Sargon’s palace (Gardner).

Kleiner, Fred S. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global History. Enhanced 13th ed. 1. Boston: Wadswort Cengage Learning, 2009. 33-34. Print.

Gardner, Helen, Fred S. Kleiner, and Fred S. Kleiner. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global History. Australia: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013. Print.

Rhetoric of Science Draft

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The science world is often misunderstood by the general community because of the way scientists present their findings to the rest of the world. The way that science papers are often presented are too scientific and complex for the general public to understand which is why scientific research gets downplayed so much. Also science isn’t portrayed in the news very often because it lacks the drama element news reporters look for when reporting. So often people are in the dark when it comes to science which makes them skeptical because people don’t trust what they don’t understand. This lack of knowledge can lead to people not trusting scientific discoveries and vaccines that are beneficial to people.

The news coverage of science isn’t very broad and when they do present articles it is usually for entertainment or drama. David Icke published an article called “Cancer is a Fungus and it is Curable.” In this article David Icke mentions Tullio Simoncini’s discovery that cancer is a fungus and it can actually be cured by ingesting sodium bicarbonate (Icke). If you know about cancer and how it works you would be infuriated by even the title of the paper. What is more infuriating is the amount of people who actually believe what this guy is saying. On June 3, 2013 a GOP lawmaker tried to approve the cost effective method of getting rid of this fungus by putting a pic line in the body and flushing it out with sodium bicarbonate (Benen). The fact that this guy is able to sway people with no evidence to back himself up just shows that people are easily influenced by people who present interesting information whether it is right wrong.

Watson and Crick are known as the ones to discover the molecular structure of DNA in the 1950’s. People little know about Miescher who was the discoverer of the DNA or Levene who investigated the structure of the DNA or Chargaff who came up with the rules of DNA (Pray). This is because of the way that Watson and Crick present their information. They presented it in a way that was not strictly science based but in a way that even people who didn’t know much about science could understand. The tone they used in their article was very confident and relaxed which puts the reader at ease.

The way that scientific papers are written probably deters a lot of people from wanting to read them. If you look at the nature website, which is a website for scientific articles, you can clearly see that the website is meant for people with more than just a rudimentary understanding of science. Just looking at the titles of the articles you can tell that the papers are written for people in the scientific rhetorical community. Complex articles like these are the reason people choose to believe in fake science because people will often trust what is the easiest to understand even if it isn’t reliable. This leads to false beliefs and conspiracies such as the idea that pharmacies are evil and the government wants people to die to keep population down (Icke).

Rhetoric is important in presenting scientific information, the first thing that needs to be taken into account when presenting something is who the audience is. Scientists need to find a way to generalize the information they collect from their experiments so that the general public will be able to understand the information presented. The reason some people don’t believe in science is because it is not represented properly by the scientific community. The controversies that come from this leads to the increase of preventable diseases. Alternative medicine has also been on the rise which is treatments that aren’t proven to work. Alternative medicine usually has to do with religious superstitions or just unproven remedies.

The controversies do have a negative effect on the funding that medical research gets. If the people are skeptical of the medicine then the scientists will receive less money for medical research. “Americas share of global research spending fell 6 percent in five years” (Bidwell).

Bibliography

Icke, David. “Cancer Is A Fungus… and It Is Curable.” Cancer Is A Fungus… and It Is  

Curable. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2015.

Benen, Steve. “GOP Lawmaker Sees Cancer as a ‘fungus'” Msnbc.com. NBC News

Digital, 25 Feb. 2015. Web. 25 Feb. 2015.

Pray, Leslie A. “Discovery of DNA Structure and Function: Watson and Crick.”

Nature.com. Nature Publishing Group, n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2015

Bidwell, Allie. “U.S. Medical Research Spending Drops While Asia Makes Gains.” US

News. U.S.News & World Report, 2 Jan. 2014. Web. 25 Feb. 2015.

Rhetoric 202 WX

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image

This is the Rosetta stone. The top of the stone is written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, the middle is written in demotic, and the last part is written in Ancient Greek. All three of the languages on the stone say the same thing which enabled people to translate the Epyptian hieroglyphics. Heiroglyphics is one of the oldest forms of written rhetoric using images to tell a story. The Egyptians were the first ones to use symbols to make a written  sentence back in 3400 bc. You could say that the Egyptians were the first ones to make a written form of rhetoric. Which we now use daily as a form of communication.