Rola Nefertiti w religii i polityce okresu amarneńskiego

Nefertiti, the wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten, fulfilled several important functions in both the religion and politics of the Amarna Period. The very name of Nefertiti, Nfr-nfr.w-jtn nfr.t-jj.tj, which translates as The Beautiful is Beauty of Aten, The Beautiful One Has Come, shows how important was the role she played in representing the qualities of the sun god Akhetaten. Nefertiti was presented as The Great Wife of the King but also The Lady of the Two Lands. These titles are indicative of her strong position in politics, because in ancient Egypt, religion and ideology of royal power were inextricably linked. Apparently, the queen was identified with the ruler. This is evidenced, for example, in the scenes from talatat, where Nefertiti was presented on the board of a ceremonial ship pulling a captive by his or her hair and massacring him or her with a khepesh sword, held in the other hand. Very important is the sacral dimension of Nefertiti, because apart from holding significant religious and political functions, she was also deified. Nefertiti’s divine status is best illustrated and confirmed in Akhenaten’s sarcophagus. At each corner, the queen is shown with outstretched arms, covering and protecting the deceased ruler. Recent discoveries in great Wadi Dayr Abu Hinnis indicate that in 16 Year of Akhenaten’s reign, Nefertiti was still alive and was the highest queen. This sheds new light on the Amarna Period. It cannot be ruled out that Nefertiti, as Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaton, held the function of Akhenaten’s coregent, and after her husband’s death, ruled independently as Anchcheperure Semenchakare

Dziecięca ikonografia księżniczek Okresu Amarneńskiego

This article explains the characteristic style of princesses representations in Amarna Period art. This high essential aspect (in literally way) shows full of love relations between family members from Akhetaten. Children iconography in ancient Egypt remained rather persistent, however, pictures showing Meritaten, Maketaten, Ankhesenpaaten, Neferneferuaten, Neferneferure and Setepenre stand alone not only by details, but also by scenes in which princesses have been presented. The royal daughters are often shown naked or in robes looking like delicate tied with sash in waist or under bust dress belonging to their mother Nefertiti. Though girls – regardless of age – have always been portrayed with the sidelock of youth. The reliefs representing Amarna princesses and their parents deviate significantly from fixed and formal style of iconography which is characteristic for periods before and after Akhenaten’s reigns. The girls have been shown not only in family scenes enjoying a good time  with their parents, but also accompanying the royal couple in scenes of tribute from Nubia and Syria, in the scenes of killing enemies of Egypt and in the heart-touching mourning scenes. The representations of the six daughters of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, besides being the symbol of the spouses’ fertility, also performed an important religious function – the girls together with their parents and the god Aten created the divine Ennead just like the model of the nine gods from Heliopolis. The reliefs showing Amarna family seem to present real feelings and emotions of the royal couple and their children, although it could have a propagandist character

Symbolizm i funkcja Okna Pojawień w okresie amarneńskim

During the reign of the Amarna spouses, giving gold necklaces to royal officials took place (almost always) from the so-called Window of Appearance. From them, Akhenaten and Nefertiti, often with princesses, honoured deserved and devoted dignitaries. The popularity of the Window of Appearance closely relates to the introduction of a new religious system introduced by Akhenaten and Nefertiti. According to the new religion, Akhenaten and Nefertiti were a pair of divine twins like Shu and Tefnut, who in the Heliopolitan theology, were the children of the god Atum – replaced by Aten in Amarna. The royal couple prayed to the main solar god, while their subjects prayed to the king and queen. Since Akhenaten performed the role of a priest through whom ordinary people could pray to the god, it was necessary to createa construction that would allow the king to meet with his subjects publicly. The Window of Appearance was such architectural innovation. It was crucial because the king was an intermediator between the people and the only right sun god, Aten. The Windows of Appearance were probably located in various places in Akhetaten, including the Great Palace, the King’s House, the North Palace, the Small Aten Temple and in the temples of the Sunshades of Re in the Kom el-Nana and Maru-Aten. The characteristic shape of the Window of Appearance often appears in the architecture and the art of the Amarna Period. The structure resembles the Axt hieroglyph, which is the morning sun rising between two hills. This symbol is a part of the name of the new capital Axt-itn – The Horizon of Aten.During the reign of the Amarna spouses, giving gold necklaces to royal officials took place (almost always) from the so-called Window of Appearance. From them, Akhenaten and Nefertiti, often with princesses, honoured deserved and devoted dignitaries. The popularity of the Window of Appearance closely relates to the introduction of a new religious system introduced by Akhenaten and Nefertiti. According to the new religion, Akhenaten and Nefertiti were a pair of divine twins like Shu and Tefnut, who in the Heliopolitan theology, were the children of the god Atum – replaced by Aten in Amarna. The royal couple prayed to the main solar god, while their subjects prayed to the king and queen. Since Akhenaten performed the role of a priest through whom ordinary people could pray to the god, it was necessary to createa construction that would allow the king to meet with his subjects publicly. The Window of Appearance was such architectural innovation. It was crucial because the king was an intermediator between the people and the only right sun god, Aten. The Windows of Appearance were probably located in various places in Akhetaten, including the Great Palace, the King’s House, the North Palace, the Small Aten Temple and in the temples of the Sunshades of Re in the Kom el-Nana and Maru-Aten. The characteristic shape of the Window of Appearance often appears in the architecture and the art of the Amarna Period. The structure resembles the Axt hieroglyph, which is the morning sun rising between two hills. This symbol is a part of the name of the new capital Axt-itn – The Horizon of Aten

Influence of augmentation on the performance of the double ResNet-based model for chest X-ray classification

Purpose: A pandemic disease elicited by the SARS-CoV-2 virus has become a serious health issue due to infecting millions of people all over the world. Recent publications prove that artificial intelligence (AI) can be used for medical diagnosis purposes, including interpretation of X-ray images. X-ray scanning is relatively cheap, and scan processing is not computationally demanding. Material and methods: In our experiment a baseline transfer learning schema of processing of lung X-ray images, including augmentation, in order to detect COVID-19 symptoms was implemented. Seven different scenarios of augmentation were proposed. The model was trained on a dataset consisting of more than 30,000 X-ray images. Results: The obtained model was evaluated using real images from a Polish hospital, with the use of standard metrics, and it achieved accuracy = 0.9839, precision = 0.9697, recall = 1.0000, and F1-score = 0.9846. Conclusions: Our experiment proved that augmentations and masking could be important steps of data pre-processing and could contribute to improvement of the evaluation metrics. Because medical professionals often tend to lack confidence in AI-based tools, we have designed the proposed model so that its results would be explainable and could play a supporting role for radiology specialists in their work

Dzieła dramatyczne Williama Shakespeare (Szekspira) pod redakcją Józefa Ignacego Kraszewskiego

The article shows selected issues concerning the editorial shape of a three-volume, illustrated edition of William Shakespeare’s works translated by Stanisław Egbert Koźmian, Józef Paszkowski and Leon Urlich, published in Warsaw by Spółka Wydawnicza Księgarzy. The attention was mainly paid to the principles adopted in the organization of texts included in the edition. Some points were raised regarding the application of different titles of the same plays, the usage of italics, the phonetic transcription of English proper names, and the consistency or its absence in following the accepted rules. The description and analysis of the forewords and explanations prepared by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski also constitute an important part of the article.Artykuł ukazuje wybrane zagadnienia dotyczące kształtu edytorskiego trzytomowego ilustrowanego wydania dzieł Williama Szekspira w tłumaczeniu Stanisława Egberta Koźmiana, Józefa Paszkowskiego i Leona Ulricha, które ukazało się w Warszawie nakładem Spółki Wydawniczej Księgarzy. Uwagę poświęcono w głównej mierze zasadom przyjętym przy organizacji tekstów wchodzących w skład wydania. Zostały poruszone między innymi kwestie dotyczące stosowania różnych wersji tytułów tych samych sztuk, użycia kursywy, fonetycznego zapisu angielskich nazw własnych, konsekwencji lub jej braku przy przestrzeganiu przyjętych reguł. Istotne miejsce zajmują również opis i analiza sporządzonych przez Józefa Ignacego Kraszewskiego przedmów i objaśnień

Estimating mutual information using B-spline functions – an improved similarity measure for analysing gene expression data

BACKGROUND: The information theoretic concept of mutual information provides a general framework to evaluate dependencies between variables. In the context of the clustering of genes with similar patterns of expression it has been suggested as a general quantity of similarity to extend commonly used linear measures. Since mutual information is defined in terms of discrete variables, its application to continuous data requires the use of binning procedures, which can lead to significant numerical errors for datasets of small or moderate size. RESULTS: In this work, we propose a method for the numerical estimation of mutual information from continuous data. We investigate the characteristic properties arising from the application of our algorithm and show that our approach outperforms commonly used algorithms: The significance, as a measure of the power of distinction from random correlation, is significantly increased. This concept is subsequently illustrated on two large-scale gene expression datasets and the results are compared to those obtained using other similarity measures. A C++ source code of our algorithm is available for non-commercial use from [email protected] upon request. CONCLUSION: The utilisation of mutual information as similarity measure enables the detection of non-linear correlations in gene expression datasets. Frequently applied linear correlation measures, which are often used on an ad-hoc basis without further justification, are thereby extended