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Palestine (Arabic: فلسطين‎ Filasṭīn, Falasṭīn, Filisṭīn; Greek: Παλαιστίνη, Palaistinē; Latin: Palaestina; Hebrew: פלשתינה Palestina) is a n ame given to the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The region is also known as the Land of Israel (Hebrew: ארץ־ישראל Eretz-Yisra'el), the Holy Land and the Southern Levant.<br/><br/>

In 1832 Palestine was conquered by Muhammad Ali's Egypt, but in 1840 Britain intervened and returned control of the Levant to the Ottomans in return for further capitulations. The end of the 19th century saw the beginning of Zionist immigration and the Revival of the Hebrew language. The movement was publicly supported by Great Britain during World War I with the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The British captured Jerusalem a month later, and were formally awarded a mandate in 1922.<br/><br/>

In 1947, following World War II and the Holocaust, the British Government announced their desire to terminate the Mandate, and the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition the territory into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish leadership accepted the proposal but the Arab Higher Committee rejected it; a civil war began immediately, and the State of Israel was declared in 1948.<br/><br/>

The 1948 Palestinian exodus, known in Arabic as the Nakba (Arabic: النكبة‎, an-Nakbah, 'The Catastrophe') occurred when approximately 711,000 to 725,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War during which Israel captured and incorporated a further 26% of Palestinian territory.<br/><br/>

In the course of the Six Day War in June 1967, Israel captured the remainder of historic Palestine and began a continuing policy of Israeli settlement and annexation.
The Tacuinum (sometimes Taccuinum) Sanitatis is a medieval handbook on health and wellbeing, based on the Taqwim al‑sihha تقويم الصحة ('Maintenance of Health'), an eleventh-century Arab medical treatise by Ibn Butlan of Baghdad.<br/><br/>

Ibn Butlân was a Christian physician born in Baghdad and who died in 1068. He sets forth the six elements necessary to maintain daily health: food and drink, air and the environment, activity and rest, sleep and wakefulness, secretions and excretions of humours, changes or states of mind (happiness, anger, shame, etc). According to Ibn Butlân, illnesses are the result of changes in the balance of some of these elements, therefore he recommended a life in harmony with nature in order to maintain or recover one’s health.<br/><br/>

Ibn Butlân also teaches us to enjoy each season of the year, the consequences of each type of climate, wind and snow. He points out the importance of spiritual wellbeing and mentions, for example, the benefits of listening to music, dancing or having a pleasant conversation.<br/><br/>

Aimed at a cultured lay audience, the text exists in several variant Latin versions, the manuscripts of which are characteristically profusely illustrated. The short paragraphs of the treatise were freely translated into Latin in mid-thirteenth-century Palermo or Naples, continuing an Italo-Norman tradition as one of the prime sites for peaceable inter-cultural contact between the Islamic and European worlds.<br/><br/>

Four handsomely illustrated complete late fourteenth-century manuscripts of the Taccuinum, all produced in Lombardy, survive, in Vienna, Paris, Liège and Rome, as well as scattered illustrations from others, as well as fifteenth-century codices.
Around 840 AD a group of Turkic people known as the Uighur were displaced from their ancestral homelands in the Mongolian Steppe, and driven south by Kirghiz raiders. The Uighur moved into the Tarim Basin, settling in the old oasis cities of Kuqa and Aksu before gradually spreading around the rim of the Taklamakan Desert. Here they underwent an extraordinary transformation, changing from pastoral nomads to settled oasis dwellers and cultivators.
Antonio Canova's statue Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, first commissioned in 1787, exemplifies the Neoclassical devotion to love and emotion. It represents the god Cupid in the height of love and tenderness, immediately after awakening the lifeless Psyche with a kiss, a scene excerpted from Lucius Apuleius' The Golden Ass. A masterpiece of its period, it appeals to the senses of sight and touch, yet simultaneously alludes to the Romantic interest in emotion co-existing with Neoclassicism.<br/><br/>

Joachim Murat donated the first version (pictured) to the Louvre Museum in Paris, France in 1824; Prince Yusupov, a Russian nobleman who acquired the piece in Rome in 1796, gave a later version (created in 1796) to the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. The plaster cast for this later version is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.