Great Britain, also known as just Britain, was not always what it is today. Like many other countries and territories, Britain had to fight over wars for its independence.

What is the difference between Britain and The United Kingdom?

First it is important that we clarify the difference between two terms that are commonly used interchangeably; The United Kingdom and Great Britain.

Britain, today, is the island conformed by three countries; England, Scotland and Wales. On the other hand, when we refer to the United Kingdom, we are expressing the short term for The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island, which along with the three mentioned countries, a fourth one is added; Ireland.  Again, this is the correct terminology that is applied in the present.

In this article we will be focusing on the past. We will analyze the events that occurred all the way back to 55 B.C.

The Roman invasion in Britain.

Before Romans even thought of making an attempt to invade and conquer Britain, the island was lead by Celtic kings and chiefs. The Celts, or Britons, were people gathered in many different tribe groups. At that time, Britain was a territory of villages and farmers. No roads existed, and the common way of transportation would be by horse on land, or by sailing small boats in rivers.

Just across the sea, Britain was relatively close to the Roman Empire, which was quite strong already and just getting stronger and stronger with time.

The Roman Empire had been forming and extending since around a century by the time it was ruling Gaul in 55 B.C., which is what we know today as Rome. This magnificent Empire was being lead by the Roman General Julius Caesar at that time.

Julius Caesar is today very well known for the history of his conquests and military leadership. Britain was in Julius Caesar’s plans. He had the desire to fight and make Britain part of his Empire. This is when in 55 B.C. he decided to lead his army to fight for Britain against the Celts.

What he did not expect was that the Celts fought back with such bravery, that they made him go back with his troops empty-handed. But, Julius Caesar was not an opponent that gave up with one try.

During the next year, in 54 B.C. he decided to go back with many more soldiers than the last time. Although, once again he did not obtain the Briton’s territory and he no longer wanted to lose time and troops with an island that he thought wasn’t worth that much after all.

The Celts lived peacefully with their own; pacifically taking care and managing their culture and land. And that went on for approximately 100 more years. Until in A.D. 43, the Romans returned to Britain.

Stronger than ever and without the leadership of Julius Caesar; the Roman Empire battled fiercely with four legions against the Celts. This was when the Romans, leaded now by Emperor Claudius, finally conquered the Southern half of Britain and turned into part of the Roman Empire. The Empire showed up at Britain with newer weapons, and it is said that even Emperor Claudius joined his own army with a troop of elephants prepared for war.

Claudius gave the British Celts the opportunity to decide if they would fight against them or not. Those who decided to make peace had to agree to obey their laws and pay Roman taxes. Many Celts did agree to join the Empire, but many others were convinced to fight for the island.

The conquest was not done overnight, though. The Celts made it pretty difficult for the Romans to take over their territory. It took the Romans about 30 years of intense fighting until they were actually in control of most of the Southern area of Britain.

It took a total of three attempts from the Romans to finally succeed. Two failed attempts from Julius Caesar and the successful one from Claudius. The main reason why the Romans desired to win over Britain that much was due to Britain’s natural resources.

In one of Julius Caesar’s books that were found by archaeologists, it is possible to read the following statement, written by his very own hand, all those years ago:

“The Britons have a huge number of cattle, they use gold coins or iron bars as their money, and produce tin and iron.”

The Romans wanted to take over Britain in order to become richer and more powerful.

A calendar is a system that we use to count, define and keep track of time. We calculate days, months and years with the use of a calendar.

Was the Coligny calendar solar or lunar?

The calendar that we use in modern days, and that is used in most parts of the world, is the Gregorian calendar. It is a solar calendar; this means that it is fundamentally guided and based on the Earth’s movement around the Sun.

But, in addition to solar calendars, we also have the existence of lunar calendars. This type of calendar follows the amount of time that it takes for the Moon to complete its four orbiting phases around the Earth, and the result of that is called a lunar month.

Even a combination of both types of calculation exists as well in some kinds of calendars.

So, essentially, a calendar helps us coordinate time. Our use of the Gregorian calendar tells us that it takes the Earth 365 days to make a whole circle around the Sun.

There are twelve “lunar months” in one solar year, and this is called a lunar year. This means that in the essence of quantity; both years share 12 months. But, Lunar years do not coincide with solar years. A lunar year has a total of 354 days; this is the reason why every certain time there are thirteen lunar months in one year.

The Coligny calendar, is a lunisolar calendar, this means it combines Moon phases and the time of a solar year as well.

This calendar was found in Coligny, Ain, France in 1897. It is a big bronze tablet that was originally found broken into 73 pieces. It is believed to have been prohibited by the Romans during the Roman Empire, because at the time, Julius Caesar was making imperative the use of his calendar; the Julian calendar.

The Coligny calendar was part of the beliefs, culture and traditions of the Gaulic groups. These groups were integrated by Celtic people of an educated and professional class of Gaul, Britain and Ireland.

Now, let’s compare the Gregorian calendar to this ancient Coligny calendar.

The calendar that we use today (Gregorian) is summed up by 12 months, starting with January and ending with December. Each month has either 30 or 31 days, except for February, which has 28 days and only every 4 years contains 29 days.

Again, this calculation of time is based on the Earth’s movement around the Sun.

What makes the Gregorian different from the Coligny calendar?

Now, the Coligny calendar has a total of 12 months as well, beginning with Samonios and ending with Cantios, and each month had 29 or 30 days. And every 2.5 years, there was an extra month that was added; Sonnocingos, which was the intercalary month. This means it could be inserted before Samonios or between Cutios and Giamonios.

The Coligny calendar was a system of 30 years, divided into 12 months and the extra month number 13 every 2.5 years. Then each month was divided into halves. The first half would be made out of 15 days, and the second half would contain 14 or 15 days. At this point it was following the phases of the moon, which means that every center of the month we would have a full moon during that night.

The Coligny calendar is believed to be no longer used in the present, but there are still cultures and religions that base their calculation of time on a lunar or a lunisolar calendar.

Even though the use of the Coligny calendar was forbidden during Julius Caesar’s Roman Empire, the discovery of this ancient tablet suggests that Celtic tribes were trying to preserve their ideologies over the ones of Julius, even in the middle of difficult times of invasion and conquest.

In a talk to the Festival of Science in Salford, Dr Cotgreave, Director of SBS, will argue that Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Mendel would probably all fail to get research funding if they worked in the UK today.

“Newton took 15 years to write his first major book; Darwin spent ages doing tedious descriptive work on barnacles; Einstein’s work was so whacky that a committee would have foreseen little probability of it turning out to be right; and, as a monk, Mendel was hardly part of a group with a “relevant track record.

“I’m quite certain that all of these things would have caused the grant-giving bodies to turn down their applications if these great scientists applied for funding today,” said Peter Cotgreave. “How could Mendel have a relevant track record in genetics when the subject didn’t even exist until he virtually invented it.

“In the past the ‘dual support’ system of research funding meant the universities got some unencumbered money to invest in new ideas, on slightly off-beat things that did not fit with the establishment’s view of the world. These are the breakthroughs that really matter, in terms of inventing new products and processes to keep the economy buoyant.

“But funding mechanisms have become so skewed, that this discretionary funding has been almost completely abolished. The results are obvious. The number of scientific Nobel Prizes won by people working in the UK’s universities has been slashed by 90% since the 1950s and 1960s.”

“If this short-sighted approach carries on, the UK economy is going to suffer drastically.”

“It’s a great shame, because there is a lot of new money going into British science, and we want to see it deliver economic, social and environmental benefits. But the scope for such benefits is limited while researchers cannot take the risk of doing something really creative”.

Peter Cotgreave’s talk The Importance of Individuality in Research will be at 15.45 on 9 September in the Clifford Whitworth Building at the University of Salford.

Save British Science today berated the Government for its crazy proposals to change the way university teaching is funded next year.

“These proposals will move about £22 million out of university science departments,” said Dr Peter Cotgreave, Director of SBS, “and we just can’t understand how a government that talks about the importance of science education in a knowledge economy could come up with such a daft idea.”

Under the proposals, money allocated to the teaching of some subjects, such as chemical engineering and physics will rise slightly, but these rises will be far outweighed by the losses suffered by other science and engineering disciplines, including biology and electronic engineering. The average university will lose hundreds of thousands of pounds from its overall budget for teaching the three core sciences and the various engineering disciplines.

“The real problem is that the Government sets the budget without reference to the demand it makes on the universities,” said Peter Cotgreave. “It insists that universities must take more students, increase access, do more and better research, and so on, but doesn’t actually work out how much this will all cost, and then allocate funding streams accordingly.”

“Making fairly arbitrary changes to the relative funding for different subjects, a year or two before the whole system will have to be re-organised because of top-up fees, isn’t suddenly going to stop the available money having to be spread very thinly”.

“If the budget is insufficient to fund what is expected of it, it is pointless for the Government to persist in an Alice-in-Wonderland denial that somehow by fiddling the sums, the money can magically be spread in different ways that will defy the laws of mathematics”.

ENDS

In a world well into a “post-9/11” multilateral, international realignment, how accurate is the backward-looking post-Soviet label?

True, Azerbaijan continues to be plagued by the polluting industry and severe economic doldrums common to many former Soviet states. Its people still suffer from corrupt bureaucrats, limited opportunities, and in some cases well-learned, wrong-headed ideas that stifle growth, namely that governments, not people, call the shots, that it is government’s job to solve the problems of society and that government has no obligation to respond to citizen demands for equity and justice. Yet to see nothing but such post-Soviet characteristics in Azerbaijan is to miss the very real changes that have taken place in the country since 1991.

The Winter 2003 issue Give & Take highlights just a few of the new citizen groups in Azerbaijan whose actions demonstrate the power of the individual to stand up to government and make a difference. The first section of the journal looks at issues such as how to found and register a nongovernmental organization (NGO) — a difficult, frustrating process, as detailed by ISAR-Azerbaijan director Stephanie Rust. Nevertheless, hundreds of local groups have registered and begun to operate throughout the country despite these challenges.

In the second section of the journal, with the help of ISAR-Azerbaijan staffers Elmira Abdullayeva and Nargiz Kerimova, we spotlight the impressive work of a few of these NGOs. Many are now quite experienced and they tackle an incredible range of issues — from diabetes education to professional development for beekeepers. Some NGOs focus on the children of refugees and internally displaced persons in Azerbaijan’s many refugee camps such as the Galkhan camp in Saatly, Azerbaijan. This story describes innovative approaches to the intractable problem of raising the children of war.

Research for this issue of the journal uncovered an extremely diverse NGO sector. Many local groups — their accomplishments largely unsung in the West — have done tremendous work with tiny sums of money. Those highlighted here represent only the tip of the iceberg: last year ISAR-Azerbaijan’s local NGO directory detailed the work of over 400 grassroots NGOs throughout the country, not just in Baku and other major cities. All of them are operating effectively in a region where international assistance is sparse and local philanthropy largely undeveloped. All have demonstrated creativity in fundraising and enthusiasm in responding to social injustice.

Organizing for change means forming coalitions. Cooperation to influence legislation — as Margo Squire, Azerbaijan country director for the Eurasia Foundation, notes in her article — is crucial. NGOs are also cooperating to advocate for environmental and social issues. For instance, as explored in the final section of the journal, activists have added their voices to the debate over the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. When completed in 2004, BTC will transport Caspian oil and gas to the Turkish port of Ceyhan in the Mediterranean Sea. Give & Take presents several of the perspectives in this debate, including those of an oil company executive, the government of Azerbaijan, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and multiple NGO viewpoints.

The complexities of globalization force us all to delve deeper: what happens locally when governments, international financial institutions, and transnational corporations get behind giant commercial development projects? Big projects affect small communities, and these communities must be given their say. Give & Take attempts to draw attention to such independent voices and include them in the wider dialogue. The dominance of the oil industry in Azerbaijan’s economy continues to increase. Svetlana Tsalik of the Open Society Institute asserts in her article that some portion of the revenues must be used to improve the conditions of Azerbaijan’s people; her article, which has been abstracted from a forthcoming book, offers concrete recommendations for using oil production profits to achieve social reform.

As such stories show, the “post-Soviet” label becomes daily less successful as a term for describing Azerbaijan. In 2003, Azerbaijan must be examined in the light of a whole range of new dynamics. The oil industry, with its millions of dollars in investments and powerful international partners, is far more visible than those who practice grassroots civil society development, but the efforts of the local NGOs have an endemic strength that is all their own. It is this force that in the end will free this country and its people from the cramped post-Soviet stereotype and offer them a more solid path to the future.