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The Dutch Discovery of Australia
17th-century Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) navigators were the first Europeans to set foot on Australian soil. Although there is a strong theory that the Portuguese explorer, Cristóvão de Mendonça (1475-1532...
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Eighty Years' War
The Eighty Years' War (1568-1648, also known as The Dutch Revolt and Dutch War of Independence) was a military conflict between the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands and Spain, which then governed them, beginning in the reign of King...
Definition
Dutch East India Company
The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was formed in 1602 by the Staten-Generaal (States General) of the then Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. The company was granted a 21-year charter with rights to trade exclusively in Asia and to...
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Ten Notorious Dutch Pirates
While there have been pirates and privateers of all nationalities, some Dutch mariners were particularly troublesome in the early modern period, targeting, in particular, the Spanish Main but also shipping in the eastern Atlantic and the...
Definition
Sumerian Language
The Sumerian language was spoken in southern Mesopotamia before the 2nd millennium BCE and was the first language to be written in the cuneiform script. It is an isolate language meaning we know of no other languages that relate to it ancestrally...
Definition
Romani Language
Romani is an Indo-European language, belonging to the Indic subbranch which includes Sanskrit and Hindi. Because of the Romani diaspora throughout Europe and West Asia, it developed in close contact with European and Iranian languages. It...
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European Discovery & Conquest of the Spice Islands
Clove, nutmeg, and mace are native to only a handful of tiny islands in the middle of the vast Indonesian archipelago – cloves on five Maluku Islands (the Moluccas) about 1250 km (778 mi) west of New Guinea, and nutmeg on the ten Banda Islands...
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Battle of Neerwinden
The Battle of Neerwinden saw the major defeat of a French republican army by an allied force of Austrians and Dutch during the War of the First Coalition (1792-97), part of the broader French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802). The battle drove...
Definition
Etruscan Language
The language of the Etruscans, like the people themselves, has remained somewhat mysterious and has yet to be fully understood. The alphabet used a western Greek script, but the language has presented difficulties to scholars because it is...
Definition
Indo-European Languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of related languages that today are widely spoken in the Americas, Europe, and also Western and Southern Asia. Just as languages such as Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian are all descended from...