World Championship of Karate …

 

La Poste de France issued a souvenir sheet of three stamps on the occasion of the World Championship of karate, which will be held from 21 to 25 of November 2012 in Paris, Bercy.

The souvenir sheet was made in Manga style. The left stamp depicts a young girl making a Mawashi Geri, the right stamp features a young boy making a Yoko Tobi Geri and the central stamp takes a visual of a stylized Eiffel Tower, symbol of Paris.

 

Stamps on ‘ WORLD HERITAGE ’

The Limes: Frontiers of Roman Empire in Germany

 

Germany issued a Souvenir Sheet in 2007 to commemorate the Limes under its series of World Cultural Heritage. The 550 km track of the Roman Frontier in Germany from Danube River to the North West Germany is depicted in the map in this Souvenir Sheet. The stamp area depicts one of the fortified gates of the Limes.

The Latin noun ‘limes’ had a number of different meanings: a path or balk delimiting fields, a boundary line or marker, any road or path, any channel, such as a stream channel, or any distinction or difference. But the word ‘limes’ was utilized by Latin writers to denote a marked or fortified frontier

The ‘Roman Limes’ represents the border line of the Roman Empire at its greatest extent in the 2nd century AD. It stretched over 5,000 km from the Atlantic coast of northern Britain, through Europe to the Black Sea, and from there to the Red Sea and across North Africa to the Atlantic coast. The remains of the Limes today consist of vestiges of built walls, ditches, forts, fortresses, watchtowers and civilian settlements. Certain elements of the line have been excavated, some reconstructed and a few destroyed. The two sections of the Limes in Germany cover a length of 550 km from the north-west of the country to the Danube in the south-east.

At its height the Roman Empire extended into three continents. Its borders reflected the waxing and waning of power over more than millennia. In what is now Germany there were several military campaigns into the area north of the Alps and east of the River Rhine from 55/53 BC to 15-16 AD, but the area was not brought under direct control until around 85 AD when the oldest part of the Limes was created between the River Rhine and the high Taunus Mountains. This frontier followed the contours of the landscape. Later the courses defined were much straighter and the first forts established. Similarly in the area of the Raetian Limes the border was secured first under Emperor Claudius (41-54 AD), probably moved north across the river under the Emperor Domitian, and then under Emperor Trajan forts were established.

The early Limes barrier seems to have been a cleared stretch of forest monitored by wooden towers. Under the Emperor Hadrian (117-138 AD) the Limes was additionally secured with a palisade fence. In the 2nd century AD the Limes was in part straightened, and also strengthened with embankments or stone walls and numerous forts, and fort lets.

- Pradeep Kumar Mallik, Patna

email : mallikphila@gmail.com