The Medusa (Fig. 1) is the only one of Caravaggio’s works to which the writer Giovan Battista Marino dedicated an ekphrastic poem. It is thought that Marino saw the work on a 1601 trip to Florence; by that time, the painting had been received in the armoury of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando de’ Medici. Collecting a painting in an armoury makes sense, of course, when the painting counts as arms––Caravaggio painted his Medusa on a convex shield, and Marino’s madrigal engages with just this aspect, addressing the Grand Duke:

Now what enemies will there be who will not become cold marble in gazing upon, my Lord, in your shield, that Gorgon proud and cruel, in whose hair horribly voluminous vipers make foul and terrifying adornment? But yet! You will have little need for the formidable monster among your arms: for the true Medusa is your valor.

The distribution of rations can be found in documents from different period of the Egyptian history but the general features of the ration system is not easy to trace. Most of the sources are the more or less fragmentary lists of wages/payments that reflect various conditions, such as status of the recipients, period to which the payment corresponds etc, that are not always known to us. Other documents provide us with categories of allowances ascribed to the workmen and officials who participated on the same project. A few traces of a systematic approach can be recognized in the evidence, for instance value-units and day’s work units, but many details remain unclear. Bread, beer and grain represented the basic components of the rations in all periods. Bread and beer was often allocated daily while the grain was at some periods used as a monthly payment. On the other hand meat was considered an extra ration while linen and other valuable products could be distributed in longer periods, for instance once a year. Rations were distributed to the attendants of projects organized by the state but similar payments in the form of commodities occurred in exchange for a hired service in the private sphere.

Organic amendment application is one of the sustainable options to provide nutrients and carbon resources for plant and soil microbes. However, it is complicated to predict how the organic amendment will affect nutrient availability in the soil and plant growth due to the complex interaction between soil, plants, and microbes. In chapter 2 we explored the influence of liquid organic amendments and rhizodeposition on litter decomposition under different background media. Liquid organic fertilizer derived from food waste not only contains plant available nutrients, but also contains labile C which is a great resource for soil microbes. Plant roots can manipulate the rhizosphere using similar processes, by adding labile carbon compounds to the immediate root environment, either through active exudation or sloughing off mucilage or dead root material. Using a container study, we found that when ample organic matter was available in the growing media, the presence of plant roots had a strong positive impact on litter decomposition. In both low and high organic matter growing media a one-time addition of fertilizer had minimal or negative effects on litter decomposition. Boosting root length growth via the one-time addition of inorganic fertilizer when organic matter was negligible, likely let the plant outcompete decomposer microbes for N, while selecting for microbes that primarily feed on root exudates. A shift that would retard litter decomposition rates once the easily decomposed portion of the litter was broken down. Recycling old orchards by chipping the trees and incorporating the wood chips into the soil can be one option for the disposal of discarded trees. In chapter 3, we examined how wood chip incorporation into an orchard soil prior to planting affects root architecture and soil biological activity. We found significant increases in standing root length density in planting berms with wood chip incorporation two and three years after trees were planted. This was due to an increase in root mass per soil volume rather than an increase in specific root length or a change in proportion of fine roots produced. Thus, although root foraging was increased, this was not due to a change in root architectural traits. In the fourth chapter we assessed how wood chip incorporation in the soil affected microbial composition in bulk soil and rhizosphere. Wood chip incorporation increased bacterial diversity in the soil and rhizosphere but did not affect fungal diversity in the soil. We did find an increase in fungal diversity in the rhizosphere when wood chips were incorporated in the soil. When we studied diversity along the root axis, we found that young root tips (more active) had greater bacterial diversity in the rhizosphere than the diversity in the bulk soil, but this was not the case for fungal community. Overall, we found that differences in diversity and community composition between blocks were greater than the impact of incorporating wood chips or the differences between rhizosphere and bulk soil.