Spherical structures have been used by mankind since time immemorial in religious and public buildings, as well as in engineering structures. With the development of lightweight design and construction, non-standard architectural and planning solutions are used. More and more frequently they are being successfully implemented in private home projects and becoming a fact of everyday life. This may be explained by certain advantages of the form, as well as by the opportunities offered to the construction industry by the age of new materials and technologies for the works performance. The functional and architectural-structural design of round-shaped buildings in the form of geodesic domes will allow creating comfortable, cost-effective, energy-efficient and environmentally expedient conditions for human habitation taking into account the shortage of land areas and increased demand for alternative housing options due to the environmental situation around the world. This article analyzes the experience of building spherical buildings of different types and scales. The authors present the results of research carried out in the field of the geodesic dome design improvement with the use of wood and polymer materials.

The increased operational properties, main of which - ensuring fire resistance in the conditions of the hydrocarbon mode of the fire, resistance to low temperatures and lack of wet processes at installation are necessary for means of fire protection of structures of buildings and constructions of an oil and gas complex. The review of means of fire protection of new type - the constructive bent fire protection which advantage is the set of positive characteristics as constructive fire protection (a plate, a shell, etc. with dry process of installation), and coverings is submitted (plasters, epoxy structures, etc. with wet process of installation). Domestic experts (LTD Promizol, Moscow) developed the constructive bent fire protection for increase in building constructions of buildings and constructions of an oil and gas complex keeping operational properties in the conditions of the Arctic climate. Means of fire protection represents a grid with 3D - the reinforced structure. The closest analogy are products of the Hapuflam GmbH and FLAMRO companies, but at the moment there are no data on a possibility of use in the conditions of the Arctic region for protection of bearing structures and cable systems.

1 Th is article is devoted to analysis of two Aramaic inscriptions on silver bowls found during looters' excavations of Burial-mound I near the village of Prokhorovka in the Southern Urals in 1911. Th e palaeographic and linguistic data obtained during analysis of the inscriptions and also new archaeological materials, which came to light only after the archaeological investigation of the burial-mound was completed in 2003, make it possible to date them to a period no later than the end of the 3 rd century BC. 138Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia 15 (2009) us to recount these again. In the context of our work it is important, however, to note that the dating of the burial-ground changed more than once in the works of Rostovtsev himself. 4 In the burial-mound, which Rudenko designated as No. 1 and which was situated in the southern part of the group, among other things two silver bowls were found in the central burial: on these there were two inscriptions executed using a punching technique. Th ese inscriptions were fi rst studied by the scholar, P.K. Kokovtsev. 5 On one of these bowls Kokovtsev deciphered Iranian words "concealed by Aramaic script" and these he had translated as "bowl of Ātarmihr". Th e inscription on the other phiale consisted, in his opinion, of no more than "signs for numerals and abbreviations", which had denoted the weight of the bowl. Kokovtsev also noted that "both inscriptions had been written in the same general Aramaic script of a much later period: inscriptions on the coins of satraps of the last Achaemenids can be regarded as the most ancient example of that script and the Pahlavi script on the fi rst two series of so-called coins of Persepolis (from the era of the Arshakids) as the latest". Kokovtsev paid particular attention to the Semitic style in which the letter aleph had been written and he dated the inscriptions to the 3 rd or 2 nd century BC, referring as he did so to the problems standing in the way of providing a more precise date because of "the meagre range of epigraphic material available for the period in question as regards Aramaic palaeography".Unfortunately, in the course of the following 80 years the inscriptions from Prokhorovka were not turned to again by leading Iranists either in our country or abroad, apart from simple references in works by B.V. Henning 6 and D.N. MacKenzie. 7 Only the appearance of recent research undertaken by V.A. Livshits 8 lent new momentum to the study of this question. When Livshits solved the question of the chronology of the inscriptions on the Prokhorovka phialai, executed, in his opinion, in the Parthian language, he had started out from the following observations. Firstly, the Prokhorovka inscriptions had, from the palaeographic point of view, borne a close resemblance to early Parthian texts of the period from the 2 nd century BC to the 2 nd century AD 9 Secondly, the "pseudo-case" form tšty with the ending 'y' in the inscription on Phiale No. 1 has many parallels in ostraca from Old Nisa, the earliest of which 4 S...

During excavations of the necropolis consisting of burial-mounds near the village of Prokhorovka in the so-called 'fortifi ed site' three burials were found. In one of them (Burial 3) a skeleton of a young woman was discovered accompanied by rich and diverse grave goods. Th ese included a silver bowl decorated with an engraved gilded frieze with a plant pattern in the form of a winding branch of ivy and a decorative band of three-strand plaiting. Th e shape and decoration of the Prokhorovka bowl make it possible to conclude that it dates from the middle or third quarter of the 4 th century BC.

Style called Art Nouveau appeared in the last quarter of the XIX century in Austria-Hungary and quickly spread throughout Europe. This style has reached the heyday in Russia in the end of the 1890s-1900s. The object of classic Art Nouveau style characterized by the asymmetrical facades, the almost full abandonment of historical decorative elements, the extensive use of the plant ornaments, and other characteristic feature was considered in this paper on the example of the F.P. Efremov`s mansion in Cheboksary, Russia. The project of building reconstruction was also proposed.