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In heraldry and vexillology, a heraldic flag is a flag containing coats of arms, heraldic badges, or other devices used for personal identification. Heraldic flags include banners, standards, pennons and their variants, gonfalons, guidons, and pinsels. Specifications governing heraldic flags vary from country to country, and have varied over time.
This is a directory of flag pages intended for the use of everybody, especially members of the Heraldry and Vexilollogy WikiProject. It is intended for flags of all nations and organizations, within reason, and also includes many subnational entities with separate flag pages.
This is a collection of lists of flags, including the flags of states or territories, groups or movements and individual people. There are also lists of historical flags and military flag galleries. Many of the flag images are on Wikimedia Commons .
The origins of heraldry lie in the medieval need to distinguish participants in battles or jousts, whose faces were hidden by steel helmets. Vexillology (from the Latin vexillum , a flag or banner) is the scholarly study of flags , including the creation and development of a body of knowledge about flags of all types, their forms and functions ...
The origin of flags is unknown. Some of the earliest known banners come from ancient China to identify different parts of the army. [3] For example, it is recorded that the armies of the Zhou dynasty in the 11th century BC carried a white banner before them, although no extant depictions exist of these banners.
Heraldry developed in the High Middle Ages based on earlier traditions of visual identification by means of seals, field signs, emblems used on coins, etc. Notably, lions that would subsequently appear in 12th-century coats of arms of European nobility have pre-figurations in the animal style of ancient art (specifically the style of Scythian art as it developed from c. the 7th century BC).
The use of flags replaced the use of vexilloids for general purposes during late medieval times between about 1100 to about 1400. However, vexilloids still remain in use for specialised purposes, such as for some military units or to symbolise various organisations such as fraternal organisation in street parades.
National flags are adopted by governments to strengthen national bonds and legitimate formal authority. Such flags may contain symbolic elements of their peoples, militaries, territories, rulers, and dynasties. The flag of Denmark is the oldest flag still in current use as it has been recognized as a national symbol since the 14th century.