Word: mesopotamia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...when did the cultural elements (art forms, techniques, tools, customs) move across the Pacific? Dr. Ekholm does not know, but he suspects that the early high civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, characterized by agriculture, pottery-making and pyramid-building, set up a cultural tremor that lapped most of the world. Traders, explorers, fugitives and raiders carried the techniques with them, just as their modern equivalents carry the catching customs of modern industrialism. Probably faint cultural ripples, relayed slowly from people to people, and from island to island for thousands of years, finally crossed the ocean...
...they were all amazed and marveled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works...
These inscriptions were the "Rosetta Stone of Western Asia" which enabled scholars to decipher Babylonian and the other cuneiform languages of ancient Mesopotamia. About 100 years ago, philologists dangled from the cliff to copy part of the inscriptions; they tried it again in 1904. But much was missed or garbled, and the inscriptions are too inaccessible to be photographed effectively. The Cameron party will make accurate copies by pressing a rubber compound against the carvings. Orientalists all over the world are eagerly awaiting the results...
Huntington may be best remembered for his theories about the influence of climate on civilization. He argued that as civilization develops, it moves toward colder regions. The earliest civilized people hardly ventured away from the warm lands of Egypt and Mesopotamia; their technique of life could not cope with even a mild winter. The Greeks and Romans knew more about battling winter, and benefited from the mental stimulus of the north Mediterranean climate. After the invention of the chimney and other body warmers, civilization throve best in North Europe and America, where the cold, changeable climate kept minds alert...
...local knowledge of the Near East shown in several of Agatha Christie's thrillers (Murder in Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile) was acquired at firsthand, as her first travel book now proves. It is a breezy, completely unsinister tale of a couple of winters she spent before the war in Syria, where her husband, Archaeologist Max Mallowan of the British Museum, went...