Word: mesopotamia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Where is the motherland of civilization? Prehistorians generally locate it in Mesopotamia, but Seton Lloyd, director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, thinks that the Anatolian Plateau farther north in Turkey may have been civilized first. One of his field parties has excavated a Bronze Age site near Burdur that looked at first like a small village of a dozen small houses. Deeper down, the diggers found mud and stone fortifications 10 to 15 ft. thick, and a wooden upper story that was apparently destroyed by fire about 4,500 B.C. Under the ruins were human skeletons...
...usual theory is that Anatolia was not inhabited by civilized people until about 3,000 B.C., when the cultures of Mesopotamia moved slowly north. But the walled village seems to be as old as anything in Mesopotamia, and heaped-up debris under it hints that the place was occupied by civilized town-dwellers 500 years before the walls were built. So man's first, faltering civilization may have spread from Anatolia to Mesopotamia and later Greece...
...ancient Gaulish coins. Hajdu also produces metal bas-reliefs, which he calls "orchestrations of light and shade," that bring to mind the pulsations of a Spanish dance or the interlocking vapor trails of high-flying jets. At best they reflect the inspiration he found in the art of ancient Mesopotamia, to create a world "real in facts but invented in forms...
...land that Nuri presides over, the classic land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, is the size of California. Long known as Mesopotamia, oil-rich Iraq is now shaking itself free from the sand that has drifted over it for centuries...
...hatchet-shaped hunk off the defunct Ottoman Empire, called it Transjordan, and handed it to Hussein's grandfather Abdullah "one Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem," as he later said. Churchill was repaying Abdullah's fighting services to Britain in Lawrence of Arabia's desert campaign (another hunk-Mesopotamia, now Iraq-was given to Abdullah's brother Feisal). Thenceforth, while Britain's Glubb Pasha built the British-equipped Arab Legion into Islam's sprucest fighting force, Abdullah ruled the sandy wastes as a Bedouin black-tent state...