Word: mesopotamia
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...Boyd--who speaks a half-dozen languages--ultimately built a life around the art of English itself, rather than anything so foreign as the phonology of ancient Mesopotamia...
...quote comes from a tablet currently on display at Harvard's Semitic Museum. It is part of an exhibit on the excavations of the town of Nuzi, a small provincial city in northern Mesopotamia that was once part of the Mittani kingdom, a Near Eastern world power from around 1500 B.C.E. The tablet is one of 14 preserved from the deposition of Kushshi-harbe, the mayor of Nuzi, during investigations into his sexual misconduct and criminal behavior...
...dozen or so centuries before the birth of Christ, the lands surrounding the Mediterranean were bursting with civilization. Pharaohs reigned over Egypt to the south, the empires of Mesopotamia flourished to the east, and the Greeks dominated the Aegean to the north. But just a bit farther north still, another, more enigmatic people ruled the Balkans, where Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Hungary and Ukraine now lie. Known as the Thracians, they left no temples, no great monuments, no massive tombs. They didn't even have a written language; the only accounts of their society--a confederation of tribes that never achieved...
...known by the reddish tinge its iron oxide-rich stone takes on in the light of the setting sun. It is the first pyramid in the classic smooth-sided shape so familiar to schoolchildren. Previously, only step-sided pyramids had been built (a shape that was also seen in Mesopotamia and turned up, much later, in Latin America). It was Snefru who conceived of the more difficult smooth-sided form. "He made the intellectual jump," says Rainer Stadelmann, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo. Enlisting two of his sons as architects, Snefru perfected a system of earthen ramps...
...idea of a conflict between the worlds of matter and spirit inspired Mani, a member of a Christian sect in 3rd century Mesopotamia. He saw the cosmos as divided between opposing forces: light and dark, good and evil, spirit and matter. Our age, he said, was chaotic because darkness had swallowed up portions of the light. But, he said, Jesus came into the world as part of a battle to distill light from the darkness. This dualistic philosophy was Manichaeism, and it would find adherents from North Africa to southern China...