Word: mesopotamia
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First described 3,800 years ago in Mesopotamia, rabies has always inspired a special terror because of the gruesome and inexorable way it progresses once it takes hold of a victim. It attacks the nervous system, producing symptoms such as irrational furies, fearfulness and foaming at the mouth. The difficulty that patients have in swallowing water or food led to the disease's other common name: hydrophobia. Since the virus moves through the body inside nerve tissue rather than the blood, the disease triggers no antibodies and can't be detected during its incubation. Once it reaches the brain, death...
...Near Eastern Languages and Literatures Department will gain Professor James Russel, a specialist in the history and culture of Mesopotamia...
These layers of sediment become pages in urban history, which, in large measure, is the history of civilization. The need to preserve foods and seeds at trading centers in ancient Mesopotamia and Anatolia focused human ingenuity on the problem of storage and led eventually to the development of armories, banks and libraries. Along a treacherous path paved with bloodshed and pestilence, cities evolved as the repositories of humanity's collective intelligence: the record of culture and science that enables a civilization to benefit from the lessons of the past...
...action was in Egypt and Mesopotamia...
...Mesopotamia's trading partners was the Chalcolithic people in what is now Israel -- a peaceful group who built houses of stone and planned their towns and streets in an orderly fashion. "They had excellent knowledge of animal behavior and of botany," says Israeli botanist Daniel Zohary, and had managed to domesticate and improve wild grapes, olives, dates and figs, which they traded throughout the region. Their elaborately designed churns were used to make a kind of yogurt and possibly for brewing beer...