Word: ancient
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...gods who controlled the destinies of ancient Athens were enshrined on the high hill called the Acropolis, but the common people who made the city truly immortal were content to congregate just below, in a vast marketplace known as the Agora. There, in 25 crowded acres which served them as a combination shopping center and community forum, the free and free-speaking people of Athens pursued a favorite pastime which consisted, in the words of St. Paul, of "nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing." A favorite meeting place in the ancient Agora...
...high civilization ever developed in the Sahara, but the Tassili region seems to have been influenced for thousands of years by more advanced lands. The earliest paintings in the caves are primitive. Slightly later drawings are more sophisticated. Dr. Lhote believes that the ancient people of Taasili developed an independent artistic style not derived from cave art elsewhere...
Tassili, though remote, was not alone in the ancient world. Some of the drawings show great troops of cattle, proving that the domestication of animals, one of man's greatest achievements, had reached Tassili, probably through Egypt...
Camels & Masks. Other signs of Egyptian influence are drawings of Nile boats and of bearded strangers with shields and spears and feathers in their hair. Then appear camels and horses. The war chariot -that great invention of ancient warfare -was at least heard of in the depths of the Sahara. Many of the drawings have not been interpreted yet. They show drinking bouts and hunting scenes, priests sacrificing a bull, a "ballet" of 40 ostriches and humans wearing animal masks...
...some wry modern hindsight. As an observer of 19th century Europe, "only Marx and Tocqueville are comparable to him," says Berlin. "For Herzen," he says, the " 'collective nouns' capable of stirring strong emotion, like Nationality, or Democracy, or Equality, or Humanity, or Progress . . . [were] modern versions of ancient religions which demanded human sacrifice . . . The dogmas of such religions declare that mere invocation of certain formulae, certain symbols, render what would normally be regarded as crimes or lunacies-murder, torture, the humiliation of defenseless human bodies-not only permissible but often laudable...