Word: ancient
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...year later there was a small revolution. Marshal Phibun Songgram, Pridi's ancient rival in the seesaw of Siamese politics, took over as Premier and charged that Pridi himself was responsible for the King's murder. (Pridi has since turned up in Peking, leading a "Free Thai" movement blessed by the Communists.) In the years that followed, successive courts of inquiry tried to fix the blame for the King's death on other guilty parties to no positive avail...
...workers in the creaky Delle Cure Foundry on the outskirts of Florence, which makes pipe and other cast-iron products. Since it was started in 1933, in a dingy, damp building now 87 years old, the foundry has limped along, losing money most of the time. Its equipment is ancient and its labor force, since World War II, has always been too big. In 1952 the owners went bankrupt, automatically closing shop...
During Austrailia's Stone Age, which Captain Cook doomed in 1770, the aborigines painted on cliffs and in caves. Today their descendants explain that ancient rock pictures of hunting and dancing stick men, in northern Australia, were done by Mimis. ("Mimis" are so thin they can hunt only in still weather, and so shy they have never been seen.) For the haloed, mouthless figures painted in caves in the Kimberley district, they have a different explanation: Wondjina (gentle fertility gods) first made them by casting shadows on the rock. Before each rainy season, the aborigines retouch the divine shadows...
...multitude of purposes: some are simply decoration, others help educate the children and a tew are used in magic rites. Ants and the damp soon destroy them all. The works reproduced in UNESCO's book were new when collected on a 1948 expedition, are probably the most ancient bark paintings remaining in existence
Troubadours & Puritans. Courting is not always immediately recognizable as such, but there is no doubt that the art has had its ups and downs. In ancient Greece, wives were mere childbearers, purchased from their fathers; only courtesans and homosexuals knew the joys of courtship. In the later Roman Empire, courting seems to have been simply the "pursuit of the other man's wife, conducted as a sport." Though St. Jerome complains that the 4th-century minx had some shockers up her sleeve ("Her upper garment sometimes falls ... to show her naked shoulders, and as if she would...