Word: ancient
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...breathtakingly brief time?just 25 years?HEW has assembled an empire that would be the envy of the pharaohs or the ancient Chinese emperors. Only this is a benevolent empire of round-the-clock services that go directly to 115 million Americans and indirectly touch just about everybody in the nation. It is an empire, moreover, of 1,125,000 bureaucrats augmented by computers. Without its electronic marvels, HEW's accomplishments would be unthinkable. While most of the department's programs are administered from its huge Washington headquarters, Social Security data are processed in a building outside Baltimore...
Tell me by what art thou bindest On thy feet those ancient shoon: Tell me, Grinder, if thou grindest Always, always out of tune...
...Colman Brady, a Tipperary bridegroom, waiting for the dawn of his wedding day. wakes his brother and sister for a nocturnal trek. Their goal is "a rock shadow over the village, at once enchanting and threatening"-one of those mysterious neolithic monuments that mark the fringes of Western Europe, ancient altars still defying the new Christian God. Chilled, the two siblings retreat. Brady greets the sun alone with exhilarated hope. It is a false dawn. A chill grips Brady's life for four decades and 600 pages...
Despite the abundance of these ancient works, the contemporary world has seen little of them. Many of the originals are carefully locked away in the vaults of various European cities, and some have never been publicly displayed. Nor are the caverns always accessible. France's celebrated Lascaux cave with its paintings of running bison and horses is now closed to all but a few selected scholars; contamination and changes in humidity and temperature caused by sightseers in the few decades after the cave was discovered in 1940 caused more damage to the fragile paintings than had occurred during...
What that culture was like remains an enigma. What, for instance, is the significance of the Venus figures, with their exaggerated sexual features? What role did the great cave paintings play in the lives of those ancient people? Whatever the answers, it is clear the art is exceptionally complex, more than simple "hunting magic," as some turn-of-the-century scholars thought. Every indication is that Cro-Magnon man was deeply involved in rituals, ceremonies, myths, perhaps even a kind of religion...