Word: ancient
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Humanity's current predatory relationship with nature reflects a man- centered world view that has evolved over the ages. Almost every society has had its myths about the earth and its origins. The ancient Chinese depicted Chaos as an enormous egg whose parts separated into earth and sky, yin and yang. The Greeks believed Gaia, the earth, was created immediately after Chaos and gave birth to the gods. In many pagan societies, the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature -- the soil, forest, sea -- was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate...
...move is an important step in China's campaign to formalize the country's legal code and replace renzhi, the rule of men, with fazhi, the rule of law. Although the ancient Chinese developed a sophisticated civil service system, the prominence of law waxed and waned with the fortunes of China's Emperors. The Communists tried to install a Soviet-style system after the 1949 revolution, but the fledgling effort began to unravel during Chairman Mao's "anti-rightist" political campaign in the late 1950s. What little jurisprudence survived was virtually swept away during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution...
...earthquake was the latest catastrophe for the Armenians, an ancient people who through the ages have been massacred, conquered and divided. Their home is a region of mountain ranges and fertile valleys, roughly the size of Maryland, lying in what the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov called the "high Caucasian maze." Of the republic's 3.5 million people, 90% are Armenian...
...break for New York City and a free-lance career. But he retained his academic title, and he never really stopped being professorial. As he sees it, the unexamined life is not worth loving: "The moons of Saturn, the Bard of Avon, the mysteries of sex, the behavior of ancient societies -- all have to be analyzed before they can be appreciated." Besides, Professor Asimov has a vision: "I believe that if there's such a thing as God's word, it's rationality, and I have the call to spread...
...professor, who studies the literature and cultural history of Scandinavia, had hoped to analyze a 1000-year-old runestone, inscribed with ancient writing. However, when he arrived at the field where the rock was located, Mitchell discovered that a local farmer had destroyed his key to the past. "A farmer had loaded a couple of sticks of dynamite onto the runestone and turned it into rubble," Mitchell says. "All medieval historians are frustrated trying to reconstruct a world about which we know very little...