Word: ancient
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ancient cities of the Indus Valley belonged to the greatest civilization the world may never know. Since the 1920s, dozens of archaeological expeditions have unearthed traces of a 4,500-year-old urban culture that covered some 300,000 square miles in modern-day Pakistan and northwestern India. Digs at major sites such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa revealed a sophisticated society whose towns had advanced sanitation, bathhouses and gridlike city-planning. Evidence of trade with Egypt and Sumer in Mesopotamia, as well as the presence of mining interests as far as Central Asia, suggests that the fertile Indus River...
...Indus Valley civilization poses an intractable problem, one that legions of archaeologists and scientists have puzzled over from the first excavations to a new study published last month. Its writing, etched in signs on tiny, intricate seals and tablets, remains undeciphered, shrouding the ancient culture in mystery. A code-busting artifact with bilingual text, like the Rosetta stone, has yet to be found. By some counts, more than 100 decipherments of the civilization's often anthropomorphic runes and signs - known in the field as the Harappan script - have been attempted over the decades, none with great success. Some archaeologists spied...
...team's study, published initially in April in Science and more extensively in August in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, employed computer modeling to prove that the Harappan script communicated language, and has reinvigorated attempts to crack what is one of the lingering puzzles of ancient history...
...clouds at the end of a blazing day. Night was falling. Cicadas chirped and thrummed. The faintest of breezes caught in the crowns of two maples flanking the opened ground. After the laughter and singing, the mixed smiles and tears of the Friday wake; after the heartbreaking hymns and ancient prayers of the Saturday morning funeral; after so many words and pictures, the burial was brief and quiet. (See TIME's photos: mourning Ted Kennedy...
...weakened Congress - staging events harking back to an idealized Hindu past, such as the theatrical "rath yatra" (literally, a chariot ride, but used here to allude to the mythical Lord Rama's quest to slay the evil Ravana) that motivated frenzied crowds of Hindus to demolish an ancient mosque in December 1992, sparking months of Hindu-Muslim carnage. When in power from 1998 to 2004, the BJP renamed popular cities with names they deemed more "native" and changed school syllabi to ingrain a "Hindu" version of Indian history among students, moving away from the greater complexities of India's diverse...