Word: assyria
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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History was well along before it occurred to anybody that there were two ways of looking at war. War was war -bloody, awful, sometimes glorious-and the normal way in which a nation established itself in the days when Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria and Persia were harrying each other for territory and tribute. Aggression invariably had the sanction of a deity. The Israelites' takeover of the Canaanites was commanded by Jehovah himself. And wars were usually as total as soldiers with limited technology could make them...
...demands of circumstance. Confident of an unending supply from earth's mighty rivers and timeless seas, man has wasted water and polluted it. Parched by unpredictable droughts, he has migrated thousands of miles to slake his thirst. He has fought over it since ancient times: Sennacherib of Assyria revenged himself on Babylon by dumping debris in the city's canals; today armed Arabs and Israelis challenge each other across the banks of the disputed River Jordan...
...archaeologists dug another tunnel for some 160 feet to trace the wall. Inscribed on it were various letters. One monogram, repeated ten times, is deciphered by the excavators as "Gugu," the names under which King Gyges is mentioned in the Assyrian annals. Gyges had sent an embassy to Assyria, which ceated a sensation since the Lydian horsemen had come so far and spoke a language strange to the Assyrians...
SUMER: THE DAWN OF ART, and THE ARTS OF ASSYRIA, both by Andre Parrot. These splendid books are the first two in a 40-volume survey of man's art. The project's guiding hand, as might be expected, is that of that homme perpetually engage, Andre Malraux...
...ARTS OF ASSYRIA, by André Parrot (383 pp.; Golden Press; $25). The extraordinary book-by-book progress through the history of art, proposed by France's Minister of Culture André Malraux and begun this year in the superb volume Sumer: The Dawn of Art (TIME, June 2), is continued with an equally lavish book on Assyria. The grim, skilled art of the warrior peoples who fought in the Mesopotamian valleys-it includes magnificent lion hunts as well as gloomy strings of captives-has never been presented better. Familiar bas-reliefs are well done in black and white...