Word: babylonian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...forbid Jews to set foot on the Mount lest they accidentally step on the site of the ancient Holy of Holies, where only the high priest entered, once a year. In addition, there are various views over how and when a new Temple could or should be raised. The Babylonian Talmud offers conflicting opinions, but Rashi, the great medieval sage, insisted that the Temple must descend directly from heaven when the Messiah comes. On the other hand, tradition holds that God's biblical command to build the Temple is irrevocable, and the Jerusalem Talmud says Jews may construct an intermediate...
...every schoolchild used to know, is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. But in the electronic age, the ancient Babylonian constant -- or rather the accurate calculation of its value -- has become a symbol of computational prowess. In the 1950s the U.S. led the way, churning out estimates of pi accurate to thousands and tens of thousands of decimal places. Then the French took the lead. With the emergence of Japan's supercomputer industry in the 1980s, pi has become an almost exclusive province of the Japanese. The last world record, 201 million digits...
...Hades, and mine this day was no exception. Heading downtown, I boarded one of the system's older trains -- creaking, crotchety and covered with indescribable graffiti. I looked closer at one cluster of squiggles, spray-painted by the ubiquitous Taki 183. Was it . . .? Could it be . . .? Yes, there in Babylonian script were the opening words of the Gilgamesh Epic...
...They are recipes and as such practically a unique genre that one simply has not encountered before in cuneiform literature," said Hallo, a professor of Assyriology and Babylonian literature at Yale...
Yale recently celebrated the 75th anniversary of its Babylonian collection, which contains about 40,000 items...