Word: babylonian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Customs do change. Babylonian law decreed drowning as the proper punishment for a woman accused of adultery, but if she floated after being forced to jump into a sacred river, she was judged innocent. In the Middle Ages, someone who had sexual relations with a Jew could be punished by burial alive; adulterers were flogged through the streets, prostitutes had their noses slit, and men were burned alive for having sex with dogs, goats, cows, even geese...
Dozens of ancient coins, Babylonian bas-reliefs, Assyrian and Egyptian monuments, and Hittite tablets found a home at Harvard in 1903 thanks largely to the generosity of one man, Jacob Henry Schiff...
...Nation (1915) he restaged his father's Civil War, complete with dramatic scenes of the Ku Klux Klan that brought charges of racism along with blockbuster success. In Intolerance (1916) he took on, among other things, Belshazzar's feast, with elephants, dancing girls and collapsing Babylonian towers...
...tangled skein of allegiances that gives Lebanon its bewildering complexity was many centuries in the making. It is a land that through most of its history has been overrun and ruled by outsiders, from Egyptian viceroys and Babylonian governors to Ottoman mutessarifs and French commissioners. In ancient times, it was inhabited by the Phoenicians, who took their name from the purple dye they plied around the Mediterranean. Later it became part of that smaller region known as the Holy Land. The cedars of Lebanon were celebrated by the Psalmists, and its mountains provided inspiration for religious mystics...
...basement contains thousands of Babylonian tablets and texts "of considerable value" which are especially well secured, Moran said...