Word: babylonian
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...tablet itself is certainly genuine. On July 10 the Museum announced that a Viennese expert working his way through thousands of similar clay documents in its possession translated one dating from 595 B.C that described a gift of 1.7 lbs. of gold to a Babylonian temple by a "chief eunuch" named Nabu-sharrussu-ukin...
...called it "a world-class find." What makes the ancient but seemingly mundane receipt significant is that the book of Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) mentions the exact same official - though under a different transliteration, Nebo-Sarsekim, and a different title, chief officer, as accompanying the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar when he marched against Jerusalem...
...longer so reluctantly. Twenty-one years is long enough to allow a generation of Palestinians to grow to adulthood knowing only, and hating, the occupation. But in a land so old, 21 years is merely an instant. Civilizations are piled on top of one another (Hebrew, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Hellenistic, Maccabean, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Egyptian, crusader, Mameluke, Ottoman, on and on), all the laminations that conquerors have left in the earth there -- a rich debris of meanings and promises and desires. The accumulation of passion and memory, so much of it implicated with God, can make the land seem...
Prior to entering the white-dwarf stage, however, an aging star cools and balloons into a red giant. And that, the Ruhr researchers speculate, is probably what Sirius B was when the Babylonians--and then the Greeks, Romans and Franks--gazed skyward. To the unaided eyes of the ancients, the two closely spaced stars looked like a single pinpoint, with a decided reddish tint imparted by the dominating giant. The combined light of the binary pair would certainly have been brighter than it is today, and indeed Babylonian cuneiforms tell of Sirius' being visible in the daytime...
...what isn't." Archaeologists are praying for the safety of what may be the world's oldest calendar, a 10,000-year-old pebble with 12 notches; of the Warka head, circa 3200 B.C., depicting a Sumerian woman in white marble; and of a group of 800 neo-Babylonian cuneiform clay tablets that form the world's oldest intact library, circa...