Word: babylonians
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...career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges ... The idea was to prove at every foot of the way that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even-ultimately, God willing, one day-that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself...
...really want to touch them. So this is how we do it," says Barbara Mangum, one of the six interns receiving advanced training in art conservation at the Center. Lying on the table in front of Mangum are two seventh century B.C. bronze Chinese vases, a cluster of Babylonian cuneiform tablets soaking in a beaker of water, and a coffee-table sized Egyptian mummy. The mummy, Mangum says, is not cursed...
Funeral Games ends the trilogy. The novel opens in 323 B.C. with Alexander, 33, dying of swamp fever in a Babylonian palace. Renault guides us through the property, noting its special features and listing the previous owners. Her description could be a model for Beverly Hills realtors: "Nebuchadrezzar's bedroom, once ponderously Assyrian, had been Pesianized by successive kings from Kyros on. Kambyses had hung its walls with the trophies of conquered Egypt; Darius the Great had sheathed its columns with gold and malachite: Xerxes had pegged across one side the embroidered robe of Athene, looted from the Parthenon...
Throughout history, controls have seemed a tempting quick fix for inflation. Nearly 40 centuries ago, the Babylonian King Hammurabi established wage and price limits. They set, for example, the annual wage of a field worker at eight gur (75 bu.) of corn and that of a herdsman at six gur (56.25 bu.). The Roman Emperor Diocletian in A.D. 301 published official price lists that included artichokes and transportation by camel; any gougers were executed. The most recent American experience with general controls was President Nixon's 1971-74 program of freezes, followed by varying degrees of restraint...
...Italy's city-states were being ravaged by imperialist-republican quarrels, and the papacy went into exile in Avignon, part of a papal fief on the borders of France. Not unjustly, the exile of the papacy was called the "Babylonian captivity": the avarice and corruption of the papal court was unequaled even in the days of the Medicis and Borgias. Seven French Popes resided at Avignon before Gregory XI (1370-78) finally returned the papal seat to Rome...