Word: babylonic
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...Babylon, for example, was the first great city of the ancient world; according to the Bible, it was "the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth." Ancient Athens, for all its architectural and intellectual glory, was scarcely more than an overgrown slum; the grandeur of Rome was overshadowed by its ramshackle ghettos, crime rate and traffic jams. Sanitation was so bad in the Paris of Louis XIV that two miles from the city's gates a traveler's nose would tell him that he was drawing near. Scarcely anyone today needs to be told about how awful...
...communities. But men, alas and thank God, are never strictly practical. Until people are known by numbers alone, the great city will continue to exist. F. Scott Fitzgerald was speaking of Manhattan, but he might just as well have been talking of London or Paris-or Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon or Justinian's Constantinople. Looking at it from afar, he said, was always to see it "in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world...
...Near Eastern sculpture. There is a four-sided stella, which, if I remember correctly, is a copy of the copy in the British Museum. It is called the Black Obelisque, and on it the Assyrian king Shalmanesar III recorded his conquest of most of the Near East, including Babylon. Nearby is a cast of an Assyrian bas-relief which shows kings impaling their captives on spears...
...that the integrity of its theme is seriously stretched . From the institutional oppression of the poor by the rich in modern times Griffith moves to the political intrigues of Catherine de Medici, to religious conflicts in Christ's Palestine, and to the grand movements of the political civilization of Babylon. He calls the injustices of each social system "intolerance." Consequently, the film's climax-with the four stories intercut-lacks any thematic synthesis. Griffith turns largely to the human interests in his four endings...
...Babylon Times, whose first issue recently sneaked onto the newsstands, is put out mostly by people who've left New York City for the country, where they think they might be able to survive The Fall. A haphazard collection of stories, essays, and poems gathered over the past year, it's Editor John Wilton's way of participating while staying in the woods to observe...