Word: croesus
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...footnote in the slowly growing record of man's early history. But recent digs have turned up enough material to flesh out two rich chapters in that saga. At Sardis, in western Turkey, a Harvard-Cornell N.Y.U. group has uncovered what is believed to be one of King Croesus' fabled gold refineries. In the barren desert of southeastern Iran, archaeologists from Harvard's Peabody Museum have found evidence of an extinct Middle Eastern city that was conquered by Alexander the Great during the latter part of its 5,500-year existence...
...Bowls of Croesus. The search for Croesus' refinery began when Andrew Ramage, one of the Harvardmen on the expedition, noticed some oddly similar circular depressions in a clay floor near the site of a shrine built to Cybele, the goddess who protected ores and metals. Not far off was the Pactolus Torrent, which once was noted for its gold-rich sands. Moreover, slag similar to that produced in metal smelting rimmed the edges of the depressions. Ramage and his colleagues soon realized that they had stumbled on an ore refinery...
Careful digging revealed that the circular depressions were cupels, or metal-refining bowls. Unearthed with them were four furnaces, remnants of bellows, tiny bits of gold and gold alloys, and pottery fragments from the time (570-547 B.C.) when Croesus ruled the Lydian Empire in what is now western Turkey...
...second weapon is money. Croesus-rich Kuwait alone has nearly $3 billion deposited in British banks, figures that by withdrawing that much, it could topple the pound sterling. Even if the Kuwaitis switched their accounts to Swiss banks (at lower interest rates), the Swiss would simply deposit most of the money in London's City, which alone is equipped to handle the Arab world's huge deposits...
...explored so often before. On his trip, however, he has no clear idea where he wants to go, except that his :amily should resemble the Kennedy clan only in the most superficial aspects. The book drifts in two unsynchronized directions. One leads past Jimmy Kinsella, a second-generation Irish Croesus who has prodded his youngest son Charles into the Governor's mansion and then sits by, fulminating helplessly, as the family splits over the hoariest of issues: political realism v. political idealism. O'Connor's solution is resourceless and unbelievable: Governor Charles, the realist, has his brother...