Word: cuneiform
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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WITH its own kind of mathematics and a menagerie of strange-looking symbols, the young science of genetics was for years no more meaningful to the general public than the cuneiform inscriptions of ancient Babylonia. Hiroshima changed that. The possible genetic effects of radioactive fallout-monstrous malformations of the human form brought about by exposure of human genes to radioactivity-were easily, and chillingly, imaginable. Genetics became a matter of immediate concern to all men. Last summer TIME'S editors explored this mysterious area at the root of life in a cover story on Geneticist George Wells Beadle...
Just a Hunch. Since the Near East used cuneiform and the Greeks and Minoans a linear script, most scholars automatically assumed that there could be no connection between the two ways of writing. But Scholar Gordon, a Ph.D. in Semitic languages from the University of Pennsylvania, had a hunch there was. "When I started this research," he admits, "I was merely setting out to see whether my notion was correct. At first I was frustrated at every turn because I thought that Phoenician-or West Semitic-was the language root. But Phoenician only seemed to fit the puzzle in certain...
...inscription which proved that the mosque of the Moslem city was built in its final form at the time of the Sultan Saladin in 1174 A.D. Under its three entrances he found three stone slabs with carvings showing Nabonidus and the worshiped crescent moon with inscriptions in the cuneiform writing of ancient Mesopotamia. They had been placed face down for the faithful to walk on, presumably as a sign that the ancient religion was finally suppressed. Dr. Rice believes that traces of the old culture persisted until the 11th century A.D., when Islam was under attack by Christian crusaders...
...nation to keep its memory bright, say archaeologists, is to write its records on durable material which will eventually be found. The Hittites of northeastern Asia Minor (2000-1200 B.C.) did the trick well. Their archives, written in cuneiform characters on baked clay bricks, were dug up in 1906. The records gave scholars the Hittite view of late Bronze Age politics. The Hittites, said the Hittites, were lords of all they surveyed...
...Arzawan ruins have been dug up so far, and archaeologists are eagerly awaiting the final results. The Arzawans could write (on clay bricks), and presumably they had archives. If archives are found, scholars may learn what the Arzawans thought about the loudmouthed Hittites, who defamed them in cuneiform 3,100 years...