Word: cuneiforms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...museums, banks and stores in the lawless days following Baghdad’s collapse. They stole ancient treasures from the city’s famous museums where some of the most impressive archaeological finds of the past century had been preserved. Among the missing artifacts were thousands of ancient cuneiform tablets, the 5,000-year-old Vase of Uruk and the Harp of Ur. This enormous cultural loss is a profound blow to Iraq and the world...
...Fertile Crescent, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was home to the first known systems of writing, irrigation and mathematics. Cuneiform was stamped on clay tablets to record early works of literature, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh...
...widow may also provide evidence against Ay. A cuneiform document reports that a letter was sent from an unnamed widowed Egyptian Queen to the Hittite King in what is now Turkey, pleading that one of his sons be sent south to marry her. The writer's fear was that she would otherwise be forced to wed one of her "servants." Ankhesenamen, as onetime Queen, would surely have seen Ay as a servant. Some people, including Cooper and King, believe that an ancient ring bearing her and Ay's names indicates that the two were in fact married, a move that...
Authorities may never know the identity of the victim?believed to have been no more than 21 years old when she died?or of her enterprising murderer (or team of killers) who went to enormous trouble to duplicate mummification techniques and the ancient cuneiform writing. Saleem ul Haq, director of Karachi's archaeology department, is convinced the perpetrator of the fraud is "definitely someone who has links to archaeology." But as good as his attention to detail may have been, it wasn't good enough. The first clue: South Asia's ancient civilizations had no tradition of mummification. Also...
...techniques. Its brain had been extracted through the mouth, while Egyptian mummies had theirs removed through the nose. An incision in the abdomen looked suspiciously like a stab wound. Some of the woman's vertebrae were dislocated or fractured. All of her teeth were missing. Grammatical errors in the cuneiform inscriptions suggested the engraver knew modern Persian. The mummy's gold ornaments weighed only 15 grams. "No princess could wear such poor jewelry," says the Karachi archaeology department...