Word: cuneiforms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...time it takes to read this sentence, some 300 million e-mails will be sent and received. On average, Americans spend more time reading e-mails than they do with their spouses. E-mail has become, he argues, "our electronic fidget." In his history of mail from cuneiform tablets to the Pony Express to Gmail, Freeman traces how far the epistolary form has come--and lays out a case for why we should take a step back. E-mail might be cheaper, faster and more convenient, but its virtues also make us lazier, lonelier and less articulate. The author...
...like the Rosetta stone, has yet to be found. By some counts, more than 100 decipherments of the civilization's often anthropomorphic runes and signs - known in the field as the Harappan script - have been attempted over the decades, none with great success. Some archaeologists spied parallels with the cuneiform of Mesopotamia. Others speculated an unlikely link between Harappan signs and the similarly inscrutable "bird-men" glyphs found thousands of miles away in the Pacific Ocean on Easter Island...
...first half of the 20th century, the archeological museums of universities like Yale and Harvard and art museums like the MFA used partage to acquire their most important pieces. In the 1920s and 1930s, a team from Harvard excavated a site called Nuzi in modern Iraq, finding thousands of cuneiform tablets that detailed daily life. These remain on display in Harvard’s Semitic Museum...
...conquer rival city-states and to establish Babylon as Mesopotamia's political heart. But Hammurabi was concerned about more than expansion, as demonstrated by the magnificent Code of Hammurabi stela, a 7-ft.-high (2 m) column of basalt upon which he inscribed 282 codified laws and punishments in cuneiform, the Babylonian script that predates even hieroglyphics. Although its prescriptions sound cruel today ("If a man commits a robbery and is caught, that man will be killed"), it helped him craft his image as a just ruler: the stela was displayed publicly, so nobody, regardless of status, could plead ignorance...
Babylon reached its greatest heights in the early 6th century B.C. under the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, who endowed his capital with unequaled architectural splendor. Cuneiform sources offer little evidence of what the city looked like, but classical accounts - in particular, by the 5th century Greek historian Herodotus - describe a city that extended for 14 miles (23 km) in each direction, divided in the middle by the mighty Euphrates, and fortified by five sun-dried mud-brick walls, each up to 23 ft. (7 m) thick. The walls guarded a spectacular inner city, whose grand streets ran parallel...