Word: cuneiforms
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...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...
Nothing is weirder than Sacred Harp. Its favored subject matter--the pilgrim, the grave, Christ's blood--is stark; its style--severe fourths and otherworldly open fifths--has been obsolete for more than a century. Its notation, in which triangles, circles and squares indicate pitch, looks like cuneiform. Yet it exudes power and integrity. Five people sound like a choir; a dozen like a hundred. It is one of the most democratic choral forms: no audience, no permanent conductor--just people addressing one another...
...Conservatives are calling the Nebo-Sarsekim tablet, stamped in cuneiform script, such a proof. Lawson Stone, a professor of Old Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, describes Nebo-Sarsekim's rank as roughly equivalent to Deputy Undersecretary of the Interior. "The logical assumption," he contends, "is that Jeremiah wasn't written by a later writer, but a person writing at the time. I don't know why a later writer trying to create a legendary basis for [a later Jewish regime] would want to make reference to a third-ranked Babylonian clerk. This argues that the document...
...will take a lot more cuneiform tablets to convince him. But then, the British Museum still has a lot left to look through...
...years, of rock carvings in northwest China that archaeologists say might be early Chinese characters, a finding that would more than double the estimated age of written Chinese's origins 3,000 B.C. Estimated era that Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia (in modern-day Iraq) are believed to have developed cuneiform, the world's earliest known written language...