Word: cuneiforms
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...conquer much of the Middle East, from roughly 900 B.C. to 612 B.C. They were known for their ferocious cruelty. In addition to their biblical role as the oppressors of Israel, there was the testimony of Ashurnasirpal II, an Assyrian king of the 9th century B.C. who boasted in cuneiform inscriptions of having rebellious chieftains impaled on stakes, dismembered and skinned alive. Ashurnasirpal made Nimrud, known in the Bible as Calah, his capital. The fortress city on the banks of the Tigris was dominated by an elaborate palace and a towering ziggurat and was populated in part by peoples subjugated...
...cuneiform figures scratched into the tablets provide instructions for dozens of Mesopotamian stews, vegetable dishes and meat pies...
...They are recipes and as such practically a unique genre that one simply has not encountered before in cuneiform literature," said Hallo, a professor of Assyriology and Babylonian literature at Yale...
...really want to touch them. So this is how we do it," says Barbara Mangum, one of the six interns receiving advanced training in art conservation at the Center. Lying on the table in front of Mangum are two seventh century B.C. bronze Chinese vases, a cluster of Babylonian cuneiform tablets soaking in a beaker of water, and a coffee-table sized Egyptian mummy. The mummy, Mangum says, is not cursed...
Professor of Assyriology Giovanni Pettinato was mystified by the writings. Cuneiform is, after all, not a language, only a style of writing. While the epigraphist could recognize the characters, some of them formed words of a language he had never encountered. Pettinato pondered photographs of the tablets for three months, then cracked the code. Sumerian characters had been used to write an early Western Semitic tongue he dubbed "Eblaite." On other tablets, straight Sumerian was written, functioning as an official language, as Latin did in medieval Europe...