Word: hebrew
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...stuff!" the Babylonian reviewers must have said, when the Book of Genesis appeared in their bookstalls. To them the Hebrew Story of Mankind was nothing more than the rehash of an old Sumerian legend which they had learned in their cradles, a sort of Macbeth-out-of-Holinshed affair, lacking even the frankness to acknowledge its source...
...least that is the opinion suggested by a recent discovery. A tablet has been found at Nippur unmistakably antedating the Hebrew epic by ten centuries, and giving in surprisingly similar detail, even to names, the creation and fail of man. Supplemented by other records, a complete Sumerian legend can be constructed, which carries the history of Babylonia up to a flood strangely like that which bore Noah on his famous voyage. Thenceforward, the tale is different, and, as the critics would have said, the Hebrew plagiarism ceases...
Perhaps there is another way, besides literary theft, to account for the coincidences. The scientists may continue their studies, and perhaps uncover a new Ossian scandal; but meanwhile it is safe to make what conjectures our imaginations suggest. The Hebrew Adam tasted forbidden fruit to gain knowledge; the Sumerian Adapa did likewise; the temptation in each case involved a woman; both were driven out of their paradises in the Euphrates Valley to toil in unproductive fields; finally the descendants of both were chastened by a flood which wiped out all but the worthy. In fine, it might seem almost reasonable...
...very rare edition of a treatise by Jacopo da Cessole and was printed in 1532. This is the work which Caxton translated and printed as "The Game and Playe of the Chesse"--the second book printed in England. There is also a learned work in Latin and Hebrew by Thomas Hyde, professor of Oriental languages at Oxford at the close of the seventeenth century. The Widener copy of this "Shahiludium" is of the extremely rare edition of 1689. No copy of this edition appears in the standard bibliography on the subject or in any of the great collections of chess...
...leaf the signature of John Bunyan and a copy of Pindar with marginal notes by John Milton are on exhibit, as is a ponderous copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle with woodcuts by Michael Wolgemuth and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff. Among the manuscripts, which are mostly Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts copied in the middle ages, is one done by the monk Erasmus, with marginal pen and ink drawings by Holbein...