Word: nile
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Died. Pierre Montet, 80, internationally respected French archaeologist who, after finding the world's oldest alphabetical inscription at a Lebanon site in 1922, went on to spend 20 years excavating at the Nile Delta town of Tanis, onetime capital of ancient Egypt, uncovering through the years three mummies of Pharaohs from the 21st and 22nd dynasties, their gold death masks and silver sarcophagi still intact; of pulmonary congestion; in Paris...
Ever since travelers started traveling, they have been telling others how and where to do it. Herodotus in 450 B.C. described the wonders of the Nile, where the natives worshiped crocodiles and shaved off their eyebrows when their cats died. Mark Twain, who made the Grand Tour a century ago, wrote delightedly of the cheapness of Moroccan currency ("I bought nearly half a pint of their money for a shilling"). The package tour, credit cards and 21-day-excursion jet fares have made the wonders of the Nile less wondrous and even Moroccan currency a lot less cheap...
...made chimps of his soldiers too long, and they had lots of bones to pick. The animals, they decided, were fair game. So while Nkrumah sat in Conakry, turning himself into a Guinea pig and pondering whether he should pack his trunk and join his friend Nasser at his Nile perch, the boared soldiers decided what they needed was some good gnus. One night when they were all croc-ed, they turned the zoo into Nkrumah's Bar & Gorilla...
...history of man's ventures and adventures into the lives of the peoples of the Pacific Ocean, Alan Moorehead (The White Nile, The Blue Nile, Cooper's Creek) has constructed a coherent parable that is an irony in time a version of the fall of man-a chronicle of inevitable disasters. The "impact" of which he writes in this unobtrusively expert narrative is the effect of the European Enlightenment upon the primitive, "the fateful moment when a social capsule is broken open, when primitive creatures, beasts as well as men, are confronted for the first time with civilization...
...Rome than from the subtler Orient. It was also in this Eurasian melting pot that Buddha acquired his characteristic togalike robe, borrowed from Rome. Likewise Hercules (opposite) holds the hero's traditional club, but his head is crowned with Serapis' sacred basket of mysteries, symbolizing the Nile's fertility...