Word: object
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Parfitt started wondering about another aspect of the Lemba's now-credible oral history: a drumlike object called the ngoma lungundu. The ngoma, according to the Lemba, was near-divine, used to store ritual objects, and borne on poles inserted into rings. It was too holy to touch the ground or to be touched by non-priests, and it emitted a "Fire of God" that killed enemies and, occasionally, Lemba. A Lemba elder told Parfitt, "[It] came from the temple in Jerusalem. We carried it down here through Africa." (See pictures of John 3:16 in pop culture...
...conflagrations. The drum element is the biggest stretch, since scripture never straightforwardly describes the Ark that way. He bases his supposition on the Ark's frequent association with trumpets, and on aspects of a Bible passage where King David dances in its presence. Parfitt admits that such a multipurpose object would be "very bizarre" in either culture, but insists, "that's an argument for a connection between them." (See pictures of spiritual healing around the world...
...whether museums should ever acquire, either through purchases or as gifts, antiquities that have no clear record of how and when they came out of the ground. Some museum directors argue they should be able to take in the most important of these. To do otherwise would mean the object disappears into private hands, where it's denied to the public and to specialists for study. Cuno suggests the establishment of an outside advisory panel that could rule on whether an object is so significant that a museum could acquire it even if its papers are not in order...
...graduate of the GSAS Psychology and Social Relations department), what object would be best at keeping a lonely student company...
...inanimate object that is most like a person or is most comparable to a person would be best. I would say an iPod, since you can hear people sing or talk about things. But if it has to be strictly disconnected from human contact, at least things that resemble humans––a stuffed animal, a robot, anything that sort of is sort of human-like or moves, if you were lonely enough to imagine that it provides comfort or understanding...