Word: papyrus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...staff and students at the St. Theresa Mission School in Nandere, a tiny village deep in the bamboo-and-papyrus forests 30 miles north of Kampala, were more fortunate. First a band of Amin's soldiers robbed Headmaster Kibunka Peregrine of his watch and money; then, the headmaster told TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief David Wood, one of the soldiers "jammed a hand grenade in my mouth and told me to take him to the deacon." Peregrine knocked on the bullet-scarred door of the deacon's office, but no one emerged. "When Amin's boys left...
Ancient Egyptian women urinated on the leaves of the papyrus plant. If the plant died, everything was as usual. If it survived, they were pregnant. Such self-diagnosis among would-be mothers (or those who would prefer not to be) is still coveted today. Despite some frowns from the medical establishment, a growing number of women are using commercial kits, sold over the counter in pharmacies, which are designed to allay their fears-or confirm their wishes-about pregnancy. Says one proponent of the do-it-yourself trend: "It gives me the opportunity to find out whether I am pregnant...
...dramatizing his theories. To show that the Polynesian islands could have been settled by ancient mariners from South America, he crossed the Pacific on a balsa raft. To demonstrate that Egyptians might have reached the New World centuries before Columbus, he conquered the Atlantic in a boat made of papyrus. Now Heyerdahl is about to take a reed boat down the Tigris River from the purported site of the biblical Garden of Eden, eventually reach the open sea and either sail to India or East Africa, or sink-whichever comes first. His goal: to prove that the Sumerians-who established...
Lindbergh's feat was technologically progressive; its trajectory pointed into the future. Much of today's adventuring is essentially regressive - men employing ever more primitive modes of transportation. Thor Heyerdahl's crew sailed in the papyrus rafts called Ra I and II to show that ancient Egyptians might have discovered America. His 1947 voyage aboard the Kon Tiki was similarly primitive...
...READING period goes back to the earliest artifacts of western literature. We learned from fragments of papyrus discovered in the early 1940's by the archeologist, Ichbin Scheissmann, and now known as the Lead Sea Scrolls. Inside one of these withered "Blue Scrolls" (as Scheissmann calls them) one of the ancient scribes tells a tale of woe: previous to his writing in his blue scroll he had been forced to write scroll after scroll and read even more than that, all in a period of two weeks. The poor fellow threatens suicide because he wasn't prepared to write...