Word: papyruses
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...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...
Today Gnosticism is the object of renewed interest among scholars, owing largely to the publication of a remarkable library of Gnostic scriptures. Known as the Nag Hammadi Codices, for the town in southern Egypt near the site of their discovery, the library consists of twelve 4th century papyrus books containing 52 texts that are thought to have been translated from the original Greek into Egypt's ancient Coptic language. Many scholars believe that it will become as important to understanding the early Christian era as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the library of a Jewish Essene community that was discovered...
Breast cancer is not a new disease. The papyrus records of ancient Egyptian medicine contain references to breast lumps and swellings. But this ailment has drawn increased attention in recent years. It is the leading killer of women in the 40-to-44 age group and the primary cause of cancer deaths among women of all ages, striking one out of every 15. Before 1974 has ended, some 90,000 American women will learn that they have cancer of the breast; another 33,000 will die from...
...clay tablets discovered in an excavation of the city of Ugarit (now Ras Shamra, Syria), which flourished more than 3,000 years ago, Kilmer deciphered the thin cuneiform script as the words and musical symbols of an ancient song. Older by 1,400 years than the 400 B.C. papyrus that contains music for Euripides' play Orestes, Kilmer's finding is the earliest specimen of notated music. Her discovery puts music's birthplace in the Middle East, debunking the prevailing theory that Western music originated in Greece. "These findings have absolutely revolutionized thinking about the age and history...
Among many archaeological discoveries in the Holy Land, one recent find bears special contemporary relevance. A team of American archaeologists, digging near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in present-day Iraq, have just completed piecing together the papyrus fragments of several long-buried scrolls. Heralded as the oldest known samples of the written word, the scrolls are said to contain the transcribed record of an ancient tribunal formally entitled the "Celestial Select Committee Investigating the Fall...