Word: persianism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Term was long and tedious, and a review is even more so. The whole thing was summed up back in November by the Chief Storekeeper of the local ROTC unit. The Storekeeper, who practices the mystic art of Persian rugmaking, claimed that his insights into the future were "too frightening to reveal...
...ease in the lap of the gods ("I saw her, the goddess, taking shape and resting lightly on the couch, lovelier than all earthly women . . ."). Turms is also busy making history. He contributes to the death struggle between Greece and Persia by setting fire to the temple of the Persian goddess Cybele in Sardis, helps incite war between Carthage and Sicily, insults the majesty of Rome, and leads his fellow Etruscans to ruin on the bloody field of Himera. In the end he goes alone to his doomed homeland in Etruria, where the famed twelve "sacred cities" stand...
...that sheik, there would be four natural Arab nations: 1) Maghreb in North Africa, 2) the land of the Nile Valley, 3) Arabia Deserta, including not only Saudi Arabia but Yemen and all the little trucial sheikdoms, 4) the Fertile Crescent, stretching from the Mediterranean at Lebanon to the Persian Gulf, and including Syria and Iraq in a unity of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys...
...only as a document of faith but as a legacy of art, the murals are extraordinary. The costumes pictured and some of the painting conventions (e.g., the painted frames surrounding each mural) resemble Persian art of the period. But the paintings as a whole show a transition between the easeful grace of Greek and Roman art and the frozen stiffness of later Byzantine figures. Meanings are conveyed strikingly, as when "the hand of the Lord" takes the shape of several free-floating, detached hands looming above Ezekiel. The coloring is subdued, never garish, subtly harmonious...
...published this month (Yale University; $15). Ironically, the pictures were preserved by what probably seemed to Dura's Jews to be their desecration. The commander of the city's Roman garrison, faced with the threat of an enemy attack, did his best to prepare the city against Persian siege tactics. To keep the city walls from collapsing even if they were undermined, the commander ordered the street nearest the most vulnerable wall filled with earth, heaping it up over the house roofs to the top of the wall itself. To prevent the house walls from buckling, they were...