Word: roman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Internationally, of course, this was old hat. Routinized agricultural taxation in China was well established by the Zhou dynasty (c. 1027-221 B.C.E.); the earliest Roman taxes, the portoria, were customs duties on imports and exports. The Athenians had a monthly poll tax, the metoikion, on foreigners (people whose parents were not both Athenian) of one drachma for men and half a drachma for women, while their contemporary Persians levied a tax called jizya on all non-Muslims living in Muslim-ruled areas. In 11th-century Britain, rising property taxes propelled Lady Godiva to ride the streets nude, inspiring popular...
...Gospel of Luke that describes Jesus' childhood visit to Jerusalem. Though he had been there before--Luke says his family was visiting "as usual" for Passover--the 12-year-old from Nazareth, 60 miles to the north, must still have been agog walking south down the grand new Roman street toward the Temple's lower entrance. A stretch of that road is visible today, just below the Western Wall, majestically wide but piled high on one side with huge blocks of stone that rained from above during one of the city's many destructions...
...high--a wall not of the Temple itself but of a gargantuan platform atop which it perched. To his right would have been Jerusalem's Upper City, its Gold Coast, where the families of the priests who tended the sacrificial altars lived according to Jewish law but in Roman splendor. Asked to imagine the boy's main impression, Roni Reich, director of Temple Mount excavations for the Israeli Antiquities Authority, says...
...masterpiece are scarce. But they tend to support descriptions in the four surviving written sources from approximately the same period: the Gospels and the biblical book of Acts; the part of the Jewish Talmud called the Mishnah; and the histories of Flavius Josephus, a Jewish priest and commander turned Roman military aide who lived in the years A.D. 30 to A.D. 100. For instance, a stone found later near the Temple's likely site was inscribed with the words TO THE PLACE OF TRUMPETING, which corroborate Josephus' description of the signal for the beginning of the Sabbath...
Accept that odd premise--Erdrich makes it seem marvelously plausible--and the novel's overarching theme becomes poignantly clear. From 1912 to 1996, Agnes, disguised as Damien and thus a sham as both man and priest, tries to bring Roman Catholicism to the Ojibwes of Little No Horse reservation on a lonely patch of North Dakota. These people have been deprived of their ancestral lands and hence the sustaining spirits of their culture; they are stalled between past and future. What help can a missionary from the conquering side bring them...