Word: sumerians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Brooklyn Museum stands a splendid statuette of almost solid copper, silently questioning knowledgeable visitors. The questions: "Do I represent a hero, a king, a priest, a demon, a god, or some ancient's idea of a joke? Was I molded and cast by a Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Kassite, Hurrian, Hyksos, Elamite, or by some barbaric genius of the Caucasus? Was my native city Eridu, perhaps, or Susa. Persepolis, Nineveh, Larsa, Lagash, Umma, Ur, Alalakh, or Hattusas? Am I 5,000 years old, or closer to a mere...
...sample containing Carbon 14 (perhaps from a Sumerian tomb) is dissolved in a hydrocarbon fluid in a 4-in. tube. Radiation from its unstable atoms makes the liquid give flashes of light. They are too faint for human eyes to see, but photomultiplier tubes pick them up. The whole system is immersed in liquid mercury. As a further safeguard, the counting apparatus is adjusted so that it ignores all flashes of light too weak or too strong to come from Carbon...
...wedge-shaped marks on a clay tablet, carefully compiling a pharmacopoeia. His calligraphy was better than most doctors': he got more than a dozen formulas on the two sides of a tablet little bigger than a modern picture postcard. Then the sands of the desert covered the great Sumerian city of Nippur (90 miles southeast of Babylon), and the physician's secrets were lost for thousands of years...
...Sumerian pharmacologist neglected to sign his work. It is also disappointing in another respect, the patient translators note: he failed to say what diseases his remedies were for. But along with such oddities as the ground-up skin of the kushippu bird, he also used salt and saltpeter, which had some value as antiseptics and astringents...
...before that could happen, Picasso had climbed back into overalls, and his art was on a new tack-one which took him straight over the horizon and out of most solid citizens' ken. He borrowed ideas from the whole range of art history, carving figures that looked like Sumerian fetishes, and drawing in every manner from the Cro-Magnon to that of severe 19th Century classicists such as Ingres. His subject matter became anything at all-dogs, women, roosters, bones, furniture, dots, musicians-violently twisted, hacked, smeared and rearranged to suit Picasso's moods...