Word: sumerians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from the beginning this "legal-minded people" had something to argue about, although they did agree about their origins. Johnson sifts the archaeological record and concludes, as does Genesis, that Abraham the patriarch came from Ur, a Sumerian city excavated in the 1920s and believed to have flourished in the fourth and third millenniums B.C. Such corroborations of ancient texts by modern scholars suit the author's purpose, which is to condense legend and fact into a flowing historical narrative...
...city in political and cultural decline, destroyed in 1600 B.C. by the invading Hittites. In 1973 the team found a royal palace from the 3rd millennium and, a year later, a small room with 42 tablets, resembling petrified waffles flung across the floor. The cuneiform on some tablets was Sumerian; on others it was indecipherable. Almost 1,000 more tablets were unearthed in September...
...mystified by the writings. Cuneiform is, after all, not a language, only a style of writing. While the epigraphist could recognize the characters, some of them formed words of a language he had never encountered. Pettinato pondered photographs of the tablets for three months, then cracked the code. Sumerian characters had been used to write an early Western Semitic tongue he dubbed "Eblaite." On other tablets, straight Sumerian was written, functioning as an official language, as Latin did in medieval Europe...
...breakdown of booty taken in a conquest of neighboring Mari, 240 miles away: the victorious commander got 15%, the rest went to the king of Ebla. Along with some literary documents, Pettinato also discovered a spectacular bonus: bilingual dictionaries, the oldest ever found, matching Eblaite words to Sumerian equivalents -and confirming his readings of the new language...
...efforts as the Penguin Book of Women Poets and The Other Voice: Twentieth-Century Women's Poetry in Translation. The editors have devoted several pages to such major figures as Enheduanna (c. 2300 B.C.), the first writer in history, male or female, whose work has been preserved. A Sumerian moon priestess, she composed incantations that still resonate in the present. Considerable space has also been given to the dazzling Mexican poet of the Spanish Golden Age, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, as well as to America's incomparable Emily Dickinson. Willis Barnstone's rendering...