Word: sumerians
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...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...
...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...
...week to the TIME Books section in the hope that their works will be reviewed. As Christmas approaches, the incoming stream becomes a torrent in anticipation of our annual section on gift books, which appears in this issue. The new volumes-on subjects ranging from Peruvian highways to Sumerian icons, from precious plants to psychic phenomena-are delivered to the office of Books Editor Stefan Kanfer. "It's like getting a lot of Christmas cards," he says. "You are suddenly reminded not only of people, but also of subjects that you haven't been in touch with...
...newly launched vehicle for Heyerdahl's latest voyage is the Tigris, an 18-meter-long (59 ft.) craft constructed from 30 metric tons (33 tons) of reeds gathered from the swamps of southern Iraq; its design is based on drawings found on ancient Sumerian clay tablets. Iraqi workmen first tied the reeds together into two long, tapering rolls. Then the rolls were joined to form the craft's hull. Though on earlier voyages Heyerdahl and his crew drifted across oceans at the whim of winds and currents, the Tigris will be more versatile. It has been fitted with...