Word: ur
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...Ur-Game. In 1905, the year he graduated from Yale, William Champion read an article about an exhibit of African game boards at the Chicago Exposition of 1893 in which the author noted that Kalah "has served for ages to divert the inhabitants of nearly half the inhabited area of the globe." Fascinated by the failure of such a pandemic pastime to catch on in the U.S. and Europe, Champion began tracing its migrations and permutations...
...stakes of female slaves, and maharajahs using rubies and star sapphires as counters. He finally traced it back some 7,000 years to the ancient Sumerians, who evolved the six-twelve-sixty system of keeping numerical records." Out of this system of record keeping, the Sumerians developed this ur-game of board games...
...throwback to the last of the Roman legionnaires in Germania. Making love to a local landowner's wife, he is the incarnation of Woden offering himself to the goddess of the forest. Even the shepherd Brace defends is not merely an old reprobate but a kind of Ur-brigand descended from the race of Jacob. As for the fox: Is he a fox? He may be Brace's alter ego. He may even be man himself, close to madness and ready to spread destruction in the world...
...cities stirred-but it was more than the zephyrs of spring that stirred them. For thousands of years, since ancient Ur rose on the banks of the Euphrates, man has sought out the city as a place of wonder and opportunity, a citadel of art and learning, the home of kings and gods. In the U.S., in the spring of 1962, he did not have to look far in any direction to find its towers near at hand. Never in history has a society been so urbanized: seven out of every ten Americans, 125 million strong, live in cities...
...shocks the rationalistic Englishman. There is a pet fox in the attic. Also in the attic, though Augustine does not know it, is a young, half-crazed fanatic sought by the police as a member of a proto-Nazi assassin band dedicated to the murder of liberal politicians. This ur-Nazi hangs himself before he can enact his fantasies of "purifying" Germany through selective murder, leaving another fox in another attic, Adolf Hitler, to climb to his yet unimaginable destiny...