Word: urs
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Died. John Daniel Hertz, 82, Austrian immigrant newsboy who became a transportation tycoon by founding the Yellow Cab Co. in Chicago in 1915 and the Hertz Drive-Ur-Self in 1924, later retired to the race track (one possession: Count Fleet), but left off retirement to parlay more fortunes as a partner of Manhattan's Lehman Brothers, and devote his millions to creating an engineering scholarship fund; of a stroke; in Los Angeles...
Clasped Hands. At the great city of Eridu, once dedicated to the god of waters, archaeologists have found no fewer than 16 temples built in successive generations one on top of another at the same site. The Sumerians created at Eridu, Nippur, Uruk, Ur and Lagash a complex of city-states more sophisticated than anything man had previously known. But however mature they became politically, they remained children of the gods. They portrayed themselves in statues with hands clasped in prayer, their huge, vacant eyes staring heavenward as if they themselves were in a trance. When it came to worship...
...Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates (now part of Iraq), founded one of the world's first major civilizations. But only in this century have scholars come to know the Sumerians with any thoroughness, chipping away at the sites of such ancient city-states as Ur, Lagash and Mari. Last week a U.S. expedition, sponsored by the American Schools of Oriental Research and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, was at work at the site of the holy city of Nippur, the seat of Enlil, god of the elements. There, only 100 miles south...
When historians look back into time to name the first civilized people, they usually pick the Sumerians, who built imposing cities, including Abraham's Ur of the Chaldees, in southern Mesopotamia about 3000 B.C. But the Sumerians did not think of themselves as native Mesopotamians: according to their legends, they came from a place called Dilmun, where lived Ziusudra, the sole survivor of the Flood. Last week Danish archaeologists were digging into the ruins of a city on oil-rich Bahrein Island in the Persian Gulf. They think it is Dilmun, the mysterious "home city of the Land...
Disk-Shaped Seals. After figuring in early legends, Dilmun takes slightly more tangible form in Sumerian writings as a city on an island three days' sail down the Persian Gulf. Merchants from Ur traded there, and clay-written records tell that they brought woolen goods, returning with cargoes of copper, ivory and gold. This suggests that Dilmun acted as middleman between Mesopotamia and the civilization of the Indus Valley in Pakistan. In both places have been found a few peculiar, disk-shaped stone seals. Since most Mesopotamian seals are cylindrical and Indus seals are square, archaeologists have long speculated...