off topic - Blacksmith discovered why frogs drive Hawaii residents batty.
sciam.com - Scientific American's website
The Mystery of Damascus Blades
by John D. Verhoeven
Centuries ago craftsmen forged peerless steel blades.
But how did they do it?
The author and a blacksmith have found an answer.
Frogs Driving Hawaii Residents.....
Information Technology, 2500 B.C.
... first developed the written word some five millennia back.
sciam.com
... drama's stage is Mesopotamia
... Euphrates to the west, the Tigris to the east
... flanking Zagros Mountains southward
... shores of the Persian Gulf
... lively and unique, Uruk was a southern lowlands city
... vital water from the Euphrates
... of large temples to the gods
... dwelt the priests who tended to divine and human needs
... where worked the scribes whose accounts.....
Such ancient cities are marked by three essentials:
a wall,
public buildings
and a flow of worldly surplus, largely agrarian products
but with bronze and silver, too, enabling steady growth
and widespread trade.
Uruk (Erech, it is called in Genesis) had for two millennia
been only one among hundreds of similar farming
and pastoral villages in this land of Sumer.
From their images we know the Sumerians as a robust,
stocky, black-haired people and from their written word
as ones with a language all their own.
Sumer was followed by later peoples with distinct languages,
who nonetheless became for nearly three millennia
cultural heirs to Sumer.
As power shifted far up the Tigris... while newcomers densely
peopled the larger surrounding area. These were speakers of
Semitic tongues, first Babylonian, then Assyrian, and up to
a dozen more, including scriptural Hebrew and Aramaic,
all written in the Sumerian way..... |
