"Cuniform" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... what several versions of the Legend of the Creation, the works of Babylonian and Assyrian editors of different periods, must have existed in early Mesopotamian Libraries. King's edition of the Creation Texts appeared in "Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum," Part XIII, London, 1901. As the scope of this work did not permit the inclusion of his translations, and commentary and notes, he published these in a private work entitled, "The Seven Tablets of Creation, or the ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... Sanskrit word Sindhu is in the singular the name of the river Indus, in the plural of the people and territories on its banks. The name appears as Hidku in the cuneiform inscription of Darius' son of Hystaspes, in which the nations tributary to that ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... stage we have ample evidence afforded by the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria. Spells employed to the hurt of any worshipper of the gods are spells against which the worshipper may properly appeal to the gods for protection. A god is essentially the protector of his worshippers, and he protects each as well as all ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... origin of the Cuneiform Character, and of the Pyramid or Sun-worship in its relation to Egyptian Architecture, is placed at the end, so as not to interrupt the personal narrative. That chapter, it is believed, will be found very interesting, illustrated, as it is, by Mr. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... kind, and of about the same age, is the famous Babylonian cylinder found in the ruins of Persepolis, and now preserved in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. It is about seven inches high, barrel-shaped, and covered with inscriptions in the cuneiform character, disposed in vertical lines, and affording a positive example of an indented surface produced by mechanical impression. Such cylinders are supposed to have been memorials of matters of national or family importance, and were in early ages, as we know by tradition, very ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... years. But Mr. Brown goes on to quote that one of the languages of which we know next to nothing, Hittite, was 'probably allied to Proto-Armenian, and perhaps Lykian, and was above all not Semitic.' In any case 'the cuneiform mode of writing was used in Cappadocia at an early period.' As even Professor Sayce declines to give more than a tentative reading of a Cappadocian cuneiform inscription, it seems highly rash to ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... are surprisingly well given, even the knuckles of the fingers being indicated. As regards the drapery, it is noteworthy that an attempt has been made to render folds on the right breast and the left arm. The skirt of the dress is covered with an inscription in cuneiform characters. ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... Babylon, and flowed into the Persian gulf. There is, indeed, no direct evidence to show that this branch bore a name resembling Pison. Palgu is the Assyrian whence the Greek Pallakopas was derived. It is remarkable, however, that the word Pison closely resembles the cuneiform term "pisana," or "pisanu," which is used for a water-reservoir, a canal or a channel; and as this "Pallakopas" was the channel par excellence, it may very possibly have been called "pisana" or Pison, the (great) channel. The identification of the channel called "Pallakopas" ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... antiquarian researches in the islands of the Mediterranean, has visited parts of America, and has won reputation as a scholar and writer by a number of works on such abstruse questions as Oriental philosophy and religion, the cuneiform inscriptions and the distinctions of race. The present book is merely a novel, yet it was clearly intended to embody the deepest and maturest thoughts of the author in regard to "the proper study of mankind," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... of our Aryan Race who inhabited India and colonial Egypt in prehistoric times we know practically nothing, and the same may be said of the Chaldean, Babylonian, and Assyrian nations who composed the 2nd sub-race—for the fragments of knowledge obtained from the recently deciphered hieroglyphs or cuneiform inscriptions on Egyptian tombs or Babylonian tablets can scarcely be said to constitute history. The Persians who belonged to the 3rd or Iranian sub-race have it is true, left a few more traces, but of the earlier civilizations ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... but knew nothing of the science of vocal music; I did not know a word of Spanish, or Italian, or German, or English; even with the literature of France I was but little acquainted; but I could read the cuneiform characters of Babylon and Persepolis as readily as you read this page, while Sanscrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Chaldaic, flowed from my tongue as freely as a nursery rhyme. As an instructress of young ladies, therefore, I could not hope to find a livelihood, but as an assistant to some learned ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... known to scholars all over the world as the oldest extant specimen of what can be called writing; indeed one can here see the actual evolution (I am quoting from a work of reference, or at least from my recollection of it) from the ideographic cuneiform to the phonetic syllabic script. Every time I have read about that manuscript and have happened to be in Orillia (Ontario) or Schenectady (N.Y.) or any such place, I have felt that I would be willing to take ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... Gerard Dows and Zoffanies, I know the croaking chorus from the "Frogs" of Aristophanes, Then I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din afore, And whistle all the airs from that confounded nonsense "Pinafore." Then I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform, And tell you every detail of Caractacus's uniform. In short in matters vegetable, animal and mineral, I am the very model of a ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... cuneiform inscriptions represent crucifixion as the common punishment for rebellion and treason. The Jews may have imitated the Assyrians, as crucifixion may have been adopted long before that of Christ and the two thieves ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... time future and time past! Think of the indefinite possibilities in the one, the rigid fixity of the other. Our present actions are like cements that dry quickly and set hard on exposure to the air—the dirt of the trowel abides on the soft brick for ever. Many cuneiform inscriptions were impressed with a piece of wood on clay, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... a different attention span (but not a shorter one). [Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one).] Artists are always disappointed by their audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll find cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and action, not like we had in the old days. As artists, it would be a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore ...
— Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books • Cory Doctorow
... cuneiform alphabet, by which pictures have been reduced to phonetic signs, the attempt has been made to arrange or classify these gods according to their proper order in the Pantheon, but thus far much obscurity and doubt seem to pervade ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... first where man settled in great city communities, under an orderly government, with a developed religion, practicing agriculture, erecting dwellings and using a syllabified writing. All modern civilization had its source there. For 6,000 years the cuneiform or wedge-shaped writing of the Assyrians was the literary script of the whole civilized ancient world, from the shores of the Mediterranean to India and even to China, for Chinese civilization, old as ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... (a comparatively young people) obtain the original myth? It is most probable that they obtained it through the mediation either of the Canaanites or of the North Arabians. Babylonian influence, as is now well known, was strongly felt for many centuries in Canaan, and even the cuneiform script was in common use among the high officials of the country. When the Israelites entered Canaan, they would learn myths partly of Babylonian origin. North Arabian influence must also have been ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... people. He was so short that he could easily walk under my arm; his gait was something between a roll and a limp, although he stoutly disclaimed lameness; he laughed whenever I spoke to him, and answered in a voice which seemed the cuneiform character put into sound. First, there was an explosion of gutturals, and then came a loud trumpet-tone, something like the Honk! honk! of wild geese. Yet, when he placed his squat figure behind a tavern table, and looked at me quietly with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... acquaintance with the classic lands of Greece and Rome. The unknown characters upon the rocks of Sinai have been deciphered, but the meagre contents still leave us in darkness as to their origin and purpose. The cuneiform or arrow-headed inscriptions of the Persian monuments and tablets, have yielded up their mysteries, unfolding historical data of high importance; thus illustrating and confirming the few and sometimes ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, in the ninth volume of Cuneiform Texts, gives a collection of the business documents of one firm, "Murashu Sons, of Nippur," in the reign of Artaxerxes I. Here we have to do with a family deed-chest, a collection of documents found together and fortunately ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... the Babylonian account of Creation is comparatively late; the Hebrew account, as certainly, comparatively early. It is not merely that the actual cuneiform tablets are of date about 700 B.C., coming as they do from the Kouyunjik mound, the ruins of the palace of Sennacherib and Assurbanipal, built about that date. The poem itself, as Prof. Sayce has pointed out, indicates, by the peculiar pre-eminence ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... his commentary (Hierakonpolis, i. p. 9) on this scene, Prof. Petrie supposes that the seven-pointed star sign means "king," and compares the eight-pointed star "used for king in Babylonia." The eight-pointed star of the cuneiform script does not mean "king," but "god." The star then ought to mean "god," and the title "servant of a god," and this supposition may be correct. Hen-neter, "god's servant," was the appellation of a peculiar kind of priest in later days, and was then spelt ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... of one method, and the "Philostratus" of Blount (who pillaged the "Areopagitica") of the other. And yet, again, how perverse is human nature! how more perverse is literary taste! There is a large class of men madly desirous to read cuneiform and runic inscriptions simply because of their unreadableness, adding to our compulsory stock of knowledge about the royal Smiths and Joneses of to-day much conjectural and conflicting information concerning ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... developed the cuneiform method of writing. They had no paper, but made their inscriptions on clay tablets and cylinders. These were set away in rooms called libraries. The discovery of the great library of Ashur-bani-pal, of Nineveh, revealed the highest perfection ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... been studying them for two months. Emanuel Deutsch, one of the great authorities on cuneiform inscriptions, gives us the following information ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... [4] The cuneiform Achaemenian inscriptions found in Persia and in other places, deciphered and published by Grotefend, Burnouf, Lassen, Rawlinson, Norris, Spiegel, de Saulcy, ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... This notable archaeologist began his career in the East as an officer in the Bombay army. He distinguished himself as a political agent and diplomatist. While resident at Baghdad, he devoted his leisure time to cuneiform studies. One of his remarkable feats was the copying of the famous trilingual rock inscription of Darius the Great on a mountain cliff at Behistun, in Persian Kurdistan. This work was carried out at great personal risk, for the cliff is 1700 feet high and the sculptures ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... "Everybody for ever!" which last was exhibited in Pall Mail, among the recent collection of works of Art by amateurs and others, for relief of the Lancashire distress. He has also brought his common sense to bear on such unlikely subject's as the origin of the cuneiform character. The possession of a brick from Babylon set him a thinking. How had it been manufactured? Its under side was clearly marked by the sedges of the Euphrates upon which it had been laid to dry and bake in the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... Egyptian documents, being written in hieroglyphics, were, without metaphor, a dead-letter. It will be readily admitted that in order to deal with ancient Assyrian history it is necessary to have learnt to decipher cuneiform inscriptions. Similarly, whoever desires to do original work from the sources, in ancient or mediaeval history, will, if he is prudent, learn to decipher inscriptions and manuscripts. We thus see why Greek and Latin epigraphy and mediaeval palaeography—that is, the sum of the various kinds ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... bandages and garments, terracotta vases and vessels, alabaster jars, &c., special rooms are devoted. The antiquities which, although found in Egypt, are certainly not of Egyptian manufacture, e.g., Greek and Phornician glass, Greek statues, tablets inscribed in cuneiform from Tel el-Amarna, &c., are arranged in groups in rooms set apart for them; and the monuments of the Egyptian Christians or Copts are also classified and arranged in a separate room.—Athenum, May 14 ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... &c. Bilingual (Greek and Cypriote) Dedication to Demeter and Persephone from Curium Syrian Pottery. Syrian Weapons, &c. West Semitic Alphabets West Semitic Numerals Palestinian Pottery types Egyptian Pottery types Mesopotamian Pottery, Seals, &c. Cuneiform and other Scripts ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... cricoid cartilage was imperfect in form; the hyo-epiglottic muscles very strong. The proper arytaenoid were present, and strong, but did not extend so high as in man; the thyro-arytaenoid muscles were very fully developed. In the interior of the larynx there were no projections nor ventricles, no cuneiform cartilages, nor cornicula laryngis. The rings of ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... lying, and deception, just as in the letter Beth was originally easily discerned the effigies of a house, may very easily pass unread by the multitude. The language, or rather the alphabet, is much less complicated than the cuneiform of the Medes and Persians, yet no one studies it, except women, most of whom are profoundly skilled in this lore, which makes them so fearfully and wonderfully wise. Thus it is easy for man to deceive his brother man, but not his sister woman. Again, most of us are glad to take everybody ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... oldest authentic human records now decipherable are the cuneiform inscriptions from the archives of Assurbanipal, translated by the late George Smith, of the British Museum, and in them we find abundant reference to the dance, but must content ourselves with a ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... to know quite a lot of odd, out of the way things, and to have opinions of his own concerning the lost Kingdom of Atlantis, and the Man with the Iron Mask, the building of Stonehenge, the Pre-dynastic Egyptians, cuneiform writings and Assyrian sculptures, the Mexican pyramids and the shipping activities ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... share of the background glory. Occasionally the common people had representations of their lives and their pursuits, but the main subject of all the valley art was the king and his doings. Sculpture and painting were largely illustrations accompanying a history written in the ever-present cuneiform characters. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... however, alike owed their origin to a race which we will term Sumerian. Its members spoke agglutinative dialects, and the primitive civilization of Babylonia was their creation. They were the founders of its great cities and temples, the inventors of the pictorial system of writing out of which the cuneiform characters subsequently developed, the instructors in culture of their Semitic neighbors. How deep and far-reaching was their influence may be gathered from the fact that the earliest civilization of ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... famous Assyrian excavator and translator of cuneiform inscriptions, has told us in his "Assyrian Antiquities" of his finding close to the site of Nineveh portions of a crystal throne somewhat similar in design to the bronze one mentioned above, and in another part of this interesting book we have a description ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... dispute concerning the antiquity of gonorrhoea in the Old World as there is regarding syphilis. The disease was certainly known at a very remote period. Even Esarhaddon, the famous King of Assyria, referred to in the Old Testament, was treated by the priests for a disorder which, as described in the cuneiform documents of the time, could only have been gonorrhoea. The disease was also well known to the ancient Egyptians, and evidently common, for they recorded many prescriptions for its treatment (Oefele, "Gonorrhoe 1350 vor Christi Geburt," ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Babylonia before the supposed Semitic conquest, viz. the Accadians in the north and the Sumerians to the south, peoples not related to the Semites in blood or in language, but generally called Turanian, and thought to be perhaps akin to the Chinese. The cuneiform writing which remained in use for millenniums after the Semitic immigration as the sacred literary form, was supposed to have been the invention of these peoples, who had also made some ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... And The Magic Book Tales Of The Magicians The Peasant And The Workman The Shipwrecked Sailor The Adventures Of Sanehat The Tell Amarna Tablets The Hittite Invasion Of Damascus The Amorite Treachery The War In Phoenicia Northern Palestine Southern Palestine Royal Letters Cuneiform Inscriptions And Hieratic Papyri The Great Tablet Of Rameses II At Abu-Simbel Hymn To Osiris Travels Of An Egyptian In The Fourteenth Century B.C. Dirge Of Menephtah Hymn To The Nile The Solemn Festal Dirge Of The Egyptians Hymns To Amen Hymn To Pharaoh The Song ...
— Egyptian Literature
... brilliant genius to whom so much is due in the deciphering of the cuneiform inscriptions, Ihave little doubt that long ago a chair would have been founded at the Collge de France expressly ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... blood of the Saviour (!); a silver column supporting a fragment of the pillar at which Christ was scourged; a cup of agate containing a portion of the skull of St. John; the sword of the Doge Morocini; cuneiform writings from Persepolis; an episcopal throne of the seventh century, said to have been St. Mark's; and many other things, the genuineness of which to try and believe was of course next to impossible; and one could ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... with an incision approximating in section to that of the furrow of a plough, only more equal-sided. A fine sculptor strikes it, as his chisel leans, freely, on marble; an Egyptian, in hard rock, cuts it sharp, as in cuneiform inscriptions. In any case, you have a result somewhat like the upper figure, Plate XI., in which I show you the most elementary indication of form possible, by cutting the outline of the typical archaic Greek head with an incision like that of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... In the Middle Ages certain biblical names were without valid reason applied to noted places. No-Ammon mentioned in Scripture (Jer. xlvi. 25 and Nahum iii. 8), also in cuneiform inscriptions, was doubtless ancient Thebes. See Robinson, Biblical Researches, vol. I, p. 542. Another notable example is the application of the name of Zoan to Cairo. Ancient Tanis (p. 78) was probably ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... in cuneiform and kept conveniently on the second floor of his palace, fell with Nineveh, where, until recently recovered, for millennia they lay. Additionally, from shelves set up in the days of Khammurabi—the Amraphel of Genesis—Nippur has yielded ghostly ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... "You should talk to him of Heaven, or pigs, or Babylonic cuneiform—anything but Lola Brandt. You ought to go to work on ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... controlled, and this is a great advantage. To-day we are tolerably well acquainted with the old religions of Egypt, Babylonia and Persia. We read and translate correctly the hieroglyphics of the Nile, the cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia and the sacred books, Zend or Pahlavi, of Parseeism. Religious history has profited more by their deciphering than the history of politics or of civilization. In Syria also, the discovery of ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... verses, having a beginning and an end, and handed down to us in an alphabetic form of writing. China may have possessed older books in a half phonetic, half symbolic writing; Egypt certainly possessed older hieroglyphic inscriptions and papyri; Babylon had its cuneiform monuments; and certain portions of the Old Testament may have existed in a written form at the time of Josiah, when Hilkiah, the high priest, found the law book in the sanctuary (2 Kings xxii. 8). But ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... instructive. In a few brief sentences we acquire more accurate knowledge of the affairs of Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Assyria, Babylon, and other neighboring nations than had been preserved to us in all the other remains of antiquity up to the recent discoveries in hieroglyphical and cuneiform monuments." [Footnote: Vol. iii. p. ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... falcated[obs3]; furcated[obs3], forked, bifurcate, zigzag; furcular[obs3]; hooked; dovetailed; knock kneed, crinkled, akimbo, kimbo[obs3], geniculated[obs3]; oblique &c. 217. fusiform[Microb], wedge-shaped, cuneiform; cuneate[obs3], multangular[obs3], oxygonal[obs3]; triangular, trigonal[obs3], trilateral; quadrangular, quadrilateral; foursquare; rectangular, square, multilateral; polygonal &c. n.; cubical, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... old Assyrian correspondence is here well preserved, as we may see by comparing those letters with the cuneiform inscriptions, etc., by S. Abden Smith (Pfeiffer, Leipsic, 1887). One of them begins thus, "The will of the King to Sintabni-Uzur. Salutation from me to thee. May it be well with thee. Regarding Sinsarra-utzur whom thou hast sent to me, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... chemistry entirely new. I was not familiar with one word of botany, zoology, physics, physiology, or comparative anatomy. About the universe which I inhabited I knew as little as I did about cuneiform writings. Except for my mathematics and a mere modicum of chemistry I had nothing on which to base my new work; and students coming from Government free schools, or almost anywhere, had a great advantage over men of my previous ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... writing, indeed, upon the material employed is nowhere better shown than in the case of the Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions. The ordinary substitute for cream-laid note in the Euphrates valley in its palmy days was a clay or terra-cotta tablet, on which the words to be recorded—usually a deed of sale or something of the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... signs extended to us. The minds of these august and solitary men have not yet been sounded; they are too distant. Standing upon their lofty pinnacles, they are as legible to the rabble below as a line of cuneiform writing in a page of old copybook roundhand. By their deeds we know them, as heathendom knows of its gods; and it is repeatedly on record that the moment they have taken fire they must wed, though the lady's finger be circled with nothing closer fitting than a ring of the bed-curtain. Vainly, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... front, the frontal bone; behind, the occipital bone; between the two the large parietal bone, p. s the scurf bone, w mastoid fontanelle, f petrous bone, t tympanic bone, l lateral part, b bulla, j cheek-bone, a large wing of cuneiform bone, ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... the mysteries of Isis. The meaning of it, so long in dispute, has finally been practically determined through a new discovery in the cuneiform inscriptions. It is the symbol of two hands holding two closed eyes; and ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... of the Achaemenians, represented to us by the Persian texts of the Cuneiform inscriptions"—so I began this morning, determined to interpolate a paragraph which is wanting in your beautiful chapter, namely, the relationship of the language of the inscriptions to that of the ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... bifurcate, crinkle. Adj. angular, bent, crooked, aduncous^, uncinated^, aquiline, jagged, serrated; falciform^, falcated^; furcated^, forked, bifurcate, zigzag; furcular^; hooked; dovetailed; knock kneed, crinkled, akimbo, kimbo^, geniculated^; oblique &c 217. fusiform [Micro.], wedge-shaped, cuneiform; cuneate^, multangular^, oxygonal^; triangular, trigonal^, trilateral; quadrangular, quadrilateral; foursquare; rectangular, square, multilateral; polygonal &c n.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Sanskrit possesses some little features of accents and kerned sections, which render justification quite a fine art, accents on varying bodies needing to be utilised.... The firm does much Hindustani work, and possesses seven sizes of type in this language. Amongst the curiosities are the cuneiform types, the wedge-like series of faces in which old Persian, Median, and Assyrian inscriptions are written; and last, but by no means least in interest, the odd-looking hieroglyphic type faces, which are on bodies ranging ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... graduates—even men sporting professional sheep- skins—who couldn't tell whether Gladstone's an English statesman or an Irish policeman. They knew all about Greek roots but couldn't tell a carrot from a parsnip. They could decipher a cuneiform inscription, perhaps, and state whether a pebble belonged to the paleozoic or some other period; but couldn't tell a subpoena from a search- warrant, a box of vermicelli from a bundle ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... wayside bills, signs on shop-fronts, are all in French. When by any chance the owner of a shop breaks out into an English notification of his wares—and it is generally a Chinaman or Parsee who is fired by this noble ambition—the result is as difficult to decipher as if it were a cuneiform inscription. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... heroes and heroines are quite too self-conscious; amid all their deeds of derring-do they have their eye on Mudie's. The old way was better. Even before the Pyramids were reared, when books were pictures and letters were cuneiform, heroes had their poets and kings their laureates. You can no more imagine Agamemnon, after the fall of Troy, rushing off to write an account of it for "Bentley's," than you can imagine Helen certifying that she found Pears' soap matchless ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... And if the censorious reader has detected here and there in these pages a tendency toward the Higher Criticism, or a leaning to State Socialism, or any passage that seemed to indicate a familiarity with cuneiform inscriptions, or with the history and habits of Pre-Adamite Man, he may be assured that, at the time of writing such passage, I had been smoking the mighty pipe— or rather, the mighty pipe had been smoking me—and the unlawful erudition had effervesced per ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... a perfervid interest, as, indeed, he thought it politic to affect. The Professor was a most learned archaeologist, and positively bulged with information on his favourite subjects; but it is just possible that Horace might have been less curious concerning the distinction between Cuneiform and Aramaean or Kufic and Arabic inscriptions if his informant had happened to be the father of anybody else. However, such insincerities as these are but so many ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... the days of Nimrod war has been the constant occupation of men, the fingers of one hand suffice to number the great commanders. The "unlearned" hardly think of usurping Tyndall's place in the lecture room, or of taking his cuneiform bricks from Rawlinson; yet the world has been much more prolific of learned scientists and philologers than of able generals. Notwithstanding, the average American (and, judging from the dictatorship of Maitre Gambetta, the Frenchman) would not have ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... The comma in these inscriptions stands for a small cuneiform mark, I believe of contraction, and the small ^s for a zigzag mark of the same kind. The dots or periods are similarly ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... III. These had evidently served as lids to the chests. Some tablets also were inscribed with notes in hieratic, written in red ink. But in spite of these exceptions, it was at once recognised that all the documents were written in Babylonian cuneiform. The reading of the introductory lines on various tablets served to show that the find consisted of part of the Egyptian state archives in the times of the two kings Amenophis III. and IV. Thus the first ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr
... and the greater is the tendency to approximate to the larger lateral diameter of the European female. The front to back diameter of the ape's pelvis is usually greater than the measurement from side to side. A similar condition affords the cuneiform, from which it may be inferred that the erect position in the Negro has not been maintained so long as in the Mongol, whose pelvis has assumed the quadrilateral shape owing to persistence of spinal axis weight for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... is impossible to tell. The guess may be hazarded that cephalhematoma, hydrocephalus, meningocele, nevi, or an excessive amount of vernix caseosa were the conditions indicated, but a wider acquaintance with the meaning of the cuneiform characters is necessary before any certain identification is possible. The 'pieces of skin hanging from the head' (No. 51) may have been fragments of the membranes; but there is nothing in the accompanying ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... supernatural, and the latter was supposed to be constantly interposing in the ordinary affairs of life. Among other beliefs then prevalent, was one in the existence of a kind of half nature, such as that in Centaurs, dragons, and griffins. In the Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions lately deciphered, we read, of one Heabani, a semi-bovine hermit, supposed to have lived 2,200 B.C. Thus the accounts in Scripture of the serpent accosting Eve, and of Balaam arguing with his ass, would not have seemed ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... the first beginnings of that mythology which in Homer and Hesiod stands before us as a mouldering ruin. The soil of Mesopotamia has given back the very images once worshipped by the most powerful of the Semitic tribes, and the cuneiform inscriptions of Babylon and Nineveh have disclosed the very prayers addressed to Baal or Nisroch. With the discovery of these documents a new era begins in the study of religion. We begin to see more clearly ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... his victories. He and his shoals of soldiers are very real and potent. It does seem madness for one little kingdom to stand out, and all the more so because its king is cooped up in his city, as the cuneiform inscription proudly tells, 'like a bird in a cage,' and all the rest of his land is in the conqueror's grip. They who look only at the things seen cannot but think the men of faith mad. They who look at the things unseen cannot but know that the men of sense are fools. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... tree and the wind over ancient graves. No man is educated until he has arrived at that state of thought when a picture is quite the same as a book, an old gray-beard jug as a manuscript, men, women, and children as libraries. It was but yester morn that I read a cuneiform inscription printed by doves' feet in the snow, finding a meaning where in by-gone years I should have seen only a quaint resemblance. For in this by the ornithomanteia known of old to the Chaldean sages I saw that it was neither from arrow-heads ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... writing and language and even Babylonian books by the ruling classes in Asia Minor and Syria at a little later time. That governors of Syrian cities should have written their official communications to Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty in Babylonian cuneiform (as the archives found at Amarna in Upper Egypt twenty years ago show us they did) had already afforded such conclusive proof of early and long maintained Babylonian influence, that the more recent discovery that Hittite lords of Cappadocia used the same script and language for diplomatic ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... the cuneiform material see Delitzsch, Assyrisches Handwoerterbuch, and, for various etymologies proposed for the name, Barton, Semitic Origins, p. 102 ff.; Haupt, in Journal of the American Oriental Society, xxviii, 112 ff.; Barton, ibid., xxxi, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... out, two suitable logs of slippery elm (Ulmus fulva) were provided for the new fire. One of the logs was from six to eight inches in diameter and from eight to ten feet long; the other was from ten to twelve inches in diameter and about ten feet long. About midway across the larger log a cuneiform notch or cut about six inches deep was made, and in the wedge-shaped notch punk was placed. The other log was drawn rapidly to and fro in the cut by four strong men chosen for the purpose until the punk was ignited by the friction thus produced. Before and ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Society—Brighton Association—said that they hadn't come to listen to any sensational stories, but that they had come to listen to facts. [Laughter.] Well now, a little gentleman, very reverend, full of years and honors, learned in Cufic inscriptions and cuneiform characters, wrote to "The Times" stating that it was not Stanley who had discovered Livingstone but that it was Livingstone ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... number on the two sides. (1/65. Quoted by Col. Ham. Smith in 'Nat. Lib.' volume 10 page 79.) Dogs have properly five toes in front and four behind, but a fifth toe is often added; and F. Cuvier states that, when a fifth toe is present, a fourth cuneiform bone is developed; and, in this case, sometimes the great cuneiform bone is raised, and gives on its inner side a large articular surface to the astragalus; so that even the relative connection of the bones, the most constant of all characters, varies. These modifications, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... the old text were reprinted in every land and by the middle of the nineteenth century, the cuneiform language (so called because the letters were wedge-shaped and "cuneus" is the Latin name for wedge) had given up its secrets. Another ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... of 1887, Prof. A.H. Sayce gives the following Hymn of Ancient Babylonia to the Fire-god, from The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... to the Negative Absolute. So my acceptance is that, though curtly dismissed, there was something to base upon in this report; that there were unusual markings upon this object. Of course that is not to jump to the conclusion that they were cuneiform characters ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... had penned 14 Epistles, using the tall cuneiform Hieroglyphics, she didn't have a blessed thing to do before her 1 o'clock Engagement except drop in at a Flower Show and a Cat Show and have her Palm read by a perfectly fascinating Serpent with a Goatee who had been telling ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... written; but in view of all the relevant information now possessed, including that drawn from the deciphered cuneiform inscriptions, the most probable date is about a thousand years before Christ. Professor R. Roth of Tubingen whose authority herein as an original investigator is perhaps hardly second to any other man's says ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... he lived at Babylon in the time of King Moabdar; but the name of Moabdar does not appear in the list of Babylonian sovereigns brought to light by the patience and the industry of the decipherers of cuneiform inscriptions in these later years; nor indeed am I aware that there is any other authority for his existence than that of the biographer of Zadig, one Arouet de Voltaire, among whose more conspicuous merits strict historical ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Exploration Fund has also added materially to our knowledge of that country which is associated with the early history of the Chosen People. But the most valuable aid to Bible study came from the discovery of the Assyrian Royal Library, a series of clay tablets and cylinders covered with cuneiform inscriptions which were deciphered by Mr. George Smith of the British Museum. From these and from the records on the monuments of Egypt historical information has been derived of inestimable value in the study ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... nations. Layard unearthed the greater portion, on the site of ancient Nineveh, of the Assyrian "books" (for so are named the tablets of clay, sometimes enamelled, at others only sun-dried or burnt). The writing on these "books" is the cuneiform, and was done by impressing the "style" on the clay while in a waxlike condition. Many of the tablets were broken when Layard and Rawlinson gave them over to the British Museum. The reconstruction of these ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... by which they are enveloped."[I] She comments in the same book on the fact that German anatomists have been reluctant to admit the existence of these cartilages; and she adds on page 61, "It was, therefore, a great satisfaction to me to find them described under the name of the cuneiform cartilages in Wilson's 'Human Anatomy.'" It must be confessed, however, that Wilson's description of them is totally different from Madame Seiler's. He says, "The cuneiform cartilages are two small cylinders of yellow fibro-cartilage, about seven lines in length and enlarged at each ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... to follow its course for some distance between that point and Suez. Persian monuments have been found by Lepsius in the neighbourhood, commemorating the work of Darius. On one of these the name of Darius is written in the Persian cuneiform characters, and on a cartouche in the Egyptian form. Until this date it therefore appears that ships sailed up the Pelusiac branch of the Nile to Bubastis, and thence along the canal to Heroopolis, where the cargoes were transhipped to the Red Sea. This inconvenient ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... construction the exigencies of the political campaign might seem to demand, and the candidate could take his position on either side of the fence with entire consistency. Or, if letters must be written, profitable use might be made of the Dighton rock hieroglyphic or the cuneiform script, every fresh decipherer of which is enabled to educe a different meaning, whereby a sculptured stone or two supplies us, and will probably continue to supply posterity, with a very vast and various body of authentic history. For even the briefest epistle in the ordinary chirography is dangerous. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... striking illustrations of perseverance to be found in every other branch of science, art, and industry. Perhaps one of the most interesting is that connected with the disentombment of the Nineveh marbles, and the discovery of the long-lost cuneiform or arrow-headed character in which the inscriptions on them are written—a kind of writing which had been lost to the world since the period of ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... and Appendices, illustrating the History and Geography of Herodotus, from the most Recent Sources of Information; and embodying the Chief Results, Historical and Ethnographical, which have been obtained in the Progress of Cuneiform and Hieroglyphical Discovery. By George Rawlinson, M.A., late Fellow and Tutor of Exeter College, Oxford. Assisted by Col. Sir Henry Rawlinson, K.C.B., and Sir J.G. Wilkinson, F.R.S. In Four Volumes. Vol. III. With Maps ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... his extended fingers forward haphazard to a learned periodical, which fell open to a discussion of cuneiform inscriptions. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... a "Commentary on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Babylon and Assyria," including readings of the inscriptions on the Nimroud Obelisk, discovered by Mr. Layard, and a brief notice of the ancient kings of Nineveh and Babylon. It was read before the ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... of this version," says Lenormant, "which, interesting though it be, is, after all, second-hand, we are now able to place an original Chaldeo-Babylonian edition, which the lamented George Smith was the first to decipher on the cuneiform tablets exhumed at Nineveh, and now in the British Museum. Here the narrative of the Deluge appears as an episode in the eleventh tablet, or eleventh chant of the great epic of the town of Uruk. The hero of this poem, a kind of Hercules, whose name has not as yet ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... a Greyhound and a Mastiff, the latter described in the tablets as "the chained-up, mouth-opening dog"; that is to say, it was used as a watch-dog; and several varieties are referred to in the cuneiform inscriptions preserved in the British Museum. The Egyptian monuments of about 3000 B.C. present many forms of the domestic dog, and there can be no doubt that among the ancient Egyptians it was as completely a companion of man, as much a favourite in the house, and a help ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... these were the warlike Kassites. The Sumerians, who preceded the Semites in the occupancy of Babylonia, were of an unknown stock. They were the founders of Babylonian culture. Even by them the soil was skillfully cultivated with the help of dikes and canals. They were the inventors of the cuneiform writing. The cuneiform characters were originally pictures; but these were resolved into wedge-shaped characters of uniform appearance, the significance of which was determined by their position and local relation ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... stone, and looking to casual inspection like nothing so much as random flights of arrow-heads. The resemblance is so striking that this is sometimes called the arrow-head character, though it is more generally known as the wedge or cuneiform character. The inscriptions on the flanks of the lions are, however, only makeshift books. But the veritable books are no farther away than the next room beyond the hall of Asurnazirpal. They occupy part of a series ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... successfully or plausibly was the quickest road to royal favor, as Joseph and Daniel found it to be; failure to give satisfaction in this respect led to banishment from court or death. When a scholar laboriously translates a cuneiform tablet dug up from a Babylonian mound where it has lain buried for five thousand years or more, the chances are that it will turn out either an astrological treatise or a dream book. If the former, we look upon it with some indulgence; if the latter with pure contempt. For we know ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... to promote the progress of the kindred sciences. The work of Champollion, so brilliantly supplemented by the Vicomte de Rouge and Mariette Bey, has led to the accurate classification of the monuments of Egypt. The deciphering of the cuneiform inscriptions has given us the dates of the palaces of Nineveh and Babylon; the interpretation by savants of other inscriptions has made known to us those Hittites whose formidable power at one time extended as ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... learned, as to be quite discouraging. Where however the German k has the same worth as the Roman c I have adopted it in preference. With respect to the Egyptian names and those with which we have become acquainted through the cuneiform inscriptions, I have chosen the forms most adapted to our German modes of speech, and in the present edition have placed those few explanations which seemed to me indispensable to the right understanding of the text, at the foot of the page, instead of among the less easily accessible ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... supposed efficacy appears to have been the words and characters inscribed upon them.[112:2] Gradually, however, a system of therapeutics was evolved, and the use of charms and incantations yielded in a measure to practical methods. The later Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions (about B. C. 1640) contain references to classified diseases;[112:3] and although healing-spells were still largely in vogue, the employment of various herbs and potions became an important feature in ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... found a broken cuneiform tablet which once gave an account of the reign of Khammurabi, the contemporary of Chedor-laomer and Arioch, of the wars that he carried on, and of the steps by which he rose to the supreme power in Babylonia, driving the Elamites out of it, overthrowing his rival Arioch, and making Babylon for ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... cuneiform inscriptions, that relations existed between the First Empire of Chaldea and the pharaohs of the Great Pyramids of Gizeh, as early as the reign of the Chaldean king Naram-Sin; (circa 3755 B.C.) Subsequent to the periods cited, there exist a number of historical facts showing the knowledge of ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... through Rawlinson's decipherment of cuneiform and the excavations of Botta and Layard in the middle of the nineteenth century was followed by a concerted attack on Babylonia. It was clear from the Nineveh tablets that most of the literary treasures of Assyria were merely copies ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various |
