"Cuniform" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... band of workers. Doubtless much still remains to be done; but the essential thing, from the present standpoint, is that a sufficient knowledge of the Assyrian language has been acquired to ensure trustworthy translations of the cuneiform texts. Meanwhile, the material found by Botta and Layard, and other successors, in the ruins of Nineveh, has been constantly augmented through the efforts of companies of other investigators, and not merely Assyrian, but much earlier ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... said that 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 accuracy is perhaps ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... written, graven neatly in straight lines across the 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 of cases placed down the centre of this room. Perhaps it is not too ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... time of Francois Champollion, 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 ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... figures, and endless inscriptions floated before me. In the morning I was roused and informed that six workmen had been secured. Twenty minutes' walk brought us to the principal mound. Broken pottery and fragments of brick, inscribed with cuneiform characters, were strewn on all sides. With joy I found the fragment of a bas-relief. Convinced that sculptured remains must still exist in some parts of the mound, I sought for a place where excavations might be commenced with some prospects of success. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... strongly characterized by the qualities which fascinate in his novels. Of his poems "Samlede Digte," (1882) I have not the space to speak, and can only regret that they are written in a language in which they will remain as hidden from the world as if they had been imprinted in cuneiform inscriptions upon Assyrian bricks. They are largely occasional and polemical; and more remarkable for vigor of thought than ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... 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 the ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... forms of the body 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
... 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
... aquiline, jagged, serrated; falciform[obs3], 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.; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... [4] The cuneiform Achaemenian inscriptions found in Persia and in other places, deciphered and published by Grotefend, Burnouf, Lassen, Rawlinson, Norris, Spiegel, de Saulcy, Oppert, Menant, Kossowicz, ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... The 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 ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... this is tradition, but recent discoveries in cuneiform literature shed light upon it. From these, compared with the fragments of Berosus, a priest of Babylon in the third century before Christ, and the scattered notices of Scripture history, we infer that the dynasty which Belus founded reigned more than five hundred ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... and contrasted as Persia and Sweden, has made 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," both individually and collectively. The nature of man, how it is affected ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... 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 human ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
... 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; ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... 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 of the Keltic or 4th sub-race ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... read—who knows the character—treachery, 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 ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... such, 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, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... 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 it is, is based ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... 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 ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... Biggleswade. He was a little, untidy man with round spectacles, a fringe of greyish beard and a weak, rasping voice, and he knew more of Assyriology than any man, living or dead. A flippant pupil once remarked that the Professor's face was furnished with a Babylonic cuneiform in ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke
... 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 so remarkable then as they do to us. In an Egyptian novel—the ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... 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 ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... highest credit to the work in which they appear. The forbidding appearance of Dr. Kraitsir's articles will get more notice than their deep learning. We cannot but regret that such valuable papers as those on "Hieroglyphics," "Cuneiform Inscriptions," "Indian Languages," and we may add, though belonging to another class of subjects, "Brahma" and "Buddha," by the same author, should not have been dressed with a little more taste, and the naked deformity of barbarous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... gold and jewels, from the Church of St. Sophia, Constantinople; a crystal vase containing the 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 only marvel at the credulity of many good men and women, who must ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... characteristic of amorous dukes. We read them in the 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... discovered for the history of Assyria and other ancient oriental 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 tablets was undertaken by George Smith, an English Assyriologist of the British Museum, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... even alluded to in the Books of the Kings; Nineveh and not Babylon was the capital of the Assyrian empire, and the Assyrian monarchs were not in the habit of forgiving their revolted vassals, much less of sending them back to their own kingdoms. And yet the cuneiform inscriptions have smoothed away all these objections. Esar-haddon mentions Manasseh among the subject princes of the West, and it was just Esar-haddon who rebuilt Babylon after its destruction by his father, and made it his residence during a part of the year. Moreover, ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... Voltelen had said to me: "You ought to learn to read writing." And from that moment forth my ambition was set upon reading writing, an idea which had never occurred to me before. When my tutor first showed me writing, it had looked to me much as cuneiform inscriptions and hieroglyphics would do to ordinary grown-up people, but by degrees I managed to recognize the letters I was accustomed to in this their freer, more frivolous disguise, running into one another and with ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... SIMUL ATQ' CIRONA." [Footnote: The comma in these inscriptions stands for a small cuneiform mark, I believe of contraction, and the small for a zigzag mark of the same kind. The dots or periods are similarly ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... Assyrians 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 ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... ocean. Inhabitants of Mesopotamia would find themselves reaching the ocean in almost any direction in which they travelled, either the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, or the Persian Gulf. Accordingly, the oldest map of the world which has been found is one accompanying a cuneiform inscription, and representing the plain of Mesopotamia with the Euphrates flowing through it, and the whole surrounded by two concentric circles, which are named briny waters. Outside these, however, are seven detached islets, possibly representing the seven zones or climates into which the ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... alphabet in order to express the hieroglyphs on monuments and manuscripts in Roman letters; but much more data are needed before scholars will read the ancient Mayan-Aztec tongues as they have been enabled to understand the Egyptian inscriptions or the cuneiform records of Babylonia. For the American hieroglyphs we still lack a ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... 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, ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... of history, however, distribute the power of flight with less of prejudice. Egyptian sculpture gives the figure of winged men; the British Museum has made the winged Assyrian bulls familiar to many, and both the cuneiform records of Assyria and the hieroglyphs of Egypt record flights that in reality were never made. The desire fathered the story then, and until Clement Ader either hopped with his Avion, as is persisted by his critics, or flew, as is claimed ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... dependence of 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
... 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
... 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 a whole trip ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... [1307] For 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, 355 ff. The frequent expression ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... pseudo-base in something else—would be instantly translated 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
... 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 strong among the Israelites, at least ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... not obtain its general prevalence without possessing some peculiar merits. Its primary merit was that of simplicity. The pictorial systems of the Egyptians and the Hittites required a hand skilled in drawing to express them; the cuneiform syllabaries of Babylonia, Assyria, and Elam needed an extraordinary memory to grasp the almost infinite variety in the arrangement of the wedges, and to distinguish each group from all the rest; even the Cypriote syllabary was of awkward and unnecessary extent, and was expressed ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... first edition looked so strange and 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... I. "You should talk to him of Heaven, or pigs, or Babylonic cuneiform—anything but Lola Brandt. You ought to go to ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... 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 ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... know from the 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 ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... tempting display of color. Miss Virginia hunted up her distance glasses, which she seldom used, in order the better to view it; but she failed to make out anything in particular. Her ardor might have suggested an archaeologist over a cuneiform inscription, as she tried to decide whether a certain patch of blue and white was ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... 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
... invention of the 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
... 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 ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... excavated relics of the Biblical Nebuchadrezzar. 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 ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... imagine that I had come among a singular 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... pay expenses, and bought it in myself. So I have it still. 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 ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... do cuneiform writing on a dab of clay, like the Babylonish king," Ken said; "all spikey and cut in, instead of sticking out; much worse than Braille. Go to it, and ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... laborious investigations now being made in the classical countries can be indirectly 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 Aramaic ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... architecture of these countries; but the explorations of M. Botta, commenced in 1843 and continued by M. Place, and those of Mr. (now Sir A. H.) Layard in 1845, combined with the successful attempts of Prof. Grotefend, Prof. Lassen, and Col. Rawlinson at deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions, have disclosed a new world to the architectural student, without which some of the developments of Greek architecture must have remained obscure. The authentic remains of buildings of the early Chaldaean period are ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... a chamber lined with sculptured slabs, divided, like those of Khorsabad and Nimroud, by bands of inscription. He also found, at the foot of the mound, a monument about three feet high, and rounded at the top, containing a figure with a long cuneiform inscription, and above it various sacred emblems. When discovered it was supported by brickwork, and near it was a ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... 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 their royal prototypes of an antiquity unknown, and, as we fondly hoped, unknowable. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... does much 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 far as the Mediterranean, but whose name had until ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... 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 to one another. It is ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... 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
... 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 ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... between 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 are ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... carried out on lines similar to those recommended in the acquired disease. When curving of the tibia causes disability in walking, the bone may be straightened by a cuneiform resection. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... word 'moly,' which had been Greek for at least twelve hundred 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 seek in this direction for an interpretation of a Homeric word 'moly,' used in Cappadocia ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... 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
... note of music on any instrument; I could sing, it is true, 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 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... no more curious and interesting part of that most curious and interesting business of editing than (when it is not merely tedious), the reading of offered correspondence. There is the pure lunatic, such as the man who for years sends despatches in a sort of cuneiform cipher, probably quite meaningless and certainly not likely to meet with a decipherer; there is the abusive person who (less piquantly than Reade in the letter quoted above) gives his opinion of your paper; ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... studying them for two months. Emanuel Deutsch, one of the great authorities on cuneiform inscriptions, gives us the ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... they formed a part of the great Private Library of Ashur-bani-pal, which that king kept in his palace. The tablets found by Layard in 1852 and by Rassam in 1853 form the unique and magnificent collection of cuneiform tablets in the British Museum, which is now commonly known as the "Kuynjik Collection." The approximate number of the inscribed baked clay tablets and fragments that have come from Kuynjik and are now in the British Museum is 25,073. It is impossible to over-estimate their ...
— The Babylonian Story of the Deluge - as Told by Assyrian Tablets from Nineveh • E. A. Wallis Budge
... Germans immediately before the war. I understand that this is believed to be the great palace where Belshazzar saw the handwriting on the wall. It is built of bricks, each one of which is stamped in cuneiform characters. There are very fine bas-reliefs of animals, both mythical and real. In the centre is the great stone lion, massively impressive, standing over the prostrate form of a man. The lion has suffered from fire and man; there have ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... 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 ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... less accurate and extensive than our 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 isolated facts preserved to us in the ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... 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 Zoan, and we are told (Num. xiii. 22) that Zoan ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... These, re-edited 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 ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... writing. Our modern 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 for the complexion. It was better for the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... dry-as-dust and uninviting. But had John Hammond devoted his days to the study of Coptic manuscripts, or the arrow headed inscriptions upon Assyrian tablets, she would have toiled her hardest in the endeavour to make herself a Coptic scholar, or an adept in the cuneiform characters. If he had been a student of Chinese, she would not have been discomfited by such a trifle as the fifty thousand ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Lion. [Cuneiform] Virgin. [Cuneiform] Scales. [Cuneiform] Scorpion. [Cuneiform] Bow. [Cuneiform] Capricornus [Cuneiform] ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... has published 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
... the cuneiform sign for water is also used, inter alia, to express the idea of begetting (banu). Compare with this the references from Hebrew and Arabic writings. In Isaiah xlviii. 1, we read 'Hear ye this, O house of Jacob, which are called by the name of Israel, and ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... Morning, after she 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 all the Gells the most ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... method of recording their history, and there are few subjects of deeper interest than the study of the efforts of the human mind to perpetuate itself in written characters. The Easterns had their cuneiform or arrow-headed symbols, and the Western world has even yet its quipus, and tells its history by the number of ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... voice can utter is limited, it now becomes possible to write all the words of a language with a few hundred signs. The Japanese, who borrowed some of the Chinese symbols, used them to denote syllables, instead of entire words. The Babylonians possessed, in their cuneiform [9] characters, signs for about five hundred syllables. The prehistoric inhabitants of Crete appear to have been acquainted with a ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... 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 of them. Each ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... lie in boasting of 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 ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... important work to do. A very learned lady who is writing a historical book has commissioned me to collect all the literature relating to the Tell el Amarna letters—the cuneiform tablets, you know, of ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... bureaucracy, the officiousness of the jack-in-office. Except for the nuisance, it didnt particularly matter. When Mr Le ffacase read my contribution I knew there would be no concern in future whether it was handwritten, typewritten, or engraved in Babylonic cuneiform on ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Assyrian civilization 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 ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... relating to the god and his precise position in the Sumerian-Babylonian Pantheon still remains obscure, fragmentary cuneiform texts connected with the religious services of the period have been discovered, and to a considerable extent deciphered, and we are thus in a position to judge, from the prayers and invocations addressed to the deity, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston |
