"Cuniform" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have had any knowledge of the 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 ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... 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 let Mother ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... 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 ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... them for two months. Emanuel Deutsch, one of the great authorities on cuneiform inscriptions, gives us the following ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... 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
... done is clearly to trace the outline of subject with an incision approximating in section to that of the furrow of a plow, 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 a Greek triglyph, only not so precise ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... surrendered to a British force and remained in British occupation for some months. At Rishire, some miles south of Bushire and near the summer quarters of the British resident and the British telegraph buildings, there are extensive ruins among which bricks with cuneiform inscriptions have been found, showing that the place was a very ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... 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 of ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... 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 years, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... the conviction that the one God created all things. Nor must it be forgotten that this vision of creation was given to people ignorant of natural science, and prone to fall back into surrounding idolatry. The comparison of the creation narratives in Genesis with the cuneiform tablets, with which they evidently are most closely connected, has for its most important result the demonstration of the infinite elevation above their monstrosities and puerilities, of this solemn, steadfast attribution of the creative act to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... a point somewhat north of 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. ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... 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 at me quietly with his mouth shut, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... 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; ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... Milton's "Areopagitica" is an example 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 their royal prototypes of an antiquity unknown, and, as we fondly hoped, unknowable. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... 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 ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... 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, ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... kali on the head of the new-born infant it 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 prediction to help us to trace the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... 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, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... year 1908, the late Canon Driver showed how the literature of Assyria and Babylon had thrown light upon Hebrew traditions concerning the origin and early history of the world. The majority of the cuneiform documents, on which he based his comparison, date from a period no earlier than the seventh century B.C., and yet it was clear that the texts themselves, in some form or other, must have descended from a remote antiquity. He concluded his brief reference to the Creation and Deluge ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... 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 is 1700 feet high and the sculptures and inscriptions ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... the 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 for Sir ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... 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 ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Schuyler communicates some notes regarding inscriptions that have been found at and near Derbend, embracing Cufic of A.D. 465, Pehlvi, and even Cuneiform. Alluding to the fact that the other Iron-gate, south of Shahrsabz, was called also Kalugah, or Kohlugah he adds: 'I don't know what that means, nor do I know if the Russian Kaluga, south-west of Moscow, has anything to do with it, but I am told there is a Russian popular ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... tablet of the King, discovered at Nimroud, are the names of thirteen Great Gods (among which are YAV and BEL); and the left-hand character of every one is a cross composed of two cuneiform characters. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... 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
... eye, in which one may easily 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 his brother man, but not his sister woman. ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... a start, isn't it?" Penrose argued. "Grotefend only had the word for 'king' when he started reading Persian cuneiform." ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper
... have some specially 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 Amenhotep ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... 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 of the Keltic or 4th sub-race we have no records at ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... 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 ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... 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 ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... vocabulary. The success of these works proved that they had helped to satisfy a want long felt by students of the Egyptian language, and as a similar want existed among students of the languages written in the cuneiform character, Mr. L.W. King, of the British Museum, prepared, on the same lines as the two books mentioned above, an elementary work on the Assyrian and Babylonian languages ("First Steps in Assyrian"), which appeared in ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... 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 Scriptures and ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... spoken in ancient Persia, and closely related to the Sanskrit. There were two main branches of the Iranian group, viz. the Old Persian and the Avestan. The Old Persian was the official language of the court, and appears in a number of so-called cuneiform[2] inscriptions, the earliest of which date from the time of Darius I (sixth century B.C.). The other branch of the Iranian, the Avestan,[3] is the language of the Avesta or sacred books of the Parsees, the followers of Zoroaster, founder of the religion of the fire-worshippers. Portions ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... divided into chapters and 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 the Veda, with its ten books ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller |
