"Cuniform" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... aduncous[obs3], uncinated[obs3], 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
... 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 ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... 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 ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... 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 or Mandalas, its 1017 ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... 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 ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... times, that what appears in print must be true. We should rather hope that some beneficent influence may create among the erudite a like healthy suspicion of manuscripts and inscriptions, however ancient; for a bulletin may lie, even though it be written in cuneiform characters. Hotspur's starling, that was to be taught to speak nothing but "Mortimer" into the ears of King Henry the Fourth, might be a useful inmate of every historian's library, if "Fiction" were substituted for the ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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 ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... 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 ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... 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
... Progress of the Art of Writing." They, with others, have sought to record the origin and gradual development of the art of writing from the Egyptian Hieroglyphics of 4000 B. C.; the Chinese Figurative, 3000 B. C. ; Indian Alphabetic, 2000 or more B. C. ; the Babylonian or Cuneiform, 2000 years B. C.; and the Phoenician in which they include the Hebrew or Samaritan Alphabet, 2000 or more B. C., down to the writings of the new or Western world of the ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... ambitions a year. But enthusiasm may be a long-sustained devotion to a single ideal. A curious instance of it was seen in the case of an Armenian scholar who, so it is reported to the writer by a student of Armenian culture, spent forty years in mastering cuneiform script in order to prove that the Phrygians were descended from the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... did the Israelites (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 strong among the Israelites, at least while they sojourned in North Arabia. From the Kenites, at ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... Spanish Bishop of Yucatan drew up a Mayan 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 ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... the 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 ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... this ancient people is scarcely 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 Scriptures and other ancient writings. ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... tablets, each tablet consisting of six columns (three on the obverse and three on the reverse) of about 50 lines for each column, or a total of about 3600 lines. Of this total, however, barely more than one-half has been found among the remains of the great collection of cuneiform tablets gathered by King Ashurbanapal (668-626 B.C.) in his palace at Nineveh, and discovered by Layard in 1854 [1] in the course of his excavations of the mound Kouyunjik (opposite Mosul). The fragments of the epic painfully gathered—chiefly by George Smith—from ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... 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, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... arrow-head. By a combination of these wedges, letters and words were formed by the skilled and practised scribe, who would thus rapidly turn off a vast amount of "copy." All works of history, poetry, and law were thus written in the cuneiform or old Chaldean characters, and on a substance which could withstand the ravages of time, fire, or water. Hence we have authentic monuments of Assyrian literature in their original form, unglossed, unaltered, ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... Mexico," in. 338-340. See also note, p. 340. Sir Robert Ker Porter mentions a block of stone found among the ruins of Susa, having, on one side, inscriptions in the cuneiform diameter; and, on another, hieroglyphical figures with a cross in the corner. See his "Travels," vol. ii. p. 415. Among the ancient pagans, the cross was the symbol of eternal life, or divinity. On medals and monuments ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... 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 to England to have five minutes at the British Museum, just five, to ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... Amena told me was true, it is something more than a unique gem. There is an inscription on it, some characters carved in the stone which are, as he said, the history of it, but to me they are as unintelligible as the Assyrian cuneiform would be. Possibly you may know something of them. If you do, here is a lens ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... 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 sun. But how about those curious cuneiform characters? How ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... been studying 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
... capture by suicide, cannot be identified. Asurbanipal (A[)s]ur-b[a]ni-apli), the son of Esarhaddon and grandson of Sennacherib, who ascended the throne B.C. 668, and reigned for about forty years, was, as the cuneiform records and the friezes of his palace testify, a bold hunter and a mighty warrior. He vanquished Tark[u] (Tirhakah) of Ethiopia, and his successor, Urdaman[e]. Ba'al King of Tyre, Yakinl[u] King of the island-city of Arvad, Sand[)a]sarm[u] of Cilicia, Teumman ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... we cannot read it? Up to the 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 ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... 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 ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... respect 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 legible ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... ipga, pinde, hali riksi, and 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 origin of the popular belief in the good luck following ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... 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
... 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. 1561, ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... "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 ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... membrane, etc. It is situated between the hyoid (tongue) bone above and the trachea below. The cartilages are the (1) epiglottis, (2) thyroid, cricoid, arytenoid, the two small, unimportant cornicula laryngis, or cartilages of Santorini, surmounting the arytenoids, and the two cuneiform, or cartilages of Wrisberg, in the folds of mucous membrane on each side of ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... in his more recent work on Human Origins that he thus comes forward as an historian, in preparation for which he seems to have devoted himself to the study of cuneiform and hieroglyphs and mastered the subject thoroughly and exhaustively, before bursting forth from behind the clouds to flood the world with ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... 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 marked, on ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... 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
... drawing, an Egyptian lad was supposed to study all these, and as we have seen, those lads who were trained for work in the Foreign Office had to learn other languages as well; they had also to read and write 'cuneiform'—the name given to the strange wedge-shaped letters of Assyria ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... 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 books of the Zoroastrian faith were ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... inscription which shall change the foundations of human knowledge. Wiser men deride the dream, and laugh at the idea of scientific kabbala. The wiser men are fools. Suppose that Aristotle had discovered on a cuneiform-covered tablet at Nineveh the few words, 'Survival of the Fittest.' Philosophy would have gained twenty-two hundred years. I will give you, in almost as few words, a truth equally pregnant. The ultimate evolution of the creature is into the creator. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... 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
... the use of Babylonian 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 ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... 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 lieu ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke
... "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, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... 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 (Qy. robbers). The Mahomedans, who have copied the Jews ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various |
