A silent film nearly 100 years old will get a fresh airing complete with new music tonight (March 3) in Baltimore. I have yet to see D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance,” but I’m intrigued. It tells four different historical moments of intolerance, the first of which deals with the fall of Babylon to Cyrus II. I can’t tell …
Babylon, bab-ilu, Babel, “Gate of the gods” was the Big Apple of its day. Yet we get “the whore of Babylon” and the “Tower of Babel,” Bob Marley’s Babylon site of oppression and reputation for excess. The biblical view of Babylon is no less real in its critique than the grandeur that we know Babylon …
I finally broke down and went all junior-high with my research — different colored pens for the different accounts of Cyrus’ taking Babylon. The most ancient records are notoriously problematic. Each one has a either a bone to pick or a bridge to sell, and they simply don’t agree on the facts. Did or did …
“The language of God,” Biblical Hebrew. I’m off soon to teach our third week’s class, and we’re in the thick of it now. The alphabet (or aleph-bet) is kind of fun — little ditties, the novelty of recognizing letters completely different from what we see in English, of reading from right to left. But the …
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The small clay cylinder, 2500 years old and a bit beat up has quietly moved people all over the world since its very beginnings. Cyrus II, founder of the Persian Empire produced this declaration of intent for liberty and peace. The National Museum of Iran recently reported that besides Iranian schoolchildren, elites, and not-so, officials …
To hear in a cryptic message whatever our innermost self is inclined to hear, right or wrong is timelessly human, or so it would seem. The “Croesus syndrome, ” is how the Asheville Jung Center refers to it. Croesus was a super wealthy and powerful ancient Greek ruler who consulted an oracle (prophet, of a sort) …
Sept. 10-12, and now Norouz. Is it just coincidence that the Cyrus Cylinder, a 2500 year old document sometimes described as the first declaration of human rights and attributed to the founder of the Persian Empire, traveled from its museum home in the West (UK) to the Middle East (Iran) on September 10 (2010) for an exhibit that began …
I just finished Anne Rice’s Servant of the Bones. From the original queen of vampire writing, who’d have thought? A book that includes not just the gothic but profound questions of purpose and identity and (here’s what’s especially intriguing to me right now) reflects some good research into ancient Near Eastern religion and history. Marduk, …
As writers, do we ever get off the first page? Not just the physical first to which most of us return again and again (before discarding) but the writing itself. It’s always empty, always new. These days, I’m reading all sorts of things about the transition from Babylonian to Persian rule in the ancient Near …
A small clay object with scratches decipherable by only a few people in the world can nevertheless still move nations. Sometimes called “the first charter of human rights,” this text inscribed on a cylinder of clay comes from Cyrus II, founder of the Persian Empire and called “messiah” by the biblical prophet Isaiah. It dates back to the …
