#like 4000 year old cuneiform tablets

[ritaruellblog]

Thinking About Immediate Secrets Of Oil Perfume

Perfume, an  combinations of  scent compounds, some  important oils, fixatives  as well as solvents,  origins backs to ancient Mesopotamia  and also Egypt  as well as later by the Romans  and also Persians. Perfumery, the art of making  fragrance,  discovered its  presence in East Asia  as well,  however  primarily it was incensed based.

Tapputi was the  initial  fragrance  manufacturer whose name was  discussed in cuneiform  tablet computer from the second millennium BC in Mesopotamia. According to recent  explorations, more than 4000  years of ages perfumes are found in  old  fragrance  manufacturing facility that was spread in an  location of 4000 square-meter  location. Those perfumes were  made from herbs, almonds, coriander, bergamot, and other spices,  however not  blossoms. Avicenna, the Persian doctor and chemist,  originated the distillation of oils of  blossoms. He began this  procedure with rose.  Before that, oils, petals and crushed  natural herbs were  combined to make  fragrances.  After that the art of making  fragrance  got to Europe in 14th century  as well as  later on Hungarians launched the  contemporary perfume, a  blend of oils in alcohol  remedy, in 1370. In 16th century, this  multiplied art of Italy was  required to France and then it  ended up being the European center of perfume  and also  aesthetic manufacture. With this impact,  farming of  blossoms became a flourishing  market in the south of France.  Throughout the Renaissance  duration, perfumed were  suggested for royal class  just. Around 18th century, perfume  sector  flourished like anything,  considering that the cultivation of  fragrant plants were  raised to  supply more and more raw material. A perfume can be  defined on the basis of its concentration level, the family it belongs to  and also the notes of  aromas it spreads. Perfume oil has to be  thinned down with a solvent, as  unmixed oils are highly concentrated  and also can cause allergies. Ethanol or a  blend of ethanol  as well as water are  one of the most common diluting agents for perfumes. Neutral  scenting lipids like jojoba, Oil Perfume fractionated coconut oil or wax are  the most effective  means to  weaken  fragrance oils. The  strength and endurance of a perfume depends on the amount of  focuses it  has. According to  standard  as well as  modern-day classification, perfumes  contain number of  classifications like single  flower, floral  arrangement, ambery, woody, leathery,  intense floral,  eco-friendly, oceanic/ozone, citrus,  and so on. Each category is  widely known for its own  diversity. Plants are the  principal source of aromatics  and also each part of plant is responsible for a specific aromatic compound.  Besides plants, animals like Ambergris, Civet, Musk  as well as Honeycomb are  likewise  terrific  resources of aromatic compounds. Besides these, other natural  resources are Lichens and  Algae.  However  contemporary perfumes  include odorants which are not  normally  readily available;  instead they are synthetic odorants like Calon. The synthetic odorants are organically synthesized and then  detoxified before the composition of  fragrance. In case of natural sources, odorants are  acquired by dissolving the raw material in a solvent to obtain the  preferred aromatic  substances. On the other hand, the  technique of heating the raw material  and after that condensed to distill aromatic vapors is called  purification. It can be either steam distillation or dry distillation.  Fragrant oils can  additionally be  accumulated  with expression that is compression of the raw  product.

[additivebloodcurse]

Walk like an Egyptian, but eat like an ancient Babylonian. While cookbooks containing Mesopotamian fare do exist, to be really authentic, take your recipes from a clay tablet, densely inscribed in cuneiform.

[meret118]

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System in the World: A Short, Charming Introduction

Discover the Oldest Beer Recipe in History From Ancient Sumeria, 1800 B.C.

Cook Real Recipes from Ancient Rome: Ostrich Ragoût, Roast Wild Boar, Nut Tarts & More

[ksu-archives]

Confessions of a MARB Student Assistant - Mirna Zaher

As the academic year comes to a close, I asked our two student assistants - Meghan Collins and Mirna Zaher - to reflect on the time they’ve spent working here in the Department of Museums, Archives and Rare Books. Here’s Mirna’s story…

Mirna Zaher, BA International Affairs with a minor in Anthropology, Kennesaw State University, 2018

This is honestly one of the best jobs in the world. Every day is like an adventure because you never know what you will be doing. The scope of my tasks ranges from inputting data onto spreadsheets to aiding in the reenactment of Romeo and Juliet using an original seventeenth-century Shakespeare folio. I first heard about this job while I was seeking full time employment at the KSU Sturgis Library. I was sad at the time that I did not receive the full time position I had applied for, but now I consider it to be a great turning point in my life that led to me getting the job here. I have been here for a few months now and each day I grow to love it more. The coolest thing about being a student assistant in the MARB department is that you get the chance to do a little bit everything in the archival and rare book world. This includes helping process old materials, digitization, working with very rare and incredible books, and other small scale projects.  One such project we worked on was the Fairbanks project in which we were tasked by the daughter-in-law of the late Hollywood actor, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., to find a pamphlet from our Georgia Marble Collection that highlighted his memorial. After months of fruitless searching we finally located the long sought after pamphlet. Once the item was digitized and sent to Mrs. Fairbanks we were delighted to find that she had personally thanked us all in an email she sent out to our team. This was truly amazing because first off she is kind of famous which is really cool, and second because it showed us just how much our work here really impacts people. The most amazing collection pieces we have in my opinion are the two 4000-year-old cuneiform tablets. These tablets are simply just amazing. They are in pristine condition and are some of the oldest things written by humanity. Being able to see these is seeing history, real history, with your own eyes and it is breathtaking. Our rare book collection is just as amazing. We have part of an original 1611 King James Bible, as in the book that standardized the English language and completely paved history for centuries to come. That is just one of many amazing pieces that we have. This job has given me so much experience in so many different things such as office work and assisting in teaching a class. 

Whether or not I decide to pursue a higher degree in this subject in the future, being able to work here has given me more opportunities than I ever could have imagine, and it has given me the ability to share these experiences and knowledge with so many others. To work here is like working hands on with the past, reading old files, holding old books, looking at old photographs, it humanizes history. It gives you the ability to sit down and realize that these people were just normal people like you and me. They were probably doodling in their textbooks in the 1600s because they were bored during class, or that the seemingly meaningless inscription in a book or a letter did indeed mean something to someone at one point in time. It makes history and our shared past so much more personal. Overall my experience here has been a memorable one. I have had the opportunity to meet and work with so many amazing and brilliant people. This has truly been a life changing experience that I look forward to continuing during my time here.

[biofunmy]

In Iraq Museum, There Are Things ‘That Are Nowhere Else in the World’

BAGHDAD — If people remember anything about the Iraq Museum, it is most likely the televised images of it being looted in 2003 as American troops watched from their tanks.

Statues too heavy to move were knocked from their pedestals, their 3,000- and 4,000-year-old shoulders bashed to powder. Some lost their eyes or one side of their face. Glass cases were shattered, their contents gone or thrown on the floor.

One of the museum’s most treasured art works was the Warka vase, with carvings dating back five millenniums showing that even then the ancient Mesopotamians grew wheat and fruits, wove cloth, and made pottery. When someone walked off with it, a bit of human history was lost.

The same was true of the Golden Lyre of Ur, a 4,500-year-old musical instrument inlaid with gold, silver and carnelian.

I was there in 2003 on the second morning of looting and was stopped about 150 feet from the museum entrance by crowds of Iraqis rushing by clutching clay objects I could not identify. They also carried more prosaic items — file cabinets, chairs and spools of electrical wire.

This spring, 16 years later, I was back at the museum. It had reopened in 2015 after conservationists had repaired some of the damage and European countries, among others, had helped restore several galleries. Still, I expected to see bare rooms and empty niches.

Instead, I found that despite the loss of 15,000 works of art, the museum was filled with an extraordinary collection.

In a well-lit gallery, I stared up at two majestic alabaster creatures at least 12 feet tall but looking even taller because they were set on plinths.

They had the bearded faces of men, four or five legs, the wide wings of eagles, and the bodies and tails of bulls. Known as lamassu in the ancient Sumerian language, they were thought to be spirit guardians so they were set at city gates, palace entrances and the threshold of throne rooms.

Here, they watched over two long rooms of friezes that showed ancient Mesopotamians carrying tribute or walking beside their horses, which were finely carved with muscled flanks and elaborate reins.

The lamassus and friezes survived the looters because they were too heavy to haul away.

Art historians and archaeologists know how exceptional the collection is. But despite Baghdad’s relative safety today, neither the city nor the museum have yet to become a major destination for Iraqis, much less foreign tourists.

“There are things there that are nowhere else in the world, especially from early Mesopotamian history,” said Christopher Woods, the director of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, who recently visited Baghdad.

“It’s a textbook collection,” he said.

In addition to trying to get back the pieces that were looted (some 4,300 have been recovered), the challenge now is to make the museum accessible to as many Iraqis as possible, said Abdulameer al-Hamdani, the recently appointed Iraqi culture minister.

“I’ve ordered the museum to be open every day and I’ve asked to let graduate students and university students come for free,” said Mr. al-Hamdani, an archaeologist by training who has a doctorate from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Still, it is hard to get visitors, especially younger Iraqis, to feel that the museum’s art is relevant to their lives, he said.

While many more school classes come now than in the past, there is little to guide them — no docents or audio-guides, and scant audiovisual aids. The children rush through, stopping to touch a lamassu or another statue and then dash on.

Some days the museum is almost empty as it was when I visited, except for a few teenagers and three men from Diyala Province, who had come on their day off. They were eager for information but barely read the sometimes technical labels.

Three of the teenagers, who had come on their own when their classes finished for the day, glanced up briefly at the lamassus’ benign faces, but seemed not to know what to make of them.

“I liked the other room with the statues better,” said Amina Atiyeh, 14, as her companions nodded in assent.

The museum’s collection is so comprehensive that art historians say it is daunting to try to talk about it in its entirety.

“What is so striking about the Iraq Museum is the chronological span that it covers,” said Paolo Brusasco, an archaeologist and art historian at the University of Genoa, who has worked extensively in northern Iraq.

“From the Assyrian period all the way to the Ottoman,” he said.

The museum’s earliest pieces date to almost 4000 B.C.E. That is more than three millenniums before the ships described by Homer plied the Aegean Sea or the Old Testament was written.

The collection has painted pottery in the shape of strange creatures whose mouths double as spouts; tiny sculptures of animals thought to have been toys; fragile boats made of a light wood found in ancient graves. Historians conjecture that the boats were intended to carry souls to the next world.

There are statues of men and women with large, incredulous eyes as well as fragments of beautifully carved parts of mosques that are a mere few hundred years old.

While there are superb examples of Sumerian art outside Iraq, most notably at the Louvre, the British Museum, the state museums in Berlin and the Metropolitan Museum, as well as the Oriental Institute in Chicago, the Iraq Museum has it all, Mr. Brusasco said.

The museum’s origins date to the early 1920s when Gertrude Bell, the British administrator and explorer who helped to establish modern Iraq, worked with King Faisal to create a museum of Iraqi art by stopping Western archaeologists from walking off with all of the country’s treasures.

They pushed through legislation requiring that foreign excavators donate at least half of their finds to the museum.

Today, Iraqi law stipulates that anything found in Iraq, stays in Iraq. That means the museum’s collection will continue to grow since there are some 13,000 archaeological sites in Iraq and a number of continuing excavations, Mr. al-Hamdani said.

But Mr. al-Hamdani sees his main challenge as figuring out how to create a culture of learning around the museum.

“We have to give visitors a context,” he said.

“Putting artifacts in a box is like a death,” he added, referring to the glass cases that house the collection’s smaller pieces. “In a box, art has no soul.”

Great works like the three-foot-tall Warka vase, which was recovered, are arresting sights but much more so when their history is explained.

The Warka vase, for example, was found in Uruk, in present day Muthanna Province, which archaeologists believe was the world’s largest city at its height, and where the earliest examples of writing were found — in cuneiform on clay tablets.

The vase is a rare example of the most ancient narrative art, telling its story in four tiers.

The vase shows that farmers “approached the king for the new year festival bringing grain, sheep, gold and barley,” said Mr. Brusasco, the University of Genoa archaeologist.

Mesopotamians were among the earliest beer brewers, using barley as a critical ingredient. Tablets describe 30 to 40 different kinds of beer and specify different qualities, he said.

There is no end to the past in Iraq, said Ali al-Nashmi, a professor of archaeology and history at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad.

“In Iraq, cities are built on top of cities,” he said.

Sahred From Source link Travel

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[usviraltrends-blog]

New Post has been published on https://usviraltrends.com/war-savages-ancient-sites-in-yemen-and-iraq-destroying-archaeological-record-science/

War savages ancient sites in Yemen and Iraq, destroying archaeological record | Science

Some Yemenis suggest that the 2800-year-old Marib Dam, one of the country’s best known ancient sites (shown before it was bombed), was deliberately targeted.

imageBROKER/Alamy Stock Photo

By Andrew LawlerApr. 10, 2018 , 5:35 PM

A new front has opened in the destruction of archaeological heritage in the Middle East. Across northern Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State (IS) group devastated antiquities during its reign of terror starting in 2014, pulverizing classical statues such as those of Palmyra in Syria and bulldozing a 3000-year-old ziggurat at Iraq’s Nimrud. The IS group has now been routed by Iraqi and Syrian forces, curbing the destruction but giving archaeologists a firsthand look at an aftermath that is grimmer than many had expected. Meanwhile, the assault on antiquity has extended to Yemen, 2000 kilometers to the south, another archaeological treasure house riven by conflict.

“Our immortal history has been wasted by wars,” lamented Mohanad Ahmad al-Sayani, chair of Yemen’s General Organization of Antiquities and Museums in Sana’a.

In Yemen, the cultural losses have gone largely unnoticed by the wider world but are keenly felt by archaeologists. Although the country has been far less studied than Mesopotamia, it played a critical role in the rise of empires and economies in the region starting around 1000 B.C.E., researchers said at a meeting here last week of the International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East.

By 1200 B.C.E., the kingdom of Saba in what is now central Yemen controlled the export of frankincense, derived from a tree that grew only along the country’s southern coast. The prized resin was burned for a millennium and a half in temples from Persia to Rome. The vast wealth of Saba—home to the biblical Queen of Sheba—funded impressive temples, cities, and engineering marvels. Among them was the Marib Dam, built on Wadi Adhanah in the eighth century B.C.E. to help expand agriculture in this arid region; some claim it is the world’s oldest dam.

Today, Yemen is racked by civil war and Islamic extremists who, in a campaign against heresy, have destroyed ancient mosques in the port city of Aden, and a multidomed shrine in the Hadhramaut region.

Yemen’s cultural heritage damaged in war

Bombs dropped by a Saudi-led coalition have damaged the ancient Marib Dam, a museum in Dhamar, and medieval castles in Aden and Sana’a. 

A. Cuadra/Science

Bombs dropped by the Saudi-led coalition have wreaked the most damage, Al-Sayani said. The Marib Dam, in an unpopulated area far from the capital, was struck in 2015, leaving a deep gash in the well-preserved northern sluice gate. The regional museum of Dhamar in the southwest, which contained thousands of artifacts from the Himyarite Kingdom, was completely destroyed. The Himyarites conquered Saba in 280 C.E., took over the frankincense monopoly, and became key players in the expanding Indian Ocean trade between the Roman Empire and India until Ethiopian forces overthrew them in 525 C.E.

Al-Sayani showed images from a dozen flattened or severely damaged sites, including medieval castles such Aden’s Sira Fortress, and the centuries-old al-Qassimi neighborhood in Sana’a. More than 60 sites have been destroyed or severely damaged since the conflict began in 2015, Al-Sayani said, chiefly from Saudi bombings. Although some were strategic targets, he charged that the Saudi attacks were a conscious campaign to wreck Yemen’s heritage and demoralize its citizens. “After 3 years of assessing the damage, I believe the bombing is being done with a purpose, since many of these sites are not suitable or useful for military use,” he says.

The destruction seems deliberate, agrees archaeologist Sarah Japp of Berlin’s German Archaeological Institute. “The Saudis were given information on important cultural heritage sites, including exact coordinates,” by UNESCO, said Japp, who was based in Sana’a before the war. UNESCO intended to protect the sites, but she fears that the data may instead have been used for targeting. “There is no reason to say all of these [bombings] are just accidents.” The Saudi embassy in Berlin and officials in Riyadh did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Meanwhile, 2000 kilometers to the north in Syria and Iraq, the damage wrought by years of IS group control is only now coming into focus. “It is nothing short of a catastrophe,” said Michel al-Maqdissi, former head of excavations in Syria’s antiquities department in Damascus, who now works at the Louvre in Paris and maintains contacts in Syria.

Some of the worst reports come from Mari, a 60-hectare site on the banks of the Euphrates River that 4000 years ago was one of the world’s largest cities. Just north of Sumer and the Akkadian Empire, Mari served as a key trading center for Mesopotamian goods and Anatolian metals and stone, and once boasted the best preserved early palace in the Middle East.

But no longer. Archaeologist Pascal Butterlin of Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris, who worked at Mari for years and has gathered information from Syrian sources, displayed an image of the palace from the ground that shows near total destruction of Mari’s central area. The site’s ancient statues were removed to museums long ago, so the reasons behind the destruction remain murky, although the IS group’s desire to profit from antiquities is well-known. A nearby large mound called Tell Medkouk was bulldozed completely to unearth objects for looting. From satellite data on the center of Mari, Butterlin estimates that looters dug some 1500 pits, many of them more than 5 meters deep and 6 meters wide. The vehicle tracks “make it look like they had traffic jams there,” he said. He suspects that thousands of looted cuneiform tablets, small figurines, and bronze objects won’t show up on the art market for years, as sellers wait for international outrage to cool.

The situation is even worse at Dura-Europos, which until recently was a remarkably well-preserved city upstream of Mari. From the first century B.C.E., this city lay on the frontier of the Roman and Persian empires, which took turns controlling it, and once held both one of the world’s oldest Jewish synagogues and oldest Christian churches. “The scale of the disaster there is profound,” said Chekmous Ali, a Syrian archaeologist now at the University of Strasbourg in France. “There are innumerable pits—some 9500—and the necropolis is gone.”

Across the border in Iraq, the old city of Mosul once boasted a host of Islamic and Christian monuments, many destroyed or damaged during the IS group’s 3 years of control. But the worst devastation came last summer, when more than 30,000 bombs and missiles hit historic buildings during the battle for the city, said Karel Nováček of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic. “The old city was annihilated,” he said at the meeting. He charges that the destruction continues, as Iraqi construction crews clear the wreckage without trying to preserve what’s left or tally the damage.

“The heritage management is nonexistent,” he said. “We need careful removal of the rubble, but that is not happening.” His team is assembling what data they can from old reports and photographs that could provide some basis for reconstructing historic sites. He plans to lead an on-the-ground assessment in June, in hopes of providing Iraqis a chance to mend what they can of their battered cultural heritage.