At the beginning Sumer (a region of Mesopotamia) was the birthplace of writing, the wheel, agriculture, the arch, the plow, the saw, irrigation, beer, the spear, money, calendar and many other innovations, and is often referred to as the Cradle of Civilization. The Sumerians developed the earliest known writing system – a pictographic writing system known as cuneiform script,
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The Sassoons and Kadoories created huge, competing business empires, helped open China to the West and aided Jewish refugees in Shanghai during the Shoah – but their fates differed greatly, as revealed in a new book The chefs were French, the managers Swiss, the jazz musicians American. In the 1930s, the Majestic was Asia’s most luxurious hotel. The world’s high and migh
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The exhibition takes a holistic approach to the celebrated monument, from its construction to its stunning re-creation. New York We all used to visit museum shows about antiquity to feast our eyes on gorgeous objects and imagine the cultural wealth of, say, ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome. These days, curators are increasingly changing and deepening the experience
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Babylon has seen it all. From its peak as the Neo-Babylonian capital under King Nebuchadnezzar through its heavy-handed 1987 reconstruction by Saddam Hussein to its post-invasion demise when American and Polish troops ran roughshod over its ruins and ISIS threatened its very existence, the ancient city has witnessed empires come and go. History spanning the centuries
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