His eyes

“His eyes gleamed with a hard, dull light the color of glue and almost never displayed emotion, except occasionally to shutter open as though in mild surprise.”

—Kenzaburo O’, A Personal Matter, translated by John Nathan, 1969.

a night sky vaulted with black stars

“Wordless, Bird stared for an instant at the numberless antholes in the ebonite receiver. The surface, like a night sky vaulted with black stars, clouded and cleared with each breath he took.”

—Kenzaburo O’, A Personal Matter, translated by John Nathan, 1969.

a somber yet truly vivid green

“Bird looked up at the trees billowing above the rooftops in their opulence of leaf and saw that the squalling rain had washed them to a somber yet truly vivid green. It was a green that transported him, as the traffic light had done at the highway intersection. Perhaps, he mused, he would see this kind of vibrant green when he lay on his deathbed.”

—Kenzaburo O‘, A Personal Matter, translated by John Nathan, 1969.

her eyes

“I looked into her eyes. Her eyes were like a deep spring in the shade of cliffs, which no breeze could ever reach. Nothing moved there, everything was still. Look closely, and you could just begin to make out the scene reflected in the water’s surface.”

—Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun, translated by Philip Gabriel, 1998.

Brown paper

“Brown paper, especially wrapping paper, is very pleasant, very cosy to paint on. Many an experienced artist has used it when he wasn’t up to anything grand or grandiose.”

—J.D. Salinger, De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period, from Nine Stories, 1953.

the cylinder-seal

“[T]he seal impressions of the Uruk period are little masterpieces. At that time the stamp-seal of earlier periods was almost entirely superseded by the cylinder-seal. This was a small cylinder of ordinary or semi-precious stone, varying in length from 2.5 to 8 centimetres, as thick as the thumb or as thin as a pencil, and pierced lengthwise throughout, so that it could be worn on a string around the neck. On its surface was engraved a design which, when rolled on clay, could be repeated ad infinitum. These early cylinder-seals were already made with great skill, and the designs—which ranged from friezes of animals or plants to scenes of daily life or mythological subjects—were compsed and arranged with considerable ingenuity.”

—Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, third edition, 1992.

an amulet

“[T]he object itself [the cylinder seal] was adopted by the Egyptians, who engraved it with their own traditional designs and, having no clay tablets on which to roll it, used it for centuries as an amulet.”

—Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, third edition, 1992.

longer and wider seals

“The short and narrow cylinder-seals . . . bearing monotonous friezes of schematized animals or geometric designs . . . were [later] replaced . . . by longer and wider seals with totally different compositions depicting either ‘banquet scenes’ or ‘animal-contest scenes’. . . . There were also some religious motifs, such as the sun-god on a boat. . . . Some seals, notably those of kings, were made of lapis-lazuli or other semi-precious stones, or even of gold, and they were sometimes capped with silver at both ends. An important novelty was the appearance . . . of the first short cuneiform inscriptions on cylinder-seals.”

—Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, third edition, 1992.

‘cuneiform’ writing

“The writing used in Mesopotamia throughout history and known as ‘cuneiform’ was originally—as all primitive writings, past or present—a collection of small, simplified drawings, or pictograms. . . . [I]n all probability the first pictograms were engraved on wood or painted on skins or leaves, but such media must have disintegrated long ago in the humid subsoil of Iraq, and the only documents that have survived are written on clay. The process of writing was in itself very simple: the scribe took a lump of fine, well-washed clay and shaped it as a small, smooth cushion, a few centimetres square. Then, with the end of a reed stalk cut obliquely he drew lines dividing each face of the cushion into squares and filled each square with incised drawings. The ‘tablet’ was then either baked or left unbaked. Baked tablets are nearly as hard a stone; old unbaked tablets crumble into dust between the fingers, but if they are collected with care, allowed to dry slowly in the shade and hardened in an oven they become almost indestructible. It must be added . . . that a number of archaic inscriptions were engraved in stone, at first with a bronze point, then with a cold chisel.

In the course of time the Mesopotamian script gradually lost its pictographic character. The signs were laid down in horizontal lines rather than in squares or in vertical bands. They became smaller, more compact, more rigid, more ‘abstract’, finally bearing no resemblance to the objects they represented. The awkward curves disappeared and were replaced by straight lines, at first, of equal width, then—as the prismatic stylus was forced into the clay proir to being drawn on its surface—vaguely triangular or wedge-shaped. Towards the middle of the third millennium B.C. this evolution was completed and the true ‘cuneiform’ writing (from Latin cuneus: wedge, nail) was born. . . .”

—Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, third edition, 1992.

writing boards

“Sometimes the scribe did not impress his style into clay but into wax spread over ivory or wooden boards, several boards being bound together by means of metal hinges like a miniature folding screen. In 1953 a number of such writing boards, some of them still bearing traces of an astronomical composition, were discovered at Nimrud in a well where they had been thrown during the sack of the city.”

—Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, third edition, 1992.