the golden age of Mesopotamian civilization

“This was the golden age of Mesopotamian civilization: at the latest at the end of the fourth millenium, in the so-called Late Uruk Period, architecture attained great heights, and the visual arts flourished, with the appearance of figurative scenes exalting the power of the king. It was also at that time that writing came to be invented: the resulting release of cultural and intellectual energy can only be imagined. Writing was then used exclusively in the economic sphere, primarily as a memory aid, but it nevertheless enables us to recognize that its inventors spoke Sumerian, an agglutinative language without any known parallel.”

—The Art and Architecture of Mesopotamia, by Giovanni Curatol, Jean-Daniel Forest, Nathalie Gallois, Carlo Lippolis, and Roberta Venco Ricciardi, 2007.

a heritage of great value

“‘[T]he world has a heritage of great value. The Mosaic code of the Bible owes some of its principles to some of the laws formulated by Hammurabi, who was called the law-giver. From their system of arithmetic, in which they used the multiple of twelve as well as our familiar ten, we derive our sixty minutes to the hour and 360 degrees to the circle. Arabia gave us our numerals, which are still called Arabic to distinguish them from the Roman system of notation. The Assyrians invented the sundial. The modern apothecary symbols and the signs of the Zodiac originated with the Babylonians. Comparatively recent excavations in Asia Minor have revealed that there was a magnificent empire there.’

‘A magnificent empire?’ Homer dreamed. ‘Where? In Ithaca in California? Away out to hell and gone’ Without any great people, without any great discoveries, without sundials, without numerals, without Zodiacs, without humor, without anything? Where was this great empire?’”

—William Saroyan, The Human Comedy, 1943.

Roxy Music

a great big white elephant

“It was a great big white elephant of a house, the kind crazy movie stars made in the crazy ’20s.”

—narrator, Sunset Blvd., 1950.

Speech Bubble Logos

The invention of the microscope

“The invention of the microscope is variously attributed to the Dutch spectacle-maker Zacharias Janssen in 1590 and to Galileo, who announced it in 1610. In 1656 the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes noted with wonder: ‘There are now such Microscopes . . . that the things we see with them appear a hundred thousand times bigger, than they would do if we looked upon them with our bare Eyes.’”

—Cynthia Wall, The Bedford Cultural Edition of The Rape Of The Lock by Alexander Pope, 1998.

too fine for mortal Sight

“Transparent Forms, too fine for mortal Sight,
Their fluid Bodies half dissolv’d in Light.
Loose to the Wind their airy Garments flew,
Thin glitt’ring Textures of the filmy Dew;
Dipt in the richest Tincture of the Skies,
Where Light disports in ever-mingling Dies,
While ev’ry Beam new transient Colours flings,
Colours that change whene’er they wave their Wings.”

—Alexander Pope, The Rape Of The Lock, 1712.

Picture and Vision

“[For] we have the Power of retaining, altering and compounding those Images, which we have once received, into all the varieties of Picture and Vision that are most agreeable to the Imagination; for by this Faculty a Man in a Dungeon is capable of entertaining himself with Scenes and Lanskips more beautiful than any that can be found in the whole Compass of Nature.”

—Joseph Addison, On The Pleasures of Imagination, Spectator 411, 1712.

The pupil with a stylus

“[Virgil’s] schooling trained him in Greek and Latin. The pupil with a stylus made his letters on a wax tablet which could then be smoothed. He listened to the teacher’s lesson and read or recited his exercises aloud. He wore the Roman tunica, a sleeved shirt reaching the knees, and after his fifteenth year the Roman toga, a white woolen full-length robe, passed over the left shoulder, brought from behind under the right arm, and then thrown again over the left shoulder. . . .

Tall and dark-haired, with a dark complexion, Virgil retained in Rome a shy and countryfied air. He had a fine reading voice. He was not robust.”

—Robert Fitzgerald, postscript from his translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid, 1983.

the scroll of fate

“What was a liber, a book, at Rome? A roll of papyrus on which the text was inscribed in ink with a reed pen. Publication consisted of the preparation and sale—or presentation as gifts—of copies made by hand. A wealthy man would have copyists on his household staff. There were bookshops, and Augustus founded a public library on the Palatine. Books were valuable, not owned by everybody, and by our standards hard to handle and to read. Words were not set off from one another by spaces but appeared in an unbroken line. You held the scroll in your right hand and unrolled it with your left. This is what Jupiter does metaphorically for Venus in Book I, unrolling the scroll of fate, and in Book IX, line 528, the poet calls on the Muse of Epic to unroll with him, as though on a scroll, the mighty scenes of war. In the first case the text is the future; in the second it is the past.”

—Robert Fitzgerald, postscript from his translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid, 1983.