More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In the 1970s, many geologists had said that the axe-makers would just have used blocks of jade that had been carried down the mountains by rivers and glaciers. But that’s not the case. By going much higher up, between 1,800 and 2,400 metres above sea level, we found the chipping floors and the actual source material – still with signs of its having been used.
The crucial breakthrough to real writing came when it was first understood that a graphic symbol, like the one for beer on the tablet, could be used to mean not just the thing it showed, but what the word for the thing sounded like. At this point writing became phonetic, and then all kinds of new communication became possible.
George Smith published the tablet only twelve years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. And, in doing so, he opened a religious Pandora’s box.
It’s why archaeologists get so agitated about illicit excavations today. For although the precious finds will usually survive, the context which explains them will be lost, and it’s that context of material – often financially worthless – that turns treasure into history.
Ramesses in the British Museum was one of the first works to challenge long-held assumptions that great art had begun in Greece.
