United States or Czechia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Since cursive writing was unknown among the Aztecs, the presence of these secretaries is an amusing feature in the account. The wine-cellar also is remarkable for two reasons; firstly, because the level of the streets and courts was but four feet above the level of the water, which made cellars impossible; and, secondly, because the Aztecs had no knowledge of wine.

This monument, which is covered on three sides with an inscription in the hieratic or cursive character, contains an opening invocation to Nin or Hercules, conceived in the ordinary terms, the genealogy and titles of the king, an account of the rebellion of Asshur-bani-pal, together with its suppression, and Shamas-Vul's own annals for the first four years of his reign.

In consequence, there developed two varieties of wedge-writing: the one that may be termed lapidary, used for the stone inscriptions, the official historical records, and such legal documents as were prepared with especial care; the other cursive, occurring only on legal and commercial clay tablets, and becoming more frequent as we approach the latest period of Babylonian writing, which extends to within a few decades of our era.

In Wester broch "the most remarkable things found" were three egg-shaped quartzite pearls "having their surface painted with spots in a blackish or blackish-brown pigment." He also found a flattish circular disc of sandstone, inscribed with a duck or other water-fowl, while on one side was an attempt, apparently, to write runes, on the other an inscription in unknown cursive characters.

A cursive character, it is therefore imagined, must always have been in use, parallel with a cuneiform one; and as the Babylonians and Assyrians are known to have used a character of this kind from a very high antiquity, synchronously with their lapidary cuneiform, so it is supposed that the Arian races must have possessed, besides the method which has been described as a cursive system of writing.

Living in the centripetal domain of a myopic existence as everyone did he supposed that his hapless childhood would always be his point of reference, his vantage point, and also the multi-pointed obstacle of his life. Generalizations, skewed and concocted from the sordid past that were their antecedent, extruded from his fissures in an incessant cursive lava flow of amicable contempt.

A favourite pursuit among them being literary labour, they introduced great improvements in the copying of manuscripts; and in their illumination and illustration are found the germs of the restoration of painting and the invention of cursive handwriting. St. Benedict enjoined his order to collect books.

Of this, however, there is at present no direct evidence. No cursive writing of the Arian nations at this time, either Median or Persian, has been found; and it is therefore uncertain what form of character they employed on common occasions. The material used for ordinary purposes, according to Nicolas of Damascus and Ctesias, was parchment.

In digging we turned up immense quantities of textiles in scraps, fine and coarse, nets, knitted work, as well as weaving, plain and in colours, and bits of papyrus in Greek cursive hand. The wretched Ababdeh tribes were constantly at war with one another, and the Dervish Khalifa could make his authority felt about here with a small handful of resolute men judiciously placed.

They are of upright habit, and of a simple and definite outline, which throws into sharp relief the cumbrous and obscure cuneiform system of Babylonia. Although not so cursive in form as the Hieratic or Demotic types of Egyptian writing, there is here a much more limited selection of types.