The Faravahar is arguably the best-known symbol of the Persian Zoroastrian faith. This symbol consists of a winged disc with a man emerging from it. The man is shown holding a ring. Whilst the symbol is well known, the meaning behind it is more complicated. The Faravahar was adopted as a secular symbol to represent the modern nation of Iran.
Arising from the Fertile Crescent, the Assyrian Empire once ruled over Mesopotamia with powerful armies and grand stone palaces. This advanced civilization greatly predated the Roman and Greek Empires but produced works of art as delicate as Greek amphorae and as monumental as Roman statuary.
When we think of ancient civilizations, we tend to think of people that lived around 2,000 years ago, but the Assyrian civilization is much, much older than that, and it played a far more influential role on the world stage than people realize. Before there were the Romans, the Greeks, or the Persians, the Assyrians were at the center of what we recognize as the cradle of civilization.
A large collection of texts from the Assyrian healer Kisir-Ashur's family library forms the basis for Assyriologist Troels Pank Arbøll's new book. In the book entitled Medicine in Ancient Assur - A Microhistorical Study of the Neo-Assyrian Healer KisÌ£ir-Aššur, Arbøll analyses the 73 texts that the healer, and later his apprentices, scratched into clay tablets around 658 BCE.
Sure, there are many important issues that have deserved your attention during the pandemic -- elections, vaccines and tiger documentaries spring to mind. But one issue has really gripped my interest -- the handshake. A social norm turned faux-paw due to COVID-19, some experts, such as U.S.
Cultural confidence and its close ally, morality, define the character and, ultimately, the longevity of nations, whose average historical life is 245 years, which, ironically, is almost exactly America's age [1]. A 2017 Gallup poll that found 81 percent of Americans believe that our state of moral values is fair or poor.