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Author: Irving Finkel
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 1529303273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
'It's enthralling stuff, mixing the scholarly with the accessible and placing storytelling right at the heart of the human experience.' - History Revealed 'A fascinating journey' - Yorkshire Post 'Marvellous...Finkel is an expert in Mesopotamian cultures at the British Museum, and is one of the most clever, and nicest, of people it has ever been my pleasure to encounter...A fascinating journey' - The Scotsman There are few things more in common across cultures than the belief in ghosts. Ghosts inhabit something of the very essence of what it is to be human. Whether we personally 'believe' or not, we are all aware of ghosts and the rich mythologies and rituals surrounding them. They have inspired, fascinated and frightened us for centuries - yet most of us are only familiar with the vengeful apparitions of Shakespeare, or the ghastly spectres haunting the pages of 19th century gothic literature. But their origins are much, much older... The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies takes us back to the very beginning. A world-renowned authority on cuneiform, the form of writing on clay tablets which dates back to 3400BC, Irving Finkel has embarked upon an ancient ghost hunt, scouring these tablets to unlock the secrets of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians to breathe new life into the first ghost stories ever written. In The First Ghosts, he uncovers an extraordinarily rich seam of ancient spirit wisdom which has remained hidden for nearly 4000 years, covering practical details of how to live with ghosts, how to get rid of them and bring them back, and how to avoid becoming one, as well as exploring more philosophical questions: what are ghosts, why does the idea of them remain so powerful despite the lack of concrete evidence, and what do they tell us about being human?
Author: Irving Finkel
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 1529303273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
'It's enthralling stuff, mixing the scholarly with the accessible and placing storytelling right at the heart of the human experience.' - History Revealed 'A fascinating journey' - Yorkshire Post 'Marvellous...Finkel is an expert in Mesopotamian cultures at the British Museum, and is one of the most clever, and nicest, of people it has ever been my pleasure to encounter...A fascinating journey' - The Scotsman There are few things more in common across cultures than the belief in ghosts. Ghosts inhabit something of the very essence of what it is to be human. Whether we personally 'believe' or not, we are all aware of ghosts and the rich mythologies and rituals surrounding them. They have inspired, fascinated and frightened us for centuries - yet most of us are only familiar with the vengeful apparitions of Shakespeare, or the ghastly spectres haunting the pages of 19th century gothic literature. But their origins are much, much older... The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies takes us back to the very beginning. A world-renowned authority on cuneiform, the form of writing on clay tablets which dates back to 3400BC, Irving Finkel has embarked upon an ancient ghost hunt, scouring these tablets to unlock the secrets of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians to breathe new life into the first ghost stories ever written. In The First Ghosts, he uncovers an extraordinarily rich seam of ancient spirit wisdom which has remained hidden for nearly 4000 years, covering practical details of how to live with ghosts, how to get rid of them and bring them back, and how to avoid becoming one, as well as exploring more philosophical questions: what are ghosts, why does the idea of them remain so powerful despite the lack of concrete evidence, and what do they tell us about being human?
Author: Noah Angell
Publisher: Monoray
ISBN: 1800961324
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
'An absorbingly creepy travelogue through the corridors, tunnels and basements of our most famous cultural repository. With Noah Angell as our guide, the British Museum becomes a haunted prison filled with imperial plunder and restless spirits clamouring for attention.' - Malcolm Gaskill, author of The Ruin Of All Witches 'Fascinating and illuminating' - Peter Ackroyd 'Brilliantly delicate, pointed, shivery... You could read it as a guide to which galleries to avoid - or to where the push for repatriation should be most urgent.' - Erin L. Thompson, professor of art crime at the City University of New York 'Achieves a near-impossible marriage between paranormal pop-culture, folklore and hauntology' - Roger Clarke, author of A Natural History of Ghosts 'A heady cocktail of history and folklore that leaves a haunting aftertaste... Spine-tingling' - Lindsey Fitzharris, New York Times bestselling author of The Facemaker What if the British Museum isn't a carefully ordered cross section of history but is in instead a palatial trophy cabinet of colonial loot - swarming with volatile and errant spirits? When artist and writer Noah Angell first heard murmurs of ghostly sightings at the British Museum he had to find out more. What started as a trickle soon became a deluge as staff old and new - from overnight security to respected curators - brought him testimonies of their supernatural encounters. It became clear that the source of the disturbances was related to the Museum's contents - unquiet objects, holy plunder, and restless human remains protesting their enforced stay within the colonial collection's cabinets and deep underground vaults. According to those who have worked there, the institution is heaving with profound spectral disorder. Ghosts of the British Museum fuses storytelling, folklore and history, digs deep into our imperial past and unmasks the world's oldest national museum as a site of ongoing conflict, where restless objects are held against their will. It now appears that the objects are fighting back.
Author: Ellen
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
ISBN: 1616961449
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
This fiendish anthology, complied by the horror genre’s most acclaimed editor, drags you into the twisted minds of modern literary masters at their fiendish best. Visionary storytellers fill this collection of tales lyrical and strange, monstrous and exhilarating, horrific and transformative. *A sweetly vengeful voice on the radio calls a young soldier out to join a phantom patrol. *A hotel maid who threw her newborn child from a fourth-story window lingers in an interminable state. *An intern in a paranormal research facility delves deeply into the unexplained deaths of two staff members. *A serial killer plans his ultimate artistic achievement: the unveiling of an extremely special instrument in a very private concert. At once familiar and shocking, these riveting stories will haunt you long after you put down your book and turn out the light.
Author: Richard Jones
Publisher: New Holland Australia(AU)
ISBN: 9781847739858
Category : Haunted places
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
This title takes the intrepid ghost seeker on a truly hair-raising journey to some of the capital's spookiest places. From the chilling manifestations at the infamous 50 Berkeley Square to the eternal restlessness of Jack the Ripper's victims, no haunted house is left unmentioned.
Author: Richard Lloyd Parry
Publisher: MCD
ISBN: 0374710937
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Guardian, NPR, GQ, The Economist, Bookforum, and Lit Hub The definitive account of what happened, why, and above all how it felt, when catastrophe hit Japan—by the Japan correspondent of The Times (London) and author of People Who Eat Darkness On March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of northeast Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than eighteen thousand people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned. It was Japan’s greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways. Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo and spent six years reporting from the disaster zone. There he encountered stories of ghosts and hauntings, and met a priest who exorcised the spirits of the dead. And he found himself drawn back again and again to a village that had suffered the greatest loss of all, a community tormented by unbearable mysteries of its own. What really happened to the local children as they waited in the schoolyard in the moments before the tsunami? Why did their teachers not evacuate them to safety? And why was the unbearable truth being so stubbornly covered up? Ghosts of the Tsunami is a soon-to-be classic intimate account of an epic tragedy, told through the accounts of those who lived through it. It tells the story of how a nation faced a catastrophe, and the struggle to find consolation in the ruins.
Author: Noriko Tsuchiya
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Netsuke have once again come to the fore in the popular imagination of the public. This book brings together one hundred of the beautiful and interesting netsuke from the extensive collection of the British Museum, each of which has its own special charm and story to tell.
Author: Helen Peters
Publisher: Nosy Crow
ISBN: 0857638416
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
Compelling period fiction for 9+ readers from the Waterstones Children's Prize shortlisted Helen Peters. Evie couldn't be angrier with her mother. She's only gone and got married again and has flown off on honeymoon, sending Evie to stay with a godmother she's never even met in an old, creaky house in the middle of nowhere. It is all monumentally unfair. But on the first night, Evie sees a strange, ghostly figure at the window. Spooked, she flees from the room, feeling oddly disembodied as she does so. Out in the corridor, it's 1814 and Evie finds herself dressed as a housemaid. She's certain she's gone back in time for a reason. A terrible injustice needs to be fixed. But there's a housekeeper barking orders, a bad-tempered master to avoid, and the chamber pots won't empty themselves. It's going to take all Evie's cunning to fix things in the past so that nothing will break apart in the future... Absorbing, brilliant storytelling from the author of The Secret Hen House Theatre, The Farm Beneath the Water, Anna at War and The Jasmine Green Series for younger readers.
Author: Zachary Lesser
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081229792X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Four years before the publication of the First Folio, a group of London printers and booksellers attempted to produce a "collected works" of William Shakespeare, not in an imposingly large format but as a series of more humble quarto pamphlets. For mysterious reasons, perhaps involving Shakespeare's playing company, the King's Men, the project ran into trouble. In an attempt to salvage it, information on the title pages of some of the playbooks was falsified, making them resemble leftover copies of earlier editions. The deception worked for nearly three hundred years, until it was unmasked by scholars in the early twentieth century. The discovery of these "Pavier Quartos," as they became known, was a landmark success for the New Bibliography and played an important role in establishing the validity and authority of that method of analysis. While more recent scholars have reassessed the traditional narrative that the New Bibliographers wrote, no one has gone back to look at the primary evidence: the quartos themselves. In Ghosts, Holes, Rips and Scrapes Zachary Lesser undertakes a completely fresh study of these playbooks. Through an intensive bibliographical analysis of over three hundred surviving quartos, Lesser reveals evidence that has gone entirely unseen before: "ghosts" (faint, oily impressions produced when one book is bound next to another); "holes" (the tiny remains of the first simple stitching that held pamphlets together); and "rips and scrapes" (post-production alterations of title pages). This new evidence—much of it visible only with the aid of enhanced photographic methods—suggests that the "Pavier Quartos" are far more mysterious, with far more consequential ramifications for book history and Shakespeare scholarship than we have thought.
Author: Irving Finkel
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385537123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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Book Description
The recent translation of a Babylonian tablet launches a groundbreaking investigation into one of the most famous stories in the world, challenging the way we look at ancient history. Since the Victorian period, it has been understood that the story of Noah, iconic in the Book of Genesis, and a central motif in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, derives from a much older story that existed centuries before in ancient Babylon. But the relationship between the Babylonian and biblical traditions was shrouded in mystery. Then, in 2009, Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum and a world authority on ancient Mesopotamia, found himself playing detective when a member of the public arrived at the museum with an intriguing cuneiform tablet from a family collection. Not only did the tablet reveal a new version of the Babylonian Flood Story; the ancient poet described the size and completely unexpected shape of the ark, and gave detailed boat building specifications. Decoding this ancient message wedge by cuneiform wedge, Dr. Finkel discovered where the Babylonians believed the ark came to rest and developed a new explanation of how the old story ultimately found its way into the Bible. In The Ark Before Noah, Dr. Finkel takes us on an adventurous voyage of discovery, opening the door to an enthralling world of ancient voices and new meanings.
Author: Irving L. Finkel
Publisher: British museum Press
ISBN: 9780714111889
Category : Cuneiform inscriptions
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Cuneiform script on tablets of clay is, as far as we know, the oldest form of writing in the world. The choice of clay as writing medium in ancient Mesopotamia meant that records of all kinds could survive down to modern times, preserving fascinating documents from ancient civilization, written by a variety of people and societies. From reading these tablets we can understand not only the history and economics of the time but also the beliefs, ideas and superstitions. This new book will bring the world in which the cuneiform was written to life for the non-expert reader, revealing how ancient inscriptions can lead to a new way of thinking about the past. It will explain how this pre-alphabetic writing really worked and how it was possible to use cuneiform signs to record so many different languages so long ago. Richly illustrated with a wealth of fresh examples ranging from elementary school exercises to revealing private letters or beautifully calligraphic literature for the royal library, we will meet people that arent so very different from ourselves. We will read the work of many scribes from mundane record keepers to state fortune tellers, using tricks from puns to cryptography. For the first time cuneiform tablets and their messages are not remote and inaccessible, but wonderfully human documents that resonate today.
