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Volume 54, Number 4 July/August 2003

In This Issue

July/August 2003
The Beauty That Heals
Written by Sylvia Smith
Photographed by Richard Duebel

As futuristic as a Star Wars film set and as organic as a melon patch, the new hospital in Kaedi, Mauritania used local ideas and local bricks to build an award-winning extension that has everything, it seems, except straight lines.

 
Flight of the Blackbird
Written by Robert W. Lebling Jr.
Illustrated by Norman MacDonald

Driven from his native Baghdad by a jealous music teacher, a young virtuoso named Ziryab—"blackbird"—landed in Muslim Spain in 822, where he opened the first music school. Under the ruler's aegis, he also brought or invented many cultural changes—in table manners, hair styles, clothing and gastronomy as well as music—whose influence is still discernible in Europe and the New World after more than a millennium.

 
Shepherd's Best Friend
Written by Louis Werner
Photographed by Thorne Anderson

Large, tawny dogs with black faces, up-curled tails and spiked collars guard herds of sheep on the Anatolian plateau.  They are kangals, a very old and much treasured breed whose single-minded protectiveness has won them admirers well beyond Turkey.

 
Splendid Suzanis
Written by Caroline Stone
Photographed by Paul Lunde

When daughters were born in the farming and herding lands of what is now Uzbekistan, their mothers would soon begin embroidering elaborate textiles called suzanis for the future dowry, and the girls would join the work as soon as they could wield a needle. Produced for home use—not for trade, as carpets were—suzanis are still relatively little-known today, but they are among Central Asia's most elegant textile arts.

Traders of the Third Millennia
Written by Richard Covington
Photographed by Metropolitan Museum of Art

As the exhibition "Art of the First Cities" shows, today's globalization got its start with the trans-Asian trade system of the third millennium BC, which transported art objects, techniques and ideas throughout the continent. Today's curators used the trans-global trade system of the third millennium of our era to make their exhibition possible, arranging loans of priceless objects from 51 museums in 15 countries.

Zalabia and the First Ice-Cream Cone
Written by Jack Marlowe
Photographed by David Alan Harvey

If you sought respite from the midsummer swelter at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis by visiting one of the fair's dozens of ice-cream stands, you might have met Ernest Hamwi curling thin waffles into cones and asking, "You want your zaiabia with one scoop or two?" Was that the beginning of America's love affair with the ice-cream cone? Not quite, says Albert Doumar of Norfolk, Virginia.