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Ancient Mesopotamia: everything you wanted to know
00:50:06
Moudhy Al-Rashid answers listener questions on ancient Mesopotamia, which encompassed multiple remarkable civilisations and saw numerous revolutionary innovations
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- [00:01]
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- [02:00]
David Musgrove
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Do you know your Sumerians, from your Babylonians and your Akkadians? Well, all of these civilizations formed part of the story of ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where over the course of several millennia, city states formed, writing flourished, the wheel may have been invented, mathematics was practiced, and dogs were gods, pets and warriors. In today's Everything youg Wanted to Know episode, Moody Al Rashid, the author of Between Two Rivers, answers your questions on the ancient region in conversation with David Musgrove.
- [02:49]
Moody Al Rashid
Right, today we are tackling a very big subject, Ancient Mesopotamia, which is big in terms of time and space. So the first thing we need to do the obvious Google search query is what and where was ancient Mesopotamia? So, Moody, can you enlighten us about that, please?
- [03:06]
With pleasure. So ancient Mesopotamia is the name of a region between and around the two rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers, that run through what is now Iraq, up through Syria, and in some cases a little further afield than that. So it's the name of a region, not of a civilization. And it was home to several cultures and civilizations in antiquity. The Sumerians were one of the first that we have written record of, and then later the Babylonians, and even as far into the future as the Persians, the common denominator, interestingly, amongst all these cultures and civilizations that lived in the region during a huge stretch of time in antiquity, the period that we'll focus on is about 3350 BCE all the way to 100 cell is the cuneiform writing system. So this is not a language, it's a writing system that was interestingly shaped by some shared political and intellectual ideologies that hopefully we'll get to go into in a bit. So even if ancient Mesopotamia doesn't refer to a civilization, rather to a place, there are still things that are shared by those civilizations that make it meaningful to refer to the region in this way over such a huge time period.
- [04:15]
You just referenced the cuneiform script there. That leads in nicely to our next question, which is how do we know about ancient messages? Mesopotamia, what are our sources? So presumably that is one of the sources.
- [04:25]
Yes, yes. So there's always sort of two broad categories of sources. The first is archaeology. And in Mesopotamia, there have been excavations of some pretty incredible sites, Uruk being the birthplace of writing, which I'll get to in a second. Kish, the birthplace of kingship, according to some traditions. Ur Mari, the site of a major palace in what is now Syria, and within those sites, and some very interesting architecture and institutions that we can reconstruct from that. Temples, palaces, private homes, burials, libraries, even toilets. And then objects like pottery can also. It doesn't sound very exciting, but it can tell us quite a lot about the people that lived in a particular period. But what I personally think is really special about ancient Mesopotamia is exactly the writing system that we mentioned. Cuneiform. Cuneiform was written, for the most part, on clay, quite a durable material. Even if a library is set on fire in antiquity, it's actually great for assyriologists because it bakes all these tablets and preserves them in a much better state than they have been if they were just left to dry on their own. And there are hundreds of thousands of sources that preserve writing in cuneiform, which is a wedge shaped writing system. That's where the name comes from, cuneus in Latin, which means wedge. And it was developed around 3350 BCE, basically as a tech innovation to help people in Uruk especially keep track of agricultural products as well as the people working within agriculture. And it was remarkably used for over 3,000 years. So it's not just recorded on clay. We also have monumental inscriptions in stone. So palace reliefs, for example, are covered not just in incredible art, but in really stunning, I mean, at least to me, cuneiform inscriptions. But other objects like weapons, figurines and even amulets to protect people against evil forces, preserve cuneiform writing. They tell us about major political and intellectual milestones, but they also tell us about everyday life. And that's the bit I find the most moving. And this is, I think, what makes the sources for the study of Mesopotamia so interesting. You can learn about the birth of a baby or the price of grain, or what a doctor was worried about a recipe for stew lullabies. It's just the breadth of sources for this region is incredible.
- [06:42]
I'm going to skip on to one of our later questions that came in, which was, was writing invented in ancient Mesopotamia? So is this the first form of writing that humanity knows of?
- [06:52]
So I think yes and no. As far as I know, it's the earliest known writing system. But as far as I understand it, writing was possibly developed and or invented elsewhere completely independently of this. I think China and India, for example, are two examples. It's possible that it was also an independent development in Egypt, just, you know, sort of a century after it was developed in Mesopotamia. But it also could be that the idea of writing was borrowed through various networks and then kind of invented anew in Egypt. And this happened around 3350 BCE in Mesopotamia, the development of writing. And it was basically a response to administrative needs of people, scribes and administrators who were trying to keep track of agricultural products in the city of Uruk and then a little bit further north in Jemdet Nasser. And they basically needed a mnemonic device to keep track of things. And we're not talking about sort of 10 or 20 kilos of barley. In one case, I think a beer brewer, so to speak, had to keep track of 137,000 liters of barley. And he was brewing beer from eight different grains. So there was a lot of stuff to keep track of. And they really needed a way to do that. And they began with just simple numerical tablets, and then they eventually expand to include other types of information, and that eventually expands into a full writing system, partly with the aid of sign and word lists that the early scribes made. They sort of knew they had to find a way to disseminate and preserve this writing system in order to make it possible for future generations and for other people to recover and be able to use it. And these, you know, some have argued that these are the earliest dictionaries and some arguments, even the earliest examples of philosophical thought because of the types of things they were listing and the way that they were listing them. But sorry, that was kind of a huge tangent into. Was writing invented in ancient Mesopotamia? I think yes, you can say it's the earliest example, but it was also invented elsewhere independently.
- [09:00]
Well, it's a big question. I think it deserves a decent answer. Picking up on that a bit more. Agrobiodiverse has said that he's confused by the languages that were spoken in the region over time. I'm with you, Agrobiodiverse. I'm confused too. Could you summarize the link linguistic history of Mesopotamia for us?
- [09:16]
Yeah, sure. I mean, it is confusing. And I think one of the sources of confusion is that the way cuneiform gets written about makes it sound like it's a language when actually it's a writing system. Just like Latin script is used to write English and French and German with some variations and some additions and subtractions, so to speak. So cuneiform was a writing system, and the first language it was developed to write is Sumerian, we think. But early scribes expanded the writing system in really creative ways in order to make it possible for signs to reflect more sounds and even more words. And that makes it possible for the writing system to get adapted to write the completely unrelated language of Akkadian a bit later in the third millennium BC so around 2300 BCE. And at that point you have a very early dialect of Akkadian called Old Akkadian, but there are dialects from the 2nd millennium BC so fast forwarding a couple hundred years, and that's the Babylonian and Assyrian dialects of the Akkadian language. Akkadian is a Semitic language. It example Arabic. There's actually a huge overlap in vocabulary. And I remember being sort of semi told off by one of my master's language teachers for not attempting to memorize the Akkadian vocabulary, but just relying on my knowledge of Arabic vocab. So there is quite a lot of overlap in the way the language sounds and a lot of the words that are used. So so far we have Sumerian in the third millennium bc and then Akkadian in the late third and through the second millennium bc. But cuneiform was also adapted to write even more unrelated language. So Hittite, which is an Indo European language, Eblaite, another Semitic language, Elamite, Old Persian, Hurrian and even Ugaritic, where it gets changed into an Alphabet. So the scribes in Uruk reduced the set of symbols and signs and what they stood for to create an Alphabet in the second millennium bce. So the kind of bottom line is cuneiform was a writing system and it was used to record a bunch of languages, primarily in ancient Mesopotamia. We'd be most concerned with Sumerian and Akkadian with its various dialects.
- [11:24]
Wow. We've got a lot of different names of civilizations here. You've said that ancient Mesopotamia is an area and there's civilizations that sort of exist within it. So we've talked a bit about the Sumerians, the Akkadians. Can you briefly timeline the story here? What are the different civilizations, when are they about and how do they intersect with one another?
- [11:41]
Yeah, sure. So we're going to have a lot of overlap in the language terminology, which is both useful and confusing, so I'll try to make it as straightforward as possible. But speaking very roughly, we have the Sumerian. It's not really a civilization as such, in the third millennium BC. So about 3000-2300 BCE, Mesopotamia was home to Sumerian speakers who lived in separate city states. And you even see sort of walls being erected between these city states that speak to some evidence of intercity conflict. They were not unified, as it were, under an emperor or a major king. So it's difficult to talk about a Sumerian civilization, one such civilization. There were very many cities and they shared this language of Sumerian, as well as some cultural common denominators as well. In the 2300s BCE, for about 100 or so, just a little bit over 100 years, we have the rise of the Akkadians, who sort of appear with Sargon the great in 23B 30, I think, BCE. And they bring with them a new language, which is the Semitic language of Akkadian. That cuneiform was adapted to write and arguably becomes the first empire with a footprint that reached all the way to Syria and Turkey, part of Iran in the east. It was a rather huge empire that reached its peak under Sargon's grandson, Naram Sin. So that takes us through to the very end of the third millennium. And when the Akkadians fall around 2100 BCE you see a kind of rebirth of sumeri under the UR3 or the third dynasty of UR3 period. And that's a very short period as well. It's about 100 years. And then from 2000 BCE onwards you see the appearance of the Babylonians and Assyrians, Assyrians in the north of Mesopotamia and Babylonians in the south for the most part, with some fluctuations in kind of empire sizes throughout that millennium and beyond. And within the Babylonians you have some major tribal identities, like the Amorites, famously King Hammurabi, who under whose reign the first complete law collection survives. And then the Kassites from about 1500 BCE onward, but they still sort of assimilate to Babylonian culture. So we can still call it Babylonian civilization. And then moving into the first millennium BCE so from about 1000 BCE onward we still have the Assyrians and Babylonians. But in 539 BCE the Persians conquer the area, Babylon falls to the Persians and they take over, so to speak, most of the region. So there's quite an ebb and flow of different peoples that are in the region across these 3,000 or so years.
- [14:28]
There's a lot to contend with there. Don't worry, listeners, stick with us. We'll keep you on top of all this.
- [14:34]
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- [14:44]
Moody Al Rashid
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- [14:45]
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- [14:58]
Moody Al Rashid
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- [15:04]
So Max Quigley on Instagram asks who were the first rulers of ancient Mesopotamia? I know you've kind of address that, but would it be Sargon or is there another name that we should be conjuring with?
- [15:14]
So I think this is a really interesting question because it raises the question of who was the first king? Where did this idea of a king come from? And it actually dates back to long before Sargon. But we're not really sure how things evolve from a leader of a city to a king where it's kind of an inherited role as opposed to necessarily based on merit. For example, in the early cuneiform texts, there are references to lords. There's a really interesting one from Jamdat Nasser that looks like a bunch of dots and pictures, but it actually tells you the sizes of fields belonging to a lord and the wife of the lord. So we know even in this early period of writing there was some sort of idea of a city leader. But when does that become a king? In the Babylonians own idea of their history, they drafted something that we today call the Sumerian king list that blends mythology and history. And it says that kingship descended to the city of Kish in some traditions, or Eridu in others. Two major intellectual and religious centers in Mesopotamia. And I think that one's interesting because it lists kings from a mythical early time for which there were no sources. They kind of can't know what happened all the way until about 1800 BCE when this document was made. So it begins with legendary figures. Etana is one, he's a king who rode on the back of an eagle to retrieve a plant to help him and his wife have a baby. There's another called Dugalbanda, who is a sort of like flash figure. He could run at superhuman speeds. And then of course, Gilgamesh, who's a little bit better known, maybe made famous more recently in Star Trek episodes, but he supposedly ruled Uruk for 126 years. So these legendary kings rule for impossible periods of time. And it's sort of like they're trying to create an ideology of kingship by assigning it to these incredible superhuman people. But then at some point, the document transitions from this mythical era to a normal era, which lists mortal kings who rule specific cities for realistic time periods, who are also confirmed and or corroborated from other contemporary sources. So I think that document tells us a lot about the first rulers. Arguably, I would say one of the first kings that is potentially a real one is Gilgamesh, as well as being a legendary one that lives on throughout Mesopotamian history and even today. But we can learn a lot about ideas of rulership and also about how people understood their own history. I think it's a really, really interesting window onto how people back then understood their own ancient past and made sense of a past that they couldn't possibly know.
- [17:54]
Let's tackle another big Google question. You've probably answered this already with discussion of the script, but what is ancient Mesopotamia famous for?
- [18:02]
Pretty much anything that you're interested in, you can find a first or a very early articulation of it in ancient Mesopotamia. And Say it's famous for that. So some argue the wheel, which has a slightly contested history. I'm not sure we can definitely say it came from Mesopotamia, but as we talked about writing, I mean, that's a pretty, pretty big thing to be famous for. And then even after that, the early dictionaries, the earliest examples of people trying to record what signs and words mean and organize them into kind of categories and themes. But you know, beyond that, I say it's famous for the earliest epic literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, most famously, which tells the story of King Gilgamesh and his kind of transformation from a absolutely terrible king to one who actually rules with his community in mind. But it's also a myth about anxiety, about death, about love and grief. And it's a sort of sci fi novel in a way because he goes beyond the limits of the known world into a fantasy land where jewels grow on trees and the oldest living man resides who survived the flood. So it's a wonderful example of possibly the earliest literature. There are even been the first war memorials as far as I know. There's a white monument in Telbana, Syria, from about 2500 BCE or mid third millennium BCE. The earliest Pythagorean theorem, not written as such, but numbers that tell us that they were familiar with this theorem a thousand years before Pythagoras lived. The earliest approximation of PI and the earliest math mistakes that I think everyone can probably relate to in some way. I mean, as a historian of science, I think they should be most famous for. I want them to be most famous for their incredible achievements and innovations in the sciences, particularly in astronomy. They used math previously thought to originate in medieval Europe. They developed the zodiac, which we still use to organize the sky into sections to be able to kind of map it as well as organize what we're observing in it. So I think there are so many things that Mesopotamia is and, or could be famous for. Yeah, it's kind of mind blowing how many cool things come from the region.
- [20:21]
Well, let's drill into one of those specific ones. Which question from John Sharman. You've just mentioned it. Was it the source of the Flood story in the Bible?
- [20:28]
Yeah. So I can't speak to the Bible's textual history, but I can tell you about the flood story in Babylonian literature, which as I understand it, has a lot of commonalities with the story that appears in the Bible. So it was first written during what I've called already the Old Babylonian period, which is around 2000-1600 BCE and that myth features a king called Atrakasis. His name means exceeding of wisdom. And he gets a message from a mischievous God called Ea, who disagrees with the other gods, plan to send a deluge to wipe out humanity because they become too loud and annoying effectively. And he's instructed to build a boat and put the seed of all life on earth on it. And there's actually a really moving scene in that epic in that version, that old Babylonian version of that flood story, where he talks about how he's gotten everyone in the town to help him build this boat, basically in a day. And they're having a feast to celebrate, and he gives this speech that uses a bunch of puns that may foreshadow the flood to come. So he talks about how Enlil, the supreme God, will rain cuckoo cakes down and kibtu wheat. But cuckoo is very close to the word kaku, which means weapon in Akkadian. And kibtu is close to kabitu, which means heavy. So he's sort of lying to them and saying all these lovely things will rain down from the heavens. Or is he basically trying to warn people? And then after the feast, he sort of weeps and pukes. He feels so ill that he has to abandon all these people and take this boat, because he's been instructed to do so by this God to ensure the survival of humanity. So I don't know if that much detail is gone into. Into the Bible, but certainly someone had to build a boat and put animals onto it. And then at the end of the storm, which is described in such beautiful poetic terms in the Babylonian myth, as well as in the Gilgamesh epic, there's a tablet that recounts the story from a slightly different perspective. They send out three birds. I think it is a dove. I want to say a swallow, but I can't remember. And then a raven. And to see which one will come back because they can't find lan, and the raven eventually doesn't come back. It's still remarkable that this flood story was written so early on, and then in whatever kind of. With whatever variations, gets retold in a totally different context.
- [22:56]
Seemed like a good time to tackle this question as well. From Sylvia Rose on Instagram, who wants to know, what were the religions practiced in ancient Mesopotam?
- [23:03]
Sure. So some people say it's the religion isn't the right word for it, but I think it's a totally fine way to understand that they worshiped a pantheon of gods or goddesses. They were deities of various forces or phenomena. So there's goddess of war and love, that's Ishtar. And I'm going to focus on the later pantheon because it's the one I'm most familiar with. There are gods of war, plague and death, but like not the death that comes at the end of a long life inflicted death. There's a sky God, Anu, a goddess of writing and a God of writing. There's a goddess of healing, Gula, whose attribute animal is a dog. I'm a huge Gula fan because I love dogs. But there are also city gods and personal gods that you could call upon for various misfortunes to kind of come to your aid. They were housed in temples. Interestingly, the word for house and temple are the same in some periods. And what's interesting to me, and again betraying my bias more than anything else, is that these deities formed part of how people explained natural phenomena. They explained the world with reference to them as well as to other, what we call supernatural phenomena like ghosts, demons, magic. And they were responsible for various illnesses and misfortune. But they were also responsible for writing messages to humanity to interpret in the sky and on earth. So for example, an eclipse was a message from the deities about events to come in the human sphere. So religion was kind of, it kind of of permeated everything. It permeated how they understood the world as well as it having some really specific categories like a goddess of love and war or a supreme deity to rule the whole pantheon.
- [24:41]
Excellent. Now let's move back from the supernatural to the natural. Armchair tracker wants to know what came first, cities or large scale agriculture. And I know this isn't a topic that is close to your research, but maybe you can give us a sense of this.
- [24:54]
In Mesopotamia they sort of pop up at the same time, cities and agriculture, because they in many ways depend on each other. So if we go back to the early history of Uruk and the development of writing, the conditions that led to the development of writing are essentially, really, really successful. Agriculture, largely in that region, relying on irrigation because the weather basically oscillated between boiling hot and torrential rain. They couldn't rely on rain fed agriculture, as was the case further north. They had to figure out a way to harness water. So cities and towns develop around water, water features, irrigation works and the resources that those enable. And in some kind of. This is like a really rough sketch that has a lot more nuance. But these agricultural surpluses, so there being enough food to basically feed everyone, plus some more freed people up to do Other things, which is a kind of precursor to social stratification and eventually the rise of institutions we associate with cities, like governments, armies, laws, et cetera. So essentially, agriculture, as I understand it, brought people together into these cities, and people being together in this way led to the developments that we associate with early urbanism. But I think there's a lot of new research on this topic and better understandings of climate in Mesopotamia in the ancient world, that might move the kind of timeline a little bit further into the past and possibly even away from Uruk work. Waiting to see more of that published right now.
- [26:20]
Urbanism for many people, goes hand in hand with civilization. So let's tackle a question from Roberta Alessandra, who asks, is Mesopotamia still considered the cradle of civilization? And actually, I'm going to drop in a question from Hugh Berkmayer alongside it, which is, why is Mesopotamia so overlooked in favor of ancient Egypt? Because I wonder if perhaps your answer might encompass both those points.
- [26:42]
Sure. So I think in some ways it can be considered the cradle of civilization. I think it depends on what you understand civilization to be. So, as you said, maybe early urbanism, for example, and the institutions that we associate with early cities, maybe writing or laws, science and medicine, maybe those also factor into the definition. So I think in that sense, there is all this and more very early on in Mesopotamia. So we can call it the cradle of civilization. In that sense, it has been overlooked, I think, for different reasons. I think partly it's a bit of a kind of PR failure on the part of scholars like me, but maybe also the timing of a lot of these discoveries. So, for example, in the 1920s, the tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered around the same time as the cemetery at Ur. So even though there are some incredible finds from the royal cemetery of Ur, they were kind of overshadowed, possibly by the finds from ancient Egypt. That's maybe also down to the fact that the climate in Egypt preserved things way better than the kind of muddy, wet climate in Mesopotamia. But possibly another way to answer this is looking at the history of how history on Mesopotamia has been done. The early history is really bound up with imperialism and colonialism. So, for example, Sir Henry Rawlinson, one of the earliest Assyriologists, I think some even call him the father of assyriology, who played a big role in the decipherment of cuneiform, was a British East India Company army officer. I think the early context for assyriology affects how people approach the subject, their biases and knowledge about the region's past. As a result, but also assyriology very early on was more or less a tool to reveal the Bible. I think Woolley, C. Leonard Woolley, who was the lead archaeologist at Ur at the time that the Royal Cemetery was uncovered and other incredible discoveries. I think one of the things he said was that he was going to shed light on the Old Testament. So this is another set of biases to consider that may have affected how knowledge about Mesopotamia was received. But I think decades of hard work by assyriologists, now the field's finally getting the treatment it deserves. And hopefully with some more outreach, maybe more airtime, more people can learn about it and we can help address that.
- [29:01]
Well, I imagine a few people read your book and they might be encouraged to take up the subject. Tell me this big question on Google. Did they have slaves in ancient Mesopotamia?
- [29:13]
So, yes, they did have slaves. It's not as clear cut with enslaved person versus non enslaved person as it was, say, before the Civil War in America, which is not me trying to condone or explain it away. It's just a nuance that kind of deserves closer attention to help us reconstruct what these people's lives were like, as well as the economic context that made that possible. There were a variety of professions that an enslaved person found themselves doing, I think is a better way to say it, because it wasn't by choice. Some even were sent off to be trained, like for example, in the Neo Babylonian period, so the 600s BCE and a little bit beyond that, there were slaves trained as seal cutters, which there are these really tiny cylinder seals that are about the size of batteries, small batteries. And I can't even imagine the amount of work that goes into carving those and the teeny tiny cuneiform signs that are on those. But they were also trained as scribes, bakers, and more. Also in the Neo Babylonian period, there was a woman called Ishunatu who was a slave of a major wealthy family in Babylon, and she ran a pub in the city of Kish. She was responsible for everything from sourcing all of the ingredients to make stuff for the pub, but also the furniture and running it, paying rent, et cetera. So she had a host of responsibilities that maybe we don't associate with an enslaved person in our kind of more popular understandings of the history of this subject. But whatever their careers looked like they were property, they were considered property and had little mobility to change their lives. For example, law collections specify really strict punishment for someone who aids a fugitive slave because it's basically tantamount amount to theft, and I think in some there's even capital punishment for that. But slaves could buy their freedom or be released from their status by owners. For example, there was a woman named Gudaga around 2100 or 2000 BCE who purchased the freedom of her children for 20 shekels. So there are stories like that that I find really moving that we can know about people from kind of both ends of the economic spectrum, from kings to a woman named Godaga who went out of her way to earn this money to buy her children's freedom.
- [31:28]
Now, given that you've just given us some personal stories, the answer to this next question is yes. But a popular Google question is, do we know much about individual people in ancient Mesopotamia?
- [31:38]
So much. So much. That's what I think is so amazing about cuneiform, is that it was used to record so many things. I mean, there are lots of things that it was not used to record. So there is a lot of stuff that's missing from our history. But it was used to record almost everything within restricted contexts. So countless stories survive from ancient Mesopotamia, including people's names, moments in their lives, and even sometimes things like their horoscopes, which I think is super cool. So what the sky looked like on a particular night or year, I'll just give a couple of examples, if that's okay, because I think there are some really cool ones. During the old Assyrian period, so 2000 to 1600 BCE, in the north of Mesopotamia in Assyria, there was a huge international trade network that kind of centered around Ashur and then Kanesh in what is now Turkey. And basically, women in Ashur would weave these textiles, which took, like six months to make. This isn't like knitting a scarf, although I feel like if I had to knit a scarf, it would take way more than six months. But Lamassi knew what she was doing. She would do everything from sourcing the wool all the way up to completing an entire textile, send it to her husband, who was based in Kanish, which is about five weeks away on a donkey, and he would sell them in the marketplace there and send the money back. So this woman had seven children. She had to weave these textiles. She had to make sure everybody was fed. She also had to make her kids clothes. And there are letters between her and her husband in which she complains about basically, the juggler, the working mom juggle, 4,000 years ago. And there's even one where she basically begs him to come home. And I think that that's so moving that we can get that window onto her life. If we go a little further north to what is now Syria, in the city of Emmar, there are a bunch of footprints pressed into clay. And they're footprints of a couple of toddlers and another baby whose footprint hasn't survived. And these are children who were sold into slavery by their parents in order to ensure their children's survival. Two of the twins whose footprints survive. They're about the size of a deck of cards. BAAL Belu and Ishmat Dagan are their names. And their mom is called Kue. And we know about this episode, this I can't even imagine as a mom like, tragic episode, of their having to be sold into slavery. But we also know what happened to them. So from about 10 years later, there are documents from a diviner's library where there was basically a school teaching people how to be able to read signs and tell the future, which was a fairly systematic thing in ancient Mesopotamia. And we know that these two twins, BAAL Belu and Ishmat Dagan, went on to become scribes and scholars. So it's so interesting that we can follow the thread even of two enslaved people from babyhood to adulthood. I think it's very moving. And these people weren't royalty, but we still get a glimpse. It's just a glimpse, but it's still something. And it's something really personal. And that's one of the things I really love about cuneiform.
- [34:40]
Those are some great personal stories. Let's get even more personal and tackle the big question. Did they have good toilets and sewerage systems?
- [34:49]
Another amazing question. They did. And they even begin to appear in the early third millennium. So. So that's quite early, if you think about it, for someone to be thinking, okay, we need a drainage system and we need to put this stuff somewhere. I know more about the toilets in Ur than anywhere else. It's kind of a weird sentence to say out loud. It was basically. It could be just a hole in the ground, but sometimes it was like a brick square toilet above, like a drain opening that led into a cylindrical shaft that was dug into the ground. And this shaft was padded with pottery rings that were perforated and spaced in a really specific way to allow liquid to seep into the ground. So that's how the number ones were dealt with, number twos. In some cases, there was drainage where you could just manually put some water into this shaft and it would drain into a larger network. But in some cases, you were responsible for dealing with your own number twos. So, yes, they did have toilets. Depending on where you lived and when and whether there was drainage available in that particular part of the city or era, you sometimes had to deal with your own mess. But it's an amazing question.
- [35:57]
It's important to tackle the big issues in these conversations. Another big issue is, did they have pets?
- [36:04]
Yeah, I love this question. I have two dogs. I have a Labrador and a Ridgeback who looks like Scooby Doo and acts a bit like Scooby Doo as well. And so I know mostly about dogs, as far as I know, I don't think there is much to say about cats, but they definitely had dogs who were their faithful companions, as they are to us today. They helped with security, maybe even sanitation, healing, which I love. So I mentioned one of the goddesses of healing, Gula, and at her feet, in most of her iconography, is a dog just sort of lying there, looking like he's at attention or she's at attention. They even went to war in some eras. And there are records of provisions for dogs of war. There are some really lovely proverbs about dogs that are so relatable. So, for example, there's one that describes a dog. Dog knowing how to pick something up but not put it down. I think anyone with a dog is familiar with that challenge. There's another lovely one about fate being like a dog always at your heels. I know that is a bit sinister, but I like to think about it. If you know fate is a dog, then it can't be that bad. And then a lovely one about an older dog that gets played with, turns into a puppy. So they must have been a part of the fabric of everyday life. In some cases, they even receive special burials. So there's a temple to the healing goddess Gula, I think, in the city of Isin, and there are just over 30 burials of dogs of all kinds of ages under the ramp leading up to this temple. So they must have had some sort of important role in healing or in ritual related to healing. There was also a specialist field of medicine for veterinarians, not just for dogs, but for larger animals like cattle as well. And physicians for people trained in this. So there's a physician named Kitzir Ashur who is part of a reputable family of exorcists, which is a really abominable translation, but we don't have a better one for a type of medical professional in ancient Mesopotamia who dealt with the kind of remote supernatural causes of illness and misfortune. He's known from a library in Ashur, which is really in the Assyrian heartland and once even the capital of ancient Assyria. And he trained in a veterinary context before moving on to physicians. So there is lots of really kind of evidence from all kinds of angles about dogs and by extension pets in ancient Mesopotamia, which I think is really lovely that we can get that window onto it.
- [38:25]
Did I hear you right? There's a career path of a veterinarian exorcist, sort of.
- [38:30]
So I don't know much about how veterinarians were trained, except as that training applied to physicians for people. So he was being trained as a medical exorcist and he went through this kind of veterinary tract first before, I think it was just to familiarize himself with the human body without having to do surgeries or desecrate in a way, the bodies of the dead, which was not done in ancient Mesopotamia. Physicians knew about the human body by analogy to animals as well as through things like injuries and war injuries. But they never dissected people after they had died.
- [39:06]
Do they have mummies in ancient Mesopotamia?
- [39:09]
Not exactly. There is evidence that they carried out some basic embalming for certain bodies. So for example, if we go back to the royal cemetery at Ur, there are obviously the graves that it gets its name for. There are 16 royal tombs. There are also thousands of non royal tombs. So I'm not sure why we still call it the royal cemetery. And some of these show evidence of embalming as well as the attendance that followed them into the afterlife. So it's quite grisly and actually very sad if you think about it. But tens of people were killed to accompany some of the more elite graves into the afterlife. In one room that's C. Leonard Woolley, the excavator at work, called the Great death pit, had 74 people. And a study was done on the only, as far as I know, the only skull that was complete enough to. To do a study on. And it seems like the person met their end through blunt force trauma with a weapon, with a hafted weapon, I guess, sort of like a hammer and a dagger mixed together. But these bodies were partly embalmed as well as the bodies of the people in the royal tombs. But really basic. It wasn't like in ancient Egypt where they removed the internal organs and stored them in separate jars. It was really just the kind of whatever they needed to do to make it as straightforward as possible.
- [40:26]
To wrap up this question. From the way you've talked about it, this isn't the right framing of the question, but this is what People type into Google, why did Mesopotamia fail?
- [40:36]
Yeah, I mean, I agree. I don't think it did, really. I think different cultures and empires displaced others. But that really happens in any region. We can talk about maybe the death of cuneiform script, which linked a lot of these civilizations to each other. The very last dateable cuneiform tablet that we know of and that we can date is from 79 to 80 CE. So we're now beyond the BCE era, and it's also from Uruk, which is a coincidence I absolutely love. So, in a way, yes, cuneiform stops getting used, but the region continues to be a center of empires and learning through to the Islamic period and beyond. It is an interesting question, though. It's an interesting to think about where the boundaries are between all these eras.
- [41:22]
Absolutely right. Let's finish with a question from Tom Drew, who wants to know what sites still remain of the ancient civilizations. And bearing in mind the geography you've described, these are places which have troubled recent histories quite often. Has that impacted on the survival of these archaeological sites?
- [41:39]
In some cases, yes. I mean, Daesh, for example, around 2014 and in 2014 targeted a lot of ancient sites, I think, as part of their attempt to create a power vacuum as well as a kind of identity vacuum that they could then fill. Didn't work even in the slightest, but they did quite a lot of damage. Not as much as I think was initially thought, thankfully, as well as looting museums and destroying objects in museums. So certainly there was heritage destruction in the region, but there are still quite a lot of ruins of the major settlements and cities that remain, many of which can be visited today in parts of Iraq and even further afield. So, for example, there's an ancient settlement in Saudi Arabia, northwestern Saudi Arabia, called Tayma, where there was a Babylonian palace for the last independent Babylonian king, Nabonidus, excavated by a joint Saudi German team. So that's very visible as well. And I think if we think about what they built these sites out of, it was mostly mud brick, but within the mud, they mixed some organic matter, like straw. Unfortunately, that means that when the straw degraded, the bricks fell apart. So there are a lot of conservation challenges, and there have been attempts to address those by, for example, making mud bricks following the instructions that we have in cuneiform tablets, which is super cool in order to shore up these ruins. But I think one thing I will say is a place you can't go to because we don't know where it is, even though it's in tons and tons of written records is Agad, which is the capital of Sargon's empire, arguably the first empire in the region in the 2,330s BCE. We still haven't found it, but other than that, there are many places to visit, lots of sites that remain, and lots of technologies we can use to survey the sites that we can't access for one reason or another.
- [43:26]
So where is Agad? Where is it likely to be? Are people actively looking for it?
- [43:29]
Possibly around Baghdad. It may not have been found yet because there's a sprawling metropolis built on top of it, which would just speak to many millennia of occupation. But yeah, I'm not sure. I guess we'll hopefully find out sometime in the future where this wonderful capital was of the arguably first empire.
- [43:48]
Okay, well, we'll have you back on if anybody ever really finds it. Right. To conclude, and in the spirit of the earlier point about Mesopotamia not being overlooked, can you tell the listeners three things that everyone should know about ancient Mesopotamia?
- [44:03]
I think the first thing to know about ancient Mesopotamia is that it was the home of the cuneiform writing system, which preserves so much from the ancient world in the words of the people who lived there, and sort of related to that. The second thing is that we can know so much about its people, like Lamasi and the twins from Amar and so many countless others, and even their pets. I mean, everything about every aspect of life, really. And then the third thing I would say is its incredible legacy. Primarily I'm thinking of the sciences because I'm super biased in favor of the history of science, but things like advances in math, mathematical astronomy, and the development of the zodiac, I just want people to know that they did incredible things worth remembering as such.
- [44:49]
David Musgrove
That was Moody Al Rashid. Her book Between Two Rivers, Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History, is published in the UK at the end of February 2025, and later in 2025 in the US. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer, AR.