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Moudhy Al-Rashid, "Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History" (W.W. Norton, 2025)
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- [00:04]
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- [00:59]
Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBM Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:06]
Nicholas Gordon
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in around and about the Asia Pacific region. In 1923, archaeologist Leonard Woolley stumbled upon a room that dated back to 530 B.C. the time of the Babylonians. Oddly, the room was filled with artifacts that were thousands of years older. A clay drum led Woolley to speculate that he might have stumbled across the world's first museum. Whether that was really the case is still somewhat unknown. But this room is the inspiration behind Moody Al Rashid's book, Between Two Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History, which dives into the many different aspects of life society across the many states that governed Mesopotamia. Moody Al Rashid is an honorary fellow at the University of Oxford's Wolfson College, where she specializes in the languages and history of ancient Mesopotamia. So, Moody, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about your book Between Two Rivers. This whole book is inspired by kind of one archaeological discovery, and I wonder if you might talk a little bit about what was it that people found that kind of started you on the journey of writing this book?
- [03:19]
Moody Al-Rashid
Yeah. Thank you for having me. So Between Two Rivers, it tells us a history of Mesopotamia through objects found in what early excavators thought was an ancient museum in the city of Ur. So if we just try to situate ourselves for a second geographically, Ur is in what is now southern Iraq, and we call it the area Ancient Mesopotamia to refer to the place between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, covered by Iraq, Syria, and parts of Turkey as well. And there in urban. A bunch of objects were found by these early excavators in the 1920s in an archaeological layer that belonged to the 500s B.C. so the 6th century BCE. And they found these in a room in a palace of a princess named Enigaldi Nanna. But the objects that they found from what they describe as a kind of intact or unbroken brick floor come from much earlier era. So that detail is important because it suggests that these artifacts were collected during the 500s BCE and put on that intact floor. And they didn't just kind of bubble up from earlier periods that are preserved in deeper layers of archaeology. So these included, for example, a really ornate, beautiful title deed, effectively sometimes called a boundary stone that looks a bit like a tombstone, which is currently in the Iraq museum from the 1100s BCE. An inscribed clay cone, which looks a bit frankly like an ice cream cone, but that's covered in cuneiform of a ruler named Qudmabuk from the 1800s BCE. A fragment of a statue, just a shoulder of a statue of a king named Shulgi who ruled around 2000 BCE. The brick of another king, sort of indirectly. They found a brick of another king called Amar Suan from the same era as Shulki, and then a mace head. So part of a weapon, really quite a devastating weapon of war that had no Inscription, but that excavators thought looked older than the rest of the stuff. But then they also found a small cylindrical tablet that they called the key to unlocking the kind of mystery of this collection of much older things from a much later era. And it was basically a description of a brick, of that brick of Amar Suan, who ruled around 2000 BCE, and the circumstances of its discovery by a governor of Ur named Sin Balasu Iqbi. And it ends with a line that is open to interpretation, I should say, that made these excavators think it was the earliest known museum label. So that line says that the brick was there for display. I think the Akkadian, the word that's translated as display is tamartu, which can mean other things. So the lead excavator, his name was C. Leonard Woolley. He concluded from that object, from that key, that cylindrical clay tablet, that this was an ancient museum. So the book opens with this museum, which I sort of, you know, I'm using air quotes as I say it, because it's not completely clear actually what it was. And I do get into that. And I've also submitted an academic article about it because apparently it was too boring to get really into in the book. And each of the objects, I feel, offers a really interesting way into some aspect of life in Mesopotamia. So, like, the macehead can tell us about violence and war and how people made sense of that, really. The statue of the king can tell us about leadership. And any Galdi Nanna herself, the woman who ostensibly lived in that palace, can offer a window onto the lives of women. So it's an interesting discovery because it is evocative. What are those older things doing in that room? But also because of how much I think it can tell us about life in ancient Mesopotamia from just one single room.
- [07:04]
Nicholas Gordon
So, you know, maybe we can talk, maybe somebody start at the end. But can I talk about who was kind of Princess Enigaldi Nana, you know, the person whose palace ostensibly had what may have been the world's first museum?
- [07:17]
Moody Al-Rashid
Yeah, I think to understand Anni Galdi Nanna or what, very little we know about her, actually, we have to understand her place, what she was doing in the city of Ur. So Ur was quite a bustling, important city on what is now the Arabian or Persian Gulf, which at the time stretched further inland than it does today. So Ur is quite a bit inland now, but at the time it would have been coastal, and it was a fairly important city for lots of reasons and partly because it was the center for the worship of the moon God Sin. His name is Sin in Akkadian and Nana in Sumerian. So Akkadian and Sumerian being the two primary languages recorded in the cuneiform writing system from this region. And the moon is important for lots of reasons and it has been to many cultures throughout history and still is. So for example, it was a timekeeping tool for the months as well as even for the hours over the course of a night, and helps create the calendar as well as other ways of organizing the sky to make other astronomical leaps. So the moon is really important. And a major part of the city of Ur is this vast ziggurat complex. So Ziggurat is just a stepped temple, a stepped pyramid, and the buildings related to worship that were around it, including the home or palace of the high priestess and Igaldinana in the later periods of the moon God. So one interesting element of the moon God's worship was that it, it was led by a woman, it was led by a high priestess who would sort of be his earthly wife in a way. So a kind of representation of a divine wife. And she was such an important role, she had to be taken from royalty and was always chosen by an omen. So kings would look, well, their scholars would look to the skies or look to the insides of sheep for a sign from the moon God saying, I need a priestess. It has to be this particular daughter. And this practice goes all the way Back to the third millennium BCE. Keeping in mind that we're in the 500s with Enigaldi Nana. This is an over 2000 year old practice. The earliest named princess that I'm aware of, there might be a slightly earlier one, but is Enheduanna and she lived around 2330 BC. Interestingly, also the first named author in history. So Enigaldina was one in a long line of these priestesses. She was a daughter of the last independent Babylonian king named Nabonidus, who's well known in the sources for his interest in, well, the sort of, we call it archaeology or his interest in the past. Maybe a little bit anachronistic, but still informative. And his interest in the past is part of what inspired these early excavators to call the collection of stuff of older stuff in any Galdinana's palace a museum. But unfortunately that's sort of all we know about her. We know she was a high priestess, she may have collected older things and displayed them or not displayed them. We don't even know her birth name, we just know the name Enigaldinana, which she was given when she was consecrated as a high priestess to the moon God. But presumably she had a sort of Babylonian name at birth. We also don't know what happened to her after Babylon fell to the Persians in 539 BCE. So we don't know that much directly, but we can kind of infer from what we know about this role of the high priestess, which was hugely important for lots of different reasons.
- [10:39]
Nicholas Gordon
So I want to ask kind of about writing and how Mesopotamian writing. I mean, because this, this potential museum label was in cuneiform. You know, how did this writing style actually work? You know, what was the grammar? Like, what was the actual technique of writing and you know, in miscellaneous society, like who actually knew how to, how to read and write? Like what parts of society were literate, basically?
- [11:07]
Moody Al-Rashid
Yeah, a great question. And you know, it has such an interesting answer and I'll, I'll try to keep it brief because it's literally my favorite subject is to talk about cuneiform. It' such an interesting writing system, but the kind of highlights real is that it was a writing system. So sort of like how Latin script or the letters we use to write English also get used to write French and German. Cuneiform was similarly a writing system that was used to write different languages, but it wasn't an Alphabet. So each sign could stand for a whole word, it could stand for a syllable, it could stand for a word and a syllable or many words. It's a really interesting multi layered writing system. And it was, you know, we're very grateful for this. But it was required primarily in clay because it was impressed. It was pushed with a reed stylus into clay. And that's how it gets its kind of telltale triangles or wedges, which is where the word comes from in English. So it's, I'm gonna get pronounce it wrong because I don't know any Latin is. The only Latin I know is cuneus, means wedge in Latin. And in the Arabic word for cuneiform is mismati, which comes from nails, like, you know, hammer and nail prints and the Akkadian words. So Akkadian was one of the languages that cuneiform was used to write. They called it sataku, which means triangle. So it's funny that in English and Arabic and in Akkadian, we all kind of use the visuals of the writing system to describe it. So the two main languages which I've alluded to already that it was used for were Akkadian and Sumerian, which are two completely unrelated languages. Akkadian is a Semitic language, so related to Arabic, and Sumerian is what we call a language isolate. We so far have been unable to identify language that it's related to, but they were often mastered together, especially by professional scribes and scholars, because it was really hard to learn cuneiform for any language without understanding how it was used for Sumerian. I won't get into that, but I do explain it in my book by using emojis, which I think are actually very Sumerian in a way. So it was developed around 3350 BCE and used for over 3000 years, which means, if you sort of think about it temporarily, over half of human written history is in cuneiform. And the sources are truly remarkable. They preserve major political or intellectual milestones, like the earliest historical records. There are milestones in science like the development of the zodiac, epic works of literature, like the very famous story of Gilgamesh, a legendary king who seeks eternal life after the death of his lover and companion, Enkidu, and finds answers to questions he didn't think to ask instead. But I think even more remarkable is that the sources tell us about people's everyday lives, not just these, like major milestones and figures. They preserve receipts for like, onions and garlic and flour, dictionaries that helped people learn, including really like kids in school, lullabies that people sang to their babies, letters between wives and husbands or siblings, moments that sometimes feel like modern email exchanges. Like, I came across one letter where the writer is basically saying, why do I wag my tail like a dog for you? I've written to you three times and you still haven't replied to me. So it's like being left unread, but in clay. And in terms of who got to learn this writing system, it was largely quite a narrow subset of people. It was people who were going to train, be professional scribes or scholars. But in some periods it also kind of expands. The kind of literate segment of society expands to include merchants or business people who needed to learn like a basic repertoire of signs to be able to send each other letters or keep their own records so they don't have to pay a scribe every time they want to send a letter to someone or make a record of a transaction. So it's, it's the, the, the second part of your question, which is who, who got to learn this writing system? The answer changes depending on the period and the place, but primarily it was just those who were going to become professional Scribes who bothered or who were bothered to teach this writing system.
- [15:27]
Nicholas Gordon
I was looking something up as you were talking, because I remember. I mean, isn't there that famous example of cuneiform, which is basically someone complaining about the type of copper that he bought and it was. How it was really bad, which I know is popular on the Internet as a meme. Basically, when people are annoyed about this quality of something, they refer back to this cuneiform tablet.
- [15:53]
Moody Al-Rashid
Yeah. And I think it's one. I love that it's become a meme. Even though he was actually. I forget his name now. I can't believe I'm forgetting his name, but he was quite a good copper merchant. But he's sadly remembered for this one customer service complaint. But what I love about that is that. That they had a kind of equivalent to, like a Yelp review that was zero stars. There are kind of parallels to all sorts of things that we try to communicate today are preserved in the cuneiform writing system. And it really shows for me that not that much has changed. I mean, a lot has changed, obviously. And, you know, every culture and every historical period has its own unique characteristics that make it fascinating, but the kind of humanity of it, the things we worry about, the things we complain about, the things we love, the, you know, the people we love, hasn't really changed all that much over the course of thousands of years.
- [16:44]
Nicholas Gordon
You know, one thing that struck me in kind of reading about the possibility that what they found in the palace of Princess Enigaldi Nanna might have been a museum. I mean, one thing that struck me was that, like, there really was a lot of time between the different, you know, permutations of Mesopotamian empires. You know, you know, the Akkadians and the Babylonians, even before that, the Sumerians, mean, like, thousands of, like a thousand years would separate these different. These different groups. And. And there's a sense, I think, when we kind of think about society, like, kind of in. In those times, it all kind of gets compressed. And doesn't we always forget that actually, like, there were thousands of years between these different forms of empire? So, you know, how different were these different permutations of Mesopotamia? But what happened when it went from Sumerians and the Akkadians to the Babylonians? How did things change?
- [17:39]
Moody Al-Rashid
It's a great question. Before I answer it, I'm going to kind of share one of my favorite cuneiform facts, just to kind of drive home the point that you just made about the thousands of years. So the earliest Examples of cuneiform, which are a sort of proto cuneiform, are from around 3350 BCE, and they're from the city of Uruk, which is not too far from Ur. And the last datable, like securely dateable cuneiform tablet also comes from Uruk, and it's from 79 to 80 CE. So there is almost 3,500 years between that last tablet and the very first one, which is a greater period of time than there is between that last tablet and us. So the kind of. The vast. Such a vast time period covered by, like you said, the different empires and cultures and civilizations that lived in this region and this shared writing system. So if we just quickly list some of the main ones so that we have a kind of terminological anchor for this. There were the Sumerians, who were very early. Potentially the earliest written records were made by the Sumerians. And that's again around 3000 BCE, just to kind of simplify it. And then around 2300 BCE we get the Akkadians, and around 2000 BCE there are the Babylonians and Assyrians. Assyrians, Babylonians in the south, Assyrians in the north. And then much later, from around 500 BCE onward, there are the Persians, the Greeks, and some others. So by the way, for anyone who wants to learn about the Assyrians specifically, I highly recommend Eckhart Fromm's book, Assyria. I think the subtitle is Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire. It's really excellent and accessible, full of interesting details that I didn't even know as a specialist. Just wonderful book. But. But anyway, so we're talking about different cultures, for the most part, different collections and styles of art, approaches to statehood, you know, burial rites, literature, and in some cases, you know, even totally different languages, as with Sumerian and Akkadian, which gets used by the Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians. But there are some common denominators. So one of them is they all used cuneiform, and they all had these kind of set disciplines of things that they wrote down in cuneiform, like lists of words and bilingual dictionaries, specific poems or types of poetry and hymns, later specific types of scientific texts. So there was some scholarly and intellectual overlap. In some cases, they shared a language, like the Babylonians and Assyrians. They had these different dialects of the Akkadian language. And there were also some common ways of understanding things like the role of the king and the expectations of the king vis a vis his people. So the king Wasn't just there divine right. The king had to continually justify his right to rule effectively by fulfilling certain criteria like that he looks after the most vulnerable in society, often referred to simply as the orphan and the widow, that he dispenses justice, that he protects the borders and protects against chaos, that sort of thing. But again, these are still unique cultures with unique ways of doing things. And even there's even variation from city to city within empires. So I think the very kind of not so informative answer is that there are both similarities and differences. But the thing that blows my mind is just the sheer number of years that we have sources for all the people that lived in this region.
- [21:11]
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- [22:19]
Nicholas Gordon
You know, I mean, sticking on the writing point, I mean your book talks about kind of the. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is now seen as this very important work in kind of global literary history. I will note I too have watched the Star Trek episode Dharmak. I too, you know, you know, Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk, you know, so I too have watched that episode where the Epic of Gilgamesh plays a part. But you know, what makes this story kind of so important in literary history? Why does it still kind of have that staying power today?
- [22:56]
Moody Al-Rashid
Yeah. So funnily enough, I had to learn Gilgamesh in the original cuneiform as one of the requirements of my master's. So for a long time I really didn't like the story because I just associated it with, like, exam stress and being forced to do stuff I didn't really want to do because my interests were medical texts and astronomical texts. But revisiting it years later, I realized really just what a powerful story it is. So, very roughly, it traces the transformation of this legendary king named Gilgamesh of the city of Uruk, from a tyrant who forced his people to build a nearly 10k long wall, which is a real wall, although we don't know who built it. To this king who ruled with care over his community, he did a lot of other stuff that was even worse than that, but that's the kind of example that I'll give. And integral to that transformation was his meeting with a man called Enkidu, a wild man who is described as having been born in silence in the wilderness. In other words, not born to a mother in childbirth with the screams that go along with it, but just kind of popping out in the wilderness as a creation of direct creation of the gods sent to be Gilgamesh's match. Now Gilgamesh ends up loving Enkidu, described as he loves him like a bride, and when he's killed, he's so devastated and so anxious about mortality that he goes on this impossible quest to find the key to immortality. And to do this, he has to journey beyond the limits of the known world. So it's, in a way, it's also like a sci fi story, because the world he finds beyond the borders is a really fantastical world. And he does this to find one of the survivors of the great flood, the bitter biblical flood, so to speak, that is much earlier than the Bible that nearly wiped out all life on Earth. And the survivor, whose name is Uttanapisti, he imparts other wisdom that Gilgamesh wasn't expecting. So most importantly, I think he helps Gilgamesh realize that his own individual immortality is impossible and actually kind of irrelevant. But rather, it's the survival of his community of civilization that matters, which is sort of like, I don't know, literary articulation of survival of the fittest. I think it's like you want to want the species to survive, the genetics to survive, not necessarily each individual within it to survive, but I think beyond that, the story deals with so many themes that we still grapple with. Love, loss, processing, grief, like the stages of grief, really anxiety about death and really like, what's the point of it all? And there's a line from the very end which I didn't really appreciate the first time, or maybe the first 10 times even that I read it. But basically, Uttanapisti is trying to explain to Gilgamesh that eternal life is not the answer to the question of how to deal with grief, and that he's wasting his life in search of answers to this question, but rather living your life in a way that meaningfully serves others is the answer. And that idea that human life is collective and not individual and that that is eternal life, to me, that's a really moving lesson about how to live and how to appreciate and use this chance we have have on this planet, which is really nothing but the blink of an eye in the Earth's age. It's an opportunity, really, not to be squandered. And I think that's one of the things that makes it such an enduring, meaningful, and beautiful work of literature from such a long time ago.
- [26:23]
Nicholas Gordon
So you mentioned at the kind of very beginning of your answer that you would much rather want to focus on medical texts than the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is a great segue to my next question, which is, you know, how well did these societies kind of understand the world around them? I mean, how much, you know, quote unquote, science, did they do?
- [26:41]
Moody Al-Rashid
Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons I love the medical text so much, so they had these. They have thousands of texts that. And these are all, again, in clay, written in cuneiform, that describe all kinds of medical problems, from feeling depressed, not with a, With a lowercase D, not a capital D, to, you know, urinary tract infections and eye diseases and also sorts of things that we still deal with today. And I think that's what was so interesting to me about medicine, is that it's the same domain of inquiry, let's say that it's the same human body. We haven't changed, notably since 5,000, 4,000 years ago, but their interpretation of everything is completely different. And I find that so interesting. And I think that really comes out in astronomy, actually. It really illustrates how this idea of interpreting signs, signs on the body, signs in the world around you as messages from the gods, but in a really systematic way that does make it scientific. So one reason I love astronomy as well is that if you try to imagine the night sky thousands of years ago without light pollution, there were probably like 2000 visible stars. I don't know how one would even begin to count that, but it's in the thousands, I imagine. And I actually find it really hard to understand how people began to notice that a handful of these dots moved and maybe even that they didn't twinkle. And that's one thing that made them different. And these would have been the visible planets. And they also noticed that the majority of the dots they moved together as a fixed backdrop. So there's something different and there's a different timing to how things moved. And at some point, not necessarily even in someone's lifetime, one of the moving dots on one of the planets returned to the same place in the sky on the same Babylonian calendar date. So for example, for the planet Jupiter, this takes over 70 and sometimes over 80 years in Babylonian calculations of time. So it has to be a kind of multi generational enterprise. And I find that really mind blowing. It's an effort at empirical observation, mistake making, course correcting and then committing a kind of set pattern to writing that these people did over the course of multiple generations. And at first the records of what they saw in the sky, like the moon and the planets, took the form of omens which are basically like if then statements. If there is an eclipse, then the king will die. And these start to get written down after about 2000 BCE so really early some earlier examples or references. So things in the night sky were understood as messages from the gods about events to come so that people like kings could make decisions accordingly. So the whole thing begins as an effort to make sense of divine signs. But the way they get used, the way these omens get used and the way they get collected into these really long textbooks. So one of them, which is called Enuma anu Enlil, is 70 tablets long. So if you think about 70 clay tablets that basically have to be kept together as a book and they're are almost 70,000 omens collected in this almost 70,000 if then statements beginning with an observation of something in the sky and ending with a prediction. So in the courts of Neo Assyrian kings, for example, there are lots of sources that show how the astronomers used these omens. They would, you know, observe where Mars is in the sky and say, well it means XYZ politically or predicting whether an eclipse is about to happen so that they can tell the king, okay, you need to go into hiding cause this is a bad sign for your safety. And if we move further south to Babylonia, they're keeping from around 650 BCE these really kind of detailed what we call astronomical diaries. So records of nightly observation of stuff going on in the sky as well, as things on Earth. And there are some really incredible moments preserved in these, like the appearance of Halley's Comet in 164 BCE and even the death of Alexander the Great. And then finally, around 500 BCE, the Babylonians developed the zodiac, which helped some take astronomy into the realm of mathematics because it completely revolutionizes how the sky is organized. So this barely scratches the surface, but we basically see this trajectory from, you know, interpreting phenomena, natural phenomena as signs from the gods all the way to mathematical astronomy. And it's a topic I love so much because it offers us insights into how people made sense of the same world around them, the same bodies, and also how they were like, like huge nerds back then, just like us who dedicated their lives to these subjects. I just absolutely love that.
- [31:23]
Nicholas Gordon
I mean, speaking of omens and divination, I mean, this was a big part of these societies, right? I mean, I think, what was it you mentioned how, like, kings would often. Was it basically reroll the dice and do the same divination technique over and over and over again until they got the answer they wanted, which, of course, would be exactly the kind of polygon policy policy that they wanted to do. But, but, but. So he's like, how did you know? How did religion and. And divination, all this stuff kind of work for these societies?
- [31:54]
Moody Al-Rashid
Yeah. So people, I mean, fundamentally people, and particularly scholars who were trained to interpret these, they saw signs everywhere. So everything around you could be interpreted as a sign. And there were like two different ways of doing this. There were unprovoked signs. So observing the sky, looking at the color of water in a well, observing a birthmark on someone's face. And these things can be interpreted as, you know, an eclipse, for example, could foretell the death of the king, or the brightness of Venus might tell us whether a woman would have a difficult childbirth. The color of water might tell us if someone's gonna make money or not, that sort of thing. And so, again, these are unprovoked things that can be observed when they happen, and you just have to wait until you come across them. But then there were also these provoked omens, which k often used to check, or scholars actually often used to check the unprovoked ones, most famously by looking at the innards of a sheep, which is a bit gruesome. The liver primarily, and interpreting marks on the liver, the liver being a good choice because a liver is sort of different for every animal, and it will have different marks based on the experiences that animal has had. Like, was there a Drought, did they have an illness? Was there a nutritional deficiency? And the liver is sort of like a, you know, a palimpsest for all of those life experiences. So it's a good choice for something to read that will be different in every animal. And basically a yes or no question would be asked, like, should I appoint any Galdi Nana as high priestess? And then a scholar trained to read livers would tally up the different marks to get a negative or positive answer. The exact details are less important than what it means. And it means really that people understood the world around them as a kind of cuneiform tablet, as a tablet of messages from the gods about events to come that had to be interpreted in these, like, really systematic ways. And the gods were in constant communication with them through things like eclipses, birthmarks and sheep's livers. So it was hugely important to put a lot of effort and training into reading these signs and to protect that knowledge, especially in the later periods, you have a lot of these secrecy signature sections on tablets that exhort the reader to secrecy and say, this must not be shared with someone who's not trained. So this, I mean, there's really one small subset of what we might understand as religion without even going into the pantheon itself, and the gods who were seen as responsible for this type of communication. But for me, it's a really important one because of how it links with science and making sense of the world. And I think that's. It's a really interesting two sides of the same coin, so to speak, with science. And they all really work well together and in a way, come full circle to the writing system itself.
- [34:44]
Nicholas Gordon
I wanted to make sure that. I asked about the role that women played in these societies. I mean, how much do we know about kind of what Akkadian women, Sumerian women, Babylonian women, like, what they did in society, kind of how much power they had, the responsibilities they had. How much do we know about that?
- [35:04]
Moody Al-Rashid
A lot is the short answer. Because the sources are far from silent on what women did. They don't paint a particularly rosy picture. That's a separate kind of. Still like a heavily patriarchal society. But women did do all sorts of stuff in addition to being mothers and wives. So there were business women, for example, or merchants, including wildly successful ones who served as landlords in some eras or even as sort of tavern keepers. And in the Old Assyrian period, so from around 2000 to 1600 BCE, there are a lot of women who have their own kind of like weaving networks where they weave these. These vast tapestries. That take, sorry, textiles that take about six months to make, and those would be then sell on the international market further north in what is now Turkey, in a trading center called Kanesh. And there are tons of sources that tell us about the ins and outs of this and including some of the frustrations of women who were working full time making all the food for their family from scratch, making all the clothes for their family from scratch because there was no Costco to go to, and, you know, looking after their kids at the same time. So the kind of juggle, circa 2000 BCE sources even tell us about the lives of enslaved women who you'd think would be sort of erased from the record, but very much are not. Not necessarily from their perspective, but from the perspective of those who needed to keep records about them. But these include ones who eventually got freed. So there's one woman, if we fast forward again to any Galdinana's era, called La Tubashini, and she was enslaved, and upon being freed, she took a really powerful family court, sort of equivalent of taking someone, I don't know, like a tech mogul or something to court in Babylon to fight for the freedom of her children. I'm sorry, I'm bouncing around between time periods because I'm just saying what comes to mind. But we remember the first named author in history was a woman named Enheduanna. There's a wonderful book about her by Sophis Hell, with translations of her hymns and poems. But women also served, you know, if we think back to the sciences, they served as medical professionals, including midwives, wives, but they even wrote medical texts as well. And as medical professionals were sometimes called upon in legal cases, for example, to witness a person's identity because they were there at their birth, or to kind of confirm someone's birthday, so to speak. Medical texts do tell us about women's health, so they tell us about women's lives from that perspective. So treatments for experiences like really difficult childbirth or even miscarriage and heavy periods, which is something women still struggle with, all of the above today. And then, you know, if we leave behind the kind of everyday lives, there are some really interesting queens that leave behind, you know, fantastic stories and objects that they were buried with. One fact I love is that Assyrian queens were associated with scorpions because of how fiercely they defended their young. I don't know if you've ever seen a picture. It's a little kind of like, odd to look at, but a picture of a scorpion with a. All her babies on her back. And they would keep that they keep them on their back to protect them until they're old enough to kind of fend for themselves. And there's one Assyrian queen called Queen Nakia, who I write about in my book and who I think should be as well known as Cleopatra, was so powerful that scholars in the royal court called her Adapa, who was the name of one of the pre flood sages. That is a title usually reserved just for kings. And administrators called her my lord in letters also reserved for kings. And she did quite a lot, a lot of work for the empire. Again, whatever your views on empire, is just an interesting that she wielded that sort of power. But really there's so much to say about women in ancient Mesopotamia and the rich lives they led, which can in some ways shed light on Enigaldi Nana herself. But also that more importantly remind us that the sources do tell us a lot, they preserve a lot about women's lives. And it's just a question of getting to those sources and bringing them to life light.
- [39:09]
Nicholas Gordon
So I want to end by kind of your thoughts on kind of as you look back on this history from our vantage point, which is even more millennia later than they were removed from Enigalinana's time. I mean, how much of this history can we still see today? How much of this history still kind of influences how people talk about, about their homes and their societies today? I know many countries in the Middle east still hearken back to these old sites for legitimacy, even millennia later, even as the people and the religions and the cultures are radically different from the time of the Sumerians and the Akkadians and the Babylonians. I mean, how much is this history kind of still important? Is still important today?
- [39:59]
Moody Al-Rashid
Well, I mean, I think. I think kind of broadly speaking, I think history is so important for what it can teach us. I know people always say those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, but I think it's deeper than that. I think there are some pieces of wisdom that we can't just get in a lifetime. And we get that really from the millennia of stories that come before us, of mistakes, of learnings, of ideas. And I think in that sense, history is just broadly such an important thing to keep present, to keep alive today. And in terms of in the Middle east think I. I think this history, I'm not from any of the countries that are covered by the region. We call ancient Mesopotamia, so Iraq, Syria or Turkey. So I can't speak specifically to what it means for the people who live there. But I can imagine it through my own connection to my country, Saudi Arabia's history, which is a very long one. I mean, we think often only of the Islamic period, but there's a huge, you know, huge millennia of artifacts, of rock art, of tombs that came from, from, you know, from 10,000 years ago and even beyond. So there's like a profound love of that history that I feel and a connection to more time periods and more people than I could just connect with in one lifetime. And it survives, right? It survives into protest art. For example. There was an incredible artist, there is an incredible artist named Osama Siddiq, going back to Iraq, who incorporates cuneiform into his street art. And that came to light quite vividly in the protests. And I think it was 2009, 2019, sorry, graffiti, public monuments, you know, formal public monuments. Even the self presentation of leaders, as you mentioned, sometimes harks back to these eras and the historical sites themselves, which are still there, you know, amazingly, after thousands of years. They're an important, like, locus of connection, education, and even in some cases economy. So I think history is very much present back then and now. It encourages a kind of love of the past, love of one's own culture, whatever it looks like today as compared with the past, and a pride as well as informing how people make sense of events unfolding around them.
- [42:16]
Nicholas Gordon
So I think that's a great place to end our conversation with Moody Al Rashid, author of Between Two Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History. Moody, I actually have two final questions for you, which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work. And what's next for you? What do you think the next project might be?
- [42:36]
Moody Al-Rashid
So I not that active on bluesky at the moment, but just because my life has been too busy. But you can find me on bluesky and on Instagram and you can also email me. If you just Google my name and Wolfson, which is where I work, my email address will come up. Please feel free to reach out with any questions or if you want to be pointed to any sources. I'm always happy to help and I'm hoping, hoping to write another book. It's in the works. I'm not sure if I'm meant to talk about it, but I think it'll be even more exciting than Between Two Rivers. I probably shouldn't say that, but Between Two Rivers is sort of the gateway, the intro to this amazing topic. And I'm hoping to take it even further in the next book so you.
- [43:17]
Nicholas Gordon
Can follow me Nicholas Gordon on Twitter ickerigordon. That's N I c K R I G O r D o n. You can go to asianreviewbooks.com, find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter @BookReviews Asia. This reviews book plural and you can find many more authors at the New Books network and new booksnetwork.com we're on all your favorite podcast apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify rate us, recommend us, share us with your friends, support us interviewing those writing in around and about Asia. Next week, join us for a conversation with Abhimanyu Kumar and Aletta Andre, the authors of the House of a Hidden Tragedy. But before then, Moody. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [43:52]
Moody Al-Rashid
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