Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system

Summary

You're Dead to Me: Episode Summary – "Cuneiform: The World’s First Writing System"

Release Date: March 21, 2025

In this engaging episode of "You’re Dead to Me," BBC Radio 4’s comedy podcast that takes history seriously, host Greg Jenner delves into the origins and significance of cuneiform, the world's first writing system. Joined by two distinguished guests—Dr. Moody Al Rashid, an Assyriologist from the University of Oxford, and the ever-hilarious comedian Phil Wang—the trio uncovers the intricate history, usage, and legacy of cuneiform, blending scholarly insights with witty banter.

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1. Understanding Cuneiform

[01:08] Greg Jenner introduces the episode by defining cuneiform as one of humanity’s earliest writing systems, developed around 3000 BCE in what is now southern Iraq. He welcomes Dr. Moody Al Rashid, an expert in Mesopotamian history, and Phil Wang, a comedian known for his sharp wit and recurring appearances on the podcast.

Dr. Moody Al Rashid elaborates on the term "cuneiform," explaining, “Cuneiform gets its name from the Latin 'cuneus', meaning wedge, because of the characteristic wedge or triangular shapes impressed into clay tablets” ([05:26]).

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2. The Birth and Evolution of Cuneiform

Initially, cuneiform began as protowriting, pictorial representations that gradually evolved into a sophisticated script capable of representing multiple languages, including Sumerian and Akkadian. Phil Wang humorously attempts to visualize cuneiform, associating it with "triangles" and "shapes representing barley and fish*" ([02:51]).

Dr. Moody highlights, “Cuneiform was not just a script for one language; it's like the Latin alphabet today, used across various languages with some variations” ([07:15]).

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3. Deciphering Cuneiform: A Historical Puzzle

The episode delves into the challenges and breakthroughs in deciphering cuneiform. Greg Jenner quizzes Phil Wang on the nationality of the key figure in this endeavor.

Phil Wang initially guesses French, but it's revealed to be Henry Rawlinson, an English soldier often credited as the "father of Assyriology." Dr. Moody adds, “Rawlinson and contemporaries like Edward Hincks played pivotal roles in decoding cuneiform, particularly through the Behistun Inscription” ([09:12]).

A notable quote from Dr. Moody states, “The Behistun Inscription was like the Rosetta Stone for Assyriology, providing a trilingual key that unlocked the script’s secrets” ([10:14]).

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4. The Royal Library of Nineveh

Greg introduces King Ashurbanipal and his monumental Royal Library of Nineveh, which housed approximately 30,000 clay tablets encompassing a vast array of knowledge—from astronomy and medicine to literature like the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Phil Wang humorously remarks, “It's like the Great British Bake Off's cuneiform week, where they bake tablets instead of cakes” ([24:20]).

Dr. Moody emphasizes the library’s significance: “The discovery of the Royal Library was a game-changer, providing scholars with an unprecedented collection of Mesopotamian texts” ([16:50]).

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5. Daily Life and Literature Through Cuneiform

Cuneiform tablets offer a profound glimpse into daily life and personal relationships in ancient Mesopotamia. The podcast highlights the letters between Inaya, a merchant in Anatolia, and Taram Kubi, his wife in Ashur, revealing personal grievances and familial struggles.

Phil Wang comically interprets these letters: “How's the journey? How's the Bali? You must have been there for a while if there was time for a clay tablet exchange” ([38:01]).

Dr. Moody shares, “These tablets humanize ancient civilizations, showing that personal conflicts and emotions are timeless” ([38:28]).

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6. Education of Scribes

The training of scribes is explored through the discovery of House F in Nippur, where over 1,400 school texts provide insights into scribal education. Dr. Moody notes, “Students began with basic wedge marks as children and progressed to advanced mathematics and literature, much like modern educational systems” ([42:09]).

Phil Wang humorously likens this to, “English boys learning Latin to become lawyers” ([43:35]).

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7. Religion, Divination, and Cuneiform

Cuneiform’s role extended into the spiritual realm, intertwining divination and religion. Dr. Moody explains, “In ancient Mesopotamia, supernatural elements were part of everyday explanations. Cuneiform was used to record omens, astronomical observations, and even messages from the gods through divination practices” ([45:01]).

A memorable moment includes the discussion of using sheep liver in divination: “They would place a tablet in front of a deity’s statue, interpret the entrails like reading cuneiform signs, and thus seek divine guidance” ([47:35]).

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8. Stability and Legacy of Cuneiform

Cuneiform remained in use for over 5,000 years, with the last known inscription dated to 79 CE from Uruk. Dr. Moody reflects, “The longevity of cuneiform is a testament to its adaptability and the stability of the Mesopotamian civilizations” ([48:28]).

Phil Wang adds humorously, “Philology Wang can speak cuneiform fluently now—if only it's a language!” ([52:16]).

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9. Notable Discoveries: Stories Preserved in Clay

The episode highlights La Tubashini, a woman whose legal struggle for her children's freedom is immortalized in cuneiform tablets. Dr. Moody narrates, “Her story is a powerful reminder that ancient writings preserve the courage and humanity of individuals, transcending millennia” ([52:48]).

Phil Wang expresses admiration: “It's amazing. You never think of these old forms of writing being able to convey such emotion and nuance” ([39:31]).

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10. Quickfire Quiz: Testing Phil’s Knowledge

Towards the end, Greg Jenner conducts a rapid-fire quiz to recap the episode’s key points, with Phil Wang impressively scoring 10 out of 10:

1. Shape Origin: Triangle/wedge ([55:23])

2. Geographical Origin: Mesopotamia ([55:31])

3. Decipherer: Henry Rawlinson ([55:54])

4. Earliest Topic: Beer ([55:56])

5. Divination Purpose: Eliciting messages from gods ([56:16])

6. Doodles Found: Teacher with a cane ([56:29])

7. Language Example: Akkadian ([56:37])

8. Cruciform Monument: A deliberate forgery using cuneiform signs ([56:47])

9. Library Fate: Burned down in 612 BCE ([57:07])

10. Last Inscription: 79 CE ([57:16])

Phil Wang humorously declares himself a "philologist," much to the amusement of Greg and Dr. Moody.

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Conclusion

The episode wraps up with heartfelt thanks to Dr. Moody Al Rashid for his expertise and Phil Wang for blending humor with historical insights. Greg Jenner encourages listeners to explore more episodes featuring Mesopotamian history and other eclectic historical topics, ensuring that learning history is both entertaining and enlightening.

Notable Closing Quote:

Dr. Moody Al Rashid: “Cuneiform preserves so much of life from ancient Mesopotamia. It tells us about their working lives, their literature, their personal relationships, and even their struggles. It’s a window into the human experience across millennia” ([54:40]).

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This comprehensive exploration of cuneiform not only educates listeners about the technical aspects of the script but also brings to life the personal and societal dimensions of ancient Mesopotamian civilization. Through the combined efforts of historians and comedians, the episode underscores that history is rich with stories that resonate across time.

Transcript

[Greg Jenner]

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[Greg Jenner]

BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts hello and welcome to your Dent To Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster and today we're bouncing back to the Bronze Age with our styluses and clay tablets to learn all about the first ever writing system or script called cuneiform. And to help us decipher the ancient story, we have two very special guests in History Corner. She's an honorary fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She's an Assyriologist who researches and teaches on the history of Mesopotamia, Cuneiform and the Akkadian language. She has a wonderful brand new book that I loved called Between Two Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History. I highly recommend it and you will remember her from our episode on the ancient Babylonians. It's Dr. Moody Al Rashid. Welcome Moody.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

[Greg Jenner]

Delighted to have you back. And in Comedy Corner, he's a fantastic comedian, actor and author. You'll know him from Taskmaster Live at the Apollo. Have a good news for you from his two Netflix comedy specials too. Count them. Maybe you've read his Side Splitting book Side Splitter, which I loved on audiobook, but you'll definitely remember him from our previous episodes of youf're Dead to Me, most recently on the Terracotta warriors and the History of Kung Fu which sounds like a film title, but isn't returning for a triumphant fifth appearance. It's Phil Wang. Welcome back again.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Hello.

[Phil Wang]

Thanks for having me. Yes. Moody is an Assyriologist. I'm a sillyologist. Comedy corner. Bring in the silly baby.

[Greg Jenner]

Phil. Together we've tackled mighty military matters. We've done the Borgias, we've done Chinggis Khan, we've done the Terracotta warriors and kung Fu. Today we're going quite nerdy. What does the word cuneiform mean to you spiritually, emotionally?

[Phil Wang]

I picture triangles. Yeah. Sort of carved triangles. A lot of grain. Barley. The sort of. The recording of barley.

[Greg Jenner]

That's fairly good knowledge.

[Phil Wang]

Straight off the bat, the biggest word in my. One of those diagrams called the word bubbles.

[Greg Jenner]

The word clouds.

[Phil Wang]

The biggest word there is. Old. That's my. That's my header. How far am I right? Ballpark.

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, Moody, I don't want to give him too many sort of stars early on, but I feel that was quite good.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

That's pretty spot on.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. And help. The font for old is just like a really big font.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah, yeah. The O is a triangle, the L is a triangle, and the D is a triangle. But if, you know, if you can read cuneiform, you can tell the difference.

[Greg Jenner]

So what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And, well, I think Phil has outclassed us all. You might remember a mention of cuneiform on our Babylonians episode we talked about before with Moody and Kay Curd. Maybe you've seen some cuneiform tablets in the British Museum or in the Ashmolean Museum in the States. I think Paris has some. More likely you've seen something resembling cuneiform. Well, probably as a prop in a video game or in a movie. But to be honest, I don't think cuneiform is something that most people are visualizing. I think, Phil, you did really well because you then mentioned hieroglyphs. I think people go to hieroglyphs when they think of old scripts.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah, right. As I have.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, yeah. But you knew triangle stuff, so that's good.

[Phil Wang]

Triangles. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

So, anyway, the questions we have to answer. What exactly was cuneiform? What do all these clay tablets actually tell us? What do they say? And who first figured out how to decipher it? Let's find out. Right. Dr. Moody, can we start with some quick basic definitions? Because I'm feeling very basic. What is cuneiform? Am I pronouncing it right? Yeah. How did it get its name? What does its name mean?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah. So cuneiform or cuneiform are both completely fine. So it was a writing system developed just before 3000 BCE in what is now southern Iraq. And it was a script, not a language, found mostly on clay tablets, but also on some extremely large monumental inscriptions made out of stone and some other objects as well. And it gets its name from the Latin cuneus. I don't know any Latin, but I know cuneus in Latin, which means wedge. So because the. Because they get impressed into clay, they have this characteristic wedge or triangular shape. And funnily enough, in Akkadian, the word for cuneiform is sataku or santaku, which means triangle. So we're all, oh, wow. Yeah. And funnily enough, in Arabic, it's mismari, which means nail, imprint. So they kind of also went with the visuals.

[Greg Jenner]

Like fingernail.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Like a nail. Hammer and nail, yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

So you said it was developed over 3,000 BCE so it's over 5,000 years old.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

That's right.

[Greg Jenner]

Possibly even older than that. Like 5,300 years old, give or take.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Who used it?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Lots and lots of different people use cuneiform to write lots of different languages. But it's the writing system that was used in the region that we call ancient Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and around the Tigris and Euphrates, these rivers, and what is now Iraq and Syria and some of the neighboring countries as well. The oldest tablets come specifically from Uruk in southern Iraq, and those date to about 3350 BCE, this kind of still called proto cuneiform. It's like, really, really early stage. They don't look like triangles yet.

[Phil Wang]

They're an even simpler shape.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

They're actually a more complicated shape because they look like the things that they represent. So they look like pictures, basically. Yeah, those are my favorite ones. They're so pretty.

[Greg Jenner]

And then they're like, guys, triangles. I've got it. I've tried it. Triangle.

[Phil Wang]

We don't need to draw every brick in the pyramid. We just need the triangle shape, actually.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Exactly. Various empires rose and fell in this region. We had the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians before them, the Sumerians, and then the neighboring Elamites, Hittites, and eventually the Persians. And they all used some variation of cuneiform for their many languages. The main two languages, however, in ancient Mesopotamia were Sumerian and Akkadian.

[Greg Jenner]

Sumerians, Akkadians, then Babylonians, then Elamites, Hittites, Neo Assyrians.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

And then Persia.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Exactly.

[Greg Jenner]

Someone needs to do a song. There needs to be like a kind.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Of like an Alphabet song.

[Greg Jenner]

Like an Alphabet song. Like, if only Sesame street could just do this for us, that'd be great.

[Phil Wang]

The neo Sumerians.

[Greg Jenner]

The Neo Assyrians.

[Phil Wang]

Neo Assyrians, yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

So they come after the Assyrians.

[Phil Wang]

Couldn't be bothered to come up with a new name. Everyone else came up with a new name. They're like, we're just Assyrians again.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, okay. All right. But it's not a language exactly.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Cuneiform is the writing system. Just like we use Latin script to write stuff in English, French, German. It's used for multiple languages with some variations. Same with cuneiform.

[Greg Jenner]

Phil, we're gonna mix things up here. We're gonna go to modern history now. We're gonna start with only a couple hundred years ago when they deciphered cuneiform. Can you guess the nationality of the man who deciphered this ancient Near Eastern technology? Oh, nationality for us, please, Phil.

[Phil Wang]

French.

[Greg Jenner]

It's a good guess. His name was Henry Rawlinson.

[Phil Wang]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

And he was from England, as.

[Phil Wang]

That's what I wanted to say. That's what I actually wanted to say, but I thought I wouldn't have been allowed to say that.

[Greg Jenner]

It's usually an Englishman or Frenchman. In fairness, in this period in history, Moody. What was an Englishman doing in Iran? Was he doing a classic bit of empire? Hello, I've just come to do a bit of empire.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Basically, yes. He was an officer of the British East India Company, and he was originally sent to India, and then he went to Iran after that to help the shah, I think, reorganize his army or something like that. And he fell in love with ancient Persian monuments and cultures.

[Greg Jenner]

So he was invited in by the Shah of Persia, bizarrely a rare thing. Normally. It's a sort of invas Asian things. That's quite nice. They actually said, welcome. Please, Phil. The study of languages is called philology.

[Phil Wang]

Is it?

[Greg Jenner]

And your name is Phil.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

I feel like, therefore, you have an innate skill in this.

[Phil Wang]

Interest in this. Yeah, I wish I did. No, I do have an interest in it. I mean to say I wish I had a skill in it.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

All right.

[Phil Wang]

But I didn't know. I did not know that.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. How would you go about decoding an ancient script? Because you're an engineer, right?

[Phil Wang]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

So you think laterally.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah, sure.

[Greg Jenner]

You're Henry Rawlinson. How do you start decoding that?

[Phil Wang]

Well, ideally, you have some sort of key. You find some sort of key a la Rosetta stone. Right. Something that just tells you what each symbol means. Aside from that, without that, I'm guessing you're looking for patterns.

[Greg Jenner]

Sure.

[Phil Wang]

You're looking for structures, you're looking for sentences, and then looking for what repeats, where they. Where particular symbols lie, and seeing if there's a logic to them.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

This is good stuff, Phil. I think that's exactly right. I feel like I should just maybe just take. Get a cup of coffee or something.

[Phil Wang]

Thanks, Moody.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, we're all good here. It's just me and Phil. We're gonna solve this.

[Phil Wang]

Well, my name is Philology Wang.

[Greg Jenner]

Exactly. Philology Wang.

[Phil Wang]

Cool name.

[Greg Jenner]

Moody. It sounds like Rawlinson used the Phil Wang technique.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

He actually exactly did that. Yeah. He and a bunch of other philologists basically looked for patterns in these trilingual inscriptions that were in various places in Iran, namely Persepolis, but also some big ones on Mount Alvand. And then the big kind of Rosetta of assyriology, which is the Behistun inscription. They first found royal names, and then from there they found the word for of, kind of unexciting, but very important of. Yeah, anam.

[Greg Jenner]

Really?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

That was like, the first.

[Greg Jenner]

That's a really crucial word, isn't it?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

It really is, yeah. I mean, it appears so many times, so it kind of helps you orient words in relation to each other as well. So there's a pattern there. He was kind of played, in my view, a more minor role because a lot of work was already done by the time he got to the Behistune inscription by other philologists.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, really?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

A lot of copies were made. A lot of kind of words were decoded.

[Greg Jenner]

Are you besmirching an Englishman's name, Moody? How dare you?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

I'm just seeing what happened.

[Phil Wang]

He kicked it off the line.

[Greg Jenner]

He showed up and said, I've got this, lads. Thank you very much. Is Behiston sort of the Rosetta equivalent that Phil mentioned? Is that like the key discovery?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

I think it became the more kind of famous and sensationalized one, and therefore it became kind of central to all the stories about decipherment that came out of this period of history. But a lot of work was already done by the time Behistun was decoded, so I would say it kind of helped confirm things.

[Phil Wang]

And is Behistun similar to Rosetta Stone in that it's the same script in two or three different languages?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah, it's a trilingual inscription, but all using cuneiform. So it's three cuneiform inscriptions in these, like, almost like caption boxes, but they're different languages recorded. One of the languages was known Old Persian. People knew how to read Old Persian from other texts that were not written in cuneiform. So they kind of knew what it might say. Ok. And then they kind of overlaid that onto the cuneiform.

[Greg Jenner]

And this inscription at Behistun talks about a very famous king called Darius of Persia. Darius the Great. Have you heard of him?

[Phil Wang]

No.

[Greg Jenner]

No. He's a sort of big name in like, video game. I thought maybe you'd sort of fought him on total war at some point. He's a couple hundred years before Alexander the Great and he was a big conqueror and he fought 19 battles to crush rebellions. And this inscription says, aye, King Darius of Persia.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

I guess of.

[Greg Jenner]

I guess of. Yeah, there is of did some crushing and I'm gonna stick it up here in Elamite. And Persian. And Akkadian.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

And Akkadian. Yeah. He wants to cover all the bases, I guess, make sure everyone could see what he did.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. And Henry Rawlinson decoded it with help.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yes. So he, I think, initially tried to. Because it's very high up and it's not, you know, easily accessible, so they had to use pulleys and.

[Greg Jenner]

Cause it's up on like a rock. It's like on a cliff or something. It's like really high up.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Exactly. Very bright as well because the sun sort of hits it as looking at it. And Rawlinson has been credited with scaling the rocks to make the drawings, but he actually sent a few boys to do it for him.

[Greg Jenner]

Of course he did. Yes.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

And you.

[Greg Jenner]

That boy.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yes, exactly. You climb this instead of me and make the copy and then I will do the kind of intellectual work to decode it. And he ended up publishing that in 1847 and he was just 37 years old.

[Greg Jenner]

You've already qualified that he wasn't necessarily the sole most important man in this story. So who else should be added to the checklist?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah, I mean, there were a couple of others who worked on this at the same time. But I would say Edward Hinks is one of the unsung heroes of this entire story. He was an Irish. I don't know how to say this word. Clergyman.

[Greg Jenner]

Clergyman.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Clergyman.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

This happened when I was recording my book. I was like, I can't pronounce anything. I know what all these words mean and I've used them hundreds of times, but I can't actually say them out loud. So he was an Irish clergyman. He did something really remarkable, which is he matched up the letters or the. Sorry, the characters that were used in the monumental inscriptions, which he called lapidary, which is a kind of formal font, let's say, to the characters used in the clay tablet, which is a little bit messier, which he called cursive. And that unlocked thousands and thousands more texts.

[Greg Jenner]

Phil, how do you think Henry Rawlinson took to Hincks's work? Do you think he welcomed this other man coming along with new ideas?

[Phil Wang]

No, I imagine. I imagine there's a lot of beef. I imagine if it was a Kendrick Lamar Drake, such situation between the two. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

You think there was rap songs about each other?

[Phil Wang]

Yeah, yeah. Uniform songs about each other?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, I think you'll bang on, Right? I mean, Moody, he. He tries to make, like, crush his career, right?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Pretty much, yeah. He complained. He complained when the British Museum hired Hinks for a period of time. I can't remember how long it was.

[Greg Jenner]

A year or something.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah, exactly. He complained then and he tried to suppress Hincks's work, which is not exactly in the spirit of sort of scholarly cooperation, but here we are.

[Phil Wang]

No, you gotta have a little healthy competition, I think, in philology.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah.

[Phil Wang]

You gotta. That's the force that keeps the discipline moving forward. You know, it can't. Can't all just be friends.

[Greg Jenner]

Have you ever been tempted to crush a rival comedian's career? I mean, you're the only film in comedy, right? I mean, there might be. There could be hundreds of others, but you've.

[Phil Wang]

I'm the only fill wing.

[Greg Jenner]

Anyway.

[Phil Wang]

I've buried at least three.

[Greg Jenner]

So Rawlinson and Hinks was squabbling, and in 1857, so 20 years after Rawlinson first went out to. To Persia, I suppose, as it would have been called at the time, the Royal Asiatic Society. I don't know what they are, but they. They sort of intervened and said, right, okay, we're gonna. We're gonna officially declare that cuneiform has been decoded. They announced this how, Moody?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Well, they held a competition. We're talking about competition. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay. Phil, how do you think the competition was judged? What kind of. Talk me through the rounds.

[Phil Wang]

Oh, man. Like a kind of spelling bee. Like a uniform spelling bee. And he's like, spel. Rollins and Hinck set to stand there and go, triangle. Triangle pointing to the top left. Triangle pointing to the top right. Is it something like that?

[Greg Jenner]

I think that's great. I like that.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

I like that, too. I wish they did that.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. How did this competition work? Is it Live translation, spelling bee, as Phil has suggested, which I'd love to see.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

I would also love to see that. So the Society invited four people to submit sealed translations of a particular cuneiform inscription that was an Assyrian one. So it was Horllinson Hinks and two others, Henry Fox Talbot and Jules Au Pair, and they all sent in similar results. So basic decipherment had been. Had been achieved by then, and that's when the discipline of assyriology takes off.

[Greg Jenner]

I see, so they all win.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yes, yes.

[Phil Wang]

Oh, that's nice.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah.

[Phil Wang]

Bit of a cop out.

[Greg Jenner]

And this is the Akkadian language now? Yes. So the. The three languages were Elamite, Akkadian and Old Persian. All three languages have been decoded.

[Phil Wang]

Oh, I see. So the test was, if these three people can decipher this independent of one another, then.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Right, then we think we can read this thing.

[Greg Jenner]

And this invents a new discipline of which you are a practitioner. Yes, assyriology.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Assyriology. The way I try to explain it is in the same way that Egyptology studies ancient Egypt, assyriology studies ancient Assyria and the other civilizations that existed in Mesopotamia. But they've kind of focused on Assyria because around the time of the beginning of this discipline, an incredible royal library was uncovered from Nineveh, which was the royal library of the last great Neo Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal. And there were about 30,000 tablets that were unearthed from that. So I think that really, you know, that was the kind of game changer for the field and that's why it took its name from it.

[Greg Jenner]

But assyriology is named after the fact that there's this incredible library which dates to when?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Roughly the seventh century bc. So the six hundreds.

[Greg Jenner]

Amazing. And so Nineveh, the royal library was discovered in what we now call mosul in Iraq. 30,000 kinaifum tablets, which is amazing. They were brought to the British Museum, the home of Iraqi history. But this wasn't just.

[Phil Wang]

Not in the BM did it even happen? That's always been my motto.

[Greg Jenner]

But this wasn't the first time the massive collection of ancient cuneiform tablets have been put in a museum. Right. Because this is what the library is like. This was already a collection of knowledge by someone saying, this stuff's old.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yes. King Ashurbanipal wanted to create this royal library and he sent scholars to different parts of the empire to copy the most well known and important texts, including some very old ones like the Epic of Gilgamesh, and brought them under one roof. So to speak. It gets its name as a royal library because the types of disciplines attested, the types of works attested, are just so incredible. You have astronomy, medicine, literature, omens. It's just such a vast. Such a vast collection.

[Phil Wang]

And this library is a library of tablets, really.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Clay tablets.

[Phil Wang]

Wow.

[Greg Jenner]

So this is from about 650 BCE. So it's very late in the grand sweep of Mesopotamian history, but it is earlier than. Like, it's earlier than Socrates. So, you know, when we say ancient, it's ancient, but it's really late in.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

In cuneiform forms.

[Greg Jenner]

In cuneiform. Yeah. So it's kind of. I'm slightly struggling to work out how to frame that, but, yeah, we've got Ashurbanipal. I like to call him Ashurban. Ashompaul. I don't know why. I always imagine in my head.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yes, yes. So Ashurbanipal is an interesting guy. I mean, he has these reliefs of himself doing things like fighting lions or throwing spears, and then he has these styluses tucked into his belt as if to make sure everyone knew. I'm not just a warrior. I'm not just protecting my kingdom. I'm also really smart. I know math, I know science, I know how to read.

[Greg Jenner]

And the thing that just. I'm gonna have to say again, just to make sure people understand, but this is a Neo Assyrian king saying, this stuff belongs in a Museum. It's 2,500 years old. So it's an ancient person going, this is archaeology, or this is knowledge. That's mad for us. Right. My brain doesn't quite compute.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah.

[Phil Wang]

And at that point, would they been able to understand cuneiform from 2,500 years ago?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yes. Yeah. It's quite a stable script. I mean, the styles change, and you can sort of tell when something's really.

[Phil Wang]

Old was always clay, don't they?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah. I mean, it was used on other objects, but the scholarly stuff was on clay.

[Greg Jenner]

That was the good stuff.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah. That's my favorite stuff.

[Greg Jenner]

So the library of Nineveh was this incredible compilation of all the knowledge, two and a half thousand years worth put into one place. And then in the year 612 BCE, it was destroyed.

[Phil Wang]

Oh, no.

[Greg Jenner]

Along came some baddies who sacked the city. And that was fantastic news for you, Moody. Do you know why?

[Phil Wang]

Because they spread it everywhere, ended up in different places. Because it was cool, because it was exciting.

[Greg Jenner]

He's spiraling, he's losing.

[Phil Wang]

I don't see how it could have been good.

[Greg Jenner]

Because they set the building on fire. And it baked the clay.

[Phil Wang]

Oh, wow. And sort of hardened it. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Which you get.

[Phil Wang]

Why didn't they do that already?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

They don't always. They did some bake, some tablets that were really important, but for the most part, they just let them dry.

[Phil Wang]

Wow. So baking was kind of like laminating.

[Greg Jenner]

So. Yeah. So the next episode of the Great British Bake Off. That's what we want to see.

[Phil Wang]

It's cuneiform week here at the tent.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so we know how cuneiform was deciphered, and we know how it was preserved. The library burned down baking the knowledge, which is extraordinary. Let's now discover how cuneiform was first invented. Phil, you've already mentioned the Alphabet. We know it has letters in it. Cuneiform isn't phonetic, but in the very, very, very late Old Persian, there was a tiny element of phonetic in there. A little bit. A little bit alphabetic. A little bit.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

That's right.

[Greg Jenner]

So just right at the end, it changed a tiny bit. But the system is not phonetic. Is that right?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Not an Alphabet. That's exactly right. There was also one earlier kineiform Alphabet from Ugarit, where they were like, we are not doing this complicated thing. We're making an Alphabet. Broadly, cuneiform is a mix of signs that characters that stand for whole words and characters that stand for syllables, like ba instead of a B and an A, or, you know, bat, like, you know, b, a T as one sound. That tells us a lot, actually, about the history of how this script develops, because initially it was just signs that stood for words. And this was when, in the earliest iterations and scribes used quite innovative methods to make each sign stand for more things, more sounds that were related to its original meaning or to the original sounds that those words had. And that enabled the writing system to take on completely unrelated languages to the ones that those initial words were in.

[Greg Jenner]

How many characters are there in cuneiform? If you were to be a scribe and train, how many would you have to learn?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

About 600 to a thousand. I mean, you probably wouldn't have to master every single one. If you were just like, writing letters, for example, if you were a scholar, you would probably need to do the upper limit of that.

[Phil Wang]

Was it a cumulative script? So they started off with some characters, and every, you know, as time progressed, they just created more and more characters in cuneiform to represent new things.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah, yeah. And then. And those characters also took on more meanings and sounds. So each character stands for a bunch of different things. So when you read a text, sometimes it takes a while because you're like. Yeah, all right. This sign has, like, like eight different values. And you have to make, like, a little table with all the different values and see which ones make sense based on context.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Can we see. Can we show Phil some cuneiform?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Let's do it.

[Phil Wang]

Yes. Let's see.

[Greg Jenner]

We haven't smuggled anything out of a library because it's probably too valuable. So we've got some pictures on an iPad.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah.

[Phil Wang]

The iPad is stolen just to add the free song. The free song that we're missing.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Stolen from my husband.

[Greg Jenner]

So we have a tablet on a tablet.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

We have a tablet on a tablet.

[Phil Wang]

Oh, that's lovely. Two tablets across time. Oh, wow, look at this. Okay, beautiful. So I'm looking at. It's a clay tablet from different angles. And it looks like a flat sourdough loaf. I mean, it's kind of lumpy. It's irregular in that way. It looks. It's not like. It's not like a perfectly square.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Phil Wang]

Tablet. It looks like bread and. Okay, so in the top. Yeah, so in the top left corner, this is so made on grid. It's almost like a comic book. There are squares. It's a grid. It's sort of a grid pattern. And within each grid are a collection of symbols. Like the top left, there's two circles, and then what looks like a boat, a sailboat. And then below that is more dot, more circles, lots of circles. Not so many triangles, actually. Lost circles, and what looks like a fish. And under that, three circles and what looks like a river. I feel like I'm picking out a theme here. I'm going to say this is a. A tablet about a fisherman. He's caught 60 fish, three from the river.

[Greg Jenner]

This is live philology.

[Phil Wang]

There's something here that looks a bit like a harp and some reeds. So he plays music in his spare time. He practices in the reed garden.

[Greg Jenner]

Is it a dating profile? Is this Hinge Tinder?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah. There's something here about how he doesn't like pineapple on pizza, loves long walks in the rain.

[Greg Jenner]

Yep. Yeah.

[Phil Wang]

But there's lots of circles. And is that counting?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

That's exactly right, yeah. The circles are numbers. Phil, you're so good at this. You really are. If you need a plan B, we need more seriologists. We have way too many tablets.

[Phil Wang]

Well, yeah, I'm sort of using a lot of my knowledge of Chinese writing forms because, like, counting in Chinese. One, two, three is one is a one line, two is two lines, three is Three lines. And then after that I go, this is not sustainable. And then it becomes more complicated characters. But for those first three, it is just like. Just Mark. Yeah, just marking.

[Greg Jenner]

That was some very good philology, Phil. Well done.

[Phil Wang]

Oh, thanks.

[Greg Jenner]

Thanks. I feel like you really, like you've just brought the level of the podcast up there. I think everyone's very impressed. You know, we're now talking about a technology that's 5,350 years old. The obvious question is, why clay? Why, you know, why is clay the technology?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Well, there was a lot of it. I mean, the silty kind of riverbed where the two rivers meet near the Arabian Gulf. It was quite a rich, fertile soil for the fertility of the soil. And coupled with some agricultural tech advances made it possible for them to have so much agricultural produce and products to keep track of, which necessitated a writing system. And since it was everywhere, they thought, let's just try. Let's just try this.

[Greg Jenner]

More people, more stuff means you need to write things down. So the invention of writing is an accounting system. It's like a software for keeping track of your receipts.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Exactly.

[Greg Jenner]

And then it turns into literature. Is that a fair.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

That's exactly right.

[Phil Wang]

Okay, so is there a case to be made? You know, it's. We often sort of credit rivers, and especially in Mesopotamia's case, the two rivers, as being crucial to the success of these civilizations because of the fertility they provide in the soil. But is there a case to be said that beyond that, they also provided the clay to write things down and for the society to progress and that domain as well? So it wasn't just sort of agriculture that the rivers allowed to happen, but record keeping as well.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Exactly.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah. So river's good.

[Greg Jenner]

River's good. River's good.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah.

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[Greg Jenner]

We should talk about who can read this. I'm assuming most people are not literate. We've got multiple societies here. It's very generic to just say Bronze Age, Mesopotamia, but like who can read and write cuneiform? Is it a very highly skilled thing? Can you have basic functional literacy if you're an ordinary fisherman or you know, who's got that knowledge?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

So kind of both and depends on the answer to that. Depends on the period you're talking about and also the place. So in some periods, professionals, for example, learned a basic kind of repertoire of science to be able to carry out transactions, write letters, and that included women. Overall, it was a kind of highly skilled that you needed to go through specialized training. And there were also different tiers that you could kind of stop at in a way, right? So some went on to become scribes and administrators and they had to just know like math for the sake of, you know, calculations and field calculations. And then others went beyond that to become, you know, medical professionals or astronomers doing much more highly specialized math, especially in the later periods. So yes and no to that.

[Phil Wang]

So I Guess when something was written by those professionals in cuneiform, the intention was only ever for other professionals in the same field to be able to read it. Really? There was no expectation that other people could read a pop science book about astrology. It was only for other professionals to actually.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yes. And in the first millennium bce, so in the kind of later periods of Mesopotamian sciences, there are these, these phrases at the end of these science texts that basically say, do not show this to the uninitiated.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, really?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

This is the secret knowledge of the, you know, you know, the gods.

[Greg Jenner]

This is just for us.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

This is just for us. Exactly. So, yeah, isn't that cool?

[Greg Jenner]

Keep it from the masses. This is just us. You said we have women scribes. The most famous one, I suppose would be the daughter of King Sargon. So Sargon the great of Arkady is a very famous sort of Sargon.

[Phil Wang]

There's a King Sargon, Not Darius Sargon. Sounds power. That's scary.

[Greg Jenner]

He's around like, like 4,000 years ago. But his daughter is the first woman author in history.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yes, that's right. She's a first named author in history. So not just the first woman author. The first author we know.

[Greg Jenner]

Wow.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah. As a woman and her name is Elhaduanna and she penned. Impressed. Whatever penned is fine. Yeah. These incredible hymns, temple hymns. Essentially the texts that are attributed to her authorship come from a slightly later period. So. So it's not exactly straightforward, but still think that's the coolest thing ever.

[Greg Jenner]

That's amazing. The earliest named author in history is a princess writing 4300 years ago.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Exactly.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah. Really cool. And the hymns. So are we able to sing these hymns now?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

I mean, you could sing them if you wanted to. We know how.

[Phil Wang]

We don't know what the tune then.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah, you can make one up, I guess. But we know the lyrics. We know the lyrics. Yeah. Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

The tune is Sean Paul. It's Ashabana Paul. Sean Paul. Yeah.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

That would actually be fantastic.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, and so how do you like, can you send messages? Like do you there letters? Is there a postal system? Can you communicate with tablets and cuneiform? I suppose is the question.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes. They wrote letters to each other and they sent them. And there were kind of mail networks, royal mail networks, so to speak. I mean literally royal road for the mail networks.

[Phil Wang]

And they carry clay tablets.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah, they carry baskets, I guess of clay tablets on, you know, donkey or depending on the period, maybe horse. But yeah, for to get messages from one part of especially a growing empire to the other you needed to be able to communicate with your, you know.

[Greg Jenner]

Governors, and do you write your own or do you go to the local scribe and dictate it?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

You could do both. In some periods, people wrote their own letters. They learned enough to write their own letters. But the way letters are written is they often start with like to so and so speak, thus says another so and so. So there is this kind of hint that they were dictated both in the taking down of the letter, but also in the delivery of the letter.

[Phil Wang]

And was this process system available to people outside of the kings and stuff so regular people could, could do this as well?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, whoever needed to send a letter. Not everyone would have needed to send a letter, but yeah, whoever needed to send one, they could access this.

[Greg Jenner]

So in the 19th century, when you get the invention of telegraphy and you'd go to the telegraphy office and you dictate your thing and someone would put into Morse code and then someone else would translate it for them. And it's the same thing in but 4,000 years ago. So dictating it. So it's like, hey, Siri. But instead it's hey, scribe, scribe. Okay, putting the Siri in a Siri. There you go.

[Phil Wang]

I didn't catch that.

[Greg Jenner]

I don't know what I did not hear. Please say that again. What kind of things do you think people were dictating in their tablets, Phil.

[Phil Wang]

In the letters to each other?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. What kind of stuff do you think is getting jotted down?

[Phil Wang]

Probably like, this place sucks.

[Greg Jenner]

It's really hot.

[Phil Wang]

It's really hard. We got a river that's pretty good, I guess. But what's it like over there then? This place sucks too, actually. It's really hard. I have to go to this stupid scribe every time I want to send a letter to someone.

[Greg Jenner]

So you think it's just like when people just complain?

[Phil Wang]

Must have been, yeah. The arrogance, though. I think there's a lot to complain about back then, actually. Must have been loads.

[Greg Jenner]

The hymn to Nyankazi is one of the earliest things ever written down. And that's a song to a goddess about beer. And I know that one of the earliest ever cuneifilm tablets we have is about beer.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

That's right.

[Greg Jenner]

It's amazing. I feel like nothing has changed. Can you tell us about this ancient. Is it one tablet? Is it fragments? What have we got? The beer tablet.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

So there are a whole bunch of table that tell us stuff about beer from the earliest, earliest periods of writing. But what I think is really interesting Is that one of the earliest names, at least? We think it's a name, and we think we're pronouncing it correctly when we say the name is. Cushim is a beer brewer. And this is not like, you know, someone in their basement making, like, a microbrew for the neighbors on a Sunday. Yeah. This is a guy who at one point was responsible for 135,000 liters of barley over the course of 37 months for the production of beer. And then in another tablet, he's responsible for nine different cereals to produce eight different kinds of beer. So this is part of an, you know, administrative machinery.

[Greg Jenner]

So he's a beer magnate. He's like. He's like Mr. Heineken. He's in charge of all of the beer of the city to pay people.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Essentially, as part of the Russians.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes. Because beer is a currency, almost sort of.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah, beer was. I mean, I don't. There's an amazing book about the history of beer by a scholar named Tate Paulette. So I hope I'm not getting this wrong, but I think it had more of the consistency of porridge.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes. It's thick and soupy, isn't it?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Exactly. It's a coca straw.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

But it was high calorie, so high energy and cleanish fluids because water wasn't always clean. So it was a really good way.

[Phil Wang]

To pay for it, particularly alcoholic, presumably.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Probably not too alcoholic and probably not very tasty, I'm guessing.

[Greg Jenner]

So, Kashim.

[Phil Wang]

I'm sorry, Moody, you mentioned a few times now the word rations. What do you mean by that in this context? What were rations?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

They were how people got paid for service in this area to the temple, usually in agricultural work. Instead of being paid in, like, coins, for example, which were not a thing at the time, they got paid in basically bowls of food, whether it was barley or oil or in some cases, beer. So it was part of the payment system.

[Greg Jenner]

So Kushim might be one of the first named people in history.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

And he's a beer brewer.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

He's a beer brewer.

[Greg Jenner]

That's great.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

So cool.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so there we go. So beer is the history. The history of the world is beer, basically. Beer and writing. A slightly drunk texting. So we have hundreds of thousands. You know, I was a medieval historian by training, and I used to complain that we had too many documents. But you have hundreds of thousands of cuneiforms, tablets. So you haven't read them all?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Oh, no, no.

[Greg Jenner]

Right.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

I probably read, like a hundred.

[Greg Jenner]

That's extraordinary, because that gives us such a window into daily life.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah, it really is extraordinary. I mean, you can. You can get windows onto people's working lives, but you can also get windows onto what lullabies they sang to their babies, or what did they write to their far flung husbands, what did they observe in the night sky? What sort of astronomical leaps did they make? It's. It's just so moving.

[Phil Wang]

What I was going to ask, are these good reads? Are they real tablet turners, Steve?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

I think so, yeah.

[Phil Wang]

That's amazing.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

I think so.

[Phil Wang]

What were people writing about? I mean, these are letters, presumably, and also all of it. Literature and records as well.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah, I think, you know, they were pretty good record keepers, too. So it can be borderline sort of dry where you're reading about, like, a forestry institution in the city of Ummah and what classes of laborers were working. And the familial lines on that. You're just name after name after name, but you're still getting these people names from thousands of years ago, which is pretty cool. But it can also be like some of the most beautiful literature that, you know, I feel like I've ever read, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, really beautiful.

[Greg Jenner]

Language and poetry and storytelling, arguably the first great story. It's the earliest great literature in human history that's recorded. And we have it because of Kinir form.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Exactly.

[Phil Wang]

And we have it in complete form. Gilgamesh.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Almost. Almost.

[Greg Jenner]

We don't know how it ends. And then Gilgamesh did.

[Phil Wang]

It's like Game of Thrones. He's still not finished.

[Greg Jenner]

Something we do have, which is really charming, I think, and quite interesting. We have a letter. We have a series of letters between a wife and a merchant husband who are in different cities. They're writing to each other. What do you imagine they're writing to each other, Phil?

[Phil Wang]

Things like, how are you? Good trip? You get in all right? That person must have been somewhere. How's the journey? How's the journey? Must have been something like that.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Phil Wang]

How's the journey? And then he's running back. How the kids? How's the Bali? I mean, you must have been there for a while if there was time for them to have a clay tablet exchange. Right.

[Greg Jenner]

I feel like there's more drama in these tablets, Moody.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Oh, yes, they did write about Barley, too, but they also shouted at each other a little bit.

[Greg Jenner]

So who are our protagonists? Is it Inaya?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Inaya. He's the husband and he's living in Anatolia, which is what is now Turkey, where there is a major Trading hub, like an international trading hub called Kanish. And he moved there essentially to handle trade. And then his wife, Taram Kubi, is in the heartland of Assyria, in the capital of Ashur, and she's writing to him, quite fiery letters. And one of them reads, when you went away, you did not leave a single shekel of silver. You picked the house clean and took it away. Since you left, there has been hardship and hunger in the city. What is this extravagance that you keep writing to me about? There is nothing for us to eat. Do we live in luxury? I have picked clean everything in my possession and sent it to you. Today I live in an empty house. She also asks him to finally pay for the textiles that she made that he's out there selling, which takes about six months to make one of these textiles. And the letter ends. Why do you keep on listening to slander and do you keep sending me angry letters?

[Phil Wang]

Wow. So she's invoicing him as well, on top of all that. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

I feel like they might need couples therapy. It's not going well, that relationship, is it?

[Phil Wang]

God, she's making it sound like it's his fault. The entire city is falling apart. I feel like it's a little dramatic because of you.

[Greg Jenner]

The whole city. City is starving. Yeah.

[Phil Wang]

But it's amazing. You never think of these old forms of writing being able to convey such emotion, you know, such nuance or. Yeah. Or anger even. I've always thought of them as very, very specific numbers, dates, names. Like feelings, not emotion.

[Greg Jenner]

Well, as I said, a Kinnear film is developed as an accountancy system early on, but it becomes just a way to communicate everything and anything that people want to say to each other, which means literature, letters, language, astronomy, petty complaints, legal trials, presumably.

[Phil Wang]

Do we have his replies? I'm invested. Now I see why you got into this new tablet.

[Greg Jenner]

Who dis.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

I don't know if we have his replies, but there are actually quite a few exchanges between a husband and wife in this era. This was the Old Assyrian period, so about 2000-1600 BCE, where many of the wives stayed behind in Ashur, made these textiles for onward sale, essentially in Kanish, which was about five weeks away on donkey and not exactly an untreacherous journey. I sort of feel like I empathize with them because these women are, like, working, and they're also looking after, like, eight children and, like, making, you know.

[Phil Wang]

They'Re not getting the money. Yeah. The money back.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah. And they're doing a lot of work.

[Greg Jenner]

So kind of meanwhile, Inaya is in Turkey having a great time.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah, Having a blast. Maybe even taking a second wife.

[Greg Jenner]

I was gonna say. He's probably got a second family, hasn't he? He's like, who's this woman writing to me? I'm trying to play with my new kids. So how did scribes learn all these systems? Do we have evidence of their training?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah. And there are lots and lots of tablets that tell us about every stage of scribal education. There's one house in Nippur, a city in what is now Iraq, that archaeologists have given the very kind of charming name of House F. And. Wow. Yeah, thanks, Archaeology.

[Greg Jenner]

That's great.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Exactly. We're very excited now to hear about. And they found over 1400 school texts, basically from just in the first season, that tell us about, you know, the first messy wedges that scribes were impressing as little kids.

[Greg Jenner]

My first wedge.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah, my first wedge. Exactly. It's like those, you know, wobbly kind of fingerprint smudged.

[Greg Jenner]

Finger spice. Finger spice. Finger spice, yeah.

[Phil Wang]

Triangle stands for cat. Triangle stands for dog.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

But, yeah, all the way up to, you know, quite advanced math and Sumerian literature.

[Greg Jenner]

Doing your GCSEs.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah. Teaching fake contracts, everything.

[Phil Wang]

So there were schools and kids were taught gunu film at school.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

They were, yeah. And then you also get glimpses into, like, how frustrating it might have been to be a student because there's one tablet with a bite mark in it.

[Greg Jenner]

Amazing.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah. Like maybe a 12 year old.

[Phil Wang]

They do look like sourdough, like I said. So that might have just been an honest mistake.

[Greg Jenner]

Just a very hungry student.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

And then some doodles as well. There's one that maybe of a teacher sitting in a chair with like a. Holding a stick out.

[Phil Wang]

Oh, cool.

[Greg Jenner]

I feel like the teeth marks justifies my earlier Great British Bake off joke. I feel like clay bake tray bake. That's the third week in the series.

[Phil Wang]

That's true. Leaf trying out one of them.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, exactly. Just breaking a tooth on it that's been overproofed, I think. Yeah. So we've got schoolboys doodling. We've got a doodle of. Somewhat like of a man sitting down with a long stick. And we think it's the teacher.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Maybe it might be. I kind of can't imagine who else the student would have.

[Greg Jenner]

The stick suggests corporal punishment, doesn't it?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

It might. There are stories about schools that the students had to write down that are in Sumerian, where it gets kind of, you know, heated at times.

[Greg Jenner]

But what language do they Speak. And what language are they writing in if they're training to be scribes?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

So they were probably speaking Akkadian at home because by the time House F exists, Sumerian is a dead language.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, okay.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

But they were learning Sumerian at school because it was important to learn this ancient, authentic old language, just like Latin was.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so it's like a Victorian schoolboy learning Latin, so he'd go and become a lawyer.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Exactly.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay.

[Phil Wang]

Is there a modern language that is related to Akkadian in any way?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah, there are lots, actually. So it's a Semitic language. So it's related. I mean, in Iraq today, they speak. I mean, they speak lots of different languages, but they speak Arabic as well. And Arabic is also a Semitic language. So there's a lot of vocab overlap and some grammar overlap, because Aramaic derives.

[Greg Jenner]

From Akkadian, and then Aramaic is the father of several languages, I think. Is that sort of chain? Is it Maybe, Yeah.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

I mean, I don't know, like, to what extent Aramaic borrows from Akkadian, but it was at one point simultaneous, and people were bilingual in Aramaic and Akkadian in the.

[Greg Jenner]

That's in the late period, wasn't it? Yeah. So the Neo Assyrian period. And then Persian comes in, and then you're like, oh, there's a whole other language that learns. But they're still learning Sumerian scribes as kids. You're learning a dead. Dead language by that point. And, like, so dead.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah. And there are even proverbs that are like, what good is a scribe who doesn't know Sumerian? And it's like, oh, I guess nobody wanted to really learn this, so they had to come up with proverbs to inspire them.

[Greg Jenner]

The scribes are sort of. They're also being used in religion. Right. So religion is also important. And we talked about some of this when we did our Babylonians episode with Kay, but I think we just probably reiterate it for Phil's benefit. What does cuneiform teach us about sacred text and the understanding of gods and monsters, ghosts, planets and stars?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

So I think the easiest way to explain that is that in ancient Mesopotamia, supernatural things were real. The gods, goddesses, demons, ghosts. They were as part of the natural world as like a rock and a tree and a river. So they formed a kind of normal part of explanations for stuff happening in the world. So there was a really close connection between, in particular, the divine and the science. They weren't considered two separate things. And so the people who were trained in observing the natural world were essentially Observing signs being left behind by divine beings about events to come. So, for example, a lunar eclipse was bad news because it was a sign from the gods that the king was gonna die. For example.

[Greg Jenner]

Sorry, king, sorry, I've got bad news.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

They did have a workaround, though. So they would get a substitute to be in the king's place for a couple of months, and then that person would live like a king and then be killed.

[Phil Wang]

Oh, really?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Just to be absolutely sure.

[Greg Jenner]

Swap in a peasant body double. Yeah.

[Phil Wang]

Holy.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

I know. It was brutal.

[Greg Jenner]

Would you take that? Would you? Would you? I mean, two months living as a king. If you know you're gonna die at.

[Phil Wang]

The end, you have to think about the average quality of life at the time and how much of an upgrade that would have been, even for just for two months. I would have considered it. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Depending what age I was. If I was 40, I was already knocking on death's door, to be honest. So if I was that, you know, I'd take that. Two months in heaven and then death.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

You can imagine why it was so important for the, you know, the observers, for the diviners and the scholars to get the signs right. Because there was a lot that rode on these things that are happening in the natural world. And there were entire textbooks that were filled with omen to tell people how to interpret an eclipse or the position of Jupiter in a particular constellation or what the color of Mars in the sky might have been.

[Greg Jenner]

And there's also divination. So telling the future by using sheep. Phil, how would you go about telling the future with sheep?

[Phil Wang]

Is it sort of like a tea leaves reading kind of thing? Like, the pattern they fall into tells a story.

[Greg Jenner]

So you're watching sheep flock, like.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah. You get up on a hill and you look down and see what. Sort of.

[Greg Jenner]

See what they spell out?

[Phil Wang]

Yeah, exactly.

[Greg Jenner]

If they spell out S O, S.

[Phil Wang]

It'S like, oh, oh, like king dead. You go, not this again. All right, who wants two months in paradise?

[Greg Jenner]

No, unfortunately, no. The sheep has to die here.

[Phil Wang]

Oh, entrails.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. It's the liver, isn't it? They're looking at the liver. But what I find really interesting is that writing is still very important in this process. Can you tell us why?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

So you had to. Well, among. There were a couple of different ways, but one way was to write your yes or no question. It has to be a yes or no question. It couldn't just be like, what's going to happen tomorrow? It has to be, will I recover from, you know, this journey or whatever.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah, they went crazy.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

They didn't think guts could tell everything. And they would place this tablet in front of the statue of the relevant deity, who would then presumably read the question and leave their answer, write the answer down in the entrails of the sheep, so particularly the liver. And then they would read the liver like they would read cuneiform signs because cuneiform signs have multiple meanings and so do.

[Greg Jenner]

So do livers.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

So do livers. Yeah. And the liver is even sometimes called the tablets of the gods, where the gods leave their messages. Yeah. So writing was kind of. It permeated their entire world. In astronomical phenomena were also the writing. The heavenly writing is the movement of the planets.

[Greg Jenner]

So you said that cuneiform is quite a stable technology. We have the earliest technology at 3350. The absolute latest we go to is in the Roman era. Right. The latest cuneiform is like, what, 79 CE?

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

That's exactly right. The last datable cuneiform tablet so dateable is from 79 or 80 CE, which.

[Greg Jenner]

Is the year Vesuvius erupted.

[Phil Wang]

That coincidence?

[Greg Jenner]

I was going to say maybe the volcano erupts. Everyone. I feel like this is a sign. Let's just put down the gadaev, move on.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

And what I love is it's also from Uruk.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

So it started in Uruk and I mean, we don't know, but.

[Phil Wang]

Oh, the last one was also from Uruk.

[Greg Jenner]

So that's amazing. So it's a stable technology. It changes a little bit over the time in terms of the font, in terms of how it's written. But you can still read it through that time.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah, it's pretty. Yeah, it's pretty easy to read.

[Greg Jenner]

It's amazing. And so Akkadian then is followed by Aramaic, followed by Persian, followed by other languages, and off we go. There's one more thing to mention, Phil, as our expert philologist here.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

What do you think the cruciform monument of Manish Tushu was?

[Phil Wang]

Oh, no, I was just reading about this.

[Greg Jenner]

You're sick of hearing, aren't you?

[Phil Wang]

The cruciform.

[Greg Jenner]

The cruciform monument of Manish Tushu.

[Phil Wang]

So cruciform means. Is that a cross? Okay. Monument of Manitous. It's a big. It's a building. There's a tower, an obelisk, but it's got a cross in it. A big obelisk, but it's got a cross across it. So it's a big T. Big T. It's not bad.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

It's not bad. Yeah, it is. A big T, but it's only about this big.

[Phil Wang]

I feel like monument kind of overplays the size.

[Greg Jenner]

It's a minument.

[Phil Wang]

So it's about a foot. About foot tall.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah.

[Phil Wang]

Okay.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

And it's like a 3D cross basically.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

So it has like 12 sides. I don't know, I can't do math, but it's something like that.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. The reason I've asked is because it's a forgery.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Like it, it sort of gets to the heart of what's quite interesting about cuneiform. It's that this is a deliberately new thing that's meant to look old.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Exactly right. It's an ancient fake.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

So a bunch of priests in the 6th, I think it's the 6th century or the 600s BCE actually. Surprisingly bad at dates, but they made this 3D cross shaped document, populated it with old looking signs that is a font not known from any other period. So they completely made this up and it pretends to be from the era of Manishtushu, who was about almost 2,000 years before, who was one of Sargon the Great's descendants. And they are basically saying, we've been priests, have been here since this time, so please keep paying us.

[Greg Jenner]

It's a forgery. It's basically saying we've always been here.

[Phil Wang]

So it's a Christian cross.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

It's just. Yeah, it's just the random 600bc I probably should have said that all my dates are bce.

[Greg Jenner]

It's sort of the era of kind of the Persian. It's the 6th century BCE. So it's in the 500s BCE and it's them claiming fake ancestry, saying, no, no, we've been here for like 1-800-years and it's a brand new. It's like dipping it in like when you were a kid you had to make like an old document and you dipped it in tea to make it look old.

[Phil Wang]

It's that, exactly that he said it's cross shaped document. So there's writing all over.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Writing all over the sides of it. Yeah, on every edge. And it's describing basically the roles of these priests and how long it's been established for. And so they presumably did that to justify their profession, make it more authoritative and authentic.

[Greg Jenner]

So There you go, Phil, 3,500 years of technology, of script, a very impressive history. You had to impress it.

[Phil Wang]

Yeah, it's really good. I got it.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. So you now know about cuneiform?

[Phil Wang]

Yeah, I can speak cuneiform.

[Greg Jenner]

No, no, you can't speak it it's not a language.

[Phil Wang]

I feel like neo.

[Greg Jenner]

Start again.

[Phil Wang]

I'm like, neo when he says, I know kung fu.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Phil Wang]

I know kuneir form.

[Greg Jenner]

You know kuneir form?

[Phil Wang]

I can speak it very fluently.

[Greg Jenner]

No.

[Phil Wang]

I don't know why you have such a problem with me saying that.

[Greg Jenner]

Language. It's a script. Oh, never mind. The nuance window. This is where Phil and I sit quietly in the classroom and we carve our clay tablets for two minutes while Dr. Moody tells us something we need to know about cuneiform's history. Take it away, Dr. Moody.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

In 592 BCE, a young woman, or maybe even still a girl, named La Tubashini, was sold into slavery by marriage by her adoptive mother, Chamay. This marriage was financed by a third party, presumably to secure access to the children who would be born of the forced union and who would have had the same legal status as their mother. It's a harrowing story, but remarkably, around 560 BCE, Laatubashini was emancipated from her slave status, and her first official act as a freed woman was to fight for the freedom of her children. On 29 October, 560 BCE, the Babylonian courts heard her lawsuit against members of the incredibly powerful and wealthy family who had financed the arrangement in the first place. She argued before a minister and the king's judges that, like her, her children should also be freed. Five clay tablets that span three decades tell her story. And even if the nature of the legal sources lack the color of a literary work, they tell us a lot about her courage. They tell us that she survived her decades long ordeal as an enslaved woman, forced into marriage at least six pregnancies and births without the benefit of anesthesia or antibiotics products, and far more that is lost to time. And they tell us that she survived all this. A fighter, willing to take on a powerful family and argue before the king's judges for the freedom of her children. In the end, she only succeeded in freeing one son, a boy named Ardea. Among many things, what moves me about her story is just what we can learn from cuneiform. This writing system preserves so much of life from ancient Mesopotamia. As we've talked about receipts, lullabies, literature, letters, liver omens, astronomical leaps, and also the lives of women like Latubashini and her six children. Her story is a reminder that people in the ancient past were no less human, no less loving or brave, and no more immune to pain than we are. And neither is any person today who seems too different to have anything in common with. They were not the other and neither are any of us from each other.

[Greg Jenner]

Beautiful. Thank you so much.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Thanks.

[Greg Jenner]

So what do you know? Now this is our quickfire quiz for Phil to see how much he's learned.

[Phil Wang]

I should have written more notes. I've just written Sumerian.

[Greg Jenner]

I have to say, that is quite. There's not many triangles on that page. How are you feeling?

[Phil Wang]

Confident, as always happens when I'm on this show. You tell me about the quiz at the start of the episode and when you tell me about it at the end, I'm always surprised. So I'm not feeling too confident just now.

[Greg Jenner]

We got 10 questions. Historically, you're very good at these quizzes. I believe in you. Okay, question one. Cuneiform gets its name from the Latin word for which shape.

[Phil Wang]

Triangle.

[Greg Jenner]

It is triangle or wedge shape. There we go. We're off to a flyer. Question 2. Where in the world was cuneiform developed and used?

[Phil Wang]

Mesopotamia.

[Greg Jenner]

It is absolutely between the two rivers. Question 3. The rock carved inscriptions at Behestun about Darius the Great were transcribed and translated by which English soldier commonly known as the father of Assyriologist Rawlinson. It was Henry Rawlinson. Well done. Well remembered. Question 4. What are the earliest surviving cuneiform tablets about our earliest named person in history? Possibly.

[Phil Wang]

Oh, a brewer, A beer maker.

[Greg Jenner]

That's it. Beer. Absolutely. 135,000 liters of beer. I'm doing my best. It's a lot of beer. Why was cuneiform needed during ancient sheep liver divination rituals?

[Phil Wang]

Oh, it was used to elicit messages from the gods.

[Greg Jenner]

That's right. With a yes, no question. Which had to be written down.

[Phil Wang]

Yes.

[Greg Jenner]

Well done. And the liver was also the tablet of the gods, wasn't it? That was Lovely. Night. Question 6. What doodles have been found on a schoolboy's cuneiform tablets?

[Phil Wang]

A drawing of probably his teacher with a cane.

[Greg Jenner]

That's right, yeah. And also teeth marks as well if the child was hungry. Question 7. Can you name one of the languages written in cuneiform?

[Phil Wang]

Akkadian.

[Greg Jenner]

Very good. We could have Sumerian, Old Persian, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian. You went with Akkadian, which is, I think is a good one. Question 8. What is the cruciform monument of Manishtoshu your favorite?

[Phil Wang]

It is a lie. It is an ancient lie that some priests cooked up to look important.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. To say we've been here much longer than. Yeah, we claim to be absolutely right. Question 9. The Royal Library of Nineveh was Created by King Asha. It was my King Ashurbanipal Sean Paul, to house 30,000 claytaves. What happened to it?

[Phil Wang]

It was burned.

[Greg Jenner]

It was burned down and everything was taken to the British Museum. When was the last known cuneiform inscription created?

[Phil Wang]

79 or 80 CE.

[Greg Jenner]

Amazing. 10 out of 10. Phil Wang, you are a philologist.

[Phil Wang]

Triangle out of triangle. Correct.

[Greg Jenner]

That's fantastic. Well done. Oh, well done, Moody, for teaching him, because that's. Thank you. That was really some technical stuff we've covered there, but just so interesting.

[Phil Wang]

It really was. Yeah. And, yeah, it's always amazing because we do think about these ancient peoples, like you say, as being more about. More robotic in a way that they were just about survival, that the writing was just about practical things. But. But there's so much sort of life and drama that we would recognize today.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, it's so proper stuff, isn't it? It's a husband and wife arguing. It's a mum trying to get her kids back. It's, you know, a boss saying, where's my. Where's my order? It's not end time. It's really. It's proper human life.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Yeah, it really is. It's so. I love it. It's so beautiful. I love cuneiform.

[Greg Jenner]

Well, thank you so much for sharing that with us today. And thank you also, Phil, for your knowledge and wisdom and comedy.

[Phil Wang]

Oh, thanks for having me. It's been fascinating.

[Greg Jenner]

It's been great. And listen, after today's episode, you want more Mesopotamia with Moody? Check out our episode on the ancient Babylonians. And to hear more from Philly. Philly Wang. Wang. Listen to his episodes on the Borgias, Chinggis Khan, the Terracotta warriors, and the history of Kung fu. We've given you quite a weird curriculum so far, haven't we?

[Phil Wang]

Yeah, it's a varied curriculum.

[Greg Jenner]

I feel like we're training you for some sort of purpose. I don't know.

[Phil Wang]

What an enormous battle.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes, exactly. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends. Subscribe to youo're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds, where you will hear the show a month before it arrives on other platforms. So there we go. There's a. There's a bonus for you. And switch on your sounds notifications too, so you never miss an episode. I'd just like to say huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we have the marvellous Dr. Moody Al Rashid from the University of Oxford. Thank you, Moody.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

Thank you for having me.

[Greg Jenner]

It's been a pleasure. And in Comedy Corner. As ever, we have the fantastic Philology Wang. Thank you, Phil.

[Phil Wang]

Thank you for using my full name. It's been a pleasure.

[Greg Jenner]

And to you, lovely listener. Join me next time as we decode another message from the past. But for now, I'm off to go and carve an emoji inscribed Rosetta Stone to help future archaeologists. And it's going to involve an awful lot of rude emojis. Bye. This episode of youf're Dead to Me was researched by Hannah Kohler Cusworth and Matt Ryan. It was written by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, Emin Ngoose and me. The audio producer was Steve Hanke and our production coordinator was Ben Hollins. It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me and senior producer Emma Lagoose and our Executive editor was James Cook. Your Dead to me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

[Phil Wang]

I'm Nicola Coughlan and for BBC Radio.

[Greg Jenner]

4, this is history's youngest heroes, rebellious risk and the radical power of youth. She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself.

[Phil Wang]

Twelve stories of extraordinary young people from across history.

[Greg Jenner]

There's a real sense of urgency in them.

[Dr. Moody Al Rashid]

That resistance has to be mounted.

[Greg Jenner]

And it has to be mounted now. Subscribe to History's Youngest Heroes on BBC Sounds.

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