Dr. Moudhy Al-Rashid
Appearances
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Exactly. They're sort of internally kind of consistent with each other and the methods they use are agreed upon. And there's like a rule following that these scholars used in generating and writing these down, which is really interesting. But what gets us more science-y in a way, or science in the way that we might understand it today, which is not necessarily the pinnacle of how we might
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
understand science in the ancient world, but is the way that the omens were applied involved a lot of empirical observation. So moving into the first millennium BCE with the rise of Assyria, which was the largest empire the world had ever known up to that point, covering from
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Persia or Iran in the east all the way to what is now Cyprus, and then in the south, Egypt all the way up north through Anatolia. It was a humongous empire run at its height by someone called King Ashurbanipal, who's an interesting figure in his own right.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
But even the kings that came before him and Ashurbanipal himself, they relied on their court astronomers to take nightly observations of the sky and then interpret those with respect to these kind of textbooks of omens and then make predictions about what the king should or shouldn't do or whether he should lay low or everything was fine.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
But as a result of making all these observations every night, they then started to be able to predict other astronomical phenomena. So there are these little leaps along the way. There's an astronomer called Rachel, who I think he's working under Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. I hope that's right, but he's working sometime in the 8th or 7th centuries BCE.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And he starts to make predictions about, listen, there's going to be an eclipse on the 14th. So you're fine until then, but we'll figure it out when that happens. Or Mars will pass through Scorpio. When that happens, you should be okay. But until then, I would lay low because it's not a good omen for Mars to be in Scorpio, that sort of thing.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So you start to see predictions about other astronomical events, which is kind of impossible not to happen at some point if you're making so many observations every single night. of the skies and the patterns of planetary motion and of eclipse appearances.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
That's a great question, because I think, first of all, it forces us to imagine what the sky would have looked like without light pollution, which must have been unbelievable. I grew up in Saudi Arabia, and when I was a kid, we used to go out to the desert on the weekends, and sometimes we'd sleep in the desert.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And I remember looking up at the night sky and being able to see the Milky Way and just probably a couple thousand stars. I mean, it's impossible to count them. Just out of this world levels of beauty and perspective that you can get from something like that. Whereas here in Oxford, I look up and it's like eight stars maybe that I can If I'm lucky, I can do it.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Okay, but I guess better than like three stars. If we can put ourselves in their shoes and imagine just how much they're looking at. But amongst those many thousands of anchors that move in a fixed pattern, if they do move very slowly, there are other objects that move quite quickly across the night sky from night to night, and those are the planets.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And five of those are visible to the naked eye without use of a telescope, which are the ones that are closest to us. So Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Venus in particular is so bright, if you ever have a chance outside of London to stargaze, Venus, it's impossible to miss that planet. So they noticed from early on, these planets move, whereas the stars are a fixed backdrop.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And there are some references to them using various metaphors, and I think one of them is that they're referred to as the wild sheep of the sky, whereas the stars are the domesticated sheep that don't move. So they have lots of lovely ways of referring to the differences. So they didn't have tools the way we would understand tools. They didn't have telescopes.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
They didn't have big buildings that helped them organize the sky. They used the naked eye. They used their fingers to measure distances as well as other kind of more standardized measurements. And then eventually math was their most important tool for figuring out what was going on in the sky.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Yes, and they refer to them so many times in the sources that it's sort of hard to doubt our understanding of their naming. But for example, one of the words they used to refer to Venus was dilbat or dilibat, which comes from basically the word for shining, because it's just such a bright object. Makes sense, yeah.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Yeah, and then similarly, the one for Jupiter, which is also bright, sometimes easy to confuse Jupiter and Venus if it's not a good viewing conditions, is Kakabupetsu, which means white star, because it looked, again, like a really bright white star.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Saturn, I think, is called Kayamanu, which means it has to do with steadiness, I think, because Saturn moves a bit more slowly because it's further away. And then there are also deities associated with the planets, just like in Greek. I mean, our names of the planets today are based on the names of deities, Jupiter being the kind of head of the Roman pantheon, for example.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And interestingly, the planet Jupiter in Mesopotamia in Babylonian Assyria was associated with the god Marduk, who was the head of the Babylonian pantheon as well, so that pantheon's Jupiter or Zeus, so to speak. Venus associated with Ishtar, who was Inanna in the earlier periods, but the goddess of love and war, Ishtar. Mars with the god of war, Nergal.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So there are some really interesting kind of overlap in the deities associated with the planets. And sometimes the planets are referred to by their kind of divine name, by the name of the deity associated with them.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
I think yes and no. A lot of these texts exhort secrecy, so you must not share this with the uninitiated, for example, and there's a bit of gatekeeping there. So in that sense, there's a kind of prestige to it and a guardedness to this type of knowledge that requires quite a lot of training to be able to do it correctly, which makes perfect sense.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
It's not straightforward to observe planetary motion and predict it and memorize a lot of these omens associated with those and know how to communicate with the king as well. But there's also evidence that some of them weren't treated particularly well.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
For example, there are some letters in which astronomers are writing to the king saying, like, why am I doing this manual labor, which I'm supposed to do instead of paying tax? It means I can't teach the next generation of astronomers. I'm so busy doing all this stuff that I don't have time to do my thing, my astronomy stuff. You know, there are other letters from court scholars.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
There's one named Urad Gula. He's a physician, so it's a slightly off topic, in which whatever he did, he fell out of favor with the king. And he and his father write multiple letters begging that he be reinstated because he can no longer afford to live and he's not being paid, you know, the way his father had been paid. In one of them, he writes that he's dying of a broken heart.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So you can kind of feel the precariousness of it. You know, yes, what they're doing is uber important to royal decision-making. It takes many years of training to achieve, but it doesn't always match up to the way they get treated in the texts.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Absolutely. And you also get a sense of it wasn't always sunshine and roses between the astronomers themselves. So there's an interesting letter from an astronomer named Balasi in which he's responding to a concern of the king. So the king wrote these letters to the scholars saying, so-and-so said that Mars is visible, like what's your take on it effectively or that sort of thing.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And there's one in which the king has obviously written and said, Venus is apparently visible, and that's a problem, so can you just talk me through what's happened? We don't have the original letter, but we have Bellassi's response, which is basically something along the lines of, the guy who told you that Venus is visible is an idiot. It's actually Mercury. I think he calls him an ignoramus.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
He's actually Mercury. And actually, you know, it's quite difficult to confuse that. Mercury and Venus, especially with no light pollution. I find that difficult to wrap my head around.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So there's also a little bit of a really kind of nasty peer review system sometimes that comes through in these letters reminding us that these aren't just tablets floating around full of knowledge, but there are people... that are writing these and people that are stressing over these. And even kings who stress over some of the things that they're either observing or experiencing.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
The letters include letters back and forth to physicians as well. And there are some really lovely kind of human moments where, again, we don't have the letter from the king, but the physician is quoting the king's worry about their baby having a fever and saying, don't worry, it's teething. Your baby's teething. he's going to be totally fine.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
I know it's stressful, but he'll be fine in four days or whatever the exact prognosis ended up being. So there's a lot of humanity as well as really interesting science in these letters.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Yeah, well, we call them handbooks, actually. But I use the word textbook because sometimes I think that tells us a little bit more about what they were to these people. In scholarship in ancient Mesopotamia, there are kind of multiple strands. And one of those is the standardization of collections of omens.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So in the medical tradition, there's a standardized collection of diagnostic omens, which are organized from head to toe. It's 40 tablets. It's copied in the same order over and over again once it achieves that standard form for centuries with some differences, but the kind of order of tablets stays the same even if there are some variations of like the odd omen or sign used.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Similarly, in astronomy, there was a kind of standardized collection of astronomical omens The title we give to that work, which is about 70 tablets long, I think, and it's 6,500 to 7,000 omens recorded in those tablets. We call it Enuma, Anu, and Lil, which means Wen, Anu, and Enlil, which are two of the major deities.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Anu is the sky god, Enlil is the Sumerian name for the king of the gods, and this also refers to two of the three main sections of the sky. The sky is divided into the region of Anu, the region of Enlil, and the region of Ea, who I haven't referred to yet, who's a god of wisdom. So that textbook of omens, it's organized.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
I mean, the first bit's on lunar omens, and then it talks about solar omens, and then weather omens, and then planetary omens. So it's organized. It's not just like a completely random collection of observations and predictions or fake observations and predictions.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
There's also the tablet in there that gives tables, like lunar tables, of the duration of the visibility of the Moon or the number of hours of sunlight and daylight on the equinoxes and solstices, that sort of thing. So it gives these kind of ideal mathematical tables halfway through, which we think were used to allow for anomalies against those mathematical ideals to be considered as omens.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So it's a really packed, it's a really dense textbook of omens. And that, we think, comes from the 1st millennium BCE. There are some forerunners that are earlier, like the lunar omens from the Old Babylonian period from around 2000 BCE, but it achieves this kind of standard form that's not exactly standardized all across the board, but is more or less standard in the 1st millennium BCE.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
But scribes have other kind of sources at their fingertips as well that are very similar to that textbook and that are in some ways based on parts of it.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Yeah, definitely. And Babylon also becomes a major kind of player at the very end of cuneiform culture and the kind of height of mathematical astronomy and stuff. So we can hopefully talk about it again a bit later. But yeah, so the Kassites, they're around from about 1500 BCE to 1100 to 1000 BCE. I think the Amarna letters that we were talking about, they come from the Kassite period.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
But one of the interesting things that the Kassite scholars did, we think, is that they collected all these threads of knowledge in various disciplines. So primarily astronomy and medicine and a couple of others. And they created these standard textbooks. So there are lots of reasons to attribute this kind of flourishing of scholarship to this period. And literature as well.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
I always forget about literature. Sorry. I feel bad saying that. They just standardize a whole host of different works. And then it's in this form that a lot of these textbooks get copied. Previously, it was thought that Enuma Anu Enlil, the astronomical omen compendium I just referred to, was written in this period.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
But now I think they've moved the date a little bit further based on other evidence. But the Kassite period is really a kind of anchor for a lot of the production of these texts.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
In order to expand upon the omens, so let's say you start with something like Venus wearing a crown. Venus, the planet, sometimes looks like it's surrounded by a bit of a halo. They might expand on that by giving the crown a different color, red, green, white, black, etc. They might expand on it by saying it's really bright or really dim. So opposites, binary opposites.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And they might say it's dimmed on the left side or it's dimmed on the right side. So they definitely use a lot of left-right symbolism, let's say, in generating outcomes for these omens. Because again, it's very unlikely that these are grounded in prediction of
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
like something being observed with the moon and an actual political event happening immediately after, very unlikely that that's the source for there's just far too many of them. One really nice example from Enuma Anu Enlil is a description of Venus being dimmed on the right side, having a bad outcome, which is that childbirth will be difficult for women.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And the next omen after that is Venus being dimmed on the left side, having a good omen, which is that childbirth will be easy. So the kind of reasoning there is that Something bad being dim happening to the good side, the right side, has a bad outcome because it's a positive and a negative. Something bad happening to the bad side, they kind of cancel each other out.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So dimmed left side has a good outcome because two negatives become a positive. So there's almost like a mathematical approach to it. But yes, there's definitely this left-right symbolism That comes up in really surprising ways in The Omens and really shows how much they thought about how to generate these according to really specific rules.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Even if reading them at first glance, you're like, what on earth? This is so bizarre. Like this is, you know, how are they making these up? But there are actually internal rules to doing it. And right left is part of that.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Yeah, it's an incredible moment, I think, in the history of science is when these observations are no longer used or no longer just used to make decisions about stuff on Earth, but when they're used to predict other related phenomena. And that really starts to happen, I would say, 8th, 7th century BCE onward and really takes off after that, after the fall of Assyria.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And then you start to get different observational astronomy texts coming out of Babylonia, so Babylon and Borsippa and related cities, Uruk as well. Part of that is that because they were doing so many observations at night, it's impossible not to notice patterns. I mean, we're kind of built to notice patterns, aren't we?
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And even if those patterns occur over multiple generations, you still have that accumulation of knowledge that is written down that allows people to access and learn from older knowledge in order to make predictions based on patterns that they can find in these texts. And from about 600, so that's a little early, but B.C.E. onwards, you start to get these diaries.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
We call them astronomical diaries from Babylonia. So now we're leaving the Assyrians behind. We're leaving behind Balasi, and we're leaving behind Rashil and all the other astronomers I've already referred to, and poor Uragula, the physician who fell out of favor. And we're moving now to, let's just say Babylon.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
where we have these nightly long observations being written down about everything going on in the sky as well as everything going on on Earth that's deemed to be relevant. So they give all the positions of the planets. They give whether or not an eclipse is predicted or witnessed, the duration of visibility, what type of moon. Is it a new moon? Is it a full moon?
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
If there is a comet visible, they'll talk about a comet. And then they'll give things like the price of grain, the level of the Euphrates. So there's still this connection between stuff going on above and stuff going on below. It's not worded the way omens are, if X, then Y. It's just a flat-out list of And they do this for centuries. We don't know exactly who's writing these, as far as I know.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
It may be astronomers, it might be scribes that are being dictated by the astronomers, or it might be two multiple people coming together together. to put these together. And these diaries really lay the groundwork, because there are so many observations in them, for algorithms to be generated to then predict and model the motion of planets in the sky using mathematics.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
You can really see in the record the kind of step one, step two, step three. Not that necessarily the mathematical astronomy is a pinnacle of all this, but it is, as far as I know, the kind of earliest example of exact sciences in antiquity. And it's a really incredible moment and a really generational effort. that they've all done kind of together without whether they realized it or not.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Yeah, exactly, which is just so incredibly, to me, really moving because I think the history of science is a history of people trying to make sense of the world around them. They care enough in these periods to do that every single night, and they care enough to try to connect it with events on Earth, but they also care enough to think, oh, wow, this is actually cool. We can make math out of this.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
I mean, there were nerds back then just as they are today. I love it.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Yes, I agree. And I think you have these occasional incredible moments in them, like Halley's Comet being observed in the sky. I think it's 164 BCE. And then again, 78 years later. I don't know if you've ever seen a comet. I saw Hale-Bopp when I was a kid, and I saw NEOWISE a couple of years ago during the pandemic.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And they're just like these incredible, like, what is this thing just floating in the sky? What is that? And they recognize that we've seen this one before. We saw this. Somebody wrote about this 78 years ago. Maybe they didn't know exactly that, but they knew that this wasn't some bizarre thing, that this was an observed phenomenon.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And they wrote about it, and I think moments like that are incredibly moving. And then there are the events on Earth, like the one you mentioned earlier. where you have a really boring sentence, the king died. And that king is Alexander the Great. And that's recorded in an astronomical text, essentially.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
I mean, it's recorded in a lot of other places, but I think it's just incredible that it even finds its way into these observational records.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Absolutely. They contain datable observations. Please don't ask me how those got extrapolated, because it's just incredible that we can know exactly. This eclipse lasted for 47 minutes, and it's just incredible to me that we know all this stuff. So they do contain datable and verifiable observations of planetary motion, eclipse cycles, etc.,
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Sure, yeah. So there are two kind of offshoots of the diaries and other observations that get made. And there is the mathematical astronomy, which uses pure math to model the movement of planets as well as the sun and the moon and eclipses.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
But then there are the goal year texts, which use just pattern recognition, essentially, to do the same thing, but they're using recurring patterns that have been observed in the texts to predict when the next such event will occur. And so what they are, basically, are a list of predictions of astronomical phenomena for the year to come, for the goal year.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
They make those predictions, again, in a kind of descriptive way based on existing patterns, and that's really different to the mathematical stuff, but they're happening alongside each other. So even as mathematical astronomy takes off and we have these incredible instructions for how to carry out these procedures, people are still doing the non-mathematical predictions alongside that.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
They're doing a whole host of other seemingly less science-y types of astronomy as well alongside that, including using sort of ideal schemes to model the universe that are incorrect, that are just not correct, but that they're still using them maybe to use as a kind of benchmark for observation or a way of predicting things mathematically in a simpler way. We're not really sure.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
It's a nice example of how they're still doing things the kind of old way alongside this completely innovative way of doing things.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Yes, one of my favorite things to talk about. So I've alluded to this kind of ideal way of doing math and sandwiched in that enuma, anu, enlil. There were those lunar tables that offer us incorrect ways of modeling the universe mathematically, essentially. One of the incorrect but ideal ways that they modeled time was using a schematic calendar, which
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
which was actually a very practical way to measure time. So the calendar in Mesopotamia was 12 months of 30 days each. There's also a cultic calendar, which every single month they wait for the new moon, and then they announce the start of the next month, etc. But
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
In order for things to be possible to do, like paying interest and knowing when things are due, you have to have a fake calendar, basically. And that was 12 months of 30 days each. And that formed part of something that we call schematic astronomy, which all these other kind of slightly incorrect modeling of the universe fall into as well.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And there's evidence that then around 500 BCE, just after 500 BCE, they projected that calendar onto the sky, onto the ecliptic. So the band of the sky where eclipses occur and where the planets are moving and where the Sun is moving throughout the year as well. They divided the sky into 12 months of 30 days each, so 12 sections of 30 degrees each, and that becomes the zodiac.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And in really early descriptions of the zodiac, those 12 sections of the sky that are named back then as well after constellations, are initially referred to by the names of the months of the calendar. So, this is a really interesting kind of theoretical exercise that ends up with this spatial expression. And eventually, that becomes the zodiac that we know today.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
That is the goatfish, so Capricorn, which I only recently learned was actually a goatfish as well in later years.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Yeah, because it's a goat with like a mermaid tail. Yes. The scorpions, Scorpius, Leo, Gemini, the twins, etc. So they named each of these 12 sections after the main constellation within it. And that is where we get the zodiac from.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And the zodiac is this incredible innovation because it allows them to create a new celestial coordinate system to record their observations, but then also to make mathematical calculations within those as well, especially that sort of 30 degrees each. So it's a slightly different system of measurement that is being used in those texts.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
The mathematical astronomy texts, we typically divide into two categories. The first category is these tables that give the kind of values that would be generated with an equation of some kind or an algorithm of some kind. And then the second category is procedure texts that give instructions for those calculations, which I think is just absolutely incredible.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
If you read these texts, you have to read them about 200 times. And even at the end of those, you're like, I actually still have no clue what's going on. But the procedure texts... are basically verbal descriptions of an algorithm.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
They're giving you instructions, you know, this is the maximum, this is the minimum, you add X to that, and if it falls above, then you subtract this much, and then you eventually get this kind of zigzag within a maximum and minimum, and that's supposed to lead you to whatever the distances that has been traveled or whatever is trying to be modeled.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So there's a wonderful example as well of a procedure text for Jupiter, for the planet Jupiter, that is giving instructions for calculating the distance traveled by Jupiter over 60 days. And it basically models this, and this is all described with words and, of course, numbers, but it's not a flat-out equation like you would have in a math textbook today.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
of modeling that distance as two trapezoids. But the trapezoids aren't in real space. They're in abstract mathematical space. And then the area of these trapezoids is the distance traveled by Jupiter. So it's a highly geometric and I think almost like a precursor to calculus method that's being applied to calculate how far Jupiter has traveled.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Not actually how far Jupiter the planet has traveled, but how far in their vision it has traveled.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Yeah, absolutely. But what I think is really interesting is that even alongside the development of mathematical astronomy, the development of the zodiac, which leads to completely new ways of thinking about other stuff too, not just the sky.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So medicine was revolutionized by the zodiac because it made it possible to connect the zodiac to different parts of the body and just understand the body differently. The cultic calendar was changed with reference to the zodiac where
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
The position of planets within the zodiac was then connected with certain dates, and just like we do astrology today, it's just a different way of organizing information that makes it a little bit more bounded and a little bit easier to follow. There's an excellent scholar named Dr. Willis Munro who's written about how knowledge becomes bounded in the late 1st millennium BCE.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So alongside all that, omens are still important. And the people doing the astronomy are still calling themselves, which means the scribes of Enuma Anu Enla, the scribes of this textbook. So even in the later periods where maybe it dwindles in importance, there's still that prestige attached to it. omen-taking or a connection with that distant past maybe is another way to account for it.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So I think this kind of proliferates a new way of thinking, but alongside that, there's still respect for the past.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
That's a great question too. So I think typically math was used for practical things to calculate the area of a field and then the yield that that field might have and therefore how much money you might be able to make from it, that sort of thing, or whatever math you needed to do to calculate how many bricks you needed to build something.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Absolutely, yes. And as you said, there are so many different fields of science in ancient Mesopotamia that includes things like medicine, as well as astronomy, and then later mathematical astronomy. So it's a huge field, and I'm so excited to get to talk to you about some of it today.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
But in the later periods, I don't know if that changes outside of astronomy. And I think there are lots of other things going on as well in the later period. So cuneiform culture is starting to get more and more restricted and When the Greeks come in, in particular, you can see a real decrease in the number of people doing cuneiform.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Actually, this starts to happen even with the Persians from about 539 BCE. Instead of being attached to the royal court and having all this prestige, they get relegated to temples, which has become the main sites for cuneiform worship. or a scholarship being done in cuneiform in this way that's kind of established by thousands of years of tradition as well as the innovations that go along with it.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And then when the Greeks come, that gets even more restricted, and then after the Parthians, even more so. So, I think there is much more going on outside of cuneiform that we don't know about during these later periods because they weren't written on clay. I mean, Why did they stop using cuneiform? You know, historians, how are we supposed to know what they were doing?
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And there are lots of references to writing boards and scrolls in the cuneiform text as well. So we know there's this whole other corpus that may well include some pretty cool math. But as far as I know, in terms of schools and what people were learning, math was, well, I guess in astronomy too, it's for practical things.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
I think it gets transmitted. So it gets a new life, really. And there are little pockets of evidence for the transmission of Babylonian astronomical knowledge.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
There's an Oxyrhynchus papyrus fragment from Egypt that has, I'm going to get this slightly wrong because it's been a while since I looked at it, but on one side it has the Saros cycle, which is developed in Mesopotamia, written out in Greek, and on the other side it's sort of spelled out in Akkadian. So there's a direct kind of
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Like a translation of somebody sharing this knowledge in two different languages. And there are a host of other kind of threads like that that show how it goes from Babylonia into Greece and then beyond. And the zodiac in use today is the same zodiac that comes from Babylonia. The 60-minute hour comes from the units of measurement that they use today.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
for time, as well as the degrees system that they use. So the legacy of Babylonian science is very much a part of how we still do science, even if their goals or maybe what they were doing with it was slightly different. It was obviously powerful enough of an organizational system to survive into other cultures and beyond, even if cuneiform dies out.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
I mean, the last datable tablet is from 79 to 80 CE, and it's an astronomical almanac of predictions and records for a particular year.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
I would love to make a sort of overarching point, which is that, you know, people back then were interested in trying to make sense of the world just as we are today.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And they did it in really systematic ways, according to sets of rules that they followed that maybe don't make that much sense to us or that maybe never wrote those rules down, but we can extrapolate them from the thousands and thousands and thousands of tablets that they've left behind. There's something really meaningful and moving about the fact that people were just as intelligent.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Yes, absolutely. And I think that's kind of from a, if you think of it from a more general approach to knowledge, knowledge production, natural phenomena in general, that there really is a lot of overlap and a lot of common denominators in how they try to make sense of the world. And one of those common denominators is that they phrased a lot of their observations about the world as omens.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
They had just as innovative moments. leaps as we might have today thousands of years ago and they are looking at the same sky i mean not the same sky i see here at oxford with eight stars but you know the incredible you know endless universe that they were trying to make sense of and i think that's really beautiful
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And that is across a lot of different disciplines, but in particular medicine and astronomy in the very early period. So instead of just having a text that says, The moon's cycle is 28 days, and this is the layout of the land.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
They're phrased as observations about the moon, how visible it is, whether there's an eclipse, paired with a prediction of something to happen on Earth, and similar with medical symptoms as well, although those tend to be more related to the body.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Absolutely. There is a lot of change. And in particular, in the first millennium BCE, so from 900 BCE to about 100 CE, there's a lot of innovation that happens in how people approach the world and how they write about it as well.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Not trying to be as complete, for example, as they were in the previous millennium and trying to kind of use different ways of understanding the world to connect different elements of it. So it's really interesting innovation.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
I would say written astronomy begins in ancient Mesopotamia. For all we know, people were doing really advanced mathematical astronomy before writing. But from what we know from the sources, I would say the earliest texts in astronomy come from ancient Mesopotamia. And some of the observations they make about the planets, the moon, lunar cycles, eclipse cycles, happen really, really early.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
There's a text from the dawn of writing from around 3000 BCE in which someone is recording transactions related to a festival for the goddess Inanna. The goddess Inanna was the goddess of fertility and later Ishtar, fertility and war. And she's associated with the planet Venus. And so they refer to the planets often by the name of the deity that's associated with it.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And there's a reference in this text that to the morning and evening Inanna, and that's an indication that they were making so many observations of the planet Venus that they knew that when it was visible in the morning, it was Venus, and that when it was visible in the evening, it was also Venus, and that these weren't two different stars being observed.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
They really had this observational program in place from very early on, even if it doesn't really get fleshed out properly until about 1800 BCE onward, and then really, really drilled down in the first millennium BCE.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Yes. So this text comes from Uruk, I believe. I hope I'm not misremembering. So we're talking about what is now southern Iraq, or if you're referring to how the region is referred to in antiquity, southern Mesopotamia, which basically refers to the land between the rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. So it is a place that was home to many civilizations and cultures in antiquity.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And for this text, it would have been most likely the Sumerian speakers who were writing this down. But then later astronomy, we started to move into other civilizations like the Assyrians and Babylonians, Assyrians in the north and Babylonians in the south, barring some periods in which the Assyrians just took over everything.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Yeah, that's a great question. And thankfully, the answer is yes, because it's so many thousands of years of history and so many sort of changes of the guard, so to speak, that it really is hard to keep track of all the political upheaval. But in terms of scholarship, one thing that all of these cultures and civilizations shared was the use of the cuneiform writing system.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
In English, it gets its name from cuneus, which means wedge in Latin. you have these clay tablets in which people have impressed signs with a reed stylus that have these really characteristic wedge or triangular shape to them because of how they get impressed with the reed stylus. And so that is shared across 3,000 years of history. So over half of human written history is in cuneiform in a sense.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And out of that writing system, because there are so many unique features to it, there is a really specific way of doing scholarship that that develops. And that seems to be shared across from the 2nd millennium BCE onwards. So from the dawn of the Babylonians and Assyrians, that seems to start to be shared across those two major players in the region until the end of cuneiform's use.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
One possible way to understand it is that because cuneiform was such an old writing system, it develops, of course, across time. It was initially developed to write the Sumerian language, which is not related to any known language. And then scribes and scholars expanded what signs stood for to make it possible to use the writing system to write the completely unrelated Akkadian language.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So as a result of this expansion and this extension of the writing system to write totally different languages, Each cuneiform sign takes on more than one meaning. So as a really basic example, the cuneiform sign for house is just a word. It's a sign that stands for a whole word. Not only does it stand for the word house, but it also stands for syllables that sound like the word for house.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So in Sumerian, that's ae. In Akkadian, that's bit, and so then it sounds like bet and pit and pet. So it takes on all these other values. And it's slightly technical and boring, but the reason I'm giving this backdrop is to say that in a way, the world starts to look like a cuneiform tablet. So scholarship interprets natural phenomena as signs, almost as cuneiform signs, with multiple meanings.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And so the kind of aim of scholarship becomes the interpretation of the world as signs. And I think it's really informed by the writing system itself. And that's where omens come in. And they wrote thousands and thousands of these omens down. And an omen is basically a statement in the cuneiform sources that is something like, if observation, then prediction. So if observation
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
A lunar eclipse takes place in the east, then the king will die, or something along those lines. So the observation is about something going on in the sky.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And they had these omens for all sorts of things, like stuff that happened on Earth, a fox being present in a city, somebody having a birthmark, I have a birthmark on my left cheek, what that might mean about a person's life or the success of the observer. But in terms of celestial omens, they were typically concerned with broader political trends.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So you have an observation paired with a prediction, and that observation is understood to be a sign from the gods, not a cause. The eclipse is not causing anything to happen. It's the gods saying, listen, we're sending this eclipse to warn you that the king is going to die. So if you want to do anything about that, here's a set of rituals that's available to you to prevent that from happening.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And this whole kind of scholarly culture builds up around these assumptions about what the world means and what messages it's sending. LSG
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
In a way, yes. We have these lists of omens from the earlier periods. So again, when I say earlier period, now we're talking about around 1800, 1900 BCE. Lists of omens, some of which are impossible things. So an eclipse being green, for example. And the reason for that is that the scholars writing these things down were not just interested in what was, in actual facts, in observable things.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
They were interested in every possible eventuality that could happen and and the outcomes associated with those. So they created this whole system of knowledge built on possibility effectively, but they structured these in really systematic ways. So for example, in writing down the omens about a lunar eclipse, let's say color, let's use color as an example,
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
You know, we know that there's only a certain number of colors that an eclipse can look like, and that's mainly red or no color, maybe orange sometimes. But they would apply a couple of other colors to these that were impossible, and they used these kind of ordered ways of expanding upon something they did observe.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
So they're not making up phenomena, they're just modifying existing possible phenomena in these ways to generate all possible outcomes. in order to allow their omens to cover more ground essentially.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
And these omens would have been used by decision makers like kings who needed to know whether it was safe to go to war at a particular time of year or whether they should undertake a journey or if there was an eclipse, And it foretold the death of the king.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Then the king had to go into hiding for a couple of months, and someone would be put in his place and pretend to be the king while the bad omen passed. And just to be absolutely sure that the king would be safe, they would then kill that person at the end of the few-month period. And this person would sort of sign up, and this wasn't a foreplay. Okay.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
Yeah, it's pretty terrible. I mean, I think some people have argued that actually maybe for some people, you know, living like a king for three months might be the ultimate kind of, but I don't know that I would ever feel that way. True, maybe. So yeah, so they really took these omens seriously, and they generated them in really, really systematic ways.
The Ancients
Origins of Astronomy
It wasn't just a completely random collection of fake observations. They were grounded in empiricism, but then they were extrapolated in really, really specific ways.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
And that's why it took its name from it.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
You have astronomy, medicine, literature, omens. It's just such a vast, such a vast collection.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
In cuneiform. In cuneiform, right. Yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Yes, yes. So Ashurbanipal is an interesting guy. I mean, he has these reliefs of himself doing things like fighting lions or, you know, throwing spears. And then he has these styluses tucked into his belt as if to make sure everyone knew, 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Yes, yeah. It's quite a stable script. I mean, the styles change and you can sort of tell when something's really old.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
They did bake some tablets that were really important, but for the most part they just let them dry.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Not an alphabet. That's exactly right. There was also one earlier cuneiform 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 or characters that stand for whole words and characters that stand for syllables like ba instead of a B and an A or bat like B-A-T as one sound.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
And that enabled the writing system to take on completely unrelated languages to the ones that those initial words were in.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
About 600 to 1,000. I mean, you probably wouldn't have to master every single one if you were just writing letters, for example. But if you were a scholar, you would probably need to do the upper limit of that.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Yeah, yeah. Right, right. 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, all right, this sign has 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
It actually is stolen from my husband.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Yeah, the circles are numbers. Phil, you are so good at this. You really are. If you need a plan B, we need more seriologists. We have way too many tablets.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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, 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
And since it was everywhere, they thought, let's just try this.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
So kind of both. And 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
And there were also different tiers that you could kind of stop at in a way.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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 period. So yes and no to that. Yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Actually, yes. And in the first millennium BCE, so in the kind of later periods of Mesopotamian sciences, there are these phrases at the end of these science texts that basically say, do not show this to the uninitiated. Oh, really? This is the secret knowledge of the, you know, the gods. This is just for us. This is just for us. Exactly.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Yes, that's right. She's the first named author in history. So not just the first woman author, the first author of this name we know. Wow. Yeah, as a woman. And her name is Elhadwana. And she penned, penned, impressed, whatever. Yeah. The pen is fine, yeah. These incredible hymns, temple hymns, essentially.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
The texts that are attributed to her authorship come from a slightly later period, so it's not exactly straightforward, but I still think that's the coolest thing ever. That's amazing.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
I mean, you could sing them if you wanted to. I guess we don't know the tune, though. Yeah, you can make one up, I guess. We know the lyrics. We know the lyrics, yes.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Yes. Yes, absolutely. Yes, they wrote letters to each other and they sent them and they were kind of,
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
mail networks royal mail networks or speak i mean literally royal road yeah for the mail networks um and they carry clay tablets 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 uh messages from one part of especially a growing empire to the other you needed to be able to communicate with your you know governors and do you write your own or do you go to the local scribe and dictate it
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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 as well.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
So there are a whole bunch of tablets 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 Kushim. is a beer brewer.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
And this is not like, you know, someone in their basement making like a micro-brew for the neighbours on a Sunday. This is a guy who at one point was responsible for 135,000 litres 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
So this is part of an administrative machinery.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
To pay people, essentially, as part of their rations.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Sort of, 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. Yes, it's thick and soupy, isn't it? Exactly, it's a poker straw.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Exactly. But it was high calorie, so high energy and cleanish fluids because water wasn't always clean. So it was a really good way to pay people. And not particularly alcoholic, presumably? Probably not too alcoholic and probably not very tasty, I'm guessing.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
They were how people got paid for service in this era 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, so to speak.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Oh, no, no. I've probably read like a hundred.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Yeah, it really is extraordinary. I mean, 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 just so moving.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Yeah, and they were pretty good record keepers too, so it can be borderline sort of dry where you're reading about... a forestry institution in the city of Ummah and what classes of laborers were working and the familial lines and then you're just name after name after name. But you're still getting these people's names from thousands of years ago, which is pretty cool.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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 language and poetry and storytelling.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. They did write about barley too, but they also shouted at each other a little bit.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Inaya, he's the husband and he's living in Anatolia, which is what is now Turkey, where there's a major trading hub, like an international trading hub called Kanish. And he moved there essentially to handle trade. And then his wife, Taram Kugbi, 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... Right. Right.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
And the letter ends, why do you keep on listening to slander and do you keep sending me angry letters?
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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. It's about 2000 to 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. Wow. And not exactly an untreacherous journey.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
I sort of feel like I empathize with them because these women are, like, working, and they're also looking after, like, eight children. Yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Yeah, having a blast, maybe even taking a second wife.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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. Wow. Thanks, archaeology. That's great. Exactly. We're very excited now to hear about how stuff.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
And they found over 1,400 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. My first wedge. Yeah, my first wedge, exactly. It's like those, you know, wobbly kind of fingerprint smudged tablets. Finger space, finger space, finger space.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
But, yeah, all the way up to, you know, quite advanced math and Sumerian literature. Doing the GCSEs. Yeah, GCSEs, fake contracts, everything.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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. Amazing. Yeah, like maybe a 12-year-old.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
And then some doodles as well. There's one that's maybe of a teacher sitting in a chair holding a stick out.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Maybe, it might be. I kind of can't imagine who else the student would have... The stick suggests corporal punishment, doesn't it? There are stories about schools that the students had to write down that are in Sumerian where it gets kind of heated at times.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
So they were probably speaking Akkadian at home because by the time House F exists, Sumerian is a dead language.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
But they were learning Sumerian at school because it was important to learn this ancient, authentic old language, just like Latin was. Yeah, OK.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Yeah, 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. That was in the late period, wasn't it?
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Yeah. And there are even proverbs that are like, what good is a scribe who doesn't know Sumerian? And it's like, well, I guess that nobody wanted to really learn this. So they had to come up with proverbs to inspire them.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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 sciences.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
I've got bad news. 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. Oh, really? Just to be absolutely sure. They'd swap in a peasant body double. Yeah, exactly. I know, it was brutal.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
You can imagine why it was so important for the observers, for the diviners and the scholars to get the signs right, because there was a lot that rode on these signs. Things that are happening in the natural world.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
And there were entire textbooks that were filled with omens 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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 had 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. Yeah, they went crazy.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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…
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
So it delivers, yeah. And the liver is even sometimes called the tablet of the gods, where the gods leave their messages. Yeah, so writing was kind of, it permeated their entire world. Wow. And astronomical phenomena were also the writing, the heavenly writing, is the movement of the planets.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
That's exactly right. The last datable cuneiform tablet, so datable, is from 79 or 80 CE.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Move on. And what I love is it's also from Uruk. Yeah. So it started in Uruk, and I mean, we don't know. Oh, the last one was also from Uruk.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
It's not bad, yeah. It is a big T, but it's only about this big.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Yeah, and it's like a 3D cross, basically. So it has like 12 sides, I don't know, I can't do math, but it's something like that.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Exactly. Right. It's an ancient fake. Yeah. So a bunch of priests in the sixth, I think it's the sixth century or the 600s BCE. I'm 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
And it pretends to be from the era of Manishtushu, who was about almost 2000 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Well, it's just, yeah, it's just the random sheep.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
I don't know any Latin, but I know cuneus in Latin, which means wedge. So 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. Oh, wow.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
I probably should have said that. All my dates are in B.C.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
In 592 BCE, a young woman, or maybe even still a girl, named Laa Tubashini was sold into slavery by marriage by her adoptive mother, Hamaya. 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
It's a harrowing story, but remarkably, around 560 BCE, Laa to Bashini was emancipated from her slave status, and her first official act as a freedwoman 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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, and far more that has lost its 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
In the end, she only succeeded in freeing one son, a boy named Ardia. 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 La Tubashini and her six children.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
And funnily enough, in Arabic, it's mismari, which means nail imprint. So they kind of also went with the visuals. Like fingernail. Like a nail. Hammer and nail. Yeah. Okay.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Lots and lots of different people used cuneiform to write lots of different languages. But it's the writing system that is used in the region that we call ancient Mesopotamia between the Tigris and around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and what is now Iraq and Syria and some of the neighboring countries as well.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
The oldest tablets come specifically from Uruk in southern Iraq, and those date to about 3350 BCE. This kind of still called proto-cuneiform is like really, really early stage. They don't look like triangles yet.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Exactly. Kineiform 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 Kineiform.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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 culture.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
I feel like I should just maybe just get a cup of coffee or something. Thanks, Moody.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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 Stone of Assyriology, which is the Behistun inscription.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
They first found royal names, and then from there they found the word for of, kind of unexciting, but very important. Of? Of, yeah, Annam. Really? Yeah, that was like the first.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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 Behistun inscription by other philologists. Oh, really? A lot of copies were made. A lot of kind of words were decoded.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
How dare you? I'm just saying what happened.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
I think it became a 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
And then they kind of overlaid that onto the cuneiform.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
And Akkadian, yeah. He wants to cover all the bases, I guess. Make sure everyone could see what he did.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
So he, I think, initially tried to, because it's very high up and it's not easily accessible. So they had to use pulleys and levers. Because it's up on like a rock.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Exactly. And very bright as well, because the sun sort of hits it as you're 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
You there, boy! 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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? Clergyman. Clergyman. This happened when I was recording my book. I was like, I can't pronounce anything.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Pretty much, yeah. He complained when the British Museum hired Hinks for a period of time. I can't remember how long it was. Like a year or something, wasn't it? Yeah, exactly. He complained then, and he tried to suppress Hinks's work, which is not exactly in the spirit of sort of scholarly cooperation, but here we are.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Well, they held a competition. We're talking about competition, yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
I like that too. I wish they did that. Yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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 Horace and Hinks and two others, Henry Fox Talbot and Jules Aupert. And they all sent in similar results. So basic decipherment had been achieved by then. And that's when the discipline of Assyriology takes off. I see.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
Yes. Assyriology. 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.
You're Dead to Me
Cuneiform: the world’s first writing system
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.